And, This is Ezra Klein

Transcript

Speaker 1 This is an iHeart podcast.

Speaker 2 Tired of spills and stains on your sofa?

Speaker 5 Wash away your worries with Anibay.

Speaker 7 Anibay is the only machine-washable sofa inside and out where designer quality meets budget-friendly prices.

Speaker 12 That's right, sofas start at just $699.

Speaker 3 Enjoy a no-risk experience with pet-friendly, stain-resistant, and changeable slip covers made with performance fabric.

Speaker 2 Experience cloud-like comfort with high-resilience foam that's hypoallergenic and never needs fluffing.

Speaker 12 The sturdy steel frame ensures longevity, and the modular pieces can be rearranged anytime.

Speaker 11 Shop washable sofas.com for early Black Friday savings up to 60% off site-wide, backed by a 30-day satisfaction guarantee.

Speaker 16 If you're not absolutely in love, send it back for a full refund.

Speaker 19 No return shipping or restocking fees, every penny back.

Speaker 22 Upgrade now at washablesofas.com.

Speaker 23 Offers are subject to change and certain restrictions may apply.

Speaker 25 No, it's not too soon to start holiday shopping.

Speaker 28 Ulta Beauty's early Black Friday event is happening now through November 22nd.

Speaker 29 Shop $10 beauty minis from brands like Mac and Too Faced.

Speaker 33 Take 30% off Lancome and Touchland fragrances and body mists.

Speaker 37 With new offers dropping every week, our associates can help you find the perfect gifts.

Speaker 40 Head into Ulta Beauty today to shop our early Black Friday event, Ulta Beauty.

Speaker 44 Gifting happens here.

Speaker 48 It's the gaming event of the year featuring T-Pain's Nappy Boy Grizzlies versus Neo's Gentleman's Gaming.

Speaker 51 It's a 4v4 matchup featuring Call of Duty, Tetris, Track Mania, Tony Hawk Pro Skater 3 Plus 4, and Tekken 8.

Speaker 59 Season Zero of the Global Gaming League is live streaming on YouTube and Twitch.

Speaker 62 Head over to globalgamingleague.com.

Speaker 65 Com, com. Global, Global, Global, Global, Global, Global, Global.

Speaker 66 Owning a home is full of surprises. Some wonderful, some

Speaker 66 not so much. And when something breaks, it can feel like the whole day unravels.
That's why HomeServe exists.

Speaker 66 For as little as $4.99 a month, you'll always have someone to call, a trusted professional ready to help, bringing peace of mind to four and a half million homeowners nationwide.

Speaker 66 For plans starting at just $4.99 a month, go to homeserve.com. That's homeserve.com.
Not available everywhere. Most plans range between $4.99 to $11.99 a month, your first year.

Speaker 66 Terms apply on covered repairs.

Speaker 68 Every holiday shopper's got a list, but Ross shoppers, you've got a mission.

Speaker 71 Like a gift run that turns into a disco snow globe, throw pillows, and PJs for the whole family.

Speaker 73 Dog included.

Speaker 1 At Ross, holiday magic isn't about spending more.

Speaker 75 It's about giving more for less.

Speaker 73 Ross, work your magic.

Speaker 67 Well, coming up next, I have Ezra Klein here in studio talking about his new book that he co-authored with Derek Thompson called Abundance.

Speaker 67 In this book, Ezra does not hold back on taking a very critical look at democratic governance all across the United States of America, in particular in my home state of California.

Speaker 67 This is Gavin Newsom.

Speaker 67 And this is Ezra Klein.

Speaker 67 Ezra, it is great to have you here in studio. Thanks for having me here for this weird inversion.
The weird inversion. And you've been, I mean, you've been all over the place.

Speaker 67 You got a new book, Abundance, and we'll jump right into that. But I want to just frame a little bit of the relationship that we have that goes back, and you may not even remember this.

Speaker 67 I was a new mayor in San Francisco and was asked by Bill Maher to go on a show. I remember.
And you were one of the panelists. And I'll never forget.
just sparring with Bill, obviously, and then you.

Speaker 67 And after the show was done and we were all finishing, you had left, Maher goes up to me and he goes, Who the hell was that? And I'm like, I know. Who the hell was that? And it was you.

Speaker 67 We were like, whoa.

Speaker 67 Just for both of us didn't have a, you know, I was, I was relatively new. Bill's been seasoned.
You were Lieutenant Governor then. I don't think I was.
You maybe was Lieutenant Governor, wasn't he?

Speaker 67 You know, was I still, was I Lieutenant Governor? I'm pretty sure you were. So maybe I was Lieutenant Governor.

Speaker 67 So, but I was like, anyway, I'd been on the show a bunch of times, but you were, you had a next level capacity to analyze things and to deliver a point of view.

Speaker 67 And so it's not surprising to me that so much of that, including that conversation we probably had on that studio and said, is reflected in what you've been focused on for me.

Speaker 67 I think about your book from that era, Republic 2.0, it was called, right? Yeah, Citizenville. Citizenville? Yeah, how to take the town square digital and reinvent government.
How about that?

Speaker 67 Yeah, it's something we should thread into this conversation. I think people have forgotten that era of Gavin Newsome.
Yeah, well, I think in so many reflects

Speaker 67 aspects, I was reading this book and you're reflected in this. I mean, this has been my struggle as a former mayor.

Speaker 67 You chronicle San Francisco, California disproportionately. But this book is fundamentally about the future and you framing the future in abundance terms.

Speaker 67 But it's also a real shot against liberalism in many respects, against the world we created now.

Speaker 67 competing against us in terms of process and courts and laws and rulemaking and all of that that's created so much of this cost of living dynamic. So tell us what was the inspiration of the book.

Speaker 67 Tell us a little bit about what abundance is.

Speaker 67 I mean, the reason the book is so rooted in California is that I am. I mean, so this book is co-authored with Derek Thompson from The Atlantic.
And so we both have our own things we bring to it.

Speaker 67 But I grew up in Irvine, as you know. I went to the C system, then I went to DC for 12 or 13, 14 years.

Speaker 67 And I spent a bunch of time in D.C. covering a political system where the problem was Republicans were bad oftentimes.

Speaker 67 The things that I wanted to see happen were not happening there because they were being blocked by the Republican Party. And then in 2018, I moved back here.

Speaker 67 I moved back to Oakland and then to San Francisco. And I looked around

Speaker 67 and it just wasn't doing well. People were unhappy.
People were leaving. I mean, I mean, you know this.
You're a retail politician. Like you can sense people's anger.

Speaker 67 When they find out you have anything to do with politics, they tell you real quick.

Speaker 67 And we could see the housing crisis had metastasized into something that was genuinely now a crisis, not just homes are expensive.

Speaker 67 California high-speed rail has always lit me on fire.

Speaker 67 We'll get into that. Yeah, we'll get to that.

Speaker 67 And what I began to, and I was thinking about clean energy, where your, I mean, the goals that you have set for clean energy in this state are remarkable.

Speaker 67 And in order to achieve them here or nationally, because the Inflation Reduction Act was passing around this time too, that I was thinking about a lot of this, we have to build faster than we have ever built.

Speaker 67 And the laws don't really permit that.

Speaker 67 And so the thing that I began thinking a lot about was that there is something something liberalism is good at and knows how to look for which is where can we subsidize something that people need but there's something liberalism is bad at because it doesn't know how to look for it which is how do we create more how do we make it possible to build more of things people need and not only are we not good at pursuing that we don't even realize how often we are getting in the way of it how often we are the problem there is i think something bracing as a liberal about asking this question of why in the places where people who agree with me govern, you and I, I don't think have that different politics, aren't the outcomes what I want to see?

Speaker 67 Why can't I go say to the Texans or the Floridians, no, no, no, no, you just have to do our policies from California.

Speaker 67 And that's the thing I'm grappling with here. No, and I appreciate that.
And we'll get to that question because I think it's a fundamental question.

Speaker 67 And it's interesting what you sort of define from that prism that's important because what people are actually looking for isn't necessarily what you are identifying specifically, I would challenge as the problem.

Speaker 67 That said,

Speaker 67 what you identify as the problem, I completely agree with that. I was going back to my speech, my first speech as governor of the state of California.
It might have well corrected.

Speaker 67 It's quoted in these pages. Yeah, literally.

Speaker 67 So if you can build a sports stadium with these new rules and fast-track a judicial process and what we refer to, and we'll get to CEQA, our California rules that go back to quite literally Ronald Reagan in 1970 as it relates to environmental review.

Speaker 67 It should work for homelessness. It should work for housing.
And I announced that day an effort to sue up to 47 cities. We started with one, Huntington Beach, California.

Speaker 67 Doesn't make you popular as governor to announce a lawsuit against Charles City because they weren't meeting their zoning requirements under our housing element.

Speaker 67 So much of that, again, reflected in this friction. and your own reflected frustration and lived experience in the state of California.

Speaker 67 But my point is this, as a practitioner, it's a very different reality.

Speaker 67 But what you identify, I completely embrace. These labyrinths of rules, federal rules, state rules, absolutely localism, though, and I want to talk about that.
Localism is determinative.

Speaker 67 And you pick on, understandably, San Francisco.

Speaker 67 But you can look at almost any city, including a Republican-held city like Huntington Beach.

Speaker 67 And these same rules and restrictions apply there in the same frustrations. So from the prism of left versus right, you take the shot against liberals.

Speaker 67 But can't we argue that there is sort of equality of consideration, NIMBYism that persists in rural and red parts of the country? Well,

Speaker 67 let me flip this because to shadow box around the fact that you know more about California governance than I ever will in a thousand years of doing this would be ridiculous.

Speaker 67 Why is it easier to build homes in Texas and California? They have, well, you established that in the book. In Houston, you make the point.

Speaker 67 I think it was 70,000 permits in 2023, just 7,500 in a much smaller city, San Francisco, but understandable contract. But a city with more demand.

Speaker 67 More demand, and it's simply because they have no zoning. They have land use considerations.
But Austin has zoning. Yeah, but not Houston in the context of that, Frank.

Speaker 67 The thing I'm getting at here, which I really would like your, the thing you just said, right, about localism, it's so important.

Speaker 67 And like, this is so much the conversation I'd love for us to have here because the texture that you have been grappling with of why do things that you want to have happen not happen is I think a really interesting thing to add to it.

Speaker 67 But when you're saying, well, you know, is this really a problem for liberals?

Speaker 67 It's easier to build in Texas and Florida than not just in California, but in California or New York. Right.
Right. The cost of living crisis is worse in blue states.

Speaker 67 And a little bit of that is blue states are a place a lot of people want to live. But you should be able to in places where you're governing for the working class in theory.

Speaker 67 And you're the cost of the point is a point. And just to level set, so people are listening, I completely agree, this notion of the supply-demand imbalance.
I mean, you're making an econ 101 argument.

Speaker 67 And that supply demand imbalance is next level in the state of California. We're simply not building enough housing.
And that goes to, I mean, and you correctly identify a NIMBYism

Speaker 67 and people, you know, incumbent protection rackets, so to speak,

Speaker 67 not just from a corporate perspective, but someone who's very satisfied with their backyard and their views and their home and their community. They don't want density.

Speaker 67 They don't want other people moving in. They don't want any infrastructure built around it as it relates to transportation.
They're very satisfied with what they have.

Speaker 67 And I think, and they abuse, in some respects, a lot of these rules that have been around decades and decades to advance that aim.

Speaker 67 So you identified all this, I think, pretty well as a problem for the state and for you. So when you gave a state of the state a couple years back, I'm genuinely forgetting the number.

Speaker 67 What was the housing goal you set? We said, well, we had an audacious goal that was a study of studies that identified what the state would need in order to address the supply-demand imbalance.

Speaker 67 But we made the point we were going through a legally binding process, what we refer to as our RHNA goals, and we've established that here is the legally binding goal, 2.5 million units by 2030.

Speaker 67 And that is the established state policy, and that's the goal. So you're not on track for that.
Not even close. Why? For, well, a number of reasons.
Macroeconomic.

Speaker 67 I mean, I think you have to be fair as it relates to the realities of what just occurred, as it relates to the constraints around the market.

Speaker 67 Interest rates are high. Obviously, we came out of a very difficult period

Speaker 67 during COVID,

Speaker 67 but fundamentally, because of the inability to get local government to get out of the way and allow for more construction. And that's why we created a housing accountability unit.

Speaker 67 That's why we've taken 800 actions. That's why we've unlocked 7,500 units.

Speaker 67 And that's why we have advanced 42 SEQA reforms and some of the most significant housing reforms in California history as it relates to ADUs, which you identified. ADUs now you can build.

Speaker 67 Can I do in single family home zoning and duplexes? But at the end of the day, state visions realize back to localism. Why did the ADU effort work?

Speaker 67 And the single-family housing or multifamily housing didn't? I mean, those were big bills and we, Yimbies, greeted them with

Speaker 67 delight. But I would say everybody would say that, what was it, SB9? Yeah, SB9, SB6.

Speaker 67 The cities have made it so those don't actually, it doesn't build as much housing as well. And that's why we created this housing accountability to drive more responsibility at the local level and

Speaker 67 providing technical assistance. It's not just a stick, it's also a carrot.
But no, look, there's, but that's the construct, right? I mean, that's a classic example. People like their neighborhoods.

Speaker 67 That's the foundation of NIMBYism. And this YIMBYism frame, which is yes in my backyard, for those wondering, the hell we're even talking about,

Speaker 67 I embrace it. I celebrate.
I don't think there's been a more YIMBY governor in California's history. And that's why we've signed so many of these bills and supported many of these bills.

Speaker 67 But you're right, that application, a lot of these are new reforms just in the last few years in this high interest rate environment.

Speaker 67 So we'll see how quickly things unlock as interest rates drop down. But fundamentally, it's the NIMBYism that drags it.

Speaker 67 Let me ask you something about the housing reforms as I flip the whole table of this podcast.

Speaker 67 It's a problem with having a podcast host on.

Speaker 67 So during the election, when Kamala Harris and then Barack Obama at the DNC, actually, by the way, on Barack Obama, then Kamala Harris, were up there talking about the need to build 3 million new homes, right?

Speaker 67 And really sounding like Yimbies from the stage. It's great.
I was thinking, man, that is a huge intellectual victory for a movement that didn't exist like 25 minutes ago.

Speaker 67 Then I started thinking and started running back to the data. I'm like, okay, how's it working out? And you look in San Francisco and housing starts aren't up.
And you look in LA and they're not up.

Speaker 67 You look in California,

Speaker 67 not talking here about ADUs, but housing starts in January 2025 were lower than in 2015. I began thinking to myself, oh shit, we actually have won an intellectual argument without winning the policy.

Speaker 67 So I began doing some reporting because I knew how many, I mean, not literally how many, but I knew there's been a pretty torrid pace with you and, you know, Scott Wiener and Buffy Wicks and a bunch of other housing champions.

Speaker 67 These are local elected officials in housing.

Speaker 67 And so I began calling developers in San Francisco and saying to them,

Speaker 67 what's going on here? Why don't I see a movement in how much you're building? And what they all told me was, I didn't end up writing this piece.

Speaker 67 I just didn't have time, but I've meant to for some time, was

Speaker 67 all these fast track bills required me to take on a bunch of new standards and requirements, prevailing wages and environmental standards and this and that that made it more expensive for me to take the fast track than just do what I'm doing.

Speaker 67 It wouldn't pencil out for me to do it. Now, look, I don't know if that's 100% true.
I can see you.

Speaker 67 But if that's not it,

Speaker 67 why do you think all those bills didn't lead to

Speaker 67 well, a lot of them have. I mean,

Speaker 67 we can talk about it.

Speaker 67 You know, I don't want to get into really parochial politics, but we can talk about a 500-unit project on Stevenson Street in San Francisco was never going to get done until the state intervened and compelled the hand of the city to actually move forward.

Speaker 67 Again, NIMBY, I mean, and you've got an ideological war that's going on in progressive cities that don't, they don't believe in the supply-demand framework.

Speaker 67 They don't believe in this notion of abundance fundamentally. They have a degrowth mindset, which you talk a lot about, or at least write about in the book.

Speaker 67 And so you're struggling with that ideological spectrum. But San Francisco, I mean, it's just infamously just loves its neighborhoods.

Speaker 67 doesn't want to see it upzone don't want to see the density so they're constantly pushing back against this and we are as a state finally intervening in ways the state has never intervened in the past so i think it's a little too early to sort of assert

Speaker 67 the sort of fatalist or have a fatalist

Speaker 67 notion of what hasn't yet occurred, when in fact we're starting now to flex our muscles and the application of these laws are now starting to fully go into effect.

Speaker 67 And ultimately, we want to see them materialize and manifest. But that's, I think that's the friction.
But look, let me just stipulate again, we're not arguing here. You're 100% right.

Speaker 67 I'm just asking, I'm curious. No, but also you're not,

Speaker 67 you know, you talk about it as a bagel liberalism.

Speaker 67 Everything bagel liberalism. Yeah, everything bagel liberalism.

Speaker 67 Everything together. You even were a little critical of the Biden administration and the Chips and Science Acts and the infrastructure.

Speaker 67 This stuff happened to that.

Speaker 67 Look, you go to the rural broadband effort, right? 2021, they passed a bipartisan infrastructure bill, say it's the biggest infrastructure bill in decades, which is not wrong. Yeah.

Speaker 67 1.2 trillion, but 500, 550 of new. Yeah.
And one of the big headline pieces of it is $42 billion for rural broadband. 2021, that passes.

Speaker 67 By the end of 2024, functionally nobody is hooked up to rural broadband. And me and Derek look into it.
And there is a 14-stage process. I mean, I'm sure California was going through it.

Speaker 67 A 14-stage process of they're creating a map and then the map can be challenged and there's these letters of intent and so on and so forth.

Speaker 67 And by the end of their administration, of the 56 states and jurisdictions that were trying to apply for the money, three had made it through, which putting aside the fact that that meant all these people didn't get broadband, it also meant that they couldn't run on that.

Speaker 67 Right. So much of the political theory of the Biden administration was that if you can show liberal democracy can deliver,

Speaker 67 you will pull people out of wanting these strong men who say they're going to burn the whole thing down and give you something out of the ashes.

Speaker 67 And if you can't really,

Speaker 67 if the things don't move fast enough, if they don't get to the people fast enough, it's much harder for liberal democracy to make the case that it delivers. I want it to deliver.

Speaker 67 I like these policies.

Speaker 67 But the speed thing is a real problem.

Speaker 67 And I'll say one more thing because I was talking, I did an event the other night with Jon Favreau, and we were talking about, we were talking about high-speed rail, but I was saying that the stimulus bill under Obama, that had three big headline projects for reinvestment.

Speaker 67 It had high-speed rail, it had smart grid,

Speaker 67 and it had a nationwide system of interoperable health records. I remember those days.
Yeah, 043. Yeah.

Speaker 67 At some point, we got to be upset about this, you know?

Speaker 76 If you have ever worried about the safety of your home, you need to hear this. Right now, SimplySafe is giving This Is Gavin Newsome listeners early access to their Black Friday sale.

Speaker 76 Here's why SimplySafe is the only security system you should trust to keep your home safe. Typical security systems don't really prevent someone from entering your home.

Speaker 76 They just react once someone is already inside. Real security stops a crime before it even starts.
That's why over 4 million Americans trust SimplySafe.

Speaker 76 SimplySafe takes action before a criminal gets into your home. The moment someone steps onto your property, AI security cameras identify the threat and alert SimplySafe's live agents.

Speaker 76 Agents take action immediately, confronting the criminal and if they need to, triggering sirens and dispatching the police. SimplySafe is like having your own personal security guard.

Speaker 76 And right now, you can take 60% off any new system with early access to SimplySafe's Black Friday sale at simplysafe.com slash Gavin. That's simplysafe.com slash Gavin for 60% off.

Speaker 76 There's no safe like Simply Safe.

Speaker 3 Tired of spills and stains on your sofa?

Speaker 5 Wash away your worries with Anibay.

Speaker 7 Anibay is the only machine-washable sofa inside and out where designer quality meets budget-friendly prices.

Speaker 12 That's right, sofas start at just $699.

Speaker 3 Enjoy a no-risk experience with pet-friendly, stain-resistant, and changeable slip covers made with performance fabric.

Speaker 2 Experience cloud-like comfort with high-resilience foam that's hypoallergenic and never needs fluffing.

Speaker 14 The sturdy steel frame ensures longevity and the modular pieces can be rearranged anytime.

Speaker 11 Shop washable sofas.com for early Black Friday savings up to 60% off site-wide, backed by a 30-day satisfaction guarantee.

Speaker 16 If you're not absolutely in love, send it back for a full refund.

Speaker 19 No return shipping or restocking fees.

Speaker 16 Every penny back.

Speaker 22 Upgrade now at washable sofas.com.

Speaker 58 Season 0 of the Global Gaming Gaming League is live streaming on YouTube and Twitch.

Speaker 65 Com, com.

Speaker 71 Like a gift run that turns into a disco snow globe, throw pillows, and PJs for the whole family, dog included.

Speaker 75 At Ross, holiday magic isn't about spending more, it's about giving more for less.

Speaker 67 So you have five core chapters in this book.

Speaker 67 You talk about growth, you talk about governance, you talk about deploying, inventing, you know, a lot of language very familiar here in the state of California.

Speaker 67 Again, abundance is fundamentally, foundationally who we are, at least believe we are in the state of California.

Speaker 67 And so in that respect, I agree, this sort of, this, you know, perception, performance is one thing, and I would argue a little bit more favorably to Biden.

Speaker 67 I mean, 775,000 manufacturing jobs, just the job growth generally.

Speaker 67 And I'm not just talking about job recovery from the pandemic, but the six plus million jobs that you have to stack on that after we were back to full recovery.

Speaker 67 The fact that Chips and Science Act is producing real results as it relates to private sector investment, and the fact that we finally have an industrial policy that is worker-centric.

Speaker 67 And I think that's that worker-centricity that you can argue against because that was, and you call it out in here when you talk to Gina about issues related to child care and other aspirational frameworks as it relates to small businesses and reaching diversity goals and the like.

Speaker 67 But there is the fundamental disconnect, and you're absolutely right as it relates to these large-scale, audacious projects. And I will give you your due on high-speed rail.

Speaker 67 I have been as critical or more than you have about this.

Speaker 67 In fact, I appreciate you reference my pivot after I took this job as governor where we called out the status quo and now we're trying to level set and get this back on track.

Speaker 67 But at least there's a vision. At least Obama had a vision.
He wanted to be big in big things. He wanted to do big things.
And at least progressive states still have a vision.

Speaker 67 And they have a desire. I mean, and I think that's part of an abundance frame.
And

Speaker 67 while it's difficult to manifest that vision,

Speaker 67 I don't think it's an indictment necessarily.

Speaker 67 Well, it's an indictment in terms of our ability to deliver on time and under budget.

Speaker 67 But the vision, I think, is foundational and important. And I give credit to the Obama administration in that respect for all three, even if they were all for things.
Look, I'm all for vision.

Speaker 67 My

Speaker 67 upset, the point of this book is that I want the things to happen. I mean, we can talk about high-speed rail.

Speaker 67 We must talk about high-speed rail. But before we get there for a second, I mean, I do get the question around this book because it is very critical of how liberals have governed.

Speaker 67 Well, then why are you just a Republican, right? If Texas is so good at housing. And the thing that I keep telling people is you've really really confused means and ends here.

Speaker 67 Another thing that keeps coming up is like, you want deregulation. Isn't that a Republican thing? Well, not if I'm deregulating the government itself so it can deliver on the things you want.

Speaker 67 What's supposed to matter in politics is not the means, it's the ends.

Speaker 67 And what I sort of want, what I'm trying to push here is for liberals to get a little bit more means agnostic and more like ends obsessed. There you go.

Speaker 67 So the thing that I, the place where I probably differ a little bit in in what you just said a second ago is that I don't want to give anybody credit for a vision that didn't happen.

Speaker 67 High-speed rail has, you have a great quote to me on this. I use it in the book.
High-speed rails undermined the public's faith in what can get done. It undermines the next high-speed rail, right?

Speaker 67 And the thing that I want to see happen is a kind of reckoning inside the governing, I would call it a culture. It's not just laws.

Speaker 67 It's not just regulations, although it is all those things, but it is a culture of what happens when the Democrats who are setting this stuff up get in the room together and people start raising their hands and saying, What about this?

Speaker 67 And what about that? And how about the other thing?

Speaker 67 And instead of hearing no, everybody gets kind of a little bit. And it's not the only thing going on, but there is something wrong in a culture that so often fails to deliver what it promises.

Speaker 67 I mean, not just high-speed rail, the big dig, the second avenue subway, right?

Speaker 67 These, you know, parts of them got done in the second avenue piece or the big dig eventually got done, but too much, too expensive. You can't do enough if you're doing that.
And it's not inevitable.

Speaker 67 europe builds trains better than we do they just do and they have governments i checked and they have unions more than we do right so it's not less lawyers and you point that out in the book well that's an issue i'd be very curious to hear so this is a thing i think people don't know that i would i would love to hear to hear your thoughts on that we do government different in this country than they do in in europe there's a qualitative difference between it which is they run government through bureaucracies and we restrain government through courts, which at the moment with Trump seems good in a bunch of ways.

Speaker 67 And there are ways in which it's good. And there are also ways in which it makes it hellacious

Speaker 67 to deliver. Yeah.

Speaker 67 And I would say that's the central theory of at least the argument that I would make against the high-speed rail is, I mean, look, this thing started, and you make the point, it started, there was sort of talk about the vision.

Speaker 67 The original vision was not Obama.

Speaker 67 It wasn't even necessarily Jerry Brown, but you point to 1982 when Brown, at least says, former governor Jerry Brown, we should look at this high-speed rail thing.

Speaker 67 And then eventually Arnold Schwarzenegger, a Republican, puts a bond on the ballot in 2008 and the voters approve it. And you're right, there was a lot of promotion and promise, $33.6 billion,

Speaker 67 two hours and 20 minutes downtown by 2020. By 2020 and the whole thing.
And then reality.

Speaker 67 Now, I get here decade later, decade plus later, and reconcile the fact that we have to dig our way out of this. There's a new reality.
There's scarcity of resources. There's an abundance of delay.

Speaker 67 There's an abundance of cost overruns. And we have to level set that we need to build something or we're left with literally nothing.

Speaker 67 We're left with pieces that go nowhere, that have no utility and actually have a long-term cost.

Speaker 67 But let's do it by telling people what it is and what it's not. And so this focus on the Central Valley, which as you

Speaker 67 recognize, was stipulated as a requirement under the Obama grant, the $3 billion,

Speaker 67 in one of the fastest growing parts of the state, an important part of the state, a state that has a deep desire to connect to the rest of the state in a state of mind that's not just about a transportation project, but about upzoning, about economic development, which a lot of that has occurred in and around these new stations that have been built.

Speaker 67 50 large-scale projects, the size of three Golden Gate Bridges. The entire environmental clearance is now 100% done, LA to San Francisco.
There were 2,000. It took 2012 to 2025.

Speaker 67 I can't make up for that. I can only deal with the component part.
It's crazy. It's crazy, but the point is, is we're at the point where just announced we're doing railhead.

Speaker 67 We're finally laying the tracks. I mean, we can lament about it.

Speaker 67 We absolutely learned from it and we've stress test a lot of it. You talk about the consulting class versus a bureaucratic class.
You're absolutely right.

Speaker 67 And we started to shift that just a few years ago. But the litigation on the 2,270 parcels.
that we had to purchase was next level. And that delay, I think, is the core of this.

Speaker 67 There's plenty of other bureaucratic malaise and other issues we can identify. But back to this notion, I think you're right.
This idea of sort of, I think, little liberal litigation.

Speaker 67 I don't know what phrase you used in the book,

Speaker 67 but we were mindful of that and critical of that. And you mark that as a big part of the sort of 1970s construct in America.
And tell us a little bit more about the thinking there.

Speaker 67 We can put a pin in high-speed rail.

Speaker 67 There are two major liberal movements that happen in the 20th century.

Speaker 67 The one we think about a lot is New Deal liberalism. That's the one where we build aggressively.
It's a growth-oriented liberalism. It's a liberalism of material goods.

Speaker 67 And it's the liberalism that defines the left-right divide in our national narrative, right? Liberals believe in big, strong government. Conservatives believe in small, limited government.

Speaker 67 In the 60s, 70s, 80s, you have real problems that have emerged from this New Deal order. We have built heedlessly, recklessly, intensely.

Speaker 67 We are cutting highways all across the country, many of them, though not all of them, through marginalized communities.

Speaker 67 But man, the rich communities don't like it when a highway goes through either, right? And they have a lot of the power that leads to this.

Speaker 67 There is a genuine despoiling of the environment. My colleague Derek likes to talk about the moment in Los Angeles.

Speaker 67 I think it's in the 40s or 50s, where people wake up and think there's been a chemical attack from the Japanese, but it turned out that the city had launched its own chemical attack on itself.

Speaker 67 People forget in California, a lazy pundit could suggest the modern environmental movement started in 1967 in reaction to that and the business community saying enough.

Speaker 67 And Governor Ronald Reagan established the California Air Resources Board, of which that rights and responsibility were afforded under the 1970 Clean Air Act, which you also highlight in the book, Richard Nixon, affording California a waiver so that we can address the unique air quality concerns that you identify in the book.

Speaker 67 And then, of course, everybody forgets it's Reagan who signs the California Environmental Quality Act. Yeah, this CEQA

Speaker 67 issue that you and others and myself

Speaker 67 are taking it time. It's worth taking, I think, a minute on CEQA.
So Reagan signs a bill into law from Jake Ambinder's research. It doesn't even merit.
a full article in the LA Times.

Speaker 67 That's interesting. Nobody quite knows what they've done because initially CEQA, it just says, look, when the government does stuff, it's got to produce a report on what the likely consequences are.

Speaker 67 No big deal.

Speaker 67 And then there is a proposed development in Mammoth, which, you know, the great ski and snowboard town, which I've been to many, many times. Oh, you Southern Californians.
Yeah, Mammoth.

Speaker 67 But there's a mixed-use development that's proposed there, you know, sort of condos and some shopping at the bottom of them. And a bunch of rich Mammothians, I don't know what they call themselves,

Speaker 67 file a lawsuit. And they have a novel argument, which is that this development can't go forward because it violates CEQA.
And this gets rejected in the courts because this year.

Speaker 67 What year roughly would this be? I'd want to double check this, but early 70s, I would think.

Speaker 67 But I could be wrong on that.

Speaker 67 So

Speaker 67 what happens here is that the courts reject this a bunch of times because CEQA is about public. development.
And then the Supreme Court rules, no, no, no, no.

Speaker 67 Public development is anything that requires a permit by the state of California.

Speaker 67 There's a Sierra Club lobbyist who we quote in the book who says, after that, CEQA applies to anything where you are rubbing two sticks together in the state.

Speaker 67 And so now, having been, as Ambinder puts it in his dissertation on this stuff, informed by the courts of what the law they passed actually does, the legislature puts a pause on it because now everything's in huge legal limbo.

Speaker 67 But the key thing here is that CEQA, I mean, and I'm sure you know all this much better than I do, but CEQA's power is amplified a lot by courts that interpreted it in a way that was very different than anybody initially interpreted it.

Speaker 67 And this is part of a period in liberalism where you have this rise of an environmental movement that has legal dimensions and political dimensions and statutory dimensions and cultural dimensions.

Speaker 67 It's Rachel Carson, it's Ralph Nader. And the key thing about this period of liberalism, the new left period of liberalism, is that it is fundamentally skeptical of government action.

Speaker 67 The New Deal is this alliance between between the government, the unions, and the corporations to build, to put people to work, to industrialize America and make it into this kind of advanced, you know, globe-spanning superpower.

Speaker 67 And the new left comes in and says, we are destroying this place.

Speaker 67 We are turning this country conformist. The term ticky-tacky comes from a song about Daly City and how gross all those homes are, right?

Speaker 67 Like there's a whole thing about the aesthetic destruction of it.

Speaker 67 I have great quotes from Lyndon Johnson's speeches about, we used to worry about the ugly American, now we have to worry about the ugly America, right? There's a whole change that begins to happen.

Speaker 67 And the way that this moment in liberalism tries to square the circle. Because the new left is part of this era that's very individualistic, right?

Speaker 67 We think about this for Reagan and individualism, but it's happening on the left too. And it wants a highly participatory democracy.

Speaker 67 And the way it tries to square it is create a million different ways that individuals or individuals represented by nonprofit groups typically can sue the government to stop it or force it to think about things that it wasn't thinking about before.

Speaker 67 Sorry, I've got a mosquito there.

Speaker 67 And it creates ways to sue the government and force it to think about things that it wasn't thinking about or hadn't earlier.

Speaker 67 Get that damn thing.

Speaker 67 If I got it, I'd be like a bomb in that old interview. Remember?

Speaker 67 The time when he truly seemed superpowered.

Speaker 67 So the way they do that is they create this raft of legislation.

Speaker 67 Some of it is environmental, but not all of it.

Speaker 67 And what it allows is for individuals or individuals represented by groups and a huge world of nonprofits emerges to take the best talent out of the law schools and like set them to suing government to sort of enforce this.

Speaker 67 Ralph Nader, when he runs for president in 2000, is asked, what qualifies you to be president? He says, nobody has sued more government agencies than I have.

Speaker 67 That all made the left. Yeah.
And so this is very potent in blue states that had a strong new left. And we don't think about it really.

Speaker 67 It's not part of our national narrative of the left and the right. Our national narrative is like the guys who like government and the party that likes government and the party that doesn't.

Speaker 67 It's not that way. The right loves a big police state.
And the left has a very divided soul on government. It likes some kinds of government, but it hobbles government.
And

Speaker 67 that sort of made sense for its time. But now we're in a different time where the problems are problems of not building enough.

Speaker 67 And environmentally, particularly, all of a sudden we've gone from a period where it really was environmentally important to stop much of the things that were happening.

Speaker 67 And now we're in one where the environmental movement has to build, build, build, build. The IRA is a building approach to climate change.
And our laws are not set up for that.

Speaker 67 And this is where I'd like to get your perspective. The thing that's also true is like the Democratic coalition is not set up to revisit those laws.

Speaker 67 You all have been doing little carve outs of CEQA, but you've not ripped it out and rebuilt it. And nor have we done that at the national level.

Speaker 67 And as much as Democrats know this, the environmental groups don't want to do that. There's a lot of power and incumbents around the legislative architecture we have now.

Speaker 67 And you don't get a huge, I mean, you tell me if this is wrong, but I feel like you don't get a huge parade for rebuilding legislative process, right? Zero. And so it feels like

Speaker 67 it just, it just, it's years and years of friction, trial and error. It takes a couple of years.
You introduce, you socialize, it gets nowhere, finally gets through, new coalition, new personalities.

Speaker 67 You finally get it done. Then two years later, you're actually able to exercise it.
I'll give you two specific examples. I have a 270-day judicial review process that we pushed.

Speaker 67 We worked it for its first use case, it was the first above-ground storage facility in California, last half century, CITES.

Speaker 67 It's in an off-stream dam in California. The second, quite literally, a week ago, for 300-megawatt solar, large-scale solar facility, facility, which we are testing it.

Speaker 67 Hardly perfect, but that was three years in the making just to have this established rule where I can finally fast-track large-scale projects to start addressing your point.

Speaker 67 And you're right, there was no fundamental coalition for any of that. It was a very lonely process until after years and years of trial and error, we finally broke through.

Speaker 67 Do you think you benefit from the other side of it?

Speaker 67 From being able to get these projects built? Like if you could get them built, do you think like it's an intermediate period of pain and then better politics?

Speaker 67 It will be better politics, but I won't be around to enjoy the fruits of that. And I think that's the great struggle, to your point.
I mean, you made that point about Biden earlier.

Speaker 67 I mean, that's just, come on, it's 48 months. You're in the middle of trying to address the pandemic.
You've got all kinds of global issues. You've got supply train constraints.

Speaker 67 You've got war in Ukraine. You've got all of these issues.
And yet, he passes, I refer to it as a master class.

Speaker 30 Time for a sofa upgrade: introducing anime sofas, where designer style meets budget-friendly prices.

Speaker 19 Every Anibay sofa is modular, allowing you to rearrange your space effortlessly. Perfect for both small and large spaces, Anibay is the only machine-washable sofa inside and out.

Speaker 3 Say goodbye to stains and messes with liquid and stain-resistant fabrics that make cleaning easy.

Speaker 7 Liquids simply slide right off.

Speaker 80 Designed for custom comfort, our high-resilience foam lets you choose between a sink-in feel or a supportive memory foam blend.

Speaker 15 Plus, our pet-friendly, stain-resistant fabrics ensure your sofa stays beautiful for years.

Speaker 12 Don't compromise quality for price.

Speaker 14 Visit washablesofas.com to upgrade your living space today.

Speaker 81 Sofas start at just $699 with no risk returns and a 30-day money-back guarantee.

Speaker 11 Get early access to Black Friday now.

Speaker 80 The biggest sale of the year can save you up to 60% off.

Speaker 6 Plus, free shipping and free returns.

Speaker 20 Shop now at washablesofas.com.

Speaker 59 Season 0 of the Global Gaming League is live streaming on YouTube and Twitch.

Speaker 65 Global, global, global, global, global, global, global. Global, global, global, global, global, global, global.

Speaker 33 Take 30% off Lancome and Touchland fragrances and body nests.

Speaker 68 Every holiday shopper's got a list, but raw shoppers, you've got a mission.

Speaker 71 Like a gift run that turns into a disco snow globe, throw pillows, and Pijays for the whole family.

Speaker 82 Being a parent is basically a juggling act.

Speaker 84 Dinner, hockey practice, homework, a last-minute science project, and someone's always, always

Speaker 86 shouting for you from another room.

Speaker 87 So yeah, I'll take any shortcuts that actually works.

Speaker 88 And that's why I'm all in on HelloFresh.

Speaker 85 Fresh ingredients, super easy recipes, and over 80 options every week.

Speaker 86 So everyone eats. No one complains.

Speaker 89 And I get to feel like I've got it all together.

Speaker 84 At least for dinner.

Speaker 89 And the best part, you're in total control.

Speaker 83 Skip a week, pause any time, pick what works for you.

Speaker 92 It's dinner on your terms.

Speaker 93 They even have 15-minute recipes.

Speaker 85 Perfect for those nights when everyone's hungry and patience is officially off the menu.

Speaker 91 And with so many options, even my pickiest eater found something they loved, which means no more backup mac and cheese.

Speaker 87 Try HelloFresh today and get 50% off the first box with free shipping.

Speaker 93 Go to hellofresh.ca and use promo code meal50. That's hellofresh.ca promo code meal50.

Speaker 67 You are more defensive of Biden's record than of your own. No, I'm more proud of the work they did.

Speaker 67 breaking through, actually addressing the issues that Democrats claim they wanted to address, including marginally, and I agree with you. Again,

Speaker 67 there's zero daylight in this book, which is remarkable, including its own critique, my own self-critique of my own state and my own performance. So it's interesting.

Speaker 67 But he had, as I said, an industrial policy that was worker-centric, and there was reforms at the same time, the deal with Manchin, which you acknowledge in the book, marginal.

Speaker 67 Well, the progressives killed those.

Speaker 67 You're talking about the permitting reforms. The permitting reforms, but that sort of manifested in finally on the Chips and Science Act to be a version of that with Kelly and Cruz as it relates.

Speaker 67 So there were some component parts. And they learned on this.
I mean, Brandies, who is Biden's former NEC director, has an awesome piece in foreign affairs about why we need to build faster, right?

Speaker 67 There's real learning here. But I won't.

Speaker 67 But if we, but I'm going to, let me stipulate, let me make this quick.

Speaker 67 If we can figure that out, if we can, I don't, this is, this is the most, one of the most important books Democrats can read. Wake up.

Speaker 67 I sent this to the two leaders of my California Assembly and Senate. You love to hear it.
I just know. But no, I'm serious.
I said, guys, wake up. This is it.

Speaker 67 I mean, we're being judged here at a different level. We've done some good things together.
We got to get serious. Israel is spot on on a lot of this stuff.

Speaker 67 There's some, you know, we had population growth the last two years, by the way. In December, they updated all the census numbers.
It grew in California the last two years.

Speaker 67 You had red states that had population decline in the last few years, with the exception of Vermont. There's some quibble.
Yeah, I can quibble in some of that respect.

Speaker 67 But fundamentally, these larger trend lines you identify in this friction struggle to build more and build better and address, I'm with you on the high-speed rail. It It furiates me as a taxpayer.

Speaker 67 You're 100%. It's an indictment of our ability to deliver.
That said, we are finally doing railheads. We're buying train sets.
We got partnerships with Bright Line and High Desert Corridor.

Speaker 67 We did full electrification of Caltran, $714 million, 51 miles. We got all the environmental work done.
All the hard work's now behind us.

Speaker 67 Now we're laying track and we're finally getting that first 119 miles done. We'll get to 171.
It's a $6.5 billion gap. We have a strategy to address that.
I don't even want to.

Speaker 67 I want to hold Heispell for a second because I want to do one thing on Biden before we go.

Speaker 67 But the issue with Biden is I don't know what the hell more he could have done in a short period of time to deliver on a bold vision and lay the tracks for benefits that we'll enjoy.

Speaker 67 Yes, not all in 48 months, but over the course of the next four or eight years. But this is a

Speaker 67 living. Like, I'm not saying it's all his fault.
That's not my point here, right? He is inheriting a government.

Speaker 67 Although you see in a very dark way with Musk and Doge, that a lot that was taken as a binding constraint actually isn't.

Speaker 67 So I want to hold that because I think there are things as grotesque as what that crew is doing to the government.

Speaker 67 There's also things that need to be learned from what they're doing to the government.

Speaker 67 But it didn't, I really think it's important to hold this in mind for all of us because this is something I really did not understand.

Speaker 67 It did not used to take this long to deliver. Medicare.
Medicare delivered Medicare cards a year after they passed that bill.

Speaker 67 It took the Affordable Care Act four years to begin delivering actual insurance tenants. Yeah, we can talk about that.

Speaker 67 It took on the Inflation Reduction Act, which is doing the much smaller job of just beginning to negotiate prices on some drugs three years to get that started.

Speaker 67 I mean, we built, I mean, these are the classic examples, but we built the Empire State Building in a year. The average environmental review takes four and a half years.

Speaker 67 Just a few years to go to Gate Bridge. I agree.
You know all this.

Speaker 67 The thing that I want to say about this, which is not Joe Biden's fault, but it is the fault of now, I think, a long period of Democrats beginning to get accustomed to this slowness.

Speaker 67 This is not going to work politically. I agree with you.

Speaker 67 You are not going to hold the people you need to hold if your answer in every term is you can't feel what I did because the government takes too long. If it had to take too long, fine.

Speaker 67 But it doesn't actually, right? These are man-made.

Speaker 67 And it's not just government, it's also private sector. I mean, there is another component of this.

Speaker 67 The markets actually play a really significant outsize influence in timing on a a lot of these things, on investments, et cetera.

Speaker 67 Yeah, but they would build fast in a lot of cases if we let them build fast. I mean, they're not why we didn't get rural broadband done.
That was not them. No, but that's just, you know, I agree.

Speaker 67 That's 50 state solutions and thousands and thousands of municipalities. I think I'm pushing them a little bit here with using the example of Biden, not you.

Speaker 67 But I do think this is, I think that those of us who want to defend liberal democracy from an actual challenge to it, right?

Speaker 67 One of the things Trump is getting the most mileage out of, and he says it himself all the time.

Speaker 67 I think it's why he likes what Elon Musk is doing for all of the risk of it is the sense of constant action.

Speaker 67 All of a sudden, government, which normally you don't feel moving, you feel it moving, maybe badly. Maybe what you feel is the heat from it burning to the ground.

Speaker 67 But you feel movement. I agree with that.
Right. And populists have that, they have a politics of energy almost all of the time, right? This is something you see across countries.

Speaker 67 And I think that Democrats need to begin to think about speed as a thing we are actually tracking and pursuing government. We have other things we need to pursue and track.
Equity, right, justice.

Speaker 67 There are a lot of things we need to think about and you need to make trade-offs between them.

Speaker 67 But speed is one we have just let slip. And it's not just like bad because it's kind of sad that we let it slip.

Speaker 67 Jake Sullivan said about Biden, he said, elections are measured in four years and his presidency will be measured in decades. It won't, or his policy agenda will be judged in decades.

Speaker 67 So much of it is going to get undone, including a lot of the transatlantic alliance that he worked worked so hard to rebuild, that it won't.

Speaker 67 One reason that this book is politically important to me,

Speaker 67 you know my background is as a policy reporter and the stuff I like is like the details of the policy, but one reason it's politically important to me is that Democrats have, I think, gotten a little bit of learned helplessness around not.

Speaker 67 every little bit of how government moves slowly. People think about procurement reforms.
You've done a lot on that. But in general, the sense that it just, we just can't do what we once did.

Speaker 67 Like the way the government used to work, I was reading a great piece by Harold Meyerson, who's at the American Prospect, and he's a great California reporter, too. And he wrote this piece.

Speaker 67 It was back during the stimulus debate under Obama. He sent it to me the other day.

Speaker 67 And he talks about the way the

Speaker 67 Works of Progress Administration started up under FDR

Speaker 67 and the unfathomable speed.

Speaker 67 at which they just cut through everything to put millions of people, the equivalent today of putting 10 million people to work in a matter of months. Right.

Speaker 67 And he was saying, you can't do it today, Harold was,

Speaker 67 because you just wouldn't have the laws. But I just think it's really important to say laws are man-made.
There are laws of physics.

Speaker 67 There are technical things we don't yet know how to do. But the difference between places that construct apartment buildings quickly and that don't is that's us.

Speaker 67 100%.

Speaker 67 And look, and you highlight some of those successes. I mean, you talk about what what happened during the Trump administration and COVID.

Speaker 67 By the way, a lot of innovation happened during COVID, including on land use. We did something called Home Key, RoomKey.
We changed land use in CEQA. We did it through an emergency frame.

Speaker 67 You referenced the I-95. Because risk tolerance went up.
Risk tolerance went up. I-95, an emergency frame is the most expensive anyway.
We had the I-10, which we got done in eight days.

Speaker 67 That was even more. Through the I-95.
Yeah, you should have added that. And one nice thing you could have said about our state.

Speaker 67 But so there was a state of mind, though. I mean, we're doing it right now in terms of the emergency work we're doing on the rebuild of the fire emergency.

Speaker 67 And people are celebrating it. If these emergency structures work better,

Speaker 67 then why is it not making the normal structure closer to them? No, look,

Speaker 67 this is why. It's why I wanted to do this podcast.
It's why I love, don't like your book.

Speaker 67 This is why I think it's essential reading for Democrats, this notion of speed, appearing to take action, but not doing things to people, but with people and finding that right balance.

Speaker 67 It's not, I think there's the stress, and it goes to your opening point about some of the questions you're getting, sort of this notion of a binary, that it's one or the other, why aren't you a Republican?

Speaker 67 As opposed to, you know, risk-taking without recklessness. You know, what's that right balance?

Speaker 67 You know, is the right balance of Doge is the example of the $140 billion that Clinton and Gore saved on a $1.4 trillion government, and they reduced the size of the workforce by 400,000, but they did that again in partnership.

Speaker 67 and did real reform versus the recklessness of Doge. Is it the RFI2 process? I thank you for recognizing our procurement reforms.

Speaker 67 You highlight, we brought in Jen Polka from Code for America to bring in a private sector version. We did the original Doge.

Speaker 67 We call it ODI, which is the Office of Digital Innovation, which is now Office of Data Innovation. We're trying to change the entire procurement framework.

Speaker 67 We inherited these old cobalt systems that you highlight from 1959 and these IBM mainframes from the 1980s. All of that creates a stress on the system.
And so it's not easy overnight to fix it.

Speaker 67 But the emergency mindset, and I think the break break-the-glass point you're making is for Democrats right now, and it's the soul searching we have, we got to deliver.

Speaker 16 There's nothing like sinking into luxury.

Speaker 9 Anibay sofas combine ultimate comfort and design at an affordable price.

Speaker 8 Anibay has designed the only fully machine washable sofa from top to bottom.

Speaker 7 The stain-resistant performance fabric slip covers and cloud-like frame duvet can go straight into your wash.

Speaker 19 Perfect for for anyone with kids, pets, or anyone who loves an easy-to-clean, spotless sofa.

Speaker 12 With a modular design and changeable slip covers, you can customize your sofa to fit any space and style.

Speaker 12 Whether you need a single chair, love seat, or a luxuriously large sectional, Annabe has you covered.

Speaker 20 Visit washable sofas.com to upgrade your home.

Speaker 3 Sofas started just $699 and right now, get early access to Black Friday savings, up to 60% off store-wide, with a 30-day money-back guarantee.

Speaker 22 Shop now at washable sofas.com.

Speaker 67 Add a little

Speaker 17 to your life.

Speaker 40 Head into into Ulta Beauty today to shop our early Black Friday event, Ulta Beauty.

Speaker 72 Like a gift run that turns into a disco snow globe, throw pillows, and Pijays for the whole family, dog included.

Speaker 84 Being a parent is basically a juggling act, dinner, hockey practice, homework, a last-minute science project, and someone's always, always

Speaker 85 Fresh ingredients, super easy recipes and over 80 options every week.

Speaker 89 So everyone eats, no one complains, and I get to feel like I've got it all together, at least for dinner.

Speaker 83 And the best part, you're in total control. Skip a week, pause any time, pick what works for you.

Speaker 93 They even have 15-minute recipes.

Speaker 93 Go to hellofresh.ca and use promo code meal50. That's hellofresh.ca promo code meal50.

Speaker 67 Does your legislature want to fix it?

Speaker 67 They all intellectually do, but then you have every constituency and every group, and they're showing up 24-7. That NIMBYism is well established.
You've established it from the mindset.

Speaker 67 It's not just, by the way, Reagan in CEQA, but it's the NEPA, it's Endangered Species Act.

Speaker 67 It's the Clean Water Act, all the stuff Nixon did, but it's not, but in any reform, people panic. Oh, you don't care about, you're just turned in conservative.

Speaker 67 You can't even, I mean, we've had a podcast here. You talk to Republicans.
You're like, geez, what the hell is going on? Guy's selling out. Sold his soul.
So you have reforms around process in CEQA.

Speaker 67 People panic, said, what, you just want to destroy the environment.

Speaker 67 So there's a political price you pay for that reform, but you're right, there's a political price for not reforming, which is where the Democratic Party is today.

Speaker 67 So speed, decision-making, the sense of action and purpose.

Speaker 67 By the way, a lot of what this president is celebrating is what the last president did.

Speaker 67 And a lot of the investments, I mean, the AI investments that Sam and others were announcements

Speaker 67 were making

Speaker 67 a bomb in a minute.

Speaker 67 I want to get the credit. That's one of the reasons I think this speed thing is actually so important.
You want to shorten.

Speaker 67 Look, the policy feedback loops are broken because people don't know who did the policy.

Speaker 67 When you said a second, a couple of minutes ago that these projects that can only exist because of your fast tracking will not exist while you are in office, right?

Speaker 67 That is a breakdown of the way the voters can maintain accountability, right? When they don't know who did what, it's actually a big problem.

Speaker 67 One thing that I think about with what you were just saying on the politics of it is that, and I see it very clearly in California, I'm sure it's true in other places.

Speaker 67 You can,

Speaker 67 you should tell me if this is facile. You can avoid short-term pain in a way that ultimately creates almost unsolvable long-term pain.

Speaker 67 And so, you know, you obviously used to be mayor of San Francisco. London Breed said a lot of the right things on Yimbyism and all the rest of it.
Former mayor of San Francisco.

Speaker 67 But couldn't get it done

Speaker 67 and lost re-election. Not the only reason, but a big reason.
People are furious about the homelessness problem there. And that's in large part a housing problem.
It's not the only reason.

Speaker 67 But in large part, you make that point and you're spot on about it. In Oakland, they recalled the mayor.

Speaker 67 In Los Angeles, I mean, there's a lot of reasons for what's going on there, but Caruso ran a much stronger campaign than people have expected at the beginning.

Speaker 67 Former Republican, became Democrat, outperformed a lot of his people. Yeah.
And so you have this sort of thing happening where there's almost, I think, I don't want to say a ceiling.

Speaker 67 We'll see see what you do in a couple of years. I don't want to say a ceiling on where California politicians can go.

Speaker 67 But it is very hard to be successful when people are angry about problems that maybe you didn't cause, but you're also not willing to take the pain now to solve it.

Speaker 67 Well, I am taking the pain and I'm taking the political, I mean, I can give you proof points of the work we've done and the political capital we've used to get a lot of these reforms advanced.

Speaker 67 And that's, I think,

Speaker 67 that's where I struggle a little bit with the book, just again, the book that I celebrate and I'm handing out to folks, is it's not a lot of that has acknowledged the actual policy reforms that we are advancing, that we are marching and moving towards, and how we're actually starting to see some progress in that respect.

Speaker 67 But with that in mind, I get the speed and the scale, but I also want to make a case. Look, this is a state, you know, where we're gaining population again.
We're running budget surpluses, we dominate

Speaker 67 in every innovative

Speaker 67 category. You talk about the future of abundance in the context of invention and deployment.
That's California. 18% of the world's R ⁇ D is in this state.
No other state comes close.

Speaker 67 Only two countries have more R ⁇ D, and that's Germany and China. This is a state with 41% more manufacturing output than the state that tends to get a lot of credit in Texas.

Speaker 67 Texas, by the way, takes $71.1 billion of federal money from the taxpayers. We give $83.1 billion.
We have more scientists, engineers, more Nobel laureates, more venture capital.

Speaker 67 Half of the unicorn companies in the country are in California. There's a lot going right.
They just get a survey of the top 10 happiest cities.

Speaker 67 With respect, Houston went on that list.

Speaker 67 San Jose was very happy when I lived in San Jose. San Jose was.
Irvine was on that list.

Speaker 67 Fremont. Interestingly, number one, San Diego.
So, you know, I don't know. We dominate in AI.
The world, again, we're inventing the future. It happens here.

Speaker 67 By the way, you saw in homelessness, the numbers through the roof across the rest of the country stabilized here in California. The housing crisis, not unique to blue states any larger, longer.

Speaker 67 Lower taxes in this state than in many, many states. People talk about the high taxes in California.
It's just BS. 16 states, 16 states tax their poorest residents more than we tax our top 1%.

Speaker 67 40% of our residents pay lower taxes than in Florida and Texas. 80% of our residents pay slightly above average taxes.
So this notion of even being a high-tax state is BS.

Speaker 67 This notion that everyone's leaving is complete BS. We dominate in so many of these categories because I think of our values, but we're not building enough damn housing.

Speaker 67 And that's led to this homeless crisis, not exclusively, as you said, but it's contributed. And yes, we had a vision decades ago.

Speaker 67 The taxpayers advanced it on a high-speed rail, and we watched China clean our clock. You highlight that in miles and numerics that are depressing.
I don't even want you to repeat them.

Speaker 67 I can for everybody, but I'm not going to. But we're going to get the damn thing done.
They complain about the Erie Canal. They complain about the Panama Canal.

Speaker 67 They complained about the Transcontinental Railroad right before it finally started

Speaker 67 to

Speaker 67 see real progress. And I feel like we're at that tipping point with this damn high-speed rail.
But nonetheless, you're right, John. I'm not high speed rail for a second.

Speaker 67 So I keep keep forgetting that. I will say first,

Speaker 67 I will say first, look, I love California.

Speaker 67 I have Redwoods tattooed on my shoulder. Like, no joke.
And

Speaker 67 leaving the state to go live in New York City was like the right thing for a bunch of reasons, but

Speaker 67 a difficult personal choice for me because this is my soil. Yeah.

Speaker 67 So every, you know, you lived through a tough time, though, in San Francisco.

Speaker 67 You know what? I would still. I mean, it was, that was, I admit it was a tough title.
That was a tough time in SS, the pandemic. And by the way, that city's coming around.
It's turning around. It's

Speaker 67 objectively. I love SF too.
Yeah. Objectively.
You know, as I say, what is it? Criticism is an act of love. Yes.
God bless you. There's a lot of love in this book.

Speaker 67 There's a lot of love in this book, man. A lot of love in this book.

Speaker 67 And then this is, I think, always the great

Speaker 67 paradox of California. California is the frontier of the future.
It always has been.

Speaker 67 And

Speaker 67 technologically, as you said, but also culture, right? You go to Northern California, we're inventing everybody's technology. You go to Southern, we're giving the whole world its culture, right?

Speaker 67 It's a wild place.

Speaker 67 And to me, the reason the housing thing matters here, the reason I structure the housing chapter the way that I do with Derek is that

Speaker 67 you need to make it possible for people to be and

Speaker 67 prosper.

Speaker 67 from that prosperity, right?

Speaker 67 It is good for people to be near the AI boom. I have friends, I mean, they fought fires in the city of San Francisco and couldn't afford to live there, right?

Speaker 67 The point of California's riches is that they should be shared, not shared necessarily just through taxation and redistribution, but through the ability of people to go live in these super high productivity places, where as happened with like a young Steve Jobs and Wozniak, you sort of fall into this world where maybe if you have a genius for something, you have the connections to make it matter.

Speaker 67 You You know, I have this sort of line in the book that in making these cities so expensive, we did the real gating. We really closed the frontier because the true frontier isn't land, it's ideas.

Speaker 67 You frame it with Horace Greeley, go west, young man, go west, and then you create that new construct. Yeah, so I want to pull that.

Speaker 67 It's actually everything you say about California, and you know this, I'm not telling, but I'm saying it for the audience, that

Speaker 67 makes it so important that like the working-class families can be here and are not driven out. But on high speed rail, let me, because by the way,

Speaker 67 the housing crisis in this state explains more things in more ways on more days. That affordability issue is at the core of 90% of California's real and structural problems.
This is foundational.

Speaker 67 Again, you could not be more right.

Speaker 67 It is at the core. of the issues that define the challenges, not just of this state, increasingly all over the United States.

Speaker 67 We talk about the future happening here first, where America's coming attraction.

Speaker 67 That's all those those wonderful things that you and I were just discussing, but obviously all of these perilous issues that you have been discussing and the reason you wrote this book.

Speaker 67 So high-speed rail.

Speaker 67 So when I went out and did the reporting on that, and I went up and down the track with the people building it and the people from the rail authority, and they told me a couple of things that have stuck in my head that I don't try to resolve in the book, but I'd be curious for your thoughts.

Speaker 67 So one was that the Merced Bakersfield leg, which is the leg that is currently being tried,

Speaker 67 I think they said they had something like line of sight, either had spent or had line of sight on something like, it was in the range of $11 to $15 billion.

Speaker 67 We $13.4 billion,

Speaker 67 of which 10.8 from the state and 2.6 from the Fed. All right.
And that the estimate on finishing was said to Bakersfield was $36 billion.

Speaker 67 Yeah, well, there's currently our estimates, and this plus or minus, and this is a moving target, about $6.5 billion that we, based upon what we have, the current commitments, we had an additional $3 billion from the federal government.

Speaker 67 Obviously, the Trump administration is trying to vanillize that as they did in the last time. And then cap and trade proceeds that will continue to accrue.

Speaker 67 If we extend cap and trade, can you bond against that? There's a lot of variations. So you're saying you think you have line of sight on the money.

Speaker 67 We have a delta of 6.5 billion. Roughly.
Yeah. Okay.

Speaker 67 And what a bunch of the people working on said is like, look, in the end, for this to really work, it needs to be LA to San Francisco, and that would cost $110 billion.

Speaker 67 Yeah, well, we're looking at it, and I don't, you know, look,

Speaker 67 here I am.

Speaker 67 We extended high-speed rail. The idea is to get it in these density and population corridors, which is the point you make in the critique.

Speaker 67 And get to Fresno, for example, to Gilroy, where Caltran is. And we can then connect to San Jose and into San Francisco.
You have the existing infrastructure in place. That's about an hour.

Speaker 67 You get into Palmdale.

Speaker 67 Now you're connecting with the new Bright line that's going all the way to Vegas and one of the fastest growing parts of the state in Palmdale, where middle-class families can still afford a home.

Speaker 67 And so those are component parts. And that's where I think that $36 million billion dollar number came from.
Those three component parts roughly add up to that.

Speaker 67 Now the Tehachapi Mountains, getting them over, all of those larger issues, those are issues that obviously are component parts of this larger

Speaker 67 course of many, many years, right? Oh, but

Speaker 67 I think the big question people have about it, and you hear people asking this all the time, is that... And I just wrote, I inherited this.
Yes, you inherited this. It's not your

Speaker 67 from 2000.

Speaker 67 I'm not blaming Governor Newsome on the other side. God bless.
I'm just trying to get that closer. My question is, if the there is not a line of sight on that 36 to 110 billion, right?

Speaker 67 That doesn't exist. And that's a very hard thing.

Speaker 67 When you're trying to get revenue generation, once you start getting the large population corridors, if you could connect Silicon Valley to Central Valley, which is the foundational argument, and you can start sharing, we're looking at train sets that have interoperability, not just with Bright Line, but high desert corridors.

Speaker 67 You have two private sector partners, and we're actually procuring train sets very, very shortly. As I say, we did the railhead.
We're starting to lay track.

Speaker 67 This thing's starting to get very, very real. Some of the projects you did see are projects that will have profound impacts economically in terms of the upzoning, particularly in the Fresno corridor.

Speaker 67 And Fresno is a very important part of the project. I think the big worry I heard from transportation types is that the ridership in those corridors, as fast-growing as they may be,

Speaker 67 is not enough to throw off money. It's not even enough to handle that operating budget, very likely.
And it's definitely not going to throw off money that's going to complete $110 million train.

Speaker 67 And that we're finishing something that in the end is going to be a monument to not being able to build the thing we wanted. Yeah, we're not going to be able to build a new airport.

Speaker 67 We're not, you know, I mean, the end of the day, we've got these constraints that are well established already, these pre-existing constraints.

Speaker 67 There's not a high-speed rail in the system that's not enjoying some popularity and success. Most, at least, are wildly popular.
It's an experience no one's had in the United States of America.

Speaker 67 At least we're out there daring and we're trying to advance. Are there performance that can be made that would make the next pieces just easier?

Speaker 67 I mean, I was always interested that like it wasn't exempted from CEQA in the first place. It's a pro-environmental project.
I know. You know, are there things like that that can be done?

Speaker 67 I mean, I wish you wrote this damn book in 2007. That's right now.
Where the hell were you? It's a good question. Seriously.
By the way, where were you in 2007? I was in Washington, man.

Speaker 67 Were you in Washington? I was in Washington. No, I mean, but you're right.
No, look,

Speaker 67 and I don't disagree. It's the the art of the possible.
And I know that back to that's a practitioner framework. I mean, I love to intellectualize all these things.

Speaker 67 What coulda, shoulda, woulda, but there's certain foundational facts. And interestingly, you made the point in the book that I have to over and over make to people.

Speaker 67 Why did we start in the Central Valley? It was a requirement, federal requirement for federal dollars. Now, it's not the worst idea.
I mean, the Intercontinental Railway.

Speaker 67 Just to say it, it was a requirement because the federal program wasn't just for high-speed rail. It was to start where you had air pollution for marginalized communities.

Speaker 67 Which is both like,

Speaker 67 I just want to say this because it's part of why I'm saying this in the book is that that all sounds great.

Speaker 67 And there is, you can come up with reasons to start in Central Valley, but it's the part of the state that will generate the least political capital to keep going because it has the least dense ridership.

Speaker 67 But it's also part of the state that does have. I mean, you know, you talk about ignorance, poverty, and disease.
You talk about the issues of air quality and life expectancy.

Speaker 67 You talk about the economic opportunities.

Speaker 67 what it does is air quality is the whole track. Well, ultimately, a fully electrified track.
I mean, that ultimately will.

Speaker 67 This is just to me, it's an example. This one wasn't California's fault.
This was the Obama administration, but it's an example of

Speaker 67 they should have given, I want to say what I think should have happened here. They should have given you

Speaker 67 whatever three some billion dollars. That's what that grant was.

Speaker 67 And just said, use it for high-speed rail. Right.
It shouldn't have been a stacked series of ideas, right? It doesn't all need to be a triple axle, right?

Speaker 67 High-speed rail is hard enough, as you know better than I do.

Speaker 67 Representative democracy is a tough thing. Dictatorships are a little easy.

Speaker 67 I want to say representative democracy

Speaker 67 knew that. No, a lot of folks in the Central Valley, a lot of the elected officials, a lot of the Blue Dog Democrats, a lot of.
But the Obama administration, when they created those programs, right?

Speaker 67 That's a lot happening. I really, this is an important point to me.

Speaker 67 But there were a lot of representatives, Democratic representatives, that stipulated their support for that bill and those dollars that it go to the Central Valley. There is a lot of politics in that.

Speaker 67 I don't want to take that away. But I do want to say, because this comes up a lot when I'm talking about this book.
It's like, oh, do you hate democracy?

Speaker 67 People have no fucking idea what is happening in these regulatory processes. 100%.
Like,

Speaker 67 I cover this professionally. And when I dig into what is happening after these bills pass, I'm like, oh my God.
Really? That is not democracy.

Speaker 67 That is, we have created things that we're supposed to allow for participation, and they are often very captured. Maybe they're captured by interests you like.
That's fine.

Speaker 67 But that is not the thing that, the mass of Californians who voted for Prop 1A knew they were getting.

Speaker 67 And even those of us covering the stimulus bill, we're not looking at the precise requirements in the notice of funding opportunity in the grant program.

Speaker 67 So there is this thing, I think, where a lot of this highly technocratic governance, which is very much a negotiation between different interests, is in this like King's Cup way being justified as democracy.

Speaker 67 That's not what democracy looks like. I'll use that chant here, right? Democracy is not shit and Nobody knows about it.

Speaker 67 Look, I mean, you're very adjacent to the arguments that Elon Musk is making with Doge. Yeah.
This clay layer of bureaucracy, this is not representative.

Speaker 67 Who the hell are these people to make these rules? Who are these people making these decisions and the opacity of these decisions? They're not made in sunshine and daylight.

Speaker 67 And a lot of these three-level agencies. I'm supposed to Nicholas Bagley, the more liberal law professor making these rules.

Speaker 67 But I'll take the hit. No, well, it's not even a hit, but I mean, I think it goes to the sentiment.
It goes goes to, I think it goes to the thematics of your book.

Speaker 67 It goes to what you're trying to stress test and what you're trying to stress upon us as Democrats that we need to be more accountable. Here's the perspective.
Here's the thing.

Speaker 67 But let me make this point. I say this all the time, my legislator friends, right when I signed a bill, I said,

Speaker 67 this happens so often. It's not an indictment of any individual legislature.
It's sort of institutionalized. They think the process is done.
The process just begun. It's just beginning.
Programming is

Speaker 67 not problem solving. And then that implementation application goes through exactly what you're saying.

Speaker 67 You mentioned no-foes in

Speaker 67 the book. We have no fuzz, which are notice of funny availability, not opportunity.
And then you stack all those things up with all these rules and requirements along the lines you suggest.

Speaker 67 That was never part of anyone's understanding or vision is what you just said. I have this joke.
And I think there's absolute legitimacy.

Speaker 67 I have this joke that everybody knows a schoolhouse rock song of like how a bill becomes a law, but what they don't know is how a law becomes or does not become. like a reality, right?

Speaker 67 Like the things that happen after are actually much more complicated. But I want to say one thing about Elon Musk and Doge.

Speaker 67 And this point, I was just referencing Nick Bagley, who is a great administrative law professor at U of Michigan. He was Gretchen Whitmer's, your gubernatorial colleague's chief counsel.

Speaker 67 He wrote this piece that's very influential these days and very influential for me called The Procedural Fetish. And one of the things he says in that that I think is really wise is that

Speaker 67 the Democratic Party is very legalistic. It's got a lot of lawyers in it.
Between Tim Walls was the first person on a Democratic ticket since Mondale to not go to law school.

Speaker 67 We're very legalistic. And lawyers and constitutional lawyers and administrative procedure lawyers, they grapple a lot with a very hard question, which is what makes government action legitimate?

Speaker 67 And the answer they often come to is procedure, right? It is following the procedure set out in the laws and the rules and the court orders, et cetera.

Speaker 67 It's not that there's nothing to that, but the point Bagley makes, which I think is the right counter or the way to think about the point Elon Musk is making, is that to most people, what makes government legitimate in a democracy is that they are getting what they think they voted for.

Speaker 67 When they vote for you and you say you're going to do X, Y, and Z, they got X, Y, and Z. And if they don't feel like they got that, they vote you out, right? They see you as illegitimate, a failure.

Speaker 67 And the problem with Musk and Doge, in addition to its lawless nature, is that its ends are terrible.

Speaker 67 And the people did not vote for, you know, not to be able to reach anybody at the Social Security Administration or the IRS ever again on the phone, right? That wasn't part of the pitch.

Speaker 67 But it's, I think, really really important that

Speaker 67 liberals have a little bit more of this sense, not that procedure is meaningless because it isn't. You need procedure.

Speaker 67 But what really connects government to people is outcomes, a lived experience of government acting in their life.

Speaker 67 And if you are letting endless levels of not just process, but process you have created, I mean, when we're talking about no-foes and no-fahs, and I mean, that is the work of men and women.

Speaker 67 You know, we are, we are writing that shit down on the computer. Yeah.
And when we lost everyone, we opened up with CEQA. I know.
Yeah, this is going to be a very high, high audience podcast.

Speaker 67 But when you do that, I think that that actually is a cultural change. The thing I respect about Elon Musk,

Speaker 67 there's a lot these days I don't like about the guy, but there is a relentlessness to the way he pursues his objectives.

Speaker 67 A real sense that in between here and the end he is seeking might be a lot of pain, might be a lot of disappointment, might be a lot of angry people.

Speaker 67 But if this is worth it, which on Tesla and SpaceX it was, and on destroying the the federal government, in my view, it isn't,

Speaker 67 then this is worth it. And that, I think, has not been the culture of liberal governance.

Speaker 67 The culture of liberal governance has actually been to try to generate political support by giving things to interest groups in the middle of the process. Well, so, right?

Speaker 67 You pass the bill, then there's a regulatory thing, nobody's really paying attention to that, and you do a bunch of payoffs there.

Speaker 67 And then the thing doesn't work as well, or it's slower, or it's more expensive. And then people think you don't do a great job.
And like, that's actually

Speaker 67 undermining the legitimacy of government. Couldn't agree more.

Speaker 30 Time for a sofa upgrade.

Speaker 19 Introducing Anibay sofas, where designer style meets budget-friendly prices. Every Anibay sofa is modular, allowing you to rearrange your space effortlessly.

Speaker 19 Perfect for both small and large spaces, Anibay is the only machine-washable sofa inside and out.

Speaker 3 Say goodbye to stains and messes with liquid and stain-resistant fabrics that make cleaning easy. Liquids simply slide right off.

Speaker 80 Designed for custom custom comfort, our high-resilience foam lets you choose between a sink and feel or a supportive memory foam blend.

Speaker 15 Plus, our pet-friendly, stain-resistant fabrics ensure your sofa stays beautiful for years.

Speaker 12 Don't compromise quality for price.

Speaker 3 Visit washablesofas.com to upgrade your living space today.

Speaker 81 Sofas start at just $699 with no risk returns and a 30-day money-back guarantee.

Speaker 11 Get early access to Black Friday now.

Speaker 80 The biggest sale of the year can save you up to 60% off.

Speaker 16 Plus, free shipping and free returns.

Speaker 20 Shop now at washable sofas.com.

Speaker 62 Head over to globalgaming league.com.

Speaker 71 Like a gift run that turns into a disco snow globe, throw pillows, and Pijays for the whole family.

Speaker 82 Being a parent is basically a juggling act.

Speaker 84 Dinner, hockey practice, homework, a last-minute science project, and someone's always, always

Speaker 85 Fresh ingredients, super easy recipes and over 80 options every week.

Speaker 89 So everyone eats, no one complains, and I get to feel like I've got it all together, at least for dinner.

Speaker 83 And the best part, you're in total control.

Speaker 91 Skip a week, pause any time, pick what works for you.

Speaker 93 They even have 15 minute recipes.

Speaker 93 Go to hellofresh.ca and use promo code rescue50. That's hellofresh.ca, promo code rescue50.

Speaker 67 By the way, sort of going back to that book, Sadisabelle literally talks about this in the context of it's not inputs, it's outcomes. This pyramid's inverting, more choice, more voice.

Speaker 67 I talk about government being a vending machine where you put in your taxes, you get police, fire, healthcare, education.

Speaker 67 If you don't like what you get, you kick the machine, you shake the machine, and shifting that paradigm and not just government efficiency, but how government works,

Speaker 67 moving away from you vote, I decide, more of a participatory framework in between elections. We're finally starting to see the fruits of that vision.

Speaker 67 And near the end of my term term in the context of these new models, we've created Engaged California, our new procurement platforms, the work that Jen Polka helped seed in the reforms we're doing as it relates to our

Speaker 67 large-scale IT reforms. But look, this is this notion of being accountable.
I mean, society becomes how we behave. We are our behaviors.
All this, to your point, happened on our watch. We own it.

Speaker 67 Democrats, we own it.

Speaker 67 Can't point fingers. You got to look in the mirror.
You got to take responsibility. I think foundationally, that's at the center of this book.

Speaker 67 And I think it's very helpful and it's, you know, it's humbling as well.

Speaker 67 But it's critically important this time, not only that we focus on situational politics, but how we're governing and how we're delivering real results.

Speaker 67 Because, I mean, if I have another press conference about how much money we're spending on homelessness, they're going to take my head off. They want to see encampments off the damn street.

Speaker 67 That's what they're measuring by. They want more housing so that the cost of that housing goes down because there's more supply.
They don't give a damn about the the process.

Speaker 67 They don't know what a NOFA is or a NOFO. They don't care about any of that stuff.
You're 100% right. It does matter.
I think there's a balance that we have to find. We're trying to find that balance.

Speaker 67 We're iterating. But this notion of relentlessness is very resonant, what you just said.
To be seen doing what you said about Trump a minute ago.

Speaker 67 We've got to be seen, not defending the status quo, defending the high-speed rail. This went really well for me,

Speaker 67 but defending

Speaker 67 the

Speaker 67 the sort of dynamic expectations uh that taxpayers rightfully are placed on us but let me just end with that because you end this book making that case from an abundance frame back to this this nomenclature around abundance but you talk about darpa you talk about crisper uh you talk about ARPANET going back 1969, the origins of the internet.

Speaker 67 You talk about the NIH, the NSF, you talk about all of these things that few people that are listening even know, but that are important and it relates to innovation.

Speaker 67 It's not an act that occurs, it's a process contradicting a little bit of what we just said that unfolds over time. Tell me a little bit about that.
Well, everything's a process.

Speaker 67 So we don't want to say all processes are bad, just like all regulations are not good or bad.

Speaker 67 Yeah, this is the other piece of the book that we haven't talked that much about, but abundance is not just like me banging my fist on the table about how high-speed rail didn't get finished.

Speaker 67 It's also motivated in part by a belief that Democrats have developed a dysfunctional relationship with technology and in a way the future.

Speaker 67 And I sort of date this back in my own reading of it to around 2016 when I think the harms of social media became really salient to people. I think it got overblamed for the 2016 election.

Speaker 67 I've never been a believer that misinformation was like the driver there. But it is rotting our brains and it's not making us better people and it's fucking up our kids, right?

Speaker 67 And it's represented by like a small crew of tech billionaires who, you know, in the years since have turned, you know, more and more both right and weird.

Speaker 67 And I think the left got to become very skeptical of it.

Speaker 67 And one of the things that we are trying to say is that a huge amount of social progress, a huge amount of what makes it possible to live a life better than the one we live now, is not just new social insurance programs, though those are very important and I would like to see some of them, or redistribution, it's technology.

Speaker 67 And it is also being thoughtful about the government's ability to organize resources and rules and manpower to pull technology from the future into the present, right?

Speaker 67 The canonical example here is Manhattan Project, but you can think of the internet, which, as we talked about, comes from the ARPANET.

Speaker 67 You can think about Operation Warp Speed, like the one truly great success of Donald Trump's first term, which is now disowned very much by him. And the

Speaker 67 degree by the Democrats, too,

Speaker 67 credit too, a little bit. We should.
And so

Speaker 67 there are a lot of problems.

Speaker 67 Like the only reason we have any shot on preventing a world of three or four degrees of warming Celsius is because we have created miracles through government policy in solar, wind, EVs,

Speaker 67 EVs. Tesla would not exist had it not been for the regulatory environment

Speaker 67 of California. One of the great shames.
Federal subsidies. One of the great shames of what Elon Musk has become is is that guy is a walking advertisement for the power of public-private partnerships.

Speaker 67 Thank you. He is just like every major company he has done is built on government subsidies, government loan guarantees, over 3 billion government demand in the original

Speaker 67 465. Now this guy is just pulling the ladder up after him.
It drives me fucking crazy. Well said.
But

Speaker 67 I guess it's a side, but also it's a principle that you lay out as it relates to DARPA and which gave us GPS, gave us the self-driving car he's now promoting that gave us so much of this innovation.

Speaker 67 Yeah, and certainly that seeded it.

Speaker 67 And, you know, look, like I'm a big believer in universal health care. A lot of my career has been, you know, about trying to expand health insurance.
But where health insurance is...

Speaker 67 You're in the only state that does that regardless of ability to pay in very pre-existing conditions and immigration. But there's

Speaker 67 a reality to this that for the people who have health insurance, which is most people, what really matters is when you get sick, is there a cure? My wife is kept alive alive by shots of insulin.

Speaker 67 She just is, right? At another age, she wouldn't be. There is so much that we do not yet know how to cure, right? There is so much.

Speaker 67 I mean, what Medicare or Medicaid can offer or private health insurance, because they don't yet cover it for most people, with GLP-1s is just more valuable than what it could offer before GLP-1s.

Speaker 67 These are going to be transformational medications for people. They already are.

Speaker 67 And so getting really serious about what we want the government to do technologically and having a vision of the future that is an abundant one, right?

Speaker 67 A vision of the future that is not just about like how cheap consumer goods are, that's fine, but is about the things we need to build or better a life, right? Cheap energy, cheap healthcare, right?

Speaker 67 Abundant housing, education, right? There's a lot of things we only touch on in the book that are really important here.

Speaker 67 I think that one of the shames of politics in the last couple of years is it got to be a really bitter argument over our past, right? With the right... The notion of American reverse pre-1960s.

Speaker 67 The right was gripped by a deep nostalgia for an America, I think, that never really was.

Speaker 67 And the left was really focused, really focused on the injustices of our history, which I think are very real. So I'm not trying to undermine that as a thing worth confronting.

Speaker 67 But I think visions of the future, for different reasons on both sides, became really degraded.

Speaker 67 And one thing that did change with Trump between his first term and his second is Elon Musk, Mark Andreessen, in a way, RFK Jr., they changed his meaning.

Speaker 67 Trump was the defender of the past in America in 2016, make America great again.

Speaker 67 All these futurist influencers and rocket makers and so on, they sort of made him into something that represented a kind of future. I think it's quite dark one,

Speaker 67 but there is around him, J.D. Vance, right? It changed what he meant.

Speaker 67 And I think to compete with that, and given that they're going to destroy the present, I don't think it's going to end up being a very attractive vision to people.

Speaker 67 But to compete with that, I think Democrats need to figure out how to represent a future again. I think Obama represented the future.
I think Bill Clinton represented the future.

Speaker 67 And like both that sort of ability to grab reform, which is part of what abundance is about, reform of government, and that ability to grab the high ground of the future, which is the other part of what it's about, this ability to integrate a theory of technology and an optimism about it and an ability to sort of wrap it in policy, those things are really important.

Speaker 67 We haven't talked about AI. There's a lot coming here that's going to be very important.

Speaker 67 And the party, particularly in that medical frame, and the party and the thinkers in it are going to have to be alert to this side of it too, because

Speaker 67 it is a mistake to think of politics as a separate sphere from technology.

Speaker 67 If we could do more modular housing, it would change what is possible in housing policy, right? These things are bi-directional. They're intertwined.

Speaker 67 And I would like to see a liberalism that isn't just angry about a bunch of things the government has failed to do, as I am, but is also optimistic about what is possible.

Speaker 67 And that's where that vision between red and blue states really diverges. I mean, Trump and them, they're trying to destroy wind and solar.
They don't want this vision. They don't want more trade.

Speaker 67 They don't want more people, right? It's all scarcity. And that leaves a pretty big opening for the Democratic Party to capture both reform and abundance from them.
I love that.

Speaker 67 And it's a great way to end because it's a framework of optimism. Of course, you know, and I appreciate just thinking about Clinton.
Don't stop thinking about tomorrow.

Speaker 67 I mean, obviously there was language around that and, you know, talking about your tomorrow's, not his yesterday's.

Speaker 67 Obviously, the journey that we were on in the 1960s with the vision that was JFK.

Speaker 67 But I will say about our state, and it's a point of pride and principle for me as governor to say it, or as the future ex-governor is a fifth generation California, future happens here first.

Speaker 67 And I talked about this being America's coming to traction.

Speaker 67 But that's the game that separates, I think, our game.

Speaker 67 from the game played everywhere else. It's the reason we went from the seventh largest economy to the sixth largest economy in the world.
And we dominate in so many spheres, even today.

Speaker 67 But you're absolutely right. We now have to dominate on that reform agenda and we have to deal with the original sin, and that's housing.

Speaker 67 And again, being accountable to these larger visions as well and deliver and level set with folks. And so it's in that spirit of an abundant mindset that, Ezra, I'm glad you took the time to be here.

Speaker 67 I'm really moreover pleased you took time to write this book, which is an essential reading for everybody listening. Thanks for being with us.
Thank you so much for having me. Thank you.

Speaker 62 Head over to GlobalGamingLeague.com.

Speaker 65 Com, com. Global, double, double, double, double, double, double.
Double, double, double, double, double, double, double.

Speaker 79 Want Black Friday prices without the crowds? Lowe's gets it. Shop their early Black Friday deals and beat the rush.

Speaker 79 $99 is all you need to grab a select seven-foot pre-lit artificial Christmas tree for the holidays. And don't sweat what gifts to get, Dad.

Speaker 79 They have up to 40% off select tools and accessories going on now. That's how Lowe's celebrates Black Friday early.
Selection varies by location while supplies last.

Speaker 96 It's the season to come together over your holiday favorites at Starbucks.

Speaker 97 Warm up with a creamy caramel brulee latte. Get festive with an iced gingerbread chai, or share a velvety peppermint mocha.
Together is the best place to be at Starbucks.

Speaker 29 Sacksaw Fifth is revealing the season's most wanted holiday steals.

Speaker 98 Whether you're gifting someone on your list or treating yourself to a designer score, find deals on McQueen, Valentino, Versace, Stewart Weitzman, and more at up to 70% off every day.

Speaker 98 Outshine at every event and outsmart your budget. From shimmer-ready party looks to luxe layers and cozy giftable accessories, Sacks Off Fifth is your secret source for celebrating in style.

Speaker 98 Your holiday shopping mission starts now at SacksOffFifth.com or a Sacks Off Fifth store near you.

Speaker 1 This is an iHeart podcast.

And, This is Ezra Klein

Press play and read along

Transcript

More episodes from This is Gavin Newsom

And, This Is Governor Newsom Live At The DealBook Summit With Andrew Ross Sorkin

And, This Is How The World Looks At Us Under Trump With Ian Bremmer

And, This Is A Final Election Day Push With Aaron Parnas

And, This Is Flooding The Zone With Truth Ft. Ben Meiselas of MeidasTouch

And, This Is How To Solve The Climate Crisis With President Clinton