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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.

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. this is gavin newsome And this is Ezra Klein.
Ezra, it is great to have you here in studio. Thanks for having me here for this weird inversion.
Weird inversion. And you've been, I mean, you've been all over the place.
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.
I was a new mayor in San Francisco and was asked by Bill Maher to go on his show. I remember this.
And you were one of the panelists. And I'll never forget just sparring with Bill, obviously, and then you.
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.
We were like, whoa. Just for both of us didn't have a, you know, I was relatively new.
Bill's been seasoned. You were lieutenant governor then.
I don't think you were mayor then. Maybe I was lieutenant governor.
Wasn't he? Was I still, was I lieutenant governor? I'm pretty sure you were lieutenant governor. 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.
And so it's not surprising to me that so much of that, including that conversation we probably had on that studio and set is reflected in what you've been focused on for decades and decades. Funny, I think about your book from that era, Republic 2.0, it was called, right? Yeah, it was Citizenville.
Citizenville? Yeah, how to take the town square digital and reinvent government. How about that? Yeah, it's something we should thread into this conversation.
I think people have forgotten that era of Gavin Newsom. Yeah, well, I think in so many aspects, I was reading this book, and you're reflected in this.
I mean, this has been my struggle as a former mayor. You chronicle San Francisco, California disproportionately, but this book is fundamentally about the future and you framing the future in abundant terms, but it's also a real shot against liberalism in many respects, against the world we created now 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. Tell us a little bit about what Abundance is about.
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.
But I grew up in Irvine, as you know. I went to the C system, then I went to D.C.
for 12 or 13, 14 years. And I spent a bunch of time in D.C.
covering a political system where the problem was Republicans were bad oftentimes. 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. I moved back to Oakland and then to San Francisco.
And I looked around and it just wasn't doing well. People were unhappy.
People were leaving. I mean, you know this.
You're a retail politician. You can sense people's anger.
When they find out you have anything to do with politics, they tell you real quick. And we could see the housing crisis had metastasized into something that was genuinely now a crisis, not just homes are expensive.
California high-speed rail has always lit me on fire. We'll get to that.
Yeah, we'll get to that. And when 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.
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. And the laws don't really permit that.
And so the thing that I began thinking a lot about was that there is something liberalism is good at and knows how to look for, which is where can we subsidize something that people need? But there is 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 don't think have that different politics, aren't the outcomes what I want to see? 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.

Right.

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.

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.

And that's what I completely agree with that. I was going back to my speech.
My first speech as governor of the state of California, it might as well- It's quoted in here. These pages.
Yeah, literally. It said, if you can build a sports stadium with these new rules and fast-tracked judicial process and what we refer to, and we'll get to CEQA, are California rules that go back to quite literally Ronald Reagan in 1970 as it relates to environmental review.
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.
Doesn't make you popular as governor to announce a lawsuit against your city because they weren't meeting their zoning requirements under our housing element. So much of that, again, reflected in this friction and your own reflected frustration and lived experience in the state of California.
But my point is this, as a practitioner, it's a very different reality. 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. And you pick on, understandably, San Francisco.
But you can look at almost any city including a republican health city like huntington beach 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 but can't we argue that there is sort of quality of consideration andbyism that persists in in rural and red parts of the country as well 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 why is it easier to build homes in texas and california they have well you establish that in the book in hou make the point, I think it was 70,000 permits in 2023, just 7,500 in a much smaller city, San Francisco, but understandable contrast. But a city with more demand.
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 frame. 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.
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. But when you're saying, well, you know, is this really a problem for liberals? It's easier to build inxas and florida they're not just in california but in california or new york right right the cost of living crisis is worse in blue states 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 yeah in places where you're governing for governing for the working class in theory and your point is a point just to level set people listening notion of the supply-demand imbalance.
I mean, you're making an econ 101 argument. And that supply-demand imbalance is next level in the state of California, simply not building enough housing.
And that goes to, I mean, and you correctly identify nimbyism and people, you know, incumbent protection racket, so to speak. not just from a corporate perspective, but someone who's very satisfied with their backyard and their views, their home and their community.
They don't want density. 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.
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. 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. 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, and balance.
But we made the point, we were going through a legally binding process, what we refer to as ARENA goals, and we've established that. Here is the legally binding goal, 2.5 million units by 2030.
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 a number of reasons. Macroeconomic.
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 markets. You're saying that interest rates are high.
Interest rates are high. Obviously, we came out of a very difficult period during COVID.
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.
That's why we've taken 800 actions. That's why we've unlocked 7,500 units.
And that's why we have advanced 42 CEQA reforms and some of the most significant housing reforms in California history as it relates to ADUs, which you identify. ADUs now you can build.
They work. They do in single family home zoning and duplexes.
But at the end of the day, state vision's realized back to localism. Why did the ADU effort work and the single family housing or multi-family housing

didn't i mean those were big bills and we yimby's greeted them with uh with delight but i would say everybody would say that what was it sb9 yeah sb9 sb6 the cities have made it so those don't actually it doesn't build as much housing that's it that's why we created this housing accountability to drive more responsibility at the local level and providing technical assistance. It's not just a stick.
It's also a carrot. But no, look, that's the construct, right? I mean, that's a classic example.
People like their neighborhoods. That's the foundation of nimbyism.
And look, this nimbyism frame, which is yes in my backyard, for those wondering what the we're even talking about, I embrace it. I celebrate it.
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.
But you're right. That application, a lot of these are new reforms.
They're just in the last few years in this high interest rate environment. So we'll see how quickly things unlock as interest rates drop down.
But fundamentally, it's the nimbyism that drags it.

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

It's a problem with having a podcast host on. So during the election, when Kamala Harris

and then Barack Obama at the DNC, actually the other way around Barack Obama, then Kamala Harris,

were up there talking about the need to build 3 million new homes, right? And really saddened

like, that is a huge intellectual victory for a movement that didn't exist like 25 minutes ago. 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. You look in California, 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. So I began doing some reporting because I knew how many, I'm 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 these are local elected officials and passing big bills yeah and so i began calling developers in san francisco and saying what's going on here why don't i see a movement and how much you're building what they all told me was i didn't end up writing this piece i just didn't have time but i meant to for some time was all these fast track bills required me to take on a bunch of new standards and uh requirements right 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 it 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.
But if that's not it, why do you think all those bills didn't lead to- Well, a lot of them have. I mean, we can talk about it.
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. Again, I mean, and you've got an ideological war that's going on in progressive cities.
They don't believe in the supply-demand framework. 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. And so you're struggling with that ideological spectrum.

But San Francisco, I mean, it's just infamously just loves its neighborhoods. Doesn't want to see it up zone.
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 the sort of fatalist or have a fatalist, a 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.
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. I'm just asking.
I'm curious. No, but also you're not, you know, you talk about as a bagel liberalism.
Everything bagel liberalism. Yeah, I get it.
We stack everything together. You even were a little critical of the Biden administration and the chips and science acts and the infrastructure bill because they did the same thing.
Look, you go to the rural broadband effort, pass a bipartisan infrastructure bill say it's the biggest infrastructure bill in decades which is not wrong yeah 1.2 trillion but 500 550 of new yeah and one of the big headline pieces of it is 42 billion dollars for rural broadband yep 2021 that passes 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.

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.

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

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

And if you can't really,

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.

I like these policies.

But the speed thing

is a real problem.

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 high-speed rail, but I was saying that the stimulus bill

under Obama, that had three big headline projects for reinvestment. It had high-speed rail,

it had smart grid, and it had a nationwide system of interoperable health records.

I remember those days.

Yeah, 0 for 3.

Yeah.

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So you have five core chapters in this book. 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.
Again, abundance is fundamentally, foundationally who we are, at least believe we are in the state of California. 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.
I mean, 775,000 manufacturing jobs, just the job growth generally. 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.
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.
And I think it's that worker centricity that you can argue against because that was in you call it out in here when you talked 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. 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. I have been as critical or more than you have about this.
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. 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.
And they have a design. And I think that's part of an abundance frame.
And while it's difficult to manifest that vision, I don't think it's an indictment necessarily. Well, it's an indictment in terms of our ability to deliver on time and under budget.
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 0 for 3.
Look, I'm all for vision. My upset, the point of this book is that I want the things to happen.
I mean, we can talk about high-speed rail. 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. Well, then why aren't you just a Republican, right? If Texas is so good at housing.
And the thing that I keep telling people is you've really confused means and ends here another thing that keeps coming up it's 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 what's supposed to matter in politics is not the means it's the ends and what i sort of want what i'm trying to to push here is for liberals to get a little bit more means agnostic and more like ends obsessed. So the thing that I, the place where I probably differ a little bit 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.
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? 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. 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? And what about that? And how about the other thing? 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. I mean, not just high-speed rail, the Big Dig, the Second Avenue subway, right? 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.
Europe builds trains better than we do. They just do.
And they have governments, I checked, and they have unions more than we do. So it's not just that.
They have less lawyers than 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 love to hear your thoughts on that we do government different in this country than they do 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. And there are ways in which it's good.
And there are also ways in which it makes it hellacious to deliver. Yeah.
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.
The original vision was not Obama.

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.

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, two hours and 20 minutes downtown. By 2020.
By 2020 and the whole thing. And then reality.
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.
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.
We're left with pieces that go nowhere, that have no utility and actually have a long-term cost. 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 is you stipulate, recognize was stipulated as a requirement under the Obama grant, the $3 billion in one of the fastest growing parts of the state, an important part of the state, a state that has deep desire to connect to the rest of the state and a state of mind. That's not just about a transportation project, but about up-zoning, about economic development, which a lot of that has occurred in and around these new stations that have been built, 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 2024, though.
I can't make up for that. I can only deal with the component part.
But it's just- But it's crazy. It's crazy.
But the point is, we're at the point where we just announced we're doing railhead.

We're finally laying the tracks. I mean, we can lament about it.
We absolutely learned from it. And we've stress-tested a lot of it.
You talk about the consulting class versus a bureaucratic class. You're absolutely right.
And we started to ship 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. 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, I think, liberal litigation, I don't know what phrase you use in the book, but you 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 your thinking there.
We can put a pin in high-speed rail. There are two major liberal movements that happened in the 20th century.
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.
And it's the liberalism that defines the left-right divide in our national narrative. Liberals believe in big, strong government.
Conservatives believe in small, limited government. In the 60s, 70s, 80s, you have real problems that have emerged from this New Deal order.
We have built heedlessly, recklessly, intensely. We are cutting highways all across the country, many of them, but not all of them, through marginalized communities.
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. There is a genuine despoiling of the environment.
My colleague Derek likes to talk about the moment in Los Angeles, I think it's in the 40s or 50s, where people wake up and think there's been a chemical attack from Japanese, but it turned out that the city had launched its own chemical attack on itself. By the way, people forget in California, a lazy pundit could suggest the modern environmental movement started in 1967 in reaction to that.
And the business community is saying enough. 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 books in the 56s.
And then, of course, everybody forgets it's Reagan who signs the California Environmental Quality Act. Yeah, this CEQA issue that you and others and myself love to hate at times.

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.

That's interesting.

Nobody quite knows what they've done.

Because initially CEQA, it just says, look, when the government does does stuff it's got to produce a report on you know what the likely consequences are no big deal uh and then there is a proposed development in mammoth which uh you know the great ski and snowboard yeah uh town which i've been to many many times you southern californians yeah mammoth um 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 uh file a lawsuit and they have a novel argument which is that this development can't go forward because it violates sequa and this gets rejected in the courts because what year roughly would this be uh i'd want to double check this but early 70s but i could be wrong on that so let me so what happens here is that uh the courts reject this a bunch of times because sequa is about public development and then the supreme court rules no no no public development is anything that requires a permit by the state of California. 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.
And so now having been, as Ambender 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.

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. 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.
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.
The New Deal is this alliance 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. And the New Left comes in and says, we are destroying this place.
We are turning this country conformist. The term ticky-tacky comes from a song about daily city and how gross all those homes are right like there's a whole thing about the aesthetic destruction of it i have great um quotes from lyndon johnson 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 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? We think

about this for Reagan and individualism, but it's happening on the left too. And it wants a highly

participatory democracy. 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. Sorry, got a mosquito there.
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. Get that damn thing.
If I got it, I'd be like a bomb in that old interview, remember? The time when he truly seems super powered. So the way they do that is they create this raft of legislation.
Some of it is environmental, but not all of it. And what it allows is for individuals or individuals represented by groups and a huge world of non-profits emerges to take the best talent out of the law schools and set them to suing government to sort of enforce this.
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. And so this is very potent in blue states that had a strong new left.
And we don't think about it really. It's not part of our national narrative of the left and the right.
Our national narrative is the guys who like government and the party that likes government and the party that doesn't. 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 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. 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.
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. 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. 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.
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.
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. I mean, no, quite the contrary.
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.
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.
We worked it for its first use case was the first above-ground storage facility in California last half century sites. It's an off-stream dam in California.
The second, quite literally a week ago, for 300 megawatt solar, large-scale solar facility, which we are testing it.

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.

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. Do you think you benefit from the other side of it? 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 for you? 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.
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.
You've got war in Ukraine. You've got all of these issues.
And yet he passes. I refer to it as a masterclass.
You are more defensive of Biden's record than of your own i'm no i'm i'm i'm more proud of the work they did breaking through actually addressing the issues that democrats claim they wanted to address including marginally and i agree with you again that 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 my own performance. So it's interesting.
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.
Well, the progressives killed those. Progressives killed.
You're talking about the permitting reforms. The permitting reforms, but that sort of manifested and finally on the Chips and Science Act to be a version of that with Kelly and Cruz as it relates it relates to so there was some component parts and they learned on this i mean brandies who is biden's former ndc director has an awesome piece in foreign affairs about why we need to build faster right there's real learning here but i want to but if we but i'm let me stipulate let me make this quicker if we can figure that out if we can i don't this is this is the most one most important books Democrats can read.
Wake up. I sent this to the two leaders of my California assembly and said it.
You love to hear it. I just know it, but no, I'm serious.
I said, guys, wake up. This is it.
I mean, we're being judged here at a different level. We've done some good things together.
We got to get serious. Ezra's spot on, on a lot of this stuff.
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. You had red states that have population declined in the last few years, with the exception of Vermont.
I can quibble in some of that respect. 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 furiates me as a taxpayer. 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 Brightline and High Desert Corridor.
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. 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- I want to hold High Speed Oil for a second.
I want to do one thing on Biden before we go to High Speed Rail. 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 will enjoy yes not all in 48 months but over the course of the next four eight years this is a problem like i'm not saying it's all his fault that's not my point here right he is inheriting a government, 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.
So I want to hold that because I think there are things as grotesque as what that crew is doing to the government. There's also things that need to be learned from what they're doing to the government.
But I really think it's important to hold this in mind for all of of us because this something i really did not understand it did not used to take this long to deliver medicare medicare delivered medicare cards a year after they passed that bill it took the affordable care act four years to begin delivering actual insurance yeah we can talk it took on the inflation reduction act which is doing a much smaller job of just beginning to negotiate prices on some drugs, three years to get that started. 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. Just a few years to go to get bridge.
I agree. You know all this.
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. Yeah.
This is not going to work politically. I agree with that.
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.
But it doesn't actually, right? These are man-made concerns. And it's not just government.
It's also private sector. I mean, there is another component of this.
The markets actually play a really significant outsized influence in timing on a lot of these things, on investments, et cetera. 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. That's 50 state solutions and thousands and thousands of municipalities.
The thing I'm pushing on a little bit here with using the example of Biden, not you, 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? one of the things Trump is getting the most mileage out of.

And he says it himself all the time.

I think it's why he likes what Elon Musk is doing for all of the risk of it, is this sense of constant action. 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.
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. Right.
And I think that Democrats need to begin to think about speed as a thing we are actually tracking and pursuing government. Love it.
We have other things we need to pursue and track. Love it.
Equity, right? Just, right? There are a lot of things we need to think about and you need to make trade-offs between them. 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. 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. So much of it is going to get undone, including a lot of the transatlantic alliance that he worked so hard to rebuild, that it won't.

One reason that this book is politically important to me, and I'm just a kind of, 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 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 we just can't do what we once did.
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, it was back during the stimulus debate under Obama.
He sent it to me the other day. And he talks about the way the Works Progress Administration started up under FDR and the unfathomable speed 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? And he was saying, you can't do it today, Harold was, 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.
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.
100%. And look, and you highlight some of those successes.
I mean, you talk about what happened during the Trump administration and COVID. By the way, a lot of innovation happened during COVID, including on land use.
We did something called home key, room key. We changed land use in CEQA.
We did it through an emergency frame. You referenced the I-95.
Because risk tolerance went up. Risk tolerance went up.
The I-95, an emergency frame is the most expensive. We had the I-10, which we got done in eight days.
That was even more. Screw the I-95.
Yeah, you should have added that. And what a nice thing you could have said about our state.
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 fires in Los Angeles.
But if these emergency declarations- And people are celebrating it in the context. If these emergency structures work better, then why is it not making the normal structure closer to them? No, look, this is why I wanted to do this podcast.
This is why I love Don't Like Your Book. 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.
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 Republican? As opposed to risk-taking without recklessness.
What's that right balance? 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 and did real reform versus the recklessness of Doge. Is it the RFI process i thank you for recognizing our procurement reforms you highlight we brought in jen polka to from code for america to bring in a private sector version we did the original doge we call it odi which the office of digital innovation which is now office of data innovation we're trying to change the entire procurement framework 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.
But the emergency mindset, and I think the break the glass point you're making, is for Democrats right now. And it's the soul searchingsearching we have, we got to deliver.
Does your legislature want to fix it? They all intellectually do, but then you have every constituency in every group, and they're showing up 24-7. That nimbyism is well-established.
You've established it from the mindset. It's not just, by the way, Reagan in CEQA, but it's the NEPA, it's Endangered Species Act.
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.
You can't even, I mean, we've had a podcast here. You talk to Republicans.
You're like, geez, what the hell's going on? Guy's selling out, sold his soul. So you have reforms around process.
In CEQA, people panic, said, what, you just want to destroy the environment. 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.
So speed, decision-making, the sense of action and purpose. By the way, a lot of what this president is celebrating is what the last president did.
And a lot of the investments, I mean, the AI investments that Sam and others were making were making because of the Obama administration. You want to get the credit.
That's one of the reasons I think this speed thing is actually so important. You want to shorten.
Look, the policy feedback loops are broken because people don't know who did the policy. When said a second a couple minutes ago that the these projects that can only exist because of your fast tracking will not exist while you are in office right that is a breakdown of the way uh the voters can maintain accountability right when they don't know who did what it's actually a big problem um 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 you can 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 and so you know you obviously used to be mayor of san francisco london breed uh said a lot of the right things on Yimbyism and all the rest of it.
Former mayor of San Francisco. But couldn't get it done.
Yeah. 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. But in Oakland, you make that point and you're spot on.
In Oakland, they were called the mayor. Yep.
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 yeah um at the beginning and former republican democrat outperformed a lot of yeah and so you have this sort of thing happening where there's almost i think i don't want to say a ceiling we'll see what you do in a couple years um i don don't want to say a ceiling on where California politicians can go, but it is very hard to be successful when people are angry about our problems that maybe you didn't cause, but you're also not willing to take the pain now to solve. Well, I'm trying, 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 in the political capital we've used to get a lot of

these reforms advanced. And that's, I think, 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 is 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. 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 where we're gaining population again. We're running budget surpluses.
We dominate in every innovative 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.
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.
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. 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.
With respect, Houston went on that list. But San Jose was- I was very happy when I lived in San Francisco.
San Jose was, Irvine was on that list. Oh yeah? 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. 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 longer.

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%. 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.
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.
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, the taxpayers advanced it on 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.
I can for everybody,

but I'm not going to. But we're going to get the damn thing done.
They complained about the Erie

Canal. They complained about the Panama Canal.
They complained about the Transcontinental Railroad

right before it finally started to see real progress. And I feel like we're at that tipping

point with this damn high-speed rail. But nonetheless, you're right to criticize it.
Well, let's talk about high-speed rail for a second. You can't help yourself.
So I will say first, look, I love California. I have Redwoods tattooed on my shoulder, like no joke.
And leaving the state to go live in New York City was like the right thing for a bunch of reasons, but a difficult personal choice for me because this is my soil. Yeah.
So every, you know. You lived through a tough time though in San Francisco when you were writing this book.
You know what? I would still. I mean, that was, I admit.
That was a tough time in SF. It was a pandemic.
And by the way, that city's coming around. It's turning around.
Look, I. Objectively.
I love SF too. Yeah love sf too yeah objectively you know as i say uh what is it criticism is an act of love yes god bless you there's a lot of love a lot of love in this book man a lot of love in this book but and then this is i think always the great uh paradox of california california is the frontier of the future.
It always has been. And 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 given the whole world, it's culture, right? It's a wild place. 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 you need to make it possible for people to be and prosper from that prosperity.
Right? 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? 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.
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.
You frame it with Horace Greeley, go west, young man, go west. And then you you create that new construct yeah so so i want to pull that 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 that that makes it so important that like the working class families can be here and are not are not driven out but on high speed well let me because by the way just back to 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.
Again, you could not be more right. It is at the core of the issues that define the challenges, not just to this state, increasingly all over the United States.
We talk about the future happening here first, where America's coming attraction. That's all 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.
So high-speed rail. 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 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 so one was it the merced bakersfield leg which is the leg that is currently being tried um 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.

We have $13.4 billion, which 10.8 from the state and 2.6 from the feds. All right.
And that the estimate on finishing, we said to Bakersfield, was $36 billion. 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 additional $3 billion from the federal government.
Obviously, the Trump administration is trying to analyze that as they did the last time. And then cap and trade proceeds that will continue to accrue.
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 we have with a delta of 6.5 billion roughly yeah okay and what a bunch of people working on it 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 dollars yeah well we're looking at you know you know look here i am we're 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, 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.
You get into Palmdale. 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.
And so those are component parts. And that's where I think that $36 billion number came from.
Those three component parts roughly add up to that. Now the Tehachapi Mountains, getting them over, all of those larger issues, those are issues that obviously are component parts of this larger effort.
And that'll be, you know, over the course of many, many years, right? But I think the big question people have about it, and you hear people asking this all the time, is that- And I just, Robert, I inherited this. Yes, you inherited this.
It's not your fault. This was not my baby from 2008 or 1982.
I'm not blaming Governor Newsom on this. God bless.
I'm just trying to get that contract. But I think the question is, there is not a line of sight on that $36 to $110 billion, right? That doesn't exist.
And that's a very hard thing. Well, 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 Brightline, but a high desert corridor.
So 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. 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. And Fresno is a very important part of this thing.
I think the big worry I heard from transportation types is that the ridership in those quarters, as fast growing as they may be, 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 billion train. 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. 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.
There's not a high-speed railing 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. At least we're out there daring, and we're trying to advance a new paradigm.
Are there reforms that could be made that would make the next pieces just easier? I mean, I was always interested that it wasn't exempted from CEQA in the first place. It's a pro-environmental project.
I know. You know, are project i know you know are there things like that i mean i wish you wrote this damn book in 2007 where the hell were you it's a good question seriously by the way where were you in 2007 i was in washington man were you in washington i was in washington no i mean but you're right no look and and i don't just say it's the art of the possible and i know that back to that's a practitioner framework framework.
I mean, I love to intellectualize all these things. What could have, should have, would have.
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, 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 Railroad.
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 yeah which is both like 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 and there's you can come up with reasons certain 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.
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.
You talk about the economic opportunities. Yeah, but what addresses air quality is the whole track.
Well, ultimately a fully electrified track.

I mean, that ultimately will.

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,

they should have given,

I want to say what I think

should have happened here.

They should have given you

whatever three some billion dollars,

that's what that grant was.

And just said, use it for high speed rail, right? It shouldn't have been a been a stacked series of ideas. It doesn't all need to be a triple axel.
High speed rail is hard enough, as you know better than I do. Representative democracy is a tough thing.
Dictatorships are a little easy. But that wasn't representative democracy.
Nobody 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 the Democratic coalition.
administration when they created those programs, right? Yeah. That's a lot of folks in the central valley a lot of the elected officials a lot of the blue dog democrats a lot of the obama administration what when they created those programs right yeah that's a lot happening i really this is an important point to me 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 there is a lot of politics in that i don't i don't want to take that away but i i do want to say because this comes a lot when I'm talking about this book.
It's like, oh, do you hate democracy? People have no fucking idea what is happening in these regulatory processes. 100%.
Like, 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. That is, we've 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. But that is not the thing that, you know, the massive Californians who voted for Prop 1A knew they were getting.
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. So there is this thing 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 that's not what democracy looks like i'll use that chant here right democracy is not shit but nobody knows about you look i mean you're you're very adjacent to the arguments that Elon Musk is making with Doge.
Yeah. This clay layer bureaucracy.
This is not representative. 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. And a lot of these three-level agencies- I would say I'm close to Nicholas Bagley, the more liberal law professor making these rules.
But I think i'll take the hit no it's well it's not even a hit but i mean i think it goes to the the sentiment it goes to i think it goes the thematics of your book 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 here's something but let me make this point i say this all the time my legislative friends right when i signed bill, I said, 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 has just begun. It's just beginning.
Program passing is not problem solving. And then that implementation application goes through exactly what you're saying.
You mentioned no foes in 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. That was never part of anyone's understanding or vision is what you just said.
And I think there's absolute legitimacy. 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 like the things that happen after actually much more complicated but i want to say one thing about elon musk and doge and this point i was just i just referenced nick bagley who is a great administrative law professor at u of michigan he was gretchen whitmers your your gubernatorial colleagues uh chief counsel he wrote this piece it'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 uh 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 mondell to not go to law school we're very 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? 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. 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.
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.
And the problem with Musk and, in addition to its lawless nature, is that its ends are terrible. And the people did not vote for 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.
But it's, I think, really important that liberals have a little bit more of the sense, not that procedure is meaningless because it isn't. You need procedure.
But what really connects government to people is outcomes, the lived experience of government acting in their life. You got it.
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 faas.
And I mean, that is the work of men and women. God bless you.
You know, we are writing that shit down on the computer. Yeah.
I mean, we lost everyone. We opened up with Sequa.
I know. Yeah, this is going to be a very high audience podcast.
But when you do that, I think that that actually is a cultural change. The thing I respect about Elon Musk, 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.
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. But if this is worth it, which on Tesla and SpaceX it was, and on destroying the federal government, in my view, it isn't, then this is worth it.
And. And that I think has not been the culture of liberal governance.
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 said.
Right? 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. 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 uh undermining the legitimacy of government couldn't agree more by the way sort of going back to that book citizen literally talks about this in the context of it's not inputs, it's outcomes, there's pyramids inverting, more choice, more voice.
I talk about government being a vending machine where you put in your taxes, you get police, fire, healthcare, education. 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.
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.
And near the end of my term, in the context of these new models, we've created Engage California, our new procurement platforms, the work that Jen Polka helped seed in the reforms we're doing as it relates to large-scale IT reforms. But look, 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. Democrats, we own it.
Can't point fingers, got to look in the mirror, got to take responsibility. I think foundationally, that's at the center of this book.
And I think it's very helpful and it's, you know, it's humbling as well, 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. 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. 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 process.
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.
We're iterating. But this notion of relentlessness is very resonant, what you just said.
To be seen doing. It's what you said about Trump a minute ago.
We've got to be seen, not defending the status quo, defending the high-speed rail. This went really well for me.
But defending- It's a hard brief. The sort of dynamic expectations 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 nomenclature around abundance. But you talk about DARPA, you talk about CRISPR, you talk about ARPANET going back to 1969, the origins of the internet.
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. 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.
Well, everything's a process. So we don't want to say all processes are bad, just like all regulations are not good or bad.
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.
It's also motivated in part by a belief that Democrats have developed a dysfunctional relationship with technology and in way the future. 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 over blamed for the 2016 election. 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? 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. And I think the left got to become very skeptical of it.
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. 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? The canonical example here is the Manhattan Project, but you can think of the internet, which as we talked about, you know, comes from the ARPANET.
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 us.
And to some degree by the Democrats too, right? Which could lay some credit too, a little bit. We should.
And so there are a lot of problems. 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, battery, EVs.

Tesla would not exist had it not been for the regulatory environment of California and federal subsidies.

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

Thank you.

He is a walking advertisement for the power of public-private partnerships. Thank you.
He is just like every major company he has done is built on government subsidies, government loan guarantees. Over 3 billion in California.
And induced government demand. Yes.
In the original, which you outlined, 465 from Obama. Now this guy is just pulling the ladder up after him.
It drives me fucking crazy said but um i don't agree more i guess but also it's a principle that you lay out as it relates to darba and which gave us gps gave us the self-driving car he's now promoting that gave us so much of this innovation yeah and certainly it seeded it see and you know look like i'm a big believer in universal health care a A lot of my career has been, you know, about trying to expand health insurance.

But where health insurance ends up- You're in the only state that does that, regardless of ability to pay in pre-existing conditions and immigration.

But there's 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 by shots of insulin. She just right at another age she wouldn't be there is so much that we do not yet know how to cure yeah right there is so much i mean what medicare or medicaid can offer or private health insurance because they don't yet cover it um for most people with glp1s is just more valuable than what it could offer before GLP-1s.
These are going to be transformational medications for people. They already are.
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? A vision of the future that is not just about like how cheap consumer goods are, that's fine but it's about the things we need to build or better a life right cheap energy cheap health care right abundant housing education right there's a lot of things we only touch on in the book that are really important here 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 the right notion of american reverse pre-1960s well the right was gripped by a deep nostalgia yeah for an america i think that never really was 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. But I think visions of the future for different reasons on both sides became really degraded.
And one thing that did change with Trump between his first term and his second is Elon Musk, Mark Andreessen, in a way, RRFK Jr., they changed his meaning. Trump was the defender of the past Americaica in 2016 make america great again all these

futurist influencers and you know 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 but it is but but there is around

him jd vance right it changed what he meant and i think to compete with that and given that they're

going to destroy the present um i don't think it's going to end up being a very attractive vision to

people 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. And 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 um and an optimism about it and the ability to sort of wrap it in policy those things are really important we haven't talked about ai there's a lot coming here that's going to be very important yeah 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 it is a mistake to think of politics as a separate sphere from technology. If we could do more modular housing, it would change what is possible in housing policy, right? These things are bidirectional.
They're intertwined. 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.
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.
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. 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. I mean, obviously there was language around that and, you know, talking about your tomorrow's, not his yesterday's.
Obviously the journey that we were on in the 1960s with the vision that was JFK. But I will say about our state, and it's a point of pride in principle for me as governor to say it, or as the future ex-governor as a fifth generation California, future happens here first.
And I talked about this being America's coming attraction. But that's the game that separates, I think, our game 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.
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.
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.
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.