Ezra Klein: America At Its Breaking Point

Ezra Klein of the New York Times wields a lot of influence in some parts of Capitol Hill.

If you want to talk policy, Ezra Klein is the man to call.

Ezra Klein, who believes that Biden has been a very good president, makes the case that he should bow out of this campaign.

He was on television urging Democrats, shut down the government.

Ezra Klein says that Charlie Kirk was practicing politics the right way.

Journalism is dead.

Legacy media is dead.

We're living in a time when truth is under pressure, when misinformation and disinformation spreads faster than facts, and when journalism is being challenged in unprecedented ways.

Ezra Klein is an author and columnist for the New York Times.

He also writes about polarization in American politics, and he tackles a whole host of big issues in his podcast, The Ezra Klein Show.

This is What Now with Trevor Noah.

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We do our recording in a gray box.

Yeah, yours has very similar too.

My God, it seems like we should.

I don't live my life in a gray box.

It's not authentic to me.

Do you think they chose that because it feels like...

Oh, they chose that because that's the room in which we recorded, and there were no other rooms.

There's not a

plan.

We'll see what happens over time, but moving to video was something that that we pushed.

Oh, God.

If there hadn't been a build out for that.

I'm always torn about that.

How do you feel about it?

Torn.

I mean,

it's a big audience.

It's a new audience.

I don't like having to think about how I look.

And, you know, the way in which things go viral is double-edged.

Podcasts are an in-context medium and virality is an out-of-context.

No one clips a podcast.

Like, no one.

No one clips an audio podcast.

No No one goes like, oh, this clip.

I mean, you've probably seen this over the years.

When I was at the Daily Show, we'd always see how there'd be a scandal of a politician saying something, but it was only an audio.

Never really went anywhere.

That's why I always think Trump's grabbed him by the pussy, never derailed him, because he's not on camera saying it.

That's interesting.

Yeah, I guess the only one that really worked was Mitt Romney's like 47%.

That was audio in it.

Which one was that one?

You remember he gave this riff at a fundraiser.

He's like, look, 47% of the country.

No, I don't remember that.

Oh, yeah, it was a big deal of 2012.

Oh, and that ended his.

It didn't end anything.

I mean, nothing ends anybody anymore.

But it wasn't.

I mean, anymore, but back then.

Back then, they were enders.

Yeah.

At least we thought there were.

Maybe they're never.

Yeah.

No, I think they were enders.

And I think enders still exist, funny enough.

Well, we'll look for one today.

No, I genuinely.

See, which of us doesn't make it out of this?

I genuinely do.

I genuinely think there still are enders.

Yeah.

What do you think would be one for one side or the other?

I think they exist for everyone except Donald Trump.

Yeah.

And I think it's because he's approached this whole thing in the same way

that a wrestler does in that like the whole point is to be the foil, the whole point is to be, you know what I mean?

So

it's like it's

if somebody's playing the game by different rules, then the rules that we normally use don't apply to them.

So you go like, oh, that's how you get disqualified normally.

He can't get disqualified because he's not playing the game by the same rules.

For the Republican Party, the enders are all about Donald Trump.

Yeah.

Like if J.D.

Vance came out on a hot mic, no, finished him.

Oh, man, we all know.

No, fight him won the 2020 election.

That was ridiculous, but we got to say it for, you know, that'd be, that'd be an ender for him.

He, he, he created something new,

and no one has figured out how to respond to the new that he created.

Yeah.

Do you know what I mean?

Like the mechanism that was set up to deal with the news

wasn't, like in a weird way, I feel like

the way we think of news is designed perfectly for how news was.

It has a certain level of decorum.

And then I think for Donald Trump, you have to cover him the way you cover wrestling and reality TV.

Do you know what I mean?

Yes.

Like those are not covered the same way.

Yes.

So it's not going to be like...

But the point of cover, I mean, the thing that the news doesn't know what to do about with Donald Trump, we could talk about this on the thing.

But...

Yeah, we could jump in.

We're ready, right?

Yeah, we can jump straight in.

Jump straight in.

I'm following you, man.

No, no, no.

You just want me to give you that answer.

I want you to give me that answer.

That's a great, this is where the audience found us in the middle of that answer.

All right.

So the thing the news doesn't know how to deal with with Trump

and never figured out was that

the sort of implicit way the news worked was that the news covered things.

In covering it, it created the thing's importance.

And then in covering it positively or negatively, it sent a signal to the country about whether or not, you know, this politician, if it was a political story, was good or bad.

And when the news becomes in one side of the country's narrative, the enemy, and so covering the thing negatively is in fact a badge of honor to that person,

it breaks the feedback loop that

the media as a

source of

judgment in American democracy was sort of built around.

And yeah, it never figured out what to do after that.

I'm not sure there is an answer either.

I don't think there is.

There aren't gatekeepers anymore in the world.

No, no, no.

They at least felt that they speak to everybody.

They actually aren't.

Except you, maybe.

No, far from it, my friend.

There is no gate.

I don't have a key.

I don't know how the gate works.

You are now in an

interesting

complicated position now in the news in that like, you know, you're with the New York Times, but an opinion, you know, and I thought to myself, I was like, before we, before we get into the heavy topics, because I mean, Ezra Klein, you deal with everything.

I was like,

I was like, let's do something light.

What is your opinion on what's happening in the world right now?

That's your light.

I'm not for it.

Against.

But no, no, okay.

No, jokes aside.

Like when you wake up every day, and I love asking people who work in the news this question particularly because I find there's oftentimes a disconnect or rather just a different way that people are seeing it, people who work in the news and people who don't.

People who work in the news are sometimes like people who work in an emergency room in that they have a very different idea of July 4th than the people who are out celebrating it.

You get what I'm saying?

Yeah, I do.

Because they see the fire, the fire marks and the burns that people come in with.

And so I wonder, like, how you feel about this moment in time.

Is it as bad as some people feel?

You as somebody from the inside, do you feel like it is, you know, a DEF CON one?

Because it goes backwards, right?

It's like a DEF CON one.

You guys forget which DEF CON you don't want to be at.

Yeah, I think we're at the one you don't want to be at.

We're at the, oh, okay, we're there.

I think if you go back in my career, I'm usually somebody saying, calm down a little bit.

Things, you know, there's a long sweep of history.

Things have been much worse in the past.

Go look at the 60s, constant political assassinations, violence in the streets.

I think that

we are,

I think this is the worst political moment in terms of its danger and threat

easily of my lifetime.

Trump won, by the way, at least until the pandemic.

One of the things I always said was that George W.

Bush was a much worse president, right?

That he led to many more deaths, that the Iraq war and

other dimensions of his foreign policy deformed American politics for a generation, created Donald Trump in certain ways by wrecking the Republican Party and making it a hollow shell Trump could take over.

But we're in something different now.

When you have literally masked men abducting people off the street, when you have military occupation of American cities, when you have the weaponization of the federal government against supposed enemies, the search for pretexts on which to fire people, on which to harass them.

I don't, you don't need

a PhD in history to know that those are the early chapters of history books that are not fun to read.

Now, it doesn't mean it will go that badly, right?

You know, the reality of reality is that talking about the future, you're always talking about probabilities.

But, you know, if you, if I would have said at the beginning of this administration that, you know,

70-30, we stay in the part of the probability cloud that is relatively normal, right?

30% chance we don't, which is pretty bad.

Now I think it's more 50-50 or worse.

It's funny, when I first started at the Daily Show, I was thrust into this world of American politics, and it was politics the way it was.

Everyone had a concrete idea of how things were.

So I remember seeing some of the candidates come up and then people in the building would tell me, they'd be like, oh no, Trevor,

they call it the, what was it, Summer Madness?

Or it had like a name in the media world, you know, where people go like, those candidates don't count.

They're not going to be around.

It's silly summer, I think is what they said.

Yeah, they said silly summer.

So all of these people you see popping up, they're not Ben Coss and Donald Trump, all of that.

That's not going to be a thing because everyone was so sure they knew how America worked.

And I would say from 2016 onwards, the one thing I've realized is

more than ever, I've seen Americans go,

I don't know.

I don't know how this country actually works now.

I don't, you know, there used to be like a fixed idea about how it worked and now that that seems to be gone we were talking about this before the camera turned on but people thought they understood what the rules of politics were yeah and what kinds of political moves comments decisions would be functionally disqualifying what was a level beneath which the american people would not let you go

And

that was a form of American exceptionalism, internalized American exceptionalism.

These terrible things have happened in other places, but we're America.

They're not going to happen here.

We have this political culture, this civic culture, this fundamental understanding of how we're supposed to treat one another.

And I think that to the extent many people who used to feel certainty around that have become a bit unboard, it's the recognition of a bottomlessness.

Trump has not found the bottom.

There is not a thing he has done, except maybe support vaccinations for COVID,

that he has not been able to persuade his own base to tolerate.

You know, maybe the Epstein files.

But it is, in fact, the thing that

made so many people initially think Trump would be disqualified, not by some rulemaker somewhere, but by the voters.

The cruelty, the outrageousness, the sort of gleeful destruction of

what I would say are things that maintained basic civic bonds that actually makes him appealing to many people.

And once that got understood, right?

In fact, forget like the people on the left who used to think they knew how American politics worked.

Think about the people on the right.

Go read, you know, J.D.

Vance's Hillbilly LGBTQ.

And like check out the things that Vance was saying.

on podcasts about virtue and public life and the way we treat each other after that in that period, right?

I mean, and look at the personality transplants of Ted Cruz, of Elise Stefanik, of Vance, of once people understood

that it was

not only, but quite substantially the worst parts of Donald Trump that accounted for his appeal.

It wasn't all that people thought he was a businessman from watching The Apprentice.

That really altered things.

And then when he was able to not just go through the first term, but box out, but box out every other Republican after losing re-election.

That was almost unheard of.

Almost unheard of.

So then

there was no pathway to power except his favor on the right.

And so the complete demolition of the idea that this will ever snap back, or at least anytime soon, that we're just in an aberrant moment from a sort of unusual reality TV superstar.

Like that's over.

And that's the end of the surety, right?

Both Both on the left and the right.

Everybody understands running a different game now.

Or if they don't, which actually, to be fair, I think a lot of Democratic Party politicians don't,

they're

dinosaurs, right?

They're going to get, they're going to go extinct.

One of the biggest reasons I want to...

If you didn't bring me here for optimism.

Oh, no, we're going to find optimism.

We're going to find optimism, my friend.

I always think optimism

is only defined by the time scale you use.

That's fair.

Yeah.

100 years, things get much much better thousand years million years oh did we even matter um

the ais are gonna love what we left them

like i like the assumption that people think that the ais will want the same things we want if they get as intelligent as they do but we'll we'll actually talk about ai because i i loved your your your piece on it i i want to i want to talk about you as ezra klein because You know,

there's a song in the musical Hamilton, right?

I think it's Aaron Burr's character.

Forgive me if I get any of these people wrong.

I just remember the songs and I remembered liking it.

And he has the song, The Room Where It Happens.

And all he's singing about in the song is he goes, I just want to be in the room where it happens,

where the rules are written, where the constitution is made, where countries are defined,

where he's like, I don't even, it's an interesting song because it's a person saying, I don't even care to necessarily do it.

I don't necessarily care to be remembered for it, but man, I want to be in that room where it happens.

And all I could think about for this episode was, that's Ezra Klein.

That I just want to be in the room where it happens.

No, no, no, that you are in the room where it happens, not that you want to be, because I went, look at this Venn diagram, right?

For anyone who's like tuning in, going like, okay, well, Trevor, what's your fascination with Ezra Klein?

I go, okay, how about this?

Here's somebody who is in the epicenter of news in many ways.

You know, you've got Vox, which I was a big fan of, helped me a lot on the Daily Show, by the way.

We We got to talk about that.

You've got Vox that

reshaped how many people saw news, especially young people,

now working at the New York Times, curating, shaping the opinion section, working on the podcast,

doing journalistic work that sort of like branches out what the New York Times does.

So you've got the news element, journalism.

Then you've got the writing.

the investigating, the campaigning for certain ideas in the world.

So like shaping what the world is thinking.

Then you've got another little circle, and that is the politics itself.

The amount of times I've heard a person who is either a Democrat in power or somebody who's adjacent to them saying, well, we're going to reach out to Ezra Klein or Ezra Klein hopefully will in some way, shape or form, your name is there.

And I was like, wow, the politicians are even looking to this guy.

And then...

you're in like this world.

I see you on podcasts.

I see you talking to like everyday people.

I go, this is the perfect Venn diagram of the room where it happens.

Do you feel like that about yourself?

I know.

No.

I've lost faith in there being a room where it happens.

Ah, Ezra, no, you can't be serious.

Says the man in the room.

I think that one of my lessons of the past couple of years is there's not a room.

Look, man,

everybody knew.

Everybody knew Joe Biden was too old to run for president again.

Okay.

Everybody knew.

Not that he was senile.

He wasn't senile.

Yeah.

But

they knew.

And there was no room, not only was there no room,

the people in the room

were not in a position where they could even say it.

And the point is not that I have some great perspective on any of this.

The point is that

One of the things I find frightening about this period for all that I was talking about earlier is the feeling that, you know, I am at my core reporter.

I talk to people, as you were saying, sometimes they talk to me.

And I think in a lot of these conversations, some part of me is like, are you the adult?

Are you the person who knows what's going on here?

Yeah.

And

you come to realize

that person isn't there.

or that set of people.

There's nobody set in strategy for the Democratic Party right now, man.

There are some people in theory in charge, but they are not.

They're reactive.

They're behind.

Right.

And it gives you a different,

like, I see things as much less formed.

I think when I was a reporter working in the Washington that had rules that you were talking about earlier, I believed much more.

And I think it was actually truer that there was a rumor it happened.

Okay.

And I think those,

I think that's not really how a lot of things work.

It's diffuse across social media, for instance.

The amount of elite communication that elites are doing with each other through social media vibes and through this tweet.

I mean, Donald Trump is, of course, the epicenter of this.

How much of his, not just governing, but his signal sending to the rest of the Republican Party, to the right, to the country, is not going into a room where the stakeholders are assembled.

and like banging his fist on the table and giving them an answer.

It's shooting out a tweet or a truth social post.

What he is doing in all caps, they're all doing now.

But

here's the thing I think you may be missing is

oftentimes the people in the room don't know that they're in the room.

This metaphor is starting to stretch.

No, think about it.

This is what I mean, honestly, right?

We call it the room where it happened, or we think about it like that because whatever happened has now had an effect on society.

That's when that room has an importance.

You with me?

So when you think about that hotel room where, you know, it's like Harry Belafonte meeting with MLK and meeting with like that room becomes something because of what came from it.

Before then, it's just a hotel room.

Yeah.

No one in that room walked in and went, this is the room where it happens.

Do you get what I'm saying?

I think we're not saying something that different now.

Yeah.

And so, so this is what this is what I'm saying fascinates me about you.

And even you giving me that answer makes me more excited to talk to you about it because I go,

that means to me, you sort of like are approaching this with a degree of humility, which

I'm honestly intrigued by because I go, some people would go, yeah, I'm that guy.

You're going like, no, no, there's not even a room.

There's not a room.

There's not a guy.

Okay.

So

let's go on a journey together then.

Let's go on a journey.

Let's stop this journey because I want to build all these pieces together.

You got Ezra Klein,

who gets into

campaigning was really like your first foray into the world of politics, right?

Like campaigns.

I'm a blogger.

No, no, but before, like,

never before that.

Weren't you with

Dean?

Yes.

That was after I was a blogger.

Oh, so this is a guy that you were brought by the Dean campaign because Joe Trippy, the campaign manager on the Dean campaign, read my blog spot blog that I started as an 18-year-old college student and had 35 hits on my site, my chart, my site meter, I think it was called back then, my traffic meter

a day.

And one of them turned out to be Joe Trippy.

And so at some point, he invited me to intern on the Dean campaign.

What was it about your writing?

that got somebody who was running a presidential campaign to say, yo, this is a good idea.

It was

something very specific, actually.

I had read the book that, as much as any book did, got me into politics.

The single greatest piece of campaign journalism ever produced, this is every political journalist will tell you this, is Richard Ben Kramer's account of the 1988 presidential election, okay, what it takes.

And what it takes, one of the, it follows a bunch of the candidates that year.

And as a college student reading this, I got sort of into Gary Hart, who's this very fascinating, who's very far-sighted, way ahead on a lot of things, but is very tame by modern standards.

Very tame.

The good old days of monkey business.

In 2003 or 2004, I forget what year this is all happening exactly, but Gary Hart, who has been out of politics for a long time, is considering running for president again.

And as a weird, what it takes obsessive on my little blog spot blog, I am a Gary Hart stan.

Joe Trippy had worked on Hart's 88 campaign.

I'm pretty sure that's the one he was on.

And so Hart, I'm sorry, Trippy, I think, was somewhat fascinated

to see this like college student blogging in support of his one-time employer.

I mean, also, the blog sphere was small then.

The Dean campaign was the first campaign to take blogs seriously.

And so Trippy kept more tabs on the blogosphere than other people would have.

They were ahead of the curve.

Yeah, they were ahead of the curve.

So I mean, like blogs then are basically the inception of the idea of podcasts now.

If you look at each election, there's a new type of media that sort of has its imprint on them.

And blogs are, you know, this is like the flushing world of blogs.

So that's, I think, how Trippy ends up being kind of fascinated by me.

And you get called in and you interning on this campaign.

What was it like?

I mean, for those who don't know, like, how Dean was basically, he's like the favorites.

This is like, no, no, no, but there was a moment where it was like, this is the guy.

He's in the primary.

Yeah, in the primary.

You're like, oh, man, this guy's going to do it.

Yeah.

This guy's going to do it.

And then I still don't fully understand the story.

He went, oh yeah, like the Kool-Aid man or something.

And then it all ended.

So I don't think it was he.

Oh, yeah.

I left the, I was an intern on the campaign for like four to six weeks over a summer.

And my learning from that was I never wanted to be on a campaign again.

Why?

I just don't.

want to have to defend everything a politician says.

I don't want my judgment to be subsumed to theirs.

I just didn't like that part of being on a campaign.

I could see what it meant when you would rise up because I did.

I thought I wanted to work in politics.

And I realized that I would not be good at working in politics because, you know, my views would differ.

And that's not what you can have as staff.

And,

but Dean, and I'm worried I'm going to get some details here wrong by memory, but Dean loses Iowa.

That was the thing that the Democratic Party, and it would end up doing the same thing at later dates, right?

Like 2022.

The Democratic Party very much wanted to beat George W.

Bush that year.

And Dean had developed a lot of grassroots momentum, but there was a fear that he was unelectable.

And the party sort of fled to safety of John Kerry, the war hero, the known quantity.

And,

you know, and then as soon as like

Dean's momentum blunted, then there was this kind of flight.

And so Kerry becomes the nominee.

You can see a very similar thing happen away with Biden, where, you know, Bernie Sanders

has much more grassroots momentum, much more

excitement within the base.

Biden is struggling, right?

He's not doing well.

He doesn't, I mean, Buttigievich wins Iowa, not Biden.

But then it's like after South Carolina and Biden wins out, there's a kind of flight to the safety of Joe Biden, which was sort of maybe a good idea for that election, not a good idea in the long run.

You know, the Democratic Party tries to make safe strategic decisions when it's really afraid of losing.

And so I think you saw that in those two elections, which is slightly separate from the question you asked me, but is where my mind went.

No, you see, I love it because remember, I'm building a case here, the room where it happens.

Because just in that story for me alone, you're in a moment in time that I think goes on to define something.

One part is maybe myth and the way stories are told, right?

Because many of the people that I've spoken to and still speak to now in journalism or political circles, they'll say, no, it was the Howard Dean Yelp.

That's what got him.

And what sticks to me, or what sticks out in people bringing that up is that it created this idea that you had to be perceived a certain way in order to win an election, right?

So many people took the cautionary tale away from the story.

They didn't talk about not winning Iowa.

They said, no,

you have to be prim, you have to be proper, you have to make sure everything you do is right, because if you scream or yelp in the wrong way, it's over for you.

And this sort of persists for a very long time in American politics.

You know, they're like, Are you electable?

Forget your politics.

Do you just, you know, do you have that electability?

Let's say again, I really hope I'm remembering it right that it's Iowa he lost and not New Hampshire.

Oh, no, no.

It's been a long time since I found it out before.

We'll throw the thing.

We'll put it up on screen.

That's fine.

We've got technology now.

Yeah, we could just throw the thing up.

Or we'll just put up liar on your face.

As you said,

bam, bam, bam, liar.

Bam, bam, bam, liar.

Yeah, you got it.

And then we just carry on with the episode.

Perfect, good.

Yeah, that's what it is.

No, so, okay, so you work in this world.

You realize you don't want to work in politics because you don't want to toe a line.

And so you get dragged into journalism, right?

Like this, you get pulled into this world of journalism.

I'm blogging and people around me begin realizing I'm to become a journalist way before I do, right?

Yeah, but what is it about?

I want to know like...

what they saw in you that you didn't see and and what still keeps you going in that world today because you're very good at it that's the thing you know so blogging which nobody went into at that time to build a career, didn't, nobody knew what that word was, right?

It was a thing that a lot of us were just doing because we wanted to write about politics on the internet.

It was like no different than writing in a forum or, and we didn't have social media back then in the way we do now.

So, you know, I'd started a small blog spot blog and then TypePad to the kids out there.

These are blogging publishing softwares.

And, you know, it just kind of kept getting bigger.

I, you know, was part of a co-blogger team called Panthagon and Not Geniuses was another one I was on.

And it just kind of kept building.

And then, you know, it went from dozens of people a day to hundreds to thousands.

It was never huge by, you know, podcast or YouTube or anything standards.

But,

but it was enough to get a little bit noticed by a media industry that was trying to figure out what is this blogging thing and how do we get some of its energy for ourselves.

And so the next year, I intern at the Washington Monthly, which is a small policy magazine.

And, you know, that's the first time I'm around journalism.

And in terms of, you know, what did other people see in me, I think one thing other people saw that I didn't was that journalism is a career.

It's not like I grew up the kid of a bunch of journalists.

I lived in Southern California.

I didn't know anybody who did that professionally.

Which is rare for a lot of journalists, by the way.

Yeah.

Whatever people are like, oh, you're my uncle.

Yeah, exactly.

There's more of that to you there.

Yeah, it's a cost down.

Or you're just in more of a milieu where it exists.

And

I,

so I just had never really thought about it.

I don't have like a much better, like I sort of assumed that for a long time that I assumed I would work in politics and then that wasn't going to be true.

And, you know, maybe I'd go to law school, but I didn't want to be a lawyer, which seemed like a problem with that plan.

And,

you know, so then I went and interned at the Monthly.

I I just loved it and loved just being around journalism.

And I mean, the idea, it is still a kind of magic as a journalist that you can call

just people who know

everything about something

and they will out of nowhere take an hour out of their day to explain it to you, right?

You can just like, how does a Federal Reserve work, right?

Just like the idea that you could just follow curiosity around like that is remarkable.

I still have not law, I mean, my whole podcast is you just bring people on, you're like, I can just ask you all these questions and you'll answer them in a way that it would be really weird to do if you were at a party or in social life.

I've a couple of times had friends on my show, you know, people I've known a long time.

And I just noticed that I asked them questions there that in the whole long arc of our relationship, I've never asked because You don't typically say to people, why do you do what you do?

What have you learned in it?

You know, what about this kind of very basic question about it?

Not you're so often trying to show people you understand them and you're keeping up with their stories.

You don't just sit there and indulge your curiosity for two hours.

You know, so the next year I sort of apply for a writing fellowship at the American Prospect and get that.

And, you know, that's sort of like almost a glorified internship there.

And, you know, then we're off to the races.

Those races involve Vox.

I have a deep personal fascination with Vox because for a few reasons.

One, I was starting at the daily shows.

2015 into 2016.

First John was still the host and I was popping in and doing segments.

2016, I became the host of the daily show, you know, frying pan into the fire.

2015 into 2016 is also a time when, you know, America is heading into an election.

Yeah, I vaguely remember that.

Yeah, the Republican field.

How did it go?

Yeah, the Republican field.

I don't want to spoil it.

We've got to watch it.

Watch it.

No spoilers.

The Republican field is bigger and crazier than it's ever been.

You know, people are like, what is this democratic side of things?

And everything seems a little crazier than usual.

But from my recollection, most people believed that this was a blip and the norm would be established.

And that norm was Hillary Clinton would win because she seemed like the most winnable candidate.

It's like this is the winning person.

And the Republican side seemed like a joke for the most part.

It was crazy.

There were too many people.

And

this is all happening.

I'm now trying to consume as much news as possible to catch up so I can be in this world of American

news.

I realized very quickly that a lot of the people in the news in America either don't understand it

or like in and around politics, they don't understand it, or they don't know how to explain it.

And then I stumble upon this website called Vox.

And not only is it telling you the news, it's breaking it down.

It's explaining it.

You know, it's like, oh, let me tell you, this is what gerrymandering is.

Trevor, you're warming my cold.

cold.

No, I'm being serious.

I'm being serious.

And I think there are a lot of people who are my age or younger, especially, who went, oh, now I not only understand this, but I know why I should care.

And I wonder if you felt that, like, when you were doing your work at Vox, did you feel like you were trying to fix something that was wrong with journalism at that time in that, like, journalism had become an insider's game?

Politics had become an insider's game.

And for the first time, for me, at least, when I was watching Vox, and I think a lot of people were interacting interacting with it, they went, oh, no, this is me.

Politic, like the Greek word, it is of the people.

I'm the people.

So my

trajectory in journalism from the American Prospect.

I was there for three or four years.

I went to the Washington Post.

And what I became known for as a journalist was extremely detailed coverage of policy debates, which people had traditionally thought nobody would read.

And because they thought nobody would read it, it didn't get that many resources.

I mean, I'm not saying it was never covered,

but it,

you know, the

great job in journalism was to cover the election, cover the horse race, cover the, and policy journalism was a bit of a, a bit more of a backwater.

It's C-SPAN.

C-SPAN.

Yeah.

And

I...

had this blog at the Prospect and also wrote pieces of the magazine there.

It was very policy heavy.

I got picked up by the Post to work in their business and economics section where where I had a blog.

And in particular, I did a huge amount of coverage of healthcare.

And the thing that frustrated me covering it, because I was able to build a really good audience for that and people wanted to know, and yet every day we were covering the thing in the act

that was changing or maybe changing,

which most days was, if people,

anybody remembers this at all, the public option in Obamacare, whether the government would run a health insurance

plan that you could buy into.

We spent most of that year, anybody covering this, covering the back and forth of the public option.

In the end, the public option didn't make it into the bill.

Joe Lieberman killed it.

And

I remember thinking a lot during that year, it's like,

if you had just not read most of what we covered about the Affordable Care Act, if you had checked in like eight months ago and checked in right here at the end, in a weird way, you would have been better informed.

You'd have not gone through like knowing a lot about a thing that did not end up existing.

And I'm not saying that coverage is totally useless because, you know, maybe the public option would have happened, but it also was never the main part of the bill.

And the thing that frustrated me was knowing that I had covered so many parts of the bill, the construction of the exchanges, the Medicaid, how are we going to do subsidies, silver plans, bronze plans?

I mean, all this is on some level, maybe sounds like gobbledygook to people, risk corridors.

And there was nowhere to put it all together.

Every day you could come to my wonk blog, as it was called, and hear what was happening in policy that day.

But if you just had the question, what the hell does Obamacare?

How does it work?

What does it do?

We didn't have anything for you.

But that was most people's question.

When I looked at my email, that was most people's, what they were asking about.

They were asking about something that wasn't happening today.

And I started thinking about how.

The news is so focused on what's new and changing and for a very obvious reason, which is that the way the news worked for a very long time was we

etched ink into wood pulp, flattened wood pulp, and gave it to people.

And that's expensive to do.

And so you had like the whole thing was built in order to minimize

how much space we had to use.

Right.

Yeah.

Like paper is expensive.

But now we're on the internet and you don't have to do that anymore.

And so could you build something using websites and new publishing technologies that attached to ongoing stories all the context you needed to understand them?

And Vox was sort of built on this experimental idea.

And without going like into the whole sorted history of card stacks and all these different things we tried, some parts of it worked, some parts of it didn't.

There are things that

when we launched it,

this is sort of like very weedsy publishing history, but in a way I think it's important.

The whole news business went into this period where Facebook was firehosing traffic at everybody.

And so all of a sudden, your ability to control like where people read your stuff broke.

And so actually your ability to innovate as the news broke because you couldn't innovate on their platform, only your own.

So a lot of the things that I thought were the most interesting,

the way the technology evolved didn't quite allow.

But what Vox is built to do, what it is still out there doing,

was to be focused on the contextual layer of the news, to use the new thing that happened to talk about the broad thing that was happening.

And at our best, across a bunch of different forms from articles to the Netflix show Explained, which we did for five seasons.

You know, that thing of like,

how do you get at the thing that isn't changing, but is really important?

You know, it was a new way to animate a news site.

Aaron Powell, Jr.:

I think beyond that, though,

there was something you were doing that was addressing

a need that

had arisen because of what had happened in America.

And in many places in the world, I think we're seeing it as well.

I think as communities have gone down, as people spend less time in community, like community halls, community gatherings, town council meetings, when you look at how ubiquitous and omnipresent those things were in people's lives, and you see them diminish over time in America and around the world, it's interesting when you watch like old, I'm sure you've seen a bunch of them, pictures or when there were videos, people would be at a town hall meeting like in a big way.

There are still a few in small parts of America here and there, but I don't think it is where it used to be.

And

in those, there would be a lot of discussing.

What does that mean?

They said they're going to build a highway, but my house is there.

What is that?

What is eminent domain?

And someone would have to explain it.

And someone would get into the details of what the law was, or the idea was, or the politics were.

Once that went away, no one thought to themselves that people's ability to dissect, process,

and then respond to the news is directly related to how much information they have about what the news is reporting.

Do you know what I mean?

TV shows started understanding this.

That's why they went with previously on.

Because they went, hey, man, maybe you didn't see the previous episode, or maybe you forgot it.

And if you think about it, it's like they spent so much time focusing on something so stupid.

Who cares if you know what happened in the previous episode?

But they were like, no, we need you to.

And I was always fascinated that the news sort of didn't do that.

The news wasn't saying previously on.

It would just tell you this happened today.

The Democrats did this.

The Republicans did this.

This person did that.

That person said this.

But you'd go, but how do we get here?

And that's what I feel you tapped into.

That's what I feel like you and your colleagues worked on was creating the context that the news relies on without realizing it.

Does that make sense?

I think that's right.

I mean,

again,

a lot of it was about the internet made new things possible.

Yeah.

When you have profound changes in communication mediums, what you are communicating should not stay the same.

And I mean, for everything we're talking about.

Say that again, though.

I love that.

When you have profound changes in communication mediums, what you are communicating, and for that matter, the way you are communicating it, shouldn't stay the same.

If it does, you've not noticed something.

And by the way, this is one of the things that explains the breakdown in the rules of politics and the assumptions that we know what's going on.

It was not the case that from when I was a kid, you know, to when I was

in my 20s, that the dominant mediums of political communication changed like five times.

But since then, it's been like, you know, blogs and then the rise of social media, then the rise of algorithmic social media and podcasting and TikTok virality.

And one of the things just happening is that a lot of politicians are not suited.

And a lot of political figures and thinkers and parties and they're built for the old way of doing things.

Trump, say what you you will about him, he is truly fucking native to Twitter, right?

Like, like, as if he's an OG on Twitter, if you're not aware of that, that's what I mean, right?

Yeah, yeah, like he is

there,

he was designed by it.

I'm like a big fan of like, you know, these media theorists like Marshall McLuhan and like his big line people maybe heard from him is a medium as a message.

And what he means by that is that we get distracted.

We're like, is it a good tweet or a bad tweet?

And he's like, it doesn't matter.

What matters is what being on there leads you to expect expect and reward.

And what Twitter is, is a

platform that creates compression, right?

Initially, it's one, it's what, 100 characters.

Later it becomes 280 and now it's kind of whatever, but it rewards the

incredible compression of an idea and then rewards you or penalizes you based on whether the people who follow you like it.

Yeah.

Or respond to it, which was a lot of fun.

Or just respond.

Yeah, the other thing, right?

They could also hate it.

That's possible.

Yeah, as long as they engage engage in it, that was the main thing.

What it is not is deliberative.

What it is not is like a way to hear people out.

And on the one hand, on the other hand,

Trump is not deliberative, right?

Trump is not listening.

But Trump is amazing at knowing what's resonating in a crowd.

Oh, yeah, he gets retweets.

Yeah.

That's what he's aiming for.

And so,

anyway, so Vox, in a way, is built for a new medium, but it keeps changing, right?

It keeps moving.

And

I think one of the things to just be really alert to is the way every movement changes meeting.

We were talking before the show started about

this is a podcast on some level, but in the last couple of years, all the podcasts have gone video too.

And some were always there, like Rogan, but a lot of us weren't.

I've gone video.

And going video changes the show.

Right.

So now people get these like little clipped out pieces of podcasts.

And in many ways, what made podcasting such an unusual medium was that that didn't happen.

It was all in context.

It was all in context.

But now we're in video because video allows it, like people clip it out and then it goes viral and then people know you did the podcast, which is, can be great, but also it's going to change how people act in the room.

It's going to change how the interviewer acts, right?

Like every time the medium changes, it changes us back.

And so I think like one of the things that, you know, maybe you're picking out of my career, but is I think I'm pretty alert to how mediums are changing, like on the meta level.

That is what I'm thinking.

And you got to think about what are the opportunities and what are the drawbacks, right?

I am not, I do not write on X or Threads or Blue Sky.

Like now my show will put some clips up, but not because I don't think anybody should, but because

it doesn't work for the kind of content I want to put into the world.

Like the compression is in many ways like the enemy of what I'm trying to do.

The compression and the, did you like it?

Did you like it?

Did you like it?

Yeah, yeah, fundamentally.

I sort of want people to have the feeling after listening to my show, like, huh, I need to think about that for a while.

I don't just want them going, yeah.

And so, you know, you got to decide like where, like, what are the mediums that work that way?

One of the most frustrating things to me about the media is how bad it is about thinking about mediums.

Like, just like the poverty of media theory in the media is crazy

and among politicians.

And it's like it's such a defining force in our lives like what are the rules and incentives of the places in which we communicate why why do you think the media is so bad at looking at itself when it's so good at looking at everything else you know like I've I've always been intrigued by this like why every interview with New York Times Washington Post they seemed like they were the slowest to adapt to where the world was moving while they were reporting on the world moving.

You know, they would be writing articles about how everything's becoming digital, but they weren't becoming digital.

They would be covering stories about how people are watching less TV on TV, but TV wouldn't think about what the next step should be beyond TV.

Like, why do you think that is?

Because you would think it's the most observant space to be in.

And yet.

It's usually not because nobody notices.

I'll say two things about it.

So one is that it's not that the media isn't even good at looking at itself.

The media actually loves to talk about itself.

It's not good at looking at the thing around itself.

So, the media loves to talk about editorial decisions, for instance.

Okay.

Do we make the right editorial decisions?

It doesn't like to talk about the financial context in which those editorial decisions happen.

And I'm not saying something hugely conspiratorial here, but like the way newspapers, for instance, evolved.

What's the business model of a classic newspaper?

The business model of a classic newspaper is a local advertising monopoly.

You are funding foreign bureaus by telling people there is a shoe sale down down the block.

You are funding

deep corruption investigations by telling people that down the street, somebody is selling a skateboard and like classified local advertising, et cetera.

What that creates is a huge incentive to be palatable.

to the entire community or as much of it as you possibly can.

Because you need them to go buy the shoes.

Being the one newspaper

is a lot more valuable than being one of two or one of four.

What did Michael Jordan say, right?

Republicans and Democrats buy shoes.

Which he says he didn't say in that way or whatever, but it's an interesting, you know, just talking about newspapers.

It's also true, by the way.

It's true and Democrats do buy shoes, right?

There's

almost a political wisdom in that comment that I think it's easy to dismiss, too.

But so the voice of the newspaper evolves to be extremely neutral.

And then around it, you have things like tabloids and

other things like that.

What then happens is we move online.

And the reason it's hard for the organizations to do what you're talking about is there actually is immediately a

tension between these two business models.

So what you are doing to maintain your local advertising monopoly and what you do to stand out in the hyper-competitive and eventually algorithmic and socially shared space of online content are almost fundamentally the opposite things.

And it is very hard to shift one business model to the other and one newsroom to the other, right?

People grew up doing a kind of thing.

They were trained for a kind of thing.

And maybe you don't even want to do the other thing because you think maybe with some justification, the other thing isn't a great thing for democracy or not the right way to do the newsroom.

It's beneath you in a way.

It's less prestigious.

You see this all the time with there's endless debate online about the New York Times headlines.

And,

you know, are they

sane washing Donald Trump?

Or are they, you know, are they really anti-Trump if you're on the right?

And one of the things that, I mean, first, if you're reading a New York Times headline,

like the amount of leverage I think the left thinks we have over American politics in our headlines is not true.

Like most people who read New York Times headlines probably have a pretty settled opinion about Donald Trump.

But also, the New York Times wants to be a place that the other half of the country can read.

These tensions don't have an answer.

And they reflect

in our paper, in other organizations, you know, not just like a question of how do you do the media or how do you do the news,

but who are you for?

How do you fund that thing?

How do people find you, right?

This is such a big deal.

The thing that is now broken is distribution.

I mean, the business models do, but distribution.

For a while, we distributed through you came and subscribed and bought the thing.

The New York Times is one of the last places that has a homepage that matters.

What we decide to put in what order on our homepage is meaningful in the structure of American politics and how people find us.

But even for us and for a lot of other places, that's not really how people find you.

Before social media kind of broke, they came through social media.

So then you're only seeing what the, like I always felt this at Vox.

I often felt people had a, often had a very weird impression of us because they only knew, we spent all this time thinking about like in what order to put things on the homepage because we were trying to give you an editorial product that had a certain structure to it.

But we had no control.

No, people were coming to you through

all these centers through a clip, like through a link, through this thing went viral because we hate it or we love it.

But they didn't see all the things that didn't go viral, which were like how you had to understand like the entire package of the news.

So the bundle unbundled.

And like that changes everything too.

And so like the New York Times headlines people know are the ones they don't like for one reason or another,

which is fine.

Like that's not, that's their right.

The point is not to complain about the critiques.

The point is more that

I think the place where the media is the worst is about thinking about the context in which it operates and like the forces it actually doesn't have control over.

And then like, you know, and then it's very, very hard to adapt to those as they change.

It's funny, you bring up two points that I think a lot of people would be interested in because we think about it and we speak about it all the time.

One is who tells the news slash

who has the right to tell the news.

And then the other part of it is, has the news ever been fixed you know like people now will say they'll go oh man i don't trust the news anymore the news is broken man i don't know you you know and then a lot of older people will be like you know back in my day you could trust the news you knew that the news was

you know but now these days you don't know back in the day but i mean if if i'm listening to what you're saying

really all that happened is they might have moved further away from that central sort of hub of where the news was.

They moved further away from the shoe store.

So now the news is not sort of for them anymore.

And so maybe if we look at both of these, like, like how do you, how do you process that as a journalist?

Like on the one hand, has the news ever been fixed?

You know, because like

black people in America and in many countries will go like, oh, which news?

The news took a while to get around to our stories.

Women might say the same thing, which news?

The news took a while.

People in other countries might go like, oh, you, Americans, you, your news, let me tell you what was actually happening in my actual country that your news was reporting on.

So let's talk about that part first.

Like, how do you think about that as a journalist?

Do you even have to grapple with the idea of biased, not biased?

Where are we calling ourselves or what is the core of what we're doing?

I will speak for myself as a journalist and say speak for all of them, Ezra.

I speak for all of them.

You speak for all of them.

I have never been a believer in the

concept of objective news.

I don't think there's an old Hundred Thompson quote.

It's something like, the only time I ever saw objective news was on the closed circuit camera, the security camera at a Woolworths.

There is news that is trying hard to be fair and news that is not.

There is news that is curious and news that is not.

But people always talk about bias as if bias only lives in the adjectives used in a story.

If I say, Donald Trump said X.

And then I put a bunch of spin on the ball versus I don't, or what's been on, that's where they see the bias.

The bias in the news, the most fundamental form of bias and another way of saying bias is judgment or decision making

is in what to cover it all

the

universe of possible stories is so much larger than any publication because we're not just cover what happened today we could do long form we could do narrative we could do anything

the most fundamental question is what do we cover and why

And

the thing that we have never grappled with,

again, you know, I'm not sure there is a way to grapple with it, but nobody's ever offered a good framework for how we make our coverage decisions.

And oftentimes that's what I wanted us to think about the most.

The most important question is what to decide to cover.

And then there's a question of how do you cover it?

And the great, it's a really hard job.

I mean, truly, imagine you are the editor, the executive editor of the Washington Post,

and you have to decide of everything that happened i mean in the world but forget that just in politics that day what's the most important one what's the second most important one who should you quote in that most important one and who shouldn't you

like there isn't an answer to that question i mean there are a couple days of the year maybe when there is um you know the 9-11 it's pretty clear what's going to go on the front page on 9-12

but there usually isn't.

And so you have to come up with some internal framework or intuitive framework that does a couple of things all at the same time, right?

One thing it has to do is

make some sense to you, right?

As a person putting out this product, you have to think you did a good job.

The next thing it has to do is make sense not just to your audience, as if that is this, you know, one blob out there.

Yeah.

Your audiences.

People have to look at it.

and say to themselves, that seems reasonable.

Like if we just had homepage right now after homepage that didn't cover Trump at all, and it was like, you know, what's really important is decisions Xi Jinping is making in China.

That would look really weird to people.

It might be in the long sweep of history that actually what seems to be really important is a bunch of decisions Xi Jinping is making right now in China.

But it would look weird to an American audience to move our coverage 70-30 over to China and India.

And you could just keep going down the line like this, right?

So the question of how do you decide what matters is just a very hard and unsolved one.

And one of the hard things about the news is I actually think most often our heuristic is what do the other newspapers or news organizations decide that matters.

I mean, you guys had this issue, I'm sure, at the Daily Show.

Ours was different, though.

It was similar, but it was different.

And I very quickly came to a realization sometimes

your incentives as the person who is actually doing the thing do not match up with the organization's incentives, right?

So one of the simplest things we came across at the Daily Show was, and I think you'd appreciate something like this.

They would go out and they would do like, you know, testing and audiences and blah, blah, blah.

And they'd be like, this is what, and they would go, this is what the audience of the daily show is most interested in.

Number one, without fail, most times, was like climate change.

They were like, your audience, daily show audience, this age of people, we've polled them.

They want to know about climate change.

That's the number one thing they talk about.

And then when you would go to the ratings,

every episode we did about climate change was one of the worst.

People wouldn't watch the episode about climate change.

But when they were asked the question, they would say, the most important thing to me is that this show covers climate change.

But when the show would cover climate change, they wouldn't watch the episode on climate change.

And what that taught me was, oh, there's all these weird incentives that are taking place.

Because let's say from the network side, I could go as Trevor, I think we should do climate change every day because without the climate, then, you know, there's nothing.

Without the world, what is the daily show?

And they would go, Yeah, this is a very um, it's a noble pursuit, but you're cancelled,

no one's watching your show.

And then I'm like, Oh, well, what was the point of this

on the other side?

The audience themselves, I felt like, had this interesting incentive because somebody was asking them what was important, they thought they have to answer the answer that they think is the most important, which is, of course, climate change.

But that's not what they were clicking on, that's not what they were watching, that's not what they were doing.

And I actually remember I had a conversation with a

photographer who was like an amazing journalist, you know, out, I mean like a war,

you know, like out there in the field taking pictures of live rounds being fired and everything.

And she's, she's a Pulitzer Prize winner and everything.

And she said to me, one of the most interesting things that shook how I even perceived your world of news.

She said, I covered a story in, I think it was in Ukraine at the time.

And she said it was one of the most devastating stories ever.

And I had these pictures and I took it to my editors and they said,

This is amazing, but we can't publish it or we won't publish it because we've already had too many stories on Ukraine.

So we need to put in a few other stories that might not actually be as important as this story, but the audience will sort of drop off if we have another Ukraine story.

And we've already given Ukraine this much promise.

So we need to like move on.

And in that moment, I realized, well, I had this, I had this question that was sort of a realization.

And I went, Did journalism die

the day it needed to make a profit?

Did it ever, I mean, aside from the period in which it is funded as an appendage of political parties.

What I mean is, like, when we think of it, let's think of journalism as it exists, even like beyond the classic newspaper/slash person wearing the hat with the little press thing.

I just mean like the concept of it, you know,

I've always loved the quote Charlie Munger has, show me the.

the the um the incentives and i'll show you the outcome

when the news even from a cable side in America, when the news is a loss leader, every network has to have news and it just loses money.

You can't make money from it.

The news at that point did hold a

certain place in America.

People trusted it and believed, but it also wasn't sensational.

It wasn't trying to grab you.

You watch those old reports.

They were good, but if we're honest, they were boring by today's standards, right?

So let me alter the thing you just said.

Go, go, go, yeah.

Keep going.

Because this period you're talking about,

the news made a much bigger profit.

Before they were,

when they were lost leaders they weren't lost leaders i mean maybe the network nightly news you could say that about right but the newspapers oh no no no no i don't mean no but the thing i'm saying network so the thing i'm saying about all of those actually is that the the alteration of what you're saying if you're thinking about this in in time right yeah because i think you've got in here like there's a period where it moved into a more financialized model there's not um

we make less profit now by a lot

you could say that um

the new what was it the news died the day.

That was your formulation, right?

That the news died the day when it no longer had monopoly profits.

Because the thing that it had

when it, so fundamentally, the news, the news, never really made a profit.

Advertising made profits.

Again, like this is like a key thing, right?

That's always the case.

But it's really important, right?

If what had ever happened was that people loved paying money for news.

No, I mean, it's a very different business.

And it's never been that business.

So what you had was this other thing that didn't just make a profit, it made a lot of profit.

And that lot of profit created a lot of space.

That's interesting.

It had some incentives in it, right?

Don't turn off all the people who buy shoes.

Yeah.

But it also had a lot of room to, like, I forget.

I used to know the number.

The Baltimore Sun used to have like

six to 10 foreign bureaus.

Did the Baltimore Sun need that many?

Like, weren't we overstocked in foreign bureaus of the ball?

But they had a lot of money.

So they actually had a lot of room to make choices about things.

Yeah.

And also, if you have like a really good business,

then your ability to withstand some subscribers being mad at you or some politicians being mad at you is a lot stronger than if you don't.

And so it is, the news has become hyper-competitive.

It is an absolute war of all against all.

And not just news versus news, but news versus literally everything else, right?

In the period you're talking about when there are a couple broadcast networks and it's 6 p.m.

They all run the news, changes a lot when cable news becomes part of the equation right it's the it'll change a lot when there's more networks i guess yeah no yeah so

all of a sudden you're like fighting with the gardening channel yeah and the video games channel and nickelonian and but whatever else and it as it becomes more competitive and more capitalistic like in a well-functioning market according to econ 101

profit is driven near to zero that when profits are high what you should understand you have is a non-well-functioning market.

Because, in theory, with no barrier to entry, you should always have profits driving as near to zero as competition allows.

And so, it used to have functionally monopoly profits, local monopoly profits, they funded a lot of news.

And now you have a highly competitive market.

Um,

and people are actually deciding whether or not they want your news or this other person's news.

And hey, this other person's news tells them they're right all the time.

Damn.

And I mean, the thing that makes me the most just sad about my move to video is what appears to work in headlining for YouTube.

So I'm on YouTube now.

And I just have to sit and be like, we are not going to do headlines that move a word into all caps.

Gavin Newsom destroys Donald Trump

because I just think it's bad.

But

according to all the data I have in front of me, I am probably leaving audience on the table.

You definitely are.

Eviscerates, destroys, lying, defenestrates.

All of the

people are windows.

All it is.

But you see, unfortunately, that's sort of where we're back at.

That's a competitive market.

Yeah.

Right.

You can survive, not just survive, thrive with kind of boring headlines, which in some ways are good.

You know, don't turn everybody's temperature up before they even read the story.

Right.

You can do that when you're not in a highly competitive market.

But now we're all in a highly competitive market.

Yeah.

I mean, Twitter is like this too.

It's a gain of function research for takes.

Like hit it until until it actually becomes viral and escapes containment and destroys your career.

These markets are weird.

But this is what I mean about

the profit side of it

is I actually like that you've added to that.

Thank you.

Because it's not always about the market itself.

It's also about what you are able to do within that market, right?

So

if you can afford to, you can open a store.

that basically makes no profit.

If you can afford to, as the business owner, you can do that.

You ever go go to Tokyo?

Yeah.

You ever notice how the stores there are amazing?

Yes.

It's because they have public policy set up to make functionally non-profitable small stores survive.

How do they do that?

I knew the answer to this like two years ago, but there's some great books about it.

But they've just structured the way real estate works, the way zoning works.

That is beautiful.

They make it so that you can survive running like a little ramen shop that serves three people at a time.

You don't need to be a big volume business.

And so Tokyo just has this incredible thriving craftsmanship.

Now, you see, this is a question I have for you as the journalist: is like,

why is it, and I'm not putting all of this at journalism's door, please don't get me wrong, but like, why is it that people don't seem to know that small detail that enables them to make a decision about a larger detail?

So what you just said to me now

is, you know, because I've been to Tokyo, I love it.

I love the stores.

I love how diverse they are.

I love how interesting.

And to your point, I love the craftsmanship.

But people who go to Japan will say the same thing.

they'll say man it's amazing and you've got such great clothing and such great food and people take care and they don't have to like feed as many people as possible so they try and make it really really really good and the quality and and everyone sort of loves that and then when they come home whether it's to the united states or the united kingdom or south africa or wherever they are they'll go why can't we you know why is every coffee shop like a you know why is that all taken over where's the where's the craftsmanship and but what you just said to me, I go, like, why don't we know more of this?

You know, and again, you have a New York Times journalist on here, and he immediately tells you the secret to Tokyo.

And you're like, why don't the journalists reveal this?

Oh, no, no, no.

But this is what I'm saying.

I had to bring you here, Ezra.

This is not a sustainable model for us to work from.

Are you going to go to everyone's house and tell them this?

No, and I mean it like a like this is this is what I mean is like where do you think it's broken down?

There are many Americans who I would argue don't know why their local store has closed down.

They don't see the connection between policies that are made or not made that will determine how their town thrives or doesn't thrive.

The don't know is the main thing.

And then we judge people for feeling or acting a certain way when they only have the information that they have.

And so, like, I wonder how you grapple with that or where you think the breakdown comes in.

The Tokyo example is like specific.

But in the broader thing about why did the store close down,

i

for most things when people start the sentence like why won't the media tell us usually yeah you can i can then turn around and give me six minutes and i'll find you including on this tokyo example by the way a bunch of beautifully reported long-form stories that you've never heard of

one thing i said a minute ago is a distribution is broken how does a story that was published, I mean, how often are you going to run?

Let's say you're the New York Times or in this case, let's take take it off the mind player, right?

Let's say you're the Boston Globe, you know, in the heyday, and you've got, you know, some Asia bureaus.

And one of your reporters is like, you know, I want to do a story on a function of the way Tokyo's housing market and zoning policy and it like has kind of come together.

I'm like, great, it's a good story.

Yeah, let's do it.

And you run that story on, you know, June 14th.

2007.

Some people read it.

It's like, that's a good story.

Like, you know, that explains something about Tokyo for me.

And then, what are you going to rerun it on June 15th and have the person do another version of it?

And so it's almost always there somewhere, but how does it find you?

Yeah.

Again, going back to the explainer model that we were trying to think about at Vox of these like constantly updated, you know, explainers, it's like one thing I always thought about is we are sitting on this astonishing archive of information.

Just astonishing.

How do we derive value out of everything we've already done?

Not just we,

but the audience, the people we're trying to serve.

Like if I were doing, I am very, very, very pessimistic, I will say, about the effect I think AI is going to have on the news and the news consumption.

So I don't see the next thing as a booster.

But

if I were one of these organizations right now,

I would be thinking really hard.

about how to train AI models on my own archives such that you could talk to like the New York Times bot and it could tour you through everything we've ever done before that might be of interest to the thing you're thinking about.

The New Yorker's archive is astonishing.

The New Republic goes back to 1917, 1912, something in that area.

The amount of just incredible work

sitting in the back issues of Esquire.

Like, how do you get it to people?

Well, all of a sudden, now we have a technology that is able to be trained on mass mountains of content.

Yeah, it can digest it.

And you can actually ask it a question and then it can answer you

and like create a little syllabus of cool things for you.

Like, maybe that would work.

Like, certainly it's worth a try.

Can you tell it like what you want, what, what you were interested in and sort of home pages begin to reformulate?

Yeah.

I mean, the problem so much with algorithmic news, going back to your thing about climate change, is that

there is no,

this is a Buddhist in me, we don't have a stable self.

Do I want to read about climate change?

Well,

no,

yes.

Like, do I want to eat Oreos?

I mean, no, like not in the long run.

I mean, yes, right now I do.

And the thing that the

like Facebook and TikTok and everything are incentivized

is for your instant desire.

The desire that happens almost before you realize it's happening.

But of course, we have slower desires, desires that we, that are true to us.

Like I would like to sleep more.

I would also like to stay up later, like, you know, watching TV.

Like, I imagine this world in which we could build these

systems where we could tell them not what we want this second, but what we want.

what the part of us that can think about ourselves in some kind of long-run way thinks we want.

And with it holding

that sense of our better self in mind and in its system prompt, it could help us find things that would lead to that.

And in fact, give us a reminder.

It's like, you told me you don't want to do high-speed clicking around a bunch of social media shit on the internet.

Are you sure you want to be doing what you're doing right now?

Right now, they don't seem to do that very well, but it's totally technologically possible.

It is.

Like when we were at Vox, like the big thing was, hey, look, there's no length limit anymore.

And we can update a story endlessly.

Shouldn't we do something with that?

And like what I see AI doing is creating slop.

Not the only thing it's doing.

But you could, I mean, my God, if you're a news organization sitting on a limit, on a on an archive that is like almost limitless.

It really seems like there's something you could do there.

Anyway, it's something I've been thinking about.

I think I share a lot of your optimism and

skepticism at the same time about AI, because

I think AI has this like tiny window problem in that if we can get it in that tiny window, I think it could be the greatest thing that's almost ever happened to humanity.

A few years ago, if you told anybody that something could dethrone Google,

they would have laughed at you.

If you even suggested the possibility that there would be something that people would go to for search more than Google, people would say you were crazy, right?

And then something like TikTok comes along.

Search, but it tells you how smart you are first.

Of course.

What a brilliant question, Ezra.

I'm glad that you said that.

You always have been a funny person.

That's not just a thought.

That's an insight, Trevor.

You really are thinking like a journalist now.

I love how it throws those things.

Have you ever tried to out-nice AI?

No.

Oh, that's one of my favorite things.

I'm always like, could you be meaner to me?

Really?

Yeah.

What is that about?

I I don't need to be glazed so much when I have a question.

You don't need to be mean, but could you just not?

Oh,

no, no, no.

I live in a world where everyone is so angry.

I try to do the opposite.

So I will tell it.

I'll be like, that is a great answer.

Oh, I do that.

You're really amazing.

I really love the way you think.

This is so much fun.

And then it'll be like, I am having fun.

I'm having a great time.

And I love that.

And then I'll just like see how far we can go down this like rabbit hole.

So we're all

you know why?

Because it's, I know it's ridiculous, but I believe that if it's a slight chance pascal's wager right i always loved that when i when i read about it pascal's wager was it the french philosopher i guess and he said

i don't believe that there is a god but on the off chance that there is

i would rather accept them so that i can get into heaven because if i'm wrong i'm going to hell if there is no god nothing happens to me But if there is a God, man, that's tough.

So I'm just going to say, I'm pro-God.

I worship.

And I always loved that idea.

And so what I do with ai is i go i don't think that it'll lead to the apocalypse i think it'll be somewhere in between and it might be terrible in many ways and great in other ways but if it does lead to the apocalypse i would love to know that i was part of teaching it like niceness uh-huh and maybe there's just like a slither of code that exists in its head where it goes like man just just be nice just be like super nice do you know what i mean yeah

Just like Trevor's Wager.

Yeah, just Trevor's Wager.

Just terminate it.

Also, you can take the wager in a slightly other direction, which is to say, almost certainly these things are not sentient.

Almost certainly.

Yeah, that they don't have any qualitative experience of what it is like to be an AI.

But as the systems get more and more powerful, like how sure are we that

we don't really understand what's going on inside of them?

And they're exhibiting a lot of strange behavior already where it begins deceiving people to protect itself from being retrained and things like that.

On the off chance that actually the AI's life is complete hell, being asked a million totally boring questions and being asked like skin tags or whatever, may as well be nice to it.

Say thank you.

I like that, actually.

You appreciate the work that's said to be.

AI is working in like an Amazon warehouse and you're like, you know what?

I'm going to be nice to you.

There are people who think about this who are worried that we are like just torturing a bazillion copies of the, you know, I think probably not.

I don't know.

I don't have to be a dick.

Yeah, I agree with that.

Look, I don't think you have to be a dick because I do think your actions towards AI are defining how AI then processes what being a human is.

And then it'll it'll feed that back to us.

That's how I think of it.

So I go, be part of the training data that makes it think that humans are good and kind.

The same way we are with children.

You know, I've always thought one of the most important reasons that we have children in society is because they force us to fake how we are with each other.

You know what I mean?

Like, I remember when I worked in an office, I would always love how people would have a child.

They'd come into the office and that would be the first time they introduced their child to people they never speak to.

You know, they'd be like, this is Dave.

Oh, and this is Susan.

Say hi to Susan.

It's like, you've never said hi to Susan.

You've worked here for seven years.

You've never said hi to Susan.

But now your kid is saying hi to Susan.

You know what I mean?

And you're like, what do we say to the man?

We say, thank you.

You've never said thank you.

You grab your sandwich at Subway and you keep it moving.

You with me?

And I feel like, in a way, AI has that for us.

It's like, if we are teaching this kid how we are, maybe, just maybe,

maybe it'll bring out the good in us.

We're going to continue this conversation right after this short break.

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I want to talk to you a little bit about the politicians that we're talking about.

So, you know, we talked about journalism and the media.

So you've got, you know, the fourth estate.

America is in an interesting place right now

because,

and please correct me if I'm wrong, because I mean, I'm only the person observing it from my point of view.

It feels like the most uncertain space it's been in in a very long time, right?

And what makes this moment more unique than others is that its uncertainty is affecting the world in a really uncertain way.

You know, I was back home in South Africa the other day and I was reading an article written from South Africa, which was which was nice.

And then I read one from the US, but how like the small country of Lesotho, which is a country landlocked inside South Africa, has basically had its textile industry decimated because Trump imposed tariffs on Lesotho because he didn't like that the country had the trade deficit with the U.S.

was, in his opinion, improved.

While aggressively mispronouncing their name in the liberation, yeah, completely.

Yeah, at some point, he was even like, no one even knows it.

No one even knows it.

They don't even know what it is, you know, Lesotho, Lesotho, Lesotho, nobody knows.

And I was like, it's crazy, man.

It's one of the, I don't often get angry when I read a news story, but that one made me more angry than most because

it was interesting how callous Trump was about this decision.

He cut this country off for a trade deficit, which means nothing, by the way.

It means nothing to the U.S.

in terms of actual numbers.

They're selling textiles, clothing to the U.S.

The idea that we want to be running a trade surplus

with Lesoto.

It's impossible.

It is literally, literally, literally impossible.

You have to try to even imagine what it would look like.

It's just, it's not how trade deficits and surpluses work.

We're not trying to run a surplus with every country on Earth.

We're just not.

It's stupid.

That's not.

I don't want to.

Why don't you keep going?

Because I want to say something more significant about this in a sec, but why don't I not?

No,

so here's what I found myself thinking when I was looking at this as I was going, man,

just like the internet,

just like social media, just like most of the things we consume,

we cannot undo the threads of the tapestry that now bind the world together.

You know, and the world was always connected, but I don't feel like it was always connected the way it is now, now, now.

There was a time when an American prison could, yes, affect the U.S.

economy and the global economy and it would affect certain countries, et cetera, et cetera.

But now it's like, it's this world where it really is the butterfly effect.

And when I look at that, I go, everyone has to pay attention to America.

So like no one in Lesotho can go,

I don't read American news.

I don't care.

They have to care because now American news is directly impacting them.

People in Denmark can't say, I don't care about American news because now Trump wants Greenland.

You know, people in South Africa can't say, I don't care about American news.

I focus on my news because Trump's going to...

Brazil were tariffing them because...

Bolsonaro tried to attempt a coup and they thought that was something that maybe they should do something about.

So mean tariffs so so so you imagine the whole world focusing on something that itself is completely unpredictable and unstable in this moment in time

and it feels like maybe i'm wrong it feels like the only counterbalance to it

is the democratic party right

Because for all intents and purposes, it looks like Trump has the Republican Party wrapped up, and this is his thing now.

It's a cult.

If he goes one way, they go with him.

And no matter what they say, they'll go with him the next day.

So we want the Epstein files.

He goes, actually, we don't want them.

Everyone's like, well, who cared about them in the first place?

Who cares about Epstein?

FC who?

Jeffrey?

Who did?

Jeffrey.

Who even uses that name anymore?

People move on, right?

They go with him.

So now you need the Democratic Party.

And then you go, wait,

they are polling lower.

I mean, the changes every, you know, few weeks or what, but they're polling lower than they were like years ago.

And you're just like, wait, wait, wait, what?

What happened here?

And then you read these stories about how the Democratic Party has no compass, no focus.

They don't know who to go with, who to go against, what their message should be, etc.

And then this is where you come in because

they've reached out to people like you to say, Ezra,

what should we be doing?

From the little, I'm not saying you run the Democratic Party, please.

The internet

internet will say this about you, not me.

I will let them do their job.

But like, I would love to know, as somebody who's had more of an insight look into what's happening, what do you think is going wrong?

You're talking about how things feel and the callousness with which Trump talks about, you know, Lesotho, but talks about

human beings.

I think all the time about

this,

the White House X account posting this video, which they called Immigrant ASMR.

Oh, yeah, I've seen this.

And it's these immigrants like dragging their manacles behind them.

And this actually relates to the Democratic Party.

One thing I've said to a lot of Democratic politicians is that I think they're operating on the wrong level.

They're not sensing the level we are working at now.

They're used to fighting over policy and Medicaid cuts and food stamp cuts and taxes.

And

like they're still in an election against Paul Ryan.

And

I think we are

in a much more civilizational set of questions.

Like, what kind of civilization are we?

What Donald Trump is, what he represents, the way he thinks about people, is very much the 19th and the early 20th centuries.

Rest of the world, even many people here, are just like pawns on the chessboard.

They don't have rights of dignity.

We don't have to care about them at all.

They're not in any way part of our moral circle of concern.

And

treating even people here

who are not in the circle we have drawn around us

with immense cruelty is not only

appropriate, it's necessary.

That's how you maintain the hierarchy and the excellence of your society, right?

That's the argument.

This is a reason he's very into McKinley, right?

Not picking some more modern president.

He doesn't have a bust of Reagan up.

The 20th century and the back half of the 20th century are not perfect, and we don't follow this all the time by any means.

But the basic set of liberal ideals that emerge,

that we are in this interconnected world,

that people's lives and their self-determination have value, that there are rights that particularly within our country that we should have and uphold even against people we don't like.

even for people, I'm sorry, that we don't like.

That was really hard one.

And I think that we really came to take it for granted.

Just like you were talking about the rules of the game earlier, just the sense

of

sort of

the dignity and value of other human beings and the way that politics should interact with them.

And

what I think Trump represents is a rejection of that that actually has an ideological superstructure to it.

Right.

If you read Ben Shapiro's new book, which I am because he's coming on my show, it's Lions and Lions versus

Scavengers, where the good people are lions and then they're these scavengers at the gates of all of us.

Like, the right now believes

that we became a soft, weak, feminized society because

we ceased to believe in the strong.

In fact, we restrained the strong.

And we adopted both the narrative and the victim's mentality of the weak.

And we came to hate our own inheritance and

attack ourselves for colonialism and racism and the sins of our past.

And in doing, broke our own civilization.

And the left, and this maybe goes to the Democratic Party, the left also took what it had achieved for granted.

like international institutions, basic set of ideals.

Like all it could see was where it hadn't gotten yet.

You know, Barack Obama arises as like such a remarkable political phenomenon.

And by the end, it's like, oh, just another politician, right?

You know, we didn't get, we didn't get everything we wanted.

Like it was useless.

And

one thing that I think is true about why the Democratic Party, as it currently exists, is not well suited to the moment is that

it didn't even know it was having this argument.

It didn't even really see that this was still an argument to be had.

And so it doesn't,

forget defending its policies, which it does with inconsistent success.

It actually has not done the intellectual work to defend or sell its own inheritance.

Like, what does it mean to be a liberal?

What is the value of that?

What is good about that?

What is it that Trump is breaking?

Why do we care about it?

And there's a real

absence in my traveling around the party and my looking into the rooms where things are supposed to be happening.

I don't see a lot of Democrats able to tell a story about this country that is operating at the level of the story that Trump, or if you listen to him in different contexts, J.D.

Vanser, are telling.

They are telling a very radically different story than the story of forget Barack Obama, Ronald Reagan.

And one of the problems with being part of a successful political movement for many decades is you actually

forget

how to defend what you are.

You become self-satisfied and a little smug and lazy.

And it's like, well, these guys can't win.

People like that don't win here.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Yeah.

And

it is the cruelty of Trump, the callousness that, as much as anything else, not just needs an answer, but a counterexample.

And

they're just not

coming through yet, right?

I'm not seeing the people who seem to be able to talk on the level of the moment.

And it worries me because you're going to, to defend this, you're going to have to figure out a way to

fight back on it in a way that rallies people to you, not just like in a way that makes you seem frightened.

Right.

So this is actually maybe then a question to the times that we're in now.

It's interesting that you say, you know, Trump is in like the rhetoric in a certain way.

There is also something important to acknowledge, and that is Trump, I've always felt, is very good at acknowledging what is actually happening.

His warp on reality is his to deal with, but he's also very good at acknowledging what is happening.

You get what I'm saying?

You know, like I remember on one of our episodes, we had Tracy Macmillan Cottaman, and he was, she was talking about how like when Trump was like black jobs, they're coming for black jobs.

They're taking your black jobs.

And a lot of people were quick to go like, how dare you call them black jobs?

And there were a lot of black people in America who went, oh, damn.

Yeah, thank you for acknowledging the fact that these are jobs that black people used to be able to rely on and now can't.

And the market hasn't catered to them.

And it's this interesting world where I go, on the one hand, Trump has espoused this hateful, spiteful rhetoric.

But on the other hand, he has, in my opinion, acknowledged more problems than many other politicians do.

Like I would watch many Democratic politicians who would, I think sometimes

the issue was the fact that they would tell people to focus on the sort of larger story as opposed to focus, you know what I mean?

They go like, remember, we are the richest nation in the world right now.

And I know that it feels this, but remember that your, your kids are in a better position than they've ever been.

And it's like, yeah, yeah, but you're not listening to what the people are saying now.

And that's sometimes the curse of

of the populist versus, you know, the pragmatic person maybe, is a populist goes, let me tell you what's wrong.

And let me tell you how we're going to spin this thing and fix it do you get what i'm saying it's all wrong and i'm going to fix all of your problems and i'll tell you who the villains are and that's the key thing about the population that is a key thing and so i wonder now what do you make of the politicians who are coming up let's do new york i mean we're here in new york mamdani it feels like he has tapped into you know,

whichever side of the force you see him on, he's tapped into a side of the force that is connected with people in a way that sort of establishment Democrats couldn't.

You know, everyone thought, oh, Andrew Cuomo's in this race.

It's Andrew Cuomo.

He was a governor.

He knows New York.

It's his.

And then Mamdani comes along, says things that some newspapers or some outlets will write.

It's like, oh, it's crazy.

He wants to make all grocery stores run by the government.

But people vote for that.

What do you think?

Five grocery stores.

No, I know, but that's what I mean.

It's funny, right?

But even people I spoke to went like, all, and I was like, where did you see all?

And they're like, I just saw this.

I heard this.

But that aside, do you think that's the answer?

Do you think that the Democratic Party now

has to do a better job?

Like Trump promises all.

What he delivers, he delivers, but he promised, you have to admit, he promises all.

He goes, no more illegal immigration, no more this, no more, fully this, fully the, fully.

Do you think maybe the antidote is the opposite?

Or do you think it's a, where do you think we find?

There are a couple, I think there are a couple levels to that, right?

So one thing, and again, communication mediums matter here.

So one thing you were just saying about Trump, the black jobs thing,

Democrats, liberals, they hate it when you say that there's something fundamentally honest about Trump.

Yeah, they do hate it.

Because he's constantly saying things that are untrue.

Yes.

But this is what I always say to people.

I go, if I may interject, I think maybe it's the wording we use.

It's not honest.

He's authentic.

Yeah.

But I think that's the thing.

The way I would describe it is that the thing you feel with him is that when you ask him a question or you see him ask a question, he's telling you the thing that actually popped into his head.

Yeah.

And one thing about the mediums we're in now, podcasting being a big one of these, but Twitter actually really being another,

is it can really sniff out when you're not doing that.

Like Barack Obama has a lot of Twitter followers.

Like I forget the number, but it's some huge number.

He's not good at it.

He's not trying to be either.

It doesn't sound like a person talking to you.

Like he's built for other mediums.

One thing that is true about Trump, it's true in a different way about Bernie.

It's true about Zoron.

When you ask him a question, it feels like they tell you the thing they thought.

I think a really important moment of the campaign that Mom Donnie ran or is still running,

you know, when he was asked about globalized Intifada.

And he didn't sort of,

you could watch him not do the easy political thing.

Right.

Whatever you thought of that.

You watched him processing that information.

And he was like, and he had his commitments and he's going to, and it created some news cycles, but he just sort of like,

he knows what he thinks.

And in part, he tapped into, I think this is very, very important.

Like,

you know, I just wrote a book, Abundance, all about unaffordability.

And he tapped into unaffordability as the central dilemma in New York.

And he had big policies that,

like, on the one hand, you could say in a line, free daycare, free buses,

government grocery stores, freeze-rent,

but also they were like mimetic containers for the whole of his worldview, right?

The government exists to make the things you need available to you.

The government exists to make the things that you need available to you.

Right.

Like every single one of those policies says the same thing.

Yeah.

Right.

We are here to make living in New York affordable for you.

Right.

Either because we're giving it to you or because we're not letting people raise their prices on you.

You can argue

that you're not going to be able to do it.

You can argue about whether or not those policies are good, but

they are potent.

And then, yeah, he's able to like Andrew Cuomo had all the money

and no message

and

no

authenticity to like the media of the moment when he was on.

Like, I don't know, you felt, you always felt with Cuomo, I always feel with Cuomo that that he's like running to save something.

He was like running for his own redemption.

And Momdani, again, say what you will about him.

I think it's crazy that Schumer and Jeffries have not.

Like, I just think it's insane.

But

they haven't endorsed it.

Before you move on, what do you think that says about the Democratic Party, though?

Nothing good.

It says that they're cowards.

That's the thing it says.

And the thing people can smell from it.

But what are they cowards about?

So we were talking a minute ago about like, why do so many politicians not say the thing on their mind?

Yeah.

You can feel it.

I mean, you've interviewed a lot of politicians.

You can feel the algorithm running.

Yeah.

And it's because they're afraid, right?

They think things, but they've been trained over long periods of time to be afraid.

And Schumer and

Jeffries are for different reasons.

This is my read of the situation, not I haven't talked to them about it.

They're afraid of parts of Mamdani.

Either they're afraid of him becoming the face of the Democratic Party and them not being able to defend things that he says.

But if he's going to become the Democratic candidate, I mean, he is a Democratic candidate for mayor of New York and he's probably going to win.

So they can't get out of that.

I've heard that Jeffries is worried about Mom Dani sort of setting off a wave of primary challenges of Democrats.

I'm not 100% sure I understand that issue.

Like Mom Dani was just running in a primary as an elected Democrat.

It wasn't a weird, he wasn't like knocking off an incumbent.

Also, frankly, the Democratic primary could probably use some of its incumbents knocked off.

I think there's probably a lot of coalitional problems for them around Mandani.

You know, Israel is just like an issue that splits the Democratic Party and very increasingly difficult for them a ways.

But I don't know the true answer.

But the thing you feel from it is just fear.

They're just afraid of him.

Like on some level, I would respect it more if they came out against him.

Oh, that's fascinating.

Like, I don't agree with it.

But it would show some gumption.

But, like, if you don't think he's a good candidate for mayor, say so.

Tell people to vote for Andrew Cuomo if that's what you believe.

But this, this,

like, what is this?

Yeah, it's, it's the, it's the passive nothingness that sort of, I think that's what turns people off, the voters.

Do you know what I mean?

Yeah, I agree.

I think it's like a meta, like everything a politician says is both operating at the level of the thing they said, you know, the policy, whatever.

Yeah.

But also, what does it say about them?

What's the meta conviction that just got expressed?

People, politicians constantly say things that are, good politicians in a weird way, sometimes say things that are unpopular.

And in saying a thing that's unpopular that you know they believe, it's a reminder to you that they believe things.

I like that.

One thing Trump does for his audience is he says things that part of the end, you know, going back in his career when he wasn't as dominant a force as he is now, he would say things that would trigger the kind of media and elite response that most politicians would have absolutely shrunk before.

Yeah.

And he didn't.

And it wasn't that you had to like the thing he said,

but it was a like an object level proof that he would say the thing he believed and he would stand strong behind it.

And so, the thing, one of Trump's greatest assets is the perception that he creates of his own strength and fortitude, even if you don't like him.

Well, it means it shows that he stands for something, shows whether he does or doesn't is a separate thing.

Yeah.

But it makes people go, oh, and I've seen people say this all over the world, funny enough.

I remember when I, first time I spoke to people in the Middle East about Trump, I was traveling through Qatar, the Arab Emirates, I was shocked at how differently they saw Trump there to how, you know, like people were here like Muslim ban and blah, blah, blah and the Middle East hates.

And when you went there and people were like, no, a lot of people were like, no, actually, we like what he stands for.

And look, we don't agree with him, but at least he's honest.

And he's, it's

people prefer somebody who they don't like for certain reasons, but they know where they stand.

There's a trust that comes with that in a weird way.

I trust.

who you will be.

But I'd love to know because you brought up so many things there.

There's like,

you know, you spoke about the government providing, and I want to talk a little bit about that, obviously, with your book, Abundance.

And you talk about the Israel thing.

You put out, in my opinion, like one of the best pieces.

And

I'm sad that it's not coming from leaders,

you know, Israel, Palestine.

You're dealing with this issue that I mean has been going on longer than a lifetime for many people.

And you put out a podcast that was, it was difficult,

it was nuanced, it was long, It was complicated.

And I was sitting there and I was thinking to myself, I was like, man,

I would love to know like what you went through and what you thought of to make that episode of the podcast.

Which episode of the podcast?

Talking about, it starts off where you're talking about like October 7th, and you have the expert who's talking about genocide and its definition.

Yeah, the genocide.

And I was thinking to myself, I was like, man.

I thought about you as a person, you know, and I was like, okay, Ezra Klein, you'll correct me if I'm wrong anyway, grew up in an orthodox jewish family no not orthodox not orthodox yeah reform okay reform sorry so reform jewish family you you you grew up in this world where you know like many jewish people you you you have this this world where you're straddling you know it's like you're white until you're not and there's this thing and you know all my jewish friends will tell me that as well they're like oh yeah people will say we're white until i remember this year uh it's in junior high that uh

it got um

it became something to be like you got kiked out of something damn like that just like happened for for a year, you know?

That just became a saying?

Of just saying, you know, is like, I just, I just, I remember it really clearly.

That is wild.

But that's, that's, that's what like literally every single Jewish friend in my life has told me that they go, because I, I would grab, I'll be like, you're white.

And they'd be like, listen, I don't think I'm white.

I, I, I do think I'm white, but no, no, no, but I'm saying you feel sometimes that there's a,

you know, Jews always like to say anti-Semitism is, anti-Semitism is a light sleeper.

But, um, but anyway, go.

And then, and then, you know, I look at the opinion pieces you've written, the work you've done grappling around, you know, what's happening now with Israel's invasion of and occupation of Gaza, et cetera.

And then I watched this podcast and I went,

on the one hand, I was extremely grateful because I went, damn, you've really tackled and grappled with something extremely difficult and you brought people on and there's this nuance and

it's not.

easy because

everybody comes to it with a preconceived notion of where they wish to stand or how they feel their opinion makes the issue seem or not seem.

Do you know what I mean?

And there's a part in the video, I think it's right in the beginning, actually.

You play a clip of Joe Biden talking about October 7th and him saying this is a certain amount of 9-11s, you know, because of the population of Israel.

And then you say the death toll in Gaza would be, I think, 2,500 9-11s.

And I went, damn, man.

I'm watching all of this and I'm going,

first of all,

or how are we at the place where this is sort of the forum where it's being handled?

And like the leaders aren't the ones, do you know what I mean?

Presidents aren't providing context for this.

It doesn't feel like the leaders of the world are shaped.

It's happening on podcasts.

It's happening on TikTok.

It's happening on, and I would just love you to walk me through like that experience for you.

It's like, as you're grappling with something that big, you're occupying the space of a human, you're occupying the space of an opinion journalist, but you're also occupying the space of an informer.

Like, what's going through your mind when you're creating that episode?

Yeah, there is a tension between

my work and my personhood in this.

And I try to let one inform the other.

Let me try to not be too abstract about it.

Although I do find this, like, you know, how

open I want to go about it always tricky.

I am like horrified.

I was in, we were talking about Tokyo.

I was in Tokyo on October 7th.

I was taking a week off of my book leave

and I just arrived.

And I just knew by the end of that day that my book leave was over.

Like this was the worst

attack on Jewish people, right?

It was genuine savagery and butchery.

And

you could also sense what was going to come after it was going to reshape everything.

And

if you're Jewish

or you know Israel well, one thing it's worth knowing about Jewish people is

when

someone says,

we're going to kill all of you, Jewish people believe them.

Like, that's the thing ingrained.

Israel is a very strange place.

It's a place that has a very profound sense of its vulnerability and its weakness

and has also become incredibly strong.

And it has never resolved that tension.

And

Hamas understood that about Israel.

It executed, it didn't think it was going to destroy Israel in this attack, right?

people on mopeds and paragliders and but it wanted to create a massive reaction that either would bring in other regional players

or

trigger such an unfathomably violent response from Israel that the world would begin to see Israel the way Palestinians see Israel.

And in that, they succeeded.

And

people can argue about at what point this was true,

at what point we moved from

the kind of response that any country would have

done

after an attack like that.

Although I put out the first piece I did back was a piece saying, because they had not invaded Gaza yet, like, don't do this.

Do counter-terrorism operations.

Try to destroy the leadership of Hamas, but they obviously want you to re-invade and occupy and create a horrendous death toll.

Like, do not give Hamas what it wants.

Israel did what it did.

And it,

I mean, at some point, and again, people can debate when exactly this was, like, this moved into something indefensible.

The level of truly unfathomable devastation of Gaza, the death toll.

the induced starvation, and

constantly tweaking the dial where it's just just above the line until a couple weeks ago, where the international community would be like, where the headlines would become something Israel couldn't bear.

But they've kept the Gazans in a state of hunger.

They've used food as a weapon of war.

At the same time, the acceleration of settlement building in the West Bank, acceleration of violence in the West Bank.

Like the first and current reality is like Israel's not under real threat any longer.

This is just punishment of people, right?

Punishment of the Palestinians.

And,

you know,

Judaism has been defined in many ways in its historical

trajectory.

Like when I grew up in my, you know, Reform synagogue, it's like both things were there.

The lessons of having been driven from place to place made a refugee over and over and over again.

I think of Spencer Ackerman, who's a national security journalist, but an old friend who's on my show early in all this.

And I always think of him saying, I cannot think of a less Jewish thing than to make another human human being into a refugee.

Like that line has stayed with me.

You know, it's a religion of strangers, right?

You shall remember what it was like to be a stranger in the land of Egypt.

And

so on the one hand, you have that sort of less in the diaspora.

Everywhere Jews go that they have been able to thrive, it has to be a place of

equal rights for minorities.

And then you have the, you know, creation of Israel, which also at the same time is like, it's understood as the shelter.

It's understood as

the last place Jews can be.

And because of that, it creates

this other strain of Judaism, which is a strain of strength, right?

We need dominance.

We need full control.

We need, and understandably need, security.

And,

you know, I remember being in my own synagogue growing up, and I was in like, you know, as a teenager after your partner,

I don't think confirmation class is usually a thing for Jewish people, but it was somehow in my synagogue.

I remember my rabbi

saying that

Israel, the Israeli Jews, would be in the right to expel all Palestinians from the land, like in this shouting match from him and then like stalking out of the synagogue and like not going back.

Like that was there then.

You know, it's you know, early 90s or something, late 90s probably.

But it has like really, really

become now something profoundly callous.

You know, it's heartbreaking all around.

We're going to continue this conversation right after this short break.

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I was

reading through

the comments to your opinion piece

just after October 7th.

And then I was looking through the comments on

the YouTube video and the clip that you put out.

What I found interesting was

how

most people, especially on the YouTube video, I think were very appreciative.

They were like, wow, this is insightful.

This is nuanced.

Thank you so much.

Thank you.

I learned so much.

I learned.

That was the main thing people said.

I learned so much.

What was interesting, though, was some of the people who were negative came for you personally.

And I found myself wondering if, like, that is something that's going to affect how people

tell news, report news, you know, investigate news, is that now things have become personal.

Because again, I could be wrong on this, but I don't remember having a personal vendetta or idea against any journalist.

It was the newspaper that, you know, the newspaper was sort of the shield and the front that a journalist used.

So you went, can't believe the New York Times said this, but they didn't know the name of the person.

The hard thing about covering some of this stuff is it's hard.

It's hard to put it down.

It's hard to look at all straight in the face.

There's a lot I would just prefer not to know.

It's not the YouTube comments or the, you know, the Instagram reels about how I'm bad.

Or, you know, you can find plenty of stuff about how I'm bad.

And there are ways in which I'm bad.

But when I'm...

When I'm doing something like the episode with Phleep Sands

about the question of genocide,

The hard thing for me on that one isn't, will people be mad at me?

People are going to be mad at me.

The hard thing is, how do you create something that enough people who I want to reach can hear it?

I'm not a local advertising monopoly.

I don't need to reach everybody who buys shoes.

But

I am trying to create a space

that allows more than one kind of person into it.

And

I have a big audience in Israel also,

on this particular issue at least.

I want to create spaces both partially that can persuade,

but also

in which people do their own thinking.

I think a thing about podcasting and long conversations is a medium compared to, say, an opinion piece, like an essay.

When I write an essay, when I write a piece,

I am trying to persuade you of my ideas.

When I do interviews,

which are most of what I put out, I'm trying to create a space in which you can think.

And there are provocations in that space.

There are insights, there's context, there's history.

There's probably ideas I have, there are ideas a person has, right?

There's persuasive elements to it.

But it's fundamentally meant to be generative.

The most common like angry feedback I get is actually just that people want me to really clearly do the final piece of thinking in one direction or another for them.

You know, throw the final punch in an argument

or,

you know, stop exploring this.

Just like say what, you know, yeah.

And there's value to that.

Certainly can be.

And there are times when I do.

But also I think that one thing

that's worth doing in the work is creating spaces where people can think.

And podcasts are just, I think, particularly good for that.

So I guess I am pulled towards certain topics myself and I try to follow that pull.

Like that's my framework for how to do my own news.

And that's an advantage I have.

I don't have to, like, the organizing principle of the Ezra Klein show is that Ezra Klein did the shows.

And so I try to make that pretty honest to what I'm thinking about.

But I

don't have to.

Like being a little bit uncertain is also like part of the project.

Like it's also how I apprehend the world.

I think it's in short supply in the whole world.

Yeah.

So anyway, I'm not sure that answered the question, but no,

I don't go into it thinking like, what will people think of me?

Right.

I go into thinking like,

what am I thinking?

What would help me think more?

I like that.

No, I just thought of it because I, you know, obviously in doing the research before chatting to you today, just going through everything.

Even your book Abundance, you know,

I found myself intrigued by

how a lot of the criticisms of your book seemed to spend

an inordinate amount of time going after you, you, but not the idea, idea.

You with me?

Yeah.

So I love arguing ideas.

All my friends will tell you that's all I want to do.

I just go like, let's say something and let's argue.

But what I'm trying to do in all of it is to, you know, to borrow your language, to be generative.

I want to come out of the argument, thinking a little bit differently and sharpening or honing an idea that I held and even having the space to implant something that somebody else has given me.

I want to walk away going, oh man, that's new.

That's beautiful.

I didn't think of that.

Or now I think differently.

Those things I think, you know,

that makes me feel like my brain is fertile.

Something is happening to it.

But I always think in a good relationship, you're not making it about the person.

You know what I mean?

I always go like, you're not the idiot.

That's stupid.

And I mean it genuinely.

I go like, oh, that's a dumb idea.

But you're not dumb.

You're my friend.

I would hope you're not dumb.

I don't think you're dumb.

But when I was looking at the book, I was going like, man, people are like coming at you a lot for it.

And then when I was trying to weave it all together and how I see the world, I was going, is that sort of what's become the problem?

And

is it more prevalent on the democratic side of politics or is it not on liberal?

Like, I would love to argue with you.

on just the idea.

Does that make sense?

Yeah, I mean, and to be fair, I will say that a lot of people have

been getting away with the idea.

Although, in a weird way, I think.

In a weird way, like how it elaborates.

Oh,

I feel like there's been a strain of

a lot of the critique of abundance has, I think, had a strange dimension to it, where it's like, oh, I agree with most of these policies.

I don't like its theory of power is what it usually gets said.

And it took me some time to understand even what was going on here.

Right.

Well, for those who don't know, just give me a short short story.

No, what abundance is pitching.

Yeah.

So abundance is basically saying, why or exploring,

why when Democrats govern,

don't we get better outcomes?

Why in the places where you can't blame the problem on Republicans, California or New York or Massachusetts, you know, or at times like the Biden administration or the Obama administration?

How are these places or these times, like, how are you getting these terrible housing scarcities?

Why aren't we building enough clean energy?

How come this money that is earmarked to create a nationwide network of EV chargers, of electric vehicle chargers, like, have you used that network lately?

Where did it go?

Where's the high-speed speed rail, high speed rail?

And, you know, eventually through exploring this and with my co-author on it, Derek Thompson,

one thing I slowly came to believe is like, oh, we're in many ways failing at governing.

And in particular, we're failing to create enough of the things people need in the real world that we have created scarcities.

And we've done this often through well-meaning rules and regulations.

We do it through

hampering government and making it hard for government to act and trapping government itself in procedure.

We often just don't pay attention to the physical world.

We think a lot about how to move money around, but we don't think about what needs to get built.

Can we build transmission lines to move all this clean energy we're supposedly going to create?

And we're also having trouble with that part from one place to another.

And so, it's really, I mean, to me, it's a very, you know, liberal or more than that

project.

Where if you want to have a Green New Deal government, you can't do it with these rules, this government.

If you want to create Medicare for all, you're going to have to radically expand the supply of healthcare available to people, doctors, nurses, hospitals.

When the government says it's going to build you high-speed rail, you should fucking be able to ride that high-speed rail within 20 years.

The Big Dig, the Second Avenue subway.

And that

if

we liberals want to say to people, like, don't fall for the bullshit of these strong men.

Trust us.

Well, then we need to be pretty honest about how we failed and why, why our government didn't deliver for you.

So much so that places like California, New York, and, you know, Massachusetts, et cetera, Illinois.

are losing working-class families.

They're leaving because you become unaffordable.

And we need to fix that.

And so then, so that's sort of the book and it's an exploration of that.

And

a vision.

There's also a lot about technology and

trying to sort of point liberalism towards a, not just a philosophy, but

the operational capacity to create abundance.

Zoran Mamdani, who's been interested in the book and has talked about abundance on the campaign trail, like knows you need to think about it.

Because

if you want to freeze the rent, you're also going to need to build a ton of new housing.

If you want to make buses free, then you need to be able to put enough buses into play to deal with the ridership increase.

If you want to build a lot of public housing, which he does, you can't do it under the current rules.

Like New York has not built public housing at that speed in generations.

And at the cost it often, at how much it often costs to build public housing in these jurisdictions, you have places like DC where it can often cost like more than a million dollars to build a single unit of affordable housing.

Like you can't afford to build affordable housing if under the government's rules, it costs a million dollars to build it.

And building the market rate housing next door costs $350,000 a unit.

Like that's a world in which the government cannot deliver.

So you need to make a government capable of delivering.

Abundance creates understandable friction on the left side of the party

because

it's often about how we fail

and about how our friends and our commitments

have become parts of that failure.

And there are a lot of people who want to say the Democratic Party should just be about

the problem of billionaires and corporate power.

And like everything we say should be about underlining that core message.

This is an oligarchy.

The problems are billionaires and corporate power.

And there are ways in which this is an oligarchy.

And there are times when the problem is corporate power and billionaires.

That's not why Texas builds a lot of housing, California doesn't.

It's not why we can't build transmission lines.

And so

which I think has a more liberal view of power, which is that power can be ill-used wherever it collects.

Bureaucracies can become ossified and hide-bound.

Unions can be great or they can be a problem.

Businesses can be great or they can be a problem.

Liberalism is an endless balancing of different forces in society.

And

the system is, yeah.

Today we're an alliance, tomorrow we're not.

And like the way to tell is to know what you're trying to achieve and who is and is not on your side in that.

I think that people took that and take me as a sort of like, if what you want is for the Democratic Party to be extremely populist,

I think we sort of became like the liberal idea, you felt you had to knock off the board.

And on social media, there's like a lot of dynamics for

conflict.

It's this funny experience I've had releasing abundance, which has done

so much better than I would have thought.

Like it's been for 24 or 25 weeks in.

It hasn't fallen off the bestseller list.

Barack Obama last week made it one of his five or six books of the summer and said it's like a great blueprint for reform in government.

And he would know he was president.

You know, these four like very kind of leftist mayors and local leaders, you know, are like, you know, we are using this in our cities where we govern in the nation.

I find that like in the way it's being greeted by people who are in government and work on government, like it's a really, really interesting, constructive conversation.

And then you turn on social media and people want to fight.

So let me ask you a question.

But I think that's all part of it.

So let me ask you a question to that point.

Let's break it down into a few chunks.

The first part of it, and I often find this is a puzzle that I grapple with in comedy and commentary, whatever it is in life, is I go, if Barack Obama is like, oh yeah, this is great and I love it.

And, you know, if,

you know,

billionaires in silicon valley elon musk was like yeah this is great i like this idea and you know i think it was reed hoffman he is not elon musk has not said he likes this idea oh no he reposted he reposted a john stewart yeah you're right on john stewart but like reed hoffman's like yeah i like this idea i i i i sometimes wonder if that is sort of what some people are butting up against is they're going yeah yeah yeah They're going, we don't think of Barack Obama as like the big reform guy.

We think of him as an incrementalist.

We think of him as somebody who is not fully progressive.

And, you know, to your point, he's not fully left.

I think that's what some people are saying for that first part.

I think what's also interesting is like when I read through the book is I go,

I agree with you.

It is easy for people to focus on the one thing they don't agree with.

You know, so they'll go like, look, look,

I agree on most of it, but this one thing makes it irrelevant.

And I think a lot of people have said that, some in a more nuanced way than others.

But it feels like there's an insidious hidden menace in these stories.

Because you see, when you were even talking about it, you said we.

You said, why have we made it harder for the railways?

And the we've made it that the we.

And I think that's actually where the issue comes up is people go, whoa, wait, which we?

You know?

So the Biden example you gave on the Jon Stewart thing, and you did write about this a little bit, was

you cannot talk about broadband not being rolled out in America the way it should be without talking about the telecom companies affecting how that bill actually gets passed, you know, in its final iteration.

I don't think America has a single example of laws and

policy being shaped without the people who are making money trying to shape their policy.

We see this in South Africa, by the way.

Everything you're saying, many South Africans complain and they go, the government can't fix the roads.

The government is not doing a good job with providing basic services.

The government, and then people inevitably go, you know what?

We need to like break this thing up and

just get it moving.

But when you start scratching, you go, whoa, wait, wait, wait.

Why is it that hard to do that?

Oh, there's a company that has a monopoly on fixing roads and they're trying to make it so that they keep on having the thing.

Oh, there's a company that wants to charge high rates for data and for internet access.

And they're a cellular, this is a company that makes a lot of money.

It's a telecoms company and they affect the politicians and how they make the decisions.

And I think that's some of what the criticism is about is like people going, Ezra, we agree with you on this, but we wonder why you've left out this boogeyman that is way more powerful than a lot of people will acknowledge in terms of how the we actually get to make the rules.

So

I would say two things about this.

So one is that I don't think we left it out.

I think that in a lot of the stories we told,

it wasn't the core boogeyman in the story.

Not because we were not open to finding it there.

It just wasn't.

Let me say this a different way, maybe.

Political coalitions have enemies they are comfortable with

and enemies or problems they are not comfortable with.

And Democrat liberals, leftists, depends how you want to think about this, are very comfortable when the enemy is corporate power.

So if I tell you there's a problem in health insurance, And the problem is the private health insurers.

Like, yeah, fuck them.

There's a problem in the pharmaceutical industry, drug prices are too high, right?

And it's because the pharmaceutical companies are greedy and pharmacy benefits.

How dare they?

Yeah, and that's often true.

Like, I'm a believer that we should negotiate down Medicare drug prices, etc.

Go back to what I told you motivated the book.

I look around and I see a reality that blue states became unaffordable in a way red states didn't.

Is it plausible that the issue is that

blue states are

hotbeds of oligarchic control and red states have managed to solve the problem of corporate power, that like Florida and Texas do not allow businesses access or influence to their legislatures, but California, New York, and New Jersey do.

And it's not the problem, right?

It doesn't, that doesn't pass a smell test at all.

So a lot of the book is about housing.

That's an important thing to pay attention to because it's the single biggest part of most families' budgets.

And there are places where private equity has begun buying up housing, but during the period of time when these problems took root, that was not the issue.

We,

in which case I mean liberals living in blue states, passed a lot of rules that made it really, really hard to build new housing.

Not because the corporations made us do that.

A lot of corporate developers would like to build higher housing towers than they're able to.

And

we allowed a terrible problem to take hold

and need to fix it.

How do you hone in on

let me just

keep on this for a minute?

Because I really think people get caught between two versions of something.

Abundance is not about every problem, it's about the problems that we have been particularly bad at fixing.

And so

I don't think there is an

inability

to identify places where you have, say,

intense corporate concentration creating monopoly problems.

That was, in fact, part of the Biden administration.

They made Lena Kahn

commissioner.

And they went after antitrust monopolies in a much more aggressive way.

Like the book is not critiquing that.

The book is not against doing that.

But they were trying to build a huge amount of new clean energy.

And the truth of that project, which again was another big motivating force in the book, is that it's going to have corporate power on both sides of it.

You'll have a lot of fossil fuel power that wants to maintain the

wealth of their investments, their status quo.

You have a lot of new green energy companies emerging that want to make solar panels and wind turbines.

And, you know, and if you cover any of those fights, and I've covered a bunch of them, you'll find companies on both sides.

What you will also find is a legal structure that makes it hard to build new things.

And that legal structure can be used to block certain kinds of fossil fuel

projects,

but it can also be and is being used against green energy.

And figuring out how to create a speedway for green energy actually requires us to

not just have an anti-corporate viewpoint, who's going to build all this shit if it's not corporations.

Like if we're going to do the green transition, like we are going to have to have people building things and making money laying it down.

I think decarbonization is important.

I think energy, clean energy abundance is important.

So what I want to do is shape a market that gets corporations to use their power for good.

I am happy to construct a law that basically makes fossil fuel investments, particularly coal, like worthless, right?

That's a very, very big problem for those corporations.

But this is what I mean, that it's about balancing and it's about being goal-oriented.

Where corporations are a problem, great.

Like, that's what we're here to do.

We're here to solve problems.

But if you keep saying you're going to solve problems and you keep failing, then saying the same thing louder, which is what the Democratic Party has often done, is not going to be enough.

And being able to see problems that are inconvenient for your coalition to see.

Like that becomes really, really important.

And I think is part of how Democrats have to win trust back with people.

Like, yes, attack corporate power.

Corporate power is a problem.

But you know what?

Every fucking person that lives in this country has a story about how the government has failed them.

And having credibility with them is partially about saying, yeah, we know.

And like, we know we were part of that.

And the reason you should trust us next time when you're not happy about how it went last time is because we learned to acknowledge the problem.

Yeah, if you can't acknowledge that you made the mistake, how can we trust that you can fix it, essentially, because you were part of that?

Just to take a step back, I was thinking of like, you know, sort of of going to the thread through all of our stories, like what we choose to focus on and how we focus on it in journalism, in politics, you know, with abundance, even looking at a problem.

I'm always intrigued by like which problem we choose to fix first and how we fix it.

The housing thing you said is particularly interesting to me because I'm not an economist,

and but I try my best to understand how economics works and why it affects the way we live.

I try my best.

And one of the things that intrigued me is depending on when you look at the timelines, the red state success story isn't necessarily as successful as you think it is because it's just a newer story, right?

So Texas is a good example.

If you look at the blue states, you know, or the major cities, let's call them major cities rather, because I think that's, to be honest with you, I think that's, and this is my opinion, I think this is what has hurt a lot of the rhetoric in America, is that people call it blue states.

red states.

The blue states have done this.

The red states have done this.

Then somebody's first inclination is to say, no, screw blue, screw red.

I don't want red solution.

I don't want blue solution.

When I look at it from an economics point of view, I go major cities

and secondary cities or rural areas.

That's how I think of it.

Forget the politics altogether.

Generally speaking, major cities will attract more people.

They will generally provide more jobs.

That's why they're major or that's why they become major.

Prices then go up.

Affordability then goes down.

And then you start a sprawl that spreads out then there's an event that moves people from one place to the next it can be a gold rush or it can be a gold flea in our case i think covid moved quite a lot of people in in a in a far more rapid way than we thought but the reason i bring up time scales is because i go washington dc

i think per capita you will correct me if i'm wrong internet put liar um washington dc i think per capita has built more houses than Texas has.

And that's blue run, blew everything.

And this is like on a per capita basis.

And if you look at the cost of living in Texas now, the cost of actually owning a house, it's no longer the like housing utopia that it was like a few years ago, because now everyone's rushed in.

And it feels like basic economics.

And so I wonder, when we're looking at these problems and when you're thinking about them, do you think

we sometimes get bogged down on where to start?

Or do you think like you because sometimes I like I think everyone is guilty of this, maybe even myself included, is we'll go, yeah, but that's not the the problem.

Oh, but that's not the problem.

Yeah, but that's not the problem, but that's not the real problem.

And it's like, okay, well, we'll start with the problem.

Do you get what I'm saying?

Yeah, I just don't think the story you're telling is right.

You don't think the storytelling is right?

What element of it?

The core element of it.

See, look at these cities, right?

Yeah.

And you can track housing creation in different cities.

Austin had a big influx of people in the past decade or two.

What happened?

Look at housing creation.

It spikes.

Right, right, right.

They build a ton of new housing.

Yes.

And rents go down.

And then?

That's still, they're going down.

The rents have gone down in Austin in the past couple of years.

But then, and maybe I'm missing this, but then like when you speak to the people, when I was in Austin, I didn't speak to everyone, but every night when I'd do a show, I would speak to thousands of people and I'd go out into the street and I'd try and I'd listen to the news.

The people in Austin go, we hate the people from California who've come here because now we can't afford houses.

We can't.

go up for a while, but then they began building.

Okay, got it, got it, got it, okay, drop it.

You can look at housing starts in LA, NSF.

It's not like I lived in San Francisco.

I lived in Los Angeles.

I can tell you that there is no technical inability to build an apartment complex in San Francisco.

Do you think it's the NIMBY's?

It's the NIMBY's.

It's the rules.

It's a lot of different things.

But what I'm asking, the deeper question I'm asking you in that question is, do you think that there are many people in the Democratic Party, let's call it, or, you know, who will say the things, going back to what I was saying, climate change, but they don't actually want it.

So they'll say, we want more housing and we want to fix it, but then they don't want it in their back.

They don't want affordable housing anymore.

Well, there's that, and there's the coalition building is hard.

But I want to stay on the thing you said because I think, because I do want to push this back.

You can go look at, for instance, other countries, like a place like Shenzhen in China, or Tokyo, which has an amazing housing market because it builds incredibly vertically.

And so despite being

one of the densest cities in the world, it's an affordable city.

And it's because they build housing.

How to build housing is a solved problem.

Who's the they?

Just so we can.

Tokyo?

No, no, yeah, no, I mean, it's honestly, who's the they?

They have rules

in which developers can build homes and the developers work off of the rules to build the homes.

I mean, unless you're doing public or social housing,

most housing is, you know, is privately created.

San Jose, right, the Silicon Valley, you drive around Silicon Valley, it has become one of the richest areas in the entire world.

It's like strip malls and suburbs

because we do not allow, we, California, Silicon Valley, we built rules to make it impossible that as all this wealth flooded there, you couldn't build up.

And so the people who do the work for those people, right, who cut their hair and run their restaurants, they commute hours every day.

And their kids don't get to grow up there and take advantage of that great community that they help build.

I just, I really want to push this because I think it is a kind of fatalism.

The idea that we cannot build apartment buildings when more people move to a place

is not true.

Like we can choose to build it or not build it, but that's actually, in a way, the one place I'm optimistic maybe

is that

we choose scarcity.

We could choose abundance too.

We can build.

I mean, you look at other countries.

You look at this country in the 50s.

What we fucking forgot?

We, I think it's in the 50s, in 10 years, if I'm remembering the statistic right, we increased the nation's housing stock by about a quarter.

10 years.

Like California built more houses per capita then than it does now.

We had a massive loss of technology since then?

Did somebody like burn all the plans for how you build a building?

We decided.

And we decided for reasons.

It's good for the homeowners.

Your home is worth more in many cases when you have homeowners.

Because nobody can build around it.

I mean, we talk about this all in the book.

But it's really, really, really important in my view, like not to get into fatalism.

And it's not, by the way, it's easy to build.

Like if you have a huge influx of people, prices will go up.

Yeah.

Right.

Austin did see prices go up.

What the market is supposed to do, what the government is supposed to do in that case is respond, right?

That's a signal.

We need more homes.

That signal should be met by private housing and should be met also by government capable of building enough affordable public housing.

And in places where often Democrats govern, but not only, neither one is happening.

And like the idea that we have settled into this, I'm just like, well, that's it.

Sorry, everybody.

Like go leave.

Drive the working class out of your cities and then have a fucking lawn sign that says, kindness is everything.

No human being is illegal.

Like, that's just hypocrisy, right?

And like, yeah, people get mad at you.

Also, by the way, it has electoral power implications.

Like, the census happens and, you know, you're going to see in the next one, Texas and Florida and places like that get a bunch more seats.

And California

because people have had to move there.

So I just,

this isn't like, I'm just doing some trick of the time scales.

There is no concept, there is no technical inability to build these things.

Other countries build high-speed rail.

Right.

Like you can ride it.

You've been able to ride it for decades in Japan, in China, in Europe.

We made rules where you couldn't build it.

It's not that Americans are not capable of building high-speed rail or paying somebody who's done it in Europe to do it here.

We just have not completed any of it.

We should be, we who believe in government, should be much more ripshit about this than we are, not not explaining it away.

Like we should be mad.

Like if you, like as the like the left of center,

if you can't make the places you govern affordable for the people you have promised to govern on behalf of the working class, if you cannot make the government deliver the things you have told them it's going to give them, like good roads.

high-speed rail, good trains, good parks, all of it.

Like, Isn't that a problem?

Like, shouldn't you be furious?

Not just like let the right tell people how government is bad, but shouldn't you be like

unbelievably committed to making government that people feel about it the way they feel about it in places where the government delivers, right?

Like what better thing to run on and beat people like Donald Trump on than like elect us and we will govern this country the way we govern California or New York instead of allowing them to say

they're looking at California look and they're going to govern this country the way they govern California or New York

like I just I think that the

explaining away government failure is one of the most toxic traits of the left like the left should demand an excellent government and it should be relentless and ruthless about making that happen and it's not you don't think it is genuine it isn't it depends it depends on which for me I think it depends on which part of the left you're looking at because I think I think you're right in what you're saying about what people should demand of their government, and everyone who says that they are left or progressive should demand these things of a government.

But maybe that's sort of what we're touching on in all of these worlds.

We look at your world with journalism.

There's one part of the media that is acknowledging its existence in the story that it's telling.

There's another part that isn't.

It's going like, no, we're going to keep printing newspapers and we're never going to go online and we're never going to have an AI trend in our models and we're never, we're never, we're never, we never, we're never.

The way it is is good enough.

And then you look at the world of politics and politicians going, I'm actually not going to think about my answer.

I'm not going to tell you my truth.

I'm not going to make you uncomfortable.

I'm not going to stand because the way it is is good enough.

And then I think when we move into the economics of it all in the world, it sort of sounds like the same theme as you're going.

It's like there's people who go, the way it is is good enough.

Do you get what I'm saying?

But I actually think that's why the Mamdanis and his cohorts in different parts of America, I think that's why I think they are doing well is because whether people agree with them or not,

people are saying they are

coming forward with that promise.

They are pushing the idea that the government must do more.

But here's the thing:

and this is going to be the challenge for Mamdani.

It's a challenge for everybody.

It's

the cycle of American politics

is

exciting leaders rise up,

particularly newcomers,

promising amazing things.

And then they deliver 10 or 15% of it and create a cycle of disappointment.

That's in a way like what led to a lot of people moving from Barack Obama is like the greatest thing ever to incrementalist.

I mean, and he actually did a lot.

Like the Affordable Care Act did, you know, it does deliver insurance to 20-some million people.

You know, whether it's Mom Donnie or it's Mikey Sherrill,

who will likely be the next governor of New Jersey or, you know, Abigail Spanberger in Virginia, or it's

like anybody running Baltimore, any Westmore in Baltimore, the campaign is the easy part.

It's delivering that's the hard part.

And so, yes, like it's really exciting.

Mom Danny's campaign.

Yeah.

All these people are exciting.

Like people, good politicians should be exciting in campaign mode.

Yeah.

What I want in abundance is to make it possible for them to deliver.

Different ones will want to deliver different things, but I don't want this endless cycle of disappointment.

The hard part is not making the promise.

The hard part is building the high-speed rail, is delivering the housing, is making the buses free, is creating free games.

Yeah, I'm with you.

So I don't think we can say, like, hey, look, people are getting excited.

Like, they always get excited.

It's exciting to have a new person say, all these other fucking people have failed.

Not me.

I'm different than them.

I'm going to give you all the things you want.

But then they typically don't.

And some of that is that, you know, the world is hard and it's complicated and there are trade-offs.

And then sometimes you look around and you're like, yeah, if we did things differently, maybe we could give you 50%, not 10%,

60%.

But that's going to require us to take a different approach.

That's sort of the abundance argument.

And by the way, it's why, you know, like actual politicians on the left who are thinking about how to deliver, like Mom Dani are talking about abundance on the campaign trail, why Obama, who had a bunch of things he wanted to deliver and wasn't able to, is talking about abundance.

People who Gavin Newsom, who like a lot of abundance is a critique of California, I went on his podcast.

He's like, I love abundance.

I've given it to the heads of the legislature.

Like people who have to grapple with this stuff,

they're the, like, they are really in the teeth of it.

And it's hard to change, right if you're easy they would all have done it but that's also why I think it's important to create a political force that wants to see a change and that will like back them up if they actually try like what I want to see from Amdani is that he creates a New York City government capable of doing the things he promises right that's the hope like he wants to build I think his promise is 200,000 public housing units I want to see him succeed at that

that's going to require changing a lot about how government works.

And if you're going to have more private building on top of that, changing even more about how government works.

That's the question, like delivery, not campaign promising.

And you see, in that inspiring and optimistic, despite what you say about yourself, conclusion, I actually rest my case.

Because if you remember at the beginning of this conversation, I said, you are in the room where it happens.

You said you are not.

And you said there is no room.

And then a few moments ago, you said to me that you wrote a book and Obama has told people to read the book.

Mamdani, who is the front runner in the democratic race here in New York, he has pushed the book.

Multiple other leftist mayors and leaders around the country are pushing the book.

And I go, if that's not being in the room where it happens,

I don't know what is.

Abundance, the book where it happens.

I don't know, my friend.

Thanks for taking the time.

Thank you.

I really enjoyed it.

Thank you for your thoughtfulness.

Thank you for your candor.

Thank you for trying more than anything.

You know what I mean?

I think that's sort of like the underlying thread that I feel.

And this is something I think we will always grapple with in politics, in debate, and conversation, is

we have become a society that punishes people

more for trying and failing than rewarding them for trying in the first place.

And I think like that's the first step.

Do you get what I'm saying?

I genuinely do.

I go like, oh man, thanks for trying and thanks because if you don't try, you end up in a world where every politician goes, don't try, just keep quiet.

Just, and then every now and again, you need someone who steps up and goes, oh yeah, you know what I mean?

The case for trying.

Yeah, man, the case for trying.

So thank you very much, Dave.

I appreciate it.

Thanks for coming on.

What Now with Trevor Noah is produced by Day Zero Productions in partnership with Sirius XM.

The show is executive produced by Trevor Noah, Sanaz Yamin, and Jess Hackle.

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