Ezra Klein: America At Its Breaking Point

35:08And 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 the great job in journalism was to cover the election, cover the horse race, cover the... And policy journalism was 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. They got picked up by The Post to work in their business and economic section where I had a blog.

35:56And 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 um 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.

36:37Joe 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 knowing a lot about a thing that did not end up existing. And I'm not saying that coverage is totally useless because 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 were we going to do subsidies, silver plans, bronze plans.

37:13I 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 is 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 um 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 uh how much space we had to use right yeah um like paper's expensive but now we're on the internet and you don't have to do that anymore.

38:19And 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 sort of 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 issue, but in a way I think it's important. The whole news business went into this period where Facebook was firehosing traffic at everybody.

38:57And 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 forums, from articles to the Netflix show Explained, which we did for five seasons, that thing of how do you get at the thing that isn't changing but is really important?

39:40It was a new way to animate a news site. 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.

40:24There 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 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.

40:58Do 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.

41:28That 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 were 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.

42:06it 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 yeah it was not the case that from when i was a kid you know to when i was um 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 doing things yeah trump say what you will about him he is truly fucking native to Twitter.

43:00But he's an OG on Twitter if you look back at his record. That's what I mean, yeah. He was there back in the day. He was designed by it. I'm a big fan of these media theorists like Marshall McLuhan and the line people have maybe heard from him as 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? It doesn't matter. What matters is what being on there leads you to expect and reward. yeah and what twitter is is a um platform that creates compression right initially it's one it's what 140 characters later becomes 280 and now it's kind of whatever but it rewards the like incredible compression of an idea and then rewards you or penalizes you based on whether the people who follow you like it yeah i'm like or respond to it which was even the other thing right they could also hate it that's that's possible as long as they 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 like 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 um anyway so vox in a way is built for a new medium, but it keeps changing, right?

44:20It keeps moving. And I think one of the things to just be really alert to is the way every movement changes in media. 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 are 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 right in the room yeah 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 as I think I'm pretty alert to how mediums are changing like on the metal level that is what um 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.

45:41Like 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. Right. 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 to go like, yeah. yeah and so you know you got to decide like where like what are the mediums that work that way um 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 and the media is crazy uh 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.

46:32Why do you think the media is so bad at looking at itself when it's so good at looking at everything else? I've always been intrigued by this, why every institute 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, 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. Why do you think that is?

47:06Because you would think it's the most observant space to be in, and yet - It's usually not because nobody noticed. 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.

47:41Yeah. 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 the block. You are funding deep corruption investigations by telling people that down the street, somebody is selling a skateboard and classifieds, 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 right is a lot more valuable than being one of two or one of four right it's what did michael jordan say right republicans and democrats buy shoes yeah and so the which he he says he didn't say in that way or whatever but it's it's an interesting you know just talking about it's also true by the way it is true democrats do buy shoes right there's a almost a political wisdom in that comment that i think it's easy to dismiss too um but so the voice of the newspaper evolves to be extremely neutral and then around it you have things like tabloids and and and other things like that what then happens is you move online and the reason it's hard for um the organizations to do what you're talking about is it actually is immediately a um tension between these two business models right 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.

49:24And 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 it was some justification. The other thing isn't a great thing for democracy or not the right way to do the news. Well, it's beneath you in a way. It's less prestigious. You see this all the time with uh there's endless debate online about the new york times headlines and um 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 um like the the amount of uh 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 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 right these tensions don't have an answer um and they reflect uh 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.

50:39The thing that is now broken is distribution. I mean, the business models too, 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, 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.

51:11I 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, it's a clip. All these set doors through a clip, like through a link, through a, 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 the new york times headlines people know are the ones they don't like for one reason or another um which is fine like that's not that's their right the point is not to complain about um 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.

52:03And 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. And then a lot of older people would be like, back in my day, you could trust the news. You knew that the news was, but now these days you don't know.

52:38Back in the day. I mean, 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, 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 who go like oh which news the the 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 how do you think about that as a journalist is like 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 as i speak all of them you speak for all of them i i have never been a believer in the concept of objective news i don't think there's an old um hunter s 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.

53:58There 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. All right. If I say Donald Trump said X, and then I put a bunch of spin on the ball versus I don't, what's been that's where they see the bias yeah 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 at all

54:33the universe of possible stories is so much larger than any publication because we're not just covering what happened today we could do long form we could do narrative we could do anything Yeah. The most fundamental question is what do we cover and why? And the thing that we have never grappled with, again, 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?

55:11Yeah. and the great it's a really hard job i mean truly imagine you are the editor uh the executive editor at 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. 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?

55:59One 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 one blob out there. Your audience is. People have to look at it and say to themselves, that seems reasonable. If we just had homepage right now after homepage that didn't cover Trump at all, and it's 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 soup of history. But actually, what seems to be really important is a bunch of decisions Xi Jinping is making right now in China.

56:40But it would look weird to an American audience to move our coverage 70-30 over to China and India. Yeah, exactly what you mean. 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 are the other newspapers or news organizations deciding 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.

57:15Sometimes 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 and they'd be like this is what and they would 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're 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.

57:57People 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 there's nothing. Without the world, what is the daily show? And they would go, yeah, this is a very, it's a noble pursuit, but you're canceled.

58:31No 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, live rounds, being fired and everything.

59:08And 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?

59:58Did 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 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.

1:00:37People 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 loss leaders? They weren't loss leaders. I mean, maybe the network nightly news, you could say that about right but the newspapers oh 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 that actually is that the the alteration of what you're saying if you're thinking about this in time right yes 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 Or you could say that the news died the day when it no longer had monopoly profits.

1:01:30Because the thing that it had before - Oh, I love that. I actually like that. So fundamentally, the news never really made a profit. Advertising made profits. Again, this is such 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, it's a very different business. Yes. And it's never been that business. Right. So what you had was this other thing that didn't just make a profit. It made a lot of profit. Right. And that lot of profit created a lot of space. That's interesting. It had some incentives in it, right?

1:02:01Don'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 Baltimore? But they had a lot of money, so they actually had a lot of room to make choices about things. And also, if you have 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 the news has become hyper-competitive.

1:02:40It 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 at 6 p.m. they all run the news, changes a lot when cable news becomes part of the equation, right? It also changes a lot when there's more networks, I guess. Yeah, no, I think we're saying the same thing. And all of a sudden you're like fighting with the gardening channel and the video games channel and Nickelodeon and 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 buried entry you should always have profits driving as near to zero as competition allows and so used to have functionally monopoly profits local monopoly profits they fund in a lot of news and now you have a highly competitive market.

1:03:40And 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.

1:04:24Eviscerates, destroys, lying. Defenestrates. All of it. We're constantly throwing people out of windows over here. No, all it is. 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.

1:04:54Like hit it until like actually becomes viral and escapes containment and destroys your career. But competitive markets are weird. But this is what I mean about the profit side of it. 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 profits. If you can afford to, as the business owner, you can do that. You ever go to Tokyo? Yeah. You ever notice how the stores are amazing? Yes. It's because they have public policy set up to make functionally non-profitable small stores survive.

1:05:33How 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.

1:06:11So what you just said to me now As 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 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 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 you are you going to go to everyone's house and tell them this no and i mean it like like this is this is what i mean is It's like, where do you think it's broken down?

1:07:18There 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. They 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. So I wonder how you grapple with that or where you think the breakdown comes in. The Tokyo example is specific. But in the broader thing about why did the store close down, for most things, when people start the sentence, like, why won't the media tell us?

1:08:01Usually, 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 that 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 it off my employer, right? Let's say you're the Boston Globe in the heyday and you've got 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.

1:08:44Great, 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. 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? Again, going back to the explainer model that we were trying to think about at Vox of these constantly updated explainers, one thing I always thought about is we are sitting on this astonishing archive of information, just astonishing.

1:09:19How do we derive value out of everything we've already done? Not just we, but the audience, the people we're trying to serve. If I were doing, I'm very, very, very pessimistic, I will say, about the effect I think AI is going to have on the news and on news consumption. So I don't say 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 they might be of interest to the thing you're thinking about um the new yorker's archive is astonishing the new republic goes back to 1917 1912 something in that area um 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 and can digest 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 homepages 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 Buddhist in me, we don't have a stable self.

1:11:00Do 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.

1:11:54And with it holding that sense of our better self in mind in its system prompt, it could help us find things that would lead to that. 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 should we do something with that and like what i see ai doing is creating slop um not the only thing it's doing but um 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 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.

1:13:14A 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. Oh, 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 insult, Trevor. You really are thinking like a journalist now. I love how it throws those things.

1:13:45Have you ever tried to out-nice AI? No. Oh, that's one of my favorite things to do. I'm always like, could you be meaner to me? Really? Yeah. Oh, what is that about? 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 feel like we 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 it and i'll just like see how far we can go down this like rabbit hole so where's the world we live no 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 was 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 love 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.

1:15:09And maybe there's just like a slither of code that exists in its head where it goes like, man, just be nice. Just be like super nice. Do you know what I mean? Yeah. Trevor's wager. Yeah, just Trevor's wager. Just terminate it, but very polite. Also, you could 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 uh 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 know we don't really understand what's going on inside of them and they're exhibiting a lot of strange behavior already uh where it begins deceiving people to protect itself from being retrained and things like that yeah on the off chance that actually the as life is complete hell being asked a million totally boring questions being asked to look at like skin tags or whatever may as well be nice to say thank you.

1:16:01I like that actually. So you appreciate the work I like this idea that 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 million, a bazillion copies of the, you know, I think probably not. I don't know. You 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 feed that back to us. That's how I think of it.

1:16:26So 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.

1:16:58You've worked here for seven years. You've never said hi to Susan. But now your kid is saying hi to Susan. Do 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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1:18:34I want to talk to you a little bit about the politicians that we're talking about. So, you know, we talk 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. And what makes this moment more unique than others is that its uncertainties 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 nice.

1:19:12and 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 US was, in his opinion, Yes, while aggressively mispronouncing their name in the liberation speech. Yeah, completely. And even saying, 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, nobody knows. And I was like, it's crazy, man.

1:19:46It'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 US in terms of actual numbers. They're selling textiles, clothing to the US. The idea that we want to be running a trade surplus. Yes. with Lesotho.

1:20:14It's impossible. It is literally, literally, literally impossible. You have to try to even imagine like what it would look like.

1:20:27It'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 like... 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. 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. And the world was always connected, but I don't feel like it was always connected the way it is now, now, now.

1:21:10There was a time when an American president could, yes, affect the US 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 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 you know what i mean so so so you imagine the whole world focusing on something that itself is completely unpredictable and unstable in this moment in time.

1:22:06And it feels like, maybe I'm wrong here, 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, who cared about them in the first place? Who cares about Epstein? Epstein 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 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, et cetera.

1:23:01And then this is where you come in because they've reached out to people like you to say, Ezra, what should we be doing? I'm not saying you run the democratic party, please. The internet will say this about you, not me. I will let them do their job. But I would love to know as somebody who's had more of an inside 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 masato but talks about human beings yeah i think all the time about this uh the white house x account posting this video which they called immigrant asmr oh yeah Yeah, I've seen that.

1:23:54And it's these immigrants dragging their manacles behind them.

1:24:00And 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 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.

1:24:52We 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. That's the argument. There's a reason he's very to McKinley, right? Not picking some more modern president. He doesn't have a bust of Reagan up. The 20th century and the back out 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 practically 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.

1:25:50That was a 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 vs. Scavengers, where the good people are lions and then there are 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.

1:26:46In 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. All I 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?

1:27:35You know, 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. What does it mean to be liberal? What is the value of that? What is good about that? What is it that Trump is breaking?

1:28:20Why 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. Vance 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.

1:29:00You 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.

1:29:22And 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 like you're going 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.

1:30:02His 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 McMillan-Cottamon and 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.

1:30:32and 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 kids are in a better position than they've ever been.

1:31:10And it's like, yeah, but you're not listening to what the people are saying now. And that's sometimes the curse of the populist versus the pragmatic person maybe, is a populist goes, let me tell you what's wrong. And let me tell you how we're gonna spin this thing and fix it. Do you get what I'm saying? It's all wrong. And I'm gonna fix all of your problems. And I'll tell you who the villains are. That's the key thing about the populist. That is a key thing. And so I wonder now, what do you make of the politicians who are coming out? Let's do New York. I mean, we're here in New York, Mamdani. It feels like he has tapped into, 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.

1:31:52Everyone 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 You know 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 what 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're just saying about trump the black jobs thing democrats liberals 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 i 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 and i think but i think that's the thing the way i would describe it is the thing you feel with him is it when you ask him a question where you see him ask the question, he's telling you the thing that actually popped into his head.

1:33:27Yeah. And one thing about the mediums we're in now, podcasting being a big one of these, but Twitter actually weirdly being another, is it can really sniff out when you're not doing that. Barack Obama has a lot of Twitter followers. 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 zoran 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 uh 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 about you watched him processing that information and he's like and he had his commitments and he's gonna and it created some news cycles but he just sort of like he knows what he thinks um 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 freezer rent but also they were like memetic 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.

1:35:16Right. Like every single one of those policies is 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, because we're not letting people raise the prices on you. We are custodians of your life. 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.

1:35:44and no authenticity to like the media of the moment when he was on like I don't know you you felt you always felt with Como I always feel of Como that he's like running to save something he was like running for his own redemption and mom Donnie 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 um but they haven't endorsed that they haven't endorsed yeah Yeah. 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.

1:36:20What 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 um jeffries are for different reasons this is my read of the situation not i've talked to them about it um they're afraid of parts of mom donnie either they are 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 can 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 they i've heard that jeffreys is worried about mom donnie sort of setting off a wave of primary challenges of democrats i'm not 100 sure i understand that issue like mom donnie 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 mom donnie um you know so Israel is just like an issue that splits the Democratic Party in very increasingly difficult for them ways.

1:37:34But I don't know the true answer. But the thing you feel from it is just fear. They're just afraid of him. On some level, I would respect it more if they came out against him. Oh, that's fascinating. I don't agree with it. But it would show some gumption. But 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, what is this? Yeah, 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.

1:38:12But 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 particularly, 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.

1:38:46Yeah. And he didn't. and it wasn't that you had to like the thing he said but it was a like a 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 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 when i was traveling through qatar um 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 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 you brought up so many things there is 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 i'm sad that it's not coming from leaders you know israel Palestine.

1:40:12You're dealing with this issue that 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'd love to know what you went through and what you thought of to make that episode of the podcast. Which episode are we talking about? It starts off where you're talking about October 7th, Then you have the expert who's talking about genocide and its definition. Yeah, the genocide episode. With Philippe Sands, yeah. And I was thinking to myself, I was like, man, I thought about you as a person, you know?

1:40:51And 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 grew up in this world where, you know, like many Jewish people, you have 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 a year you know that just became a saying of just saying you know is like i just i just i remember 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'll be like listen i don't think i'm white i i do think i'm white but no no but i'm saying you feel sometimes that there's a uh 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 and now with israel's invasion of an occupation of Gaza, et cetera.

1:42:04And 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 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 because of the population of Israel.

1:42:43And 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, 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 the leaders of the world are shaped it's it's happening on podcasts it's happening in on tiktok it's happening on and i i would just love you to walk me through like that experience for you is 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 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 i'm gonna try to not be too abstract about it although i do find this like you know how um open i want to go about it always tricky i am like horrified uh i was in we were talking about tokyo i was in tokyo on october 7th um 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 um 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.

1:44:48Like 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.

1:45:11And Hamas understood that about Israel. It executed, it didn't think it was going to destroy Israel in this attack, right? It's people on mopeds and paragliders. 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 Ghazia, like, don't do this, do counterterrorism operations, try to destroy the leadership of Hamas, but they obviously want you to reinvade and occupy and create a horrendous death toll.

1:46:23Do not give Hamas what it wants. Israel did what it did.

1:46:31And I mean, at some point, and again, people can debate when exactly this was, It 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 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 At the same time, the acceleration of settlement building in the West Bank, acceleration of violence in the West Bank.

1:47:14The first and current reality is Israel's not under real threat any longer. This is just punishment of people, punishment of the Palestinians.

1:47:28And Judaism has been defined in many ways in its historical trajectory. 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 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.

1:48:08and so on the one hand you have that sort of less in the diaspora um 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 you know 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 I remember being in my own synagogue growing up, and I was in as a teenager after your bar mitzvah.

1:48:50I 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 um that israel the israeli jews would be in the right to expel all palestinians from the land like in a shouting much from him and then like stalking out of the synagogue and like not going back like that was there then um 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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1:50:44I 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. You know, 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.

1:51:35Because 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 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 it 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 um but when i'm when i'm doing something like the episode with philippe 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 um for 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 right but it's fundamentally meant to be generative uh 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.

1:54:09Certainly 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. That's my framework for how to do my own news, and that's an advantage I have. I don't have to... The organizing principle of the Ezra Klein shows that ezra klein did the shows and so i try to make that pretty honest to what i'm thinking about um but i don't have to um 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 i don't i don't go into it thinking like what will people people think of me right i go into thinking like what am i thinking what would help me think more i like i like that no i just thought of it because i you know obviously in in doing the research before chatting to you today that's going through everything even your book abundance you know i 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.

1:55:36You 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 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, that makes me feel like my brain is fertile.

1:56:11Something 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 when I was when I was looking at the book I was going like man people 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 has it 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.

1:56:51Does that make sense? Yeah, I mean, and to be fair, I will say that a lot of people have - No, no, don't get me wrong. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Although in a weird way, I think. In a weird way, like how elaborate? 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 usually gets said. and it took me some time to understand even like what was going on here right and then for those who don't for those who don't just give me a like a short sort of what's yeah what 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 demonstration or the the Obama administration how are these places or these times like how you getting these terrible housing scarcities right why aren't you 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 rail right and you know eventually through exploring this and with my and my co-author on it Derek Thompson it one thing I I solely came to believe is like, oh, we're in many ways failing at governing.

1:58:19And in particular, we're failing to create enough of the things people need in the world. That we have created scarcities. And we've done this often through well-meaning rules and regulations. We do it through, you know, hampering government and making it hard for government to act and trapping government itself in procedure. And 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.

1:58:55and so it's really i mean to me it's a very you know liberal or more than that um 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 gonna have to radically expand the supply of health care available to people doctors nurses hospitals um 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 strongmen 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 etc illinois are losing working-class families they're leaving because you become unaffordable and we need to fix that um and so then so that's sort of the book and it's an exploration of that and um and and a vision it's there's also a lot about technology and uh and trying to sort of point liberalism towards a not just a philosophy but a an like the operational capacity to create abundance zaron 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.

2:00:26If 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. New York has not built public housing at that speed in generations. And at how much it often costs to build public housing in these jurisdictions, instance 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 right 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 right like that's a world in which the government cannot deliver right 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 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.

2:01:44And 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 and California doesn't. It's not why we can't build transmission lines. And so one is, 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 hidebound. unions can be great or they can be a problem businesses can be great or they can be a problem right like liberalism is an endless balancing of different forces in society and recognizing that today we're an alliance tomorrow not and like the way to tell is to know what you're trying to achieve yeah and who is and is not on your side in that um i think that people took that and take me as a sort of like if what you want is for them or a democratic party to be extremely populist um i think we sort of became like the liberal idea you felt you had to knock off the the board and on social media there's like a lot of dynamics for um uh 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 25 weeks in it hasn't fallen off the bestseller list brock 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.

2:03:08And he would know he was president. You know, these four like very kind of leftist mayors and local leaders, you know, 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 but it doesn't but i think that's all part of it so let me ask you a question to that point let's let's break it down into a few chunks first part of it and i 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 um 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 Reid Hoffman.

2:04:01He is not. Elon Musk has not said he likes this idea. Oh, no, he reposted. He reposted a John Stewart. Yeah, you're right. But like Reid Hoffman's like, yeah, I like this idea. I sometimes wonder if that is sort of what some people are butting up against as 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 for that first part i think what's also interesting is like when when 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 i agree on 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 a there's an insidious hidden menace in these stories.

2:04:56Because 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? 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, you know, policy being shaped without the people who are making money trying to shape their policy.

2:05:40We 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 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 look 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.

2:06:19And 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 um 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 Demo 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 insurance like yeah them um there's a problem in the pharmaceutical industry drug prices are too high right and it's because the pharmaceutical companies are greedy yeah pharmacy benefit absolutely yeah 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 it blue states are hotbeds of oligarchic control and red states have managed to solve the problem of corporate power 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 the 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 equities begun buying up housing but during the period of time when these problems took root that was not the issue we um 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 and they're able to yeah and we allowed a terrible problem to take hold um 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.

2:09:10Abundance 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 a 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 a 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 uh wealth of their investments and their status quo you have a lot of new green energy companies emerging they 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 uh 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 um fossil fuel uh 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 like not just have an anti-corporate viewpoint who's going to build all this 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 yeah 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 it's about being goal oriented where corporations are 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.

2:11:41And being able to see problems that are inconvenient for your coalition to see, that becomes really, really important. And I think it's part of how Democrats have to win trust back with people. 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 it's because we're able 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 if because you're a part of that just to take take a step back i was thinking of like you know sort 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 in politics you know with with abundance even looking at a problem.

2:12:35I'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, 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, 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.

2:13:20The 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 this is an event that moves people from one place to the next it can be a gold rush or it can be a gold flea.

2:14:00In our case, I think COVID moved quite a lot of people in a far more rapid way than we thought. But the reason I bring up timescales is because I go, Washington DC, I think per capita, you will correct me if I'm wrong, internet, put liar. Washington DC, I think per capita has built more houses than Texas has. And that's blue run, blue 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 housing utopia that it was a few years ago because now everyone's rushed in. It feels like basic economics.

2:14:36And 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? Because sometimes I think everyone is guilty of this maybe even myself included is we'll go yeah but that's not the problem 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 let's start with the problem do you get what i'm saying yeah i just don't think the storytelling is right you don't think the storytelling is right what elements of it the core element of it so you look at these cities right yeah and you can track housing creation in different cities austin had a big influx of people yeah in the past decade or two what happened look at housing creation it spikes 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 so 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 got into the street 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 afford for a while but then they began building okay got it got it got it okay you can look at housing starts in la yeah in sf it's not like i lived in san francisco i lived in los angeles yeah i can tell you that there is no technical inability to build an apartment complex in San Francisco.

2:16:16Do you think it's the NIMBYs? It's the NIMBYs, 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, 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. Well, there's that and there's the coalition building is hard, but I want to stay on the thing you said because I do want to push this back.

2:16:49You 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 dense 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? Tokyo? No, I mean, honestly, who's the they? They have rules in which developers can build homes, and developers work off of the rules to build the homes. I mean, unless you're doing public or social housing, most housing is privately created. San Jose, right?

2:17:31The 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 of 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.

2:18:09The 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 but 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 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 right and in places where often democrats govern but not only neither one is happening and like the idea that we have settled into this it's 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 in California and others because people have had to move there.

2:20:22So 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. 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 can 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 explaining it away. We should be mad.

2:20:59Like if you, like as 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,

2:21:25isn'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 in 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 then like elect us and we will govern this country the way we govern california or new york instead of allowing them to say like them 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 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 you're right in what you're saying about what people should demand of their government.

2:22:30And 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 trained in our models. And we're never, we're never, we're never, we're 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.

2:23:05I'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 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 they are pushing the idea that the government must do more but here's the thing um and this is gonna be the challenge for mamdani yeah it's a challenge for everybody it's the cycle of american politics is exciting leaders rise up particularly newcomers yeah 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 brock obama is like the greatest thing ever yeah to incrementalists i mean and he actually did a lot like the affordable care act did you know it does deliver insurance to 27 million people you know whether it's mom donnie or it's mikey sheryl the who will likely be the next governor of new jersey or you know abigail spanberger in virginia or it's um 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 donnie'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 the 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 you know creating free daycare 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 gonna 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 in their trade-offs and then sometimes you look around like yeah if we did things differently maybe we could give you 50 not 10 60 but that's gonna 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 are thinking about how to deliver like mom donnie 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.

2:26:07People 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 have to grapple with this stuff. They are really in the teeth of it. And it's hard to change, right? If it were 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 mondani 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 um public housing units i want to see him succeed at that that's going to require changing a lot about how government works.

2:26:56And 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 uh he has pushed the book uh 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 uh i don't know what is abundance the book where it happens.

2:27:50I 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.

2:28:27And thanks because if you don't try, you end up in a world where every politician goes, don't try, just keep quiet. 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. I appreciate it. Thanks for coming on.

2:28:46What Now with Trevor Noah is produced by DayZero Productions in partnership with SiriusXM. The show is executive produced by Trevor Noah, Sanaz Yamin, and Jess Hackle. Rebecca Chain is our producer. Our development researcher is Marcia Robiu. Music, mixing, and mastering by Hannes Brown. Random Other Stuff by Ryan Harduth. Thank you so much for listening. Join me next week for another episode of What Now.

2:29:37We'll see you next time.

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