Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson: Politics, Trump, AOC, Elon & DOGE | Lex Fridman Podcast #462

1. 0:00 – 3:08

   Episode highlight

   1. EKEzra Klein0:00

      Democrats still think the currency of politics is money and the currency of politics is attention. And that's a huge difference between the two sides right now.

   2. DTDerek Thompson0:07

      I think this deal, man, is very easy to make here. Department of Government Efficiency, that sounds like an organization that's needed if government is inefficient. And one of the themes of our book is just how inefficient government can be. Not only at building houses, building energy, often at achieving its own ends. Building high-speed rail when it wants to build high-speed rail, adding affordable housing units when it wants to afford, add affordable housing units. You know, I love Ezra's line that we don't just need to think about, you know, deregulating the market, we need to think about deregulating government itself, getting the rules out of the way that keep government from achieving the democratic outcomes that it's trying to achieve. This is a world in which a Department of Government Efficiency is a godsend. We should be absolutely obsessed with making government work well, especially if we're going to be the kind of liberals who believe that government is important in the first place.

   3. EKEzra Klein1:02

      In my lifetime, the Democratic Party has never been as internally fragmented and weak, leaderless, rudderless as it is right now. Now, it won't stay that way. You cannot change American politics, you can't change the Democratic Party if you're not willing to upset people. Donald Trump reformed the Republican Party by willingly being able to fight Republicans. He ran against George W. Bush, against Jeb Bush, against Mitt Romney, against the trade deals, against a bunch of things that were understood to be sacred cows. Somehow this guy ran, like, right after Mitt Romney and John McCain while attacking Mitt Romney and John McCain, right? If you are not... Like, the Democratic Party does need to change. It needs to obtain a different form 'cause the Obama coalition is exhausted. It's done. It's not gonna be able to do that if it doesn't have standard-bearers who are willing to say, "We were wrong about some things. We have to change our views on some things. We have to act differently and speak differently."

   4. DTDerek Thompson1:58

      When Elon takes over Tesla, when Elon is at SpaceX, when Elon's at X, I would imagine, and you know this better than me because you know him and, maybe most importantly for the purposes of this part of the conversation, you know the people who work for him. I'll bet if you ask the people who work under Elon at X, Tesla, SpaceX, they say, "I know exactly what Elon wants. This is his goal for the super heavy rocket. This is his goal in terms of humanoid robots. This is his goal in terms of profitability of Twitter and the growth of our subscription business and how we're gonna integrate new features." There's a, probably a really clear mind-meld. Right now, I have no sense that there's a mind-meld. And, in fact, I have the exact opposite sense, that rather than an example of creative destruction, which would be a mitzvah of entrepreneurship, we have an active destruction destruction. We have destruction for the sake of destruction. It's much cleaner to me from an interpretive standpoint to describe Doge as an ideological purge of progressivism, performing an act of, or performing the job of efficiency, rather than a department of actual efficiency itself.

2. 3:08 – 6:37

   Introduction

   1. DTDerek Thompson3:08

   2. LFLex Fridman3:08

      The following is a conversation with Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson. Ezra is one of the most influential voices representing the Left wing of American politics. He is a columnist for The New York Times, author of Why We're Polarized, and host of The Ezra Klein Show. Derek is a writer at The Atlantic, author of Hit Makers and On Work, and host of the Plain English Podcast. Together, they've written a new book, simply titled Abundance, that lays out a kind of manifesto for the Left. It is already a controversial, widely debated book, but I think it puts forward a powerful vision for what the Democratic Party could stand for in the coming election. If I may, let me comment on the fact that sometimes on this podcast, I delve into the dark realm of politics. Indeed, politics often devises and, frankly, brings out the worst in some very smart people. Plus, to me, it is frustrating how much of the political discourse is drama and how little of it is rigorous, empathetic discussion of policy. I hate this, but I guess I understand why. If the other side is called either Hitler or Stalin online by swarms of chanting mobs, it's hard to carry out a nuanced discussion about immigration, healthcare, housing, education, foreign policy, and so on. On top of that, any time I talk about politics, half the audience is pissed off at me. And, no, there is no audience capture. I get shit on equally by different groups across the political spectrum, depending on the guest. Why? I don't know, but I'm slowly coming to accept that this is the way of the world. I try to maintain my cool, return hate with compassion, and learn from the criticism and the general madness of it all. Still, I think it's valuable to sometimes talk about politics. It's an important part to the big picture of human civilization, but indeed, it is only still a small part. My happy place is talking to scientists, engineers, programmers, video game designers, historians, philosophers, musicians, athletes, filmmakers, and so on. So, I apologize for the occasional detour into politics, especially over the past few months. I did a few conversations with world leaders and I have a few more coming up. So, there will be a few more political podcasts coming out, in part so I can be better prepared to deeply understand the mind, the life, and the perspective of each world leader. I hope you come along with me on this journey into the darkness of politics as I try to shine a light on the complex human mess of it all, hoping to understand us humans better, always backed, of course, by deep, rigorous research and by empathy.

   3. Long term, I hope for political discussions to be only a small percentage of this podcast. If it's not your thing, please just skip these episodes. Or maybe come along anyway since both you and I are reluctant travelers on this road trip. But who knows what we'll learn together about the world and about ourselves. This is the Lex Fridman Podcast. To support it, please check out our sponsors in the description and now, dear friends, here's Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson.

3. 6:37 – 15:58

   Left-wing vs right-wing politics

   1. LFLex Fridman6:38

      You are both firmly on the left of the U.S. political spectrum. Ezra, I've been a fan of yours for a long time. Uh, you're often referred to, at least I think of you as, one of the most intellectually rigorous voices on the left. Uh, can you try to define, can you define the ideals and the vision of the American left?

   2. EKEzra Klein6:56

      Oh, good one. (laughs) Starting small here.

   3. LFLex Fridman6:58

      And maybe contrast them with the American right.

   4. EKEzra Klein7:00

      Sure. Um, so-

   5. LFLex Fridman7:02

      (laughs)

   6. EKEzra Klein7:02

      ... the thing I should say here is that you can define the left in different ways. I think the left has a couple fundamental views. One is that life is unfair. We are born with different talents. We are born into different nations, right? The, the luck of being born into America is very different than the luck of being born into Venezuela. Um, we are born into different families. We have luck operating as an omnipresence across our entire lives and as such the people for whom it works out well, we don't deserve all of that. We got lucky. I mean, we also worked hard, and we also had talent, and we also applied that talent. But at a very fundamental level that we are sitting here is unfair and that so many other people are in conditions that are much worse, much more precarious, much more exploited is unfair. And one of the fundamental roles of government should not necessarily be to turn that unfairness into perfect equality, but to rectify that unfairness into a kind of universal dignity, right, so people can have lives of flourishing. So I'd say that's one thing. The left is fundamentally more skeptical of capitalism and particularly unchecked forms of capitalism than the right. I always think this is hard to talk about because what we call unchecked capitalism is nevertheless very much supported by government, so I think in- in a way you have both. Like markets are things that are enforced by government, whether they are, you know, how you set the rules of them is what ends up differing between the left and the right. But the left is, tends to be more worried about the fact that you could get rich, uh, building coal-fired power plants, belching pollution into the air, and you could get rich laying down solar panels and the market doesn't know the difference between the two. And so there's a set of goals about regulating the- the unchecked, uh, potential of capitalism that also, uh, relates to sort of exploitation of workers. Um, there's like very fundamental questions about how much people get paid, how much power they have. Again, the rectification of economic and other forms of power is very fundamental to- to the left. When you think about what the minimum wage is. I am a successful podcast host. When I go into a negotiation with The New York Times, I have a certain amount of market power in that negotiation because other firms want to hire me. When you are a minimum wage worker, um, the reason we have a minimum wage is in part to rectify a power problem. A lot of workers do not have market power. They do not have a bunch of job opportunities. They are not working with firms. Um, and by the way, without certain kinds of regulation those firms would cartelize and make it so they can hold down wages anyway. So trying to rectify power imbalances is I think another thing folks on the left take more seriously. That would be a start of things that I think broadly unite the, maybe let's call it the intuitions. Um, I wanna say that's a podcast answer, not a book. I'm sure I left, uh, a million, a million things out here, but- but I'll start there.

   7. LFLex Fridman9:57

      I mean, there's a lot of fascinating things there. On- on- on the unfairness of life, that could be the interperson unfairness, so one person getting more money than another person or more skills or more natural abilities than another person. And then there's the just- the general unfairness of the environment, the luck of the draw.

   8. EKEzra Klein10:13

      Mm-hmm.

   9. LFLex Fridman10:14

      Things that happen, all of a sudden you cross a street and a car runs a red light and runs you over and you're in the hospital, so that unfairness of life.

   10. EKEzra Klein10:22

       Mm-hmm.

   11. LFLex Fridman10:22

       And in general, uh, I guess the left sees there's some role or a lot of role for government to help you when that unfairness strikes. And then maybe there's also a general notion of, uh, the size of government. I think the left is more comfortable with a larger government as long as it's effective and efficient. A- at least in this idea.

   12. DTDerek Thompson10:42

       That- that's certainly true in the last 100 years. Uh, it was New Deal liberals who enlarged the government in the 1930s. It was Republicans who acquiesced to that larger government in the 1950s. And then starting in the 1970s, 1980s, it's typically been conservatives who've tried to constrict government. Sometimes they failed. Um, while liberals have typically tried to expand certainly taxing and spending. Well, one thing that I was thinking as Ezra was talking, and I was just writing this down because I thought Ezra's answer was really lovely, but, like, at a really high level I thought, maybe you disagree with this, I thought about distinguishing between liberals and conservatives based on three factors: what each side fears, what each side values, and what each side tolerates. I think liberals fear injustice and conservatives often fear cultural radicalism or the destruction of society, and as a result they value different things. Liberals, I think, tend to value change. And at the level of government that can mean change in terms of creating new programs that don't previously exist. It's typically been liberals, for example, who've been trying to expand health coverage while conservatives have tried to cut it back. Just in the last few years it was Biden who tried to add a bunch of programs, whether it was infrastructure, the CHIPS and Science Act, the IRA, and then Trump comes into office and is unwinding it. And then I also think they tolerate different things. I think liberals are more likely to tolerate a little bit of overreach, a little bit of radicalism in terms of trying to push society into a world where it hasn't been, while I think conservatives are more likely to tolerate injustice.... they're more likely to say, "There's a kind of natural inequality in the nature of the world, and we're not going to try to over-correct for it with our policies." And so I think that even at a layer above what Ezra was articulating, be it with the, um, with the policy differences between liberals and conservatives, there's almost, like, an, an archetypal difference between what they fear, and value, and tolerate. Um, liberals fearing injustice, seeking change, tolerating sometimes a bit of what people might think of as, as overreach, while conservatives fear that overreach, value tradition, and often tolerate injustice.

   13. EKEzra Klein12:54

       The only thing I, I, I would say is that I do think this sort of, "The left likes big government, the right likes small government," oversimplifies. The, the left is pretty comfortable with an expansive government that is trying to correct for some of the, the imbalances of power, and injustices, and imbalances of luck I talked about earlier. The right is very comfortable with a very powerful police, and surveillance, and national security state. Uh, I always think about the, uh, sort of George W. Bush era, although right now with ICE agents hassling all kinds of Green Card holders, you can use- you can think about this moment too. But the right's view that, on the one hand, the government is incompetent, and on the other hand, we could send our army across oceans, invade Afghanistan and Iraq, and then rebuild these societies we don't understand into fully functioning liberal democracies that will be our allies was an (laughs) extraordinary level of trust in a very big government. I mean, that was expensive. That took manpower. That was... Compared to we're gonna set up, you know, the Affordable Care Act in America, that took a lot more faith in the US government being able to do something that was extraordinarily difficult. But the left has more confidence in the government of the check, and the right has more confidence in the government of the gun.

   14. LFLex Fridman14:06

       You're right. There's some degree to which what the right... When the right speaks about the size of government is a little bit rhetoric and not actual policy, because they seem to always grow, the size of government, anyway. They just kinda say, "Small government," but they don't... It's, you know, in the surveillance state, in the, in the foreign policy in terms of military involvement abroad, and really, in every, every program, they're not very good at cutting either. They just kinda like to say it.

   15. DTDerek Thompson14:38

       Cutting is really hard. If you... Government spends trillions of dollars, and if you cut billions of dollars, someone is going to feel that pain, and they're going to scream. And so you look at defense spending under Reagan, you look at overall spending under Reagan, Reagan might be one of the most archetypally conservative presidents of the last 40, 50 years, he utterly failed in his attempt to shrink government. Government grew under Reagan. Defense grew. All sorts of programs grew. So I think that one thing we're sort of scrambling around in our answers is that, at a really high level, there are differences between liberalism and conservatism in American history. But often at the level of implementation, it can be a little bit messy. Even Bush's foreign policy that Ezra was describing, sort of from a big sense of American history, is very, like, Wilsonian, right? This sense of, like, it's America's duty to go out and change the world.

   16. EKEzra Klein15:31

       Or to use a current example, McKinleyan.

   17. DTDerek Thompson15:33

       Or M- or McKinleyan, right. And a lot of people compare, um, Donald Trump's foreign policy to Andrew Jackson, this sense of, "We need to pull back from the world. America first. We need to care about what's inside of our borders and care much less about what's outside of our borders." Sometimes the differences between Republican and Democrat administrations don't fall cleanly into the lines of liberal versus conservative, um, because those definitions can be

4. 15:58 – 40:34

   Political leaders on the left and the right

   1. DTDerek Thompson15:58

      mushy.

   2. LFLex Fridman15:59

      All right. So to descend down from the platonic ideals of the left and the right, well, who is actually running the show on the right and the left? Who are the dominant forces? Maybe you could describe, and you mentioned democratic socialists, the progressives, maybe liberals, maybe more sort of mainstream, uh, left, and, uh, the same on the right with, uh, Trump and Trumpism.

   3. EKEzra Klein16:24

      So on the right, it's pretty straightforward at the moment, and the right is composed differently than it was 10 years ago. But the right is run by Donald Trump and the people who have been given the nod of power by Donald Trump. So that is right now Elon Musk, but Elon Musk's power is coming from Donald Trump. That is, you know, maybe in some degrees J.D. Vance, maybe in some degrees Russ Vought, uh, maybe sometimes, um, you know, Homans over at, uh, DHS. The right... Beneath that, the Republicans in Congress are extraordinarily disempowered compared to in other administrations. They are sort of being told what to do, and they are doing what they are told. Republicans in Congress, Senate Republicans, they didn't want Pete Hegseth. They didn't want Kash Patel. They didn't want Tulsi Gabbard. They didn't want RFK Jr. Nobody got elected to be a Republican in the Senate hoping that they would confirm Robert F. Kennedy Jr., a member of the Kennedys, a Democrat who was pro-choice and running as a Democrat two years ago for HHS. But Donald Trump told them to do it, and, and they did. So the, the right has developed a very, very top-down structure. And one of Trump's talents, one of the things that makes him a disruptive force in politics is his ability to upend the sort of coalitional structure, the interest group structure that used to, uh, prevail. Um, you know, the Koch brothers were the big enemy of the left, you know, 10, 15 years ago. The view was that, in many ways, they set the agenda of the right. The Koch brother network is much less powerful under Donald Trump because he just disagrees with them and has disempowered them. Not to say none of their people or none of their groups are meaningful at all. They are, but you wouldn't put them at the forefront in the way that you might have at another time. Right this second, uh, we're using the left, but Democrats are in fundamental disarray. There is no leader. Democrats, Senate Democrats, uh, decided to vote for the continuing resolution avoiding a shutdown, or a critical mass of them did. Uh, Hakeem Jeffries, the leader of the House Democrats-... and Chuck Schumer, the leader of Senate Democrats, are in bitter disagreement over whether or not they should have done that. Democratic leadership isn't even united on the single biggest point of leverage they might have had. They disagree over whether or not it was even a point of leverage. Outside of them, the party has no leader, which is fairly normal after a pretty crushing defeat. Uh, but there isn't the next in line. Uh, so, you know, you go back, right? And it was pretty clear that, you know, after Barack Obama it was gonna be Hillary Clinton. After Hillary Clinton it was either gonna be, uh, Joe Biden or Bernie Sanders. Bernie Sanders had come in second in the primary, Joe Biden had been the vice president. You often have a presumptive next nominee who the party can look to for a kind of leadership. Even after 2000, Al Gore was still giving big speeches. There was a question about Al Gore running again. There is no presumptive in the Democratic Party right now. You can't turn around and say, "Oh, it's gonna be Pete Buttigieg. It's gonna be Josh Shapiro. It's gonna be Gretchen Whitmer." Absent parties are given force, modern parties, which are, are quite weak by historical standards. Modern parties tend to be given force by a centralizing personality. Donald Trump being a very strong example of that on the right, but Barack Obama was the, the person who held together the Democratic Party for a long time. In my lifetime, the Democratic Party has never been as internally fragmented and weak, leaderless, rudderless as it is right now. Now, it won't stay that way. There's a rhythm to these things. There'll be a midterm, they're probably gonna pick up a bunch of seats in the midterm. Um, if that means Hakeem Jeffries becomes Speaker after the midterm, he's gonna have a much louder voice because he's gonna have power. Uh, it's gonna be a harder road for Schumer to get back to the majority because of the Senate map. And then we'll start having a primary, uh, on the left. And you'll begin to see voices emerge out of that. But right now, the, you know, the Democratic Party, it doesn't have points of power. Just, the- there's simply outside of, you know, at the national level, there is no Democrat who wields control over a branch of government, right? They don't have the Supreme Court, they don't have the House, they don't have the Senate, they don't have the presidency, and they don't have a next in line. So you're, you're looking at a, you're looking at an organization without any of the people in a position to structure it. And the, the head of the DNC, the new head, Ken Martin, doesn't have power in that way. So it's, uh, they're- they're pretty fractured.

   4. LFLex Fridman20:41

      You were, you got a lot of criticism for this, but you were one of the people who early on said that, uh, Biden should step down. Why is the Democratic Party at this stage in its history so bad at generating the truly inspiring person? To me personally, you know, AOC is an example of a person that might be that person.

   5. EKEzra Klein21:03

      You should have her on the show.

   6. LFLex Fridman21:05

      Well... (laughs) Uh, uh-

   7. EKEzra Klein21:06

      I would watch that.

   8. LFLex Fridman21:07

      (laughs) Definitely. I mean, you know, I, I really try to, and we'll talk about this, I try to do like two, three hours, and there's a hesitancy, uh, on the left especially to do these kinds of long programs. I think it's a trust issue. I'm not exactly sure what it is. 80% of the people on this show are left wing. I'm pretty good faith and I try to bring out the best in people and-

   9. EKEzra Klein21:29

      Have you invited her? Is that what you're saying? That-

   10. LFLex Fridman21:30

       Uh, yeah, yeah.

   11. EKEzra Klein21:31

       Yeah. Uh, we'll see what happens when, when people get closer to 2028. (laughs)

   12. LFLex Fridman21:35

       Sure.

   13. EKEzra Klein21:35

       Maybe people begin taking, taking that kind of risk.

   14. LFLex Fridman21:37

       I hope so. You know, Bernie's up there in age, so he can't, you know, he can't do it anymore. Why is the Democratic Party so bad at generating this kind of talent?

   15. EKEzra Klein21:43

       I don't think it's so bad at generating them. I think that it would, it turned out to be bad at generating them this year. Look, like I, yeah, as you mentioned, you know, back in February 2023, I was somebody who came out and said, like, "Biden can't run again. This isn't gonna work." And my view, and that was really what that set of pieces was about, um, was about the argument that even though Biden was clearly gonna win the primary, that there was still time for Democrats to do something the parties had done in the past and have an open convention. And you could structure the lead-up to an open convention in a number of different ways, right? You could have something like a mini primary, but, but basically you'd have Democrats out in the media, out giving speeches, and their ultimate audience would be the delicates- the delegates at the Democratic National Convention. And, and my hope was through that you would find the person for this moment. The thing for Kamala Harris that was really difficult was she was for another moment. She was picked by Joe Biden in 2020 amidst, um, just a very different political equilibrium. A, a sense that you had a, a transitionary moment between two versions of the Democratic Party. Maybe Joe Biden reaching a little bit back to the past, to these sort of lunch pail, you know, blue collar Democrats. Joe from Scranton-

   16. LFLex Fridman22:53

       Mm-hmm.

   17. EKEzra Klein22:53

       ... was a big, a big part of the Joe Biden appeal. But also, Biden never has a chance if he's not Barack Obama's vice president. And so you have this sort of weird set of historical factors, like, operating at the same time. There's a desire for stability and experience amidst the chaos of Donald Trump and the pandemic. There is Biden as Obama's vice president who nevertheless did not run in the election after Obama. Um, I think a lot of people look back at 2016 and think, "You know what? If Biden had been the candidate, he would have beaten Trump and we would live in a different reality." And then Biden chose Harris as an effort to shore up his own, uh, at least assumed weaknesses, right? He's a white man in the Democratic Party at a time when the Democratic Party is diversifying, and when the view of how you win elections is you put to, is you put back together the Obama coalition. And the Obama coalition is young people, it's, uh, you know, voters of color, um, and it's enough working class white voters and then college-educated white voters, right? That's the Obama coalition. And so Biden picks Harris, you know, for different reasons. My view at that time was I was sort of a Tammy Duckworth person and thought he should have picked Tammy Duckworth. Uh, but, but there were different people-... out there. And then the kind of moment that Harris was running in just sort of dissipates. Um, first, she has a particular background from California where she's a tough-on-crime, her book is called Smart on Crime, prosecutor. But she runs in the Democratic Party at a time when it's turned on that kind of politics. People want a lot from her personally, but they don't want a, a sort of prosecutorial, uh, character. So she sort of abandons that and never, I think, really finds another political identity, certainly before she begins running, you know, in, in 2024 that works. But she's a talented debater. Um, she's a very talented performer on the stump. But she doesn't really have a theory of politics and policy that she's identified with. But she's a way for Biden to signal that he understands that him being, you know, in 2020, a 78-year-old White guy, he understands the future is not him, or at least not just him. And he's sort of trying to make a coalitional pick that, uh, speaks to his own, you know, potential weaknesses. I think by 2024, you have two problems, right? Once... H- he only steps down, what is it? June? Like, they are weeks from the DNC. They don't have time anymore for an open convention. You now... The Biden administration is very unpopular for a number of reasons, but particularly inflation and cost of living. So now you have Kamala Harris running with a sort of anvil of being associated. I mean, it's the Biden-Harris administration. Um, she doesn't really have a lane on cost of living. It's not something she's known for working on in the Senate. It's not something she has a bunch of great ideas about. Not something she's great at talking about. It's probably not the candidate you would pick for a cost of living election. And she's had no time to build that out, right? Maybe if she had been running in a primary for, you know, a year and a half, having to fend off Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders and Pete Buttigieg and whomever else, she either would have figured out how to do it, right? Primaries are periods of education and, and learning for the candidates too. Or they would have found somebody else who could do it. Um, but she doesn't get any of that, right? She's thrown into the game with three months to go. So, you know, they picked the candidate in 2020 who won. Whether you think Biden's inspiring or not, he was probably... He was a reasonable pick for that moment. He should have never run for a second term, and he sort of implied to a lot of people that he wouldn't. And then the, the handover to Harris was a very difficult handover to a candidate who didn't go through any kind of selection process for the moment at which she was running. We'll see what they do in, in 2028, but the, the consequences of, of what they did in 2024 have been severe.

   18. DTDerek Thompson26:29

       There's two really big questions on the table that I think click together in an interesting way. You asked, one, "Why did Trump win," and two, "Why do Democrats have this certain communication style that might make them less interested in coming onto an unstructured three-hour conversation with you?" Let me try to tell a story that connects them. I think Trump's victory in 2024 was overdetermined. Th- there are a lot of factors here. Number one, if you look internationally, incumbents lost all over the world. They lost in the US. They lost in Europe. They lost in pretty much every developed country at rates that we really haven't seen in 50 years. And that's largely because the inflation crisis that came after COVID created an absolute disaster for incumbent establishment power. People couldn't bring prices down. Voters were furious, and they were destroying establishment orders all over the world. Democrats happened to be in power, and as a result, they got the brunt of it. That's number one. Number two, if you look at elections over the 21st century, two things are true. One, almost every election is unbelievably close for reasons that I'm not en- tr- sure I entirely understand. The parties have gotten really good, historically, bizarrely good, at getting each group to come to the polls with about 48% such that every election is a battle over the next 1.5%. And in a world like that, little thermostatic swings are very important. And what we've seen over the last few years, and there's this theory about thermostatic public opinion in American politics, that says that what often happens in politics is one party has a very compelling message of change, they become the establishment, and then they become the victims of this... exactly the weapon that they marshaled. That then the next out-group party says, "We have a theory of change, and we're gonna throw out the bums." And the next party comes in, and they overreach, and then they lose. In a world where you have th- thermostatic change and every election is very close, you tend to have elections swinging back and forth. So, um, I think that also explains why Democrats and Republicans have struggled to hold onto power for 6-year, 8-year, 12-year terms the same way they did, say, in the 1930s or 1960s. But finally, you have to look at what kind of character Donald Trump is and what kind of a media figure he is. We were just talking off camera about how every age of communications technology revolution clicks into focus a new skill that is suddenly in critical demand for the electorate, right? The world of radio technology is a world in which Franklin Delano Roosevelt can be powerful in a way that he can't be in the 1890s. And then you have the 1950s. D- Dwight Eisenhower in 1956, I believe, was the first televised, um, uh, national convention. Famously, the 1960 presidential debates between JFK and Richard Nixon take an election that is leaning toward Nixon and make it an election that's leaning toward JFK because he's so damn handsome and also just electrically compelling on a screen. We have a new screened technology right now, which is not just television on steroids. It's a different species entirely. And it seems to favor, it seems to provide value for, individuals, influencers, and even celebrities and politicians who are good at something like live-wire authenticity. They're good at performing authenticity, as paradoxical as that sounds. Trump is an absolute marvel at performing authenticity even when the audience somehow acknowledges that he might be bullshitting. He's just an amazing performer for this age, and it speaks to the fact that...... he seems to be, to borrow Ezra's term, remarkably disinhibited in front of every single audience. There doesn't seem to be this sort of background algorithm in his head calculating exactly how to craft this message to, to different audiences. He just seems to be like a live wire animal in front of every audience. And I think that compares very distinctly to the Democratic character of bureaucratic caution in our age.

   19. EKEzra Klein30:25

       (laughs) Yeah.

   20. DTDerek Thompson30:26

       And there is an im- a really important distinction between this vibe of the Trumpian ruler and the vibe of the rule follower. And the vibe of the bureaucratic rule follower is a little bit afraid of unstructured conversation, is always performing the background algorithm of, "How do I communicate in a way that balances all of the coalitions on my side?" Because if you look at the Democratic Party right now to compare to the Republican Party, I mean, in 2015, I think there were four political parties in America. There was MAGA, there was a center right, there was the Bernie wing, and there was the Biden, Clinton, Obama wing. And what happened is that Trump killed and skinned the center right and is now wearing it as a hat. The entire Republican Party is Donald Trump wearing the skins of the old center right, the Romney wing.

   21. EKEzra Klein31:16

       Yeah.

   22. DTDerek Thompson31:16

       And the Republic- and the Democratic Party is still a fight. It's exactly what Ezra described. It's a jungle. And maybe there's something about that jungle nature of the Democratic Party that is making some of its leaders perform this sort of coalitional calculation when they're communicating, such that it makes them less interested in appearing in settings that might cost them, that might not benefit them in exactly the sort of pre-calculated way they have to get their message across. And so there's not necessarily a whole lot of empirics to that theory. I'm a little bit going on vibes here and maybe Ezra sees some flaws to the theory.

   23. EKEzra Klein31:50

       It's the, it's an age of the vibes. (laughs)

   24. DTDerek Thompson31:51

       It's the, it, it is the age of the vibe.

   25. EKEzra Klein31:52

       Yeah.

   26. DTDerek Thompson31:52

       Yeah, exactly. I'm trying to perform the live wire-

   27. EKEzra Klein31:54

       (laughs) You share the vibe.

   28. DTDerek Thompson31:54

       ... authenticity that I'm describing. But, but I, I do think that might begin to explain why you, Lex, might be picking up on a difference between the political vibes. An eagerness and a willingness on the one hand to have kind of unstructured and even chaotic conversations, and a care on the other side about not letting struc- con- conversations become too unstructured or too care less.

   29. EKEzra Klein32:16

       Can I build on that? I know we're supposed to talk about abundance, but I, I wanna talk about this. (laughs)

   30. DTDerek Thompson32:22

       (laughs)
5. 40:34 – 43:34

   Internal political divisions

   1. EKEzra Klein40:34

   2. DTDerek Thompson40:34

      Is there a degree to which the left, uh, uniquely attacks its own more intensely than, uh, maybe, uh, other parts of the political spectrum?

   3. It's possible. You know, you, you go back to the model that I gave you of 2015, where there used to be these four large parties: MAGA, center right, center left, and left. Right now, the Republican Party is all MAGA. So there is no coalitional fight to be had. It's all Donald Trump. And if Donald Trump wants to name a former left-wing environmentalist to be, be the HHS secretary, everyone says, "Okay. That sounds like a fantastic idea. That's exactly who we were gonna nominate too. Thank you, Donald."

   4. (laughs)

   5. "It's wonderful."

   6. Yeah.

   7. "Tip of my tongue."

   8. EKEzra Klein41:15

      (laughs)

   9. DTDerek Thompson41:15

      On the, on the Democratic side, there is a fight, and it's happening right now. And our book is trying to win a certain intra-left-

   10. EKEzra Klein41:27

       Mm-hmm.

   11. DTDerek Thompson41:27

       ...coalitional fight about defining the future of liberalism in the Democratic Party. So I'm not of the left. I'm certainly not of the far left. I have center left politics and maybe even, like, a center left personality style, if (laughs) we can even call it that. But I do not begrudge the left for fighting because there's a fight to be had. In many ways, I think sometimes they see... I'm not endorsing this. I'm, I'm, I'm describing it. I think they see their near-term opposition as not always the Republican Party, but as the forces in the Democratic Party that are in the way for them controlling one of the two major parties in this country. And so they do have an oppositional style, and maybe that's personality-based. They are fighting the center left. They are criticizing the center left consistency- consistently. But...I wanna be good faith about this, even though I don't share their politics and say that they're, they're doing it because they're trying to win power on the left of center. And so that's why they're criticizing the way they are. Now, our book, and much of my writing is an attempt to do a little bit of a, of, of a very specific dance. Ezra touched on this, I think, really beautifully. We're in an era right now of anti-institution politics, anti-establishment politics, and Democrats are at risk right now as being seen as the party that always defends institutions. The party that always defends the establishment status quo. And that is an absolute death knell, I think, for this century's angry anti-establishment politics. So what we're trying to do is essentially say, here's a way to channel the anger that people have at the establishment, but toward our own ends, right? We believe that we have answers on housing and energy, and high-quality governance and science and technology. Really good answers that are fiercely critical of the status quo in Democrat-led cities and Democrat-led states. Um, we're trying to be oppositional in a way, in a way that's constructive rather than just destructive.

6. 43:34 – 54:54

   AOC

   1. LFLex Fridman43:34

      Just to put a nice pretty bow tie on the whole thing. L- let me ask for advice. What do I need to do for AOC to do a three-hour interview with you?

   2. DTDerek Thompson43:46

      (laughs)

   3. LFLex Fridman43:46

      Ezra, from your throne of wisdom.

   4. EKEzra Klein43:48

      Uh, uh, that, I, I-

   5. LFLex Fridman43:49

      (laughs)

   6. EKEzra Klein43:49

      ... don't think I know how you get AOC herself to do it. Um, uh, I, uh, I would not, I would not pretend to know her offices or her particular views on this. I do think, though, that you can see different Democrats taking on different kinds of risks. Right now, we're sort of in the age of Gavin Newsom starting a pod... I mean, Gavin Newsom is the Governor of California, and he's spending some percentage of his time doing a podcast with Charlie Cook and Michael Savage and Steve Bannon. Gavin Newsom realizes that one lane for a, a Democrat is to be high-risk and talking to virtually everybody. I think Pete Buttigieg, in a different way, is somebody who wants to take, uh, media risks. Now, I think he's gonna... My gut on him is he's gonna hold his powder a little bit. So he'll probably wanna do the Lex Fridman podcast, assuming he runs in 2028, in 2027.

   7. LFLex Fridman44:39

      Buttigieg?

   8. EKEzra Klein44:40

      Buttigieg, right. I think a lot of them are trying to figure out what is the lane for right now, and there's a lane for the next two years, and there's a line for the two years after that. And you're gonna see a lot of people begin to blanket media in the two years after that. Now, it'd be interesting, I would be curious too, would Hakeem Jeffries come on and do your show right now? That'd be interesting. I mean, would he do it for four hours? I don't know. Uh, the, the four-hour ask, the three to four-hour ask-

   9. LFLex Fridman45:03

      Mm-hmm.

   10. EKEzra Klein45:03

       ... as somebody who also books politicians, is hard. I have trouble... I like to book people for 90 minutes to two hours, and I tend to nego- be, get negotiated down to... I try not to go under 75 or 65. But even as somebody, I think, well-regarded in that world, you know, it's very, very, very hard for me to get politicians to sit for two hours.

   11. LFLex Fridman45:23

       I don't have the sense that the three-hour ask is a big ask because of scheduling. I think they, it still is grounded in the fear of saying the wrong thing.

   12. EKEzra Klein45:32

       I just think they're used to something else, right?

   13. LFLex Fridman45:34

       Used to stuff.

   14. EKEzra Klein45:34

       I think that when you talk... I mean, they are scheduled by schedulers, right? If you talk to them yourself, if you end up having a personal relationship with Wes Moore of Maryland-

   15. LFLex Fridman45:42

       Mm-hmm.

   16. EKEzra Klein45:43

       ... and he wants to do your show. He will tell his scheduler, "I want-"

   17. LFLex Fridman45:47

       Okay.

   18. EKEzra Klein45:47

       "... three to four hours to do the show."

   19. LFLex Fridman45:48

       Yeah.

   20. EKEzra Klein45:49

       But the scheduler is used to a world, the staff is used to a world where nobody gets three to four hours with the boss.

   21. LFLex Fridman45:54

       Yeah.

   22. EKEzra Klein45:54

       Reporters don't, donors don't-

   23. LFLex Fridman45:56

       Yeah.

   24. EKEzra Klein45:57

       ... policy staffers don't. So then when some interview comes in and they say, "Hey, I want three to four hours," the j- the answer is "No," because culturally, it's not done. You need Donald Trump himself, uh, Pete Buttigieg himself, AOC herself to say to their staff, "No, no, no. We're making time for this."

   25. LFLex Fridman46:15

       Right.

   26. EKEzra Klein46:15

       Because it's not how they make time for things normally. I don't know how much it is fear. I do think they're unused to it, but I suspect a lot of it is simply booking culture. Uh, like I run into it too. They're not used to saying yes to three to four hours for anything. It's not that they don't have it. They have three to four hours if their kid is having a graduation, right? I mean, they're human beings. They can make time. But, um, but it would have to come in a way from them. My sense is, this is part of the, the Rogan... Uh, it's very unclear because there are very differing stories on what happened in the Rogan-Harris negotiations. But it does seem that time was one of the, the sticking points.

   27. DTDerek Thompson46:48

       It's also possible that you're gonna find, as you try to interview Democratic politicians, that the exact same thing that happened with tech CEOs is gonna happen among Dem-

   28. EKEzra Klein46:56

       Yeah.

   29. DTDerek Thompson46:56

       ... Democratic politicians. You interviewed some tech CEOs, and then they did a great job. And their friends were like, "You were fantastic on the Lex Fridman podcast. That was such a great thing that you said in, you know, minute 97." And then there becomes a bit of a meme that you can create really high-value moments for yourself if you appear on Lex's podcast. And then it becomes less risky-

   30. LFLex Fridman47:16

       Yeah.
7. 54:54 – 1:06:37

   Political realignment

   1. EKEzra Klein54:54

      Uh, one thing that we think is that we're in a period of realignment. Uh, the last chapter of the book, we talk about an idea that is picked up from a historian named Gary Gerstle, which is, uh, idea of political orders. And political orders are periods that have a sort of structure of consensus and a structure of a zone of conflict, but it's more or less agreed on by the two sides, even if only tacitly. So you have a New Deal order. New Deal order is founded by FDR. It is entrenched when Dwight Eisenhower accepts the New Deal as part of the, the US proving that it can treat workers better than the Soviet Union. So those are sort of right there the three, uh, the three ingredients typically of an order. You have a party that starts it, a opposition party that accepts key premises, right? Dwight Eisenhower doesn't come in and say, "We're gonna roll back the whole New Deal." And it's often held in place by an external antagonist, in that case, the Soviet Union. You then, you have the, in the '70s, stagflation, the Vietnam War, a series of problems that the New Deal order no longer seems able to handle. So you have the rise of what he calls the, the neoliberal order. And the neoliberal order is if you're gonna choose a founder, it's gonna be Reagan on that one, right? It's much more about markets. It is very concerned with things like inflation. And it really is entrenched by Bill Clinton. You know, the era of big government is over. And partially, it's entrenched also by the fall of the Soviet Union, right? The fall of the Soviet Union is, like, this proof point that every, that the, the, the sort of capitalists were right, that markets are the way of the future, government does not know what it's doing. And, and that becomes, like, the governing set of assumptions. And so there are arguments about what the markets should be doing, right? You know, Obamacare is about creating sort of markets in health insurance, right? You can use markets for very progressive ends. Um, we wanna use markets for lots of progressive ends. But the neoliberal order basically collapses amidst a financial crisis and climate change, and China. And those are the three things that, that, that sort of Gerstle, but, but also separately we think kill it, which is the neoliberal order does not have an answer to the financial crisis, and it botches, in many ways, the answer to the financial crisis, puts too little demand into the economy, lets, um, uh, a sort of recession linger and a very slow recovery linger for too long. It doesn't know what to say really about climate change. Markets have made a lot of people rich by, you know, doing a lot of things that are very, very damaging for the environment, very damaging for the future of the human race potentially. And you have the rise of China. And the neoliberal order said, "You integrate China into the global economy. You bring them into the WTO. You trade with them. You help them build their industrial base. You help them pull their people out of poverty," which that part is good, "and they will become more like the West. They will liberalize. They will have a free press. They will... The, the m- the richer we make China, the more China's gonna become like us." And that proves totally wrong, right? China becomes more authoritarian over time. But it also sort of develops an industrial base. It becomes a, as it does not become more like us, becomes dangerous, you know, at least in our view, right? You don't wanna ever have a conflict with a, an- another country who you've outsourced your key industrial base to. And so you have this sort of fall of that order. And, and then again here, things that would have been ridiculous at one point in American politics then become possible. Bernie Sanders is one of them, right? The idea that you would have somebody, a self-described socialist running for president and coming anywhere near the Democratic nomination, that was unthinkable in 2004. And by 2016, it almost happened. And Donald Trump is another thing. Donald Trump runs, like, headlong into the failures of neoliberalism in the Republican Party. He runs against trade. He runs against a sort of Paul Ryan, more open immigration. George W. Bush and John McCain were both very big on liberalizing immigration policy. Um, he runs against the Iraq War and, you know, sort of foreign adventurism, and there's a sort of isolationist instinct that co-exists very awkwardly now within a territorial expansionist instinct, but at least in 2016, it was more isolationist. And so Donald Trump and his sort of re-imagining of the Republican Party as a right-wing populist, uh, more like sort of some, uh, Christian Democratic Parties in other countries, you know, up in that quadrant of socially conservative, um, economically populist, uh, that, that becomes something that's possible. But nothing has found an equilibrium, right? Nobody's agreed to the other side's premises. There are certain ones that people are agreeing on. Both the Republican and Democratic Parties have very different view on China now, uh, right? Like, Biden kept a lot of Trump's, uh, policies on China and actually strengthened them, and now Trump is building on that aggressively again. Uh, but in terms of the other things, there isn't agreement about what the next period in American politics should look like. And that's one reason I think it's very dangerous, both as a, a question of media strategy, but also as a question of politics, to code people, places, platforms too tightly. Republicans and Democrats aren't gonna get along in Congress. That, that has to do with, I think, the incentives of Congress. My first book is called Why We're Polarized. It's about those almost hydraulic incentives for partisanship. But in terms of what is the meaning of my podcast, of Derek's, of yours, of Joe Rogan, of Theo Von, of Call Your Da- of Call Her Daddy, um, of a million different places that, uh, are, are not well-coded, it, that's, I think, very up for grabs. I mean, Elon Musk was an Obama-era liberal in 2012. I mean, I think his, his personal process of radicalization is not gonna unwind itself, but a lot of the people who Democrats are like, "All these billionaires are right-wing now," no, people are just uncertain. I mean, some of them are a little bit afraid, but people are uncertain. They're moving back and forth. The sort of texture of it is unsettled. And-... it's gonna take time. These transitionary periods, I mean, they can go very badly too. But they take time. And I think people who are clinging to old certainties about what tells you which side folks are on, my sense is a lot of people who are very open to MAGA in 2025 are gonna feel very differently about it in 2028. Depending on how they do, right? If they do great, then they're gonna entrench. But if they don't, then a lot of people who became MAGA-curious, uh, are not gonna be MAGA-cious anymore. But they're not gonna want the last Democratic Party either. I was making this point to someone the other day about, uh, why the Democratic Party's embrace of the Liz Cheney style independent didn't work. Um, Liz Cheney, of course, being o-, you know, Dick Cheney's daughter, a Republican. But, but what, what Liz Cheney, the Never Trumpers were, were a way of reaching out to who the Democratic Party thought the independents were. But the key thing about an independent to a political party is not that they don't like the other party, it's that they're an independent because they also don't like your party. And so finding a bunch of people who are meant to be messengers to them about why they shouldn't like the other party, it's fine. But what you need to do is explain (laughs) why they should like your party. You need to have some message, you need to accept some fault, you need to think about what it was about you that drove them away. One of our, like, deep views about politics right now, and, and not politics, policy, the, the, the texture of the economy of the country, is that the last period in American politics, in the economy, was about demand. The fundamental problem coming out of the financial crisis was demand. We had too little demand in the economy. Behind that too little demand in the economy was this other thing that was building up, which was a cost of living crisis. Housing was getting super expensive. Healthcare, uh, uh, in certain ways, energy, but energy's more complicated in, in ways we can talk about. Elder care, childcare, higher education, right? This is a point, my wife is a journalist at the Atlantic, Annie Lowrey with Derek, and she wrote this piece on, in 2020, early 2020, right before the pandemic, that went very viral called The Affordability Crisis. And it sticks in my head 'cause she's writing at a time when people were saying, "The economy's great. Everything's great." Like, you looked at measures of consumer confidence in 2020, February of 2020, terrific. She's like, "So how come if the economy's so great, everybody I talk to is so upset?" And she's like, "Look, like, people are making more money than ever, but it's getting eaten up and eaten up and eaten up by these things they really need that keep getting more expensive, even as consumer goods get cheaper." Then the pandemic hits, the problem becomes COVID. But then you have inflation. And inflation moves the problem of the economy, the fundamental problem everybody's paying attention to from the demand side, how do we get more people at work, how do we get them to spend more money, to the supply side. We don't have enough, right? We have a constriction of semiconductors, of used cars, and then eventually everything, right? Everything is getting more expensive. And we do get, I mean, we'll see what happens with tariffs. We do get, you know, by 2024 the rate of inflation under control. But prices are still much higher, and now people are paying real attention to prices. And the affordability crisis, which again is a cost of living crisis, which had been growing for a very long time, is now at crisis levels. And it becomes the substance of politics. People, you know, you had all these Democrats saying, "I don't know what the problem is. Like, inflation has come down to whatever it was, three to 4% in 2024." And they're right about that, but one, the price level of everything remained high, but two, people were now like, "The fuck is housing so expensive for? Like, I'm never gonna be able to afford a home."

   2. LFLex Fridman1:04:11

      Mm-hmm.

   3. EKEzra Klein1:04:11

      Like, "My parents went to public university debt-free. I could never do that." And what we've done is fail, I mean, Democrats in this case, Republicans haven't done that great on it either, but in blue states, Democrats have failed on cost of living. The reason California, Illinois, New York are losing hundreds of thousands of people to Florida, Texas, Arizona, Colorado is that they've failed on cost of living. It is too expensive to live there. And the reason they failed at cost of living is supply. We, they did not make enough, they actually made it too hard in many cases to make enough of the things people needed. Some of those are straightforward, like we didn't let people build enough homes. Some of them are more like we've made it too expensive to build public infrastructure, like high speed rail or the 2nd Avenue subway. Some of it has to do, I think in the long run, with, with innovation and, and the relationship between Democrats and technology. But one of our views is that there are other things in politics that will matter too, but we are in a period where the cost of living, supply, affordability is the fundamental economic question. Donald Trump himself has said he won because of the price of groceries. He's got this very funny quote where he's like, "Nobody said..." I don't have a Donald Trump impression, but he's like, "Nobody ever used the word groceries in politics before I d- I did." Well, it'd be good if he then wasn't making it more expensive. But Democrats believe his weakness is cost of living. They're probably right. But they don't have a strength on it. And the key question our book is trying to refocus politics on is, how do we make more of what we need? How does government either organize itself or organize markets to create more of what we need? And how do we admit, as liberals, times when we've put the, we've made it so the government makes it too hard to make more of what we need? I'll say one last thing, and then it's a pretty long answer. I thought one of the most important things that has come out recently is a piece in Foreign Affairs by Brian Deese, who's a former, uh, head of Joe Biden's National Economics Council. And Deese helped negotiate every major bill Biden passed. It's a very straightforward piece about what it is Democrats have not done to make it possible to build at the level of their goals. And he says things like, "We should just remove federal funding from cities that have highly restrictive home zoning codes." He says, "We should have a goal for how much nuclear we build in the next 10 years. We should be trying to reach a goal of new nuclear capacity." It's a very, very important piece 'cause Deese is right at the center of Democratic policy. Instead of retrenching, he's like, "Okay, we didn't get there. What do we do now to make it possible to get to the place we promised you we can go?"

8. 1:06:37 – 1:13:47

   Supply-side progressivism

   1. EKEzra Klein1:06:37

   2. LFLex Fridman1:06:37

      And, uh, we should say that the book you've mentioned, which I've gotten a chance to read and I think it's incredible, highly recommend, it's called Abundance. I, uh...... think of it as a kind of manifesto for what the left would represent in, in the coming years. So I think people should read it, uh, from that angle. And both of you have been writing about this topic, sort of from different angles for a while. I think in, uh, '22, Derek, you wrote an article (laughs) uh, on this topic of abundance titled A Simple Plan to Solve All of America's Problems. And, uh, Ezra, you wrote an article in '21 on supply side progressivism titled The Economic Mistake the Left is, uh, Finally Confronting. And you just described, laid out this more progressive perspective on supply side economics that you're presenting in Abundance a- a- I was wondering if you could kinda give the, the broad high level explanation of this idea of supply side, uh, progressivism.

   3. DTDerek Thompson1:07:44

      Well, my piece about the abundance agenda, which I wrote in 2022, uh, started with me standing outside waiting for a COVID test. And this was a period where two years after the pandemic started, COVID tests were still being rationed, and it was like 21 degrees outside. And I was getting very, very frustrated about the fact that still we seem to have a scarcity of COVID tests. And as I'm sitting outside just, you know, freezing my ass off and just getting really mad, I'm thinking, "You know, it's not just COVID tests we've had scarcity of. We also had a scarcity of COVID vaccines early on in the rollout, which created this really discombobulated scheme for distributing the early COVID vaccines." And then also you go earlier into March and May of 2020, and we had a shortage of PPE equipment for our doctors to remain safe as they were taking care of a pandemic. And I thought, "You know, it's interesting that this entire experience of the pandemic has essentially been defined by this concept of scarcity." And as I zoomed out a little bit, I thought, "You know, it's not just the pandemic. It's really so much the 21st century economy that's been defined by scarcity." Ezra beautifully described the degree to which housing unaffordability has become the economic problem of our time. You know, in the history of political orders, each political order is in part defined by the internal crisis. The Great Depression springs new neoliberalism. Stagflation springs neoliberalism. Now we're in this molten moment where we're waiting for the new political order to emerge, and it's going to emerge because of the lever, because of the power of housing affordability. You have to solve that problem if you wanna solve the problem of American anger about prices. And part of this is just pure arithmetic. If you look at any family's budget, the biggest part of their budget in any given year is the part that goes to rent or mortgage. It's housing, housing, housing, and housing connects to everything else. It connects to innovation. You want cities to agglomerate, to bring smart people together. Housing relates to all sorts of (laughs) other affordability. Like, if you care about the cost of childcare or eldercare, you wanna make it cheaper to house institutions, buildings that can care for children, which means you wanna bring those rents down. And so I thought as I'm zooming out on this concept of scarcity in the 21st century, we have chosen to make housing scarce. In some of the most productive cities and states often run by Democrats, we have rules, zoning rules, historic preservation rules, permitting processes, environmental reviews, laws that we created that have gotten in the way of making abundant the most important material good there is, which is housing. And as I kept sort of working myself into a lather and getting mad about the world, I thought, "You know, it's actually not just housing. It's, it's clean energy too." You know, there's lots of environmentalists who are on my side and believing very fervently in climate change, who've made it very difficult to cite solar panels or cite solar farms, or to raise wind turbines, or to advance geothermal, or to accept nuclear power. We have chosen to make clean energy scarce as well. And then finally, the ultimate boss of scarcity was the pandemic itself, which constricted the sup- the supply of all sorts of goods around the world, setting the price of everything to the moon. And that's why inflation wasn't just an American phenomenon, not just a North American phenomenon, it was a global phenomenon. And I thought, "What we need to solve for this crisis of penumbral scarcity is an abundance agenda, an approach towards solving America's problems that puts abundance first." And Ezra and I have a very focused definition of abundance. We believe, we say in the first page of the book, um, uh, America needs to build and invent more of the things it needs. Um, we believe that housing is critical. We believe energy is critical. We talk a lot about science and technology, but we really put government effectiveness at the heart of this. Because one really deep vein of our book is a criticism of where liberalism has gone wrong in the last 50 years, where liberalism has gone from, in the New Deal era, a politics of building things. I mean, FDR and the progressives transformed the physical world, not just with infrastructure projects, but with building roads, the highway system under Dwight Eisenhower. We changed the physical world during the decades, the 1930s to the 1950s. But in the last half century, liberalism has become very good at the politics of blocking rather than the politics of building. And if you look at the way that liberals define success in the last few decades, it's often about success defined by how much money you can spend rather than how much money... uh, rather than how many things you can actually build. I mean, you look at the fact that, for example, in the book, we have so many examples. Uh, California authorizes more than $30 billion to build a high-speed rail system, which basically doesn't exist. I mean, just last week, the mayor of Chicago bragged that they spent $11 billion building 10,000 affordable housing units. That's $1.1 million per affordable housing unit. That's absolutely pathetic. We have a story in the book about a $1.7 million public toilet built in San Francisco, $1.7 million for a toilet because of all of the rules that get in the way and raise the price of building...... public infrastructure like public bathrooms in San Francisco and California. So liberalism, I- I- I'm worried over the last 50 years has become so good at the politics of blocking, and the politics of associating the money authorized as success rather than what you build in the physical world, that we've lost sense of material abundance, of how importance- how important outcomes are, and not just processes. And so this is a book that's trying to nudge the Democratic Party back to what we think are, i- in a way, historically its roots, thinking about what Americans need and making it easier for government to act efficiently to provide them, and that really does, I think, begin with housing and energy.

9. 1:13:47 – 1:23:54

   Wealth redistribution

   1. DTDerek Thompson1:13:47

   2. LFLex Fridman1:13:47

      Is there a tension between kind of, uh, the left, the progressive wealth redistribution kind of ideas with the idea of building that's primarily, uh, sort of getting out of the way and letting the market get the job done?

   3. EKEzra Klein1:14:08

      I'd say two things on that. So one, we think there's a real tension between equality, redistribution, and constricting the supply of specifically housing.

   4. LFLex Fridman1:14:18

      So housing, by the way, I- I would love to understand this, that's the, that's the big problem of our era-

   5. EKEzra Klein1:14:23

      Housing and, housing and energy I think are the two most significant that we focus on in the book, right? Housing and clean energy. We don't own enough housing, we don't own enough clean energy. I would add, uh, things to that, uh, public infrastructure. We don't really focus that much on education, but we could, uh, and we could talk about that. Um, immigration is probably there for me too, and we talk about that a little bit in the book. And we do talk a lot about how to pull innovation forward from the future. But when you ask about sort of redistribution, I really think this is an important point because... There's a great new paper by David Schleicher, and I'm so sorry because I'm forgetting his co-author. They're law professors, though. And they talk about the victory of gentry law. We used to have a law that was very dynamic when it came to property and land. It was very different than how things were in Britain. And over time, you know, sort of back half of the 20th century, we moved American law to be much more for what they call the gentry. We moved it much more towards protecting those who currently have things, right? And we do that through a million things, covenants and HOAs and all these sort of contracts we make people enter into so they can't even build on their own land. But one of the things that just happens when you constrict the supply of housing is that people who got in when the getting was good, you know, I mean, it's a classic story in New York, in LA, in, in SF, you know, you bought a place in 1977 for $220,000 and now it's worth $2.7 million and maybe you'll pass it on to your kids or you sell it, but the working class families can't afford to live there anymore, right? So that's not even a question of redistribution. Sometimes what you need in order to create the possibilities for opportunity and mobility is enough supply of the thing. At the same time, we don't think, like, that redistribution is the problem here. I'm pro-redistribution. I'm pro-more redistribution than we currently do. But to give one example of the way these can be great things that go together, Derek tells in the book at some great length, um, the story of Operation Warp Speed. And here you have in the mRNA vaccines, uh, technology that was critically funded by public money, specifically DARPA at different points, then, um, hastened, you'st know, after COVID, government through Operation Warp Speed under Donald Trump, you know, really tried to clear out regulatory cruft, move these things really fast. But the demand on the side of the public for having funded so much of this or having made so much possible was that when these vaccines hit, they were going to be free, maybe the most important medical advance of that entire era. And it wasn't gonna be like Ozempic, say, where it's, you know, $15,000 for a year of doses, right? It wasn't gonna be only available to the richest people at the beginning. We were gonna try to give it to everybody sorted by need to the best that we could, and it would be free. Now, you're not gonna do that with everything, right? There are places for the price signal to, to actually function and where it can function to then bring on more supply later, and, you know, there's all the Econ 101 stuff that we all know. But there are a lot of places where, uh, redistribution and supply increases go hand in hand. Another good example, I've done, over the course of my career, a huge amount of work on health insurance reform and universal healthcare. And let's say you got, you know, Bernie Sanders had become president in 2016 and had swept in a huge Democratic majority and they passed Bernie's Single Payer for All Plan, which was, by the way, much more expansive than any existing single payer plan in the world, right? It covered much more than Canada's or the UK's or anybody else. If you had done that, what you would've needed immediately was a huge supply increase in healthcare, because you would have had a huge demand increase. What happens if you make healthcare free? People are gonna use more of it. Um, if you make insurance much more widespread, people are gonna go to the doctor more often. Well, if you don't have enough doctors, you don't have enough nurses, you don't have enough surgeons, you need more. We constrict the supply of all those things using residency rules, using, um, you know, nursing rules, immigration rules, who can practice as a nurse practitioner, what can a nurse practitioner actually do. You have to be attentive to the supply side even if what you're doing is aggressive redistribution. Now, there are places where these things don't conflict. Like, I'd like to see a much expanded child tax credit and I don't think that has, like, I don't think that has a big supply side implication one way or the other. But on a lot of the things we're talking about, even if what you want to do, and it is often what we want to do, to do more redistribution, if you're redistributing some kind of thing that gives you access to a good or a service, you need to expand the good or the service. We do rental vouchers. Giving people rental vouchers in the San Francisco housing market, unless you build more housing, just creates something that o- our friends at the Niskanen Center call cost disease socialism, where you are increasing demand for a good at which you've constricted supply. If you do that, you're just gonna drive the price up. To some degree, that's at least part of the story of higher education. We give people Pell Grants, we give people all kinds of subsidies for higher ed, but we have not done nearly enough to increase supply or regulate, um, the way in which colleges just then pocket part of that money, and so they're building these fancy gyms and they're competing with each other, but they're not actually increasing, uh, the supply of slots. Uh, c- certainly not the level we want them to. So there's a lot here where I think it scrambles traditional categories. Uh, you cannot do effective redistribution in ways that we would like to see them done and many people on the left would like to see them done if you're not taking supply of the thing that you're subsidizing seriously.

Episode duration: 3:15:17