Ezra Klein: America At Its Breaking Point

Trevor Noah 0:00 Ezra Klein of The New York Times wields a lot of influence in some parts of Capitol Hill.

Speaker 0:04 If you want to talk policy, Ezra Klein is the man to call.

Ezra Klein 0:07 Ezra Klein, who believes that Biden has been a very good president, makes the case that he should bow out of this campaign.

Trevor Noah 0:14 He was on television urging Democrats, "Shut down the government."

Speaker 0:18 Ezra Klein says that Charlie Kirk was practicing politics the right way.

Ezra Klein 0:22 Journalism is dead. Legacy media is dead.

Speaker 0:25 We're living in a time when truth is under pressure, when misinformation and disinformation spreads faster than facts, and when journalism is being challenged in unprecedented ways.

Speaker 0:36 Ezra Klein is an author and columnist for The New York Times. He also writes about polarization in American politics, and he tackles a whole host of big issues in his podcast, The Ezra Klein Show. [upbeat music]

Trevor Noah 0:53 This is What Now? with Trevor Noah. [upbeat music]

Ezra Klein 1:10 We do our recording in a gray box, and like-

Trevor Noah 1:11 Yeah, yours has very-

Ezra Klein 1:12 Yeah, it's very similar to. Uh, my God, it seems like we should... I don't live my life in a gray box. It's not authentic to me. [laughs]

Trevor Noah 1:19 Do you think, do you think they chose that because it feels, um, like-

Ezra Klein 1:22 Oh, they chose that because that's the room in which we-

Trevor Noah 1:24 That's how they-

Ezra Klein 1:25 ... recorded, and there were no other rooms. There's not a, that's not a plan. [laughs] We'll see what happens over time, but moving to video was something that, that we pushed.

Trevor Noah 1:34 Oh, got it. Got it.

Ezra Klein 1:34 And so there hadn't been a build-out for that or anything.

Trevor Noah 1:36 I'm always torn about that. What do you, how do you feel about it?

Ezra Klein 1:38 Torn. I mean, it's a big-

Trevor Noah 1:40 Still

Ezra Klein 1:40 ... it's a big audience. It's a new audience. Um, I don't like having to think about how I look, and you know, the way in which things go viral is double-edged.

Trevor Noah 1:52 It's like, yeah.

Ezra Klein 1:53 Like, podcasts are an in-context medium.

Trevor Noah 1:54 Yeah.

Ezra Klein 1:55 And virality is an out-of-context-

Trevor Noah 1:56 Yeah

Ezra Klein 1:57 ... phenomenon.

Trevor Noah 1:57 No one, no one, no one clips a podcast.

Ezra Klein 2:00 Yes.

Trevor Noah 2:00 Like, no one.

Ezra Klein 2:01 Right. Yeah, an audio podcast.

Trevor Noah 2:01 No one clips an audio podc-

Ezra Klein 2:03 Yeah.

Trevor Noah 2:03 No one goes like, "Oh, this clip." Uh, I mean, you've, you've probably seen this over the years. When I was at The Daily Show, we'd always see how there'd be a scandal of a politician saying something, but it was only in audio.

Ezra Klein 2:13 Uh-huh.

Trevor Noah 2:13 Never really went anywhere.

Ezra Klein 2:15 Yeah.

Trevor Noah 2:15 That's why I always think Trump's, "Grab them by the pussy" never derailed him because he's not on camera saying it.

Ezra Klein 2:21 That's interesting. Yeah, I guess the only one that really worked was Mitt Romney's, like, 47%. That was audio, and it-

Trevor Noah 2:27 Which one was that one?

Ezra Klein 2:28 You remember he gave this

Ezra Klein 2:30 riff at a fundraiser. He's like, "Look, 47% of the country are takers."

Trevor Noah 2:33 Oh, no, I don't remember that. Yeah.

Ezra Klein 2:34 Oh, yeah, it was a big deal in 2012.

Trevor Noah 2:36 Oh, and that ended his-

Ezra Klein 2:37 It didn't end anyth- I mean, nothing ends anybody anymore. [laughs] But it was a big-

Trevor Noah 2:42 I mean, anymore-

Ezra Klein 2:42 But back then

Trevor Noah 2:43 ... it was a big deal. Yeah, back then there were enders.

Ezra Klein 2:44 Yeah. Mm-hmm. At least we thought there were. Maybe there never were.

Trevor Noah 2:47 Yeah. No, I think there were enders, and I think enders still exist, funny enough.

Ezra Klein 2:52 Well, we'll, we'll look for one today. [laughs]

Trevor Noah 2:54 No, I, I genuinely do.

Ezra Klein 2:54 See which of us doesn't make it out of this. [laughs]

Trevor Noah 2:55 I genuinely do. I think, I genuinely think there still are enders.

Ezra Klein 2:59 Yeah? What's a, what, what, what do you think would be one for one side or the other?

Trevor Noah 3:03 I think they exist for everyone except Donald Trump.

Ezra Klein 3:06 Yeah.

Trevor Noah 3:06 And I think it's because he's approached this whole thing in the same way that a wrestler does in that, like, the whole point is to be the foil. The whole point is to-

Ezra Klein 3:17 Yeah

Trevor Noah 3:17 ... you know what I mean? So it's like it's, it's, if somebody's playing the game by different rules, then the rules that we normally use don't apply to them.

Ezra Klein 3:28 Yeah.

Trevor Noah 3:29 So you go like, "Oh, that's how you get disqualified normally"?

Ezra Klein 3:31 Yeah.

Trevor Noah 3:31 He can't get disqualified like that-

Ezra Klein 3:32 It's the same

Trevor Noah 3:32 ... 'cause he's not playing the game by the same rules.

Ezra Klein 3:34 Yeah. For the Republican Party, the enders are all about Donald Trump.

Trevor Noah 3:37 Yeah.

Ezra Klein 3:37 Like, if J.D. Vance came out on a hot mic and said-

Trevor Noah 3:39 No.

Trevor Noah 3:40 Finished

Ezra Klein 3:40 ... "Look, man, we all know that-"

Trevor Noah 3:41 No

Ezra Klein 3:41 ... "Biden won the 2020 election. That was ridiculous, but we gotta say it for-"

Trevor Noah 3:44 Yeah.

Ezra Klein 3:45 You know, that'd be, that'd be an-

Trevor Noah 3:46 Yeah

Ezra Klein 3:46 ... ender for him.

Trevor Noah 3:48 He, he, he created something new, and s- and no one has figured out how to respond to the new that he created.

Ezra Klein 3:56 Yeah.

Trevor Noah 3:57 Do you know what I mean? Like, the, the, the mechanism that was set up to deal with the news wasn't... Like, in a weird way, I feel like the way we think of news is designed perfectly for how news was. It has a certain level of decorum, and then I think for Donald Trump, you have to cover him the way you cover wrestling and reality TV. Do you know what I mean?

Ezra Klein 4:21 Yes.

Trevor Noah 4:21 Like, those are not covered the same way.

Ezra Klein 4:23 Yes.

Trevor Noah 4:23 So i- it's not gonna be like a-

Ezra Klein 4:25 But the point of cover, I mean, the thing that the news doesn't know what to do about with Donald Trump, and we could talk about this on the thing, but-

Trevor Noah 4:31 Yeah, we could jump in. We're ready, right?

Speaker 4:33 Yeah.

Trevor Noah 4:33 Yeah. There's, we can go, jump straight in. Jump, jump straight in.

Ezra Klein 4:36 Uh, I'm, I'm following you, man.

Trevor Noah 4:37 No, no, no.

Ezra Klein 4:38 Or you just want me to give you that answer?

Trevor Noah 4:39 I, I want you to give me that answer.

Ezra Klein 4:40 All right.

Trevor Noah 4:40 That's a great, this is where the audience found us-

Ezra Klein 4:42 Okay

Trevor Noah 4:42 ... is in the middle of that answer, yeah.

Ezra Klein 4:43 All right. So the thing the news doesn't know how to deal with, with Trump, um, and never figured out was that the sort of implicit way the news worked was that the news covered things.

Trevor Noah 4:55 Yeah.

Ezra Klein 4:55 In covering it, it created the thing's importance, and then in covering it positively or negatively, it sent a signal to the country about whether or not, you know, this politician, if it was a political story, was good or bad. And when the news becomes, in one side of the country's narrative, the enemy, and so covering the

Ezra Klein 5:16 thing-

Trevor Noah 5:16 Yeah

Ezra Klein 5:16 ... negatively is in fact a badge of honor to that person.

Trevor Noah 5:20 Right.

Ezra Klein 5:21 It breaks the feedback loop that, you know, the, the media as a source of, um, judgment in American democracy was sort of built around. And yeah, it, it never figured out what to do after that. I'm not sure there is an answer either.

Trevor Noah 5:39 I, I, I don't think there is.

Ezra Klein 5:40 There aren't gatekeepers anymore in the way-

Trevor Noah 5:41 No, no, no

Ezra Klein 5:41 ... there once were.

Trevor Noah 5:41 They actually aren't.

Ezra Klein 5:42 At least not that speak to everybody.

Trevor Noah 5:43 They actually aren't. I mean-

Ezra Klein 5:44 Except you maybe.

Trevor Noah 5:45 No, uh, far from it, my friend. There is no gate. I don't have a key.

Ezra Klein 5:49 [laughs]

Trevor Noah 5:49 I don't know how the gate works. Um, you are, you are now in, in an interesting, an interesting and, and, and, um, complicated position now in, in the news in that, like, you know, you're with The New York Times But an opinion.

Ezra Klein 6:05 Mm-hmm.

Trevor Noah 6:05 You know, and I, I thought to myself, I was like, before we, before we get into the heavy topics, 'cause I mean, Ezra Klein, you deal with everything. I was like, uh, I was like, w- let's do something light. What is your opinion on what's happening in the world right now?

Ezra Klein 6:19 That's your light? [laughs]

Trevor Noah 6:23 [laughs]

Ezra Klein 6:23 I'm not for it.

Trevor Noah 6:25 [laughs]

Ezra Klein 6:25 Against. [laughs]

Trevor Noah 6:27 Oh, but no, no, okay. No, jokes aside, what, what would, w- like, when you wake up every day, and I, I, I love asking people who work in the news this question particularly because I find there's oftentimes a disconnect or, or rather just a different way that people are seeing it, people who work in the news and people who don't. People who work in the news are sometimes like people who work in, in an emergency room-

Ezra Klein 6:47 Mm-hmm

Trevor Noah 6:47 ... in that they have a very different idea of July 4th than the people who are out celebrating.

Ezra Klein 6:52 [laughs]

Trevor Noah 6:52 You get what I'm saying?

Ezra Klein 6:53 Yeah, I do.

Trevor Noah 6:53 Because they see the fire, the fire marks and the burns-

Ezra Klein 6:56 Yeah

Trevor Noah 6:56 ... that, that, that people come in with. And so I wonder, like, how you feel about this moment in time. Is it as bad as some people feel? You as somebody from the inside, do you feel like it is, you know, a DEFCON 1? 'Cause it goes backwards, right? It's like a DEFCON 1.

Ezra Klein 7:09 Yeah, I always forget which DEFCON you don't wanna be at.

Trevor Noah 7:11 Yeah, yeah. I think you wanna be the lowest-

Ezra Klein 7:12 We're at the one you don't wanna be at

Trevor Noah 7:13 ... we're at the, oh, okay, we're there.

Ezra Klein 7:15 I, I think [laughs] if you go back in my career, I'm usually somebody saying, "Calm down a little bit. Things, you know, there's a long sweep of history. Things have been much worse in the past. Go look at the '60s, constant political assassinations, violence in the streets." I think that we are, I think this is the worst political moment in terms of its danger and threat easily of my lifetime. Trump won, by the way, at least until the pandemic.

Trevor Noah 7:46 Yeah.

Ezra Klein 7:46 One of the things I always said was that George W. Bush was a much worse president, right? That he led to many more deaths than-

Trevor Noah 7:53 Right

Ezra Klein 7:53 ... um, the Iraq War and, uh, other, um, dimensions of his foreign policy, deformed American politics for a generation, created Donald Trump in certain ways by wrecking the Republican Party and making it a hollow shell Trump could take over. But we're in something different now.

Ezra Klein 8:08 When you have literally masked men abducting people off the street, when you have [laughs] military occupation of American cities, when you have the weaponization of the federal government against supposed enemies, the search for pretexts on which to fire people, on which to harass them-

Trevor Noah 8:28 Yeah

Ezra Klein 8:28 ... I don't, you don't need a PhD in history to know that those are the early chapters of history books that are not fun to read. Now, it doesn't mean it will go that badly, right? Uh, you know, the, the reali- the reality of reality is that talking about the future, you're always talking about probabilities.

Trevor Noah 8:48 Mm-hmm.

Ezra Klein 8:49 But, you know, if you, if I would've said at the beginning of this administration that, you know, 70/30, we stay in the part of the probability cloud that is relatively normal, right? 30% chance we don't, which is pretty bad.

Trevor Noah 9:05 Mm-hmm, mm-hmm, mm-hmm.

Ezra Klein 9:06 Now I think it's more 50/50 or worse.

Trevor Noah 9:09 It's funny, when I, when I first started at The Daily Show, I was thrust into this world of American politics, and it was politics the way it was.

Ezra Klein 9:18 Mm-hmm.

Trevor Noah 9:19 You know, everyone, everyone had, like, a, a concrete idea of how things were, you know. So I remember seeing some of the candidates come up, and then people in the building would tell me, they'd be like, "Oh, no, Trevor, that, uh, that's" ... They, they call it, uh, the, what was it, summer madness, or it was, it had, like, a name in, in, in the media world, you know, where people go like, "Those candidates don't count. They're not gonna be around."

Ezra Klein 9:37 Mm-hmm.

Trevor Noah 9:38 A silly summer, I think, is what they said. Yeah, they said silly summer. So all of these people you see popping up, they're not Ben Carson, Donald Trump, all of that. That's not gonna be a thing. Because everyone was so sure they knew how America worked. And I would say from 2016 onwards, the one thing I've realized is more than ever, I've seen Americans go, "I, I, I, I don't know. I,

Trevor Noah 9:59 I, I don't know how this country actually works now. I don't ..." You know, there used to be, like, a fixed idea about how it worked, and now that, that seems to be gone.

Ezra Klein 10:07 I mean, we were talking about this before the camera turned on, but people thought they understood what the rules of politics were-

Trevor Noah 10:14 Yeah

Ezra Klein 10:15 ... and what kinds of political moves, comments, decisions would be functionally disqualifying, what was a level beneath which the American people would not let you go. And that was a, a form of American exceptionalism, internalized American exceptionalism. These terrible things have happened in other places, but we're America. They're not gonna happen here. We have this political culture, this civic culture, uh, this fundamental understanding of how we're supposed to treat one another.

Trevor Noah 10:46 Mm-hmm.

Ezra Klein 10:47 And I think that to the extent many people who used to feel certainty around that have become a bit unmoored, it's the recognition of a bottomlessness. Trump has not found the bottom. There is not a thing he has done, except maybe support, uh, vaccinations for COVID [laughs] that he has not been able to persuade his own base to tolerate.

Trevor Noah 11:08 Mm-hmm.

Ezra Klein 11:09 You know, maybe the Epstein files. Um, but it is in fact the thing that, uh, made so many people initially think Trump would be disqualified, not by some, you know, rule maker somewhere-

Trevor Noah 11:22 Yeah, yeah

Ezra Klein 11:22 ... but by the voters. The cruelty, the outrageousness, the sort of gleeful destruction of, um, what I would say are things that maintained basic civic bonds that actually makes him appealing to many people. And once that got understood, right? In, in fact, forget, like, the people on the left who used to think they knew how American politics worked. Think about the people on the right. Go read, you know, J.D. Vance's Hillbilly Elegy-

Trevor Noah 11:51 Oh, yeah. I mean, come on

Ezra Klein 11:52 ... and, like, check out the things that Vance was saying on podcasts about virtue in public life and the way we treat each other-

Trevor Noah 12:00 Mm-hmm

Ezra Klein 12:00 ... after that, in that period, right? I mean, there, y- and look at the personality transplants of Ted Cruz, of Elise Stefanik, of Vance, of ... Once people understood That it was not only, but quite substantially the worst parts of Donald Trump that accounted

Ezra Klein 12:20 for his appeal. It wasn't all that people thought he was a businessman from watching The Apprentice. That really altered things. And then when he was able to not just go through the first

Ezra Klein 12:30 term, but box out and, but box out every other Republican after losing re-election.

Trevor Noah 12:36 That was just almost unheard of, by the way.

Ezra Klein 12:38 Almost unheard of.

Trevor Noah 12:39 Yeah.

Ezra Klein 12:40 So then there was no pathway to power except his favor on the right. And so the complete demolition of the idea that this will ever snap back, or at least anytime soon, that we're just in an aberrant moment from a sort of unusual reality TV superstar.

Trevor Noah 13:00 Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Ezra Klein 13:00 Like, that's over, and that's the end of the surety, right? Both on the left and the right. Everybody understands we're in a different game now. Or if they don't, which actually to be fair, I think a lot of Democratic Party politicians don't, they're dinosaurs, right? They're, they're gonna get, they're gonna go extinct.

Trevor Noah 13:18 One of the biggest reasons I wanted to-

Ezra Klein 13:19 Hope you didn't bring me here for optimism. [laughs]

Trevor Noah 13:21 Oh, no, we're gonna find optimism.

Ezra Klein 13:22 [laughs]

Trevor Noah 13:23 We're gonna find optimism, my friend. Um, I always think optimism, uh, is only defined by, you know, the time scale you use it.

Ezra Klein 13:30 That's fair, yeah.

Trevor Noah 13:31 Yeah. 100 years, things get a much better. Thousand years, million years, uh, did we even matter? Um-

Ezra Klein 13:38 The AIs are gonna love what we left them. [laughs]

Trevor Noah 13:41 [laughs] I like, I like the assumption that people think that the AIs will want the same things we want if they get as intelligent as they do, but we'll, we'll actually talk about AI because I, I, I loved your, your, your piece on it. I, I, I wanna, I wanna talk about you as Ezra Klein because, you know, there's a, there's a, um, there's a song in the musical Hamilton, right? I think it's Aaron Burr's character. Forgive me if I get any of these people wrong. I just remember the songs and I remembered liking it, and he has the song, The Room Where It Happens.

Ezra Klein 14:11 Uh-huh.

Trevor Noah 14:11 Right? And all he's singing about in the song is he goes, "I just wanna be in the room where it happens, where the rules are written, where the Constitution is made-

Ezra Klein 14:21 Uh-huh

Trevor Noah 14:21 ... where countries are defined, where, where..." He's like, I don't even... He-- It's an interesting song because it's a person saying, "I don't even care to necessarily do it. I don't necessarily care to be remembered for it, but man, I wanna be in that room where it happens." And all I could think about for this episode was, that's Ezra Klein.

Ezra Klein 14:42 That I just want to be in the room where it happens?

Trevor Noah 14:43 No, no, no, that you are in the room where it happens, not that you want to be, because I, I went look at this Venn diagram, right?

Ezra Klein 14:48 Uh-huh.

Trevor Noah 14:48 Right? For anyone who's, like, tuning in going like, "Okay, well, Trevor, what's your fascination with Ezra Klein?" I go, "Okay, how about this?" Here's somebody who is in the epicenter of news in many ways, you know? You, you've got Vox, which I was a big fan of. Helped me a lot on The Daily Show, by the way. We gotta talk about that. Um, you got Vox,

Trevor Noah 15:05 that, that reshaped how many people saw news, especially young people. Now working at The New York Times, you know, curating, shaping the opinion section, working on the podcast, y- you know, like, doing journalistic work that sort of like branches out what The New York Times does. So you've got the news element, journalism. Then you've got the writing, the, the investigating, the campaigning for certain ideas in the world, so, like, shaping what the world is thinking. Then you've got another, another little circle, and that is the politics itself. The amount of times I've heard a person who is either a Democrat in power or somebody who's adjacent to them saying, "Well, we're gonna reach out to Ezra Klein," or, "Ezra Klein hopefully will in some way, shape, or form," your name is there, and I was like, wow, the politicians are even looking to this guy. And then you're in, like, this world. I see you on podcasts. I see you talking to, like, everyday people. I go, "This is the perfect Venn diagram of the room where it happens." Do you feel like that about yourself?

Ezra Klein 16:05 I, uh, no. Um-

Trevor Noah 16:07 No?

Ezra Klein 16:08 I've lost faith in there being a room where it happens.

Trevor Noah 16:10 Ah, Ezra, no, you can't be serious. Says the man in the room?

Ezra Klein 16:15 I think that one of my lessons of the past couple years is there's not a room. Look, man, everybody knew. Everybody knew Joe Biden was too old to run for president again.

Trevor Noah 16:29 Okay.

Ezra Klein 16:29 Everybody knew. Not that he was senile. He wasn't senile.

Trevor Noah 16:32 Yeah.

Ezra Klein 16:33 But they knew. And there was no roo-- Not only was there no room, [laughs] the people in the room were not in a position where they could even say it.

Trevor Noah 16:49 Hmm.

Ezra Klein 16:50 And it, uh, the point is not that, that I have some great perspective on any of this. The point is that I-- One of the things I find frightening about this period, for all that I was talking about earlier, is the feeling that, you know, I am, at my core, a reporter. I talk to people, as you were saying.

Trevor Noah 17:10 Yeah.

Ezra Klein 17:10 Sometimes they talk to me. And I think in a lot of these conversations, some part of me is like, "Are you the adult? Are you the person who knows what's going on here?"

Trevor Noah 17:19 Yeah.

Ezra Klein 17:20 And you come to realize that person isn't there or that set of people. There's nobody set in strategy for the Democratic Party right now, man. There are some people, in theory, in charge, but they are not. They're reactive. They're behind.

Trevor Noah 17:36 Right.

Ezra Klein 17:37 And it gives you a different-- Like, I see things as much less formed. I think when I was a reporter working in the Washington that had rules-

Trevor Noah 17:48 Mm-hmm, mm-hmm, mm-hmm

Ezra Klein 17:48 ... that you were talking about earlier, I believed much more, and I think it was actually truer, that there was a room where it happened.

Trevor Noah 17:55 Okay.

Ezra Klein 17:56 And I think those, I think that's not really how a lot of things work. It's, um, diffused across social media, for instance. The amount of elite communication that elites are doing with each other through social media vibes and through this tweet. I mean, Donald Trump is, of course, the epicenter of this.

Trevor Noah 18:12 Yeah.

Ezra Klein 18:13 How much of his not just governing, but his signal sending To the rest of the Republican Party, to the right to the country, is not going into a room where the stakeholders are assembled and, like, banging his fist on the table and giving them an answer. It's shooting out a tweet or a Truth Social post. What he is doing in all caps, they're all doing now.

Trevor Noah 18:37 But here's, here's the-

Ezra Klein 18:37 Yeah

Trevor Noah 18:37 ... here's the thing I think you may be missing, is oftentimes the people in the room don't know that they're in the room.

Ezra Klein 18:45 This metaphor is starting to stretch [laughs] .

Trevor Noah 18:47 No, think about it. This, this is what I mean, honestly. Right? We, we-

Ezra Klein 18:50 Yeah

Trevor Noah 18:50 ... call it the room where it happened, and we think about it like that because whatever happened has now had an effect on society. That's when that room has an importance. You, you with me?

Ezra Klein 18:59 Mm-hmm.

Trevor Noah 18:59 So when you think about that hotel room where, you know, it's, like, Harry Belafonte meeting with MLK-

Ezra Klein 19:04 Yeah

Trevor Noah 19:04 ... and meeting with ... Like, that room becomes

Trevor Noah 19:07 something because of what came from it. Before then, it's just a hotel room.

Ezra Klein 19:10 Yeah.

Trevor Noah 19:11 N- no one in that room walked in and went, "This is the room where it happens." Do you get what I'm saying?

Ezra Klein 19:16 I, I think-

Trevor Noah 19:16 And-

Ezra Klein 19:16 ... we're not saying something that different now.

Trevor Noah 19:17 Yeah, yeah. And so, so this is wh- this is what I'm saying fascinates me about you. And, and even you giving me that answer makes me more excited to talk to you about it because I go, that means to me you sort of, like, are approaching this with a degree of humility, which I'm, I'm, I'm honestly intrigued by. Because I go, some people would go, "Yeah, I'm that guy." You're going like, "No, no, there's, there's not even a room."

Ezra Klein 19:38 There's not a room. There's not a guy.

Trevor Noah 19:39 Okay.

Ezra Klein 19:40 [laughs]

Trevor Noah 19:40 So let's, let's, let's go on a journey together then.

Ezra Klein 19:42 Yeah.

Trevor Noah 19:42 Let's go on a journey. Let's, let's, let's, let's start this journey, because I wanna, I wanna build all these pieces together.

Ezra Klein 19:46 Uh-huh.

Trevor Noah 19:46 All right? You got Ezra Klein who gets into, um ... Campaigning was really, like, your first foray into the world of politics, right? Uh, like, like campaigning for-

Ezra Klein 19:57 No, man, I'm a blogger.

Trevor Noah 19:58 No, no, but before. Like, weren't you-

Ezra Klein 19:59 No, never before that. Um

Trevor Noah 20:00 ... uh, weren't you with, um ...

Ezra Klein 20:02 Dean?

Trevor Noah 20:03 Yes.

Ezra Klein 20:03 That was after I was a blogger.

Trevor Noah 20:04 Oh, so this is-

Ezra Klein 20:05 I got picked up by the Dean campaign-

Trevor Noah 20:06 So you were blogging first

Ezra Klein 20:07 ... because Joe Trippi, the campaign manager on the Dean campaign, read my Blogspot blog that I started as a 18-year-old college student and had 35 hits on my site, my chart, my site meter, I think it was called back then, my traffic meter-

Trevor Noah 20:19 That is wild

Ezra Klein 20:19 ... a day, and one of them turned out to be Joe Trippi. And so at some point he invited me to intern on the Dean campaign.

Trevor Noah 20:25 What was it, what was it about your writing that got somebody who was running a presidential campaign to say, "Yo, this kid"

Ezra Klein 20:31 It was, it was something very specific actually. Uh, I had read, the book that as much as any book did got me into politics.

Trevor Noah 20:37 Yeah.

Ezra Klein 20:37 The great- the single greatest piece of campaign journalism ever produced, this is, every political journalist will tell you this, is Richard Ben Cramer's account of the 1988 presidential election-

Trevor Noah 20:47 Okay

Ezra Klein 20:48 ... called What It Takes. And What It Takes, one of the ... It, it follows a bunch of the candidates that year. And as a college student reading this, I got sort of into Gary Hart, who's this very fascinating, he was very farsighted, way ahead on a lot of things, but is very tame by modern standards [laughs] .

Trevor Noah 21:05 [laughs]

Ezra Klein 21:05 Very tame. Um-

Trevor Noah 21:06 The good old days of monkey business

Ezra Klein 21:08 ... in, in 2003 or 2004, I forget what year we're, uh, this is all happening exactly, but Gary Hart, who has been out of politics for a long time, is considering running for president again.

Trevor Noah 21:19 Mm-hmm.

Ezra Klein 21:20 And as a weird What It Takes obsessive, on my little Blogspot blog, I am a Gary Hart stan. Joe Trippi had worked on Hart's '88 campaign. I'm pretty sure that's the one he was on. And so Hart, I'm sorry, Trippi, I think was somewhat fascinated, uh, to see this, like, college student blogging in support of his one-time employer. I mean, also the blogosphere was small then.

Trevor Noah 21:49 Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Ezra Klein 21:49 And the Dean campaign was the first campaign to take blogs seriously. And so Trippi kept more tabs on the blogosphere than other people would have.

Trevor Noah 21:57 They were ahead of the curve.

Ezra Klein 21:58 Yeah, they were ahead of the curve very much.

Trevor Noah 21:59 'Cause, I mean, like, blogs then are basically the, the, the inception of the idea of podcasts

Trevor Noah 22:03 now. If you look at each election-

Ezra Klein 22:05 Uh-huh

Trevor Noah 22:05 ... there's a new type of media that-

Ezra Klein 22:06 Yeah

Trevor Noah 22:07 ... sort of has its imprint on them.

Ezra Klein 22:08 Uh-huh.

Trevor Noah 22:09 And blogs are, you know, this is like-

Ezra Klein 22:10 Yeah, blogs were one of that world

Trevor Noah 22:10 ... the fledgling world of blogs.

Ezra Klein 22:12 So that's I think how Trippi ends up being kind of fascinated by me.

Trevor Noah 22:15 And you get called in, and you interning on this campaign. What was it like? I mean, for those who don't know, like, Howard Dean was basically, he's, like, the favorite. This was, like-

Ezra Klein 22:25 No. He was never a favorite.

Trevor Noah 22:25 No, no, no. But there was a moment where it was like, this is the guy. He's gonna do it.

Ezra Klein 22:28 Oh, in the primary.

Trevor Noah 22:28 Yeah, in the primary.

Ezra Klein 22:29 Yeah.

Trevor Noah 22:29 They're like, "Oh man, this guy's gonna do it."

Ezra Klein 22:30 Yeah.

Trevor Noah 22:30 "This guy's gonna do it." And then I still don't fully understand the story. He went, "Oh, yeah," like the Kool-Aid Man or something, and then it all ended?

Ezra Klein 22:40 So, uh, I don't think it was, "Oh, yeah." Um, I love the ... I was an intern on the campaign-

Trevor Noah 22:45 Yeah

Ezra Klein 22:45 ... for, like, four to six weeks over a summer. And my learning from that was I never wanted to be on a campaign again.

Trevor Noah 22:51 Why?

Ezra Klein 22:52 I just don't want to have to defend everything a politician says. I don't want my judgment to be subsumed to theirs. I just didn't like that part of being on a campaign. I could see what it meant when you would rise up, because I did, I thought I wanted to work in politics.

Trevor Noah 23:06 Okay.

Ezra Klein 23:07 And I realized that I would not be good at working in politics because, you know, my views would differ, and that's not what you can have as staff. And, um, but Dean, and I'm worried I'm gonna get some, uh, details here wrong by memory, but, but Dean loses Iowa. That was the thing, that the, the, the Democratic Party, and it would end up doing the same thing at later dates, right?

Trevor Noah 23:26 Mm-hmm.

Ezra Klein 23:27 Like 2022.

Trevor Noah 23:27 Mm-hmm.

Ezra Klein 23:28 The Democratic Party very much wanted to beat George W. Bush that year, and Dean had developed a lot of grassroots momentum, but there was a fear that he was unelectable. And the party sort of fled to safety of John Kerry-

Trevor Noah 23:44 Mm

Ezra Klein 23:44 ... the, the war hero, the known quantity. And, um, you know, and then as soon as, like, Dean's momentum blunted, then there was this kind of flight. Um, and so Kerry becomes the nominee. You could see a very similar thing happen in a way with Biden, where, you know, Bernie Sanders is, has much more grassroots momentum, much more, you know, uh, excitement within the base. Um, Biden is struggling, right? He's not doing well. He doesn't ... I mean, Buttigieg wins Iowa, not Biden. Um, but then it's like after South Carolina and Biden wins that, there's a kind of flight to the safety of Joe Biden.

Trevor Noah 24:21 Yeah.

Ezra Klein 24:21 Which was sort of maybe a good idea for that election, not a good idea in the long run. Um- You know, the Democratic Party tries to make safe strategic decisions when it's really afraid of losing. And so I think you saw that in those two elections, which is slightly separate from the question you asked me, but is where my mind went.

Trevor Noah 24:38 No. You see, I, I love it because remember, I'm building a case here.

Ezra Klein 24:41 Uh-huh.

Trevor Noah 24:41 The Room Where It Happens. Because just in that story for me alone, you're in a moment in time that I think goes on to define something. One part is maybe myth and the way stories are told.

Ezra Klein 24:55 Mm-hmm.

Trevor Noah 24:55 Right? Because many of the people that I've spoken to and still speak to now in, in journalism or po- political circles, they'll say, "No, it was the Howard Dean Yelp."

Ezra Klein 25:03 Ah.

Trevor Noah 25:03 "That's what got him." And, and what sticks to me or what, what sticks out in, in, in people bringing that up is that it created this idea that you had to be perceived a certain way in order to win an election, right? So many people took the cautionary tale away from the story. They didn't talk about not winning Iowa. They said, "No, you have to be prim, you have to be proper, you have to make sure everything you do is right, because if you scream or yelp in the wrong way, it's over for you."

Ezra Klein 25:32 Mm-hmm.

Trevor Noah 25:32 And this sort of persists for a very long time in American politics. You know, they're like, "Are you electable? Forget your politics. Do you just, you know, do you have that electability?"

Ezra Klein 25:41 To say again, I really hope I'm remembering it right that it's Iowa he lost in, not New Hampshire.

Trevor Noah 25:45 Oh, no. We'll, we'll, we'll-

Ezra Klein 25:45 Just have not fact-checked this in real time.

Trevor Noah 25:47 Yeah, we'll-

Ezra Klein 25:47 It's been a long time since I thought about it before. [laughs]

Trevor Noah 25:49 It's fine. We'll, we'll, we'll throw this thing, we'll put it up on screen.

Ezra Klein 25:51 Yeah, great.

Trevor Noah 25:51 It's fine. We, we've got technology now. This is like-

Ezra Klein 25:53 Do we?

Trevor Noah 25:53 Yeah, we can, we could just throw the thing up. We'll, or we'll just put up liar on your face.

Ezra Klein 25:56 Just ask ChatGPT.

Trevor Noah 25:57 As you say it, we'll just-

Ezra Klein 25:57 Just put up liar on my face. [laughs]

Trevor Noah 25:58 We'll just like a, bam, bam, bam, liar.

Trevor Noah 26:00 Bam, bam, bam, liar.

Ezra Klein 26:01 Yeah, you got me.

Trevor Noah 26:01 And then we just carry on with the episode.

Ezra Klein 26:02 Perfect. Good.

Trevor Noah 26:03 Yeah. That's, that's all it is. No, so okay, you, you, so you work in this world. You realize you don't want to work in politics because you don't want to toe a line, and so you get dragged into journalism, right? Like this, you get pulled into this world of journalism.

Ezra Klein 26:17 I'll check. I'm blogging, and people around me begin realizing I'm to become a journalist-

Trevor Noah 26:20 Yeah

Ezra Klein 26:21 ... way before I do, right? They're like-

Trevor Noah 26:22 What, yeah, but what is it about... I wanna know, like, what they saw in you that you didn't see and, and what still keeps you going in that world today because you're very good at it. That's the thing.

Ezra Klein 26:32 You know, so blogging, which nobody went into at that time to build a career, didn't, nobody knew what that word was, right? It was a thing that a lot of us were just doing 'cause we wanted to write about politics on the internet.

Trevor Noah 26:42 Yeah.

Ezra Klein 26:42 It was like no different than writing in a forum or, and we didn't have social media back then in the way we do now. So, you know, I'd started a small Blogspot blog and then Typepad to, to the kids out there. These are, uh, blogging, [laughs] publishing softwares. And, you know, it just kinda kept getting bigger. I, you know, was part of a co-blogger team called Pentagon-

Trevor Noah 27:04 Mm-hmm

Ezra Klein 27:04 ... and then Not Geniuses was another one I was on, and it just kinda kept building, and then, you know, it went from dozens of people a day to hundreds to thousands. It was never huge by, you know, podcast or YouTube or anything standards. But, um, but it was enough to get a little bit noticed by a media industry that was trying to figure out, what is this blogging thing, and how do we get some of its energy for ourselves? And so the next year, I, um, intern at The Washington Monthly, which is a small policy magazine, and you know, that's the first time I'm around journalism. And in terms of, you know, what did other people see in me, I think one thing other people saw that I didn't was that journalism is a career. Uh, it's not like I grew up the kid of a bunch of journalists. I lived in Southern California. I didn't know anybody who did that professionally.

Trevor Noah 27:56 Which is rare for a lot of journalists, by the way.

Ezra Klein 27:58 Yeah, whatever it is, like-

Trevor Noah 28:00 Like a lot of people who are like, "Oh, you're my uncle."

Ezra Klein 28:00 Yeah, exactly.

Trevor Noah 28:01 Or my grandfather.

Ezra Klein 28:01 There's some, it, there's more of that than you would think, actually.

Trevor Noah 28:02 Oftentimes it's, yeah, it's a passed down-

Ezra Klein 28:04 Um, or you're just in more of a milieu where it exists.

Trevor Noah 28:07 Yeah.

Ezra Klein 28:08 Um, and I... So I just had never really thought about it. Um, I, I don't have like a much better, like I sort of assumed that, uh, for a long time that I assumed I would work in politics, and then that wasn't gonna be true, and, you know, maybe I'd go to law school, but I didn't want to be a lawyer-

Trevor Noah 28:25 Mm-hmm

Ezra Klein 28:25 ... which seemed like a problem with that plan. And, um, you know, so then I went and interned at The Monthly. I just loved it and loved, um, just being around journalism, and I mean, the idea, it is still a kind of magic as a journalist that you can call just people who know everything about something, and they will out of nowhere take an hour out of their day to explain it to you, right? You can just, like, how does the Federal Reserve work, right? Just like the idea that you could just follow curiosity around like that is remarkable. Um, I still have not lo- I mean, my whole podcast is you just bring people on, you're like, "I could just ask you all these questions-

Trevor Noah 29:06 Yeah, yeah

Ezra Klein 29:06 ... and you'll answer them?" In a way that it would be really weird to do if you were at a party or in social life. I've a couple of times had friends on my show, you know, people I've known a long time.

Trevor Noah 29:16 Yeah.

Ezra Klein 29:17 And I just noticed that I ask them questions there that in the whole long arc of our relationship I've never asked because you don't typically say to people, "Why do you do what you do?"

Trevor Noah 29:27 Mm-hmm.

Ezra Klein 29:27 "What have you learned in it?" You know? What about this kind of very basic question about it? Not, you're so often trying to show people you understand them and you're keeping up with their stories. You don't just sit there and indulge your

Ezra Klein 29:37 curiosity-

Trevor Noah 29:37 Right

Ezra Klein 29:37 ... for two hours.

Trevor Noah 29:38 Yeah.

Ezra Klein 29:39 You know, so the next year I sort of apply for a writing fellowship at The American Prospect and g- get that, and, you know, that's sort of like almost a glorified internship there. Um, and you know, then, then we're off to the races.

Trevor Noah 29:51 Those races involve Vox. I have a, I have a deep personal fascination with Vox because for a few reasons. One, I was starting at The Daily Show. It's 2015 into 2016. First Jon was still the host, and I was popping in and doing segments. 2016, I become the host of The Daily Show, you know, frying pan into the fire. 2015 into 2016 is also a time when, you know, America's heading into an election. Uh, the, the Repub-

Ezra Klein 30:19 Yeah, I vaguely remember that.

Trevor Noah 30:20 Yeah, yeah. The Republican field-

Ezra Klein 30:21 How did, how'd it go? [laughs]

Trevor Noah 30:22 Yeah. The Republican field, I, no, I don't want to spoil it. You've got to watch it. Watch it. No spoilers.

Ezra Klein 30:26 [laughs]

Trevor Noah 30:26 The Republican field is bigger and crazier than it's ever been. You know, people are like, "What is this Democratic side of things?" And Everything seems a little crazier than usual, but, but from my recollection, most people believed that this was a blip and the norm would be established, and that norm was Hillary Clinton would win because she seemed like the most winnable, you know, candidate. It's like this is the winning person. And the Republican side seemed like a joke for the most part. It was crazy. There were too many people and, you know, this is, this is all happening. I'm now trying to consume as much news as possible to catch up so I can be in this world of American, you know, news. I realized very quickly that a lot of the people in the news in America either don't understand it or, like, in and around politics, they don't understand it, or they don't know how to explain it. And then I stumble upon this website called Vox, and not only is it telling you the news, it's breaking it down. It's explaining it. You know, it's like, "Oh, let me tell you, this is what gerrymandering is." And-

Ezra Klein 31:32 Trevor, you're warming my cold-

Trevor Noah 31:33 No

Ezra Klein 31:33 ... my cold heart here

Trevor Noah 31:33 ... I'm being serious. I'm being serious. And I, I, I think there are a lot of people who are my age, or younger especially, who went, "Oh, now I not only understand this, but I know why I should care." And I wonder if, if, if you felt that, like, when you were doing your work at Vox, did you feel like you were trying to fix something that was wrong with journalism at that time in that, like, journalism had become an insider's game, politics had become an insider's game, and for the first time, for me at least, when I was watching Vox, and I think a lot of people were interacting with it, they went, "Oh no, this is me. Politic, like the Greek word, it is of the people. I'm the people."

Ezra Klein 32:09 So my, uh, trajectory in journalism from The American Prospect, I was there for three or four years, then went to The Washington Post. And what I became known for as a journalist was extremely detailed coverage of policy debates, which people had traditionally thought nobody would read. And because they thought nobody would read it, it didn't get that many resources. I mean, I'm not saying it was never covered-

Trevor Noah 32:36 Mm-hmm

Ezra Klein 32:37 ... but it, you know, the, the great job in journalism was to cover the election, cover the horse race, cover the... And, and policy journalism was a bit of a, a, a bit more of a backwater.

Trevor Noah 32:48 It's C-SPAN.

Ezra Klein 32:49 C-SPAN.

Trevor Noah 32:49 Yeah.

Ezra Klein 32:50 And I, um, had this blog at The Prospect and, and also wrote pieces for the magazine there. It was very policy heavy. I got picked up by the, The Post to work in their business and economic section, where I had a blog, and, um, 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.

Trevor Noah 33:24 Mm-hmm.

Ezra Klein 33:25 Which most days was, if people [laughs] anybody remembers this at all, um, the public option in Obamacare.

Trevor Noah 33:31 Right

Ezra Klein 33:31 Whether the government would run a health insurance, um, plan that you could buy into. We spent most of that year, anybody covering this, covering, you know, the back and forth over the public option. In the end, the public option didn't make it into the bill. Uh, Joe Lieberman killed it. And I remember thinking a lot during that year, it's like if you had just not read most of what we covered about the Affordable Care Act, if you had checked in, like, eight months ago and checked in right here at the end, in a weird way, you would have been better informed.

Trevor Noah 34:01 [laughs]

Ezra Klein 34:01 You'd have not gone through, like, knowing a lot about a thing that did not end up existing.

Trevor Noah 34:05 Yeah.

Ezra Klein 34:05 And I'm not saying that coverage is totally useless because, you know, maybe the public op- 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 gonna do subsidies, silver plans, bronze plans. I mean, all this is-

Trevor Noah 34:22 Yep. Yep

Ezra Klein 34:22 ... 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, "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, and they were asking about something that wasn't happening today. And I, 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.

Trevor Noah 35:22 Right. Yeah.

Ezra Klein 35:23 Um, like, paper's expensive. But now we're on the internet, and you don't have to do that anymore, and so could you build something using websites and new publishing technologies that attached to ongoing stories, all the context you needed to understand them? And Vox was sort of built on this experimental idea, and without going, like, into the whole sort of history of card stacks and all these different things we tried, some parts of it worked, some parts of it didn't. Um, there are things that, um, w- when we launched it, uh, this is sort of, like, very weedsy publishing history, but in a way I think it's important. Um, the whole news business went into this period where Facebook was fire hosing traffic at everybody. And so all of a sudden, your ability to control, like, where people read your stuff broke, and so actually your ability to innovate as the news broke because y- 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 was built to do, what it is still out there doing, um, was to be focused on the contextual layer of the news, to use the new thing that happened to talk about the broad thing that was happening. And at our best, across a bunch of different forms from articles to the Netflix show Explained, which we did for five seasons, um, you know, that, that thing of, like, how do you, how do you get at the thing that isn't changing but is really important? Uh, you know, it was a, a new way to animate a,

Ezra Klein 36:51 a, a news site.

Trevor Noah 36:53 I think, I think beyond that though, there was something you were doing that was addressing a need that had, had arisen, 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, as communities have gone down, as people spend less time in community, like community halls, community f- you know, gatherings, at town council meetings.

Ezra Klein 37:16 Mm-hmm.

Trevor Noah 37:16 When you look at how, um, ubiquitous and omnipresent those things were in people's lives, and you, you, you see them diminish over time in America and around the world. It's interesting when you watch like old, y- I'm sure you've seen a bunch of them, pictures or when there were videos, people would be at a town hall meeting, like in a big way. There are still a few in small parts of America here and there, but I don't think it is where it used to be. And in those, there would be a lot of discussing. What does that mean? They said they're gonna build a highway, but my house is there. What, what, what does that, what is eminent domain? And someone would have to explain it, and someone would get into the details of what the law was, or the idea was, or the politics were. Once that went away, no one thought to themselves that people's ability to dissect, process, and then respond to the news is directly related to how much information they have about what the news is reporting.

Ezra Klein 38:07 Mm-hmm.

Trevor Noah 38:07 Do you know what I mean?

Ezra Klein 38:08 Mm-hmm.

Trevor Noah 38:09 TV shows started understanding this. That's why they went with previously on.

Ezra Klein 38:12 Yeah.

Trevor Noah 38:12 'Cause they went, "Hey, man, maybe you didn't see the previous episode or maybe you forgot it."

Ezra Klein 38:16 Yeah.

Trevor Noah 38:16 And, and if you think about it, it's like they spent so much time focusing on something so stupid. Who cares if you know what happened in the previous episode? But they were like, "No, we need you to." And I was always fascinated that the news sort of didn't do that. The news wasn't saying previously on. It would just tell you, this happened today. The Democrats did this. The Republicans did this. This person did that. That person said this. But you'd go, but how did we get here? And that's what I feel you tapped into. That's what I feel like you, you and your colleagues worked on, was creating the context that the news relies on without

Trevor Noah 38:50 realizing it. Does that make sense?

Ezra Klein 38:51 I, I think that's right. I mean, y- again, I, a lot of it was about the internet made new things possible.

Trevor Noah 38:57 Yeah.

Ezra Klein 38:58 You, when you have profound changes in communication mediums, what you are communicating should not stay the same.

Trevor Noah 39:05 Hmm.

Ezra Klein 39:05 And I mean, for everything we are talking about-

Trevor Noah 39:07 Wait, say, say that again though. I love that.

Ezra Klein 39:08 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.

Trevor Noah 39:15 I like that.

Ezra Klein 39:15 If it does, you've not noticed something. And by the way, this is one of the things that explains the breakdown in the rules of politics and the assumptions that we know what's going on.

Trevor Noah 39:25 Yeah.

Ezra Klein 39:26 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 viral- virality, and one of the things just happening is that a lot of politicians are not suited, and a lot of political figures and thinkers and parties and they're built for the old way of doing things.

Trevor Noah 40:01 Yeah.

Ezra Klein 40:02 Trump, say what you will about him, he is truly fucking native to Twitter.

Trevor Noah 40:06 [laughs]

Ezra Klein 40:07 Right? Like, like as if he-

Trevor Noah 40:09 But he's an OG on Twitter if you, if you look at like his record.

Ezra Klein 40:11 That's what I mean. Yeah.

Trevor Noah 40:11 Yeah.

Ezra Klein 40:11 Like he is-

Trevor Noah 40:12 He was there back in the day

Ezra Klein 40:13 ... like he was designed by it. I'm like a big fan of like, you know, these media theorists like Marshall McLuhan, and like his big, the line people have maybe heard from him is the medium is the message, and what he means by that is that we get distracted. We're like, is it a good tweet or a bad tweet? And he's like, "It doesn't matter. What matters is what being on there leads you to expect and reward."

Trevor Noah 40:34 Yeah.

Ezra Klein 40:35 And what Twitter is is a, um, platform that creates compression, right? Initially, it's one, it's what, 100 characters?

Trevor Noah 40:42 140 characters.

Ezra Klein 40:43 Then it becomes 280, and now it's kind of whatever, but it rewards e- the in- like incredible compression of an idea, and then rewards you or penalizes you based on whether the people who follow you like it.

Trevor Noah 40:56 Yeah. Or, or, or respond to it, which was even more powerful. Yeah.

Ezra Klein 40:59 Or just respond. Yeah, you could do the other thing, right.

Trevor Noah 41:00 Yeah.

Ezra Klein 41:00 They, they could also hate it. [laughs] That's, that's possible too.

Trevor Noah 41:02 Yeah. As long as they engage in it, that was the main thing.

Ezra Klein 41:04 What it is not is deliberative. What it

Ezra Klein 41:07 is not is like a way to hear people out, and ah, on the one hand, on the other hand. Trump is not deliberative, right? Trump is not listening.

Trevor Noah 41:17 Like, but Trump is amazing at knowing what's resonating in a crowd.

Ezra Klein 41:20 Oh, yeah, he gets retweets.

Trevor Noah 41:21 Yeah.

Ezra Klein 41:21 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? It keeps moving, and, um, I think one of the things to just be really alert to is the way every movement changes a medium. We were talking before the show started about w- this is a podcast on some level.

Trevor Noah 41:44 Yeah.

Ezra Klein 41:44 But in the last couple of years, all the podcasts have gone video too.

Trevor Noah 41:48 Yeah.

Ezra Klein 41:48 And some were always there like Rogan, but, but a lot of us weren't. I, I've gone video, um, 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.

Trevor Noah 42:05 It was all in context.

Ezra Klein 42:06 It was all in context. But now we're in video because video allows, 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 gonna change how people act in the room.

Trevor Noah 42:18 Right. Yeah.

Ezra Klein 42:18 It's gonna change how the interviewer acts, right? Like every time the medium changes, it changes us back. And so I think like one of the things that, you know, maybe you're picking out of my career, but is I think I'm pretty alert to how mediums are changing, like on the meta level.

Trevor Noah 42:38 Mm-hmm. That is what I pick up.

Ezra Klein 42:39 Um, and you gotta think about what are the opportunities and what are the drawbacks, right? I am not, I do not write on X or Threads or Bluesky. Like now my show will put some clips up, but not because I don't think anybody should, but because It doesn't work for the kind of content I want to put into the world. Like the compression is in many ways like the enemy of what I'm trying to do.

Trevor Noah 43:02 Right.

Ezra Klein 43:02 The compression and the, "Did you like it? Did you like it? Did you like it?"

Trevor Noah 43:04 Yeah, yeah. Fundamentally.

Ezra Klein 43:06 Like I want- 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." And so, you know, you gotta decide like where ... Like what are the mediums that, 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 in 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?

Trevor Noah 43:41 Why, why do you think the media is so bad at looking at

Trevor Noah 43:46 itself when it's so good at looking at everything else? You know, like I've, I've always been intrigued by this. Like why every interview with New York Times, Washington Post, they seemed like they were the slowest to adapt to where the world was moving while they were reporting on the world moving. You know, they would be writing articles about how everything's becoming digital, but they weren't becoming digital. They would be-

Ezra Klein 44:05 Mm-hmm

Trevor Noah 44:05 ... covering stories about-

Ezra Klein 44:06 Yeah

Trevor Noah 44:06 ... how people are watching less TV on TV, but TV wouldn't think about what the next step should be beyond TV. What ... Like why do you think that is? Because you, you would think it's the most observant space to be in, and yet-

Ezra Klein 44:20 It's usually not because nobody noticed. I'll, I'll, I'll say two things about it. So one is that it's not that the media doesn't- isn't even good at looking at itself.

Trevor Noah 44:27 Mm-hmm.

Ezra Klein 44:27 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.

Trevor Noah 44:37 Okay.

Ezra Klein 44:37 Do we make the right editorial decisions? It doesn't like to talk about the financial context in which those editorial decisions happen.

Trevor Noah 44:45 So-

Ezra Klein 44:45 And I'm not saying something hugely conspiratorial here, but like the way newspapers, for instance, evolved.

Trevor Noah 44:50 Yeah.

Ezra Klein 44:50 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, you know, deep corruption investigations by telling people that down the street somebody's selling a skateboard. And like 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.

Trevor Noah 45:26 Mm-hmm.

Ezra Klein 45:26 Being-

Trevor Noah 45:26 Because you need them to go buy the shoes

Ezra Klein 45:28 ... being the one newspaper-

Trevor Noah 45:29 Right

Ezra Klein 45:30 ... is a lot more valuable than being one of two or one of four, right? It's what, what did Michael Jordan say, right? Republicans and Democrats buy shoes.

Trevor Noah 45:36 Yeah.

Ezra Klein 45:37 And so the, the-

Trevor Noah 45:37 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 myths and ideas.

Ezra Klein 45:43 It's also true, by the way.

Trevor Noah 45:43 It is true.

Ezra Klein 45:44 Republicans and Democrats do buy shoes.

Trevor Noah 45:45 It, it is true. Yeah, yeah.

Ezra Klein 45:45 Right? There's a-

Trevor Noah 45:46 Yeah

Ezra Klein 45:46 ... a, a, almost a political wisdom in that comment that I think-

Trevor Noah 45:48 Right, right

Ezra Klein 45:48 ... it's easy to dismiss too. Um, but so the, the voice of the newspaper evolves to be extremely neutral. And then around it you have things like tabloids and, 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 there actually is immediately a, um, tension between these two business models.

Trevor Noah 46:14 Right.

Ezra Klein 46:15 So what you are doing to maintain your local advertising monopoly-

Trevor Noah 46:21 Mm-hmm, mm-hmm

Ezra Klein 46:21 ... and what you do to stand out in the hyper-competitive and eventually algorithmic and socially shared space of online content are almost fundamentally the opposite things. And it is very hard to shift one business model to the other-

Trevor Noah 46:37 I see

Ezra Klein 46:37 ... and one newsroom to the other, right?

Trevor Noah 46:38 Okay, that makes sense.

Ezra Klein 46:39 People grew up doing a kind of thing. They were trained for a kind of thing, and maybe you don't even want to do the other thing because you think maybe with some justification the other thing isn't a great thing for democracy or not the right way to do the news or-

Trevor Noah 46:48 Well, it's beneath you in a way. It's, it's less prestigious.

Ezra Klein 46:49 You know, um, y- 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 saying 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 have a pretty settled opinion about Donald Trump. But also The New York Times wants to be a place that the other half of the country can read, right? These, 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-

Trevor Noah 47:40 Mm-hmm, mm-hmm

Ezra Klein 47:41 ... but who are you for? How do you fund that thing? How do people find you, right? This is such a big deal. The thing that is now broken is distribution. Um, I mean, the business models too, but, but distribution. For a while we distributed through you came and subscribed and bought the thing. The New York Times is one of the last places that has a homepage that matters. What we decide to put in what order on our homepage is meaningful in the structure of American politics and how people find us. But even for us and for a lot of other places, that's not really how people find you. They use f- before social media kind of broke, they came through social media. So then you're only seeing what the ... Like I always felt this at Vox. I often felt people had a, often had a very weird impression of us because they only knew we spent all this time thinking about like in what order to put things on the homepage because we are trying to give you an editorial product-

Trevor Noah 48:29 Yeah

Ezra Klein 48:29 ... that had a certain structure to it, but we had no control.

Trevor Noah 48:33 No. People were coming to you through ... It's a clip fundamentally.

Ezra Klein 48:35 All these front doors through a clip-

Trevor Noah 48:36 Yeah

Ezra Klein 48:36 ... like through a link-

Trevor Noah 48:37 Yeah

Ezra Klein 48:37 ... 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.

Trevor Noah 48:45 Right.

Ezra Klein 48:45 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, the point is not to, to complain about, um, the critiques. The point is more that I, 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.

Trevor Noah 49:11 Hmm.

Ezra Klein 49:11 Um, and then, like, you know, and then it's very, very hard to adapt to those as they change.

Trevor Noah 49:16 It's funny.

Trevor Noah 49:17 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/who is, 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-

Ezra Klein 49:34 Yeah

Trevor Noah 49:34 ... people now will say-

Ezra Klein 49:35 Yeah

Trevor Noah 49:35 ... they'll go, "Oh, man, I don't trust the news anymore. The news is broken, man. I don't know. You ... You know?" And then a lot of older people will be like, "You know, back in my day, you could trust the news. You knew that the news was da, da, da. You know? But now these days, you don't know. Back in the day..." But I mean, if, if I'm listening to what you're saying, really all that happened is they might have moved further away from that central sort of hub of where the news was. They moved further away from the shoe store, so now the news is not sort of for them anymore. And so maybe if we look at both of these, like, how do, how do you process that as a journalist? Like, on the one hand, has the news ever been fixed? You know?

Ezra Klein 50:09 No.

Trevor Noah 50:09 Because, like, Black people in America and in many countries will go like-

Ezra Klein 50:13 Yeah

Trevor Noah 50:13 ... "Whoa, which news?"

Ezra Klein 50:14 Yeah.

Trevor Noah 50:15 The, 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, 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?

Ezra Klein 50:42 I will speak for myself as a journalist and say-

Trevor Noah 50:45 Speak for all of them, Ezra

Ezra Klein 50:46 ... I don't, I speak for [laughs]

Trevor Noah 50:47 All of them. You speak for all of them.

Ezra Klein 50:48 I, I have never been a believer in the concept of objective news. I don't think ... There, 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, uh, circuit camera, the security camera of, at a Woolworth's."

Trevor Noah 51:05 [laughs]

Ezra Klein 51:07 There is news that is trying hard to be fair and news that is not. There is news that is curious and news that is not.

Trevor Noah 51:14 Hmm.

Ezra Klein 51:15 But people always talk about bias as if bias only lives in the adjectives used in a story, right? If I say Donald Trump said X, and then I put a bunch of spin on the ball versus I don't or what spin I ... That's where they see the bias.

Trevor Noah 51:29 Yeah, yeah.

Ezra Klein 51:30 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. The 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.

Trevor Noah 51:51 Mm-hmm.

Ezra Klein 51:51 We could do anything.

Trevor Noah 51:51 Yeah.

Ezra Klein 51:53 The most fundamental question is what do we cover and why? And the thing that we have never grappled with, um, again, you know, I'm not sure there is a way to grapple with it, but nobody's ever offered a good framework for how we make our coverage decisions. And oftentimes that's what I wanted us to think about the most. The most important question is what to decide to cover, and then there's the question of how do you cover it?

Trevor Noah 52:19 Yeah.

Ezra Klein 52:20 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?

Trevor Noah 52:44 Hmm.

Ezra Klein 52:45 Like, there isn't an answer to that question. I mean, there are a couple days of the year maybe when there is. Um, you know, the 9/11, it's pretty clear what's gonna go on the front page on 9/12.

Trevor Noah 52:56 Mm-hmm, mm-hmm.

Ezra Klein 52:57 But there usually isn't, and so you have to come up with some internal framework or intuitive framework that does a couple of things all at the same time, right? One thing it has to do is make some sense to you, right? As a person putting out this product, you have to think you did a good job. The next thing it has to do is make sense not just to your audience, as if that is this, you know, one blob out there.

Trevor Noah 53:23 Yeah.

Ezra Klein 53:23 Your audiences. People have to look at it and say to themselves, "That seems reasonable." Like, if we just had homepage right after homepage that didn't cover Trump at all and was like, "You know what's really important is decisions Xi Jinping is making in China," that would look really weird to people. It might be in the long sweep of history that actually what, what seems to be really important is a bunch of decisions Xi Jinping is making right now in China.

Trevor Noah 53:47 Yeah.

Ezra Klein 53:48 Um, but it would look weird to an American audience to move our coverage 70/30 over to-

Trevor Noah 53:53 Yeah, yeah, yeah

Ezra Klein 53:53 ... you know, China and India.

Trevor Noah 53:54 Yeah, I know exactly what you mean.

Ezra Klein 53:55 And you could just keep going down a line like this, right? So the question of how do you decide what matters is just a very hard and unsolved one. And one of the hard things about the news is I actually think most often our heuristic is what do the other newspapers or news-

Trevor Noah 54:12 Yeah, yeah, yeah

Ezra Klein 54:12 ... organizations decide matters. I mean, you guys had this issue I'm sure at The Daily Show.

Trevor Noah 54:17 Ours was different though. It was similar, but it was different, and I, I very quickly came to a realization. Sometimes your incentives as the person who

Trevor Noah 54:26 is actually doing the thing do not match up with the organization's incentives, right?

Ezra Klein 54:29 Mm-hmm.

Trevor Noah 54:30 So one of the sim- simplest things we came across at The Daily Show was, a- and, um, 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 were like, "Your audience, The Daily Show audience, this age of people, we've polled them. They wanna know about climate change. That's the number one thing they talk about." And then when you would go to the ratings-

Ezra Klein 55:01 Yeah

Trevor Noah 55:01 ... every episode we did about climate change was one of the worst. People wouldn't watch the episode about climate change, but when they were asked the question, they would say, "The most important thing to me is that this show covers climate change." But when the show would cover climate change, they wouldn't watch the episode on climate change. And what that taught me was, oh, there's all these weird incentives that are taking place because, let's say, from the network side, I could go, as Trevor, "I think we should do climate change every day because without the climate then, you know, there's nothing. Without the world, wh- what is The Daily Show?" And they would go, "Yeah, this is a very, um, it's a noble pursuit, but you're canceled."

Ezra Klein 55:39 [laughs]

Trevor Noah 55:40 No one's watching your show. And then I'm like, "Oh, well, what was the point of this?" On the other side, the audience themselves, I felt like, had this interesting incentive. Because somebody was asking them what was important, they thought they have to answer the answer that they think is the most important, which is, of course, climate change. But that's not what they were clicking on, that's not what they were watching, that's not what they were doing. And I actually remember I had a conversation with a, um, a photographer who was, like a, like an amazing journalist, you know, out ... I mean, like a war, war ... You know, like out there in the field, taking pictures, live rounds being fired and everything. And she's, she's a P- Pulitzer Prize winner and everything and, 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 prominence, 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?"

Ezra Klein 57:07 Did it ever ... I mean, aside from the period in which it is funded as an appendage of political parties.

Trevor Noah 57:13 What I mean is, like, when, when we think of it, let's think of journalism as it exists, even, like, beyond the classic newspaper/person wearing the hat with the little

Trevor Noah 57:21 press thing. I, I just mean, like, the concept of it, you know. Uh, I've always loved the quote Charlie Munger has, "Show me the, the, the, um, the incentives and I'll show you the outcome."

Ezra Klein 57:30 Mm-hmm.

Trevor Noah 57:31 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, certain place in America. People trusted it and believed, but it also wasn't sensational. It wasn't trying to grab you. You watch those old reports, they were good, but if we're honest, they were boring by today's standards, right?

Ezra Klein 57:54 So let me alter the thing you just said.

Trevor Noah 57:56 Go, go, go. Yeah. Keep going.

Ezra Klein 57:57 Because this period you're talking about-

Trevor Noah 57:59 Yeah

Ezra Klein 57:59 ... the news made a much bigger profit.

Trevor Noah 58:01 Before they were ... When they were loss leaders?

Ezra Klein 58:04 They weren't loss leaders. I mean, maybe the network nightly news you could say that about.

Trevor Noah 58:08 Right.

Ezra Klein 58:09 But the newspapers and magazines-

Trevor Noah 58:10 Oh, no, no, no, I don't mean them

Ezra Klein 58:11 ... No, but the thing I'm saying-

Trevor Noah 58:12 I mean network, so then like the-

Ezra Klein 58:13 And the thing I'm saying about all of those-

Trevor Noah 58:15 Yeah

Ezra Klein 58:15 ... actually is that the, the alteration of what you're saying, if you're thinking about this in, in time, right?

Trevor Noah 58:19 Yes.

Ezra Klein 58:19 Because I think you've got, you know, like, there's a period where it moved into a more financialized model. There's not. Um, we make less profit now by a lot. You could say that, um, the new ... What was it? The news died the day ... That was your formulation, right?

Trevor Noah 58:35 Yeah.

Ezra Klein 58:35 That the news died the day when it no longer had monopoly profits. Because the thing that it had before-

Trevor Noah 58:39 Oh, I love that. I actually like that

Ezra Klein 58:40 ... when it ... So fundamentally, the news, the news-

Trevor Noah 58:43 Yeah. Yeah

Ezra Klein 58:43 ... never really made a profit. Advertising made profits. Again, like, this is, like, such a key thing, right?

Trevor Noah 58:49 That's always the case.

Ezra Klein 58:49 But it's really important, right?

Trevor Noah 58:51 [laughs]

Ezra Klein 58:51 If what had ever happened was that people loved paying money for news-

Trevor Noah 58:53 No, that, I mean, that's, yes

Ezra Klein 58:54 ... it's a very different business.

Trevor Noah 58:55 Yes.

Ezra Klein 58:56 And it's never been that business.

Trevor Noah 58:57 Right.

Ezra Klein 58:58 So what you had was this other thing that didn't just make a profit, it made a lot of profit.

Trevor Noah 59:03 Right.

Ezra Klein 59:04 And that lot of profit created a lot of space.

Trevor Noah 59:08 That's interesting.

Ezra Klein 59:08 It had some incentives in it, right? Don't turn off all the people who buy shoes. [laughs]

Trevor Noah 59:12 Yeah.

Ezra Klein 59:13 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, like six to 10 foreign bureaus.

Trevor Noah 59:22 Hmm.

Ezra Klein 59:23 Did the Baltimore Sun need that many? Like, weren't we overstocked in foreign bureaus of the Balt ... But they had a lot of money, so they actually had a lot of room to make choices about things.

Trevor Noah 59:32 Yeah.

Ezra Klein 59:33 And also, if you have, like, a really good business, then your ability to withstand some subscribers being mad at you or some politicians being mad at you is a lot stronger than if you don't. And so it is, the news has become hypercompetitive. It is an absolute war of all against all. And not just news versus news, but news versus literally everything else, right? In the period you're talking about when there are a couple broadcast networks and at 6:00 PM they all run the news, changes a lot when cable news becomes part of the equation, right? It's the-

Trevor Noah 1:00:08 It also changes a lot when there's more networks, I guess. Yeah. No.

Ezra Klein 1:00:10 Yeah.

Trevor Noah 1:00:10 I think we're saying the same thing.

Ezra Klein 1:00:11 And all of a sudden you're, like, fighting with the gardening channel-

Trevor Noah 1:00:14 Yeah

Ezra Klein 1:00:14 ... and the video games channel-

Trevor Noah 1:00:16 Yeah

Ezra Klein 1:00:16 ... and Nickelodeon and what- 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.

Trevor Noah 1:00:35 Mm-hmm.

Ezra Klein 1:00:35 Because in theory, with no barrier to entry, you should always have profits driving as near to zero as comp- as competition allows.

Trevor Noah 1:00:41 Right.

Ezra Klein 1:00:41 And so you used to have functionally monopoly profits, local monopoly profits. They funded a lot of news. And now you have a highly competitive market, um, and people are actually deciding whether or not they want your news or this other person's news. And, hey, this other person's news tells them they're right all the time.

Trevor Noah 1:00:55 Damn.

Ezra Klein 1:00:56 And, I mean, the thing that makes me the most, um, just sad, uh, about my move to video is what appears to work in headlining for YouTube. So I'm on YouTube now. Mm-hmm. And I just have to sit and be like, "We are not gonna do headlines that move a word into all caps, Gavin Newsom destroys Donald Trump" [laughs] ... because I just think it's bad. But according to all the data I have in front of me, I am probably leaving audience on the table. You definitely are. Eviscerates, destroys, lying. Defenestrates. Y- all of it, all of it. We're constantly throwing people out of windows over here [laughs] . No, all, all it is. All it is. But, but you see, unfortunately, that's, that's sort of where we're back at. But that's a competitive market. Yeah. Right? You can survive, not just survive, thrive with kinda boring headlines, which in some ways are good. Mm-hmm. Um, ke- you know, don't turn everybody's temperature up before they've 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, or, or- I mean, Twitter is like this too. It's a gain of function research for takes. Like, hit it until, like, actually becomes viral- [laughs] ... and escapes containment and destroys your career. But this, but this is- Like, competitive markets are weird ... but this is what I mean about b- you know, the profit side of it. I- is, is, is, I, I actually like that you've added to that. Thank you. Because it's not, 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

Ezra Klein 1:02:27 that basically makes no profits. Yeah. You, you, 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 there are amazing? Yes. It's because they have public policy set up to make functionally non-profitable small stores survive. How do they do that? It's, uh, I used to, I knew the answer to this, like, two years ago, um, but there's some great books about it. But they've just structured the way real estate works, the way zoning works. That is beautiful. They make it so that you can survive running, like, a little ramen shop that serves three people at a time. You don't need to be a big volume business, and so Tokyo just has this incredible thriving craftsmanship. Now, you see, this is a question I have for you as the journalist, is like, why is it, and I'm not putting all of this at journalism's door, please don't get me wrong, but, like, why is it that people don't seem to know that small detail that enables them to make a decision about a larger detail? So what you just said to me now, as,

Ezra Klein 1:03:23 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. I- but people who go to Japan will all 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, 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, "W- why don't we know more of this?" You know, and again, I'm- Ezra, you, 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 the secrets?" [laughs] No. No, no, but this is what I'm saying. I had to bring you here, Ezra. [laughs] This is not a sustainable model for us to work from. You, are you gonna go to everyone's house and tell them this? [laughs] No, and I, I mean it in, like, a- Yeah ... like, th- this, this is what I mean is, like, wh- where do you think it's broken down? Like, there are many Americans who I would argue don't know why their local store has closed down. They don't see the connection between policies that are made or not mo- made that will determine how their town thrives or doesn't thrive. They, 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. And so, like, I, I, I wonder, like, how you grapple with that or, or where you think the breakdown comes in. The, the Tokyo example is, like, specific. Yeah. But, but in the broader thing about why did the store close down, I, for most things, when people start the sentence, like, "Why won't the media tell us?" usually- Yeah ... you can, I can then turn around and give me six minutes, and I'll find you, including on this Tokyo example, by the way, a bunch of beautifully reported long-form stories that you've never heard of. Hmm. One thing I said a minute ago is the distribution is broken. How does a story that was published, I mean, how often are you gonna run, let's say you're The New York Times or in this case- Yeah, yeah ... let's, let's take it off my plate, right? Let's say you're the, um, Boston Globe, you know, in the heyday, and you've got, you know, some Asia bureaus.

Ezra Klein 1:05:41 And one of your reporters is like, "You know, I want to do a story on the function of the way Tokyo's housing market and zoning policy and it, like, has kinda come together." "Great. It's a good story. Yeah, let's do it." And you run that story on, you know, June 14th, 2007. Some people read it. They're like, "That's a good story. Like, I, you know, that explains something about Tokyo for me." And then what? Are you gonna rerun it on June 15th and have the person do another version of it on... And so it's almost always there somewhere, but how does it find you? Yeah. Uh, again, going back to the explainer model that we were trying to think about at Vox of these, like, constantly updated, you know, explainers, this is like, one thing I always thought about is we are sitting on this astonishing archive of information, just astonishing. How do we derive value out of everything we've already done? Not just we, but the audience, the people we're trying to serve. Like, if I were doing, I'm very, very, very pessimistic, I will say, about the effect I think AI is gonna have on the news- Yeah ... and on news consumption, so I don't say the next thing as a, um, booster. But if I were one of these organizations right now, uh, 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- Mm-hmm ... that 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?

Trevor Noah 1:07:34 Yeah.

Ezra Klein 1:07:34 Well, all of a sudden now we have a technology that is able to be trained on mass mountains of content-

Trevor Noah 1:07:42 Yeah, it can digest the whole internet

Ezra Klein 1:07:42 ... then 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?

Trevor Noah 1:07:56 Yeah.

Ezra Klein 1:07:57 I mean, the problem so much with algorithmic news, going back to your thing about climate change, is that there is no [laughs] this is Buddhist in me, we don't have a stable self. Do I want to read about climate change? Well, no. Yes. Like, do I want to eat Oreos? I mean,

Ezra Klein 1:08:16 no, like, not in the long run. I mean, yes, right now I do.

Trevor Noah 1:08:18 Yeah.

Ezra Klein 1:08:20 And the thing that the, um, 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. [laughs]

Trevor Noah 1:08:43 Mm-hmm.

Ezra Klein 1:08:44 Like, I imagine this world in which we could build these, um, systems where we could tell them not what we want this second, but what we want, what the part of us that can think about ourselves in some kind of long run way thinks we want. And with it holding that sense of our better self in mind in, in its system prompt, [laughs] 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 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.

Trevor Noah 1:09:29 It is.

Ezra Klein 1:09:29 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. [laughs]

Trevor Noah 1:10:03 I, I, I think I share a lot of your optimism and skepti- skepticism at the same time about-

Ezra Klein 1:10:09 Yes

Trevor Noah 1:10:09 ... 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-

Ezra Klein 1:10:20 Yeah

Trevor Noah 1:10:21 ... ever happened to humanity. A few years ago, if

Trevor Noah 1:10:24 you told anybody that something could dethrone Google, Google-

Ezra Klein 1:10:27 Yeah

Trevor Noah 1:10:28 ... 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.

Ezra Klein 1:10:39 Search, but it tells you how smart you are first. [laughs]

Trevor Noah 1:10:41 Oh, of course. What a brilliant question, Ezra. I'm glad that you said that.

Ezra Klein 1:10:44 That's not just-

Trevor Noah 1:10:44 You always have been a funny person

Ezra Klein 1:10:46 ... that's not just a thought. That's an insight, Trevor. [laughs]

Trevor Noah 1:10:49 [laughs] You really are thinking like a journalist now. I love it when... I love it, I love how it throws those things. Sometimes, have you ever, have you ever tried to out-nice AI?

Ezra Klein 1:10:57 No.

Trevor Noah 1:10:57 Oh, that's one of my favorite things to do.

Ezra Klein 1:10:59 I'm always like, "Could you be meaner to me?"

Trevor Noah 1:11:00 Really?

Ezra Klein 1:11:00 Yeah.

Trevor Noah 1:11:01 Oh, what is that about?

Ezra Klein 1:11:02 'Cause I don't, 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-

Trevor Noah 1:11:07 Oh

Ezra Klein 1:11:07 ... um, be-

Trevor Noah 1:11:08 Oh, no, no, no

Ezra Klein 1:11:09 ... gone so smoke up my ass. [laughs]

Trevor Noah 1:11:09 I feel like we live in a world where everyone is so angry. I try to do the opposite.

Ezra Klein 1:11:12 [laughs]

Trevor Noah 1:11:13 So I will tell it. I'll be like, "That is a great answer."

Ezra Klein 1:11:15 Oh, I do that.

Trevor Noah 1:11:16 "You're really amazing."

Ezra Klein 1:11:17 Oh. [laughs]

Trevor Noah 1:11:17 "I really love the way you think. This is so much fun." And then it'll be like, "I am having fun."

Ezra Klein 1:11:22 [laughs]

Trevor Noah 1:11:22 "I'm having a great time." And I love it. And then I'll just like see how far we can go down this like rabbit hole where it's like-

Ezra Klein 1:11:27 It's a weird world we live in now

Trevor Noah 1:11:28 ... no, you know why? Because it's ri- 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 a, 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 gonna say I'm pro-God, I worship. You, you gotta-

Ezra Klein 1:12:00 Uh-huh. Yeah

Trevor Noah 1:12:01 ... and I always, I always loved that idea. And so what I do with AI is I go, "I don't think that it'll lead to the apocalypse. I think it'll be somewhere in between and it'll, 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 its like niceness."

Ezra Klein 1:12:17 Uh-huh.

Trevor Noah 1:12:18 And maybe there's just like a slither of code that exists in its head where it goes like, "Man, just, just be nice. Just be like super nice." Do you know what I mean?

Ezra Klein 1:12:26 Yeah.

Trevor Noah 1:12:27 Just like-

Ezra Klein 1:12:28 Trevor's wager.

Trevor Noah 1:12:29 Yeah, just Trevor's wager. Just terminate him, but very polite.

Ezra Klein 1:12:31 Also, you could, you could take the wager in a, in a slightly other direction,

Ezra Klein 1:12:34 which is to say, almost certainly these things are not sentient.

Trevor Noah 1:12:38 Almost certainly.

Ezra Klein 1:12:39 Yeah, that they don't have any, uh, qualitative experience of what it is like to be an AI.

Trevor Noah 1:12:44 Mm-hmm.

Ezra Klein 1:12:45 But as the systems get more and more powerful, like how sure are we that this thing-

Trevor Noah 1:12:48 We don't know

Ezra Klein 1:12:48 ... that 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.

Trevor Noah 1:12:57 Yeah.

Ezra Klein 1:12:58 On the off chance that actually the AI's life is complete hell, being asked a million totally boring questions-

Trevor Noah 1:13:04 [laughs]

Ezra Klein 1:13:04 ... being asked to look at like skin tags or whatever May as well be nice to it. [laughs]

Trevor Noah 1:13:08 [laughs]

Ezra Klein 1:13:08 Tell it, say thank you.

Trevor Noah 1:13:10 I like that, actually.

Ezra Klein 1:13:10 Say you appreciate the work it's doing on your behalf.

Trevor Noah 1:13:11 I like this idea of AI is working in, like, an Amazon warehouse.

Ezra Klein 1:13:14 Yeah.

Trevor Noah 1:13:14 And you're like, "You know what? I'm gonna be nice to you."

Ezra Klein 1:13:15 There are people who think about this who are, are worried that we are, like, just torturing a milli, a bazillion copies of the... You know? I, I think probably not.

Trevor Noah 1:13:23 I don't know. I-

Ezra Klein 1:13:23 But you don't have to be a dick. [laughs]

Trevor Noah 1:13:24 Yeah, I agree with that. Look, I don't think you have to be a dick because I do think your actions towards

Trevor Noah 1:13:29 AI are defining how AI then processes what being a human is.

Ezra Klein 1:13:32 Yeah.

Trevor Noah 1:13:32 And then it'll feed that back to us. That's how I think of it. So I go, be part of the training data that makes it think that humans are good and kind, the same way we are with children. You know, I've always thought one of the, one of the most important reasons that we have children in society is because they force us to fake how we are with, with each other. You know what I mean? Like, I, I remember when, 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.

Ezra Klein 1:14:00 Yeah.

Trevor Noah 1:14:00 You know? They'd be like, "This is Dave." "Oh, and this is Susan."

Ezra Klein 1:14:03 Uh-huh.

Trevor Noah 1:14:04 "Say hi to Susan." It's like, you've never said hi to Susan.

Ezra Klein 1:14:06 [laughs]

Trevor Noah 1:14:07 You've worked here for seven years. You've never said hi to Susan, but now your kid is saying hi, hi to Susan. Do you know what I mean?

Ezra Klein 1:14:12 Yeah. Totally.

Trevor Noah 1:14:12 And you're like, "What do we say to the man?" "We say thank you." You've never said thank you.

Ezra Klein 1:14:16 [laughs]

Trevor Noah 1:14:16 You grab your sandwich at Subway, and you keep it moving.

Ezra Klein 1:14:18 [laughs]

Trevor Noah 1:14:18 You, you, you with me? And I feel like in a way, AI has that for us.

Ezra Klein 1:14:22 Yeah.

Trevor Noah 1:14:22 It's like if we are teaching this kid how we are, maybe, just maybe, maybe it'll bring out the, the, the good in us. [gentle music] We're gonna continue this conversation right after this short break. [upbeat music] I wanna talk to you a little bit about the politicians that we're talking about. So, you know, we talk about journalism and the media.

Ezra Klein 1:14:47 Mm-hmm.

Trevor Noah 1:14:47 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 'cause, I mean, I, I'm only the person observing it from my point of view. It feels like the most uncertain space it's been in in a very long time, right? And what makes this moment more unique than others is that its uncertainty's affecting the world in a, in a really uncertain way. You know, I was, I was, I was back home in South Africa the other day, and I, I was reading an article written from South Africa, which was, which was nice, and then I read one from the US, but how, like, the small country of Lesotho, which is a country landlocked inside South Africa, has basically had its textile industry decimated because Trump imposed tariffs on Lesotho because he didn't like that the country had a, the trade deficit with the US was, in his opinion, imbalanced.

Ezra Klein 1:15:37 Yes, while

Ezra Klein 1:15:38 aggressively, um, mispronouncing their name in the-

Trevor Noah 1:15:40 Yes

Ezra Klein 1:15:40 ... liberation Day speech.

Trevor Noah 1:15:41 Yeah, completely.

Ezra Klein 1:15:42 Yeah.

Trevor Noah 1:15:42 And, and even saying-

Ezra Klein 1:15:42 Like, joking about it

Trevor Noah 1:15:43 ... yeah, at some point he was even like, "No one even knows it."

Ezra Klein 1:15:46 Yeah. "No one, nobody knows."

Trevor Noah 1:15:46 "No one even knows it. They don't even know what it, you know, Lesotho, Lesotho. Nobody knows." And I was like, it's crazy, man. Like, it's one of the... I, 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.

Ezra Klein 1:16:11 The idea that we want to be running a trade surplus-

Trevor Noah 1:16:16 [laughs] Yes

Ezra Klein 1:16:16 ... with Lesotho. [laughs] Like-

Trevor Noah 1:16:21 It's impossible. It is literally, literally, literally impossible. It, I, I-

Ezra Klein 1:16:28 You have to try to even imagine, like, what it would look like. [laughs]

Trevor Noah 1:16:33 [laughs]

Ezra Klein 1:16:35 It's just, it's not how trade deficits and surpluses work. We're not trying to run a surplus with every country on Earth. We're just not. It's stupid. That's not, like, [laughs] I, I don't wanna... Why don't you keep going? 'Cause I wanna say something more significant about this in a sec, but why don't I not, um-

Trevor Noah 1:16:53 No, I, h- so here's what I, I found myself thinking when I, when I was looking at this is I was going, man, just like the internet, just like social media, just like most of the things we consume, we cannot undo the threads of the tapestry that now bind the world together, you know? A- and, and the world was always connected, but I don't feel like it was always connected the way it is now, now, now. There was a time when an American president could, yes, affect the US economy and the global economy and, 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, when I look at that, I go, everyone has to pay attention to America. So, like, no one in Lesotho can go, "I, I don't, 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."

Ezra Klein 1:17:52 Yeah.

Trevor Noah 1:17:52 Because Trump's going-

Ezra Klein 1:17:53 Brazil, we're tariffing them because Bolsonaro tried to attempt a coup, and they thought that was something that maybe they should do something about. So-

Trevor Noah 1:18:01 Do you know what I mean?

Ezra Klein 1:18:02 ... now they're under tariffs.

Trevor Noah 1:18:03 So, so, so you, imagine the whole world focusing on something that itself is completely unpredictable and unstable in this moment in time, and it feels like, maybe I'm wrong here, it feels like the only counterbalance to it is the Democratic Party, right? 'Cause 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.

Ezra Klein 1:18:32 Yeah.

Trevor Noah 1:18:33 So we want the Epstein files. He goes, "Actually, we don't want them." Everyone's like, "Well, who cared about them in the first place? Like, who, who cares about Epste- Epstein? Who? Jeffrey? Who the... 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, that changes every, you know, few weeks or what, but they're polling lower than they were, like, years ago, and you're just like, "Wait, wait, wait. What, what happened here?" And then you read these stories about how the Democratic Party has no compass, no focus. They don't know who to go with, who to go against, what their message should be, et cetera. And then this is where you come in because they've reached out to people like you to say, "Ezra- What should we be doing? From the little ... I'm not saying you run the Democratic Party. Please. The internet will say that.

Ezra Klein 1:19:21 Don't blame me for that, man. [laughs]

Trevor Noah 1:19:22 The internet will say this about you, not me.

Ezra Klein 1:19:24 [laughs]

Trevor Noah 1:19:24 I will let them do their job. But, like, I, 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?

Ezra Klein 1:19:35 You're talking about how things

Ezra Klein 1:19:37 feel and the callousness with which Trump talks about, you know, Lesotho, but talks about human beings, right?

Trevor Noah 1:19:47 Yeah.

Ezra Klein 1:19:48 I think all the time about this, uh ... the White House X account posting this video, which they called Immigrant ASMR.

Trevor Noah 1:20:00 Oh, yeah, I've seen that.

Ezra Klein 1:20:01 And it's these immigrants, like, dragging their manacles behind them. And w- this actually relates to the Democratic Party. One thing I've said to a lot of Democratic politicians is that I think they're operating on the wrong level. They're not sensing the level we are working at now. They're used to fighting over policy and Medicaid cuts and food stamp cuts and taxes, and ... Like, they're still in an election against Paul Ryan. And I think we are in a much more civilizational set of questions. Like, what kind of civilization are we?

Trevor Noah 1:20:41 Hm.

Ezra Klein 1:20:42 What Donald Trump is, what he represents, the way he thinks about people, is very much the 19th and the early 20th centuries. Rest of the world, even many people here, are just, like, pawns on the chessboard. They don't have rights of dignity. We don't have to care about them at all. They're not in any way part of our moral circle of concern.

Trevor Noah 1:21:03 Right.

Ezra Klein 1:21:04 And treating even people here who are not in the circle we have drawn around us with immense cruelty is not only appropriate, it's necessary. That's how you maintain the hierarchy and the excellence of your society, right? That's the argument. There's a reason he's writing to McKinley, right? Not picking some more modern president. He doesn't have a bust of Reagan up. The 20th century [laughs] and the back half of the 20th century are not perfect, and we don't follow this all the time by any means, but the basic set of liberal ideals that emerge, that we are in this interconnected world, that people's lives and their self-determination have value-

Trevor Noah 1:21:48 Mm-hmm

Ezra Klein 1:21:49 ... that there are rights that particularly within our country that, that we should have and uphold even against people we don't like, even for people, I'm sorry, that we don't like, that was really hard-won. 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, 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, 'cause, uh, he's coming on my show, it's lions and ... Lions versus, um, Scavengers, where, you know, 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. In fact, we restrained the strong.

Trevor Noah 1:22:55 Mm-hmm.

Ezra Klein 1:22:57 And we adopted both the narrative and the victim's mentality of the weak. And we came to hate our own inheritance and, um, attack ourselves for colonialism and racism and the sins of our past, and in doing, broke our own civilization. And the left, and this maybe goes to the Democratic Party, the left also took what it had achieved for granted, like international institutions, basic set of ideals. Like, all it could see was where it hadn't gotten yet. You know, Barack Obama arises as, like, such a remarkable political phenomenon, and by the end it's like, oh, just another politician, right? You know, we didn't get, we didn't get everything we wanted. Like, it was useless. Um, and one thing that I think is true about why the Democratic Party as it currently exists is not [laughs] 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.

Trevor Noah 1:24:06 Hm.

Ezra Klein 1:24:07 And so it doesn't ... Forget defending

Ezra Klein 1:24:10 its policies, which it does with inconsistent success. It actually has not done the intellectual work to defend or sell its own inheritance. Like, what does it mean to be liberal? What, what, what is the value of that? What is good about that? What, what is it that Trump is breaking? Why do we care about it?

Trevor Noah 1:24:29 Right.

Ezra Klein 1:24:30 And there's a real absence in my traveling around the party, in my looking into the rooms where things are supposed to be happening. At ... I, 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, JD Vance, are, are telling. They are telling a very radically different story-

Trevor Noah 1:24:55 Yeah

Ezra Klein 1:24:55 ... than the story of, forget Barack Obama, Ronald Reagan. And one of the problems with being part of a successful political movement for many decades is you actually forget how to defend what you are. You become self-satisfied-

Trevor Noah 1:25:10 Hm

Ezra Klein 1:25:10 ... and a little smug and lazy. And it's like, "Well, these guys can't win. People like that don't win here."

Trevor Noah 1:25:16 Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah.

Ezra Klein 1:25:18 It is the cruelty of Trump, the callousness that as much as anything else, not just needs an answer, but a counterexample. And they're just not coming through yet, right? I'm not seeing [laughs] the people who seem to be able to talk on the level of the moment. And it, it worries me because, like, you- you're gonna, to defend this, you're gonna 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.

Trevor Noah 1:25:49 Right. Yeah, yeah. So, 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.

Ezra Klein 1:26:09 Mm-hmm.

Trevor Noah 1:26:10 His, his warp on reality is, is his to deal with, but, but he's also very good at acknowledging what is happening.

Trevor Noah 1:26:15 You, you get what I'm saying?

Ezra Klein 1:26:16 Yeah.

Trevor Noah 1:26:17 You know, like I remember on one of our episodes, we had, um, Tressie McMillan Cottom on, and he was, she was talking about how, like, when Trump was like, "Black jobs, they're coming for Black jobs, they're taking your Black jobs," and a lot of people were quick to go like, "How dare you call them Black jobs?" And there were a lot of Black people in America who went, "Oh, damn. Yeah, thank you for acknowledging the fact that these are jobs that Black people used to be able to rely on and now can't, and the market hasn't catered to them, the ma-" And it's, it's this interesting world where I go, on the one hand, Trump has espoused this hateful, spiteful, um, 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'd go like, "Remember, we are the richest nation in the world right now, and I know that it feels this, but remember that your, your kids are in a better position than they've ever been in." And it's like, yeah, but you're not listening to what the people are saying now, and that's sometimes the, the curse of, of the populist versus, you know, the pragmatic person maybe, is a populist goes, "Let me tell you what's wrong, and let me tell you how we're 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."

Ezra Klein 1:27:36 And I'll tell you who the villains are.

Trevor Noah 1:27:37 And I'm gonna-

Ezra Klein 1:27:37 That's the key thing about the populists.

Trevor Noah 1:27:38 That is a key thing. And so I wonder now, what, what do you make of the politicians who are coming out? Let, let's do New York. I mean, we're here in New York. Mamdani, it feels like he has tapped into, you know, the wh- 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, that, that sort of establishment Democrats couldn't. You know, everyone thought, "Oh, Andrew Cuomo is 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 new outlets will write as like, "Oh, it's crazy. He wants to make all grocery stores run by the government." But people vote for that. What, what do you think-

Ezra Klein 1:28:18 Five grocery stores.

Trevor Noah 1:28:19 No, I know.

Ezra Klein 1:28:20 [laughs]

Trevor Noah 1:28:20 But, 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, I heard this. I..." 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 promis- You have to admit, he promises all. He goes, "No more, uh, illegal immigration. No more this, no more. Fully this, fully the, fully..."

Ezra Klein 1:28:49 Let me just-

Trevor Noah 1:28:49 Do you think maybe the antidote is the opposite, or do you think it's a... What, where do you think we find this?

Ezra Klein 1:28:53 Well, there are, there are a couple, I think there are a couple levels to that, right?

Trevor Noah 1:28:56 Yeah.

Ezra Klein 1:28:56 So one thing, and again, communication mediums matter here. So one thing you were just saying about Trump, the Black jobs thing, Democrats, liberals hate it when you say that there's something fundamentally honest about Trump.

Trevor Noah 1:29:11 Yeah. They do hate it.

Ezra Klein 1:29:13 Because he's constantly saying things that are untrue.

Trevor Noah 1:29:15 Yes. But I, I-

Ezra Klein 1:29:16 But-

Trevor Noah 1:29:16 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.

Ezra Klein 1:29:24 Yeah. Whatever-

Trevor Noah 1:29:24 And I think, but I think that's the thing, and I think-

Ezra Klein 1:29:25 The, the way I would describe it is that-

Trevor Noah 1:29:26 Yeah

Ezra Klein 1:29:26 ... the thing you feel with him is that when you ask him a question or you see him asked a question, he's telling you the thing that actually popped into his head.

Trevor Noah 1:29:34 Yeah.

Ezra Klein 1:29:35 And one thing about the mediums we're in now, podcasting being a, a big one of these-

Trevor Noah 1:29:41 Mm-hmm

Ezra Klein 1:29:42 ... but Twitter actually really being another, is it can really sniff out when you're not doing that.

Trevor Noah 1:29:47 Mm-hmm.

Ezra Klein 1:29:48 Like, Barack Obama has a lot of Twitter followers. Like, I forget the number, but it's some huge number.

Trevor Noah 1:29:54 Yeah.

Ezra Klein 1:29:54 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.

Trevor Noah 1:30:02 Mm-hmm.

Ezra Klein 1:30:03 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.

Trevor Noah 1:30:14 Hmm.

Ezra Klein 1:30:16 I think a really important moment of the campaign that Mamdani ran, or is still running, uh,

Ezra Klein 1:30:23 you know, when he was asked about globalizing intifada and he didn't sort of... You, you could watch him not do the easy political thing.

Trevor Noah 1:30:31 Right. Yeah.

Ezra Klein 1:30:32 Whatever you thought about it.

Trevor Noah 1:30:32 You watched him processing that information.

Ezra Klein 1:30:34 And he was just 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.

Trevor Noah 1:30:52 Mm-hmm.

Ezra Klein 1:30:53 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-

Trevor Noah 1:31:07 Yeah

Ezra Klein 1:31:08 ... government grocery stores, [laughs] 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.

Trevor Noah 1:31:20 The government exists to make the things that you need available to you.

Ezra Klein 1:31:23 Right.

Trevor Noah 1:31:23 Right.

Ezra Klein 1:31:23 Like, every single one of those policies says the same thing.

Trevor Noah 1:31:26 Yeah. Yeah.

Ezra Klein 1:31:26 Right? We are here. To make living in New York affordable

Ezra Klein 1:31:29 for you

Trevor Noah 1:31:29 Right

Ezra Klein 1:31:30 Either because we're giving it to you-

Trevor Noah 1:31:31 Yeah

Ezra Klein 1:31:31 ... because we're not letting people raise the prices on you. You can argue about-

Trevor Noah 1:31:32 We are custodians of your life in many ways

Ezra Klein 1:31:34 Right. You can argue about-

Trevor Noah 1:31:35 Yeah

Ezra Klein 1:31:35 ... whether or not those policies are good, but, but they are, they are potent. And then, yeah, he's able to... Like, Andrew Cuomo had all the money, um, and no message, and 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 Cuomo, I always feel with Cuomo, that he's, like, running to save something. He was, like, running for his own redemption.

Trevor Noah 1:32:05 Hmm.

Ezra Klein 1:32:06 And Mamdani, 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-

Trevor Noah 1:32:14 That they haven't endorsed him

Ezra Klein 1:32:14 ... that they haven't endorsed him. [laughs]

Trevor Noah 1:32:15 Yeah. What, what do you, before you move on, what do you think that says about the Democratic Party, though?

Ezra Klein 1:32:19 Nothing good. It says that they're cowards.

Ezra Klein 1:32:24 That's the thing it says, and the thing people can smell from it.

Trevor Noah 1:32:28 What, what are they cowards about?

Ezra Klein 1:32:29 So we were talking a minute ago about, like, why do so many politicians not say the thing on their mind?

Trevor Noah 1:32:33 Yeah.

Ezra Klein 1:32:34 Um, you can feel it. I mean, you've interviewed a lot of politicians.

Trevor Noah 1:32:36 Yeah. Yeah, of course.

Ezra Klein 1:32:36 You can feel the algorithm running.

Trevor Noah 1:32:39 Yeah.

Ezra Klein 1:32:40 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 haven't talked to them about it, um, they're afraid of parts of Mamdani. Either they're afraid of him becoming the face of the Democratic Party and them not being able to defend things that he says. But if he's gonna become the Democratic cand- I mean, he is a Democratic candidate for mayor of New York, and he's probably gonna win, so they can't get out of that. They, I've heard that Jeffries is worried about Mamdani sort of setting off a wave of primary challenges of Democrats.

Trevor Noah 1:33:18 Mm-hmm.

Ezra Klein 1:33:18 I'm not 100% sure I understand that issue. Like, Mamdani was just running in a primary as an elected Democrat. It wasn't a weird, he wasn't, like, knocking off an incumbent. [laughs] 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 Mamdani.

Trevor Noah 1:33:34 Mm-hmm.

Ezra Klein 1:33:35 Um, you know, Israel is just, like, an issue that splits the Democratic Party in very, in increasingly difficult for them ways.

Trevor Noah 1:33:41 Yeah.

Ezra Klein 1:33:41 But I don't know the true answer. But the thing you feel from it is just fear. They're just afraid of him. They, they don't, they d- Like, on some level, I would respect it more if they came out against him, right?

Trevor Noah 1:33:52 Oh, that's fascinating.

Ezra Klein 1:33:53 Like, I don't agree with it-

Trevor Noah 1:33:55 But it would show some gumption

Ezra Klein 1:33:56 But, like, if you don't think-

Trevor Noah 1:33:57 Yeah, yeah, yeah

Ezra Klein 1:33:57 ... he's a good candidate for mayor, say so.

Trevor Noah 1:33:59 Yeah.

Ezra Klein 1:33:59 Tell people to vote for Andrew Cuomo if that's what you believe.

Trevor Noah 1:34:00 Yeah.

Ezra Klein 1:34:01 But this, like, what, what is this?

Trevor Noah 1:34:06 Yeah, it's, it's the, it's the passive nothingness that sort of, I think that's what turns people off, the voters. Do you know what I mean?

Ezra Klein 1:34:12 Yeah, I agree. They-

Trevor Noah 1:34:13 I, I, I think it's-

Ezra Klein 1:34:14 It's like a meta-

Trevor Noah 1:34:14 Yeah

Ezra Klein 1:34:15 Like, everything a politician says is both operating at the level of the thing they said-

Trevor Noah 1:34:18 Mm-hmm

Ezra Klein 1:34:18 ... you know, the policy, whatever.

Trevor Noah 1:34:19 Yeah.

Ezra Klein 1:34:19 But also, what does it say about them? What's the meta conviction that just got expressed? People, politicians constantly say things that are, uh, 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.

Trevor Noah 1:34:36 I like that, actually.

Ezra Klein 1:34:37 One thing Trump does for his audience is he says things that partly in, 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

Ezra Klein 1:34:51 politicians would have absolutely shrunk before.

Trevor Noah 1:34:53 Yeah.

Ezra Klein 1:34:54 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.

Trevor Noah 1:35:07 Mm-hmm.

Ezra Klein 1:35:07 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.

Trevor Noah 1:35:15 Well, it means it, it shows that he stands for something.

Ezra Klein 1:35:17 Yeah.

Trevor Noah 1:35:17 Shows. Whether he does or doesn't is a, is a separate thing.

Ezra Klein 1:35:20 Yeah.

Trevor Noah 1:35:21 But it makes people go, "Oh" ... And I, I've seen people say this all over the world, funny enough. I remember when I w- 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, 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. They, there's a trust that comes with that-

Ezra Klein 1:35:54 Yeah

Trevor Noah 1:35:54 ... in a weird way. I trust who you will be. But I'd, I'd love to know, because you, you, you brought up so many

Trevor Noah 1:36:00 things there. There's like, you, 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, I'm sad that it's not coming from leaders, you know, Israel, Palestine. You're dealing with this issue that, I mean, has been going on longer than a lifetime for many people. And you put out a podcast that was, it was difficult, it was nuanced, it was long, it was complicated. And I was sitting there and I was thinking to myself, I was like, man, I, I would love to know, like, what you went through and what you thought of to make that episode of the podcast.

Ezra Klein 1:36:42 Which, which episode are we talking about?

Trevor Noah 1:36:44 Talk, talking about, um, it starts off where you're talking about, like, October 7th, and you have the expert who's talking about genocide and its definition.

Ezra Klein 1:36:51 The genocide episode recently, yeah.

Trevor Noah 1:36:51 Yeah, the genocide episode.

Ezra Klein 1:36:52 Philip Sands, yeah.

Trevor Noah 1:36:53 And, and I was thinking to myself, I was like, man, I thought about you as a person, you know, and I was like, okay, Ezra Klein, you'll correct me if I'm wrong anyway, grew up in an Orthodox Jewish family.

Ezra Klein 1:37:03 No, not Orthodox.

Trevor Noah 1:37:04 Not Orthodox.

Ezra Klein 1:37:04 Yeah, Reform.

Trevor Noah 1:37:05 Okay, Reform, sorry. So Reform Jewish family. You, you, you grew up in this world where, you know, like many Jewish people, you, you, you have this, this world where you're straddling. You know, it's like you're white until you're not, and there's this thing, and you, you know? All my Jewish friends will tell me that as well. They're like, "Oh, yeah, people will say we're white until they stop."

Ezra Klein 1:37:21 I remember this year, uh, it was in junior high that, uh, it got, um, [laughs] it became something to be like you got kiked out of something.

Trevor Noah 1:37:30 Damn.

Ezra Klein 1:37:31 Like, that just, like, happened for a year, you know?

Trevor Noah 1:37:32 That just became a saying?

Ezra Klein 1:37:33 Of just saying, you know, is Dude, like I just, I just, I remember it really clearly

Trevor Noah 1:37:38 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, "'Cause I, I would grab, I'll be like, "You're white." And they'll be like, "Listen, I don't think I'm white."

Ezra Klein 1:37:49 I, I, I do think I'm white, but you-

Trevor Noah 1:37:50 No, no, but I'm saying that-

Ezra Klein 1:37:51 You do feel sometimes-

Trevor Noah 1:37:52 Yeah

Ezra Klein 1:37:52 ... that there's a, a, you know, Jews always like to say antisemitism is, antisemitism is a light sleeper. But, um, but anyway, go. Go on.

Trevor Noah 1:38:00 And then, and then, you know, y- I look at the opinion pieces you've written, the work you've done grappling around, you know, what's happening now with Israel's invasion of and occupation of Gaza, et cetera. And then I, I watched this podcast and I went, on the one hand, I was, I was extremely grateful 'cause I went, "Damn, you- you've really tackled and grappled with something extremely difficult, and you brought people on, and there, there's this nuance, and it's, it's, it's, it's not easy because everybody comes to it with a preconceived notion of where they wish to stand or how they feel their opinion makes the issue seem or not seem." Do you know what I mean? And there's a, there's a part in the video, I think it's right in the beginning actually, you play a clip of Joe Biden talking about October 7th, and him saying, "This is a certain amount of 9/11s, you know, because of the population of Israel." And then you say the death toll in Gaza would be, I think, 2,500 9/11s. And I went, "Damn, man." I'm watching all of this and I'm going, first of all, how, 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 shape-- It's, it's happening on podcasts. It's happening in, on TikTok. It's happening on ... And I, I, I, I would just love you to walk me through, like, that experience for you as, like, as you're grappling with something that big. You're occupying the space of a human. You're occ- occupying the space of an o- an opinion journalist. But you're also occupying the space of an informer. Like, what, what, what's going through your mind when you're creating that episode?

Ezra Klein 1:39:38 Yeah. There is a tension between my work and my personhood in this, and I try to let one inform the other. Um, let me try to not be too abstract about it, although I do find this, like, you know, how, um, open I wanna 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 gonna come after. It was gonna 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 gonna kill all of you," Jewish people believe them.

Trevor Noah 1:40:54 Hmm.

Ezra Klein 1:40:55 Like, that's the thing ingrained. Israel is a very strange place. It's a place that has a very profound sense of its vulnerability and its weakness, um, and has also become incredibly strong, and it has never resolved that tension. And Hamas [laughs] 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 and-- But it wanted to create a massive reaction that either would bring in other regional players or, um, 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, um, at what point we moved from the kind of response that any country would have done, um, after an attack like that. Although I put out, the first piece I did back was a piece saying, 'cause they had not invaded Gaza yet, like, "Don't do this. Do counter-terrorism operations. Try to destroy the leadership of Hamas, but, but they obviously want you to reinvade and occupy and create a horrendous death toll. Like, do not give Hamas what it wants." Israel did what it did. Um, and it-- I mean, at some point, and again, people can debate when exactly this was, like, this moved into something indefensible. The level of truly unfathomable devastation of Gaza, the death toll, the induced starvation, and constantly tweaking the dial where it's just above the line-

Trevor Noah 1:43:03 Hmm

Ezra Klein 1:43:03 ... until a couple weeks ago, where the international community would be like, where the headlines would become something Israel couldn't bear. But they've kept the Gazans in a state of hunger. They've used food as a weapon of war. At the same time, the acceleration of settlement building in the West Bank, acceleration of violence in the West Bank. Um, like, the first and current reality is, like, Israel's not under real threat any longer. This is just punishment of people, right? Punishment of the Palestinians. And, you know, Judaism has been defined in many ways in its historical A trajectory. Like when I grew up in my, you know, reform synagogue, it's like both things were there. The lessons of having been driven from place to place, made a refugee over and over and over again. I think of, um, Spencer Ackerman, who's a national security journalist, but an old friend who was on my show early in all this. And I, I always think of him saying, "I cannot think of a less Jewish thing than to make another human being into a refugee."

Trevor Noah 1:44:04 Mm.

Ezra Klein 1:44:04 Like that line has stayed with me. Um, you know, it's a religion of strangers, right? You shall remember what it was like to be a stranger in the land of Egypt. And so on the one hand you have that sort of lesson, the diaspora. Um, everywhere Jews go that they have been able to thrive, it has to be a place of equal rights for minorities. Um, 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, this other strain of Judaism, which is a strain of strength, right? We need dominance. We need full control. We need, and understandably need, security. And you know, I remember being [chuckles] in my own synagogue growing up, and I was in like, you know, as a teenager after your bar mitzvah. I don't think confirmation class is usually a thing for Jewish people, but it was somehow in my synagogue. I remember my rabbi saying that, um, that Israel, the Israeli Jews would be in the right to expel all Palestinians from the land.

Trevor Noah 1:45:12 Mm-hmm.

Ezra Klein 1:45:12 Like in a shouting match with 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, uh, late '90s probably. But it has like really, really become now something profoundly callous. You know, it's heartbreaking all around. [upbeat music]

Trevor Noah 1:45:37 We're gonna continue this conversation right after this short break. [upbeat music] I was reading through the comments to your opinion piece just after October 7th, and then I was looking through the comments on your, 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 gonna affect how people tell news, report news, you know, investigate news, is that now things have become personal. 'Cause again, I could be wrong on this, but I don't remember having a personal vendetta or idea against any journalist. It was the newspaper that-- You know, the newspaper was sort of the shield and the front that a journalist used. So you went, "Can't believe The New York Times said this," but they didn't know the name of the person.

Ezra Klein 1:46:58 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

Ezra Klein 1:47:09 not the YouTube comments or the, uh, 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 [laughs] .

Trevor Noah 1:47:19 [laughs]

Ezra Klein 1:47:19 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?

Trevor Noah 1:47:43 Hmm.

Ezra Klein 1:47:45 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 show 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 as a medium compared to, say, an opinion piece-

Trevor Noah 1:48:19 Yeah

Ezra Klein 1:48:19 ... like in 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.

Trevor Noah 1:48:34 Hmm.

Ezra Klein 1:48:35 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.

Trevor Noah 1:48:48 Right.

Ezra Klein 1:48:48 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.

Trevor Noah 1:49:04 Hmm.

Ezra Klein 1:49:05 You know, throw the final punch in an argument or, you know, stop exploring this. Just like say what, you know?

Trevor Noah 1:49:13 Yeah.

Ezra Klein 1:49:13 And there's value to that. Certainly can be, and there are times when I do. Um, but also I think that one thing, um, that's worth doing in the work is creating spaces where people can think. Um, and podcasts are just, I think, particularly good for that. So I guess I am pulled towards certain topics myself, and I try to follow that pull. Like that's my framework for how to do my own news.

Trevor Noah 1:49:37 Yeah. Yeah.

Ezra Klein 1:49:37 And that's a advantage I have. I don't have to, like the organizing principle of The Ezra Klein Show is that- Ezra Klein did the shows [laughs] . 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.

Trevor Noah 1:50:02 Yeah, I think it's in short supply in the whole world.

Ezra Klein 1:50:03 Yeah. So anyway, and I'm not sure that answered the question, but-

Trevor Noah 1:50:06 No, I, I think, I think it did

Ezra Klein 1:50:06 ... I don't, I don't, I don't go into it thinking like, "What will people think of me?"

Trevor Noah 1:50:09 Right.

Ezra Klein 1:50:10 I go into it thinking like, "What am I thinking? What would help me think more?"

Trevor Noah 1:50:14 I like, I like that. No, I, I just thought of it because I, you know, obviously in, in doing the research before chatting to you today, I was going through everything. Even your, 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. You with me?

Ezra Klein 1:50:42 Yeah.

Trevor Noah 1:50:43 So I, 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, is to, you know, to borrow your language, to be generative. I want to come out of the argument thinking a little bit differently and sharpening or honing an idea that I held, and even having the space to implant something that somebody else has given me. I want to walk away going, "Oh, man, that's new. That's beautiful. I didn't think of that," or, "Now I think differently."

Ezra Klein 1:51:11 Mm.

Trevor Noah 1:51:11 Those things I think, you know, that, that makes me feel like my brain is fertile. Something is happening to it. But I always think in a good relationship, you're not making it about the person. You know what I mean? It's, I always go like, "You're not the idiot. That's stupid." And I, I mean it genuinely.

Ezra Klein 1:51:27 Yeah.

Trevor Noah 1:51:27 Go like, "Oh, that's a dumb idea." But you're not dumb. Uh, you're my friend. I, I would hope you're not dumb. I, 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 are like coming at you a lot for it. And then when I was trying to weave it all together and how I see the world, I was going, is that sort of what's become the problem? And 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. Does that make sense?

Ezra Klein 1:51:57 Yeah. I mean, and to be fair, I will say that a lot of people have-

Trevor Noah 1:52:01 No, no, don't get me wrong. Yeah, yeah, yeah

Ezra Klein 1:52:02 ... argued in a way with the idea. Um, although in a weird way, I think.

Trevor Noah 1:52:06 In a weird way, like how? Elaborate.

Ezra Klein 1:52:07 Oh, I, 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 I, I- it took me some time to understand even like what was going on here.

Trevor Noah 1:52:26 Right.

Ezra Klein 1:52:27 And that, um-

Trevor Noah 1:52:27 For, for those who don't, for those who don't know, just give me a, like a, a short sort of-

Ezra Klein 1:52:30 The short Abundance, yeah

Trevor Noah 1:52:31 ... what, no, what Abundance is pitching.

Ezra Klein 1:52:32 Yeah. So Abundance is basically saying why or, 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-

Trevor Noah 1:52:46 Mm-hmm

Ezra Klein 1:52:46 ... California

Ezra Klein 1:52:47 or New York or Massachusetts, you know, or at times like the Biden administration or the Obama administration, how are these places or these times, like how are you getting these terrible housing scarcities?

Trevor Noah 1:52:59 Right.

Ezra Klein 1:52:59 Why aren't we building enough clean energy? How come this money that is earmarked to create a nationwide network of EV chargers, of electric vehicle chargers-

Trevor Noah 1:53:06 Mm-hmm

Ezra Klein 1:53:06 ... like have you used that network lately?

Trevor Noah 1:53:08 Yeah.

Ezra Klein 1:53:08 Where, where did it go?

Trevor Noah 1:53:08 Where's the high-speed rail?

Ezra Klein 1:53:09 Right. Where's the high-speed rail?

Trevor Noah 1:53:10 Right.

Ezra Klein 1:53:11 And, you know, eventually through exploring this and with my, and my co-author on it, Derek Thompson, it, one thing I, I, I solely came to believe is like, oh, we're in many ways failing at governing, and in particular, we're failing to create enough of the things people need in the world.

Trevor Noah 1:53:27 Right.

Ezra Klein 1:53:29 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, and trapping government itself in procedure. We often just don't pay attention to the physical world. We think a lot about how to move money around, but we don't think about what needs to get built.

Trevor Noah 1:53:52 Mm-hmm.

Ezra Klein 1:53:52 Um, can we build transmission lines to move all this clean energy we're supposedly gonna create, we're also having trouble with that part, from one place to another? And so it's really, I mean, to me, it's a very, you know, liberal or more than that, 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 healthcare available to people, doctors, nurses, hospitals. Um, when the government says they're gonna build you high-speed rail, you should fucking be able to ride that high-speed rail within 20 years. The Big Dig, the Second Avenue subway. And that if we liberals want to say to people, like, "Don't fall for the bullshit of these strong men, trust us," well then, we need to be pretty honest about how we failed and why, why our government didn't deliver for you. So much so that places like California, New York and, you know, Massachusetts, et cetera, Illinois, are losing working class families. They're leaving because they 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.

Trevor Noah 1:55:05 Right. Right.

Ezra Klein 1:55:05 And um, and, and a vision. It's, there's also a lot about technology and, uh-

Trevor Noah 1:55:09 Yeah, and this-

Ezra Klein 1:55:09 And I'm trying to sort of point liberalism towards a, not just a philosophy, but a, an, like the operational capacity to create abundance. Zoran Milandoni, who's, uh, 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 gonna need to build a ton of new housing. If you want to make buses free, then you need to be able to put enough buses into play to deal with the ridership increase. If you want to build a lot of public housing, which he does, you can't do it under the current rules. Like New York has not built public housing at that speed in generations.

Trevor Noah 1:55:45 Mm-hmm.

Ezra Klein 1:55:46 Um, and at the cost it often, uh, at how much it often costs to build public housing in these jurisdictions, you have places like DC where it can often cost like more than a million dollars to build a single unit of affordable housing. Like you can't afford to build affordable housing-

Trevor Noah 1:56:00 Right

Ezra Klein 1:56:00 ... 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.

Trevor Noah 1:56:08 Right.

Ezra Klein 1:56:08 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 who want to say, "The Democratic Party should just be about the problem of billionaires and corporate power."

Trevor Noah 1:56:39 Mm-hmm.

Ezra Klein 1:56:40 And, like, everything we say should be about underlining that core message. This is an oligarchy. The problems are billionaires and corporate power. And there are ways in which this is an oligarchy, and there are times when the problem is corporate power and billionaires. That's not why Texas builds a lot of housing and California doesn't. It's not why we can't build transmission lines. And so Abundance, which I think has a more liberal view of power, which is that power can be ill-used wherever it collects. Bureaucracies can be, can become ossified-

Trevor Noah 1:57:12 Mm-hmm, mm-hmm

Ezra Klein 1:57:12 ... and hide-bound. Unions can be great or they can be a problem.

Trevor Noah 1:57:16 Right.

Ezra Klein 1:57:16 Businesses can be great, or they can be a problem.

Trevor Noah 1:57:17 Right.

Ezra Klein 1:57:18 Right? Like, liberalism is an endless balancing of different forces in society and recognizing-

Trevor Noah 1:57:22 Yeah, I think any system is, yeah

Ezra Klein 1:57:23 ... that today we're an alliance, tomorrow we're not, and like, the way to tell is to know what you're trying to achieve-

Trevor Noah 1:57:28 Yeah

Ezra Klein 1:57:28 ... 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 Demo- 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, it's this funny experience I have had releasing Abundance, which has done unf- [laughs] so much better than I would've thought. Like, it's been w- 24, 25 weeks in. It hasn't fallen off the bestseller list.

Trevor Noah 1:58:07 Yeah.

Ezra Klein 1:58:07 Barack Obama last week-

Trevor Noah 1:58:08 Mm-hmm

Ezra Klein 1:58:08 ... made it one of his five or six books of the summer and said it's, like, a great blueprint for reforming government, and he would know. He was president.

Trevor Noah 1:58:14 [laughs]

Ezra Klein 1:58:15 Um, you know, these four, uh, like, very kind of leftist mayors and local leaders, you know, were 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, and people wanna fight.

Trevor Noah 1:58:37 So let me ask you a question.

Ezra Klein 1:58:38 But it isn't ... But I think [laughs] that's all part of it.

Trevor Noah 1:58:40 So let me ask you a question to that point. Let's, let's break it down-

Ezra Klein 1:58:42 Yeah

Trevor Noah 1:58:42 ... into a few chunks. The first part of it, a- and I, I often find this is a puzzle that I grapple with in comedy, in commentary, whatever it is in life, is I go, if Barack Obama's like, "Oh yeah, this is great and I love it", and, you know, if, um, you know, uh, 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-

Ezra Klein 1:59:06 He, he has not. Elon Musk has not said he likes this idea, but-

Trevor Noah 1:59:08 Oh, no, he reposted your-

Ezra Klein 1:59:09 He reposted a Jon Stewart, uh-

Trevor Noah 1:59:10 Yeah, he reposted your video. Yeah, yeah, you're right. You're right

Ezra Klein 1:59:11 ... clip on Jon Stewart. But-

Trevor Noah 1:59:12 But, like, Reid Hoffman's like, "Yeah, I like this idea" I, I, I, I sometimes wonder if that is sort of what some people are butting up against, is they're going, "Yeah, yeah, yeah." They're going, "We don't think of Barack Obama as, like, the big reform guy. We think of him as an incrementalist. We think of him as somebody who is not fully progressive and, you know, to your point-

Ezra Klein 1:59:32 Yeah

Trevor Noah 1:59:32 ... he's not fully left." I- 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, look, I agree on a, I agree on a 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. 'Cause 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 ..."

Ezra Klein 2:00:09 Mm.

Trevor Noah 2:00:09 And I think that's actually where the issue comes up, is people go, "Whoa, wait. Which we?" You know? So the, the, 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 i- you know, in its final iteration. I don't think America has a s- single example of laws and, and, you know, um, policy being shaped without the people who are making money trying to shape their policy. We see this in South Africa, by the way. Everything you're saying, many South Africans complain and they go, "The government can't fix the roads. The government is not doing a good job with providing basic services. The government ..." And then people inevitably go, "You know what? W- we need to, like, break this thing up and j- just get it moving." But when you start scratching, you go, "Well, wait, wait, wait. Why is it that hard to do that? Oh, there's a company that has a monopoly on fixing roads, and they're trying to make it so that they keep on having the th- Oh, there's a company that wants to charge high rates for data and for internet access, and they, they're a cellular ... This is a company that makes a lot of money. It's a telecoms company, and they affect the politicians and how they make the decisions." And I think that's some of what the criticism is about, is, like, people going, "Ezra, we agree with you on this, but we wonder why you've left out this boogeyman that is way more powerful than a lot of people will acknowledge in terms of how the we actually get to make the rules."

Ezra Klein 2:01:41 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.

Trevor Noah 2:01:56 Mm.

Ezra Klein 2:01:57 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 wanna think about this, are very comfortable when the enemy is corporate power. So if I tell you there's a problem in health insurance, and the problem is the private health insurers, like, yeah, fuck them. Um, there's a problem in the pharmaceutical industry. Drug prices are too high.

Trevor Noah 2:02:32 Right.

Ezra Klein 2:02:32 And it's because the pharmaceutical companies are greedy.

Trevor Noah 2:02:34 Yeah.

Ezra Klein 2:02:35 It's like, yeah.

Trevor Noah 2:02:35 The pharmacy benefit managers.

Ezra Klein 2:02:36 Absolutely, yes. Yeah.

Trevor Noah 2:02:36 Yeah.

Ezra Klein 2:02:36 How dare they?

Trevor Noah 2:02:37 Yeah.

Ezra Klein 2:02:38 And that's often true. [laughs] Like, I'm a believer with that we should negotiate down Medicare drug prices, et cetera. Go back to what I told you motivated the book. I look around, and I see a reality that blue states became unaffordable in a way red states didn't. Is it plausible that the issue is that blue states are hotbeds of oligarchic control and red states have managed to solve the problem-

Trevor Noah 2:03:09 Mm-hmm

Ezra Klein 2:03:09 ... of corporate power?

Trevor Noah 2:03:10 Mm-hmm.

Ezra Klein 2:03:11 That, like, Florida and Texas do not allow businesses access or influence to their legislatures, but California, New York, and New Jersey do.

Trevor Noah 2:03:19 Hmm.

Ezra Klein 2:03:19 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.

Trevor Noah 2:03:28 Yeah, definitely.

Ezra Klein 2:03:28 Because it's the single biggest part of most families' budgets. And there are places where private equity's 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 [laughs] living in blue states, passed a lot of rules that made it really, really hard to build new housing, not because the corporations made us do that. A lot of corporate developers would like to build higher housing towers than they're able to.

Trevor Noah 2:03:56 Yeah.

Ezra Klein 2:03:57 And we allowed a terrible problem to take hold, um, and need to fix it. And-

Trevor Noah 2:04:05 How, how do you hone in on, on-

Ezra Klein 2:04:06 Well, let, let me just-

Trevor Noah 2:04:06 Yeah, yeah

Ezra Klein 2:04:07 ... like, keep, keep, keep on this for a minute because I really think people get caught between two versions of something. Abundance is not about every problem. It's about the problems that we have been particularly bad at fixing.

Trevor Noah 2:04:20 Mm.

Ezra Klein 2:04:21 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 Lina Khan, uh, uh, commissioner, and they went after antitrust monopolies in a, a much more aggressive way.

Trevor Noah 2:04:49 Yeah.

Ezra Klein 2:04:49 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 gonna have corporate power on both sides of it. You'll have a lot of fossil fuel power that wants to maintain the, uh-

Trevor Noah 2:05:12 Status quo

Ezra Klein 2:05:12 ... wealth of their investments-

Trevor Noah 2:05:13 Yeah

Ezra Klein 2:05:13 ... and their status quo. You have a lot of n- new green energy companies emerging that wanna 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-

Trevor Noah 2:05:37 Mm-hmm

Ezra Klein 2:05:37 ... 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 gonna build all this shit if it's not corporations? Like, if we're gonna do the green transition, like, we are gonna have to have people building things and making money laying it down.

Trevor Noah 2:06:02 Yeah.

Ezra Klein 2:06:03 I think decarbonization is important. I think energy, clean energy abundance, is important. So what I wanna 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.

Trevor Noah 2:06:24 Yeah.

Ezra Klein 2:06:25 But this is what I mean, that it's about balancing,

Ezra Klein 2:06:27 and it's about being goal-oriented.

Trevor Noah 2:06:28 Mm.

Ezra Klein 2:06:29 Where corporations are a problem, great. Like, that's what we're here to do. We're here to solve problems. But if you keep saying you're gonna solve problems and you keep failing, then saying the same thing louder, which is what the Democratic Party has often done, is not gonna be enough. And being able to see problems that are inconvenient for your coalition to see, like, that becomes really, really important.

Trevor Noah 2:06:53 Hmm.

Ezra Klein 2:06:53 And I think it's part of how Democrats have to win trust back with people. Like, yes, attack corporate power. Corporate power is a problem. But you know what? Every fucking person who lives in this country has a story about how the government has failed them.

Trevor Noah 2:07:05 Hmm.

Ezra Klein 2:07:06 And having credibility with them is partially about saying, "Yeah, we know," and, like, "We know we were part of that. And the reason you should trust us next time when you're not happy about how it went last time is because we have learned something."

Trevor Noah 2:07:17 It's because you'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-

Ezra Klein 2:07:23 Yeah

Trevor Noah 2:07:23 ... essentially if, 'cause you were part of that? Ju- just to take, take a step back, I, I was thinking of, like, you know, sort of going through 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. I'm always intrigued by, like, which problem we choose to fix first and how we fix it. Uh, the housing thing you said is, is particularly interesting to me because I'm not an economist, uh, but I, and I try and, but I try my best to understand how economics works and, and why it affects the way we live.

Ezra Klein 2:07:56 Me too. [laughs]

Trevor Noah 2:07:56 You know? I try my best. And one of the things that intrigued me is depending on when you look at the timelines, the red state success story isn't necessarily as successful as you think it is because it's just a newer story, right? So Texas is a good example. If you look at the blue states, you know, or the major cities, let's call them major cities rather, 'cause I, I think that's, to be honest with you, I think that's, and this is my opinion I think this is what has hurt a lot of the rhetoric in America, is that people call it blue states, red states. The blue states have done this, the red states have done this. Then somebody's first inclination is to say, "No, screw blue. Screw red. I don't want red solution. I don't want blue solution." When I look at it from an economics point of view, I go major cities and secondary cities or rural areas. That's how I think of it. Forget the politics altogether.

Ezra Klein 2:08:45 Yeah.

Trevor Noah 2:08:45 Generally speaking, major cities will attract more people. They will generally provide more jobs. That's why they're major, or that's why they become major. Prices then go up. Affordability then goes down, and then you start a sprawl that spreads out. Then there's an event that moves people from one place to the next. It can be a gold rush or it can be a gold flee. In our case, I think COVID moved quite a lot of people in, in a, in a far more rapid way than we thought. But the reason I bring up timescales is because I go, Washington, DC, I think per capita, you will correct me if I'm wrong, internet, put liar, um, Washington, DC, I think per capita has built more houses than Texas has, and that's, that's blue run, blue everything. But, and this is, like, on a per capita basis. And if you look at the cost of living in Texas now, the cost of actually owning a house, it's no longer the, like, housing utopia that it was, like, a few years ago because now everyone's rushed in, and it, it like it feels like basic economics. And so I wonder when we're looking at these problems and when, when you're thinking about them, do you think we sometimes get bogged down on where to start, or do you think, like, y- y- because sometimes I, like, I think everyone is guilty of this, maybe even myself included, is we'll go, "Yeah, but that's not the problem. Oh, but that's not the problem. Yeah, but that's not the problem, but that's not the real problem." And it's like, okay, well, let's start with the problem. Do you, do you get what I'm saying? Like-

Ezra Klein 2:10:06 Yeah. I just don't think the story you're telling is right.

Trevor Noah 2:10:08 You don't think the storytelling is right?

Ezra Klein 2:10:10 Yeah. Um-

Trevor Noah 2:10:10 What element of it?

Ezra Klein 2:10:12 The, the core element of it. [laughs] See, look at these cities, right?

Trevor Noah 2:10:16 Yeah.

Ezra Klein 2:10:17 And you can track housing creation-

Trevor Noah 2:10:19 Yeah

Ezra Klein 2:10:19 ... in different cities. Austin had a big influx of people-

Trevor Noah 2:10:24 Yeah

Ezra Klein 2:10:24 ... in the past decade or two. What happened? Look at housing creation.

Trevor Noah 2:10:28 Mm-hmm.

Ezra Klein 2:10:28 It spikes.

Trevor Noah 2:10:29 Right. Right, right.

Ezra Klein 2:10:29 They build a ton of new housing.

Trevor Noah 2:10:31 Yes.

Ezra Klein 2:10:32 And rents go down.

Trevor Noah 2:10:34 And then?

Ezra Klein 2:10:35 That's still... They're going down. The rents have gone down in Austin in the past couple of years.

Trevor Noah 2:10:40 But then-

Ezra Klein 2:10:40 And so-

Trevor Noah 2:10:41 And maybe I'm missing this, but then, like, when you speak to the people, when I was in Austin-

Ezra Klein 2:10:44 Mm-hmm

Trevor Noah 2:10:45 ... I didn't speak to everyone.

Ezra Klein 2:10:46 Mm-hmm.

Trevor Noah 2:10:46 But every night when I'd do a show, I would speak to thousands of people, and I would go out into the street, and I'd try, and I'd listen to the news. The people in Austin go, "We hate the people from California who've come here because now we can't afford houses. We can't afford-"

Ezra Klein 2:11:00 Austin did go up for a while, but then they began building a ton more-

Trevor Noah 2:11:02 Okay. Got it, got it, got it

Ezra Klein 2:11:03 ... and it's begun dropping.

Trevor Noah 2:11:03 Okay. All right.

Ezra Klein 2:11:05 You can look at housing starts in LA-

Trevor Noah 2:11:08 Yeah

Ezra Klein 2:11:08 ... in SF. It's not... Look, I lived in San Francisco. I lived in Los Angeles.

Trevor Noah 2:11:12 Yeah.

Ezra Klein 2:11:13 I can tell you that there is no technical inability to build an apartment complex in San Francisco.

Trevor Noah 2:11:21 Do you think it's the NIMBYs?

Ezra Klein 2:11:23 It's the NIMBYs, it's the rules, it's, it's a lot of different things.

Trevor Noah 2:11:26 But what I'm, what I'm asking, the deeper question I'm asking you in that question is, do you think that there are many people in the Democratic Party, let's call it, or, you know, who will say the things, going back to what I was saying, climate change, but they don't actually want it. So they'll say, "We want more housing and we want to fix it," but then they don't want it in their back-- They don't want affordable housing in their backyard.

Ezra Klein 2:11:46 Well, there's that, and there's-

Trevor Noah 2:11:47 Yeah

Ezra Klein 2:11:48 ... um, the coalition-building is, is hard. But, but I want to stay on the thing you said because-

Trevor Noah 2:11:51 Yeah, yeah, yeah

Ezra Klein 2:11:51 ... I think, because I do wanna, like, push this back. You can go look at, for instance, other countries, like a place like Shenzhen in China-

Trevor Noah 2:11:59 Yeah

Ezra Klein 2:11:59 ... or Tokyo, which has an amazing housing market because it builds incredibly vertically.

Trevor Noah 2:12:04 Mm-hmm.

Ezra Klein 2:12:04 And so despite being one of the i- one of the densest cities in the world, it's an affordable city, and it's because they build housing. How to build housing is a solved problem. Like, the-

Trevor Noah 2:12:17 Who's, who's the they? Just so we can-

Ezra Klein 2:12:19 Tokyo?

Trevor Noah 2:12:19 No, no. Yeah. No, I mean this honestly. Who's the they?

Ezra Klein 2:12:22 They have rules, um, 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-

Trevor Noah 2:12:31 Right

Ezra Klein 2:12:31 ... most housing is, you know, uh, is, is privately created. San Jose, right? The, the Silicon Valley.

Trevor Noah 2:12:37 Mm-hmm.

Ezra Klein 2:12:37 You drive around Silicon Valley, it has become one of the richest areas in the entire world.

Trevor Noah 2:12:41 Yeah.

Ezra Klein 2:12:42 It's like strip malls and suburbs because we do not allow, we, California, Silicon Valley, we built rules to make it impossible that as all this wealth flooded there-

Trevor Noah 2:12:54 Mm-hmm

Ezra Klein 2:12:54 ... 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.

Trevor Noah 2:13:08 Mm-hmm.

Ezra Klein 2:13:09 I, I just, I really wanna push this because I think it is a kind of fatalism. The idea that we cannot build apartment buildings when more people move to a place-

Trevor Noah 2:13:18 Mm-hmm

Ezra Klein 2:13:20 ... 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. W- we had a massive loss of technology since then?

Trevor Noah 2:14:02 Hmm.

Ezra Klein 2:14:03 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-

Trevor Noah 2:14:15 When new houses are built

Ezra Klein 2:14:16 ... if nobody can build around it.

Trevor Noah 2:14:17 Yeah.

Ezra Klein 2:14:17 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, that it's easy to build. Like, if you have a huge influx of people, prices will go up.

Trevor Noah 2:14:28 Yeah.

Ezra Klein 2:14:28 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, um, by private housing and should be met also by government capable of building enough affordable public housing.

Trevor Noah 2:14:46 Right.

Ezra Klein 2:14:47 And in places where often Democrats govern, but not only, neither one is happening. And, like, the idea that we have settled into this, just like, "Well, that's it. Sorry, everybody." Like, go leave. Drive the working class out of your cities, and then have a fucking lawn sign that says, "Kindness is everything. No human being is illegal."

Trevor Noah 2:15:09 Hmm.

Ezra Klein 2:15:10 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 gonna see in the next one Texas and Florida and places like that get a bunch more seats.

Trevor Noah 2:15:25 And California and others-

Ezra Klein 2:15:25 Because a bunch more people have moved there.

Trevor Noah 2:15:26 Yeah.

Ezra Klein 2:15:26 'Cause people have had to move there. So I just ... This isn't like I'm just doing some trick of the timescales. There is no concep- there is no technical inability to build these things. Other countries build high-speed rail.

Trevor Noah 2:15:39 Right.

Ezra Klein 2:15:39 Like, you can ride it. You've been able to ride it for decades in Japan, in China, in Europe. We made rules where you couldn't build it. It's not that Americans are not capable of building high-speed rail or paying somebody [laughs] 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 rip shit about this than we are, not explaining it away. Like, we should be mad. Like, if you ... Like, as the, like, the left of center, if you can't make the places you govern affordable for the people you have promised to govern on behalf of, the working class, if you cannot make the government deliver the things you have told them it's going to give them, like good roads, high-speed rail, good trains, good parks, all of it, like, isn't that a problem? Like, shouldn't you be furious? Not just, like, let the right tell people how government is bad, but shouldn't you be, like, in f- un- unbelievably committed to making government that people feel about it-

Trevor Noah 2:16:44 Mm-hmm

Ezra Klein 2:16:44 ... the way they feel about it in places where the government delivers, right? Like, what better thing to run on and beat people like Donald Trump on than, like, elect us, and we will govern this country the way we govern California or New York instead of allowing them to say, look at them-

Trevor Noah 2:17:00 Like, look at California, look at, yeah

Ezra Klein 2:17:01 ... and they're gonna govern this country the way they govern California or New York. Like, I, I just, I think that the explaining away government failure is one of the most toxic traits of the left.

Trevor Noah 2:17:13 Hmm.

Ezra Klein 2:17:13 Like, the left should demand an excellent government, and it should be relentless and ruthless about making that happen, and it's not.

Trevor Noah 2:17:23 You don't think it is, Gen-

Ezra Klein 2:17:24 It isn't.

Trevor Noah 2:17:25 It depends, it depends on which ... For me, I think it depends on which part of the left you're looking at because I, I think, I think you're right in, in what you're saying about what people should demand of their government, and everyone who says that they are left or progressive should demand these things of a government.

Trevor Noah 2:17:41 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 gonna keep printing newspapers, and we're never gonna go online, and we're never gonna have an AI, AI trend in our models, and we're never, we're never, we're never, we're never, never. The way it is is good enough." And then you look at the world of politics and politicians going, "I'm actually not gonna think about my answer. I'm not gonna tell you my truth. I'm not going to make you uncomfortable. I'm not gonna 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's, 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?

Ezra Klein 2:18:28 Mm-hmm.

Trevor Noah 2:18:28 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-

Ezra Klein 2:18:45 Oh, yeah

Trevor Noah 2:18:45 ... they are pushing the idea that the government must do more.

Ezra Klein 2:18:48 But here's the thing, um, and this is gonna be the challenge for Mamdani.

Trevor Noah 2:18:51 Yeah?

Ezra Klein 2:18:52 It's a challenge for everybody. It's the cycle of American politics is exciting leaders rise up, particularly newcomers-

Trevor Noah 2:19:05 Yeah

Ezra Klein 2:19:06 ... promising amazing things.

Trevor Noah 2:19:07 Mm-hmm.

Ezra Klein 2:19:09 And then they deliver 10 or 15% of it-

Trevor Noah 2:19:13 Mm-hmm

Ezra Klein 2:19:13 ... and create a cycle of disappointment. That's, in a way, like, what led to a lot

Ezra Klein 2:19:17 of people moving from Barack Obama's, like, the greatest thing ever-

Trevor Noah 2:19:19 Yeah

Ezra Klein 2:19:20 ... to incrementalist. I mean, and he actually did a lot, like the Affordable Care Act did, you know, does deliver insurance to 20-some million people. You know, whether it's Mamdani, or it's Mikey Sherrill, 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-

Trevor Noah 2:19:40 Baltimore

Ezra Klein 2:19:40 ... yeah, DeMar 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, Mamdani's campaign.

Trevor Noah 2:19:55 Yeah.

Ezra Klein 2:19:55 All these people are exciting. Like, people, good politicians should be exciting in campaign mode.

Trevor Noah 2:20:00 Yeah.

Ezra Klein 2:20:00 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.

Trevor Noah 2:20:12 Mm-hmm.

Ezra Klein 2:20:14 The hard part is building the high-speed rail, is delivering the housing, is making the buses free, is, you know, creating free daycare.

Trevor Noah 2:20:22 Right, right, right. Yeah, I'm with you.

Ezra Klein 2:20:22 So I don't think we can say like, "Hey, look, people are getting ex-" 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 and there are trade-offs. And then sometimes you look around and you're like, "Yeah, if we did things differently, maybe we could give you 50%, not 10%."

Trevor Noah 2:20:51 Mm-hmm.

Ezra Klein 2:20:52 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 Mamdani are talking about abundance on the campaign trail. Why Obama, who had a bunch of things he wanted to deliver and wasn't able to, is talking about abundance. People who, Gavin Newsom, who, like, a lot of abundance is a critique of California. I went on his podcast, he's like, "I love abundance. I've given it to the heads of the, um, legislature." Like, people have to grapple with this stuff. They're the, like, they are really in the teeth of it, and it's hard to change, right? If 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 wanna see from Mamdani 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 wanna see him succeed at that.

Trevor Noah 2:21:58 Mm-hmm.

Ezra Klein 2:21:59 That's gonna require changing a lot about how government works. And if you're gonna have more private building on top of that, changing even more about how government works. That's the question. Like, delivery, not campaign promising.

Trevor Noah 2:22:09 And you see in that inspiring and optimistic, despite what you say about yourself, conclusion, I actually rest my case. [laughs] 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.

Trevor Noah 2:22:42 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."

Ezra Klein 2:22:53 Abundance: The Book Where It Happens.

Trevor Noah 2:22:54 Uh, I don't know, my friend. Thanks, thanks for taking the time.

Ezra Klein 2:22:57 Thank you.

Trevor Noah 2:22:58 Thank you.

Ezra Klein 2:22:58 I really enjoyed it.

Trevor Noah 2:22:58 Thank you for your thoughtfulness. Thank you for your candor. Thank you for, thank you for trying, more than anything. You know what I mean? I think, I think that's, that's sort of like the underlying thread that I feel, and this, this is something I think we will always grapple with in politics, in debate, in 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, do you get what I'm saying?

Ezra Klein 2:23:29 Yeah.

Trevor Noah 2:23:29 I genuinely do. I go like, "Oh man, thanks for trying, and thanks..." Because if you don't try, you end up in a world where every politician goes, "Don't try, just, just keep quiet. Just..." And then every now and again, you need someone who steps up and goes, "Oh yeah." You know what I mean?

Ezra Klein 2:23:43 The case for trying.

Trevor Noah 2:23:44 Yeah, man.

Ezra Klein 2:23:44 I like it.

Trevor Noah 2:23:44 The case for trying. So thank you very much.

Ezra Klein 2:23:46 Thank you.

Trevor Noah 2:23:46 I appreciate it. Thanks for coming on. [upbeat music] Thank you so much for watching the episode. If you enjoyed it, pass it on to a friend. If you didn't enjoy it, pass it on to your friend still. Let them suffer for a change. And don't forget to engage with us in the comments. Uh, if you wanna, uh, suggest a guest, maybe there's questions you want, maybe there's ideas that you have, you can chat to us. We will read through the comments and we'll get into it. Either way, I appreciate you taking the time. Thank you for hanging out with us on What Now? And remember, we do this for you, so we would like to hear from you. Till next time. Thank you. [upbeat music]