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Podcast

#462 – Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson- Politics, Trump, AOC, Elon & DOGE

Lex Fridman Podcast

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  • Left vs Right Ideals
    • The American left believes in rectifying unfairness through government intervention, promoting universal dignity.
    • They are more skeptical of unchecked capitalism and prioritize regulating it to address worker exploitation and environmental concerns. Transcript: Ezra Klein Left? Lex Fridman Oh, good. Ezra Klein We’re starting small here. Lex Fridman And maybe contrast them with the American right. Sure. So the thing I should say here is that you can define the left in different ways. Ezra Klein I think the left has a couple of fundamental views. One is that life is unfair. We are born with different talents. We are born into different nations, right? The luck of being born into America is very different than the luck of being born into Venezuela. We are born into different families. We have luck operating as an omnipresence across our entire lives. And as such, the people for whom it works out well, we don’t deserve all of that. We got lucky. I mean, we also worked hard and we also had talent and we also applied that talent. But at a very fundamental level, that we are sitting here is unfair and that so many other people are in conditions that are much worse, much more precarious, much more exploited is unfair. And one of the fundamental roles of government should not necessarily be to turn that unfairness into perfect equality, but to rectify that unfairness into a kind of universal dignity, Right? So people can have lives of flourishing. So I’d say that’s one thing. The left is fundamentally more skeptical of capitalism and particularly unchecked forms of capitalism than the right. I always think this is hard to talk about because what we call unchecked capitalism is nevertheless very much supported by government. So I think in a way, you have both. Like markets are things that are enforced by government, whether they are, you know, how you set the rules of them is what ends up differing between the left and the right. But the left is tends to be more worried about the fact that you could get rich building coal fired power plants, belching pollution into the air, and you could get rich laying down solar Panels. And the market doesn’t know the difference between the two. And so there’s a set of goals about regulating the unchecked potential of capitalism that also relates to sort of exploitation of workers. There’s very fundamental questions about how much people get paid, how much power they have. Again, the rectification of economic and other forms of power is very fundamental to the left. When you think about what the minimum wage is, I am a successful podcast host. When I go into a negotiation with the New York Times, I have a certain amount of market power in that negotiation because other firms want to hire me. When you are a minimum wage worker, the reason we have a minimum wage is in part to rectify a power problem. A lot of workers do not have market power. They do not have a bunch of job opportunities. They are not working with firms. And by the way, without certain kinds of regulation, those firms will cartelize and make it so they can hold down wages anyway. So trying to rectify power imbalances is, I think, another thing folks on the left take more seriously. That would be a start of things that I think broadly unite the maybe let’s call it the intuitions. I want to say that’s a podcast answer, not a book. Lex Fridman I’m sure I left a million things out here, but I’ll start there. So one person getting more money than another person, more skills or more natural abilities than another person. And then there’s just the general unfairness of the environment, the luck of the draw, the things that happen. All of a sudden you cross a street and the car runs a red light and runs you over and you’re in the hospital. So that unfairness of life. And in general, I guess the left sees there’s some role or a lot of role for government to help you when that unfairness strikes. And then maybe there’s also a general notion of the size of government. I think the left is more comfortable with a larger government as long as it’s effective and efficient, at least in this. Derek Thompson That’s certainly true in the last 100 years. It was New Deal liberals who enlarged the government in the 1930s. It was Republicans who acquiesced to that larger government in the 1950s. And then starting in the 1970s, 1980s, it’s typically been conservatives who’ve tried to constrict government. Sometimes they failed, while liberals have typically tried to expand, certainly, taxing and spending. Well, one thing that I was thinking as Ezra was talking, and I was just writing this down because I thought Ezra’s answer was really lovely, but like at a really high level, I thought, Maybe disagree with this. I thought about distinguishing between liberals and conservatives based on three factors. What each side fears, what each side values, and what each side tolerates. I think liberals fear injustice and conservatives often fear cultural radicalism or the destruction of society. And as a result, they value different things. Liberals, I think, tend to value change. And at the level of government, that can mean change in terms of creating new programs that don’t previously exist. It’s typically been liberals, for example, who’ve been trying to expand health coverage while conservatives have tried to cut it back. Just in the last few years, it was Biden who tried to add a bunch of programs, whether it was infrastructure, the Chips and Science Act, the IRA, and then Trump comes into office and is Unwinding it. And then I also think they tolerate different things. I think liberals are more likely to tolerate a little bit of overreach, a little bit of radicalism in terms of trying to push society into a world where it hasn’t been. Well, I think conservatives are more likely to tolerate injustice. They’re more likely to say there’s a kind of natural inequality in the nature of the world and we’re not going to try to overcorrect for it with our policies. And so I think that even at a layer above what Ezra was articulating with the policy differences between liberals and conservatives, there’s almost like an archetypal difference Between what they fear and value and tolerate. Liberals fearing injustice, seeking change, tolerating sometimes a bit of what people might think of as overreach, while conservatives fear that overreach, value tradition, and Often tolerate injustice. (Time 0:10:51)
  • Government’s Role
    • The left prefers an expansive government focused on social welfare, while the right favors a powerful state for security and defense.
    • Both sides can exhibit trust in government for different purposes, like social programs or military interventions. Transcript: Ezra Klein Only thing I would say is that I do think this sort of the left likes big government, the right likes small government oversimplifies. The left is pretty comfortable with an expansive government that is trying to correct for some of the imbalances of power and injustices and imbalances of luck I talked about earlier. The right is very comfortable with a very powerful police and surveillance and national security state. I always think about the sort of George W. Bush era, although right now with ICE agents hassling all kinds of green card holders, you can think about this moment too. But the right’s view that on the one hand, the government is incompetent. And on the other hand, we could send our army across oceans, invade Afghanistan and Iraq, and then rebuild these societies we don’t understand into fully functioning liberal democracies That will be our allies, was an extraordinary level of trust in a very big government. I mean, that was expensive. That took manpower. That was compared to we’re going to set up, you know, the Affordable Care Act in America. That took a lot more faith in the U.S. Government being able to do something that was extraordinarily difficult. But the left has more confidence in the government of the check and the right has more confidence in the government of the gun. Lex Fridman You’re right. There’s some degree to which what the right when the right speaks about the size of government, it’s a little bit rhetoric and not actual policy because they seem to always grow the size Of government anyway. They just kind of say small government, but they don’t, it’s, you know, in the surveillance state, in the foreign policy in terms of military involvement abroad, and really in every Program, they’re not very good at cutting either. They just kind of like to say it. Derek Thompson Of dollars, someone is going to feel that pain and they’re going to scream. And so you look at defense spending under Reagan, you look at overall spending under Reagan. Reagan might be one of the most archetypally conservative presidents of the last 40, 50 years. He utterly failed in his attempt to shrink government. Government grew under Reagan. Defense grew, all sorts of programs grew. So I think that one thing we’re sort of scrambling around in our answers is that at a really high level, there are differences between liberalism and conservatism in American history. But often at the level of implementation, it can be a little bit messy. Even Bush’s foreign policy that Ezra was describing, sort of from a big sense of American history, is very like Wilsonian, right? This sense of like, it’s America’s duty go out and change the world. Or to use a current example, McKinleyan. Or McKinleyan, right. And a lot of people compare Donald Trump’s foreign policy to Andrew Jackson, this sense of we need to pull back from the world. America first. We need to care about what’s inside of our borders and care much less about what’s outside of our borders. Sometimes the differences between Republican and Democrat administrations don’t fall cleanly into the lines of liberal versus conservative because those definitions can be mushy. (Time 0:16:50)
  • Political Leadership
    • Donald Trump and his endorsed figures, including Elon Musk, currently dominate the American right.
    • The Democratic Party is fragmented and lacks a clear leader after a significant political defeat. Transcript: Lex Fridman Maybe you could describe, and you mentioned Democratic Socialists, the progressives, maybe liberals, maybe more sort of mainstream left, and the same on the right with Trump and Trumpism. Ezra Klein So on the right, it’s pretty straightforward at the moment. And the right is composed differently than it was 10 years ago. But the right is run by Donald Trump and the people who have been given the nod of power by Donald Trump. So that is right now Elon Musk. But Elon Musk’s power is coming from Donald Trump. That is, you know, maybe in some degrees, J.D. Vance, maybe in some degrees, Russ Vought, maybe sometimes, you know, Homans over at DHS. The right beneath that, the Republicans in Congress are extraordinarily disempowered compared to in other administrations. They are sort of being told what to do and they are doing what they are told. Republicans in Congress, Senate Republicans, they didn’t want Pete Hegseth. They didn’t want Kash Patel. They didn’t want Tulsi Gabbard. They didn’t want RFK Jr. Nobody got elected to be a Republican in the Senate, hoping that they would confirm Robert F. Kennedy Jr., a member of the Kennedys, a Democrat who was pro-choice and running as a Democrat two years ago for HHS. But Donald Trump told them to do it, and they did. So the right has developed a very, very top-down structure. And one of Trump’s talents, one of the things that makes him a disruptive force in politics is his ability to upend the sort of coalitional structure, the interest group structure that Used to prevail. You know, the Koch brothers were the big enemy of the left, you know, 10, 15 years ago. The view was that in many ways, they set the agenda of the right. The Koch brother network is much less powerful under Donald Trump because he just disagrees with them and has disempowered them. Not to say none of their people or none of their groups are meaningful at all. They are. But you wouldn’t put them at the forefront in the way that you might have at another time. Right this second, we’re using the left, but Democrats are in fundamental disarray. There is no leader. Democrats, Senate Democrats decided to vote for the continuing resolution avoiding a shutdown or a critical mass of them did. Hakeem Jeffries, the leader of the House Democrats, and Chuck Schumer, the leader of Senate Democrats, are in bitter disagreement over whether or not they should have done that. Democratic leadership isn’t even united on the single biggest point of leverage they might have had. They disagree over whether or not it was even a point of leverage. Outside of them, the party is no leader, which is fairly normal after a pretty crushing defeat. But there isn’t the next in line. So, you know, you go back, right? And it was pretty clear that, you know, after Barack Obama, it was going to be Hillary Clinton. After Hillary Clinton, it was either going to be Joe Biden or Bernie Sanders. Bernie Sanders had come in second in the primary. Joe Biden had been the vice president. You often have a presumptive next nominee who the party can look to for a kind of leadership. Even after 2000, Al Gore was still giving big speeches. There was a question about Al Gore running again. There is no presumptive in the Democratic Party right now. You can’t turn around and say, oh, it’s going to be Pete Buttigieg. It’s going to be Josh Shapiro. It’s going to be Gretchen Whitmer. Absent parties are given force, modern parties, which are quite weak by historical standards. Modern parties tend to be given force by a centralizing personality. Donald Trump being a very strong example of that on the right. But Barack Obama was the person who held together the Democratic Party for a long time. In my lifetime, the Democratic Party has never been as internally fragmented and weak, leaderless, rudderless as it is right now. Now, it won’t stay that way. There’s a rhythm to these things. There’ll be a midterm. They’re probably going to pick up a bunch of seats in the midterm. If that means Hakeem Jeffries becomes speaker after the midterm, he’s going to have a much louder voice because he’s going to have power. It’s going to be a harder road for Schumer to get back to the majority because of the Senate map. And then we’ll start having a primary on the left. And you’ll begin to see voices emerge out of that. But right now, the Democratic Party, it doesn’t have points of power. They’re simply outside of, you know, at the national level, there is no Democrat who wields control over a branch of government, right? They don’t have the Supreme Court. They don’t have the House. They don’t have the Senate. They don’t have the presidency. And they don’t have a next in line. So you’re looking at an organization without any of the people in a position to structure it. (Time 0:20:05)
  • Biden and Harris
    • Ezra Klein believed Joe Biden shouldn’t seek re-election and advocated for an open convention to choose a better candidate.
    • Kamala Harris’s selection as VP was for a different political climate, and the quick transition to her candidacy was difficult. Transcript: Lex Fridman Were one of the people that early on said that Biden should step down. Why is the Democratic Party at this stage in its history so bad at generating the truly inspiring person? To me personally, you know, AOC is an example of a person that might be that person. Ezra Klein You should have her on the show. Lex Fridman I would watch that. Definitely. You know, I really try to, and we’ll talk about this, I try to do like two, three hours, and there’s a hesitancy on the left, especially to do these kinds of long programs. I think it’s a trust issue. I’m not exactly sure what it is. 80% of the people on this show are left-wing. I’m pretty good faith, and I try to bring out the best in people. Ezra Klein Have you invited her? Is that what you’re saying? Yeah, yeah. We’ll see what happens when people get closer to 2028. Sure. Maybe people begin taking that kind of risk. Lex Fridman I hope so. Bernie’s up there in age, so he can’t do it anymore. Why is the Democratic Party so bad at generating? Ezra Klein I don’t think it’s so bad at generating them. I think that it turned out to be bad at generating them this year. Look, as you mentioned, back in February 2023, was somebody who came out and said, like, Biden can’t run again. This isn’t going to work. And my view, and that was really what that set of pieces was about, was about the argument that even though Biden was clearly going to win the primary, there was still time for Democrats To do something the parties had done in the past and have an open convention. And you could structure the lead up to an open convention in a number of different ways, right? You could have something like a mini primary, but basically you’d have Democrats out in the media, out giving speeches, and their ultimate audience would be the delegates at the Democratic National Convention. And my hope was through that you would find the person for this moment. The thing for Kamala Harris, it was really difficult when she was for another moment. She was picked by Joe Biden in 2020 amidst just a very different political equilibrium, a sense that you had a transitionary moment between two versions of the Democratic Party. Maybe Joe Biden reaching a little bit back to the past, to these sort of lunch pail, you know, blue collar Democrats. Joe from Scranton was a big part of the Joe Biden appeal. But also Biden never has a chance if he’s not Barack Obama’s vice president. And so you have this sort of weird set of historical factors like operating at the same time. There’s a desire for stability and experience amidst the chaos of Donald Trump and the pandemic. There is Biden as Obama’s vice president, who nevertheless did not run in the election after Obama. I think a lot of people look back at 2016 and think, you know what, if Biden had been the candidate, he would have beaten Trump and we would live in a different reality. And then Biden chose Harris as an effort to shore up his own at least assumed weaknesses, right? He’s a white man in the Democratic Party at a time when the Democratic Party is diversifying. And when the view of how you win elections is you put back together the Obama coalition. And the Obama coalition is young people. It’s, you know, voters of color. And it’s enough working class white voters and then college educated white voters. That’s the Obama coalition. And so Biden picks Harris, you know, for different reasons. My view at that time was I was sort of a Tammy Duckworth person and thought I should have picked Tammy Duckworth. But but there are different people out there. And then the kind of moment that Harris was running in just sort of dissipates. First, she has a particular background from California where she’s a tough on crime. Her book is called Smart on Crime Prosecutor. But she runs in the Democratic Party at a time when it’s turned on that kind of politics. People want a lot from her personally, but they don’t want a sort of prosecutorial character. So she sort of abandons that and never, I think, really finds another political identity, certainly before she begins running, you know, in 2024 that works. But she’s a talented debater. She’s a very talented performer on the stump, but she doesn’t really have a theory of politics and policy that she’s identified with. But she’s a way for Biden to signal that he understands that him being, you know, in 2020, a 78-year white guy, he understands the future is not him or at least not just him. And he’s sort of trying to make a coalitional pick that speaks to his own, you know, potential weaknesses. I think by 2024, you have two problems, right? Once he only steps down, what is it, June? Like they are weeks from the DNC. They don’t have time anymore for an open convention. You now have the Biden administration is very unpopular for a number of reasons, but particularly inflation and cost of living. Associate. I mean, it’s a Biden-Harris administration. She doesn’t really have a lane on cost of living. It’s not something she’s known for working on in the Senate. It’s not something she has a bunch of great ideas about, not something she’s great at talking about. It’s probably not the candidate you would pick for a cost of living election. And she’s had no time to build that out, right? Maybe if she had been running in a primary for, you know, a year and a half, having to fend off Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders and Pete Buttigieg and whomever else, she either would Have figured out how to do it, right? Primaries or periods of education and learning for the candidates, too, or they would have found somebody else who could do it. But she doesn’t get any of that, right? She’s thrown into the game with three months to go. So, you know, they picked the candidate in 2020 who won. Whether you think Biden’s inspiring or not, he was probably he was a reasonable pick for that moment. He should have never run for a second term. And he sort of implied to a lot of people that he wouldn’t. And then the handover to Harris was a very difficult handover to a candidate who didn’t go through any kind of selection process for the moment in which he was running. (Time 0:24:40)
  • Trump’s Media Prowess
    • Trump’s 2024 win resulted from factors like global incumbent losses due to inflation, close elections, and Trump’s media mastery.
    • Trump excels at performing authenticity in the current media landscape, contrasting with the Democrats’ bureaucratic caution. Transcript: Derek Thompson Two really big questions on the table that I think click together in an interesting way. You asked, one, why did Trump win? And two, why do Democrats have this certain communication style that might make them less interested in coming on to an unstructured three-hour conversation with you? Let me try to tell a story that connects them. I think Trump’s victory in 2024 was overdetermined. There are a lot of factors here. Number one, if you look internationally, incumbents lost all over the world. They lost in the US, they lost in Europe, they lost in pretty much every developed country at rates that we really haven’t seen in 50 years. And that’s largely because the inflation crisis that came after COVID created an absolute disaster for incumbent establishment power. People couldn’t bring prices down. Voters were furious and they were destroying establishment orders all over the world. Democrats happened to be in power. And as a result, they got the brunt of it. That’s number one. Two things are true. One, almost every election is unbelievably close for reasons that I’m not sure I entirely understand. The parties have gotten really good, historically, bizarrely good at getting each group to come to the polls with about 48 percent, such that every election is a battle over the next 1.5 percent. And in a world like that, little thermostatic swings are very important. And what we’ve seen over the last few years, and there’s this theory about thermostatic public opinion in American politics that says that what often happens in politics is one party Has a very compelling message of change. They become the establishment and then they become the victims of exactly the weapon that they marshaled. That then the next outgroup party says we have a theory of change and we’re going to throw out the bums. And the next party comes in and they overreach and then they lose. In a world where you have thermostatic change and every election is very close, you tend to have elections swinging back and forth. So I think that also explains why Democrats and Republicans have struggled to hold onto power for six year, eight year, 12 year terms the same way they did, say, the 1930s or 1960s. But finally, you have to look at what kind of character Donald Trump is and what kind of a media figure he is. We were just talking off camera about how every age of communications technology revolution clicks into focus a new skill that is suddenly in critical demand for the electorate, right? The world of radio technology is a world in which Franklin Delano Roosevelt can be powerful in a way that he can’t be in the 1890s. And then you have the 1950s. Dwight Eisenhower, 1956, I believe, was the first televised national convention. Famously, the 1960 presidential debates between JFK and Richard Nixon, take an election that is leaning toward Nixon and make it an election that’s leaning toward JFK because he’s So damn handsome and also just electrically compelling on a screen. We have a new screened technology right now, which is not just television and steroids. It’s a different species entirely. And it seems to favor, it seems to provide value for individuals, influencers, and even celebrities and politicians who are good at something like live wire authenticity. They’re good at performing authenticity, as paradoxical as that sounds. Trump is an absolute marvel at performing authenticity, even when the audience somehow acknowledges that he might be bullshitting. He’s just an amazing performer for this age. And it speaks to the fact that he seems to be, to borrow Ezra’s term, remarkably disinhibited in front of every single audience. There doesn’t seem to be this sort of background algorithm in his head calculating exactly how to craft his message to different audiences. He just seems to be like a live wire animal in front of every audience. And I think that compares very distinctly to the democratic character of bureaucratic caution in our age. And there is a really important distinction between this vibe of the Trumpian ruler and the vibe of the rule follower. And the vibe of the bureaucratic rule follower is a little bit afraid of unstructured conversation, is always performing the background algorithm of how do I communicate in a way that Balances all of the coalitions on my side? Because if you look at the Democratic Party right now to compare to the Republican Party, I mean, in 2015, I think there were four political parties in America. There was MAGA, there was a center right, there was the Bernie wing, and there was the Biden-Clinton wing. And what happened is that Trump killed and skinned the center right and is now wearing it as a hat. The entire Republican Party is Donald Trump wearing the skins of the old center right, the Romney wing. And the Democratic Party is still a fight. It’s exactly what Ezra described. It’s a jungle. And maybe there’s something about that jungle nature of the Democratic Party that is making some of its leaders perform this sort of coalitional calculation when they’re communicating, Such that it makes them less interested in appearing in settings that might cost them, that might not benefit them in exactly the sort of pre-calculated way they have to get their message Across. And so there’s not necessarily a whole lot of empirics to that theory. I’m a little bit going on vibes here, and maybe Ezra sees some flaws to the theory. It’s an age of the vibe. It’s an age of the vibe, yeah, exactly. I’m trying to perform the live wire authenticity that I’m describing. But I do think that might begin to explain why you, Lex, might be picking up on a difference between the political vibes. An eagerness and a willingness on the one hand to have kind of unstructured and even chaotic conversations and a care on the other side about not letting conversations become (Time 0:30:25)
  • Attention Economy
    • Democrats prioritize fundraising and traditional social media, while Republicans excel at personal online engagement.
    • Democrats should adapt to the current attention economy and be willing to take risks and upset people to enact change. Transcript: Ezra Klein One is Democrats still think the currency of politics is money and the currency of politics is attention. And that’s a huge difference between the two sides right now. So what did Kamala Harris come in and do? She came in and raised a shit ton of money, right? Like a billion dollars in record time, basically. She had more money than Donald Trump did and used it to try to buy attention. What it meant for Democrats to be good at social media is to have a good social media team. People in your office somewhere, in your campaign headquarters, who put out cool things on social media, good memes and good advertisements and so on. What it means on the right to be good at social media is to be you personally good at social You’re Vivek Ramaswamy. You’re J.D. Vance. You’re Donald Trump. You’re Elon Musk. And what you understand is you are the product. What it means to be good at attention is you are good at attention. Now, Harris, I think, was actually better at some dimensions of this. They were just slightly older dimensions than people always gave her credit for. Hell of a performer on the stump. She was way better on the stump than people realized she would be. And a good debater. She’d always been a good debater. She trashed Donald Trump in that debate. But she does not do social media herself at any level, right? Because she’s not going to take risk. Democrats, most Democrats still live in a world where the thing that they are optimizing for in attention is to not get negative attention. And what the Trumpist wing of the Republican Party understands, and this is truer for them than it probably would be for Democrats, because for them, the media is the enemy or at least Mainstream media is, et cetera. But is that attention, a volume of attention is itself good. And you can only get a critical mass of it if you’re willing to accept negative attention. Agenda control doesn’t come from positive attention. It comes from conflict. You get agenda control by doing things the other side disagrees with. So they enter into functioning agreement with you to keep the thing you’re doing at the front. Now, that doesn’t make you highly popular. Donald Trump is the most unpopular modern president at this stage of his presidency, except for Donald Trump’s first term. It took, I think Nate Silver said it was 221 days for Joe Biden’s net favorability to go negative. It’s taken something like 55 days for Donald Trump to do the same. So what Donald Trump is doing does not optimize for favorability. It does not opt out. It does not optimize, by the way, for big wins. Democrats feel like they got trashed in 2024 and in a way they did. But Trump’s popular vote victory was the smallest popular vote victory since 2000 when Al Gore beat George W. Bush by 17 dogs and three old men or whatever it was. And so attention works really differently. And while I don’t I think some of the like, you know, the Rogan of the left discourse has been, frankly, overstated because honestly, the most parsimonious model of 2024 and 2020 is in 2020, you have a 48-48 nation, something like that, or maybe you have something that’s more like a 49 Democrat, 47 Republican nation. And in 2020, because of the pandemic, Donald Trump suffered a let’s call it a 2.5 point incumbent penalty. People are mad about the pandemic. They’re mad about things being chaotic. So he loses 2.5 points. That gives, given the natural split of the electorate, Joe Biden a 4.5 point popular vote victory. In 2024, people are mad about inflation. They’re somewhat mad about the border. You have a 2.5 point penalty applied to the incumbent administration. Now it’s Harris. And you get a 1.5 point popular vote victory for Donald Trump. I genuinely don’t think, and this held internationally too, right? I generally don’t think you need a lot more to explain the election right now than that. But you do need something more than that to explain. Trump’s now, since 2016, almost decade-long dominance of all attention in American politics. Starting when he came down the golden escalator in 2015, American politics from 2015 to 2020, when Joe Biden won, was about Donald Trump. Then from 2020 to 2024, when Joe Biden was president, it was about Donald Trump. And then from 2024 on, it’s about Donald Trump. Joe Biden was an intentional void, be it his age, be it their strategy. They agreed that the topic of the nation should be Donald Trump, right? When he went back to begin his campaign in 2024, he goes to Valley Forge and gives a speech about January 6th and Donald Trump, right? It wasn’t about his own achievements. It was about Donald Trump. Joe Biden didn’t do the Super Bowl interview, right, in 2023. That’s when I did my thing about this is not going to work. Like, probably because at that point he was not capable of good extemporaneous, you know, interviews. I mean, I think that was my view of them, right, that the revealed thing here was that they didn’t trust him to do interviews. I didn’t have some inside information about anything. I just looked at what they were doing, what they weren’t doing. They’re behind in the polls. They weren’t doing things like the Super Bowl interview. If you can’t turn your candidate into the product, if you don’t trust your candidate to be the product in an election, you’re fucked. Right. And so that was that was to me the tell. But attention is the coin of the realm. Now, there are better and worse ways of doing it. I don’t think Donald Trump is doing himself huge favors right now. I think they had there was a path they could have walked to be a majority party. I think that if he was more restrained, more inhibited, if he was able to not do a bunch of things that are mobilizing opposition to him, you know, you could talk about what they would or Wouldn’t achieve that way. But I think they could be in a much stronger political position that would make them stronger for the midterms. It would eventually make, you know, J.D. Vance stronger as a successor. I think they are running a very high risk strategy that has a very reasonable chance of, you know, if they don’t make a, you know, what I would call like an autocratic breakthrough, they Might. Yeah, they might completely blow up their own movement. Right. It’s all very high risk. So for them, like for everybody, for everything, what makes them good at politics is also what makes them bad at politics. But for Democrats, the caution, the sort of bureaucratic culture, the fear of saying anything that will make anybody mad, it is optimized for a different attentional era. And one of the things I am watching when you’re saying about leaders, one of the things I’m watching in the people coming up, the ones who want to run in 2028, is who seems like they have Adapted to this era, not in the way Trump did or Vance did or Musk did. I think they’re going to need something different. They fully represent the Twitter era of politics. I mean, Musk bought Twitter. They’re sort of all in on what politics right now, what online politics feels like. I think the thing that will come next is someone who’s able to synthesize both the lessons of it and the feeling that we all have that it’s kind of sick and poisoned. Right. That Twitter is not a good place. X is not a good place. TikTok politics is not a good place. That we’re all being turned on each other. Somehow you need to be authentic and authentically angry at what we’ve all become in the way that Obama ran as a political reformer who hated the red and blue cut of America, who hated What political consultants and pollsters were doing to us. You’re not going to have somebody who just echoes. There’s not going to be there’ll be no Joe Rogan of the left. There’ll be no Donald Trump of the left because the left is different than the right. But it will have to be something authentically (Time 0:36:24)
  • Booking Democrats
    • To secure an interview with prominent Democrats, demonstrate high expected value and create a positive meme around the podcast.
    • Showcasing the benefits of appearing on the show can encourage more politicians to participate. Transcript: Lex Fridman There a degree to which the left uniquely attacks its own more intensely than maybe other parts of the political spectrum? It’s possible. Derek Thompson You go back to the model that I gave you of 2015, where there used to be these four large parties, MAGA, center-right, center-left, and left. Right now, the Republican Party is all MAGA. So there is no coalitional fight to be had. It’s all Donald Trump. And if Donald Trump wants to name a former left-wing environmentalist to be the HHS secretary, everyone says, okay, that sounds like a fantastic idea. That’s exactly who we were going to nominate to. Thank you, Donald. That’s wonderful. Lex Fridman Tip of my tongue. Derek Thompson On the Democratic side, there is a fight and it’s happening right now. And our book is trying to win a certain intra-left coalitional fight about defining the future of liberalism, the Democratic Party. So I’m not of the left. I’m certainly not of the far left. I have center-left politics and maybe even like a center-left personality style, if we can even call it that. But I do not begrudge the left for fighting because there’s a fight to be had. In many ways, I think sometimes they see I’m not endorsing this. I’m describing it. I think they see their near term opposition as not always the Republican Party, but as the forces, the Democratic Party that are in the way for them controlling one of the two major parties In this country. And so they do have an oppositional style, and maybe that’s personality based. They are fighting the center left. They are criticizing the center left consistently. But I want to be good faith about this, even though I don’t share their politics and say that they’re doing it because they’re trying to win power on the left of center. And so that’s why they’re criticizing the way they are. Now, our book and much of my writing is an attempt to do a little bit of a very specific dance. Ezra touched on this, I think, really beautifully. We’re in an era right now of anti-institution politics, anti-establishment politics. And Democrats are at risk right now as being seen as the party that always defends institutions, the party that always defends the establishment status quo. And that is an absolute death knell, I think, for this century’s angry anti-establishment politics. So what we’re trying to do is essentially say, here’s a way to channel the anger that people have at the establishment, but toward our own ends, right? We believe that we have answers on housing and energy and high quality governance and science and technology, really good answers that are fiercely critical of the status quo in Democrat-led Cities and Democrat-led states. We’re trying to be oppositional in a way that’s constructive rather than just destructive. Lex Fridman Just to put a nice pretty bow tie in the whole thing, let me ask for advice. What do I need to do for AOC to do a three-hour interview with you? Ezra, from your throne or wisdom? Ezra Klein I don’t think I know how you get AOC herself to do it. I would not pretend to know her offices or her particular views on this. I do think, though, that you can see different Democrats taking on different kinds of risks. Right now, we’re sort of in the age of Gavin Newsom starting a podcast. I mean, Gavin Newsom is the governor of California, and he’s spending some percentage of his time doing a podcast with Charlie Cook and Michael Savage and Steve Bannon. Gavin Newsom realizes that one lane for a Democrat is to be high risk and talking to virtually everybody. I think Pete Buttigieg, in a different way is somebody who wants to take media risks. Now, I think he’s going to my gut on him is he’s going to hold his powder a little bit. So he’ll probably want to do the Lex Frubin podcast, assuming he runs in 2028, in 2027. Buttigieg, right. I think a lot of them are trying to figure out what is the lane for right now. And there’s a lane for the next two years and there’s a lane for the two years after that. And you’re going to see a lot of people begin to blanket media in the two years after that. Now, it’d be interesting. I would be curious to know, would Hakeem Jeffries come on to your show right now? That’d be interesting. I mean, would he do it for four hours? I don’t know. The four hour ask, the three to four hour ask as somebody who also books politicians is hard. I have trouble. I like to book people for 90 minutes to two hours. And I tend to get negotiated down to I try not to go under 75 or 65. But even as somebody, I think, well regarded in that world, you know, it’s very, very, very hard for me to get politicians to sit for two hours. Lex Fridman I don’t have the sense that the three hour ask is a big ask because of scheduling. I think it still is grounded the fear of saying the wrong thing. Ezra Klein I just think they’re used to something else, right? I think that when you talk, I mean, they are scheduled by schedulers, right? If you talk to them yourself, if you end up having a personal relationship with Wes Moore of Maryland, and he wants to do your show, he will tell his scheduler, I want three to four hours To do the show. But the scheduler is used to a world. The staff is used to a world where nobody gets three to four hours for the boss. Reporters don’t. Donors don’t. Policy staffers don’t. So then when some interview comes in and they say, hey, I want three to four hours, the answer is no, because culturally it’s not done. You need Donald Trump himself, Pete Buttigieg himself, AOC herself to say to their staff, no, no, no, we’re making time for this because it’s not how they make time for things normally. I don’t know how much it is fear. I do think they’re unused to it, but I suspect a lot of it is simply booking culture. Like I run into it too. They’re not used to saying yes to three to four hours for anything. (Time 0:44:30)
  • Guest Selection
    • Invite politicians who have something concrete to say and focus on immediate ideas rather than pre-running campaigns.
    • This moment is about hearing perspectives on the current state of America, not about 2028. Transcript: Ezra Klein It’s not that they don’t have it. They have three to four hours if their kid is having a graduation, right? I mean, they’re human beings. They can make time, but it would have to come in a way from them. My sense is this is part of the Rogan. It’s very unclear because there are very differing stories on what happened in the Rogan-Harris negotiations, but it does seem that time was one of the sticking points. Derek Thompson It’s also possible that you’re going to find, as you try to interview Democratic politicians, that the exact same thing that happened with tech CEOs is going to happen among Democratic Politicians. You interviewed some tech CEOs, and then they did a great job. And their friends were like, you were fantastic on the Lex Friedman podcast. That was such a great thing that you said in, you know, minute 97. And then there becomes a bit of a meme that you can create really high value moments for yourself if you appear on Lex’s podcast. And then it becomes less risky for the next marginal CEO to say yes. And I think right now what we’re talking about fundamentally is not physics, it’s culture. It’s just norms. I think there’s a fear of low expected value if you’re a high-ranking Democratic politician and maybe you do a podcast like this. What if I say the wrong thing and it goes viral and my bookers and my agenda people and myself just feel terrible for the next few weeks because all we see on Blue Sky and X is just people hating? View that goes well. If you talk to Wes Moore, let’s say, and there is a five minute segment where he articulates some vision of liberalism in the 2020s that everyone says, my gosh, that is the best possible Articulation of what the Democratic Party can stand for the next four years that I’ve ever heard. Suddenly what’s happened is that appearing on the show becomes massively de-risked. And in fact, the risk valence entirely switches. We are leaving dollars on the floor by not appearing on this guy’s podcast because I’m AOC. I’m a sensational communicator. If Wes Moore can do it, I can do it even better. And so I think to a certain extent, there’s a little bit like of a riot theory phenomenon here. The person who throws the first stone in a riot has to be very courageous. The person who throws the hundredth and first stone in a riot doesn’t need to be courageous at all. And there might be a little bit of that going on that people need to see proof of high expected value before it breaks what we’re acknowledging to be a bit of a communications norm on the Left. Lex Fridman That’s a really convincing and powerful theory. I think I want to push back on it because uh so what’s what’s going to happen for example this very conversation you’re both going to come off brilliant well we’re barely like 50 minutes Into yeah it’s gonna be no more material it’s all straight down but what people will get tired they’ll listen to this sloppy and they’re like well that’s ezra like he’s brilliant they’re Going to be worried about their own candidate if AOC comes off brilliant. They’re not going to be thinking, oh, this is a place to be brilliant. They’re going to be like, well, that’s because AOC is brilliant. But my candidate is not. It still boils down to the caution. I’ve had a lot of Republican, high-profile Republican people reach out to me. They don’t give a shit. They’re just like, whatever, I’ll come. People on the left, I’ve had two people who I respect deeply and admire, express caution about the previous people I’ve interviewed and not wanting to come on. Ezra Klein Well, that’s the thing the left has to get over. Yeah. Like what? That’s a very important cultural. They began to do a thing where spaces were verboten because it had platformed so and so. And I think that culture is changing. I think they realize I mean that they abandoned huge, vast swaths of significant culture because like they wouldn’t go places. It’s crazy. Like you have to, the idea that you only go where people agree with you is genuine lunacy. I don’t want to act as your booker here. And 20, you know, 2020 candidates are what they are and they each have their own press strategy. But I would say like, I’m doing this myself on my show. I like, I don’t think the best people to get right now in the Democratic Party are the seven people who lead the polls. I’m looking for people who will think out loud. I just had Jake Auchincloss on. He’s a not-that House member from Massachusetts. I just think he’s a guy who thinks out loud. I am booking someone else right now like that. Two more people like that, frankly, who are neither of them. They’re like the net. Like I could get like a bigger name. I’m more interested in people who are thinking like one reason I think Bernie Sanders always did everything is to him. The thing he was really doing was he had something to say. The point of almost everything for Bernie Sanders is to be in a place where people can hear the thing he has to say. And a lot of politicians don’t have that. Right. The point of anything is what it does for them in the polls, what it does for them with the donors, how it repositions them. I’m interested right now at this moment because it’s not 2028. It’s not 2027. There’s no Democratic primary happening right now. The idea that you can like pre run the Democratic Party is stupid or primary is stupid. We don’t even know what the like we, we might be in World War III, right? We have no idea what, you know, we might have, you know, AGI. Like the things that the 2027 primary might be about, the kinds of scandals that might have erupted by them are totally different. Whereas, you know, the reason to have people on is because they are saying something, they’re a live mind in the moment that has a perspective on this that you want to hear. And so I would look for that. And I think a lot of people who are not, you know, there are people who are trying to protect something, protect a standing in the polls, protect a sort of coalitional set of allies they Currently have. And then there are people who are, you know, trying to just be heard. Again, a lot of Bernie Sanders’ culture, the way he does media, is now Bernie Sanders is Bernie Sanders. He didn’t used to be. He wasn’t in 2015 even. Like when Bernie Sanders ran for president in 2015, it wasn’t initially a big deal. It was like, oh, bummer, Elizabeth Warren didn’t run for president. It was a feeling of most people on the left. And so Bernie Sanders was a guy who’s been saying the same thing for decades, but in the wilderness and nobody was listening. And now he still has the instincts of somebody who understood that the most important thing was to find a place where people were listening, where they would let you talk and even better Let you talk for a while. I think the candidate who’s going to do well in 2028 is going to have an instinct like that. But I but even right now, I think the question is one of my big questions is I’m booking for my show is just. I want someone who has a perspective on this moment, who feels like they have had a thought that is about right now and who we are right now and what the story of America is right now. I think what’s really important is what Ezra said. It’s about having something to say. Derek Thompson We wanted to talk to you and talk together about how much we wanted to talk to you because we got something to say. You know, we wrote a 300-page book about how much we have to say. We love going on podcasts and television shows and (Time 0:50:23)
  • Political Realignment
    • American politics is in a period of realignment, lacking a shared vision for the future after the decline of the neoliberal order.
    • Democrats must address the cost of living crisis and focus on supply-side solutions to regain public trust. Transcript: Ezra Klein I can say for sure is that we know. There’s also a reality, and I mean, the book is trying to enter into this reality. I think one thing you’re saying is that people have coded you. And so Donald Trump is really excited to do it and maybe loving politicians or not. One thing that we think is that we’re in a period of realignment. The last chapter of the book, we talk about an idea that is picked up from a historian named Gary Garstle, which is an idea of political orders. And political orders are periods that have a sort of structure of consensus and a structure of a zone of conflict. But it’s more or less agreed on by the two sides, even if only tacitly. So you have a New Deal order. New Deal order is founded by FDR. It is entrenched when Dwight Eisenhower accepts the New Deal as part of the U.S. Proving that it can treat workers better than the Soviet Union. So those are sort of right there, the three ingredients typically of an order. You have a party that starts it, opposition party that accepts key premises, right? Dwight Eisenhower doesn’t come in and say, we’re going to roll back the whole New Deal. And it’s often held in place by an external antagonist. In that case, the Soviet Union. You have then, you have in the 70s, stagflation, the Vietnam War, a series of problems that the New Deal order no longer seems able to handle. So you have the rise of what he calls the neoliberal order. And the neoliberal order is if you’re going to choose a founder, it’s going to be Reagan on that one, right? It’s much more about markets. It is very concerned with things like inflation. And it really is entrenched by Bill Clinton. You know, the era of big government is over. And partially it’s entrenched also by the fall of the Soviet Union. Right. The fall of the Soviet Union is like this proof point that every that the sort of capitalists are right, that markets are the way of the future. Government does not know what it’s doing. And that becomes like the governing set of assumptions. And so there are arguments about what the markets should be doing, right? You know, Obamacare is about creating sort of markets and health insurance, right? You can use markets for very progressive ends. We want to use markets for lots of progressive ends. But the neoliberal order basically collapses amidst a financial crisis and climate change and China. And those are the three things that sort of girth a little bit, but also separately, we think, kill it, which is the neoliberal order does not have an answer to the financial crisis. Lets a sort of recession linger and a very slow recovery linger for too long. It doesn’t know what to say really about climate change. Markets have made a lot of people rich by, you know, doing a lot of things that are very, very damaging for the environment, very damaging for the future of the human race, potentially. And you have the rise of China. And the neoliberal order said, you integrate China into the global economy. You bring them into the WTO. You trade with them. You help them build their industrial base. You help them pull their people out of poverty, which that part is good. And they will become more like the West. They will liberalize. They will have a free press. They will. The richer we make China, the more China is going to become like us. And that proves totally wrong. Right. China becomes more authoritarian over time. But it also sort of develops an industrial base. It becomes as it does not become more like us, becomes dangerous. You know, at least in our view, right, you don’t want to ever have a conflict with a another country who you’ve outsourced your key industrial base to. You have the sort of fall of that order. And then again here, things that would have been ridiculous at one point in American politics had become possible. Bernie Sanders is one of them, right? The idea that you would have somebody, a self-described socialist running for president and coming anywhere near the Democratic nomination. That was unthinkable in 2004. And by 2016, it almost happened. And Donald Trump is another thing. Donald Trump runs like headlong into the failures of neoliberalism in the Republican Party. He runs against trade. He runs against a sort of Paul Ryan, more open immigration. George W. Bush and John McCain were both very big on liberalizing immigration policy. He runs against the Iraq War and, you know, sort of foreign adventurism. And there’s a sort of isolationist instinct that coexists very awkwardly now within a territorial expansionist instinct, but at least in 2016, it was more isolationist. And so Donald Trump and his sort of reimagining of the Republican Party as a right-wing populist, more like sort of some Christian Democratic parties in other countries, you know, Up in that quadrant of socially conservative, economically populist, that becomes something that’s possible. But nothing has found an equilibrium, right? Nobody’s agreed to the other side’s premises. There are certain ones that people are agreeing on. Both the Republican and Democratic parties have a very different view on China now, right? Like Biden kept a lot of Trump’s policies on China and actually strengthened them. And now Trump is building on that aggressively again. But in terms of the other things, there isn’t agreement about what the next period in American politics should look like. And that’s one reason I think it’s very dangerous, both as a question of media strategy, but also as a question of politics, to code people, places, platforms too tightly. Republicans and Democrats aren’t going to get along in Congress. That has to do with, I think, the incentives of Congress. My first book is called Why We’re Polarized. It’s about those almost hydraulic incentives for partisanship. But in terms of what is the meaning of my podcast, of Derek’s, of yours, of Joe Rogan, of Theo Vaughn, of Call Her Daddy, of a million different places that are not well-coded, that’s, I think, very up for grabs. I mean, Elon Musk was an Obama-era liberal in 2012. I mean, I think his personal process of radicalization is not going to unwind itself. But a lot of the people who Democrats are like, all these billionaires are right wing now. No, people are just uncertain. I mean, some of them are a little bit afraid, but people are uncertain. They’re moving back and forth. The sort of texture of it is unsettled. And it’s going to take time. These transitionary periods, I tells you which side folks are on, my sense is a lot of people who are very open to MAGA in 2025 are going to feel very differently about it in 2028, depending On how they do. Right. If they do great, then they’re going to entrench. But if they don’t, then a lot of people became MAGA curious are not going to be MAGA curious anymore. But they’re not going to want the last Democratic Party either. I was making this point to someone the other day about why the Democratic Party’s embrace of the Liz Cheney style independent didn’t work. Liz Cheney, of course, being Dick Cheney’s daughter, a Republican. But what Liz Cheney, the never Trumpers were, were a way of reaching out to who the Democratic Party thought the independents were. But the key thing about an independent to a political party is not that they don’t like the other party. It’s that they’re an independent because they also don’t like your (Time 0:58:35)
  • Housing and Opportunity
    • Housing is crucial for freedom, opportunity, and economic mobility, enabling people to live near dynamic industries and innovation hubs.
    • Restrictive regulations have created artificial scarcity, driving up costs and hindering economic growth in cities. Transcript: Lex Fridman Let’s say the second part of the question first. What’s so important about housing? Derek Thompson We’re talking about life. And even at a higher level, we’re kind of talking about freedom. Like the freedom to live where you want to live, the freedom to feel like the good and achievable life is actually good and achievable. This is profoundly a question of housing. There’s this great paper that was written several years ago called The Housing Theory of Everything by Bauman, Southwood, and I forget the other guy’s name. But they made this really beautiful point that no matter what you care about in terms of public policy or politics, housing probably makes contact with it. If you care about innovation, innovation, as I said, it’s about getting people together in a city where they can work together. That’s about housing density. If you care about child care costs, that’s about bringing down the cost of buildings. That’s also about housing. If you care about being able to live near your friends and family, this is also profoundly a question of housing. So when we talk about housing over and over, we’re not just talking about the four walls and roof and floor. We’re talking about what housing means to people because housing is life. And right now, what we very clearly see in the data is that Americans are leaving expensive cities and states that tend to be run by Democrats, and they’re moving to areas that are sunnier, That are cheaper, and are often more likely to be run by Republicans. And this is, I think, because starting in the 1960s, 1970s, you had this era of blockage points in housing. We started seeing zoning regulations. We started seeing historic preservation rules. We started seeing laws that made it easier for citizens to sue to stop a new development from going up. Essentially, new tools were invented to empower people’s natural conservatism. You know, for hundreds of years, people might have always felt like I kind of want my neighborhood to stay the same. Like that might have been something that like the Neanderthals were feeling. But only in the last 50 years have we really outfitted human beings with a weapon to go along with their biological preference for the familiar such that they can utilize it to stop the Change of the physical world around them. And so we’ve seen the rise of what is commonly called nimbyism, not in my backyard, the rise of a movement to stop the development of new housing around where they live. And so what you see in the data is, according to one study that was reported on by Yoni Applebaum, my colleague at The Atlantic, if there’s a city with a 10% increase in the progressive Vote share, there’s a 30% decline in the number of houses that are permitted. For some reason, it does tend to be these areas that are more populated by progressives that have more of these choke points. Some of this is just historical quirk, but some of it is, I think, maybe the character of a certain kind of liberal, maybe often an older liberal, who believes that preserving the physical Environment is the good. That the best thing you can do for the planet is to stop things from changing around you, stop things from being built. And that’s an old fashioned version of environmentalism that we’re trying to turn the liberals against. Because really we see the challenge with climate change is not how do we get everybody to stop using electricity? How do we get people to stop using any power or joules or electrons that come from natural gas and oil? We want people to recognize that if the people want to lead modern lives, and they’re going to continue to demand modern lives, and so we have to use clean energy technology to allow them To live those lives. That means you have to build an absolute shit ton of nuclear energy, solar and wind and geothermal and nuclear, and maybe in the near future, even fusion. It requires an attitude of being excited about building new things rather than a liberalism that seeks always to block changes to the physical environment around them. So I think that what we’re trying to do is to allow people in a way to meet processes and outcomes. I think liberals want housing abundance in some part of their brains, in some part of their hearts. I think they want the price of housing to go down. Of, a mindset or paradigm shifting argument that gets them to see how the processes that we’ve created go so dramatically against the outcomes that liberals want. And we’re trying to say, here’s a new process. Here’s a new question you can ask yourself. How can we solve the housing problem on the supply side? Lex Fridman And also solving the housing problem is one of the mechanisms to lift people out of poverty. So there’s a lot of goals that align well with liberals. You write about cities. Cities are where wealth is created, not just where it is displayed. They are meant to be escalators into the middle class, not penthouses for the upper class. So the housing problem we’re talking about specifically, or most importantly, is in urban areas. Ezra Klein Yeah, this is something that we spend a lot of time thinking about for the book. There’s a lot of land in the United States. And sometimes you’ll hear people say something like, I’ve heard this a lot. Well, not everybody can live in San Francisco or Venice in Los Angeles or, you know, Manhattan or Brooklyn or whatever. And fine, right? Not everybody can. That’s true. The problem is that cities are engines of opportunity and economic dynamism. I mean, as you know better than we do, the frontier AI labs in the U.S., basically all of them outside of China, exist in 50 square miles in the Bay Area. There’s not one in New York. There’s not one in Dallas. There’s not one in Chicago. There’s not one in Austin. There’s not one anywhere but in the Bay Area. But the key thing is that there is huge spillover from these hyperdynamic industries, be it finance in New York, be it tech in San Francisco, be it culture in Los Angeles, you make a lot More money being a barber near Google than you do being a barber in rural Arkansas. And this is the ancient pathway to mobility, people who are poorer and work in the service sector, they move to richer areas where the productivity is higher and thus the sort of money Spreads around. And if you look at American mobility and opportunity over the 20th century, about a third roughly on calculations, just comes from this people moving to richer areas. And if you look in like the last 20-ish years, 30-ish years, you see this extremely steady process of income convergence as people move towards richer areas begin to throw itself into Reverse. Because it used to make sense for the janitor and the lawyer to move to New York City. But now it only makes sense for the lawyer to and the janitor leaves because (Time 1:28:07)
  • Manufactured Scarcity
    • The housing crisis is self-inflicted due to restrictive zoning and regulations that empower NIMBYism.
    • Overcoming this requires not just legal changes, but political courage to represent the interests of those who benefit from increased housing supply. Transcript: Derek Thompson There’s certainly a lot of regulation that you want to get out of the way. I mean, you look at California, for example. You were just giving a beautiful summary of just how important it is for people to be able to move next to economic opportunity. If you look at the number of houses that have been permitted in the state of California, over the last 40 years, it’s basically just a squiggle line down. Tragedy here, just to put a really fine point on it, is that the city wasn’t gated by geography or by destiny. Or by technology. We know how to build apartment buildings. Yeah. Elijah Otis invented the elevator in the 1850s. This is not exactly a breaking technology. We chose to do this. We wrote these laws. We, people, are filing these lawsuits. We, judges, are accepting these lawsuits and determining that this building can’t be built. This is entirely self-inflicted, and it’s why over and over again in this book, we call it a manufactured scarcity, which is like a little bit of a funny term. How do you manufacture the absence of something? No, a manufactured scarcity means you didn’t have to do this. This is a human made rule whose purposeful goal was to make it harder to add to the supply of something. And in this case, especially since the 1960s, we have made it purposefully difficult to add housing supply. And the outcome just followed the process. You see housing supply decline often in the richest cities and these states that are governed too often by progressives. How do we undo it? Yes, a huge part of it exists at the layer of law. California is already trying to change its laws, end single family zoning, make it easier to add accessory dwelling units called ADUs. We’re changing this at the level of law. But one thing I’m very fixated on is making sure that we also communicate to people that it has to be changed at the level of mindset and even at the level of political courage. Because here’s like a model of what often happens. You’re the mayor of some city and you want to add a housing development of, let’s say, 500 units, right? 500 apartment unit building is going to be set up by some developer. And there’s a city council meeting to determine whether or not this apartment building is going to be built. Because of loss aversion and because the people who tend to go to city council meetings are older and richer and homeowners, guess what the overwhelming volume of reaction is in those City council meetings? It’s a lot of people who feel like they have something to lose saying you cannot put up this building. You cannot add these apartments. It’s going to ruin the character of the neighborhood. It’s going to create traffic. It’s going to be like an eyesore because I don’t like buildings that are that tall. Any number of excuses can come out of like the Pez dispenser of excuses. You take care of one, there’s going to be another that comes to the surface. And so what often happens is that these mayors or these people sitting in the city council will look out into this room of 50 people saying no, no, no. And they’ll say, I’m going to represent the feedback that I see, and I’m going to vote no on the addition of this housing, on the addition of these housing units, the addition of this apartment Building. Where political courage comes into play is the ability to say, you know what, I want everyone here to know that I hear you. I’m listening to you and I represent you. And so I’m grateful that you showed up to the city council meeting. But for every one person here who says they see a benefit to adding a new apartment building, I know that there are 10,000 people in the city that didn’t have the wealth or the knowledge To be here at this meeting. And they’re going to benefit from more housing because that’s going to bring down their housing costs. And I represent them as well. I don’t just represent, you could say, the circle of care that I can see right now. I also represent the circle of voters that we can’t see right now, who are in the city, or who are in the state, or might even want to move to the state, but currently can’t because housing Prices are too high on account of housing supply being restricted. And so one thing we’re trying to get liberals to have is a sense of political courage to stand up against this very visible nimbyism and say, we represent interests that aren’t necessarily Visible at this city council meeting. We represent the larger interest of housing abundance. So we’re going to always default to saying yes, rather than default to saying no, just because the people who happen to come to these meetings are NIMBYs. Ezra Klein I want to add a wrinkle on regulation and deregulation. So we were talking about coding earlier. Who gets coded as right wing? Who gets coded as left wing? Deregulation is a word that is highly coded as right wing. The right wing wants it to deregulate, right? They want the government to stop regulating the market. It’s fine. In many cases, the government should deregulate parts of the market. In many cases, it should regulate parts of the market more. What we don’t talk about enough is how much the government regulates the government and how badly it needs to deregulate the government. So I have many more left friends and they’ll come to me or they’ll critique me and they’ll say, this all is fine. But what we really need in this country is public housing or it’s been rebranded social housing. It’s fine. Singapore, huge amount of social housing. Right. They do a great job with it. One of the things we go into and this book is a manifesto on some level, but something we really try to do is take you into the gritty, grimy, frustrating details of how policy plays out On the ground. What actually happens after a bill passes and why we get the outcomes we do. Because often it’s like a bunch of decisions made after everybody stopped paying attention. So one of the things we pay some real attention to is the part of the kind of housing that people on the left all agree on is affordable housing through government grants. The government says, oh, we’re not just going to have market rate developers coming in, building more luxury condos for the children of the upper class. We’re going to build affordable housing for people who should be in this city, but otherwise couldn’t couldn’t pay enough to be here. California, I can give you two different examples, but let’s look at Los Angeles. I’m from outside LA. And they have something, I always forget if it’s measure H or measure HHH, but California, LA voters pass a bond measure, about a billion dollars, a little bit more, I think it was, to Build affordable housing. Six years later, when I’m writing about this, they have built a couple thousand units at an average cost of six to seven hundred thousand dollars a unit. So it’s like it’s costing more to build housing under this affordable housing bond measure, which they have agreed to pay for, than it is to buy a home market rate in Denver. Denver is a nice place to live. So why? What had happened? Well, it turns out that when you trigger the public money in California, in various cities, these are city ordinances often, but not always, and you use these public grants and you cobble Together the different grants you need to build an affordable housing complex, what you’ve done is layer onto yourself a huge number of rules that the market rate developers don’t Have to follow. You’re either using union labor or paying prevailing wage. You’re building to hire green building codes. (Time 1:39:46)
  • Deregulating Government
    • Instead of just deregulating markets, the government should deregulate itself to become more efficient.
    • This means simplifying processes and rules that hinder the completion of projects like affordable housing and high-speed rail. Transcript: Derek Thompson That’s what regulations are. They’re just rules. And sometimes they give us exactly the outcomes we want. And sometimes they give us the outcomes we would never hope for. And here’s a good example. You go back to the 1940s, 1950s. America was fucking disgusting. Disgusting. The air and the water was horrifying. In 1943, residents of Los Angeles woke up to a smog that was so black they thought the Japanese had launched a chemical attack against America. In New Hampshire, in the rivers next to textile mills, sometimes the rivers themselves would run green and purple and red, depending on what textile colors were being dumped into the River. You had the Ohio River on fire in the 1960s, 1970s. The world of mid-1900s America was truly sickening, and it made people sick. And so we passed a raft of environmental rules, and some of them achieved exactly what we wanted. The air we breathe and the water we drink is cleaner because of the Clean Air and Water Acts. We did extraordinary things with this era of regulation. Some of these regulations were about outcomes. The Clean Air and Water Act regulates specific pollution levels in the air and the water or the emissions coming out of tailpipes. Some of the regulations, though, were about process. NEPA is the National Environmental Protection Act, and it, among many other things, empowered individuals and citizens to sue the government and organizations, businesses, to Stop construction or fill out environmental reviews to prove that their construction would meet muster, wouldn’t degrade the environment too severely. This opened the door to an infinitude of lawsuits to wrap up any effort to build anything in red tape forever. So fast forward to 2021, the year or sorry, the month after Newsom signs, Gavin Newsom, governor of California, signs the law to end single family zoning in California. Seems like a massive win for the pro-housing YIMBYs of California. The month after that law was passed, the board of supervisors in San Francisco decided to rule against an apartment building that would have added 500 total units and 100 below market Rent units, so something like public or social housing, that was going to be built on a Nordstrom parking lot, just about the best possible place you could add housing in the world, a Nordstrom parking lot, because the builders, the developers, didn’t file the appropriate paperwork under environmental review. So this is a world in which the most housing-starved city in America is being starved even more of housing because of the expression of or the power of the instrumentalization of a rule Past the 1970s that has allowed people to sue to stop the physical world from being changed. And I think it goes back to this idea that like sometimes the solutions of one era can become the problems of the next generation, right? It was really good to pass the set of environmental bills that we did in the 1960s and 1970s because it addressed the extremely real problem of air and water and land being degraded by Industry. But we’re in a new world and the problem environmentalism today is in part a problem of global warming And we have to build not only dense housing, but also clean energy. And the same rules that were designed to help the environment in the 1960s and 1970s are sometimes ironically used in a way that hurt the environment in the 2020s. And that’s one reason why we as liberals need a paradigm shift. Okay. You said a lot of really interesting insights there. Lex Fridman So one, if I understood correctly, that regulation of outcomes is more a good idea than regulation of process because regulation of process is where you can breed a lot of basically The lawyers show up. The other insight is if we get rid of 99% of lawyers, the world would be a better place. There’s a lot of jokes around that. I don’t know. I don’t know if you agree. Ezra Klein I definitely wouldn’t say 99%. Lex Fridman 98%. Yeah, yeah. 82.3. 82. In the 80s. No. Majority of them. Ezra Klein No. They’re simply there to take advantage of the rules. We talk a lot about a book. I don’t know if you’ve run into this one, but it’s by Mansur Olson, who’s sort of a founder of public interest economics. And it’s called The Rise and Decline of Nations. This is like a very famous book. Libertarians love this book. And I love this book. It’s not right about everything, but its fundamental question is, how come after World War II did the completely destroyed, bombed out countries of Germany and Japan, you would have Thought they would be just screwed. Instead, they both become growth miracles. They both do much better than the UK, which was on the winning side of the war. Why? And Olsen’s argument is that affluent, stable societies over long periods of time develop something that is very difficult to develop and very important to develop, which is bargaining Organizations. Right. Collective action is hard. It is hard to form an organization. It is hard to make that organization persist. But if you can do that in an atmosphere of stability, then over time, that organization will tend to entrench its power. Right? Think about AARP or the Chamber of Commerce or certain unions or, you know, the National Manufacturing Council, et cetera, the Business Roundtable. You know, they’re not that powerful when they start, but over a long period of time, they become really powerful and they start to pass laws and make themselves more powerful and so on. There’s a lot you can say about this insight, but my favorite part of Olson’s book and one that I don’t think people emphasize enough is this insight he has, which is that over time, countries Will begin, every country has a kind of form of natural selection within it. And that form of natural selection will select for people with the skills to navigate, best navigate the kind of economy that country has. So if you’re in China right now, and China is in its developmentalism phase, you really want to be in civil infrastructure, right? It is great to be a civil engineer in China, great to be working on semiconductors in China, great to be doing all this stuff in the physical world. But America, you know, as a kind of price of our affluence and our success, we’ve become a country, and this happens for a lot of countries, where negotiation is really important. And a country in which negotiation is really important is going to, over time, start developing a preference for lots of lawyers, people in finance, management consultants, because It is a society that requires continuous, what he calls complex bargaining. And I think this actually explains all Patrick Collison. We quote him in the, who’s a founder, CEO of Stripe, you know, brilliant tech guy. Here’s his point that he made in an interview with Noah Smith, who’s a blogger and economist, where they were talking about high-speed rail. And sort of Patrick makes his point. He’s like, it’s just tough to be a high-speed rail engineer in America. You’re going to have a much easier time working in the digital space. And so the digital space becomes a kind of frontier of last resort. And so people want to build things, (Time 1:50:51)
  • Centralizing Power
    • Elon Musk uses financial influence to ensure Republican congressional loyalty to Trump, further centralizing power.
    • This reduces checks and balances within the political system and limits diverse perspectives. Transcript: Ezra Klein Because I really want to emphasize that it has goals. The goals are clear on some level, and they have to do with centralizing power. So let me take out something that’s not doge, because this is, I think, an important place where you see what the effort is. What is Congress for? Not just Democrats in Congress who are, in theory, right now, the opposition party, but Republicans in Congress. Congress is this aggregation of information from different places in the country who’ve chosen representatives to represent them in Washington. That’s how the system works. One of the things that has really cowed congressional Republicans, it is a huge sun-like gravitational force now on Capitol Hill, that Elon has made it known that any House or Senate Republican who defies Trump on a key vote, cabinet nominees of CR, that kind of thing, he will dump 50 to 100 million dollars into a primary. It’s no money at all for him. It’s lethal for them. Right. This is well known. He has said this personally to some of them. Right. It’s been well reported. This is probably why Jody Ernst voted for Pete Hegseth. Well, what’s achieved by this? I think it’s an interesting question because Republicans, in theory, are allied to Donald Trump, right? He’s the nominee of their party. They don’t have literally the same view of him. Value in the system in there being checks and balances. There’s a value in the system and the system having to absorb other kinds of information. Now, we already don’t have the checks and balances we once had or thought we would have in this country because we have nationalized political parties instead of, you know, branches Of government that sort of compete, you know, with ambition, checking ambition. And I’ve done whole shows on this and we can talk about that if we want. But we do have political parties and political parties are themselves institutions that aggregate different kinds of information in order to try to come to some outcome that is a better Outcome because more information has surfaced. I think Donald Trump would be in a stronger position for him if Senate Republicans could have done what they actually wanted to do and not confirm RFK Jr., not confirm Tulsi Gabbard, Not confirm Pete Hegseth, not confirm Kash Patel and Don Vigino, right? That’s actually a huge amount of risk the Trump administration has taken on. If they had named a sort of normal figure to HHS and then there’s a measles outbreak, well, measles outbreaks are tough. Like, that’s a hard thing. If you name RFK Jr. And there’s a huge measles outbreak, you’re really going to get blamed for that because people are ready to blame you. If there is a domestic terror attack after you’ve put Kash Patel, who’s quite unqualified, in charge of the FBI, and they sort of launched a war internally against the FBI, which they See as a hotbed of anti-Trump sentiment, and the FBI in the sort of internal chaos misses some things and you have deaths on Americans. So that’s a huge amount of risk you’ve taken on. I mean, the guy they fired, Chris Wray, he was Trump’s appointee. It wasn’t some Democrat. Trump named him in his first term. But Elon, right, what he did here was he created a kind of death star of primary money. And he has said that, like, if you cross Trump in Congress, even as a Republican, you’re done. Like between Trump’s control of attention and loyalty and my ability to outspend you, like you’re toast. I think what that reveals is that what he wants is for power to be centralized under Trump. We’ve been talking about the bureaucracy, but he also wants it to be true in Congress. I am not a Donald Trump fan, but obviously other people are Donald Trump fans, right? Obviously, I think at this point Elon Musk is a Donald Trump fan, but much of the country thinks this guy is great. And I think we should take what they are doing at word and deed. The point of Donald Trump is that Donald Trump is right about things. We should give him power and he should use that power. My sense is you have some mixed feelings about him, but not everybody does. And this sort of very consistent application of authority across the people he’s named, J.D. Vance, the difference between Mike Pence and J.D. Vance is J.D. Vance said explicitly in the whole run up to the vice presidential sweepstakes that his view of what went wrong in the first administration is between the bureaucracy and the staff. Too many people are trying to inhibit Donald Trump. And that what he would do is tell Trump that he’s got to get rid of these generals and he’s got to get people who will do what Trump actually said. The view of Trump’s fans, the view of his allies, is that the first term didn’t go well enough because they had too much opposition from Republicans in Congress who talked Trump into Things they shouldn’t have talked him into, and too much opposition from the civil service and even from Trump’s own staff. I think a very simple heuristic of why these terms are so different is that the most important member of the Trump family, Trump aside, in the first term was Jared Kushner and maybe Ivanka. And the most important member of the family in the second is Don Trump Jr., right? Kushner brought in a bunch of inhibitors. He brought in mainstream figures like Gary Cohn and, you know, Kushner represented other parts of society that, you know, were sort of mixed on Trump. And they wanted him to do certain things and not others. And there was maybe a productive tension. McConnell, you know, was majority leader. He was more powerful than Thune is. Paul Ryan was speaker. He’s more powerful than Mike Johnson is. In the second term, you have Don Trump Jr., who brings in much more right-wing figures. They’re accelerators, not inhibitors. Accelerationists, in many cases, explicitly. You have Elon Musk, who believes the likeliest problem is Trump doesn’t go far enough fast enough. And you have a weak Republican Congress that is further cowed by Musk’s money. It could be good or it could be bad, but the Curtis Yarvin take that we need a more monarch-like figure is clearly being tested out. The view, just as you said, about software engineering things is that you often need a benevolent dictator. Now, I don’t think Trump is benevolent. Other people do. But the view that what is being attempted here is something much more centralized in its power, I think is actually a shared view of what’s going on. It’s like a consensus reality we have, not like an argument over reality we’re having. Lex Fridman Do you think there’s some degree to where if you trust in the system of democracy, which I do, and there’s some people, and we’ll talk about them, one of the main criticisms and concerns Of Donald Trump is he’s going to break democracy. But if you trust that democracy holds, isn’t this an interesting experiment of how when everybody’s aligned, aggressive cutting of regulation and the number of people is an experiment Of like, okay, let’s see what this does to a really over bloated bureaucracy that’s become extremely inefficient. And by the way, so I have an optimism about it that matches the division of abundance in the book, that once you do the creative destruction, then you start to really be able to step in and Have a clear vision of like, okay, housing. How do we, what are the to solve housing? But I do think the first step that’s needed is the destruction. Derek Thompson As we said, we’re sort of speed running a particular experiment here of what does executive power look like if we do away as much as possible with checks (Time 2:24:20)
  • Bureaucratic Failure
    • Joe Biden’s $42 billion rural broadband initiative failed due to a complex 14-stage bureaucratic process.
    • Liberals must prioritize outcomes over process and embrace institutional reform to regain public trust. Transcript: Derek Thompson Then it’s about understanding how to accomplish that. A stage of the process that I think Doge has entirely skipped. I don’t think we’ve reached the stage of understanding. We’ve destroyed, and then maybe it’s sometimes promised to understand the thing that we’ve destroyed after the fact. You want to set goals. You want to understand how to meet those goals, and then you want to meet them. And the problem with liberalism of the last few years and last few decades is that we’ve become disconnected from outcomes. Really, really crystal clear example. So Joe Biden in 2021 signs the bipartisan infrastructure law, and he and Pete Buttigieg call it, truthfully, one of the most important infrastructure bills passed in the last few decades. $1.2 trillion to do exactly what Ezra and I want to do, to build in the world. There’s a piece of that law that’s a $42 billion program called BED, which stands for Broadband Equity Access and Deployment, I think. $42 billion to build rural broadband. Fast forward to 2024, practically none of it is built. We’re now four calendar years after it was passed. And the program is, at this point, it seems like it’s going to die and they’re just going to transfer the whole thing to Starlink. So why? We want to understand why does government fail to achieve its outcomes and how can we learn from those failures to allow government to succeed at its outcomes? Well, you look into it and it turns out that in order to take these $42 billion and send it to the states, the states had to go through a 14 stage process in order to get the money. First, the FCC had to draw a map of the places where America needed more rural broadband. And then there was a challenge period where people could question the map. And the FCC would remake the map, and then the challengers would re-sue them to change the map again. Then the states had to file a letter of intent and a five-year action plan and a funding program, all of which could be subject to their own challenge periods. And in each of these challenge periods, the Commerce Department is going back to the states and saying, we really like your five-year plan, but your workforce development program Didn’t pass this matrix of equity, and you didn’t reach out to the right bidders over here. And if you try harder to reach out to more people who just aren’t white men to be your employees, that would be fantastic if you could put that into the new edit that you submit to us. And of course, there are delays because every state has to do its own programs. The Commerce Department is backed up. Yada, yada, yada. You get to a point where out of 56 states and jurisdictions that have applied to begin the 14 stage process, by the time the Democrats lose the election in November 2024, three out of the 56 have passed all 14 stages and very little of the money has actually been spent because of all the problems that Ezra and I discussed about how hard it is to build in the physical world. $42 billion, therefore, dies upon contact with planet Earth. That’s not government achieving its goals. And a doge that we were sort of, you know, du-umvrits of in this parallel universe is one that would try very clearly to, A, articulate a goal. What are we trying to do here? We’re trying to build rural broadband. Why? Because we think connectivity is incredibly important to the economy of the future. It helps people’s health. It helps the economy of rural areas. Let’s build rural broadband. Two, what are the roadblocks? What are the bottlenecks? What’s hard about taking a pot of money that exists in Washington and actually creating broadband networks in rural Kentucky? Let’s understand what those roadblocks are so that we can do two things. We can take away the things that need to be taken away to accelerate the program. And maybe we can add new policies that will accelerate the spending because bottom line, we want to make a difference in the world. That’s a world where government is, to borrow Ezra’s language, deregulated itself. It’s easier for the government to achieve its goals. It’s really important at the level of sort of principle here that liberals fall out of love with this procedural fetish that has dominated the left over the last half century and fall Back in love with outcomes. To be ruthlessly obsessed with how liberalism has failed and how these kind of failures aren’t just technocratic stories to tell in a podcast. I think this is fundamental to why Democrats are losing the communications war in an era of anti-establishment and anti-institution. We find ourselves in a reflexive position of having all the cranks, so to speak, having left the Democratic Party, and we’re the ones who defend all institutions. We’re the ones who defend the establishments. We’re the ones saying government can only do good. But as a result, we lose the ability to talk to people about how government fails and how they can see that failure and how sometimes they’re literally leaving cities and states run by Democrats because that failure is so effing obvious to them. So this isn’t just about the Bede program. It’s not just about 14-step programs. It’s not just about rural broadband. It really is about a higher level principle of political communication. How do you develop a liberalism that in an age of anti-establishment anger, both reflects that anger and channels it for proactive purposes by not just doing destruction, destruction, But creative destruction? Lex Fridman So first of all, beautifully put. Second sort of the big thing that doge did is make this a sexy topic to discuss and then you can tear down doge with the way they’re doing it say it’s wrong criticize but then people are all Of a sudden more and more caring about uh the efficiency of government and educating themselves learning about it and it’s creating a culture of transparency to the whole thing so now You can swoop in with a book like Abundance and describe, here’s how to do actually, how to have a clear mission and metrics, how to solve these problems. It’s supposed to have this culture of process. Me personally, one of the things that really frustrates me about this world is that. Uh, the bureaucracy of that kind of process, especially because everybody, at least in the United States is just all so fucking polite everywhere about the whole thing. They’re all so nice to you as they’re doing the process about every single thing. They’re just like, they’re, this is, and then the, you have to call from nine to five, there’s hours and let’s schedule a meeting in three weeks from now to discuss this document so we Can have another document. And all of a sudden, the big dreams and the visions, the hopes that people have invested in building a project that’s an incredible project dies. It’s not just the waste of money. It’s the possibility of a beautiful thing that could have been built never gets built. Derek Thompson You’re retracing Ezra’s lovely line about how the character of the right these days is autocratic and the character of the left can be overly bureaucratic. I hope there’s a middle synthesis lane here where there’s a political identity that believes in efficient bureaucracies. Sometimes it actually does take a lot of people to get certain things done. But you really, I think, need to have an eye toward institutional reform. This is a theme of our book that we haven’t talked about as much yet, but I think it’s so important for abundance to believe that (Time 2:49:14)
  • Respect for Sam Harris
    • While Ezra Klein disagrees with Sam Harris on certain issues, he admires Harris’s intellectual independence and willingness to criticize both sides.
    • Harris has avoided falling into conspiracy theories and remained clear-eyed about the dangers of Trumpism. Transcript: Lex Fridman I hope your book becomes the manifesto of the Democratic Party. It’s a beautiful vision. I’m a little bit skeptical because of the momentum of bureaucratic thought, but nevertheless, I hopeful I have to ask Because I’m a fan of both of you In the interest of time Ezra You had An intense debate Many years ago With Sam Harris Okay So you’re I would say Like I said I’m a fan of both of you You’re both intellectually Rigorous people So it debate, the contentiousness Of it was both sad to me, but also just a fan of you. And since I admire your intellects, it’s just fun to watch. What is it? Godzilla and King Kong fight. I wish there was more of it. I wish you would do this podcast again and debate it more on some other topic and argue it’s just great. Anyway, you know, some time has passed. Ezra Klein What was this, eight years ago now? Lex Fridman Yeah, yeah. Ezra Klein 2018-ish, something there. Lex Fridman Yeah, the battles you have fought over the years. A lot of chapters, A lot of chapters. Yeah. This is like several chapters ago. But, you know, in the interest of camaraderie, what do you admire most about Sam Harris? Ezra Klein Oh, that’s not a hard question. If you go back, if you listen to that debate on my show at Vox, I intro that debate by saying, look, I disagree with Harris on this specific conversation he had with Charles Murray about Race and IQ, but he’s good on meditation. He’s good on psychedelics. He’s good on consciousness. He’s good. I don’t know if I said AI back then, but I think he’s good on AI. I always felt in that without going back into the Wayback Machine that Sam really thought he really somehow got where I was wrong. And I thought I offered, like, a lot of, like, tries for de-escalation. And you can, he did me weirdly the favor of publishing our whole email correspondence. I think if you read that, you can see that, like, I was not angling for a fight here. What I admired about him since, I think the thing that he’s been good on is he’s been very independent. So Sam, at that time, there was sort of the emergence around then of this thing that people then called the intellectual dark web. And it was like Sam and the Weinstein brothers and Ben Shapiro. And I forget who was part of it. And as a bunch of those people, I think, I mean, it kind of split up over time. But Harris has done a good job not falling into conspiracy as the Weinstein brothers did, not letting his anger at the left blind him to the failures of the right. He’s a guy, you know, I guess both for better and for worse, as we all are, but he is perfectly willing to stand alone in a crowd. Like I haven’t listened to that much of his stuff lately, but my sense is he’s been like quite clear eyed from my perspective on Donald Trump. So, like, I don’t think Sam—my view is not that Sam Harris is, in general, a bad actor. It just isn’t. Lex Fridman Yeah, he’s been, like, difficult to categorize and fearless about it, meaning, like, he doesn’t—he deliberately resists audience capture, so— Yeah, which is a hard thing to do. Ezra Klein I think I saw a clip of him on this show, sort of like going after Trump, and it became like a big whole thing. Lex Fridman Yeah, I mean, he’s been very consistent on that. Let’s try to find the interesting thing here. I actually had a while back a podcast with Richard Heyer. He studies intelligence. And it was a very detailed non-policy discussion about IQ tests and all that kind of stuff. And there I did, I tried extremely hard to be very nuanced because that felt like an uncomfortable topic back then. It doesn’t feel so uncomfortable now. Do you think the Overton window has expanded? Do you think the kind of things we’re willing to talk about now? I mean, this has to do with the Trump moment also. Ezra Klein I think the place where the topic seems to me to have changed in my ambient awareness of it is two things. One is a sense of the Flynn effect, which is, yeah, it’s hard to individually change her IQ, but there is a very well-documented effect. And I talked to James Flynn before I talked to Sam. There is a very well-documented effect where IQs have been rising over time. There’s good evidence now that that has stopped. Again, this is ambiently my sense, right? I’ve read some things like in passing, I have not, I did not come to this podcast preparing to talk about IQ, or I would have prepared very carefully. And then there was an interesting FT article just the other day. It was like, have we passed peak human intelligence? And my sense is not, is it that that wasn’t about IQ? Although again, like I don’t remember exactly what was in it. I kind of glanced at it and put it aside to read more later, but that literacy scores are going down and a number of test scores are going down. And the sort of sense of the piece was that we are making ourselves stupider by endlessly staring at screens and social media, which I think is probably right. I’ve had this sort of line since becoming aware of that piece in my head that we spend a lot of time talking about how to get smarter and not enough time talking about how to avoid getting Dumber. But we do a lot of things that we think make us smarter, like I would say having social media on our phones because like, oh, you’re getting all this information all the time that in fact Make us dumber because it’s not just that the information is bad, but the lack of concentration, the constant distraction, the sort of lack of focus. And so my sense is that there is a different kind of conversation here. I’m not sure it’s really an IQ conversation, but that there is a sense that we are inflicting a possibly global, certainly societal, cognitive wound on ourselves, right? That’s what John Height’s book is a little bit about, right? That’s sort of more coming at it from a behavioral standpoint. But we have, you know, the Flynn effect reflects, right? This is how James Flynn would describe it. The Flynn effect reflects societies putting on, as he, I think, put it, the scientific spectacles. You create societies where we prize things like reading, abstract intelligence, symbolic logic. You teach people and them a lot, and we get better and better and better at doing it. And I mean, reading changes the brain. It changes the physical structure of the brain. You’re hijacking parts of the mind meant for other purposes to do this kind of interpretive work. But it’s, of course, possible just as we became societally connected and then made more and more widespread technologies like literacy that changed our brains and led to the increase In this thing we call G, right, G intelligence, and decreases in other things, right? Like, I’m really shitty at knowing which direction I’m going into. The sort of part of my brain that does navigation is terribly atrophied compared to somebody in a society that did not have Google Maps. It’s entirely possible to go too far in that, right? It’s entirely possible to move on to technologies to begin to weaken that. I have this concern very profoundly about AI, by the way, which obviously you have a lot of your (Time 2:59:33)
  • Cognitive Decline
    • Social media and AI can hinder cognitive abilities by promoting distraction and automating crucial creative processes.
    • We must actively cultivate focus and critical thinking to avoid becoming overly reliant on technology. Transcript: Lex Fridman Yeah, I definitely think, and all that is brilliantly put, I definitely think that social media is making me dumber. Like if I spend a week checking social media versus reading books, I’m just distinctly the quality of my thoughts. Even the same content. Yeah. Ezra Klein I don’t read things anymore as much as I can on like a screen. I print everything out and I sit at a table and I read it. I can read on my iPad. I create it my laptop. I print it all out because my attention is different. Lex Fridman And the same goes for AI, whether we’re talking about this kind of research. It’s more distinct and rigorous in the other space that I do every single day is programming. I’m definitely becoming a worse programmer by using AI, offloading, because it actually works really well there. I’m becoming worse at creative thinking at what you’re saying, writing the first draft, which require that skill, that first little leap, that little mini leap into the creative genius That we all do every single day. AI is not able to do that. And it’s definitely dulling that. All right. We covered a lot of ground today. On the note of optimism, what gives you hope about the future of this great nation of ours, the future of America, looking out in the next few years, in the next few decades, centuries, When we colonize the solar system and beyond? Or we could just stick to the next couple of decades. Derek Thompson Sure. Despite the fact that our book is a deep diagnosis of modern liberalism with a ton of criticism of the last half decade in politics, I am at root a profound optimist about everything. Just at a general personality sense, right? To a certain extent, a question like this is attempting to elicit a little bit of what can be considered analysis of the world, but you’re also eliciting what is fundamentally like personality, Right? Like what, what makes you optimistic? I’ve just always been a real optimist. Um, I’m optimistic about science and technology, especially in the realm of biomedical science in a big way. I think if you look at what’s happening right now in mRNA cancer vaccines, in CAR T cell therapy for redesigning T cells to attack cancers, if you look at the GLP-1 drug revolution and Some of these studies that have been done on the fact that GLP-1 drugs, while they were initially synthesized from lizard venom to help people with type 2 diabetes, turn out to have these Effects that seem to reduce body-wide inflammation that not only rewires our minds and makes it easier for people’s desired sense of moderation to be actualized, so people who want To eat more fruits and vegetables seem to find it easier to eat more fruits and vegetables when they’re on GLP-1 drugs. But also because there’s probably a lot of neurological issues that are fundamentally issues of inflammation, including maybe dementia and Alzheimer’s, we might have accidentally, From the tongue of a lizard, a partial medicine for Alzheimer’s disease. The ability of science to connect these dots in the cosmos just absolutely thrills and fascinates me. And I hope that we get better at making those connections. And while I have a lot of fears about AI, many of them shared by Ezra, I am really interested in the possibility of AI being useful for synthesizing large bodies of knowledge to allow people To make cross-domain comparisons. I think a lot of inventions in tech history are essentially ingenious recombinations of ideas. To a certain extent, you look at something as fundamental or archetypal as Thomas Edison inventing the incandescent light bulb. What did he do? He just tested 10,000 different materials and figured out that actually it was like a very special kind of bamboo that burned for the right amount of time and said, boom, I did it. I made the incandescent light bulb. The ability to have a machine or accelerate the degree to which we understand what those 10,000 materials can do or synthesize knowledge so people can combine it and say, we’re going To take a little bit of, you know, CRISPR over here and a little bit of cancer science over here to develop a gene therapy that targets a particular inhibitor that allows the immune system To attack a protein that is explicitly related to pancreatic cancer. I do absolutely believe that we might be on the doorstep of those kind of breakthroughs. And that makes me incredibly optimistic because I think at base, it’s like, you know, what’s life about, right? What’s abundance about? Why housing and energy? Well, because we think they’re fundamental to living a good life. You need a place to live and people deserve the freedom to live where they want to live. Energy is what powers the entire economy and more energy would power technologies that we can’t even imagine or just be getting to, whether it’s supersonic flight powered by clean Fuel or fusion technology that basically gives us infinite solar energy, the sun’s actual energy in a particular location. I mean, these are beautiful things that can happen. But also, I think the good life is about health. It’s about health, and it’s about the wealth that comes and the freedom that comes from finding health in your own life. And I am incredibly optimistic that we might be at the cusp of a real golden age in taking all these little ingredients that we’ve spent decades on, whether it’s genomics and proteomics And a little bit of AI, we’re at a moment right now, I hope, where we can have this explosion of combinatorial intelligence. And that hopefully, in an optimistic way, AI could be useful in accelerating us toward that future. But I also think, to the point of this book, we have to get institutions right too. These are discoveries that are going to happen inside of institutions and how those institutions work and how they’re funded and the incentives that are created by law or by technology Really matter in terms of the world that we build. And so that’s why I think it’s really important to not only be obsessed with what the technology can do, but how it’s instantiated in the institutions that we have, because it ultimately Is institutions and individuals that build the world, not technology acting on its own. (Time 3:08:10)
  • Optimism for the Future
    • Derek Thompson is optimistic about scientific and technological advancements, particularly in biomedicine and clean energy.
    • He emphasizes the importance of institutional reform to ensure these technologies benefit everyone. Transcript: Lex Fridman And I should say that you make a really great case for investing in weird science, meaning stuff that doesn’t on the surface make sense. We said lizard venom. You know, there’s all this popular criticism of scientific projects that sound like a waste of money, when in reality, at least in the scientific realm, projects that seem like they Don’t have any positive effect might actually end up being the ones that transform human civilization as we know it because of the unintended discoveries that happen and all the eureka Moments, all the special discoveries happen truly uh when you’re just passionately pursuing a cool thing in science that’s how scientific minds work and so it makes sense to invest In things that uh in in in uh exploring weird shit the weird mysteries of the universe so anyway uh, Ezra, what gives you hope? Ezra Klein I’m a less temperamentally honest person than Derek by a lot, actually. And I would usually give a pretty similar answer to this question that Derek gave, which is technological advancement, right? We live in an age of marvels. I guess I’ll say from the realist perspective that we live in a more liquid moment than many. That, you know, if one of the advantages of the 90s of, you know, much of the life that I have grown up in is that much of the structure of technology of global governance was fairly stable. We could sort of like look at it and there were certain, not certainties, but fairly reliable guardrails of what was and what wasn’t going to happen. And there were disruptions like 9-11 and the financial crisis. They weren’t small, and slowly they broke that entire system. But I think one of the things people sort of miss, sort of feel about the way history is accelerated, is that things have just all gotten faster and less predictable. And they really have, I think, gotten faster and less predictable. We’re in an age, it seems to be more like the early 20th century, late 19th century, than like the 1990s. And that means the possibilities range very widely, right? When you think about AI, when you think about biotech advances, when you think about energetic advances, when you think about the sort of shifting nature of global alliances, of the Technological and political systems, we are in the most high variance period that I think has happened in a very, very, very long time. And that carries tremendous peril. Things could go terribly and it carries tremendous possibility, right? What if AI is an incredible boon for humanity? What if we do invent and deploy the clean energy technologies that deliver energy abundance, not just a kind of answer to the worst of climate change, but genuine energy abundance, Unlocking new things like mass desalination and, you know, like what if we do? Like I’m an animal suffering person. I’m a vegetarian. I care a lot about animal suffering. What if we did figure out cultivated meat, right, that we grow in, you know, breweries and on scaffolds and we don’t have to kill tens of billions of animals that we’ve raised in unimaginable Suffering every single year, right? Like, you know, what if we do figure out how to make government better and more responsive, right? What if that thesis, antithesis, synthesis thing does work out? But it’s not hope. It’s like, that’s a future you have to create, a future you have to call into being, a future you’ll have to fight for. So it isn’t so much that I found myself hopeful about what America or the world would be like in 2030 or 2040, but I find that I believe in the possibility of enough remarkable outcomes That it makes the present really worth being engaged in and really worth trying to do your small part to bend the arc of the time in the direction that you find more just. (Time 3:14:32)
  • Embracing Uncertainty
    • Ezra Klein acknowledges the high-variance nature of the current era, with both immense risks and remarkable possibilities.
    • He emphasizes the need for active engagement and fighting for a more just future amidst this uncertainty. Transcript: Lex Fridman So thank you for talking today. Derek Thompson Thanks very much, Lex. Thanks so much. Lex Fridman Thanks for listening to this conversation with Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson. To support this podcast, please check out our sponsors in the description. And now, let me leave you with some words from Napoleon Bonaparte. (Time 3:18:38)