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

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. I think the steelman is very easy to make here. Department of government efficiency. That sounds like an organization that's needed if government is inefficient. And one of the themes of our book is just how inefficient government can be. Not only at building houses, building energy, often at achieving its own ends. building highspeed rail when it wants to build high-spe speed rail, adding affordable housing units when it wants to afford add affordable housing units. You know, I love Ezra's line that we don't just need to think about, you know, deregulating the market. We need to think about deregulating government itself, getting the rules out of the way that keep government from achieving the democratic outcomes that it's trying to achieve. This is a world in which a department of government efficiency is a godsend. We should be absolutely obsessed with making government work well, especially if we're going to be the kind of liberals who believe that government is important in the first place. In my lifetime, the Democratic Party has never been as internally fragmented and weak, leaderless, ruerless as it is right now. Now, it won't stay that way. You cannot change American politics. You can't change Democratic party if you're not willing to upset people. Donald Trump reformed the Republican party by willing people to fight Republicans. He ran against George W. Bush, against Jeb Bush, against Mitt Romney, against the trade deals, against a bunch of things that were understood to be sacred cow. Somehow this guy ran like right after Mitt Romney and John McCain while attacking Mitt Romney and John McCain, right? If you are not like the Democratic party does need to change. It needs to attain a different form because the Obama coalition is exhausted. It's done. It's not going to be able to do that if it doesn't have standard bears who are willing to say we were wrong about some things. We have to change our views on some things. We have to act differently and speak differently. When Elon takes over Tesla, when Elon is at SpaceX, when Elon's at X, I would imagine, and you know this better than me because you know him. And maybe most importantly for the purposes of this part of the conversation, you know the people who work for him. I'll bet if you ask the people who work under Elon at X, Tesla, SpaceX, they say, "I know exactly what Elon wants. This is his goal for the Super Heavy rocket. This is his goal in terms of humanoid robots. This is his goal in terms of profitability of Twitter and the growth of our subscription business and how we're going to integrate new features." There's a probably a really clear mind meld right now. I have no sense that there's a mind meld. And in fact, I have the exact opposite sense that rather than an example of creative destruction, which would be a mitzvah of entrepreneurship, we have an act of destruction destruction. We have destruction for the sake of destruction. It's much cleaner to me from an interpretive standpoint to describe Doge as an ideological purge of progressivism performing an act of or performing the job of efficiency rather than a department of actual efficiency itself. The following is a conversation with Ezra Klene and Derek Thompson. Ezra is one of the most influential voices representing the left wing of American politics. He is a columnist for the New York Times, author of Why We're Polarized, and host of the Ezra Klein show. Derek is a writer at The Atlantic, author of Hitmakers and On Work, and host of the Plain English podcast. Together, they've written a new book simply titled Abundance that lays out a kind of manifesto for the left. It is already a controversial, widely debated book, but I think it puts forward a powerful vision for what the Democratic Party could stand for in the coming election. If I may, let me comment on the fact that sometimes on this podcast, I delve into the dark realm of politics. Indeed, politics often divides us. and frankly brings out the worst in some very smart people. Plus, to me, it is frustrating how much of the political discourse is drama and how little of it is rigorous, empathetic discussion of policy. I hate this, but I guess I understand why. If the other side is called either Hitler or Stalin online by swarms of chanting mobs, it's hard to carry out a nuanced discussion about immigration, healthcare, housing, education, foreign policy, and so on. On top of that, anytime I talk about politics, half the audience is pissed off at me. And no, there is no audience capture. I get shit on equally by different groups across the political spectrum, depending on the guest. Why? I don't know. But I'm slowly coming to accept that this is the way of the world. I try to maintain my cool, return hate with compassion, and learn from the criticism and the general madness of it all. Still, I think it's valuable to sometimes talk about politics. It's an important part to the big picture of human civilization, but indeed, it is only still a small part. My happy place is talking to scientists, engineers, programmers, video game designers, historians, philosophers, musicians, athletes, filmmakers, and so on. So, I apologize for the occasional detour into politics, especially over the past few months. I did a few conversations with world leaders and I have a few more coming up. So there will be a few more political podcasts coming out in part so I can be better prepared to deeply understand the mind, the life, and the perspective of each world leader. I hope you come along with me on this journey into the darkness of politics as I try to shine a light in the complex human mess of it all, hoping to understand us humans better, always backed, of course, by deep, rigorous research and by empathy. Long term, I hope for political discussions to be only a small percentage of this podcast. If it's not your thing, please just skip these episodes or maybe come along anyway since both you and I are reluctant travelers on this road trip. But who knows what we'll learn together about the world and about ourselves. This is the Lex Ruben podcast. To support it, please check out our sponsors in the description. And now, dear friends, here's Ezra Klene and Derek Thompson. You are both firmly on the left of the US political spectrum. Ezra, I've been a fan of yours for a long time. Uh, you're often referred to, at least I think of you as one of the most intellectually rigorous voices on the left. Can you try to define Can you define the ideals and the vision of the American left? Oh, good. We're starting small here. And maybe contrast them with the American right. Sure. Um, so the thing I should say here is that you can define the left in different ways. I think the left has a couple fundamental views. One is that life is unfair. We are born with different talents. We are born into different nations, right? The the luck of being born into America is very different than the luck of being born into Venezuela. Um, we are born into different families. We have luck operating as an ominant presence across our entire lives. And as such, the people for whom it works out well, we don't deserve all of that. We got lucky. I mean, we also worked hard and we also had talent and we also applied that talent. But at a very fundamental level that we are sitting here is unfair and that so many other people are in conditions that are much worse, much more precarious, much more exploited is unfair. And one of the fundamental roles of government should not necessarily be to turn that unfairness into perfect equality, but to rectify that unfairness into a kind of universal dignity, right? So people can have lives of flourishing. So I'd say that's one thing. The left is fundamentally more skeptical of capitalism and particularly unchecked forms of capitalism than the right. I always think this is hard to talk about because what we call unchecked capitalism is nevertheless very much supported by government. So I think in in a way you have both like markets are things that are enforced by government. Whether they are you know how you set the rules of them is what ends up differing between the left and the right. But the left is tends to be more worried about the fact that you could get rich uh building coal fired power plants, belching pollution into the air, and you could get rich laying down solar panels, and the market doesn't know the difference between the two. And so there's a set of goals about regulating the the unchecked uh potential of capitalism that also uh relates to sort of exploitation of workers. Um there's like very fundamental questions about how much people get paid, how much power they have. Again, the rectification of economic and other forms of power is very fundamental to to the left. When you think about what the minimum wage is, I am a successful podcast host. When I go into a negotiation with the New York Times, I have a certain amount of market power in that negotiation because other firms want to hire me. When you are a minimum wage worker, um the reason we have a minimum wage is in part to rectify a power problem. A lot of workers do not have market power. They do not have a bunch of job opportunities. They are not working with firms. Um and by the way, without certain kinds of regulation, those firms would cartilize and make it so they can hold down wages anyway. So trying to rectify power imbalances is I think another thing folks on the left take more seriously. That would be a start of things that I think broadly unite the maybe let's call it the intuitions. Um, I want to say that's a podcast answer, not a book. I'm sure I left a million a million things out here, but but I'll start there. I mean, there's a lot of fascinating things there on on the unfairness of life. That could be the interperson unfairness. So, one person getting more money than another person, more skills or more natural abilities than another person. And then there's the just the general unfairness of the environment, the luck of the draw, 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 u 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 its that's certainly true in the last 100 years. Uh it was New Deal liberals who enlarged the government in the 1930s. It was Republicans who acquiesced to that larger government in the 1950s and then starting in the 1970s 1980s it's typically been conservatives who've tried to constrict governments. Sometimes they failed um while liberals have typically tried to expand certainly taxing and spending. Well, one thing that I was thinking as Ezra was talking and I was just writing this down because I thought Ezra's answer was really lovely, but like at a really high level, I thought maybe 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 um the policy differences between liberals and conservatives, there's almost like an an archetypal difference between what they fear and value and tolerate. um liberals fearing injustice, seeking change, tolerating sometimes a bit of what people might think of as as overreach, while conservatives fear that overreach, value tradition, and often tolerate injustice. The the only thing I I I would say is that I do think this sort of the left likes big government, the right likes small government oversimplifies. The the left is pretty comfortable with an expansive government that is trying to correct for some of the the imbalances of power and injustices and imbalances of luck I talked about earlier. The right is very comfortable with a very powerful police and surveillance and national security state. Uh I always think about the uh sort of George W. Bush era although right now with ICE agents hassling all kinds of green card holders you can use you can think about this moment too. But the rights 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 US government being able to do something that was extraordinarily difficult. But the left has more confidence in the government of the check. And the right has more confidence in the government of the gun. 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 in the foreign policy, in terms of military involvement abroad, and really in every every program, they're not very good at cutting either. They just kind of like to say it. Cutting is really hard. If you government spends trillions of dollars and if you cut billions of dollars, someone is going to feel that pain and they're going to scream. And so you look at defense spending under Reagan, you look at overall spending under Reagan. Reagan might be one of the most archetypally conservative presidents of the last 40, 50 years. He utterly failed in his attempt to shrink government. Government grew under Reagan. Defense grew. All sorts of programs grew. So I think that one thing we're sort of scrambling around in our answers is that at a really high level there are differences between liberalism and conservatism in American history. But often at the level of implementation it can be a little bit messy. Even Bush's foreign policy that Ezra was describing sort of from a big sense of American history is very like Wilsonian, right? This sense of like it's America's duty to go out and change the world or to use a current example McKinley or or McKinley, right? And a lot of people compare um Donald Trump's foreign policy to Andrew Jackson. This sense of we need to pull back from the world, America first, we need to care about what's inside of our borders and care much less about what's outside of our borders. Sometimes the differences between Republican and Democrat administrations don't fall cleanly into the lines of liberal versus conservative. Um because those definitions can be mushy. All right. So to descend down from the platonic ideals of the left and the right, who is actually running the show on the right and the left, who are the dominant forces? Maybe you could describe and you mentioned democratic socialists, the progressives, maybe liberals, maybe more sort of mainstream uh left and the same on the right with Trump and Trumpism. So on the right, it's pretty straightforward at the moment. 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 JD Vance, maybe in some degrees Russ V, maybe sometimes um, you know, Homeman's over at uh, DHS. the right beneath that the Republicans in Congress are extraordinarily disempowered compared to in other administrations. They are sort of being told what to do and they are doing what they are told. Republicans in Congress, Senate Republicans, they didn't want Pete Haggsf. They didn't want Cash 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 is pro-choice and running as a Democrat two years ago for HHS. But Donald Trump told him to do it and and they did. So the the right has developed a very very top- down structure. And one of Trump's talents, one of the things that makes him a disruptive force in politics is his ability to upend the sort of coalitional structure, the interest group structure that used to uh prevail. Um you know, the Koch brothers were the big enemy of the left, you know, 1015 years ago. The view is that in many ways they set the agenda of the right. The Koch brother network is much less powerful under Donald Trump because he just disagrees with them and has disempowered them. Not to say none of their people or none of their groups are meaningful at all. They are, but you wouldn't put them at the forefront in the way that you might have at another time. Right this second, uh we're using the left, but Democrats are in fundamental disarray. There is no leader. Democrats, Senate Democrats, uh, decided to vote for the contining resolution avoiding a shutdown, or a critical mass of them did. Uh, Hakee Jeff, 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. Uh but there isn't the next in line. Uh so you know you go back right and it was pretty clear that you know after Barack Obama it was going to be Hillary Clinton. After Hillary Clinton it was either going to be uh Joe Biden or Bernie Sanders. Bernie Sanders had come in second in the primary. Joe Biden had been the vice president. You often have a presumptive next nominee who the party can look to for a kind of leadership. Even after 2000 Al Gore was still giving big speeches. There was a question about Al Gore running again. There is no presumptive in the Democratic party right now. You can't turn around and say, "Oh, it's going to be Pete Budachedge. It's going to be Josh Shapiro. It's going to be Gretchen Whitmer." Absent parties are given force, modern parties, which are are quite weak by historical standards. Modern parties tend to be given force by a centralizing personality. Donald Trump being a very strong example of that on the right, but Barack Obama was the the person who held together the Democratic party for a long time. In my lifetime, the Democratic Party has never been 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. Um, if that means Hakee Jeff becomes speaker after the midterm, he's going to have a much louder voice because he's going to have power. Uh, 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 uh on the left and you'll begin to see voices emerge out of that. But right now the you know the Democratic party it doesn't have points of power. There's simply outside of you know at the national level there is no Democrat who wields control over a branch of government, right? They don't have the Supreme Court, they don't have the House, they don't have the Senate, they don't have the presidency, and they don't have a next in line. So you're you're looking at a you're looking at an organization without any of the people in a position to structure it. And the the head of the DNC, the new head Ken Martin, doesn't have power in that way. So it's uh they're pretty fractured. You were you got a lot of criticism for this, but you 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, AC is an example of a person that might be that person. You should have her on the show. What I would watch that definitely. But, you know, I really try to and we'll talk about this. I try to do like 2 three hours and there's a hesitancy uh on the left especially to do these kinds of long programs. I think it's a trust issue. I'm not exactly sure what it is. 80% of the people on the show are leftwing. I'm pretty good faith and I try to bring out the best in people. Have you invited her? Is that what you're saying? Yeah. Yeah. We'll see what happens when when people get closer to 2028. Sure. Maybe people begin taking taking that you know Bernie's up there in age so he can't, you know, he can't do it anymore. Why is the Democratic party so bad at generating I don't think it's so bad at generating them. I think that it was it turned out to be bad at generating them this year. Look, like I yeah, as you mentioned, you know, back in February 2023, I was somebody who came out and said like Biden can't run again. This isn't going to work. And my view, and that was really what that set of pieces was about. Um was about the argument that even though Biden was clearly going to win the primary, that there was still time for Democrats to do something the parties had done in the past and have an open convention. And you could structure the leadup to an open convention in a number of different ways, right? You could have something like a mini primary, but but basically you'd have Democrats out in the media out giving speeches and their ultimate audience would be the delegates, the delegates at the Democratic National Convention. And and my hope was through that you would find the person for this moment. The thing for Kla Harris that was really difficult was she was for another moment. She was picked by Joe Biden in 2020 amidst um just a very different political equilibrium, a sense that you had a a transitionary moment between two versions of the Democratic party. Maybe Joe Biden reaching a little bit back to the past to these sort of lunch pale, you know, bluecollar Democrats. Joe from Scranton was a big a big part of the Joe Biden appeal. But also Biden never has a chance if he's not Barack Obama's vice president. And so you have this sort of weird set of historical factors like operating at the same time. There's a desire for stability and experience amidst the chaos of Donald Trump and the pandemic. There is Biden as Obama's vice president who nevertheless did not run in the election after Obama. Um I think a lot of people look back at 2016 and think, you know what, if Biden had been the candidate, he would have beaten Trump and we would live in a different reality. And then Biden chose Harris as an effort to shore up his own uh at least assumed weaknesses, right? He's a white man in the Democratic party at a time when the Democratic Party is diversifying. And when the view of how you win elections is you put to is you put back together the Obama coalition. And the Obama coalition is young people. It's uh you know voters of color um and it's enough working-class white voters and then college educated white voters, right? That's the Obama coalition. And so Biden picks Harris, you know, for different reasons. My view at that time was I was sort of a Tammy Duckworth person and thought I should have picked Tammy Duckworth. Uh but but there are different people out there and then the kind of moment that Harris was running in just sort of dissipates. Um first she has a particular background from California where she's a tough on crime. Her book is called Smart on Crime Prosecutor, but she runs in the Democratic party at a time when it's turned on that kind of politics. people want a lot from her personally, but they don't want a sort of prosectoratorial uh character. So, she sort of abandons that and never, I think, really finds another political identity, certainly before she begins running, you know, in in 2024 that works. But she's a talented debater. Um she's a very talented performer on the stump, but she doesn't really have a theory of politics and policy that she's identified with. But she's a way for Biden to signal that he understands that him being, you know, in 2020 a 78-year-old white guy, he understands the future is not him or at least not just him. And he's sort of trying to make a coalitional pick that uh speaks to his own, you know, potential weaknesses. I think by 2024, you have two problems, right? Once 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 B administration is very unpopular for a number of reasons, but particularly inflation, cost of living. So now you have Kla Harris running with a sort of anvil of being associated. It's a Biden Harris administration. Um she doesn't really have a lane on cost of living. It's not something she's known for working on in the Senate. It's not something she has a bunch of great ideas about. Not something she's great at talking about. It's probably not the candidate you would pick for a cost of living election. And she's had no time to build that out, right? Maybe if she had been running in a primary for, you know, a year and a half, having to fend off Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders and Pete Budajedge and whomever else, she either would have figured out how to do it, right? Primaries are periods of education and learning for the candidates, too, or they would have found somebody else who could do it. Um, but she doesn't get any of that, right? She's thrown into the game with 3 months to go. So, you know, they picked the candidate in 2020 who won. Whether you think Biden's inspiring or not, he was probably he was a reasonable pick for that moment. He should have never run for a second term. and he sort of implied to a lot of people that he wouldn't. And then the the handover to Harris was a very difficult handover to a candidate who didn't go through any kind of selection process for the moment in which he was running. We'll see what they do in in 2028, but the the consequences of of what they did in 2024 have been severe. There's two really big questions on the table that I think click together in an interesting way. You asked one, why did Trump win? and two, why do Democrats have this certain communication style that might make them less interested in coming onto an unstructured three-hour conversation with you? Let me try to tell a story that connects them. I think Trump's victory in 2024 was overdetermined. 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 CO 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 happen to be in power and as a result they got the brunt of it. That's number one. Number two, if you look at elections over the 21st century, two things are true. One, almost every election is unbelievably close. For reasons that I'm not sure I entirely understand, the parties have gotten really good, historically, bizarrely good at getting each group to come to the polls with about 48% such that every election is a battle over the next 1.5%. And in a world like that, little thermostatic swings are very important. And what we've seen over the last few years, and there's this theory about thermostatic public opinion in American politics that says that what often happens in politics is one party has a very compelling message of change. They become the establishment and then they become the victims of exactly the weapon that they marshaled that then the next outroup 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 worldview of thermostatic change and every election is very close, you tend to have elections swinging back and forth. So, um I think that also explains why Democrats and Republicans have struggled to hold on to power for 6 year, 8year, 12-year terms the same way they did say in the 1930s or 1960s. But finally, you have to look at what kind of character Donald Trump is and what kind of a media figure he is. We were just talking off camera about how every age of communications technology revolution clicks into focus a new skill that is suddenly in critical demand for the electorate. Right? The world of radio technology is a world in which Franklin Delano Roosevelt can be powerful in a way that he can't be in the 1890s. And then you have the 1950s. Dwight Eisenhower in 1956 I believe was the first televised um national convention. famously the 1960 presidential debates between JFK and Richard Nixon. Take an election that is leaning toward Nixon and make 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 screen technology right now which is not just television on steroids. It's a different species entirely. And it seems to favor, it seems to provide value for individuals, influencers, and even celebrities and politicians who are good at something like livewire 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 the sort of background algorithm in his head calculating exactly how to craft his message to to different audiences. He just seems to be like a livewire 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 an 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 the center right, there was the Bernie wing and there was the Biden Clinton Obama wing. And what happened is that Trump killed and skinned the center right and is now wearing it as a hat. The entire Republican party is Donald Trump wearing the skins of the old center right, the Romney wing. And the Republic and the Democratic party is still a fight. It's exactly what Ezra described. It's a jungle. And maybe there's something about that jungle nature of the Democratic Party that is making some of its leaders perform the 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 theory. It's an age of the vibe. It is the age of the vibe. Yeah, exactly. I'm trying to perform the live wire authenticity that I'm describing, but but I I do think that might begin to explain why you, Lex, might be picking up on a difference between the political vibes, an eagerness and a willingness on the one hand to have kind of unstructured and even chaotic conversations and a care on the other side about not letting conversations become too unstructured or too careless. Can I build on that? I know we're supposed to talk about abundance, but I I want to talk about this. There's an abundance of time. An abundance of time. We're on the Lex Freedman show. So, uh, two or three things. 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 Kla Harris come in and do? She came in and raised a shit ton of money, right? Like a billion dollars in, you know, 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 and you know, good advertisements so on. What it means on the right to be good at social media is to be you personally good at social media. You're Vivc Ramaswami, you're JD 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 the mainstream media is, etc., 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 uh 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 optimize, by the way, for big wins. Democrats feel like they got trashed in in in 2024. And in a way they did. But Trump's popular vote victory was the smallest popular vote victory since 2000 when uh Al Gore, you know, 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 the most parsimmonious model of 2024 and 2020 is in 2020 you have a 4848 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 uh Donald Trump suffered a let's call it a 2.5 point incumbent penalty. People were 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 uh 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? All 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 Donald Trump's now since 2016 almost decadel long dominance of all attention in American politics. Starting when he came down the golden escalator in 2015. Donald uh Donald Trump 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 6 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 and 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. Um, 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's 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, JD Vance stronger as a successor. I think they're running a very high-risisk 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 error era. And one of the things I am watching when you were saying about leaders, one of the things I'm watching in in in the people coming up, the 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. Uh they're they're sort of allin 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's not a good place. X is not a good place. Tik Tok 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 no not going to be there will be no Joe Rogan of the left. There will be no Donald Trump of the left because the left is different than the right. But it will have to be something authentically of this era, but also authentic to the backlash to it, which I think as we enter into this period where the president and everybody around him fully embraces this attentional economy, I think people are going to want something different from the from this attentional economy in four years and be okay with the negative attention that comes with being authentic. You're going to have to have some of it, right? You you you cannot change American politics. can't differently and speak differently. Is there a degree to which the left uh uniquely attacks its own more intensely than u maybe uh other parts of the political spectrum? It's possible. You know, you go back to the model that I gave you of 2015 where there used to be these four large parties, MAGA, center right, center left, and left. Right now, the Republican party is all MAGA. So, there is no coalitional fight to be had. It's all Donald Trump. And if Donald Trump wants to name a former left-wing environmentalist to be be the HHS secretary, everyone says, "Okay, that sounds like a fantastic idea. That's exactly who we were going to nominate, too." Thank you, Donald. That's wonderful. tip of my tongue on the on the Democratic side. There is a fight and it's happening right now and our book is trying to win a certain intral coalitional fight about defining the future of liberalism in the Democratic Party. So, I'm not of the left. I'm certainly not of the far-left. I have centerleft 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 I'm describing it. I think they see their nearterm opposition as not always the Republican party but as the forces in the Democratic party that are in the way for them controlling one of the two major parties in this country. And so they do have an oppositional style and maybe that's personality based. They are fighting the center left. They are criticizing the center left consistency consistently. But I want to be good faith about this even though I don't share their politics and say that they're they're doing it because they're trying to win power on the left of center. And so that's why they're criticizing the way they are. Now, our book and much of my writing is an attempt to do a little bit of a of of a very specific dance. Ezra touched on this, I think, really beautifully. We're in an era right now of anti-institution politics, anti-establishment politics, and Democrats are at risk right now as being seen as the party that always defends institutions, the party that always defends the establishment status quo. And that is an absolute death nail, 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 highquality governance and science and technology. Really good answers that are fiercely critical of the status quo in Democrat-led cities and Democrat-led states. Um we're trying to be oppositional in a way that's that's constructive rather than just destructive. 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 me, Ezra? From your throne of wisdom. I I that I I don't think I know how you get AOC herself to do it. Um I I would not I would not pretend to know her offices or her particular views on this. I do think though that you can see different Democrats taking on different kinds of risks. Right now we're sort of in the age of Gavin Newsome starting a I mean Gavin Newsome 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 Newsome realizes that one lane for a Democrat is to be high risk and talking to virtually everybody. I think Pete Buddhajed in a different way is somebody who wants to take uh 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 Friedman podcast assuming he runs in 2028. In 2027 Judge, 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, that'd be interesting. I would be curious to know, would Hakeem Jeff come on and do your show right now? That'd be interesting. I mean, would you do it for four hours? I don't know. Uh the the 4h hour ask, the 3 to four hour ask 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 negot be get negotiated down to I try not to go under 75 or 65. But even as somebody I think well regarded in that world, you know, it's very very very hard for me to get politicians to sit for 2 hours. I don't have the sense that the three-hour ask is a big ask because of scheduling. I think they it still is grounded in the fear of saying the wrong thing. I just think they're used to something else, right? I think that when you talk I mean they are scheduled by schedulers, right? that 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 3 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 3 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 3 to four hours." The answer is no because culturally it's not done. You need Donald Trump himself, uh, Pete Booty Judge himself, AOC herself, to say to their staff, "No, no, no. We're making time for this, right? 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 unus. But I suspect a lot of it is simply booking culture. Uh, like I run into it, too. They're not used to saying yes to 3 to four hours for anything. It's not that they don't have it. They have 3 to four hours if their kid is having a graduation, right? I mean, they're human beings. they can make time, but um but it would have to come in a way from them. My sense is this is part of the the Rogan, it's very unclear because there are very differing stories on what happened in the Rogan Harris negotiations, but it does seem that time was one of the the sticking points. 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 Freedman 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 highranking 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 cuz all we see on Blue Sky and X is just people hating. But if you get one interview that goes well, if you talk to Wes Moore, let's say, and there's a 5-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 derisked. And in fact, the risk veilance 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 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 hundth 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. 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 we're barely like 50 minutes into a 4 hour material next. It's it's all straight downhill. But what people will tired, they'll listen to this 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 cuz 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. Well, that's a thing the left has to get over. Yeah. like what that that's a very important cultural they they began to do a thing where spaces were verboden because it had platformed so and so and I think that culture is changing I think they realized 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 I don't want to act as your booker here um 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. Like I'm looking for people who will think out loud. Like I just had Jake Aenclaws on. He's like a not that well-known House member from Massachusetts. I just think he's a guy who thinks out loud. Um I am uh 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're going to like pre-run the Democratic party is stu or primary is stupid. We don't even know what the like we might be in World War II, right? We have no idea what, you know, we might have g, 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 I have people on is because they are saying something. They're a live mind in the moment that has a perspective on this that um that 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. Um, again, a lot of Bernie Sanders's 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." 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. Yeah. And now he still has the instincts of somebody who understood that like 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 as 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. I we wanted to talk to you and talk together about how much we wanted to talk to you cuz we got something to say. You know, we we wrote a 300page book about how much we have to say. We love going on podcasts and television shows and radio and then doing live events to tell people what we have to say. We think this idea of abundance isn't just important for redefining what the American left means. We think that the outcome of thinking abundantly about housing and energy and science and technology is what politics is all about. It's about giving people the good life and we think this is the path toward it. So certainly one thing that's profoundly motivated us is having something very concrete that we just want to get out there in the world. Like my sense as a writer, as a thinker, is I want my software running on as many pieces of hardware as possible. I want to get my ideas out there as much as possible. And who gets credit for them and where the idea goes and that's that's all secondary. I believe in ideas because they're important. And so I want to talk to people who have large platforms about those ideas because how else is the idea getting into the mainstream except through those large large platforms. Um that's how broadcast technology works in the first place. So maybe one thing that you're touching on is a little bit of ideological ambiguity. Maybe a part of this is this sense that people don't know exactly what it is they have to say for 3 hours. All all I all 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 are not. Uh one thing that we think is that we're in a period of realignment. Uh the last chapter of the book we talk about an idea that is picked up from a historian named Gary Gartol which is idea of political orders. And political orders are periods that have a sort of structure of consensus and a structure of a zone of conflict, but it's more or less agreed on by the two sides, even if only tacitly. So you have a new deal order. New deal order is founded by FDR. It is entrenched when Dwight Eisenhower accepts the New Deal as part of the the US proving that it can treat workers better than the Soviet Union. So those are sort of right there the three uh the three ingredients typically of an order. You have a party that starts it a opposition party that accepts key premises right now 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 the in the 70s stagflation the Vietnam war a series of problems that the New Deal order no longer seems able to handle. So you have the rise of what he calls the the neoliberal order. And the neoliberal order is if you're 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 the the sort of capitalists were right, that markets are the way of the future. Government does not know what it's doing. and and that becomes like the governing set of assumptions. And so there are arguments about what the markets should be doing, right? You know, Obamacare is about creating sort of markets in health insurance, right? You can use markets for very progressive ends. Um we 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 that that sort of gel but but also separately we think kill it which is the neoliberal order does not have an answer to the financial crisis and it botches in many ways the answer to the financial crisis puts too little demand into the economy lets um a sort of recession linger and a very slow recovery linger for too long. It doesn't know what to say really about climate change. Markets have made a lot of people rich by you know doing a lot of things that are very very damaging for the environment very damaging for the future of the human race potentially. And you have the rise of China and the neoliberal order said you integrate China into the global economy. You bring them into the WTO. You trade with them. You help them build their industrial base. You help them pull their people out of poverty. Which that part is good. And they will become more like the West. They will liberalize. They will have a free press. They will the the 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 uh 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. And so you have to sort of follow that order. And and then again here things that would have been ridiculous at one point in American politics become possible. Bernie Sanders is one of them, right? The idea that you'd have somebody a self-described socialist running for president and coming anywhere near the Democratic nomination that was unthinkable in 2004 and by 2016 it almost happened. And Donald Trump is another thing. Donald Trump runs like headlong into the failures of neoliberalism in the Republican party. He runs against trade. He runs against a sort of Paul Ryan more open immigration. George W. Bush and John McCain were both very big on liberalizing immigration policy. um he runs against the Iraq war and you know sort of foreign adventurism and there's a sort of isolationist instinct that 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 re-imagining of the Republican party as a right-wing populist uh more like sort of some uh Christian Democratic parties in other countries you know up in that quadrant of socially conservative um economically populist uh that that becomes something that's possible, but nothing has found an equilibrium, right? Nobody's agreed to the other side's premises. There are certain ones that people are agreeing on. Both the Republican and Democratic parties have a very different view on China now. Uh right, like Biden kept a lot of Trump's uh policies on China and actually strengthened them. And now Trump is building on that aggressively again. Uh but in terms of the other things, there isn't agreement about what the next period in American politics should look like. And that's one reason I think it's very dangerous both as a a question of media strategy but also as a question of politics to code people, places, platforms too tightly. Republicans and Democrats aren't going to get along in Congress. That that has to do with I think the incentives of Congress. My first book is called Why We're Polarized. It's about those almost hydraulic incentives for partisanship. But in terms of what is the meaning of my podcast, of Derek's, of yours, of Joe Rogan, of Theo Vaughn, of Call Your Call Her Daddy, um, of a million different places that, uh, are not well coded. It that's, I think, very up for grabs. I mean, Elon Musk was an Obama era liberal in 2012. I mean, I think his his personal process of radicalization is not going to unwind itself, but a lot of the people who Democrats are like, "All these billionaires are rightwing 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 mean, they can go very badly, too, but they take time. And I think people who are clinging to old certainties about what tells you which side folks are on. My sense is a lot of people who are very open to MAGA in 2025 are 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 uh are not going to be magic 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 uh why the Democratic party's embrace of the Liz Cheney style independent didn't work. Um Liz Cheney of course being a you know Dick Cheny's daughter Republican but but what what Liz Cheney the never Trumpers were were a way of reaching out to who the Democratic party thought the independents were. But the key thing about an independent to a political party is not that they don't like the other party. it's that they're an independent because they also don't like your party. And so finding a bunch of people who are meant to be messengers to them about why they shouldn't like the other party, it's fine. But what you need to do is explain why they should like your party. You need to have some message. You need to accept some fault. You need to think about what it was about you that drove them away. One of our like deep views about politics right now and and not politics policy the the the texture of the economy of the country is that the last period in American politics in the economy was about demand. The fundamental problem coming out of the financial crisis was demand. We had too little demand in the economy. Behind that too little demand in the economy was this other thing that was building up which was a cost of living crisis. Housing was getting super expensive. health care uh uh in certain ways energy but energy is more complicated in ways we can talk about elder care higher education right this is a point my wife is a journalist at the Atlantic Annie Lowry with Derek and she wrote this piece on in 2020 early 2020 right before the pandemic that went very viral called the affordability crisis and it sticks in my head because she's writing at a time when people were saying the economy is great everything's great like you looked at measures of consumer confidence in 2020 February of 2020 terrific She's like, "So, how come if the economy is so great, everybody I talk to is so upset?" And she's like, "Look, like people are making more money than ever, but it's getting eaten up and eaten up and eaten up by these things they really need that keep getting more expensive even as consumer goods get cheaper. Then the pandemic hits, the problem becomes CO. But then you have inflation and inflation moves a problem of the economy, the fundamental problem everybody's paying attention to from the demand side. How do we get more people at work? How do we get them to spend more money to the supply side? We don't have enough, right? We have a constriction of semiconductors of used cars and then eventually everything, right? Everything is getting more expensive and we do get I mean, we'll see what happens with tariffs. We do get, you know, by 2024 the rate of inflation under control, but prices are still much higher. And now people are paying real attention to prices. And the affordability crisis, which again is a cost of living crisis, which have been growing for a very long time, is now at crisis levels. And it becomes the substance of politics. People, you know, you had all these Democrats saying, I don't know what the problem is. Like inflation has come down to whatever it was, 3 to 4% in 2024. And they're right about that. But one, the price level of everything remained high, but two, people were now like, "The fuck is housing so expensive for like I'm never going to be able to afford a home. Like my parents went to public university debtree. I could never do that. And what we've done is fail. I mean, Democrats in this case, Republicans haven't done that great on it either. But in blue states, Democrats have failed on cost of living. The reason California, Illinois, New York are losing hundreds of thousands of people to Florida, Texas, Arizona, Colorado, is that they've failed on cost of living. It is too expensive to live there. And the reason they failed on cost of living is supply. We They did not make enough. They actually made it too hard in many cases to make enough of the things people needed. Some of those are straightforward like we didn't let people build enough homes. Some of them are more like we've made it too expensive to build public infrastructure like highspeed rail or the second avenue subway. Some of it has to do I think in the long run with with innovation and and the relationship between Democrats and technology. But one of our views is that there are other things in politics that will matter too. But we are in a period where the cost of living, supply, affordability is the fundamental economic question. Donald Trump himself has said he won because of the price of groceries. He's got this very funny quote where he's like, "Nobody said I don't have a Donald Trump impression, but he's like nobody ever used the word groceries in politics before I I did." Well, it'd be good if he then wasn't making it more expensive, but Democrats believe his weakness is cost of living. They're probably right, but they don't have a strength on it. And the key question our book is trying to refocus politics on is how do we make more of what we need? How does government either organize itself or organize markets to create more of what we need? And how do we admit as liberals times when we've put the we've made it so the government makes it too hard to make more of what we need? I'll say one last thing in this pretty long answer. I thought one of the most important things that has come out recently is a piece in foreign affairs by Brian De who's a former uh head of Joe Biden's National Economics Council and De helped negotiate every major bill Biden passed. It's a very straightforward piece about what it is Democrats have not done to make it possible to build at the level of their goals. And he says things like we should just remove federal funding from cities that have highly restrictive home zoning codes. He says we should have a goal for how much nuclear we build in the next 10 years. We should be trying to reach a goal of new nuclear capacity. It's a very very important piece because de is right at the center of democratic policy. Instead of retrenching he's like okay we didn't get there. What do we do now to make it possible to get to the place we promised you we can go? And uh we should say that the book you've mentioned which I've gotten a chance to read and I think it's incredible. Highly recommend. It's called Abundance. I uh think of it as a kind of manifesto for what the left would represent in the coming years. So I think people should read it uh from that angle. And both of you have been writing about this topic sort of from different angles for a while. I think in uh 22 Derek, you wrote an article uh on this topic of abundance titled the simple plan to solve all of America's problems. And Ezra, you wrote an article in 21 supply side progressivism titled the economic mistake the leftists uh finally confronting. and you've just described laid out this more progressive perspective on supply side economics that you're presenting in abundance. I was wondering if you could kind of give the the broad highlevel explanation of this idea of supply side uh progressivism. Well, my piece about the abundance agenda which I wrote in 2022 uh started with me standing outside waiting for a COVID test. And this was a period where 2 years after the pandemic started, CO tests were still being rationed. And it was like 21 degrees outside and I was getting very very frustrated about the fact that still we seem to have a scarcity of COVID tests. And as I'm sitting outside just, you know, freezing my ass off and just getting really mad. I'm thinking, you know, it's not just CO tests. We've had scarcity. Uh we also had a scarcity of co vaccines early on in the roll out which created this really discombobulated scheme for distributing the early co vaccines. And then also you go earlier into March and May of 2020 and we had a shortage of PPE equipment for our doctors to remain safe as they were taking care of a pandemic. And I thought, you know, it's interesting that this entire experience of the pandemic has essentially been defined by this concept of scarcity. And as I zoomed out a little bit, I thought, you know, it's not just the pandemic. It's really so much the 21st century economy that's been defined by scarcity. Ezra beautifully described the degree to which housing unaffordability has become the economic problem of our time. You know, in the history of political orders, each political order is in part defined by the internal crisis. The Great Depression springs new neoliberalism. Stagflation springs neoliberalism. Now, we're in this molten moment where we're waiting for the new political order to emerge. And it's going to emerge because of the lever, because of the power of housing affordability. You have to solve that problem. If you want to solve the problem of American anger about prices, and part of this is just pure arithmetic. If you look at any family's budget, the biggest part of their budget in any given year is the part that goes to rent or mortgage. It's housing, housing, housing. And housing connects to everything else. It connects to innovation. You want cities to elomerate to bring smart people together. Housing relates to all sorts of other affordability. Like if you care about the cost of child care or elder care, you want to make it cheaper to house institutions, buildings that can care for children, which means you want to bring those rents down. And so I thought as I'm zooming out on this concept of scarcity in the 21st century, we have chosen to make housing scarce in some of the most productive cities and states often run by Democrats. We have rules, zoning rules, historic preservation rules, permitting processes, environmental reviews, laws that we created that have gotten in the way of making abundant the most important material good there is, which is housing. And as I kept sort of working myself into a lather and getting mad about the world, I thought, you know, it's actually not just housing. It's it's clean energy, too. You know, there's lots of environmentalists who are on my side and believing very fervently in climate change who've made it very difficult to site solar panels or site solar farms or to raise wind turbines or to advance geothermal or to accept nuclear power. We have chosen to make clean energy scarce as well. And then finally, the ultimate boss of scarcity was the pandemic itself, which constricted the the supply of all sorts of goods around the world, setting the price of everything to the moon. And that's why inflation wasn't just an American phenomenon, not just a North American phenomenon, it was a global phenomenon. And I thought, what we need to solve for this crisis of penumbal scarcity is an abundance agenda, an approach towards solving America's problems that puts abundance first. And Ezra and I have a very focused definition of abundance. We believe we say in the first page of the book um uh America needs to build and invent more of the things it needs. Um we believe that housing is critical. We believe energy is critical. We talk a lot about science and technology. But we really put government effectiveness at the heart of this because one really deep vein of our book is a criticism of where liberalism has gone wrong in the last 50 years where liberalism has gone from in the New Deal era a politics of building things. I mean FDR and the progressives transformed the physical world not just with infrastructure projects but with building roads, the highway system under Dwight Eisenhower. He changed the physical world during the decades the 1930s to the 1950s. But in the last half century, liberalism has become very good at the politics of blocking rather than the politics of building. And if you look at the way that liberals define success in the last few decades, it's often about success defined by how much money you can spend rather than how much money rather than how many things you can actually build. I mean, you look at the fact that, for example, in the book, we have so many examples. California authorizes more than $30 billion to build a highspeed rail system, which basically doesn't exist. I mean, just last week, the mayor of Chicago bragged that they spent 11 billion building 10,000 affordable housing units. That's $1.1 million per affordable housing unit. That's absolutely pathetic. We have a story in the book about a $1.7 million public toilet built in San Francisco. $1.7 million for a toilet because of all of the rules that get in the way and raise the price of building public infrastructure like public bathrooms in San Francisco and California. So, liberalism, I I'm I'm worried over the last 50 years, has become so good at the politics of blocking and the politics of associating the money authorized as success rather than what you build in the physical world that we've lost sense of material abundance of how importance how important outcomes are and not just processes. And so this is a book that's trying to nudge the Democratic party back to what we think are in a way historically its roots, thinking about what Americans need and making it easier for government to act efficiently to provide them. And that really does I think begin with housing and energy. Is there a tension between kind of uh the left the progressive wealth redistribution kind of ideas with the idea of building that's primarily uh sort of getting out of the way and letting the market get the job done. Let's say two things on that. So one, we think there's a real tension between equality, redistribution, and constricting the supply, specifically housing. So housing, by the way, I I would love to understand this. That's that's the big problem. Housing housing and energy, I think, are the two most significant that we focus on in the book, right? Housing and clean energy. We don't have housing. We don't have enough clean energy. I would added things to that. uh public infrastructure. We don't really focus that much on education, but we could uh and we could talk about that. Um immigration is probably there for me, too, and we talk about that a little bit in the book. And we do talk a lot about how to pull innovation forward from the future. But when you ask about sort of redistribution, I really think this is an important point because there's a great new paper by David Schliker and I'm so sorry cuz I'm forgetting his co-author. They're law professor. So when they talk about the victory of gentry law, we used to have a law that was very dynamic when it came to property and land was very different than how things were in Britain. And over time, you know, sort of back half of the 20th century, we moved American law to be much more for what they call the gentry. We moved it much more towards protecting those who currently have things, right? And we do that through a million things, covenants and HOAs and all these sort of contracts who make people enter into so they can't even build on their own land. But one of the things that just happens when you constrict the supply of housing is that people who got in when the getting was good, you know, I mean, it's a classic story in New York, in LA, and in SF, you know, you bought a place in 1977 for $220,000 and now it's worth $2.7 million and maybe you'll pass it on to your kids or you sell it, but the working-class families can't afford to live there anymore, right? So, that's not even a question of redistribution. Sometimes what you need in order to create the possibilities for opportunity and mobility is enough supply of the thing. At the same time, we don't think like that redistribution is the problem here. I'm pro redistribution. I'm pro more redistribution than we currently do. But to give one example the way these can be great tastes in the book at some great length um the story of operation warp speed. And here you have in the mRNA vaccines uh technology that was critically funded by public money specifically DARPA at different points. Then um hastened you know after co government through operation warp speed under Donald Trump you know really tried to clear out regulatory croft move these things really fast but the demand on the side of the public for having funded so much of this having made so much possible was that when these vaccines hit they were going to be free. maybe the most important medical advance of that entire era. And it wasn't going to be like OAMPic say where it's, you know, $15,000 for a year of doses, right? It wasn't going to be only available to the richest people at the beginning. We were going to try to give it to everybody sorted by need to the best that we could and it would be free. Now, you're not going to do that with everything, right? There are places for the price signal to to actually function and where it can function to then bring on more supply later. And you know, there's all the econ 101 stuff that we all know. But there are a lot of places where uh redistribution and supply increases go hand inand another good example I've done over the course of my career a huge amount of work on health insurance reform and universal healthcare and let's say you got you know Bernie Sanders had become president in 2016 and had swept in a huge democratic majority and they passed Bernie's singlepayer for all plan which was by the way much more expansive than any existing singlepayer plan in the world right it covered much more than Canada's or the UK's or anybody else if If you had done that, what you would have needed immediately was a huge supply increase in healthcare because you would have had a huge demand increase. What happens if you make healthcare free, people are going to use more of it. Um, if you make insurance much more widespread, people are going to go to the doctor more often. Well, if you don't have enough doctors, you don't have enough nurses, you don't have enough surgeons, you need more. We constrict the supply of all those things using residency rules, using um, you know, nursing rules, immigration rules, who can practice as a nurse practitioner, what can a nurse practitioner actually do? you have to be attentive to the supply side even if what you're doing is aggressive redistribution. Now, there are places where these things don't conflict. Like, I'd like to see a much expanded child tax credit. And I don't think that has like I don't think that has a big supply side implication…

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