Ezra Klein 与 Derek Thompson：政治、Trump、AOC、Elon 与 DOGE｜Lex Fridman Podcast #462

Democrats still think the currency of politics is money, and the currency of politics is attention. 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. One of the themes of our book is just how inefficient government can be—not only at building houses or building energy, but often at achieving its own ends: building high-speed rail when it wants to build high-speed rail, adding affordable housing units when it wants to add affordable housing units.

I love Ezra's line that we don't just need to think about 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 DOGE 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, rudderless as it is right now. It won't stay that way. You cannot change American politics—you can't change the Democratic Party—if you're not willing to upset people. Donald Trump reformed the Republican Party by being willing to fight Republicans. He ran against George W. Bush, against Jeb Bush, against Mitt Romney, against the trade deals, against a bunch of things that were understood to be sacred cows. Somehow, this guy ran right after Mitt Romney and John McCain while attacking Mitt Romney and John McCain, right?

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-bearers who are willing to say, “We were wrong about some things. We have to change our views on some things. We have to act differently and speak differently.”

When Elon takes over Tesla, when Elon is at SpaceX, when Elon is 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, or 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 the profitability of Twitter and the growth of our subscription business and how we're going to integrate new features.”

There's probably a really clear mind meld right now. I have no sense that there's a mind meld. In fact, I have the exact opposite sense: rather than an example of creative destruction—which would be a mitzvah of entrepreneurship—we have an act of 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 the job of efficiency, rather than as a department of actual efficiency itself.

The following is a conversation with Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson. Ezra is one of the most influential voices representing the left wing of American politics. He is a columnist for The New York Times, author of Why We're Polarized, and host of The Ezra Klein Show. Derek is a writer at The Atlantic, author of Hit Makers and On Work, and host of the Plain English podcast.

Together, they've written a new book simply titled Abundance that lays out a kind of manifesto for the left. It is already a controversial, widely debated book, but I think it puts forward a powerful vision for what the Democratic Party could stand for in the coming election.

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.

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 of the big picture of human civilization, but it is still only 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?

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

Sure. The thing I should say here is that you can define the left in different ways. 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 from the luck of being born into Venezuela. We are born into different families. Luck operates as an omnipresent presence across our entire lives.

As such, the people for whom it works out well 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, the fact 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.

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: markets are things that are enforced by government. How you set the rules for them is what ends up differing between the left and the right.

But the left 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 the exploitation of workers.

There are fundamental questions about how much people get paid and 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 would cartelize and make it so they can hold down wages anyway. So trying to rectify power imbalances is, I think, another thing folks on the left take more seriously.

That would be a start of the things that I think broadly unite the—maybe let's call them—the intuitions. I want to say that's a podcast answer, not a book. I'm sure I left a million things out here, but I'll start there.

I mean, there's a lot of fascinating things there on the unfairness of life. That could be the interpersonal unfairness: one person getting more money than another person, more skills or more natural abilities than another person.

And then there's 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—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. 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 and 1980s, it's typically been conservatives who've tried to constrict government. Sometimes they failed, while liberals have typically tried to expand it, certainly in 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—was that, at a really high level, I thought about distinguishing between liberals and conservatives based on 3 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. As a result, they value different things. Liberals, I think, tend to value change, and at the level of government, that can mean creating new programs that didn'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, or the IRA. Then Trump comes into office and is unwinding it. 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.

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. So I think that, even at a layer above what Ezra was articulating with the policy differences between liberals and conservatives, there's almost an archetypal difference between what they fear, value, and tolerate.

Liberals fear injustice, seek change, and sometimes tolerate a bit of what people might think of as overreach, while conservatives fear that overreach, value tradition, and often tolerate injustice.

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The only thing I would say is that I do think this idea that the left likes big government and 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, injustices, and imbalances of luck I talked about earlier.

The right is very comfortable with a very powerful police, surveillance, and national security state. I always think about the George W. Bush era, although right now, with ICE agents hassling all kinds of green-card holders, you can think about this moment too. 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 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.

You're right. There's some degree to which, 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 in the surveillance state, in 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.

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Cutting is really hard. If the government spends trillions of dollars and you cut billions of dollars, someone is going to feel that pain and they're going to scream. So you look at defense spending under Reagan, and you look at overall spending under Reagan. Reagan might be one of the most archetypally conservative presidents of the last 40 or 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 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 Wilsonian, right? This sense that it's America's duty to go out and change the world. Or, to use a current example, McKinley, right? 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 Democratic administrations don't fall cleanly into the lines of liberal versus conservative, 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 mainstream left, and the same on the right with Trump and Trumpism.

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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, in some degrees, J.D. Vance; in some degrees, Russ Vought; maybe sometimes Stephen Miller; and Tom Homan over at DHS.

The right beneath that—the Republicans in Congress—are extraordinarily disempowered compared to 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 is pro-choice and was running as a Democrat 2 years ago, for HHS. But Donald Trump told them to do it, and they did.

The right has developed a very top-down structure. 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.

The Koch brothers were the big enemy of the left 10 or 15 years ago. The view was that, in many ways, they set the agenda of the right. The Koch brothers' network is much less powerful under Donald Trump because he just disagrees with them and has disempowered them. That's 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. 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 has no leader, which is fairly normal after a pretty crushing defeat. But there isn't the next in line.

You go back, and it was pretty clear that 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 nominee 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 is 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, weak, leaderless, and 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, and 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 doesn't have points of power. Simply, 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. The head of the DNC, the new head, Ken Martin, doesn't have power in that way. So they're pretty fractured.

You got a lot of criticism for this, but you were one of the people who 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, AOC is an example of a person who might be that person. You should have her on the show.

I would watch that, definitely. But I really try to—and we'll talk about this—I try to do 2- or 3-hour programs, 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.

Eighty percent of the people on the show are left-wing. 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 people get closer to 2028.

Sure. Maybe people begin taking that seriously. Bernie's up there in age, so he can't do it anymore.

Why is the Democratic Party so bad at generating them?

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, I was somebody who came out and said, “Biden can't run again. This isn't going to work.”

My view—and that was really what that set of pieces was about—was 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. 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.

My hope was that through that, you would find the person for this moment. The thing that was really difficult for Kamala Harris was that she was for another moment. She was picked by Joe Biden in 2020 amidst a very different political equilibrium, a sense that you had a transitional moment between 2 versions of the Democratic Party.

Maybe Joe Biden was reaching a little bit back to the past, to these sort of lunch-pail, blue-collar Democrats. Joe from Scranton was a big part of the Joe Biden appeal. But 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 operating at the same time.

There's a desire for stability and experience amidst the chaos of Donald Trump and the pandemic. There's 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 assumed weaknesses, right? He's a white man in the Democratic Party at a time when the Democratic Party is diversifying. And the view of how you win elections is you put back together the Obama coalition.

The Obama coalition is young people, voters of color, enough working-class white voters, and then college-educated white voters, right? That's the Obama coalition. And so Biden picks Harris for different reasons.

My view at that time was that I was sort of a Tammy Duckworth person and thought he should have picked Tammy Duckworth. 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 tough on crime. Her book is called Smart on Crime: A Career Prosecutor's Plan to Make Us Safer. 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 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.

She's a way for Biden to signal that he understands that he, in 2020, as a 78-year-old white guy, 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 potential weaknesses.

I think by 2024, you have 2 problems, right? Once he finally steps down—what is it, June?—they are weeks from the DNC. They don't have time anymore for an open convention.

You now have the Biden administration, which is very unpopular for a number of reasons, but particularly inflation and cost of living. So now you have Kamala Harris running with a sort of anvil of being associated with it. 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, and it's 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.

Maybe if she had been running in a primary for 1½ years, 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—primaries are 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 3 months to go. So they picked the candidate in 2020 who won. Whether you think Biden's inspiring or not, he was probably 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 she was running.

We'll see what they do in 2028, but the consequences of what they did in 2024 have been severe.

There's 2 really big questions on the table that I think click together in an interesting way. You asked 1: Why did Trump win? And 2: Why do Democrats have this certain communication style that might make them less interested in coming onto an unstructured, 3-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 1, 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.

Number 2, if you look at elections over the 21st century, 2 things are true. One, almost every election is unbelievably close. For reasons that I'm not sure I entirely understand, the parties have gotten 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. What we've seen over the last few years—and there's this theory about thermostatic public opinion in American politics—is that what often happens in politics is 1 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.

Then the next out-group party says, “We have a theory of change, and we're going to throw out the bums.” The next party comes in, they overreach, and then they lose. In a worldview of thermostatic change, where every election is very close, you tend to have elections swinging back and forth.

I think that also explains why Democrats and Republicans have struggled to hold on to power for 6-year, 8-year, or 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 brings 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 national convention. Famously, there were 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 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 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 the sort of background algorithm in his head calculating exactly how to craft his message for 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. There is a really important distinction between this vibe of the Trumpian ruler and the vibe of the rule follower. The vibe of the bureaucratic rule follower is a little bit afraid of unstructured conversation and 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 it to the Republican Party, I mean, in 2015, I think there were 4 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. 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's 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.

So there's not necessarily a whole lot of empirics to that theory. I'm going a little bit on vibes here, and maybe Ezra sees some flaws to the 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 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 there's an abundance of time. We're on the Lex Fridman show.

Two or 3 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 2 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 was 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 personally good at social media. You're Vivek Ramaswamy, 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—just slightly older dimensions—than people always gave her credit for. She was a 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 risks. 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, et cetera—is that 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 functional 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. 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 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. While I don't think some of the “Rogan of the left” discourse has been, frankly, overstated, the most parsimonious model of 2024 and 2020 is that in 2020 you have a 48–48 nation, something like that. Or maybe you have something that's more like a 49% Democratic, 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 were mad about the pandemic. They were 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 you need a lot more to explain the election right now than that, and this held internationally too, right? But you do need something more than that to explain Donald 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 went to Valley Forge and gave 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 in 2023, right? That's when I did my thing about, “This is not going to work,” probably because at that point he was not capable of good extemporaneous interviews. I mean, I think that was my view of them, right? 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 were 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? So that was, to me, the tell.

Attention is the coin of the realm. 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 a path they could have walked to be a majority party. 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 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 JD Vance stronger as a successor. I think they're running a very high-risk strategy that has a very reasonable chance of—if they don't make what I would call an autocratic breakthrough—they might completely blow up their own movement, right? It's all very high risk.

For them, as for everybody, 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'm watching, when you were talking about leaders, is the people coming up—the ones who want to run in 2028—and who seems to 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. Musk bought Twitter. They're 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? Twitter's not a good place. X is not a good place. TikTok politics is not a good place. 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 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, and also authentic to the backlash to it. 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 this attentional economy in 4 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 cannot change American politics or change the Democratic Party if you're not willing to upset people. Donald Trump reformed the Republican Party by being willing to get Republicans to fight. He ran against George W. Bush, against Jeb Bush, against Mitt Romney, against the trade deals, against a bunch of things that were understood to be sacred cows. Somehow, this guy ran right after Mitt Romney and John McCain while attacking Mitt Romney and John McCain, right?

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-bearers who are willing to say, "We were wrong about some things. We have to change our views on some things. We have to act differently and speak differently." Is there a degree to which the left uniquely attacks its own more intensely than maybe other parts of the political spectrum?

It's possible. You go back to the model that I gave you of 2015, where there used to be these 4 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.

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, too. Thank you, Donald. That's wonderful." On the Democratic side, there is a fight, and it's happening right now. Our book is trying to win a certain intra-coalitional fight about defining the future of liberalism in the Democratic Party.

I'm not of the left. I'm certainly not of the far left. I have center-left politics and maybe even a center-left personality style, if we can 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 they see their near-term opposition as not always the Republican Party, but as the forces in the Democratic Party that are in the way of them controlling one of the 2 major parties in this country.

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. That's why they're criticizing the way they are.

Our book and much of my writing is an attempt to do a very specific dance. Ezra touched on this, I think, really beautifully. We're in an era right now of anti-institution politics and anti-establishment politics, and Democrats are at risk of being seen as the party that always defends institutions, the party that always defends the establishment status quo. That is an absolute death knell, I think, for this century's angry anti-establishment politics.

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." We believe that we have answers on housing and energy, high-quality governance, science, and technology—really good answers that are fiercely critical of the status quo in Democratic-led cities and Democratic-led states. We're trying to be oppositional in a way that's constructive rather than just destructive.

Just to put a nice, pretty bow on the whole thing, let me ask for advice. What do I need to do for AOC to do a 3-hour interview with me, Ezra, from your throne of wisdom?

I don't think I know how you get AOC herself to do it. I would not pretend to know her office 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. Gavin Newsom is the governor of California, and he's spending some percentage of his time doing a podcast with Charlie Kirk, Michael Savage, and Steve Bannon. Gavin Newsom realizes that one lane for a Democrat is to be high-risk and talk to virtually everybody.

I think Pete Buttigieg, in a different way, is somebody who wants to take media risks. My gut on him is that he's going to hold his powder a little bit, so he'll probably want to do the Lex Fridman Podcast, assuming he runs in 2028. I think a lot of them are trying to figure out what the lane is right now. There's a lane for the next 2 years, and there's a lane for the 2 years after that. You're going to see a lot of people begin to blanket media in the 2 years after that.

That would be interesting. I would be curious to know: would Hakeem Jeffries come on and do your show right now? Would you do it for 4 hours?

I don't know. The 4-hour ask—the 3- to 4-hour ask—for somebody who also books politicians is hard. I have trouble. I like to book people for 90 minutes to 2 hours, and I tend to get negotiated down. I try not to go under 75 or 65 minutes.

But even as somebody I think is well regarded in that world, it's very, very, very hard for me to get politicians to sit for 2 hours. I don't have the sense that the 3-hour ask is a big ask because of scheduling. I think it's still grounded in the fear of saying the wrong thing. I just think they're used to something else.

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 3 to 4 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 4 hours for the boss. Reporters don't, donors don't, policy staffers don't.

So when some interview comes in and they say, "Hey, I want 3 to 4 hours," the answer is no, because culturally it's not done. You need Donald Trump himself, Pete Buttigieg himself, or AOC herself to say to their staff, "No, no, no. We're making time for this," because that's not how they normally make time for things.

I don't know how much of it is fear. I do think they're unused to it, but I suspect a lot of it is simply booking culture. I run into it, too. They're not used to saying yes to 3 to 4 hours for anything. It's not that they don't have it. They have 3 to 4 hours if their kid is having a graduation, right? They're human beings. They can make time, but it would have to come from them.

My sense is this is part of the Rogan-Harris negotiations. It's very unclear, because there are differing stories about what happened in the Rogan-Harris negotiations, but it does seem that time was one of the sticking points.

It's also possible that, as you try to interview Democratic politicians, 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. Their friends were like, "You were fantastic on the Lex Fridman Podcast. That was such a great thing that you said in minute 97."

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 it becomes less risky for the next marginal CEO to say yes. I think 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 I just feel terrible for the next few weeks because all we see on Bluesky and X is people hating?

But if you get 1 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 over the next 4 years that I've ever heard"—suddenly, appearing on the show becomes massively de-risked.

And in fact, the risk calculus 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 of a riot theory phenomenon here. The person who throws the 1st stone in a riot has to be very courageous. The person who throws the 101st stone in a riot doesn't need to be courageous at all. And there might be a little bit of that going on: 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 what's going to happen? For example, in this very conversation, you're both going to come off brilliant.

Well, we're barely 50 minutes into a 4-hour conversation. It's all straight downhill.

But people will get tired. They'll listen to this and they're like, "Well, that's Ezra. 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 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 2 people whom 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, that's a very important cultural thing. 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 realized—I mean, they abandoned huge, vast swaths of significant culture because they wouldn't go places. It's crazy. The idea that you only go where people agree with you is genuine lunacy.

I don't want to act as your booker here. 2028 candidates are what they are, and they each have their own press strategy. But I would say I'm doing this myself on my show. I don't think the best people to get right now in the Democratic Party are the 7 people who lead the polls. I'm looking for people who will think out loud.

Like, I just had Jake Auchincloss on. He's a not-that-well-known House member from Massachusetts. I just think he's a guy who thinks out loud. I am booking 2 more people like that right now, frankly. Neither of them is a big name. I could get a bigger name; I'm more interested in people who are thinking.

One reason I think Bernie Sanders always did this so well is that, to him, the thing he was really doing was that 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. A lot of politicians don't have that. 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 pre-run the Democratic primary is stupid. We don't even know what we might be in World War III, right? We have no idea; we might have AGI. The things that the 2027 primary might be about, the kinds of scandals that might have erupted by then, are totally different.

Whereas 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 you want to hear. And so I would look for that. I think a lot of people are not doing that. 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 trying to just be heard.

Again, a lot of Bernie Sanders's culture—the way he does media—is now just Bernie Sanders being Bernie Sanders. He didn't used to be. He wasn't in 2015. Even 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." That was a feeling of most people on the left. And so Bernie Sanders was a guy who had 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 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 even right now, I think the question is one of my big questions as I'm booking for my show: 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. We wanted to talk to you and talk together about how much we wanted to talk to you because we got something to say. We wrote a 300-page 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.

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. Who gets credit for them and where the idea goes, 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 platforms? 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 I can say for sure is that we know there's also a reality, and 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 left-leaning politicians are 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 Gerstle, which is the idea of political orders.

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 2 sides, even if only tacitly. So you have a New Deal order. The New Deal order is founded by FDR. It is entrenched when Dwight Eisenhower accepts the New Deal as part of the US proving that it can treat workers better than the Soviet Union.

So those are, right there, the 3 ingredients typically of an order. You have a party that starts it, an opposition party that accepts key premises. The opposition party 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.

Then you have, in the 1970s, 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. It's much more about markets. It is very concerned with things like inflation. And it really is entrenched by Bill Clinton: "The era of big government is over." Partially, it's entrenched also by the fall of the Soviet Union.

The fall of the Soviet Union is this proof point that the capitalists were right, that markets are the way of the future. Government does not know what it's doing. And that becomes the governing set of assumptions.

And so there are arguments about what the markets should be doing. Obamacare is about creating markets in health insurance. 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, climate change, and China. And those are the 3 things that sort of gel, but also, separately, we think kill it. The neoliberal order does not have an answer to the financial crisis, and it botches in many ways the answer to the financial crisis. It puts too little demand into the economy, lets a sort of recession linger, and lets 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 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. 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 is good. And they will become more like the West. They will liberalize. They will have a free press. The richer we make China, the more China is going to become like us. And that proved totally wrong, right? China becomes more authoritarian over time, but it also develops an industrial base. As it does not become more like us, it becomes dangerous, at least in our view, right?

You don't ever want to have a conflict with another country that you've outsourced your key industrial base to. And so you have to follow that order. 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 was unthinkable in 2004, and by 2016, it almost happened.

Donald Trump is another thing. Donald Trump runs headlong into the failures of neoliberalism in the Republican Party. He runs against trade. He runs against Paul Ryan's more open immigration policy. George W. Bush and John McCain were both very big on liberalizing immigration policy. He runs against the Iraq War and foreign adventurism. There's an isolationist instinct that coexists very awkwardly now with a territorial expansionist instinct, but at least in 2016, it was more isolationist.

Donald Trump and his reimagining of the Republican Party as a right-wing populist party, more like some Christian Democratic parties in other countries, up in that quadrant of socially conservative and economically populist, becomes something that's possible. But nothing has found an equilibrium, right? Nobody has agreed to the other side's premises. There are certain things that people are agreeing on.

Both the Republican and Democratic parties have a very different view of China now. Biden kept a lot of Trump's policies on China and actually strengthened them. 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.

That's one reason I think it's very dangerous, both as a question of media strategy and as a question of politics, to code people, places, and platforms too tightly. Republicans and Democrats aren't going to get along in Congress. That has to do, I think, with the incentives of Congress. My first book is called Why We're Polarized. It's about those almost hydraulic incentives for partisanship.

But in terms of what is the meaning of my podcast, of Derek's, of yours, of Joe Rogan, of Theo Von, of Call Her Daddy, and of a million different places that are not well coded, it is, I think, very much up for grabs. Elon Musk was an Obama-era liberal in 2012. I think his personal process of radicalization is not going to unwind itself, but a lot of the people Democrats talk about when they say, “All these billionaires are right-wing now”—no, people are just uncertain. Some of them are a little bit afraid, but people are uncertain. They're moving back and forth.

The texture of it is unsettled, and it's going to take time. These transitional periods can go very badly, too, but they take time. I think people are clinging to old certainties about what tells you which side folks are on. My sense is that 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. If they do great, then they're going to entrench. But if they don't, then a lot of people who became MAGA-curious are not going to be MAGA-curious anymore. 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 the never-Trumpers were a way of reaching out to who the Democratic Party thought the independents were.

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 independent because they also don't like your party. Finding a bunch of people who are meant to be messengers to them about why they shouldn't like the other party is 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 deep views about politics right now—not politics as policy, but the texture of the economy of the country—is that the last period in American politics and 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, in certain ways; energy, although energy is more complicated; elder care; higher education. My wife, Annie Lowrey, is a journalist at The Atlantic, and she wrote a piece in early 2020 called the affordability crisis that went very viral.

It sticks in my head because she was writing at a time when people were saying, “The economy is great. Everything's great.” You looked at measures of consumer confidence in February 2020, and they were terrific. She said, “So how come, if the economy is so great, everybody I talk to is so upset?” People were making more money than ever, but it was getting eaten up and eaten up and eaten up by the things they really needed, which kept getting more expensive even as consumer goods got cheaper.

Then the pandemic hits, and the problem becomes COVID. But then you have inflation, and inflation moves the problem of the economy—the fundamental problem everybody's paying attention to—from the demand side, “How do we get more people at work? How do we get them to spend more money?” to the supply side: We don't have enough.

We have a constriction of semiconductors, of used cars, and then eventually everything. Everything is getting more expensive. We'll see what happens with tariffs. By 2024, we do get the rate of inflation under control, but prices are still much higher.

Now people are paying real attention to prices. The affordability crisis, which again is a cost-of-living crisis that had been growing for a very long time, is now at crisis levels. It becomes the substance of politics.

You had all these Democrats saying, “I don't know what the problem is. 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. Two, people were now saying, “Why the fuck is housing so expensive? I'm never going to be able to afford a home. My parents went to public university debt-free. I could never do that.”

What we've done is fail. Democrats in this case—Republicans haven't done that great on it either—but in blue states, Democrats have failed on the cost of living. The reason California, Illinois, and New York are losing hundreds of thousands of people to Florida, Texas, Arizona, and Colorado is that they've failed on the cost of living. It is too expensive to live there.

The reason they've failed on the cost of living is supply. They did not make enough. They actually made it too hard, in many cases, to make enough of the things people needed. Some of them are straightforward, like we didn't let people build enough homes. Some of them are more like we've made it too expensive to build public infrastructure, like high-speed rail or the Second Avenue Subway.

Some of it has to do, I think, in the long run with innovation and the relationship between Democrats and technology. But one of our views is that there are other things in politics that will matter, too. We are in a period where the cost of living, supply, and affordability are the fundamental economic questions.

Donald Trump himself has said he won because of the price of groceries. He's got this very funny quote where he's like—I don't have a Donald Trump impression—but he's like, “Nobody ever used the word groceries in politics before I did.” It would be good if he then wasn't making it more expensive, but Democrats believe his weakness is the cost of living. They're probably right, but they don't have a strength on it.

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? How do we admit, as liberals, the times when 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 Deese, who's a former head of Joe Biden's National Economic Council. Deese helped negotiate every major bill Biden passed.

It's a very straightforward piece about what Democrats have not done to make it possible to build at the level of their goals. 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 power we build in the next 10 years. We should be trying to reach a goal of new nuclear capacity.

It's a very important piece because Deese is right at the center of Democratic policy. Instead of retrenching, he's like, “Okay, we didn't get there.”

What do we do now to make it possible to get to the place we promised you we can go? And we should say that the book you've mentioned, which I've gotten a chance to read, I think is incredible. Highly recommend. It's called Abundance. I 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 from that angle.

And both of you have been writing about this topic, sort of from different angles, for a while. I think in 2022, Derek, you wrote an article on this topic of abundance titled “A Simple Plan to Solve All of America's Problems.” And Ezra, you wrote an article in 2021, “Supply-Side Progressivism: The Economic Mistake the Left Is Finally Confronting.” You've just laid out this more progressive perspective on supply-side economics that you're presenting in Abundance. I was wondering if you could give the broad, high-level explanation of this idea of supply-side progressivism.

Well, my piece about the abundance agenda, which I wrote in 2022, started with me standing outside waiting for a COVID test. This was a period where, 2 years after the pandemic started, COVID tests were still being rationed. It was 21 degrees outside, and I was getting very frustrated about the fact that we still seemed to have a scarcity of COVID tests.

As I'm sitting outside, freezing my ass off and getting really mad, I'm thinking, it's not just COVID tests. We've had scarcity. We also had a scarcity of COVID vaccines early on in the rollout, which created this really discombobulated scheme for distributing the early COVID vaccines. Then you go earlier into March and May of 2020, and we had a shortage of PPE for our doctors to remain safe as they were taking care of a pandemic.

I thought, you know, it's interesting that this entire experience of the pandemic has essentially been defined by this concept of scarcity. As I zoomed out a little bit, I thought, it's not just the pandemic. It's really so much of 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.

In the history of political orders, each political order is in part defined by its internal crisis. The Great Depression springs New Deal liberalism. Stagflation springs neoliberalism. Now we're in this molten moment where we're waiting for the new political order to emerge. 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.

Part of this is just pure arithmetic. If you look at any family's budget, the biggest part of their budget in any given year is the part that goes to rent or mortgage. It's housing, housing, housing. And housing connects to everything else. It connects to innovation. You want cities to agglomerate to bring smart people together.

Housing relates to all sorts of other affordability issues. 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. 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. As I kept working myself into a lather and getting mad about the world, I thought, it's actually not just housing. It's clean energy, too.

There are lots of environmentalists who are on my side and believe very fervently in climate change who've made it very difficult to site solar panels or solar farms, to raise wind turbines, 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 supply of all sorts of goods around the world, setting the price of everything to the moon. That's why inflation wasn't just an American phenomenon, not just a North American phenomenon; it was a global phenomenon.

I thought, what we need to solve for this crisis of pervasive scarcity is an abundance agenda—an approach toward solving America's problems that puts abundance first. Ezra and I have a very focused definition of abundance. We say on the first page of the book, “America needs to build and invent more of the things it needs.”

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.

Liberalism has gone from, in the New Deal era, a politics of building things. FDR and the progressives transformed the physical world, not just with infrastructure projects, but by building roads—the highway system under Dwight Eisenhower. He changed the physical world during the decades from 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. If you look at the way liberals define success in the last few decades, it's often about success defined by how much money you can spend rather than how many things you can actually build.

In the book, we have so many examples. California authorizes more than $30 billion to build a high-speed rail system, which basically doesn't exist. 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 the rules that get in the way and raise the price of building public infrastructure like public bathrooms in San Francisco and California.

I'm worried that over the last 50 years, liberalism has become so good at the politics of blocking and the politics of associating the money authorized with success, rather than what you build in the physical world, that we've lost our sense of material abundance—of how important outcomes are, and not just processes.

So this is a book that's trying to nudge the Democratic Party back to what we think are, in a way, its historical 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 the left's progressive wealth-redistribution ideas and the idea of building, which is primarily about getting out of the way and letting the market get the job done?

Let's say 2 things on that. First, we think there's a real tension between equality, redistribution, and constricting the supply, specifically of housing. Housing, by the way, I would love to underline this. That's the big problem. Housing and energy, I think, are the 2 most significant things that we focus on in the book, right? Housing and clean energy.

I would add things to that: public infrastructure. We don't really focus that much on education, but we could, and we could talk about that. 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 redistribution, I really think this is an important point, because there's a great new paper by David Schleicher, and I'm so sorry because I'm forgetting his co-author. They're law professors. 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, and it was very different from how things were in Britain. Over time, in the 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 toward protecting those who currently have things.

We do that through a million things: covenants, HOAs, and all these sorts of contracts that we make people enter into, so they can't even build on their own land. But one of the things that happens when you constrict the supply of housing is that people who got in when the getting was good—I mean, it's a classic story in New York, in Los Angeles, and in San Francisco—you bought a place in 1977 for $220,000, and now it's worth $2.7 million.

Maybe you'll pass it on to your kids or sell it, but working-class families can't afford to live there anymore. 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 that redistribution is the problem here. I'm pro-redistribution. I'm pro more redistribution than we currently do. But to give one example, we talk in the book at some great length about the story of Operation Warp Speed.

Here you have, in the mRNA vaccines, technology that was critically funded by public money, specifically DARPA at different points. Then, after COVID, the government, through Operation Warp Speed under Donald Trump, really tried to clear out regulatory cruft and move these things really fast.

But the demand from the public, given that we had funded so much of this and made so much possible, was that when these vaccines hit, they were going to be free.

#462

That was maybe the most important medical advance of that entire era. It wasn't going to be like Ozempic, where it's $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 actually function and where it can function to bring on more supply later. There's all the Econ 101 stuff that we all know. But there are a lot of places where redistribution and supply increases go hand in hand.

Another good example: I've done a huge amount of work over the course of my career on health insurance reform and universal healthcare. Let's say Bernie Sanders had become president in 2016, swept in a huge Democratic majority, and they passed Bernie's Medicare for All plan, which was, by the way, much more expansive than any existing single-payer plan in the world. It covered much more than Canada's or the UK's or anybody else's.

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. If you make insurance much more widespread, people are going to go to the doctor more often.

If you don't have enough doctors, nurses, or surgeons, you need more. We constrict the supply of all those things using residency rules, nursing rules, immigration rules, and rules about who can practice as a nurse practitioner and what a nurse practitioner can actually do. You have to be attentive to the supply side, even if what you're doing is aggressive redistribution.

There are places where these things don't conflict. I'd like to see a much-expanded child tax credit, and I don't think that has a big supply-side implication one way or the other. But on a lot of the things we're talking about, even if what you want to do—and it is often what we want to do—is more redistribution, if you're redistributing something that gives you access to a good or a service, you need to expand the good or the service.

We do rental vouchers. Giving people rental vouchers in the San Francisco housing market, unless you build more housing, just creates something that our friends at the Niskanen Center call “disease socialism,” where you are increasing demand for a good at which you've constricted supply. If you do that, you're just going to drive the price up.

To some degree, that's at least part of the story of higher education. We give people Pell Grants and all kinds of subsidies for higher education, but we have not done nearly enough to increase supply or regulate the way in which colleges just pocket part of that money. They're building these fancy gyms and competing with each other, but they're not actually increasing the supply of slots—certainly not to the level we want them to.

There's a lot here where I think it scrambles traditional categories. You cannot do effective redistribution in ways that we would like to see it done, and many people on the left would like to see it done, if you're not taking the supply of the thing that you're subsidizing seriously.

If you think about it from a first-principles standpoint, what if what you wanted to do was bring American poverty as close to 0% as you possibly could? You got a bunch of smart people into a room and said, “What can we possibly do?” In my opinion, the answer would include a lot of what's sometimes called demand-side policies: a lot of redistribution of income.

The child tax credit would be essential. Expanding the Earned Income Tax Credit would be essential. Expanding cash welfare might be essential. Certainly, redistributing income from the rich to the poor would be essential. These are demand-side policies. They're tax-and-spending policies.

But if you only approach this subject through the demand side, you will utterly and categorically fail. Housing is the biggest part of a typical family's budget. If your only policy on housing is to increase housing vouchers without increasing the supply of housing, macroeconomically speaking, there's only one direction for housing prices to go, and it's straight up to the moon. You're not actually bringing housing prices down. You're just subsidizing a constricted market and therefore creating enormous inflation.

You have to solve some of these problems on the supply side. One of the conceptual scoops that Ezra and I are trying to work out for the left, for liberals in America, is to get people to ask the question: How do we solve this problem with supply?

Housing is a crisis. How do we solve it with supply? Energy is a crisis. How do we solve it with supply? Medical innovation and scientific discovery are massively interesting phenomena. We don't even really understand how they exist—how do great discoveries actually happen? Is there a supply-side policy for that as well? That's the question we're asking over and over in the book.

At the end of the day, demand-side progressivism and what Ezra calls supply-side progressivism really are peanut butter and chocolate. They are two flavors that go beautifully well together.

But here's the problem that I think your question was putting your finger on. I think a lot of Americans don't believe that these things work together because what they see is a liberalism that just taxes and spends, and Americans don't see the benefits of that spending.

The Biden administration authorized $42 billion to build rural broadband in America. Practically none of it was built. It authorized $7.5 billion to build EV charging stations in America. Practically none of it was built. How many tens of billions of dollars have been authorized to build high-speed rail in California? Practically none of it exists. You can't write it.

The problem is that when the reputation of a tax-and-spend liberal makes contact with the fact that people don't see the results in the physical world, they ask, “Where's my money going?”

I have in my head something like this idea of what I call Equinox liberalism. There are some forms of liberalism where it's very expensive, but you see what you're getting. When you spend $270 to go to Equinox for the month, it's a really expensive gym bill, but people who go there seem to love it. They're like, “The equipment is always free. Everything is clean. I go into the locker room, and there's a bunch of Kiehl's lotions to put on my face after I shower. I am getting exactly what I'm paying for. Yes, I'll pay out the nose for a gym because I love seeing that money going to work.”

In places like Sweden and Denmark, citizens seem very happy. They're paying much higher taxes than people are in America, but they're seeing where the money is going to work.

The problem with a liberalism that blocks rather than builds is that people don't see the money going to work. All they see are the dollar signs being spent by government, and then they walk out of their house and see collapsing infrastructure, crime, and housing prices going to the moon.

They think, “Wait, this social contract has broken down. You're asking for Equinox prices, but you're giving me a shitty gym, and that's unfair.”

What we're trying to say—in a very serious way, because I'm not trying to be flippant about gyms—is that part of this problem is that Democrats have looked so hard at the demand side of the ledger that they've forgotten how powerful the levers are on the supply side. If we can just pull those levers on housing in particular, we can bring down the cost of living, and people might even support the tax-and-spend model more because they'll feel like they're participating in Equinox liberalism and not its opposite.

Can we zoom in on the housing problem? Can you explain the housing problem and the importance of housing in the quality of life and in the flourishing of the nation of the United States in general? What is broken about it?

#462

Let's say the second part of the question first. What's so important about housing? We're talking about life. Even at a higher level, we're talking about freedom—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 Bowman, Southwood, and—I forget the other guy's name. 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, is about getting people together in a city where they can work together. That's about housing density. If you care about childcare 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.

When we talk about housing over and over, we're not just talking about the four walls, roof, and floor. We're talking about what housing means to people, because housing is life.

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, cheaper, and often more likely to be run by Republicans. I think this is because, starting in the 1960s and 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.

For hundreds of years, people might have always felt, “I kind of want my neighborhood to stay the same.” That might have been something 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 people live. What you see in the data, according to one study that was reported on by Yoni Appelbaum, my colleague at The Atlantic, is that 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.

The best thing you can do for the planet is to stop things from changing around you, to stop things from being built. That's an old-fashioned version of environmentalism that we're trying to turn liberals against, because 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 fuels or electrons that come from natural gas and oil?”

We want people to recognize that if people want to lead modern lives, they're going to continue to demand modern lives. 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, wind, and geothermal, 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 it. I think that what we're trying to do is to align the 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. But there hasn't quite been a really clean articulation 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.

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?” Also, solving the housing problem is one of the mechanisms to lift people out of poverty. There are 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. Yeah, this is something that you spend a lot of time thinking about for the book.

#462

There's a lot of land in the United States. 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 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. 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.

The key thing is that there is huge spillover from these hyperdynamic industries. Be it finance in New York, tech in San Francisco, or culture in Los Angeles, you make a lot more money being a barber near Google than you do being a barber in rural Arkansas.

This is the ancient pathway to mobility. People who are poorer and work in the service sector move to richer areas, where productivity is higher, and thus the money spreads around. If you look at American mobility and opportunity over the 20th century, about a third, roughly, on some calculations, comes from people moving to richer areas.

If you look at the last 20-ish or 30-ish years, you see this extremely steady process of income convergence as people move toward richer areas begin to throw itself into reverse. 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 move, and the janitor leaves because you can't support yourself and your family, live in a home, and have a reasonable commute being a janitor working in Manhattan.

Obviously, some people do it, and it's often very tough, and they live very far away. It's very hard in San Francisco. You can't look at cities and say, “Well, that's just where the rich people are.” That's a problem that many Democrats now have.

Michael Bloomberg famously described New York City as a luxury good, and luxury goods cost luxury prices. That's true in the sense that New York became a luxury good, but that's a problem. That is a terrible, profound inversion of what the city is.

There's this famous advice, possibly apocryphally, from Horace Greeley, who was an early American newspaper publisher and political candidate. He said, “Go west, young man, go west,” right? The opportunity is out in the West, where the lands are open.

It's never been true, including for him. That guy moved from a rural area to New York City, and that's how he became famous. He ran a newspaper and ran against Ulysses S. Grant in a presidential election.

The cities are the frontier. The cities have always been the frontier—not of the land, but of the economy—because the frontier of the economy is where ideas are produced. And ideas, even in the age of remote work, are produced in the big cities, where people live together, compete with each other, and cooperate with each other.

So if you gate the cities, if you make it impossible for someone making $50,000 with 2 kids to live in the city, then what you've done is you've actually closed the American frontier. You've forced them into lower-productivity places. Their children are less likely to grow up around the inventors in the cities.

There's really amazing research from Raj Chetty and others basically showing that kids, no matter what they are, no matter what income class they're in, are likelier to grow up innovating and patenting innovations in the place around them. Smart kids don't just grow up and innovate in anything.

If they grow up in the Bay Area, they innovate in technology, as Steve Jobs and Wozniak did, because they just lived around those people. And that is true in many, many, many different things.

So when you gate the cities, housing is almost too small a thing for what we're talking about. We are talking about whether you can live next to economic opportunity. We are also talking about whether you can put together the people who will create the next era of economic opportunity.

Right now, the Bay Area is still, in some ways, drafting off of back when it was cheap. A lot of the people we're talking about who have made amazing things there started in the Bay Area when you could afford to live there. It wasn't always like this, and it wasn't that long ago that it wasn't like this.

Now, fine, you can go there if you have money or you have a great job offer from Google or Apple or whomever. But over time, you need the ferment.

I have a personal interest in reading memoirs and noticing if the memoir is really a housing story. One of the ones I like about this is Moby, the electronic musician. His first memoir, which is great, is a memoir of a certain era in New York. It's a housing story. He was just living next to a bunch of other musicians in cheap-ass housing.

I just read Meet Me in the Bathroom by Lizzy Goodman, a sort of oral history of the aughts rock revival in New York City. It's a housing story. They could afford to live there.

I've read a bunch of these in San Francisco, too, where people were functionally squatting. The essence of the San Francisco ferment—its queerness, its openness, and tolerance of new ideas—was the home of the psychedelic counterculture that intermixed with the defense culture that created Silicon Valley.

You've probably read Fred Turner's From Counterculture to Cyberculture. That was a story of cheap housing. You need to allow people to be around each other, to mix with each other. If only one type of person can afford to be there, it becomes a monoculture over time.

So it's not just housing. This is about the geography of economic innovation and opportunity. That's why it's so fucking important.

Yeah. I mean, that's so brilliantly put. The economic dynamism and the intellectual dynamism that make America, I think, the greatest nation on Earth, are at the core of the housing story. It's like you have to live near the place where there is turmoil and turbulence, intellectually and economically speaking.

#462

And so you want to be able to move there and be part of that culture, part of that economy, and part of how you raise your kids and, culturally, what you want them to study and what you want them to do.

Yeah, that's fascinating. So how do we solve the housing problem? Is it just removing as much regulation as possible? Is it just getting out of the way?

#462

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.

The 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, yeah.

#462

Elisha Otis invented the elevator in the 1850s. This is not exactly a breakthrough 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 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 outcomes just follow the process. You see housing supply decline often in the richest cities and states that are governed too often by progressives.

How do we undo it?

#462

Yes, a huge part of it exists at the level of law, right? California is already trying to change its laws, right? 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. Here's 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?

A 500-unit apartment 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, 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 kind of an eyesore because I don't like buildings that are that tall." Any number of excuses can come out of the PEZ dispenser of excuses. You take care of one, and there's going to be another that comes to the surface.

And so what often happens is that these mayors or these people sitting on 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 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 1 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 who 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.

I want to add a wrinkle on regulation and deregulation. 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 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.

I have many of my more left-wing 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." Singapore has a 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 a bunch of decisions made after everybody stopped paying attention.

One of the things we pay some real attention to is the kind of housing that people on the left all agree on: affordable housing through government grants, right? The government says, "We're not just going to have market-rate developers coming in and 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 pay enough to be here."

California—I could give you 2 different examples, but let's look at Los Angeles. I'm from outside LA, and they have Proposition HHH. Los Angeles voters passed a bond measure of about $1 billion, a little bit more, I think it was, to build affordable housing.

6 years later, when I'm writing about this, they have built a couple thousand units at an average cost of $600,000 to $700,000 a unit. So 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 at 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 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 higher green building codes. Oftentimes, to get through the planning board meetings that Derek is talking about, you've made a bunch of concessions on the design: Is there going to be parking in it? Security? Things like that. You have to often agree to who's going to be in the home.

There's a thing in the Proposition HHH stuff where they wanted it to not just be taxpayer money. They also wanted nonprofit grants so the money would go further. So you're trying to get these other grants, but these grants are to house homeless veterans.

Now, to open the thing, you need to find these homeless veterans. You need to go through extra disability-accessibility reviews. And, of course, we all want these things to be accessible, but they already had to comply with the Americans with Disabilities Act. Now you're doing another disability-accessibility review in the city.

They come in and say, "Well, your doors are a little bit not as wide as we think. So you've got to make all your doors 3 inches wider before you can open up." And that adds time, and that adds cost.

You have these subcontractor rules, right? This is now an example from San Francisco, but you had a preference initially for minority-based subcontractors. That became illegal; it became a preference for small businesses, but that meant it had a preference against the bigger contractors who were more efficient at building housing.

In order to use public money, and then very much in order to build public housing directly, it ends up being more expensive and slower than market-rate housing. And that is a choice. We do not have to try to solve every problem in society through an individual housing project.

Building affordable housing is hard enough. It's not impossible, but it's difficult to do. You do have to talk with the neighbors, right? It's never going to be trivial to build a 500-unit apartment building, but instead we layer on all these external and additional agenda items.

I call this everything-bagel liberalism, because you sprinkle just enough on the bagel and it's great. But if you saw Everything Everywhere All at Once, you put everything on the everything bagel, and it becomes a black hole from which nothing can escape.

And so, there’s a need to deregulate government, right? Why? I saw some of Elon Musk’s marathon appearance on your show, and he talks about high-speed rail in California. The thing he says there is that it’s functionally illegal to build high-speed rail in California. I’ve got 100 disagreements with Elon Musk right now. That’s not one of them.

It’s functionally illegal to build high-speed rail in California. I went out and toured the high-speed rail project. I’ve done a lot of reporting on that. You can’t build it affordably. You just can’t build it on time. They have no way to get the money to build the rest of it. It’s not going to happen.

And it’s not going to happen not because you can’t build high-speed rail. Europe builds high-speed rail. Japan builds high-speed rail. China builds high-speed rail. And it’s not because of the private market, like, “We’ll only build luxury high-speed rail.” It’s because we have so heavily regulated a public project that you can’t finish it, and you definitely can’t bring it in on time and affordably.

And so I’d really like to decode deregulation, because there are places where I would like to regulate more. I don’t want you to be able to build a coal-fired power plant in America. I just don’t want it to be possible. I think it’s bad. But I do want it to be possible to build high-speed rail and affordable housing, including through the public sector.

One thing my friends on the left, I think, really underrate is how hard they’ve made it for the government to act. They believe in government, but if you believe in government, then you have to make it possible for government to complete projects. You have to make it possible for the people who work for government to apply their own genius and initiative. They have to have agency.

I always say that we’re sort of trapped right now between a party that wants government to fail and a party that won’t make government work. We’re trying to push this idea that the thing we want is a capable government, a strong government—a government that, when it promises it will do something, actually does it and gets it done. That requires not just deregulation of the private sector, though sometimes it does require that. It requires deregulation of the government itself.

I love this question of deregulation, but I also sometimes find it very frustrating because people’s sense of regulation is so specifically coded. Regulation is just rules. If you change the word from “regulation” to “rules,” I think it’d be easier for people to see that some rules are good and some rules are stupid. We all understand that in life. That’s what regulations are. They’re just rules. Sometimes they give us exactly the outcomes we want, and sometimes they give us the outcomes we would never hope for.

Here’s a good example. You go back to the 1940s and 1950s. America was fucking disgusting. Disgusting. The air and the water were 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 and 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 are cleaner because of the Clean Air Act and Clean Water Act. We did extraordinary things with this era of regulation. Some of these regulations were about outcomes. The Clean Air Act and Clean Water Act regulate 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 Policy Act, and, among many other things, it empowered individuals and citizens to sue the government and organizations and businesses to stop construction, or to fill out environmental reviews to prove that their construction would meet muster and 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 month after Gavin Newsom, governor of California, signed the law to end single-family zoning in California. It seemed 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, including 100 below-market-rate units—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.

The developers didn’t file the appropriate paperwork under environmental review. This is a world in which the most housing-starved city in America is being starved even more of housing because of the power of instrumentalizing a rule passed in the 1970s that has allowed people to sue to stop the physical world from being changed.

I think it goes back to this idea that sometimes the solutions of one era can become the problems of the next generation. It was really good to pass the set of environmental bills that we did in the 1960s and 1970s because they addressed the extremely real problem of air, water, and land being degraded by industry. But we’re in a new world, and the problem environmentalism faces today is in part a problem of global warming.

We have to build not only dense housing but also clean energy. The same rules that were designed to help the environment in the 1960s and 1970s are sometimes, ironically, used in a way that hurts the environment in the 2020s. That’s one reason why we as liberals need a paradigm shift.

Okay. You said a lot of really interesting things there. If I understood correctly, regulation of outcomes is more of 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 that if we get rid of 99% of lawyers, the world would be a better place. There are a lot of jokes around that. I don’t know if you agree, but—

I definitely wouldn’t say 99%.

98.2? 3? In the 80s. Okay, the majority of them.

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—by Mancur Olson, who’s sort of a founder of public choice economics. It’s called The Rise and Decline of Nations. This is 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, the completely destroyed, bombed-out countries of Germany and Japan—you would have thought they would be just screwed—instead became growth miracles? They both did much better than the UK, which was on the winning side of the war. Why?

Stable societies over long periods of time develop something that is very difficult and very important to develop, which is bargaining organizations. Collective action is hard. It is hard to form an organization, and 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.

Think about AARP, the Chamber of Commerce, certain unions, the National Association of Manufacturers, and the Business Roundtable. 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 that, over time, countries will begin—every country has a kind of form of natural selection within it. That form of natural selection will select for people with the skill to best navigate the kind of economy that country has.

So, if you’re in China right now, and China is in its developmentalist phase, you really want to be in civil infrastructure. 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, as a price of our affluence and our success, has become a country—and this happens to a lot of countries—where negotiation is really important. A country in which negotiation is really important is going to, over time, start developing a preference for lots of lawyers, people in finance, and management consultants, because it is a society that requires continuous, what he calls, complex bargaining.

I think this actually explains a lot. Patrick Collison, who’s the founder and CEO of Stripe, is a brilliant tech guy. Here’s this point that he made in an interview with Noah Smith, who’s a blogger and economist, where they were talking about high-speed rail. Patrick makes this point: 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. People who want to build things go into bits and bytes, not into atoms, to use the old Peter Thiel distinction. I think there’s something to that. It’s not that lawyers are bad. Some of the people I love most in this world are lawyers, and many lawyers do amazing, amazing work.

But one reason we've selected for so many lawyers—and America has a lot of lawyers—is that we became a society that needs a lot of lawyers because we are stable, affluent, and we've become very into bargaining. Donald Trump is a real estate developer. That's a relational business. The way real estate development works in this country—the reason you don't have all that many huge firms building housing in many, many states simultaneously—is that it requires a lot of relationships in the individual city you're in.

If you read, say, Maggie Haberman's great biography of Donald Trump, Confidence Man, which focuses a lot on his time as a real estate magnate in New York, you see that Donald Trump doesn't build a ton of stuff in other states. He actually builds in other countries sometimes, or, more to the point, he puts his name on things built in other countries, but really what he did was build here. And he built here through his relationships with the New York political system.

Over time, societies that make building and construction and creation something that is the output of negotiations, rather than very clear standards and rules where, if you've done it, you can just do it, get a lot of lawyers. You get a lot of management consultants. You get a lot of finance people because that's what society is selecting for. That's what you've made it possible to have agency and freedom in. That's what you need to do to do big things.

This is coming from Nick Bagley, who's a University of Michigan law professor. But between Walter Mondale and Tim Walz, there's not a single person on a Democratic presidential ticket who didn't go to law school. Not one. The Democratic Party in particular is a party of lawyers. And lawyers look at things through the legal perspective.

The legal perspective is that government is legitimate by following process. And Bagley's point is that government attains legitimacy, at least in part, through outcomes. When you prize process so highly over outcomes, you think you're acting legitimately, but actually what would have made you legitimate in the view of the people is that you built the thing you told them you were going to build. You made it possible to live affordably in the city.

And so you have this sort of movement, then, over time to populist strongmen who say, “I alone can fix it,” because they've kind of given up on this procedural liberalism—like, that didn't deliver for them. You keep telling them, “We're the ones who know how to run government,” and they don't see it. Eventually, somebody else comes and says, “I'm going to bust through the walls of this thing like the Kool-Aid Man,” and they win.

So, speaking of the Kool-Aid Man, I see what you're about to do.

Yeah. I'm so transparent.

It makes me think I'm a robot built in a lab somewhere. Sam Altman once said to me, he said, “Well, aren't you just a reinforcement learning system with energy running through it?” Yeah. I'd like to think not, but maybe.

So, on the Kool-Aid Man, I was wondering if you could maybe steelman the case for and against Elon Musk and DOGE because you mentioned all of these regulations, all of this complexity that gets in the way of building. It seems like a bold human like Elon is required to break through the regulations. Put that on one side, and on the other side, I read somewhere that abundance is kind of the anti-DOGE. To me, it seems like there are conflicting ideas, but there's also alignment. So maybe can we break all that down?

I think the steelman is very easy to make here: the Department of Government Efficiency sounds like an organization that's needed if government is inefficient. One of the themes of our book is just how inefficient government can be, not only at building houses and building energy, but often at achieving its own ends—building high-speed rail when it wants to build high-speed rail, adding affordable housing units when it wants to add affordable housing units. I love Ezra's line that we don't just need to think about 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. That, to me, is the pillbox version of a steelman case for a Department of Government Efficiency.

Wait, before you do the anti-case, can I offer a different steelman, please? I think the steelman case for what DOGE is, rather than what it pretended to be, is that the government is an interest—the bureaucracy, the deep state, the rules, the regulations—and it's not about efficiency. It never was. You wouldn't do this if it was about efficiency.

It's zero-based budgeting. You're breaking the thing. You're turning it on and off. You're firing massive parts of it because the only way to make change within it possible is to delete what currently exists, whether it was efficient or not. You would never actually know that if you had it all come and present its case for efficiency or something. You'd never know. You'd get turned around.

The problem with the government is that there is no actual competition. The Department of Education doesn't get outcompeted by the Agency of Education, which is started up three years ago or something. Because of that, the only way to make radical change possible is to bulldoze the thing that currently exists, and then, once that is done, you can begin to rebuild.

If you've fired half the Department of Education, then you can start rehiring your people and they will actually do what you want. If you have shown that you can delete every regulation or just not follow it, then you can begin deciding which ones to actually follow. If there is no USAID and you've moved it back under State, then you can tell State what really to fund in terms of foreign aid.

There's a theory here, I think, that it was never about efficiency. He's not trying to make things run a little bit better. He's not trying to lower the overhead cost of government. The theory is that, in the first term, the bureaucracy impeded Donald Trump. It didn't listen to him.

Bureaucracy is supposed to be the limbs of the president. The only way to make the federal government a neural link of Donald Trump himself is to destroy the federal government and then rebuild it as that thing.

I think if you talk to people at DOGE, or to people who are authors of Project 2025, who are at Heritage, or who are chiefs of staff of the people working for Heritage, and you have a truth-serum conversation with these folks and say, “Defend this,” this is what they're saying: something metastatic has grown inside of the government. Not just over the last few years under Joe Biden, but over the last few decades, maybe going all the way back to FDR and even Woodrow Wilson.

We have allowed an administrative state to accumulate like barnacles on a ship around the executive branch, and it's keeping the executive branch from being able to translate the democratic will into policy because there's never a president who is purely elected by the people. They're elected into an office that is already pre-contaminated by the bureaucracy itself.

We're trying to take all of that away. This is very explicitly the case they're going to make: trying to make government more democratic, not less, by allowing the democratically elected president to lead in a pure way.

Okay. So, as you said, 2 things. One is the steelman, and then at the end there was a non-steelman. The first part is cutting, removing as much as possible to see what's actually needed. That's one of the ways to figure out what's actually needed: by removing it. And then there's the second thing that you mentioned, so that you can install the people who follow your policy.

What I disagree with you about is that that wasn't the steelman. I think you have to listen to them to do the steelman, right? I don't think the steelman is imaginary. If you read the OMB memo that froze funding, it said explicitly that the government has to reflect the will of the people as expressed through their choice of president. If you read anything Russ has ever said, they have the unitary executive theory.

I'm not saying it's right or wrong. If you ask me to do the non-steelman, which I would love to do too, it is not my view that the steelman case of this is to make the federal government fully responsive to Donald Trump. But the steelman case for what they are doing, as expressed by them—and I think a steelman reflects this; I have talked to these people, right? I'm telling you what they tell me on some level—is that they believe, as Derek said a minute ago, this has become non-democratically responsive.

The way it becomes democratically responsive is deeply responsive to the president. The president represents a different politics than Joe Biden's politics. And so, if you have a state filled with liberal civil servants who don't want to do what he says, that is a violation of small-d democratic principles of how the government should be run.

I think if you don't like it, that's fine, but I do want to say that I actually think that is the steelman. They're not doing this for no reason. They have an intention here, and whether you like it or not depends on whether or not you like their view.

Okay. Well, I don't like it because it cuts my ear in a certain way. One of the criticisms I have of Donald Trump and the Trump administration is that there's a natural circle of sycophancy that forms in favor of him. Every president has their personality and psychological quirks, and I think he is one of the people around whom favoritism is more likely to develop.

So when you choose who to install as the head of whatever organization, if you fire everybody and rehire, the rehiring process is more likely to have people who just said nice things about Donald Trump in the past versus a meritocracy-based system where these people are really good. AOC should definitely come on this show. Well, she has her own show, but the ideal—the steelman to me of maybe what Elon is doing—is in order to have the best people in the world doing a great job at every part of government, you have to figure out how to do that.

I mean, his first email was, “What have you done this week?” If we just steelman everything he's been doing, it's like, “Let's find the productive people that show up to work, that love what they're doing, that are actually sort of amazing at what they're doing.” I mean, how would you solve that problem? From his experience in business, it's painful but effective to just fire almost everybody and then rebuild from there, and continuously do that. As a result, as long as everybody's aligned on a mission, you're simplifying the system over and over, so it's more and more and more effective.

Now, how else would you approach it? We could start criticizing how you would make government more efficient if not by the way that they're doing it.

Yeah. Can I steelman the other side now?

Sure.

Okay. You wouldn't do this. You wouldn't do this. So, let me say a couple of things. One is that efficiency only makes sense when yoked to a goal. So, if Elon Musk came in and did this at Tesla, Musk had a goal for Tesla. It was to build the electric vehicle of the future.

At SpaceX, he had a goal for SpaceX. We know what the goal for SpaceX is: in some long-term way, go to Mars, but in some short-term way, cheaper orbital travel, cheaper orbital shipping, reusable rockets, et cetera. We know what the goal for SolarCity was. In a way, I do think the purchase of Twitter is late Elon, which becomes a much more political set of goals, but nevertheless, at least there's an expressed idea for Twitter, which is the return of free expression.

I think it's really important, if you are steelmanning—or any kind of manning—to really ask and listen to what people are saying their goal is, because efficiency does not exist in a vacuum. A state that is efficient at building dirty energy and a state that is efficient at building clean energy could be opposite versions of each other, right? You have to be optimizing toward something. You're an AI guy. You have to optimize toward something.

The goal I find myself really consistently frustrated by is conversations about DOGE that treat efficiency as some free-floating thing. Or I sometimes will hear people say to me—very smart people have said to me—“Oh, what DOGE is really doing is stripping the government down to the studs so it can put AI into it, because Elon believes AGI is coming soon and you need to make a government capable of using AGI.” And I always say to them, “Okay, AI toward what? Toward what value function? Toward what prompt are you inserting at the base level?” Sorry about that.

I think a few things become very clear. One is that it is toward Donald Trump. It is his movement. Elon Musk serves at his pleasure. Elon Musk has said that he would like to himself chisel Donald Trump's face into Mount Rushmore. He said he loves Donald Trump as much as a man can love any other man. He believes in Trump, right? I think you have to take him at his word.

Or maybe you think he's very cynical, and he's saying all that to curry favor in a sycophantic way with Trump. But at some point, Elon Musk does not serve with any kind of independence. If Trump says your power is gone, his power is gone. He's an outsider; he's functionally an outside adviser to the government. So then you really do, I think, have to listen to what Donald Trump has said and what Russ Vought has said.

They believe that Trump represents something fundamental. His movement represents something fundamental that has been suppressed in American life. Okay. I think if you were doing something—the best cases I've seen for Elon are a zero-based budgeting case—you're trying to break everything down to the studs, and then it needs to rejustify itself. He did this at Twitter. The engineers had to come in and justify to his people what they were actually doing.

But that wasn't how those emails worked. We all know this, right? He doesn't have a staff capable of seriously working through and then following up on emails from 2 million government employees about what they did that week and then really checking, “Well, did they do it well? Was the thing accomplished?” He's got 50 people who do nothing. If you want to do zero-based budgeting, it has to be against a criterion.

So, coming in and gutting USAID—some things USAID does are just extraordinary. PEPFAR: nobody anywhere thought PEPFAR was not an efficient program. PEPFAR is maybe the highest-value thing that we have ever done in the US government to save human life through foreign aid. I mean, just bluntly, it's a George W. Bush program. It saved a generation of people from dying of HIV/AIDS.

They just turned it off, and they didn't have somebody come in and justify the PEPFAR funding. They just turned it off, as they turned all these different things off, and have never given people a serious effort to come back in and say, “This is what we do.” They just fired half of the people at the Department of Education. The Department of Education has the lowest staffing level of any agency, but the 4th-highest appropriation, and it administers more than $1 trillion in higher education loans. In overhead terms, it is one of the leanest of all the agencies, alongside the Social Security Administration.

They didn't tell those people what they wanted out of a Department of Education of half the size. They didn't let those people come in and argue for their jobs. They're just cutting things, and they're not explaining at any point, at any level, what they want to do with them.

And then I will also say what they're doing is probably illegal. Just this week, or last week, a judge said that about 26,000 people need to be rehired by the federal government because their firings were illegal. Now that's going to go up to the Supreme Court, and we'll see what John Roberts and Amy Coney Barrett say. That game is not done yet.

But they have Congress. I am a person who believes we needed civil service reform: too hard to hire, too hard to fire, too hard to manage. They could have gone to Congress, and frankly, at the beginning, Ro Khanna and a bunch of Democrats said that they wanted to work with DOGE. Democrats were defeated. If you had wanted to build some amount of political bipartisanship, it was there to do, right? The Democrats voted for the Laken Riley Act, the hardcore immigration bill. They were ready to deal.

But they didn't want to do that because it is fundamentally, for them, about political control. And this is my steelman case for their actions. This is a case—I believe what Elon did at Twitter was not make Twitter more efficient. It's not like a better product now. It's a different product.

What he did was make it controllable. He went into something where he thought the people disagreed with him, and he broke it until he had actual operational control of the thing. They would do what he wanted them to do, and then he could move it in his direction.

What they're doing in the federal government—and this is what Chris Rufo wanted to do, it's what Russ Vought wanted to do—is make the thing controllable. What they want to do with that control, I don't even think they fully know. But their view is that the federal government is like the capital city that they have conquered, and now they need to turn it into something that they can actually use.

And in order to do that, Russ Vought said you need to traumatize the civil servants. That was his word: traumatize the civil servants. When Elon Musk talked about USAID, he said, “It's all worms, no apple. We're going to feed it to the wood chipper.” This isn't the language of, “Let's see who's really doing a good job here and who's not.” This is the language of conquering. This is the language of destruction.

They have not articulated new, better goals for it. Nor are they starting with the parts of the government where I think you would start. What do they want the Department of Education to do? I'm a professional political journalist. I talk to people in the Trump administration, and I can't tell you what they want out of it, aside from the fact that they don't like it and they think it's a hotbed of other people's power. I can tell you what some conservatives have written about it, but the administration itself has not articulated goals.

So what I think their view is right now is that they're breaking the thing and trying to make the people who would be oppositional either leave or go into hiding. Then they're going to figure out what they want to do with it. Right now, they're in the period where you have to sack, and later on you can build your monuments and turn the civil service to your own ends. I don't think it's a steelman; that is what I think is going on.

I think that's, from a certain perspective, an accurate and insightful description. If we just look at Twitter, you said that he didn't make it more efficient. He made it more controllable. Let me just describe this, because I know the engineers inside Twitter well, although we could argue that the government is very different than a company. That's an important argument there.

With Twitter, the culture that's there now—people are really excited to work there and to be productive there.

Elon is really good at finding engineers who are extremely good at what they do and are there to give everything. The resulting thing is a machine in which, with all barriers removed, you create beautiful stuff. It's not like “move fast and break things,” this very cynical perspective on it. No, everybody loves what they do, is good at it, and is rapidly figuring out the multitude of problems that arise, and so it creates a different culture—a culture of productivity. It's not some negative boys' club, or that there are all kinds of negative perspectives you can take on those things. No, it's a positive culture of productivity.

The controllable side is also really important to understand, and that could be taken advantage of in a really negative way, especially in government. But you should say that on some of the most successful software projects, there is a level of control required. In open-source projects, Linus Torvalds, who heads up the Linux kernel, has to be what's often called the “Benevolent Dictator for Life.” There has to be a controllability to the machine of this extremely productive, efficient team working together.

Now, those are engineering projects. And the problem with government is you get elected new benevolent dictators for life who come in. They're often not benevolent, and they all convince themselves they're benevolent. You know, I'm sure Hitler thought he was doing the right thing, the good thing, the benevolent thing in his worldview. Every single dictator does that. Yes, so that's a problem.

But in order to be efficient, there has to be some level of controllability. And I think, to go back to the steel man, you have to have a culture of productivity. I'm not sure about that. I've had quite a bit of experience with the DoD and DARPA from the academic side, and everything is so bureaucratic and slow. That's a different culture. So part of the destruction is in reestablishing a culture and, yes, making it more controllable so you can be efficient.

We still need to define what the outcome is: productivity in service of what? Efficiency in service of what? And I think the juxtaposition of the private and public sectors is really useful here. Private companies, publicly traded companies, have the benefit of tight and quantifiable feedback loops. Are you making more money this quarter than you were last quarter, or less? How's consumer feedback? Do people say they like the product more? Are you getting 4.8 on your reviews, or 4.6? The feedback loops are very quantifiable, and they're also very, very quick. You know exactly when you're doing a good or bad job.

And so the KPIs are so cleanly drawn that people are aligned in their sense of whether we are moving forward or moving back. Right? I don't think government has done this at all under DOGE. In fact, I think in some ways goals that you could clearly identify as being good are being torn down. And this is why, again, it's so useful to be able to articulate goals in politics, because without an articulation of goals, you don't know whether the job to be done is to take something away or to add something.

Right now, the answer from DOGE is to take away, take away, subtract everything, break down to the studs, as Ezra said. But let's take a really concrete example here: the FDA. DOGE just laid off dozens of probationary employees—upwardly mobile, recently hired, often very young, nicely credentialed employees at the FDA—as a part of its slashing of the federal workforce.

One of the big problems of the FDA is the slow approval of Phase 3 clinical trial drugs. Everyone in this country who believes in science and technology wants the most lifesaving drugs to be brought into the public marketplace as soon as possible and competed against other drugs so the price comes down and helps to extend people's lives and health spans. I think everyone agrees that is an outcome worth fighting for, and if they don't, certainly Ezra and I are willing to say that's an outcome that we want. That's what we want from our science policy.

What happens if you cut probationary employees at the FDA? The FDA doesn't become more efficient; it becomes less efficient, because the same amount of work spread over fewer people means longer delays in terms of approving Phase 3 clinical trial drugs and deciding whether or not to approve them for public consumption. So in this really clear and very specific example, I think we can see the problem with not having articulated goals. You don't know whether the job to be done is to take away employees or to add them.

I think if instead what DOGE had done is come in and said, “You know what? Elon Musk and a bunch of other people from Silicon Valley—one thing we take very seriously is the importance of scientific and technological progress. Because if you look back over decades and centuries, what distinguishes our generation from every other generation in terms of its health and its power is science and technology. And we want to infuse government with a sense of scientific and technological progress.”

To that end, one thing we want to do is have a smarter and more efficient FDA so that people can experience lifesaving medicines. I think what you would do is research the bottlenecks that exist in American science and pharmaceutical policy and say, “We should hire more people at the FDA to accelerate drug approval, decide which drugs are to be rejected, and which drugs are to get the FDA label.” That is the opposite of the DOGE approach. And this really puts a fine point on the problem of a DOGE without goals.

When Elon takes over Tesla, when Elon is at SpaceX, and when Elon is 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 Tesla, SpaceX, and X, 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 the profitability of Twitter and the growth of our subscription business and how we're going to integrate new features.” There's probably a really clear mind meld right now.

I have no sense that there's a mind meld. In fact, I have the exact opposite sense: rather than an example of creative destruction, which would be a mitzvah of entrepreneurship, we have an act of 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 the job of efficiency rather than as a department of actual efficiency itself.

I really want to emphasize that it has goals. The goals are clear on some level, and they have to do with centralizing power. Let me take something that's not DOGE, because this is, I think, an important place where you see what the effort is. One of the questions 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, whose people have chosen representatives to represent them in Washington. Right? That's how the system works. One of the things that has really cowed congressional Republicans—it is a huge gravitational force now on Capitol Hill—is that Elon has made it known that any House or Senate Republican who defies Trump on a key vote—cabinet nominees, the CR, that kind of thing—will have $50 to $100 million dumped 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 Joni Ernst voted for Pete Hegseth. 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, and they don't all have literally the same view of him. But I think you might say, from one perspective, there is a value in the system in there being checks and balances. There's a value in 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 branches of government that sort of compete, with ambition checking ambition. 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 is surfaced.

I think Donald Trump would be in a stronger position 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 Dan Bongino, 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 were a measles outbreak, well, measles outbreaks are tough. 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've 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 American soil, that's a huge amount of risk you've taken on.

#462

I mean, the guy they fired, Christopher Wray, was Trump's appointee. It wasn't some Democrat. Trump named him in his first term.

But Elon, what he did here was create a kind of Death Star of primary money. He has said that if you cross Trump in Congress, even as a Republican, you're done. Between Trump's control of attention and loyalty and my ability to outspend you, 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 that through 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. Obviously, I think at this point Elon Musk is a Donald Trump fan, but much of the country thinks this guy is great.

I think we should take what they are doing at their 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 that 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—JD Vance—the difference between Mike Pence and JD Vance is that JD Vance said explicitly, in the whole run-up to the vice-presidential sweepstakes, that his view of what went wrong in the first administration was that, between the bureaucracy and the staff, too many people were trying to inhibit Donald Trump. What he would do is tell Trump that he's got to get rid of these generals and 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 there was too much opposition from Republicans in Congress, who talked Trump into things they shouldn't have talked him into, too much opposition from the civil service, and even too much opposition from Trump's own staff.

I think a very simple heuristic for 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. The most important member of the family in the second is Donald Trump Jr.

Kushner brought in a bunch of inhibitors. He brought in mainstream figures like Gary Cohn, and Kushner represented other parts of society that were sort of mixed on Trump. They wanted him to do certain things and not others, and there was maybe a productive tension.

McConnell 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 Donald 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 that 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, 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 a consensus reality we have, not an argument over reality we're having.

Do you think there's some degree to which, if you trust in the system of democracy—which I do—and there are some people, and we'll talk about them, for whom one of the main criticisms and concerns about Donald Trump was that he's going to break democracy, but if you trust that democracy holds, isn't this an interesting experiment in how, when everybody's aligned, aggressively cutting regulation and the number of people is an experiment of, “Okay, let's see what this does to a really overbloated bureaucracy that's become extremely inefficient”?

By the way, I have an optimism about it that matches the vision of abundance in the book: once you do the creative destruction, then you start to really be able to step in and have a clear vision of, “Okay, housing—how do we solve housing? What are the policies to solve housing?” But I do think the first step that's needed is the destruction.

#462

As Ezra said, we're sort of speed-running a particular experiment here.

Yeah. What does executive power look like if we do away as much as possible with checks and balances? I would submit that we're already starting to get some feedback loops from the market.

The stock market is not the economy, but it is a very clear voting mechanism. What's clear is that many institutional and retail investors think that the current economic regime is pushing us toward a recession that we don't have to have.

Donald Trump has insulated himself from any feedback loop or any sense of criticism that his tariff policy might not be the best course of strategy for American industry or global relations. As a result, what we have is, I think, fairly described as a kind of purposeful chaos.

What other term can you use if a tariff is being announced at 9:00 a.m., then taken away at 3:30 p.m., and then, 10 days later, announced at 9:37 and renegotiated at 2:45? This is not a principled theory of the perfect tariff level on international trade. This is, I think, much more parsimoniously explained by just an expression of Donald Trump's personality.

This is a New York real estate guy. He loves making big, awesome pronouncements and then using those big, awesome pronouncements to negotiate little one-on-one dealings where he can wrest for himself a personal sense of power, money, or pride.

Announcing these tariffs in a chaotic way forces world leaders to get on the phone with him and say, “Donald, what can I give you to bring down the tariff?” This is personality standing in for politics in a way that's totally unmolested by anybody else's sense of, “Hey, let's maybe cool it on the tariff policy. Hey, let's maybe slow down on the deportations. I'm not so sure about this particular move over here.”

Instead, you have an executive branch that's just a full manifestation of Donald Trump's mind. I do think that the early returns, if you look at consumer sentiment, the stock market, and the 10-year yield, give you a range of aggregated economic information telling us that the economy, consumers, employers, and investors do not like what's happening now. That's going to be a really interesting test case.

Donald Trump's first 4 years in office, love him or hate him, were 4 rather successful years of economic growth: low unemployment, steady growth, low inflation—pretty much every economic indicator in the green. We're already in the red in many of the economic indicators that never even blinked yellow under his first administration.

I personally don't think it's a coincidence that you're getting these red indicators at a time when Donald Trump is having an entirely different experience of being president, where there is no moment of, “Hey, maybe let's cool it on the tariffs.” The one more thing I would add here is that you said maybe Trump's presidency is a kind of right-wing abundance. I think that's a worthy question: Is Donald Trump just doing his own version of abundance, and should we, even if we disagree with his process ideologically, sort of root for the outcomes that are likely under it?

Here's why I don't think so. Let's say that you, or just someone who is a conservative, shares our view that they want housing to be abundant. I think what they should really root for is reducing the tax of forbidding building and making it easier to add housing units cheaply.

Well, houses are made out of materials. Two of the most important materials in home building are softwood lumber and drywall. We import softwood lumber from Canada, and one of the key ingredients in drywall is imported from Mexico.

One of the first things that's going to happen if you raise a 25% tariff on lumber from Canada and drywall from Mexico is that the cost of housing is going to go straight up. This isn't my personal opinion. This was a March 7 memo sent by the National Association of Home Builders, essentially in a kind of controlled panic, saying, “Please don't do a tariff policy like this. You're going to screw over homebuilders.”

Ironically, Donald Trump, you were elected by Biden-to-Trump voters who were mad about the price of housing. So I am not, in the moment, optimistic that his centralizing style is going to be economically useful for Americans, whatever their interests.

My sense of the early feedback and the early returns is that he, in fact, does not have a very clear and beneficial economic agenda. He has a personal agenda. He likes taking phone calls from international leaders and working out little deals with them. I don't think that's in the larger interest of economic growth, and I certainly don't think it's in the specific interest of reducing housing prices.

Okay, there's a lot to say there. First of all, can we separate the abundance and DOGE efforts from tariffs? I don't know who agrees with tariffs. Tariffs don't make sense to me economically. Maybe you can explain who agrees with or likes the tariffs on the right or the left. Do you see my point?

#462

Well, to comment on that point, one of the mechanisms by which bureaucracy forms is a kind of polite civility, structure, and process. There is an argument to be made—and I'm not saying Donald Trump is that person—but there are some qualities there in picking up the phone and calling Putin that go against all the process.

Some of the most successful peace negotiations throughout history broke process. He's just spoken to Modi. You know, there's a process.

You're not supposed to meet with Pakistan or whatever for India. You just say, “Screw it. I'm going to go to a wedding—a Pakistani wedding of a high-up official. I'm going to do these things that are very Trumpian: break the rules.” Okay, in a perfect world, some of that is good when matched with principled policy that's surrounded by a large number of experts who actually understand that policy.

Okay, I can criticize Trump all day, but I'm just saying that there is some degree to picking up the phone and talking to leaders and playing the game: in the morning, say one thing; in the evening, another. That could be part of a principled chaos. I think the important part of madman theory is that you're not actually a madman; you just have to convince people you are. Yes. Yes. Look, I don't think I am in agreement that we should talk to everybody.

I don't know how many people followed the 2008 election closely who are watching this. There was a big fight in that election between Clinton and Obama about whether you should negotiate with your enemies. Obama's view was that we should talk to anybody, and Clinton's view was more nuanced than that, right? Certainly, we shouldn't at this juncture.

During his presidency, Obama did a deal with Iran on the nuclear question. He negotiated with Cuba. He had very direct negotiations with Russia. Importantly, unlike Donald Trump, he did it without alienating all of our traditional allies.

One of the things that I think is important to say about Trump is that the difference between Trump and, say, Biden—or Trump and Obama—is not that Trump will negotiate with Putin and Obama wouldn't. It's that Trump is realigning our alliances. He doesn't really seem to want to negotiate with the Europeans, or at least he wants to do it from a more hostile position.

He wants to make Canada the 51st state, not treat it as a longtime ally. The thing here is not that Trump is negotiating with our perceived enemies. These are his perceived allies, and he's turning our traditional allies into perceived enemies.

So with him, I think it's important to say that I am very much of the view that you talk to everybody. It was my view going back for some years that it was clear that the Biden administration needed to be pushing for negotiations over Ukraine. There was not going to be some endgame here where Ukraine got all of its territory back.

But I don't think it is reasonable to look at what he is doing and say that is the norm that he has broken. The idea that we should have negotiations—I mean, many different presidents have done many surprising things, and he's rolled back a bunch of those things. Republicans have been very unfriendly to the opening that began with Cuba, right? That was a big deal in American foreign policy, something Obama did against very heavy criticism.

It cost him and cost Democrats in Florida and among Cuban voters in the following election. So I just don't think that that's that unusual of a thing with Trump.

I also just want to say, with the tariffs, you sort of wanted to cut the tariffs off from DOGE and cut the tariffs off from this broader agenda. One reason I don't is that I think the way to understand tariffs is that you can be accomplishing many different things with them.

One theory that you heard from some people around Trump, and that fit what he said on the campaign trail, was that Trump's position on the campaign trail was that he was going to lay down 10% to 20% tariffs on all imported goods and 65% tariffs on imported goods from China. I think that's a bad idea for a bunch of different reasons, but what that is is a stable change in the cost structure for all corporations and all trade. Then different players can make different investment decisions in the long term based on this new cost structure.

What he's doing, as Derek said—and I've had these funny experiences where I'm literally doing a podcast with a tariffs expert and my producer says, “He just delayed the tariff on the auto parts”—is moving on and off these tariffs and negotiating over them endlessly. I've been told this again by people around him: their view is that America had leverage it wasn't using, and tariffs in particular are a form of executive control.

Trade deals need to be negotiated and ratified with Congress. Trade deals are something you have to do with the rest of the system. But tariffs are something Trump can do unilaterally. One thing Trump wants is control. That is the through line of virtually everything in his politics.

Tariffs are a leverage-based form of foreign policy. America has the biggest economy in the world. Anybody who's going to get into a trade war with us is going to suffer worse than we will. There's something where the president can use the tariffs, because of authority granted by Congress some time ago for other purposes, with a huge amount of discretion.

You can use them, on the one hand, to say, “Well, I think that we've lost too much manufacturing, and the dollar is overvalued in other places, and so we want to use tariffs to change the cost structure so that people have to locate more of the supply chains and the intermediate manufacturing in the United States.” But you can also use a tariff to say, “Colombia has to take the people we're deporting, and they have to take them in chains,” right? Donald Trump is doing both things.

The reason I think it's important to keep those in mind is that what Donald Trump wants, and what connects a lot of different things, is leverage over things. I think it connects to Eric Adams. You were sitting here talking about New York City. Eric Adams is a Democratic mayor, right? Donald Trump had no truck with Eric Adams. He did not support Eric Adams. Eric Adams is not his natural ally.

But what he had over Eric Adams, he realized, was leverage: he could get the cases off Eric Adams and then get Eric Adams in his pocket. So Donald Trump stepped in to save the corrupt Democratic mayor of New York City, not because they have a deep ideological alliance, but because then Donald Trump would have power over New York City and its policy that he wouldn't otherwise have.

The thing that connects Trump is that he's a very old-school politician. He's very relational. He's very 19th century. He's looking for the angle. He's very zero-sum. He's looking for things that give him power. DOGE is a way of getting power over the bureaucracy.

Tariffs are a way of getting power over the international financial system and foreign policy, and of breaking traditional alliances. Maybe, in his mind, getting Canada to become the 51st state. Maybe getting Mexico to change its immigration policy. Using—and trying to weaponize—the Justice Department against Eric Adams is a way of getting power over a Democratic mayor. Some of what they're doing with grants and money is a way of getting power over other institutions in American life.

Again, you could think it's bad or you could think it's good, but it is coherent. I think it's bad, but it is coherent, and the people who think it's good think it's good for Trump to have power. With the Eric Adams thing, they were very explicit about this, right? They said that it is worthwhile for the president to negotiate over his policy objectives and to trade things to get his policy objectives more fully carried out.

Eric Adams went from saying New York City would be a sanctuary city to saying they would aggressively carry out deportations. You can think that kind of transactionalism is fine. I think in this case, given that it's about corruption, it wasn't. But the idea—Trump's idea—that the problem is that the president doesn't wield enough power here, the way he does in Russia, the way he might in India, the way he might in China, is a consistent governing philosophy.

Trump has spoken very openly of envying some of the powers these other people have. I think it's a consistent governing philosophy that needs to be taken as that, right? I think sometimes, if you just describe what he's doing quite neutrally, people say, “Oh, you're criticizing him. You're anti-Trump.” But I'm just describing what he's doing.

You could think it's good or it's bad, but the fact that he wants to arrogate power and find points of leverage—tariffs are one, what he's doing through DOGE is another, what he did with the DOJ is another—is all very consistent. The question is really just whether or not you have a normative view on Trump having that much power.

Yeah, I have a question about DOGE. But before that, I'll just say that I don't think Donald Trump should have that much power, because I think, to this day, my biggest criticism and concern is that he is a person who denied the results of the election. I like George Washington. I like people who have the skill, the ability, and the track record to walk away from power.

A person who's unwilling to accept reality and is willing to bend reality to maintain a grip on power—even if what they're trying to do is really good, maybe making a government more efficient—makes me very concerned. But on the topic of DOGE, I'm more on the Elon side.

If we can combine DOGE and abundance as a topic, if DOGE succeeds—let's just forget DOGE and talk about the effort of making government more efficient—what does that look like before the next election and after the next election, if we can just look at success? I know I'm jumping again, but I'll do something quick and then pass to you.

From my perspective, I'm not a huge fan of the experiment framing, because amidst this experiment, people through USAID—as my colleague Nick Kristof has documented, and potentially further and otherwise—will die, lose homes, and be scammed by things. I feel like experimenting with government at that level is very dangerous. But assuming democracy survives, if Democrats are going to make the government work again, they're going to have to become less rule-bound than they were.

I have this line that the problem with the personality type of the right is that it’s autocratic now, and the problem with the personality type of the left is that it’s bureaucratic. I don’t want to see things going either to where DOGE is, in terms of—I think there’s a fundamental lawlessness to it, but I also don’t like the aims of it—or to where Democrats were, which is such unfathomable conservatism, such respect for process that they will put the process ahead of getting their own things done.

They will listen to any lawyer with any super-intense interpretation of any law, and that’ll turn them all the way back. What DOGE has demonstrated is that the room for movement inside the American government, inside the state, is much wider than anybody gave it credit for, in both Republican and Democratic administrations. It may not be as wide—it probably isn’t legally as wide—as what DOGE is trying to do. That’s why they’re losing all these court cases, but it is wide. And you could also use Congress, right? You could pass a statute to make it wider, and you should.

There is no abundance agenda that works if the Democratic Party is as rule-bound and as process-obsessed as it was in the last 10 years. It doesn’t work, flatly. That is why so many of the stories we tell in the book are about process gone wrong. Not just—it’s not process gone wrong because it’s doing exactly what it was intended to do, but it is process that has become antagonistic to the promised outcomes.

And so I do hope there’s a kind of thesis. All the institutions are great. Democrats are the defenders of government. Antithesis: the government is a corrupt cesspool. It’s a ball of worms, and it has to be destroyed and taken over by a benevolent or non-benevolent dictator. And synthesis is that the government’s process has made it not a functional state. It’s nonresponsive in many important ways, and it needs to be reformed at a quite fundamental level—but in a way that is lawful, in a way that is thoughtful, in a way that is running experiments, gathers information, and then can make adjustments; in a way that is respectful of the human lives that it touches and affects; in a way that is not hostile to the goals of good government, but is more committed to them than it is committed to the process that government has erected and evolved over time.

As you articulated the principle beautifully, and just to put some meat on the bones, abundance is about being incredibly concrete about what you want to accomplish in the world. Then it’s about understanding how to accomplish that—a phase 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.

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: 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 BEAD. It stands for Broadband Equity, Access, and Deployment. It’s $42 billion to build rural broadband. Fast-forward to 2024: practically none of it is built. We’re now 4 calendar years after it was passed. At this point, it seems like the program is going to die, and they’re just going to transfer the whole thing to Starlink.

So why? We want to understand why government fails to achieve its outcomes and how we can learn from those failures to allow government to succeed at its outcomes. You look into it, and it turns out that in order to take this $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. Then there was a challenge period where people could question the map, and the FCC would remake the map. Then the challengers would sue them again to change the map. The states had to file a letter of intent, a 5-year action plan, and a funding program, all of which could be subject to their own challenge periods.

In each of these challenge periods, the Commerce Department is going back to the states and saying, “We really like your 5-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. 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. 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, 3 out of the 56 have passed all 14 stages.

Very little of the money has actually been spent because of all the problems that Ezra and I have 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.

A DOGE that we were, sort of, advocates of in this parallel universe is one that would try very clearly to 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 2 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 has, to borrow Ezra’s language, deregulated itself. It’s easier for the government to achieve its goals. I think that it’s really important at the level 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 kinds of failures aren’t just technocratic stories to tell on 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 the 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, how they can see that failure, and how sometimes they’re literally leaving cities and states run by Democrats because that failure is so fucking obvious to them. So this isn’t just about the BEAD program. It’s not just about 14-stage 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?

So, first of all, beautifully put. And second, the big thing that DOGE did is make this a sexy topic to discuss. You can tear down DOGE with the way they’re doing it, say it’s wrong, criticize it, but then people are all of a sudden more and more interested in the efficiency of government, educating themselves, and learning about it. It’s creating a culture of transparency around the whole thing.

So now you can swoop in with a book like Abundance and describe how to actually have a clear mission and metrics and how to solve these problems. That allows us to have something other than this culture of process.

Personally, one of the things that really frustrates me about this world is the bureaucracy of that kind of process, especially because everybody, at least in the United States, is just 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. And then you have to call from 9:00 to 5:00. There are hours, and they say, “Let’s schedule a meeting in 3 weeks from now to discuss this document so we can have another document.”

All of a sudden, the big dreams and the visions, the hopes that people have invested in building an incredible project, die. It’s not just the waste of money. It’s the possibility of a beautiful thing that could have been built never gets built.

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 each generation adopts institutions passed down from previous generations, which were created for different eras and different decades to solve different problems.

That’s how you get an environmental revolution in the 1960s that solves the problem of dirty air and dirty water, but leaves us with a set of norms like NEPA that make it impossible to add clean energy in our generation.

It's just a tragedy of unintended outcomes. To narrow this down to a world that I know you care a lot about, there's a chapter in our book about science policy and the history of the NIH. The NIH really comes into its own after World War II, and it is immediately this beautifully funded crown jewel of biomedical research. It's the federal government irrigating university researchers studying cancer and heart disease and brain science and everything else. Practically every single scientific breakthrough in the US in the last 70 years at least bears the fingerprints of the NIH.

But the NIH is also a bureaucracy, and like every bureaucracy, it has accumulated a set of processes and habits that have flaws. The people most affected by it—scientists in America—told us, and will tell anybody else who's listening, that according to some surveys, 40% of the time that scientists are working today in America, they are filling out grants and doing paperwork, not doing science. That is astonishing. As we say in the book, imagine if we discovered that one year there was a virus that broke out in the American academic scene such that our scientists suffered from chronic fatigue syndrome between January and June every single year. They just couldn't work. We'd be like, "This is an absolute shame. We have to fix this problem."

This problem exists. It's our own bureaucratic rules—the rules that we wrote—that are slowing down science. So what should we do? I don't think we should tear down the NIH. I don't think we should slash and burn grants as we're currently doing in the administration. I think we should understand what's broken and be clear about our desired outcomes.

My desired outcome for science is that we produce and pursue high-risk, high-reward science under the theory that almost no important breakthrough is going to be obvious before you discover it. If it's obvious, you probably already knew it. So why is it some new science? You should want to incentivize scientists to ask their biggest, most curious questions in a high-risk, high-reward environment.

Right now, the NIH doesn't do that. The NIH, for a variety of reasons, whether it's aspects of the peer-review process or just assumptions that scientists have of the system, is too incrementalist. It funds older researchers and wastes a lot of scientists' time with bureaucratic paperwork and kludge. We'd love to reform it. We have ideas for reforming it.

But if liberals don't use the language of and act on institutional reform, we will allow institutions to grow old and sclerotic and piss off Americans, and they'll vote for people who come in with a wrecking ball to tear it down. That's why I think it's so important for abundance liberals like us to be very clear about our goals, our outcomes, and exactly what we want to accomplish, because I think that's the only way to really see how and why institutions that are all around us truly do need reform.

Listen, 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 I'm nevertheless hopeful. I have to ask this. 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.

You're both intellectually rigorous people. The contentiousness of the debate was sad to me, but as a fan of both of you, and since I admire your intellects, it was also fun to watch Godzilla and King Kong fight. I wish there was more of it. I wish you would do his podcast again and debate some other topic and argue. It's just great.

Some time has passed. What was this, 8 years ago now? 2018-ish, something like that. The battles you have fought over the years—that's a lot of chapters. This is several chapters ago. In the interest of camaraderie, what do you admire most about Sam Harris?

That's not a hard question. If you go back and listen to that debate on my show at Vox, I introduce Harris with a 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 on AI—I don't know if I said AI back then, though. I think he's good on AI.

Without going back into the Wayback Machine, I always felt that Sam really thought he somehow got where I was wrong, and I thought I offered a lot of possible tries for de-escalation. He did me, weirdly, the favor of publishing our whole email correspondence, and I think if you read that, you can see that I was not angling for a fight here.

What I've admired about him is that he's been very independent. At that time, there was the emergence of this thing that people then called the intellectual dark web. It was Sam and the Weinstein brothers and Ben Shapiro, and I forget who else was part of it. There were a bunch of those people. I think it kind of split up over time, but Harris has done a good job not falling into conspiracy, as the Weinstein brothers did, and not letting his anger at the left blind him to the failures of the right.

He's a guy—both for better and for worse, as we all are—but he is perfectly willing to stand alone in a crowd. I haven't listened to that much of his stuff lately, but my sense is that he's been quite clear-eyed, from my perspective, on Donald Trump. My view is not that Sam Harris is generally a bad actor. It just isn't. He's been difficult to categorize and fearless about it. He deliberately resists audience capture, so, yeah, that's a hard thing to do.

I think I saw a clip of him on this show sort of going after Trump, and it became a big whole thing.

Yeah, I mean, he's been very consistent on that.

Let's try to find the interesting thing here. I had a podcast with Richard Haier a while back. He studies intelligence, and it was a very detailed, non-policy discussion about IQ tests and all that kind of stuff. There, 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 kinds of things we're willing to talk about now have changed? I mean, this has to do with the Trump moment also.

I think the place where the topic seems to me to have changed, in my ambient awareness of it, is in 2 ways. One is a sense of the Flynn effect. It's hard to individually change your IQ, but there is a very well-documented effect, and I talked to James Flynn before I talked to Sam. There is good evidence now that that has stopped.

Again, this is just my ambient sense. I read some things in passing. I did not come to this podcast preparing to talk about IQ, or I would have prepared very carefully. There was an interesting FT article just the other day asking, "Have we passed peak human intelligence?" My sense is not that it was about IQ, although, again, I don't remember exactly what was in it. I kind of glanced at it and put it aside to read more later. It was about literacy scores going down and a number of test scores going down.

The 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 line in my head since becoming aware of that piece: We spend a lot of time talking about how to get smarter and not enough time talking about how to avoid getting dumber.

We do a lot of things that we think make us smarter, such as having social media on our phones, because you're getting all this information all the time, that in fact make us dumber. It's not just that the information is bad, but the lack of concentration, the constant distraction, and the lack of focus. My sense is that there is a different kind of conversation here. I'm not sure it's really an IQ conversation, but there is a sense that we are inflicting a possibly global, certainly societal, cognitive wound on ourselves.

That's what Jonathan Haidt's book is a little bit about, right?

That's sort of more coming at it from a behavioral standpoint. But the Flynn effect reflects societies putting on, as James Flynn put it, the scientific spectacles. You create societies where we prize things like reading, abstract intelligence, and symbolic logic. You teach people these things a lot, and we get better and better and better at doing them.

Reading changes the brain. It changes the physical structure of the brain. We are 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 a connected society 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, or general intelligence, and decreases in other things.

I'm really shitty at knowing which direction I'm going in. The 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. It's entirely possible to move on to technologies that begin to weaken that.

I have this concern very profoundly about AI, by the way, which obviously you have a lot of your roots in. There are parts of AI I'm very optimistic about, but my biggest concern about AI is that we're going to make ourselves much stupider without realizing it. The things that are easy to automate with AI, such as getting the AI to summarize the reading of something or getting AI to write the first draft of something, are where all the intelligence happens, in my view.

I think one advantage I have over a lot of other podcast hosts who superficially do what I do.

Probably this is true for you. I'm sure this is true for you. What I know is that I really do the reading. No summary is equivalent to me doing the reading, sitting there, making the associations myself, spending the time in the book, and thinking about what it brought up in me. I write the first draft.

ChatGPT cannot write the first draft of my book. The first draft is fucking hard to write, and it's often hard because it's completely wrong, but not because it's narrowly wrong. Right? ChatGPT will never tell you that the problem with what you're trying to do is that you're just trying to do the wrong thing. It'll never tell you, if you tell it to write a first draft, that it's the wrong direction for this draft.

Some part of you has to know it. And often the problem is you just haven't done enough reporting, haven't done enough research. ChatGPT can't tell you that either. My worry for my kids, my worry for society, is creating technologies that make it incredibly alluring to automate the part of creation that is most difficult, most laborious, and most likely to lead to genuine insight and the sort of sharpening of your own mental acuity.

I mean, we better fucking hope the AIs can autonomously make innovations, because we're going to stop being able to.

Yeah, I definitely think all that is brilliantly put. I definitely think that social media is making me dumber. If I spend a week checking social media versus reading books, I can distinctly feel the quality of my thoughts, even with the same content.

I don't read things on a screen as much anymore. I print everything out and I sit at the table and read it. I can read it on my iPad. I can read it on my laptop. I print it all out because my attention is different.

The same goes for AI. Whether we're talking about this kind of research, where my thinking is more distinct and rigorous, or the other space that I work in every single day, which is programming, I'm definitely becoming a worse programmer by using AI and 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 requires 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 over the next few years, the next few decades, centuries, when we colonize the solar system and beyond? Or we could just stick to the next couple decades.

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 in 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 personality, right? What makes you optimistic? I've just always been a real optimist.

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, and at the GLP-1 drug revolution, there are some 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 effects that seem to reduce body-wide inflammation.

They not only rewire our minds and make 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 are 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 absolutely thrills and fascinates me. 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 it was actually 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 synthesize, 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 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 kinds of breakthroughs.

That makes me incredibly optimistic because I think, at base, it's like, what's life about? 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 are just beginning to imagine.

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 and the freedom that come from finding health in your own life.

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 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 institutions, and how those institutions work, 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.

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 ultimately it's institutions and individuals that build the world, not technology acting on its own.

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. 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.

All the Eureka moments, all the special discoveries happen 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 exploring weird shit—the weird mysteries of the universe.

So anyway, Ezra, what gives you hope?

I'm a less temperamentally optimistic person than Derek by a lot, actually. Yeah. 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. If one of the advantages of the ’90s, of much of the life that I have grown up in, is that much of the structure of technology and global governance was fairly stable, we could look at it and there were certain—not certainties, but fairly reliable guardrails—of what was and what wasn't going to happen.

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 or feel about the way history has accelerated is that things have just all gotten faster and less predictable. They really have.

We're in an age that seems to be more like the early 20th century, the late 19th century, than like the 1990s. That means the possibilities range very widely, right? When you think about AI, when you think about biotech advances, when you think about energy advances, when you think about the shifting nature of global alliances and the technological and political systems, we're in the most high-variance period that I think has happened in a very, very, very long time.

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 an answer to the worst of climate change, but genuine energy abundance—unlocking new things like mass desalination and, you know, all—what if we do? 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 bioreactors 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?

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 time in the direction that you find more just.

Well, thank you to both of you for fighting for abundance and writing this manifesto for abundance, and for all the writing and the work you do in the podcast, and just being incredible minds in this world that I'm a fan of. Thank you for talking today.

Thanks very much, Lex.

Thanks so much.

Thanks for listening to this conversation with Ezra Klene 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 Bonapart. In politics, stupidity is not a handicap. Thank you for listening and hope to see you next time.