Why Ezra Klein is So F***ing Angry (with Democrats)

Summary

Podcast Summary: Hasan Minhaj Doesn't Know - "Why Ezra Klein is So F*ing Angry (with Democrats)"**

Introduction In this episode of Hasan Minhaj Doesn't Know, Hasan Minhaj sits down with Ezra Klein, a prominent political commentator and New York Times columnist, to delve into the reasons behind Ezra's noticeable increase in profanity and his growing frustration with the Democratic Party. The conversation explores Ezra's perspectives on government overregulation, policy failures, political polarization, and his personal evolution in the public eye.

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Ezra Klein's Public Image and Use of Profanity

Shift in Communication Style Hasan Minhaj begins by addressing the noticeable shift in Ezra Klein's communication style, particularly his increased use of profanity. Ezra acknowledges this change, attributing it to his expanded platform and the need to express genuine frustration with current political dynamics.

• Quote:
  Ezra Klein ([02:40]): "I am a bit of a potty mouth. Let's take a look."

Intentional vs. Unintentional Language Ezra explains that his use of profanity is not intentional but a natural reflection of his emotions and thoughts in the moment.

• Quote:
  Ezra Klein ([03:10]): "I don't think I am doing it intentionally. Beyond it is the language that is coming to my mind in a moment."

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Critique of Democratic Governance and Policy Failures

Failures in Infrastructure Projects Ezra expresses deep frustration with the Democratic Party's handling of major infrastructure projects, specifically citing California's high-speed rail and public housing initiatives.

• Quote:
  Ezra Klein ([10:28]): "Everyone in the government of California should be embarrassed over high-speed rails. They should have done something to make sure it never happens again, and they haven't."

Overregulation and Bureaucratic Hurdles He argues that overregulation has paralyzed government initiatives, making it difficult to implement effective solutions on time and within budget.

• Quote:
  Ezra Klein ([21:52]): "We've overregulated government itself... making it functionally impossible to construct on time, on budget..."

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Government Overregulation vs. Deregulation

Balancing Regulation Ezra discusses the delicate balance between necessary regulation and the pitfalls of overregulation, emphasizing that not all regulations are inherently bad but require careful consideration.

• Quote:
  Ezra Klein ([23:35]): "Some regulation is bad, some regulation is good. There are things I would like to deregulate to build clean energy and more efficiently."

Deregulating Government Operations He advocates for deregulating government operations to enhance efficiency, particularly in critical areas like housing and clean energy.

• Quote:
  Ezra Klein ([25:17]): "You need to consolidate the authority to build transmission lines... What do we need more of? Then work backwards as to why it's so hard to get."

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Political Polarization and Party Dynamics

Evolution of Political Parties Ezra explores how political polarization has deepened the divide between the Democratic and Republican parties, making collaboration and effective governance more challenging.

• Quote:
  Ezra Klein ([35:21]): "The right is an authoritarian party that follows its leader. The left is a bureaucratic party."

Impact of Personality Cults He criticizes the Republican Party's shift towards authoritarianism under leaders like Donald Trump, contrasting it with the Democratic Party's bureaucratic challenges.

• Quote:
  Ezra Klein ([36:00]): "The Republican Party is an authoritarian party that follows its leader... It's not rebellious, it's a top-down personality cult."

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Personal Growth and Public Perception

Adapting to Increased Visibility Ezra reflects on his transition from a policy-focused pundit to a more publicly visible figure, including his appearances on shows like The Colbert Report.

• Quote:
  Ezra Klein ([42:03]): "I grew up Bearden... I don’t think I got a glow up. My clothes aren't that different. I did grow a beard."

Maintaining Authenticity He emphasizes the importance of staying true to oneself despite the pressures of a larger platform and increased scrutiny.

• Quote:
  Ezra Klein ([44:14]): "I did start working out differently because I felt I used to be pretty strong when I was younger... If I don't turn this, it's just gonna go off."

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Government Efficiency and Policy Implementation

Challenges in Housing and Clean Energy Ezra highlights specific areas where government overregulation has hindered progress, such as housing and clean energy initiatives.

• Quote:
  Ezra Klein ([25:34]): "We need to build more clean energy infrastructure, but it's incredibly hard to do because of excessive regulations."

Cycle of Public Distrust He explains how repeated failures and mismanagement lead to a vicious cycle of public distrust and further overregulation.

• Quote:
  Ezra Klein ([21:36]): "You have a vicious cycle of public failure, public distrust, more regulation, more public failure, more public distrust..."

---

Comparison Between Right and Left

Authoritarian vs. Bureaucratic Left Ezra contrasts the authoritarian tendencies of the right with the bureaucratic and procedural focus of the left, illustrating the fundamental differences in their approaches to governance.

• Quote:
  Ezra Klein ([36:29]): "The right is authoritarian... the left is bureaucratic."

Learning from Governance Failures He suggests that the Democratic Party needs to learn from its own governance failures to improve efficiency and public trust.

• Quote:
  Ezra Klein ([37:54]): "I want them to learn that a lot of the things that they have treated as inviolable... there was a lot more you could have done than you did."

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Notable Themes and Insights

1. Authenticity in Political Discourse: Ezra advocates for honest and unfiltered communication, even if it entails using strong language to convey genuine emotions.

2. Necessity of Government Reform: Overregulation hampers effective policy implementation, necessitating a reevaluation of existing bureaucratic frameworks.

3. Impact of Political Polarization: The increasing ideological divide between parties leads to dysfunctional governance and hampers collaborative efforts.

4. Personal Integrity Amidst Public Scrutiny: Maintaining authenticity and personal values is crucial as one's public platform grows.

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Conclusion

The episode provides a critical examination of the Democratic Party's governance issues through Ezra Klein's candid insights. His growing frustration with overregulation and bureaucratic inefficiencies underscores the need for internal reforms to enhance government effectiveness and restore public trust. Additionally, Ezra's personal reflections on his evolving public persona add depth to the conversation, highlighting the challenges faced by public figures in maintaining authenticity amidst increased visibility and scrutiny.

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Notable Quotes with Timestamps:

• Ezra Klein ([02:40]): "I am a little bit like Samuel L. Jackson. The real question I want to ask you is, is the cursing appropriate?"

• Ezra Klein ([10:28]): "Everyone in the government of California should be embarrassed over high-speed rails. They promise more. And that was a load of bull."

• Ezra Klein ([21:52]): "We've overregulated government itself... making it functionally impossible to construct on time, on budget..."

• Ezra Klein ([35:21]): "The right is an authoritarian party that follows its leader. The left is a bureaucratic party."

• Ezra Klein ([37:54]): "I want them to learn that a lot of the things that they have treated as inviolable... there was a lot more you could have done than you did."

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This comprehensive summary captures the essence of the episode, highlighting Ezra Klein's frustrations with Democratic governance, his views on political polarization, and his personal growth in the public sphere. Notable quotes provide specific insights and emphasize key points discussed during the conversation.

Transcript

[Hasan Minhaj]

Lemonade.

[Ezra Klein]

I don't think I am cursing as much as that little montage of things clipped from different podcasts and interviews, but it's all right.

[Unknown]

Coming up on this week's episode of. Hasan Minhaj doesn't know.

[Ezra Klein]

Everybody in the government of California should be embarrassed of We Up Governance. Great. That just promises more. And that was a load of bull. There's a lot of things they're doing over there that I don't love. This is up and bull. They're doing stupid. To cover your on lawsuits, you have to be rip angry. You knew what you were saying was bull.

[Unknown]

Ladies and gentlemen, that was Ezra Klein.

[Ezra Klein]

That was the end of Ezra Klein's career at the New York Times.

[Hasan Minhaj]

Ezra Klein has been explaining American politics for 20 years. But what's changed over that time is who's listening. Back in Ezra's Vox days, all my nerdy liberal friends were Ezra Klein Stans. They would send me vox articles about the Affordable Care act or Dodd Frank, and I pretended to read each and every one. But today, Ezra has a much more powerful audience than a bunch of Sacramento virgins. As a New York Times columnist and popular podcaster, he has become a legit celebrity with very real influence in the Democratic Party. He was one of the first liberal pundits to admit the thing that everybody already knew, that Joe Biden's brain had turned into applesauce. And that column that he wrote had a huge impact. But candidates and campaigns, they're not really Ezra's specialty. Ezra's a policy guy. He loves policy. He literally once wrote that quote, the point of politics is policy. Now, if you said that into a mic at a Trump rally, you'd literally get booed off the planet. But Ezra has so much to say about policy that he wrote a new book about it called Abundance. So I sat down with him to talk about the book, his recent glow up. And what the F is up with all the swearing.

[Ezra Klein]

Y' all ready? Yes.

[Unknown]

Post 2024 election, I feel like Ezra's gone a little mask off. And dare I say, you've started to pick up a bit of a potty mouth. Let's take a look.

[Ezra Klein]

You're not going to vote for them, no matter what fucking policies they promise you. Like, shut the fuck up with that. Oh, get the fuck over it. It completely sounded like what it actually is to me, which is bullshit. A bunch of this was bullshit, right? Bullshit stories about Haitian immigrants eating dogs and cats. If it's so big in a big way, Donald Trump is president today because we did a shitty job on this with China.

[Unknown]

Okay, I'm not here to judge.

[Ezra Klein]

You're just here to collect.

[Unknown]

But I am loving Mask off. Ezra, this is great.

[Ezra Klein]

You know what's funny? If you go back to my podcast in the Vox days.

[Unknown]

Yeah.

[Ezra Klein]

There's a little bit of cursing in there. There's some I used to get people. I'm not Mike Birbiglia. I'm a Blue con. I'm a Blue pundit.

[Unknown]

Oh, gotcha. Okay.

[Ezra Klein]

And it happens at the time. Some. Yeah, we have a little explicit tag on the show.

[Unknown]

Right.

[Ezra Klein]

I think since the election, more people have been having me on their shows.

[Unknown]

Yes.

[Ezra Klein]

And I'm a little frank. It is wild when my editors aren't the ones looking at the transcript.

[Unknown]

It has been so fun to see an introvert turn into Samuel L. Jackson. The real question I want to ask you is, is the cursing appropriate? Because I'm with. It resonates with me. But is it appropriate for.

[Ezra Klein]

I think it depends what you're doing. I would not say I am doing it intentionally. Beyond it is the language that is coming to my mind in a moment.

[Unknown]

Got it.

[Ezra Klein]

But I will say one thing, which is that I have a view that you should not make the language in which you talk about politics overly formal. When I was young, I was reading. So I got my start in journalism as a blogger, and I remember being in college and I was reading some blog. It was by somebody who's pseudonymous. Right. So not even a big political blog. And at that time, there wasn't even such a thing as a big political blog. But I remember them writing about something related to politics and using the word props. And as dumb as it sounds now.

[Unknown]

I mean, waves the context, meaning I want to give this person props. Got it. Okay.

[Ezra Klein]

It was actually like a thunderbolt to me because I'd never seen anybody write about politics in non stentorian language. I mean, all political writing up until then wore a bow tie. Like, it just all wore a bow tie. And, you know, I was young and it's just like, oh, you could just write about it the way you would talk and write about it.

[Hasan Minhaj]

More colloquial.

[Ezra Klein]

Yeah, more colloquial.

[Unknown]

Yeah.

[Ezra Klein]

So I don't think I am cursing as much as that little montage of things clipped from different podcast interviews.

[Unknown]

But it's a run. It is a run. And by the way. But I'm not. I am.

[Ezra Klein]

The other thing that is true is that this is not. I always think you can do a kind of lying through Affect, which is. And I worry that I particularly have a tendency towards this. Or you can have a misdirection by affect, which is that you are talking about something people should not be calm about, but your temperament is very calm.

[Unknown]

Oh, got it.

[Ezra Klein]

And so I try when I'm actually upset about something for the emotion of that anger, that sadness, that heartbreak, that enthusiasm to come out. Now, cursing is one of the lazier ways to do it. It's not the only tool in the toolbox, but I'm not self editing away from it either. That clip you played, which is from the first one you had, which is like, get the fuck out of here with that. That's from deep into pod. Save Americ interview. That's about. And this is maybe a good bridge to the book that's about the tendency for people to excuse away the anger that residents of liberally run cities feel about disorder, about crime, about there being suddenly an incredibly visible level of immigration, about the fact that they can't afford a house. And sometimes you'll have liberals say, well, I have this crime chart and it shows the crime isn't going up. And you really do at some point have to look around and ask, are you telling everybody there that their experience is wrong because you looked at the pundits table or have you like gone and searched out what your chart might be missing? Well, I get personally frustrated at the tendency to tell voters, tell people their experience of their life does not accord with your personal politics.

[Unknown]

Well, this is, this is important because I wanted to open with that game to talk about something more substantial. Why are you so mad?

[Ezra Klein]

So there's different directions to be mad on. There's an abundance of anger I'm feeling at the moment. I mean, we are talking and by the time this comes out, who knows what will have happened? It's very hard to keep any commentary current for more than three and a half hours right now. But we're talking at a moment when Trump and Musk and Vance are lighting fire to the constitutional system, overturning the economy for no reason. They're trying to deport a kid with a green card for acts of speech. They're not even claiming he committed a crime. We are in an incredibly dark political timeline. And so I'm furious at them for their decisions. Right. And the wanton cruelty inside of them. One of the things that I find almost there is no bottom to my distaste for their, the way they exalt in cruelty. And I haven't actually said this anywhere before, but they had this thing the other day, it was actually a couple weeks ago now.

[Unknown]

But they meaning the President.

[Ezra Klein]

They meaning the President. But it was the White House X account.

[Unknown]

Okay.

[Ezra Klein]

And it was. I think it was called Immigration asmr. And it was. You know what ASMR videos are? These sort of, you know, they're sort of calming, soothing, like somebody doing bubble pop.

[Unknown]

Sure. Ezra Klein's voice and then like someone's playing with marbles. Yeah, yeah.

[Ezra Klein]

But it was immigrant. It was the mana they were shaking and dragging, the manacles they are using when they deport people. Right. It was the ASMR of deporting immigrants as their metal manacles.

[Unknown]

Right.

[Ezra Klein]

Jing. Even if you want to deport these people. Right. The idea that you would tweet that out is. And then Elon Musk with a stupid little cry, happy, funny cry face thing. They're not good people.

[Unknown]

That cruelty and the lack of decorum is what you're saying.

[Ezra Klein]

Yeah. As Adam Serwa said, the cruelty is the point. I'm not saying the lack of decorum isn't the thing. The lack of decorum, fine. There is a virtue matters. Virtue matters in politics. It matters in human beings. And when you walk down this road with yourself, when you begin to wring the virtue out of yourself, even like, again, political opinions aside, whatever you think about immigration aside, when you begin to make cruelty a meme, a thing you do for the applause of the crowd, when you want to see the crowd, it's not that the lion has to eat the combatant, it's that you want to see the person suffer. So that's one side of it, right? That we are living through an age when we have elected some of the worst people to do some of the worst things. And then, yeah, we, on my side of the aisle, we fucked up governance. And we explained it away again and again and again. And we talk about it nationally, where I think in some ways the problem's been less bad. But I'm Californian, you're Californian. And I like the people in many cases who lead the government in California, Gavin Newsom and others. And California is Lewis and Hunter of thousands of people every year because they can't afford to live there in San Francisco and Los Angeles. I'm from outside la. I lived in SF during a bunch of the writing of this book. And I had friends who were moving away because they couldn't afford to raise families in the place that they protected, in some cases, the place that they served, the place where they treated the sick and fought fires and we have been explaining this away. Michael Bloomberg used to say that New York City is a luxury good. Right? It is a luxury good and so it should be priced like a luxury good.

[Unknown]

What do you mean? This explaining away graphs, details like those sort of things.

[Ezra Klein]

No, I don't mean graphs details, I mean just being okay with it.

[Unknown]

Oh, hand waving it.

[Ezra Klein]

This is not hand waving it. Saying it's the other people's fault, not fixing it.

[Unknown]

Got it.

[Ezra Klein]

Or when government fails. Everybody in the government of California should be embarrassed as shit over high speed rails. See, there it was.

[Unknown]

There it was.

[Ezra Klein]

And they should have done something to make sure it never happens again and they haven't. Can I ask you redid high speed rail in California today? It would not go any differently. That's embarrassing. It's not that we failed the first time, it's that we would fail the second. The Second Avenue subway in New York City, most expensive per km rail project ever in human history. The second, the next phase of it is projected cost more per km. That's what we should be embarrassed of.

[Unknown]

Right? Can I ask a two part follow up to what you just said? I've heard and argue this back to me because I actually agree with you. I think virtue matters. In Hindi there's a word called izzat which means dignity and self respect. Like the way in which you carry yourself. You should have izzat. Like I'm not going to do that. That would be demeaning of me. There are people that have argued that those memes that get posted. Trump had that meme on Valentine's Day. Roses are red, violets are blue. If you're illegal we will deport you. And it looked like a Valentine's Day card that my friendship would. Exactly. And I heard from many people, some people make the argument they go good, have the ugliness, just be as out there as possible. Why hide it under decorum and soft language? What do you say to that? I have a lot of friends that feel that way. They're like good.

[Ezra Klein]

Really interesting.

[Unknown]

I want to see the pimple. I want to see the ugly fucking whitehead for what it is. I want to see the bulbous white pus that's inside of it. And don't use Mac foundation to cover it up with some pretty soft language. That was the first question that I wanted.

[Ezra Klein]

I don't think it's impossible to have a grand distance between the bureaucratization and the cruelty. Right. So the movie the Zone of Interest, I don't know what it would have meant to go See this movie, which is about the German town on the other side of a concentration camp. It just. It's normalcy, but it just seemed like to me, which I have not seen it, like a tough way to spend an evening. But that movie from everybody who did see it and everything I read about it, it. I mean, it's haunting just even to think about it. So you can have an extraordinary gap between the normal, the mechanistic workings of government and the horrific heart of what that government is doing. But I think typically you don't and say behind that, behind the zone of interest, Hitler, he didn't hide the ball. You can go read my Kampf, right? Hitler was clear, like the ugliness was part of it. The violence was always part of it. The hatred was always part of it. You unleash these forces. We are creatures who are barely civilized. Barely civilized when you make it. Part of the way that you get ahead in a political party is to unleash the part of yourself, to grow the part of yourself that treats other human beings as less than human, that treats them with contempt. I think a lot about JD Vance as a person. I think about him as a person. Not because I'm so. Not because of his political views. I knew JD Vance when he had different political views. But I think it's so wild that.

[Unknown]

You know these people for a long time. I, again, as a comedian, we know. We know them as like, almost like Pokemon characters.

[Ezra Klein]

When JD Vance was on my podcast back in maybe it was 2012.

[Unknown]

Sure.

[Ezra Klein]

You know, back in the initial hillbilly elegy days, virtue was really important to him. Decency wise. It was something he didn't like about Donald Trump. And one of the things that frightens me about the modern Republican Party is watching people give themselves personality transplants in order to get ahead in it. Watching them unleash a cruelty and anger that maybe was always inside of them, maybe is put on for show and then becomes real. Elise Stefanik didn't used to be like this. Ted Cruz, who I've never liked in politics, didn't used to be like this. So many of them have imitated the worst part of Donald Trump's character.

[Unknown]

Oh, got it.

[Ezra Klein]

To come up behind him.

[Unknown]

Got it.

You're not cosplaying to change who you are.

[Ezra Klein]

You're not cosplaying because you become what you force yourself to be. It's like all the kids online who get into anti Semitism because it's edgelord humor. And soon enough, we're actually little neo Nazis Got it.

[Unknown]

Okay.

[Ezra Klein]

The parts of yourself that you exercise get stronger. And so that thing, right like that, the cruelty is really there and it's better if we can see it. I'm not saying that there's nothing to it, right. You can have something that is so well hidden under bureaucracy that you really are unable to fight the thing at the heart of it because they have layered it in such a maze of complexity. But that's usually not what happens. And institutions are structures of formation. They form the people in them. And when you begin to make part of the thing, you have to do. Another good example of this is the lying, right? From Sean Spicer in the first term saying it was the biggest inauguration crowd ever, to the fact that to get ahead in Republican Party politics, you had to pretend to believe, believe that Donald Trump won the 2020 election, that it was rigged. When you, even if you knew what you were saying was bullshit. When you begin to stomp on the part of yourself that is uncomfortable deceiving people in public, then that part of yourself begins to die.

[Hasan Minhaj]

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[Unknown]

You said something on Colbert. You said democrats like government but don't make it work. Republicans try to make government fail. I was watching it and I was like, expound on that. But you didn't have time. You had to get to the act break.

[Ezra Klein]

I think in a way that's the core of this book.

[Unknown]

Got it.

[Ezra Klein]

So there is this ideological collusion that is contrary to our typical story of politics. We have this typical story of politics. The left likes big government. It wants government to do things. The right hates government. It wants to destroy government. Partially right. The right hates parts of the government. Those we were just talking about with the deportation love letter, they like a big police state, they like a big surveillance state. They like a big national security state. They want the government to have incredible powers to imprison, to harm, to investigate. But the left has a very divided soul about government. There's a part of the left that does want government to do big things. And then there's a left that emerged, particularly in the back half walls, people like Ralph Nader and Rachel Carson who are responding to the excesses of New Deal pro growth liberalism. We were building too fast. We weren't thinking about what we were making. We were despoiling streams and clear cutting forests and Robert Moses was cutting highways through places where black people lived and wasn't getting any input from that community. And we sort of built a lot of ways to check the power of the government. We if you look at how environmental law works in this country.

[Unknown]

Yeah. So just for the, for the listeners who haven't read the book yet, you do this, you kind of wax poetic about in the 60s and 70s, basically there were, there were a lot of critical lawsuits against companies that were doing things that were environmentally harmful to.

[Ezra Klein]

But more than that, there were new laws passed that the way they worked was they made it easy to sue the government.

[Unknown]

Yes.

[Ezra Klein]

You know, that's what the National Environmental Policy Protection act is.

[Unknown]

Yes.

[Ezra Klein]

There are tons of these bills at the state and local level. The way they work is they create an avenue for you to sue the government. Government, if particularly the government did not do enough research and assessment of the likely consequences of an action. And the question that that suit is asking is not is this thing good or bad for the environment? It's was this aspect of the thing considered? Were possible mitigation strategies discussed? And so over time, these say environmental reviews went from, I think it was like an average of seven pages to thousands of pages as people realized they had different ways to sue them. And so they're all built now to do sort of COVID your ass on lawsuits. But this is true across a lot of different domains. And so what you have is in, you know, even particularly in blue states, a government that is hobbled from action by well meaning liberal legislation that was worried about government doing too much and ended up creating government that does too little.

[Unknown]

Isn't there a little bit of this cut the red tape and let builders build and let us get shit done. Isn't that a bit of a conservative argument?

[Ezra Klein]

There is, but it has one distinction that I think people, people don't actually think about that much, which is, yes, it is that. Yeah, there is a lot of red tape.

[Unknown]

Yeah.

[Ezra Klein]

Too often in politics we're sort of affective about things. If you're a liberal, you know you're supposed to be pro regulation.

[Unknown]

Yeah.

[Ezra Klein]

And sort of discount ideas or news stories where regulation is bad. If you're conservative, you're pro deregulation. So there are places where liberals should not be pro regulation. We have way over regulated building a house on the private market. But the other thing that I think people don't think about at all here is deregulating government itself. And what we have often done is we've over regulated government, not necessarily the private market, although sometimes, yes, the private market too. And, and so sometimes when I talk about housing with my sort of more leftist friends, they'll say, well, the answer here is public housing. Fucking great. I live On a block with tons of public housing. I love public housing. Under the rules that we currently build public housing, which are more difficult than the rules under which we build private housing the government cannot afford, There is no possible way for the government to solve housing problems by building public housing because it has made that public housing functionally impossible to construct on time, on budget, et cetera. You would need to restructure the way the government itself builds. Again, that's high speed rail. Right. In California. So the private sector wasn't the main ones doing high speed rail. That was the government, and we made it. When the government does things, the government has to hit a much higher standard than the private sector in order to do very complex builds. And then it doesn't get them done. And then we lose even more faith in the government. Then we put it under even more rules for audits and oversight, which makes it even harder to get anything done. And you get this vicious cycle of public failure, public distrust, more regulation, more public failure, more public distrust, et cetera.

[Unknown]

Yes. I mean, are you basically saying that regulation has kind of gotten in the way of the American dream in 2025?

[Ezra Klein]

Some regulation. We want these things that I consider to be a bit childish.

[Unknown]

Yeah.

[Ezra Klein]

We want to be able to say government is good or government is bad, or regulation is good or regulation is bad. It's just not how life works. Some regulation is bad, some regulation is good. There are things I would like to, for instance, environmental laws that deregulate our ability to build clean energy and more intensely regulate the building of fossil fuel infrastructure. I want to make it harder to build things that leak methane and carbon and carbon dioxide into the air. I want to make it easier to site solar panels to do interstate transmission lines. Right now, the whole theory of decarbonization is we're going to move the entire economy functionally onto electricity. We have all these things where, you know, you pump oil into your car. What you're going to do is you're going to plug your car into something, right? That's electric vehicles. But that means what we're going to do is increase the amount of electricity we need to generate by something like two or three times. So now we need to generate two or three times more electricity. And we need to turn all the electricity we're currently generating from dirty sources over to clean ones. So we need to build all of this electricity because a lot of it's going to be solar and wind. There are places you have more solar and wind power. At least it's easier and more Efficient to generate it, then you got to move it from there. We don't have enough transmission lines to do that, so you need to build a bunch of them. But we're not building nearly enough because you've made it incredibly hard to do. So you need to deregulate in a way. What I would really say is you need to consolidate the authority to build transmission lines. It all, unfortunately, is case by case by case. And it's why the core idea of the book is that you need to ask, what do we need more of? And then you need to work backwards as to why it's so hard to get.

[Unknown]

Can you articulate what the title abundance means? Because the way you closed your Colbert segment was it was an overarching idea of hope and abundance for your children. But what specifically needs to be abundant?

[Ezra Klein]

The. I would call them the factors of production.

[Unknown]

Okay.

[Ezra Klein]

What we really focus on in the book is housing.

[Unknown]

Yeah.

[Ezra Klein]

Clean energy. Gotcha. State capacity. The ability of government to do things. Scientific innovation, and the implementation, the manufacturing and deployment of those innovations. Which the point there is like, we invented the solar panel in this country, Right. But we let China make so many of them, and we made it so hard to make them here, that now China completely owns solar panel manufacturing. And then they've started to own the innovations on that. They're just better at building.

[Unknown]

So what's wild is when we were going over the book, we were riffing, and we kind of felt there are these weird parallels that you're making that Tech Maga also agrees with. So I was wondering, have you found yourself, as you've gotten older, to be personally becoming more conservative?

[Ezra Klein]

No, I think I've become more like.

[Unknown]

Can I give an example for me?

[Hasan Minhaj]

Yeah.

[Unknown]

And then you can, like, you can answer. I'm not. This is not like a gotcha. So sometimes I'll be driving into the city to our studio. So our studio's here. It's near Grand Central Station. I'll be driving in, and I have a Toyota. Not to brag. And sometimes I'll hit that fourth or fifth pothole and I'll be like, if I hit another fucking pothole, the next sign that I see that says, I'm a developer and I'm going to fix the. I'll vote for you. I will literally vote for you.

[Ezra Klein]

Well, I guess if that's what it means. The reason I sort of don't just say yes to that question is I just don't think this maps onto a simple single dimension of conservatism and liberalism.

[Unknown]

Gotcha.

[Ezra Klein]

If we even know what those mean anymore.

[Unknown]

Yes.

[Ezra Klein]

Because I'll say one thing for sure.

[Unknown]

Yes.

[Ezra Klein]

I don't think Donald Trump and the Republican Party that he leads are conservatives. I don't think big conservatives for a long time.

[Unknown]

Yeah.

[Ezra Klein]

Maybe if we had the conservatives of George Romney, Mitt Romney, I would find parts of that appealing. Maybe. Although I also want a much more powerful. This is my argument with my leftist friends who sometimes when I. There's a thing that me and Derek criticized. Derek Thompson is my co author on the book criticized called Everything Bagel Liberalism. You know, it's where you sort of layer way, way, way, way too much into a single project. So, you know, in order to build this affordable housing, you also need to hit these green and do a higher than normal ventilation standard and, and, and, and, and, and pay prevailing wage or higher. And finally you've made it so you can't actually complete the affordable housing development because you've got so many good things in there.

[Unknown]

Yeah.

[Ezra Klein]

That in like, I have my. There are the liberals or people who I understand myself to be ideologically aligned with, who will then push me. It's like, well, you don't want to, like, you don't want this to be, you know, green energy, you know, green code compliant. I'm like.

[Unknown]

And you're like, I can't get everything you can get.

[Ezra Klein]

I'm on your left because I want a government capable of delivering on the things it promises. And you want a government that just promises more shit.

[Unknown]

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Well, you, you talk about this, this thing in the book called Procedure Fetish. Okay. You say Democrats and Progress has this thing called procedure Fetish. Now what does that mean? Because it sounds like something you would see on an NSFW discord for attorneys. Like, what is Procedure fetish?

[Ezra Klein]

That's a term from Nicholas Bagley, who is a administrative law professor at Michigan at UMich, he was the lead counsel. I'm just establishing some bona fides here for Gretchen Whitmer. Governor Gretchen Whitmer.

[Unknown]

Yeah.

[Ezra Klein]

And so this is his law review article, the, the Procedural Fetish. And what he basically says is that. So first liberalism has developed. It has centered itself professionally around the legal profession. So between. Until Tim Walz, the last presidential or vice presidential candidate, a Democratic ticket.

[Unknown]

Yeah.

[Ezra Klein]

This is a wildstat who did not go to law school was, I believe, Walter Mondale. Like, you got to go back that far to find even one.

[Unknown]

Right. I mean, Lincoln was a lawyer though, right? Like, there's a lot of, there's a lot of lawyers.

[Ezra Klein]

The point is that you should never have a lawyer. The point is that does it need to be the case that you never don't have a lawyer? Right. The point is that liberals became highly legalistic. It's not like that on the Republican side. Right. I mean, There are lawyers. J.D. vance is a lawyer. Yeah. But it's a mix of things. And the point that Bagley is making is that the legalistic way of looking at the law asks a very important question, which is how does government attain legitimacy? Government has all this power. How do you make that power legitimate? And the lawyers. Because they're lawyers. There's nothing, nothing wrong with this. You just want to balance it out. Is it is legitimate because it follows the agreed upon process, not because it.

[Unknown]

Achieves the agreed upon outcome, which is some parliamentary procedure.

[Ezra Klein]

Yeah. So yeah. Oh my God.

[Unknown]

Jesus. I'm talking that talk.

[Ezra Klein]

That's. Wow.

[Unknown]

Well, well, the dichotomy.

[Ezra Klein]

And I want to, I want to.

[Unknown]

I want to pitch this for you while you're on, while you're on the press tour for the book. The way I see it and the way it's being articulated is it's almost like there's the rule Follower party versus the rule breaker party. And there is in every small business owner and every entrepreneur that I know, whether it's. It's a group of comedians starting a fucking open mic at a bar, all the way up to someone who is opening a small restaurant to. I know so many people that are trying to pursue the American dream. But that's the dichotomy.

[Ezra Klein]

Yeah.

[Unknown]

Rule followers versus rule breakers. And I do think tech maga and Trump are speaking to the rule breaker party. And my question to you is, how do you get a bunch of Democratic Lisa Simpsons to all of a sudden while out. Because Nelson is the president.

[Ezra Klein]

Yes.

[Unknown]

And you're fundamentally asking these nitpicking litigators to behave a little bit like Nelson and Weil out. And that's such a. I don't know if I'm articulating that.

[Hasan Minhaj]

Right.

[Unknown]

But that is so contrarian to their core of who they are.

[Ezra Klein]

So, you know, my first book was on political polarization.

[Unknown]

Yeah.

[Ezra Klein]

And one of the arguments of that book is that polarization.

[Unknown]

Why we're so divided.

[Ezra Klein]

Right. Why we're polarized.

[Unknown]

Why we're polarized.

[Ezra Klein]

One of the arguments of that book is that polarization can become a totalizing process. It begins with something kind of natural. Right. In the mid century, the political parties weren't even ideologically distinct. You had liberals in the Republican Party, conservatives in the Democratic Party. So when people would vote for their Democratic member of the House, they might not get a party that reflected in any way the ideology they voted for at that individual level. Yada, yada, yada, story about why we sort of split into liberals and conservatives being Democrats and Republicans. And that makes sense. But then it's sort of. It doesn't know where to stop. And one of the things that begins to happen is you psychologically polarize. The parties become temperamentally very different. And one way you can actually see this is in something that happened really just in the last couple of years. My friend Matt Iglesias calls it the crank realignment.

[Unknown]

Okay.

[Ezra Klein]

So you used to have a bunch of cranks in both parties. And on the right you were talking about drugs.

[Unknown]

I was like, wait, what?

[Ezra Klein]

Okay, go ahead. You had on the right a certain kind of conspiracy theorist, Right. Think about the John Birch Society from the past. You think about the sort of people who believed, you know, Bill Clinton was running a vast murder ring. Right. You have a sort of crankish Republican Party. It can be very like, you know, worried the globalists, all that. And on the left you had this sort of anti GMO I don't know about these vaccines.

[Unknown]

Like, crunchy, very granola. Yeah. Yeah.

[Ezra Klein]

RFK Jr. Is a very good example of a left crank, okay? And he used to be on the left crank. Like, he used to be like a left crank on Air America. And the thing where he's now in the Republican Party speaks to a way the party's psychologically polarized. The Democrats became the party of people who like the. Who like the systems. Right. If you think about those lawn signs, no human being is illegal. We believe in science. It's not that you believe in science. You believe in scientific institutions. You're not out there running experiments. You're sort of assuming what the experts tell you is true. And the reason you hate RFK Jr is he's saying what the experts tell you is not true. And I'm not an RFK Jr fan either. That dude should not be HHS secretary. But there was something healthy about the fact that the parties were a little bit divided in this way that you had on the left, populists who were very skeptical of corporations. I mean, you think about ad busters skeptical of all the advertising. And on the right, you had its own sort of versions of this. But now it's like the Democrats are the party of manners, a party of systems, a party. And the Republican Party is the other thing. You were saying rule breakers. I think the right likes to think themselves as rule breakers, but they're not. They're.

[Unknown]

You don't think what's happening right now that they're breaking the rules? Well, I can't even keep up with how many.

[Ezra Klein]

They're autocrats.

[Unknown]

I asked myself, I'm like, is this a.

[Ezra Klein]

They're autocrats, okay? It is a part. It is an authoritarian party that follows its leader. You can't break Donald Trump's rules.

[Unknown]

Right.

[Ezra Klein]

People always say these things. You can't say on the left. Right, the left, it's so censorious. Like, it doesn't let you say anything. Try being a Republican and getting ahead right now and saying, you know what? Donald Trump and Elon Musk are breaking the law left and right. And Donald Trump, of course, didn't win the 2020 election. That was a load of bullshit. Try saying that in the Republican Party and see how far you get. So it's. So the problem is the right is autocratic and the left is bureaucratic.

[Unknown]

It.

[Ezra Klein]

And they, they.

[Unknown]

But would they argue again, I don't agree with what they're doing. Would they argue, hey, we're breaking the existing rules.

[Ezra Klein]

Yeah.

[Unknown]

Because the existing rules suck. Like the existing rules about why are we playing the game this way?

[Ezra Klein]

I wouldn't, I wouldn't. My point is not that the right isn't breaking rules or breaking laws.

[Unknown]

Yeah.

[Ezra Klein]

My point is that it's not rebellious. It is a top down personality cult.

[Unknown]

Okay.

[Ezra Klein]

Which makes it dangerous.

[Unknown]

Yeah.

[Ezra Klein]

I would. There's a lot of things they're doing over there that I don't love. Like let's be clear.

[Unknown]

Sure.

[Ezra Klein]

But if they were passing them legally, my view is that's the outcome of an election. Right. You can get rid of usaid. That is your power as a political party.

[Unknown]

Right.

[Ezra Klein]

If you can pass it, you can do it.

[Unknown]

Right.

[Ezra Klein]

Nothing illegal about that. The constitution doesn't say we have USAID just going in and closing it down overnight. You can't do that like that. That is against the law. So I mean they did do it.

[Unknown]

Yeah.

[Ezra Klein]

So. And I do think like I. If I want Democrats to learn anything from them.

[Unknown]

Yeah.

[Ezra Klein]

I want them to learn that a lot of the things that they have treated as inviolable. You know, our lawyer said we couldn't do this. A lot of that was just norms. There were. There was a lot more you could have done than you did.

[Unknown]

Yeah. Can I.

[Ezra Klein]

In not doing it.

[Unknown]

Yeah.

[Ezra Klein]

You ran government badly and people got fed up with you.

[Unknown]

You can I. Can I make a pitch? It's a bit of a leap, but I'm. I'm kind of. Yes. Handing what what you're saying and tell me if you follow me here. There is the way you were saying where the Democratic Party is like. Well, my lawyer said. Well they. The censor said. Or like this very like no, no, we can't type energy is. Is the whole Luigi phenomenon a symptom of this as well? In a world where the majority of people use pleasantries or Twitter fingers to do something, there is something kind of bold about action in the face of frustration.

[Ezra Klein]

I think it's completely true. Right. And it's always one of the appeal of authoritarians or strongmen. I alone can fix it. There are.

[Unknown]

You're doing something. How many times have you heard like do something?

[Ezra Klein]

One of the. I used to have as my Twitter back. Way, way, way old days of Twitter. I used to have a. I'll out myself as a nerd here a comic panel from the incredible God. It's Aja and Fraction. I forget their first names. But an incredible Hawkeye run in Marvel Comics. And it was just this picture from this one panel of a newspaper headline that said everything is horrible. Please, somebody do something. Yeah, like that's at the core of politics, right? Or the famous Occupy Wall street sign. Shit is fucked up and bullshit.

[Unknown]

Yeah.

[Ezra Klein]

One of the huge mistakes Democrats made with Joe Biden was even though they did do quite a lot, they left open the entire field of performing the doing of a lotness. Biden at 82 was simply not able to project any kind of mastery of events. And that was devastating. People do want leadership, particularly at times when the world feels unruly and disordered. Now Trump is going to go. Is already going. I mean the guy is. It took Biden 221 days for his approval ratings to turn net negative. It's taken Donald Trump about a month. So this is not working. But yeah, you gotta give people a deep sense, which is both about what you're gonna do and about how you do it, that you see that society is on some fundamental level a bit deranged.

[Unknown]

Is there a.

[Ezra Klein]

And you're gonna try to fix it.

[Unknown]

Is there?

[Ezra Klein]

And yeah, look, there was a genius to Donald Trump on the first day of his presidency signing those executive actions in public and throwing the pen out. Right. There is a lot for Democrats to learn from the Trump administration. There is a lot for them.

[Unknown]

Senator Elizabeth Warren, by the way, I said the Democrats have to pick up a little. But a little bit of the WWE energy.

[Ezra Klein]

Yeah. A little bit of the WWE and.

[Unknown]

Throw in the pen is like a.

[Ezra Klein]

Yeah, it's got a T shirt cannon full of all the regulations.

[Unknown]

Totally.

[Ezra Klein]

There's a lot you can do. And yeah, part of the appeal. I mean to be fair, he said this very explicitly and this is an old Steve Bannon thing. They are trying to give an incredible impression of action which they are doing now. The problem with that and the reason they're going to sour people on it is that they are overwhelming not just the rest of us, but themselves. They have no idea what they're doing. They do not have some attentional resources we don't have. Look how often Elon Musk is tweeting. These people are not paying close attention. They are saying yes to things coming from all parts of the administration. They are not red teaming it in the sense of, of like going to the agency and be like what will happen if we do this? You're having big internal fights in that administration over say firing a bunch of air traffic controllers and planes are falling out of the sky. They're doing stupid shit and things are going to break. But on the other side, this thing where you have to Wait for everything to go through an endless interagency process. This thing where you will pass $42 billion for rural broadband, and years later, not a single home will be hooked up to parole broadband. You have to be rip shit angry about that. Like. Like, even if it's under you, you have to be angry about it. You have to be up there pounding the table in front of people. A genius of Donald Trump always in his first term is that he always seemed mad about his own government. Like how fast it was moving, what it was doing and not doing. He didn't own everything. Like, there's things that were not in his power. And he made sure you knew it, and he made sure you shared his impatience. Bernie Sanders is also really good at this as a politician. Bernie Sanders has voted for a million bills Bernie Sanders thinks are completely watered down quarter measures, and he both votes for those bills, tells you he voted for them, and he rails against how far we still have to go. You do not have to own everything you don't like about government because you are part of government and you sure as hell don't have to stop trying to fix it.

[Unknown]

Yeah, I want to pivot from something global to something a little bit more local, which is you, Ezra Klein.

[Ezra Klein]

How often I curse.

[Unknown]

Now you're cursing more. You have a hit podcast called the Ezra Klein show and it's now become a video podcast. You're doing Colbert, you're doing the media rounds. You have gone from being voice famous to video famous. Dare I say, Ezra, you've had a glow up.

[Ezra Klein]

People keep saying this.

[Unknown]

Let's take a look. You went from high school librarian to this. What's it like?

[Hasan Minhaj]

What's it like?

[Ezra Klein]

But you know what's funny? What's it like? I am currently wearing that shirt.

[Hasan Minhaj]

Oh, the same.

[Unknown]

The same shirt.

[Ezra Klein]

Not like I have bought another version of it.

[Unknown]

It's the same shirt.

[Ezra Klein]

It is this shirt. So just keep that in mind.

[Unknown]

Well, how does it feel having your Chris Pratt moment? You went from likable guy on a sitcom to I'm doing TRT and I'm a marvel superhero.

[Ezra Klein]

I am glad people feel that way. I grew up Bearden. What I will say say is that it has changed my public image more than I would have thought.

[Unknown]

How you feeling?

[Ezra Klein]

I guess I'm feeling fine. I don't know. I'm worried about the state of the world, man.

[Unknown]

It's okay to say that you're feeling yourself. And look, I'm not here to grill you. I'm not here to ask you the hard question, but can I? Yeah, look, did you take any inspiration from someone that you may or may not know? Let's take a look. Is that, did you go to your barber and when they have the poster on the wall and they say, what do you want? Did you point to my photo?

[Ezra Klein]

I just sort of have a shirt. It's just.

[Unknown]

Ezra, Ezra, you got the hide a mint taper with the right part.

[Ezra Klein]

You're not even wearing this thing, man.

[Unknown]

Oh, I gotta stay ahead of you.

[Ezra Klein]

Yeah, fair enough.

[Unknown]

I can't be here. I gotta be two pieces ahead of you.

[Ezra Klein]

God's honest truth about what people called the glow up. I'm 40 years old.

[Unknown]

Yes.

[Ezra Klein]

I turned 39. It happened a year ago. It's crazy. And I don't know, I was a little bit like, you go in one direction or you go in the other. And the thing that really bugged me most things, I don't think I got a glow. My clothes aren't that different. I did grow a beard. I've had this haircut for many years now.

[Unknown]

Yes.

[Ezra Klein]

But I did.

[Unknown]

You did lose the glasses. You did have your. She's all that.

[Ezra Klein]

I've worn contacts for, like, on and off for a long time. And now I'm doing more video. I wear more clothes, contacts, because you get that weird, like, light thing happening on the glasses. But I did start working out really differently because I felt I used to be pretty strong when I was younger. And then my 30s, I got injured a bunch of times and I had this moment. And the other thing I did was I read Peter A's Outlive. And that whole book is like, its main thing is the muscle mass you have will determine your long term outcomes.

[Unknown]

Yeah. Yeah.

[Ezra Klein]

And I was like, if I don't turn this, it's just gonna go off.

[Unknown]

Oh, yeah.

[Ezra Klein]

And so the. The reality of the.

[Unknown]

The.

[Ezra Klein]

To the extent there's been, like, any real change.

[Unknown]

Yeah.

[Ezra Klein]

It's like, I do drink my protein shakes now.

[Unknown]

So are you and you do take it seriously, but are you and Barbaro out here lifting?

[Ezra Klein]

Oh, my God. Like, you can't keep up with Barbaro. I got no cardio compared to that guy.

[Unknown]

Oh, for real?

[Ezra Klein]

I got no cardio compared to anybody. But, you know, definitely I am Michael Barbaro.

[Unknown]

And can you beat me in a foot race?

[Ezra Klein]

No.

[Unknown]

Oh, Ezra, I notice you hitting the gpc.

[Ezra Klein]

You can't beat that guy in a foot race. Can't beat him in the podcast charts.

[Unknown]

All right, let's take this down.

[Hasan Minhaj]

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