Kara Swisher (7:34)

No problem. So much news Brian.

Brian Tyler Cohen (7:36)

So much news. Okay, well let's start off first with Elon Musk. He, he, he aligns himself with Trump who of course, you know, these EV loving liberals hate. Tesla's stock price is falling. Car sales are falling both in the US and internationally. So I have two questions here. Can Tesla survive this? And is there a world in which Republicans flock to EVs to compensate for the liberals who have left?

Kara Swisher (8:01)

No, they are not. You know his audience is a particular group of people who believe in cl, as did Elon Musk many many years ago. He was quite adamant on it and quite dramatic. And so I think what he's done is the biggest destruction of. Well there's a couple things cuz I think it's easy to blame it on nobody likes him, which they, you know his, his negatives are quite high, especially with his customers. When you do things that your customers don't like, it's, you know, the customer's always right no matter what it is. And I don't think that the people who the MAGA groups are not rushing to EVs, they find they're hostile to them. Right. And so was Trump until just the other day when the car sale on the lawn of the White House. But he was hostile to electric vehicles. And so this is not a group people that wants to buy these things. They don't even want to buy the cyber truck which is sort of in their genre. Right. They've only sold 45,000 trucks. They were supposed to sell 250,000. They have not. And they've had to recall them all because they were badly glued. And I think the real problem with Tesla is it's a meme stock. And the reason it's as high as it is, which is 134, a PE ratio of 134, which is insane because most car companies are in the single digits, right? PE ratios. And so it's a meme stock that's betting on Elon Musk. And one of the things that they're betting on is that he's going to do robo taxis. Well, the problem is Waymo's been doing them for several years in, in San Francisco and other cities, so he doesn't have one robo taxi on the road, you know, while others are innovating. The second thing is that the cars have not been updated. You live or die in the car business and the technology business by your latest version and as good a car. And let me say Teslas are good cars. It's not as good as other new cars that are coming. And so there's all these new competitors now, including in China with BYD here, there's plenty of different competitors. They're all growing market share. And Tesla's losing it, which is a natural thing for it to happen because it was the only choice. But when you get a choice as a consumer, you want to go with the sexy BMW or the really cool Ford. The Ford has several. I think it's the Mach 5, beautiful electric car. And so if you have this, Tesla looks the same year after year, and you don't like the guy, you're like, I think I'll get the cool one with the people I kind of like or I don't care. You know, they don't sit around and insult all manner of people that I happen to like. So that's the other thing. And so the other thing that's then promising is that it's an AI company, that it's a robotics company. And he's always. Elon's always promising the next thing, and maybe one of them will be right. And he's saying the robotics company is what it's going to be. It's going to be this, it's going to be that. He can say what he damn well pleases. And I like that. He's like shooting for the moon, but the products aren't there to make up for the market share of this company. Company going down. And then on top of it, he's dislikable. And so you don't want to buy his stuff. That's all.

Brian Tyler Cohen (10:51)

Well, look, I think, I think all of this was so easy to preview. I mean, I spoke with Mark Cuban in the lead up to the election about how Elon Musk was so clearly aligning himself with Donald Trump. And so, and so how, like, for him, unless he really does plan on just pivoting away from direct to consumer sales and going full blown AI or robo taxis or B2B, whatever it may be, like, how could he not have. How could he not have four what aligning yourself with Donald Trump would do.

Kara Swisher (11:19)

To his brand because he's benefiting from other things. Like, look, these new auto tariffs benefit Tesla. Just so you know, it's the only company that gets benefited. Nobody else does, just Tesla. And so, you know, he's got more space contracts for starlink. The government is the biggest buyer of things. And so what does he need the rest of us lousy people when he's got Trump to give him contracts? So, you know, the government, that's where all tech is moving forward is that, you know, why do you rob banks? That's where the money is. Why do you suck up the government? Because that's where the money is. And so even as he talks about cutting, he's benefiting enormously. And also by getting rid of the people that were investigating some of his problems at each of these companies. And so he's gotten rid of the regulators, which he always wanted to do, and he's getting sweet fat contracts. And that's what's sad here is because, you know, real progress in technology depends on innovation. Instead, it now depends on access. It doesn't depend on how good your product is now. It depends on how close you are to this, you know, to this very corrupt president. And so that's not innovation. That's not what got Elon to where he is today. And so the problem he has is as good an entrepreneur he is, a lot of it is he's kind of a P.T. barnum character in many. I'm gonna do this, I'm gonna do that. Like when he was, when he did that stupid thing where he's like, we're gonna do robocapsis. I'm like, I'm in a robo taxi right now. You're not the pioneer of like, I'm riding around Sanford yesterday. I took three or four waymos all over Sanford. They're everywhere. And so. And they've got millions of miles they've tested. And so and also, I don't trust the safety of the Tesla as much because they use fewer points of safety. So I'm not going to use a Tesla. But I also didn't use the GM thing because I didn't think the technology was up to. It wasn't a political thing. It was, if I'm in a driverless car, I'm going to be a safe driverless car, the safest I can. And so it's hard. And then when you're at over 100, whatever what I just said, PE ratio, General Motors, which has much bigger business than Tesla does, is it's 7.41 PE ratio. Think about it, about that. It's a meme stock based on Elon. And so he's very good at that. Like with Twitter, the business is less good and now the valuation is up. Cause you're buying Elon Musk Inc. You're not buying this shitty social media site where advertising doesn't work. You're just doing it. So you're paying the big. And that's not capitalism, as far as I can see.

Brian Tyler Cohen (13:40)

Well, look, I wanna zoom out a little bit. Republicans have been really effective more broadly over the decades at finding villains. George Soros has been one again for decades. Is Musk not just the same exact thing, if not worse, on the right as the very thing that Republicans have clutched their pearls about on the left?

Kara Swisher (13:57)

Of course, hello. They went on and on about safety of communications and they just did the worst thing ever. And they're like, on Hillary Clinton, these people don't have. Hypocrisy is so thick, it's kind of ridiculous. And there's lots. We'll talk about that in a second. But yes, he's explicitly. Keep this in mind. Every accusation is a confession. With these people, whatever they say, I'm like, oh, that's what they're doing. So if they accuse someone of something, it's because that's what they're doing. Elon is exactly what they claim to have hated with George Soros, but he's explicit and right in front of you, buying elections. That's what he's doing. That's what he's doing in Wisconsin right now. That's what he's doing everywhere.

Brian Tyler Cohen (14:40)

He's straight up paying people to sign a petition in Wisconsin, which is basically just him saying he's buying votes, which is, you know, the same scheme that he pulled in Pennsylvania.

Kara Swisher (14:49)

And it worked. Let me just tell you. It worked, by the way. Well, thank you, Citizens United. It's legal to do this, what he's doing now, maybe they'll stop him for all kinds of reasons. But Elon Musk, one of the great attributes of him, he just doesn't. He goes. He blows through stop signs. That's his greatest skill, is blowing through stop signs. And so that's what he's gonna do until you stop him. And of course, nobody now is gonna stop him because Trump needs him for a variety of reason. Not just the money, because there's plenty of rich people, but he's willing to take the heat for Trump in a way that's really significant. Elon's negatives are way down. Trumps are just slightly down. Right? But Trump is Elon, and Elon is Trump. But Elon's taking away. He's a heat shield in rocket terms is what he's doing.

Brian Tyler Cohen (15:30)

But do you think that sticks? Do you think that. Let's say there comes a point where Elon does lose his political. His political usefulness for Trump and Trump, finally, do you think that then Trump basically gets to start fresh and all of the negatives just rest on Elon. He's gone. So that Trump just gets to, like, start over fresh?

Kara Swisher (15:52)

No. Elon Musk's approval rating is falling through the floor. Like, I've never seen such a brand destruction as this. This is really quite something. I don't know. I don't know. I think he thinks, you know, Elon's a massive distraction at the same time, is doing significantly troubling things. Right? But, like, even North Carolinians don't like the major federal agency cuts. They don't like any of this. And so Musk is a very polarizing figure. And even though Republicans view him favorably, I suspect more and more, as you're seeing all over the place, we don't like this guy. What is he doing here? And it's not to say other presidents haven't had rich people secretly around them, but nothing like this. Not someone whose finger is in the pie so explicitly. And I think people like their corruption quiet, I guess. I don't know what to say or something, but this guy's explicitly tit for tat. Let's get rid of the agencies that are investigating me in any way. And by the way, look, I get it. Like, some of them, maybe some of the investigations are over the top, as many bureaucrats could be at the same time, maybe they're not. The other thing is everyone's for reforming government and making it work better for citizens, but not everyone's for doing it with the subtlety of a chainsaw. They don't want that. They want someone to pick and choose what's good and what's bad and to figure it out. And I don't think this Doge thing isn't very popular, and that's. That's that. And so I think he'll dump it when that becomes clear if he loses the midterm elections. And he's not finding that much. What he's proving, by the way, is the government's kind of efficient. Like, he's not finding much. Right. He's really not.

Brian Tyler Cohen (17:24)

The fact that they have to lie about. About these cuts and say that they've cut $8 billion where there's only $8 million, when you have to start lying about cuts that, you know, Joe Biden already made during his administration, and then you're taking credit for them during. During Trump's administration. That's kind of a testament to the fact that, to your exact point, government is running pretty efficiently right now. But more broadly, it's an interesting tack, because while I get that it might sound nice to cut waste, fraud, and abuse, the reality is that loss aversion is a pretty powerful. A pretty powerful tool in politics. And so eventually, you're gonna start chopping away at constituencies that you need that are effective. Everybody might start off on board when you just offer up this nebulous, you know, idea of cutting, waste, fraud, and abuse. But when that starts to look like, okay, now we've cut off, you know, with usaid, clean water, clean food, HIV prevention, when it means that you have to start chopping away Medicaid at food. Right?

Kara Swisher (18:22)

The leopard didn't eat my face. Oh, I didn't think the leopard was gonna eat my face. Like, oh. But you know, what's interesting about the polling is it depends on what you ask. If you say to people, should the government, should we do efficiency? There was one. Everyone says, yes, 70, 80% of people, yes, should we? They didn't specifically ask about Doge. When you start to ask specifically about Doge, they're like, no, we don't like this. We don't like how he's doing it. There's a big difference between this and. That's very. The right is very smart about this. They get a little piece of something. Immigration is problematic in many states and worrisome. That's true. It's true. Democrats should not have ignored that. Like, people were saying it to them. We're worried about our jobs. We're worried about the price of eggs. We're worried about this and to ignore it is, is stupid. But the response to it, that you think voters aren't smart and they are. And so when you ask them whether you like these, whether you disapprove, all of them say he has too much authority, he's unfettered, he's rich, he's a rich guy, he's obnoxious, they're doing too much, they've gone too far. And so at more and more those polls, there's a Washington Post IPSOS poll, there's all disapproval all over the place, concern all over the place. And you should be concerned as a citizen, cuz you want your government to be efficient, but you don't want it to be. And so, you know, and then his other antics, whatever he's doing, being anti trans and everything else, it's distasteful and cruel when he calls people the R word and stuff like I'm not even gonna use it, cuz it's so stupid. And there's Republicans kind of like it cuz they like it, they like Trump for his in your face stuff, but when it starts to affect them, they don't like it so much.

Brian Tyler Cohen (20:00)

Yeah, right. It's an interesting point that, you know, Democrats ignored all of these flashing all of these blinking red lights at our own peril. Republicans guilty of doing the exact same thing right now, of course. But you know, as far as the broader ecosystem of tech oligarchs is concerned, you've got the Elon Musk, so you've got the Mark Zuckerbergs who have predicated their support for Trump on this idea that they want free speech, that they're these free speech champions.

Kara Swisher (20:24)

No, they want money.

Brian Tyler Cohen (20:26)

This administration is now deporting legal residents over op EDS that they've written. And so is there any pressure on these purported free speech champions to square?

Kara Swisher (20:36)

That's not why they did it, Brian. They're lying to you. That's not what they. Because they wanted contracts with the government. Let's just, I'm sorry, the reason they were standing there like a bunch of like toys on a shelf of a, of a, of a spoiled rich person even richer than he is, is because they want something. They want government contracts, they want to be left alone. That's why they're paying the million dollar vigs. Those are vigs. Like that's how it works, kids. It's. Those are vigs that they're paying so they don't get bothered that they can get off. Now look at what happened with Disney. Disney paid a vig right didn't they give money to the inauguration? And then now, because they're shareholders who are the owners of the company want to keep DEI initiatives in place. They're getting investigated. I was like. I wrote one of the Disney. I was like, no good deed. No good fucking deed. And I at the time said, you could pay as much as you want. They're gonna come get you when they want.

Brian Tyler Cohen (21:28)

I mean, we're seeing that with these law firms right now. I mean, Paul Weiss offered. Offered up $40 million in pro bono legal services, and Trump right off the bat says, okay, well, actually, that's just our starting offer. And now we're gonna chip away at that, too.

Kara Swisher (21:41)

Correct.

Brian Tyler Cohen (21:42)

With the Public Integrity Unit. I mean, they had somebody basically jump on the grenade and sign off on the dismissal of Eric Adams, thinking that doing so would protect the rest of the Public Integrity Unit. And then it got disbanded anyway.

Kara Swisher (21:54)

Yes, of course. Listen, I pay attention. Everything they do is a distraction to something. Look, the real thing they want are the tax cuts for the rich. Let's just. That's it. That's what they want. They wanted it before, when I wrote in 2016, when they all went to Trump Tower, when I broke that story where all the tech people were there. They wanted the money repatriated to them, the profits without taxing. They want their money. They want their money here. They want their tax cuts. They don't want the tariffs. They're like, wait a minute. Like, that's not what we wanted. We want our. Everything's about the tax cuts for the wealthy. That's what they want. And so they will put up with all manner of nonsense, including what's really interesting. Listen, Brian, liberals can be very irritating with the words and everything else. Abso fucking lutely. There's no question there. But let me just say, they don't actually ban both. They don't actually eliminate words. Everything. Every accusation of the right is a confession of what they'll do, which is cut words in the budget, but just haphazardly cut words like, that's how Jackie Robinson came off. That's how the Iwo Jima thing happened with the code talkers. They actually do the things they accuse others of doing, despite the liberals being too censorious. They actually ban. They actually do the things. And so it's all offensive for the tax cuts. Just keep that in mind. That's what they want from this guy. And the minute they get it, that'll be that. That'll be that. Once they get what they want, they'll be. We'll see what happens after that.

Brian Tyler Cohen (23:27)

If you sat down with Elon Musk right now, I presume you would get all of one question out before he would, you know, get up.

Kara Swisher (23:34)

He wouldn't sit down and make the interview.

Brian Tyler Cohen (23:36)

But if you, if you got one question out, what would that first question be?

Kara Swisher (23:39)

Oh, that's a good question. What happened to you? Like what, what is wrong with you? What is wrong with you? Like this Let. I was just talking to a bunch of people who knew him before. I'm here in San Francisco right now, and I, I, I was, this is a surprise to many of us. And I don't say he was a nice person before. None of these people are nice, Brian. They aren't. But some of them are. Some. Reid Hoffman's a lovely person. Always, always has been, always will be a lovely person. Tim Cook's a very nice guy. Always had. Satya Nadella is a nice guy. Like, like, despite all the other things, there's certain people who are, people are often that, like, they were the transformation of this guy and believe me, he wasn't a lovely guy, but he wasn't this guy. Like, it's really something really profound. Always had problems, always had issues, always had oddnesses and stuff like that. But this is a real transformation of someone moving down towards Howard Hughes land. Right. That's where he's going and that's where this is going. And so someone in desperate needed help. And not that I want to give him help, but yeah.

Brian Tyler Cohen (24:41)

His response to all of that would be, well, you know, I didn't, I'm the same as I've always been. The Democratic Party didn't, you know, I didn't leave the Democratic Party. The Democratic Party left me.

Kara Swisher (24:49)

Whatever.

Brian Tyler Cohen (24:50)

I mean, this is, this is the refrain, right?

Kara Swisher (24:52)

Cause they investigated him. That it was again, he wanted, he was investigated in ways he thought was unfair. He felt like a victim because most of these, because the richest people in the world, as you know, Brian, are the victims.

Brian Tyler Cohen (25:02)

Correct.

Kara Swisher (25:02)

I don't know if you know that.

Brian Tyler Cohen (25:03)

No, I do.

Kara Swisher (25:03)

Yeah. And so they didn't, he didn't like that. And so what happens is these people don't get their way. And the minute they, you know, it's like a, there's a, there's a, there's a Twilight Zone episode where that Billy or whatever, everything everyone watches around him because if he looks at you, he'll disappear you. If he gets mad at you. They're like those people, they, if they don't get their way they suddenly. Or you don't disagree with them because they're so used to being licked up and down all day, they don't understand discomfort with you or, or, or saying, I don't agree with that. I'm not sure this is the right thing. They, it, they lose their fucking mind because they're used to being told, you know, being violently agreed with.

Brian Tyler Cohen (25:46)

You said something to me in our last interview a few months back that has always stuck with me because I thought the imagery was so appropriate, it was so spot on. And that was that in terms of why Elon has switched sides and why he's moving over to the right, is because he wants to be pet and those people are willing to pet him. And that's really, at the end of the day, what he's looking for.

Kara Swisher (26:05)

Yeah, he does. I mean, my image of him that was really sad was the Mar A Lago New Year's Eve. So he's there in sort of an ill fitting tux. It wasn't even a good tuxedo. It was like, can't you afford a nice tuxedo? Yeah, you could probably have someone sew it on you. You're so rich, right? Like little tiny children do it maybe. And he was there by himself. I think his mother might have been with him. Whatever. At Mar A Lago, you're the richest man in the world and this is. This. You're so lonely. This is where you are. Right. I almost feel, you know, in many ways. Look, I hate to pay a compliment to Trump, but he seems to have a family that likes him, kind of. It looks like it. Right? He seems to. His granddaughter. Does it. I don't think that's fake. I don't think that's fake. And I think he has had children and obviously Elon has children, but only that one child he carries around like a doll was there. And that's. I think that's, it's really a strange. And he's not supposed to, by the way, show this kid in public. Just so you're aware, they have an agreement where they're not supposed to show this kid in public. And he doesn't anyway. But he's not there with all of his children. Don't like him. Right. Especially Vivian, who just did a wonderful interview in Teen Vogue. I thought, oh my God, you're the richest man in the world. And here you are. This is where. That's how lonely you are. No friends? No. Your new friends who were there because you're rich. It just was, it was very sad. To me, pathetic is another word.

Brian Tyler Cohen (27:31)

He, he has unilaterally disabused me of the notion that all of the money in the world will somehow make you happy. No, let's finish off with this. You know, we've talked a lot about how the Republican Party today, and we alluded to this before with Signal Gate. You know, we're in a post shame, post hypocrisy world. And so after the last literal decade of Republicans clutching their pearls over Hillary Clinton being careless with national security information.

Kara Swisher (27:56)

She must be having a great week.

Brian Tyler Cohen (27:59)

Does the fact that this has happened now, does it stick for a Republican Party for whom shame and hypocrisy don't exist?

Kara Swisher (28:06)

No. Well. Cause look at there, there's a couple things at work here. Just from the technology point of view, they're incompetent. Like the fact that Mike Walls made it four weeks disappearing. I was like, four weeks? It's usually a day. Like I was just sort of watching. And of course then he has his Venmo thing public. So you're like, are you completely stupid, dad? Like, I was like.

Brian Tyler Cohen (28:27)

And also, dear Spiegel did a full expose on how. On how Gabbard, Hegseth and Waltz all had. All had some of their public information, their passwords, email addresses available online, which were then linked to programs like for example, Signal.

Kara Swisher (28:42)

Yes, exactly. And so it's a real problem. I mean, it's really fascinating in that regard. But that said, so it's. First, it's incompetent because they didn't know they had brought this guy in. I suspect they were trying to bring someone else in and they mistake. That's happened to me with tech people. I've gotten in threads on Meta, but with the Meta senior staff, I'm in on email things suddenly because someone with my name or a similar name.

Brian Tyler Cohen (29:04)

Yeah.

Kara Swisher (29:05)

Was supposed to be. It's happened a half a dozen times for me. I've seen it. It happens personally for everybody. That said, one, they're incompetent. Two, they're careless and sloppy. Right. These are important things. They're obviously on their personal cell phones because. Or they've side loaded stuff onto a government phone. My ex wife was a government official. She was a CTO of America. She had a phone she hated. It was a BlackBerry, I believe, because it was the most secure at the time and she had to use it. She couldn't use her personal phone for anything. And you couldn't sideload things. You couldn't. They were 1. Were they or not on their personal phones. 2, what network were they on? Because all these networks are poor. Where were they doing?

Brian Tyler Cohen (29:45)

I mean, we know Steve Witkoff was.

Kara Swisher (29:47)

In Russia when the group checked. Was he in a skiff? Obviously not. And that's even very hard to do. It's hard to do when you're trying to protect it. And to do this was incredibly sloppy. The other thing is all the word games they're playing, the hypocrisy around what a war plan is versus they clearly was information that shouldn't be on a commercial app. Period, period, period, period. Like it doesn't even matter it was a war plan, but they'll twist that in any way they want to do the thing they were doing. Again, we're all looking at the incompetence they were trying to get out of accountability of what they were putting. They are using signal because it disappears eventually because they wanted to hide what they were doing. Because government officials are supposed to, supposed to show you their homework all the time. And then it goes in the National Archives. So hundreds of years from now, historians can look at what they did, right? And so if there's a problem, we can look at what they did. They were trying to hide their actions secretly and honestly. They should just meet together and talk to each other and do that if they want to do that. But instead, because they're such lazy morons, they did it on this. And what they were ultimately they were trying to do is hide their home from people because they didn't want you to see what they actually were doing. And that's to me a disservice to the American people who pay their salaries so that we can see their homework and what they're doing. So that's what they were doing. They were up to tricks, but they're just stupid. They're just incompetent.

Brian Tyler Cohen (31:13)

So as always, great talking to you. For anybody who's watching right now, check out on with Kara Swisher and also pivot. Kara Swisher, thanks so much for taking the time.

Kara Swisher (31:21)

Thanks, Brian.

Brian Tyler Cohen (31:25)

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Ned Price (33:57)

You know Brian, you're thinking about it in the right terms. Precisely the right terms. What we know and what we don't know. Let's first start with what we know and what we know is pretty staggering. Just to put this in context as we understand it, as told by Jeffrey Goldberg of the Atlantic, this was a discussion, a session, convening of, of the Principals Committee. And the Principals Committee is just as it sounds, the principal from every relevant department and agency across our national security apparatus, meaning the Secretary of State, Secretary of Defense, National Security Advisor, CIA Director on down, where the most complex, consequential, controversial and yet sensitive issues are discussed, adjudicated and ultimately decided. Now, in every administration in which I've worked, in every administration over the past 60 plus years, those discussions have taken place in one place, and that's a White House situation room for very good reason, because these are held at a top secret level. If people aren't able to be there in person, let's say the Secretary of State is traveling around the world. Perfectly understandable and in fact encouraged that that person has a team that goes ahead and they set up a top secret tent in the Secretary's hotel room and the Secretary can beam it in into the situation room on that top secret basis. The fact that this group thought that Signal, a commercial application, was an appropriate substitute, it's really just staggering. There is no other way to describe it. Signal and its brethren have been the subject of nation states that have attempted to hack them and in some cases have hacked them, but also private sector entities that have similar capabilities. And when you think about the collect this collection of people, the Vice President, United States, the CIA Director, Secretary of State, there is no higher, there is no more valuable set of intelligence targets than the individuals who were in this single SIGNAL chat room. So you can imagine if an intelligence service stumbled upon this chat room, they would consider it to be a gold mine. But you also raise what we don't know. And that that is to me what is just as worrisome. Was this the tip of the iceberg? Were there multiple signal PCs convened? Was there a signal chat on Iran, on Russia, on China? Where did this start and where does it end? You know, the irony of this, Brian, is that Jeffrey Goldberg, the reporter who was inadvertently added to this chain, probably did more than all of these supposed custodians of our national security combined to protect our national security by force. If this gets them to stop this practice, that is to our collective, to our national benefit.

Brian Tyler Cohen (36:47)

Ned, quick question. Specifically, you know, there was a member of this group chat that was actually in Russia at the time that the thread was happening. Is there a way in which, depending on where he was, that his communications could have been intercepted? If he joined a certain WI fi network, for example, while he was discussing with these other principals on the group.

Ned Price (37:08)

Group chat, the answer is almost certainly yes. The fact that Steve Witkoff, the special envoy for the Middle east, was not only in Russia, but in Moscow at the Kremlin meeting with President Putin around the same time this chat was taking place, means that the Russians, who have one of the most sophisticated intelligence services and technical capabilities around the world, almost certainly had access to his electronic communications. They may have gained physical access to his phone. At the very least, I have the utmost confidence that he was the target of technical surveillance. That is to say, using the technology, they have to go after the contents of his phone. So given what we know of the Russians and their tradecraft and their sophisticated capabilities, I think it is highly likely, if not almost certain, that the Russians saw this before the rest of the world did. When Jeffrey Goldberg reported it.

Brian Tyler Cohen (38:01)

Is there any worry that the reason that the Trump administration is opting to use use these unsecured chat apps, where they obviously have features where what they were saying can be disappeared after a certain amount of time? I mean, I use signal, and there are ways in which you can make it disappear after an hour, a day, a week. That they're doing it to purposefully subvert requirements that the government be transparent about what it is they're actually doing.

Ned Price (38:32)

I think it is quite possible that they're using this to skirt something known as the Presidential Records act, and that legislation mandates that this type of record communication of a policy deliberation among senior principals in the government be maintained for a certain number of years. But as we think about this, I'm actually less concerned with the details of the Presidential Records act and the safekeeping of official government documents, documents than I am with the national security implications of this. It's terrible that they're violating, seem to be violating the Presidential Records act, but that really pales in comparison to the use of this technology to discuss information that almost certainly is classified at the top Secret level. One is against the law and shouldn't be done. The other is against the law, shouldn't be done, and can put our national security at risk and almost certainly has.

Brian Tyler Cohen (39:26)

During the congressional hearing, we heard the excuse be trotted out that this is all justifiable because as far as the principals were concerned, or as far as they were letting on, the information that they were discussing wasn't classified. So, first of all, do you buy this excuse that the information that they were discussing wasn't classified? And what do you make of this excuse that all of this is justifiable in the event that it wasn't classified.

Ned Price (39:50)

You know, Brian, I think there are really two possibilities here. Neither these of than good. One is that they're lying. And I think that is probably most likely they are lying. They knew this was classified and they're trying to cover it up. At this very moment, when you talk about military, pending military operations, tactics, techniques and procedures, TTP as they're called, that is by definition classified information. So it is hard to imagine that the substance that they were communicating was not classified at the time. Now, the other possibility, and this is what they may be resting their case on, is a distortion of the most technical technicality there is in that a senior U.S. government official, whether it's the president, vice president, in some cases the Secretary of Defense or CIA director, can retroactively declassify information. And so it may well be that they are saying now after the fact that they know Jeffrey Goldberg was in there, there, we're going to go ahead and declassify this. They sort of wave their magic classification, want it. And so they're telling the American public this is not classified. What they're not saying is that it should have been classified and they're only declassifying it if that's in fact what they are doing to save their own skin.

Brian Tyler Cohen (41:10)

Right. Can you speak to the, to the excuse that they've been putting forward that there was no negative outcome and so kind of the ends justify the media means because they were able to accomplish the mission they sought out to accomplish, everything that happened in the lead up to that outcome is, is permissible, fine, justifiable, because really they got what they wanted in the end.

Ned Price (41:32)

Yeah, Brian, this, this goes back to the question of what we don't know they are right. This operation went off seemingly. It had the effects that the Trump administration intended. But what with, with the, with the.

Brian Tyler Cohen (41:45)

Exception of inviting the editor in chief of the Atlantic into the, into the war room room, so to speak.

Ned Price (41:49)

That small asterisk. Yes, but the question is, you know, what have the Russians learned from this group chat? What if the Chinese learn from this group chat? What if the Iranians learn from this group chat? Both about our capabilities, what we can do, the intelligence we have, but also importantly the intelligence we don't have, what we call intelligence gaps that can be really, really valuable information to our adversaries, what we aren't able to get our hands on, on which can help in turn inform them as to how to protect their secrets, whether they're military secrets or intelligence secrets. But the other element of this, Brian, is again, was this the only signal chat? Was there a China signal chat? Was there a Russia signature signal chat? Was there an Iran signal chat? What has this group of individuals who displayed rank incompetence, not to mention, mention laziness. And if you go back to the way in which so many of them stake their career, hypocrisy, in terms of the way they're handling classified information, what have they divulged on other scores? Whether it's communicating through signal, whether it's speaking through open phone lines, whether it's by having loose lips with those around them. To me, that is almost as frightening as what we've learned, what we know from this episode.

Brian Tyler Cohen (43:09)

Ned, what are, what are the general or usual consequences for this type of recklessness with national security information?

Ned Price (43:16)

Well, as you know, there's really no analog to this. There's not a similar case in which we know of a Principals Committee discussion being held on Signal and for very good reason, because administration's, you know, protected our national security. And I'll be boneheaded enough to do that.

Brian Tyler Cohen (43:33)

This.

Ned Price (43:34)

But if let's say these were two low level intelligence officials or military officials or a group of low, lower level officials who were discovered, they would almost certainly be disciplined. I think there's a very good chance they would lose their job. They would almost certainly lose their access to classified information. There is an analogous case that is while it does have some similarities, obviously very different, and that was the case of Hillary Clinton, Clinton's unclassified email server. But in that case, and one of the reasons why it's so different is that Secretary Clinton and her aides knew that this was an unclassified server. So they went out of their way to just keep their conversations on an unclassified basis. The only reason we have those records is because the State Department turned them over because they went through the natural and correct protocol calls. But remember what happened in that case. The Department of Justice that was then in the hands of an appointee of President Obama initiated an investigation. Whether that was right or wrong, I will leave others to decide. But the Department of Justice at least looked into the matter and ultimately concluded there was no basis for criminal charges. I would be shocked if Pam Bondi, Donald Trump's new attorney general, or Cash Patel, his new director of FBI, FBI, launched any sort of investigation into this, criminal or otherwise. I would be similarly shocked if the Republican leadership of the Congressional Intelligence committees or the Foreign Relations committees or the Armed Services Committees or the oversight committees launched their own hearings and investigations into this. This is not a level playing field. People like Pete Hegseth and Mike Waltz and all these other people spent the past 10 years crowing about operational security and pointing to Secretary Clinton. The fact that they are now in the midst of this. You know, to say it's ironic is an understatement. To say it's sad and pathetic, I think is closer to the way I feel.

Brian Tyler Cohen (45:34)

And that's the part I want to dig into a little bit here to finish off. You know, we have spent the better part of a decade listening to how Hillary Clinton's purported recklessness with national security information, that, by the way, a House committee led by Republicans found no wrongdoing, arguing of that that was the gravest threat that we'd ever faced, that it put all of our lives at imminent risk. And yet now you have the White House running away from this, doing apologia, claiming that all of this wasn't classified, so it's fine, claiming that nothing went wrong. You have Pete Hegseth himself trying to claim that all of this is just a hoax. He came out and said that Jeffrey Goldberg was just discredited, and so he's trying to undermine the whole thing, despite the fact that the White White House had already come out and verified its legitimacy. And so what do you make of the fact that all of these people predicated so much of their identities on this idea that national security information has to be carefully guarded, that anybody who acts in a way that's reckless with that information should be up for immediate discipline, if not criminal prosecution themselves? Those people are now, now I either conspicuously silence lying about it or trying to justify it when it happens to a Republican.

Ned Price (46:50)

Brian, to me, it suggests a couple things. One, so many of these individuals who are now at the apex of our national security bureaucracy are just unserious individuals. They never had the best interests of our national security in mind as they were pursuing Secretary Clinton and other related matters. Matters they were trying to score cheap political points. And I think the rank hypocrisy that we're seeing now is. Is really telling of that. The fact that so many of the statements that we've heard from these individuals over the years could be transplanted onto this case and, and fit neatly and nicely. Yeah, really, it, it's. I think Secretary Clinton put it best in a tweet of hers that I saw. I think she said something like, you have got to be kidding. And I can only imagine what she is thinking as she sees the very people that went after her for something that doesn't even compare to what we are seeing of this administration. So much of what we are, I've heard from this universe over the past 10 years. It's just not on a level. It was political, it was not about national security. It was about burnishing their own credentials. And ultimately, I think this episode goes to show so the one to suffer is our own national reputation and probably even our own national security in the end.

Brian Tyler Cohen (48:20)

Ned Price, thank you so much for all of the time and the knowledge. I appreciate it and I'm sure this won't be the last time we speak.

Ned Price (48:27)

Thanks a lot, Brian. I appreciate it.

Brian Tyler Cohen (48:32)

I'm joined now by Congressman Jim Himes. Thank you so much for taking the time.

Jim Himes (48:35)

Thanks for having me.

Brian Tyler Cohen (48:36)

So, right off the bat, I do want to talk about some new reporting. It's international reporting from dier Spiegel that shows that in fact, the private information, emails, usernames, passwords of some of Trump's, Trump's top cabinet officials are indeed available online. And of course, those are the exact pieces of information that will allow folks to gain access into unsecured apps like, for example, Signal. And so can I have your reaction right off the bat to this new reporting that kind of really puts on full display why these folks shouldn't be using unsecured apps to do, to do war planning?

Jim Himes (49:09)

Yeah, yeah. No, I mean, you premise the question exactly right. You know, and while I have zero sympathy for the arguments that it's okay to put war planning on Signal, that's wrong for, oh, so many reasons. Just ask Jeffrey Goldberg. You know, what this illustrates is that the long running world of six months ago is not the online world of today. So the answer, of course, is, as they've done for a long time with the President, United States is when you have a position of immense sensitivity, you get off your personal phone. Right. Because there's just so many vulnerabilities there.

Brian Tyler Cohen (49:45)

And so, and so what would normally happen in an instance where, let's say a lower, a lower ranking official, where some regular member of the military did what these Trump administration officials did with regard to this Signal chat?

Jim Himes (50:01)

Yeah, you know, I tried to make this point in my opening today when we had the Director of National Intelligence and the director of CIA and the other leaders of the. I see. You know, Americans need to remember because they're trying to litigate this by saying, oh, well, the information wasn't that classified or didn't need to be classified or was declassified look, any service member that reports to Pete Hegseth, any service member who had done this would have been court martialed, cashiered, dropped in ranks, probably kicked out of the service. Right. And that's what's driving me crazy right now. This was an egregious mistake. It could have resulted in the loss of life of our pilots, of our sailors in the region. But mistakes do happen. And when mistakes happen, the critical thing is that people take responsibility for those mistakes, that they say, we're going to learn how this happened, we're going to fix it, and we're going to visit accountability on people who allowed it to happen. None of those things have happened here.

Brian Tyler Cohen (50:58)

Right, Right.

Jim Himes (50:58)

Pete Hegseth is still, and Mike Waltz is still calling Jeffrey Goldberg of the Atlanta Atlantic a loser and saying somehow it's his fault. So, I mean, I got to tell you, quite apart from the underlying action which might have resulted in dead pilots, the way this, the way that Pete Hegseth and so many people involved in this thing have responded is, should give us zero confidence that they're going to learn from this mistake.

Brian Tyler Cohen (51:23)

Well, to that point, even today, most recently, Trump was asked about this and he started blaming Signal and suggesting that Signal itself is defective for apparently, apparently allowing for the crime of Jeffrey Goldberg accessing a chat that he was invited to, like, for that taking place. And so does it give you any pause that in a moment where what this administration should be doing is just recognizing its mistake and then moving forward in a way that shows that they're willing to correct it, the fact that they're not, and instead keep casting the blame onto Signal, onto Jeffrey Goldberg, onto the deep state, onto Democrats, Democrats, I mean, we're probably a day away from them going back and claiming that, you know, Hillary Clinton, Hugo Chavez or Chinese boob bamboo fibers are to blame for all of this, does the fact that they will not accept responsibility give you pause in terms of their ability or willingness to actually fix some of these problems that landed us here in the first place?

Jim Himes (52:19)

Yeah, look, I couple things. Number one, we all know who Donald Trump is, and his way of operating sets the tone here. Now, we've all been watching Donald Trump for at least eight years now. And Donald Trump's strategy when faced with a scandal or a problem or a mistake, is to attack, is to attack, to sue. You know, and that's pathological, right? Human beings don't act that way. We teach our five year olds that when you make a mistake, you say sorry and you learn from it. But that's Not Donald Trump. And what does worry me a little, a little bit. Look, I don't think that these guys are going to start chatting about attacks next month on Signal because they don't like the bad publicity. But, but you know, values start at the top. And no, of course Donald Trump's going to oppose impose no accountability. And you know, that really raises an issue for the, you know, million plus uniformed service members who are now watching their boss, the Secretary of Defense, Heggar Seth, do everything except accept responsibility. You know, not one of them would survive this. And I care a lot about systems. And a system that says that accountability is only for the sergeant or the lieutenant or the captain, but not for the general or the Secretary of Defense is a system that's not going to work in the long run.

Brian Tyler Cohen (53:45)

Can you talk about the implications here in terms of what are our enemies are able to glean from all of this? Well, you know, as I said, probably not great, huh?

Jim Himes (53:58)

But for the grace of God. I mean, again, you know, technically speaking, the Russians and the Chinese, had they been on their game, and they're usually on their game, they could have gotten this stuff and they could have passed it to the Houthis. And even though it was only two hours, I guess, you know, it could have resulted in real problems, fatal problems, lethal problems for our service people. But look, I mean, let's, let's, let's, let's zoom out a little bit here, right? When the United States votes with Russia and North Korea and not with the UK And Germany, when it comes time to condemn the Russian invasion of Ukraine, when we completely shut down our soft power, usaid. Right. When we completely shut down our soft power when some guy named Big Balls fires the people who look after our nuclear weapons. Weapons. I mean, I could keep saying these things for the next 20 minutes, but the answer to your question is that the folks in the Kremlin, the folks in Beijing, the folks in North Korea and Iran cannot believe the good fortune that they now have. That they now have.

Brian Tyler Cohen (55:05)

Congressman, can you bring us a little bit behind the curtain? Because there is a very cynical view of this, which is that none of your Republican colleagues ever cared over the last decade when they were wailing about the national security implications of what Hillary Clinton did, that they never cared about, that it was only for political attacks and their silence gives credence to that theory. Are there people on the right who seem to care at all, or is it true that over the last decade, anytime that we heard about national security, it was really just to Brandish their own credentials. And it wasn't actually about the content of what they were saying, the substance of what they were doing. Attacking.

Jim Himes (55:46)

Yeah, you know, in the closed hearing today, because the open hearing got pretty hot, right? In the closed hearing, I sort of tried to take the temperature down a little bit by reminding my colleagues on the Republican side what would have happened if this scandal had emerged under Biden or under Obama. And I think they got it right. Remember Benghazi? Right. Long time ago, but Benghazi spurred no fewer than nine investigations. Right. And so these guys know that if this had happened under Biden, there would have been impeachments underway. You know, the Capitol would probably be inflamed right now. Jim Jordan would be swinging from the chandeliers. I mean, they. They know that. And to be fair to them, look, a number of them. Look, you and I both know that right now, with the president's numbers as high as they are, declining though they might be, you know, know, Senate and House Republicans are a wholly owned subsidiary of Donald J. Trump, Inc. But look, you've got a few profiles encouraged there. You know, Don Bacon is saying, come on, guys, this is crazy. This is terrible. And I'm sure that Susan Collins is, you know, as concerned as ever and considering drafting a sternly worded letter. But, you know, this. You know, this president has a galactic drop on pretty much every member of the House and the Senate. On the Republican side.

Brian Tyler Cohen (57:11)

Right. This isn't exactly soldiers storming the beaches of Normandy. Levels of courage that we're seeing right now out of the Republican conference. Congressman, what do you expect will happen in the immediate aftermath of all of this? I mean, you had just alluded to the fact that in the past, as the result of, you know, in the immediate aftermath of Benghazi, we saw no fewer than nine investigations. What's gonna happen as the result of. Of this?

Jim Himes (57:34)

Yeah, and by the way, let me go back to your previous point here, because it's not even about soldiers, you know, storming the beaches of Normandy. It's not that long ago that John McCain, in a presidential debate when he was running against Barack Obama and a woman said, barack Obama is a Muslim. In a presidential campaign debate. John McCain said, no, ma', am, I don't agree with Barack Obama on anything thing, but he's a decent, civil human being. I mean, that sounds like it was 200 years ago, but it was just, you know, whatever. It was 12 years ago. Anyway, you know, to your question, where do we go from here? You know, for us to Let this go. It's totally up to them for us to let this go. There needs to be an honest proffering of the facts of what happened, not by Jeffrey Goldberg, but by the people actually involved. I know that's a crazy thought, but you know, know what? The ranking member of the Intelligence Committee probably ought to not get his information from Jeffrey Goldberg of the Atlantic. So there needs to be an honest proffering of the facts. There needs to be an investigation that says. And it needs to be a fair investigation that says, here's how this all went wrong, here's what we're learning, and then there needs to be some accountability, whatever that looks like. But we are so far from that right now when Mike Waltz is calling Jeffrey Goldberg a loser, loser, and Pete Hegseth is climbing off a plane and blaming, you know, whatever it is, I mean, anyway, that this is not hard as a political matter. I don't like to think politically about national security matters, but, folks, Republicans, Donald Trump, Pete Hegseth, you want this to go away, Just own it, learn from it, and let's move on.

Brian Tyler Cohen (59:15)

And the irony of that, Congressman, is that that is probably the last thing that any of these Trump administration officials would do, because their whole. Their whole ethos, their whole worldview is to never accept defeat, never accept blame, never shoulder any accountability or responsibility for anything they've done, and instead to barrel forward as if they've been right all along. And really, that's gonna be their own undoing. Because what could have been a shorter, albeit uncomfortable, news cycle is now being prolonged by virtue of the fact that they would rather cook up more conspiracy theories and cast blame everywhere they can instead of just acknowledging objective, real. And look, this isn't a difficult story for people to wrap their heads around. This isn't similar to, like, Trump's first impeachment, where we have to figure out an extortion plot against the Ukrainian president where he withheld funding for weapons in exchange for dirt on Joe Biden. Everybody understands what it means to accidentally include somebody, you know, include a journalist in an unsecured group chat while you're doing war planning. It's pretty obvious for everybody who's watching right. Right now to see what's happening. So. No, that's right.

Jim Himes (60:25)

And look, think about it this way. Take it out of the partisan realm. All of us make mistakes. You know, I make mistakes. And it's hard to say. It's hard to recognize a mistake and to say you're sorry. But here's the thing. You know how we get better. We get better by learning from our mistakes. And Donald Trump's religious view that you always deny, deny, deny and never apologize. Look, that may be satisfying in the moment. Usa. Usa. Usa. That may be satisfying in the moment, but the problem with that is that you never learn. And this is a scary, complicated world. And man, if your whole ethos is about never learning, it's not going to work.

Brian Tyler Cohen (61:06)

Correct. We'll leave it there. Congressman, thank you so much for your time. I appreciate it.

Jim Himes (61:09)

Thanks, Brian.

Brian Tyler Cohen (61:13)

I'm joined now by Ezra Klein, the co author of the new book A Bonus. Ezra, thank you so much for joining.

Ezra Klein (61:18)

Thrilled to be here.

Brian Tyler Cohen (61:20)

So walk me through the general top line of this right now of what you were looking to do with abundance.

Ezra Klein (61:25)

So one thing I was looking to do was just explain why the governance outcomes in places where the people I seem to agree with were in charge just weren't better. I was living in California during a lot of this book and trying to think about why do we have a housing crisis like this? Why in a state that is so committed to renewable energy, are we so far off from beating our clean energy target targets? What the fuck happened to high speed rail? And slowly, as I began to work through these questions individually, it got clearer that at the core of every one of them was really the same problem. Liberalism is really good right now at helping people afford things that are plentiful. It is not good at making those things plentiful. So if the problem is we need to send you a check so you can buy the thing out there, we can do that, right? Food stamps work incredibly well. Well, Social Security, great program, earned income tax credit, fantastic. But when it comes to something like we actually need more houses, we need more public infrastructure, we need these things to be delivered on time and affordably. That was where you began to see a real problem and began to come clear that we just weren't that good as a governing movement at asking a pretty simple question, which is what do we need more of and how do we get it?

Brian Tyler Cohen (62:37)

You talk in the book a little bit about the ways in which people are migrating from blue states to red states, specifically from California to Texas. How existential is the lack of housing, for example? How existential is our inability to create what we need to create gonna be as far as the politics are concerned.

Ezra Klein (62:55)

Oh man, it's so bad. So look, if you just keep running these trends, right, California, Illinois, New York, the big blue states, they're losing hundreds of thousands of people a year and have been for some time. So if that continues, the way political power works in America is it's apportioned by population. Population. So in the 2030 census, the estimate right now is big blue states are gonna lose about 11 to 12 congressional seats and electoral college votes, which means.

Brian Tyler Cohen (63:23)

That even the blue wall.

Ezra Klein (63:24)

So that means you imagine which we.

Brian Tyler Cohen (63:26)

Couldn'T even win this last election cycle.

Ezra Klein (63:28)

You imagine a Democrat winning in 2032, every state Kamala Harris won, plus the entire blue wall, which I just. We gotta stop calling this thing the blue wall. Like, it's not been a wall for a long time, but plus Michigan.

Jim Himes (63:40)

Yeah.

Ezra Klein (63:41)

Nor blue, but plus Michigan, Pennsylvania, with Wisconsin. They would still lose the election. So that's one dimension. But I always want to say to liberals, the problem here is not just the politics. If you are the party that believes itself to be the party of working class families, and in the places where you govern unchallenged, you have made things so unaffordable, you are losing working class families by the droves, then you are just failing in your fundamental purpose. Right? The purpose of politics is to win power, but to win power to make people's lives better. Right? And so, yeah, on the one hand, if you let this keep going, you're not gonna win power. But also, even when you have won power, you're not making people's lives better. And in theory, that's why we're doing this whole fucking thing.

Brian Tyler Cohen (64:22)

I mean, you wrote the book.

Ezra Klein (64:23)

Me and Derek.

Brian Tyler Cohen (64:24)

You and Derek wrote the book. Is there no urgency by the people who can actually. Who are in positions where they can actually make change, to do the things that you laid out in the book? Clearly, if you as an author, recognize these things and you don't have a vested interest in being able to stay in a office, the people who do would have an even greater vested interest, would feel that urgency tenfold, you would think, wouldn't you?

Ezra Klein (64:44)

I'll say a couple things here. One more generous to them and one less so the more generous one. They often don't have as much power as you think, be it Gavin Newsom or, you know, London Breed who got voted out in the last election, or Karen Bass or before Karen Bass, Eric Garcetti. Right? All these California politicians or New York politicians, they're dealing with, dealing with at the gubernatorial level, legislatures, where they often have power, but they are dealing with a lot of interest groups that can turn the vote against them. So they're cutting a lot of deals with, be it unions or the chamber of Commerce or the developers or whomever it might be. So they're not kings in Queens. At the local level they have boards of supervisors and city councils and so on. So I am sympathetic to the fact that the executive often does not weak the power they think they wield. On the other hand, they often don't use the power they do have. So in la, Karen Bass, she passed early in her term a pretty good housing package. And that housing package actually did make it a lot easier to construct multifamily housing. And then because there was some political tension and friction around that, they kind of gutted it. So you do have this problem of short term political pain and long term political pain. Changing things creates short term political pain because you're always apportioning power from somewhere to somewhere else. Right. If you make it harder for NIMBYs to block things they don't like, they're going to be mad about it. On the other hand, if you can get through that period, you can get to where you can actually govern the city, the state better because the long term pain California politicians are now facing and New York politicians and Illinois politicians, et cetera, the long term pain they're now facing is profound. People hate the way it feels often to live in the places they govern. They hate the homelessness crisis that is metastasized across the state. They hate how expensive everything is. They hate that they didn't actually build high speed rail. And so there is a lot I don't like about Elon Musk. A lot. We could talk about it. One thing though that I think he understands that I wish more politicians would take not the lawless side of him, but the other side of him, which is that sometimes to get to the thing you're trying to get done, you have to be relentless and you have to absorb a lot of intermediaries pain. And if you do, getting over the other side of that will be worth it. But you don't get there without pain. And the structure of liberal governance, the culture of liberal governance, it's highly coalitional, it's highly bureaucratic, it doesn't want anybody to be too upset. And as such, it often cannot accomplish big things because it is loading them down with too many interior compromises.

Brian Tyler Cohen (67:15)

Yeah, I mean, while I was reading, the thing that struck me, I think most was just was how much money, time, resources were allocated not to the thing, but to regulating the regulators who would regulate the thing. I mean, there is so much piled on. But I am curious because we've seen certain instances where we've been able to overcome that. You wrote about how Josh Shapiro was able to do that with I95. Get that, get that roadway back up in about 12 days. It was supposed to take months. That was, that was owed in large part to the fact that they were able to pause a lot of the regulations that would normally have encumbered this, this project we're now seeing. Gavin Newsom and the California Democrats look to do the same thing with the rebuild in the Palisades in the aftermath of the fire. And so the question becomes if we have these instances where we're able to put a lot of the regulations on pause and we're seeing like a direct causational effect of how that works when we're able to do that, the obvious question becomes why not just always do that? If we're able to be build a Road in 12 days in a country that we're not even able to get through the paperwork in years, why not just do more of the thing that we're seeing right in front of our faces is actually working well, one thing.

Ezra Klein (68:29)

I hope about this book is it's sort of operating at two levels as you're kind of gesturing at. One is this almost like manifesto level and then the other is this real gritty texture of governance level, which I think is a place where liberals don't always like to go. We sort of pass a big bill or elect the person. Then we're like hope for the best, right? The IRA's passed hope for the best. Like I hope that solves climate change. And then you get into what happens after the implementation and it's really bad. So then you have these examples, these counterexamples and in each one of the ones you mentioned, what is happening is that there is a crisis. In that case the collapse of the I95 bridge or here the fires. And it's allowing the governor to use emergency powers to pause a huge amount of or relieve a huge amount of regulation that would normally make things much slower. Let me make the argument against my position for a minute to be fair. Right? Let me steel man this. I tell the i95 story in some detail and talk to the Department of Transportation lead there and what they wiped out are a bunch of environmental and anti corruption and procurement regulations. Some of those you really understand why they're there. So on the day that this tanker overturns and catches fire and the bridge collapses and it's a huge artery on the Northeast, so it would be a very big problem. And Shapiro says, look, this could take us a year to rebuild, right that is the initial view. It's going to take about a year. And what they end up doing is using this emergency declaration. And so the guy, the Department of Transportation lead is there and there are two contractors working nearby on the bridge on just preexisting projects. And he pulls them both in, he's like, you're on this now. And he was telling me, normally we would have done, we would have gone out, we would had requests for proposals, they'd come in, there'd be a notice and comment period. He said it would have normally taken us 12 to 20, 24 months just to hire the contractors.

Brian Tyler Cohen (70:13)

What they did in minutes.

Ezra Klein (70:14)

What they did in minutes. So on the one hand, you can see how that has a useful motivation behind it because you can really see how if the DOT lead can just go be like it's you, the opportunity for corruption is really present. But if you can never do that, then the opportunity to move fast is never present. And it leads to, I think this question, can we not achieve some of the good anti corruption goals throughout other means like inspector generals who look at things after the fact as opposed to slowing so much down on the front end?

Brian Tyler Cohen (70:44)

Correct. On one hand, you're seeing both of these phenomena play out in real time. You're seeing the overt corruption play out in the Trump administration where, you know, Elon Musk himself is benefiting from, from taking over contracts that were previously awarded to other companies because he's now regulating the, you know, himself basically. And so that's, that's on one side of the spectrum. Spectrum. And on the other side of the spectrum, you know, we are sitting in California right now, which is bogged down by these perpetual impasses when it comes to building anything, really, whether you're looking at houses, whether you're looking at the debacle that is high speed rail. Is it true that we're not able to find some middle ground between overt corruption and self dealing like Elon Musk taking a contract away from Verizon and handing it to Starlink. And the other side of the coin, which is that we just can't. You can't get anything done because every single step of the way has to take 10 years.

Ezra Klein (71:36)

Yeah. I think this is not just one of the things that we're trying to describe in the book is not just a set of policies, but a culture. And I would say that the two sides have become these weird, distorted mirrors of each other. The culture of the right is now autocratic. It's follow the leader. It's Whatever Donald Trump says goes. Whoever he picks is fine. Whoever wants a contract gets it. It's very, I'm really seeing this in of a lot lot of other countries and the culture left is bureaucratic. It follows a process, it follows the rules, it listens to everything the lawyers say. It has very little daring to it and it does not like it when anybody is upset. So both of these sides frankly need a little bit more of the other woven into them. My first book was about polarization. One of my views is that polarization can be a totalizing process. You have a period in mid 21st century where polarization not that bad. And the two sides are ideologically very diverse. You have conservative Democrats and liberal Republicans for a bunch of reasons that ends and then it sets off this feedback loop where it keeps polarizing on more and more things. So not just liberal and conservative, but ultimately temperament and relationship to the institutions. And so the right is very anti institution but pro leader. And the left is used to kind of weak leaders and very strong institutions. And you're going to need need Democrats to learn something from Musk in the right here. Not lawlessness, not going all the way where they went. But one thing they have proven is that a lot of things we talked about and I was always told by people in government were rules, were laws, they were norms.

Brian Tyler Cohen (73:09)

You are speaking my language here.

Ezra Klein (73:11)

Tell me.

Brian Tyler Cohen (73:12)

Well, this has been the tack that I've been on for especially in the aftermath of this election, but certainly before it in the sense of sense that the perfect microcosm of this is the parliamentarian. Democrats will see the parliamentarian push back on something that we're seeking to do and Democrats will just throw their hands up and say, well, parliamentarian says no. And so that's it. There's no way to get there. The Republicans see the parliamentarian push back on something that they're seeking to do and they say let's just get a new fucking parliamentarian. Like what are we doing? And they've done that. They've literally just gotten rid of the parliamentarian and brought a new one in. And I think that's the perfect microcosm for the two two parties because oftentimes it looks like Democrats that Republicans will not accept no for an answer and Democrats won't take yes for an answer when there are options right in front of them. And that's just part of this broader theme of Democrats unwillingness to fight. It almost looks like they are there in they are there to preserve the institutions as opposed to what the Broader institutions are supposed to be there to allow them to do do, which is to govern effectively. It's what you were talking about before. I mean, it's this idea that you are in office presumably to do something, and so often it feels like you're just there, or at least the Democrats are just there to preserve the institutions that may very well serve as bulwarks to their agenda.

Ezra Klein (74:26)

So we talk in the book about this work by Nick Begley, who is a law professor at University of Michigan. He was a lead counsel for Gretchen Whitmer. So very, very democratic guy. And one thing that he says that I think is really interesting, he has this whole thing about the procedural fetish on the left and his left, right. I mean, this is a guy who trains administrative lawyers. And he says the problem is that in the liberal legal profession, the legitimacy of government, which is a hard question, right? How do you make government legitimate? It has all this power. How do you keep the exercise of that power legitimate? That the answer the legal profession has come up with is that it adheres to procedure, right? Legitimacy is conferred through. You can prove to a court that you follow the rules at every point. You did the reviews, you talked to the people, everything. You follow the rules precisely. But what Bagley says, and it's true for people, legitimacy is conferred through outcomes. What they want from a government, what makes a government something they support or don't support, is whether or not their lives are getting better, whether or not their problems are getting solved. And so there's actually a connection to this. There's books about this, political science. But strong men thrive in process, prosper amidst the widespread belief in ineffective government. If liberal government, and here I don't just mean American liberals, but I mean liberal democracy. If liberal government over time has come to seen as unresponsive, as captured as for the elites, then that is the fertile soil in which you'll get somebody who rises up and says, I alone can fix it. Right? Let me crash through everything and make it work for you. And I think there's stuff here I can't prove, but I think is true. Right? You have very advanced Western democracies that have become highly technocratic. And in a lot of them, I think they've become so complex and the sort of professional guilds around them, from the lawyers to the management consultants to everything else, have become so strong that what was once supposed to be a way of making government highly responsive has become a way of distancing government from the people it's supposed to serve. And Nobody quite realized it happened happened. They don't defend it when you talk to them about it, but it's how the thing works inside out of the view of the public and then the public ultimately feels it. So, yeah, people are not going to be happy with how you govern if they don't feel it in their lives. And the thing that just drives me crazy about the left is that when they fail, they don't revisit the failure and fix it. So I'll just use one small example here. The Biden administration, one of the big things they did was he got $42 billion for rural broadband. That was in 2022, I believe, or maybe late 2021. By the end of their term, a few dozen people had been hooked up by the end of their term, years and years. We built the Empire State Building in one year. We couldn't hook people up to broadband in three. But they didn't go back and do anything about it. It's just like, well, shame. Yeah, no, then you lose elections and then you open the door to this.

Brian Tyler Cohen (77:17)

Do you think that Democrats are willing to have the introspection to fix some of these problems or do you think, think that we are gonna continue down this path without any introspection, regardless of the fact that, you know, things are continuing not to work and the Democratic brand is so damaged? I mean, you know, I do point to this issue of high speed rail because it just seems to be getting worse. And it went from LA to San Francisco, that was shortened from. Is it Bakersfield? Merced to Bakersfield, Those metropolises of Merced to Bakersfield. Like, I've lived here for 15 years. I don't know where either of those places are. And I can assure you that if I'm in one of them, I probably won't need to get to the other one of them. But, like, do you think that it is bad enough that we're at a point where our elected officials or folks who are in positions of power where they can actually do something about it will. Or that we will continue barreling down this path regardless of the negative outcomes, which will include like, you know, if we don't have enough housing, we're gonna continue to lose people to Texas and we're gonna undermine our own political strength in, in relation to a red state like Texas?

Ezra Klein (78:21)

Well, we're trying. So far they haven't. I think that's the thing that I want to say. Clearly, one of the things that makes me angriest about high speed rail and I went to Fresno and toured this sort of Merced Bakersfield part they're trying to build. I think the thing that makes me angriest about it is that we've done nothing about it. We have this absolute fiasco sitting here on our hands. And okay, fiascos happen, but you would think we would have, in shame and horror pass whatever set of bills we need to pass to say nothing like this ever happens again. The next project this doesn't happen to, we have done functionally nothing. And that's what I mean by being unwilling to revisit failure. And you asked a little bit there, why don't they right? Are they going to fix this? And the answer is that it's painful.

Ned Price (79:12)

Painful.

Ezra Klein (79:13)

So I'll give you just one example. One of the things that's very painful for Democrats right now is that the entire suite of environmental legislation that we work off of was for a different era of environmental problems. So we had a sort of backlash to New Deal liberalism and the high growth america of the 20th century. And it was polluting streams and pumping toxins into the sky. And I grew up outside LA when it was very smoggy. And so we built all this statute, all these California Environmental Quality act and the National Environmental Policy act and all, all of it. And all of it is really to slow down building, to say, you got to think before you do this, because the problem was we were doing too much too fast. Now you have this era where the problem is we are cooking the planet. We need to build a huge amount of green energy infrastructure unbelievably fast because we're trying to move the entire economy, an advanced economy, off of fossil fuels and onto decarbonized energy.

Brian Tyler Cohen (80:04)

So in a way, our environmental regulations of the past are, are actually the biggest impediment to being able to save the environment.

Ezra Klein (80:11)

I wouldn't say the biggest impediment. The Republican party is a huge big impediment, but they've made it very, very hard to build because you can sue these laws. They don't know if something is good or bad for the environment. So you can sue under it. So I'm bringing this back to high speed rail. High speed rail. One of the core justifications for it is environmental. It is much better to have people whistling up and down the state packed together in these gleaming silver bullets than having them in cars driving up and down. Okay. They began doing environmental clearance on the high speed railroad route in 2012. By the end of 2024, when I was fact checking for the book, it was Almost done. That's how long it takes to bulletproof yourself against these lawsuits relative to, by.

Brian Tyler Cohen (80:55)

The way, foreign countries where. How many miles did China. Was China.

Ezra Klein (81:00)

23,000 miles. China built 23,000 miles of high speed rail in the time we were failing to build 500. So you might think they would look at that and say, oh my God, we really screwed this up. Like we got to exempt these kinds of projects, but they haven't done anything like that. You know, the amount of negotiation, the sort of. Every single jurisdiction. Like when I was like touring the high speed rail route, they were telling me as we go to place to place, they were telling me about. I actually didn't write this in the book. They were telling me about all the other things they were building in every city they went through and how proud they were of that. So they'd be here and it's like they're helping with a playground and building these new water mains. And in every city, in order to quiet opposition, they had cut what I would call side deals. And so part of the build was also doing these things for the city to make it so people weren't mad at you. That sounds good. And they were proud of it. We're going to build this in a way that's going to leave every place we go through better off. Well, no, it turned out you weren't because you were adding so much shit in so many different directions that you're not building the thing at all. And you're spending people's money for something they're never really going to get. I call this everything bagel liberalism. This tendency to add all these standards and regulations and other goals into every individual project. But again, I want to see a reckoning on this. I want to see people stand up and say, I am sorry we fucked this up and we learned something and we've now made it so it won't happen again. New York City, where I live now, the second Avenue subway extension, as you've been trying to to do for like 80 years. The first phase of it was the most expensive rail project by kilometer the world has ever seen. By far. It was unfathomably expensive. Huge disaster, huge embarrassment. They're planning phase two now. They're projecting for it to cost more per kilometer. We don't learn anything.

Brian Tyler Cohen (82:40)

Yeah.

Ezra Klein (82:40)

And like, that's the real failure here.

Brian Tyler Cohen (82:43)

Are you or have you spoken to Governor Newsom?

Ezra Klein (82:46)

I am going on his podcast tomorrow.

Brian Tyler Cohen (82:48)

Okay.

Ezra Klein (82:49)

And I have spoken to him many times over the course of this.

Brian Tyler Cohen (82:51)

I'm curious about I mean, look, you're in a unique position because you've identified a very clear, obvious and insidious problem. But you obviously have much more access to our elected officials who have the power to do something about it than a normal person would who's sitting in one of the. In Merced or Bakersfield and watching a train to nowhere. That's God knows how many billions of dollars over budget and how many years behind schedule is. Is. And so what, what is your hope?

Ezra Klein (83:21)

$85 billion over budget. Just. They haven't spent it, but even now, from where they expected it to be.33.5 billion being the initial estimate. Yeah, they tell me it cost 110 billion.

Brian Tyler Cohen (83:30)

$110 billion for a train. That, that, that, that isn't even going where.

Ezra Klein (83:35)

Well, if that would be to make the whole thing that would do L. A to SF if they could do it. But anyway, it's just, it's so much money, it's gone over budget. It's unbelievable.

Brian Tyler Cohen (83:42)

And so, and so what is your. Do you have a goal, a hope, a plan as it relates to being able to have FaceTime directly with a governor who presumably has some.

Ezra Klein (83:50)

I do. I mean, look, there is a. I'm having a lot of conversations with elected officials in the Democratic Party, and I try to say something pretty similar in each of them and try to ask them, okay, if you agree with all this because this book develops some energy around it, to my real delight. And so people want to get on its side, which has been an interesting dynamic, people coming out. Kathy Hochul, the governor of New York, said everybody needs to read Abundance, which is great. Now we'll be like, have you read Abundance? What are we doing here? Has it worked? What changes are you making based on it? I'm trying to be thoughtful that it's partially a way for Democrats to talk about a vision of the future, not just the failures of their own past. But they also need to have an answer, I think, for what has gone wrong here and what they're going to do about it. So I interviewed Newsom for parts of this and I have this great quote from him in the high speed rail section where he says, people come to me and they ask what happened to the California the 50s and 60s? Why can't we do this anymore? But the question is like, well, what is your answer? And he's done some things, procurement reforms and whatever, but they're not big enough. A big part of this, though, it does have to do with the California legislation, legislature. So one thing that Interests me. The yes in my backyard movement. The YIMBYs are a big inspiration and part of my thinking in this book. But in this place, California, where they start and where they have all these great intellectual victories and they've passed all this legislation, are we building more homes? And the answer is no. We're building ADUs, but we're not building homes. And I started doing some reporting in San Francisco about why they are the birthplace of the Yimbys. London breed said all the right things. What happened? And so I called these developers and I was like, look, there are all these bills now that fast track housing development. Why do I not see more housing? And the developers all said the same thing to me. They said, look, for me to use that bill, it triggers a series of other standards on me. Like, yes, I get a faster timeline, but I have to pay much higher wages, I have to use different kinds of contractors, I have to meet different environmental standards, and it makes my build so much more expensive that neither I nor anyone I know is using those bills. And it's fine to say to yourself, hearing that, it's like, well, I want high wages, I want high environmental standards. You know what, I do too. But those bills were there to build affordable housing. That's why they exist. We were trying to solve a problem and we loaded our solutions up with so many other projects and so many other ideas, priorities that we are not solving the core problem problem. So I think Gavin Newsom, if I talked, I mean, you'll see when I guess the podcast comes out, but I think he'll say, look, I've passed dozens of pro housing bills and my answer to that is, but you're not building more housing. And this is one very big point of all of this. Liberalism needs to be outcome focused. If you believe in the government, you shouldn't believe in the government as an institution. The point is not to be pro government. The point is to be pro the thing, things you are trying to get done. And then if they're not getting done, to figure out why and fix it. And that's why I said at the beginning that I really feel on some level I can boil this whole book down to trying to get people in power, but also people influencing those in power and organizing and voting to just refocus around a simpler and more constructive question, which is, what do we need more of and how do we get get it or why aren't we getting it? And I'm open to a huge number of answers right. There are people on the left who I think see this book as a threat, but I don't think they should. If the way to get more of something we need is to break up corporate power, great, let's break up corporate power. If it's to make it easier to fast track housing, then let's do that, right? If we need to exempt clean energy from old environmental review laws, let's do that. I am open to so many answers, but what I want is for us to be really relentlessly focused. Focused on the right questions. Which is not are we following the processes? But are we achieving the outcomes?

Brian Tyler Cohen (87:54)

Which I think is especially relevant today in an environment where Democrats learned in this past election cycle that defending the institutions that people largely don't like for exactly the reasons that you're laying out is what's causing people to lose faith in the party itself. So look, I think this was a very important read. Highly recommend for anybody who watching right now to grab abundance. Ezra, thank you so much for the time.

Ezra Klein (88:17)

I appreciate it. Thank you man. I really appreciate it.

Brian Tyler Cohen (88:20)

Thanks again to all my guests. That's it for this episode. Talk to you next week. You've been listening to no Lie with Brian Tyler Cohen, produced by Sam Graeber, music by Wellesley, and interviews edited for YouTube by Nicholas Nicotera. If you want to support the show, please subscribe on your preferred podcast app and leave a five star rating and a review. And as always, you can find me ryanteller Cohen on all of my other shows channels. Or you can go to briantylercohen.com to learn more.

Ezra Klein (88:51)

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