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- [00:01]
Chris Cuomo
Location, the lab.
- [00:02]
Ezra Klein
Quentin only has 24 hours to sell his car. Is that even possible? He goes to Carvana.com. what is this, a movie trailer? He ignores the doubters, enters his license plate. Wow, that's a great offer. The car is sold, but will Carvana pick it up in time for. They'll literally pick it up tomorrow morning. Done with the dramatics. Car selling in record time. Save your time. Go to Carvana.com and sell your car today. Pickup fees may apply.
- [00:30]
Chris Cuomo
Everybody can point out the problems. But if you are a centrist, if you are a Democrat, if you are an independent, you gotta be desperate for the ideas that'll get us to a better place in our politics. And I have a name that you are going to need if you want to get to a better place. I'm Chris Cuomo. Welcome to the Chris Cuomo Project. Ezra Klein. Okay. He is already, in my opinion, top of class as a thought leader in the media.
- [01:01]
Ezra Klein
Left, sure.
- [01:02]
Chris Cuomo
But I think there's a pragmatism to him that doesn't get enough credit. His new book, Abundance, that he does with Atlantic writer Derek Thompson. Boy, oh, boy, is it the antidote to stratification, to fighting over slices, to what makes America great again. What? The Trump slogan. Trump's not living that slogan. Okay. Our administration is not sending out a message of greatness. Right. It's of destruction. Everything sucks, everything's bad, everything's broken. Listen to Elon Musk. Has he found anything in government that he thinks works yet? No. Why? That's not what he's looking for. Well, he's looking for waste, fraud, and abuse. No, he's not. He's looking for reasons to make you believe that government doesn't work. Is that where we need to be? Getting government out of our lives? Sure. Sounds good. Maybe we don't need a government. Maybe they were right back in the day, the guys who were anti federalists, who just wanted to stay as a coalition of states. And even then, maybe then those states should do even less and less. And even then, maybe our local governments should be disbanded. All of this sounds so good right now, doesn't it? I know. That's because it's so, so thin in terms of its thought process. It's so easy. Ezra Klein's doing what's hard. Ezra Klein is talking about how to look at things with a critical eye and to see value from things that are just imperfect and separating how you get better versus deciding to just throw the baby out with the bathwater. The book, Abundance is a Roadmap of how you get to a better place, not just for Democrats, but for a democracy. And I was very, very anxious to talk to him. He's a big name, he's gaining momentum, and my opinion is he deserves it. Ezra Klein. Ezra, thank you for taking the opportunity. Appreciate it.
- [03:08]
Ezra Klein
Thank you, man. I'm glad to be here.
- [03:10]
Chris Cuomo
So I. You're definitely coming into your own. The question is how you see yourself as a value and as a commodity in trying to get a sense of how people see you. Some of it is playful, but I think, also perceptive. This male Maddow thing. I have a lot of respect for Rachel Maddow. I used to call her the professor when I was up against her when I was at cnn. And that level of erudition, of understanding it, of being a smart lefty, are you comfortable with that description and how do you see your value?
- [03:44]
Ezra Klein
I have literally never been called the male mad out to my knowledge in my life.
- [03:49]
Chris Cuomo
I'm not calling you that. I read it.
- [03:51]
Ezra Klein
Where did you read it?
- [03:52]
Chris Cuomo
I call you an Ezra Klein is what I call you. You are. Where did you have one? I was just looking at people's using ChatGPT to get a sense of how people see you. It's a good tool. I wouldn't use it for yourself, but it's a good. Those large language models are really good at grabbing what is a feigned consensus from manufactured media.
- [04:19]
Ezra Klein
Yeah, sure. You get the common denominator of the Internet. I don't know about the mail. Maddow. I think that one of the just like realities of everybody's career, and you know it as well as anybody does, that we're all shaped by the platforms we're on. And like, Rachel is a master of cable news, and cable news forces you to, as they used to tell me when I was a guest host over there, like, you gotta grab the live wire of the news. And hopefully one of the advantages I have or one of the value adds I have, as you put it, is that I don't always have to do that. The great decadence for me of being at the Times compared to when I was the editor in chief for Editor at Large Vox, which I co founded, was I always felt there that I had to be whatever the organization needed me to be, whatever the big story was of the day, I had to be covering it or managing the coverage of it. On cable news, there's a formalism. Right. And again, you are a fucking master of this in a way. I'm not, but there's A formalism that requires you to be on whatever the hive mind has decided is the story of the day. And if you follow my work nowadays, it's quite different than that. I mean, obviously I'm more connected to Donald Trump and this sort of moment, but even there, I'm stepped back. My podcast, it takes a couple days to come out, so I have to do things that have a shelf life. But I care about and love interviewing novelists and philosophers. And I'm very big into thinking through AI, which I think is coming like a tsunami wave that you can see darkening the city right now before it really crashes. And then in this book, in abundance, I'm trying to reach back into liberal history. I'm a Californian. I lived there again. I grew up there. I went to D.C. i was there for 13 or 14 years. Then I came back to California for another five years. And this book is very motivated. It's called With Derek Thompson. But my piece of it by what the hell happened to California? Why can't liberals say, vote for us and we're going to govern the whole country the way we govern California? And one of the virtues of my job is I have the time to look into that and to go tour high speed rail and try to figure out what went wrong in California high speed rail and to try to work those questions through. So what's my value add? I think people should hopefully check out the show and the column and the book and decide but. But I have the. But what's my freedom, which I have in a way that other things I've done in the past hasn't offered me, has been to try to look at things a little bit more deeply through the show and the column and the book than I would have to if all I could do was a noose I like.
- [07:00]
Chris Cuomo
Well, you should like the idea of you being a thought leader within the media, I think is warranted. And good for you. I do think that there's an interesting dynamic in our evolving media culture that there's so many who talk about politics who don't come from politics anymore. I used to get the beef of, like George Stephanopoulos, oh, he's really a Democrat and he's here. And then he wrote the book, you know, fucking over Clinton as a kind of way of like balancing him out as a fare broker or whatever.
- [07:38]
Ezra Klein
It was a good book, though.
- [07:40]
Chris Cuomo
Yeah. Yeah.
- [07:41]
Ezra Klein
One of the better political memoirs.
- [07:42]
Chris Cuomo
All too human. But the idea of needing to come from politics or having experience in the game itself as an asset to coverage of it. What do you think about that?
- [07:56]
Ezra Klein
Do you mean here things like the rise of, like Jen Psaki and that there's more people who seem to come out of administrations? Yeah, I know. I used to think that we in journalism and I come through magazines and newspapers. Right. I have no experience in the game. I was an intern on the Howard Dean campaign for four weeks and I hated it so much, I left. I think we were too precious about that for a long time. Like, you go back in journalism, mid century political journalism, and you had a lot of people who served in government, and I think they learned things from serving in government. So it always seemed to me, like when you're at the Post or the Times, that if you went into the administration as people like Jay Carney did. Carney used to be the Washington bureau chief for the Times. It didn't seem to me you could come back. And I think that's actually largely true. I mean, you could go and do things like the Pod Save America guys did. Podcasting has opened up things like that. But in terms of core journalism, the sort of newsrooms of the world, which are shrinking, unfortunately, I think we got weird about this. And it's like if you had ever actually served and tried to do something well, then you didn't have the objectivity and the impartiality to report on it. But I think most of the people who report on it don't actually get it. They don't have a good texture of it. You do if you've been doing it for long enough and you've been alert enough and done your job well enough. It's not that you can't have it without that. So I'm interested by your question, which I haven't thought about, but elicits for me that I used to think it would be better if more journalists had done tours and actually understood at a. At a almost like physical level what it is like to be in these bureaucracies. This book, abundance, it is very much about the texture of these bureaucracies and the sometimes choking effect they have on the outcomes of government. One of my critiques of liberals is that, and I'm a policy journalist going way back, we get really excited about passing the bill, passing the Affordable Care act, passing the inflation Reduction Act. It's like the bill passes and most everybody checks out, they go on to the next fight. But what happened after that bill passed? The bill passing didn't build anything, didn't give anybody health care. Somebody had to do that. Regulations had to be written, cement had to be poured. If you're going to build trains and solar arrays and we don't follow it, we don't see how it all actually goes. I was shocked when I dug in to what was in the notice of funding opportunity to get all that money for semiconductor firms to locate their factories in America. What were we asking them in the government? I was like we're asking them to prove that they have on site childcare. We're asking them how they're going to diversify their subcontractors by splitting up deliverables into more little chunks. We're trying to recapture semiconductor, advanced semiconductor manufacturing for America. Why are we doing all this extraneous stuff and I think being really attentive to the institutions of government, maybe because you've worked in them, maybe just because that's how your reporting works. I think we got too little of that, not too much. I guess the only other thing I would say is that you notice that the people who tend to move into media tend to come from the calm side of government. And I'm not saying the calm side of government doesn't have real value, but, but in a. Strangely, if I were building out a fellowship, I would not be pulling from the comm side. I want to see people who were actually trying to lay down this policy and make it work in the real world and have the sense of that.
- [11:22]
Chris Cuomo
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- [13:08]
Ezra Klein
So the intellectual genesis of this, which goes back way before me, way before Derek, but in terms of sort of my first big piece on this was called the Economic Mistake the left is Finally Confronting. And it's about how we on the left, and I'm on the left, tend to choke off supply of things even as we're subsidizing them. So we're giving people money to get housing, but we're making it hard to build housing in the cities we govern. We're putting all this money into building clean energy, but we're making it hard to actually build that clean energy, including through our environmental loss. And so what I was talking about then was what I called supply side progressivism. And that connected and it sort of had an impact. And I began to see people using it and thinking about it. And my sort of idea was that supply side had gotten right wing coded. People thought of Arthur Laffer and his napkin and tax cuts, raising their own revenue. But you really did need to think about the supply side of the economy. And Democrats had sort of stopped. They thought about demand, but they didn't think about supply. How do you make enough or invent enough of the things people need? And then Derek, about a year later, did this great piece in the Atlantic, this was during the pandemic. And he is 2022 and he talks about how some of the failures of the pandemic are failures of scarcity. We didn't have masks, didn't have enough vaccines, and how what we needed to get out of this age of scarcity was abundance. And he was sort of building on my essay in that and sort of linked back to it. But as soon as he wrote that, I was like, oh, he figured it out. He figured out how to talk about this. He figured out that this isn't just a critique of the past, it's a vision for the future and abundance for us. I mean, the problem with the word is that everybody wants a piece of it, right? Abundance sounds great, right? A cornucopia, all good things. When actually the book is very much about trade offs and the need to make them. But I do want to see. In this case we're talking more to the left, although there are versions of it on the right too. I do want to see a political movement that takes seriously its need to make abundant the things that people need to have a good life. Housing, energy, education, child care, elder care, and innovation and invention. Right. You can come up with more. I've seen a lot of people try to jam everything in there, but we already have an abundance of consumer goods. One of my lines in the book that I like is 40 years ago, you could go to public college debt free, but you couldn't have a flat screen television on your wall. Now you can't go to public college debt free and you can have a flat screen television on your wall. We've made it easy to fill a house with stuff, but hard to buy a house in a lot of places of the country. So being really thoughtful about what do we want more of public infrastructure. And then what is stopping us from having enough of it? Be it because we made it hard to build, or we need to invent things like green cement, green jet fuel. That I think is a more useful set of questions and prompts than a lot of what we argue over in American politics.
- [16:01]
Chris Cuomo
Yeah, I think that my producer was commenting on the book and referencing what he believed was something my father used to say, which he probably believed, but he didn't say, which is the problem in America is stratification, fighting over slices. That is what Trump uses very well. And he's not wrong that someone's taking part of Ezra's peace. And Ezra does not want to give up his peace. He fought very hard for his peace. He certainly doesn't want to give his peace to anybody. And he doesn't like the idea of somebody having a disadvantage, disadvantaging him with their ability to take it. And the answer to all of it is more pie. More pie destroys the slice fear, the slice argument. More pie has to be the answer. The reason that I had them chase after you to get you on the podcast was that's how I see this. That's how I see this. Which is, yeah, sure, trade offs. Yes, yes. But more pie is the answer not just for the left, but for the populism that right now is very obnoxious. The populism is very reductive. It is very anti. And I believe that there is a vein of opportunity in making the case for more. What does that mean to you?
- [17:39]
Ezra Klein
I agree with it. Let me say two things. So one, the populist right loves scarcity, scarcity, suspicion of other people, and that they'll take what you have and what there isn't enough of, that's the core of populist right politics. It's why Vance and Trump running, talking correctly about the housing crisis do not then offer a bunch of ways to build more housing. What they say is we're going to close the border to immigrants because they're taking your homes. It's not what's going on in housing just isn't right. Like Houston does not have a housing crisis. The average home in Houston sells for a little bit over 300,000. Compare that to the Bay Area, where it's 1.3 million. Houston has much less of a homelessness crisis. But you know what I can tell you if you look on a map, Houston very near the border, lots of, you know, Texas has the immigrants. Austin also much better at building apartments than la. Austin also Florida State. So they do this again and again and again. Tariffs are another scarcity policy. We're not going to make more and trade it with the world. We're going to cut trade, try to dominate other people. And I guess you said to get better deals and onshore, the entire global supply chain we could talk about. It's quite not going to work. But I want to say something else about PI, because I don't know that you realize that you just did this, but you triggered one of my favorite riffs in the book, which is that I fucking hate that metaphor because it erases. It's a metaphor about growth, right? You know, we should grow the pie instead of slicing the pie up. It erases the central characteristic of growth. If you got a blueberry pie and you make the pie better, what do you have? You got more blueberry pie. Growth is change. If I give you an economy growing at a half point a year, year on year, and I give you an economy growing at 3 points a year, year on year, what you're going to notice in 20 years is that the second one looks completely different than the first one. If you look at periods in American life when we grew a lot, what that looks like is we got aspirin, we got electricity, we got airplanes. All of a sudden we went from horses to cars. And if you look at it now, if you think about where growth might come from because our population is aging, maybe AI right, we're all of a sudden going to have endless artificial intelligences of some sort or another in our pockets, manning our computers for us, making critical decisions. What growth is, is change, is difference. A high growth economy doesn't just parcel out the present in slightly bigger slices. That's one of my problems actually with the left. One of my inspirations here is a book by a guy named Aaron, which is, he's more left than I am by quite a bit. But it's called, it's got the greatest name of a book, I think in the last 10 years. Abundance is a good name, but it's not, wait for it, fully automated luxury communism. I mean, that's a good name for.
- [20:36]
Chris Cuomo
A book, isn't it? Come on, it's tough on a T shirt.
- [20:39]
Ezra Klein
Yeah, exactly. And his point about that, and the book's a couple years old now, but he's sort of saying from a left perspective, look, imagine these technologies are coming AI, you know, genuinely clean, abundant energy, you know, potentially things like nuclear fusion. You could be mining minerals on asteroids, maybe lab grown meat. I'm a vegetarian. Like you're not going to convince people to eat less meat. Everybody hates vegetarians and to say nothing of vegans. But you know, maybe if over time we could grow chicken breasts on scaffolds, we wouldn't have to cram them in together in the way that you have probably the single largest concentration of sentient suffering in the world, but also an insane unending risk of bird flu that could mutate and jump to human beings. Right. It's not great. Also uses chickens, cows, et cetera, most of the antibiotics in this country and is a big contributor to antibiotic resistance. It's not terrific what we're doing. We should try to innovate a way out of it. If you can get the economy growing, it'll be different. We can do things we couldn't do before. It will mean that we innovate in different ways than we did before. And so the whole pie thing, it's great, it's fine. Yes. Let's, let's not just keep the pie the same size, let's definitely not make it smaller, as I think Trump sort of wants to do. But I do think that we've all sort of settled on this metaphor for growth that erases what is growth's primary characteristic, which is change and transformation.
- [22:05]
Chris Cuomo
So expand the buffet.
- [22:07]
Ezra Klein
Expand the buffet.
- [22:08]
Chris Cuomo
Right, Expand the buffet. Okay, go. Full casino. The endless offering. Look, I just think that, you know, it's really just one word. Right. He's about less. And I think the answer for America has always been more. And I think that there's a fundamental divide on that that has to be debated and argued. And it does seem to me as a long time observer. Right. 25 years on your side of the fence, 40 years on the other side and on both sides. Right. Because I've been watching this since I was 11. I do believe you guys are losing. And I have been trying to figure out why, because who are the you guys in this? Well, I think that the political left.
- [23:05]
Ezra Klein
Sure.
- [23:06]
Chris Cuomo
Now, okay. Words matter. I never said the political left and the political right until, like, the mid-2000 teens. Okay. We never use those terms. We did for Europe. And when you were learning, we never referred to left and right. It was Democrat and Republican. And I think in that change is why there's a new burden for Democrats. My father's party. My father's party does not exist today. This is not his party, this Democratic Party. And I like having Democrats tell me I don't understand what it is to be a Democrat. I get tickled by that, because they may be right. They're coming from a really wrong place. But that's okay. How do you perceive why it seems that the argument has swung to the right? Do you believe it's just the pendular move of our politics, or do you think there's something at play here that needs to be understood and adjusted to?
- [24:16]
Ezra Klein
I don't think the pendulum is swung to the right, but I don't. I think it's ricocheting. This is if I. I've not quite figured out. I feel like we're dressed for different parties here, my man. You mean literally, just literally, different parties? I feel like we're two people who, like, walked in from different parties and got into a conversation. I got so much TV to do, so I'm all overdressed today.
- [24:40]
Chris Cuomo
You look great, Ezra.
- [24:41]
Ezra Klein
Thank you.
- [24:42]
Chris Cuomo
And I like. I like how you are so new wave, you know, you're so new media, and you're doing so much stuff that I. I think is so interesting and intriguing, and yet you defaulted to the plant and lamp. One of the oldest setups in television history.
- [24:56]
Ezra Klein
Listen, man, I'm not here. I'm not here. I'm not here to defend my zoom stuff set up in this little cubicle. I'm in the last thing I'm here to defend. But I do appreciate that they put the planted lamp up for me. Otherwise, it looks like I'm getting introduced.
- [25:07]
Chris Cuomo
I'm used to it, too. Plant and land can't go wrong. Everybody wants to see it.
- [25:11]
Ezra Klein
So I think we have a bit. I think the left right thing you're getting at is interesting here. And I'd say this about. I thought where you located. It was interesting to the teens. So I'm a big Marshall McLuhan, Neil Postman guy. I think we way underrated how important our communication platforms are to our politics, to our life and the teens, is when you really get algorithmic social media. And what algorithmic social media does, because it also ends up, I mean, you remember this how much the programming at CNN and msnbc, at the New York Times, the Washington Post was about what's poppin online during that day. Then you know what to cover. Algorithmic social media selects for high engagement, high controversy ideas. The media era that preceded it. Gatekeeper media, local newspaper monopolies, three networks, a couple cable channels didn't. So in that era, the center had a lot of power. You had Bill Clinton, you had certainly when he ran for president, George W. Bush, George H.W. bush. I wouldn't probably go as far as you. I think people thought Ronald Reagan was on the right. Look, when I read history from that period, I don't think it's like nobody ever mentioned the left and the right. But I think the point you're making compared to the couple decades that preceded it is sort of right. Because what happened is that conservative and.
- [26:26]
Chris Cuomo
Liberal more than left and right. Yeah, maybe we don't really use those terms.
- [26:31]
Ezra Klein
Either way, I think that what happened is that the media architecture began to select for again, high controversy ideas that created energy by creating controversy. You'd get, you know, I remember this, I'll give you a good example of this back. This was under, I think Obama, when liberals are mad that Obama is the deporter in chief. Do you remember that?
- [26:55]
Chris Cuomo
Oh, yeah.
- [26:55]
Ezra Klein
And one of the things that emerges, I could have the years wrong on this, maybe it was under early Trump, but there emerges this hashtag, sort of like liberal left, Twitter abolishice. Right. And everybody sort of knew nobody was abolishing ice, right? But it would get a billion retweets and then people would fight about it because like how you're gonna abolish the entire Immigration and Customs Enforcement. And all of a sudden I remember Kristen Gillibrand getting asked about it and talking about it. And it was a signal at that moment, in the teens of the way in which this was gonna start ricocheting. So what you have now, and I think some people have done a good job describing this dynamic. Martin Guri's the Revolt of the Public is I think a good book on this is a media ecosystem where things shoot back and forth. So think about how fast movements arise and fall right now. Like, think about Obama and like what he and the shift in American politics he represented is followed by Trump, his polar opposite. Trump, a kind of golem summoned from the depths of Twitter and cable news simultaneously. Right. Like, with both of their personalities embedded into one person. Then, though, Trump creates, obviously, the opposite again, right. During his administration, MeToo and Black Lives Matter rise like, that's an unbelievably fast rise, instead of cultural differences, and we begin to like talking differently, acting differently. And then within a matter of a couple of years, we have this huge backlash we're in right now. And you have, like, you know, Pete Hegseth is Secretary of Defense, and you have, like, this sort of return of intense masculinity and Joe Rogan and Andrew Tate. And this all, I think, reflects not stability, not the right winning an argument, not the left winning an argument, but a communication structure like a. Like a platform on which our entire effort to publicly reason together, which is the core thing democracy is supposed to be about, has. I don't want to call it deranged, but has fallen into disequilibrium. It's not like a. It doesn't have forces that pull it into something stable. It is forces that keep it sort of like, you know, it goes here and the thing like tips and, like, goes all the way over. And so things rise with incredible power within, like, a year, two years. Then their backlash is just as powerful within a year, two years. And we just. I don't know when we're going to hit equilibrium. I don't look at what's happening around us right now in the Trump administration and think we're going to get there yet. I think if Democrats are smart, they're going to develop, hopefully my book is a little bit part of this. They're going to develop some internal equilibriating mechanisms. So they're not responding to the Trump era with more land acknowledgments or something. You got to develop at a time when they're not stabilizing mechanisms external to parties. You have to develop them internal to the coalitions. And that's going to require, by the way, leaders to do more leading and to say when something is enough. But I do think a lot of it has to do with our sort of information and media ecosystem. In a way, it's not really about winning arguments so much as it is about algorithmic preferences for certain kinds of arguments.
- [30:04]
Chris Cuomo
That is very intelligent, and I think you're one of those people for the political left. I think that the longer essays or whatever you call them, the longer pieces you've been doing that I've been seeing you do. I think that you are speaking to people who need to get back in the lab of figuring out what Democrats are offering the majority of the country. And it's hard. It's hard because of everything that you just detailed in terms of the infrastructure of our politics. Really, it all plays against what you need to do, which is to take the time and to think and to have layered thinking and to have nuance and to have context. None of that is rewarded. There's very little attention span for it in our, what you call our algorithmic communications within social media specifically. But I think that first of all, the good news is I hear people talking about what you say. And the one, one of the upsides of the downside of getting your ass kicked is you now have the opportunity to think about why you're laying on the canvas the way you are and what is it gonna be? What are you going to do now? The Democrats are a little slow on it this time around. You know, this arguing about whether Trump has a mandate or not is beside the point. It's, you know, he's in there everywhere that he can be right now. What are you gonna do about it? The how do you connect with the majority? And I think that what you're talking about with the ricochet effect is really hard. It, I don't think it plays to a virtue based political philosophy. Ricochet doesn't play to that.
- [32:14]
Ezra Klein
But not everything is comms, you know.
- [32:16]
Chris Cuomo
No, not everything is comms, but a lot of it, more now is because of this fucking social media, you know, I mean, look at the pod people, you know, and again, I, you know, I am happy to platform you and I am, I am. There's a measure of satisfaction in seeing the increase in your reach for me, because the right dominates the space, dominates it. And I don't know that that's good for critical thinking. Independence.
- [32:49]
Ezra Klein
Yeah, I mean, I'm not going to argue on that point. What I will say is that there are things that are about communication, things that are about engagement, and things that are actually still about the blocking and tackling of good government. And in fact, things are about the blocking and tackling of good government that don't even accord to our assumed structure of what the left and the right are. One of the points of the book is that when you begin to look at things from the perspective of policies that generate abundance and change and policies that generate scarcity and stasis, a lot of our treasured categories begin to kind of get a Little wishy washy. So there is a very powerful new left that emerged in the back half of the 20th century. People like Rachel Carson, Ralph Nader responding to really very real problems who make it much easier to sue the government, to force the government to do endless kind of analysis and environmental analysis and justifying itself. And that's good at a time when you have sort of New Deal liberalism that had grown very recklessly and had poisoned a bunch of streams and had pumped endless amounts of smog into the atmosphere. But this idea that the backlash to government was only on the right, it wasn't. It was on the left. And that's why you see this hindering of government action so powerfully in places where that liberal tendency was particularly strong. Places like California, places like New York. One of the inspirations. Look, man, I have a good sense of the texture of California politics. And so if we want to talk about why high speed rail didn't get built, let's do it. I don't have as good a sense as you will by any means for the texture of New York State or New York City politics. But one of the pieces that was important to me in sort of thinking through these ideas came out a couple years ago from a guy named Mark Dunkelman. He has a new book out, very aligned to mine actually, called why Nothing Works, which is very good. But he wrote this great piece in Politico, big magazine takeout on why it had been such an unending nightmare and set of failures to make Penn Station not a shithole. Right here you have one of the central arteries into arguably the greatest city in the world, and it's terrible. I mean, I was up here all the time. Pennsylvania was terrible. I mean, Mornin Tranell is nice, but it's a bit of a hack, right? We all know that they didn't actually do the fundamental thing. And he sort of talks through the story of how could we used to do it. We built the Empire State Building in a year. The first 28 during the depression. Four years to build the first 28 subway stations in New York, like now. How long would anybody think it would take to build something on the scale of the Empire State Building? So he talks about. He sort of traces through these decades of not being able to build. And that wasn't all in the social media era. It mostly wasn't in the social media era. It was a kind of crust that emerged because nobody wanted another Robert Moses who could slice his highway through a black community and could use power utterly imperiously. But as other people have said, it's like if Robert Moses was born today, he couldn't get anything done. Right? We've made it impossible to do anything like that. Again, the pendulum swung too far. And so these things have different textures in different places. The problems of California high speed rail are maybe different than the problems of Penn Station. But something was happening that wasn't even primarily about communications. It's really about, I think does liberal government and red government, conservative government has its own set of problems, sometimes the same set of problems. But in places where liberals govern, places where Democrats govern, where they believe in the exercise of government power, do they make it possible for government to exercise that power? Or do they explain away all the reasons everything comes in too late, over budget, unaffordable, maybe never happening at all. Right now I think the two coalitions are sort of temperamentally, a little deranged. They've become too, they've polarized into insufficiently diverse psychological ecosystems. And the right, its personality is autocratic and the left, its personality is bureaucratic. And the right has too little respect for structures, systems, institutions. They are very unconservative, I would say they're counter revolutionary, I think many of them would say. And the left has too much respect for it. And I'm talking about the left broadly here, right, the Democrats, the liberals, to some degree, the actual, you know, people on the actual left will say, you know, the Marxists would say there's something different and they let themselves get completely fouled up in process and then they don't go back and revisit it. Right? What has California fundamentally changed given the debacle of its high speed rail system? Nothing. It has changed nothing. It has done nothing to make it actually completable from here. It has done nothing to make the next one possible. Just nobody's going to try it again. It has learned nothing, it has done nothing. And they'll say, no, we did this little thing like you didn't do enough. What did New York learn from the Second Avenue subway? Right? Highest price, the most expensive rail construction per kilometer the world has ever seen. You know what the next one, I mean you do, but the next one, it is estimated to be higher per km. So they tell me, no, we did design, build, you know, you could do design, build, contracting. It's like you didn't do enough, right? You did not make this doable.
- [38:09]
Chris Cuomo
Have you ever talked to Andrew about.
- [38:11]
Ezra Klein
No, I haven't.
- [38:12]
Chris Cuomo
You should see if you can get him. He completed the second.
- [38:19]
Ezra Klein
You know anybody who knows him, he.
- [38:21]
Chris Cuomo
Completed the Second Avenue subway. He made Penn Station happen to the extent that it did. And he got LaGuardia.
- [38:29]
Ezra Klein
Yeah.
- [38:29]
Chris Cuomo
On his own. Beautiful.
- [38:30]
Ezra Klein
LaGuardia is great.
- [38:31]
Chris Cuomo
On his own rules. It's the only one of the three projects that he was allowed to through state government design because the federal government was so helpful to him, except with what he wanted most, which was the extra Runway. That is his sweet spot. Andrew is a very incomplete politician on a lot of levels that matter, especially these days. But in terms of building, he has, like, almost a savant quality to it. And he knows exactly why these things are so hard to do, from the conceiving stage to the contract stage to the execution stage. You would like to talk to him about that specifically because he believes it's one of the things that government does, if not the thing government does best, is when it's used. Right. Is to build infrastructure in a way that the private sector can't do by itself. But that idea of public private partnership, that's how he started his homeless organization, help. That was like, the key to it was the ability to harness both. The point is that if you want government to do things, it can. We're right now in a phase where we just want to see government as the problem with everything in people's lives. And that really is Trump's power position. Right. Is that everything government does is wrong. I do not think it's an accident that Elon Musk, who's a genius, is getting everything wrong about how government works. I've never seen a smarter guy say more dumb shit, but I believe it's on purpose. I don't believe that Elon Musk can believe and say more than once. More than once. You know, Social Security is really added to the debt. I don't think he says that more than once. Because I think there's an Ezra Klein somewhere within arm's reach of him saying, it's not how Social Security works. It's not part of the debt structure. Don't say that again. The trust fund buys treasuries. That's true. But it's not part of our debt. Don't say it again. I think that happens in his life. So for him to keep saying it, for him to keep saying it doesn't make sense.
- [40:58]
Ezra Klein
Ezra.
- [40:59]
Chris Cuomo
That one district court can stop an executive order from the president. It doesn't make sense that he says that more than once.
- [41:07]
Ezra Klein
I don't think people tell this guy he's wrong anymore.
- [41:09]
Chris Cuomo
I listen. It's so wrong. Like I, you know, I was Talking to somebody in the White House Counsel's office. And I was like, I don't understand why you let him say this. You know, was talking about the President specifically. And they were like, well, Trump's a different cat. You have to let him know that this is going to be bad for him when it gets exposed this way. And then he'll consider whether to say it a different way. That's different. Musk is supposed to be a different animal. And I believe these things are said on purpose. I think that there is a legitimate, earnest effort right now to get as many people in America as possible to think that government is the problem and to strip away as much of it as possible. And I don't know what to do about it. I don't know what to do with it. But you know how in our business, once you see something, all of a sudden you start seeing it everywhere? I hear it in every conversation I have with his people. Now, even with something as nonsense as the Epstein stuff, when I hear the AG's office explain to me, because even though I'm considered an enemy of state by the President, I have incredible contacts within his administration. So when they explain to me the Epstein transparency, all they do is blame the FBI. Well, you know, the FBI, you know, I mean, they were just hiding everything. Hiding, hiding. You got to get rid of it. Got to get rid of all that and just. We'll just put it all out. We'll just put it all out. And then, of course, they put out all this redacted stuff because they're lying to you. They're lying to you because they know the need to protect certain things and do it a certain way. But that effort, I don't know if it's an opportunity or a burden for Democrats, but it's very real. People are very into getting rid of government right now. And I'm. And that's new for me. I grew up in a place and in a time where people look to government to help with really formative problems in their lives. That's why my father went into public service. And now it seems like it's the opposite, where you want it out.
- [43:18]
Ezra Klein
You know, there's been a. I mean, as you know, certainly as well as I do, you've had a long, multi decade right wing assault on the concept of government. But there was a sort of tension on the right because they actually didn't want to destroy government. They wanted to run government. George W. Bush's administration wasn't full of people who wanted to destroy government. It's full of people who wanted to run government. Many of them were very effective administrators, although Lord knows not all. Trump is different. I mean, what they want is different. What they believe is a deep state is a revolutionary woke force arrayed against him, that it hindered and hampered his first term. I think in reality, it actually made his first term more successful than otherwise would have been, I think. And now they're going to break it. They're gonna break it over their knee. They're gonna, as Rus Vaught put it, traumatize the bureaucrats, try to drive them out and break the thing until it's something they can control, and then they'll do. I'm not even sure they know what with, but something. And that is different, right? That's not shrinking the government, that's not cutting the debt, that's not reducing the federal workforce in an intelligent way. That is, again, it's counter revolutionary. They're trying to conquer what they understand to be a opposing power center, right, the capital of the enemy, and then break the spirit of the people who work there. Like J.D. vance on that podcast a couple years ago, said what he wanted, the government was de baathification. What's fucking insane, by the way, about Vance saying that is that de ba'athification is widely considered to be one of the fundamental errors of the invasion of Iraq. Like, when you get past it, the whole thing was a huge fundamental error. Firing everybody and making the government not work was just an absolute calamity agreed upon by everybody. And J.D. vance is like, you know what we should do here? And we're gonna see, because you're right, there's a mood of this, at least on their side. They are gonna break things that they don't even know they're breaking. They're taking on an extraordinary amount of risk. I mean, there was just this meeting reported on where Rubio and Musk got into that fight. But I thought it was interesting. Another thing, deeper down in the Times reporting on that meeting where Sean Duffy, the Secretary of Transportation, is like, the hell are you firing all these air traffic controllers for when I have planes crashing every day? They are going to blame me, they're going to blame us. They put Cash Patel and Dan Bongino in charge of the FBI. Now, I'm not the world's biggest FBI fan, but if there is a big terror attack in the US Homeland after they've gone to war with the FBI as an agency and put these two guys in charge of it, who do you think is going to get Blamed for that. They are like. Russ Douthat, my colleague, had this good way of putting it. He said this is a variant of the Colin Powell line where you break it, you own it. Like you change it this much, you own it. And they're taking. I mean, they actually fired a bunch of nuclear safety people and then like were like rushing to try to hire them back. You were saying earlier that they're doing so much you don't even know where to look. Right. They're sort of overwhelming you. I always think the most important thing to understand about that is that it's not like they have some set of attentional resources. We don't. They're overwhelming them. They don't know what they're doing. They don't know what they're canceling. They don't know who they've gotten rid of. Now, some of that stuff is not going to be macroeconomic or lead to a giant crisis. Right. I know people who worked at Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. They were incredibly smart, dedicated people trying to protect you from getting scammed. And the outcome of them not being there is more people are going to get scammed.
- [46:59]
Chris Cuomo
Yes.
- [46:59]
Ezra Klein
And they're not going to know to blame the government for that or the Trump administration. And it's not going to bring down the US economy though if they keep playing so much footsie with crypto, maybe you will get contagion from that set of scams. But. But they are going to get scammed and that's just going to be sad. Right. It's going to be bad for them. There's other stuff though, where all these people are managing risk. Right. Michael Lewis has a great book, the Fifth Risk, all about the government's role just managing risk. They're knocking out a lot of those people. They're breaking the way a lot of those organizations work. And they better fucking hope you don't get a big bird flu outbreak under RFK Jr right. They better hope this all doesn't come to pass because they are making clear they have done everything they can to kick down every one of Chesterton's fences. If you know that old parable like sitting around, they're breaking all these things and they don't know why anybody put them there in the first place. And then if it turns out that was a levy and then the waters come, people are gonna know who kicked that down.
- [48:01]
Chris Cuomo
You know, you were one of the early identifiers of this as an extension of what Bannon had said about flooding the zone. And they won't know where to look and you'll be able to get a lot of stuff done because whatever they can grab onto, there's so much other stuff you're doing and you were right to identify it. I do wonder if 911 happened today, God forbid, would the reaction be the way Bush handled it and the way the country came together. Now, obviously going into Iraq was a mistake and Congress voting on it the way they did opportunistically created a real aversion to Congress owning its power over military response, which is why they just let presidents do whatever they want. But I wonder, Ezra, if it happened today, you're saying, well, they would own it because of what they did. I wonder if that's true or if Trump would just blame the deep state or the Democrats or somebody else and we are in such a paranoid fact free social media existence that he'd get away with it. There would be no accountability because his 49.2% of the country would not want to own his failure by extension. So they would gladly blame you.
- [49:27]
Ezra Klein
You might be right about that, right? The air traffic controllers are all DEI hires as part of that. I think it would depend on the kind of attack and whether or not people traced it back in the coming months to some kind of set of failures. But maybe things that create a rally around the flag against a common enemy are probably different than things that just seem like sheer incompetence. I do think for as polarized as we are, you can still have in moments of crisis, fairly high amounts of unity. But it does dissolve the pandemic is a great example of this. Yes, it is extraordinary. The amount of unity, the amount of consensus, the amount of trust people put in the government early on in that by now, right, we're in a whole different place. You know, with RFK Jr. As HHS.
- [50:17]
Chris Cuomo
That'S a perfect example. Do you remember us banging the pots?
- [50:19]
Ezra Klein
Yeah, I remember banging the pots. Right.
- [50:21]
Chris Cuomo
Remember banging the pots about everything that was happening. I think that's a great example. I've been playing with that a lot and I'm not agreeing with you out of convenience because I've been thinking the same thing myself, but I. Because I don't know what to do with it. Maybe you will. I don't know how much you absorb the far right ecosphere in digital media, but they look at you and me as if we created Covid for our own convenience, that it was all a scam now to them. And I'm not talking about some tinfoil hat, dude. This is not Alex Jones, okay? I'M talking about people with millions of subscribers on YouTube, many millions, where they believe the vaccine never worked on anything. Ivermectin is a cure for Covid, that if you just take Ivermectin, you're going to be okay, and that was hidden. And that none of any of the measures that were taken were necessary. They are right back. At the same time, this is the part I need you to explain to me. How at the same time, can you believe it was nothing but the common cold, basically, or the flu, and yet they are paranoid about long Covid. And all the people who seem to be dropping dead, who didn't use to drop dead, they were worried about both at the same time, excess mortality. And they believe the whole thing was a scam. And I don't get how they put it together, but they do. And it has worked enormously well for them, including for Bobby. And that was my beef with him, was that, yeah, now you're trying to impress rational people, but you, Cash and Tulsi are all answering for what you said on these fucked up podcasts. And you got to own that shit because you are not saying what you said. You were not saying what you said about Tony Fauci. You're not saying it now. And you know, he ducked it and got to where he is. But how do you reconcile that? How? We all live that shit and they now see it totally different than it was.
- [52:22]
Ezra Klein
I'd say two things. There was never. I always feel like people think there was some time and maybe there was, but it was like 15 years along when we had a pretty good consensus reality. But, you know, you go back to the 30s, you have 30 million people tuning into Father Coughlin. You go back to the John Birch Society. That thing was huge. It was huge. McCarthyism conspiracy has always been there. It is temperamentally part of the human creature. And so the fact that that is there now, I'm not sure if it's better or worse than it's been. I mean, I guess depends when, right? Like, Henry Ford had a newspaper that he pumped his own money into that was reported on the Protocols of the Elders of Zion. You know, there was never the golden age. So on some level, I think it's really bad what you're talking about, but I'm also. We didn't invent fake news in the year of our Lord 2017. But the flip is that I do think these people are getting the dividend, weirdly, of the vaccines working. I do think they're getting the dividend of COVID calming because if people still felt under threat, enough of them would say, I want some people to know what they're doing. And you wouldn't have RFK Jr. As HHS Secretary. I think that actually in some ways the nightmare scenario for the Trump administration is some kind of huge public health outbreak. Because the structure of distrust for that, anger at them for putting him in charge of that, even if he doesn't really do anything wrong, it's already there. It's like the whole narrative is ready to click into place because they put somebody so unqualified and so outside of medical consensus in there. At the same time, I think at the moment they're going to play a little bit with house money. It's a hell of a lot easier to say, fuck it, the vaccines are all bullshit, when Covid is not really that dangerous anymore because the vaccines did help a lot and for a lot of people. And I remember when, as you say, it wasn't the case that you could just pretty much trust that it was going to be like the common cold. So that might, you know, God forbid that changes. But you know, at the moment they're getting to play a little both house money. The other thing I would say though is that I don't think the left, the Democratic Party, you know, has done a great job dealing with its own failures here. And it did have failures, you know, in a lot of these places. Like we kept the schools closed way too long. We have those yard signs where we say we believe in science. It's something me and Derek talk about in the book. But what we believe in is scientific institutions. But we're not that willing to check in on how well they're working.
- [55:06]
Chris Cuomo
Right.
- [55:07]
Ezra Klein
They're not working as bad as RFK Jr says they are. But a lot of them, among other things, have made it very hard to do daring scientific research. Right. We have side to spending 40% of their time doing grants. I think one way you develop trust is you are willing to be honest about the failures of your own side. I think a lot about interview I did with Jared Polis, the Democratic governor of Colorado. Interesting guy. Colorado is one of the places where Democratic vote share in 2024 dropped the least. And Polis is a guy, he's a very abundance agenda guy. He's very focused on cost. But I was very surprised because I sort of called him to talk about that. When he starts telling me, and this is after Trump won but before he took office, I think he's like, I'm really pretty pissed. Darth Kid Jr. Left. I don't think we should have let him leave. I think those people were part of my voting coalition and polls was interest. He was a Democrat who was much more skeptical of the lockdowns. Right. And he has a lot of trust among his people because he was willing to buck his own consensus at key moments. I mean he's very pro vaccines. There is a balancing that needs to be done here. And one way I think, and when I look back on the cultural moment of the pandemic and I get it because I mean we were all afraid and particularly early on, it was horrifying and I mean tens of millions of people died. But, but there was a kind of a closing of ranks against even people making reasonable points and questions. And when you drive those people out of where they can kind of comfortably be in some kind of communication with scientists and medical officials, you might find they end up in a full on space of antitrust. And I'm not saying it's our fault what ARFKA jr. Says it's not. But I am saying that there are huge mistakes on the right and there are some on the left and we've never had a process of reconciliation on that. We've only had again this sort of process of ricochet and it's not healthy. There's been, no, there's been so little, I think about this a lot as a post pandemic thing. There's been so little grace in that conversation, so little recognition and willing to pull ourselves back to the point of genuine uncertainty, making decisions under conditions of incompetence, incredible uncertainty.
- [57:28]
Chris Cuomo
That's a big one on us. But on both, you know, no, but I'm. No, no. I'm not just saying left, right. I'm saying on the media and like, you know, I would point at the New York Times specifically because they're supposed to be a lodestar, but the media, so, you know, having grown up with the mid century giants that you refer to, whether it was in New York, obviously, whether it was Jack Newfield or Jimmy Breslin or Mike McAlery, those guys were in my kitchen, okay? So I knew them very well. They raised me. Tim Russert is why I went into the media. I was working in finance for Chase Capital Partners after law school and practicing on Wall Street. And Tim, I had started a think tank with a bunch of guys called the 2030 center, looking at entitlements from a generational perspective. And Tim and my brother told me, you don't really love doing this. You should think about going into the media. And that's how I got into this. So I, I understand those guys. Those guys had grace and humanity. They did not need to take down Ezra Klein to get some depth. Okay? We have lost that. And we are a gotcha driven business. And you can't apologize as a politician because I will beat you over the head with it until you stop moving. That's how our media works today. And I believe we're getting punished for it. We're getting punished for it because look at what wound up happening. Classic reaction formation. You have the most flawed, the most unapologetic mofo I've ever seen in politics. As the President of the United States. That guy would step on a puppy's fucking head. Ezra. And not apologize. Okay, why? I mean, use the word Gollum early on. I mean, I don't know any other way to see Trump. He is everything that we have said can exist.
- [59:41]
Ezra Klein
Young and shadow come to the presidency.
- [59:43]
Chris Cuomo
Yes, yes. And look, I feel like we deserve it. I do. Maybe it's cuz I'm a Catholic, but I just, you know, I believe that, you know, this is what you get. This is what you get when you play Gotcha, when you fucking cancel everybody, when you attack every kind of. When you abandon policy reporting in favor of personality reporting. And I've lived it. Clinton was a big bellwether in this. We went from me covering George H.W. bush, who everybody knew had a girlfriend in some apartment. Nobody ever reported on it, nobody ever said anything about it because that's, I guess that's his business. Worried about the people's business. And then Clinton, where it was like all we talked about forever and ever and ever and ever, which is when I came into the business. And that is something that we got to struggle with. I actually see you and I mean, you don't know me. I'm not a flatterer. Okay? I don't, and I don't particularly love the media. I look at it individually. You are serving a really important space of one. You talk plus minus about what is perceived as your side. Although I don't, I don't really think it's that fair about you. I think that you're, you're a new generation's entry into political philosophy, which I think we really need. Nobody even uses that word anymore. But you have a lot of philosophy philosopher in you. You are a professional student. You read so many different things. There's so much eclecticism in what you come up with. You create your own threads off of it. But you're obviously someone who's not making shit up or just going with a vibe that you picked up from some silo that you're in on Twitter. And I think that's really valuable and I think it's a precious commodity right now. So, so good for you. But as a we. You can't own your mistakes. You're a dead man if you own your mistakes. Can you imagine what would happen if Trump came out today and said, look at the markets. Temporary, but I shouldn't be talking this tariff talk that way. I'm using it as a tactic. Guys, calm down. It's working for us. But you know what? What? Cat's out of the bag because you're responding in a really insane way to what I'm saying. I shouldn't have said it that way. I'm not putting these tariffs in. You know, we're a free trade party and we're going to figure it out and get some better deal. He would. It would be my whole show tonight. I would not be able to avoid it. My boss would be like, wait, what do you mean the D block is you showing the cure for cancer? You know, it would be like, no, you have to go back and talk about Trump saying he was wrong. And it would be like, great. Why? I mean, you tell me. But how do we get to a place where there is what you call grace, which I would like to call grace, but I don't think it's anything approximating that. Where there is just fairness is all judgment now. It's all punishment all the time. So what do you do with that? You want me to admit a mistake? How is that made to be a safe space? As my oldest would say in the.
- [63:00]
Ezra Klein
Media today, I appreciate all the kind words. I am less pessimistic than you are. I think about where people are and where politics is. I think a lot of people have deranged themselves on Twitter. I think Elon Musk was one of the great minds and managers of our generation and gave himself brain rot and then bought the thing that gave himself brain rot to make sure that he had mainline more of the parasite. It's a shame we're in late Howard Hughes with him, not early Howard Hughes with him. But I don't believe. I actually don't agree that people aren't there for. It's not exactly apology, but thought self criticism. I think these politicians, a lot of them are working in an old frame and I think that the generation that emerges that will find what I was talking about earlier, an Equilibrium is going to be the one that can feel into this moment and into people's dissatisfaction with it. So Obama, one of the things that made him really effective, and I think he was a person with tremendous grace to him across multiple dimensions, was that when he ran for President in 08, in that famous speech he gave in 04, what he channeled first and foremost was a sense people had that it shouldn't be this way, it doesn't need to feel like this. And it doesn't mean he changed everything or saved everything. He didn't. Right. We got Trump right after. But people thrilled at that moment to the idea they didn't have to feel like this. And honestly, if Obama had been running for a third term against Trump, I think he would have wiped the floor with him. And Hillary Clinton had different problems. Trump, Musk, RFK Jr. All of them, they represent this moment in media so fully, this moment in formation. Right. They're truly of the culture. Right. They're the people who have given themselves over to it, who have let the river take them. I think that's going to exhaust people pretty quick. Biden was weird here because Biden was a pause. If he hadn't been Obama's vice president, he doesn't win. If not for the pandemic, he probably doesn't win. But he wasn't a person who could channel the next thing. He was a throwback. So he was sort of a timeout a little bit in terms of this shifting of the culture. The culture, trying to find a politician that has some stability in this moment. I have this line, I've said it before, that you familiar. Have you had John Hyde on the show?
- [65:44]
Chris Cuomo
No, but I'm very familiar with him.
- [65:45]
Ezra Klein
Yeah. So I think that the next political tendency that really works will be one that has absorbed that anger that height channels. I mean, height has been atop the Times bestseller list for 49 weeks now with the anxious generation.
- [65:58]
Chris Cuomo
Right.
- [65:59]
Ezra Klein
He's really hit a chord. And you have red and blue states banning phones in their schools. Right. People have a sense something has gone really wrong. And Trump and Musk and I mean, they're all like. They are fully of the wrongness and in a way that makes them much more culturally relevant than where the Democrats had ended up by the end of 2024. Right. They were everywhere. They got it. They sort of embodied it in that way. There's a dynamism to them. But. But I think it's going to be an od. And I think what comes next, if the Democrats are able to find the right kind of leadership. And it does take leadership. It does take somebody with an intuitive sense of the moment, of the structure of the moment. That's true in the media too. But I think there are, you know, again here, I think there are a lot of good people in the media. People are going to have to find their way to something that is less. I don't just mean without grace. I mean something that is. We gave ourselves over to virality, we gave ourselves over in the 2010s to the incentives of algorithmic media, and we all came to reflect it. I mean, that's the core of Marshall McLuhan. The medium is the message. The content is a distraction. What's changing is you. And we changed in shit ways. The reason you don't see me on Twitter very much, I'm there for a bit right now, on and off to promote the book because that's why I'm here. I'll come back for non book stuff. But at the moment I'm doing book tour, but I'm not on there because it changes me badly. I become a worse person. I become worse at covering things. I did a bunch of some of the work I did a year and a half ago. I was sort of early one of the people on the left kind of pushing pretty hard that Biden was too old to run again. He shouldn't be doing this. Back in February 2023, I think if I was on Twitter, I never would have done it because I would have been too attentive to what my own side would have thought of it and the anger of it. I think the next turn of politics, I'd like to tell you it's just abundance. I think abundance is part of it. And I think telling people, you know, what you got wrong is part of it. I really do. But I think also part of it is going to be finding modes of information and modes of communication that don't feel like we've all lost our minds and lost our GR space. Now my worry is that I think we're, I can feel like in my view, right, we in the media, we sort of have to have a little bit of a touch for where the culture is if we're, you know, if we're on top of it. I feel that we are starting to figure out social media just starting, like things are starting to get right sized, you know, like the bans on phones in schools, all of it. I think like in five years we sort of get there. But AI is about to hit us like a Truck. And that's a topic for another day. But my worry is that it always takes time for societies to reach some kind of equilibrium after a communications revolution. It took time after Gutenberg took time after radio. Right. The Nazis were great at radio. It took time after television. And my worry is that the cycle has sped up too much, and now the next thing is coming before we've even found a space with the last thing. You're getting to some really, really good leadership on that. I'm not sure I see it. But that's going to be the challenge, right? Giving people a belief that you have a vision for them that's of the future, a vision of a better life. Not just a kind of fight over what we have, as we were talking about earlier, but then also being able to channel their discontent because even the Trump voters in my family, they don't like how this feels. Not just him, but just the like. I got people who support Trump are like, I think politics is too angry. And I'm like, you support Trump, but they do feel politics is too angry. They feel from the other side, you know, I'm not gonna say all this is equal, but I get it. Somebody's gonna have to make some meaning out of it and have a little bit more of a sense of balance than what we've had. We'll see.
- [69:59]
Chris Cuomo
Who's your favorite on your side of the ball as a leader?
- [70:02]
Ezra Klein
I don't think I have a. I don't think I have that at the moment. I think there are people who are rising to the moment. I'm not saying for presidency. That'll be a. I think Brian Schatz in the Senate, the Democrat from Hawaii, has a good mixture of the right ideas on policy and the right ideas on communication and attention. I think he's stable and grounded. Adam Smith, who's a representative ranking member on defense, I think if you look at some of what he's saying, he's got a good take on it, I think. Jake Auchincloss, Massachusetts representative, I had him on my show recently. More ideas a minute than you'll hear from just about anybody else else. I would say Booker in the Senate from New Jersey, there's a decency to him that I don't think there is to that many politicians. I'm interested to see where AOC goes. I'm interested to see where Buttigieg go. I think they're both trying to figure out something interesting and we'll see if they do it. You could keep going with something like this, but in terms of who will emerge as the leader that I don't know. In terms of who I think has a grasp of the texture of the moment and in different ways, I think they all do. And a list like that could go on, but that's where I'd start.
- [71:12]
Chris Cuomo
The guy who I think it is checks every box except one for me. Right now. I have a test that I do at News Nation. I ask lawmakers to go on with a member of the other side. And 1. How weird is it that, first of all, nobody does that. That nobody. You almost never see a Republican and Democrat on at the same time unless they're part of some fringe coalition. Yeah, but on News Nation, like, that's so Adam Smith. I had to have. I had to work on this. The idea of, you know, because he. He's smart, he comes across as that lefty that's easy to hate sometimes, where he's kind of talking down to you and you got to be careful about condescension. But. But he will come on with somebody else. And it's such a great commodity for my audience. They appreciate it so much. And even though I'll listen to these two men, two women, one man, whatever it is, not say much while they're there together, the audience gets so much more out of it than they do when they're one on one. It's really interesting. The guy who I see at the top of the field for you guys is Governor West Moore. That guy has no weaknesses, except he does not like to be on TV with the other side, which is a mistake for him as a military leader that he was. But that guy checks every box. And I do believe that message precedes messenger. I do. I believe that even for Democrats. My father used to say that Democrats have to love their candidates in a way that the Republicans don't. Maybe. But I. I think that he is a really good example. Him, Jesse, Ted, Ann Richards, even, you know, a little bit of a reach. But Shirley Chisholm, Bell Abza, just in terms of New York centric Democrats who are formative to that party's strongest identity, they were all out of their own lived experience. They're different people. They. But. But Mario Cuomo was an extension of the Democratic message. He didn't create the Democratic message. And I think that's where that party is right now is figuring out what are we about. And I hope that people check out Ezra's book that he did with Derek Thompson to realize that you got to think about things. You got to think about Things. You got to think about what works. You got to think about how to understand it and how to explain it. And this book is great on every level. I'm not surprised because you are top of class in terms of putting out ideas right now. People can agree or disagree, usually to a matter of degree. You don't say stupid shit, but you're a philosopher out there in a time where nobody wants to rely on wisdom. So I see you as value added. And Ezra, I wish you all good things. I'm always a call away if I can help you with anything you're doing. The answer is going to be yes. If you ever want to come on, all I can do is invite you. Anytime you want to say yes, you can. Saying no means nothing to me, so I'll just offer and my words for.
- [74:28]
Ezra Klein
You to see, the first invite here, man.
- [74:30]
Chris Cuomo
No, I'm saying no, no, no. Absolutely. This is not a criticism. I will invite you on a regular basis. You can come whenever you want. If you need me to do anything, the answer is going to be yes.
- [74:39]
Ezra Klein
I appreciate it. It's been great fun to be here. I always appreciate our conversations. Thank you, Chris.
- [74:43]
Chris Cuomo
All right, good luck to you going forward.
- [74:46]
Ezra Klein
Thank.
- [74:47]
Chris Cuomo
Appreciate you coming on here. We need our philosophers. You know, people see that as a luxury. They see the deep questions, deep thought nuance, looking back at history, looking back at different ideas, figuring it out, realizing where you fell short. You know, going through all these things that we want to do in our personal lives. We never allow in our politics. And it's a mistake. Ezra Klein and this class of people who are thinking about why we are, how we are and what's working and what isn't and what to do with all of the technological and social developments and cultural developments and cataclysm around us, they matter as much, if not more than ever. And I believe the more conversations we have, the closer you get towards a cure for what ails us. Thank you for joining me here at the Chris Cuomo Project. Thank you for subscribing and following. Thank you for checking me out on News Nation, 8p and 11p every weekday night. If you want to wear your independence and show that you are a free agent, not some lemming who's just lapping up whatever's been sold to you by some solicitous type, buy the gear. And we use the money to give it to causes that are trying to make things better. The challenges are real. There's absolutely a way through it, which is being a critical thinker and being open to ideas even if you don't accept them on their face. Let's get after it.