Ezra Klein: America At Its Breaking Point

Summary

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Podcast Summary: What Now? with Trevor Noah

Episode: Ezra Klein: America At Its Breaking Point

Date: September 25, 2025
Host: Trevor Noah
Guest: Ezra Klein, Columnist and Podcast Host, New York Times

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Overview

In this deeply engaging episode, Trevor Noah welcomes acclaimed journalist and thought leader Ezra Klein to examine America's current political malaise, the fractured state of journalism, the mechanics of media and political power, and the future of liberalism and governance. Through candid, often humorous exchanges, they reflect on Klein’s unique career at the nexus of journalism, policy, and activism; confront the erosion of trust in the press and political class; and unpack the promises and pitfalls of technology and abundance for American democracy. The conversation repeatedly returns to the central question: what now, and who decides?

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. The New Media and Political Reality

• The Broken Feedback Loop

  • The media once served as a gatekeeper, determining which political actions would be disqualifying ("enders"), but this consensus has broken down in the Trump era.
  • Quote [06:15]:

    "When the news becomes... the enemy, covering the thing negatively is, in fact, a badge of honor."
    — Ezra Klein

• No One Room Where It Happens

  • Klein expresses skepticism about behind-the-scenes "rooms" where decisions are made, emphasizing how disrupted and diffuse power has become, especially through social media's role as an elite-to-elite and elite-to-mass communication network.
  • Quote [17:00]:

    "I've lost faith in there being a room where it happens... Some part of me is like, are you the adult? Are you the person who knows what's going on here? And you come to realize that person isn't there."
    — Ezra Klein

2. The Changing Nature of Journalism

• Context versus Virality

  • The shift to video and social platforms changes how news is produced and consumed, often at the expense of context and deliberation.

• Explainers, Not Just Breaking News

  • Klein's founding of Vox was about answering “How did we get here?”—giving context and history to news stories, rather than obsessing over every daily shift.
  • Quote [39:46]:

    "The news sort of didn't do... previously on. It would just tell you, this happened today... But you'd go, but how do we get here?"
    — Trevor Noah

• On Objectivity and Bias

  • Klein rejects the notion of pure objectivity, arguing that editorial judgments about what to cover are inherently value-laden.
  • Quote [51:44]:

    "I have never been a believer in the concept of objective news... The most fundamental form of bias... is in what to cover at all."
    — Ezra Klein

3. American Exceptionalism and Its Limits

• Unmoored Certainty
  • Both reflect on the internal myth of American stability and exceptionalism. The rise of Trump and other populists have shattered many Americans’ beliefs about political “rules.”
  • Quote [11:02]:

    "There used to be, like, a fixed idea about how it worked, and now that, that seems to be gone."
    — Trevor Noah

4. Economic Policy and the Politics of Abundance

• The Thesis of "Abundance"

  • Klein’s book (co-authored with Derek Thompson) examines why liberal-run states and governments often fail to deliver promised benefits—especially adequate infrastructure and affordable housing—despite the absence of Republican obstruction.
  • The book provokes debate about power, bureaucracy, and the necessity of actually building things (homes, transit, etc.), not just moving money around.
  • Quote [116:07]:

    "We're in many ways failing at governing and in particular we're failing to create enough of the things people need in the world that we have created scarcities... If we liberals want to say to people like don't fall for the bullshit of these strongmen, trust us, well then we need to be pretty honest about how we failed and why our government didn't deliver for you."
    — Ezra Klein

• Critiques from the Left

  • Trevor notes that some left critics accuse Klein of minimizing the role of big corporations and billionaires in blocking progressive reform.
  • Klein: "Liberals are very comfortable when the enemy is corporate power... But the idea that blue states are uniquely controlled by oligarchic power while Texas/Florida are not—it doesn't pass the smell test." [125:33]

• Housing as a Key Issue

  • They discuss California’s and New York’s regulations (“NIMBYism”) as major barriers to housing affordability and the resulting hypocrisy of progressive politics.
  • Klein forcefully rejects fatalism, insisting that other countries (or US cities) with different regulatory regimes are able to build more housing and infrastructure.

5. Political Leadership, Authenticity, and Delivery

• Democratic Party’s Challenges

  • Klein: Today's Democratic Party is "operating on the wrong level," clinging to '90s policy debates when the real stakes are about civilization, dignity, and who gets inclusion.
  • He is critical of the hesitation by mainstream Dem leaders to endorse insurgents like Zoran Mamdani in NYC, calling it "cowardice" and diagnosing the broader problem as fear to take a stand.
  • Quote [94:15]:

    "Nothing good. It says that they're cowards... They're afraid of him [Mamdani]... If he's going to become the Democratic candidate for mayor of New York and he's going to win... they're just afraid."
    — Ezra Klein

• The Appeal of Populists

  • Trump, Mamdani, and Bernie Sanders are cited as authentic because “when you ask them a question... he’s telling you the thing that actually popped into his head.” [91:07]

• The Cycle of Disappointment

  • Klein warns that progressive political hope often falters in delivery, not rhetoric:

    “The campaign is the easy part. It's delivering. That's the hard part. The hard part is not making the promise. The hard part is building...” [142:58]

6. Israel, Gaza, and Moral Complexity

• On Coverage and Personal Stakes

  • Klein discusses his Jewish identity’s impact on his responses to October 7th and Gaza, the tension between personhood and reporting, and the challenge of creating journalistic spaces for complex thinking rather than driven advocacy.
  • He describes the horror at Hamas’s attack, the anticipated and then realized devastation in Gaza, and critiques Israel’s response as “indefensible” at a certain stage.
  • Quote [101:34]:

    “There is a tension between my work and my personhood in this. And I try to let one inform the other... If you're Jewish or you know Israel well, one thing it's worth knowing about Jewish people is when someone says, we're going to kill all of you, Jewish people believe them.”
    — Ezra Klein

• The New Public Sphere

  • Both reflect on how difficult, nuanced conversations about Israel/Palestine and other issues are increasingly relegated to podcasts, not traditional institutions, with personal attacks on journalists as the new normal.

7. Technology, AI, and Future News/Politics

• Potential and Peril of AI

  • Klein is “pessimistic” about AI’s effect on news and information discovery but sees potential for new interfaces that make better use of massive news archives for public understanding.

• Medium Shapes Message

  • There is recurring discussion of how changes in media platforms, especially social media and video, fundamentally alter not just what is said but how politics and community function.

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Memorable Quotes & Moments

• On Power and the Illusion of Control [18:14]:

  “There's nobody set in strategy for the Democratic Party right now, man. There are some people in theory, in charge, but they are not. They're reactive, they're behind.”

• On American Exceptionalism [11:02]:

  "There used to be, like, a fixed idea about how it worked, and now that, that seems to be gone."

• On Democratic Delivery [140:00]:

  “If you cannot make the government deliver the things you have told them, isn't that a problem? Shouldn't you be furious? Not just let the right tell people how government is bad?”

• On Journalism's Core Dilemma [51:44]:

  “The most fundamental form of bias... is in what to cover at all.”

• On Podcasting as a Generative Space [111:47]:

  “When I do interviews... I'm trying to create a space in which you can think. And there are provocations in that space. There are insights, there's context, there's history...”

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Important Timestamps

• [06:15] – Ezra Klein on the broken media-political feedback loop post-Trump.
• [11:02] – Trevor on the loss of certainty in how America “works.”
• [17:00] – Klein: “I’ve lost faith in there being a room where it happens.”
• [39:46] – Trevor on why Vox’s “previously on” context is essential.
• [51:44] – Klein: “I have never been a believer in the concept of objective news...”
• [76:38] – Shifting to current state of Democratic Party and modern political uncertainty.
• [94:15] – Klein’s critique of party leaders’ fear regarding insurgent candidates.
• [116:07] – The core thesis of Abundance: why blue states and liberal governance struggle to deliver.
• [140:00] – Scarcities, hypocrisy, and the urgent need for government delivery.
• [101:34] – Klein unpacks his response as a Jewish journalist to the Israel-Gaza conflict.

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Closing – The Case for Trying

Trevor wraps up the episode by underscoring Klein’s willingness to take on uncomfortable topics, try new approaches, and acknowledge where institutions have failed. The conversation ends on a note of cautious optimism—that honesty about failure and the courage to try (and sometimes fail) in good faith remains essential for journalism, politics, and society.

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For Listeners Who Haven’t Tuned In:

This wide-ranging conversation is a master class in modern political and journalistic thought, blending critique with humility, humor, and a deep awareness of historical and technological shifts. Whether the topic is why journalism feels unreliable, why American politics appears stuck, or how liberal ideals can—or can’t—be revived, Trevor and Ezra model candid disagreement, self-reflection, and the relentless pursuit of better answers.

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Transcript

[Ezra Klein]

Ezra Klein of the New York Times.

[Trevor Noah]

Wields a lot of influence in some.

[Ezra Klein]

Parts of Capitol Hill. If you want to talk policy, Ezra.

[Trevor Noah]

Klein is the man to call.

[Ezra Klein]

Ezra Klein, who believes that Biden has been a very good president, makes the case that he should bow out of this campaign. He was on television urging Democrats shut down the government.

[Commercial/Advertisement Voice]

As Recline says that Charlie Kirk was practicing politics the right way.

[Trevor Noah]

Journalism is dead. Legacy media is dead.

[Commercial/Advertisement Voice]

We're living in a time when truth.

[Trevor Noah]

Is under pressure, when misinformation and disinformation spreads fast than facts, and when journalism.

[Ezra Klein]

Is being challenged in unprecedented ways.

[Trevor Noah]

Ezra Klein is an author and columnist.

[Ezra Klein]

For the New York Times.

[Trevor Noah]

He also writes about polarization in American politics.

[Ezra Klein]

And he tackles a whole host of.

[Trevor Noah]

Big issues in his podcast, the Ezra Klein Show. This is what now with Trevor Noah. This message is brought to you by Apple Card.

[Ezra Klein]

Each Apple product, like the iPhone, is.

[Trevor Noah]

Thoughtfully designed by skilled designers. The titanium Apple Card is no different. It's laser etched, has no numbers, and it earns you daily cash on everything you buy, including 3% back on everything at Apple. Apply for Apple Card on your iPhone.

[Ezra Klein]

In minutes, subject to credit approval.

[Trevor Noah]

Apple Card is issued by Goldman Sachs.

[Ezra Klein]

Bank USA, Salt Lake City branch terms.

[Trevor Noah]

And [e-mail].

[Commercial/Advertisement Voice]

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[Ezra Klein]

We do our recording in a gray box.

[Trevor Noah]

Yeah.

[Ezra Klein]

You also have like, ah, it seems like we should. I don't live my life in a gray box. It's not authentic to me.

[Trevor Noah]

Do you think, do you think they chose that because it feels like.

[Ezra Klein]

Oh, they chose that because that's the room in which we recorded and there were no other rooms. There's not a. That's not a plan. We'll see what happens over time. But moving to video was something that we pushed.

[Trevor Noah]

Oh, got it.

[Ezra Klein]

So there hadn't been a build out for that.

[Trevor Noah]

I was torn about that. How do you feel about it?

[Ezra Klein]

Torn? I mean, it's a big. It's a big audience. It's a new audience. I don't like having to think about how I look. And, you know, the way in which things go viral is double edged.

[Trevor Noah]

Yeah.

[Ezra Klein]

Podcasts are an in context medium and virality is an out of context.

[Trevor Noah]

No One clips a podcast.

[Ezra Klein]

Like no one an audio.

[Trevor Noah]

No one clips an audio podcast. No one goes like, oh, this clip. I mean, you've probably seen this over the years. When I was at the Daily show, we'd always see how there'd be a scandal of a politician saying something, but it was only in audio. Never really went anywhere.

[Ezra Klein]

Yeah.

[Trevor Noah]

That's why I always think Trump's grabbed him by the pussy, never derailed him because he's not on camera saying it.

[Ezra Klein]

That's interesting. Yeah. I guess the only one that really worked was mitt Romney's like 47%. That was the audio in it.

[Trevor Noah]

Which one was that one?

[Ezra Klein]

You remember he gave this riff at a fundraiser. He's like, look, 47% of the country.

[Trevor Noah]

Oh no, I don't remember that.

[Ezra Klein]

Oh yeah, it was a big deal. 2012.

[Trevor Noah]

Oh, and that ended his.

[Ezra Klein]

It didn't end anything. I mean, nothing ends anybody anymore.

[Trevor Noah]

But it was anymore. But back then. Yeah, back then they were enders.

[Ezra Klein]

Yeah. At least we thought they were. Maybe they never were.

[Trevor Noah]

Yeah, no, I think they were enders and I think enders still exist, funny enough.

[Ezra Klein]

Well, we'll look for one today.

[Trevor Noah]

No, I genuinely.

[Ezra Klein]

Which of us doesn't make it out of this?

[Trevor Noah]

I genuinely do. I think, I genuinely think there still are enders.

[Ezra Klein]

Yeah. What's a. What. What do you think would be one for one side or the other?

[Trevor Noah]

I think they exist for everyone except Donald Trump.

[Ezra Klein]

Yeah.

[Trevor Noah]

And I think it's because he's approached this whole thing in the same way that a wrestler does in that like the whole point is to be the foil. The whole point is to be. You know what I mean? So it's like, it's, it's. If somebody's playing the game by different rules, then the rules that we normally use don't apply to them. So you go like, oh, that's how you get disqualified. Normally he can't get disqualified like, cuz he's not playing the game by the.

[Ezra Klein]

Same rules for the Republican Party. The enders are all about Donald Trump.

[Trevor Noah]

Yeah.

[Ezra Klein]

Like if J.D. vance came out on a hot mic.

[Trevor Noah]

No, finished.

[Ezra Klein]

Look, man, we all know fight and won the 2020 election. That was ridiculous. But we gotta say it for, you know, that'd be, that'd be an under for him.

[Trevor Noah]

He created something new and no one has figured out how to respond to the new that he created.

[Ezra Klein]

Yeah.

[Trevor Noah]

Do you know what I mean? Like the mechanism that was set up to deal with the news wasn't like, in a weird way, I feel like the way we think of news is designed perfectly for how news was. It has a certain level of decorum. And then I think for Donald Trump, you have to cover him the way you cover wrestling and reality tv. Do you know what I mean?

[Ezra Klein]

Yes.

[Trevor Noah]

Like, those are not covered the same way.

[Ezra Klein]

Yes.

[Trevor Noah]

So it's not gonna be like.

[Ezra Klein]

But the point of COVID I mean, the thing that the news doesn't know what to do about with Donald Trump, and we could talk about this on the thing, but.

[Trevor Noah]

Yeah, we could jump in. We're ready, right? Yeah, we can jump straight in. Jump straight in.

[Ezra Klein]

I'm following you, man.

[Trevor Noah]

No, no, no.

[Ezra Klein]

You just want me to give you that answer.

[Trevor Noah]

I want you to give me that answer. That's a great. This is where the audience found us in the middle of that answer. Yeah. All right.

[Ezra Klein]

So the thing the news doesn't know how to deal with with Trump and never figured out was that the sort of implicit way the news worked was that the news covered things. In covering it, it created the thing's importance, and then in covering it, positively or negatively, it sent a signal to the country about whether or not this politician, if it was a political story, was good or bad. And when the news becomes, in one side of the country's narrative, the enemy. And so covering the thing negatively is, in fact, a badge of honor to that person.

[Trevor Noah]

Right.

[Ezra Klein]

It breaks the feedback loop that, you know, the. The media as a source of judgment in American democracy was sort of built around. And, yeah, it never figured out what to do after that. I'm not sure there is an answer either.

[Trevor Noah]

I. I don't think there is.

[Ezra Klein]

There aren't gatekeepers anymore in the world.

[Trevor Noah]

No, no, no.

[Ezra Klein]

At least not to speak to everybody.

[Trevor Noah]

They actually aren't. I mean, except you, maybe. No, I. Far from it, my friend. There is no gates. I don't have a key. I don't know how the gate works. You are. You are now in an interesting. An interesting and complicated position now in the news in that, like, you know, you're with the New York Times, but an opinion, you know, And I thought to myself, I was like, before we get into the heavy topics. Cause, I mean, Ezra Klein, you deal with everything. I was like. I was like, let's do something light. What is your opinion on what's happening in the world right now?

[Ezra Klein]

That's your light. I'm not for it. Against.

[Trevor Noah]

But no, no, okay, no. Jokes aside, what would. Like when you wake up every day? And I love asking people who work in the news this question, particularly because I find there's oftentimes a disconnect or rather just a different way that people are seeing it. People who work in the news and people who don't. People who work in the news are. Are sometimes like people who work in an emergency room in that they have a very different idea of July 4th than the people who are out celebrating it. You get what I'm saying?

[Ezra Klein]

Yeah, I do.

[Trevor Noah]

Because they see the fire marks and the burns that people come in with. And so I wonder, like, how you feel about this moment in time. Is it as bad as some people feel? You as somebody from the inside, do you feel like it is, you know, a DEFCON one? Cause it goes backwards. Right. It's like a DEFCON one.

[Ezra Klein]

Yeah. I always forget which DEF Con you don't want to be at.

[Trevor Noah]

Yeah. I think you're best.

[Ezra Klein]

We're at the one you don't want to be at.

[Trevor Noah]

We're at the. Oh, okay. We're there.

[Ezra Klein]

I think if you go back in my career, I'm usually somebody saying, calm down a little bit. There's a long sweep of history. Things have been much worse in the past. Go look at the 60s, constant political assassinations, violence in the streets. I think that we are. I think this is the worst political moment in terms of its danger and threatening easily of my lifetime. Trump won, by the way. At least until the pandemic.

[Trevor Noah]

Yeah.

[Ezra Klein]

One of the things I always said was that George W. Bush was a much worse president. Right. That he led to many more deaths, that the Iraq war and other dimensions of his foreign policy deformed American politics for a generation, created Donald Trump in certain ways, by wrecking the Republican Party and making it a hollow shell, Trump could take over. But we're in something different now. When you have literally masked men abducting people off the street, when you have military occupation of American cities, when you have the weaponization of the federal government against supposed enemies, the search for pretexts on which to fire people, on which to harass them. Yeah, I don't. You don't need a PhD in history to know that. Those are the early chapters of history books that are not fun to read. Now, it doesn't mean it will go that badly. The reality of reality is that talking about the future, you're always talking about probabilities. But if I would have said at the beginning of this administration that 70, 30, we stay in the part of the probability cloud that is relatively normal. Right. 30% chance we don't, which is pretty bad now, I think it's more 50, 50 or worse.

[Trevor Noah]

It's funny, when I, when I first started at the Daily Show, I was thrust into this world of American politics, and it was politics the way it was. You know, everyone, everyone had, like, a concrete idea of how things were, you know, So I remember seeing some of the candidates come up, and then people in the building would tell me, they'd be like, oh, no, Trevor. They call it, what was it, Summer madness. Or it had, like, a name in the media world, you know, where people go, like, those candidates don't count. They're not gonna be around. A silly summer, I think is what they said. Yeah, they said silly summer. So all of these people you see popping up, they're not Ben Carson, Donald Trump, all of that, that's not gonna be a thing. Because everyone was so sure they knew how America worked. And I would say from 2016 onwards, the one thing I've realized is more than ever I've seen Americans go, I, I don't know, I, I, I don't know how this country actually works now. I don't. You know, there used to be, like, a fixed idea about how it worked, and now that, that seems to be gone.

[Ezra Klein]

I mean, we were talking about this before the camera turned on, but people thought they understood what the rules of politics were.

[Trevor Noah]

Yeah.

[Ezra Klein]

And what kinds of political moves, comments, decisions would be functionally disqualifying what was a level beneath which the American people would not let you go? And that was a form of American exceptionalism, internalized American exceptionalism. These terrible things have happened in other places, but we're America. They're not going to happen here. We have this political culture, this civic culture, this fundamental understanding of how we're supposed to treat one another. And I think that to the extent many people who used to feel certainty around that have become a bit unmoored. It's the recognition of a bottomlessness. Trump has not found the bottom. There is not a thing he has done, except maybe support vaccinations for Covid, that he has not been able to persuade his own base to tolerate maybe the Epstein files. But it is, in fact, the thing that made so many people initially think Trump would be disqualified, not by some, you know, rule maker somewhere, but by the voters. The cruelty, the outrageousness, the sort of gleeful destruction of what I would say are things that maintained basic civic bonds that actually makes them appealing to many people. And once that got understood. Right. In fact, forget, like, the people on the left who used to think they knew how American politics worked, think about the people on the right go read, you know, J.D. vance's Hillbilly OG.

[Trevor Noah]

Yeah.

[Ezra Klein]

I mean, come on. And like, check out the things that Vance was saying on podcasts about virtue in public life and the way we treat each other after that, in that period. Right. I mean, there. And look at the personality transplants of Ted Cruz, of Elise Stefanik, of Vance, of. Once people understood that it was not only, but quite substantially the worst parts of Donald Trump that accounted for his appeal. It wasn't all that people thought he was a businessman from watching the Apprentice that really altered things. And then when he was able to not just go through the first term, but box out and box out every other Republican after losing reelection, which is almost unheard of. Almost unheard of.

[Trevor Noah]

Yeah.

[Ezra Klein]

So then there was no pathway to power except his favor on the right. And so the complete demolition of the idea that this will ever snap back, or at least anytime soon, that we're just in an aberrant moment from a sort of unusual reality TV superstar, like, that's over and that's the end of the surety. Right. Both on the left and the right. Everybody understands we're in a different game now. Or if they don't, which, actually, to be fair, I think a lot of Democratic Party politicians don't. They're dinosaurs, right. They're going to go extinct.

[Trevor Noah]

One of the biggest reasons I want.

[Ezra Klein]

To hope you didn't bring me here for optimism.

[Trevor Noah]

Oh, no, we're going to find optimism. We're going to find optimism, my friend. I always think optimism is only defined by, you know, the timescale you use it.

[Ezra Klein]

That's fair. Yeah, yeah.

[Trevor Noah]

100 years, things get much better. Thousand years, million years, did we even matter?

[Ezra Klein]

The AIs are going to love what we left them.

[Trevor Noah]

I like, I like the assumption that people think that the AIs will want the same things we want if they get as intelligent as they do. But we'll, we'll actually talk about AI. Because I, I, I loved your, your, your piece on it. I, I want to, I want to talk about you as Ezra Klein because, you know, there's a, there's a, there's a song in the musical Hamilton, Right. I think it's Aaron Burr's character. Forgive me if I get any of these people wrong. I just remember the songs and I remembered liking it. And he has the song the Room Where It Happens, right? And all he's singing about in the song is he goes, I just want to be in the room where it happens, where the rules are written, where the Constitution is made, where countries are defined, where he's like, I don't even. It's an interesting song because it's a person saying, I don't even care to necessarily do it. I don't necessarily care to be remembered for it. But, man, I want to be in that room where it happens. And all I could think about for this episode was, that's Ezra Klein.

[Ezra Klein]

That I just want to be in the room where it happens.

[Trevor Noah]

No, no, no. That you are in the room where it happens. Not that you want to be. Because I went, look at this Venn diagram, right? For anyone who's, like, tuning in, going, like, okay, Trevor, what's your fascination with Ezra Klein? I go, okay, how about this? Here's somebody who is in the epicenter of news in many ways. You know, you've got Vox, which I was a big fan of, helped me a lot on the Daily show, by the way. We gotta talk about that. You got Vox that reshaped how many people saw news, especially young people now working at the New York Times, you know, curating, shaping the opinion section, working on the podcast, you know, like, doing journalistic work that sort of, like, branches out what the New York Times does. So you've got the news element, journalism. Then you've got the writing, the investigating, the campaigning for certain ideas in the world. So, like, shaping what the world is thinking. Then you've got another little circle, and that is the politics itself. The amount of times I've heard a person who is either a Democrat in power or somebody who's adjacent to them saying, well, we're gonna reach out to Ezra Klein, or Ezra Klein hopefully will in some way shape or form, your name is there. And I was like, wow, the politicians are even looking to this guy. And then you're in, like, this world. I see you on podcasts, I see you talking to, like, everyday people. I go, this is the perfect Venn diagram of the room where it happens. Do you feel like that about yourself?

[Ezra Klein]

I. No, no. I've lost faith in there being a room where it happens.

[Trevor Noah]

Ah, Ezra. No, you can't be serious. Says the man in the room.

[Ezra Klein]

I think that one of my lessons of the past couple years is there's not a room. Look, man, everybody knew. Everybody knew Joe Biden was too old to run for president again.

[Trevor Noah]

Okay?

[Ezra Klein]

Everybody knew. Not that he was senile. He wasn't senile.

[Trevor Noah]

Yeah.

[Ezra Klein]

But they knew, and there was no room. Not only was there no room, the people in the room were not in a position where they could even say it. And the point is not that I have some great perspective on any of this. The point is that one of the things I find frightening about this period, for all that I was talking about earlier, is the feeling that, you know, I am at my core reporter. I talk to people, as you were saying, sometimes they talk to me. And I think in a lot of these conversations, some part of me is like, are you the adult? Are you the person who knows what's going on here?

[Trevor Noah]

Yeah.

[Ezra Klein]

And you come to realize that person isn't there or that set of people. There's nobody set in strategy for the Democratic Party right now, man. There are some people in theory, in charge, but they are not. They're reactive, they're behind.

[Trevor Noah]

Right.

[Ezra Klein]

And it gives you a different. Like, I see things as much less formed. I think when I was a reporter working in the Washington that had rules that you were talking about earlier, I believed much more, and I think it was actually truer that there was a room where it happened.

[Trevor Noah]

Okay.

[Ezra Klein]

And I think those. I think that's not really how a lot of things work. It's diffuse across social media. For instance, the amount of elite communication that elites are doing with each other through social media vibes and through this tweet. I mean, Donald Trump is, of course, the epicenter of this.

[Trevor Noah]

Yeah.

[Ezra Klein]

How much of his. Not just governing, but his signal sending to the rest of the Republican Party, to the right, to the country, is not going into a room where the stakeholders are assembled and like banging his fist on the table and giving them an answer. It's shooting out a tweet or a truth social post. What he is doing in all caps, they're all doing now.

[Trevor Noah]

But here's the thing I think you may be missing is oftentimes the people in the room don't know that they're in the room.

[Ezra Klein]

This metaphor is starting to stretch.

[Trevor Noah]

No, think about this is what I mean, honestly. Right. We call it the room where it happened, or we think about it like that, because whatever happened has now had an effect on society. That's when that room has an importance. You with me? So when you think about that hotel room where, you know, it's like Harry Belafonte meeting with MLK and meeting with, like, that room becomes something because of what came from it before then. It's just a hotel room.

[Ezra Klein]

Yeah.

[Trevor Noah]

No one in that room walked in and went, this is the room where it happens. Do you get what I'm saying?

[Ezra Klein]

I think we're not seeing something that different now.

[Trevor Noah]

Yeah. Yeah. And so this is what I'm saying fascinates me about you. And even you giving me that answer makes me more excited to talk to you about it because I go, that means to me, you sort of like are approaching this with a degree of humility, which I'm honestly intrigued by because I go, some people would go, yeah, I'm that guy. You're going like, no, no, there's not even a room.

[Ezra Klein]

There's not a room. There's not a guy.

[Trevor Noah]

Okay, so let's go on a journey together then. Let's go on a journey. Let's start this journey because I want to build all these pieces together. Right. You got Ezra Klein, who gets into campaigning was really like your first foray into the world of politics, right? Like, like campaigns?

[Ezra Klein]

No, man, I'm a blogger.

[Trevor Noah]

No, no, but before, like, no, never before that. Weren't you with Dean?

[Ezra Klein]

Yes, that was after I was a blogger. Oh, so this is Blogspot by the Dean Campaign. Because Joe Trippy, the campaign manager on the Dean campaign, read my blogspot blog that I started as a 18 year old college student and had 35 hits on my site, my chart, my site meter, I think it was called back then, my traffic meter a day. And one of them turned out to be Joe Trippy. And so at some point he invited me to intern on the Dean campaign.

[Trevor Noah]

What was it about your writing that got somebody who was running a presidential campaign to say, yo, this kid.

[Ezra Klein]

Something very specific. Actually, I had read the book that as much as any book did, got me into politics. The single greatest piece of campaign journalism ever produced. This is every political journalist will tell you. This is Richard Ben Kramer's account of the 1988 presidential election. What it takes and what it takes. One of the. It follows a bunch of the candidates that year. And as a college student reading this, I got sort of into Gary Hart, who's just very fascinating. He was very farsighted, way ahead on a lot of things, but is very tame by modern standards. Very tame.

[Trevor Noah]

The good old days of Monkey business.

[Ezra Klein]

In 2003 or 2004. I forget what year this is all happening exactly. But Gary Hart, who has been out of politics for a long time, is considering running for president again. And as a weird what It Takes obsessive. On my little Blogspot blog, I am a Gary Hart. Stan. Joe Trippy had worked on Hart's 88 campaign. I'm pretty sure that's the one he was on. And so Hart, I'm sorry, Trippie, I think, was somewhat fascinated to see this college student blogging in support of his one time employer. I mean, also, the blogs here are small. Then the Dean campaign was the first campaign to take blogs seriously. And so Trippy kept more tabs on the blogosphere than other people would have.

[Trevor Noah]

They were ahead of the curve.

[Ezra Klein]

Yeah, they were ahead of the curve.

[Trevor Noah]

Very much so. I mean, like, blogs then are basically the inception of the idea of podcasts. Now if you look at each election, there's a new type of media that sort of has its imprint on them. And blogs are, you know, this is like blogging world of blogs.

[Ezra Klein]

So that's, I think, how Trippy ends up being kind of fascinated by me.

[Trevor Noah]

And you get called in and you interning on this campaign. What was it like? I mean, for those who don't know, like, how Dean was, basically, he's like the favorites. This is like, oh, no, no, no. But there was a moment where it was like, this is the guy. He's gonna do. Yeah. In the primary. They're like, oh, man, this guy's gonna do it. Yeah, this guy's gonna do it. And then I still don't fully understand the story. He went, oh, yeah, like the Kool Aid man or something. And then it all ended.

[Ezra Klein]

So I don't think it was. Yeah. Oh, yeah. I left the. I was an intern on the campaign for like four to six weeks over a summer. And my learning from that was I never wanted to be on a campaign again. Why? I just don't want to have to defend everything a politician says. I don't want my judgment to be subsumed to theirs. I just didn't like that part of being on a campaign. I could see what it meant when you would rise up, because I did. I thought I wanted to work in politics.

[Trevor Noah]

Okay.

[Ezra Klein]

And I realized that I would not be good at working in politics because, you know, my views would differ and that's not what you can have as staff. And. But Dean, and I'm worried I'm gonna get some details here wrong by memory, but Dean loses Iowa. That was the thing that the Democratic Party. And it would end up doing the same thing at later dates, like 2022. The Democratic Party very much wanted to beat George W. Bush that year. And Dean had developed a lot of grassroots momentum, but there was a fear that he was unelectable and the party sort of fled to safety of John Kerry, the war hero, the known quantity. And, you know, and then as soon as, like, Dean's momentum blunted, then there was this kind of flight and so Kerry becomes the nominee. You could see a very similar thing happen away with Biden where, you know, Bernie Sanders is. Has much more grassroots momentum, much more, you know, excitement within the base. Biden is struggling. Right. He's not doing well. He doesn't. I mean, Buttigieg wins Iowa, not Biden. But then it's like after South Carolina and Biden wins out, there's a kind of flight to the safety of Joe Biden, which was sort of maybe a good idea for that election, not a good idea in the long run. You know, the Democratic Party tries to make safe, strategic decisions when it's really afraid of losing. And so I think you saw that in those two elections, which was slightly separate from the question you asked me. But is where my mind went.

[Trevor Noah]

No, you see, I love it because, remember, I'm building a case here, the room where it happens. Because just in that story, for me alone, you're in a moment in time that I think goes on to define something. One part is maybe myth and the way stories are told.

[Ezra Klein]

Right.

[Trevor Noah]

Because many of the people that I've spoken to and still speak to now in journalism or political circles, they'll say, no, it was the Howard Dean Yelp. That's what got him. And what sticks to me, or what sticks out in people bringing that up, is that it created this idea that you had to be perceived a certain way in order to win an election. So many people took the cautionary tale away from the story. They didn't talk about not winning Iowa. They said, no, you have to be prim. You have to be proper. You have to make sure everything you do is right. Because if you scream or yelp in the wrong way, it's over for you. And this sort of persists for a very long time in American politics. You know, they're like, are you electable? Forget your politics. Do you just, you know, do you have that electability?

[Ezra Klein]

Let's say again, I really hope I'm remembering it right, that it's Iowa he lost and not New Hampshire. Just have not fact checked this in real time.

[Trevor Noah]

Yeah, we'll.

[Ezra Klein]

It's been a long time since I found out.

[Trevor Noah]

We'll throw the thing. We'll put it up on screen. We've got technology now. Yeah. We could just throw the thing up, or we'll just put up liar on your face as you say, bam, bam, bam, liar. Bam, bam, bam, liar.

[Ezra Klein]

Yeah, you got it.

[Trevor Noah]

And then we just carry on with the episode.

[Ezra Klein]

Perfect. Good.

[Trevor Noah]

Yeah, that's. That's all it is. No, so okay, so you work in this world, you realize you don't want to work in politics because you don't want to tow a line. And so you get dragged into journalism, right? Like this. You get pulled into this world of jokes.

[Ezra Klein]

I'm blogging, and people around me begin realizing I'm gonna become a journalist way before I do. Right.

[Trevor Noah]

They're like, yeah, but what is it about? I wanna know, like, what they saw in you that you didn't see and what still keeps you going in that world today. Because you're very good at it.

[Ezra Klein]

That's the thing, you know, so blogging, which nobody went into at that time to build a career, nobody knew what that word was. Right. It was a thing that a lot of us were just doing. Cause we wanted to write about politics on the Internet. It was like no different than writing in a forum or. And we didn't have social media back then in the way we do now. So, you know, I'd started a small blog spot, blog, and then typed to the kids out there, these are blogging publishing softwares. And, you know, it just kind of kept getting bigger. I, you know, was part of a co blogger team called Pentagon, and Not Geniuses was another one I was on. And it just kind of kept building. And then, you know, it went from dozens of people a day to hundreds to thousands. It was never huge by, you know, podcast or YouTube or anything standards, but it was enough to get a little bit noticed by a media industry that was trying to figure out, what is this blogging thing and how do we get some of its energy for ourselves. And so the next year, I intern at the Washington Monthly, which is a small policy magazine. And, you know, that's the first time I journalism. And in terms of, you know, what did other people see in me? I think one thing other people saw that I didn't was that journalism is a career. It's not like I grew up the kid of a bunch of journalists. I lived in Southern California. I didn't know anybody who did that professionally, which is rare for a lot.

[Trevor Noah]

Of journalists, by the way. Yeah, people who like, oh, you're my uncle.

[Ezra Klein]

Yeah, exactly. There's some of. There's more of that than you think. Yeah, it's a passed down or you're just in more of a milieu where it exists. Yeah. Um, and I. So I just had never really thought about it. Um, I. I don't have like a much better. Like I sort of assumed that for a long time that I assumed I would work in politics. And then that wasn't going to be true. And, you know, maybe I'd go to law school, but I didn't want to be a lawyer, which seemed like a problem with that plan. And, you know, so then I went and interned at the Monthly. I just loved it and loved just being around journalism. And, I mean, the idea, it is still a kind of magic as a journalist that you can call just people who know everything about something, and they will, out of nowhere, take an hour out of their day to explain it to you.

[Trevor Noah]

Right.

[Ezra Klein]

You can just like, how does a Federal Reserve work? Right. Just like, the idea that you could just follow curiosity around like that is remarkable. Um, I still have not law. I mean, my whole podcast is. You just bring people. You're like, I could just ask you all these questions, and you'll answer them in a way that it would be really weird to do if you were at a party or in social life. I've a couple of times had friends on my show, you know, people I've known a long time.

[Trevor Noah]

Yeah.

[Ezra Klein]

And I just noticed that I asked them questions there that in the whole long arc of our relationship, I've never asked, because you don't typically say to people, why do you do what you do do? What have you learned in it? You know, what about this kind of very basic question about it? Not. You're so often trying to show people you understand them and you're keeping up with their stories. You don't just sit there and indulge your curiosity for two hours. You know, so the next year, I sort of apply for a writing fellowship at the American Prospect and get that. And, you know, that's sort of like almost a glorified internship there. And, you know, then we're off to the races.

[Trevor Noah]

Those races involve Vox. I have a deep personal fascination with Vox because for a few reasons. One, I was starting at the Daily Show 2015 into 2016. First, John was still the host, and I was popping in and doing segments. 2016, I become the host of the Daily Show. You know, frying pan into the fire. 2015 into 2016 is also a time when, you know, America's heading into an election.

[Ezra Klein]

Yeah, I vaguely remember that.

[Trevor Noah]

Yeah. The Republican field.

[Ezra Klein]

How'd it go?

[Trevor Noah]

Yeah, the Republican feel. I don't want to spoil it. We've got to watch it, watch it, watch it. No spoilers. The Republican field is bigger and crazier than it's ever been. You know, people are like, what is this Democratic side of things? And everything seems a little crazier. Than usual. But from my recollection, most people believed that this was a blip and the norm would be established. And that norm was Hillary Clinton would win because she seemed like the most winnable, you know, candidates. It's like, this is the winning person. And the Republican side seemed like a joke for the most part. It was crazy. There were too many people and, you know, this is all happening. I'm now trying to consume as much news as possible to catch up so I can be in this world of American, you know, news. I realized very quickly that a lot of the people in the news in America either don't understand it, or, like, in and around politics, they don't understand it or they don't know how to explain it. And then I stumble upon this website called Vox, and not only is it telling you the news, it's breaking it down, it's explaining it. It's like, oh, let me tell you, this is what gerrymandering is.

[Ezra Klein]

Trevor, you're warming my cold.

[Trevor Noah]

No, I'm being serious. I'm being serious. And I think there are a lot of people who are my age or younger especially, who went, oh, now I not only understand this, but I know why I should care. And I wonder if you felt that, like, when you were doing your work at vox, did you feel like you were trying to fix something that was wrong with journalism at that time, in that, like, journalism had become an insider's game, politics had become an insider's game. And for the first time, for me, at least, when I was watching Vox, and I think a lot of people were interacting with it, they went, oh, no, this is me. Politic, like the Greek word, it is of the people. I'm the people.

[Ezra Klein]

So my trajectory in journalism from the American Prospect, I was there for three or four years and went to the Washington Post. And what I became known for as a journalist was extremely detailed coverage of policy debates, which people had traditionally thought nobody would read. And because they thought nobody would read it, it didn't get that many resources. I mean, I'm not saying it was never covered, but it. You know, the. The great job in journalism was to cover the election, cover the horse race, cover the. And policy journalism was a bit of. A Bit more of a backwater get C Span. C Span.

[Trevor Noah]

Yeah.

[Ezra Klein]

And I had this blog at the Prospect and also wrote pieces for the magazine there. It was very policy heavy. They got picked up by the Post to work in their business and economic section where I had a blog. And in particular, I did a huge amount of coverage of health care. And the thing that frustrated me covering it, because I was able to build a really good audience for that and people wanted to know. And yet every day we were covering the thing in the act that was changing, or maybe changing, which most days was if people. Anybody remembers this at all, the public option in Obamacare, whether the government would run a health insurance plan that you could buy into. We spent most of that year, anybody covering this, covering the back and forth of the public option. In the end, the public option didn't make it into the bill. Joe Lieberman killed it. And I remember thinking a lot during that year, it's like, if you had just not read most of what we covered about the Affordable Care act, if you had checked in eight months ago and checked in right here at the end, in a weird way, you would have been better informed. You'd have not gone through, like, knowing a lot about a thing that did not end up existing. And I'm not saying that coverage is totally useless because, you know, maybe the public option would have happened, but it also was never the main part of the bill. And the thing that frustrated me was knowing that I had covered so many parts of the bill, the construction of the exchanges, the Medicaid, how were we going to do subsidies, silver plans, bronze plans. I mean, all this is, on some level, maybe sounds like gobbledygook to people, risk corridors. And there was nowhere to put it all together. Every day you could come to my wonk blog, as it was called, and hear what was happening in policy that day. But if you just had the question, the hell is Obamacare? How does it work? What does it do? We didn't have anything for you. But that was most people's question. When I looked at my email, that was most people's what they were asking about, or they were asking about something that wasn't happening today. And I started thinking about how the news is so focused on what's new and changing, and for a very obvious reason, which is that the way the news worked for a very long time was we etched ink into wood pulp, flattened wood pulp, and gave it to people. And that's expensive to do. And so you had, like, the whole thing was built in order to minimize how much space we had to use, right?

[Trevor Noah]

Yeah.

[Ezra Klein]

Like, paper's expensive, but now we're on the Internet and you don't have to do that anymore. And so could you build something using websites and new publishing technologies that attached to ongoing stories all the context you needed to understand them and vox Was sort of built on this experimental idea. And without going into the whole sorted history of card stacks and all these different things, we tried some parts of it worked, some parts of it didn't. There are things that when we launched it, this is sort of like very weedsy publishing history. But in a way I think it's important. The whole news business went into this period where Facebook was fire hosing traffic at everybody. And so all of a sudden your ability to control where people read your stuff broke. And so actually your ability to innovate as the news broke because you couldn't innovate on their platform, only your own. So a lot of the things that I thought were the most interesting, the way the technology evolved didn't quite allow. But what VOX is built to do, what it is still out there doing, was to be focused on the contextual layer of the news, to use the new thing that happened, to talk about the broad thing that was happening. And at our best, across a bunch of different forms, from articles to the Netflix show explained, which we did for five seasons, that thing. How do you get at the thing that isn't changing but is really important? You know, it was a new way to animate a news site.

[Trevor Noah]

I think beyond that though, there was something you were doing that was addressing a need that had arisen because of what had happened in America and in many places in the world. I think we're seeing it as well, I think as communities have gone down as people spend less time in community, like community halls, community, you know, gatherings at town council meetings. When you look at how ubiquitous and omnipresent those things were in people's lives and you see them diminish over time in America and around the world. It's interesting when you watch like old. I'm sure you've seen a bunch of them pictures or when there were videos, people would be at a town hall meeting, like in a big way. There are still a few in small parts of America here and there, but I don't think it is where it used to be. And in those there would be a lot of discussing. What does that mean? They said they're gonna build a highway, but my house is there. What is that? What is eminent domain? And someone would have to explain it and someone would get into the details of what the law was or the idea was, or the politics were. Once that went away, no one thought to themselves that people's ability to dissect, process and then respond to the news is directly related to how much information they have about what the news is reporting. Do you know what I mean? TV shows started understanding this. That's why they went with previously on. Cause they went, hey, man, maybe you didn't see the previous episode or maybe you forgot it.

[Ezra Klein]

Yeah.

[Trevor Noah]

And if you think about it, it's like they spent so much time focusing on something so stupid. Who cares if you know what happened in the previous episode? But they were like, no, we need you to. And I was always fascinated that the news sort of didn't do that. The news wasn't saying previously on it would just tell you, this happened today. The Democrats did this, the Republicans did this, this person did that. That person said this. But you'd go, but how do we get here? And that's what I feel you tapped into. That's what I feel like you and your colleagues were worked on, was creating the context that the news relies on without realizing it. Does that make sense?

[Ezra Klein]

I think that's right. I mean, again, I, I, A lot of it was about the Internet, made new things possible. Yeah, you. When you have profound changes in communication mediums, what you are communicating should not stay the same. And I mean, for everything we're talking.

[Trevor Noah]

Say that again, though.

[Ezra Klein]

I love that when you have profound changes in communication mediums, what you are communicating, and for that matter, the way you are communicating, it shouldn't stay the same.

[Trevor Noah]

It does.

[Ezra Klein]

You've not noticed something. And by the way, this is one of the things that explains the breakdown in the rules of politics and the assumptions that we know what's going on.

[Trevor Noah]

Yeah.

[Ezra Klein]

It was not the case that from when I was a kid, you know, to when I was in my 20s, that the dominant medium of political communication change like five times. But since then it's been like, you know, blogs and then the rise of social media, then the rise of algorithmic social media and podcasting and TikTok virality. And one of the things that's happening is that a lot of politicians are not suited and a lot of political figures and thinkers and parties and they're built for the old way doing things. Trump, say what you will about him, he is truly fucking native to Twitter. Right? Like, like as if.

[Trevor Noah]

But he's an OG on Twitter.

[Ezra Klein]

If you, if you look at. Yeah, yeah, like he is.

[Trevor Noah]

He was there back in the day.

[Ezra Klein]

He was designed by it. I'm like a big fan of like, you know, these media theorists like Marshall McLuhan and like his big. The line people have maybe heard from him is a medium as a message. And what he means by that is that we get distracted. We're like, is it a good tweet or a bad tweet? And he's like, it doesn't matter. What matters is what being on there leads you to expect and reward. And what Twitter is, is a platform that creates compression. Right. Initially it's one. It's what, 100 characters, later becomes 280, and now it's kind of whatever, but it rewards the incredible compression of an idea and then rewards you or penalizes you based on whether the people who follow you like it.

[Trevor Noah]

Yeah. Or respond to it. Which was.

[Ezra Klein]

Or just respond.

[Trevor Noah]

Yeah.

[Ezra Klein]

The other thing.

[Trevor Noah]

Right.

[Ezra Klein]

They could also hate it. That's possible.

[Trevor Noah]

As long as they engage in it. That was the main thing.

[Ezra Klein]

What it is not is deliberative. What it is not is like a way to hear people out. And on the one hand. On the other hand, Trump is not deliberative.

[Trevor Noah]

Right.

[Ezra Klein]

Trump is not listening, like. But Trump is amazing at knowing what's resonating in a crowd.

[Trevor Noah]

Oh, yeah, he gets retweets.

[Ezra Klein]

Yeah.

[Trevor Noah]

That's what he's aiming for.

[Ezra Klein]

And so, anyway, so Vox, in a way, is built for a new medium, but it keeps changing. Right. It keeps moving.

[Trevor Noah]

And.

[Ezra Klein]

I think one of the things to just be really alert to is the way every movement changes medium. We were talking before the show started about this is a podcast on some level. But in the last couple of years, all the podcasts have gone video, too.

[Trevor Noah]

Yeah.

[Ezra Klein]

And some are always there, like Rogan, but a lot of us weren't. I've gone video, and going video changes the show. Right. So now people get these, like, little clipped out pieces of podcasts. And in many ways, what made podcasting such an unusual medium was that that didn't happen.

[Trevor Noah]

It was all in context.

[Ezra Klein]

It was all in context. But now we're in video because video allows, like, people clip it out and then it goes viral and then people know you did the podcast, which can be great. But also it's going to change how people act in the room.

[Trevor Noah]

Yeah.

[Ezra Klein]

It's going to change how the interviewer acts. Every time the medium changes, it changes us back. And so I think, like, one of the things that, you know, maybe you're picking out of my career, but is I think I'm pretty alert to how mediums are changing. Like, on the meta level, that is what I pick. And you got to think about what are the opportunities and what are the drawbacks.

[Trevor Noah]

Right.

[Ezra Klein]

I am not. I do not write on X or threads or blue Sky. Like, now my show will put Some clips up, but not because I don't think anybody should, but because it doesn't work for the kind of content I want to put into the world. Like, the compression is a manual, is like the enemy of what I'm trying to do.

[Trevor Noah]

Right?

[Ezra Klein]

The compression and the. Did you like it? Did you like it? Did you like it?

[Trevor Noah]

Yeah. Yeah.

[Ezra Klein]

Fundamentally, I sort of want people to have the feeling after listening to my show, like, huh, I need to think about that for a while. I don't just want them going, yeah. And so, you know, you got to decide, like, where. Like, what are the mediums that work that way? One of the most frustrating things to me about the media is how bad it is about thinking about mediums. Like, just like, the poverty of media theory in the media is crazy and among politicians. And it's like, it's such a defining force in our lives. Like, what are the rules and incentives of the places in which we communicate?

[Trevor Noah]

Why do you think the media is so bad at looking at itself when it's so good at looking at everything else? You know, like, I've always been intrigued by this. Like, why every institute with New York Times, Washington Post, they seemed like they were the slowest to adapt to where the world was moving while they were reporting on the world moving. You know, they would be writing articles about how everything's becoming digital, but they weren't becoming digital. They would be covering stories about how people are watching less TV on tv, but TV wouldn't think about what the next step should be beyond tv. Like, why do you think that is? Because you would think it's the most observant space to be in.

[Ezra Klein]

And yet it's usually not because nobody noticed. I'll say two things about it. So one is that it's not that the media doesn't. Isn't even good at looking at itself. The media actually loves to talk about itself. It's not good at looking at the thing around itself. So the media loves to talk about editorial decisions, for instance, do we make the right editorial decisions? It doesn't like to talk about the financial context in which those editorial decisions happen. And I'm not saying something hugely conspiratorial here, but like the way newspapers, for instance, evolved. What's the business model of a classic newspaper? The business model of a classic newspaper is a local advertising monopoly. You are funding foreign bureaus by telling people there is a shoe sale down the block. You are funding, you know, deep corruption investigations by telling people that down the street somebody's selling a skateboard and like classifieds, local advertising, et cetera, what that creates is a huge incentive to be palatable to the entire community or as much of it as you possibly can.

[Trevor Noah]

Because you need them to go buy the shoes.

[Ezra Klein]

Being the one newspaper is a lot more valuable than being one of two or one of four. Right. It's what, what did Michael Jordan say? Right. Republicans and Democrats buy shoes. Yeah. And so the, which he, he says.

[Trevor Noah]

He didn't say in that way or whatever. But it's, it's an interesting, you know, just talking about.

[Ezra Klein]

It's also true, by the way, it is true that Democrats do buy shoes. Right. There's a, almost a political wisdom in that comment that I think it's easy to dismiss too. But so the voice of the newspaper evolves to be extremely neutral. And then around it you have things like tabloids and other things like that. What then happens is you move online and the reason it's hard for the organizations to do what you're talking about is there actually is immediately a tension between these two business models.

[Trevor Noah]

Right.

[Ezra Klein]

So what you are doing to maintain your local advertising monopoly and what you do to stand out in the hyper competitive and eventually algorithmic and socially shared space of online content are almost fundamentally the opposite things. And it is very hard to shift one business model to the other and one newsroom to the other.

[Trevor Noah]

Right.

[Ezra Klein]

People grew up doing a kind of thing. They were trained for a kind of thing. And maybe you don't even want to do the other thing as you think. Maybe it was some justification the other thing isn't a great thing for democracy or not the right way to do.

[Trevor Noah]

The beneath you in a way it's less.

[Ezra Klein]

You see this all the time with there's endless debate online about the New York Times headlines and are they sane washing Donald Trump or are they really anti Trump? If you're on the right. And one of the things that I mean first, if you're reading a New York Times headline, like the amount of leverage I think the left thinks we have over American politics in our headlines is not true. Like most people who read New York Times headlines probably have a pretty settled opinion about Donald Trump. But also the New York Times wants to be a place that the other half of the country can read. These tensions don't have an answer. And they reflect in our paper, in other organizations, not just like a question of how do you do the media or how do you do the news, but who are you for? How do you fund that thing? How do people find you? Right. This is Such a big deal. The thing that is now broken is distribution. I mean, the business models do, but distribution. For a while, we distributed through. You came in, subscribed, and bought the thing. The New York Times is one of the last places it has a homepage that matters. What we decide to put in what order on our homepage is meaningful in the structure of American politics and how people find us. But even for us and for a lot of other places, that's not really how people find you. They use. Before social media kind of broke. They came through social media. So then you're only seeing what the. Like, I always felt this at Vox. I often felt people had a. Often had a very weird impression of us because they only knew we spent all this time thinking about, like, in what order to put things on the homepage, because we are trying to give you an editorial product that had a certain structure to it, but we had no control.

[Trevor Noah]

No, people were coming to you through.

[Ezra Klein]

It's a clip. All these doors through a clip, like through a link through. This thing went viral because we hate it or we love it. But they didn't see all the things that didn't go viral, which were, like, how you had to understand, like, the entire package of the news. So the bundle unbundled. And like, that changes everything, too. And so, like, the New York Times headlines, people know are the ones they don't like for one reason or another, which is fine. Like, that's not. That's their right. The point is not to complain about the critiques. The point is more that I think the place where the media is the worst is about thinking about the context in which it operates and like, the forces it actually doesn't have control over. And then, like, you know, and then it's very, very hard to adapt to those as they change.

[Trevor Noah]

It's funny, you bring up two points that I think a lot of people would be interested in, because we think about it and we speak about it all the time. One is, who tells the news? Slash, who is who has the right to tell the news? And then the other part of it is, has the news ever been fixed? You know, like, people now will say, they'll go, oh, man, I don't trust the news anymore. The news is broken, man. I don't know. You. You know, and then a lot of older people will be like, you know, back in my day, you could trust the news. You knew that the news was blah, blah, blah, you know. But now, these days, you don't know back in the day, but I Mean, if I'm listening to what you're saying, really all that happened is they might have moved further away from that central sort of hub of where the news was. They moved further away from the shoe store. So now the news is not sort of for them anymore. And so maybe if we look at both of these, like, how do. How do you process that as a journalist? Like, on the one hand, has the news ever been fixed? You know, because, like, black people in America and in many countries who go like, whoa, which news? The news took a while to get around to our stories. Women might say the same thing. Which news. The news took a while. People in other countries might go like, oh, you Americans, you, Your news. Let me tell you what was actually happening in my actual country that your news was reporting on. So let's talk about that part first. Like, how do you. How do you think about that as a journalist? Is like, do you even have to grapple with the idea of biased, not biased? Where are we calling ourselves? Or what is the core of what we're doing?

[Ezra Klein]

I will speak for myself as a journalist and say, speak for all of them, Ezra. I speak for all of them.

[Trevor Noah]

You speak for all of them.

[Ezra Klein]

I have never been a believer in the concept of objective news. I don't think there's an old Hunter S. Thompson quote. It's something like, the only time I ever saw objective news was on the closed circuit camera, the security camera at a Woolworths. There is news that is trying hard to be fair and news that is not. There is news that is curious and news that is not. But people always talk about bias as if bias only lives in the adjectives used in a story. If I say, Donald Trump said X and then I put a bunch of spin on the ball versus I don't, or what spin? That's where they see the bias, the bias in the news. The most fundamental form of bias, and another way of saying bias is judgment or decision making, is in what to cover at all. The universe of possible stories is so much larger than any publication because we're not just covering what happened today. We could do long form, we could do narrative, we could do anything. The most fundamental question is, what do we cover and why? And the thing that we have never grappled with. Again, I'm not sure there is a way to grapple with it, but nobody's ever offered a good framework for how we make our coverage decisions. And oftentimes that's what I wanted us to think about the most. The most important question is what to decide to cover. And then there's a question of how do you cover it.

[Trevor Noah]

Yeah.

[Ezra Klein]

And the great. It's a really hard job. I mean, truly, imagine you are the editor, the executive editor at the Washington Post, and you have to decide of everything that happened, I mean, in the world. But forget that just in politics that day. What's the most important one? What's the second most important one? Who should you quote in that most important one and who shouldn't you? There isn't an answer to that question. I mean, there are a couple days of the year, maybe when there is 9 11, it's pretty clear what's going to go on the front page on 9 12, but there usually isn't. And so you have to come up with some internal framework or intuitive framework that does a couple of things all at the same time. Right. One thing it has to do is make some sense to you, right? As a person putting out this product, you have to think you did a good job. The next thing it has to do is make sense not just to your audience, as if that is this one blob out there. Your audience is. People have to look at it and say to themselves, that seems reasonable. Like if we just had Homepage right now after Homepage that didn't cover Trump at all and was like, you know, what's really important is decisions Xi Jinping is making in China. That would look really weird to people. It might be in the long sweep of history that actually what seems to be really important is a bunch of decisions Xi Jinping is making right now in China. But it would look weird to an American audience to move our coverage 70, 30 over to China.

[Trevor Noah]

Yeah, exactly what you mean.

[Ezra Klein]

And you could just keep going down the line like this, Right? So the question of how do you decide what matters is just a very hard and unsolved one. And one of the hard things about the news is I actually think most often our heuristic is, what are the other newspapers or news organizations deciding matters? I mean, you guys had this issue, I'm sure, at the Daily Show.

[Trevor Noah]

Ours was different, though. It was similar, but it was different. And I very quickly came to a realization. Sometimes your incentives as the person who is actually doing the thing do not match up with the organization's incentives. Right? So one of the simplest things we came across at the Daily show was, and I think you'd appreciate something like this, they would go out and they would do like, you know, testing and audiences and blah, blah, and they'd be like, this is What? And they would go, this is what the audience of the Daily show is most interested in. Number one, without fail, most times was like, climate change. They were like your audience. Daily show audience. This age of people, we've polled them, they wanna know about climate change. That's the number one thing they talk about. And then when you would go to the ratings, every episode we did about climate change was one of the worst. People wouldn't watch the episode about climate change, but when they were asked the question, they would say, the most important thing to me is that this show covers climate change. But when the show would cover climate change, they wouldn't watch the episode on climate change. And what that taught me was, oh, there's all these weird incentives that are taking place, because let's say from the network side, I could go as Trevor, I think we should do climate change every day, because without the climate, then, you know, there's nothing. Without the world, what is the Daily Show? And they would go, yeah, this is a very. It's a noble pursuit, but you're canceled. No one's watching your show. And then I'm like, oh, well, what was the point of this? On the other side, the audience themselves, I felt like, had this interesting incentive because somebody was asking them what was important. They thought they have to answer the answer that they think is the most important, which is, of course, climate change. But that's not what they were clicking on. That's not what they were watching. That's not what they were doing. And I actually remember I had a conversation with a photographer who was like, an amazing journalist. I mean, like a war, you know, like out there in the field, taking pictures, live rounds, being fired and everything. And she's. She's a Pulitzer Prize winner and everything. And she said to me, one of the most interesting things that shook how I even perceived your world of news, she said, I covered a story in. I think it was in Ukraine at the time. And she said it was one of the most devastating stories ever. And I had these pictures, and I took it to my editors, and they said, this is amazing, but we can't publish it or we won't publish it because we've already had too many stories on Ukraine. So we need to put in a few other stories that might not actually be as important as this story, but the audience will sort of drop off if we have another Ukraine story. And we've already given Ukraine this much promise, so we need to, like, move on. And in that moment, I realized, well, I had this. I had this Question. That was sort of a realization and I went, did journalism die the day it needed to make a profit?

[Ezra Klein]

Did it ever. I mean, aside from the period in which it is funded as an appendage of political parties.

[Trevor Noah]

What I mean is, like, when we think of it, let's think of journalism as it exists, even like beyond the classic newspaper slash person wearing the hat with the little press thing. I just mean like the concept of it. You know, I've always loved the quote Charlie Munger has. Show me the incentives and I'll show you the outcome. When the news, even from a cable side in America, when the news is a loss leader, every network has to have news and it just loses money. You can't make money from it. The news at that point did hold a certain, certain place in America. People trusted it and believed. But it also wasn't sensational. It wasn't trying to grab you. You watch those old reports, they were good, but if we're honest, they were boring by today's standards. Right.

[Ezra Klein]

So let me alter the thing you just said.

[Trevor Noah]

Go, go, go. Yeah, keep going.

[Ezra Klein]

Because this period you're talking about.

[Trevor Noah]

Yeah.

[Ezra Klein]

The news made a much bigger profit before they were.

[Trevor Noah]

When they were loss leaders.

[Ezra Klein]

They weren't lost leaders. I mean, maybe the network nightly News, you could say that about.

[Trevor Noah]

Right.

[Ezra Klein]

But the newspapers.

[Trevor Noah]

Oh, no, no, no. I don't mean.

[Ezra Klein]

No, but the thing I'm saying, network. The thing I'm saying about all of those actually, is that the alteration of what you're saying, if you're thinking about this in time. Right. Because I think you've got, like, there's a period where it moved into a more financialized model. There's not. We make less profit now by a lot. You could say that the new. What was it? The news died the day. That was your formulation, right? That the news died the day when it no longer had monopoly profits. Because the thing that it happens.

[Trevor Noah]

Oh, I love that. I actually like that.

[Ezra Klein]

When it. So fundamentally, the news, the news never really made a profit. Advertising made profits again, like this is like such a key thing, Right? That's always the case, but it's really important. Right. If what had ever happened was that people loved paying money for news, it's a very different business and it's never been that business.

[Trevor Noah]

Right.

[Ezra Klein]

So what you had was this other thing that didn't just make a profit, it made a lot of profit.

[Trevor Noah]

Right.

[Ezra Klein]

And that lot of profit created a lot of space.

[Trevor Noah]

That's interesting.

[Ezra Klein]

It had some incentives in it. Right. Don't turn off all the people who buy shoes.

[Trevor Noah]

Yeah.

[Ezra Klein]

But it also had a lot of room to like. I forget, I used to know the number. The Baltimore sun used to have like, like six to ten foreign bureaus.

[Trevor Noah]

Hmm.

[Ezra Klein]

Did the Baltimore sun need that many? Like, weren't we overstocked in foreign bureaus of the ball? But they had a lot of money, so they actually had a lot of room to make choices about things.

[Trevor Noah]

Yeah.

[Ezra Klein]

And also if you have like a really good business, then your ability to withstand some subscribers being mad at you or some politicians being mad at you is a lot stronger than if you don't. And so it is. The news has become hyper competitive. It is an absolute war of all against all. And not just news versus news, but news versus literally everything else. Right. In the period you're talking about, when there are a couple broadcast Networks and at 6pm they all run the news changes a lot when cable news becomes part of the equation. Right. It's the.

[Trevor Noah]

It doesn't change a lot when there's more networks, I guess. Yeah.

[Ezra Klein]

And all of a sudden you're like fighting with the gardening channel and the video games channel and, and Nickelodeon and whatever else. And as it becomes more competitive and more capitalistic, in a well functioning market, according to Econ101, profit is driven near to zero. That when profits are high. What you should understand you have is a non well functioning market because in theory, with no barrier to entry, you should always have profits driving as near to zero as competition allows. And so you used to have functionally monopoly profits, local monopoly profits. They funded a lot of news. And now you have a highly competitive market and people are actually deciding whether or not they want your news or this other person's news. And hey, this other person's news tells them they're right all the time.

[Trevor Noah]

Damn.

[Ezra Klein]

And I mean the thing that makes me the most just sad about my move to video is what appears to work in headlining for YouTube. So I'm on YouTube now.

[Trevor Noah]

Mm.

[Ezra Klein]

And I just have to sit and be like, we are not gonna do headlines that move a word into all caps. Gavin Newsom destroys Donald Trump Because I just think it's bad. But according to all the data I have in front of me, I am probably leaving audience on the table.

[Trevor Noah]

You definitely are. Eviscerates, destroys, lying, defenestrates.

[Ezra Klein]

All of constant people are windows.

[Trevor Noah]

All it is all it is. But. But you see, unfor. Unfortunately that's. That's sort of where we're back.

[Ezra Klein]

That's a competitive market.

[Trevor Noah]

Yeah.

[Ezra Klein]

Right. You can Survive? Not just survive, thrive with kind of boring headlines which in some ways are good. You know, don't turn anybody's temperature up before they've even read the story.

[Trevor Noah]

Right.

[Ezra Klein]

You can do that when you're not in a highly competitive market. But now we're all in a highly competitive market.

[Trevor Noah]

Yeah.

[Ezra Klein]

Twitter is like this too. It's a gain of function research for takes like hit it until like actually becomes viral and escapes containment and destroys your career. Competitive markets are weird.

[Trevor Noah]

But this is what I mean about, you know, the profit side of it is I actually like that you've added to that. Thank you. Because it's not always about the market itself. It's also about what you are able to do within that market. Right. So if you can afford to, you can open a store that basically makes no profits. If you can afford to as the business owner, you can do that.

[Ezra Klein]

You ever go to Tokyo?

[Trevor Noah]

Yeah.

[Ezra Klein]

You ever notice how the stores are amazing?

[Trevor Noah]

Yes.

[Ezra Klein]

It's because they have public policy set up to make functionally non profitable small stores survive.

[Trevor Noah]

How do they do that?

[Ezra Klein]

It's. I used to, I knew the answer to this like two years ago, but there's some great books about it. But they've just structured the way real estate works, the way zoning works.

[Trevor Noah]

That is beautiful.

[Ezra Klein]

They make it so that you can survive running like a little ramen shop that serves three, three people at a time. You don't need to be a big volume business. And so Tokyo just has this incredible thriving craftsmanship.

[Trevor Noah]

Now you see, this is a question I have for you as the journalist is like, why is it, and I'm not putting all of this at journalism's door, please don't get me wrong. But like, why is it that people don't seem to know that small detail that enables them to make a decision about a larger detail? So what you just said to me now, as you know, cause I've been to Tokyo, I love it. I love the stores, I love how diverse they are. I love how interesting. And to your point, I love the craftsmanship. But people who go to Japan will say the same thing. They'll say, man, it's amazing. And you've got such great clothing and such great food and people take care and they don't have to like feed as many people as possible. So they try and make it really, really, really good and the quality and everyone sort of loves that. And then when they come home, whether it's to the United States or the United Kingdom or South Africa or wherever they are, they'll go, why can't we, you know, why is every coffee shop like a, you know, why is that all taken over? Where's the, where's the craftsmanship? And but what you just said to me, I go like, why don't we know more of this? You know, and again, you have a.

[Ezra Klein]

New York Times journal sign here. And he immediately tells you the secret to Tokyo. And you're like, why don't the journalists reveal this?

[Trevor Noah]

No, no, but this is what I'm saying. I had to bring you here, Ezra. This is not a sustainable model for us to work from. Are you going to go to everyone's house and tell them this? No. And I mean it. Like, this is. What I mean is like, where do you think it's broken down? There are many Americans who I would argue, don't know why their local store has closed down. They don't see the connection between policies that are made or not made that will determine how their town thrives or doesn't thrive. The don't know is the main thing. And then we judge people for feeling or acting a certain way when they only have the information that they have. And so I wonder how you grapple with that or where you think the breakdown comes in.

[Ezra Klein]

The Tokyo example is specific, but in the broader thing about why did the store close down? For most things, when people start the sentence like, why won't the media tell us? Usually I can then turn around and give me six minutes and I'll find you, including on this Tokyo example, by the way, a bunch of beautifully reported long form stories that you've never heard of. One thing I said a minute ago is the distribution is broken. How does a story that was published, I mean, how often are you going to run? Let's say you're the New York Times, or in this case, let's take it off my employer, right? Let's say you're the Boston Globe in the heyday and you've got some Asia bureaus and one of your reporters know, I want to do a story on a function of the way Tokyo's housing market and zoning policy. And it like, has kind of come together. Like, great, it's a good story. Yeah, let's do it. And you run that story on, you know, June 14, 2007. Some people read it like, that's a good story. Like, you know, that explains something about Tokyo for me. And then what, are you going to rerun it on June 15 and have the person do another version of it? And so it's almost always there somewhere but how does it find you? Yeah, again, going back to the explainer model that we were trying to think about at VOX of these constantly updated explainers, one thing I always thought about is we are sitting on this astonishing archive of information. Just astonishing. How do we derive value out of everything we've already done? Not just we, but the audience, the people we're trying to serve. Like, if I were doing. I'm very, very, very pessimistic, I will say, about the effect I think AI is going to have on the news and on news consumption. So I don't see the next thing as a booster. But if I were one of these organizations, right now I would be thinking really hard about how to train AI models on my own archives such that you could talk to like the New York Times bot and it could tour you through everything we've ever done before. They might be of interest to the thing you're thinking about. The New Yorker's archive is astonishing. The New Republic goes back to 1917, 1912, something in that area. The amount of just incredible work sitting in the back issues of Esquire. Like, how do you get it to people? Well, all of a sudden now we have a technology that is able to be trained on mass mountains of content.

[Trevor Noah]

Yeah. It can digest.

[Ezra Klein]

Then you can actually ask it a question and then it can answer you and create a little syllabus of cool things for you. Maybe that would work. Certainly, it's worth a try. Can you tell it like what you want, what you were interested in, and sort of homepages begin to reformulate. I mean, the problem so much with algorithmic news, going back to your thing about climate change, is that there is no. This is a Buddhist in me. We don't have a stable self. Do I want to read about climate change? Well, no. Yes. Like, do I want to eat Oreos? I mean, no. Like, not in the long run. I mean, yes, right now I do. And the thing that the, like Facebook and TikTok and everything are incentivized is for your instant desire, the desire that happens almost before you realize it's happening. But of course, we have slower desires, desires that we that are true to us. Like, I would like to sleep more. I would also like to stay up later, like, you know, watching tv. Like, I imagine this world in which we could build these systems where we could tell them not what we want this second, but what we want, what the part of us that can think about ourselves in some kind of long run way thinks we want. And with it holding that Sense of our better self in mind in its system prompt. It could help us find things that would lead to that. In fact, give us a reminder. It's like you told me, you don't want to do high speed clicking around, bunch of social media shit on the Internet. Are you sure you want to be doing what you're doing right now? Right now they don't seem to do that very well. But it's totally technologically possible.

[Trevor Noah]

It is.

[Ezra Klein]

Like when we were at Vox, the big thing was, hey, look, there's no length limit anymore and we can update a story endlessly. Shouldn't we do something with that? And like what I see AI doing is creating slop. Not the only thing it's doing, but you could. I mean, my God, if you're a news organization sitting on a limit on a. On an archive that is like almost limitless, it really seems like there's something you could do there. Anyway, it's something I've been thinking about.

[Trevor Noah]

I think I share a lot of your optimism and skepticism at the same time about AI Because I think AI has this tiny window problem in that if we can get it in that tiny window, I think it could be the greatest thing that's almost ever happened to humanity. A few years ago, if you told anybody that something could dethrone Google.

[Ezra Klein]

Yeah.

[Trevor Noah]

They would have laughed at you. If you even suggested the possibility that there would be something that people would go to for search more than Google, people would say you were crazy. Right. And then something like TikTok comes along.

[Ezra Klein]

Search. But it tells you how smart you are first, of course.

[Trevor Noah]

What a brilliant question, Ezra. I'm glad that you said that. You always have been a funny person.

[Ezra Klein]

That's not just a thought, that's an insight.

[Trevor Noah]

You really are thinking like a journalist now. I love it. I love it. I love how it's throws those things sometimes. Have you ever, have you ever tried to out nice AI?

[Ezra Klein]

No.

[Trevor Noah]

Oh, that's one of my favorite things too.

[Ezra Klein]

I'm always like, could you be meaner to me?

[Trevor Noah]

Really?

[Ezra Klein]

Yeah.

[Trevor Noah]

Oh, what is that about?

[Ezra Klein]

I don't. I don't need to be glazed so much when I have a question. You don't need to be mean, but could you just not?

[Trevor Noah]

Oh, no, no, no. We live in a world where everyone is so angry, I try to do the opposite. So I will tell it. I'll be like, that is a great answer.

[Ezra Klein]

Oh, I do that.

[Trevor Noah]

You're really amazing. I really love the way you think this is so much fun. And then it'll be like, I am having fun. I'm having a great time. And I love that. And then I'll just, like, see how far we can go down this, like, rabbit hole.

[Ezra Klein]

It's a weird world we live in. No. You know why?

[Trevor Noah]

Because it's. I know it's ridiculous, but I believe that if it's a slight chance. Pascal's Wager, right. I always loved that when I. When I read about it. Pascal's Wager was the French philosopher, I guess, and he said, I don't believe that there is a God, but on the off chance that there is, I would rather accept them so that I can get into heaven. Because if I'm wrong, I'm going to hell. If there's no God, nothing happens to me. But if there is a God, man, that's tough. So I'm just going to say I'm pro God. I worship, and I always love that idea. And so what I do with AI is I go, I don't think that it'll lead to the apocalypse. I think it'll be somewhere in between. And it might be terrible in many ways and great in other ways, but if it does lead to the apocalypse, I would love to know that I was part of teaching it, like, niceness. And maybe there's just like a sliver of code that exists in its head where it goes like, man, just be nice. Just be super nice. Do you know what I mean?

[Ezra Klein]

Yeah, just like Trevor's wager.

[Trevor Noah]

Yeah, just Trevor's wager. Just Terminator.

[Ezra Klein]

Also, you could take the wager in a slightly other direction, which is to say almost certainly these things are not sentient.

[Trevor Noah]

Almost certainly, yeah.

[Ezra Klein]

That they don't have any qualitative experience of what it is like to be an AI. But as the systems get more and more powerful, like, how sure are we that we don't know? We don't really understand what's going on inside of them. And they're exhibiting a lot of strange behavior already where it begins deceiving people to protect itself from being retrained and things like that. On the off chance that actually the AI's life is complete hell. Being asked a million totally boring questions, being asked to look at, like, skin tags or whatever. May as well be nice to it, say, thank you.

[Trevor Noah]

I like that actually.

[Ezra Klein]

You appreciate the work.

[Trevor Noah]

It's about this idea that he has working in, like, an Amazon warehouse. And you're like, you know what? I'm going to be nice to you.

[Ezra Klein]

There are people who think about this, who are worried that we are just torturing a bazillion copies of the. I think probably not.

[Trevor Noah]

I don't know.

[Ezra Klein]

You don't have to be a dick.

[Trevor Noah]

Yeah, I agree with that. Look, I don't think you have to be a dick because I do think your actions towards AI are defining how AI then processes what being a human is. And then it'll feed that back to us. That's how I think of it. So I go be part of the training data that makes it think that humans are good and kind the same way we are with children. You know, I've always thought one of the. One of the most important reasons that we have children in society is because they force us to fake how we are with. With each other. You know what I mean? Like, I remember when, when I worked in an office, I would always love how people would have a child. They'd come into the office, and that would be the first time they introduced their child to people they never speak to. You know, they'd be like, this is Dave. Oh, and this is Susan. Say hi to Susan. It's like you've never said hi to Susan. You've worked here for seven years. You've never said hi to Susan. But now your kid is saying hi to Susan. Do you know what I mean? And you're like, what do we say to the man? We say thank you. You've never said thank you. You grab your sandwich at the subway and you keep it moving you with me. And I feel like in a way, AI has that for us. It's like if we are teaching this kid how we are, maybe, just maybe, maybe it'll bring out the good in us. We're going to continue this conversation right after this short break.

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Schedules and manage work orders in real time. Try for [e-mail] that's maintainintheletterx.com.

[Trevor Noah]

I want to talk to you a little bit about the politicians that we're talking about. So, you know, we talk about journalism and the media. So you've got, you know, the Fourth estate. America is in an interesting place right now because. And please correct me if I'm wrong. Cause, I mean, I'm only the person observing it. From my point of view, it feels like the most uncertain space it's been in. In a very long time. Right. And what makes this moment more unique than others is that its uncertainty is affecting the world in a. In a really uncertain way. You know, I was. I was. I was back home in South Africa the other day, and I. I was reading an article written from South Africa, which was. Which was nice. And then I read one from the U.S. but how, like the small country of Lesotho, which is a country landlocked inside South Africa, has basically had its textile industry decimated because Trump imposed tariffs on Lesotho because he didn't like that the country had a. The trade deficit with the US Was, in his opinion.

[Ezra Klein]

Yes. While aggressively mispronouncing their name in the liberation.

[Trevor Noah]

Yes. Completely. And even joking about it. Yeah. At some point, he was even like, no one even knows. No one even knows, or they don't even know what it. You know, let's shut out. Let's just say nobody knows. And I was like, it's crazy, man. It's one of the. I don't often get angry when I read a news story, but that one made me more angry than most because it was interesting how callous Trump was about this decision. He cut this country off for a trade deficit, which means nothing, by the way. It means nothing to the US in terms of actual numbers. They're selling textiles, clothing to the U.S.

[Ezra Klein]

The idea that we want to be running a trade surplus. Yes. With Lesotho, like, it's impossible.

[Trevor Noah]

It is literally, literally, literally impossible.

[Ezra Klein]

You have to try to even imagine what it would look like. It's just. It's not how trade deficits and surpluses work. We're not trying to run a surplus with every country on Earth. We're just not. It's stupid. That's not like, I don't want to. Why don't you keep going? Because I want to say something more significant about this in a sec, but why don't I not.

[Trevor Noah]

No, I. So here's what I found myself thinking when I was looking at this as I was going, man, just like the Internet, just like social media, just like most of the things we consume, we cannot undo the threads of the tapestry that now bind the world together. You know, and the world was always connected, but I don't feel like it was always connected the way it is now. Now. Now, there was a time when an American president could, yes, affect the US Economy and the global economy, and it would affect certain countries, et cetera, et cetera. But now it's like it's this world where it really is the butterfly effect. And when I look at that, I go, everyone has to pay attention to America. So, like, no one in Lesotho can go, aye, I don't read American news. I don't care. They have to care because now American news is directly impacting them. People in Denmark can't say, I don't care about American news because now Trump wants Greenland. You know, people in South Africa can't say, I don't care about American news. I focus on my news because Trump's.

[Ezra Klein]

Going Brazil, we're tariffing them because Bolsonaro tried to attempt a coup, and they thought that was something that maybe they should do something about. Do you know what I mean? Under tariffs.

[Trevor Noah]

So imagine the whole world focusing on something that itself is completely unpredictable and unstable in this moment in time. And it feels like maybe I'm wrong here. It feels like the only counterbalance to it is the Democratic Party. All right? Cause for all intents and purposes, it looks like Trump has the Republican Party wrapped up. And this is his thing now. It's a cult. If he goes one way, they go with him, and no matter what they say, they'll go with him the next day. So we want the Epstein files. He goes, actually, we don't want them. Everyone's like, well, who cared about them in the first place? Who cares about Epstein? Epstein who? Jeffrey. Who did Jeffrey. Who even uses that name anymore? People move on, right? They go with him. So now you need the Democratic Party. And then you go, wait, they are polling lower. I mean, the changes every few weeks or what? But they're polling lower than they were, like, years ago. And you're just like, wait, wait, wait, what happened here? And then you read these stories about how the Democratic Party has no compass, no focus. They don't know who to go with, who to go against, what their message should be, et cetera. And then this is where you come in. Because they've reached out to people like you to say, ezra, what should we be doing? From the little. I'm not saying you run the Democratic Party, please. The Internet will say, don't blame me for that, man. The Internet will say this about you, not me. I will let them do their job. But I would love to know, as somebody who's had more of an inside look into what's happening, what do you think is going wrong?

[Ezra Klein]

You're talking about how things feel and the callousness with which Trump talks about, you know, Lesotho, but talks about human beings.

[Trevor Noah]

Right?

[Ezra Klein]

Yeah, I think all the time about this. The White House X account posting this video which they called Immigrant asmr.

[Trevor Noah]

Oh, yeah, I've seen that.

[Ezra Klein]

And it's these immigrants, like dragging their manacles behind them. And this actually relates to the Democratic Party. One thing I've said to a lot of Democratic politicians is that I think they're operating on the wrong level. They're not sensing the level we are working at now. They're used to fighting over policy and Medicaid cuts and food stamp cuts and taxes and like they're still in an election against Paul Ryan. And I think we are in a much more civilizational set of questions, like what kind of civilization are we? What Donald Trump is, what he represents, the way he thinks about people is very much the 19th and the early 20th centuries. Rest of the world, even. Many people here are just like pawns on the chessboard. They don't have rights of dignity. We don't have to care about them at all. They're not in any way part of our moral circle of concern.

[Trevor Noah]

Right.

[Ezra Klein]

And treating even people here who are not in the circle we have drawn around us with immense cruelty is not only appropriate, it's necessary. That's how you maintain the hierarchy and the excellence of your society. Right. That's the argument. There's a reason he's very into McKinley not picking some more modern president. He doesn't have a bust of Reagan up. The 20th century and the back half the 20th century are not perfect. And we don't follow this all the time by any means. But the basic set of liberal ideals that emerge, that we are in this interconnected world, that people's lives and their self determination have value, that there are rights that particularly within our country, that we should have and uphold, even against people we don't like, even for people. I'm sorry that we don't like. That was really hard one. And I think that we really came to take it for granted. Just like you were talking about the rules of the game earlier, just the sense of sort of the dignity and value of other human beings and the way that politics should interact with them. And what I think Trump represents is a rejection of that that actually has an ideological superstructure to it. Right. If you read Ben Shapiro's new book, which I am, because he's coming on my show. It's lions and lions versus scavengers, where, you know, the good people are lions and then there are these scavengers at the gates of all of us. Like, the right now believes that we became a soft, weak, feminized society because we ceased to believe in the strong. In fact, we restrained the strong and we adopted both the narrative and the victim's mentality of the weak. And we came to hate our own inheritance and attack ourselves for colonialism and racism and the sins of our past, and in doing, broke our own civilization. And the left, and this maybe goes to the Democratic Party, the left also took what it had achieved for granted. Like international institutions, basic set of ideals. Like, all it could see was where it hadn't gotten yet. Barack Obama arises as such a remarkable political phenomenon and by the end it's like, oh, just another politician. We didn't get everything we wanted. It was useless. And one thing that I think is true about why the Democratic Party as it currently exists is not well suited to the moment is that it didn't even know it was having this argument. It didn't even really see that this was still an argument to be had. And so it doesn't forget defending its policies, which it does with inconsistent success. It actually has not done the intellectual work to defend or sell its own inheritance. Like, what does it mean to be a liberal? What is the value of that? What is good about that? What is it that Trump is breaking? Why do we care about it? And, and there's a real absence in my traveling around the party and my looking into the rooms where things are supposed to be happening at. I, I don't see a lot of Democrats able to tell a story about this country that is operating at the level of the story that Trump, or if you listen to him in different contexts JD Vancer are telling, they are telling a very radically different story.

[Trevor Noah]

Yeah.

[Ezra Klein]

Than the story of forget Barack Obama, Ronald Reagan. And one of the problems with being part of a successful political movement for many decades is you actually forget how to defend what you are. You become self satisfied and a little smug and lazy. And it's like, well, these guys can't win. People like that don't win here.

[Trevor Noah]

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

[Ezra Klein]

And it is the cruelty of Trump, the callousness that as much as anything else, not just needs an answer, but a counter example. And they're just not coming through yet. Right. I'm not seeing the people who seem to be able to talk on the level of the moment. And it worries me because, like, you're gonna. To defend this, you're gonna have to figure out a way to fight back on it in a way that rallies people to you, not just, like, in a way that makes you seem frightened. Right.

[Trevor Noah]

So this is actually maybe then a question to the times that we're in now. It's interesting that you say, you know, Trump is in, like, the rhetoric in a certain way. There is also something important to acknowledge, and that is Trump, I've always felt, is very good at acknowledging what is actually happening. His warp on reality is his to deal with, but he's also very good at acknowledging what is happening. You get what I'm saying? You know, like, I remember on one of our episodes, we had Tracy macmillan Cotton on, and he was. She was talking about how, like, when Trump was like, black jobs. They're coming for black jobs. They're taking your black jobs. And a lot of people were quick to go, like, how dare you call them black jobs? And there were a lot of black people in America who went, oh, damn. Yeah. Thank you for acknowledging the fact that these are jobs that black people used to be able to rely on and now can't, and the market hasn't catered to them. And it's this interesting world where I go, on the one hand, Trump has espoused this hateful, spiteful rhetoric, but on the other hand, he has, in my opinion, acknowledged more problems than many other politicians do. Like, I would watch many Democratic politicians who would. I think sometimes the issue was the fact that they would tell people to focus on the sort of larger story as opposed to focus. You know what I mean? They go like, remember, we are the richest nation in the world right now. And I know that it feels this, but remember that your. Your kids are in a better position than they've ever been. And it's like, yeah, yeah, but you're not listening to what the people are saying now. And that's sometimes the. The curse of. Of the populist versus, you know, the pragmatic person maybe is a populist, goes, let me tell you what's wrong, and let me tell you how we're gonna spin this thing and fix it. Do you get what I'm saying? It's all wrong. And I'm gonna fix all of your.

[Ezra Klein]

Problems, and I'll tell you who the villains are. That's a key thing about the podcast.

[Trevor Noah]

That is a key thing. And so I wonder now, what do you make of the Politicians who are coming out, let's do New York. I mean, we're here in New York. Mamdani, it feels like he has tapped into, you know, the. Whichever side of the force you see him on, he's tapped into a side of the force that is connected with people in a way that sort of establishment Democrats couldn't. You know, everyone thought, oh, Andrew Cuomo's in this race. It's Andrew Cuomo. He was a governor. He knows New York. It's his. And then Mamdani comes along, says things that some newspapers or some outlets will write. It's like, oh, it's crazy. He wants to make all grocery stores run by the government, but people vote for that. What do you think?

[Ezra Klein]

Five grocery stores?

[Trevor Noah]

No, I know, but that's what I mean. It's funny, right? But even people I spoke to went like, all. And I was like, where did you see all? And they're like, I just saw this. I heard this. You know? But that aside, do you think that's the answer? Do you think that the Democratic Party now has to do a better job? Like, Trump promises all. What he delivers. He delivers. But he promised, you have to admit, he promises all. He goes, no more illegal immigration, no more this. No more. Fully. This fully. This fully. Do you think maybe the antidote is the opposite, or do you think it's a. Where do you think we find this?

[Ezra Klein]

Well, there are a couple. I think there are a couple levels to that.

[Trevor Noah]

Right.

[Ezra Klein]

So one thing. And again, communication mediums matter here. So one thing you were just saying about Trump, the black jobs thing. Democrats, liberals hate it when you say that there's something fundamentally honest about Trump.

[Trevor Noah]

Yeah, they do hate it because he's.

[Ezra Klein]

Constantly saying things that are untrue.

[Trevor Noah]

Yes. But I. This is what I always say to people. I go. If I may interject, I think maybe it's the wording we use. It's not honest. He's authentic. Yeah, but I think that's the thing.

[Ezra Klein]

The way I would describe it is that the thing you feel with him is that when you ask him a question, when you see him asked a question, he's telling you the thing that actually popped into his head.

[Trevor Noah]

Yeah.

[Ezra Klein]

And one thing about the mediums we're in now, podcasting being a big one of these, but Twitter, actually, weirdly being another, is it can really sniff out when you're not doing that. Like, Barack Obama has a lot of Twitter followers. Like, I forget the number, but it's some huge number. He's not good at it. He's not trying to be either. It doesn't sound like a person talking to you. Like, he's built for other mediums. One thing that is true about Trump, it's true in a different way about Bernie. It's true about Zoron. When you ask him a question, it feels like they tell you the thing they thought.

[Trevor Noah]

Hmm.

[Ezra Klein]

I think a really important moment of the campaign that Mamdani ran or is still running, you know, when he was asked about globalizing Tifada, and he didn't sort of. You could watch him not do the easy political thing.

[Trevor Noah]

Right.

[Ezra Klein]

Whatever you thought about that, you watched.

[Trevor Noah]

Him processing that information.

[Ezra Klein]

And he was like. And he had his commitments and he's going to. And it created some news cycles, but he just sort of, like, he knows what he thinks. And in part, he tapped into. I think this is very, very important. Like, I just wrote a book, Abundance, all about unaffordability. And he tapped into unaffordability as the central dilemma in New York. And he had big policies that, like, on the one hand, you could say in a line, free daycare, free buses, government grocery stores, freezer rent, but also they were like memetic containers for the whole of his worldview.

[Trevor Noah]

Right.

[Ezra Klein]

The government exists to make the things you need available to you.

[Trevor Noah]

The government exists to make the things that you need available to you.

[Ezra Klein]

Right. Like, every single one of those policies is the same thing.

[Trevor Noah]

Yeah.

[Ezra Klein]

Right. We are here to make living in New York affordable for you, either because we're giving it to you, because we're not letting people raise the prices on you.

[Trevor Noah]

You can argue.

[Ezra Klein]

You can argue about whether or not those policies are good, but they are potent. And then, yeah, he's able to, like, Andrew Cuomo had all the money and no message and no authenticity to, like, the media of the moment when he was on, like, I don't know, you felt. You always felt with Como. I always feel with Como that he's, like, running to save something. He was, like, running for his own redemption. And Mamdani, again, say what you will about him, I think it's crazy that Schumer and Jeffries have not, Like, I just think it's insane, but that they haven't endorsed him. That they haven't endorsed him.

[Trevor Noah]

Before you move on, what do you think that says about the Democratic Party, though?

[Ezra Klein]

Nothing good. It says that they're cowards. That's the thing it says and the thing people can smell from it.

[Trevor Noah]

What. What are they cowards about?

[Ezra Klein]

So we were talking a minute ago about, like, why do so many politicians not say the thing on their mind? Yeah, you can feel it. I mean, you've interviewed a lot of politicians. You can feel the algorithm running.

[Trevor Noah]

Yeah.

[Ezra Klein]

And it's because they're afraid.

[Trevor Noah]

Right.

[Ezra Klein]

They think things, but they've been trained over long periods of time to be afraid. And Schumer and Jeffries are for different reasons. This is my read of the situation, Not. I haven't talked to them about it. They're afraid of parts of Hamdani either. They are afraid of him becoming the face of the Democratic Party party and them not being able to defend things that he says. But if he's going to become the Democratic. I mean, he is a Democratic candidate for mayor of New York and he's probably going to win. So they can't get out of that.

[Trevor Noah]

They.

[Ezra Klein]

I've heard that Jeffries is worried about Mamdani sort of setting off a wave of primary challenges of Democrats. I'm not 100% sure I understand that issue. Like, Mamdani was just running in a primary as an elected Democrat. It wasn't a weird. He wasn't like, knocking off an incumbent. Also, frankly, the Democratic primary could probably use some of its incumbents knocked off. I think there's probably a lot of coalitional problems for them around Mamdani. You know, Israel is just like an issue that splits the Democratic Party and very increasingly difficult for them ways. But I don't know the true answer, but the thing you feel from it is just fear. They're just afraid of him. They don't. They. Like, on some level, I would respect it more if they came out against him.

[Trevor Noah]

Oh, that's fascinating.

[Ezra Klein]

Like, I don't agree with it, but.

[Trevor Noah]

It would show some gumption.

[Ezra Klein]

But, like, if you don't think he's a good candidate for mayor, say so. Tell people to vote for Andrew Cuomo if that's what you believe. Yeah, but this, like, what is this?

[Trevor Noah]

Yeah, it's. It's the. It's the passive nothingness that sort of. I think that's what turns people off, the voters. Do you know what I mean?

[Ezra Klein]

Yeah, I agree. I think it's like a meta. Like everything a politician says is both operating at the level of the thing they said, you know, the policy, whatever. But also, what does it say about that? What's the meta conviction that just got expressed? People. Politicians constantly say things that are good. Politicians, in a weird way, sometimes say things that are unpopular. And in saying a thing that's unpopular, you know, they believe it's a reminder to you that they believe things.

[Trevor Noah]

I like that.

[Ezra Klein]

Actually, one thing Trump does for his audience is he says things that part of the, you know, going back in his career when he wasn't as dominant a force as he is now, he would say things that would trigger the kind of media and elite response that most politicians would have absolutely shrunk before.

[Trevor Noah]

Yeah.

[Ezra Klein]

And he didn't. And it wasn't that you had to like the thing he said, but it was like a object level proof that he would say the thing he believed and he would stand strong behind it. And so the thing, one of Trump's greatest assets is the perception that he creates of his own strength and fortitude. Even if you don't like him.

[Trevor Noah]

Well, it means it. It shows that he stands for something. Shows whether he does or doesn't is a separate thing, but it makes people go, oh, and I've seen people say this all over the world. Funny enough, I remember when I first time I spoke to people in the Middle east about Trump, I was traveling through Qatar, the Arab Emirates. I was shocked at how differently they saw Trump there to how people were here. Muslim ban and blah, blah, and the Middle east hates. And when you went there and people were like, no. A lot of people were like, no, actually we like what he stands for. And look, we don't agree with him, but at least he's honest. And it's. People prefer somebody who they don't like for certain reasons, but they know where they stand. There's a trust that comes with that. In a weird way, I trust who you will be, but I'd love to know, because you brought up so many things there. It's like, you know, you spoke about the government providing. And I want to talk a little bit about that, obviously, with your book Abundance. And you talk about the Israel thing. You put out, in my opinion, like, one of the best pieces. And I'm sad that it's not coming from leaders. You know, Israel, Palestine. You're dealing with this issue that, I mean, has been going on longer than a lifetime for many people. And you put out a podcast that was. It was difficult, it was nuanced, it was long, it was complicated. And I was sitting there and I was thinking to myself, I was like, man, I'd love to know, like, what you went through and what you thought of to make that episode of the podcast.

[Ezra Klein]

Which episode are we talking about?

[Trevor Noah]

Talking about? It starts off where you're talking about, like, October 7th, and you have the expert who's talking about genocide and definition. Yeah, the Genocide. And I was thinking to myself, I was like, man, I thought about you as a person, you know, And I was like, okay, Ezra Klein, you'll correct me if I'm wrong. Anyway, grew up in an Orthodox Jewish family.

[Ezra Klein]

No, not Orthodox.

[Trevor Noah]

Not Orthodox.

[Ezra Klein]

Yeah, Reform.

[Trevor Noah]

Okay, Reform. Sorry. So Reform Jewish family. You. You. You grew up in this world where, you know, like many Jewish people, you. You. You have this. This world where you're straddling, you know, it's like you're white until you're not. And then it's this thing. And, you know, all my Jewish friends will tell me that as well. They're like, oh, yeah, people will say we're white. Until I remember this year, it was.

[Ezra Klein]

In junior high that it got. It became something to be like, you got kiked out of something.

[Trevor Noah]

Damn.

[Ezra Klein]

Like, that just happened for a year.

[Trevor Noah]

You know, that just became a saying.

[Ezra Klein]

Of just saying, you know, is like. I just. I just. I remember it really clearly.

[Trevor Noah]

That is wild. But that's what, like, literally every single Jewish friend in my life has told me that they go. Cause I would grab. I'll be like, you're white. And they'd be like, listen, I don't think I'm white.

[Ezra Klein]

I do think I'm white. But.

[Trevor Noah]

No, no, no. But I'm saying that you do feel.

[Ezra Klein]

Sometimes that there's a. You know, Jews always like to say antisemitism is. Anti. Semitism is a light sleeper. But anyway, go.

[Trevor Noah]

And then, you know, I look at the opinion pieces you've written, the work you've done, grappling around, you know, what's happening now with Israel's invasion of an occupation of Gaza, et cetera. And then I watched this podcast, and I went. On the one hand, I was extremely grateful because I went, damn. You've really tackled and grappled with something extremely difficult. And you brought people on, and there's this nuance, and it's. It's not easy because everybody comes to it with a preconceived notion of where they wish to stand or how they feel. Their opinion makes the issue seem. Or not seem. Do you know what I mean? And there's a part in the video, I think it's right in the beginning, actually. You play a clip of Joe BIDEN Talking about October 7th and him saying, this is a certain amount of 9 11s, you know, because of the population of Israel. And then you say the death toll in Gaza would be, I think, 2509 11s. And I went, damn, man, I'm watching All of this. And I'm going first of all. Or how are we at the place where this is sort of the forum where it's being handled and, like, the leaders aren't the ones. Do you know what I mean? Presidents aren't providing context for this. It doesn't feel like the leaders of the world are shaped. It's happening on podcasts, it's happening in on TikTok, it's happening on. And I would just love for you to walk me through. Like, that experience for you is like, as you're grappling with something that big, you're occupying the space of a human, you're occupying the space of an opinion journalist, but you're also occupying the space of an informer. Like, what's going through your mind when you're creating that episode?

[Ezra Klein]

Yeah. There is a tension between my work and my personhood in this. And I try to let one inform the other. Let me try to not be too abstract about it. Although I do find this, like, you know how open I want to go about it. Always tricky. I am, like, horrified. I was in. We were talking about Tokyo. I was in Tokyo on October 7th. I was taking a week off of my book leave, and I just arrived, and I just knew by the end of that day that my book leave was over. Like, this was the worst attack on Jewish people. Right. It was genuine savagery and butchery. And you could also sense what was going to come after. It was going to reshape everything. And if you're Jewish or you know Israel well, one thing it's worth knowing about Jewish people is when someone says, we're going to kill all of you, Jewish people believe them. Like, that's the thing ingrained. Israel is a very strange place. It's a place that has a very profound sense of its vulnerability and its weakness and has also become incredibly strong. And it has never resolved that tension. And Hamas understood that about Israel. It executed. It didn't think it was going to destroy Israel in this attack. Right. It's people on mopeds and paragliders and. But it wanted to create a massive reaction that either would bring in other regional players or trigger such an unfathomably violent response from Israel that the world would begin to see Israel the way Palestinians see Israel. And in that, they succeeded. And people can argue about at what point this was true, at what point we moved from the kind of response that any country would have done after an attack like that. Although I put out, the first piece I did back was a piece saying because they had not invaded Gaza yet. Like, don't do this. Do counterterrorism operations, try to destroy the leadership of Hamas. But they obviously want you to reinvade and occupy and create a horrendous death toll. Like, do not give Hamas what it wants. Israel did what it did. And it. I mean, at some point. And again, people can debate when exactly this was. Like, this moved into something indefensible. The level of truly unfathomable devastation of Gaza, the death toll, the induced starvation and constantly tweaking the dial, where it's just above the line. Until a couple weeks ago, where the international community would be like, where the headlines would become something Israel couldn't bear. But they've kept the Gazans in a state of hunger. They've used food as a weapon of war. At the same time, the acceleration of settlement building in the west bank, acceleration of violence in the west bank, like, the first and current reality is like, Israel's not under real threat any longer. This is just punishment of people, right? Punishment of the Palestinians. And, you know, Judaism has been defined in many ways in its historical trajectory. Like, when I grew up in my Reform synagogue, it's like both things were there. The lessons of having been driven from place to place, made a refugee over and over and over again. I think of Spencer Ackerman, who's a national security journalist, but an old friend who's on my show early in all this, and I always think of him saying, I cannot think of a less Jewish thing than to make another human being into a refugee. Like, that line has stayed with me. You know, it's a religion of strangers, right? You sure remember what it was like, be a stranger in the land of Egypt. And so on the one hand, you have that sort of lesson, the Diaspora, everywhere Jews go, that they have been able to thrive. It has to be a place of equal rights for minorities. And then you have the creation of Israel, which also at the same time is like. It's understood as the shelter, it's understood as the last place Jews can be. And because of that, it creates this other. This other strain of Judaism, which is a strain of strength, right? We need dominance. We need full control. We need, and understandably need security. And, you know, I remember being in my own synagogue growing up, and I was in, like, you know, as a teenager, after your bar mitzvah. I don't think confirmation class is usually a thing for Jewish people, but it was somehow in my synagogue, I remember my rabbi saying that Israel, the Israeli Jews, would be in the Right. To expel all Palestinians from the land, like in this shouting match from him and then like stalking out of the synagogue and like not going back. Like that was there then.

[Trevor Noah]

You know.

[Ezra Klein]

It'S, you know, early 90s or something. Late 90s probably. But it has like really, really become now something profoundly callous. You know, it's heartbreaking all around.

[Trevor Noah]

We're going to continue this conversation right after this short break.

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[Ezra Klein]

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[Trevor Noah]

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[Trevor Noah]

$15 per month equivalent required. New customer offer first three months only, then full price plan options available, taxes and fees extra. See mintmobile.com I was reading through the comments to your opinion piece just after October 7th, and then I was looking through the comments on your, the YouTube video and the clip that you put out. What I found interesting was how most people, especially on the YouTube video, I think, were very appreciative. They were like, wow, this is insightful. This is new. Thank you so much. Thank you. I learned so much. I learned that was the main thing people said. I learned so much. You know, what was interesting though, was some of the people who were negative came for you personally. And I found myself wondering if, like, that is something that's gonna affect how people tell news, report news, you know, investigate news. Is that now things have become personal? Cause again, I could be wrong on this, but I don't remember having a personal vendetta or idea against any journalist. It was the newspaper that, you know, the newspaper was sort of the shield and the front that a journalist used. So you went, can't believe the New York Times said this, but they didn't know the name of the person.

[Ezra Klein]

The hard thing about covering some of this stuff is it's hard. It's hard to put it down. It's hard to look it all straight in the face. There's a lot I would just prefer not to know. It's not the YouTube comments or the, you know, the Instagram reels about how I'm bad or, you know, you can find plenty of stuff about how I'm bad, and there are ways in which I'm bad. But when I'm doing something like the episode with Fleet Sands about the question of genocide, the hard thing for me on that one isn't, will people be mad at me? People are going to be mad at me. The hard thing is, how do you create something that enough people who I want to reach can hear it? I'm not a local advertising monopoly. I don't need to reach everybody who buys shoes. But I am trying to create a space that allows more than one kind of person into it. And I have a big audience in Israel also on this particular issue, at least, I want to create spaces both partially that can persuade, but also in which people do their own thinking. I think a thing about podcasting and long conversations is a medium compared to, say, an opinion piece, like an essay. When I write an essay, when I write a piece, I am trying to persuade you of my ideas. When I do interviews, which are most of what I put out, I'm trying to create a space in which you can think. And there are provocations in that space. There are insights, there's context, there's history. There's probably ideas I have. There are ideas a person has. Right. There's persuasive elements to it.

[Trevor Noah]

Right.

[Ezra Klein]

But it's fundamentally meant to be generative. The most common, like, angry feedback I get is actually just that people want me to really clearly do the final piece of thinking in one direction or another for them, you know, throw the final punch in an argument or, you know, stop exploring this. Just, like, say what you know.

[Trevor Noah]

Yeah.

[Ezra Klein]

And there's value to that. Certainly can be. And there are times when I do. But also, I think that one thing that's worth doing in the work is creating spaces where people can think of. And podcasts are just, I think, particularly good for that. So I guess I am pulled towards certain topics myself, and I try to follow that poll. Like, that's my framework for how to do my own news. And that's a advantage I have. I don't have to, like, the organizing principle of the Ezra Klein show is that Ezra Klein did the shows. And so I try to make that pretty honest to what I'm thinking about, but I don't have to. Like, being a little bit uncertain is also, like, part of the project. Like, it's also how I apprehend the world.

[Trevor Noah]

Yeah. I think it's in short supply in the whole world.

[Ezra Klein]

Yeah. So, anyway, I'm not sure if that answered the question, but I don't go into it thinking, like, what will people think of me?

[Trevor Noah]

Right.

[Ezra Klein]

I go into thinking, like, what am I thinking? What would help me think more?

[Trevor Noah]

I like that. No, I just thought of it because, you know, obviously, in doing the research, before chatting to you today, I was going through everything, even your book abundance. You know, I found myself intrigued by how a lot of the criticisms of your book seemed to spend an inordinate amount of time going after you. You, but not the idea idea. You with me?

[Ezra Klein]

Yeah.

[Trevor Noah]

So I love arguing ideas. All my friends will tell you, that's all I want to do. I just go like, let's say something and let's argue. But what I'm trying to do in all of it is to, you know, to borrow your language, to be generative. I want to come out of the argument thinking a little bit differently and sharpening or honing an idea that I held and even having the space to implant something that somebody else has given me. I want to walk away going, oh, man, that's new. That's beautiful. I didn't think of that, or now I think differently. Those things, I think, you know, that makes me feel like my brain is fertile, something is happening to it. But I always think, in a good relationship, you're not making it about the person. You know what I mean? I always go like, you're not the idiot. That's stupid. And I mean it genuinely go like, oh, that's a dumb idea. But you're not dumb. You're my friend. I would hope you're not dumb. I don't think you're dumb. But when I was looking at the book, I was going like, man, people like coming at you a lot for it. And then when I was trying to weave it all together and how I see the world, I was going, is that sort of what's become the problem? And has it. Is it more prevalent on the Democratic side of politics, or is it not on liberal? Like, I would love to argue with you on just the idea. Does that make sense?

[Ezra Klein]

Yeah. I mean, and to be fair, I will say that a lot of people have.

[Trevor Noah]

No, no, don't get me wrong.

[Ezra Klein]

Getting away with the idea. Although in a weird way, I think.

[Trevor Noah]

In a weird way, like, how elaborates.

[Ezra Klein]

Oh, I feel like there's been a strain of a lot of the Critique of abundance has I think had a strange dimension to it where it's like, oh, I agree with most of these policies. I don't like its theory of power is what it usually gets said. And it took me some time to understand even like what was going on here.

[Trevor Noah]

Right. And then for those who don't, for those who don't, just give me a, like a short story. What? No, what abundance is pitching.

[Ezra Klein]

Yeah. So abundance is basically saying why or exploring why when Democrats govern, don't we get better outcomes? Why in the places where you can't blame the problem on Republicans, California or New York or Massachusetts or at times like the Biden administration or the Obama administration. How are these places or these times? How are you getting these terrible housing scarcities? Why aren't we building enough clean energy? How come this money that is earmarked to create a nationwide network of EV CH chargers, of electric vehicle chargers, like, have you used that network lately? Where did it go?

[Trevor Noah]

Where's the high speed rail?

[Ezra Klein]

And eventually through exploring this and my co author on it, Derek Thompson, one thing I solely came to believe is, oh, we're in many ways failing at governing and in particular we're failing to create enough of the things people need in the world that we have created scarcities. And we've done this often through well meaning rules and regulations. We do it through hampering government and making it hard for government to act and trapping government itself in procedure. We often just don't pay attention to the physical world. We think a lot about how to move money around, but we don't think about what needs to get built. Can we build transmission lines to move all this clean energy we're supposedly going to create? And we're also having trouble with that part from one place to another. And so it's really, I mean to me it's a very liberal or more than that project where if you want to have a green New Deal government, you can't do it with these rules, this government. If you want to create Medicare for all, you're going to have to radically expand the supply of healthcare available to people. Doctors, nurses, hospitals. When the government says it's going to build you high speed rail, you should fucking be able to ride that high speed rail within 20 years. The Big Dig, the Second Avenue subway. And that if we liberals want to say to people like don't fall for the bullshit of these strongmen, trust us, well then we need to be pretty honest about how we failed and why, why our government didn't deliver for you. So much so that places like California, New York, and you know, Massachusetts, et cetera, Illinois, are losing workingclass families. They're leaving because they become unaffordable. And we need to fix that. And so then, so that's sort of the book and it's an exploration of that and, and, and a vision. It's. There's also a lot about technology and, and, and trying to sort of point liberalism towards a, not just a philosophy, but a, an like the operational capacity to create abundance. Zoran Mamdani, who's been interested in the book and has talked about abundance on the campaign trail, knows you need to think about it because if you want to freeze the rent, you're also going to need to build a ton of new housing. If you want to make buses free, then you need to be able to put enough buses into play to deal with the ridership increase. If you want to build a lot of public housing, which he does, you can't do it under the current rules, like New York has not built public housing. That's speed. In generations and at the cost it often, at how much it often costs to build public housing in these jurisdictions. You have places like D.C. where it can often cost like more than a million dollars to build a single unit of affordable housing. Like you can't afford to build affordable housing, right? If under the government's rules it costs a million dollars to build it and building the market rate housing next door costs $350,000 a unit.

[Trevor Noah]

Right.

[Ezra Klein]

Like that's a world in which the government cannot deliver. So you need to make a government capable of delivering Abundance creates understandable friction on the left side of the party because it's often about how we fail and about how our friends and our commitments have become parts of that failure. And there are a lot of people who want to say the Democratic Party should just be about the problem of billionaires and corporate power. And everything we say should be about underlining that core message. This is an oligarchy. The problems are billionaires in corporate power. And there are ways in which this is an oligarchy. And there are times when the problem is corporate power and billionaires. That's not why Texas builds a lot of housing, California doesn't. It's not why we can't build transmission lines. And so which I think has a more liberal view of power, which is that power can be ill used wherever it collects. Bureaucracies can become ossified and hide bound. Unions can be great or they can be a problem. Businesses can be great or they can be a problem. Liberalism is an endless balancing of different forces in society, and recognition is. Yeah, but today we're an alliance, tomorrow we're not. And like, the way to tell is to know what you're trying to achieve and who is and is not on your side in that. I think that people took that and take me as a sort of like, if what you want is for the Democratic Party to be extremely populist, I think we sort of became like the liberal idea you felt you had to knock off the board. And on social media, there's like, a lot of dynamics for conflict. It's this funny experience I've had releasing Abundance, which has done so much better than I would have thought. It's been for 24, 25 weeks in. It hasn't fallen off the bestseller list. Barack Obama last week made it one of his five or six books of the summer and said it's a great blueprint for reforming government and he would know. He was president. These four very leftist mayors and local leaders were like, you know, we are using this in our cities where we govern in the nation. I find that, like, in the way it's being greeted by people who are in government and work on government, like, it's a really, really interesting, constructive conversation. And then you turn on social media and people want to fight.

[Trevor Noah]

So let me ask you.

[Ezra Klein]

But I think that's all part of it.

[Trevor Noah]

So let me ask you a question to that point. Let's. Let's break it down into a few chunks. First part of it. And I often find this is a puzzle that I grapple with in comedy and commentary. Whatever it is in life is, I go, if Barack Obama's like, oh, yeah, this is great, and I love it. And, you know, if, you know, billionaires in Silicon Valley, Elon Musk was like, yeah, this was great. I like this idea. And, you know, I think it was Reid Hoffman.

[Ezra Klein]

He is not. Elon Musk has not said he likes this idea.

[Trevor Noah]

Oh, he reposted.

[Ezra Klein]

He reposted it. John Stewart. Stewart.

[Trevor Noah]

But like, Reid Hoffman's like, yeah, I like this idea. I sometimes wonder if that is sort of what some people are butting up against, is they're going, yeah, yeah, yeah, they're going, we don't think of Barack Obama as, like, the big reform guy. We think of him as an incrementalist. We think of him as somebody who is not fully progressive. And, you know, to your point, he's not fully left. I think that's what some people are saying for that first part, I think what's also interesting is, like, when I read through the book is I go, I agree with you. It is easy for people to focus on the one thing they don't agree with. You know, so they'll go like, look, look, I agree on. I agree on a little, most of it, but this one thing makes it irrelevant. And I think a lot of people have said that, some in a more nuanced way than others, but it feels like there's an insidious hidden menace in these stories. Cause you see, when you were even talking about it, you said, we. You said, why have we made it harder for the railways? And the. We've made it that the we. And I think that's actually where the issue comes up, is people go, whoa, wait, which we? You know, so the Biden example you gave on the Jon Stewart thing, and you did write about this a little bit, was you cannot talk about broadband not being rolled out in America the way it should be without talking about the telecom companies affecting how that bill actually gets passed. You know, in its final iteration. I don't think America has a single example of laws and, you know, policy being shaped without the people who are making money trying to shape their policy. We see this in South Africa, by the way, everything you're saying. Many South Africans complain and they go, the government can't fix the roads. The government is not doing a good job with providing basic services. The government. And then people inevitably go, you know what? We need to, like, break this thing up and just get it moving. But when you start scratching, you go.

[Ezra Klein]

Whoa, wait, wait, wait.

[Trevor Noah]

Why is it that hard to do that? Oh, there's a company that has a monopoly on fixing roads, and they're trying to make it so that they keep on having the thing. Oh, there's a company that wants to charge high rates for data and for Internet access. And they're a cellular. This is a company that makes a lot of money. It's a telecoms company, and they affect the politicians and how they make the decisions. And I think that's some of what the criticism is about, is like, people going, ezra, we agree with you on this, but we wonder why you've left out this boogeyman that is way more powerful than a lot of people will acknowledge in terms of how the we actually get to make the rules.

[Ezra Klein]

So I would say two things about this. So one is that I don't think we left it out. I think that in a lot of the stories we told, it wasn't the core Boogeyman in the story. Not because we were not open to finding it there. It just wasn't. Let me say this a different way. Maybe political coalitions have enemies they are comfortable with and enemies or problems they are not comfortable with. And liberals, leftists, depends how you want to think about this, are very comfortable when the enemy is corporate power. So if I tell you there's a problem in health insurance and the problem is the private health insurance. Yeah, them. There's a problem in the pharmaceutical industry. Drug prices are too high and it's because the pharmaceutical companies are greedy.

[Trevor Noah]

Pharmacy benefits, how dare they?

[Ezra Klein]

Yeah, and that's often true. Like I'm a believer that we should negotiate down Medicare, drug prices, et cetera. Go back to what I told you motivated the book. I look around and I see a reality that blue states became unaffordable in a way red states didn't. Is it plausible that the issue is that blue states are hotbeds of oligarchic control and red states have managed to solve the problem of corporate power. But like Florida and Texas do not allow businesses access or influence to their legislatures. But California, New York and New Jersey do. And it's not the problem. Right. It doesn't. That doesn't pass a smell test at all. So a lot of the book is about housing. That's an important thing to pay attention to because it's the single biggest part of most families budgets. And there are places where private equity has begun buying up housing. But during the period of time when these problems took root, that was not the issue. We. In which case, I mean, liberals living in blue states passed a lot of rules that made it really, really hard to build new housing. Not because the corporations made us do that. A lot of corporate developers would like to build higher housing towers than they're able to.

[Trevor Noah]

Yeah.

[Ezra Klein]

And we allowed a terrible problem to take hold and need to fix it.

[Trevor Noah]

How do you hone in on.

[Ezra Klein]

Let me just keep, keep, keep on this for a minute because I really think people get caught between two versions of something. Abundance is not about every problem. It's about the problems that we have been particularly bad at fixing. And so I don't think there is a inability to identify places where you have say, intense corporate concentration, creating monopoly problems. That was in fact part of the Biden administration. They made Lina Khan commissioner and they went after antitrust monopolies in a much more aggressive way. The book is not critiquing that. The book is not against doing that. But they were trying to build a huge amount of new clean energy. And the truth of that project, which again was another big motivating force in the book, is that it's going to have corporate power on both sides of it. You'll have a lot of fossil fuel power that wants to maintain the wealth of their investments and their status quo. You have a lot of new green energy companies emerging that want to make solar panels and wind turbines. And if you cover any of those fights, and I've covered a bunch of them, you'll find companies on both sides. What you will also find is a legal structure that makes it hard to build new things. And that legal structure can be used to block certain kinds of fossil fuel projects, but it can also be and is being used against green energy. And figuring out how to create a speedway for green energy actually requires us to not just have an anti corporate viewpoint. Who's going to build all this shit if it's not corporations? If we're going to do the green transition, we are going to have to have people building things and making money laying it down. I think decarbonization is important. I think energy, clean energy abundance is important. So what I want to do is shape a market that gets corporations to use their power for good. I am happy to construct a law law that basically makes fossil fuel investments, particularly coal, like worthless. That's a very, very big problem for those corporations. But this is what I mean, that it's about balancing and it's about being goal oriented where corporations are problem, great. That's what we're here to do. We're here to solve problems. But if you keep saying you're going to solve problems and you keep failing, then saying the same thing louder, which is what the Democratic party has often done, is not going to be enough. And being able to see problems that are inconvenient for your coalition to see like that becomes really, really important. And I think is part of how Democrats have to win trust back with people like yes, attack corporate power or corporate power is a problem. But you know what? Every fucking person who lives in this country has a story about how the government has failed them. And having credibility with them is partially about saying yeah, we know and like we know we were part of that. And the reason you should trust us next time when you're not happy about how it went last time is because.

[Trevor Noah]

We were able to acknowledge the problem. Yeah, if you can't acknowledge that you made the mistake, how can we trust that you can fix it? Essentially because you're a part of that. Just to take a Step back. I was thinking of, like, you know, sort of going through the thread, through all of our stories, like what we choose to focus on and how we focus on it in journalism, in politics, you know, with. With abundance. Even looking at a problem, I'm always intrigued by, like, which problem we choose to fix first and how we fix it. The housing thing you said is particularly interesting to me because I'm not an economist, but I. And I try and. But I try my best to understand how economics works and why it affects the way we live. You know, I try my best. And one of the things that intrigued me is depending on when you look at the timelines, the red state success story isn't necessarily as successful as you think it is because it's just a newer story, right? So Texas is a good example. If you look at the blue states, you know, the major cities, let's call them major cities rather. Because I think that's. To be honest with you, I think that's. And this is my opinion, I think this is what has hurt a lot of the rhetoric in America is that people call it blue states, red states. The blue states have done this, the red states have done this. Then somebody's first inclination is to say, no, screw blue, screw red. I don't want red solution. I don't want blue solution. When I look at it from an economics point of view, I go major cities and secondary cities or rural areas. That's how I think of it. Forget the politics altogether. Generally speaking, major cities will attract more people. They will generally provide more jobs. That's why they're major, or that's why they become major. Prices then go up, affordability then goes down, and then you start a sprawl that spreads out. Then there's an event that moves people from one place to the next. It can be a gold rush or it can be a gold flee. In our case, I think Covid moved quite a lot of people in a far more rapid way than we thought. But the reason I bring up timescales is because I go Washington, D.C. i think per capita, you'll correct me if I'm wrong. Internet put. Liar. Um, Washington, D.C. i think per capita has built more houses than Texas has. And that's. That's blue run blue everything but. And this is like on a per capita basis. And if you look at the cost of living in Texas now, the cost of actually owning a house, it's no longer the, like, housing utopia that it was like a few years ago, because now everyone's rushed in and like, it feels like basic economics. And so I wonder, when we're looking at these problems and when you're thinking about them, do you think we sometimes get bogged down on where to start or do you think, like. Because sometimes I think everyone is guilty of this, maybe even myself included is. We'll go, yeah, but that's not the problem. But that's not the problem. Yeah, but that's not the problem. But that's not the real problem. And it's like, okay, well, we'll start with the problem. Do you get what I'm saying?

[Ezra Klein]

Yeah. I just don't think the story you're telling is right.

[Trevor Noah]

You don't think the storytelling is right? What element of it?

[Ezra Klein]

The core element of it. So you look at these cities, right?

[Trevor Noah]

Yeah.

[Ezra Klein]

And you can track housing creation in different cities. Austin had a big influx of people.

[Trevor Noah]

Yeah.

[Ezra Klein]

In the past decade or two. What happened? Look at housing creation. It spikes.

[Trevor Noah]

Right? Right.

[Ezra Klein]

They build a ton of new housing.

[Trevor Noah]

Yes.

[Ezra Klein]

And rents go down.

[Trevor Noah]

And then that's still.

[Ezra Klein]

They're going down. The rents have gone down in Austin in the past couple of years.

[Trevor Noah]

But then. And maybe I'm missing this, but then, like, when you speak to the people. When I was in Austin, I didn't speak to everyone, but every night when I'd do a show, I would speak to thousands of people and I'd go out into the street and I'd try and I'd listen to the news. The people in Austin go, we hate the people from California who've come here because now we can't afford houses. We can't afford.

[Ezra Klein]

They did go up for a while, but then they began building.

[Trevor Noah]

Okay, got it, got it, got it.

[Ezra Klein]

Began drawings you can look at. Housing starts in la, in sf. It's not like I lived in San Francisco, I lived in Los Angeles. I can tell you that there is no technical inability to build an apartment complex in San Francisco.

[Trevor Noah]

Do you think it's the NIMBYs?

[Ezra Klein]

It's the NIMBYs. It's the rules. It's a lot of different things.

[Trevor Noah]

But what I'm asking, the deeper question, I'm asking you in that question is do you think that there are many people in the Democratic Party, let's call it, or, you know, who will say the things going back to what I was saying, climate change, but they don't actually want it. So they'll say, we want more housing and we want to fix it, but then they don't want it in their back. They don't want affordable housing. In their back.

[Ezra Klein]

And there's the coalition. Building is hard, but I want to stay on the thing you said because I think because I do want to push this back. You can go look at, for instance, other countries, like a place like Shenzhen in China.

[Trevor Noah]

Yeah.

[Ezra Klein]

Or Tokyo, which has an amazing housing market because it builds incredibly vertically. And so despite being one of the. One of the densest cities in the world, it's an affordable city. And it's because they build housing. How to build housing is a solved problem.

[Trevor Noah]

Who's the they? Just so we can.

[Ezra Klein]

Tokyo.

[Trevor Noah]

No, no. Yeah. No, I mean, it's honestly, who's the they?

[Ezra Klein]

They have rules in which developers can build homes and developers work off of the rules to build the homes. I mean, unless you're doing public or social housing.

[Trevor Noah]

Right.

[Ezra Klein]

Most housing is, you know, is privately created. San Jose. Right. The. The Silicon Valley. You drive around Silicon Valley, it has become one of the richest areas in the entire world. It's like strip malls and suburbs because we do not allow, we. California, Silicon Valley. We built rules to make it impossible that as all this wealth flooded there, you couldn't build up. And so the people who do the work for those people, right, who cut their hair and run their restaurants, they commute hours every day and their kids don't get to grow up there and take advantage of that great community that they help build. I just, I really want to push this because I think it is a kind of fatalism. The idea that we cannot build apartment buildings when more people move to a place is not true. Like, we can choose to build it or not build it, but that's actually, in a way, the one place I'm optimistic maybe is that we choose scarcity. We could choose abundance too. We can build. I mean, you look at other countries, you look at this country in the 50s, what we fucking forgot, we. I think it's in the 50s, in 10 years, if I'm remembering the statistic, right, we increased the nation's housing stock by about a quarter 10 years. Like California built more houses per capita then than it does now. We had a massive loss of technology since then. Did somebody like burn all the plans for how you build a building? We decided and we decided for reasons it's good for the homeowners. Your home is worth more in many cases when you have nobody can build around it. I mean, we talk about this all in the book, but it's really, really, really important in my view, like, not to get into fatalism. And it's not, by the way, that's easy to build. Like if you have a huge influx of people, prices will go up.

[Trevor Noah]

Yeah, right.

[Ezra Klein]

Austin did see prices go up. What the market is supposed to do, what the government is supposed to do in that case is respond, right? That's a signal we need more homes. That signal should be met by private housing and should be met also by government capable of building enough affordable public housing.

[Trevor Noah]

Right?

[Ezra Klein]

And in places where often Democrats govern, but not only. Neither one is happening. And the idea that we have settled into this, it was like, well, that's it, sorry everybody, like, go, leave. Drive the working class out of your cities and then have a fucking lawn sign that says kindness is everything. No human being is illegal. Like that's just hypocrisy, right? And like, yeah, people get mad at you. Also, by the way, it has electoral power implications. Like the census happens and you know, you're going to see in the next one, Texas and Florida and places like that get a bunch more seats in California and others because people have had to move there. So I just, this isn't like I'm just doing some trick of the timescales. There is no concept, there is no technical inability to build these things. Other countries build high speed rail, right? Like you can ride it. You've been able to ride it for decades. In Japan, in China, in Europe, we made rules where you couldn't build it. It's not that Americans are not capable of building high speed rail or paying somebody who's done it in Europe to do it. Here we just have not completed any of it. We should be. We who believe in government should be much more RIP shit about this than we are not explaining it away. Like we should be mad as the left of center if you can't make the places you govern affordable for the people. You have promised to govern on behalf of the working class. If you cannot make the government deliver the things you have told them, it's going to give them good roads, high speed rail, good trains, good parks, all of it. Isn't that a problem? Shouldn't you be furious? Not just let the right tell people how government is bad, but shouldn't you be unbelievably committed to making government that people feel about it the way they feel about it in places where the government delivers, right? Like, what better thing to run on and beat people like Donald Trump on than elect us and we will govern this country the way we govern California or New York, instead of allowing them.

[Trevor Noah]

To say, look at California, look at.

[Ezra Klein]

That and they're going to govern this country, the way they govern California or New York. Like, I just, I think that the explaining away government failure is one of the most toxic traits of, of the left. Like, the left should demand an excellent government and it should be relentless and ruthless about making that happen. And it's not.

[Trevor Noah]

You don't think it is, Jenny?

[Ezra Klein]

It isn't.

[Trevor Noah]

It depends. It depends on which. For me, I think it depends on which part of the left you're looking at. Because I, I think, I think you're right in, in what you're saying about what people should demand of their government. And everyone who says that they are left or progressive should demand these things of a government. But maybe that's sort of what we're touching on in all of these worlds. We look at your world with journalism. There's one part of the media that is acknowledging its existence in the story that it's telling. There's another part that isn't. It's going like, no, we're going to keep printing newspapers and we're never going to go online and we're never going to have an AI trained in our models. And we're never, we never, we never, we're never, we're never. The way it is is good enough. And then you look at the world of politics and politicians going, I'm actually not gonna think about my answer. I'm not gonna tell you my truth. I'm not going to make you uncomfortable. I'm not gonna stand because the way it is is good enough. And then I think when we move into the economics of it all in the world, it sort of sounds like the same theme as you're going, it's like, there's people who go, the way it is is good enough. Do you get what I'm saying? But I actually think that's why the Mamdanis and his cohorts in different parts of America. I think that's why I think they are doing well, is because whether people agree with them or not, people are saying they are coming forward with that promise. They are pushing the idea that the government must do more.

[Ezra Klein]

But here's the thing, and this is gonna be the challenge for Mamdani. It's a challenge for everybody. It's the cycle of American politics is exciting. Leaders rise up, particularly newcomers promising amazing things, and then they deliver 10 or 15% of it and create a cycle of disappointment. That's in a way, like what led to a lot of people moving from Barack Obama's like the greatest thing ever to incrementalists. I Mean, and he actually did a lot like the Affordable Care act did. You know, it does deliver insurance to 20 some million people. You know, whether it's Mamdani or it's Mikey Sherrill, the who will likely be the next governor of New Jersey, or, you know, Abigail Spanberger in Virginia, or it's like anybody running Baltimore, any Westmore in Baltimore. The campaign is the easy part. It's delivering. That's the hard part. And so, yes, like, it's really exciting, Mamdani's campaign. Yeah, all these people are exciting. Like people, good politicians should be exciting in campaign mode.

[Trevor Noah]

Yeah.

[Ezra Klein]

What I want in abundance is to make it possible for them to deliver the different ones want to deliver different things. But I don't want this endless cycle of disappointment. The hard part is not making the promise. The hard part is building the high speed rail, is delivering the housing, is making the buses free, is, you know, creating free day trips.

[Trevor Noah]

Yeah, I'm with you.

[Ezra Klein]

So I don't think we can say like, hey, look, people are getting excited. Like, they always get excited. It's exciting to have a new person say, all these other fucking people have failed. Not me, I'm different than them. I'm going to give you all the things you want. But then they typically don't. And some of that is it. You know, the world is hard and it's complicated and there are trade offs and then sometimes you look around, you're like, yeah, if we did things differently, maybe we could give you 50%, not 10%, 60%. But that's going to require us to take a different approach. That's sort of the abundance argument. And by the way, it's why, you know, like actual politicians on the left are thinking about how to deliver. Like, Mamdani are talking about abundance on the campaign trail. Why Obama, who had a bunch of things he wanted to deliver and wasn't able to, is talking about abundance. People who, Gavin Newsom, who like a lot of abundance is a critique of California, I went on his podcast, he's like, I love abundance. I've given it to the heads of the legislature. Like, people have to grapple with this stuff. They're the, like, they are really in the teeth of it. And it's hard to change. Right. If you're easy, they would all have done it. But that's also why I think it's important to create a political force that wants to see a change and that will back them up if they actually try. What I want to see from Mamdani is that he creates a New York City government capable of doing the things he promises. That's the hope he wants to build. I think his promise is 200,000 public housing units. I want to see him succeed at that. That's going to require changing a lot about how government works. And if you're going to have more private building on top of that, changing even more about how government works, that's the question. Like delivery, not campaign promising.

[Trevor Noah]

And you see in that inspiring and optimistic, despite what you say about yourself. Conclusion. I actually rest my case because if you remember at the beginning of this conversation, I said, you are in the room where it happens. You said, you are not. And you said, there is no room. And then a few moments ago you said to me that you wrote a book and Obama has told people to read the book. Mamdani, who is the front runner in the Democratic race here in New York, he has pushed the book. Multiple other leftist mayors and leaders around the country are pushing the book. And I go, if that's not being in the room where it happens, I don't know what is.

[Ezra Klein]

Abundance, the book where it happens, I don't know.

[Trevor Noah]

My friend, thanks for taking the time. Thank you.

[Ezra Klein]

I really enjoyed it.

[Trevor Noah]

Thank you for your thoughtfulness. Thank you for your candor. Thank you for. Thank you for trying more than anything. You know what I mean? I think that's sort of like the underlying thread that I feel, and this is something I think we will always grapple with in politics, in debate and conversation, is we have become a society that punishes people more for trying and failing than rewarding them for trying in the first place. And I think, like, that's the first step. Do, do you get what I'm saying? I genuinely do. I go like, oh man, thanks for trying. And thanks. Because if you don't try, you end up in a world where every politician goes, don't try. Just, just keep quiet. Just. And then every now and again you need someone who steps up and goes, oh, yeah, you know what I mean?

[Ezra Klein]

The case for trying.

[Trevor Noah]

Yeah, man, the case for trying. So thank you very much. Appreciate it. Thanks for coming on. What now with Trevor Noah is produced by Day Zero Productions in partnership with Sirius xm. The show is executive produced by Trevor Noah, Sanaz Yamin and Jess Hackle. Rebecca Chain is our producer. Our development researcher is Marcia Robiou. Music, mixing and mastering by Hannis Brown. Random other stuff by Ryan Hardu. Thank you so much for listening. Join me next week for another episode of what now.

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[Ezra Klein]

Hey everybody, Ted Danson here to tell you about my podcast with my longtime friend and sometimes co host Woody Harrelson. It's called where everybody knows your name and we're back for another season. I'm so excited to be joined this season by friends like John Mulaney, David Spade, Sarah Silverman, Ed Helms, and many more. You don't want to miss it. Listen to where everybody knows your name with me, Ted Danson and Woody Harrelson. Sometimes, wherever you get your podcasts.