Learn. Share. Evolve…

0:00:04 We view the individual as what is most concrete and most real.
0:00:10 That’s wrong, because there is no such thing as an isolated individual.
0:00:12 Can I ask you, Mark, why is it so hard to see that?
0:00:14 I don’t know.
0:00:18 Why is the illusion that we are just disconnected and separate so powerful?
0:00:20 It’s one of many things opposed to me.
0:00:25 We’re puzzling through that together this week on The Gray Area.
0:00:29 Listen to new episodes every Monday, available everywhere.
0:00:34 Is AI coming for your job?
0:00:35 Short answer, maybe.
0:00:40 This week on Net Worth & Chill, I’m sitting down with Lucy Guo, the co-founder of Scale AI,
0:00:44 founder of Passes and the youngest self-made billionaire woman in America.
0:00:47 Lucy has become one of tech’s youngest female founders to hit it big.
0:00:49 We’re talking nine-figure exit big.
0:00:54 And she’s dropping all the gems on this episode from her personal entrepreneurship philosophy
0:00:56 to how the AI industry is shaping the world.
0:01:00 Listen wherever you get your podcasts or watch on youtube.com slash yourrichbff.
0:01:03 Episode 359.
0:01:05 359 is the country code for Bulgaria.
0:01:11 1959, Alaska and Hawaii became states, and the first Grammy Awards were held.
0:01:13 Speaking of the Grammys,
0:01:17 Madonna is lashing back at people who commented about her appearance at the Grammys.
0:01:20 At least I think that was Madonna.
0:01:22 That’s good!
0:01:25 Go, go, go!
0:01:36 That one, that was good.
0:01:38 That was like a dad joke.
0:01:40 No, not dirty, but funny.
0:01:41 Timely.
0:01:44 I am back in New York.
0:01:45 Don’t know how I got here.
0:01:47 I think this city is undergoing a renaissance.
0:01:49 Even in the summer, flip-flops, tank tops.
0:01:52 During the week, it feels like, I don’t know,
0:01:55 just like anyone with options is actually out of the city,
0:01:58 but I like being in the city, walking around.
0:02:00 New restaurants, interesting stuff.
0:02:01 Little Jack’s wife, Rita.
0:02:02 Hello!
0:02:06 And just really enjoying my time back in the United States.
0:02:09 And then soon enough, I will be heading towards a sandbar in the Atlantic, Nantucket,
0:02:10 which I wanted to hate.
0:02:12 I wanted to hate Nantucket.
0:02:14 I think of myself as being more Euro-fabulous.
0:02:16 That is a total douchebag.
0:02:18 And thought, oh, I’m not going to like Nantucket.
0:02:21 The pink pants and the whale belts and all these white people running around.
0:02:25 I didn’t think I would like it, and I absolutely love it.
0:02:27 The cobblestone streets, the food.
0:02:29 You can let your kids go well because it’s an island,
0:02:32 and they can get into a little bit of trouble, but not too much.
0:02:35 I think it’s just a spectacular place.
0:02:42 So headed there on Sunday, and then back to London for the start of the school year,
0:02:45 and we’ll start freaking out about my son applying to college, which is more manufactured.
0:02:50 I think this is literally all the bullshit that I have been a part of imposing stress
0:02:55 on middle-class families and student debt on middle-class households as part of the
0:02:58 higher education industrial complex.
0:02:59 I literally think it’s coming back to haunt me.
0:03:03 I am way more stressed about college than my kid is.
0:03:05 And everyone’s like, oh, it doesn’t matter.
0:03:06 They don’t need college anymore.
0:03:10 Yeah, right, as they hire like $400 an hour tutors to try and get their kid into Vanderbilt.
0:03:14 Anyways, what the fuck is the ACT?
0:03:15 Man up.
0:03:15 Take the SAT.
0:03:16 That’s what I took.
0:03:17 $1,130.
0:03:19 $1,130.
0:03:21 $1,130 and 3.1 GPA from high school.
0:03:22 Gone into UCLA.
0:03:24 74% admission straight.
0:03:27 Then graduated from UCLA with a 2.27 GPA and got into Berkeley.
0:03:29 Yeah, things have changed a little.
0:03:30 They’ve changed a little.
0:03:31 Speaking of change.
0:03:32 Speaking of a pundit.
0:03:35 Speaking of a keen observer of change.
0:03:37 Who could we have on the podcast today?
0:03:38 That’s right.
0:03:50 We have one of the great sort of thought leaders and voices and kind of the conscience for a progressive America, Ezra Klein, a New York Times columnist and host of, wait for it, the Ezra Klein Show.
0:03:53 We discussed with Ezra the state of American democracy.
0:03:59 We broke the Jewish political consensus in the Democratic Party’s leadership vacuum and who might fill it.
0:04:01 I’m just a huge fan of Ezra.
0:04:07 Yeah, I think of Ezra Klein and people like Rachel Maddow and my favorite co-host, Kara Swisher.
0:04:16 One of the things I really respect about them is they just, if you listen to any other work, it is clear that they embody the term success as the last 10%.
0:04:18 And that is they just work hard.
0:04:19 You can just hear it.
0:04:21 They just bring it.
0:04:25 You can tell they’re just up late trying to figure out the right word, the right sentence, the right sound.
0:04:34 And I’ve always had a ton of, you just listen to anything or read anything Ezra does and you know that he’s kind of brought the, brought the egg salad, so to speak.
0:04:35 That’s right.
0:04:37 Daddy always brings the egg salad to the church picnic.
0:04:41 So with that, here’s our conversation with Ezra Klein.
0:04:47 Ezra, where does this podcast find you?
0:04:49 I’m at the Times.
0:04:50 I am in New York.
0:04:52 I am getting ready to go to Berlin.
0:04:53 Berlin?
0:04:54 What’s in Berlin?
0:04:58 My closest friend from childhood lives in Nairobi.
0:05:03 So for his 40th birthday, a bunch of his friends who live in different places are gathering in Berlin for a couple days.
0:05:05 My closest friend, 40th?
0:05:06 Are you that young?
0:05:08 I am 41.
0:05:09 Oh God, I hate you.
0:05:10 You’re 41?
0:05:13 Jesus Christ.
0:05:14 I feel so insignificant.
0:05:16 Oh my God.
0:05:17 You’re this successful at 41?
0:05:20 I don’t know about insignificance, Scott.
0:05:21 Oh my God.
0:05:25 Were you like one of those kids who was getting journalism awards when you were like nine or something?
0:05:28 No, I never wanted to do journalism.
0:05:29 I got into it accidentally.
0:05:30 Wow.
0:05:31 What did you do right out of college?
0:05:32 I was a blogger.
0:05:37 So I got into, I did journalism out of college, but because I got into blogging early.
0:05:41 I was one of those nerds who blogged in 2003.
0:05:45 Oh, that’s, that’s, um, anyways, that’s very impressive, young man.
0:05:48 Okay, so let’s bust right into it.
0:05:52 You recently debated whether Trump is leading America into a new golden age.
0:05:59 In your closing remarks, you asked some, or you said something that kind of stuck with me, and that is you asked, are we even in a decent age?
0:06:00 What did you mean by that?
0:06:13 So this debate, which is put on by the Munk Debates, was between me and Ben Rhodes of the Pod Save the World, and then Kevin Roberts, who is best known for the, as the architect of Project 2025, and Kellyanne Conway.
0:06:23 And one of my worries going into the debate was, so the way they score these debates at Munk is that everybody is polled on whether or not they agree with the thesis walking in the door.
0:06:28 And nobody, who’s going to agree that America is entering a new golden age in Canada, right?
0:06:32 That’s not, you’re not going to find a huge amount of assent for that in the audience.
0:06:39 So one of the things I was saying at the end was that I thought it was too easy to argue that we’re not entering a new golden age.
0:06:56 That where we were was much further down Maslow’s hierarchy of political or societal needs, which is that we have entered a deeply indecent age in which the both reality and aesthetic of cruelty has become prized and projected from the very top.
0:07:04 And you look at the White House Twitter account putting out, you know, Studio Ghibli memes of immigrants crying while they’re being deported.
0:07:17 There is a kind of delight in sadism that is so, that far before I think we need to debate, are we, you know, when’s the next golden age going to be?
0:07:22 We’re going to have to pull ourselves out of glorifying indecency.
0:07:29 So I think that especially affects the right where they’ve conflated masculinity with coarseness and cruelty.
0:07:43 And I would all, but when, you know, when what’s going on is going on, I think you also have to acknowledge that the left, I love that, I forget what his name is, that German theologian or actor who said,
0:07:49 America’s coming to grips with the fact that a third of America would kill the other third while a third watched.
0:08:01 And I think you’ve got to acknowledge that with everything that’s going on, there’s some moderates and Democrats that are complicit, comfortable with this type of, I don’t know, USAID being cut off.
0:08:05 Do you think that leadership has been conflated with a certain level of cruelty?
0:08:14 So I think the first thing you said, that there is a version of masculinity that has been conflated with cruelty.
0:08:24 I remember when Elon Musk and Donald Trump were accusing each other of everything under the sun as the influencers on the right reacted like kids watching their parents about to get divorced.
0:08:36 There was a little burst of trying to justify Musk saying Trump was in the Epstein files, which maybe, maybe it was, by saying, oh, you guys just aren’t used to watching alphas fight it out.
0:08:38 You don’t know what it’s like to be around alpha males.
0:08:42 And I think of this as sort of the flip side.
0:08:46 I don’t, the left is complicit and has its own problems.
0:08:51 I don’t know that it’s complicit in this, but what it did do, which I think helped create this in certain ways,
0:08:57 is there was so little room for a decent masculinity on the left, right?
0:09:07 So much of masculinity was termed toxic, that it created a lot of space for a fairly sadistic image of masculinity to rise, right?
0:09:14 In a weird way, in a weird way, justifying the prophecy of toxic masculinity, but the Andrew Tates and so on of the world.
0:09:28 And, you know, I know this is something that you focus on a lot, but in the absence of a more self-confident, grounded, mature masculinity that is able to present itself and is proud of itself for being such,
0:09:40 you leave the door open to some very, very insecure, braggy, and sort of, I think, pathetic renditions of it.
0:09:45 One of the things I always think about in the MAGA world is, look, Trump is Trump.
0:09:46 Say what you will about him.
0:09:48 The guy is very grounded in who he himself is.
0:09:50 He’s been this guy for a long time.
0:09:58 All these people who have put on the Trump suit, starting with J.D. Vance, but you can look at Ted Cruz, you can look at a lot of them,
0:10:04 who did not talk like this, did not act like this, did not think this was a way even to be in public a decade ago,
0:10:11 and have, you know, put on the cloak of it in order to be competitive, in order to be part of it.
0:10:22 And, you know, now treat that as a kind of display of alpha male characteristics when it’s a deeply, deeply beta process of just kind of following the leader.
0:10:30 You know, but because of that, because it’s not leavened by Trump’s own sense of who he is,
0:10:33 they actually, I think, lean further into just cruelty oftentimes than he does.
0:10:40 There’s nothing else there, because it is for them an act that has become real.
0:10:48 So, Trump’s popularity is at an all-time low for a president in this stage of his presidency,
0:10:51 but at the same time, the Democrats are even less popular,
0:10:54 and there’s polls showing that if the election were held again today, he would still win.
0:10:59 Is this lack of decency, is it working?
0:11:08 I don’t think when you have watched a popularity drop as fast as President Trump’s has, you can say it’s working.
0:11:12 What’s not working is the Democratic Party being leaderless and rudderless.
0:11:18 I’m not shocked that at the moment, if you ask people in a poll who they’d vote for,
0:11:21 like, they don’t really know what to say, like, which Democrat, what do they know about them?
0:11:25 But the Democratic Party is in a pretty shattered place.
0:11:30 I’ve had a little bit of more trouble than other people do, or let me put it differently.
0:11:33 I’m a little bit less confident than other people seem to be in interpreting those polls.
0:11:38 Because one of the kind of structural characteristics of the past couple decades
0:11:41 is people’s dislike of the parties is getting higher and higher and higher.
0:11:46 And it doesn’t drive their voting decisions in quite the way it has at other times,
0:11:48 but nevertheless, they do not like the parties.
0:11:53 And so one of the reasons the Democratic Party is very unpopular right now is Democrats do not like it.
0:11:55 Now, those people are not going to vote Republican,
0:11:58 but they are pissed off at the Democratic Party,
0:12:00 which has to them been ineffectual,
0:12:04 which has to them been unable to stop the worst of what Trump is doing,
0:12:08 which has to them not come up with a message or come up with a set of leaders.
0:12:10 It’s going to have to be a process of,
0:12:12 I mean, first it’s going to be the midterms,
0:12:15 and they’re going to have to figure out how to be in opposition in a way that coheres,
0:12:17 but there’s going to be a process of having to find leaders again.
0:12:22 This is the first time the Democratic Party has been leaderless in a very, very long time.
0:12:26 Even if you go back to something like 2008, you had Hillary Clinton as the heir apparent,
0:12:29 and you had for some time, and that obviously ended up being Obama.
0:12:35 But so you had like, you know, the assumed leader, you had, you know, like real rising talent.
0:12:43 This is the most open field for leadership in the Democratic Party probably in my lifetime,
0:12:48 at least since 92, at a time when, in a way that is very different from 92,
0:12:55 the other side, right, the Trumpian side, is completely coherent around a single leader
0:12:59 and is a much more dangerous and very different force, right?
0:13:03 The difference between not having an unbelievably clear opposition leader to George H.W. Bush
0:13:08 and not having one to Donald Trump, I mean, those are fairly different scenarios to be in.
0:13:10 Yeah, it really is striking.
0:13:11 I agree with you.
0:13:16 It feels like this is the most, the biggest vacuum I’ve ever observed on either side.
0:13:18 Do you feel anybody stepping up into it?
0:13:19 That’s an interesting question.
0:13:21 I’m going to put the question that was put, that was presented to me.
0:13:25 They, I get a lot, and as I’m sure you do, who do you see emerging?
0:13:28 Who do you see as the next leader or leaders of the Democratic Party?
0:13:32 And we can have that conversation, and my guess is a lot of the, you know,
0:13:34 the Venn overlap will be about 90%.
0:13:37 Right now, everyone loves Andy Beshear because no one knows him that well.
0:13:39 Everyone’s hoping for some Phoenix to rise.
0:13:40 It’s amazing.
0:13:43 So they want someone they’ve heard of, but they don’t really know yet.
0:13:44 And I think that’s Andy Beshear.
0:13:47 But anyways, the question that was presented to me that I want to present to you
0:13:50 that I thought was really interesting is, what do you think the profile is of the person
0:13:54 who will likely emerge as the new leader of the Democratic Party?
0:13:55 I don’t think it’s Leader Jeffries.
0:13:57 I know it’s not Senator Schumer.
0:14:00 But I thought that was an interesting question.
0:14:03 What does this person potentially look, smell, and feel like?
0:14:03 What are your thoughts?
0:14:09 Congressional leadership has not served as a public face of the parties for a long time.
0:14:12 To what the profile is, the truth is, I don’t know.
0:14:20 We tend to get the profile wrong at this stage in an electoral cycle because we tend to be trying
0:14:21 to refight the last election.
0:14:26 So I always talk about this, but after the 2004 election, which was, I think, the last loss
0:14:34 that was truly shattering for Democrats, there was a period of time when what they wanted to do
0:14:39 was find somebody they felt was tough enough and Christian enough to win back the heartland.
0:14:43 You know, so you had these sort of booms around people like, you know, maybe John Edwards,
0:14:47 who’s a Southerner, or maybe it’d be the governor of Montana, and he wore a bolo tie and seemed
0:14:51 like, he was very tough-talking. Maybe they needed a general of some sort.
0:14:53 Eventually, it’s Barack Obama.
0:14:59 And then in 2012, after Mitt Romney loses, there’s, you know, the famed Republican autopsy,
0:15:03 and they, you know, they need to moderate themselves on immigration, and maybe it’s somebody
0:15:06 like Marco Rubio, and of course, it’s, or Jeb Bush in Florida.
0:15:09 Of course, it ends up being Donald Trump, which is not on anybody’s mind.
0:15:17 The person who will fit the next moment is not the person who will fit the practical set
0:15:20 of problems Democrats faced in the last election.
0:15:28 So I think you have to be looking for somebody who seems organic to whatever is coming.
0:15:30 I don’t think we’ve seen that person yet.
0:15:34 I don’t, I’m not saying we don’t, that when we do see it, we won’t know they, you know,
0:15:38 that they won’t have been known by now. But I don’t think anybody has emerged as so
0:15:44 right for where we are going with such a command of what seems to be where the country wants to be
0:15:49 in a couple of years that I would put them, you know, or their profile strongly at the front.
0:15:56 Yeah. And to be fair to the field out there, at this point, we hadn’t heard of Clinton or Obama,
0:15:58 right? It’s still pretty early.
0:16:04 I mean, we knew by this point in 05, we probably, the assumption was Hillary Clinton was going to run,
0:16:08 but the assumption was Barack Obama would not run yet. I mean, it seemed crazy. He had just been elected.
0:16:14 Well, just to date myself, I had a Paul Songus sign in my window in graduate school.
0:16:16 You remember him?
0:16:20 There you go. I got excited about Gary Hart in 2004.
0:16:26 Yeah, there you go. What a, I’ll put forward a thesis and you push back or validate it.
0:16:31 When I was asked that question, I said, I know who’s not going to be, and that is nobody under
0:16:38 five foot 10. I think neither, I think the Democrats are not going to take a chance a third time on
0:16:42 nominating a woman, despite the fact that some of the stronger candidates are female. And two,
0:16:48 it’s not going to be anyone under the height of five foot 10, which is an uncomfortable thing to say
0:16:53 out loud. I think America is highly luxist and highly sexist. That what I was comfortable saying
0:16:57 was I thought it was an 80 or 90% chance it was going to be a straight white male over the height
0:17:04 of six foot because Democrats would be looking to basically just have no excuses this time.
0:17:05 Your thoughts?
0:17:13 I don’t really buy it. It might be true, just in the sense that plenty of politicians who are going
0:17:19 to be, you know, significant figures in 2028 are, you know, white men over the, over the, over five
0:17:25 foot 10. I would not count, say, Pete Buttigieg out. If you were asking me who’s well positioned,
0:17:30 he’s very well positioned and he’s very politically talented and political talent counts for a lot.
0:17:34 And I believe he’s under five 10. I guess I could be wrong about that, but I think that’s right.
0:17:43 So again, it’s often candidates who almost look like everything you would not want from the moment
0:17:50 of the last election who end up dominating in the next election. You know, Barack Obama wins after
0:17:56 this election. It’s all about flag pins and national security. And here we have this like neophyte,
0:18:02 you know, guy with the middle name Hussein and funny ears from, you know, Chicago. You know,
0:18:07 Donald Trump at the time when Republicans need to moderate on, on immigration is coming down saying
0:18:13 Mexico is sending us their murderers and their rapists. I’m very careful with any predictions
0:18:18 that say, that draw a straight line from how the party is feeling, how it is conceptualized its loss
0:18:25 now to the next. The version of that I would do is the next leader of the Democratic Party will be
0:18:31 somebody who is an absolute apex communicator. I think the thing that happened with Biden and
0:18:38 it’s sort of different with Harris is the party in, in, in a different way with Hillary Clinton too,
0:18:45 the party went to these figures who were coalitionally unifying for it, but who were never strong
0:18:50 communicators. Or at least Biden, by the time he was running for president, was not a strong
0:18:57 communicator in 2020 and definitely in 2024. And if the party has come, I think to any view about
0:19:02 itself, it’s that it is losing the battle for attention. So if you cannot be a politician
0:19:08 who conceptually, you know, whether or not you actually get invited, can go on flagrant, can go
0:19:15 on Theovan, can go on pivot, can go on these places where you have to speak extemporaneously,
0:19:23 hang out, go on Hannity, right? So one of the reasons Buttigieg is a fascinating candidate is that he has
0:19:28 proven to the party that he more than clears the communications bar. He is considered by most to be
0:19:32 the best communicator in the party right now. He’s not the only one, right? I think a lot of them
0:19:37 can do this. And some of them are trying, right? Ro Khanna was just on flagrant, right? Wes Moore is
0:19:42 going to, I think, be very, very good on this. For all that there’s weirdnesses around the way he chose
0:19:47 to do it, the fact that Gavin Newsom is sitting down with people he doesn’t agree with week after week
0:19:52 and sort of learning how they think and learning how to do that is going to make him stronger by
0:19:56 the time if he decides to run in 2028. He’s getting training, the other ones are not.
0:20:01 So in some ways, the ones I worry about more are the ones with the not worry about, but the ones I
0:20:07 think are going to have a harder time are the ones who are operating under the old communication rules
0:20:12 for what is rewarded as caution and not making mistakes. What you’re going to need are people
0:20:18 capable of being omnipresent in a way that Joe Biden wasn’t, in a way that Kamala Harris wasn’t
0:20:22 willing to do. The sense that you need somebody authentic to this era of communication, which
0:20:27 may even have changed, and I think even has changed from 2024. Like, even Zoran Mamdani’s thing is very
0:20:32 different than how Donald Trump worked. But you’re going to have to have somebody who people feel
0:20:37 is capable of winning the communication wars of this moment in these mediums.
0:20:43 Just to talk about Secretary Buttigieg for a second, do you think America is ready for a gay
0:20:47 president? Or more specifically, do you think the black community in South Carolina is ready for a gay
0:20:47 president?
0:20:53 I think that when people ask that, it’s always about which person and how are they able to
0:20:58 navigate the concerns and fears people have. Here are a couple of things I can tell you. When people
0:21:04 were doing polling in the period when Joe Biden was, when it seemed like he might step down
0:21:12 and it wasn’t yet a complete fait accompli, it would just move to Harris. Buttigieg was in some
0:21:17 of the polls I saw the best polling Democrat anybody could find. It wasn’t by a ton, just by a couple
0:21:24 points, but it was still, he was beating the others. So that’s one thing. The other thing about Buttigieg
0:21:29 is he is capable. He did this in his convention speech, but I’ve seen him do it a lot.
0:21:37 Because I think for him, being married and having a family was something he grew up not knowing if it
0:21:45 would be there for him. He is able to do something that some politicians, particularly when they’re
0:21:52 sort of firsts in a way, can sometimes do, which is that he is able to speak of family and speak of an
0:21:59 almost traditional approach to values, to masculinity, to fatherhood, to parenthood, to fidelity in a way
0:22:08 that is novel, in a way that re-imbues it with a kind of wonder and almost holiness. He is much
0:22:13 better at talking about family than virtually any other politician on the field right now. So I think
0:22:20 when you say something like, you know, is X and Y group ready for a Z president? Well, it’s like,
0:22:25 what are the stereotypes of Z for them, right? What have they been taught to fear? And that’s the
0:22:31 set of questions that that person is going to have to overcome, you know, always has been. And I think
0:22:36 in this case, there’s always been something about this question of family and traditionalism. And are we
0:22:41 breaking something? I mean, this was always a fight about gay marriage for years and years and years
0:22:50 before it became the law of the land. And Buttigieg is somebody who I think, because of how ferocious his
0:22:57 commitment to the life he has built, a little bit beyond his own expectations is, he is very, very,
0:23:04 very skilled at talking about that in a way that is fairly beautiful and affecting. So I don’t know if
0:23:08 America is ready for a gay president. Is it ready for Pete Buttigieg? I think that’s going to be a different
0:23:13 question. We’ll be right back.
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0:24:56 Hunter Biden’s three-hour interview with Andrew Callahan started out normally enough.
0:25:00 Lure. So you’re born here in Delaware or born here in Pennsylvania?
0:25:05 In Delaware. Okay, in Delaware. Yeah, Wilmington. Small talk. What are your thoughts on Wilmington,
0:25:11 Delaware? Nice place? Oh, yeah. Work, family, addiction. Anyway, I don’t want to tell people how
0:25:17 to make crack cocaine. He did. Then came the crash out. I hear Rahm Emanuel is going to run for
0:25:22 president. Like, oh, boy, there’s the answer. There’s the answer. You have the Pod Save America
0:25:28 saying, you know, I don’t think South Carolina, that’s only there. What the? I mean, are they out
0:25:34 of their minds? I don’t have to be nice. Number one, I agree with Quentin Tarantino. George Clooney is
0:25:38 not. I don’t know what he is. He’s a brand. And by the way, and God bless him.
0:25:43 We’re not picking on him. Keep coming back, Hunter. No, in fact, everybody has been crashing
0:25:47 out lately. And today on Today Explained from Fox, we’re going to ask, what’s up?
0:25:56 So you recently wrote a piece in the New York Times titled, Why American Jews No Longer
0:26:01 Understand One Another. And I thought, by the way, it really resonated with me. And you write that the
0:26:05 consensus that held American Jews together for generations has cracked, and that what is good
0:26:11 for Israel is good for the Jews no longer holds. What do you think ultimately, say more about that,
0:26:13 and what do you think ultimately broke that consensus?
0:26:21 So the piece for me was motivated in this moment by seeing the fights in so many films I knew
0:26:26 about Mamdani, where you would have young Jews in New York who were voting for him, who really liked him,
0:26:30 older Jews. And I’m stereotyping a little bit, but this is mostly what I saw,
0:26:33 who were horrified. You saw him as an anti-Semite, you know.
0:26:42 And I’ve been, as I’ve been covering, you know, Israel and Gaza and also the politics of it here
0:26:47 for, you know, a couple of years now, feeling this fissure widening.
0:26:54 And there’s a lot of dimensions to it. The thing I say in that piece is that the consensus that held
0:26:58 American Jewry together for a very long time was fundamentally about Zionism. It was that Israel’s
0:27:03 good for the Jews, and we need to be, even in America, committed to it. That opposition to Israel,
0:27:09 particularly the opposition to Israel as a Jewish state, is anti-Semitic. That Israel is seeking a
0:27:14 two-state solution and will probably either find one soon, or if it doesn’t, it is not their fault.
0:27:23 And as that consensus is broken down for a lot of reasons, but in this moment, because a two-state
0:27:30 solution is nothing that Israel wants, and Israel is now, it seems, inflicting a mass starvation event
0:27:35 on Gaza, which is broken through to the media and to people.
0:27:43 This question of what is the relationship American Jews should have with Israel and through that with each other
0:27:49 has really polarized. So you’ve had a fair amount of the community polarize around Israel, right?
0:27:53 We need to defend Israel. You know, they’re living in a neighborhood where everybody wants to kill them,
0:27:58 Hamas could release the hostages if Hamas wanted to. So anything that happens on this is on their shoulders.
0:28:05 And then another set that is moving away from it, that wants no part of what this is, not just no part of
0:28:10 this war, but no part of government after government that is incredibly right-wing, that is building
0:28:16 settlements in the West Bank at an expanding pace. And as a two-state solution has functionally dissolved
0:28:22 as a live political project, it no longer exists as a kind of parking lot that can reconcile the
0:28:28 liberalism of American Jews and their commitment to Israel. If Israel simply intends to rule over
0:28:34 seven million Palestinians who will not have rights, you know, Palestinian Israelis or Arab Israelis have
0:28:38 some rights, but it’s not like what Jewish Israelis have. And then in West Bank and Gaza, it’s a horror show.
0:28:46 There is not the capacity anymore to sort of explain that away. And so then what do you do? Do you believe
0:28:52 in equality everywhere but in the place meant to be your spiritual home? Do you support what has become
0:28:57 a structure of apartheid? You know, people don’t love the word, but we don’t have that many for it.
0:29:03 Where do you end up? And there’s not an answer right now. There isn’t a solution, a policy move or anything
0:29:10 that can sort of reunite these two questions. And Israel itself, its politics have changed dramatically.
0:29:17 And it is seeking alliance with other right-wing ethno-nationalist governments in a way that’s really changing
0:29:24 the meaning of Israel on the world stage. So it’s a tricky and very heartbreaking moment.
0:29:32 Yeah, it’s, I would love to hear more about how you personally feel as someone who is an atheist and
0:29:37 never felt much connection with Judaism. Mother’s Jewish, I consider myself Jewish, but never really
0:29:42 connected with Israel or Judaism. And then October the 8th, I decided I was a full-blown Zionist.
0:29:49 And since then, it’s become increasingly hard. It’s just, you know, the diaspora, I think, is really
0:29:54 conflicted. And when I think about brand Israel, the strongest component of brand Israel, I think,
0:30:01 used to be that they were seen as the good guys. And the David to the Goliath, if you will. And I think
0:30:06 that’s no longer the case. At the same time, and curious to get your take here, I think the rest of the
0:30:15 world and a certain element of America is really drawn to the strength and victory of Israel. I mean, if you
0:30:23 look at the Houthis, if you look at Hezbollah, obviously Hamas, I mean, Israel’s taken out Iran, effectively,
0:30:29 or at least now rules the skies over Iran. And I think strength, strength is a fantastic brand
0:30:35 association. So the brand is shifting, but there are some, I would argue, elements of the brand that
0:30:39 are very aspirational and getting a lot of recognition from around the world. Your thoughts?
0:30:45 I think if you look on the right, Zionism has come to mean, this actually goes, I think, back to our
0:30:51 conversation about masculinity at the beginning. Zionism has come to be a symbol of a certain
0:30:59 belief in strength. Israel is Sparta, or the closest thing, like, this world still has, in a way, to a
0:31:05 Sparta. The issue for that, I mean, I can’t say I really think about it too much in terms of brands,
0:31:10 but the issue with that is, one, it is losing vast amounts of other kinds of support. I mean,
0:31:14 France just came out and said it was going to recognize a Palestinian state. That has not happened
0:31:19 before. When you say what Israel means around the world, Israel’s reputation around the world,
0:31:24 you look at how Israel is seen around the world, and it is terrible, right? I mean, whatever debates
0:31:29 we’re having in America, that is not the dominant debate in the rest of the world. The rest of the
0:31:33 world is moving very, very, very far away from Israel for the most part. You know, if you go look
0:31:39 at, say, global polling on Israel. But, you know, back sort of to how I think about it here,
0:31:45 one, American Jews overwhelmingly are liberal. They believe in human rights. They believe in
0:31:54 multi-ethnic democracy. And that’s not accidental. That is the set of ideas and ideals
0:32:02 on which American Jews, to some degree now European Jews, on which, like, the safety of the diaspora
0:32:10 is built, right? If the view is you can just dominate your ethnic minorities, then the Jews of the
0:32:17 diaspora are fucked, right? Because we are an ethnic minority wherever we are. And so it is not accidental
0:32:24 that this deep commitment to liberalism as a mode of politics, right? Not talking here about, like,
0:32:29 the American left, but the broader thing we mean when we say liberalism. It runs very deep in American
0:32:38 jury. And so, yes, Israel is moving to where its allies are. People like Donald Trump, right? J.D. Vance,
0:32:48 Viktor Orban, sort of right-wing, ethno-nationalist strongmen. What does that mean for Israel? Next
0:32:54 time Democrats are in power and the Democrat who is in power is not 80-some years old and remembers Israel
0:33:01 at its founding. What does that mean for Israel in 10 years if it is just accepted that it’s an apartheid
0:33:11 state when there’s no more excuses left to be made? So, in terms of the long term, I don’t think
0:33:17 that’s a very safe place to be. What does strength get you? I mean, the ability to execute military
0:33:23 operations. But Israel is not using its strength wisely or judiciously. This morning, I woke up and
0:33:28 an Israeli commentator I know, I don’t know if it’s published yet, so I don’t want to say who it is,
0:33:33 but sent me a piece that he’s been writing. And he’s not a person like on the far left,
0:33:37 just saying, if we don’t do something, Senwar will have won from beyond the grave.
0:33:43 Because the way the world is looking at us is Hamas’s ultimate dream. That they wanted,
0:33:49 Hamas wanted the world to see us as butchers. They wanted to see us as having no respect for
0:33:54 Palestinian life and to be invested in only domination. And now that is beginning to be what
0:34:01 they’re seeing. And so, you know, it’s like in any war, right? The bombings are the easy part if you
0:34:07 have the firepower. It’s always been easier to take out. I mean, Israel has done amazing military
0:34:11 operations, functionally for its entire history, right? It’s knocked out nuclear reactors before,
0:34:16 although it needed us, in this case, to help with that. And we don’t really know how much was done.
0:34:21 Like, for all we know, in a year, Iran is going to pop up with a nuclear weapon, right? They’re just going
0:34:24 to do, they’re just going to do a sprint in the background. So I don’t know that we know how these
0:34:30 stories have ended. But, you know, as with Iraq, as with Afghanistan, as with so many of these,
0:34:36 the invasion, the bombing, the shock and awe, if you have the military technology, is often the easy
0:34:43 part. It’s what do you do when you’re ruling over those ruins? And it is very telling that almost two
0:34:47 years now, after October 7th, Israel still has never put forward a day after planning Gaza,
0:34:52 right? It doesn’t have a vision of how it should be governed, because it doesn’t know.
0:34:58 Could a lot of these problems with the brand perception or the perception, the erosion in the
0:35:02 sentiment or goodwill towards Israel around the world, which I agree with, do you think a lot of
0:35:07 that could be repaired, quite frankly, if Netanyahu leaves the stage and Israel does a hard pivot away
0:35:14 from these policies? You know, that might go a long way to repairing their reputation. And also,
0:35:18 at the end of the day, isn’t it? I mean, what the world thinks of them is very important,
0:35:25 but what the kingdom thinks of them and their neighbors believing that they have kind of exhausted
0:35:33 their ability to invade or eliminate Israel, that obviously hasn’t worked. I mean, at the end of the
0:35:35 day, could Israel argue this has been worth it?
0:35:40 I don’t know. I mean, you’d have to ask Israel if they think it’s been worth it. And I think,
0:35:44 obviously, at least its government currently does. Not, obviously, worth the deaths of October 7th,
0:35:50 but the cost of their military operations. I guess maybe the place I’d probably part,
0:35:53 I don’t think what Israel has is a brand problem. I think what they have is a reality problem.
0:35:59 I mean, they are currently committing war crimes. There is just no other way to describe it. They
0:36:06 have choked off food to Palestinians in Gaza, a people under occupation from them. No matter what
0:36:11 the insurgent or terrorist group that you’re dealing with wants or doesn’t want or will agree to or will
0:36:15 not agree to, under the rules of war, you cannot do that. You cannot hold the entire civilian
0:36:20 population responsible. The idea that Hamas was stealing the aid has now been looked into and has
0:36:24 proven false at any systemic level. You know, in the West Bank, they’re building
0:36:29 settlements at a torrid rate. There’s a lot more violence against West Bank Palestinians from the
0:36:35 treetop or the hilltop youth. So, yes, I mean, it is the case that Israel could emerge as a kind of
0:36:40 brutal ethnostate. I mean, or maybe is a brutal ethnostate that just rules over this and nobody
0:36:44 can really do anything about it. In the long run, I don’t think that’s stable in the world we live in.
0:36:49 But I’m not going to, I don’t want to tell you that, you know, you cannot have brutal states in
0:36:53 modernity. You certainly can. I just think that’s a bad thing. I think that it’s going to be a bad
0:36:57 thing for Jews worldwide. I think it’s going to be a bad thing for what it means to be Jewish. I think
0:37:03 it’s obviously going to be horror for the Palestinians. I mean, my problem with this is not really so much
0:37:08 Israel’s brand. I think we often filter a lot of American conversations when we’re among people who are
0:37:12 sort of like committed to the long-term health of Israel and the Jews through the question of, is it good
0:37:19 for Israel and the Jews? But even some world where you can say for Israel’s interests as a state,
0:37:24 ongoing domination and apartheid-like structure is good for the way they have defined their interests,
0:37:30 I still think it’s bad, right? That violates my values as a human being and like as a political
0:37:34 thinker. And so in the long run, it will lose support for that. But I’m not, you know, you could
0:37:37 certainly make an argument that it’ll find other, it’ll pick up other support and be able to become
0:37:43 very close with Russia, right? You know, there’s always ways to sort of rejigger your alliances
0:37:52 alongside your values. But, you know, it comes with a kind of deep cost as well.
0:37:58 And the term war crimes obviously is a serious term. Do you think America’s guilty of similar
0:38:01 war crimes across almost every war it’s engaged in since World War II?
0:38:05 America’s been guilty of some war crimes. Mass starvation of civilian populations is usually
0:38:10 not one of them. There’s a grid. I don’t know if you’ve read the New York Magazine cover story on
0:38:14 this. It’d be worth having her on. Like this has been, the people I know who do this work,
0:38:17 they don’t, they think this has moved out of just normal war.
0:38:21 We’re going to need a bigger boat. So we’re going to, we’re going to move on to local New York
0:38:25 politics. Mom Donnie, your turn.
0:38:35 You know, we’ll see, right? The guy ran an amazing campaign. I often say that there are two kinds of
0:38:39 politicians, the kind that communicate about policy and the kind that communicate through
0:38:43 policy. And Mom Donnie is the kind that communicates through policy, right? Every one of
0:38:48 his policies, free to rent, free buses, free daycare, you know, government owned grocery stores.
0:38:52 They say something about him, right? They’re about his values, about how he views society,
0:38:58 right? They’re, they’re, they’re mimetic. The question is if he wins, and I think he’s,
0:39:02 you got to see him as a favorite at this point, can he govern effectively? So a bunch of those
0:39:06 policies need a bunch of money. He does not have any control over taxes. He would have to go to
0:39:14 Albany and Governor Kathy Hochul, who has said she will not raise taxes. So he, under virtually any
0:39:18 scenario we can see, is not going to have the money to do the things he wants to do. You know, some of
0:39:22 them, free buses actually would not be that expensive. You could probably, you know, get that from
0:39:27 somewhere else in the New York City, you know, budget. But in terms of big things, it’s very unlikely
0:39:31 he’ll be able to pull together the money for that. I also think that if he wins, Donald Trump is going
0:39:36 to see him as a kind of soft target and go to war with Mamdani. And that will include taking a lot
0:39:41 of money or trying to take a lot of money, the federal government flow that flows from the federal
0:39:46 government into New York City away from it. So that could be a sort of crisis that, you know,
0:39:51 there’s real questions about how he’ll be able to respond to it. Then there’s the freeze of the rent
0:39:56 dynamic, which, you know, for a year or two, and I get why that policy is popular. If you’re living in,
0:40:01 you know, some in rent controlled or stabilized housing or some or housing that is meant to be
0:40:07 affordable and the rent is going up by 10 or 12 percent, that’s terrible for you. If you do an
0:40:13 extended rent freeze, you’re going to reduce the incentive by a lot to repair those buildings and
0:40:18 to build new ones. Right. There’s no way of getting around that. So you need to be really opening the
0:40:24 floodgates some other way on construction. And when I look at Mamdani’s proposals, when I’ve, you know,
0:40:29 talked to him and heard him talk about this, I think a lot of his head is in the right place.
0:40:34 I’m not sure he’s willing to disappoint the people he would need to disappoint or wield enough power
0:40:40 to really unleash a building boom at an affordable cost for him. Really, most of his plans have focused
0:40:46 on publicly public housing, which is great. But New York City has not built public housing at that level
0:40:52 in a very, very long time. And whether or not it still can is a little bit unknown. And whether it
0:40:57 can under the kind of laws that it currently has and regulations and deals it has made, it probably
0:41:02 can’t if you don’t change those. Will Mamdani be willing to disappoint his friends and pick the
0:41:07 fights to change those? I don’t know. So he’s somebody who has an incredible amount of talent.
0:41:11 I think it’ll matter a lot who we see him surrounding himself with. Who does he listen to?
0:41:16 Who would his police chief be? What would his relationship with the police be like? Who will
0:41:20 be, you know, helping him run all of this, right? Will Brad Lander be his first deputy mayor? That would
0:41:26 be, I think, you know, one world. And I think that would be an encouraging sign. But I think there is
0:41:33 still a lot that is unknown. The transition from being a movement leader, which is what Mamdani is in a
0:41:40 context to being an executive is a very big transition, as you know, better than me. And the
0:41:47 question of can he sort of wield executive power and, you know, tack when policies aren’t working out
0:41:52 or come up with alternatives when he doesn’t have the money, you know, or kind of browbeat people or
0:41:56 make allies you wouldn’t expect them to make and listen to people you wouldn’t expect them to listen
0:41:58 to. You know, all that remains to be seen.
0:42:05 It strikes me that it’s a no, it’s a no brainer if he just has lunch very publicly with Michael
0:42:10 Bloomberg once a week up until the election, that if he just pivots to sort of the old guard or,
0:42:15 or softens his image a little bit, kind of rough, you know, sands out the rough edges that he’s,
0:42:21 he’s a lock, I would think. The, and I think a lot of people feel a little bit conflicted that say,
0:42:25 okay, I don’t love his policies. Some of his, some of the things he said in the past are somewhat
0:42:30 troubling, but at the same time, I think it’s difficult not to be inspired, right? It’s my
0:42:36 understanding is 4,000 young Democrats or people under the age of 40 filled out paperwork to run
0:42:41 for office after he won, which is, you know, which is a good thing. And what also struck me, and I’m
0:42:45 curious to get your thoughts, was how similar it was to the Trump campaign, a focus on affordability
0:42:50 and weaponizing these new mediums. Isn’t, regardless of what you think of his politics,
0:42:56 doesn’t it, it doesn’t potentially Mamdani’s victory, potentially sort of illuminate a path
0:43:02 for Democrats moving forward in terms of how they should be acquitting themselves or prosecuting a
0:43:09 campaign? I’m not sure. There are a lot of lessons from Mamdani, obviously, but I think one of it is
0:43:15 find incredible political talents that are well matched to the places they’re running. So look, I mean,
0:43:20 the guy wins by, I forget the exact margin in the primary now, but you’re talking about a win that I
0:43:25 think was in the, a little bit over 10 points range in a New York City primary. That’s great, right?
0:43:29 That’s a very impressive victory. Cuomo came in with a lot more money than he had. First, he hasn’t won
0:43:34 the general yet. I think he will, but let’s not totally get ahead of ourselves. And Cuomo is a very,
0:43:41 very, very weak and obviously scandal-ridden candidate who ran a terrible campaign. So the
0:43:47 question is, can you run like Mamdani trying to win a Senate seat in Kansas City or Wisconsin? Can you
0:43:50 win the governorship in Wisconsin that way, right? There are these elections that are going to have to
0:43:56 be fit to the place where the person is running. I think the thing you see in some of these figures
0:44:02 who are over-performing, Mamdani or, you know, in a very different way, Ruben Gallego in Arizona.
0:44:07 I’ve been impressed with what I’m seeing from John Ossoff in this re-election campaign he’s running in
0:44:15 Georgia, is what you need is not like the one recipe. You need candidates who are compelling on
0:44:21 their own. And one reason they are compelling on their own is that they know who they are and
0:44:26 they’re willing to stand up for it. And sometimes that is to the left of where, you know, much of
0:44:29 the electorate is comfortable with them being. And sometimes it’s like a little bit to the right,
0:44:36 but there is something about being willing to unleash the energy of some conflict around yourself,
0:44:44 right? Not being so careful and cautious and poll-tested and mealy-mouthed that everybody feels
0:44:50 when they hear you talk. Like the first thing happening in your mind is a filter that is
0:44:57 catching anything you might say that anyone might not like first. People really sense when they’re not
0:45:02 quite talking to you. And when you talk to Mamdani or you hear him talking, you’re talking to him.
0:45:07 When you talk to Gallego or you hear him talking, you’re talking to him. Or that’s true for Angie Craig,
0:45:12 right? That’s true for Elise Slotkin. There are a lot of really good candidates, but one thing that
0:45:17 those candidates tend to have is an authenticity. And you watch me like, yeah, I would keep listening
0:45:22 to this person. One other thing I will just say about Mamdani that I’ve always found to be a big
0:45:28 part of his appeal and what makes him a real political talent is he feels very motivated by his sympathies
0:45:33 and not his resentments. That’s not, in my view, how Donald Trump feels, but it’s also not how a lot
0:45:38 of people on the left feel. Oftentimes, people in politics, they feel more motivated by who they hate
0:45:45 than who they’re in this for. And Mamdani, who took a lot of flack, right, you know, who got a lot of
0:45:54 unfair attacks. Nevertheless, there is a fundamental friendliness to his campaign, a sense that even if
0:45:59 you disagreed with him, he didn’t hate you. He wasn’t looking to push you out of his circle. He wanted you
0:46:07 in there. He wanted you in that tent. And that idea that there is a political value to what you might call
0:46:11 like a high political theory level pluralism and what you might call as a normal human being, like
0:46:18 friendliness and openness to other people. I think that’s easy to underestimate. I think that a real
0:46:24 failure of the left, and I don’t just mean like the democratic socialist left, I mean like the broad,
0:46:29 you know, left of the center, was developing a politics that seemed like it was more interested
0:46:35 at times and a communication style and figuring out who wasn’t on our side and making that clear
0:46:40 than inviting people, even people who didn’t agree with us, in at least halfway.
0:46:46 And Mamdani, though he’s, you know, to a lot of people’s left, he doesn’t feel that way. He’s looking
0:46:50 for where you agree with him, not where, you know, he can kick you out.
0:46:55 You’ve likened Trump to a living Twitter algorithm, which I love, saying that his focus
0:47:02 generally just from being, from thing to thing. Not because he’s trying to distract us, but because
0:47:10 he himself is easily distractible. I would, my sense is right now that may, in fact, not be true, that
0:47:15 he’s, he’s, he’s, the majority of his focus right now is on weapons of mass distraction from
0:47:25 Epstein. I’m, I’m curious what has surprised you about the most recent iteration of the Epstein
0:47:30 scandal, and if you have any speculation around where it heads and what it means for both parties
0:47:36 and Trump. I mean, their level of obvious panic around it. I can’t tell you what’s at the center of
0:47:44 that panic. But as you say, he has been quite consistent on his anger about this, his desire
0:47:50 that these files now are not released, whatever he was saying at another point. Mike Johnson
0:47:58 recessing the House rather than allowing that vote. It was a moment that I think, even if you’ve been a
0:48:05 bit skeptical, that, you know, that beneath the smoke, this fire certainly made a lot of people look at
0:48:11 it differently. Where it goes from here, I don’t know. It doesn’t feel to me like it’s going away.
0:48:16 I feel, I’ve said on Pivot, the fix is in. That all of a sudden they’ve decided they want to speak to
0:48:21 Jelaine Maxwell after she’s been there for several years. That it has been communicated to her that she
0:48:26 will get a pardon if, if in fact, her comments come across as exonerating the president. To me, this feels
0:48:29 just plain as day. Your thoughts?
0:48:35 I think the fact that so many people believe that is going to make that move a little bit hard to run.
0:48:41 Now, look, like my view is not that Epstein is going to bring down Donald Trump and, you know,
0:48:46 the Wall Street Journal reports that he is somewhere in those files, maybe multiple times, you know,
0:48:51 where he is in them. I don’t know. It could just be notes of them being at parties together.
0:48:58 It’s one of these things that I wonder how much what’s in there would confirm what we know,
0:49:04 which is that they were good friends and he knew about Epstein, right? Trump is the first person,
0:49:08 to my knowledge, on record in this New York Magazine story from, what was it, 06,
0:49:16 saying publicly, Jeffrey Epstein likes young women, right? He says, a lot of people say Epstein likes
0:49:22 beautiful women almost as much as I do, and he likes them young. Trump knew. Whatever else you
0:49:28 want to say about it, Trump knew. And we know Trump knew. But sometimes there’s something more
0:49:37 sticky about finding it in the official files than, you know, reading into, you know, a quote from 20
0:49:47 years ago. So, yeah, maybe they try to trot out Ghislaine, and maybe she does give testimony that
0:49:52 seems exonerating. And in a world where it seems like she got something for that, or people suspect
0:49:56 she did, I’m not sure how persuasive that will be. I think there’s still going to be a lot of calls to
0:50:01 release these. Then at some point, Democrats, if they take the House in 2026 and then, you know,
0:50:06 have it in 2027, I think you should expect that to be passing a bunch. And if Republicans have the
0:50:09 Senate, now you have, like, the Senate and the House fighting over this legislation.
0:50:15 Maybe you have oversight committees that are subpoenaing people, again, under a Democratic
0:50:20 House to get information and to have testimony, and people are actually paying attention to that
0:50:26 testimony. It’s one of the first places where I think Democrats have seen real weakness with Trump.
0:50:32 And so I don’t expect that it is simply going to dissolve. But nor do I think that one should expect
0:50:36 that it’s going to, you know, become what liberals once hoped, you know, you know, the Mueller report
0:50:40 would become. And something will happen. And that’s the end of the Trump administration.
0:50:45 If you were advising the Democratic Party on how to handle the whole Epstein scandal,
0:50:46 what would your advice be?
0:50:52 If I were advising them, I mean, you keep up the pressure. Ro Khanna’s been very sharp on this,
0:50:58 and he’s been very smart on this. And you focus on issues that are going to crack the other side’s
0:51:07 coalition. And you weave this into a larger argument about corruption. This is one of many examples that
0:51:13 Donald Trump and the people around him are astonishingly corrupt. And, you know, John Ossoff
0:51:19 has been doing this on the campaign trail in a way I think is effective. But this is a place where,
0:51:23 you know, these powerful people banded together to pull one over on you, right? You know, whip you up
0:51:26 about the Epstein files. And as soon as they got what they wanted from you, which was your votes,
0:51:32 your support, your faith, they turn around and spent it on tax cuts for themselves. And you don’t get
0:51:37 the Epstein files. You get Medicaid cuts. You get food stamp cuts. You know, meanwhile, Trump is taking
0:51:43 Qatari jets. And he’s taking, you know, making billions of dollars on crypto meme coins. And he is
0:51:49 over and over and over and over again, screwing people over to line his own pocket and out of his
0:51:57 friends. And this becomes, in a kind of an oversight structure, one of many things Democrats will be
0:52:04 going after to build a case about what has always been to me the very soft underbelly of this
0:52:08 administration, which is that they said they would come here and govern on your behalf and they’re just
0:52:13 making themselves rich and they’re screwing you over. We’ll be right back after a quick break.
0:52:25 Hey, this is Peter Kafka, the host of Channels, a show about media and tech and what happens when
0:52:32 they collide. And this may be hard to remember, but not very long ago, magazines were a really big deal.
0:52:37 And the most important magazines were owned by Condé Nast, the glitzy publishing empire that’s the
0:52:40 focus of a new book by New York Times reporter Michael Grinbaum.
0:52:46 The way Condé Nast elevated its editors, the way they paid for their mortgages so they could live in
0:52:54 beautiful homes. There was a logic to it, which was that Condé Nast itself became seen as this kind of
0:52:55 enchanted land.
0:53:00 You can hear the rest of our chat on channels, wherever you listen to your favorite media podcast.
0:53:12 Every so often you say a combination of words you never expected to say, such as Tesla opened a diner
0:53:18 in Los Angeles. This week on The Vergecast, we talked to a writer who went there, ate the food and saw a lot
0:53:24 of cyber trucks. Also, Apple’s making a big design change to its operating systems. It’s called liquid
0:53:30 glass and the public can finally try it. Our reviewers have been testing it for weeks and they have some
0:53:36 strong opinions about how it looks. Finally, it’s summer blockbuster season. We talk about the new media
0:53:41 circuit that movie stars have to endure to promote their projects. A lot of it involves eating chicken.
0:53:54 We’re back with more from Ezra Klein.
0:54:01 You and Derek Thompson, who were big fans of, put out abundance earlier this year.
0:54:06 What surprised you most about the response to it? What issues do you think got more attention than you
0:54:08 were expecting or less attention than you were expecting?
0:54:15 I mean, the level of response to it surprised me. You know, you release a book that is about,
0:54:22 in substantial portion, you know, how strong the state is in city capacity and zoning policy and
0:54:28 housing and, you know, how hard it is to build transmission lines and issues in scientific institutions.
0:54:34 You know, you could see a world for that book. Probably the modal world is some respectful reviews and
0:54:38 then you kind of, everybody moves on with their life. So the fact that it became this huge discourse
0:54:43 object that it’s, you know, at least as of last week, still on the bestseller list, whatever it is,
0:54:50 18 weeks later, that’s been amazing. I didn’t expect the backlash from like the, I’d call it like the
0:54:54 neo-populist left that we got. We didn’t get a backlash from all parts of the left, but that wasn’t
0:55:00 one I was expecting sort of Brandeisian, people very focused on corporate power because I didn’t see it
0:55:05 coming because I don’t see abundance as in conflict with that. What I came to realize over
0:55:10 time and over talking to them was that abundance is sort of more underlying theory of politics,
0:55:16 which I think is more liberal theory of politics, which is that power is ill-used in a lot of places.
0:55:20 There’s no one kind of power that if you just broke it, you would get the society you wanted,
0:55:26 right? For abundance, the kind of list of enemies is not just like corporations and rich people.
0:55:30 Sometimes those are your problem. And sometimes you have lots of other problems that, you know,
0:55:39 those don’t fix. So I think that became, it became, in my view, the fight over abundance became a
0:55:44 version of a fight that is inside the Democratic Party between, you know, what we may call liberalism
0:55:50 and populism, which are more structurally different ways of viewing politics. Of course, those can be
0:55:56 synthesized. And I think skilled politicians will do that. But I do think it is a very real divide
0:56:01 in people’s implicit way of thinking about what the problem is and how to solve it.
0:56:08 Yeah, the thing I was disappointed in, Democrats, it seemed like an argument over the theories as
0:56:13 opposed to trying to inspire a thoughtful conversation around specific programs. And the thing I took away
0:56:18 from it and that you and Derek kind of inspired in my mind was, and one of my disappointments with the
0:56:23 Democratic Party is they’re long on rhetorical flourish and short on actual programs and big, bold ideas.
0:56:29 But the thing I took away from listening to your interviews and the book was, you know,
0:56:34 8 million houses in 10 years. Let’s build 8 million manufactured homes, which cost 30 to 50%
0:56:39 less than on-site homes and create little cool communities for young people, which will create
0:56:46 cool. And basically just say to Americans, your kid’s going to be able to afford a house if they’re
0:56:50 making a decent living. Like right there, just one program, specific number, specific costs,
0:56:57 let’s get on it. And we got, seems like, diverted into this existential argument over what abundance means
0:57:06 and the externalities of it. So was your intent to foment a conversation around some sort of federally backed
0:57:10 or tax credit, private sector unleashed-inspired housing program?
0:57:16 I mean, I think that’ll come as people are coming up with their 2028 plans and trying to think about
0:57:21 how, you know, what abundance means to them and how they instantiate in policy. I think you’re going
0:57:24 to see a lot of versions of that. I mean, hell, Zoram Amdani was talking about abundance on the campaign
0:57:32 trail. The thing, I think what you’re getting at, which I feel is true, but I may be more
0:57:42 placid around, is the focus was really on the critique. And the critique unleashed a lot of energy
0:57:47 because it unleashed a lot of conflict, right? We’re saying government has worked poorly. We have failed
0:57:53 in a lot of the places where we liberals, Democrats, people on the left have governed. We have not made
0:58:00 life affordable for people. We have not delivered, you know, big mass infrastructure projects. People have
0:58:03 lost faith in the government for a lot of reasons, but this is one of them and they’re not wrong to do
0:58:08 so, right? If you, you know, if California comes back to you and says, we’d like to try building
0:58:12 high-speed rail again, I think you should say, well, what did you learn? Because like right now you’re
0:58:20 failing. I do think that there could be and hopefully will be more conversation about what does abundance
0:58:25 actually look like? As you were saying, maybe it’s 8 million homes in 10 years. I think we could do a lot
0:58:30 more on defining and really pushing for clean energy abundance, right? Having a lot more energy
0:58:35 having energy that is on the path to truly being too cheap to meter. That would be an incredible, genuine
0:58:43 step forward in human wealth. There’s so much around innovation and healthcare and healthcare supply and what
0:58:50 people have access to. Like for an extended period of time, the question of GLP-1s is going to become a very,
0:58:54 very, very important political question because right now Medicaid and Medicare do not cover them
0:59:01 as anti-obesity drugs. If they did at current prices, it would probably bankrupt the system.
0:59:07 So this question of how do you create abundance of, you know, new technologies and new medications and,
0:59:15 you know, there is a lot there. So there is a critique of how government works and in some ways of how the
0:59:21 the sort of democratic party has governed, which has been the focus because people are fighting over that.
0:59:27 I do think being a party that can offer people a vision that they can actually feel
0:59:34 of what a more abundant America would look like, what it would look like if not just you, but your children
0:59:39 could afford a home in the place they actually wanted to live, what it would look like if we really were
0:59:44 our world leaders in next generation energy, what it would look like if we really did have a lot more
0:59:50 great public infrastructure and then proved ourselves, you know, ruthless enough to change government,
0:59:57 to slaughter our own sacred cows to get there. I think that’s very compelling, but, but yes, that,
1:00:02 that part, that kind of visioning, I think has been, um, even though we start the book with it,
1:00:04 has been less a part of the conversation than I would like to see.
1:00:10 I just want to do, uh, I’d love to do a lightning round around just specific policy
1:00:17 ideas and get, just get your quick response to it. Um, lower Medicaid eligibility by two years,
1:00:23 every year for 10 years, brings it down to 40 or 45, which effectively is socialized medicine
1:00:27 because I think 70 to 90% of all healthcare costs are people over the age of 40, but basically
1:00:32 a slow but steady march towards, uh, socialized medicine.
1:00:38 I’ve always been pro lowering the Medicare age by a lot and, and also doing something like Medicare
1:00:44 for kids. So there, there’s been a theory for a long time that you can basically do, um, a Medicare
1:00:50 like program for kids or pretty cheap in general, call it up to 18 and bring Medicare eligibility down
1:00:54 to 45. Now it’s worth saying that eligibility is different. You have to say, are you going to
1:00:57 subsidize them at the same rate? You subsidize people over 65, right? There’s all, all kinds of
1:01:02 questions in probably nobody gives a shit about this anymore. In the affordable care act, there
1:01:07 was almost when the public option is getting killed, a compromise to do Medicare eligibility at 55 and
1:01:12 Joe Lieberman personally killed it, which I’ve never forgiven him for, um, the late Joe Lieberman. But
1:01:18 I have always been a big fan of, of increasing the, the age ranges that Medicare can, can cover and
1:01:22 building a very clear healthcare system for kids built on public insurance.
1:01:30 Yeah. Alternative minimum tax of 50% for anyone making over say $3 million, elimination of the
1:01:32 exemption for estate tax.
1:01:40 Yeah. And one of my, one of my views about 2028 is it the tax code is now too, too broken and Democrats
1:01:47 should figure out smart Democrats will figure out an actual simple tax reform that you got to throw out
1:01:53 the code and start over and doing something much flatter, but, but highly progressive, right?
1:02:01 And much simpler, you know, that has much simpler rules and not a billion different carve outs and,
1:02:07 you know, all of the lobbyists poked holes that we have here. So, you know, something very heavily
1:02:10 built around a value added tax, I think would make sense. You can do, you can do progressive
1:02:15 consumption taxes, right? There’s a lot of ways to do it. Your, your version is another one of that sort
1:02:23 of more oriented towards, um, richer people, but I think a flat, but highly progressive and flat,
1:02:26 I should say broad, but highly progressive tax code is the way to go.
1:02:31 So just to wrap up here and we do appreciate how generous you’ve been with your time. I’m just
1:02:38 curious with the kind of, uh, there are, I remember Thomas Friedman at Davos 25 years ago talking about
1:02:43 the emergence of the supranational, the basically nation states as individuals. And I thought that was
1:02:47 actually quite, if you look back, quite prescient, but I also think the same thing has happened.
1:02:52 There’s a certain number of people in media who have developed, whose work is so outstanding
1:02:58 and that it breaks through. But in addition, they’re able to sort of weaponize different mediums and kind
1:03:05 of become bigger than the platform itself. And I think you’re one of those people. I’m curious what
1:03:09 your strategy is. And please don’t tell me you don’t have a strategy. You just want to do great work.
1:03:14 I hate, well, you can say it, but I won’t believe you. But what is your strategy around
1:03:17 these different mediums? Where are you allocating more of your precious human capital
1:03:23 around different, different technologies, different platforms? And where are you spending less time?
1:03:27 When you think about yourself as a content producer, and a lot of it is the medium is the
1:03:30 message. Which mediums are you over and under investing in?
1:03:34 Well, one thing that I think is a little different about how I approach this than other people
1:03:44 is that I tend to be fairly all or nothing. So I want to have an absolutely amazing podcast,
1:03:50 right? I want my show to be amazing. I put a lot of time into that, right? I want to be a really good
1:03:58 columnist. I put a lot of work into those two things. And then I don’t do social media. So I’m not
1:04:05 really on Instagram. I’m not on X. I’m not on Blue Sky. The podcast is on YouTube, which I think
1:04:13 is important. But I think of that as one project. I’m not myself on TikTok. We put my stuff on TikTok
1:04:19 and actually does really well there. But that’s part of the kind of podcast, to my view. I just,
1:04:23 you know, and I wrote a book, but I don’t write tons of books, right? It’s my second book. And I’ve
1:04:28 been doing this for more than 20 years. It’s my second book. I try to really, really, really fully
1:04:40 put my energy into creating a fairly discrete number of journalistic products that are really good and
1:04:44 that lead, they create conversations. So, I mean, that piece you mentioned on American Jews don’t
1:04:50 understand each other any longer. That piece took me time. There are, you know, I think six interviews
1:04:54 in that piece, not anything made it into it, but behind it at the very least. It took me weeks to
1:04:59 do. I held it beyond when it was supposed to initially run. We then did a version in audio
1:05:06 where we actually wove more of the interviews into it. I wanted that to be something that would create
1:05:12 conversation and it really has. And so I think one of my, and this might also be, you know, I have
1:05:17 advantages and, you know, a big platform so I can, I have the privilege of being able to do this, but
1:05:23 I try to be more engaged in like the role of starting conversations than kind of jumping into
1:05:27 them. And that’s because I find that if I’m jumping into a lot of conversations, I find it very, very
1:05:32 distracting. The other thing that is not a medium that I participate in the way I participate in
1:05:37 podcasting, but I just spend a lot of time reading things on paper. And I think it’s a huge advantage.
1:05:42 I think it makes me smarter. It lets me see things that other people aren’t seeing. I just, I think
1:05:48 compared to a lot of people, a lot more of my information diet is books and printouts and a lot
1:05:55 less is scrolling. And that keeps my work a little bit more different. And just in terms of, we have a
1:06:00 lot of young people listen to podcasts, a lot of young men, actually, I think we’re 70 or 80% young men.
1:06:06 And they, people are going to look at you and think, wow, 41, I want to be Ezra Klein, right? You, you have
1:06:11 my senses. I don’t, I know you, I don’t know you, but I sort of know you. And my sense is you’re doing
1:06:15 something. You have a lot of influence. You seem to like what you do. You’re making an exceptional
1:06:20 living. Uh, you’re relevant. And a lot of people probably look at you and think, you know, I, I would,
1:06:24 I’d like to be in those shoes. I’d like to be in that seat. Can you talk about the one or two biggest
1:06:29 influences and what young people can take away in terms of getting you to where you are now?
1:06:35 I came up through blogging, which was a very different way to come up at a time when that was a very open
1:06:42 space, which it isn’t now. And so I started a blog when I was a freshman at UC Santa Cruz and, um,
1:06:45 University of California, I didn’t know that. I didn’t know I could like you more, Ezra. Well done.
1:06:49 UCLA and Berkeley, greatest, greatest gift from government.
1:06:54 I got rejected from Berkeley repeatedly. I got rejected from Berkeley, uh, when I applied first
1:06:58 and then when I tried to transfer there, but then I went to UCLA a bit too for a year. Uh, but I think
1:07:06 of myself primarily as a banana slug. So that I think allowed me to go through a backdoor. When I
1:07:10 started blogging, nobody thought of that as a career in order to die. Uh, you know, it sounded like
1:07:17 something that would grow on your foot. Um, and there was one, an amazing community around that of like
1:07:22 really, really excellent people who are, are still like amazing figures today. Right. You know,
1:07:26 Matt Iglesias was an early inspiration for me as a blogger because he was another college kid.
1:07:31 Uh, you know, Andrew Sullivan was like one of the big bloggers of that era. Um, unfortunately,
1:07:36 Kevin Drum passed away. Uh, I think it was austere now, but, but he was a real figure in that.
1:07:42 And so I think I was able to build my own sense of how to do my work and then got brought in
1:07:49 repeatedly to, to institutions in this kind of protected space where I was doing something they
1:07:54 wanted, right? Blogging and in, in, in different formats and later podcasting. And, and so they come
1:07:59 in and they’re sort of like almost like acqui-hire me to, to do this thing they didn’t really know what
1:08:04 to do yet. And that gave me a lot of freedom that not everybody else had. Um, so he’s had a cow
1:08:09 an early blogger and a big influence on me. Um, so one, I think the blogosphere, I still in some
1:08:15 ways think a lot of who I am is formed by that. And then, you know, the other thing that I think
1:08:18 has always been very important in my own work is that I’m actually a reporter. I’m not just,
1:08:24 I don’t think of myself primarily as a takes writer. And I think something that keeps my work
1:08:29 pretty fresh is that it’s not just my voice over and over and over again. And for that, I give credit
1:08:33 to a bunch of my early editors. Uh, you know, Mike Tomaski, who I remember at the American
1:08:37 prospect, I came and brought him one of my early features and he looked at me and he
1:08:40 said, this isn’t even a piece of journalism. I was like, what do you mean? That was such
1:08:45 a mean thing to say to me. It’s like, there’s no other voices in it. It’s just you. And that
1:08:49 made a big impression on me. And so, you know, my podcast is, you know, primarily interviews
1:08:54 with other people, my columns, you’ll, they’re not literally all interview based, but they are
1:08:58 heavily. If you look at, um, abundance, the book, it’s a lot of reporting, much of it on the
1:09:03 ground in different places. I think it is, people think so much about what they’re telling
1:09:07 other people and whether other people are listening and are they like, you know, how did they get
1:09:13 in the algorithm? I think the first question is how to actually be interesting and have something
1:09:18 that is worth saying. Um, what kind of work are you doing that you’re bringing to the audience?
1:09:24 Why, what service are they hiring you to do? Because nowadays there’s so much political opinion
1:09:29 out there, so much writing, so many voices, you really got to be able to offer something that
1:09:33 other people aren’t offering. And for me, a lot of the time that comes from other people, right?
1:09:38 It comes from being able to kind of, you know, interview and show them at their best. But yeah,
1:09:42 that, that sort of mixture of blogging is a kind of constantly iterative learning in public,
1:09:48 you know, um, opinionated and then merged with like a real commitment to reporting, which I think I
1:09:58 still have. Any thoughts on, um, you have two kids, any thoughts or learnings or advice, uh, to young
1:10:04 dads on how to be a good father or your learnings as a father and being, trying to be a good, a good
1:10:13 partner? This will sound not cliche, but like a little, I think something, but parenting yourself
1:10:21 is hard. It’s harder than parenting your kid. And what I mean by that is that it’s really important
1:10:27 first and foremost, how you show up for your kid. How good of a parent you are going to be is going
1:10:32 to have a lot to do with, are you sleeping? And if you’re not sleeping, are you taking care of yourself
1:10:36 in other ways? Are you feeling good in your marriage, you know, with your partner, if you are
1:10:42 married, are you feeling good at your work? Are you working out at all? And a lot of the, the place
1:10:48 where parenting gets really tough is when you have poorly parented yourself and now you are poorly
1:10:52 parenting your child because you’re pissed off because you’re a distraction from what you really
1:10:57 want to be doing because you can’t give them your attention. And I don’t say this from the mountaintop
1:11:02 where it never happens to me. I say this from the place where it happens to me all the time where
1:11:07 I’m like, I’m just being a bad parent today. Like not terrible. I’m not beating my kids, but I’m,
1:11:12 you know, mentally checked out and I’m tired and I’m not being, you know, being able to be there
1:11:18 with them. And I just often see parents not do a good job, not even sort of realize like they’re
1:11:24 part of the equation too. And that, you know, in the same way that how their kid responds to their
1:11:29 parenting is going to depend on how’s the kid eaten recently? Have they slept? Like what’s going on in
1:11:33 their lives? How they parent is going to depend on how they’re eating, how they’re sleeping, whether
1:11:37 they’re working out, whether they’re going out on a date with, you know, the person they love or
1:11:41 finding a person they love or whatever it might be. Parenting yourself is hard. You got to,
1:11:46 you got to pay attention to it. Your, your, your kids, first of all, need you to be present.
1:11:52 Is it difficult? And I struggled with this my whole career between being great at what you do and having
1:11:56 your own relevance and your own economic security, which your family benefits from. And quite frankly,
1:12:01 just being fucking exhausted or just not having the time to be a very engaged partner or,
1:12:08 or father. Is that something you struggle with? Yeah, all the time. I mean, I, one of my worst
1:12:12 feelings is feeling like the podcast often gets the best of me and sometimes my family gets the worst.
1:12:18 Uh, and they get me at the end of the day when I’m tired, when I’m, you know, worn down, when
1:12:27 the caffeine is worn off. Um, I feel like I spend so much time running from my own exhaustion,
1:12:31 right? The thing that I feel the most often that I fight the hardest is feeling tired.
1:12:38 And, uh, and it’s also just a part of my life, right? There’s not some way of doing what I’m
1:12:43 doing or the number of things I’m doing and not having to wake up earlier than my body would like
1:12:50 to, you know, there isn’t a way to do it all. And so just accepting that you’re in, you’re going
1:12:55 to be in triage all the time. And, you know, sometimes you will flex too far in one direction
1:12:59 and you’ll have to flex back for a while. I mean, the first six months of this year
1:13:05 with abundance kind of blowing up and, you know, asking more of me than I had quite anticipated
1:13:11 that was stress on my home life. That was stress on my wife. That was stress on my kids.
1:13:18 And so at a certain point, um, some, what is it? It’s July now. Uh, so I think really right about
1:13:25 the beginning of July, I just called a full four month stopped any work travel. And like for three
1:13:32 or four months, um, I’m just a hard no. And I, I’m still working, right? I’m not disengaged, but
1:13:37 I, I just find sometimes I have to do that. Like I, I pushed really hard in that direction,
1:13:41 but that could just attain its own momentum after that. And then you just are doing it
1:13:45 and doing it and doing it. And everything you do spins off more, you know, options and panels
1:13:50 and you should come here. And can you come talk at the policy school? And so I gave it everything
1:13:56 I had for a while and then kind of full stop. Um, and now I’m focusing back on, you know, uh,
1:14:02 my column, my podcast, my family life, my friendships, my partnership, my health. There are seasons
1:14:07 for things. And, but you got to know when one season’s ending and another is starting.
1:14:13 And we always end with the same question. Um, you got a time machine, you go back, you’re
1:14:18 plopped in front of you, your 25 year old self and you have 15 seconds. What do you say to your
1:14:18 25 year old self?
1:14:26 My 25 year old self. So I’d be in DC. It’s really hard because I like, I’m happy with how my life
1:14:31 has turned out. There isn’t a lot here that I want to change. There’s not a lot. I think I could
1:14:36 have told my 20 because advice is so advice is bullshit. It’s all execution, right? We all know
1:14:40 to a large extent what we should be doing. I mean, I would have invested in Tesla.
1:14:42 Buy Tesla, buy Nvidia.
1:14:44 Buy Bitcoin. Yeah, buy some Bitcoin.
1:14:47 Yeah, that’s my, I think that is, that would have changed, that would have changed a lot.
1:14:52 You just would have said the word Bitcoin over 15 times. I love that. All right.
1:14:55 Look, man, there’s a lot I could have told myself that I wouldn’t have been able to put
1:14:57 into practice, but that I would have.
1:15:01 There you go. Ezra Klein is a New York Times columnist and the host of
1:15:05 The Ezra Klein Show. Previously, he was the founder, editor-in-chief, and then editor-at-large
1:15:10 of Vox. By the way, there’s a lesson in there. I find it the most relevant. People doing the
1:15:16 best work have the shortest bios. Ezra joins us from New York. Ezra, I’m a huge fan, and
1:15:21 I just, let me, this will be the third time I reference it. When you read your stuff, when
1:15:27 you listen to your pods, when you read your books, it’s just clear, and I think this is a
1:15:32 really important lesson for young people, you can tell you just work really fucking hard
1:15:37 that you bring it, that you show up, you run through the tape, success is in the last 10%.
1:15:43 You just hear it and feel that you are laboring over sentences and words and fact-checking, and
1:15:48 very much appreciate the role model you set for professionals, just in terms of, you just,
1:15:51 quite frankly, my brother, you just bring it. Really appreciate you and your work.
1:15:54 Thanks, Scott. It’s incredibly kind of you to say.