Ezra Klein: MAGA Is Over

(upbeat music) - Hello and welcome to the Bollock Daily. I'm your host Tim Miller. D'Lide, welcome back to the show. He's the host of the podcast, The Ezra Klein Show, the author of Why Were Polarized and Co-author of Abundance of Juice Box Mafia Famous Ezra Klein. Welcome back, bud. - Always a pleasure, my friend. - Back at ya. You know, you're such an analytical guy. I figured we could start with feelings a little bit. You know, what's been happening in the interior life of Ezra Klein this week? Anything different? - You want a long description of my current, where I am currently in my meditations? - Yeah, I do. - Yeah. Or just a little peek, you know. - Where are my feelings? I mean, look, like I got a election night was, restoring of a certain level of faith that thing, it's not just a good things can happen, but the things that can happen, you can be surprised and deeply to the upside. I think that the left side of the divide in America had a national collective healing of trauma as the New York Times needle went like this on South Carolina. It was a real moment of collective effervescence. - And only the people on the left side of the country would call it that, a collective healing of trauma. So that's nice. - Yeah, right. And then one, it's amazingly you dip into X for two seconds here and you know I'm usually not on X, but I allowed myself to go back in there to hook a bit into some vibes. How rapidly the energy there goes to infighting? Just unbelievable. So I realized I was feeling worse as I kept reading there because everybody just immediately moves into factional infighting, but the thing that to me has been really encouraging and the place where I'm excited right now, I mean, I don't know how jazz for the rest of your audience is going to get about the permitting reform bill. But one, there are things actually happening. - Good news. Josh Barrows tried to talk about the permitting reform bill about a month ago and then his whole internet went out. And so we love people hanging. - I think there's a question of what you can actually do and then a question of what you can actually build. And the part that from a like a feelings perspective, I find the most like wonderful right now is that when people believe they can win, they start trying. And the idea that you can win in Kansas, you can win in Indiana, as Bobai there did for Secretary of State, you can win in Mississippi, you came within two points of Louisiana, I think there are a bunch of places where Democrats have stopped believing they should really try. And what I think opens up here, not just to analytically, but analysis is actually not possible without a certain set of feelings. And I think that what becomes possible here because people suddenly feel these things are possible, is the desire to actually try to have agency to make the decisions necessary, to maybe win another Senate seat in Texas, right? Wouldn't it feel nice to see Ted Cruz lose on election night? That possibility is a feeling and you marry that to actual analysis, you actually could do it and there are ways to figure out how. And that to me is like the new structure of sentiment inside the Democratic Coalition that I find genuinely exciting. I could not think of a more on-brand answer from Ezra Klein to talk to me about your interior life and your feelings and you get to permitting reform within 42 seconds. (laughing) That was something for-- You'll get the version of it you get out there for tears. The problem is like the other answer is two personal, there's not much in the, I'm willing to reveal it on the Bullwork podcast. All right, well maybe we'll get to the person at the end, we'll see how it goes. There we go. It's interesting what you said about this kind of feeling of possibly being able to win in Kansas in Indiana. I think it was the last time you were on two times ago, we were talking about this and you were expressing some frustration that Democrats weren't willing to make in any sacrifices to win in those states. That created a little bit of hubbub on X speaking of X. The interesting thing to me is the way in which Adam Hamilton in particular, but we've got Scott Cologne and we're able to win these races without really compromising that much on values. And I do wonder, do you feel like that's offering false hope or do you think it's a new model? Were they able to be that successful just 'cause Donald Trump stepped up on so many rakes or did Adam Hamilton tap into something that can be copied? - I don't think anything was unusual about that from like a historical perspective of how you run a race in that way. Let me try to answer this in two ways because there's what it means to win in a wave or tsunami year as the opposition and then it's gonna be what it means to govern and try to hold a seat like that. So in terms of not sacrificing too much in terms of values, one of the arguments I think I was making to you back in that conversation is people underestimate how good winning feels. The fact that Scott Cologne ran as a tough on crime prosecutor who solved more cold cases and put more people behind bars than other people in his position that he's a ran as a personally pro-life candidate. People don't feel bad about Scott Cologne. They feel thrilled because in values he is one of theirs. He's like a good person who tries to make his community better who wants people in his community to have health care who is going to vote for Supreme Court justices who protect choice. That has always been how those kinds of candidates both run and then why they end up as part of the broad democratic coalition. But the flip, the place where this gets harder over time and where maybe Adam Hamilton in the future is not gonna feel like Adam Hamilton in the present is what if you're Adam Hamilton, you're running now in 2032 for re-election and it's not a democratic way of year. You've got a democratic president who's maybe at 47% in the polls or 46% or 45%. - God willing. - God willing, right? And you're having to separate yourself. You're having to show Kansans that you're not just a 95% or a 90% or a 97% democratic party line vote that you're an independent candidate who is there for them even when they disagree with the democratic party. That's where in the future, it begins to not feel so good to have these moderates in your party when they are saying you can't have some of what you want in the health care bill or you can't have some of what you want in the environmental bill. And the question then of whether you protect them, we recognize they have to have a different politics, maybe then Adam's shift does in California. That's where it gets tougher. But the idea that Adam Hamilton or Scott Cologne is thrilling right now in election night, of course they are and it would have been even better to win also in Louisiana, even better to win also in Florida. Winning power, it feels good. - Oh, that's true. I think it was just particularly notable to me that they end up both winning, right? Josh Tarrick and Adam Hamilton. And with about two weeks left, there's one of these controversies that will be lost to history. But I think it was an interesting example of two different approaches, which is the trans kind of sports thing comes up. And Josh Tarrick puts up an ad talking about he cares about fairness and you know, he did wheelchair basketball and all this. He doesn't want trans girls and girls sports. And Adam Hamilton could ask about that the next day on TV and he gives kind of very religious answer about how, you know, he wants everybody to be respected and loved and kind of doesn't really answer the question. Right, but sort of, you know, retreats to values and avoids it. And it was interesting to me. I think he offered a model of how to represent yourself as independent by talking about caring about your Republican constituents without hippie punching. And I don't know. I think that is going to be an interesting thing to explore whether that is something that is sustainable. - I think something that is also embedded in that is, and you see this with Talleriko, you see it without him, Hamilton, you see it, I think, in a somewhat connected way that dual say it, is a desire and an excitement to see the return of a religious left in American politics. And the recognition that that gives you access to a moral framework and a language of transcendent morality that allows you to sort of pivot out of questions in an interesting way. You know, one thing that Talleriko would do a lot, and I think it would be very hard for him to do it with the same valence if he wasn't speaking from within his Christianity is he'd get asked about Paxton or something and he would first say, well, he's my brother in Christ, you know, or JD Vance, he would do this with all the time. And it's interesting, I wonder if a secular candidate could have gotten away with that, right? He's my patriotic fellow American, if that would have rang the same way to the public, but I think that in this moment of all-- - As a humanist. - Right, as a humanist, that's a secular humanist. I think in this moment of moral collapse that Donald Trump has ushered in, there is a yearning for candidates who speak in a deeper register of values and morality. That does not mean, in fact, it may actually give them more latitude than other candidates have to kind of pivot on issues. I'm not sure in the long run, you're gonna see a significantly more liberal voting record from Adam Hamilton than Josh Turck, though I guess we'll see, but Hamilton had this language of Christianity and care for the least among us that was of the first thing he was able to reach for. And I do think this reflects something that is kind of rippling in American politics. I'll say John Asif, I thought, often uses register too. He didn't use it exactly as much from saying, you know, I'm a Jewish American and I, you know, in my synagogue, but he used a lot of-- biblical illusion, he had a very preacherly southern church influence cadence on the stump. His oratory had a lot from that era in it, and he spoke very deeply in the language of value. So to me, this is something big happening in the kind of, again, like the sentiment structure, the kind of like the deeper moral structure of democratic politics right now. I agree with that. All right. We're going to stay with feelings for you for just a little bit. Then we can get into the, the nitty-gritty, okay? So last week, feel like the end of something to you. I do feel like the, the mega period is over, and we're moving on to something else, or not quite. It felt like it to me. Let me think about, let me, let me feel on this for a minute, feel. I think it is clear the Donald Trump is not finished as a force-wielding power. In American life. But he is finished as the structuring, organizing, cultural principle of American life. I think it is clear that JD Vance is not tapped into some electric current of post-right new intelligentsia that is going to make him a consolidator and ideological, like, air in a way that works to the Trump legacy. I think it's clear that who Trump is doesn't work, and in the end, it doesn't get you where you want to go. And I think that the other thing that felt different to me about the election is I do think it marks in a way that is important generational turnover in American politics. Not just in the Republican Party, but in the Democratic Party. I had this little riff on my show recently about how to do a Democratic Party, actually. Exactly. Well, that's what it has. A generational change to come with the question mark a little bit. This election to me was the elder millennials taking over the Democratic Party. Hell, yeah. You're looking at. Final. You're looking at Tallariko. You're looking at Buttigieg. You're like, I had this like whole list of them that you're running down. Now, I don't want to get the. I'm going to understand all those references that they make. Exactly. I'll move your references. But I do think, you know, you're seeing a move towards a different generation, you know, Bill Sayed, being the leaders in the Democratic Party. They have a different, you know, it's a joke to say we understand their references. But it's actually important, right? What the cultural structure that they work off of is, right? The way which are shaped both by Obama and by Donald Trump, the way that they're native to both what made social media and algorithmic media the force it is, but also give it the toxicity it now has. I think all that is going to have a lot of consequence in our politics for a long time. I agree with you. I just want to say, I don't, I feel like it's over. I mean, there's a big fight ahead, like, so people should not check out, like the last two years of Donald Trump might end up being the most dangerous two years, or he might descend into dementia and just want to go golf and build an arch. I call anything in between. Well, even if he does descend into dementia and want to go off and build an arch, that's not what Stephen Miller, his new chief of staff, is going to want to do. Great point. And so I think it's really important to realize Donald Trump is not just a person, he's a staff. Yeah. And what he did is gave, he just made Stephen Miller officially functionally the prime minister. And Donald Trump could be replaced by something dangerous and powerful. I don't, you know, I think that conceivably something from the right could emerge from outside this administration that challenges JD Vance effectively. There's not really a clear leader of that unless they talk her, but like, I don't, I don't think it's impossible that that happens. So I, it doesn't mean more out of the danger that means that we've turned the chapter, but we have turned the chapter. Think about the last expense report you filed, the receipt you couldn't find, the category you guessed at, the email from finance, asking who that was that you had coffee with three weeks ago, and whether it was really a business expense, what if I told you none of that needed to exist anymore? I bet you'd be pretty excited. And if you're anything like me, you'd be pretty excited and it's true with ramp. With ramp expenses, submit themselves finally. Just text or email your receipt and ramp categorizes codes that submit it for you. 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I have been saying in private, there's always a question, what are you saying in public, what are you saying in private? I am someone who believes in very controlled migration, but it has to be humanely done and competently done. And Americans are a deeply fair people. So if you want to do these things, and I'm glad he's saying in public now, what I've been saying in private, and we will see what happens. And what have you been saying in private exactly? I have to be super competent and it has to be fair and explainable to the average American person. People agree with you and people don't agree with you. The average American person, look, President Obama that we supported also in that context, did very well in like having a migration policy that people wanted to. In private Alex Carpose, just like, you know, we should be so much nicer to the migrants that we're tracking currently and putting into concentration camps. But privately, I think, it's kind of like a John Lennon thing in private, almost no borders. You know, a lot of everybody. A profile encourage. I mean, you know, he used to sell himself as a socialist. This was for a long time part of the Alex Carp that he was Peter Teal's socialist friend who just happened to run the government data mining contract company. And you know, Jacob Weisberg, maybe had him on the show around this, wrote this book, recently called Profiles and Cowardists. And it is a look at some of the people who lit their professed principles on fire to conduct transactionally with Donald Trump from people in charge of law firms to people in media. And look, I'm all for converts. I want the largest possible coalition here if Alex Carp wants to come in and say, in private, he thinks that ICE has become a dangerous paramilitary force empowered by volunteer technology. That's great. We're just buying on them because we wanted to make sure that they had fresh baked goods. But, you know, you're not judged by what you say when it's easy or judged by what you say when it's hard. And I didn't want to lose the contract as not a moral argument. I find it worse. I want to say this. I find Alex Carp's behavior worse if in private, he was saying this is wrong. It's one thing to have the views that it isn't wrong in private, right? Then I find you immoral but at least consistent. But if you think it is wrong and you just decided to put your boot on the throat of your morality to not rock the boat in your contracts, I've very little respect for that. Yeah. And his technology was used to identify people that had come into the country, weren't breaking any laws, weren't a danger to the country, some of them had worked visas. He wasn't writing an opinion column in the San Francisco Chronicle, right? And it wasn't like he was a government contract was doing the administrative paperwork for the Commerce Department or something like his technology was finding the migrants. It was helping DHS identify people and round them up and shackle them and you know, use them as props and then dump them into internment camps. So I don't know who he was talking to in private. - Yeah, I guess I might-- - Jason Calcandas, maybe. I guess that's what I-- I don't think Kristinaum, luckily, we'll probably find out. We'll get to have to testify about that. You can tell us who we talk to. There are going to be interesting hearings in the next couple of years. Here's the good news that we can both be really mad at Oxcarp, and he can be the most obnoxious version of the vibe shift, but it is better. It is better for virtue signaling to be back again. I've always been an apologist for virtue signaling, and I think it's, I'm ready for virtue signaling to point out. As I said, I want the largest possible coalition in favor of democratic values and humane action, and so I can have my feelings about what people did over the past couple of years, but we welcome converts with open arms. Most of them. A couple of them. I push into the pool. A couple of them might be a fake thing, okay, bro? I think you have to take a lot of it as fake. I mean, and this is the thing with my open arms. You're a well-versed one, but yes, obviously. One thing we saw with Trump, too, is that there are a lot of CEOs in this country. In Trump, one, I think it looked for a time, you know, you had Jeff Bezos, apparently personally agreeing to or even encouraging democracy, does in darkness, says the tagline for the Washington Post. But I think looking back what you see with that is that for a lot of them, it wasn't so much that their convictions had held them fast to a resistance posture, but they actually thought Trump was such an aberration that it would be costier to go along with it, even if it meant short-term contracts than to be in a public stance of opposition, because surely this is just going to go away. And then when it didn't, you saw them, many of them, not all, flip into this other posture, which is to say that they are deeply, deeply, deeply many of them transactional and changeable. In some ways, I think the ones who came out better in the second term are the ones who just held to being somewhat normal CEOs and not trying to be influencers at the same time. What did Sundar Pashai think about anything? I don't really know. Whereas some of the other ones who decided they had to get on board with it, look at your face, sir. Sundar is not really doing much for me, but okay. I think the ones who decided they had to go on Rogan and explain how they were part of a bibleshift that did an H-Wall. I guess Tim Cook was always a personal hobby horse of mind that that was actually the worst of all Trump. Yeah, we can all do. We can rank our own personal worst in the old folks, um, you know, it doesn't really do much good. Guys, we are back with the cat update. I'm sure many of you pet lovers out there have been wanting to know what's happening with Slinky. How much my life has been tormented. How often he's thrown up, and I've had to clean it up, whilst hungover or podcasting. I'm going to tell you not as much lately, because our friends with smalls are back. Most cat foods out there use meat by products and cut their food with cheap greens, fillers, and artificial ingredients, stuff that didn't grate for your cat's tummy. Big pet food does this because it's cheaper to make. But what they save on cost, your cat pays for with their health, and you pay for with getting down on your hands and knees, cleaning up, disgusting cat vomit. That's something you don't want to do. All right, you want your cat to be healthy and have yummy food. And you also don't want to have cat puke on the couch cushions. Slinky's doing well. It's a little update. You know, the daughter is happy. There's no more calls for the other kind of pet in the house, at least for now. I've survived that. He is, uh, I guess I would say emotionally co-dependent with my husband, and we found out that my father also in slinky. They've odd me. We're okay. We're kind of co-existing. It's like that roommate that you had right out of college. You found on Craigslist, you know, every once in a while, you'd meet in the living room to watch a show together. But besides that, you guys kind of going about your lives. That's me in slinky. But I gotta tell you, it's happy. They know how to make them happy with the snack treats from smalls. Your cat's health and longevity starts with what they eat for a limited time because you are a bulwark daily listener. Get 60% off your first order plus free shipping and free treats for life. When you head to smalls.com/the bulwark, one last time that 60% off your first order plus free shipping and free treats for life when you head to smalls.com/the bulwark. Go do it. I want to come back to these guys in the AI stuff at the end, but let's just do the demos first and kind of what's next. You can discuss your various reform proposals you're excited about. I believe based on social media because you can't interview streamers because they scoop you because they're streaming everything. I'm all for people hyping up the shows before they have it. Okay, so Sunpike turned Friday to listen to me and his song. There you go. Sunpike has been on your show. It will be out on Friday. He tweeted about it. When I texted you to see what you were going to talk about, you were excited to talk about the synthesis, which I was an interesting angle after having talked to Sunpike. Given that a lot of people I think would look at you and Hassan is being on kind of opposite polls of the democratic coalition. And so I'm wondering where you think the synthesis is and how sustainable this is. So I had Adam Jendelson, who is sort of more centrally, searchlight institute guy, former deputy chief of staff for Harry Reid, then chief of staff for John Fetterman before kind of Fetterman went into his full current form. And I had Hassan on, that'll come out Hassan Piker Friday. And one of the things I was sort of exploring there with the two of them with their different perspectives is how differently do they understand the election and what the democratic party should do really. And I would say it's not that different. And this is sort of you were asking about feelings at the beginning and I was saying that on X, the degree to which everything gets turned up to a thousand factually is really noticeable to me. Because in fact, you talk to people from different parts of the party and what do they think happened? They think the democratic party focused on affordability, focused on economic populism, either moderated on or downplayed a bunch of cultural topics, moderated on climate in particular in states like Texas and South Carolina and some of the others, you know, tell or we go kind of embracing oil and gas. And one of the things I've been interested to see is to what degree, you know, I know some of the centrists are happy about this. Are the leftists unhappy about it? And the answer is no, they're not, right? They're thrilled. And one of the things I was talking about with Piker, Israel is a little bit of an exception here, which we can get to if you want. But actually, I would not say a little bit of big. A lot of foreign policy is an exception. Yeah, a lot of foreign policy is an exception here. Piker seems to be like pro-China. Yes, that's going to be a different thing. But let me hold that to decide for a minute. On domestic policy, we are talking about that there is right now this fight on X about is populism, simply a thing that the Bernie Sanders wing of the party can claim or is that a traditional way of running as a democrat. And I have all these quotes that I can show you of how similar all this sounds. But I actually think that the idea that there was a lot of what Piker liked to call "molger Bernie-ism" in the election was really correct. And the "particular Bernie-ism" basically. Yeah, it's a joke on vulgar Marxism. But it's not because you heard a lot of candidates talking about Bernie Sanders. I'm still an immigrant. You know, I've been a lib for 10 years now. I don't know inside Marxist jokes. Yeah, I don't do inside Marx. You know, I don't know any grudges. You'll get it. We'll re-educate you Tim. Don't worry. Okay. If you go back to the 2012 election and then Sanders running in 2016, you have this Democratic Party, you know, under Obama in 2012, that is really economics first. Obama runs against Romney as a predatory, bane, capital plunderer. You know, I can give you these quotes from a little meme. A little meme, sure. It works. Obama, 2011 here. The only class warfare I've seen is a battle that's been waged against middle-class folks in this country for a decade now. That's a kind of quote people are grabbing from Hillary. Go and say, "Nobody talked like this before Bernie." But no, in fact, this was totally normal. There's a policy quote also 2011. Quoting actually Warren Buffett saying, you know, there was a class war and his war and his class one. As you see a lot of this. But in this period, I think you have a Democratic Party for different reasons that is getting a little fed up with what it can't do. Bernie runs in 2016 as both a Democratic Socialist but very, very, very, very focused on economic issues, which is somewhat different than Bernie 2020, which is more focused on things like climate and other things as well. And Hillary Clinton runs to Bernie's left on a bunch of these other issues, right? Famously, you know, breaking up the banks will end systemic racism. And I think when you're talking about what this shift in the party looks like, it's a shift towards really focusing on pocketbook and affordability and economic issues. Now, different candidates at different in different states are going to do that differently. So, there are those who might say Medicare for all. There are those for whom they're not going to be comfortable going that far, right? A bunch of the swing stood senators did not endorse Medicare for all, but they are going to endorse increases in the minimum wage, you know, making it easier to form a union, expanding healthcare in very dramatic ways, all these other things. But the synthesis is much more of an economics first. Democratic Party. The difficulty is going to be when Democrats have power and they need to decide between some of the economics questions, some of the affordability questions, and some of their other priorities, which are very real priorities like climate, like culture issues, like foreign policy, places where maybe what you want to do for American producers and American consumers might differ. So it's not that you're in a Democratic Party now that agrees on how it will wield all this power. But I think it's a Democratic Party that has a fairly coherent view of what it should put first, which part of itself it can put first to win in Kansas, versus what if it emphasizes it's going to lose in Texas. Well, there's an example of this. Your colleague, Lulu, was interviewing Gina Inahosa, and really kind of pressing her, because Gina's positioning herself gives a populist, an independent populist, and you know, Lulu's like, well, aren't you really just a progressive, really a liberal, and they go back and forth a bunch on it. I want to play it for you. And I'm just curious how you define the difference between populist and progressive, and tell me why you've landed on populist as a label for yourself now. I think populists meet the moment of our time. Again, the one fight, the one fight in this country. And it is about economic power. And populism is about economic power. And whereas I do think in the past, we evaluated politics as right versus left, I just don't think those labels apply at this moment in history, not in this moment in political history. We see that things are so stacked against working people in this country. And so listen, it's just a label. But if I were to pick a label to describe what are my politics, it is economic populism. It happens to be a type of politics that is rooted in our Texas history. Is part of it also that this sort of progressive liberal label could be perceived as pretty toxic by certain members of the state that you're trying to get to vote for you? No, it is not that. But what I think it is is that those labels have been associated with culture wars. And I just don't think that the culture wars are the fight of 2026. I'm just trying to sit with it. I'm not trying to be difficult. I'm just trying to understand a little bit. So your populist progressive? It's not an either or thing. Well, look, I just think that progressive politics is associated with culture wars. And I have no interest in fighting culture wars at this time. I mean, that was pretty clear, like a pretty clear example what you're talking about. I know Governor-elect Gina was essentially saying, look, this fight against the tech oligarchs is the fight right now and giving opportunity to working class people. Like that is what unifies everybody. That's the fight. And she repeats over and over again, like not the culture war stuff. I don't know how sustainable that is, but I mean, it's coherent. We'll see how sustainable this. It's going to become harder, but I don't think it's just become harder for the culture war stuff as you're putting it. I mean, that's part of it. And you know, future Republicans will have different issues. They can try to create wedges around. But the big thing that's going to happen here is what most people mean when they are talking about corporate power, when they're talking about billionaire power, yes, they don't want Elon Musk buying an election. They don't want a data center in their backyard. But it's not, that kind of power is not for them just an abstraction. It's also, you know, am I getting a race? Am I feeling better when I go to the gas pump? And so the, I think the question for Hinoosa, but for lots and lots and lots of candidates across the country and then Democrats nationally, when it comes to that, is how do you actually make people feel they got something out of Democrats governing? I mean, an interesting thing in Madaglice is pointed this out about Hinoosa. That's interesting. Have you ever written anything about that before? Yeah, right. How do you make things more affordable? It may be some supply constraints are going to have to do something about. In Texas, they have just incredibly low income taxation, right? None, in fact. And she's not proposing to change that, right? She's not running as a tax and spend populist either, right? She's not running saying the billionaires should have these huge tax rates and in Texas, even the millionaires to say nothing of people making $500,000 in above. And one reason is that I don't think she thinks it would be popular. And so the, you are still going to be bound in a very deep way by public opinion. Populist is this weird word in American politics that it has somewhat different things depending on who's using it and whether or not they're using it as a pejorative or a self-description. You're right when populists, you have left-wing populists. But in some, you know, very, very abstracted sense, populism is supposed to be representing the common person against organized and powerful interests. And the thing that that ends up doing to you right over time is what happens when you disagree with the public. And do you end up going your own way, as Donald Trump did, right? Trump ran as a right-wing populist and then did whatever the hell he wanted and became very, very, very unpopular for it. And there's a left-wing version of this, too, where Democrats run and sometimes they say all these things about class warfare and the war on the middle class, then they get in power and they do what they wanted to do, not exactly what they were elected to do. And then they lose support. And so right now these, like little clips that are getting battered around, this is the easy part. The part where you get to say, no, no, I'm a populist. It's the bottom versus the top. The left right binary is dead. But what's going to happen now is you're going to have to govern in a way that, you know, hopefully 60% of the public really agrees with. And on some issues, that's going to be really easy, like data centers. And on other issues, it's going to get a lot harder. You're using the word synthesis. And I was thinking about this and it made me think of my kind of old people, which was the fusionists, right? Like, I mean, there's this word that was going around. And for a long time, basically, as I was coming up in the Republican Party, like this was a big word to describe the coalition. It was basically social conservatives and economic libertarians, like, created a fusionist coalition and an alignment together that gained them a lot of power. And the economic libertarians, you know, this was really more my people within the coalition, like, well, okay, well, you know, would we rather, you know, there not be such strict rules around abortion and gay rights, like, of course, but like we'll give that away to the social conservatives because they're part of the coalition and the social conservatives that, you know, would we rather have more support for families or whatever, but okay, we'll not, we'll not push for those policies as much because, you know, the Wall Street Journal types, you know, want free market all the way down. And that coalition lasted about 20 years or whatever. And it's hard to tell for me whether, like, what you're proposing, the synthesis, the Bernie crafts that people are talking about, whether that's a real like version of fusionism where it's left economic populism with social moderation or whether it's kind of like a sleight of hand that people are going along with now for the time being. The reason I don't think the fusion example works here is that fusion was, the reason you had to call it fusion was it was bolting together or fusing together two things it seemed actually opposite. You were fusing together free market economics and actually very tight constraints on cultural moral issues enforced by government power. So making it illegal to have an abortion, right, and forced by the government, right, that's the social conservative view. Alongside, I don't know, I can't legal to pollute a stream. Sure. Because you wanted to because the market said it was, you know, good for your bottom line to do so. Is that to make a ton of sense? The thing here, the fusion here is I think a democratic party that can see itself on a lot of issues rowing in the same direction. And the question is simply how far to go. So for instance, a place where I see this synthesis emerging in a very, very clear way is Medicare for more. You used to have a much more live fight in the party than you do now. I was part of, you know, this for years, that had sort of this debate over whether or not you should do health care by moving towards a government insurer or whether you should do sort of competitive private insurance markets. And the competitive private insurance market side sort of had two main arguments. One is that competitive private insurance markets would be good. And I think that's not really proven to be true. But the bigger argument, the one that was more politically decisive ways you could get Republican support. Look, Mitt Romney did in Massachusetts. So we should do it nationally. Yeah, you know, Max Bakus who is a finance share when Obamacare was passing, he thought he could get Chuck Grassley, who is somehow still in the Senate. I think he'll be in his 90s if he runs for re-election in a few years. So it can be a path to 57 democratic senators, just saying not to be my cobb, but Rob Sands, make you have a sort of opportunity there. We wish great health on all of our. We do, of course, our public service. I'm just looking at possibilities out there. I think that first idea that you can have Republicans where it's gone. Second, the idea of the competitive insurance markets actually work that well, that's kind of also gone. But at the same time, I've watched the left climb down from the view that you need to abolish private health insurance, or even that it would be a politically a good idea to try it. to start there or to have a massive middle-class tax increase to ingest Medicare for all in one bite. And so like when I had a dual say out on my show and we were talking about this, he's got this analogy of climbing Everest and saying, you know, well, you got to get the base camp and you got to, you know, then get to this peak and that peak. And so you're doing this in kind of pieces. I spoke with Ron Wyden today who's a more, you know, he's a liberal, but he's a somewhat heterodox liberal as well as discovering more organ. He's sent it finance chair in the incoming Congress. So he's going to be very, very important on health care. He's done a long history on health care. Ryan Wyden deal. I mean, that was hell. What? Oh, Ryan, yeah, the Paul Ryan, Ron Wyden. Yeah, he did that. He did. I mean, that never passed, but that was a deal for doing kind of competitive markets and Medicare. He told me he's just signed on to Medicare for all, right? Not because I think that will be his plan, but he has sort of this line about how, well, if I'm going to be the convening Democrat on this, I need like all of the tables in the room. So you can see the Democrats who used to believe in the competitive markets moving towards Medicare, the Democrats who believed in Medicare for all moving towards more Medicare for more. You have Andy Kim from New Jersey with the Medicids proposal, which I think is going to be something you see Democrats begin to push. You've got Pat Ryan, an upstate New York representative who has a Medicare at 50 proposal. He's sort of been understood more often is a little bit more moderate, but I think that proposal, you could combine the Medicids and Medicare at 50 and you're beginning to do a pincer movement. So on healthcare, for instance, which I think, particularly given how badly Trump is gutting Obamacare, the Medicaid cuts that are about to go into effect, healthcare reform is going to come back to the forefront. And you can begin to see a place where the party is less divided than it was even a couple of years ago, because the liberals are not like, well, we did Obamacare, let's move on to climate. And the left isn't like Medicare for all or nothing. One other place and we pushed this side earlier, but just on foreign policy, I think that we're saying a pretty big synthesis as well. I was trying to recapture the mantle of being the anti-war party. I think that there's going to be the kind of, whatever you want to call it, five to 10% most pro-Israel members of the party in the center. And then the 3% of tankies on the left that feel alienated by that. But I think that most parts of the faction for whom being pro-Israel is not their top issue or anti-American foreign policies at their top issue. Everybody else is, I think, getting pretty aligned on, I think, a foreign policy that's maybe a couple ticks to the left of what we've seen from the last few nominees. What do you think about? I agree with this. I think that you could call it Ben Road'sism. I was going to call it Ben Road'sism, but I didn't want to, you know, I didn't want to hand it to him. I'll give Ben the clap on the back here. Okay. So on Israel particularly, I think that there is a place where you're going to see the Democratic Party come to a certain amount of common ground fairly quickly, which is an end to arm sales in the way, certainly in the way they've been done. A lot more pressure on actually having some kind of political horizon, actual sanctions on what is happening in the West Bank. I think this is the end. I think the Democratic Party's relationship with Israel where it believes that either the moral thing or even the best thing for Israel is unstinting support, almost no matter what Israel is doing, that is over. I think Joe Biden killed it. And I don't think you're going to see anything like it again. And so there's going to be a question of how far to go in applying pressure, but there is no way to ignore that it isn't a apartheid state now, a state where you have 7 million Israeli Jews who have a functionally full control over, you know, roughly 7 million Palestinians split across, you know, Israel proper in the West Bank and Gaza. And that in the West Bank was a regime of terror, and Gaza there is Israeli control over most of the territory. And right now Israel is having like a, in its kind of post-election period, despite over whether or not to even allow some of the Arab Israeli parties to be part of a governing coalition in any real way. This is not values aligned behavior. Let's put it that way from an American ally. And then Benjamin Enniahu, by the way, who's been trying as far as I can know, several of the Democratic Party's relations with Israel for a very long time. If he had listened to Brock, you know, Brock Obama tried to fight him on settlements. And Enniahu came to Congress and beat Obama in Congress, right? And that was the end of that. But, you know, Enniahu has done terrible, terrible, terrible damage to Israel here. And I mean, the question of how far people go is going to be divisive, but and probably after, you know, the Iran War, I think the question of whether or not the relationship needs to be renegotiated in a pretty fundamental way is going to be uniting on the Democratic side. All right. So the synthesis is coming into focus here, you know, some kind of Medicare for some Medicare for more. Medicare for more. Sorry. Medicare for more. Small America tries. Brothers. Ben Rhodesism in foreign policy. Two other issues we want to get to. Something that Adam Gentleson brought up on your podcast that within the kind of Bernie Krat construct, we also would allow for spanking. Prospanking. No. I didn't see that moment coming. I'll be you did it. I was just kind of a little strict. It's going to be medical. I guess you're just better way to put it. It's like, we're going to give the kids Medicare and we're going to give them a little smack on the ass from time to time. So, Gentleson brought that up on the show is a way for Democrats to show their heteronocs because a lot of the publicly spanking is fine. Then before that comes out, no, I guess a day that comes out. I'm taping with Piker who comes in and I'm like, well, what's your Democrats do now? And he's like, it's belt to ask from the Democrats. And I'm like, man. So there's more synthesis here if you're looking for it. Yes. Everybody's excited about corporal punishment. Yeah. Now, great. Piker, he was talking about to the Republicans. Yeah. Sure. Yeah. belt to ask a feedback, Seth. Light spanking of your fellow-making child. And then Medicaid's for the kids, you know, in case there are any issues they run into. This is we're finding a real synthesis here. I think from. You never know what's going to happen on the other clown show. All right. I want to do AI, but I just we've teased everybody long enough. The permitting reform bill is going through the lame duck right now. The abundancy types, the yinbees are very excited about it. There's some environmental groups that aren't as thrilled. People are looking at this as maybe a test of whether everybody can play together in the sandbox. What do you think the state of play is? Yeah. The permitting reform bill. So Baja, as people as it's now gone, acronymed, is this big bill that would make it a lot easier to build energy of all kinds. That is the simplest way to put it. And it would do that by making it first doing a lot to empower the federal government to do interstate transmission, which is really hard to do right now. And this is single biggest blocker on clean energy. But then by rolling back the way that bills like the National Environmental Policy Act or the Stork Reservation Act or Clean Water Act have become things you can use to block or delay basically anything for all kinds of reasons. It may be of nothing to do with whether or not the bill is good for the environment. And I actually I will say that as much as I like on net and for the permitting reform bill, I don't think this stuff is easy and I don't think changing the defaults in the federal government to make it much easier to build is going to go forward without anything ever going wrong. But this is a moment where you can make it possible to build a lot more clean energy faster. I was talking to people in the Biden administration and I was saying I was asking them, if this bill had been law when you came into power, what would that have meant for the Infrastructure Act and the Inflation Reduction Act and all of these big green energy bills you tried to do? And they said, oh my god, if this had been done had been finished because it takes a couple years to implement the bill like this. If this had been finished before we got in, we could have gone so much faster. So what what I take a bill like this to be is a little bit of a bet on the future. If you believe Democrats are going to win power in 2028, you really want this done because they're going to be able to sort of resubsidize green energy and they will be able to move very, very, very fast. Maybe you guys will build trains. You should build public transit. No, Libs love trains. Yeah, makes it easier to build public transit. Now, if you told me Ron DeSan, this is going to be president, it may not go as well, right? So, but it does, what a bill like this does is it moves the contest out of suing people and suing administrative agencies over whether or not they considered every possible esoteric outcome in their impact report and moves it into a fight over who can win power, who politically and also over markets, right? Is green energy actually ready and capable in the way people think it is and I think it is. You also have the data center part of the bill, which forces data centers to actually pay the cost of their energy, not spread out to taxpayers. But this is a bill that has a kind of big affordability dimension. It will lower energy costs over time, will make it easier to build energy infrastructure over time. And it does make it harder to sue to stop certain kinds of environmental projects. And so here's like a good place where you're going to see if the Democratic Party chooses affordability or not. I was looking at the vote to move the bill forward in the Senate, which it moved forward with I think 72 votes, so around half, maybe a little bit less than half of the Democrats. But it was interesting, if you broke it down by Democrats in kind of safe blue states, states went for Kamala Harris by ten or more, most of them voted against it. And you looked at Democrats in purple or red states, and they voted for it two to one. And you know, you saw Tolerico running on oil gas, you saw any Andrews running on permitting reform. So there is going to be this question in the party. You've run on affordability, you've run on sort of more of an all of the above energy strategy. What happens when you actually have to vote on that? Were you just saying that? Or did you mean it? One thing that's kind of related to this too, I'm just curious your take on since you're going to like follow like the outputs a lot more closely than I am. Kind of the inverse version of this synthesis is what you've seen in New York with Zoran. Right. Zoran runs DSA and then immediately is responsive with, you know, some changes around cutting red tape, making it easier to build, et cetera, et cetera. How has that played out the kind of abundance DSA fusionism of the Mamdani mayorship? I think it's really interesting because you also see, weirdly this comes up in the Piper conversation too, but look at Nithya Rahman who just won for the LA mayoralty, running on a kind of build, build, build socialism. It was always my view that abundance should basically be understood as a fairly leftist project because you're trying to make a government capable of delivering big policy change fast. And to do that, you need a very strong government. You need a government that is in hamper by all kinds of regulations on the government itself. And so it makes a lot of sense that if you are a democratic socialist who wants to run the government in a democratic socialist direction, that you first have a very strong agenda to restore public faith in government, and second have an agenda to unleash government to do big things pretty fast. Now the question of how, you know, you're just talking about outputs, it is still early even in New York. I mean, Zoran has been mayor less than a year here to say, well, are we building housing faster? Is New York becoming more affordable in a significant way? He's doing a lot of great stuff on red tape. He's appointed a lot of people. I really like to, you know, key commissions and offices. And so there's a lot for me to like in it. But, you know, there is still this question of do we actually know how to turn a city that is in a more low-growth equilibrium into something more high-growth? You know, in San Francisco where Daniela Luria's mayor and he's from the more modern winged party, but also like very abundance-pilled, very, you know, bill-build-build. It's not like you have seen a giant unleashing in buildings. So one thing I was trying to be a little careful on because it's all nice for me to run around celebrating people getting in on the rhetoric that I believe in. But this only matters. This is only meaningful if you actually build more homes, if you actually build more energy, if you actually build more public infrastructure, if people actually benefit from it. And that requires some of my doing things that are hard and actually painful. That's why to me, the permitting bill, which is a very big deal. This is a bigger bill by a lot on things like the Environmental Policy Act than I thought we would see for a long time. This would not have been on my bingo card for this year. And that's why you see it splitting the Democrats, I think you see it being painful. There are parts of this bill I don't like, right? That's just like the reality of a big bipartisan bill. I mean, for us, I just don't want to see a lot, like I worry about more fossil fuel infrastructure being built. You know, I believe green tech is going to out-compete it. And I am fairly confident Democrats can make smart decisions and win and then further accelerate green tech. But it's a bet. And the thing that I feel 100 prints, I'm sorry. A lot more Democratic governors in those states has to make you feel a little bit better about that. The Democratic governors do make me feel better on that. But the other thing I worry about is Trump doing a lot of damage on public lands in the next two years. And this is a fight about how the bill is actually described and what you think he can do versus what he can do now. Cory Booker is worried that you can get this sort of permit protection for permits that were functionally illegal. And whether or not that's true is I think a technical question that I'm having trouble myself adjudicating at the moment. But when you do this, you're taking a bet. And right now Democrats don't have full power. And Trump himself is a very, very lawless figure who has a lot of protection and corrupt and has a lot of protection from the courts. And so it's this tough thing. If you wait for the future, then you're going to be waiting years before you can actually get these rules in place under a Democrat if you're ever able to get it. And on the other hand, if you do it now, you have a period of time where Trump is still in the office, even though he's a lame duck. So again, the Democratic governors, the Democrats having power of the person Congress, I think you should be able to navigate this and I think net net, it's a good idea. But it's really trying to set up a system in which you can build as opposed to it assures right now that only the things you want will get built. I want to do AI really quick. Some people right now are worried about Chuck Schumer and Hacking Jeffries and how they'll manage their conferences. That's not me. I'm built different than them. I'm worried that while I was looking at the precinct returns in Seward County, Kansas, the frontier AI models advanced exponentially. And we are going to have robot overlords by the time that Adam Hamilton's up for real like to get into 2032. >> I know. They'll just rule us from within the digital realm. Hacking robots is very complicated. >> Okay. >> You should be fucking worried, man. I mean, I did this big video essay a little bit ago about why we should ban recursive self-improvement, which is where the AI begins accelerating at an accelerating rate building other AI's. And then Anthropic comes out pretty recently and says, yeah, we're really accelerating on the path to RSI. >> And there are some pretty alarming. So some media posts going around this week, again, and not from just Anthropic world, effective altruism, safety, like from people who are pro AI and one AI advancement, who have said over the past few months that they are concerned that it's accelerating much faster than they had anticipated. >> The AI horseshoe never ceases to amaze me. The two people who want you to just stop AI development, like Blue Sky Liberals who hate AI, and then people who work at the labs and have stock options. >> Right. >> It's a very strange, but it is a very real thing. People suggested it's not actually true, but I know a lot of these people, the labs, and they're terrified, they're genuinely terrified. AI regulation seems to be one of the few places where there is bipartisan interest. The issue is Trump and his belief that whoever wins on AI wins. My model of AI regulation is that what you have are moments where something goes wrong, and that expands you over 10 window in terms of what you can do. The hugging face incident dramatically expanded the number of people who took seriously that there are loss of control incidents that can happen with rogue AI or just out of control AI. It wasn't quite enough to force real regulation because nothing really happened that affected normal people. The AI's hacked another AI company to try to cheat on a test. They didn't hack Wells Fargo. They didn't hack a Chinese manufacturer or it wasn't a Chinese AI that hacked us. If you believe that you're on this path to more powerful systems that we have less and less legibility into and less control over, then you have to assume you're going to have more loss of control incidents and they're going to get more serious and more cybersecurity incidents and they're going to get more serious and eventually geopolitical and interstate incidents. Each one of these is going to offer an opportunity to act in a more aggressive way than we have before. I think the question is what does the incident look like and whether we take it? There are some people who are what's called a fast take off believer where it's like just overnight. One night the AI becomes super intelligent and takes everything over and we never get another shot. I don't really buy that. I think there are going to be moments where you can see this has gotten out of control and will we do anything? My fear of more would be that the open source models start improving just as fast as our big frontier companies. Isn't there going to be a limit on what regulation can do? There will be eventually, I don't think we're there yet. I think the open source models remain about a year behind. It's very hard to tell this because one way the open source models get better is by distilling or in other ways copying or building off of what the frontier models are doing. Regulating down the frontier models is actually a larger lever than I think people give it credit for. Folks who listen to this are worried about it, want to be informed, aren't experts. What kind of material has most informed your view on this? It was noted that you did, I believe, six straight AI podcasts and middle of the midterms. Was it eight straight AI podcasts and maybe it was just because you felt so confident about Scott Cologne. You really didn't need to cover it, I don't know, but obviously, you're going to deepen the sauce on this. What would you recommend to? I mean, I read a lot of AI sub stacks, transformer AI is very good, understanding AI is very good. Casey Newton's platform is very good. It's hard because there's no one place to keep up with AI. Is V Mosquevitz's, don't worry about the vase, the vase is very good, but it's like all, this is a very diffuse area, you know, you're reading reports from meter. There are shows that are really, really worth keeping up with. I think we have done good coverage of AI and my show Hard Fork at the Times is doing AI, of course, Machine God, which is Kevin, Bruce and Casey Newton's new show is great. You should follow Jasmine Sun, who's, you know, her work is really, really good. So there's a lot of people doing good work here. The problem is there's no one place to, to, to hold attention on it in the way that I genuinely wish there was. There's no one stop shop on AI. When a democratic 2028er calls me, I don't know. and says, "As far as what do you think I should be saying about this on the campaign trail, what's your advice to them?" Humans need to retain control over AI. That means they need to retain visibility and understanding of what AI is doing. And that requires us to not press a button on certain things, and even though it will speed you up in the race against other corporations or even in the race against China, it is better to retain control and move a little bit more slowly and focus more on diffusion in economically useful ways than to be in this all-out rush to beat everybody else to the frontier model that is completely out of control. And so I think there's a lot you have to do within that. That's not a full policy agenda, but I think at a principles level, the key thing is maintaining human control and comprehension of what these systems are and what they're doing and the ways which are being improved. By the way, it also means we need to be have confidence that when we are testing and auditing them, they're not just telling us what we want to hear. One of the most worrying things to me coming out of the various AI companies right now is a sense that the AI systems are getting better at understanding when they're being tested. And so they are lying. You're like, "Will you cheat?" And they're like, "No, I'm never a cheat." And so there is increasing evidence that they have something called chain of thought, where they try to write down what they're doing. They might be lying or admitting things on chain of thought. So when you start to get into the realms of deceptive behavior from AI and also get into AI agent swarm dynamics, which we really don't understand at all, I'm not a big fan of the language of pacing the frontier because if you pace things and you don't do anything useful with the time, then you're just slightly more slowly running off of a cliff. So the question for me is what is required for us to really be certain we have control and comprehension in these systems? We've discussed the end times, spanking, fusionism. We've done so much. Do you have any other feeling? I get this point to be more comfortable. Are there any other private feelings from the past week? You want to share it with us? We're going to do this next time. Next time we'll start with a meditation. We'll talk about the texture of awareness. It's going to be great. I'm feeling very aware right now. I'm feeling very aware. How are you in your body? I'm centered. I'm extremely centered in my body right now. I think that I can identify the ways in which my internal being is trying to deceive me. I feel like I have control over myself in a way that I'm not sure we have control over AI, at least at this point. I'm going to see you later, buddy. I appreciate you very much. We're going to have more soft boy pod for you tomorrow. I'm sorry. I'm going to fix it next week, but tomorrow we've got another soft boy coming. We'll see you all then, peace. The board daily is brought to you thanks to the work of lead producer Katie Cooper, associate producer Anzali Skipper, and with video editing by Dante DeCicco and audio engineering and editing by Jason Brown.