#462 – Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson: Politics, Trump, AOC, Elon & DOGE

98.707 - 122.358 Lex Fridman

I get shit on equally by different groups across the political spectrum, depending on the guest. Why, I don't know, but I'm slowly coming to accept that this is the way of the world. I try to maintain my cool, return hate with compassion, and learn from the criticism and the general madness of it all. Still, I think it's valuable to sometimes talk about politics.

122.999 - 144.755 Lex Fridman

It's an important part to the big picture of human civilization, but indeed, it is only still a small part. My happy place is talking to scientists, engineers, programmers, video game designers, historians, philosophers, musicians, athletes, filmmakers, and so on. So I apologize for the occasional detour into politics, especially over the past few months.

145.652 - 161.358 Lex Fridman

I did a few conversations with world leaders, and I have a few more coming up. So there will be a few more political podcasts coming out, in part so I can be better prepared to deeply understand the mind, the life, and the perspective of each world leader.

162.509 - 186.069 Lex Fridman

I hope you come along with me on this journey into the darkness of politics as I try to shine a light on the complex human mess of it all, hoping to understand us humans better, always backed, of course, by deep, rigorous research and by empathy. Long term, I hope for political discussions to be only a small percentage of this podcast. If it's not your thing, please just skip these episodes.

186.77 - 204.685 Lex Fridman

Or maybe come along anyway, since both you and I are reluctant travelers on this road trip. But who knows what we'll learn together about the world and about ourselves. And now a quick few second mention of each sponsor. Check them out in the description. It is, in fact, the best way to support this podcast.

317.787 - 331.905 Lex Fridman

So a little bit of this map is just nostalgia of it being brought back. I have a lot of nostalgia about the conversations, the experiences I had during that time. There really is an intimacy in voice communication during that time.

332.546 - 346.114 Lex Fridman

Perhaps you know this about me, perhaps you don't, but I'm a huge fan of video games and I'm going to be doing a bunch of conversations with video game designers this year. I love the artistry of games. I love the engineering challenges of games.

346.714 - 366.761 Lex Fridman

I love the high stakes deadlines that games create because it's so difficult to create a beautiful, complex, deep world with stories, with narratives, with characters. Anyway, if you want to try it, it'll be out on April 3rd. You can download Call of Duty Warzone for free and then drop into the Verdansk map on April 3rd. Rated M for Mature.

367.762 - 392.934 Lex Fridman

This episode is also brought to you by Element, my daily zero sugar and delicious electrolyte mix. I just had a tough jiu-jitsu session, and I have to say it's good to be back on the mat because I sprained my ACL a while back, and I was trying to be smart. I was being smart by staying off the mat, and I think it's back to 100%. It felt close to 100% today. I was able to go hard with a bunch of

393.774 - 416.999 Lex Fridman

you know, 200 plus pound meat heads. And I didn't tell them of any injuries and all that kind of stuff. So they're just going wild of all ranks, white belt, blue belt, purple, brown, black, all of it. I was able to do well sort of in terms of timing, in terms of movement, in terms of structural strength, you know, that injuries can sometimes compromise. So it felt really good.

540.554 - 564.564 Lex Fridman

Of course, it's very difficult to do thoroughly, but initial steps in trying to define what is liberalism, what is progressivism, what is conservatism. What is the current state of the left and the right in American politics? I think one of the things he mentioned briefly was capitalism. There's a bit more sort of a skeptical eye towards the excesses and the negative aspects of capitalism.

564.704 - 582.05 Lex Fridman

And of course, I think to some degree, that's valuable. You don't want to run away toward that direction or any direction really too far, being too skeptical of capitalism or too rah-rah, absolute free market, capitalism will save us, capitalism can do no wrong, all of it.

582.53 - 599.199 Lex Fridman

Extreme variations of any ideology I think can get us into trouble, but all of it is a beautiful experiment we'll get to learn from and I think Shopify, to me, in a small sort of philosophical way, represents distributed capitalism where anyone can sell to anyone. One of the troubles you can get into with capitalism is monopolies.

599.92 - 624.594 Lex Fridman

And to make it accessible and easy for people to create their own store and sell to anyone, that's a beautiful thing. Sign up for a $1 per month trial period at Shopify.com slash Lex. That's all lowercase. Go to Shopify.com slash Lex to take your business to the next level today. Like I said, if you're listening or watching this on Spotify, I hope this kind of ad read is okay by you. All right.

625.254 - 646.45 Lex Fridman

This is the Lex Friedman Podcast. And now, dear friends, here's Esther Klein and Derek Thompson. You are both firmly on the left of the US political spectrum. Ezra, I've been a fan of yours for a long time. You're often referred to, at least I think of you as one of the most intellectually rigorous voices on the left.

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But they don't, you know, in the surveillance state, in the foreign policy in terms of military involvement abroad, and really in every program, they're not very good at cutting either. They just kind of like to say it.

1114.383 - 1133.252 Derek Thompson

Cutting is really hard. Government spends trillions of dollars. And if you cut billions of dollars, someone is going to feel that pain and they're going to scream. And so you look at defense spending under Reagan, you look at overall spending under Reagan. Reagan might be one of the most archetypally conservative presidents of the last 40, 50 years.

1133.872 - 1155.444 Derek Thompson

He utterly failed in his attempt to shrink government. Government grew under Reagan. Defense grew, all sorts of programs grew. So I think that one thing we're sort of scrambling around in our answers is that at a really high level, there are differences between liberalism and conservatism in American history. But often at the level of implementation, it can be a little bit messy.

1155.904 - 1178.719 Derek Thompson

Even Bush's foreign policy that Ezra was describing, sort of from a big sense of American history, is very like Wilsonian, right? This sense of like it's America's duty to go out and change the world. Or to use a current example, McKinleyan. Or McKinley and right. And a lot of people compare Donald Trump's foreign policy to Andrew Jackson. This sense of we need to pull back from the world.

1178.859 - 1193.889 Derek Thompson

America first. We need to care about what's inside of our borders and care much less about what's outside of our borders. Sometimes the differences between Republican and Democrat administrations don't fall cleanly into the lines of liberal versus conservative because those definitions can be mushy.

2041.624 - 2061.096 Derek Thompson

There doesn't seem to be this sort of background algorithm in his head calculating exactly how to craft his message to different audiences. He just seems to be like a live wire animal in front of every audience. And I think that compares very distinctly to the democratic character of bureaucratic caution in our age.

2062.016 - 2167.649 Derek Thompson

And there is a really important distinction between this vibe of the Trumpian ruler and Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.

2190.435 - 2595.064 Ezra Klein

Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you

2789.332 - 2814.184 Derek Thompson

and much of my writing is an attempt to do a little bit of a very specific dance. Ezra touched on this, I think, really beautifully. We're in an era right now of anti-institution politics, anti-establishment politics. And Democrats are at risk right now as being seen as the party that always defends institutions, the party that always defends the establishment status quo. And that is...

2814.764 - 2828.549 Derek Thompson

an absolute death knell, I think, for this century's angry anti-establishment politics. So what we're trying to do is essentially say, here's a way to channel the anger that people have at the establishment, but toward our own ends, right?

3588.761 - 3606.966 Ezra Klein

You have then, in the 70s, stagflation, the Vietnam War, a series of problems that the New Deal order no longer seems able to handle. So you have the rise of what he calls the neoliberal order. And the neoliberal order is, if you're going to choose a founder, it's going to be Reagan on that one, right? It's much more about markets. It is very concerned with things like inflation.

3606.986 - 3630.327 Ezra Klein

And it really is entrenched by Bill Clinton. You know, the era of big government is over. And partially, it's entrenched also by the fall of the Soviet Union, right? The fall of the Soviet Union is like this proof point that the sort of capitalists were right, that markets are the way of the future. Government does not know what it's doing. And that becomes like the governing set of assumptions.

3630.367 - 3647.023 Ezra Klein

And so there are arguments about what the markets should be doing, right? You know, Obamacare is about creating sort of markets and health insurance, right? You can use markets for very progressive ends. We want to use markets for lots of progressive ends. But the neoliberal order basically collapses amidst a financial crisis and climate change and China.

3647.952 - 3665.184 Ezra Klein

And those are the three things that sort of Gerstle, but also separately, we think kill it, which is the neoliberal order does not have an answer to the financial crisis. And it botches, in many ways, the answer to the financial crisis, puts too little demand into the economy, lets a sort of recession linger and a very slow recovery linger for too long.

3665.825 - 3684.356 Ezra Klein

It doesn't know what to say really about climate change. Markets have made a lot of people rich by doing a lot of things that are very, very damaging for the environment, very damaging for the future of the human race potentially. And you have the rise of China. And the neoliberal order said, you integrate China into the global economy. You bring them into the WTO. You trade with them.

4529.394 - 4550.727 Derek Thompson

We believe energy is critical. We talk a lot about science and technology. But we really put government effectiveness at the heart of this. Because one really deep vein of our book is a criticism of where liberalism has gone wrong in the last 50 years, where liberalism has gone from, in the New Deal era, a politics of building things.

4550.747 - 4572.303 Derek Thompson

I mean, FDR and the progressives transformed the physical world, not just with infrastructure projects, but with building roads, the highway system under Dwight Eisenhower. We changed the physical world during the decades, the 1930s to the 1950s. But in the last half century, liberalism has become very good at the politics of blocking rather than the politics of building.

4572.964 - 4596.797 Derek Thompson

And if you look at the way that liberals define success in the last few decades, it's often about success defined by how much money you can spend rather than how many things you can actually build. I mean, you look at the fact that, for example, in the book, we have so many examples that California authorizes more than $30 billion to build a high-speed rail system, which basically doesn't exist.

4597.418 - 4605.285 Derek Thompson

Just last week, the mayor of Chicago bragged that they spent $11 billion building 10,000 affordable housing units. That's $1.1 million per affordable housing unit. That's absolutely pathetic.

4610.029 - 4625.81 Derek Thompson

We have a story in the book about a $1.7 million public toilet built in San Francisco, $1.7 million for a toilet because of all of the rules that get in the way and raise the price of building public infrastructure like public bathrooms in San Francisco and California.