Chapter 1: What is discussed at the start of this section?
Welcome, welcome, welcome to Armchair Expert, Experts on Expert. I'm Dan Shepard. I'm joined by Lily Padman.
Hi.
And today we have a returning guest. Yes. He was last year, weeks before shutdown.
Yeah, lots changed.
Six years ago. Ezra Klein, he is a political commentator and a journalist. He co-founded Vox and is currently a New York Times podcast host and op-ed columnist. Ding, ding, ding. That's why he's here. I read...
an op eddie wrote that i really really liked that we're going to discuss at length his books include abundance which is gaining a lot of political traction also been on so many big lists phil gates's list obama's list just man oh man and then why we're polarized which was how we met him the first time uh and of course listen to his podcast it is extremely well informed and beautifully executed the ezra klein show please enjoy ezra klein he's in our church world
Okay, I do believe you're stronger than you were six years ago. Have you been exercising? Are you doing a weight training program?
So this has been coming up a lot. I'm probably stronger than six years ago when I had a one-year-old.
Okay.
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Chapter 2: How has self-improvement become politically coded?
And it does happen. And yes, not on the level that we've been sold, but also it doesn't make it bad.
Yes. I always think that as a society, you want society to be skeptical of how much falls on the individual and individuals to be optimistic about how much they can do for themselves. So I'm actually largely a believer that things are pretty socially determined for us in terms of who we're born to and where we're born and the luck we come into contact with in life.
I believe that the people who are richest in our society have not done nearly as much as they think to deserve that. And a lot of people who have fallen through the cracks have just gotten a bad run of luck. And social policy, taxation, universal healthcare, universal childcare, all these things should really reflect that. And also it is good for individuals to believe because it is also true.
These things are true at the same time. That you can make changes for yourself.
That you would be a better version of yourself in the future. than you are today. That's a great modus operandi for a human, right? I want to be able to look back and go, yeah, I'm a better version of myself today. Okay, where were we though? We were talking about peptides. I have to go back and forth on these, right?
So your body doesn't get used to them, but they do virtually the same thing, which is I'm on one version of the Morelands. There's Ipamoralin or Samoralin. They tell your pituitary gland to make more of its own HGH. So you're not taking exogenous HGH, which is problematic for many reasons, but it tells your body to make more of it.
So that one I'm on, I've been on testosterone for eight years, but I'm on a really conservative dose. I can feel it from here. Can you feel my muscles? I'm rutting right now too, so that might be part of it. But I'm on a very, very small kind of conservative dose of that. And then there's another one I'm on.
I feel ashamed to admit this one because it's very expensive, but SS31 and it repairs your mitochondria. And that one, I got to say, is the one I think is most impactful.
Do you do this?
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Chapter 3: What role does attention play in modern politics?
Yeah, and you're talking about which one you're in and then you're doing how much.
Like, I miss that part of drug abuse. Look, I think so much of life is figuring out whether you can harness your most intense internal energies to something constructive or destructive. Yeah. There's a line I love. I read it in an Oliver Berkman book, but I don't think it's his line. I think he quotes somebody. But it's that behind most successful people is anxiety harnessed to productivity.
Yeah, that's right. I think so much of life, it's like so many people who are addicted and go into recovery and then become ultra marathoners. Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. I always feel inside of me, there is a constant thrumming energy. And if it doesn't have somewhere to go, it will go into just ruminating, worrying, hypochondria. And then I found political blocking. Yeah.
And thank God for you, it's just an endless river. It'll never dry up. An endless river of things that are pro-social to be worried about.
Okay, so you were here six years ago, and it was right before you were one of the last interviews in person.
That's right, yeah.
The tour was bisected on that first book by the pandemic. And you were promoting at the time why we're polarized. Yeah. Which again, and I may have said it in our first interview, but it's like, I've had a very interesting parasocial observation of you over the years, and it's evolved, which is there was moments, I think I was probably introduced to you in your wonderful arguments with Sam Harris.
And I think maybe at that time, I had diagnosed you as left of me. And I do consider myself liberal. And then I was like, he might be too liberal for me. But then you made some points against Sam that I was like, oh, he's incredibly empathetic.
You were in a debate about who Sam would come to the rescue of and how obvious it was to you that these people, he seemed to think that they had been persecuted unfairly, which makes so much sense because he himself felt like he was persecuted unfairly. And just how transparent the motivation was.
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Chapter 4: How do political figures navigate complex conversations?
group right now than in the kind of middle.
Yeah. My hope comes from the well-documented pattern of young people hating whatever the people before them did. And what we did was so loud and obvious that I can only hope they're just going to reject that. That's where my hope lies. Okay. So I read, this is why there's no liberal Joe Rogan in the New York times that you did an op-ed on this. And I just loved it.
And I want to go through the points you made in it a bit. So let's just talk about Joe Rogan for a minute, because I'll just tell you historically where we come from. Like, A, I don't agree with him on much stuff, right? It's not my brand of masculinity. I respect the work ethic. I respect the thing he's built. I respect that he doesn't seem beholden to binary options.
His politics seem to be all over the map. I respect his authenticity. I think he's very fucking true to who he is. Pretty unwavering. So I've never joined on the bandwagon of hating him or loving him. So that's just where I stand on him.
I was keying off of this debate that happened among Democrats, like right after the 2024 election, where they felt like they had like lost the podcasters. Trump was going on Rogan and Rogan endorsed him. You know, he's going on Theo Vaughn, flagrant with Andrew Schultz. Was he on with Lex Friedman? I don't remember.
But whatever it was, there was a real sense that the right had figured out podcasting and the left was now hopelessly behind.
And the left was really giving that a lot of credit. I mean, I was hearing people saying that's why he won. And I don't think it's totally off, by the way.
I think there was something very real that was significant there, though I don't think, as we will talk about, the left has taken the right lesson. So right after the election, there was this big thing about the left needs a Joe Rogan. There needs to be a liberal Joe Rogan.
As you might guess, people called me personally. And like, you need to be the opposite of Joe Rogan.
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Chapter 5: What challenges does Ezra Klein identify within the Democratic coalition?
And one of the places where it has attracted a lot of internal argument in the Democratic coalition is this argument that, well, the real problem is corporations and corporate power. And corporations and corporate power often are a huge problem. PAC money, the AI PACs that are now trying to nuke any candidate who wants to regulate AI in any serious way.
Corporate money is a real problem in politics. It was a big part of my first book, actually.
Chapter 6: How do corporate influences affect political decisions?
And also, the realities of your building things... Things get built by corporations. And the money gets lent by corporations. So you need a way to be aligning all these different institutions in society from the government to the corporations, to the unions, to the interest groups, to all these different things. The question is like, what are you trying to create more of?
And how do you get there? As opposed to sort of categorizing yourself as I'm pro-corporation or anti-corporation or pro-union or anti-union. I've been a member of unions. I want to make it much easier to unionize. I want there to be higher union density in this country. I am pretty far on the position of we need more union power. And that doesn't mean unions never make decisions I disagree with.
And also unions often have very different views. The building trades in California have been really bad actors on housing. The carpenters unions have been really good actors on housing. So the unions are not one thing. The corporations are not one thing.
But I do think there can be a tendency in politics to want to say, like, these are my allies and I'm on their side and these are my enemies and I'm against them. But particularly when you're talking about giant groups of institutions or people, you know, what we talk about is NIMBY is not in my backyard. I don't want to see us build mixed-use apartment buildings in Big Sur.
There are places we should not build over. And also near mass transit in LA and San Francisco, it should be easy as shit to put up a tall building that people can live in. And so even there, there are times when it is a very valuable thing to try to block things, but we need to be able to act. And the fact of the matter is that the reality that Texas is more able to build clean energy
even though its politics are pretty anti-clean energy.
Or that they've got the best housing story in America, in Dallas.
That's problematic for our story. That should be a thing we worry about and try to learn some lessons from.
Okay, so the last thing I want to ask you about is something that's burbling up right now, and this will be my complaint of this state. They have gotten enough votes. It seems that they're going to put this billionaire net worth tax on the ballot. So this will tax all billionaires 5% of all their assets. We just ran this experiment.
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Chapter 7: What are the implications of a wealth tax in California?
And all it succeeded in doing was killing velocity of those home sales. We're never resetting the tax base. We've lost way more money by trying to get that extra bit of money. And I just cannot foresee how on earth you're going to tell everyone that owns a company here. Because, again, if you're not thinking it through, you're like, oh, yeah, that guy has $1 billion of cash. Give me 5% of it.
That billionaire owns stock in a company. So are you saying sell 5% of your holdings of your company? Do you think that's what's going to happen? That's not going to happen. That person is going to bounce. Everyone's going to fucking bounce. The amount of money that's going to get lost by this extra grab to me is a little emblematic of the lack of pragmatism or reverse engineering reality that
We are virtuous and we have great thoughts, but it doesn't feel realistic.
So I've done some reporting on this. I've talked to the union that has put this on the ballot. I've talked to some of the tax experts about it. I have complicated feelings about it for some of the reasons that you described. So let me frame the issue in a slightly broader way. Trump and the Republicans passed a bill. that across the country, but in California also, completely guts Medicaid.
So there is, I believe it's a multi-billion dollar hole in the Medicaid budget coming up in California. This is true for a lot of states. You're going to see millions of people kicked off of the roles of health insurance and nobody really has an answer to it.
So one of the big healthcare unions in California has pushed this one-time 5% wealth tax on the richest Californians as a kind of way of plugging this hole. You tax them this money and you plug the hole. Wealth taxes have some big problems. I'm a believer, and I want to say this super clear.
I just had an episode on my show that was great with this tax expert, Ray Madoff, on how do you bring more of the assets of the rich into the taxable world? Because basically, you're Elon Musk, you're Jeff Bezos, your wealth is tied up in unrealized company stock. Right. And what you can do is borrow against it to fund your life, which is not that expensive compared to how much money you have.
And then one day you die and the rules under which it gets passed down are incredibly advantageous. And so it actually really never gets taxed in the way that like my income or a normal person's income gets taxed because it's never really treated as income. This is insanely unfair. Like the very, very rich, not the surgeons, but the startup founders are just evading taxes.
We had this leak of tax documents a couple of years ago. The guy went to jail for it. But we saw that Jeff Bezos takes the child tax credit because his taxable income was like $80,000 or under $80,000. A lot of these people are making like a couple dollars a year because all of this compensation is not being treated as income. Okay. So we really, really, really need to fix that.
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Chapter 8: How does Ezra Klein view the future of political discourse?
It's not that much of their money. The thing is, and I think this is legitimate, these billionaires are like, if people begin to realize you could just put a ballot measure on to tax our wealth. And by the way, the way the thing is constructed, it would be a tax on anybody who's living here now. So moving after the thing passes would not hide your assets from the tax.
That would end up in court.
I looked into this a bit and we have done taxation this way before and it has held up. I don't know what would happen this time. I'm not a tax law expert. You could have Ray Mattoff or somebody like that on to do that. I don't think you can retroactively tax somebody. We have done it before and it's worked. I was surprised to find that we had done that before. Okay.
But I will say that the answer they will give you is that is a tried and tested approach to doing this. I can't adjudicate that particular question.
But even if you could, the question of would you push those people now to Texas, to New York, to Colorado, to Miami, to somewhere else where they are not under this threat of ballot-based taxation every time there's a budget hole to plug is a very real one. The thing I would like to see is national-level tax reform
that does this in a much fairer and more coherent way and then does not have the issue of like pushing billionaires around to different states. Does anyone think it's going to be a net gain? I mean, the people pushing it think that and they have tax experts on that. I mean, you could ask somebody like Emmanuel Saez or Gabe Zuckman on here and they would give you the case for it.
I have also, however, talked to very progressive tax experts who think it won't work and it's a bad idea. And so what I will say is even among people who are values aligned with this tax and spend all of their time thinking about how to tax rich people more, there is a lot of debate over whether or not this tax is well-structured and doing it in one state is a good idea.
Yeah, I guess time will tell if it passes, but I think there'll be a lot less tax revenue if that passes.
If you begin to push, if you really do push billionaires out of the state, then you will over time get like a Lafferker phenomena where you have reduced the total taxable revenue. So the question of whether or not people will leave because of the tax is, And again, there's disagreement on this question. It's not that much of their money. It's over five years.
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