The Ezra Klein Show - What I’m Thinking at the End of 2024

Episode Date: December 24, 2024

There’s a lot to process as 2024 draws to a close. In our end-of-year Ask Me Anything, the supervising editor of “The Ezra Klein Show,” Claire Gordon, joins Ezra in the studio to ask your questions – on politics, and lots of not-politics too. Ezra talks about the ways this year has affected him personally: how his views on government have changed; his efforts to stave off burnout; and his off-again, on-again relationship with social media. They also discuss the making of the show: the accusation that certain episodes have “normalized” Donald Trump; how we’re going to approach covering the next administration; the story behind our new theme music; and what’s going on with that arm tattoo.Thank you to the listeners who sent in questions, and to everyone who’s tuned in this year. Without you, this year would have been a lot lonelier. (We also wouldn’t have jobs.) We’ll be re-airing one of our favorite episodes this Friday (on the art of rest). And then we’ll be back here with new episodes in 2025. Wishing you a great end to 2024. Happy new year!This episode contains strong language.Mentioned:“Magical Tree Creatures” by Pat McCuskerThoughts? Guest suggestions? Email us at [e-mail] can find transcripts (posted midday) and more episodes of “The Ezra Klein Show” at nytimes.com/ezra-klein-podcast. Book recommendations from all our guests are listed at https://www.nytimes.com/article/ezra-klein-show-book-recs.This episode of “The Ezra Klein Show” was fact-checked by Michelle Harris. Mixing by Isaac Jones, with Efim Shapiro and Aman Sahota. Our supervising editor is Claire Gordon. The show’s production team also includes Rollin Hu, Elias Isquith, Kristin Lin and Jack McCordick. Original music by Pat McCusker. Audience strategy by Kristina Samulewski and Shannon Busta. The executive producer of New York Times Opinion Audio is Annie-Rose Strasser. Unlock full access to New York Times podcasts and explore everything from politics to pop culture. Subscribe today at nytimes.com/podcasts or on Apple Podcasts and Spotify.

From New York Times opinion, this is the Ezra Klein show. So happy holidays. Welcome to the near end of a year that has felt like many, many, many years. And we thought before it all ends, we would answer a couple more questions, hopefully slightly more fun ones than are more election focused, ask me anything. And then we're going to be back with new episodes in the new year and have some stuff that I'm pretty excited about in the pipeline. But thank you to everybody who's been listening this year. It has been a ride. Thank you to Claire Gordon, who's here with me and has been an amazing

partner in building the show this year and editing it and getting things out at the last minute to her and to the team. They've all been incredible and getting the show out the door with as fast as news was moving was no small thing and took no small number of long nights. So thank you to you. Oh thank you Ezra. It has been a year. I am not yet quite ready to process it all. And these aren't all fun questions. People are here for your political analysis. I thought you told me this one was gonna be lighter.

Well, there will be some fun at the end when I'm gonna continue the tradition from last year of a rapid fire round. Okay. But to start with, short, simple, sweet from Juna Elena Amia, why are you a liberal and not a democratic socialist? Are all of my AMAs going to start with very complicated definitional questions? It's been a good table setting.

Good Lord. Okay. I think it really depends what you mean by liberal and democratic socialist because those things mean different things in Europe where there are deeper traditions of both. And I think here the liberal, democratic socialist and left dimensions overlap but are different and are referred to as different by different people. I will say, let me try to do this in stages. I'm a liberal because I believe life is fundamentally unfair. I believe both life is fundamentally unfair and I believe we deserve partial credit at

best for how we do in it. Not our fault that we were born to poor parents, not our fault we were born with dyslexia or without the iron will somebody else might have had. And also, on the other side of that, often not our fault that we were such hard workers, that our particular mix of intelligence and capacity was the right fit for the society we were in at the right time, and we had the resources or good luck to take advantage of it. capacity was the right fit for the society we were in at the right time. And we had the resources or good luck to take advantage of it. I am very well suited to a society that highly values abstract communication and not that

well suited to a society that requires you to know where you're going or work a lot with your hands. I'm just curious, because I've heard you say that before. Is there like a particular moment or something you read or a life experience where you felt this click for you as a sort of a philosophical worldview? I did really badly in school and then I did really well as an adult. And I don't think I was more or less responsible for either one. The things that have made me successful in some ways were the same things that made me unsuccessful before.

My monomania around things I'm interested in and difficulty with things I'm uninterested in. My desire to be in a quiet room reading and writing by myself all the time. I don't think when I was 14 and couldn't get it together, that was a moral failing. Some part of my mental software was different. So my own life, I just, I did not in some level deserve how badly I did when I was younger and I don't deserve how well I've done as I've been older. I mean, I do my best with what I have, but the what I have, and frankly, even the doing my best doesn't even feel like something I chose.

It feels compulsive. There are many times when I'd frankly like to do a worse job and it's not in me. It's more anxiety producing in me not to work than to work. It won't have come out yet, but I'm about to tape with Oliver Berkman, the self-help author and in his book, he's quoting somebody saying that most successful people are an anxiety disorder harnessed for productivity. I don't think that's entirely wrong. So that's a lot of why I'm a liberal.

And then you get into this question of democratic socialists for liberal. The place I find that I tend to be different than a lot of democratic socialists in America, people I know who are more on the Bernie Sanders camp, has a lot to do with what I think is politically possible. It's not that we disagree necessarily on the ideal healthcare system, but we disagree on can you get there from here? Can you abolish the private health insurance people currently have and like? Will people trust the American government enough to do that?

Can you raise taxes to the extent you need to fund that set of programs? Is that what people want? Is that possible? And I probably am just simply more open to the idea that corporations do bad things, but also do great things. I was hearing an interview Bernie gave on The Daily, and he talked about how nothing Elon Musk has done at Tesla like did anything for working class people. And I thought that was such a weird comment,

because if you believe as Bernie Sanders does, and as I do in the importance of the electric vehicle transition, and how good cleaning up that air pollution and reducing those emissions would be for working communities, then Elon Musk has done a tremendous amount for those people. Whatever else you think about his politics or his tendencies, harnessing the genus of the private sector is probably more important to me.

And I value it more highly than a lot of people call themselves democratic socialists. So there's probably an affective dimension to that around capitalism. And then- Affective and it sounds like maybe more into capitalism. I'm probably more into capitalism, but I think a lot of them are too. I think if you look at how a lot of my friends who are more on that side live, the purchasing patterns don't look that different and what technology they're using doesn't look that different.

So, there's a bit of what you're willing to credit the market with doing and being able to do. Now, let's take nothing away from Bernie Sanders or frankly from democratic socialists. Just why I feel like I tend to end up on this side of the debates. I think probably one place I'm different from a lot of liberals and democratic socialists is I would like to put invention and innovation and technology much more at the center of any kind of social justice agenda. It is now seems like a million years ago in American politics and we are elevating or

Trump is elevating to the various health agencies, people who opposed a lot of this. But I think Operation Warp Speed is one of the greatest public health achievements ever. And the work behind it, it's really amazing. And it allowed something that no other policy could have done. If we had not invented the mRNA technologies that could have gotten us to those vaccines so quickly, we couldn't have just kept lockdowns going. And I think a lot of things are like that.

We're not gonna be able to hit our decarbonization goals without clean cement, without clean jet fuel. We just don't have that yet, at least not in anything that we can afford at scale. And so there are all kinds of problems we just cannot solve effectively or affordably with the technology we have today. But we could with technology we see right over the horizon. And I would put that much more at the center. So I am maybe not just a liberal, but I am an abundance liberal.

And a techno utopian. No, I'm an abundance liberal. Because I'm not utopian about it, right? I think technology is really important. But if you don't embed it in good policy, it can also be a driver of inequality, of illness, of war, of social fracture. Believing you can solve problems with technology is not the same as not believing you can create

problems with technology. I hate when people say, not blaming you for this, but I am a little pushing on it, that anybody who believes you can solve problems with technology is a techno utopian. No, you want to solve the problems you can solve and then not create problems that don't need to be created, which is like how you want to use any tool, right? You can hammer in a nail or you can crack somebody's skull to believe in the possibility of technologies, not to believe that it is utopian. Well, speaking of technology that is ambivalent, Travis Roberts wrote in with a question about

blue sky and curious to hear your thoughts on blue skies burgeoning post-election popularity. But I wanted to add on to that. You've recently rejoined Twitter. You asked Anne Applebaum how she felt being on Twitter now that Elon Musk is using it in a more obvious political way. Yeah, how do you feel about Twitter now being on Twitter now? I'm not sure. I'm not sure I feel about Blue Sky. I'm not sure I feel about Twitter. We are recording this some weeks before it's going to come out. So it is possible I will feel differently about both of them by the time it comes out. I've very negative feelings about the way Elon Musk is using and controlling the platform that he controls.

That does not mean I think that liberals abandoning it en masse will destroy it. To a large extent, I think Elon Musk destroyed it sufficiently that I feel better being on it. I think it wields a sufficiently that I feel better being on it. I think it wields a lot less power than it once did. I think it is much less a generator of at least left-wing groupthink. It might be more of a generator of right-wing groupthink under him because he has such a megaphone on it and is using it in such purposeful ways, but that is sort of less true among the liberals.

Did he kill the woke mind virus? That's a good question. I think, as I said in the other AMA, I do not think that happened on Twitter. I think that that happened in society over the last couple of years, so to speak. And I think that he would say it hasn't happened, right? That the woke mind virus is out there spreading and that that's why you need Donald Trump on the wall to stop it. Blue sky, I think, has a

possible problem of, it has a selection problem. It's pulling liberals who are upset about the state of Twitter into one place. And so I'm a little more worried about it being a generator of group think and in-group policing and dynamics that I think make it harder to think independently. I'm not sure I should be on any of them. I'm not sure it's good for the way I think. I'm not sure it's good for the books I want to read. I'm not sure it does an evidence to pull me into stupid controversies, not even my own, just whatever is obsessing the platforms at the moment. And on the other hand, it feels like a moment of factional conversation

among sort of people on the left, which has been interesting to me. I'm certainly trying to make some arguments around abundance and where the Democratic Party should go and what has gone wrong in blue state governance that do not all feel like podcasts and columns. So some of it is coming out in those places. But I try to make sure I am using these things and not being used by them. And pretty quickly I tend to feel I'm being used by them,

right, as they colonize my mind more and more. And so if that happens in the next few weeks, you probably won't see me there anymore. And that I'm making no claims about personal virtue. I don't like clink my glass when I leave and make an announcement. You know, I'm there when it feels like it's a useful thing for what I'm trying to do. And I try to leave when it feels like it harms what I'm trying to do.

And I'm right now in the bubble between those conditions, and I'm not 100% sure which side I'm going to fall on. Is there a sign that any of us outside who care about your mental well-being should note a stage an intervention. If you see me getting on fights in like real fights on an extra blue sky, you should pull me out. Or being in a bad mood because something happened. Yeah, that kind of thing. Yeah, that's when I tend to leave, right? If one of these platforms is harming your day-to-day quality of life, so you can micro post at other digital avatars, I mean, then you're

making a mistake. I have made that mistake many times. I did an interview for the Wall Street Journal piece with some podcasters after the election, and I set a line there that I think I might have said here in the past, but that the thing that I always notice is that Twitter makes me dislike people I like and podcasts make me like people I dislike. And it's still kind of true. And I'm not sure I want to be in a place where

I feel like it makes my view of other people less sympathetic and makes them more simplistic to me because the constraints of the place make everybody, including me, more simplified. Well, on podcasts making you like people you dislike, I wanted to ask this question from David Lieberman, because I know that you have thoughts about this. He writes, I find your hosting of insiders in the MAGA Trump world extremely enlightening. I would be much less informed without it.

At the same time, your treatment of these insiders as representatives of just one more segment of opinion, while no doubt an admirable model of open-mindedness casts the current political scene as normal in a way that it isn't. Normalizing MAGA, normalizing Trump by having certain people on the show, do you have any thoughts on that and that charge? I don't know what counts or doesn't count as normal. On the one hand, do I think Donald Trump is normal or even a very stable genius? I don't. On the other hand, he has been elected or almost elected president three times now. So who's more normal?

Your glasses wearing Brooklyn podcast host that you're listening to right now? You don't wear glasses on YouTube. And a lot of days, but for my stereotyping of myself, I do. Or Donald Trump. I think the effort to treat him as continuously abnormal is a way of trying to not see other people, including him. That doesn't mean you don't oppose things he does or that his world of people do. And I think that my show, The Unappled Bomb, and shows that will be still to come will

be pretty... There are lines that feel very clear to me, right? Particularly weaponizing the government. And I want to be very alert to that. But I want to be pretty clear. Don't expect this show to be a resistance show. I don't do this and have these interviews because I'm open-minded. I am a reporter.

I am curious. I'm trying to understand things so I can make up my own mind. I think that's the definition of open-minded. I don't actually. I'm not trying to be open-minded about the Trump administration. I'm trying to understand it. Not because I'm not sure where I'll fall on certain things. In some cases the things I most need to understand and develop a more textured picture of are the things I know I hate the most. But feeling in deep opposition

to something is not a license to not, certainly in my line of work, to try to understand it. And I've been thinking a lot as we think about programming the show next year about how to balance this, I think there are going to be things inside the Trump administration that are directly on the authoritarian pathway that are him actually trying to do what gets called academically an authoritarian breakthrough. And there are going to be other things, maybe the Department of Governmental Efficiency or things that happened in Marco Rubio's Secretary of state tenure, or tariffs, they're not like that.

And they need to be simply reported on as normal politics. And so this is another dimension that I think the effort to make normal a binary, things are or are not normal, makes hard. It's an administration, it's going to govern the country for the next four years. And parts of it are just going to be politics and policy. And parts of it might be something else entirely, an effort to change or corrupt the system itself. And, you know, I intend to try to take everything at its level.

And the fact that one thing is happening doesn't mean you don't have to cover the other thing in either direction. I think this is going to be really hard to balance. I did less of this in the first Trump administration, to be honest. And I think liberals in general treated more of the first Trump administration as illegitimate. He didn't win the popular vote. There was this whole Russia investigation. It was all crazy. His administration was full of normal Republicans leaking about what a maniac he was. It was much easier even for the people reporting on it to sort of treat him as aberrant because in some ways his own administration treated him as aberrant.

And it seemed possible this was just a one-time fluke in American politics. The butterfly flapped its wings and we got this. And that's not what it is anymore. It wasn't in a way what it was then. And, you know, my first job on this show is to be a good reporter. I understand the show is an act of continuous reporting. And I'm not being a good reporter and not doing a good job if I'm not actively reporting on this administration.

So we'll see what shape that takes. Many of them don't want to talk to me, but it is not going to be a closed door policy because Trump goes over some line in one area and then, you know, there's no more talking about the tariffs or something. It's not the way I'm going to do my job. Last question on politics from Matthew Davidoff. I've heard you argue very convincingly against the filibuster.

Now we're set to have a Trump-controlled or Trump-friendly majority in all three branches. Has your opinion changed at all? It hasn't changed. Obviously, my ideal world is not that the filibuster goes away branches, has your opinion changed at all? It hasn't changed. Obviously, my ideal world is not that the filibuster goes away at the exact moment the people who I think have the worst views on society are in power. I wish Democrats had gotten rid of the filibuster and maybe if they had, they had such a thin

majority, they probably couldn't have done much with it because Joe Manchin would have stopped what they were going to do anyway. But there have been different moments over the past decade when I think Democrats could have delivered a lot better if they didn't have the filibuster to worry about. They could have built the Inflation Reduction Act quite differently because they wouldn't have been using the weird rules of budget reconciliation. Now do I want Republicans to unwind the filibuster and pass anything they want? No, in the sense that I don't want things I think are bad to happen ever.

Will I declare it somehow unfair or illegitimate if they do that? I won't. I have been saying for years, we should get rid of the filibuster. And interestingly, I do think getting rid of the filibuster will present them with some really difficult problems. One thing I don't like about the filibuster will present them with some really difficult problems. One thing I don't like about the filibuster, and I've made this point many times, is that the way I think democracy is supposed to work is people elect their representatives, their representatives deliver more or less what they promised, and people then decide if they

like what got delivered. And the filibuster is often a way that political movements avoid accountability for what they are trying to do. And it's a very useful tool for someone like Mitch McConnell to hide behind the filibuster so that his more maga drenched or more conservative colleagues can't pass things that he thinks will be unpopular. Oh, we tried, but the filibuster can't pass a national abortion ban. I don't want a national abortion ban, but I think it's gonna be a real difficult situation

for majority leader Thune if there's no filibuster and you see Republicans wanting to legislate on reproductive rights. And to the extent the public sees that, that gives them information about what Republicans are about and what they really want to do. And I think this is true for sort of every area you might think about in American politics. I do think the public does respond to one degree or another to the results of governance, particularly if there's a lot of governance happening. So my point is not that it would be great for Republicans to get the filibuster because

it's better for things to be worse because that can create more electoral backlash. But I don't think getting rid of the filibuster would be an unalloyed good for Republicans or for Democrats because all of a sudden they're playing with live ammunition. The things they promise when they have a trifecta, they don't really have a great excuse for not doing. And so then it's a question, are you promising things people actually want? That would be an interesting thing to see how they handle. Moving on from politics, no more politics. This question from Matt Holmes, that was great. What are the things you enjoy about being a father?

The context is he's 33. He's never had the desire to have kids. He says that he's listened to three of our episodes on the topic of children and he heard the things that you said about the way children are wonderful. Your son is the nicest person to you, all this touching stuff, but still can't see how the pros outweigh the cons for his life.

But it seems like he really just actually just wants to be persuaded. He says, I want to be wrong. Please help. Ooh, this is not the position I want to be in. In some ways, this is making me feel like JD Vance because I do think there's something wrong with this discourse where the question of whether or not to have kids is so similar to the question of whether or not to take a vacation to Costa Rica or the question of

whether or not to go wine tasting this weekend. Do the pros outweigh the cons from my personal life. When I do understand a lot of what is true about having kids as it is amazing that my children get to experience life. Not because it makes my life better in every respect, though I can talk about the ways it does, but because their lives are precious things and my parents gave up a lot to have me here. And my life has been a precious thing to me. And you know, on and on and on backwards down the line.

So even if I felt that having kids was less rewarding than it is for me, I don't love the discourse around this. There are people who can't have kids, there are people who wanted to have kids and weren't able to, right? My point is not that they're never conditioned. There are people who have genetic conditions, they don't want to pass on to kids. There are a lot of reasons people don't have or were not able to have had children, right? This is not what I'm talking about here.

But I do find the kind of weighing the ledger thing a little, I find it to be distinctive to our era. And I'm not sure I think it is an ethos that speaks super well of our era because I do think human life is really precious and amazing. Did you always want kids? I used to have this joke, like, do I want kids? Definitely. When do I want them?

Never. So, not in the sense that I thought parenting was going to be super fun. I actually thought I would be very bored by parenting. And I sometimes am very bored by parenting. But I always felt having kids was important. Well, I get the framework of just, if you've never had that kind of conviction, or it's always been muddled, it's more than, oh crap, I'm at the age where I need to make a decision. Can someone just nudge me?

Yeah, I understand that that's not what he's asking, but because I hear this question so often, I mean, it's a very old AMA question for us. I just sort of want to note that. I just think it's a kind of extraordinary element of our time, right? I mean, because again, like for most of you in the industry, we didn't have birth control in any significant way, right? It's so new to think about the choice this way. And I don't only want to say that the important thing in the choice is your experience as

a parent because such an important thing is your child's experience as a human being. And that's also an amazing thing about being a parent is getting to see that. I've been playing Angry Birds with my older son lately. And when we play it, I just like, I don't think anybody enjoys anything as much as he enjoys playing Angry Birds with me. He just cackles. And it's really beautiful. It's really fun, right? Going back to the Gia Tolentino episode, there's real pleasure in it. You know, kids are connection. Watching consciousness unfold is an extraordinary thing. My younger child is three.

And his language is just coming online in a very different way now. And he's talking about the past and he's imagining things. And it is an interesting, amazing thing to watch language happen. It's now so hard for me to imagine not having my kids that I almost feel like it's hard for me to make the arguments, it is really meaningful to be involved in other people's lives to that degree. And then to see their life become something that is not yours and that you support, but you do not control.

And to recognize that they are growing in ways that you can't imagine, they will have some experience that has nothing to do, not nothing to do, but is not yours. And that's part of it, right? You're just part of this human chain. And putting aside this question of, are my Saturdays better? In some ways they are, and in some ways they're worse. And they're not going to be the way they are forever, right? I have a three and a five-year-old, right?

One day I'll have a 15-year-old and an 18-year-old. And according to the testimony of every other older parent I know, I will wish they wanted to sit around playing Angry Birds and having me take them to the playground all day. And I guess I would just keep on saying that what makes parenting beautiful is not that it is fun. Sometimes it's fun. A lot of times it's not. I just had a weekend where I didn't feel that good. I really did not want to do a lot of parenting, but I don't know. Think about someone you love and how happy you are for the experiences they have, right?

The sympathetic joy you have for them. I think about the way, like how excited my mom is for the experiences I have. A lot of the joy of parenting is not the joy of parenting. It's the joy of your child's existence. Uh, there's a really beautiful quote in the book Gilead about this by Marilynne Robinson, which is, I think, my favorite book. And it's all, the book is this letter from an older man to his young son. And he says, you see how it is Godlike to love the being of someone. Your existence is a delight to us. I hope you never have to long

for a child as I did. But oh, what a splendid thing it has been that you came finally. And what a blessing to enjoy you now for almost seven years. Yeah, it's not all about you. And that's, I guess, maybe one of the really great joys of parenting. It makes you see that it's not all about you. Final question before rapid fire round. It's been a long year. It's been a weird year. Many ups, many downs. What is something significant you've changed your mind about this year?

What I've changed my mind about? Hmm. I mean, people have heard me working through the election results. I'm not sure that they've completely changed my mind. I guess- Is Harris definitely winning? I didn't say she would definitely win. Money on winning that she was the likely victor in the 2024 election.

I never said this publicly for a good reason. You admit, you admitted to it in our, maybe you were in a vulnerable and tired moment in our post-election. Oh, did I? And someone texted me how admirable it was. Sure, I changed my mind from thinking at some point that Harris is going to win to then seeing that she lost.

But I wouldn't say I changed my mind. thinking at some point that Harris is going to win to then seeing that she lost. But I wouldn't say I changed my mind. I would say that reality clicked the probabilities into focus. It's a lot of changing someone's mind. I guess the thing I would say, this may be even over a couple of years, but it's going to be a big part of my coming book. I think the thing I've changed my mind most on in politics in recent years is how destructive bad regulations can be and how seriously I take it now when I hear that regulations or rules are ill constructed. I think I used to have what in my views a pretty standard liberal

response. I was saying of course some regulations can be bad but you know look at these studies we've made the air law cleaner. We do a cost benefit analysis. There's always exceptions to the rule, but I sort of assume most of this stuff works. And now I don't. I have followed up and really dug in on the details of how enough projects have worked or not worked in government, what happened with California high-speed rail, what it takes to modernize digital government, that I am much more skeptical, not of regulation, but of a lot of existing regulations.

My belief about how much stupidity and procedural crust can exist now in government and places for very long periods of time that people are just laboring under. And it's not gone to the point that creates a crisis, but it eventually could. Housing being a good example of this. I've really changed the way I approach that. I think that a lot of liberals and certainly a lot of the politics I came up in kind of felt like the right attacks government and so you have to defend it and you look for ways to defend it. And it's not where I am now.

And I think I found myself more frustrated and then ultimately quite angry at the way the Democratic Party became just the defenders of institutions and not the reformers of them in a way that required not really admitting how badly they were working. And now we have Donald Trump who wants to burn institutions down, who does not want to make government work well. He wants to corrupt it to his own purposes. So we have thesis and anthesis and I'm interested in synthesis. And that the point of this politics is to create the state capacity, create the public

capacity that we can have great things and we can have enough of them. I mean, that's obviously a big part of the coming book, which is on my mind. Is Derek Thompson, your co-author, is he as angry as you are about all of this? Or is he like, she's Ezra, calm down. Derek is a probably more temperamentally gentle person than I am, but I don't think he feels differently about this. I think his chapters have a lot of righteous frustration. In the way the book was split up, I did more backwards looking pieces.

I have more of the things about why this project didn't work, so I really immersed in some things where why this project didn't work. So I really immersed in some things where when I came out the other side, I was like, oh my God. And I just maintain like a level of fury about the California high speed rail system that maybe other people feel is a little bit ridiculous. But to me, it is a signal failure of liberalism that could not be built in a blue state when the federal government was giving them billions of dollars, when the state was putting in billions of dollars.

And by the way, what they're actually doing is building a leg of it right now that nobody really wanted, this Merced to Bakersfield leg. They don't have the money to finish that leg. The people working on it have told me on the record that it doesn't make sense to build that really unless you can do the full San Francisco to LA line. That's the only way California high-speed rail really makes sense. But they don't have money to build that really unless you can do the full San Francisco to LA line. That's the only way California high speed rail really makes sense, but they don't have

money to build that at all. They have no sight line on that money. That money is like, they'll need like $85 billion or something. I mean, probably more over time. They have no idea how to get any of it. So they're just building in the hopes of building this thing that they don't have the money to finish and then don't have the money to expand into its final form will lead to some kind of political upheaval that leads to the money appearing.

And I don't fault the people who are there in the high speed rail authority, it's not up to them, but the entire thing is such a disaster. And liberalism should be furious. Like, this should not be allowed to happen. And they should figure out how to make it not happen. But nobody has. If this is built, how long would the trip be between San Francisco and LA? I'd have to go back and get the exact number.

But short enough that I would take that well and happily over flying, which is really not as convenient between the two as you would think and driving certainly sucks. I like taking the Amtrak. I love trains. Trains are a solved problem. You can go to other countries and board them. This is not futuristic technology. Go to Europe. You could go to Japan, they work. So much more legroom than a plane. It's not even about the train. It is about the broad issue here. That, you know, it's

like you hear about the big dig and how expensive that became the Second Avenue subway. And it's like, well, I bet something went wrong in that project. No, it's just how they go now. By the way, it's not like it's so great in some other countries. UK is not proving able to build new high-speed rail either. But I really have a different sense of how poorly government works. And I do not have the conclusion on that. My libertarian friends or my conservative friends have because I think we need government.

Nobody's building this. That's not government. And by the way, it's not like California has employed all these engineers and mechanics. This is built by private companies, by contractors. It doesn't matter if the person is a contractor who's getting paid through government grants or they're getting, they're employed by the government or it's a private developer who needs government permissions. If you don't make this stuff possible at the level of rules, nobody can do it.

And so you can't just say like, get the government out of the way either, because then you're not going to get things you need that are public goods. So yeah, I have really changed my mind on how suffocating government rules can be in the real world. And you know, the fact that you can build homes in Houston and Austin, and it's so hard in San Francisco and LA, isn't an interesting fact about the world. It is infuriating to me. I mean, is any part of you excited or hopeful that there could be a bulldozing of regulations

and a Trump second term that could have positive effects? I'm not, because what I'm interested in is outcomes. And I don't want to bulldoze regulations in order to make it possible to pump much more oil and pollute streams, right? That's not my end goal. Regulations are a tool. Ron loves clean air. He does love clean air.

The end goal, the end points matter. In some ways, I do think that Republicans and Democrats have very similar pathologies on this, which is both become process-obsessed and not outcome-oriented. I think the biggest problem around liberal governance is that it is obsessed by process, and it mistakes process for outcomes. It is not connected enough to what is actually happening once the money gets spent or the grant goes out or the contract is awarded. And among Republicans, too often they treat government as an abstraction, and they're also not trying to achieve anything except the removal of regulations,

except the shrinking of government, except the hampering of government agencies. So liberals often hobble government, conservatives try to weaken and starve it. Neither is connected to weaken and starve it. Neither is connected to an outcome I want. The process I am interested in is one that says, how do we make it easy and fast to cite and build clean energy?

How in places where we have a housing crunch do we make it easy to build housing? Work backwards from the goal you want to achieve to the rules you need. You can't have a regulations good or regulations bad view. You have to ask, are you getting the outcomes you want and then work backwards. I think that's a good place to end because that I think really captures where your mind has been most of the year. RAPID FIRE ROUND. Should we say 30 seconds? From Clark Hill, who are your top three favorite X-Men?

Ooh, when I was a kid, I loved Gambit. I don't think that would be my answer now, but I think I have to say it, given how much I loved Gambit. What a hard question to give me a 30 second round. I love Gambit. I don't think that would be my answer now, but I think I have to say it given how much I loved Gambit. What a hard question to give me in a 30 second round. Yeah, Dark Phoenix era Jean Grey and Krakoa era White Queen. I wish I knew enough to comment. And Magneto.

You got to, I mean, Magneto is an extraordinary villain. Yeah, I got to put Magneto, you got to, I mean, Magneto's an extraordinary villain. Yeah, I got to put Magneto above White Queen. Well, when you ask people for three books they'd recommend to the audience, you never let them go over like this. I always let them go over. From Dylan Smith, who noticed that we have a new intro song that we dropped with no public acknowledgement, and that is by the wonderfully talented Pat McCusker, the New York Times' very own audio engineer and composer.

The question is, why did you want to change the theme song and what kind of moods and emotions, what did you want people to feel when they heard it? These are 30 second questions. That's right. So I wanted to change your theme song because I didn't like it that much. And it didn't feel to me at this point like me or like the show. And we had a bunch of composers around the times create songs built on a mood board that we created. And we would, me and Claire and Jeff and Isaac and Aman would do these listening sessions and listen to everything and talk about it.

And Patz was just, I loved it from the moment I heard it. And it has this sort of wonderful quality of having curiosity in it, of having a sense of calm, a sense of interest. There's a little bit of anxiety there. I feel like our previous song had too much anxiety and sort of nothing else. So you're being very hard on the old theme song. I have great affection for the old theme song. If I ever hear it, one bar of it for the rest of my life, it'll flood me with feelings.

And it just fits the kind of music I like. It's interesting. It's a little bit neoclassical. I then was talking to Pat about music and we just have huge overlap in musical tastes. We were both listening to A Fair Amount of Chiosmos. We were both listening to the the Fote album that came out this year, Windswept, which is really great. So it's not a shock that he created something I loved. Thematically connected. A question from Jamie Racinelli. What was your favorite band when you

were younger? Michael Franti and Spearhead. What? Michael Franti and Spearhead. I loved the album Stay Human, which is just very hippie music. But when I was in late high school, loved that, saw them a lot. I would just go around listening to Stay Human, which is just like bouncy. It's all Little Sam poetry, inflected. It was a different time. I went to UC Santa Cruz. But I still love that album. And I used to play a lot of it for my older son

when he was young. I would particularly play a lot of Skin on the Drum, which is this more spoken word, slower track on it. In the heat of the sun, I bring shade for everyone. Like the beat on the one, I'm the skin on the drum. It is one of those things you loved when you were young that I actually still love when now that I'm old or at least middle aged. Paraphrasing a question from Nick O'Brien, will there be a free and fair election in four years?

I hope so. Sam Maxwell, you've got a stressful job. How do you unwind? And no saying reading a book or working out. No high achiever answers. Although reading is a big part of how I unwind. I listen to a lot of music and that's a big piece of it. And I have trouble with it right now, to be honest.

Unwinding, resting, kind of like letting the nervous system down regulate is a thing that as this year has gone on, has become a much more significant struggle. There's not been a new show in a few weeks. I've been taking some time off. And I would like to be better at it next year. I sort of at a certain point this year decided that the work was more important than the wellbeing and we just went for it, which has been a lot on the whole team too, not just me. And I would like to be in better balance than I've been, but you know, friends, I have friends, they go for walks. It's all the normal stuff, but there's no magic.

If you're living a really imbalanced life, you're gonna feel really imbalanced. And, you know, I lived in a really imbalanced way this year. Yeah, extended periods of lack of balance really take a minute to unwind. Yeah, and we're going into administration, it's not going to be calm. There's something about being at the end of what you thought was maybe a sprint and seeing how much it's going to be a marathon.

I felt this way in 2016 too. And yeah, it will take some real protection of the nervous system. Something that has been helpful recently has been every morning, I keep my to-do list for the day and all the things that come into my head on a little piece of paper. I have one of these little pocket sized notepads and a pen that is on me all the time. And I now try to have at the top of it every single day, things that nourish me. You know, it's like eating good food or movement or meditation, right? It's like six of them usually. So that before I see all the things I have to do,

I'm reminded of things I could do that actually feel good on my system as opposed to cause me more harm. Wait, so it's just like reading them makes you feel good or a reminder to do those things? A reminder to do them. Okay. So every time I look back at this piece of paper

where I keep all the things that come into my head to do, every person to email, every house task, I have to write the intro, I have to look at the edit. There is before that, these are like the pillars of me feeling better. So it's not like Gretchen Whitmer when she had on that piece of paper before she gives a speech to remind her to like be a boss bitch. Some like, something about ant flow. Yeah, something.

It's an empowering period thing. It's not that. No, it's, I think there's a tendency, at least for my mind, to only see all the things you need to do and to almost give no attention to the things that balance that out. And the list of things I certainly could do

is always longer than what I can get done. And I am really trying to push myself in the other direction. So when I see it, it's like, oh, maybe I don't need to do anything here. Maybe I actually have 20 minutes I should take a walk. I don't take enough vacations for rest to be just a thing that happens on vacation.

It has to happen more times a day. And there's like, bumly, like, I don't wanna keep feeling the way I felt at the end of this year. So I am trying to change the way I look at the day to day. I remember you saying a very similar thing to me around the end of last year. Yeah, it's a consistent problem.

I do have a tendency to burn myself out by the end of the year. Yeah. I would say that since October 7th, a year ago, the show has been a lot harder. I'm sorry. We are not the ones suffering the most from that. I don't mean to, there's no stolen valor. It has just been a, you know, it has been a very intense period of news. I mean, you're, I mean, look, you're in this too. You started right around then.

But bouncing between that. Yeah, bouncing between that and the election and everything else going on in the world. It, you know, it requires more than having like a hobby. Although I could having a hobby. Although I could use a hobby. You have lots of hobbies. Do I? You just staged a play.

Well, I wrote a play that my husband staged without telling me. Yeah, you're like an interesting person with a well-rounded set of views. You belong to clubs. Everybody knows you have a fun and interesting life. I'm glad I'm giving off that impression. That's important for my self-esteem. Last question of the year from Elizabeth Taylor. The?

The Elizabeth Taylor. I mean, I guess we don't know she's not. Came back from the dead, the ghost of Elizabeth Taylor. Oh, she died. The ghost of the most beautiful person who's ever lived. Came back to say the 2020s have been wack so far. That does sound like her. Vibe check for 2025.

What do you think the vibes are gonna be? What's your feeling? Ooh. I don't really wanna end on what I think about this. Yeah. This is what we're doing? You don't have another one? Probably cool things are going to happen with AI. Maybe.

I mean, we're in a, you know, people, Tyler Cowen and others made the point that there had been a big vibe shift around Trump and we're in the Trump vibe arrow right now. That I don't think is what it was like in 2017. In 2017, the vibe was resistance, not Trump. I think now we are going to experience truly the Trump vibe. It is not just a political phenomenon, but a cultural phenomenon. It has much more media power than it did then. So we're about to really feel what it is like to be in

Trump's America. For some people, that'd be really thrilling. For some people, it will not be. But I think that that is the way the vibe has shifted in 2025, which is very different than the first time he won. He has real agenda setting capacity that he did before. And Elon Musk is on the team and many, many more people in media and in technology. And so he's going to have much more capacity to shape sentiment at a time when I think the opposition to him is much less coherent and empowered. So take this for what you will. and I think this may not in the end be good for him or his movement,

but 2025 is going to be the year of the Trump vibe. I don't think a lot of our listeners will love ending on that answer. So a final question, our actual- Went from my burnout to- Final question of 2024 from Holly Hamilton, who noticed in the new album art that we also dropped this year with no public acknowledgement, a tattoo popping out from your sleeve.

What does your tattoo mean? I do want to note that that was a photo choice made by our editors, not by me. That tattoo is of redwoods. I love redwoods. They're my favorite tree. I'm a Californian. There are particular parts of California, particularly in Sierra Nevadas, that are really important to me and sort of sit in my mind as the most beautiful places in the world, but also the places I feel best in the world myself. And it is a tattoo of a scene built

around redwoods. So much better. Ts. So much better. Trees, so much better. And I will say that the theme music by Pat McCusker is called Magic Tree Creatures. And was inspired by the little forest spirits in Miyazaki movies. So one of the reasons I liked that music so much when

I heard it was it does have a bit of a feeling of being in the forest. And here in the concrete jungle of New York, there is nothing I miss like a redwood forest. Way better vibe for Twenty Second Path. Trees. Tree vibe. Thank you, Claire. Thank you to everybody who's worked on the show so hard this year. They've done amazing, amazing work.

And thank you to everybody in the audience who's been with us on the show this year, which has not always been the easiest show to listen to. And you've all been wonderful. Your voice so much. Yeah, it's a lot of time to spend with me. Even I find it to be a lot of time to spend with me. So I can't imagine what it's like for everybody else, but thank you.

And yeah, hopefully the 2025 vibes will be, I don't know how to end that. Wind, rustling leaves, roots growing in the ground. And hopefully the 2025 vibes will feel more like this. The show's production team includes Roland Hu, Elias Isquith, Kristen Lin, and Jack McCordick. Fact checking by Michelle Harris, mixing by Isaac Jones with Amin Sahota and Afim Shapiro. Our supervising editor is Claire Gordon. We have original music by Pat McCusker, audience strategy by Christina Samuelski and Shannon Busta.

The executive producer of New York Times Opinion Audio is Annie Rose Strasser. you