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And, This is Ezra Klein This is Gavin Newsom

Well, coming up next I have Ezra Klein here in studio talking about his new book that he co-authored with Derek Thompson called Abundance. In this book, Ezra does not hold back on taking a very critical look at Democratic governance all across the United States of America, in particular in my home state of California.

This is Gavin Newsom, and this is Ezra Klein. Ezra, it is great to have you here in studio. Thanks for having me here for this weird inversion. You’ve been all over the place; you got a new book, Abundance. We’ll jump right into that, but I want to just frame a little bit of the relationship that we have that goes back, and you may not even remember this. I was a new mayor in San Francisco and was asked by Bill Maher to go on a show. I remember this, and you were one of the panelists. I’ll never forget just sparring with Bill, obviously, and then you. After the show was done and we were all finishing, you had left. Maher goes up to me and he goes, “Who the hell was that?” and I’m like, “I know who the hell that was,” and it was you. We were like, “Whoa.” Just for both of us, I was relatively new; Bill’s been a seasoned pro. You were lieutenant governor then. I don’t think—maybe I was lieutenant governor. Wasn’t I?

I’m pretty sure—I was lieutenant governor. So, anyway, I’ve been on the show a bunch of times, but you had a next-level capacity to analyze things and to deliver a point of view. It’s not surprising to me that so much of that, including that conversation we probably had in that studio, is reflected in what you’ve been focused on for, I think, about your book from that era, Republic 2.0. It was called, right?

Yeah, it was Citizenville. Citizenville. Yeah, how to take the Town Square digital and reinvent government. How about that?

Yeah, we should thread into this conversation. I think people have forgotten that era of Gavin Newsom.

Well, I think in so many aspects it reflects. I was reading this book, and you’re reflected in this. I mean this has been my struggle as a former mayor. You chronicle San Francisco, California disproportionately, but this book is fundamentally about the future, and you frame the future in abundance terms. But it’s also a real shot against liberalism in many respects, against the world we created now, competing against us in terms of process, courts, and laws, and rule-making. All of that has created so much of this cost-of-living dynamic.

So tell us, what was the inspiration of the book? Tell us a little bit about what Abundance is about. I mean the reason the book is so rooted in California is that I am—I mean, so this book is co-authored with Derek Thompson from The Atlantic. So we both have our own things we bring to it, but I grew up in Irvine, as you know. I went to the system, then I went to D.C. for 12 or 13, 14 years, and I spent a bunch of time in D.C. covering a political system where the problem was Republicans. Oftentimes, the things that I wanted to see happen were not happening there because they were being blocked by the Republican Party. Then in 2018, I moved back here—I moved back to Oakland and then to San Francisco—and I looked around, and it just wasn’t doing well.

Right? People aren’t happy; people were leaving. I mean, you know this. You’re a retail politician; you can sense people’s anger when they find out you have anything to do with politics. They tell you real quick. We could see the housing crisis had metastasized into something that was genuinely now a crisis—not just homes are expensive.

Right? California high-speed rail has always lit me on fire. We’ll get to that. Yeah, we’ll get to that.

When I began to—and I was thinking about clean energy, where your—I mean, the goals that you have set for clean energy in the state are remarkable. In order to achieve them here or nationally, because the Inflation Reduction Act was passing around this time too that I was thinking about a lot of this, we have to build faster than we have ever built. The laws don’t really permit that.

So the thing that I began thinking a lot about was that there is something liberalism is good at and knows how to look for, which is where can we subsidize something that people need. But there’s something liberalism is bad at because it doesn’t know how to look for it, which is how do we create more? How do we make it possible to build more of the things people need? Not only are we not good at pursuing that, but we don’t even realize how often we are getting in the way of it—how often we are the problem.

There is, I think, something bracing as a liberal about asking this question of why, in the places where people who agree with me govern, you and I don’t think that the politics aren’t the outcomes I want to see. Why can’t I go say to the Texans or the Floridians, “No, no, no, no. You just have to do our policies from California”? That’s the thing I’m grappling with here.

No, and I appreciate that. We’ll get to that question because I think it’s a fundamental question, and it’s interesting what you sort of define from that prism. That’s important because what people are actually looking for isn’t necessarily what you are identifying specifically. I would challenge as the problem. That said, what you identify as a problem, I completely agree with.

I was going back to my first speech as governor of the state of California. It might as well come from these pages. Yeah, literally it said if you can build a sports stadium with these new rules and fast-track a judicial process and what we refer to as our California rules that go back to quite literally Ronald Reagan in 1970 as it relates to environmental review—it should work for homelessness; it should work for housing.

I announced that day an effort to sue up to 47 cities. We started with one, Huntington Beach. California doesn’t make you popular as Governor to announce a lawsuit against a city because they weren’t meeting their zoning requirements under our housing element. So much of that, again, is reflected in this friction and your own reflected frustration and lived experience in the state of California.

But my point is this: as a practitioner, it’s a very different reality, but what you identify, I completely embrace.

These labyrinths of rules—federal rules, state rules, absolutely localism, though. I want to talk about that. Localism is determinative. You pick on, understandably, San Francisco, but you can look at almost any city—including a Republican city like Huntington Beach—and these same rules and restrictions apply there and the same frustrations. So from the prism of left versus right, you take the shot against liberals. But can’t we argue that there is a sort of quality of consideration that persists in rural and red parts of the country as well?

Let me flip this because to shadowbox around the fact that you know more about California governance than I ever will in a thousand years of doing this would be ridiculous. Why is it easier to build homes in Texas than in California? You have well established that in the book, in Houston. You make the point—I think it was 70,000 permits in 2023, just 7,500 in a much smaller city, San Francisco.

But understandable context for a city with more demand, and it’s simply because they have no zoning. They have land use considerations, but Austin has zoning. Yeah, but not Houston.

In the context of that, frame the thing I’m getting at here, which I really would like your—the thing you just said about localism. It’s so important, and this is so much the conversation I’d love for us to have here because the texture that you have been grappling with of why do things that you want to have happen not happen, is I think a really interesting thing to add to it.

But when you’re saying, “Well, you know, is this really a problem for liberals? It’s easier to build in Texas and Florida than not just in California but in California or New York, right?” The cost-of-living crisis is worse in blue states. A little bit of that is blue states are places a lot of people want to live, but you should be able to, in places where governing for the working class—in theory, point just to level set—people are listening.

I completely agree with this notion of the supply-demand imbalance. I mean, you’re making an Econ 101 argument, and that supply-demand imbalance is next level in the state of California. We’re simply not building enough housing, and that goes to— I mean, you correctly identify NIMBYism and people, you know, incumbent protection racket, so to speak, not just from a corporate perspective, but someone who’s very satisfied with their backyard and their views and their home and their community. They don’t want density; they don’t want other people moving in; they don’t want any infrastructure built around it—as it relates to transportation.

They’re very satisfied with what they have, and I think they abuse, in some respects, a lot of these rules that have been around for decades to advance that aim. You identified all this, I think, pretty well as a problem for the state and for you.

So when you gave a State of the State a couple of years back, I’m genuinely forgetting the number. What was the housing goal you set? We had an audacious goal that was a study of studies that identified what the state would need in order to address the supply-demand imbalance. But we made the point that we were going through a legally binding process, what we refer to as our arena goals. We’ve established that here is the legally binding goal: 2.5 million units by 2030. That is the established state policy, and that’s the goal.

So, not on track for that—not even close. Why? Well, a number of reasons: macroeconomic. I mean, I think you have to be fair as it relates to the realities of what just occurred as it relates to the constraints around the markets. Say that interest rates are high. Interest rates are high. Obviously, we came out of a very difficult period during COVID, but fundamentally because of the inability to get local government to get out of the way and allow for more construction.

That’s why we created a housing accountability unit. That’s why we’ve taken 800 actions. That’s why we’ve unlocked 7,500 units, and that’s why we have advanced 42 SQL reforms and some of the most significant housing reforms in California history as it relates to ADUs, which you identify—you can now build in single-family home zoning and duplexes.

But, at the end of the day, state visions realized back to localism. Why did the ADU effort work and single-family housing or multifamily housing didn’t? Those were big bills, and we greeted them with delight. But I would say everybody would say that what was it? SB 9? Yeah, SB 9. SB 6?

The cities have made it so those don’t actually— it doesn’t build as much housing. That’s it, and that’s why we created this housing accountability to drive more responsibility at the local level and providing technical assistance. It’s not just a stick; it’s also a carrot.

But no, look, that’s the construct, right? I mean, that’s a classic example: people like their neighborhoods back. That’s the foundation of NIMBYism, and I look at this NIMBYism frame, which yes in my backyard, for those wondering what the hell we’re even talking about. I embrace it; I celebrate it. I don’t think there’s been a more NIMBY governor in California’s history, and that’s why we’ve signed so many of these bills and supported many of these bills.

But you’re right, that application of a lot of these new reforms just in the last few years in this high-interest rate environment. So, we’ll see how quickly things unlock as interest rates drop. But fundamentally, it’s the NIMBYism that drags it. Let me ask you something about the housing reforms as I flip the whole table of this podcast. It’s a problem with having a podcast host on.

So during the election, when Kamala Harris and then Barack Obama at the DNC were up there talking about the need to build three million new homes, really sounding like NIMBYs from the stage, I was thinking, “Man, this is a huge intellectual victory for a movement that didn’t exist like 25 minutes ago.”

Then I started thinking and running back through the data. I’m like, “Okay, how’s it working out?” You look in San Francisco, and housing starts aren’t up. You look in LA, and they’re not up. You look in California—not talking here about ADUs, but housing starts in January; they’re lower than in 2015.

I began thinking to myself, “Oh, we actually have won an intellectual argument without winning the policy.” So I began doing some reporting because I knew, not literally how many, but I knew there had been a pretty torrid pace with you and, you know, Scott Wiener and Buffy Wicks and a bunch of other housing champion local elected officials passing big bills.

So I began calling developers in San Francisco and asking, “What’s going on here? Why don’t I see a movement and how much you’re building?” What they all told me was I didn’t end up writing this piece. I just didn’t have time, but I’ve meant to for some time. It was that all these fast-track bills required me to take on a bunch of new standards and requirements—prevailing wages, and environmental standards, and this and that—that made it more expensive for me to take the fast track than just do what I’m doing. It wouldn’t pencil out for me to do it.

Now, look, I don’t know if that’s 100% true. I can see you. Yeah, but if that’s not it, yeah, why do you think all those bills didn’t lead to—well, a lot of them have. I mean, we can talk about it. You know, I don’t want to get into really period politics but we could talk about a 500-unit project on Stevenson Street in San Francisco that was never going to get done until the state intervened and compelled the hand of the city to actually move forward.

Again, you got an ideological war that’s going on in progressive cities that don’t believe in the supply-demand framework; they don’t believe in this notion of abundance. Fundamentally, they have a degrowth mindset, which you talk a lot about or at least write about in the book. You’re struggling with that ideological spectrum.

But San Francisco, I mean, it’s just infamously just loves its neighborhoods, doesn’t want to see them upzoned, wants to see the density, so they’re constantly pushing back against this. We are as a state finally intervening in ways the state has never intervened in the past.

So I think it’s a little too early to sort of assert that the sort of fatalist or have a fatalistic notion of what hasn’t yet occurred when, in fact, we’re starting now to flex our muscles, and the application of these laws are now starting to fully go into effect. Ultimately, we want to see them materialize and manifest, but I think that’s the friction.

Let me just stipulate again: we’re not arguing here; you’re 100% right. I’m just asking; I’m curious. No, but also you’re not. You know, you talk about as a bagel liberalism. What’s your everything bagel liberalism? You’ll stack everything together. You even were a little critical of the Biden Administration and the chips and science acts and the infrastructure bill. Did the same thing. Look, you go to the rural broadband effort, right.

In 2021, they passed a bipartisan infrastructure bill. Say it’s the biggest infrastructure bill in decades, which is not wrong. Yeah, $1.2 trillion. But 500 out of 50 of new. Yeah, and one of the big headline pieces of it is $42 billion for rural broadband. Yep, 2021! That passes. By the end of 2024, functionally nobody is hooked up to rural broadband.

Me and Derek looked into it, and there is a 14-stage process. I’m sure California was going through it—a 14-stage process of creating a map, and then the map can be challenged, and there’s these letters of intent and so on and so forth. By the end of their administration, of the 56 states and jurisdictions that were trying to apply for the money, three had made it through.

Putting aside the fact that that meant all these people didn’t get broadband, it also meant that they couldn’t run on that. Right? So much of the political theory of the Biden Administration was that if you can show liberal democracy can deliver, right, you will pull people out of wanting these strongmen who say they’re going to burn the whole thing down and give you something out of the ashes.

If you can’t really—if things don’t move fast enough, if they don’t get to the people fast enough, it’s much harder for liberal democracy to make the case that it delivers. I want it to deliver; I like these policies. But the speed thing is a real problem.

I’ll say one more thing because I was talking—I did an event the other night with John Favreau, and we were talking about high-speed rail. But I was saying that the stimulus bill under Obama had three big headline projects for reinvestment. It had high-speed rail, it had smart grid, and it had a nationwide system of interoperable health records. I remember those days.

Yeah, 0 for 3. At some point, we’ve got to be upset about this. You know, so you have five core chapters in this book. You talk about growth; you talk about governance; you talk about deploying inventing. You know a lot of language very familiar here in the state of California.

Again, Abundance is fundamentally foundationally who we are, at least believe we are in the state of California. In that respect, I agree. This sort of perception performance is one thing, and I would argue a little bit more favorably to Biden. I mean 775,000 manufacturing jobs—just the job growth generally. I’m not just talking about job recovery from the pandemic but the six-plus million jobs that you have to stack on that after we were back to full recovery.

The fact that the Chips and Science Act is producing real results as it relates to private sector investment and the fact that we finally have an industrial policy that is worker-centered. I think it’s that worker-centricity that you can argue against because that was—and you call it out here when you talk to Gina about issues related to child care and other aspirational frameworks as it relates to small businesses and reaching diversity goals and the like.

But there is the fundamental disconnect, and you’re absolutely right as it relates to these large-scale audacious projects. I will give you your due on high-speed rail. I have been as critical or more than you have about this. In fact, I appreciate you referencing my pivot after I took this job as Governor, where we called out the status quo, and now we’re trying to level set and get this back on track.

But at least there’s a vision. At least Obama had a vision: he wanted to be big in big things; he wanted to do big things. At least progressive states still have a vision, and they have a design. I mean, I think that’s part of an abundance frame.

While it’s difficult to manifest that vision, I don’t think it’s an indictment—necessarily, it’s an indictment in terms of our ability to deliver on time and under budget. But the vision, I think, is foundational and important, and I give credit to the Obama Administration in that respect for all three, even if they were 0 for 3. Look, I’m all for vision. My upset—the point of this book is that I want the things to happen.

I mean, we could talk about high-speed rail. We must talk about high-speed rail. But before we get there for a second, I mean, I do get the question around this book because it is very critical of how liberals have governed. Well then why aren’t you just a Republican, right? If Texas is so good at housing? The thing that I keep telling people is you’ve really confused means and ends here.

Another thing that keeps coming up is like, do you want deregulation? Isn’t that a Republican thing? Well, not if I’m deregulating the government itself, so it can deliver on the things you want. What’s supposed to matter in politics is not the means; it’s the ends. Right?

What I sort of want, what I’m trying to push here is for liberals to get a little bit more means-agnostic and more ends-obsessed. There you go. So the thing that I—the place where I probably differ a little bit in what you just said a second ago is that I don’t want to give anybody credit for a vision that didn’t happen.

High-speed rail, as you have a great quote to me in this. I use it in the book. High-speed rail has undermined the public’s faith in what can get done. It undermines the next high-speed rail. The thing that I want to see happen is a kind of reckoning inside the governing—I would call it a culture. It’s not just laws; it’s not just regulations, although it is all things.

But it is a culture of what happens when the Democrats who are setting this stuff up get in the room together, and people start raising their hands and saying, “What about this?” and “What about that?” and “How about the other thing?” Instead of here and no, everybody gets kind of a little bit, and it’s not the only thing going on. There is something wrong in a culture that so often fails to deliver what it promises.

I mean, not just high-speed rail—the Big Dig, the Second Avenue subway, right? These, you know, parts of them got done in the Second Avenue piece or The Big Dig eventually got done, but too much, too expensive. You can’t do enough if you’re doing that, and it’s not inevitable. Europe builds trains better than we do; they just do, and they have governments.

I checked, and they have unions more than we do, right? So it’s not less lawyers. Then you point that out in the book. Well, that’s an issue. I’d be very curious to hear—so this is a thing I think people don’t know that I would love to hear your thoughts on. We do government differently in this country than they do in Europe. There’s a qualitative difference between it, which is they run government through bureaucracies, and we restrain government through courts.

Yeah, which at the moment with Trump seems good in a bunch of ways, and there are ways in which it’s good, and there are also ways in which it makes it hellacious to deliver.

I would say that’s the central theory of at least the argument that I would make against high-speed rail. I mean, look, this thing started, and you make the point. It started; there was sort of talk about the vision. The original vision was not Obama. It wasn’t even necessarily Jerry Brown. But you point to 1982, when Brown at least says, former Governor Jerry Brown, we should look at this high-speed rail thing.

Then eventually, Arnold Schwarzenegger—a Republican—puts a bond on the ballot in 2008, and the voters approve it. You’re right; there was a lot of promotion and promise: $33.6 billion, two hours and 20 minutes downtown by 2020, and the whole thing—now I get here, decade later, decade-plus later, and reconcile the fact that we have to work our way out of this.

There’s a new reality; there’s a scarcity of resources; there’s an abundance of delay; there’s an abundance of cost overruns. We have to level set that we need to build something, or we’re left with literally nothing. We’re left with pieces that go nowhere, that have no utility, and actually have a long-term cost.

But let’s do it by telling people what it is and what it’s not. This focus on the Central Valley, which, as you stipulate, recognize was stipulated as a requirement under the Obama Grant—the $3 billion—in one of the fastest growing parts of the state, an important part of the state, a state that has a deep desire to connect to the rest of the state in a state of mind that’s not just about a transportation project but about upzoning, about economic development—much of that has occurred in and around these new stations that have been built.

Fifty large scale projects the size of three Golden Gate bridges. The entire environmental clearance is now 100% done. LA to San Francisco—there were 2,000 took.

2012 to—I can’t—I can’t make up for that. I can only deal with the compact part. It’s crazy. It’s crazy. But the point is we’re at the point where we just announced we’re doing railhead. We’re finally laying the tracks. I mean we could—we can lament about it; we absolutely learned from it, and we’ve stress-tested a lot of it.

You talk about the consulting class versus a bureaucratic class. You’re absolutely right, and we started to shift that just a few years ago. But the litigation on the 2,270 parcels that we had to purchase was next level, and that delay, I think, is the core of this. There’s plenty of other bureaucratic malaise and other issues we can identify. But back to this notion—I think you’re right.

This idea of—I think little liberal litigation—I don’t know what phrase you use in the book, but we were mindful of that and critical of that, and you mark that as a big part of the sort of 1970s construct in America. Tell us a little bit more about that thinking.

We can put a pin in high-speed rail. There are two major liberal movements that happened in the 20th century.

Yeah, the one we think about a lot is New Deal liberalism. That’s the one where we build aggressively. It’s a growth-oriented liberalism; it’s a liberalism of material goods, and it’s the liberalism that defines the left-right divide in our national narrative. Right? Liberals believe in big, strong government; conservatives believe in small, limited government.

Right? In the ’60s, ’70s, and ’80s, you have real problems that have emerged from this New Deal order. We have built heedlessly, recklessly, intensely. We are cutting highways all across the country—many of them, but not all of them, through marginalized communities. But, man, the rich communities don’t like it when a highway goes through either, right? And they have a lot of the power that leads to this.

There is a genuine despoiling of the environment. My colleague Derek likes to talk about the moment in Los Angeles. I think it’s. In the 40s or 50s, where people wake up and think there’s been a chemical attack from Japan, but it turned out that the city had launched its own chemical attack on itself. By the way, people forget in California, you lazy pundit, could suggest the modern environmental movement started in 1967 in reaction to that and the business community saying enough. Governor Ronald Reagan established the California Air Resources Board, of which rights and responsibility were afforded under the 1970 Clean Air Act, which you also highlight in the book. Richard Nixon afforded California a waiver so that we can address the unique air quality concerns that you identify in the book’s 50s. Then, of course, everybody forgets it’s Reagan who signs the California Environmental Quality Act into this SQRA issue that you and others, including myself, hate at times. It’s worth taking, I think, a minute on SQRA.

So, Reagan signs a bill into law from Jake Ender’s research. It doesn’t even merit a full article in the LA Times. That’s interesting; nobody quite knows what they’ve done because initially SQRA just says, “Look, when the government does stuff, it’s got to produce a report on what the likely consequences are.” No big deal. Then there is a proposed development in Mammoth, which is the great ski and snowboard town, which I’ve been to many, many times. Oh, you Southern Californians, yeah, Mammoth. But there’s a mixed development that’s proposed there, sort of condos, some shopping at the bottom of them, and a bunch of rich moms. I don’t know what they call themselves, file a lawsuit, and they have a novel argument, which is that this development can’t go forward because it violates SQRA. This gets rejected in the courts because of what year roughly this would be; I’d want to double-check this, but early 70s. I could be wrong on that.

So, what happens is that the courts reject this a bunch of times because SQRA was about public development. Then the Supreme Court rules that public development is anything that requires a permit by the state of California. There’s a Sierra Club lobbyist who we quote in the book, who says that after that, SQRA applies to anything where you are rubbing two sticks together in the state. Now, having been, as Binder puts it in his dissertation on this stuff, informed by the courts of what the law they passed actually does, the legislature puts a pause on it because now everything’s in huge legal limbo.

But the key thing here is that SQRA, and I’m sure you know all this much better than I do, but its power is amplified a lot by courts that interpreted it in a way that was very different than anybody initially interpreted it. This is part of a period in liberalism where you have this rise of an environmental movement that has legal dimensions, political dimensions, statutory dimensions, and cultural dimensions. It’s Rachel Carson, it’s Ralph Nader. The key thing about this period of liberalism, the new left period of liberalism, is that it is fundamentally skeptical of government action. The New Deal is this alliance between the government, the unions, and the corporations to put people to work to industrialize America and make it into this kind of advanced, glob-spanning superpower.

The new left comes in and says we are destroying this place; we are turning this country conformist. The term “ticky-tacky” comes from a song about Daly City and how gross all those homes are. There’s a whole thing about the aesthetic destruction of it. I have great quotes from Lyndon Johnson’s speeches about how we used to worry about the Ugly American, now we have to worry about the ugly America. There’s a whole change that begins to happen in the way that this moment in liberalism tries to square the circle because the new left is part of this era that’s very individualistic.

Right? We think about this for Reagan and individuals, but it’s happening on the left too, and it wants a highly participatory democracy. The way it tries to square it is to create a million different ways that individuals or individuals represented by nonprofit groups can sue the government to stop it or force it to think about things that it wasn’t thinking about before. Sorry, got a mosquito there. It creates ways to sue the government and force it to think about things that it wasn’t thinking about or hadn’t earlier.

With that in mind, I get the speed and the scale, but I also want to make a case that this is a state where we’re gaining population again, running budget surpluses. We dominate in every innovative category. You talk about the future of abundance in the context of invention and deployment; that’s California. Eighteen percent of the world’s R&D is in this state. No other state comes close; only two countries have more R&D than us, and that’s Germany and China. This is a state with 41% more manufacturing output than the state that gets a lot of credit, which is Texas. By the way, Texas takes $71.1 billion from federal funding, while we give $83.1 billion. We have more scientists, engineers, more Nobel laureates, more venture capital. Half of the unicorn companies in the country are in California.

There’s a lot going right. They just did a survey of the top 10 happiest cities; Houston made that list, but San Jose and Irvine were on it too. Fremont was interestingly number one. San Diego, you know, we dominate in AI. The world again, we’re inventing the future here. By the way, in homelessness, the numbers have gone through the roof across the rest of the country but stabilized here in California. The housing crisis isn’t unique to blue states; any larger, longer, lower taxes in this state than in many, many other states. People talk about the high taxes in California; that’s just BS. Sixteen states tax their poorest residents more than we tax our top 1%. Forty percent of our residents pay lower taxes than in Florida and Texas, and eighty percent of our residents pay slightly above-average tax.

So this notion of even being a high-tax state is BS. This notion that everyone’s leaving is complete BS. We dominate in so many of these categories. I think our values are important, but we’re not building enough damn housing, and that’s led to this homeless crisis, not exclusively, but it’s contributed. Yes, we had a vision decades ago; the taxpayers advanced it on high-speed rail, and we watched China clean our clock. You highlight that in miles and numerics that are depressing. I don’t even want you to repeat them; I could, but I’m not going to. But we’re going to get the damn thing done.

They complained about the Erie Canal, they complained about the Panama Canal. They complained about the Transcontinental Railroad right before it finally started to see real progress. I feel like we’re at that tipping point with this damn high-speed rail. But nonetheless, about high-speed rail for a second, you can’t help yourself.

First, I will say that I love California. I have redwoods tattooed on my shoulder, no joke, and leaving the state to go live in New York City was the right thing for a bunch of reasons, but it was a difficult personal choice for me because this is my soil. Every time you live through a tough time in San Francisco, when you’re writing, you know, I would still say that was a tough time. I admit it was tough, but that city’s coming around. It’s turning around in ways that are objectively positive.

What is it? Criticism is an act of love? Yes, God bless you. There’s a lot of love in this book, but then this is, I think, always the great paradox of California. California is the frontier of the future; it always has been. Technologically, as you said, but also culturally. You go to Northern California; we’re inventing everybody’s technology. You go to Southern California; we’re giving the whole world its culture. It’s a wild place, and to me, the reason the housing thing matters here, the reason I structured the housing chapter the way that I do with Derek, is that you need to make it possible for people to be and prosper from that prosperity. Right, it is good for people to be near. The AI boom, I have friends. They fought fires in the city of San Francisco and couldn’t afford to live there. The point of California’s riches is that they should be shared. Not shared necessarily just through taxation and redistribution, but through the ability of people to go live in these super high productivity places, where as happened with a young Steve Jobs, you sort of fall into this world where maybe if you have a genius for something, you have the connections to make it matter.

I have this sort of line in the book that in making these cities so expensive, we did the real gating. We really closed the frontier because the true frontier isn’t land; it’s ideas. You frame it with Horus, “Go west, man, go west,” and then you create that new construct. So, I want to pull that. It’s actually everything you say about California, and you know this. I’m not telling, but I’m saying it for the audience. That makes it so important that the working-class families can be here and are not driven out.

By the way, just back to the housing crisis in this state explains more things in more ways on more days. That affordability issue is at the core of 90% of California’s real and structural problems. This is foundational. Again, you could not be more right. It is at the core of the issues that define the challenges not just to this state but increasingly all over the United States. We talk about the future happening here first, where America is coming to traction. That’s all those wonderful things that you and I were just discussing, but obviously all of these perilous issues that you have been discussing and the reason you wrote this book.

So, high-speed rail. When I went out and did the reporting on that, I went up and down the track with the people building it, the people from the Rail Authority. They told me a couple of things that have stuck in my head, that I don’t try to resolve in the book, but I’d be curious for your thoughts. So, one was the Merced-Bakersfield leg, which is the leg that is currently being tried. I think they said they had something like line of sight; either had spent or had line of sight on something like it was in the range of 11 to 15 billion. We said 13.4 billion, of which 10.8 from the state and 2.6 from the feds, and that the estimate on finishing we said to Bakersfield was 36 billion.

There are currently our estimates, plus or minus. This is a moving target about 6.5 billion that we based upon what we have, the current commitments. We had an additional 3 billion from the federal government, obviously, the Trump Administration tried to vandalize that as they did the last time. Then cap and trade proceeds that will continue if we extend cap and trade. Can you bond against that? There are a lot of variations. So, you’re saying you think you have line of sight on the money with a delta of 6.5 billion, roughly.

What a bunch of the people working on said is, look, in the end for this to really work, it needs to be LA to San Francisco, and that would cost 10 billion. Well, we’re looking at, and I don’t, you know, look am we extended high-speed rail, the idea is to get it in these density and population corridors, which is the point you make in the critique, and get to Fresno, for example, to Gilroy where Kran is. We can then connect to San Jose and into San Francisco. You have the existing infrastructure in place. That’s about an hour.

You get into Palmdale, now you’re connecting with the new Brightline that’s going all the way to Vegas and one of the fastest growing parts of the state in Palmdale where middle-class families can still afford a home. Those are component parts and that’s where I think that 36 billion dollar number came from. Those three component parts roughly add up to that. Now, the Tah Hatp Mountains, getting them over all of those larger issues, those are issues that obviously are component parts of this larger endeavor.

But I think the big question people have about it, and you hear people asking this all the time, is that I just inherited this. It’s not your fault; it’s not my fault. I’m not blaming the government. I think the question is, if there is not a line of sight on that 36 to 110 billion, right, that doesn’t exist, and that’s a very hard thing. You try to get revenue generation once you start getting to the large population corridors.

If you can connect Silicon Valley to Central Valley, which is the foundational argument, and you can start sharing, we’re looking at train sets that have interoperability not just with Brightline but high desert corridors. You have two private sector partners, and we’re actually procuring train sets very, very shortly. As I say, we did the railhead; we’re starting to lay track. This thing’s starting to get very, very real. Some of the projects you did see are projects that will have profound impacts economically in terms of the up-zoning, particularly in the Fresno Corridor.

Fresno is a very important part of the big worry I heard from transportation types is that the ridership in those quarters, as fast-growing as they may be, is not enough to throw off money. It’s not even enough to handle that operating budget very likely, and it’s definitely not going to throw off money that’s going to complete a $10 million train. We’re finishing something that in the end is going to be a monument to not being able to build the thing we wanted.

Yeah, we’re not going to be able to build a new airport. You know, I mean at the end of the day, we’ve got these constraints that are well established already, these pre-existing constraints. There’s not a high-speed rail system that’s not enjoying some level of success. Most, at least, are wildly popular. It’s an experience no one’s had in the United States of America. At least we’re out there daring, and we’re trying to advance what can be made that would make the next piece just easier.

I was always interested that it wasn’t exempted from SEQUID in the first place. It’s a pro-environmental project. Are there things like that that could be done? I mean, I wish you wrote this damn book in 2007. Where the hell were you? It’s a good question. Seriously, by the way, where were you in 2017? I was in Washington. Man, were you in Washington? I was in Washington. No, I mean, but you’re right.

Look, I don’t just it’s the art of the possible. I know that back to that. It’s a practitioner framework. I love to intellectualize all these things. What could have been? But there are certain foundational facts and interestingly, you made the point in the book that I have to over and over make to people. Why did we start in the Central Valley? It was a requirement, a federal requirement for federal dollars. Now, it’s not the worst idea. I mean, the Intercontinental rail, just to say it, was a requirement because the federal program wasn’t just for high-speed rail. It was to start where you had air pollution for marginalized communities.

This all sounds great, and you can come up with a reason to start in the Central Valley, but it’s the part of the state that will generate the least political capital to keep going because it has the least dense ridership, but it’s also a part of the state that does have, I mean, you know, you talk about ignorance, poverty, and disease. You talk about the issues of air quality and life expectancy. You talk about the economic opportunities. What addresses air quality is the whole track, well ultimately fully electrified track.

This is just to me an example; this one wasn’t California’s fault. This was the Obama Administration, but it’s an example of they should have given. I want to say what I think should have happened here. They should have given you, yeah, whatever, three some billion dollars. Right? That’s what that grant was and just said use it for high-speed rail. It shouldn’t have been a stacked series of ideas. It doesn’t all need to be a triple-axle. High-speed rail is hard enough, as you know better than I do.

Representative democracy is a tough thing. Dictatorships are a little easier. Not that it wasn’t representative democracy; nobody knew that. A lot of folks in the Central Valley, a lot of the elected officials, a lot of the blue dog Democrats, a lot of the Obama Administration, when they created those programs, right, that’s a lot happening. I really think this is an important point to me. But there were a lot of Democratic representatives that stipulated their support for that bill and those dollars, that it go to the central valley. I don’t want to take that away, but I do want to say because this comes up a lot when I’m talking about this book, it’s like, oh, do you hate democracy?

People have no idea what is happening in these regulatory processes. 100%, like I cover this professionally, and when I dig into what is happening after these bills passed, I’m like, oh my God, really? That is not democracy. We have created things that were supposed to allow for participation, and they are often very captured. Maybe they’re captured by interests, you like, that’s fine, but that is not the thing that, you know, the massive Californians who voted for Prop 1A knew they were getting and even those of us covering the stimulus were not looking at the precise requirements in the notice of funding opportunity and the grant program.

So, there is this thing, I think where a lot of this highly technocratic governance, which is very much a negotiation between different interests, is in this “King’s Cup” way being justified as democracy. That’s not what democracy looks like. I’ll use that chant here. Right? Democracy is not, but nobody knows about. Look, I mean, you’re very adjacent to the arguments that Elon Musk is making with Doge. This clay-layer bureaucracy, this is not representative. Who the hell are these people to make these rules? Who are these people making these decisions?

The opacity of these decisions, they’re not made in sunshine daylight. And a lot of these three lever class Nicholas Bagley, the more liberal law professor making these rules, but I’ll take the hit. No, it’s not even a hit, but I mean, I think it goes to the sentiment. It goes to the thematics of your book. It goes to what you’re trying to stress test and what you’re trying to stress upon us as Democrats, that we need to be more accountable.

But let me make this point. I say this all the time to my legislative friends. Right? When I sign a bill, I said this happens so often. It’s not indictment of any individual legislator; it’s sort of institutionalized. They think the process is done. The process has just begun. It’s just the beginning. Program passing is not problem-solving, and then that implementation application goes through exactly what you’re saying.

What you mentioned, no foes in the book, we have no fuzz, which you notice of funny availability, not opportunity. And then you stack all those things up with all these rules and requirements along the lines you suggest that was never part of anyone’s understanding or vision is what you just said. I think there’s absolute legitimacy.

I have this joke that everybody knows a Schoolhouse Rock song of like how a bill becomes a law, but what they don’t know is how a law becomes or does not become like a reality. The things that happen after actually are much more complicated.

But I want to say one thing about Elon Musk and Doge and this point, I was just, I just referenced Nick Bagley, who is a great administrative law professor at Michigan. He was Gretchen Whitmer’s gubernatorial colleague’s Chief Counsel. He wrote this piece; it’s very influential these days and very influential for me, called the procedural fetish. One of the things he says in that, that I think is really wise, is that the Democratic party is very legalistic.

It’s got a lot of lawyers in it. Between Tim Walz, who was the first person on a Democratic ticket since Monell to not go to law school. Right? We’re very, very legalistic. Lawyers and constitutional lawyers and administrative procedure lawyers, they grapple a lot with a very hard question, which is what makes government action legitimate? The answer they often come to is procedure, right? It’s following the procedure set out in the laws and the rules and the court orders, etc.

It’s not that there’s nothing to that, but the point Bagley makes, which I think is the right counter or the way to think about the point Elon Musk is making, is that to most people, what makes government legitimate in a democracy is that they are getting what they think they voted for when they vote for you. You say you’re going to do X, Y, and Z. They got X, Y, and Z. If they don’t feel like they got that right, they vote you out. They see you as illegitimate, a failure.

The problem with Musk and Doge, in addition to its lawless nature, is that its ends are terrible, and the people did not vote for, you know, not to be able to reach anybody at the Social Security Administration or the IRS ever again on the phone. Right? That wasn’t part of the pitch. But I think it’s really important that, like, liberals have a little bit more of the sense. Not that procedure is meaningless, because it isn’t. You need procedure, but what really connects government to people is the outcome, a lived experience of government acting in their life.

If you are letting endless levels of not just process but process you have created, I mean when we’re talking about no foes and no Fs, that is the work of men and women. We are writing that down on the computer. We lost everyone; we opened up with SE. I know this is going to be a very high-audience podcast, but when you do that, I think that actually is a cultural change.

The thing I respect about Elon Musk—there’s a lot these days I don’t like about the guy—but there is a relentlessness to the way he pursues his objectives. A real sense that in between here and the end, he is seeking might be a lot of pain, might be a lot of disappointment, might be a lot of angry people. But if this is worth it, which on Tesla and SpaceX it was, and on destroying the federal government, in my view, it isn’t, then this is worth it.

I think that has not been the culture of liberal governance. The culture of liberal governance has actually been to try to generate political support by giving things to interest groups in the middle of the process. Right? You pass the bill, then there’s a regulatory thing nobody’s really paying attention to and you do a bunch of payoffs there. Then the thing doesn’t work as well or it’s slower or it’s more expensive, and then people think you don’t do a great job.

That is actually undermining the legitimacy of government. Couldn’t agree more. By the way, sort of going back to that book, “Citizen,” literally talks about this in the context of it’s not inputs; it’s outcomes. This pyramid is inverting more choice, more voice. I talk about government being a vending machine. You put in your taxes, you get police, fire, health care, education. If you don’t like what you get, you kick the machine; you shake the machine, and shifting that paradigm and not just government efficiency, but how government works, moving away from you vote, I decide, more of a participatory framework in between elections.

We’re finally starting to see the fruits of that vision. Near the end of my term in the context of these new models we’ve created, engaged California, our new procurement platforms, the work that Jen Paa helped seed, and the reforms we’re doing as it relates to large-scale reforms.

This notion of being accountable, I mean, society becomes how we behave. We are our behaviors. All this cheer point happened on our watch. We own it, Democrats. We own it. You can’t point fingers; you’ve got to look in the mirror. You’ve got to take responsibility.

I think foundationally that’s the center of this book, and I think it’s very helpful, and it’s, you know, it’s humbling as well, but it’s critically important this time. Not only that we focus on situational politics but how we’re governing and how we’re delivering real results because, I mean, if I have another press conference about how much money we’re spending on homelessness, they’re going to take my head off. They want to see encampments off the damn street; that’s what they’re measuring by. They want more housing so that the cost of that housing goes down because there’s more supply.

They don’t give a damn about the process. They don’t know what a NOAA is or a NOU. They don’t care about any of that stuff. You’re 100% right; it does matter. I think there’s a balance that we have to find. We’re trying to find that balance; we’re iterating. This notion of relentlessness is very resonant, what you just said.

To be seen doing it, it’s what you said about Trump a minute ago. We’ve got to be seen not defending the status quo, defending the high-speed rail. This works really well for me, but defending a heart brief, the dynamic expectations that taxpayers rightly are placed on us.

But let me just end with that because you end this book making that case from an abundance frame back to this nomenclature around abundance. You talk about DARPA, you talk about CRISPR. You talk about ARPANET going back to 1969, the origin of the internet. You talk about the NIH, the NSF. You talk about all of these things that few people that are listening even know but that are important, and it relates to Innovation.

It’s not an act that occurs; it’s a process, contradicting a little bit of what we just said, that unfolds over time. Tell me a little bit more. Well, everything’s a process, so we don’t want to say all processes are bad, just like all regulations are not good or bad.

This is the other piece of the book that we haven’t talked much about, but abundance is not just like me banging my fist on the table about how high-speed rail didn’t get finished. It’s also motivated in part by a belief that Democrats have developed a dysfunctional relationship with technology and, in a way, the future.

I sort of date this back in my own reading of it to around 2016 when I think the harms of social media became really salient to people. I think it got overblamed for the 2016 election. I’ve never been a believer that misinformation was the driver there, but it is rotting our brain, and it’s not making us better people. It’s upending our kids, right? It’s represented by a small crew of tech billionaires who, you know, in the years since, have turned, you know, more and more both right and weird. I think the left got to become very skeptical of it.

One of the things that we are trying to say is that a huge amount of social progress, a huge amount of what makes it possible to have life better than the one we live now, is not just new social insurance programs, though those are very important and I would like to see some of them, or redistribution. It’s technology, and it is also being thoughtful about the government’s ability to organize resources and rules and manpower to pull technology from the future into the present.

The canonical example here is the Manhattan Project. But you can think of the internet, which as we talked about, comes from ARPANET. You can think about Operation Warp Speed like the one truly great success of Donald Trump’s first term, which is now disowned very much by him and, to some degree, by the Democrats too; right? Some credit, too, a little bit we should.

There are a lot of problems. The only reason we have any shot at preventing a world of three or four degrees of warming Celsius is because we have created miracles through government policy in solar, wind, battery, which would not exist had it not been for the regulatory environment of California subsidies. One of the great shames of what Elon Musk has become is that guy is a walking advertisement for the power of public-private partnerships. He is just like every major company he has done is built on government subsidies, government loan guarantees, government demand.

This guy is just pulling the ladder up after him; it drives me crazy. Well said. But also, it’s a principle that you lay out as it relates to DARPA, which gave us GPS, gave us the self-driving car he’s now promoting that gave us so much of this Innovation.

Yeah, and certainly that seeded it. Look, I’m a big believer in universal healthcare. A lot of my career has been, you know, about trying to expand health insurance, but where health insurance is the only state that does that regardless of ability to pay in pre-existing conditions and immigration.

But there’s a reality to this that for the people who have health insurance, which is most people, what really matters is when you get sick, is there a cure? My wife is kept alive by shots of insulin. She just is, right? At another age, she wouldn’t be there.

There is so much that we do not yet know how to cure, right? There is so much, I mean, what Medicare or Medicaid can offer, or private health insurance, because they don’t yet cover it for most people with GPI’s is just more valuable than what it could offer before GPIs. These are going to be transformational medications for people. They already are, and so getting really serious about what we want the government to do technologically and having a vision of the future that is an abundant one.

A vision of the future that is not just about how cheap consumer goods are, that’s fine, but is about the things we need to build our better life—right? Cheap energy, cheap healthcare, abundant housing, education.

There are a lot of things we only touch on in the book that are really important here. I think that one of the shames of politics in the last couple of years is it got to be a really bitter argument over our past. This notion of American reverses pre-1960s. The right was gripped by a deep nostalgia for an America I think that never really was, and the left was really focused.

Really focused on the injustices of our history, which I think are very real, so I’m not trying to undermine that as a Thing worth confronting. But I think visions of the future for different reasons on both sides became really degraded.

One thing that did change with Trump between his first term and his second is Musk, Mark Andreessen, in a way, RFK Jr. They changed his meaning. Trump was the defender of the past America in 2016 “Make America Great Again,” all these futurist influencers and rocket makers and so on. They sort of made him into something that represented a kind of future—I think it’s quite dark one, but there is around him JD Van. Right? It changed what he meant.

I think to compete with that, and given that they’re going to destroy the present, I don’t think it’s going to end up being a very attractive vision to people. To compete with that, I think Democrats need to figure out how to represent a future again. I think Obama represented the future. I think Bill Clinton represented the future.

Both that ability to grab reform, which is part of what abundance is about—the reform of government—and that ability to grab The High Ground of the future, which is the other part of what it’s about, this ability to integrate a theory of technology and an optimism about it and the ability to sort of wrap it in policy.

Those things are really important. We haven’t talked about AI. There’s a lot coming here that’s going to be very important and the party, particularly in that medical frame, and the party and the thinkers in it are going to have to be alert to this side of it too because it is a mistake to think of politics as a separate sphere from technology.

We could do more modular housing—it would change what is possible in housing policy. These things are vital; they’re intertwined. I would like to see a liberalism that isn’t just angry about a bunch of things government has failed to do, as I am, but is also optimistic about what is possible.

That’s where that vision between red and blue states really diverges. I mean, Trump and them, they’re trying to destroy wind and solar. They don’t want this vision; they don’t want more trade; they don’t want more people. It’s all scarcity, and that leaves a pretty big opening for the Democratic party to capture both reform and abundance from them.

I love that, and it’s a great way to end because it’s a framework of optimism, of course you know, and I appreciate just thinking about Clinton. Don’t stop thinking about tomorrow. I mean, obviously, there was language around that, and you know, talk about your tomorrows, not his yesterdays. Obviously, the journey that we were on in the 1960s with the vision that was JFK, but I will say about our state, and it’s a point of pride and principle for me as Governor to say it, or as the future ex-Governor, as the fifth-generation Californian, future happens here first.

I talked about this being America’s coming to traction, but that’s the game that separates, I think, our game from the game played everywhere else. It’s the reason we went from the seventh-largest economy to the sixth-largest economy in the world, and we dominate in so many spheres even today. But you’re absolutely right; we now have to dominate on that reform agenda, and we have to deal with the original sin, and that’s housing.

Again, being accountable to these larger visions as well and delivering on a level set with folks. It’s in that spirit of an abundant mindset that, Ezra, I’m glad you took the time to be here. I’m really, moreover, pleased you took the time to write this book, which is essential reading for everybody. Listening. Thanks for being with us. Thank you so much for having me. Thank you.

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This is an experimental rewrite Ezra Klein: Well, coming up next, I have Ezra Klein here in the studio talking about his new book, which he co-authored with Derek Thompson, called Abundance. In this book, Ezra takes a critical look at Democratic governance across the United States, particularly in my home state of California.

Gavin Newsom: This is Gavin Newsom, and it’s great to have you here in the studio, Ezra. Thanks for having me here for this unusual moment. You’ve been all over the place promoting your new book, Abundance. Let’s jump right into that, but first, I want to set the stage a bit regarding our relationship. You may not even remember this, but I was a new mayor in San Francisco, and Bill Maher asked me to appear on his show. You were one of the panelists.

Ezra Klein: I remember that! It was quite the sparring match with Bill.

Gavin Newsom: After the show, Maher approached me and said, “Who the hell was that?” I replied, “I know who that was,” referring to you. Both of us were taken aback— I was relatively new, Bill’s a seasoned pro, and you were the lieutenant governor back then.

Ezra Klein: I’m pretty sure I was lieutenant governor at that time, too.

Gavin Newsom: Anyway, I’ve been on the show numerous times, but you had this incredible ability to analyze issues and express your viewpoint. It doesn’t surprise me at all that much of what we discussed back then is similar to what you’re focusing on now, especially reflecting back to your book, Republic 2.0.

Ezra Klein: Actually, it was Citizenville.

Gavin Newsom: Right! Citizenville. The concept was about reinventing government for the digital age.

Ezra Klein: We should tie that into our conversation. I think many have forgotten that period of your political career.

Gavin Newsom: I believe it reflects so much of my own struggles as a former mayor. Your book chronicles San Francisco and California extensively, but fundamentally, it’s about the future, framed in terms of abundance. It also critiques liberalism in many ways, highlighting the processes, laws, and rules that have created a significant cost-of-living crisis.

Ezra Klein: Exactly. What inspired Abundance was my journey. I co-authored it with Derek Thompson from The Atlantic. While we both contribute our insights, my background is essential. I grew up in Irvine, moved to D.C. for over a decade, and then returned to the Bay Area in 2018. Upon my return, I noticed that things weren’t going well.

Gavin Newsom: Right. People were unhappy, and many were leaving. As a politician, you can immediately sense if people are frustrated with the political environment.

Ezra Klein: We could see the housing crisis had evolved into something dire—not just high housing prices, but an actual crisis.

Gavin Newsom: Right, and California high-speed rail has always driven me crazy. We’ll get into that later.

Ezra Klein: Indeed! As I thought about clean energy, I realized the ambitious goals you set for California are remarkable. However, to achieve them—especially with the Inflation Reduction Act in play—we need to build faster than ever before, yet the laws don’t allow for that.

Gavin Newsom: Yes, liberalism has strengths in providing subsidies for necessities, but it struggles to foster growth and enable the construction of more essential infrastructure. We often don’t realize how frequently we hinder progress.

Ezra Klein: It feels bracing to ask why, in areas governed by those who share my views, the politics don’t yield the results I desire. Why can’t I convince Texans or Floridians to adopt our California policies?

Gavin Newsom: That’s an essential question, and I want to dive into it because what people seek might differ from the problems you’re highlighting. I do agree with your observations.

Ezra Klein: I recall my first speech as governor, and it could have come straight from your book. I emphasized that if we can fast-track judicial processes for stadiums, we should be able to do the same for issues like homelessness and housing.

Gavin Newsom: I announced an effort to sue up to 47 cities for not meeting zoning requirements under our housing element—definitely not popular as a governor.

Ezra Klein: That reflects the friction you’re experiencing—it resonates with my own frustrations and experiences in California.

Gavin Newsom: Indeed. The different rules at various levels—federal, state, and local—compound the challenges. Localism plays a significant role. You rightly pinpoint San Francisco, but these rules apply even in conservative cities like Huntington Beach.

Ezra Klein: I agree, but let’s consider why it’s easier to build homes in Texas compared to California. You clearly highlight this in your book, noting that Houston had around 70,000 permits while San Francisco had only 7,500.

Gavin Newsom: Right. Houston’s more lenient zoning laws allow for more development, whereas cities like Austin do have zoning restrictions.

Ezra Klein: That localism is crucial for understanding what’s holding us back in California.

Gavin Newsom: Absolutely, and you’re right about the urgency to address why certain desired outcomes aren’t happening. The cost-of-living crisis is worse in blue states, which makes it even more perplexing given that these areas are often more desirable to live in.

Ezra Klein: I agree with that—the supply-demand imbalance is crucial, particularly in California where we aren’t building enough housing. NIMBYism plays a part, where residents want to protect their communities from change.

Gavin Newsom: Exactly! Many homeowners abuse existing regulations to resist density or new infrastructure that could benefit their neighborhoods.

Ezra Klein: When you delivered your State of the State address a few years ago, what housing goal did you set?

Gavin Newsom: We aimed for 2.5 million housing units by 2030 based on a comprehensive study, but we aren’t on track.

Ezra Klein: What are the reasons behind that?

Gavin Newsom: There are multiple factors—economic constraints, high-interest rates, and the inability to get local governments out of the way to allow more construction.

Ezra Klein: It sounds like you’ve taken significant action, but what’s the response at the local level regarding these newly created laws?

Gavin Newsom: We’ve created a housing accountability unit and taken substantial actions to unlock units and reform housing laws in California.

Ezra Klein: The NIMBY culture has deep roots. Some residents cherish their neighborhoods, making changes difficult.

Gavin Newsom: Indeed! I acknowledge that I’m not the most popular figure for pushing these changes, but I recognize the local opposition to density remains a serious hurdle.

Ezra Klein: During the recent election cycle, when Kamala Harris and Barack Obama discussed building three million new homes, it struck me as a significant acknowledgment of a problem. However, looking at the current conditions in California shows we haven’t seen substantial increases in housing starts.

Gavin Newsom: That’s true. Despite the bipartisan push for housing legislation, the outcomes haven’t materialized as needed. You did a thorough investigation into what developers were facing.

Ezra Klein: Exactly. Many developers cited that the new standards exacerbated costs, making it impractical to pursue fast-tracked approvals.

Gavin Newsom: It’s a complex situation. While I believe collaborative efforts are underway, there are still many layers of bureaucracy to navigate.

Ezra Klein: You’ve accurately described the challenges that arise from ideological clashes in progressive cities regarding supply and growth.

Gavin Newsom: We definitely see a need for greater state intervention to spur necessary developments that align with our goals.

Ezra Klein: That dynamic is still unfolding, and while we may not have achieved all our objectives yet, it feels like we are beginning to see changes taking shape.

Gavin Newsom: Exactly. I appreciate your perspective on this. I’m also interested to hear your thoughts on the broader implications of these discussions.

Ezra Klein: Well, the challenge extends to policies like rural broadband as well, where the rollout has been disappointingly slow, despite bipartisan support.

Gavin Newsom: I think we share a common desire for these liberal policies to deliver tangible results quickly; otherwise, they’ll face skepticism from those who may opt for alternative, less democratic solutions.

Ezra Klein: Exactly! Speed truly is a critical factor. Ezra Klein: The Chips and Science Act is producing real results regarding private sector investment, and we finally have an industrial policy that focuses on workers. You can argue against the worker-centric approach—especially when discussing child care and the frameworks that support small businesses and diversity goals.

Gavin Newsom: But there’s definitely a disconnect, especially concerning these large-scale, audacious projects. I’ll give you credit; I’ve been just as critical, if not more so, about high-speed rail. I appreciate your acknowledgment of my pivot since taking on the governor’s position, where we called out the status quo and are now trying to get things back on track.

Ezra Klein: At least there was a vision in the first place. Obama had a vision; he aimed to achieve big things. Progressive states still have that vision and design—part of an abundance frame, if you will.

Gavin Newsom: While it’s difficult to manifest that vision, it’s not an indictment of our intentions—though it does raise questions about our ability to deliver on time and within budget. The vision itself remains foundational and important, and I credit the Obama Administration, despite their 0-for-3 record.

Ezra Klein: I’m all for vision too. The central point of my book is that I want these things to happen. There’s much to discuss about high-speed rail.

Gavin Newsom: Yes, and before we delve into that, I often get asked why I’m not a Republican, especially when Texas seems so successful at housing. The confusion lies in mixing means and ends. Just because I may advocate for deregulation doesn’t mean I’m advocating for traditional Republican ideals—it means allowing the government to deliver what people want.

Ezra Klein: Right. In politics, what should matter are the ends, not just the means. I want liberals to focus more on the results, whatever means they may require.

Gavin Newsom: I have to say, I can’t credit a vision that hasn’t panned out. High-speed rail, as you eloquently put it, has shaken public confidence. It undermines faith in future projects. What we need is a reckoning within our governing culture.

Ezra Klein: Exactly. It’s not just about laws or regulations; it’s a culture that often fails to deliver on its promises.

Gavin Newsom: And it’s not limited to just high-speed rail; look at projects like the Big Dig or the Second Avenue subway. While parts of those projects were completed, they were surrounded by excess costs and delays.

Ezra Klein: It’s clear to see that Europe handles train systems better than we do, and they have similar bureaucracies and unions at play.

Gavin Newsom: Right. We do government differently than Europe. Their systems run through bureaucracies while we often restrain government through courts.

Ezra Klein: True, though the latter can make delivery hellacious at times, especially with the current political climate.

Gavin Newsom: That sums up the crux of my argument against high-speed rail. The conversation about it began long before Obama or even Jerry Brown.

Ezra Klein: Yes, you mention how the idea emerged back in 1982 when Jerry Brown proposed the concept.

Gavin Newsom: That’s right! Then Arnold Schwarzenegger, a Republican, put a bond for it on the ballot in 2008, and voters approved it. There was significant promise: $33.6 billion for a project that would cut transit time to two hours and twenty minutes—with plans to be completed by 2020.

Ezra Klein: But here we are, a decade later, trying to reconcile these numbers.

Gavin Newsom: There’s a new reality now—scarcity of resources, delays, and cost overruns. We need to build something, or we’ll end up with nothing of utility.

Ezra Klein: You make a good point about focusing on the Central Valley, a key requirement stipulated under the Obama Grant. It’s an area that, despite being one of the fastest-growing parts of the state, is in need of connection.

Gavin Newsom: Exactly. The entire environmental clearance is now complete for projects connecting LA to San Francisco. You know, the original timeline was ambitious, but I acknowledge the challenges led to significant delays.

Ezra Klein: It’s fascinating to hear how the consulting and bureaucratic classes differ, as you noted.

Gavin Newsom: We started shifting toward addressing that just a few years ago, as the litigation over the 2,270 parcels we needed to purchase was a significant impediment.

Ezra Klein: That delay speaks volumes about the core issues at hand.

Gavin Newsom: Absolutely. We need to acknowledge California’s housing crisis as not just an isolated issue but a symptom of broader systemic problems.

Ezra Klein: The affordability issue really cuts to the heart of many challenges, not just in California, but across the U.S.

Gavin Newsom: Right. We’re a state gaining population again, running budget surpluses, and dominating in innovation. We have 18% of the world’s R&D, more scientists and engineers than any state except for Texas, and we still dominate in sectors like AI.

Ezra Klein: You make a powerful case! Despite all these achievements, we still struggle with housing, leading to our homelessness crisis.

Gavin Newsom: Yes. We had a vision for high-speed rail, but watching China outperform us has been disheartening.

Ezra Klein: You highlight this in your book and the stark contrasts in successful infrastructure between us and other nations.

Gavin Newsom: We’re reaching a tipping point, but the pushback is significant.

Ezra Klein: Right. When I conducted my reporting on high-speed rail, I found out specifics about the Merced-Bakersfield leg—how much it would cost, and who would be accountable for those costs.

Gavin Newsom: Exactly. We’re estimating a budget of around $36 billion for that leg, considering both state and federal contributions.

Ezra Klein: There’s real concern about whether this kind of large-scale project can be profitable, especially with ridership projections and the looming operating costs.

Gavin Newsom: Yes, finishing this project may result in it becoming a monument to challenges rather than success.

Ezra Klein: We might not have the resources to execute everything we intended.

Gavin Newsom: But we need to dive into these constraints if we’re going to create a transportation system that serves the public effectively.

Ezra Klein: There’s a lot to unpack here, especially as we navigate the complexities of high-speed rail and its implications for the state. Ezra Klein: I’ve always found it interesting that it wasn’t exempted from SEQUID in the first place. It’s supposed to be a pro-environmental project. Are there things like that that could be done? I mean, I wish you had written this book back in 2007. Where were you?

Gavin Newsom: That’s a good question! Seriously, where were you in 2017?

Ezra Klein: I was in Washington.

Gavin Newsom: Oh, you were in Washington? Well, you’re right. Look, it’s not just about the art of the possible. It’s about a practitioner’s framework. I enjoy intellectualizing these ideas and pondering what could have been, but there are certain foundational facts. Interestingly, you pointed out in the book something I have to explain repeatedly: We started in the Central Valley because it was a federal requirement to receive federal dollars.

Ezra Klein: Right, and that’s not the worst idea.

Gavin Newsom: Exactly. The intercontinental rail was mandated to start where there was air pollution impacting marginalized communities. So while this sounds great and provides a reason to begin in the Central Valley, it’s actually the area that generates the least political capital to continue, given its lower ridership density.

Ezra Klein: That’s interesting because you’re highlighting the issues like poverty, ignorance, and health concerns, which also tie into air quality and life expectancy statistics.

Gavin Newsom: Absolutely. The whole track should ultimately be electrified to address air quality. This is, to me, an example of where California wasn’t at fault—this was the Obama Administration’s decision. I believe they should have allocated, I don’t know, three billion dollars right off the bat and just said to use it for high-speed rail without complicating it with a series of stipulations.

Ezra Klein: That makes sense; it shouldn’t all have been a complicated stack of ideas. High-speed rail is hard enough on its own.

Gavin Newsom: Representative democracy is a challenging system. Dictatorships may seem simpler. But many folks, including Central Valley politicians and the Obama Administration, didn’t fully foresee the consequences when those programs were implemented. It’s crucial to recognize that there were many Democratic representatives who required their support for that bill contingent on it benefiting the Central Valley.

Ezra Klein: I don’t want to downplay that. But, as you mentioned, this often leads to confusion among constituents who aren’t aware of what the regulatory processes entail.

Gavin Newsom: Totally. When analyzing these regulatory processes as a professional, I often think, “Wow, really? This isn’t democracy.” We’ve created systems meant for participation that often end up captured by interests. And the Californians who voted for Prop 1A didn’t necessarily understand the precise requirements embedded in the funding notice and grant program.

Ezra Klein: Exactly. I feel like there’s a lot of technocratic governance that’s being misrepresented as democracy.

Gavin Newsom: Right. The opacity of how these decisions are made is concerning. Often, the process is managed by a select group of individuals who impose rules without adequate public engagement. For example, Nicholas Bagley—a liberal law professor—pointed out that many of these governing processes seem far removed from representative ideals.

Ezra Klein: Yes, and that relates to the overall sentiment of your book. We, as Democrats, should hold ourselves more accountable.

Gavin Newsom: Exactly! I often tell my legislative colleagues that signing a bill doesn’t mean the process is finished; it’s only just begun. Passing a program isn’t problem-solving, and the implementation often reflects what you mentioned about the lack of awareness around requirements.

Ezra Klein: Right, and your book points this out, especially regarding the complexities that arise after legislation is passed. The notion of having no funding availability—”no foes”—certainly complicates matters further.

Gavin Newsom: To put it humorously, everyone knows the Schoolhouse Rock song about how a bill becomes a law, but few understand how that law transitions into reality.

Ezra Klein: Exactly.

Gavin Newsom: Speaking of which, there’s a perspective on procedure that’s crucial. Nick Bagley articulated this well; he explained that the Democratic party, often very legalistic, struggles with understanding what makes government action legitimate. While procedures are important, what people ultimately want is to see government delivering the outcomes they were promised when they cast their votes.

Ezra Klein: Right. If people feel they didn’t receive what they were promised, they view the government as illegitimate and will vote them out.

Gavin Newsom: The problem with Musk and Doge is that it’s not only lawless but that its ends are detrimental to the public. People didn’t sign up for situations where they can’t get assistance from government agencies like Social Security or the IRS.

Ezra Klein: It’s important for liberals to realize that while procedures hold value, the real connection between government and the people lies in the outcomes they experience in their lives.

Gavin Newsom: Precisely. If you create endless layers of processes, which we’ve seen firsthand, it’s not only frustrating but undermining.

Ezra Klein: I think that culture shift is paramount. Elon Musk, regardless of what one might think about him, exhibits a relentlessness in pursuing objectives.

Gavin Newsom: Absolutely. There’s a drive in him that, despite the potential for pain or disappointment, seeks to achieve what he believes is worthwhile. That contrasts starkly with how liberal governance tends to operate, where political support is often garnered by appeasing interest groups midway through the process.

Ezra Klein: Yes, which often leads to ineffective or slower results, ultimately eroding public trust in government.

Gavin Newsom: Couldn’t agree more. This connects back to the core message of your book: it’s not just about inputs; it’s about the outcomes we deliver.

Ezra Klein: Exactly, and it’s about embracing a framework that balances efficiency with effective governance.

Gavin Newsom: That’s right. We need to be seen actively working towards solutions, not just defending existing systems or processes.

Ezra Klein: And your book mentions innovative historical examples like DARPA and ARPANET, as well as the importance of fostering positive associations with technology, which seems to be a vital aspect we need to engage with as we think about future governance.

Gavin Newsom: Yes, and it’s about grasping the opportunity for social progress through technology while also ensuring government can effectively organize resources for the future.

Ezra Klein: Exactly, and your references to the Manhattan Project and Operation Warp Speed highlight how government has played a pivotal role in achieving significant technological advancements.

Gavin Newsom: Indeed. Despite my strong belief in universal healthcare, we also need the government to focus on future advancements that can lead to breakthroughs.

Ezra Klein: The emphasis should be on building a future that encompasses abundant housing, healthcare, and energy, not just economic growth.

Gavin Newsom: I think that’s a crucial aspect that gets overlooked. Our political rhetoric has focused too much on past grievances rather than the potential for future progress.

Ezra Klein: Yes, and there’s a need for Democrats to reclaim this vision for a brighter future that resonates with people.

Gavin Newsom: Exactly! We need to integrate technology and optimism into our policies and demonstrate a commitment to reforming governance for the better.

Ezra Klein: It’s vital to maintain this conversation, especially as political dynamics continue to evolve.

Gavin Newsom: Yes, as a fifth-generation Californian, it’s important for me to emphasize that the future often materializes here first. We need to take charge and deal with the foundational issues that still persist, particularly housing. Gavin Newsom: Again, being accountable to these larger visions is important, and we need to deliver on a level that resonates with people. It’s in that spirit of an abundant mindset that I’m really glad, Ezra, that you took the time to be here.

Ezra Klein: I’m pleased to be here as well.

Gavin Newsom: Furthermore, I’m genuinely pleased that you wrote this book, which I believe is essential reading for everyone.

Ezra Klein: Thanks for having me. I appreciate it!

Gavin Newsom: Thank you so much for being with us.