This is an edited transcript of an episode of “The Ezra Klein Show.” You can listen to the conversation by following or subscribing to the show on the NYTimes app, Apple, Spotify, Amazon Music, YouTube, iHeartRadio or wherever you get your podcasts.
That Gavin Newsom, the governor of California, might want to run for president someday has been widely believed for a long time. That he would have a chance if he ran for president — that was less widely believed. A liberal white guy from a state the country considers badly governed just didn’t seem like the profile that either the Democratic Party — or the country — was looking for.
Well, things change. If you look at polls of the likely Democratic field now, Newsom leads in many of them. If you look at the Polymarket betting odds on who will be the 2028 Democratic nominee, Newsom is far ahead of anyone else. Jonathan Martin, a senior political columnist at Politico, wrote a piece titled “Admit It. Gavin Newsom Is the 2028 Front-Runner.”
Look, I know it’s all very early to be talking about 2028. And in this episode, I try not to. But even putting the future aside, Newsom has become, without any doubt, one of the Democratic Party’s leaders at a time when the party is desperately looking for leadership.
And as a Californian, someone who has watched and covered Newsom for a long time, he has surprised me. He is experimenting, trying new things. He has a feel for this moment — not just in politics but also in how attention now works — in a way that very few other Democrats have demonstrated. And he does not seem, in the way so many Democrats seem, afraid: of taking risks and failing — or of making his own side angry.
And it is working for him.
It began right after the election, when Newsom launched a podcast on which he began interviewing people like Charlie Kirk, Steve Bannon, Newt Gingrich and Michael Savage.
That podcast pissed off Democrats. I heard from many of them. But I watched Newsom in those episodes, and I thought: He is listening. And I wondered what he is learning from them.
At the same time, Newsom turned himself into the leader of the resistance. He began trolling Trump on social media, talking about the president in the same terms the president talks about everyone else.
It worked. Suddenly, I was being sent, left and right, Newsom tweets.
And then when Texas began its midcycle redistricting, Newsom did something many found shocking. He pushed through a ballot initiative to pause California’s independent redistricting, a huge point of pride in California — and something he had, by the way, supported. He instead created highly partisan maps to counter Texas’ — an attempt that could have not succeeded, and would have looked terrible had it failed, yet passed overwhelmingly.
But Newsom’s problem as a leader for the Democratic Party is what it has always been. California is, in my view, the greatest state in the nation, the place I love more than anywhere else on Earth. But at a time when the politics of affordability are paramount, California routinely ranks as the least affordable. Newsom has signed many good bills and done many good things, but he has not fixed that.
So I wanted to have Newsom on the show to talk through what he has learned from the right, what he believes must be the future of the Democratic Party and how he answers California’s manifold critics.
Ezra Klein: Governor Gavin Newsom, welcome to the show.
Gavin Newsom: It’s great to be with you.
I can’t believe I was on your podcast before you were on mine.
Well, that’s the way it should be.
[Laughs.]
I needed some numbers, I needed some audience, so thank you for providing that. I’m grateful.
I’m happy to help.
So I’ve been watching interviews with you recently. Everyone starts by asking you about the Democratic Party.
Yes.
I want to ask you about the right. I am always struck by how much of the modern right comes out of California.
It’s interesting, it’s interesting.
You have Breitbart in California. Ben Shapiro and The Daily Wire begin in California. Stephen Miller grew up in California.
That’s right. Santa Monica.
Peter Thiel. Curtis Yarvin is based in California. The Claremont Institute, the intellectual home of Trumpism, is also located there.
Why do you think that California has birthed so much of the new right?
Well, look, it’s the size of 21 state populations combined. So you have to put it in perspective. There’s nothing like it in scale, size and scope. You have more Republicans in California than most states have population, so you have to put all of that in perspective.
By definition, in a very pluralistic state, its politics are very diverse — even despite its perception of being a big blue state. You look at a map, two-thirds of that state is deeply red. You have some of the most conservative counties in America, and you have some of the most historically conservative counties going back decades and decades, like Orange County —
My county.
Your county — that really forged the modern construct of Reaganism and Nixon and these guys who came from that frame. So in that respect, it’s not surprising.
But Stephen Miller — I think that’s interesting because there’s this dialectic, that pushback to orthodoxy. The friction and the people who emerge from that emerge with a very strong point of view.
I know some of these guys. I don’t know some of the others. Do you think there’s something, too, about the way they end up feeling embattled on the wrong side of history? Everybody says, and I believe: California is a place where the future happens first. And a lot of them felt like they were watching what they believed in get encircled.
It seems to me it created a kind of conservatism that is much more apocalyptic, much more ethnonationalist —
It’s certainly ethnonationalist.
Much more about trying to stop where things are going — rather than preserve the best of where things were.
Yes. Ron Brownstein has written a lot about the forces of restoration in that context versus the forces of transformation. These guys want to put America in reverse. They want to bring us back in many ways to a pre-1960s world on voting rights, civil rights, L.G.B.T.Q. rights, women’s rights, etc.
And look, you think about that in the context — or I think about that in the context — of the California in your question. To me, that peaked in my modern construct, in terms of contemporary space, in 1994 with Pete Wilson, a Republican governor.
Archival clip: One of the hardest-fought state races is in California, where incumbent Republican governor Pete Wilson is facing Democratic challenger Kathleen Brown, and where the issue of illegal immigration could be a decisive one.
Archival clip: Wilson believes he has touched a nerve. He is backing Proposition 187, which would deny immigrants basic services like health and education for their children.
And on that same ballot was the beginning of the end of affirmative action, which occurred at the University of California Regents meeting shortly thereafter.
But Proposition 187 was all about pushback. The xenophobia, the nativism, the pushback against immigration — peak 1994.
Archival clip: They keep coming: 2 million illegal immigrants in California. The federal government won’t stop them but requires us to pay billions to take care of them. Enough is enough. Governor Pete Wilson.
Archival clip: Those against 187 were heard in the streets but not at the polls.
And of course his ascendancy running for re-election was all about his presidential aspirations, as well.
Archival clip of Pete Wilson: I am seeking the presidency of the United States. The values that guided us for over 200 years are suddenly under siege, and so is America.
So it was directional, not just in California, but growing across the United States. We’ve had this for decades. There’s a familiarity here.
But the response to that is also interesting. I think in many respects, the response to Proposition 187 and Pete Wilson’s success has a lot of clues in terms of how the Democratic Party responds to this moment and reasserts our success moving forward, in terms of rebuilding the party.
What clues?
It was about grass roots. It was about building movements. It was about connecting communities. It was about NGOs. It was about community organizers. It was truly bottom up, and it forced a discipline that led to a lot of organizations that are thriving today that quite literally came out of what they perceived as chaos, of 1994, 1995.
I think about it now in the context of where we were in 2004, as well. In terms of where our party is, we got shellacked: We lost the Senate, we lost the House, we lost the presidency. And then we built Media Matters, and we built Center for American Progress. We built Democracy Alliance.
We started organizing millennials. We started organizing Hispanics. We started focusing on mobile, local, social, cloud — “cloud” meaning technology. And we built this bottom-up movement that brought us back into the majority with Nancy Pelosi two years later. And then two years after that, in 2008, we had a 53 percent popular vote, the most since 1964, to get Barack Obama into the White House.
So it was a remarkable story of resilience, but it was also the hard work in 2005 and 2006 that set that course.
So I often think about the ’04 analogy. I think the Democratic Party was probably more shattered and broken after 2024, but I think people don’t remember 2004 and how bad that felt — the sense that the Democratic Party had lost touch with the heartland. It had to be a completely different thing.
I was reading books about going to Applebee’s — “Applebee’s America.” It was all about appearing less frank. You can’t have Hermès ties anymore. I mean, it was all about the heartland.
It’s so familiar, so much of this. All this stuff echoes over and over and over and over again.
You’ve actually been trying to figure out different parts of America. So I was struck, after the election, to see you start a podcast, homing in on our territory here.
You didn’t expect that?
I got to say I didn’t. Well, you’ve actually had a podcast before with Marshawn Lynch.
Yes, “Beast Mode.”
Archival clip:
[Music]
Marshawn Lynch: Man, what’s happening, man? You got Marshawn “Beast Mode” Lynch.
Doug Hendrickson: Doug Hendrickson.
Gavin Newsom: And Gavin Newsom, and you’re listening to Politickin’.
So talking about podcasts, I didn’t expect you to have — that probably beat this one.
[Laughs.] Yes.
But I would not have expected you to start with Charlie Kirk as your first guest. Steve Bannon. Dr. Phil. Michael Savage. I’ve watched you in these interviews. You’re listening. You’re looking for threads of interest and agreement.
Yes.
I watched Steve Bannon tell you repeatedly how the 2020 election was stolen. You just let the pitches go right by.
Because, I mean, how many debates have we had about that? He’s wrong, and it’s exhausting.
I want to ask what has stayed with you from these conversations and what you have been learning across a couple of them.
Let’s start with Kirk. What, for you, was the most resonant point Charlie Kirk made? And I don’t mean here that you have to have agreed with it —
Oh, yes — no, I appreciate that.
Just something that has made you think about the world a little bit differently.
I thought there was a deeper sincerity than I had anticipated, in terms of his point of view and his perspective. A willingness to engage with people he disagreed with, a willingness to debate — to the extent that he thought — in a fair and balanced way. I think there’s grace in that. Someone deeply focused on organizing in a deeper way than I fully understood.
Archival clip:
Charlie Kirk: Right around, I’d say 2021, we had a goal: Could we move the youth vote 10 points over 10 years?
Newsom: You literally sat down and put that number?
Kirk: Yeah, like, can we move it 10 points over 10 years? Because our whole hypothesis was — and we did this alongside President Trump and his great team — that this demographic is disproportionately to the Democrat side, and we believe Democrats were taking them for granted.
Someone who understood more deeply the pain that young men are facing and struggling with.
Archival clip of Kirk: They are the most alcohol addicted, most drug addicted, most suicidal, most depressed, most medicated generation in history, and the message that was largely being fed to a lot of young people was: Lower your expectations. You’re not going to have the same American dream that your parents would have. And we saw this as an opportunity, especially with young men.
And was able to do something about it and give them hope and recognize that society is failing young men.
And he was someone who clearly was playing an outsize influence — even greater than I fully understood — in terms of supporting the base of the MAGA movement.
What part of his perspective on how society is failing young men felt reasonable or recognizable to you? And which part didn’t?
Look, everybody knows the stats. If you’re 30 years old, you’re the first generation living that’s not doing better than your parents. And there’s a sense of nihilism that’s growing. I’ve had a number of other interesting guests — Atrioc and others. I went down to TwitchCon and was there with a lot of gamers, really trying to get into the belly of the beast of understanding where young men are, and this pain and suffering, this isolation, that’s turning increasingly to grievance — that they’re never going to do better than their parents, they’re never going to get out of that room with three roommates. They can’t even afford rent because they can’t afford the first two months’ payment on the rent, let alone buy a home.
And this nihilism, Kirk understood. Certainly Trump understood it, as well. He took advantage of it. But they have no prescriptions to address it and deal with it.
Of course, I only had an hour-and-a-half conversation with Charlie, but where it seems to me to have fallen short with Turning Point USA and the MAGA movement is they don’t have a prescription to actually address the real and substantive issues — but they sure as hell identify the problem.
Well, isn’t that a prescription? If I were to try to boil it down: tariffs, a closed border and Christianity?
Christianity is a big part. That was also telling.
I lazily said, “Jesus!” and he got offended. And then I said it again, and I realized: Boy, I really am offending him now. Forgive me.
I didn’t understand how deeply held his faith was and how much of an organizing principle it was for him, as well.
Oh, yes.
And how these rallies and everything — that’s interesting. Just that merger in terms of creating community, a sense of belonging, meaning, identity — it’s hard to break.
I mean, he was trying to build a new Christian right.
Yes, and Trump understands that. It gives people meaning and purpose. It’s powerful. I haven’t been to a Bernie rally necessarily, but it seems not dissimilar. Even more, there’s a religious construct to it. That’s powerful. Faith, community, belonging — we’re desperate for that. And those are universal. Those are not right and left.
Are you religious or spiritual at all?
Yes, spiritual, probably, more than religious. As my dad would say: I went to Catholic schools and went to a Jesuit university — I’m a Catholic of the distant kind. I’ll go to church on Christmas. I’m one of those. But I feel a deep connection to my faith beyond that in a spiritual sense.
And a Jesuit upbringing really has defined me. St. Francis is our patron saint in San Francisco: “Many parts, one body.” When one part suffers, we all suffer. This notion of social justice, racial justice, economic justice is deeply ingrained in me. It has really shaped me in that respect.
So I don’t dismiss that when I talk to someone like Charlie. I respect that deeply. I admire that.
Look, I think there are a lot of grievances there. But there are also a lot of grievances I have in this space: that my party has completely neglected this space, that we haven’t been organizing the campuses.
We haven’t been organizing young men. We haven’t been addressing their societal screams, their concerns. Their suicide rate — four times that of women. Their dropout rates. Their depths of despair. We have men who are suffering, and it’s hurting women. Any mother understands this.
I’ve got two boys, and one of them, as you know if you listened to that podcast, was so excited Charlie Kirk was coming on because his algorithms are saying that Andrew Tate is innocent, and this guy Jordan Peterson is an unbelievable thought leader up in Canada, and Joe Rogan is the best. And Charlie Kirk — you really need to get to know him, Dad.
I started to wake up to this reality that the Democratic Party needs to wake up to. And that’s, again, the entry into why I did this podcast and had those folks on as first guests.
I thought one of the most interesting shows you did was with the streamer Atrioc.
Yes, thank you.
What did you take from that conversation?
You know what’s so interesting? He was wonderfully combative with me. I kept wanting to talk about his history as a streamer and a gamer. He had no interest.
Archival clip of Atrioc: I do want to start talking about Gen Z men and the issue I’m seeing. Not all of them are like this. It’s a broad, diverse group, of course, and it’s a huge point of my audience, and I’m hearing them. I’m hearing their thoughts a lot. They range from angry to openly nihilistic.
He said: I’m coming on because my audience is pissed off. Pissed off with you, pissed off with everybody, Democrats and Republicans. You’re not listening to us. They’re struggling, they’re suffering, and you’re not listening to us. It’s not about gaming. It’s not about Discord. It’s not about Twitch. It’s about what the hell you guys haven’t done to address the crisis for so many young people and how they’re feeling today.
Archival clip of Atrioc: If I could boil it down to one word, it’s like radicalism is when no house. If you can’t get a house, if you don’t see a path to get a house. And I hear this all the time. Some of them are working. They’re working decent jobs. They’re working hard. It’s not even feasible in a lot of these cities to ever get a house.
It was remarkable.
Archival clip of Atrioc: Once you feel like you can get on that ladder, you’re OK. You can calm down, you can find a party, you can vote. But if you can’t see that, what’s the point? Why am I doing it? Why am I working this job for a boss I hate, for wages that are only OK? I’m never going to get another step up.
And it was not just illuminating — it woke me up.
Wake up! Wake up, Democratic Party! Wake up, everybody! People are suffering and struggling.
And look, Trump understood that in contemporary terms. I didn’t understand that in these terms. I was out there making a case, and I was one of the last men standing for Biden. And I was talking about the economy in the aggregate — 15.4 million jobs, eight times more than the last three Republican administrations combined, the best jobs market since the 1960s. All of these things were true.
All that said, I missed the obvious point: That’s in the aggregate. We’re talking about the economy. We’re not talking about the American people. We’re not talking about people’s lived experience. And we missed that.
Atrioc kept bringing that back — that systemically, for decades, this economy has not been working. Ten percent of people own two-thirds of the wealth; half the consumer spending is that top 10 percent. The stock market is seven damn stocks. Maybe 10, but primarily seven. Mostly in California.
And so he burst that reality in a way that pierced me even more than all the intellectual punditry — the things you and other people have written — because he brought it home.
You didn’t have to make it personal here, man.
[Klein and Newsom laugh.]
But it’s not nourishing the economy for enough people. People are living on edge. And I saw that at home — I lived that reality. But it’s deeper than that now.
I mean, we were able to finally afford a home —
But I think somebody listening to this could say: Look, you’re the governor of California. Nobody was unaware that inflation was punishing people, that homes had become extremely unaffordable for young people. Nobody was unaware that there was pain.
When you say it burst a bubble for you, how was that bubble burst?
On my own rhetoric. I was so stubborn.
I’m talking about my rhetorical posture, not my understanding. Look, I’m the guy who did the $20 minimum wage for fast-food workers. No other governor in our country has done that. Twenty-five dollars per hour for health care workers. Doubled the earned-income tax credit. Who has universal health care, regardless of preexisting conditions, ability to pay and immigration status.
I’m deeply mindful of the imperative to address these underlying issues. So I’m not naive in that respect — quite the contrary. But my rhetoric did not match. And I think that rhetoric, this defensive posture — that inflation was cooling from that 9.1 percent, and the jobs market was growing; we were the envy of the world, Economist magazine and everybody else; G.D.P. growth — it just landed flat.
America is already great.
Yes. And Trump understood. So it was the rhetoric, not the reality that I’m trying to —
But let me get at this rhetoric and reality landing flat, because I do think there’s something pretty deep here.
When you used to defend Biden to me and to others, the word you would use about his governance, not necessarily his communication, is “master class.”
That’s right, I agree.
And you were probably the most effective at making the case people wished he would have made.
If these policies were so good, if the policies in California were so good, then what is the disconnect? Because ultimately this whole thing is supposed to work on a feedback loop between policy, reality, voting.
Was the policy not actually that good? Was it just unable to overcome the reality? What broke?
Well, I thought the policy was extraordinary.
Then why did it not make people happier?
Because program passing is not problem solving. So you have to establish that as a framework. When you pass a piece of legislation, that’s Day 1. Now you start at the beginning of a new process, which unfolds over the course of a period of time.
And it unfolds in ways that no one understands better than Ezra Klein, that no one understands better than the person sitting across —
I’m sure you say that to all the podcasters.
No, but it’s a fundamental fact of the frame of reference that we have together in terms of your abundance agenda — understanding process, understanding the labyrinth of governance, understanding jurisdictions, understanding the pluralistic realities of how you actually manifest and implement these ideals. That’s challenging, and that plays out in 50 states.
I mean, I just think about living in the Bay Area. There are 101 jurisdictions in the Bay Area alone. There are hundreds of special districts, J.P.A.s, and transit districts in addition to that. To get anything done, how you break that down — imagine, from the presidential perspective, the CHIPS and Science Act and the I.R.A. and the tax credits, etc., having that framework. Localism is still determinative.
You can drive a lot of reforms on NEPA and CEQA in California, etc. — but localism still outweighs so much of that. And perhaps that should have been communicated more effectively, but also it needs time to gestate.
Trump’s success is destroying, not building. That’s easy. And you can destroy in nanoseconds. The symbolism and the substance of the East Wing — that’s destruction. DOGE — destruction. And that kind of destruction somehow satiates people in this respect. They feel like: Oh, there’s something actually happening. There’s real action here.
But to be a builder, that’s where greatness is. That’s where greatness lies.
That’s what I believe was the master class of the Biden administration. It was able to create a framework to build again at scale — a $1.2 trillion infrastructure package, the I.R.A. — so we can compete against our most fierce competitor, China. In low-carbon, green growth, Biden delivered $369 billion.
The reality, though, obviously, is that Trump will take advantage of a lot of those investments. But he is also taking advantage of the narrative of destruction.
A view I hold, I think even more strongly now than I did when I was writing the book, which was mostly before the election: Liberal democracy will not work if policy cannot deliver at the speed of elections. When Democrats get to the point where they are endlessly justifying why everything is so slow —
[Chuckles.] Yes.
My favorite example of this is that when Medicare was passed, it took one year for the Medicare cards to go out. When Biden, in what was arguably the most popular single thing he passed during his presidency — certainly one of them — negotiated down Medicare drug prices, the way it was designed — and you can blame corporate influence on all kinds of things. But it’s still not — those 10 drugs, I think the first time people will pay those lower prices is next year. Just in time for Donald Trump to take advantage of it.
Yes. I get it.
If you break the cord between the things that Gavin Newsom is doing and Joe Biden is doing and what people can feel — how are voters supposed to make decisions?
I think that’s why they have turned to Viktor Orban and you’ve got more authoritarian leanings. It’s why we were all reverential a decade ago, with Tom Friedman and others writing breathlessly about the China model and how they’re going to clean our clock.
People — yes, they want action. They want to see results immediately — I get that. But we also believe in due process, believe in civil service, believe in the rule of law — not the rule of Don, not the law of the jungle.
We believe in oversight — advice and consent. We believe in due process and transparency. We don’t believe in cronyism — or perhaps we don’t.
I’m not saying we need to believe in Trumpism. I’m saying: What do you do to reconnect people to the fruits of governance?
So look, I’m trying to do that in real time. One of the things that I look back on in my term is if there was a mistake.
There are policy things, things I certainly should have or could have done. But this notion of compromise and being complicit in that process — where there are all these interest groups, and we just want to work through, and we’re making progress, it feels good, so we went 80 percent of the way, and we’re going to come back — I have lost all patience for that. Because I agree with you: The public has, as well. They want to see results.
And that was reflected in 13 housing bills that I disproportionately had to assert — well, a number of them I had to put in the budget, which you just don’t do, because it couldn’t get out of the legislature otherwise — in order just to assert and deliver with a mind-set that is aligned with your critique and your observation.
But again, there’s a balance there. Because I don’t want crony capitalism. I don’t want state capitalism. I don’t want command and control. I don’t want to blow up the procurement. I don’t want to just pick winners and losers.
Let’s take as a premise that the model where you walk in and you hand Donald Trump, sometimes nonmetaphorically, a gift made of gold to get good deals from him — it’s bad.
It’s not bad. It’s corrosive beyond words. It’s extraordinary what’s happening.
We’ll go with that.
Yes.
The model where government doesn’t deliver is also corrosive.
Yes.
You have a great metaphor in your book “Citizenville,” where you say that people treat government like a vending machine: They go and put their tax dollars into it, and when nothing comes out, they begin shaking the machine.
Yes, you kick the machine.
If Gavin Newsom or somebody Gavin Newsom likes was doing DOGE, but the thing DOGE claimed to be —
We have been doing it. I started DOGE. We spell DOGE O.D.I. It started in 2019.
That’s sort of worse than DOGE, actually. [Chuckles.]
Well, I agree. It was the Office of Digital Innovation. Now it’s the Office of Data Innovation. So I made it even worse, again.
We’ve reformed our procurement. We’ve reformed our civil service system. We have advanced more generative A.I. pilots than any other big state in the country — we continue to innovate in that space. But I didn’t try to do things to people. I tried to do things with people, so it didn’t get the kind of attention that running around onstage with — who is that guy?
Chainsaw.
Yes. Chainsaw.
Milei’s chainsaw.
Which our Argentine president or our dictator-in-chief would have generated.
I’ll give you a specific: We’ve installed more green energy projects last year than at any other time in history — 7,000 megawatts. We just had in Fresno County the $5 billion, 2,300 megawatt project, Darden, the largest solar battery project, one of the largest in the world, done in record time because of the new processes we’ve put in place.
We also did the same thing with fast-tracking around permits for an aboveground storage facility, the first in half a century in California. We’re doing the same with housing — 42 CEQA reform bills I’ve signed. Infill housing reforms, A.D.U. reforms. We can get into all that as they relate to single family housing reforms — everything that you have written about. And we have moved to a degree I don’t know that many states have.
So I’m completely aligned with you in terms of having to deliver. And I’ll tell you, if nothing else, Trump has awakened our party. That’s what people want to see — but for good, not for destructive purposes.
I want to move to Michael Savage. I think it is hard for people who didn’t grow up in the era of Limbaugh and Savage to understand what Savage culturally represented and why it was so surprising to see him on your show.
How would you describe who Savage was in his heyday?
Savage was at peak back in the day. Rush Limbaugh, Michael Savage, dominating right-wing radio. He was an outsider in the Bay Area, in San Francisco. You talk about someone who was sitting there in the heart of the region and attacking 24/7 the culture and the community and the values.
And remember, the modern MAGA movement you could trace back, you could deeply argue, to Michael Savage. That’s why we thought he was an important guest.
Archival clip of Michael Savage: If I were running, I would run on a campaign of borders, language and culture. Say: Well, what do you stand for Mr. Savage? Borders, language and culture. The Republicans are having meetings now, what they should stand for. You hear this? They’re still trying to determine what their motto is. Duh.
“Language, borders and culture” — that was his mantra for decades and decades. And so, for me, I thought that was perhaps one of the most interesting interviews. It sort of mined his consciousness of where we are today.
And then what did you actually take away from the conversation with him that you thought was interesting?
I think it’s just his history. He’s a big environmentalist. He’s got a lot of deep opinions. Very critical of the current administration as it relates to endangered species, as it relates to natural and working lands, as it relates to animal rights, more broadly defined.
He’s got an interesting progressive background that evolved — or devolved, depending on your point of view — through his own experiences. And he’s a family man — unbelievable relationship with his son, who’s unbelievably successful, interestingly, and his wife, which I admire. Family and faith.
You’re really connecting Kirk and Savage to the fact that they’re human beings. I know they’re human beings.
And I think it’s important.
But you’re talking to people on the right who have a very different —
Yes, but it’s not about right or left. For one thing, it’s a great irony talking to me because I’m fighting fire with fire, and I’m pushing back, and I’m being criticized for that, by being very aggressive, and I’m not holding punches.
At the same time, I say this all the time: Divorce is not an option. We have to live together and advance together across our differences. So I want to find those areas. I want to find the humanity. I want to find the “love” — I’ll use that word. We all need to be loved, we all need to love.
Savage’s view is that California is a kind of hellscape.
Yes.
Archival clip of Savage: Five years ago I had a heart attack here in Marin County. So I’m rushed to Marin General. I have to wait in line, it’s filled with illegal aliens.
Archival clip of Savage: You’ve got the ten zones where you’ve got snow to the desert. So it’s a perfect geographic location for me. But there’s a point at which I will leave this state, and will be taxation without representation.
Archival clip of Savage: So Gavin, the homeless thing is the turning point. When that man defecated outside the window, that was the beginning of the end of San Francisco — not only for me but for the whole city.
And my point is not to have you agree or even disagree with that, but when you sit there and you listen to him and he lays it out, which part of it do you think: There is something to respond to here? Not the way he would respond to it — but is there some set of problems that from his perspective are visible but that from your perspective are harder to see?
Well, the affordability crisis — he’s 100 percent right. The poster child of our failure as a state is the issue of poverty that’s out on the streets and sidewalks as it relates to encampments and homelessness.
But look, he loves our state. That’s why he is living in the state — California. The vast majority of these guys who attack the state grew up in the state, made their wealth in the state — still have businesses in the state.
Elon Musk put his research and development headquarters — his world headquarters — back in California. His A.I. company is in California. SpaceX was launched in California. Tesla exists because of California. He’s a billionaire because of the state’s regulatory posture.
So many of these folks who are attacking the state all come from the state of California. What they don’t like is the progressive taxes.
I mean, tell me about it. [Laughs.]
Yes, you understand. But it’s the progressive tax — they want to take their capital gains someplace else, which I deeply understand.
Its homeless, housing and transportation problems are legendary. It’s a mass exodus.
The “California derangement syndrome” is not new is my long-winded point.
When I talk to people about you as a leader of the Democratic Party — and you’re a leading voice, let’s call it that for the moment.
Sounds pessimistic: “for the moment.”
So what are you suggesting? It won’t be for long? I get it. I read between the lines.
I’m not going to ask you seven different ways if you’re running in 2028.
God bless you.
What I am going to ask you is this: The big political issue of the day is affordability. California — U.S. News and World Report on Wallet Hub looked at all these different rankings — ranks 50th on affordability. These measures combine housing costs and other measures of the cost of living.
Why and what is the affordability agenda that is credible coming from the governor of California?
It’s interesting. Wallet Hub also talks about the happiest city index. Five of the Top 10 —
Listen, man, I’ve got redwoods tattooed on my arm. I grieve every day I’m not in California. You don’t need to tell me it’s the happiest place to live.
And in terms of taxes, which is interesting — Wallet Hub comes out with their annual survey on taxes saying we’re slightly above average on taxes. Total mythology there — it’s the highest tax rate in the country, but not the highest taxes across the board when you add in everything.
That said, the affordability issue in California is real. It’s been the original sin going back decades and decades. Housing — period, full stop. More things and more ways on more days. Explains everything. It’s the original sin in California. NIMBYism — we haven’t gotten out of our own way. We haven’t produced enough housing stock. It’s Economics 101: supply and demand. It’s not very complicated.
And when I started as governor, there was no housing agenda. There was no homeless agenda. It was not the responsibility or role of the state. It was assigned to cities and counties and regional Continuums of Care.
And we changed all that. In fact, I put a marker down within the first few days when I got into office by suing some cities in my state. Put 47 on notice, sued Huntington Beach, and have changed radically our approach to accountability, creating a housing accountability unit. Looked at state excess land sites, which unlocked over 5,000 units. Began a process of working with carrots and sticks to move from NIMBYism to a YIMBYist mind-set, which I think we have demonstrated in meaningful ways, in substantive ways.
We completed 110,000 housing units last year. It’s completely, completely underwhelming. And so we have more work to do.
Why is it so hard? Because you’ve wanted to do this. You set a 3.5 million housing production goal.
That was the aspirational goal. And then the legal goal, 2.5 million by 2030, became what we call the arena goals —
Great. Let’s use 2.5 million —
And that is the established legal — and by the way, it’s the first time we had goal setting that was this prescriptive.
But you’re not on track for either goal?
Well, no one is.
Yes, no one is.
Across the country. And by the way, that’s macroeconomics. You’ve got 1.2 million —
I spend, because I’m a nerd, a fair amount of time looking at statistics on housing starts in Austin and Houston —
Well, Austin is now having a big downturn in terms of costs because of some of the overbuilding. But it’s interesting.
Listen, I think of California having a big downturn in rents because of overbuilding —
You want to see that happen? [Chuckles.]
I think that would be a welcome change of problem.
No, I get it. But no, we have to build more houses.
I take you as genuinely serious. I’ve seen how many bills you’ve passed. I’ve covered a bunch of them. What makes this so hard?
Well, you’ve got 470 cities. You have 58 counties. I’ve mentioned 101 jurisdictions in the cities and counties just around the Bay Area. I haven’t even gotten to L.A. County. There are 88 cities, 88 leaders, C.O.C.s.
Everybody — everybody — is participatory in this. That’s the challenge. It’s that labyrinth.
And by the way, these folks aren’t happy. League of Cities is not happy. Our county partners are not happy.
We are asserting ourselves in ways that the state has never asserted itself into local planning decisions in order to break down those barriers, and we’ve been breaking down those barriers.
What we need is to break down the costs of borrowing. It’s the last piece that’s missing right now. I think we have shifted the dialogue. We have won the debate. We’re on the other side of this. And the proof point will be when we see the borrowing cost reduction.
So I think you can think about what it takes to build housing as having three buckets. One is land use, zoning, permitting, etc. — the legal traps you have to run in order to get started. Then there’s financing of construction — interest rates, things like that. And the cost of construction, which is related, but has to do with the cost of materials, labor, all the rest of it.
As you say, I think in a lot of blue states, the fight on land use and zoning is intellectually won. Whether or not it’s been totally won on policy is harder. But I do think that’s won.
The financing and the cost of construction, with Trump’s tariffs and deportations, is getting worse on a bunch of levels. Tell me about those, because I actually think those are harder to talk about.
You didn’t even bring up productivity, which is down about 30 percent since 1970 to 2020.
In the housing sector.
In the housing sector. In every other part of our economy —
I’m pulling that into the cost of construction, but yes.
And so, let’s establish, situationally: The tariffs environment has impacted the cost of goods, so material supplies have gone up.
He’s made it worse — Donald Trump. The labor shortages are real. Today there was a Wall Street Journal article showing a 300,000- or 400,000-plus construction workers shortage — and they can’t even get enough data center workers to address some of the energy needs for A.I., etc. And that’s been exacerbated by the mass deportation efforts. So those two things are important.
But the issue of productivity goes to deeper questions now around: Can we look at new styles of construction? Are we going to promote, at scale, modular housing? Prefab housing —
This is off-site — you’re building houses like you’d build a car and then assembling them on site.
And it’s also 3-D printing, which is really interesting. There are some interesting companies in Texas. They’re actually working with NASA in terms of some opportunities there, in terms of new materials. A.I., as it relates to the materials space, is also interesting in relation to this conversation.
So I do think we’re about to experience a completely different shift on the productivity side because of necessity, because of the reality, because of the crisis of affordability.
And this holds a lot of promise. It holds a lot of political peril in the context of the politics within labor. And that has to be accommodated and dealt with.
By the way, if there’s a big preview for California my last year, it’s in this space legislatively to take it to the next level. But we have to accommodate because there are a lot of unions within —
I want to slow down what you just said here, just for people who are not as into the modular housing debate as we are.
So right now, building housing is: Guys show up with hammers.
Same way they have been since the beginning of time.
This is why productivity is down.
Yes.
There’s no place in America that does a ton of off-site manufactured housing. But in Sweden, I think more than 80 percent of single family homes are now off-site manufactured. You can have modular build, as many places do, in unionized factories.
That’s right.
So it doesn’t have to be a nonunion industry, but it still means fewer builders.
And it means: Which unions, which different skills and which trades are part of that? And therein lies the issue we have to address.
When you talk about addressing it, I think you’re pointing toward there being some way that it can be addressed. But on some level, it will mean fewer people building on-site unless we increase housing production so much that you have a volume difference.
Yes, and that’s the opposite — the goal is to do what we need to do, which is the abundance agenda — actually addressing the demand side of the equation. So I think we’ll be fine for a decade or two as we work out of this morass, this mess we’ve created, not just in California but all across this country.
You had a hell of a conversation with Steve Bannon.
I thought I was talking to Bernie Sanders for half of it.
It’s interesting.
I mean it.
I’ve had that experience with him. What did you take from that, the strange horseshoe nature of the populism that he espouses — maybe a little bit more when he is talking to people on the left — but that I think is authentic to him?
I think it is authentic. I mean, he has a point of view. He has a perspective.
Archival clip of Steve Bannon: Let’s get back to why President Trump won again. You basically have working class people, middle class people, particularly down the chain. They’ve seen the bailouts on Wall Street, they’ve seen the oligarchs be made, they don’t think they have agency in a global supply chain. They think they’re just a cog in the machine, that their voice is not heard. They’re kind of dismissed culturally. And I don’t care if you’re Black, Hispanic or white working class. It’s not a race thing or ethnicity — you’re just dismissed.
He’s thought things through in a deeper way than I frankly understood. We’re so quick to dismiss: Oh, Steve Bannon tried to light democracy on fire on Jan. 6 — and the like.
Then you get under the hood, and he’s making a rational case for an industrial policy that’s worker centered. He’s making a rational case of critique and reflection about the W.T.O. and NAFTA. He’s making a reflective case that both parties — not just the Republican Party but also the Democratic Party — were complicit in the hollowing out of our infrastructure and our manufacturing base.
He’s making a case for progressive taxes. I stopped him in the interview. I said: You quite literally made a more effective case for California’s progressive tax policies than I or others have made. He was arguing that Trump on the “big, beautiful bill” made a mistake, that he should have increased corporate taxes and increased taxes on the 1 percent and lowered them for working folks.
Archival clip of Bannon: On the upper brackets, I don’t want to see extension. I want them to go back to the old rates, and they have to pay the old rates. And then additionally, if they can’t help us get this under control, I’m all for increasing taxes on the — they will have a tax increase if President Trump doesn’t extend it, but then I think we’ll have another tax increase.
Had he done that, the Democratic Party would be in real trouble right now.
I’ve had this experience interviewing and then listening to Bannon. There are moments where I’m like: If Trump actually listened to this guy, the left would be in much more danger.
Real trouble. Had he done that, he would have, I think, created an enduring mega-movement.
I don’t think there is one after Trump. I think it’s going to fray. There’s no chance JD Vance could keep it together. Certainly not Rubio or anybody else.
Without Trump, there’s no Trumpism, there’s no ideological framework. But there could have been — he could have built the structure from a policy framework.
And Bannon, I think, is the thought leader in that respect. I say “thought leader,” and I know that offends a lot of liberal minds who are offended by Bannon and don’t want to attach any thoughtfulness to what he promotes, but I think we would be wise to listen.
And again, there’s got to be some grace. Learn from people. Success leaves clues. There’s power of emulation. You’ve got to get out of your bubble — literally and figuratively. And you also have to find humanity — you have to find decency — in other people, for no other reason than we’re all exhausted, polarized, traumatized. We’re exhausted. This has to end. We can’t take this anymore. This is code red in this country, just the humanity that we’ve lost, the sense of purpose.
Back to meaning: That’s why I believe in national service. It should be compulsory. That’s why I believe in patriotism — not just from a party perspective but from a unifying perspective.
We have an opportunity — 249 years of this historic project of our founding fathers — to celebrate that sense of idealism. And that’s what I hope not just our party does, but we as Americans can do next year.
Well, I watched the reaction to a bunch of these conversations, and the thing you know about having conversations like that with people like Bannon, like Kirk, like Savage, is you get a lot of frustration from your own side, saying: Why are you treating them with so much grace Why are you listening so openly to them when they treat us like this? How did you take in that response?
I thought it was totally fair — and I was marginally hurt by it. But it was completely fair.
Look, you can go on cable and watch the back and forth. You can watch me on cable go back and forth. I’m happy to get into that mode, and I take a back seat to no one on being willing to engage and debate people. I’ll do it on a daily basis, but that’s not the point of the podcast.
So I’m trying to create a different space, and I think it’s important to have that space as we find the way back together.
I married into a big Republican family. You know that, but some may not know that. This is not an academic exercise for me. It’s not about right. It’s not about left. It’s not about red or blue. The human experience is what it’s all about. We’ve lost that in our politics.
I think of most of the things I’ve read in newspapers this year, maybe the one that sticks in my mind the most was in The Wall Street Journal — I apologize to The Times. But to read these sentences in the Journal was striking:
The net worth held by the top 0.1 percent of households in the U.S. reached $23.3 trillion in the second quarter of this year, from $10.7 trillion a decade earlier. … The amount held by the bottom 50 percent increased to $4.2 trillion from $900 billion.
So the top 10th of a percent in this country has $23 trillion-plus in wealth. The bottom 50 percent, $4.2 trillion. What does that kind of wealth inequality, which is prevalent in California — a lot of those rich people are in California — what does it do to a society?
Well, I mean, yesterday I was quoting Plutarch, who warned the Athenians in, I don’t know, 50 or 70 A.D. — don’t quote me. He said: The imbalance between the rich and the poor is the oldest and most fatal ailment of all republics. Two thousand years ago he said this.
That’s what it means. I say this all the time: We’ve got to democratize our economy to save our democracy. Back to code red —
Steve Bannon will tell you we need to redistribute the wealth. How do you think about that?
Well, in many respects, that’s what progressive tax states do. You have regressive tax states that do the opposite: Florida and Texas.
By the way, most of those are taker states. Progressive states like California tend to be donor states — states that are actually producing more wealth for the American people. You look at a statement that came out about a year ago from one analysis that showed that Texas took $71.1 billion more from the federal government than it provided the federal government. California that same year provided $83.1 billion to the federal government.
California’s progressive tax rate has been criticized. But foundationally, it provides me — and you’ll see it on my January budget — the ability to expand our unprecedented investments into child care, expand our universal preschool program, which we have fully implemented in our Afterschool for All and Summer School for All programs, which are nation-leading programs.
And that is part of a redistribution framework that I think in many respects was the model that Bannon was arguing, interestingly, for.
But we fundamentally tax income, not wealth.
Yes. Difficult to tax wealth.
It is difficult to tax wealth, but it is not impossible to tax wealth. I mean, we used to have a strong — or a stronger — estate tax in this country, and now it’s pretty toothless.
Yes, it’s absurd.
We live in an economy built on assets. And I just don’t know how you can have an agenda for any kind of democratization, as you put it, of the economy that doesn’t really begin to think about wealth taxation — speaking at the national level, since there are interstate dynamics that would make a wealth tax at the state level harder.
But the key point: at a state-by-state basis.
Yes, I understand that.
So from a national prism, we need to have an honest conversation about this. But we’re in the “how” business. Again, this entire conversation is not abstract. It’s not intellectual. We’re practitioners. I’m a practitioner. I’m dealing with realities, cards that are actually dealt.
I just criticize people from the sidelines.
It’s much easier.
Tell me about it. That’s why you wanted a podcast. I don’t want to be governor of California.
I’m speaking on behalf of Joe Biden and his legacy. But my point is to make this point: How do you mark to market? How do you determine assets? How do you determine this internationalization of assets?
I’m not saying these are impossible things. I’m not making an excuse. I’m making a point: The Big Beautiful Bill was the big beautiful betrayal. This was a disastrous bill for our kids and grandkids — this transfer of wealth, this debt burden, this debt bomb that we’re placing on them. What we’ve done to the next generation is a disgrace.
And that’s why Bannon was right, and Trump was wrong, and the supine Congress was wrong. So we’ve got to right that wrong as it relates to re-establishing a progressive construct. Whether or not we engage in a wealth tax, by definition, this debate is going to heat up because of the stats that you underscored.
But I don’t want to hear you tell me we need to have an honest conversation and debate. I know there’s a lot of difficulty around the implementation of something like this. We both know that.
I guess what I’m asking you is: You’re here quoting Plutarch to me. Is a society that has that level of wealth inequality a politically stable or an economically just society?
No, by definition. And that was the point he was making. That’s why I say if you don’t democratize the economy, you can’t save our democracy. That’s why populism is rising and authoritarian tendencies and fascistic tendencies are asserting themselves.
So then it sounds like you’re saying: Whatever the structure of it is, we’re going to have to do something that shifts the structure of wealth in this country.
Yes, by definition. And look, I’m going to defend our progressive tax structure in California. I’m going to defend it because I think it’s the right approach. I absolutely reject the regressive tax structures of states like Florida and Texas. I reject the regressive nature of the tax structures that were doubled down on with the big, beautiful betrayal.
I was listening to you talk with Andrew Ross Sorkin, my colleague at DealBook. And you guys talked a bit about wealth tax, and separately, you talked about baby bonds, which have always been a proposal I like a lot.
I don’t like them — I’ve done them for 3.4 million kids entering kindergarten. We put aside $1.9 billion many years ago. It’s interesting: Not everybody signed up for it, which is remarkable. Even if you hand something to someone, it doesn’t mean they’ll necessarily take it, which is a stubborn fact. But I love this idea.
What about a wealth tax or an estate tax that simply funds universal basic wealth bonds?
Well, we’re looking at universal — we’ve been playing around. I mentioned Mincome —
Minimum income.
We’ve played around with grant funding for U.B.I., and we’ve done grants in California at scale. We have a lot of interesting pilots, a lot of feedback. But we’re also looking at universal basic capital. We’re looking at this notion of a sovereign wealth framework.
Trump has talked about this, which is interesting. I don’t dismiss this.
Yes, and he’s taking cuts of companies.
We can get into the 15 percent tithing from AMD and Nvidia, and the 10 percent from Intel. But the opportunities with those $1,000 baby bonds present an entry point for that conversation that I think is important.
It’s hard for me to say: Thank you, Ted Cruz. But Cory Booker, to his credit, was more responsible than anyone as a thought leader in this space.
Here’s, I think, the difficulty on taxes for Democrats. Polling on this is clear, including among many Republicans: People want higher taxes on the rich. What they don’t necessarily believe is that Democrats will spend that money well or effectively — that they’ll put the money into the vending machine and get something out.
Yes.
You’ve talked a lot about the California tax structure here. According to the Tax Foundation, which is right-leaning but honest, California ranks second for tax collecting per capita at about $10,000 per person. Florida is about $5,000 per person.
When I hear rich people in California complain, it’s more about the feeling that when they go back and forth, they don’t see the public services in California as so much better than in other states. They don’t see the public infrastructure as so much better. They can’t ride the train.
It’s about: How do you rebuild faith that if we do move to significantly higher levels of taxation — Nordic levels of taxation — that people are going to get what they’re paying from that?
Well, I’m sorry. Again, what they get is a $4.1 trillion economic output built on the basis of a formula, as Friedman would say, for success with a conveyor belt for talent.
Milton Friedman here?
No, Tom, in this case.
Oh, Tom Friedman. OK. [Chuckles.]
Yes. I’m staying closer to home at the Times.
Got it. I want to see what treatment we’re talking about.
I’m giving some reverence to Tom.
We have a formula for success. I mean, California’s success is not an accident — it’s by design. We have 18 percent of the world’s R&D. We invest in that. Billions and billions of those tax dollars go back into R&D tax credits.
The University of California system — how many more engineers, scientists, Nobel laureates do we need? We have 13,700 active patents in the U.C. system, where those ecosystems have created these trillion-dollar companies, and created and minted these billionaires who are complaining about California.
Those are the benefits that we have provided. These companies have laid the foundation for innovation and quantum and fusion and robotics and space in the future, and are dominating that space.
We have $180 billion. It’s the largest since Pat Brown — $180 billion. It’s build.ca.gov. You can look it up. It’s a transparent website that shows the biggest investments in capital and infrastructure in California’s history that are being invested as we speak.
We’ve dominated manufacturing. I mentioned yesterday that 2.8 percent of advanced manufacturing is in places like Florida. It’s 13.9 percent in California. We dominate in every critical category —
Of the nation’s total manufacturing output.
We’re No. 1 in every category. So the economic opportunities, the growth, the energy, the daring, the creativity — all of that is present in California. My gosh, we have more Fortune 500 companies than we’ve had in a decade in California. We have more unicorn companies than we’ve ever had. Look at the venture capital that’s going back into the state.
It’s remarkable. No. 1 in two-way trade. No. 1 in direct —
I’ve heard you do this before. I agree with it.
It’s all true.
But what your critics would say is that you’re sitting on an oil well. Silicon Valley was built as an agglomeration of talent —
But how was it built?
I agree with you. But it wasn’t built in the last five years.
But it was built on these investments, these conveyor belts, these programs and protocols, well-established, that we haven’t walked away from. We’ve reinvigorated.
You feel very shaped by the culture, specifically, of Northern California.
Northern California — Silicon Valley, San Francisco — has become, even compared with what it was five or 10 years ago, that much more important as the epicenter of the global A.I. revolution.
The culture of Silicon Valley has changed. The politics of it have changed very rapidly in this period.
When I go back now to San Francisco, I feel this very strange tension of people racing headlong to invent something that even they are not sure will be good or who it will be good for.
I completely agree with that.
They hope. But they also sometimes seem like servants of a thing they are bringing into being. They would not tell you they understand how it’s working.
Yes.
I think A.I. is going to be a big part of the next turn of politics.
Unquestionably. Dominant, dominant.
Before I get to anything about regulation, how do you feel about A.I.?
Promise and peril — both/and.
Because I think what you said is spot on. I spent a lot of time with these guys, and for the next three to five years, there’s almost universal belief — people don’t know what they don’t know, but there seems to be some consensus that within three to five years, artificial general intelligence — superintelligence — that we’re on the other side of the unknown.
That’s pretty alarming.
My timeline for superintelligence is longer. General intelligence, depending on how you define it? Maybe.
Yours may be longer than that, but I have talked to some of the DeepMind people, and they were talking 36 months. I don’t want to lay them out specifically, but people associated with them, not from DeepMind.
Obviously, everyone is participating in this race, and I’ll acknowledge the bubble that’s being built, the capital expenditure that has been invested across this country and what’s happening in terms of utility costs across the country and data centers.
Energy is the one thing that will slow this down — nuclear fusion is a big part of that conversation, as well. It’s going to shape more things in more ways on more days in our politics. You’re already seeing the beginning, just the beginning, of job impacts. But its likely to get more pronounced and perhaps exponentially so.
So the tech genie is out of the bottle. You can’t stuff it back in. It’s a global race. Our biggest competitor is China. It’s a race to superintelligence, and what that means or what it doesn’t mean. And we have to navigate that.
I think we have to take responsibility to thoughtfully regulate it, and that’s why California is pursuing the first regulatory framework in the nation, S.B. 53, which took me two years to get right and land. We did it with a lot of the competing parts within the regulatory space, meaning those who see this as a dystopian future and those who want a light touch.
We’ve tried to find some balance in this space. But, obviously, the state of mind of the president and guys from California like David Sacks and others is to let it rip and to try to vandalize and trip us up from being able to do that.
I don’t think we really know what A.I. is going to do to the job market or when or to whom. I don’t think it’s clear enough in the data yet.
Nope.
But I think a couple of things are worth assuming will happen. One that is already happening is that the process of looking for a job has become hellish.
I may need to look for one a year from now. So fill me in. Give me more examples.
I talk to people, and it’s like you’re sending endless resumes to dozens of places. They’re being read by A.I. Sometimes you’re interviewing with that. It’s become very dehumanized and dehumanizing — and hard to find a job. It’s endless. Everybody is using A.I. to apply, the A.I. is reading the A.I. application. It’s just a circular thing. And what I’ve seen in human beings going through it is a profound demoralization.
Then the question of: Are you actually going to see what I think will first be job freezing, as places don’t hire as much? It won’t be like Covid, when half the people had to stay home all of a sudden. It’s going to be just a bit harder. It’s going to be a recession for the young. We’re not good at handling things where people are being affected differentially.
And the third piece I’ll just add into this mix is the fear.
It’s real.
There are so many people I know in school who are reasonably afraid that they’ll be replaced by an A.I. They work with the systems now, and they know that the systems are as good at many things as they are. A lot of jobs are not at the frontier of creativity. You’re doing something somewhat rote, somewhat replicable, some somewhat learnable. That’s what the middle class and most of its economy is built on.
Between the economic and the psychological destabilization of this, I think I am surprised by how much people know this is coming. You can see it in polling: People know it’s coming, and politics seems at sea.
That’s what we’re trying to change in California. That’s why we’re leading in this space. No other state is doing more in this space.
But let me reinforce a few of your points and then add one additional one: I completely get that anything that gets repeated, gets replaced and that A.I. has moved out in the physical world. You can see that physically in California. Not just the Waymos that are out there, but you can be deep in traffic with seven cars with no drivers — Zoox and others.
You’re seeing humanoid robotics that are going to start moving into place. You’re seeing it already exercised in a number of hospitality settings and in hotels and hospitals that are starting to play and iterate in this space, and you’re seeing mass adoption, particularly in China and elsewhere.
So this is real. It’s coming. It’s coming fast.
As it relates to that anxiety, I would also offer that it will also have a gender component. Look at that gender displacement in terms of some of those jobs — clerical jobs and paralegal jobs — and the impact that will have on women, as well. That’s a dynamic we also need to consider in this conversation.
I’m having advanced conversations, as I mentioned earlier, on universal basic capital and looking at the prospects of mass displacement — even if it’s for a period of time and on the other side, we have abundance. But how do we address that anxiety in real time? How do we accommodate for that fear? How do we own responsibility to address it?
And again, I feel a disproportionate amount of responsibility, coming from California, to lead that conversation.
Let me flip something about the California model.
California’s success partially reflects a way that growth and economic energy and activity have become unexpectedly more concentrated in the digital era. That has been amazing for California, which as you say, is a world leader in technology and advanced manufacturing and in all of these things that are engines of progress and wealth right now.
It is, in a broad sense, somewhat politically destabilizing because so many places have ended up, as we were talking about at the beginning, more hollowed out — not because of California, but because of these huge returns to concentration and capital.
Back in the ’90s — not that long ago — Democrats won rural and urban counties at about the same rates. Now Democrats dominate cities and really struggle in rural counties, in part because the people in those counties just feel left behind and unseen by them.
You’re Gavin Newsom, former mayor of San Francisco, you’re governor of California, you’ve got Silicon Valley. How do you rebuild that connection?
There’s never been a governor who spends more time in rural California. In fact, my first cabinet meeting was in rural California, in a small town, Monterey Park, dealing with water supply.
We launched just recently — it was a three-year project but completed just recently — 13 regional economic work force and development plans. We called it Regions Rising Together. It’s not one economy. It’s the intersection of many different economies to address precisely the point you were just making. It was a rural-led, suburban-led effort.
What made it different is $287 million seeded these bottom-up economic and work force plans. A three-year process, over 10,000 people. I did seven events in seven rural counties. No one covered that. You only covered what I put on some social media site and post because it made fun of or mocked Donald Trump.
Now you are framing it with an electoral construct, and that’s a different thing. I’ll tell you, that’s more challenging because as someone who has never spent more time in rural parts of California, I can assure you, having been on the ballot as many times as I have been, including my recall, it hasn’t improved my performance there — for many different reasons.
I appreciate you actually noting this because this is what I always hear from Democrats when I ask this question: Look at all we’re doing. Look at all we’re trying to do.
So what, to you, drives that disconnect?
Culture, belonging, meaning, identity. I think there are deeper issues here. They’re deep. I mean, I can go on and talk about regenerative agriculture work I’m doing, all the work we’ve done for farmers, farm workers, all these things. Next level. No Republican governor ever did any of these things. Trump is destroying ranchers and small businesses and farmers, and they’re celebrating the guy. It’s a joke. Is anyone paying attention? They still vote for him. I’m going to look for your punditry on this to try to understand.
No, but you go to roundtables, you talk to people. You do listen when you talk to people.
I love these folks. I care about these folks. I go into Kevin McCarthy’s district, and I’m like: How in the hell did you re-elect this guy? He is cutting your Medicaid programs, cutting all these damn programs that we’re investing in your infrastructure and health and wellness. All the environmental programs about air, clean water. They’re the ones cutting it, and you’re celebrating that? I don’t get it.
So there’s a cultural construct here that I’m trying to understand more fully. And it matters. Culture matters.
I was talking to Kirk. He said: Politics is not downstream of culture. Trump is culture.
They’ve owned culture, they’ve won the culture wars. We have to recognize that.
I don’t know that I would say they’re winning culture, though Democrats are probably losing it at the moment. But I do think a couple of years ago what the right figured out, because they felt it authentically — and in some ways, this goes back to the particular form of modern conservatism that grew in California — is how much energy there is in the feeling of loss.
Yes.
And the way in which they were culture was that they really understood the feeling of being left behind by culture. The feeling that your stories were not going to get told, that your views would not be respected, that the people who were then running the platforms, from companies that, at that point, were understood as liberal — they’ve obviously flipped a little bit in recent years — to the people in Hollywood, who, not only do they not care about you, they don’t like you, and they look down on you.
I hate that perception.
It’s not even entirely untrue.
No. We talk down to people, we talk past people. So damn judgmental. I mean, our party just has to be more culturally normal in that respect.
That’s why, again, I’m not just saying that — I’m also trying to prove a sensitivity to that. Back to the whole podcast conversation. We all want to be protected, respected and connected to something bigger than ourselves.
There are universal truths here. We all want to be loved, all need to be loved. We’re all in this together. So again: Grace, humility, decency and respect for people we disagree with. Don’t talk past. You can’t win people over if you talk down to people. You can’t talk past people, you can’t dismiss people.
I’ll keep going back to the Central Valley. Ask the mayor of Fresno — Republican, former police chief — how many times I’ve been there. I have the back of the people of Fresno. Bakersfield, California — Republican mayor there. How many times have I gone back? So I’m trying to demonstrate respect. I’m trying to show it.
And to the extent it’s not reciprocated? That’s the thing I can’t control, ultimately. I’m just trying to control what I can control.
One of the other things I hear people worry about the most with you as a leading voice in the Democratic Party is that you’ve taken a series of positions that Trump tries to attach to Democrats — often wrongly.
But, under your leadership in California, there actually was subsidized government health care for undocumented immigrants. There was a big push to phase out cars with internal combustion engines. These are the kind of things right now Democrats are running away from.
Yes. I can’t.
I’m sure the polls would say I should, but that’s not who I am. I’ve never been a guy who can do that.
I believe China is going to clean our clock. They have 70 percent of the E.V. market, they’re moving.
I was down in Belém, in Brazil — BYDs everywhere. They’re getting market-share supply chains. They’re advancing influence. To me, it’s not about electric power, it’s about economic power. I can’t cede that.
So California is the center of the universe in that respect. We dominated R&D. It’s why we have all the mobility out there — Zoox and Waymo and the R&D work that’s being done at Tesla and Skunk Works and Rivian and all of these other companies that are investing in that future. We are the future in that respect, and I’m trying to hold on to that.
As it relates to undocumented health care, I’m proud of that. Because I believe in universal health care. Others may say it — I did it. First state in the country. Regardless of preexisting conditions, ability to pay, and regardless of your immigration status.
I promised that. I promoted it. I ran three times on it. I did it when I was mayor. People know who I am.
We failed on the border. We need to own up to that. Largest border crossing in the Western Hemisphere, in my state. Spent a billion plus dollars to do migrant centers, to try to put a lid on things. I was quite critical, but I tried to do it in a respectful way, of the Biden administration. We failed on the border. We have to own that.
But we’ve also failed, as a consequence of that, to lead the comprehensive immigration question. We have to get the border right. Then we can get to that. But I say that to make the point: We don’t need a sanctuary policy in this country if we have a federal government doing its job. In the absence of that, we’ll deal with the cards that are dealt. And one of the cards that was dealt is people are going to end up in the emergency room, and you’re going to pay for that one way or another. I want to keep people out of the emergency room. I want to keep people healthier. I want to keep people safer. That’s why we’ve advanced these values.
Trump uses it as a cudgel — uses it very effectively — to attack our party and our values. But I’ll stand up to it. Good people can disagree, but I’m very mindful —
Why did Democrats fail on the border?
Because we didn’t own up to the reality. We didn’t take responsibility.
But beneath it, what happened? Joe Biden was not a guy who didn’t know that you shouldn’t have chaos at the border. You sent down National Guardsmen. At a policy level, why did Democrats fail?
Everything is in reaction to Trump, the overreach of Trump. We come back, and we then move 180 degrees in the opposite direction — when we didn’t need to or shouldn’t have.
You saw mass migration across the country. It was hardly unique in the United States. You had all of the shock and supply chain shock and issues coming out of Covid that created even more pressure, and then it became overwhelming.
Then what also became overwhelming was this notion that we can’t do it without Congress. And Biden then proved Trump right by doing it without Congress. And in the last six months, we saw a significant decline in border crossings under the Biden administration that ultimately led to benefits for Trump — claiming he did it all at the end, when he really closed the gap marginally.
We paid a huge price for that. And we picked up, I think, the wrong lessons in the midterms. We outperformed in the midterms. And this was a time when all Democratic governors were critical. You saw it publicly. Then they did better than we all expected. And they said: Why don’t we just focus on these other issues?
Mistake.
I call this oppositional mirroring — the tendency to become the mirror of whatever you’re politically fighting.
I think on immigration, Democrats really became Trump’s mirror. He was cruel. They were going to be compassionate.
Yes. Well said. I like that.
He tried to close it. They were not quite going to open it, but they began debating decriminalizing border crossing. There was a lot that was reactive.
Now you see Republicans making the mistake.
Completely agree.
People don’t like cruelty, either.
But I think it’s deeper than that. I spend a lot of time trying to understand the theories of the right, and they have really talked themselves into the idea that you cannot have a cohesive national community with high levels of immigration. They have talked themselves into the idea that if you have more than 15 percent of people who are foreign born — or, in some versions of this, are not Heritage American, as they call it — that you’re not a real polity.
Now, California is a very diverse place. Los Angeles, San Francisco, are very diverse places.
That’s an understatement.
What is your answer? Not on whether or not we need to secure the border, but on what it means to be a political community and what it means to be an American — if its meaning is not to be a Heritage American?
Just so people understand: In California, 27 percent of the state is foreign born. It’s a majority minority state.
I mentioned the word “pluralism” before because we practice it. It’s a word you don’t hear a lot about. I think our strength is defined by that diversity. I know that offends JD Vance and everyone else, and it offends the folks you’ve referenced — truly offends them.
That said, this is an issue that goes back. I remember this from my history books. In the 1880s, Denis Kearney, the founder of the Workingman’s Party, started and ended every speech saying: Whatever else must happen, the Chinese must go. That led to the Chinese Exclusion Act. He was in Oakland, California. The Bay Area was the center of that universe.
There were virtual walls that were being built and all these illustrations to keep the Chinese out of California. We were at peak immigration back then, peak populism out there. In so many respects, Kearney was the original Donald Trump — going after institutions, going after the media, and obviously scapegoating others.
We saw that peak drop in the 1970s to a relatively modest percentage of our overall population in this country, which is now getting close to the old 1880s peak.
So it’s very familiar, all of this. But here’s where I am on all this: I’m of the Reagan mind-set. Life force of New Americans, Lady Liberty’s torch.
He could have chosen any speech to leave the Oval Office. Ronald Reagan chose one speech to talk about the power of this country being defined by the fact that anyone can be part of this country. Nowhere else in the world is that the case, but it uniquely defines the greatness of America. I’m with Reagan on this point.
I want you to expand what that point means.
JD Vance, I think, gives the most interesting speeches of any Republican politician right now, because he’s the one trying to build a philosophy around what, for Trump, is gestural and intuitive.
Impulsive.
Vance goes to the Claremont Institute, in California, to accept an award and gives a speech, basically making an argument that in our philosophical understanding of what it means to be an American, we have erred in following Frederick Douglass and Abraham Lincoln, believing in creedal Americanism.
What Vance says in the speech is that there are billions of people in this world who might like to pledge allegiance to our flag, who would agree to the ideals of the Declaration of Independence —
I wish JD Vance and Trump would. Forgive me. But I guess they’re “real” Americans. Forgive me.
Vance argues that we can’t make them all Americans — that there is something distinctive about an American who can trace their lineage back to people who fought in our Civil War.
It was a very striking speech to me. My father, by the way, is a Brazilian immigrant — so immigration is quite close to my heart. But I think Vance is doing a couple of things with his argument. He’s mixing up immigration, which is a question of how many people we decide to let in, and this question of creedal Americanism.
He’s trying to say that the idea of being American is about what you believe is false, and it doesn’t give you a way to limit who’s an American. What we have to do is recognize and admit that bloodline, length of time, numbers of your family buried in cemeteries here, as he talks about all the time — that is what really decides it.
What’s your answer to that? I watched you get physically uncomfortable as I laid it out. I look forward to your podcast with JD.
I’m trying to get Marjorie Taylor Greene on first. But, look, you mentioned your lineage a little bit.
I remember my dad used to say — I said: Dad, when did we come out to San Francisco? He said: Well, my grandfather was here. He says he was an Irish cop even before San Francisco. He says he didn’t know what came first — the Irish cop or San Francisco. But they were immigrants who came through Indiana, came from County Cork, in Ireland.
I don’t know — is that, in JD’s view, enough — or do I have to go back to the 1680s? Are we real Americans? What’s his definition? And who’s going to decide?
This ethnonationalism concerns me. I just don’t think this is who we are. I’m not a deep thinker in this respect, and I’m not claiming to be, because I haven’t given it deep thought. But clearly they’re trying to make a point that I think California stands out as a counterpoint — in terms of economic growth, prosperity, innovation, dominance. You talk about the future — it’s happening every single day because of that vibrancy.
Half the A.I. researchers are Chinese. These guys are advancing some of the most — talk about vandalism and sand in the gears: I mean, look at all the international students. Except, I guess, we’re making carve-outs for Chinese students because I’m sure there are some carve-outs for something related to the Trump family businesses in relation to that.
This is literally part of the secret sauce of this country, and they’re putting all of that on the line because they’re looking at some vulgar version of lineage and ethnonationalism that concerns the hell out of me. I don’t even want to indulge too deeply in it.
That said, let me say this: I think one of the mistakes — and I may get in trouble for saying this about my party, and it’s the spirit of Clinton: We tend to focus so much on our interesting differences. We don’t focus on the things that unite us together.
Within the party or within the country?
Within our country.
I think that’s a mistake. I remember Clinton talking a lot about that. It’s many parts, but one body. In the spirit of Father Coz at Santa Clara University: We’re all bound together by this webbing, mutuality. But we have to find that thing that binds us together.
I think those founding documents you just referenced, the best of the Roman Republic and Greek democracy, this historic project of our founding fathers, it’s all in there. It’s the 27 grievances in that declaration — which again, I did read. And this notion that we can unite around those is critical. I think it’s the missing ingredient in our party. We need to assert that and affirm that. That’s why I talk about faith and family and patriotism — things that unite us all together. That’s what it means to be an American.
All those interesting differences — racial, religious, ethnic. But at the same time, we’re united around these fundamental values, these enduring values, these historic values that we’ve inherited — but we have to fight for.
Let me ask you then: What binds the Democratic Party together?
I’ve been writing about the big tent Democratic Party, what it would mean to build that. You said it more pithily than I have. You said in a recent interview, you want to see a party that goes from Manchin to Mamdani. What binds together a party that goes from Manchin to Mamdani?
I hear a lot of people say: Does this big tent not believe in anything? What do you think?
Give me a break. My grandfather talked about a Democratic Party that was a broad coalition. My kind of party. You brought people in. It’s about addition, not subtraction.
Come on, our party needs to be many parts, one body. So this idea of exclusion — that’s judgment. That’s purity. That’s getting into: I didn’t like the pronoun you used.
There was a year or two there where, for all of us — it took me aback, too. I wasn’t even participating, and I got pushback from my own staff saying: Why did you use that word?
We were all struggling through a post-George Floyd world and understandable racial justice and all these issues and sensitivity coming out of Covid.
A little less judgmental, a little more inclusive. If you believe in the death penalty, if you don’t believe in the death penalty, it doesn’t mean I don’t believe in you or your right to be part of our party.
If you believe in choice, but you don’t believe in late-term abortion, I’m not going to deny that.
If you have a more moderate construct as it relates to worker-centered policies or a more liberal one — we shouldn’t be excluding.
If you don’t believe in the minimum wage, but you believe in an earned-income tax credit — are you a Democrat or are you a corporate mod?
Our party needs to knit back together that coalition that helped build the world’s great middle class. So I don’t want to exclude the Manchins or the Mamdanis.
The thing that the Manchin and Mamdani line made me think a bit about is: What it would mean for the people who represent the Democratic Party nationally to seem like they simultaneously respected Joe Manchin and Zohran Mamdani?
Chuck Schumer did not endorse Zohran Mamdani, for instance. And I understand that Schumer probably has his disagreements. On the other side, the sort of people who might have seen Manchin — who, for all of my disagreements with him, and there were many, the guy was a genuine Democratic most valuable player. Holding a seat no one else could have held, that gave Democrats that 50-50 split in the Senate.
Drove me crazy, too. We all were driven mad.
That allowed Kamala Harris to break ties and pass the Inflation Reduction Act. Joe Manchin was the most valuable member of the Senate.
Yes, well said. But also drove us mad.
Drove us mad. But how does respect exist across disagreement at a time when social media and algorithmic media create a lot of incentive for line drawing? A lot of incentive for saying that you’re out and drawing our circles ever smaller?
Oh, my gosh. I’ve spent my life being on the outs and then back in, on the outs, back in. I don’t begrudge other people’s success. I don’t think you could be pro-job and anti-business. At the same time, I say: Businesses can’t thrive in a world that’s failing.
So who are you? You support a progressive tax, but not a wealth tax, and then you’re a corporate Democrat?
You’re right about the fine lines that are being drawn online, and these filter bubbles that we’re in only reinforce those lines.
You’re going to have an open primary. You’re going to have 25 candidates for president. My gosh. You’re going to see that on display on two gigantic stadium stages because you can’t even fit it on one, and every flavor of the party is going to be represented — from the democratic socialists, which are just the old progressives in my town, or Green Party folks, and the more moderate voices that “can win” those seven swing states.
We have to work through all of these. But again, with an open hand, not a closed fist — a little less judgment and a little bit of appreciation that this party — we got crushed in the last election. Donald Trump. It was Trump — just to remind us who beat us.
We need to find common ground, not just stand our ground to then hold the line so that we avoid the worst instincts of this president by extending a third term in the presidency.
I’m fascinated by what you have done since the election, which is that you seem more comfortable with contradiction and paradox in your own person than most people I see in politics.
I think in the upcoming election there are two lanes for a Democrat. You can say “shellacked” — a word that only exists when Democrats lose elections — [Laughs] I’ve never heard that word used in any other context — and we have to reach out to MAGA people. We have to listen, we have to talk to their side, go to the diners.
Or it could be that we need the resistance. We need to fight back. We need to troll them the way they’re trolling us on social media.
Those were sort of two different ideas you hear. And your answer was: Yeah, both.
Yes. My favorite book, one of the most influential books in my life, is called “Built to Last.” It’s about the tyranny of “or” versus the genius of “and”: both/and. I hate the vernacular, moving away from the binaries, but I really believe that it is both/and.
I come from a reality-based experience as a small business person. There’s a practical reality. You have to implement your ideals. None of this is an intellectual exercise, and you have to deal with cards that are dealt.
I have been as progressive and adventurous in terms of progressive policies as most, if not all, Democratic governors in this country. As a former mayor who did same-sex marriage in 2004, where my party was attacking me for being too progressive. At the same time, I was also advancing the Care Not Cash program to take welfare away from the homeless and guarantee housing in lieu of cash because I didn’t believe in the handout framework. I believed in opportunity and responsibility — more of a Clintonian frame in that. So it was: both/and.
I was trying to show not only respect to who I was in the past and my truth and authenticity — but also show respect to those I disagree with. Because I do respect people I disagree with. It’s not a zero-sum game.
I try to work with Donald Trump. I was on the tarmac with him. No governor in the country who worked with him more closely during Covid than I did.
At the same time, no one is being more aggressive, to your point, trolling and attacking back on Trump. I started when he got elected, saying: I want to work with him. But I started with a special session of my legislature — the only state that did this. It’s trust, but verify — and we fortified our litigation posture. This is the reason we have close to 50 lawsuits against the Trump administration. We have led the country because I knew it was going to come.
Both/and: To me, it’s not necessarily a paradox. It’s not a contradiction. It’s the human experience.
You’ve been working very effectively on the attentional level of politics.
I think the great sin of Democrats, attentionally, in recent years, is that they are the party of the institutions. People got all A’s. Went to Harvard.
And when you go through a lot of institutions, you’re formed by them. You become careful and cautious. The thing you don’t want to do is offend everybody at a meeting.
Yes. Well said.
That worked for a previous era of attention when everything was decided by who The New York Times decided to cover, by who would get on network news.
Ezra Klein’s podcast. [Laughs.]
Although, that doesn’t work for me because I won’t have anybody on who’s boring. Podcasts do not like people who speak in a very structured way.
Yes, I agree with that.
You can’t do a good podcast with a politician when you can watch them buffering before they answer. We’ve been talking for a long time. In this medium, for this long, it doesn’t work. It’s a way that the media changes who succeeds in them.
Yes, it’s true, too.
You seem pretty comfortable with risk.
Yes.
Your debate with Ron DeSantis was on Fox News with Sean Hannity moderating. I went back and watched that the other day.
God help you. [Laughs.]
God help us all. I’ve met a lot of Democrats who are more worried about things going wrong in their communication than about something going right.
Ezra, I’m a fail-forward-fast guy. You miss 100 percent of the shots you don’t take. I got a 960 on my SAT — I wasn’t one of those straight-A students at Harvard.
I can’t read. You’ve never seen me read a speech. I can’t read a speech. I have severe dyslexia, a learning disability that has defined me and who I am — my struggles, my insecurities, my anxieties, but also my willingness to try new things and learn from my mistakes.
You’ve got a lot of facts you’ve been spitting at me. How do you learn?
I absorb a lot. I observe. It’s just harder. I have to do hundreds and hundreds of reps. Some folks do one or two reps. But in that process, you overcompensate, and you then develop all of these other skills that have been gifts and allow you to read a room.
It allows you to pivot, allows you to be a little bit more flexible. Dare I say, even more authentic. That’s who I am. I can’t be someone I’m not. I’m not good at being someone I’m not. I’m not comfortable faking it. There are so many things in politics I’m not good at. The one good thing, though, is I think politics is radically changing. I think it’s rewarding a little bit more authenticity. Trump has sort of broken through this morass.
We’re all getting roughed up a little bit here, and we’ve all made mistakes. We haven’t talked about my legendary mistakes. You have to own up to them. It’s who you are. It shapes you — as long as you learn from them and don’t repeat them.
So I’m just constantly trying new things. I don’t have all the answers. I seek them. But again, with a willingness to fall flat on my face. Yes.
So I’ve always had a different mind-set in that respect. I’ve tried to encourage that, and I try to govern in that space. So I’ll take the hits. We tend to be months or years ahead of others on a lot of issues, and that’s risky. You get a lot of arrows in your back, but you also pave the way for others to be smarter and learn from that and attack in a perhaps more electorally successful space.
So I’m happy to be that guy. I don’t need to be president. It’s not about that. I didn’t wake up with some strategic plan. The idea that I’m even sitting here, and people talk about this, that’s beyond me.
I thought I wouldn’t last through a recall. You talk about humility: Seeing your name on a recall ballot? One of my kids had to be home-schooled because it was so humiliating for her. You can’t go outside, you can’t walk the streets without seeing signs.
Getting through that and getting to the other side — I mean, this has been a hell of a seven years as a governor of California. The most blessed and cursed state, from historic wildfires and droughts and floods and social unrest.
I’m one of the few governors left from the Covid era. There’s only a handful of us who could talk about all those scars and the mistakes that were made and the lessons learned and the humility that comes with that.
So I’m on the other side. And I think if people have noticed anything about me it’s that you feel that a little bit. I’m smashmouth about some of this stuff.
I think that Trump is one of the most destructive presidents and human beings in my lifetime. I think this republic is at real risk of becoming unrecognizable, and I have no patience for people who want to indulge it. I can’t stand the crony capitalism. I can’t stand all these supplicants who are sitting there bending the knee to this president. I can’t stand the universities that have done that, the law firms that have done that, the individual corporate leaders that have done that, other governors — maybe Democrats and Republicans — that have been complicit in this moment.
This guy is reckless. He’s a wreck. This country will not have a fair and free election if we don’t continue to fight. That’s what matters to me. Seriously.
I’m the future ex-governor. Who the hell knows what happens the rest of my life? Except one thing I know that matters in the rest of my life is I have to look at my kids in the [expletive] eye. I mean that seriously. That’s not a politician thing. To look them in the eye, not in peril of being judged. So that’s what animates me. It’s not some grand plan.
So paradox? Bring it on. Contradictions? Bring it on. Or contradictions that I think I can explain, perhaps — evolutions.
We didn’t get into trans sports. That’s an issue no one wants to hear about because 80 percent of the people listening disagree with my position on this. But it comes from my heart, not just my head. It wasn’t a political evolution.
Your position being?
I want to see trans kids. I have a trans godson. There’s no governor who has signed more pro-trans legislation than I have. No one has been a stronger advocate for the L.G.B.T.Q. community.
But you have to accommodate the reality of those whose rights are being taken away as we advance the rights of the trans community, in terms of the fairness of athletic competition.
And I just think that’s not a bigoted position. And it’s an example of some of the things I’ve been saying about being judgmental, dismissing people, throwing that person out of the party.
You want to talk about cancel culture? I’ve lived it on that issue alone, despite a record of 30 years. And people are willing to say: I’m done. I’ve lost friendships on that position.
That position, by the way, came to me two years before, when I had to try to accommodate a trans athlete and another athlete who were in the state finals at track and field. They both dropped out because we couldn’t figure out a way to make it fair. It was so unfair to both their families. It broke my heart. I tried for two years to figure out how to do this.
So I was asked: Is it fair? I’m like: I don’t know. I don’t know how to make it fair, but these people just want to survive. Where’s our grace and dignity about this community, at the same time?
So this is life. It’s not linear. It’s circular. It’s not just politics.
And I just want to bring a little life back to my politics. I’ve got a year left. I’ve got an expiration sell-by date. I’m on a milk carton.
To the extent I want to hold the line and push back against Trump, I’ll take no back seat to anybody else. To the extent you want to throw me into the mix with these 12 other remarkable leaders — they’re all friends, I’m going to see them all tomorrow at the D.G.A., half of them governors, the other half great senators and legislative leaders in Congress — what a humble and extraordinary thing.
That’s something you pinch yourself about — going back to the 960 SAT kid who couldn’t read in the back of the class.
I’ve been very careful not to ask you about 2028, so I’m not letting you go there yet. But as we wrap up a little bit, I do want to talk about a different tension, paradox, contradiction.
That was my way of getting ahead of it, so you didn’t have to ask about it.
I know, I know. You’re not going to say anything interesting if I ask you about 2028.
No, I won’t.
One of the contradictions and tensions that I do find interesting is: Toward the end of your conversation with Andrew Ross Sorkin, you talked about wanting to be a repairer of the breach.
Oh, Isaiah. Yes.
Hell, in my own job, I feel this is hard. We have an attentional world right now. We’re all very far apart, and the stakes are very high. And everything you said about Donald Trump and more is true.
I think to describe reality honestly is to say things that, if you’re a fan of Donald Trump, are going to be hard to hear.
To get attention, you need conflict. You have been, without any peer, the most successful elected Democrat this year in getting social media attention by mimicking Trump’s style, talking about JD Vance’s love of couches.
Yes. Forgive me.
Selling kneepads.
Don’t forgive me — you should buy them. A lot of people have sold out, and so have the kneepads.
It’s a good joke. But there is a tension between getting attention by leaning into conflict and being a repairer of the breach.
I’m curious, because I think you are sincere in all of these directions: How do you think about that tension?
There are so many situational politics. Now we have to deal with the reality at hand. I can’t wait to hold hands, light a candle. Everyone who says that is right.
There are plenty of people who are already auditioning for president of the United States, and they say: We just need to focus on a positive alternative agenda that is economically inclusive and addresses these trends.
And they’re right. There’s a world post-Trump. But right now, we have to protect and preserve our republic, this democracy. It’s code red. This guy has masked men all across this country, and people are disappearing in real time — it’s still happening. You have federalized National Guards still in California. You had 700 active-duty Marines in the United States of America, in the second largest city in my state.
You had this guy put BORTAC teams out near Dodger Stadium on Election Day to chill free expression, free speech and a free election just a few weeks ago in California. This guy is not screwing around.
We have to fight fire with fire. That’s what Proposition 50 is.
The redistricting initiative.
Yes. That’s what we’ve tried to do with our social media to enter into these conversations. That, by the way, helped aid and abet the fact that we were able to raise almost $120 million in 90 days to get Proposition 50 passed and to build the political coalition to make that happen.
So substance, not just style. For all the kneepads and everything else, there’s a utility for doing it. It’s not just mockery, it’s not just trolling. It actually, for me, serves a bigger purpose.
But in terms of how we get to the other side, in terms of how we lock hands moving forward, how we govern, the next president of the United States needs to be prepared.
We can’t keep this up. We’re polarized, we’re traumatized, we’re exhausted. I can’t even conceive of three more years of this.
What’s happening to our kids — their brains are already being scrambled by social media and everything else we didn’t even talk about. But this is their role model? A guy who calls someone a retard? A guy who calls someone a piggy? This is our role model? The president of the United States?
You go back now and listen to Obama’s brilliant speech at the 2004 Democratic National Convention, it sounds naive. You can feel the power in it — that we’re not red and blue, we’re not as divided —
Ah, so good. I love it.
But we are that divided, actually.
[Newsom laughs.]
But one thing I see you playing with — again, between the podcast and the social media, between sitting down with Kirk and Bannon and trolling Trump and Vance — is a “both/and” politics.
I don’t know where that goes for you or for anybody, but I think there are some interesting questions in it. What does it mean to say that the other side of this is not unity or common ground, much less an end to disagreement — but some kind of living amid the disagreement that is more like the way a good family handles it?
Despite the fact we struggle every Thanksgiving — I did again this year with some members of the family who see the world with a different set of eyes — it goes back to the fundamental point that divorce is not a damn option. It just isn’t.
Back to Clinton: He talked about defining the terms of our future. At the end of the day, we don’t have a choice. There’s no leak on your side of our boat. We rise and fall together.
I just think this notion of bringing humanity back is not only good politics, it’s just human decency. Look, I’m sorry. I’m sitting here with Ezra Klein, but the first thing I should say is it’s an abundance mind-set. It’s not a scarcity mind-set.
This notion goes back to what you were saying about JD Vance and that speech he gave, this notion that it is scarcity, it’s zero-sum, that something is being taken away. I don’t live like that in California. It has always been abundance. There’s only one dream: the American dream. Oh, and the California dream.
It’s all about an abundance mind-set. If something doesn’t exist, we have to invent it. There’s a sense of limitlessness in that.
Then, as always, our final question: What are three books or, given your turn to podcasting, three podcasts you’d recommend to the audience?
I wasn’t joking about it “Built to Last.” It’s so interesting to have a book that shaped me early on, when I was aspiring to be a small-business person. I got right out of college, took pen to paper and came up with an idea to open a little store with 13 investors. I had one part-time employee, Pat Kelly, and she said: You have to read the book “Built to Last.”
It was about a Stanford academic who was studying what works, what makes companies endure, and it talked about being a clock builder versus a timekeeper. Talked about the genius of “and” versus the tyranny of “or.” It changed my mind-set and my outlook in political terms, not just in business terms.
I hate to bring this book up because it’s such a universally obvious book. I had never read it. I’ve had 10 copies. I finally picked it up off the shelf. I was like: What the heck? “Meditations” from Marcus Aurelius. Now I’m like: Where the hell have I been?
See? You get into podcasting and immediately, the Stoics. You can’t be a podcaster and not get into the Stoics.
I’m telling you, how could you not? Perhaps there’s never been more important and impactful words ever written, and they were written by the most powerful leaders in the world, thousands of years ago.
That book doesn’t do it for me. I’ve read it.
It was never a book for publication, as you know, so it was not intended to inspire.
The thing I don’t always get with it is that: Yes, if I could just not worry about all this, I wouldn’t. If I could just look at all the problems in my life, and think: Eh, can’t change what I can’t change — I’d do it. [Laughs.]
I read something very different. It’s not about denying the existence of things. It’s about understanding what you can influence.
I don’t think it’s about denying. I would say it lacks a practice.
I see the opposite. That’s so interesting. I think it expresses the practice, and that is: You can control what you can control. You can’t control the third thing. And that’s powerful.
This notion of accountability, responsibility, agency and taking accountability — I just think that’s powerful.
But it’s the core of minor psychology, as well, in terms of just this notion that we have agency and we can shape things and change the future.
My inbox after admitting that I don’t love the book — I’m in bad shape.
Yes, you’re in trouble. All those Stoics out there listening.
And only because I was with Andrew yesterday, and I did promise I was going to read “1929.” [Laughs.]
You can’t recommend it if you haven’t read it.
No, I just started reading it.
Oh, you did start. OK.
I haven’t finished it, but I actually, legitimately, just started reading it. So it’s the one that is actually, truthfully on the proverbial night stand.
Governor Gavin Newsom, I really enjoyed it. Thank you very much.
Thank you, Ezra.
You can listen to this conversation by following “The Ezra Klein Show” on the NYTimes app, Apple, Spotify, Amazon Music, YouTube, iHeartRadio or wherever you get your podcasts. View a list of book recommendations from our guests here.
This episode of “The Ezra Klein Show” was produced by Rollin Hu. Fact-checking by Michelle Harris. Our senior engineer is Jeff Geld, with additional mixing by Isaac Jones. Our executive producer is Claire Gordon. The show’s production team also includes Marie Cascione, Annie Galvin, Kristin Lin, Emma Kehlbeck, Jack McCordick, Marina King and Jan Kobal. Original music by Pat McCusker and Aman Sahota. Audience strategy by Kristina Samulewski and Shannon Busta. The director of New York Times Opinion Audio is Annie-Rose Strasser. Transcript editing by Andrea Gutierrez, Sarah Murphy and Marlaine Glicksman.
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