The Contradictions of Gavin Newsom

Gavin Newsom is the 2028 Democratic front-runner. That’s what many of the polls and the Polymarket betting odds say. It’s been widely believed that Newsom wants to run for president someday. But belief that he could be a front-runner was less common. A liberal white guy from a state that much of the country considers badly governed just didn’t seem like the profile the Democratic Party was looking for. But as a Californian who has watched Newsom for a long time, I was surprised by him this year. After President Trump returned to the White House, Newsom started a podcast, interviewing people like Charlie Kirk, Steve Bannon and Michael Savage, which made a lot of Democrats mad. At the same time, Newsom turned himself into the leader of the resistance — trolling Trump on social media and pushing a ballot initiative to end California’s independent redistricting to counter the partisan redistricting effort in Texas. Newsom has been willing to try things and take risks. He has shown a feel for this moment — in politics and in the way attention works now. But it’s still true that he runs a state that the country considers badly governed. California tops the rankings of unaffordable states, at a time when affordability has become a central electoral issue. In this conversation, I ask Newsom about all of this — what he learned this year from talking to figures on the right, how he thinks the Democratic Party can win back voters it lost, why California is so unaffordable and what he’s doing about it. Mentioned: Applebee’s America by Ron Fournier, Douglas B. Sosnik and Matthew J. Dowd “And, This Is Charlie Kirk” “And, This Is Gaming Culture & Gen-Z Nihilism With Content Creator Brandon “Atrioc” Ewing” “And, This Is Michael Savage” “And, This Is Steve Bannon” “Newsom Says Trump’s Attacks Are ‘Not Normal’” “Barack Obama 2004 Democratic National Convention Keynote Speech” Book Recommendations: Built to Last by Jim Collins, Jerry I. Porras Meditations by Marcus Aurelius 1929 by Andrew Ross Sorkin Thoughts? Guest suggestions? Email us at [email protected]. You can find transcripts (posted midday) and more episodes of “The Ezra Klein Show” at nytimes.com/ezra-klein-podcast, and you can find Ezra on Twitter @ezraklein. Book recommendations from all our guests are listed at https://www.nytimes.com/article/ezra-klein-show-book-recs. This episode of “The Ezra Klein Show” was 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.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:31Ezra Klein?

  That Gavin Newsom, the governor of California, might want to run for president someday. I mean, that's been widely believed for a long time. That Gavin Newsom, the governor of California, would have a chance if he ran for president. That was less widely believed. 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 2020 Democratic nominee, Newsom is far ahead of anyone else. Jonathan Martin, Politico's senior political columnist,

• 1:15Ezra Klein?

  he wrote a piece entitled, "Admit It: Gavin Newsom is the 2028 frontrunner." 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 surprised me. He's taking risks. He's trying new things. He's a feel for this moment, not just in politics, but in attention and in how attention now works in a way that very few other Democrats have demonstrated. And he just doesn't seem,

• 2:00Ezra Klein?

  in the way so many Democrats seem afraid. He doesn't seem afraid of trying things and failing. Doesn't seem afraid of making his own side angry. Doesn't seem afraid of experimenting. It's working for him. It began right after the election when Newsom launched a podcast where he began interviewing people like Charlie Kirk, Steve Bannon, Newt Gingrich, Michael Savage. I mean, that podcast pissed Democrats off. I heard from many of them. But I watched him in those episodes. I thought, he's listening. And I wonder what he's learning from them. And 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 terms of president who talks

• 2:45Ezra Klein?

  about everyone else. And it worked. Suddenly, I was getting sent left and right Newsom tweets of all things. And then when Texas began its mid-cycle redistricting, Newsom did something many found shocking. He pushed a ballot initiative to pause California's independent redistricting, a huge point of pride in California, and something he had, by the way, supported, and instead created these highly partisan maps to counter Texas. And that ballot initiative, which could have failed, it would have looked terrible if it failed, passed overwhelmingly. But Newsom's problem as a leader for the Democratic Party is what it has always been. Look, California, in my view, is the greatest state in the

• 3:25Ezra Klein?

  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 state in the nation. Newsom has signed many good bills, done many good things, but he has not fixed that. So I want to have Newsom on the show to talk through what he's learned from the right, what he believes must be the future of the Democratic Party, and how he answers California's manifold critics. As always, my email, as [email protected].

• 4:09Ezra Klein?

  Governor Gavin Newsom, welcome to the show.

• 4:11Gavin Newsom?

  It's great to be with you.

• 4:12Ezra Klein?

  Can't believe I was on your podcast before you were online.

• 4:15Gavin Newsom?

  Well, that's the way it should be. I mean, I needed some numbers. I needed some audience. So, thank you for providing that. I'm grateful.

• 4:21Ezra Klein?

  I'm happy to help. So, I've been watching interviews with you recently. Everybody starts by asking you about the Democratic Party.

• 4:27Gavin Newsom?

  Yeah.

• 4:27Ezra Klein?

  I want to ask you about the right. I am always struck by how much of the modern right comes out of California. See, you have Breitbart, California.

• 4:36Gavin Newsom?

  It's interesting.

• 4:36Ezra Klein?

  You have Ben Shapiro and the Daily Wire begin in California. Stephen Miller grows up in California. Peter Thiel, Curtis Yarvin was based in California. The Claremont Institute, the intellectual home of Trumpism. Why do you think that is, that California's birthed so much of the modern right?

• 4:52Gavin Newsom?

  Well, look, it's the size of 21 state populations combined. So, you have to put it in perspective. I mean, there's nothing like it in scale and size and scope. You have more Republicans in California than most states have population. So, you have to put all of that in perspective. So, by definition, in a very pluralistic state, you know, its politics is very diverse, even despite the fact of its perception of being a big, blue state. You look at a map, 2/3 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, that really forged-

• 5:25Ezra Klein?

  My county.

• 5:26Gavin Newsom?

  Your county, forged sort of the modern construct of Reaganism and Nixon, these guys that came from that frame. So, in that respect, it's not surprising. But the Stephen Miller, I think that's interesting because there's this dialectic, right? There's sort of that pushback to sort of orthodoxy and that friction that emerges and people that emerge from that merge with a very strong point of view.

• 5:49Ezra Klein?

  I know some of these guys. I don't know some of the others. Do you think there's something to 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.

• 6:03Gavin Newsom?

  Yeah.

• 6:04Ezra Klein?

  And a lot of them felt like they were watching-

• 6:10Ezra Klein?

  What they believed in get encircled. And it seems to me it created a kind of conservatism that is much more apocalyptic, much more ethno-nationalist.

• 6:19Gavin Newsom?

  Certainly ethno-nationalist.

• 6:21Ezra Klein?

  Much more about trying to stop where things are going rather than preserve like the best of.

• 6:28Gavin Newsom?

  Yeah, I mean, Ron Bronstein's 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 pre-1960s world on voting rights, civil rights, LGBTQ rights, women's rights, et cetera. And look, you think about that in the context, or I think about in the context of California in your question, to me, that peaked in my sort of modern construct, meaning in terms of contemporary space in 1994 with Pete Wilson, a Republican governor.

• 6:57Speaker 02

  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.

• 7:10Speaker 03

  Wilson believes he has touched a nerve. He is backing Proposition 187, which would deny illegal immigrants services like healthcare and public education for their children.

• 7:22Gavin Newsom?

  And on that same ballot was the beginning of the end of affirmative action, which occurred at the UC Regents shortly thereafter. But Prop 187 was all about pushback, you know, it was xenophobia, the nativism, the pushback against immigration, peak 1994.

• 7:37Speaker 04

  They keep coming. Two million illegal immigrants in California. The federal government won't stop them at the border, yet requires us to pay billions to take care of them. Enough is enough. Governor Pete Wilson.

• 7:51Speaker 02

  Those against 187 were heard in the streets, but not at the polls.

• 7:55Gavin Newsom?

  And of course, his ascendency, running for election, reelection, was all about his presidential aspirations as well.

• 8:02Speaker 05

  I am seeking the presidency of the United States.

• 8:07Speaker 05

  The values that guided us for 200 years are suddenly under siege, and so is America.

• 8:14Gavin Newsom?

  So it was directional, not just in California, but growing across the United States. So we've had this for decades. I mean, there's a familiarity here. But, you know, the response to that is also interesting. And I think in many respects, the response to Prop 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.

• 8:42Ezra Klein?

  What clues?

• 8:43Gavin Newsom?

  In terms of rebuilding the party. It was about grassroots. 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. So, you know, I think about it now in the context of where we were in 2004 as well, in terms of where our party is, where 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 America Progress. We built Democracy Alliance. We started organizing millennials. We started organizing Hispanics. We started focusing on mobile, local, social, cloud,

• 9:27Gavin Newsom?

  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 53% popular vote two years after that, 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 '06 that set that course.

• 9:50Ezra Klein?

  So I have to think about the '04 analogy. I don't think, I think probably the Democratic Party was more shattered and broken after 2024, but I think people who don't remember 2004 and how bad that felt can miss. And in the sense that the Democratic Party lost touch with the heartland, it had to be a completely different thing.

• 10:07Gavin Newsom?

  I was reading books about going to Applebee's, Applebee's America. It was all about, you know, it was about appearing less French. You can't have, you know, Hermes ties anymore. I mean, it was all about the heart. It was, I mean, it's so familiar, so many of this stuff. All this stuff echoes over and over and over and over again.

• 10:22Ezra Klein?

  But so 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, horning in on our territory here. I gotta say, I didn't.

• 10:32Gavin Newsom?

  You really didn't.

• 10:33Ezra Klein?

  Well, you've actually had a podcast before.

• 10:35Speaker 06

  Man, what's happening, man? You got more shine, beast mode, Lynch. Doug Hendrickson. And Gavin Newsom, and you're listening to Politic.

• 10:44Ezra Klein?

  Talk about podcasts, I didn't expect you to have that probably beat this one. But I would not have expected you to start with Charlie Kirk as your first guest.

• 10:52Gavin Newsom?

  Yeah.

• 10:53Ezra Klein?

  Steve Bannon.

• 10:53Gavin Newsom?

  Yeah.

• 10:54Ezra Klein?

  Dr. Phil.

• 10:55Gavin Newsom?

  Michael Savage.

• 10:56Ezra Klein?

  I mean, I've watched you in these interviews. You're listening.

• 11:00Gavin Newsom?

  Yeah.

• 11:00Ezra Klein?

  You're looking for threads of interest and agreement. I've watched you, Bannon, tell you repeatedly how the 2020 election was stolen. You just let the pitches go right.

• 11:08Gavin Newsom?

  Because, I mean, how many debates have we had about that?

• 11:11Ezra Klein?

  I take the point.

• 11:12Gavin Newsom?

  He's wrong, and it's exhausting.

• 11:13Ezra Klein?

  I want to ask what has stayed with you from these conversations? What you have been learning across a couple of them? So let's start with Kirk. What for you was the most resonant point Charlie Kirk made? And I don't mean that you have to have agreed with it. Just something that

• 11:29Gavin Newsom?

  Appreciate it.

• 11:29Ezra Klein?

  has made the way you think about the world a little bit different.

• 11:33Gavin Newsom?

  I thought there was a sincerity, a deeper sincerity than I 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.

• 11:54Charlie Kirk?

  Right around, I'd say, 2021, we had a goal. Could we move the youth vote 10 points over 10 years? And we

• 12:02Gavin Newsom?

  And it was that literally you sat down and put that numerical together?

• 12:05Charlie 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, was that this demographic is disproportionately to the Democrat side. We believe Democrats were taking them for granted.

• 12:19Gavin Newsom?

  And someone that understood more deeply the pain that young men are facing and struggling with.

• 12:24Charlie 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.

• 12:42Gavin Newsom?

  And was able to do something about it and give them hope and recognize that society is failing young men. And someone that clearly was playing an outsized influence even greater than I fully understood in terms of supporting the base of the MAGA movement.

• 12:54Ezra Klein?

  What part of his perspective on how society is failing young men felt?

• 13:01Ezra Klein?

  Reasonable to you, recognizable to you, and which part?

• 13:06Gavin Newsom?

  I mean, look, and we all know, I mean, 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 about a number of other interesting guests. Atriak and others went down to TwitchCon and was there with a lot of gamers and really sort of trying to get into the belly of the beast of understanding where young men are in this pain and suffering, this isolation that's turning increasingly to grievance, that they'll never going to do better than their parents, they're never going to get out of that room with three roommates, they're never going to get, even they can't even afford rent because they can't even afford the first two months payment on the rent, let alone buy a home. And this nihilism, he understood, certainly Trump understood it as well. He took advantage of it, but they have no prescriptions to address it and deal with it.

• 13:50Gavin Newsom?

  So where it fell short, 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.

• 14:08Ezra Klein?

  Isn't there a prescription, I think if I were to try to boil it down, tariffs, a closed border, and Christianity?

• 14:14Gavin Newsom?

  Christianity is a big part. That was also telling. You know, I lazily said, you know, Jesus, and he got offended. And then I said it again, and I realized, boy, I really am offended. Forgive me for being... And I didn't understand how deeply held his faith was and how much of an organizing principle it is for them as well. And how these rallies and everything, that's interesting, just that merger in terms of creating community, sense of belonging, meaning, identity, that's hard to break.

• 14:41Ezra Klein?

  I mean, he was trying to build the new Christian right.

• 14:43Gavin Newsom?

  Yeah, and Trump understands that. It gives people meaning and purpose. It's powerful. I mean, I imagine it's like, you know, I haven't been to a Bernie rally necessarily, but it seems, you know, not dissimilar, but even more, I mean, 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.

• 15:03Ezra Klein?

  Are your religions sort of spiritual at all?

• 15:04Gavin Newsom?

  Yeah, spiritual, more than religious. As my dad would say about, I went to Catholic schools and went to a Jesuit university. I'm Catholic of kind of the distant kind. I'll go to church on Christmas. You know, I'm one of those. But I feel deep connection to my faith beyond that in a spiritual sense. And Jesuit upbringing really has defined me. St. Francis is my, 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's really shaped me in that respect. So I attached that. I don't dismiss that when I talk to someone like Charlie. I respect that deeply. I admire that. But look, there's a lot of grievance there.

• 15:46Gavin Newsom?

  But there's also a lot of grievance I have in this space that my party's completely neglected this space. That we haven't been organizing the campuses, but we haven't been organizing young men. We haven't been addressing their societal screams, their concerns. They're legitimate. Suicide rate, 4X that of women, dropout rates, the deaths of despair. We have men that 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 listen to that podcast, was so excited Charlie Kirk was coming on because his algorithms are saying that Andrew Tate is innocent and this guy Peterson is an unbelievable thought leader up in Canada. And Joe Rogan is the best and, you know, and Charlie Kirk, you really get to need to know him, dad.

• 16:31Gavin Newsom?

  And start to wake up to this reality that Democratic Party needs to wake up to. And that's again, that's the entry into why did this podcast and had those folks on as first guests.

• 16:42Ezra Klein?

  I thought one of the most interesting shows you did was with the streamer Atrioch.

• 16:46Gavin Newsom?

  Yeah, thank you.

• 16:47Ezra Klein?

  Yeah. What did you take from that conversation?

• 16:49Gavin Newsom?

  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.

• 16:59Speaker 08

  I do want to start talking about Gen Z men.

• 17:01Gavin Newsom?

  Yeah.

• 17:02Speaker 08

  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, their thoughts a lot. They range from angry to openly nihilistic.

• 17:17Gavin Newsom?

  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.

• 17:39Speaker 08

  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, there, 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.

• 17:57Gavin Newsom?

  It was remarkable. It kept coming over and over and over.

• 18:00Speaker 08

  Once you feel like you can get on that ladder, you're okay. You can, you can calm down, you can find a party, you can vote. But if you can't see that, it's what's the point? Why, why am I doing it? Why am I working this job for a boss I hate, for wages that are only okay? I'm never gonna get another step up.

• 18:16Gavin Newsom?

  And it was not just illuminating, it woke me up. Wake up. Wake up Democratic Party. Wake up, everybody. People are suffering and struggling. Trump understood that in a contemporary term. I didn't understand that in this 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 that were true. All that said, ah, 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. And with Atriarch, he kept bringing

• 19:00Gavin Newsom?

  that back, that systemically, for decades, this economy has not been working. 10% of people own 2/3 the wealth, half the consumer spending is that top 10%. The stock market is seven damn stocks, maybe 10, but primarily seven, mostly in California. And so, that reality, he burst in a way that pierced me even more than all the intellectual punditry, the things you've written and other people have written, because he brought it home.

• 19:27Speaker 08

  You didn't have to make it personal here, man.

• 19:31Gavin Newsom?

  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.

• 19:40Ezra Klein?

  But you needed to, I think somebody listening to this could say, like, 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. I mean, what, when you say it burst a bubble for you, how was that bubble existing?

• 20:01Gavin Newsom?

  My own rhetoric, I was so stubborn. I'm talking about some of my rhetorical posture, not my understanding. I mean, look, I'm the guy that did $20 minimum wage for fast food workers. No other government country has done that. 25 for healthcare workers. Doubled the earned income tax credit. That has universal healthcare, regardless of pre-existing condition, 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, that was so much part of the rhetoric, this sort of defensive posture, that inflation was cooling from that 9.1% and jobs market was growing. We were the envy of the world, Economist Magazine, everybody else, GDP growth.

• 20:46Gavin Newsom?

  It just landed flat.

• 20:49Ezra Klein?

  America's already great.

• 20:50Gavin Newsom?

  Yeah. And Trump understood. So it was the rhetoric, not the reality that I'm trying to make.

• 20:55Ezra Klein?

  But let me get at this rhetoric reality landing flat because I do think there's something pretty deep here. When you used to defend Biden to me and to others, that the word you would use about his governance, not necessarily his communication, is a masterclass.

• 21:07Gavin Newsom?

  I agree.

• 21:08Ezra Klein?

  Right? You, and you were, I think, 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.

• 21:30Ezra Klein?

  Reality voting. Was the policy not actually that good? Was it just unable to overcome the reality? What broke?

• 21:38Gavin Newsom?

  Well, the policy was extraordinary.

• 21:40Ezra Klein?

  But so why then did it not make people happier?

• 21:42Gavin Newsom?

  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 one. 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 Esler Klein. But no one understands better than the person sitting across.

• 22:00Ezra Klein?

  Sure, you say that to all the podcasters.

• 22:02Gavin Newsom?

  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 sort of the pluralistic realities of how you actually manifest and implement these ideals. And that's challenging. And that plays out in 50 states. It plays, I mean, I just think about my own, you live in the Bay Area. There's 101 jurisdictions in the Bay Area alone. There's hundreds of special districts, JPAs and transit districts. In addition to that, to get anything done, how you break that down. You imagine from the presidential perspective, CHIPS and Science Act and the IRA and the tax credits, et cetera. Having that framework, localism is still determinative.

• 22:47Gavin Newsom?

  And now you can drive a lot of reforms on NEPA, CEQA in California, et cetera. But localism still outweighs so much of that. And so from a communication perspective, that should have been perhaps 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.

• 23:29Gavin Newsom?

  That's where greatness is. That's where greatness lies. And that's what I believe was the masterclass of the administration was able to create a framework to build again at scale, 1.2 trillion dollar infrastructure package, the IRA, so we can compete against our most fierce competitor, China, in low carbon, green growth. They delivered 369 billion dollars. The reality, though, obviously, is that Trump will take advantage of a lot of those investments, but he's also taking advantage of the narrative of destruction.

• 24:03Ezra Klein?

  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, is liberal democracy will not work if policy cannot deliver at the speed of elections.

• 24:19Gavin Newsom?

  At the speed of elections?

• 24:21Ezra Klein?

  When Democrats get to the point where they are endlessly justifying why everything is so slow. My favorite example of this is that when Medicare 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, passed negotiating down Medicare drug prices. The way it was designed, and you can blame corporate influence and 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. And so just in time for Donald Trump to take advantage of it. If you break the cord between the things that Gavin Newsom is doing and Joe

• 25:05Ezra Klein?

  Biden is doing, and what people can feel, how are voters supposed to make?

• 25:11Gavin Newsom?

  Well, I think that's why they have turned to Orban, and you've got more authoritarian leanings. I mean, it's why we were all just reverential a decade ago, and Freeman and others writing breathlessly about the China model and how they're going to clean our clock. People, yeah, 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, you know, vis and consent. We believe in due process and transparency. We don't believe in cronyism, or perhaps we don't.

• 25:44Ezra Klein?

  Yeah, 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?

• 25:50Gavin Newsom?

  So, look, I'm trying to do that in real time. One of the things that I look back on my term is if there were a mistake, there's policy things, things I certainly should have, could have did. But this notion of compromise and being complicit in that process, as you suggest, where we're just, you know, all these interest groups, everything else, and we just want to work through. And we're making progress, feels good. So we went 80% of the way. 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 mindset

• 26:35Gavin Newsom?

  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.

• 26:50Ezra Klein?

  Let's take as a premise that the model where you walk in and you hand Donald Trump, sometimes non metaphorically, a gift made of gold to get good deals from him.

• 27:03Gavin Newsom?

  Yeah, I think it's, it's.

• 27:05Ezra Klein?

  It's bad.

• 27:06Gavin Newsom?

  It's not bad. It's corrosive beyond words. It's extraordinary what's happening.

• 27:10Ezra Klein?

  We'll go with that.

• 27:10Gavin Newsom?

  Yeah.

• 27:12Ezra Klein?

  The model where government doesn't deliver is also corrosive. You have, you have a great metaphor in your book, Citizenville, where you say that people treat government like a vending machine.

• 27:25Gavin Newsom?

  Yeah.

• 27:26Ezra Klein?

  And they go, they put their tax dollars into it. And when nothing comes out, they begin shaking the machine.

• 27:31Gavin Newsom?

  Yeah, you kick the machine.

• 27:32Ezra Klein?

  If Gavin Newsom, or if somebody Gavin Newsom likes, was doing. Doge, but the thing Doge claimed to be.

• 27:40Gavin Newsom?

  We have been doing it. I started Doge. We spell Doge O D I. Started in 2019.

• 27:45Ezra Klein?

  That's sort of worse than Doge.

• 27:46Gavin Newsom?

  Well, I agree. It's Office of Digital Innovation. Now it's Office of Data Innovation. So it's I made it even worse again. And it's and we've performed our procurement. We've reformed our civil service system. We have advanced more gen AI 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 I didn't get the kind of attention that running around on stage with a, you know, uh, who is that guy?

• 28:12Ezra Klein?

  Chainsaw.

• 28:13Gavin Newsom?

  Yeah, chainsaw with our Argentinian president or dictator and chief would have generated. I'll give you a specific. We've installed more green energy projects last year than any other time in history. 7,000 megawatts. We just had the largest solar in Fresno County, $5,2300 megawatt project, Darden, the largest battery solar 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 permits for an above-ground storage facility, the first in half a century in California.

• 28:49Gavin Newsom?

  We're doing the same with housing. Forty-two CQ reform bills I've signed, infill housing reforms, ADU reforms. We can get into all that as it relates to single-family housing reforms, everything that you have wrote and 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, I think, woken, better wake our party up to that's what people want to see, but for good, not for destructive purposes.

• 29:17Ezra Klein?

  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 sort of understand what Savage culturally represented and why it was so surprising to see him on your show. So how would you describe who Savage was in his heyday?

• 29:32Gavin Newsom?

  Savage was, I mean, this guy 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, you know, someone who was sitting there in the heart of. The region and attacking 24 seven, the culture and the community and the values. And remember, the modern MAGA movement, you could deeply argue started with Michael Savage. That's why we thought he was an important guest.

• 29:59Speaker 04

  If I were running, I would run a campaign of borders, language and culture. Say, well, what do you stand for, Mr. Savage? Borders, language and culture. The Republicans are having meanings now, what they should stand for. You hear this? They're still trying to determine what their motto is. Duh.

• 30:12Gavin Newsom?

  Language, borders and culture. That was his mantra for decades and decades. And so for me, that was, I thought perhaps one of the most interesting interviews is sort of mined his consciousness of where we are today.

• 30:25Ezra Klein?

  And then what did you actually take away from the conversation with him that you thought was interesting?

• 30:30Gavin Newsom?

  I think it's just his history. I mean, he's a, 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 her 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. I just, family.

• 31:05Ezra Klein?

  Yeah, you're, you're really connecting Kirk and Savage to, to the fact that they're human beings. I know they're human beings.

• 31:10Gavin Newsom?

  And I, I think it's.

• 31:10Ezra Klein?

  But you're talking to people on the right who have a very different.

• 31:13Gavin Newsom?

  Yeah, but I'm also talking about, but it's not about right or left. It's about, there's universe. At the, the one thing, and 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. And 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.

• 31:40Ezra Klein?

  Savage's view is that California is a kind of hellscape.

• 31:44Gavin Newsom?

  Yeah. Five years ago, I had a heart attack.

• 31:47Ezra Klein?

  Yeah.

• 31:47Gavin Newsom?

  Okay, here in Marin County.

• 31:48Ezra Klein?

  Yes.

• 31:49Gavin Newsom?

  So I'm rushed to Marin General.

• 31:51Ezra Klein?

  Yep.

• 31:51Gavin Newsom?

  I have to wait in line. It's filled with illegal aliens. You got the 10 zones, you got snow to the desert.

• 31:58Ezra Klein?

  Right.

• 31:58Gavin Newsom?

  So it's a perfect geographical location for me.

• 32:02Ezra Klein?

  Yeah.

• 32:02Gavin Newsom?

  But there's a point at which I will leave this state.

• 32:04Ezra Klein?

  I get it.

• 32:04Gavin Newsom?

  And that will be taxation without representation. 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 for, not only for me, but for the whole city.

• 32:16Ezra Klein?

  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 there is some set of problems that from his perspective are visible.

• 32:32Gavin Newsom?

  Yeah.

• 32:32Ezra Klein?

  That from your perspective are harder to see.

• 32:33Gavin Newsom?

  Well, I mean, the affordability crisis, he's 100% 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's living in the state, California. The vast majority of these guys that attacked the state grew up in the state, made their wealth in the state, still have businesses in the state. Elon Musk put his R and D headquarters back, world headquarters, back in California. His AI companies 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 that are attacking the state all come from the state of California. What they don't like is the progressive taxes.

• 33:15Ezra Klein?

  Let me tell me about it.

• 33:15Gavin Newsom?

  Yeah, you understand it. But it's the progressive tax. They want to take their capital gains someplace else, which I deeply understand. It's homeless and housing and transportation problems are legendary. It's a mass exodus. The California derangement syndrome is not new, is my long-winded point.

• 33:30Ezra Klein?

  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.

• 33:36Gavin Newsom?

  Sounds pessimistic for the moment. So what are you suggesting? Won't be for long.

• 33:40Ezra Klein?

  I'm suggesting I'm not gonna.

• 33:41Gavin Newsom?

  I read between the lines.

• 33:42Ezra Klein?

  I'm not gonna ask you seven different ways if you run into 2028.

• 33:46Gavin Newsom?

  God bless you, yeah.

• 33:47Ezra Klein?

  What I am gonna ask you is this. The big political issue of the day is affordability.

• 33:51Gavin Newsom?

  Period.

• 33:51Ezra Klein?

  California, US News and World Report on Wallet Hub, look at all these different rankings. It ranks 50th on affordability.

• 33:58Gavin Newsom?

  Yeah.

• 33:58Ezra Klein?

  These measures combine housing costs and other measures of cost of living. Why and what is the affordability agenda that is credible coming from the governor of California?

• 34:10Gavin Newsom?

  It's interesting, you know, Walert Hub also talks about the happiest city index, five of the top 10.

• 34:14Ezra Klein?

  Listen, man, I got redwoods tattooed on my arm. I grieve every day I'm not in California. You don't need to tell me it's a happier place to be.

• 34:20Gavin Newsom?

  And in terms of taxes, which is interesting, Walert 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 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 in 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 Econ 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 role of the state. It was assigned to cities and counties and regional COCs. And we changed all that.

• 35:04Gavin Newsom?

  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 has unlocked over 5,000 units, began a process of working with carrots and sticks to move from NIMBYism to a YIMBYist mindset, which I think we have demonstrated in meaningful ways, in substantive ways. 110,000 housing units were completed last year. It's completely underwhelming. And so we have more work to do.

• 35:40Ezra Klein?

  Why is it so hard? Because you've wanted to do this. You put a 3.5 million housing production goal.

• 35:46Gavin Newsom?

  That was the aspirational goal, and then the legal goal, 2.5 million by 2030.

• 35:51Ezra Klein?

  Great. Let's use 2.5 million.

• 35:53Gavin Newsom?

  In our regional, what we call the RENA goals, and that is the established legal framework. By the way, it's the first time we get goal setting that was this.

• 36:00Ezra Klein?

  But you're not on track for either goal.

• 36:01Gavin Newsom?

  Not, well, no one is.

• 36:03Ezra Klein?

  And you, no one is, but, but.

• 36:04Gavin Newsom?

  Across the country. And that's, by the way, that's a macro. You've got 1.2 million or so.

• 36:08Ezra Klein?

  But other places are, I mean, look, I spend, because I'm a nerd, a fair amount of time looking at statistics. On housing starts in Austin and Houston.

• 36:16Gavin Newsom?

  Austin's having now a big downturn in terms of costs because of some of the overbuilding, but it's interesting.

• 36:20Ezra Klein?

  But that, listen, I think of California having a big downturn in rents because it's overbuilt. I would, I think that would be a welcome change of problem.

• 36:29Gavin Newsom?

  I get it.

• 36:30Ezra Klein?

  I take it as genuinely serious. I've seen how many bills you've passed. I've covered a bunch of them. What makes this so hard?

• 36:36Gavin Newsom?

  You've got 470 cities, you have 58 counties. I've mentioned just 101 jurisdictions and the cities and counties just around the Bay Area. I haven't even gone to LA County. There's 88 cities, 88 leaders, COCs. I mean, everybody, everybody is participatory in this and that's the challenge. It's that labyrinth. By the way, these folks aren't happy. League of Cities is not happy. Our county partners are not happy. I mean, we are asserting ourselves in ways that the state has never asserted ourselves 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 cost 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.

• 37:21Gavin Newsom?

  And the proof point will be when we see the borrowing costs were down.

• 37:24Ezra Klein?

  So I think you can think about what it takes to build housing as having three buckets. One is land use, zoning, permitting, et cetera, the sort of legal traps you have to run in order to get started. Then there's financing of construction, interest rates, things like that, and cost of construction, which is related, but has to do with the cost of materials, labor, all the rest of it. And as you say, I think in a lot of blue states, the fight on land use and zoning is intellectually one. Whether or not it's been totally policy one, that's harder, but I do think that's one. The financing and the cost of construction, which by the way, with Trump's tariffs and deportations is getting worse on a bunch of levels.

• 38:09Ezra Klein?

  Tell me about those because I actually think those are harder to talk about.

• 38:12Gavin Newsom?

  Well, and you didn't even bring up productivity, which is down about 30% since 1970 to 2020.

• 38:18Ezra Klein?

  In the housing sector.

• 38:18Gavin Newsom?

  In the housing sector and every other part of our economy.

• 38:20Ezra Klein?

  Yeah, I'm pulling that into the cost of construction, but yes.

• 38:22Gavin Newsom?

  And so let's establish situationally, the tariffs environment has impacted the cost of goods. So material supplies has gone up, it's made it worse, Donald Trump. The labor shortages are real today. There was a Wall Street Journal article showing 300 or 400 plus thousand construction worker shortage and they can't even get enough data center workers to address some of the energy needs for AI, et cetera. And that's been exacerbated by the mass deportation efforts, et cetera. So those two things are important. But 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?

• 39:01Ezra Klein?

  Off-site, you're building houses like you'd build a car and then assembling them onsite.

• 39:05Gavin Newsom?

  And it's also 3D printing, which is really interesting. There's some interesting companies in Texas. They're actually working with NASA in terms of some opportunities there in terms of new materials. AI as it relates to the material space is also interesting in relationship 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

• 39:50Gavin Newsom?

  to take it to the next level. But we have to accommodate because there's a lot of unions within.

• 39:55Ezra Klein?

  I want to slow down what you just said here because I know, but just for people who are not as into the modular housing debate as you and I. So right now, building housing is, you know, guys show up with hammers.

• 40:08Gavin Newsom?

  Same way they have been since the beginning of time.

• 40:10Ezra Klein?

  This is why productivity is down.

• 40:11Gavin Newsom?

  Yeah.

• 40:12Ezra Klein?

  And modular, which there's no place in America that does a ton of off-site manufactured housing. But in Sweden, I think more than 80% of single-family homes are now off-site manufactured. You can have modular build, as many places do, in unionized factories.

• 40:27Gavin Newsom?

  That's right.

• 40:27Ezra Klein?

  So it doesn't have to be a non-union industry, but it still means fewer builders.

• 40:32Gavin Newsom?

  And it means which unions and which different skills, which trades are part of that. And therein lies, this is the issue we have to address.

• 40:43Ezra Klein?

  When you talk about address it, right, I think you're pointing towards there being some way that it can be addressed. But on some level, it will mean fewer people building onsite unless we increase housing production so much.

• 40:54Gavin Newsom?

  Yeah, that's the answer.

• 40:55Ezra Klein?

  That you have a volume.

• 40:56Gavin Newsom?

  And that's the, and the goal is to do what we need to do, which is the abundance of gender 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.

• 41:36Ezra Klein?

  You had a hell of a conversation with Steve Bannon.

• 41:40Gavin Newsom?

  I thought I was talking to Bernie Sanders for half of it.

• 41:42Ezra Klein?

  It's interesting.

• 41:43Gavin Newsom?

  I mean it.

• 41:44Ezra Klein?

  I've had that experience with him. What did you take from that? The, the, the sort of strange horseshoe nature of the populism that he espouses? Maybe a little bit more when he's talking to people on the left, but, but that I think is authentic to him.

• 41:58Gavin Newsom?

  I think it is authentic. I mean, he has a point of view. He has a perspective.

• 42:01Steve Bannon?

  Here's, I think it's important, and, and this is why I think, let's get back to why President Trump won again. You have basically working class people, middle class, and particularly lower down the chains, they've seen the bailouts on Wall Street. They've seen the oligarchs be made. They, they don't think they have agency in a global, you know, global supply chain. They think they're just a cog in the machine, that their voice is not heard, right? They're kind of dismissed culturally, they're considered, and I don't care if you're black, Hispanic, or white working class. It's not a race thing. It's, it's ethnicity. It's, you're just dismissed.

• 42:34Gavin Newsom?

  He's thought things through in a deeper way than I frankly understood. You know, we're so quick to dismiss, oh, Steve Bannon, trying to light democracy on fire on January 6th and the like. And then you get under the hood and he's making a rational case for an industrial policy that's worker's center. He's making a rational case of critique and reflection about the WTO and NAFTA. He's making a reflective case that both parties, not just the Republican Party, but Democratic Party was complicit in the hollowing out of our infrastructure and our manufacturing base. He's making the 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.

• 43:18Gavin Newsom?

  He should have increased corporate taxes and increased taxes on the 1% and lowered them for working folks.

• 43:25Steve Bannon?

  On the upper brackets, I don't want to, 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, have another tax increase.

• 43:44Gavin Newsom?

  Had he done that, Democratic Party would be in real trouble right now.

• 43:48Ezra Klein?

  If Trump listened, 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.

• 43:57Gavin Newsom?

  Had he done that, he would have, I think, created an enduring mega movement. I don't think there is one after Trump. I don't, I think it's going to fray. There's no chance JD 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. And I say thought leader, and I know that offends a lot of liberal minds that 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 that's again, there's got to be some grace. Learn from people. Success leaves clues. There's power of emulation and you've got to get out of your bubble, literally and

• 44:41Gavin Newsom?

  figuratively, and you also have to find humanity. You have to find decency in other people for no other reason that 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. A sense of purpose, back to meaning. That's why I believe in national service 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, 250 years of this historic project of our founding fathers, to celebrate that sense of idealism, this extraordinary project, 249 years. And I think that's what I hope, not just our party does, but we as Americans can do next year.

• 45:24Ezra Klein?

  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?

• 45:38Gavin Newsom?

  Yeah, of course.

• 45:38Ezra Klein?

  Why are you listening so openly to them when they treat us like this?

• 45:42Gavin Newsom?

  That's right.

• 45:44Ezra Klein?

  How did you take in?

• 45:45Gavin Newsom?

  I thought it totally fair. And I was marginally hurt by it. But it was completely fair. Look, you can go on cable and you can watch the back and forth. You can watch me on cable, go back and forth. I'm happy to get into that mode. I take a backseat to no one. I'm being willing to engage and debate people. I'll do it on a daily basis. But that's not the point of the podcast. And 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. Because I just, I'm married in a big Republican family. You know that, and some may not know that. It's not an academic exercise for me. It's not about right. It's not about left. It's not about red or blue. It's about the human experience is what it's all about.

• 46:30Gavin Newsom?

  We've lost that in our politics.

• 46:33Ezra Klein?

  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% of households in the US reached $23.3 trillion in the second quarter of this year. That is up from $10.7 trillion a decade earlier. The amount held by the bottom 50% increased to $4.2 trillion from $900 billion. So the top 10th of a percent in this country has 23-plus trillion in wealth. The bottom 50%, 4.2 trillion.

• 47:15Ezra Klein?

  What does that kind of wealth inequality, which is prevalent in California, a lot of those rich people in California, what does it do to a society?

• 47:23Gavin Newsom?

  Well, I mean, I was quoting Plutarch yesterday, who warned the Athenians in, I don't know, 50, 70 AD, don't quote me. He said, "The imbalance between the rich and the poor is the oldest, 2,000 years ago, he said, "is the oldest and most fatal ailment of all republics." That's what it means. I say this all the time. We've got to democratize our economy to save our democracy. It's just back to Code Red.

• 47:48Ezra Klein?

  Look, Steve Bannon will tell you we need to redistribute the wealth. How do you think about that?

• 47:53Gavin Newsom?

  Well, in many respects, that's what progressive tax states do. I mean, you have regressive tax states that do the opposite. Florida and Texas, by the way, most of those are taker states. Progressive states tend to be donor states like California, states that are actually producing more wealth for the American people. You looked 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 they provided to the federal government. California, that same year, provided $83.1 billion to the federal government. That said, California's progressive tax rate has been criticized, but foundationally provides

• 48:33Gavin Newsom?

  me, and you'll see it on my January budget, the ability to expand our unprecedented investments into childcare, expand our universal preschool program, which we have fully implemented, our after-school-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.

• 48:58Ezra Klein?

  But we fundamentally tax income, not wealth.

• 49:00Gavin Newsom?

  Yeah.

• 49:01Ezra Klein?

  And...

• 49:02Gavin Newsom?

  Difficult to tax wealth.

• 49:03Ezra Klein?

  It is difficult to tax wealth. It is not impossible to tax wealth. I mean... We used to have a strong or a stronger state tax in this country.

• 49:10Gavin Newsom?

  Yeah.

• 49:11Ezra Klein?

  And now it's pretty toothless.

• 49:12Gavin Newsom?

  It's absurd.

• 49:13Ezra Klein?

  And we live in an economy built on assets.

• 49:17Gavin Newsom?

  Yeah.

• 49:18Ezra Klein?

  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, speaking at the national level, because there are interstate dynamics that would make a wealth tax at the state level harder, that doesn't really begin to think about wealth taxation.

• 49:36Gavin Newsom?

  The key point at a state by state.

• 49:38Ezra Klein?

  Yes, I understand that.

• 49:39Gavin Newsom?

  So from a national prism, this is a conversation that 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 an intellectual. We're practitioners. I'm a practitioner. I'm dealing with realities, cards that are actually dealt.

• 49:54Ezra Klein?

  I just criticize people from sidelines.

• 49:56Gavin Newsom?

  It's much easier.

• 49:57Ezra Klein?

  Tell me about it.

• 49:58Gavin Newsom?

  Yeah, I mean, that's why, on behalf of the Biden.

• 50:01Ezra Klein?

  That's why you want a podcast. I don't want to be governor of California.

• 50:03Gavin Newsom?

  Yeah, I'm speaking on behalf of Joe Biden and his legacy. But, but my point is to make this point. I mean, how do you mark to market? How do you determine assets? How do you determine this sort of internationalization of assets? I'm not saying these are impossible things. I'm not making an excuse. I'm making a point. So this is a conversation you have. And the state tax, the big beautiful bill was the big beautiful betrayal. I mean, this was a disastrous bill for our kids and grandkids, for Atria Conversation, for those young kids, 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 Supreme Congress was wrong. And so we've got to right that

• 50:46Gavin Newsom?

  wrong as it relates to reestablishing 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 just

• 50:55Ezra Klein?

  I don't want you to tell me we need to have an honest conversation debate. I know there is 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.

• 51:07Gavin Newsom?

  Yeah.

• 51:08Ezra Klein?

  Is a society that has that level of wealth inequality?

• 51:14Ezra Klein?

  A politically stable or economically just society.

• 51:17Gavin Newsom?

  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 where populism is rising, authoritarian tendencies, fascist tendencies are asserting themselves.

• 51:28Ezra Klein?

  So then it sounds like you're saying, whatever the structure of it is, we're gonna have to do something that shifts the structure of wealth in this country, that brings it...

• 51:34Gavin Newsom?

  Yes, by definition. And I, look, I'm gonna defend our progressive tax structure in California. I'm gonna 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 we're doubled down on with a big, beautiful betrayal. Absolutely. So, no, I believe in that. I promote it. I practice that.

• 51:59Ezra Klein?

  I was listening to you talk with Andrew Ralston, my colleague at Dealbook, yesterday. And you talked, 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.

• 52:09Gavin Newsom?

  I don't like them. I did it. I mean, we did 3.4 million kids entering kindergarten. We put aside $1.9 billion many years ago. It's interesting, not everybody signed up for them, which is remarkable. Even if you hand something to someone, doesn't mean they'll necessarily take it, which is a stubborn fact. But I love this idea.

• 52:24Ezra Klein?

  What about a wealth tax and a state tax that simply funds universal basic wealth funds?

• 52:28Gavin Newsom?

  Well, we're looking at universal, we've been playing around, I mentioned yesterday, the MIMCOM, we've played around with grant funding for UBI.

• 52:34Ezra Klein?

  Minimum income.

• 52:34Gavin Newsom?

  And we've done grants in California at scale, and 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.

• 52:48Ezra Klein?

  Yeah, and he's taken cuts of companies.

• 52:49Gavin Newsom?

  And he's taken, we can get into the 10% tithing, or 15% tithing from AMD and Nvidia, and the 10% from Intel. But the opportunities with those $1,000 baby bonds presents an entry point for that conversation that I think is important. And I said it yesterday, I'll say it to you. That's hard for me to say. Thank you, Ted Cruz. But Cory Booker, to his credit, was one more responsible than anyone as a thought leader in this space.

• 53:14Ezra Klein?

  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, right? You've talked a lot about the California tax structure here. California ranks according to Tax Foundation, which is right-leaning but honest. Second for tax collections per capita at about $10,000 per person. Florida's about $5,000 per person. When I hear rich people in California complain, they don't so much complain, or they do complain about the level of taxation, but more about the feeling that when they go back and forth, they don't see the public services as so much better. They don't see the public infrastructure as so much better. They can't ride the train.

• 53:59Ezra Klein?

  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 from that what they're paying?

• 54:09Gavin Newsom?

  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. No, Tom in this case.

• 54:20Ezra Klein?

  Oh, Tom Friedman, okay.

• 54:21Gavin Newsom?

  I'm staying close to the home all the time.

• 54:22Ezra Klein?

  I wanted to see what Friedman we were talking about.

• 54:24Gavin Newsom?

  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. I mean, we have 18% of the world's R and D. We invest in that. Billions and billions of those tax dollars go back into R and D tax credits. The UC system, I mean, how many more engineers, scientists, more Nobel laureates do we need? We have 13,700 active patents in the UC system. Those ecosystems have created these trillion-dollar companies, four trillion-dollar companies, created and minted these billionaires that are complaining about California. That's the benefits that we have provided for these companies, have laid the foundation for innovation in quantum infusion and robotics and space and the future and dominating that space. We have $180 billion. It's the largest since Pat Brown.

• 55:09Gavin Newsom?

  Hundred and eighty billion dollars. It's build.ca.gov. You can look it up. Transparent website that shows the biggest investments in capital and infrastructure in California's history that is being invested as we speak. We've dominated manufacturing. I mentioned yesterday, 2.8% of manufacturing, advanced manufacturing is in place like Florida. It's 13.9 in California. We dominate in every critical category.

• 55:33Ezra Klein?

  Of the nation's total manufacturing.

• 55:34Gavin Newsom?

  Total, yeah, the nation's total. So we're number one 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 we've ever had. Look at the venture capital that's going back into the state. I mean, it's a remarkable, number one in two-way trade, number one in direct.

• 55:59Ezra Klein?

  I've heard you do this before and I agree with it.

• 56:02Gavin Newsom?

  But it's all true.

• 56:03Ezra Klein?

  But what people would say, that what your critics on this would say is that you're sitting on an oil well, right? Silicon Valley was built, it's an agglomeration of talent.

• 56:12Gavin Newsom?

  But how was it built?

• 56:13Ezra Klein?

  I agree with you, but it wasn't built in the last five years.

• 56:15Gavin Newsom?

  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.

• 56:30Ezra Klein?

  You feel very shaped to me by the culture specifically of Northern California. And Northern California's become Silicon Valley, San Francisco, even compared to what it was five or 10 years ago now, as the epicenter of the global AI revolution. That much more important.

• 56:50Gavin Newsom?

  Yep.

• 56:51Ezra Klein?

  And the culture of Silicon Valley has changed, the politics of it have changed very rapidly in this period.

• 56:56Gavin Newsom?

  Yep.

• 56:57Ezra Klein?

  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.

• 57:12Ezra Klein?

  It will be good, who it will be good for. They hope.

• 57:15Gavin Newsom?

  Completely agree with that.

• 57:16Ezra Klein?

  But they all of a sudden seem like servants of a thing they are bringing into being more than.

• 57:21Gavin Newsom?

  Yeah.

• 57:21Ezra Klein?

  You know, they would, they would not tell you they understand how it's working.

• 57:23Gavin Newsom?

  Yeah.

• 57:24Ezra Klein?

  I think AI is going to be a big part of the next.

• 57:27Gavin Newsom?

  Unquestionably.

• 57:27Ezra Klein?

  Turn of politics.

• 57:28Gavin Newsom?

  Dominant, dominant.

• 57:30Ezra Klein?

  Before I get to anything about regulation. How do you feel about AI?

• 57:36Gavin Newsom?

  Promise and peril, both end, because I think what you said is spot on, and I spent a lot of times with, with these guys, 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 three to five years, AGI, superintelligence, that we're on the other side of the unknown. That's pretty alarming. And so to your point.

• 58:02Ezra Klein?

  My timeline for superintelligence is longer.

• 58:03Gavin Newsom?

  Yours may be longer than that, but I'm, you know.

• 58:05Ezra Klein?

  But, but general intelligence, depending how you define it.

• 58:08Gavin Newsom?

  I talked to some of the DeepMind people, they were, they were talking 36 months. I don't want to lay them out specifically. But people associated with them, not from DeepMind, obviously the race, everybody, this bubble, everyone's participating in this race, all acknowledge the bubble that's being built, the CapEx that's been invested across this country and what's happening in terms of utility costs across the country and data center and energy is the one thing that will slow this down, how nuclear fission or fusion, nuclear fusion is a big part of that conversation as well. So 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, I think, of job impacts, but likely to get more pronounced and perhaps exponentially so. So tech genie's out of the bottle.

• 58:54Gavin Newsom?

  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. And I think we have to take responsibility to thoughtfully regulate it. And that's what California is pursuing, the first regulatory framework in the nation, SB 53, that took me two years to get. Right in land and we did it with a lot of the competing parts within the regulatory space, meaning those that see this as an dystopian future, those that want a light touch and we've tried to find some balance in this space. But obviously, the state of

• 59:37Gavin Newsom?

  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.

• 59:50Ezra Klein?

  I don't think we really know what AI is going to do to the job market or when or to whom.

• 59:53Gavin Newsom?

  No.

• 59:54Ezra Klein?

  I don't think it's clear enough in the data yet.

• 59:56Gavin Newsom?

  No.

• 59:56Ezra Klein?

  But I think a couple of things are worth assuming will happen. So one that is already happening is that the process of looking for a job has become hellish. You are.

• 1:00:08Gavin Newsom?

  I may need to look one a year from now. So keep filling.

• 1:00:11Ezra Klein?

  I mean, I talked to people and it's like you're sending endless resumes to dozens of places that they're being read by AI. Sometimes you're interviewing with that. It's become very dehumanized and dehumanizing, right? So and hard to find a job and it's it's this endless, everybody's using AI to apply. The AIs are reading the AI applicant, right? It's this circular thing, but what I've seen in human beings going through it is a profound demoralization. And 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.

• 1:00:47Gavin Newsom?

  That's right.

• 1:00:47Ezra Klein?

  And you're not going to see a huge, it's not like, it won't be like COVID where everybody has to stay home all of a sudden, or half the people have to stay home all of a sudden. It's going to be just a bit harder, a bit harder. It's going to be a recession for the young. It's, 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 just the fear.

• 1:01:11Gavin Newsom?

  It's real.

• 1:01:11Ezra Klein?

  How many people I know who are reasonably, how many people I know in school who are reasonably afraid that they'll be replaced by an AI that they can work with the systems now and they know that at many things, the systems are as good at it as they are.

• 1:01:25Gavin Newsom?

  Yeah.

• 1:01:26Ezra Klein?

  A lot of jobs are not at the frontier of creativity. You're doing something somewhat rote, somewhat replicable, somewhat learnable. And that's what the middle class and most of this economy is built on.

• 1:01:36Gavin Newsom?

  You got it.

• 1:01:37Ezra Klein?

  And I just think that between the economic and the psychological destabilization of this.

• 1:01:44Ezra Klein?

  I think I am surprised how much people know this coming. You can see it in polling. People know it's coming and politics seems at sea.

• 1:01:54Gavin Newsom?

  Yeah, 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 anything that gets repeated gets replaced. And AI has moved out in the physical world. You can see that physically in California with all of not just the WAMOs that are out there. You can be seven deep in traffic with seven cars with no drivers, but also Zook and others. You're seeing in robotics now. 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 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.

• 1:02:36Gavin Newsom?

  As it relates to that anxiety, I would also offer that it will also have a gender component. You look at that gender displacement in terms of some of those jobs, those clerical jobs and those, you know, paralegal jobs and like, and the impacts that will have on women as well. So I think that's a dynamic we also need to consider, that gender dynamic as well in this conversation. Look, I'm having advanced conversations, as I mentioned earlier, not on UBI anymore, but on universal basic capital and looking at those issues back to the baby bonds, looking at the prospects of mass displacement, even if it's for a period of time. And on the other side, we have abundance and how we address that anxiety in real time, that fear, how do we accommodate for it? How do we own a responsibility to address it?

• 1:03:20Gavin Newsom?

  And again, I feel a disproportionate amount of responsibility coming from California to lead that conversation.

• 1:03:27Ezra Klein?

  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 in the digital era more concentrated.

• 1:03:41Ezra Klein?

  And 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 in capital. And so, you know, back in the 90s, Democrats won rural and urban counties at about the same rates, right? Not that long ago. Now Democrats dominate cities, really struggle in rural counties, in part because the people in those counties just feel left behind and unseen by them. So your Gavin Newsom, your former mayor of San Francisco, your governor of California,

• 1:04:25Ezra Klein?

  you've got Silicon Valley. How do you rebuild that connection?

• 1:04:29Gavin Newsom?

  Well, also, the guy's never, there's never been a governor spend 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 economic, regional economic workforce 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, 200, this is what made it different, $287 million seeded these bottom-up economic and workforce plans, three-year process, over 10,000 people.

• 1:05:13Gavin Newsom?

  I did seven events in seven rural counties. No one covered that. He only covered what I put on some social media site and post because it sort of made fun or mocked Donald Trump. Now, you're framing it with an electoral construct, and that's a different thing. And I'll tell you, that's more challenging because as someone who's 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.

• 1:05:39Ezra Klein?

  I appreciate that you actually note this in a minute because it does get, I was gonna say to you that, 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 do you, drives that disconnect?

• 1:05:53Gavin Newsom?

  I just, I think culture. Uh, belonging, meaning, I think, identity. I think there are deeper issues here. They're deep. I mean, I could go on, talk about regenerative ag work I'm doing, all the work we've done for farmers, farm workers, all these things, I mean, like, next level. No, no Republican governor ever did any of these things. I mean, Trump is destroying ranchers and small businesses and farmers, and they're celebrating the guy. I mean, this guy's, I mean, it's a joke. It's a, it's, what the, is anyone paying attention? Yet they still vote for him. So there's, that is, you, you, I'm gonna look for your punditry on this, try to understand.

• 1:06:25Ezra Klein?

  No, but you, you go to the front tables, you talk to people. And one thing I believe is you do listen when you talk to people.

• 1:06:30Gavin Newsom?

  I like, I love these folks. I love these folks. I care about these folks. I go into Kevin McCarthy's district, and I'm like, how in the hell do you reelect this guy? He's cutting your Medicaid programs disproportionately impacting, he's cutting all these damn programs that we're investing in your infrastructure and health and wellness, all the environmental programs about, you know, air, clean water? No one's 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. And I was talking to Kirk, he says, politics, not downstream culture, it's already, Trump is culture, and they've, they've owned culture, they've won the culture wars. We have to recognize that.

• 1:07:09Ezra Klein?

  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 they 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.

• 1:07:31Gavin Newsom?

  Yeah.

• 1:07:32Ezra Klein?

  And what they said, 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 gonna get told, that your views would not be respected, that people running culture, from people who were then running the platform companies, who at that point were understood as liberal, they've obviously flipped a little bit in recent years, to people in Hollywood, that not only do they not care about you, they don't like you.

• 1:07:59Gavin Newsom?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:08:00Ezra Klein?

  They look down on you.

• 1:08:01Gavin Newsom?

  I hate that, I know, I hate that perception.

• 1:08:03Ezra Klein?

  And it's not even entirely untrue.

• 1:08:05Gavin Newsom?

  No, we talk, 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 the sensitivity of that, back to the whole podcast conversation. All want to be protected, respected and connected to something bigger than ourselves. There's universal truths here. All want to be loved, all need to be loved. We're all in this together. And so, again, grace, 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. Can't talk past people, can't dismiss people. I'll keep going back to the Central Valley. You get the mayor, a Republican former police chief mayor of Fresno.

• 1:08:49Gavin Newsom?

  How many times I've been there, I have the back of the people of Fresno. Bakersfield, California. How many times I go back, Republican mayor go there. And 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.

• 1:09:06Ezra Klein?

  One of the other things I hear people worry about with you as a sort of leading voice in the Democratic Party the most is you've taken a series of positions that Trump tries to attach to Democrats, often wrongly, under your leadership in California. There actually was subsidized government healthcare for undocumented immigrants. There was a big push to, let's call it, phase out cars with internal combustion engines. These are the kind of things right now Democrats are running away from.

• 1:09:33Gavin Newsom?

  Yeah, I can't, I mean, I'm sure the polls would say I should, but I'm not, that's not who I am. I've never been a guy that can do that. I believe China's going to clean our clock. They have 70% of the EV market. They're moving, I was down in BLM, I was down in Brazil, BYD's everywhere. They're getting market share, supply chains, they're advancing influence. And it's to me not about electric power, it's about economic power. And I just, I can't see that. And so California's the center of the universe in that respect. We dominate in R and D for, you know, it's why we have all the mobility out there in Zook, and that's why we have Waymo and the R and 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. And we are the future in that respect, and I'm trying to hold on to that. Is it related to undocumented healthcare? Yeah, I'm proud of that because I believe in universal healthcare.

• 1:10:19Gavin Newsom?

  Others may say it, I did it. First state in the country, regardless of pre-existing additions, 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 billion-plus dollars to do migrant centers, try to put a lid on things. It 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 because of that, to lead the comprehensive immigration question. We've got to get the border right, then we can get to that. But I say that to make the point. You don't need sanctuary policy in this country if we have a federal government doing its job.

• 1:11:04Gavin Newsom?

  In the absence of that, we'll deal with the cards that are dealt. And one of the cards that are 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 the people out of the emergency room. I want to keep people healthier. I want to keep people safer. And 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. And good people can disagree, but I'm very mindful.

• 1:11:33Ezra Klein?

  Why did Democrats fail on the border?

• 1:11:35Gavin Newsom?

  Because we didn't, we didn't own up to the reality. We didn't take responsibility.

• 1:11:39Ezra Klein?

  But beneath it, what happened, right? You know, 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 level of why for policies, not just what happened.

• 1:11:52Gavin Newsom?

  The why was a reaction. Everything's a reaction to Trump. Sort of 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. And 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 around COVID, coming out of COVID, et cetera, that created even more pressure. And then it became overwhelming. And then what also became overwhelming was this notion that we can't do it without Congress. And then Biden then proved Trump right. By doing it without Congress, in the last six months, we saw a significant decline

• 1:12:33Gavin Newsom?

  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. But we paid a huge price for that, and we picked up, though, 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, and then they did better than we all expected. They said, why don't we just focus on these other issues? Mistake.

• 1:13:02Ezra Klein?

  I call this oppositional mirroring, the tendency to become the mirror of whatever you're politically fighting. And I think on immigration, Democrats really became Trump's mirror. He was cruel, they were going to be compassionate. He tried to close it, they were not quite going to open it, but they began debating decriminalizing border crossing, right? There was a lot, there was a lot that was reactive.

• 1:13:25Gavin Newsom?

  Yeah.

• 1:13:26Ezra Klein?

  Now, I think you see the Republicans doing, making the mistake.

• 1:13:30Gavin Newsom?

  Completely correct.

• 1:13:31Ezra Klein?

  Right? People don't like cruelty either. But I think it's deeper than that. I spent a lot of time sort of 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 even more than 50% of people foreign born or in some versions of this, not even heritage American, let's call it, or as they call it, that you're not a real polity. Now, California is a very diverse place, LA, San Francisco, very diverse places. What is your answer not on whether or not we need to secure the border, but what it

• 1:14:14Ezra Klein?

  means to be a political community? And what it means to be an American if its meaning is not to be a heritage, as they call it, American?

• 1:14:28Gavin Newsom?

  I live in a state 27%, just so people understand. California, 27% 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, I think our strength is defined by that diversity. I know that offends J D Vance and everyone else and 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. This guy Dennis Kearney, the Working Men's Party started every speech beginning and end, said, whatever else must, happens, the Chinese must go. Led to the Chinese Exclusion Act. He was in Oakland, California. The Bay Area was the center of that universe. There were his walls, virtual walls that were being built in all these illustrations

• 1:15:12Gavin Newsom?

  to keep the Chinese out of California. We were at peak immigration back then, peak populism out there. And so many ways, respect Trump, I mean Kearney was the original Donald Trump, going after institutions, going after the media and obviously scapegoating others. We saw that peak drop in 1970s to a relatively modest percentage of our overall population in this country that is now getting close to the old 1880s peak. So it's very familiar, all of this. But I'm of the mindset, here's where I am on this. I'm of the Reagan mindset, life force of new Americans. He could have chosen any speech to leave the Oval Office.

• 1:15:51Gavin Newsom?

  Ronald Reagan chose one speech to talk about the power of this country being defined 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.

• 1:16:07Ezra Klein?

  So, but I want you to expand what that point means. So what J D Vance, who I think is the most interesting speeches of any Republican politician right now, because he's the one trying to build a philosophy around what for Trump, I think is gestural and intuitive.

• 1:16:21Gavin Newsom?

  Impulsive.

• 1:16:23Ezra Klein?

  You know, Vance goes to the Claremont Institute in California to accept an award and gives a speech, basically making an argument that we have erred in our philosophical understanding of what it means to be an American. We have erred in following Frederick Douglass and Abraham Lincoln and believing in credo Americanism. What Vance says in the speech is, look, there are billions of people in this world who might like to pledge. Allegiance tar flag, who would agree to the ideals of the Declaration of Independence. And we can't make them all-

• 1:16:59Gavin Newsom?

  I wish J.D. Vance and Trump would, forgive me.

• 1:17:02Ezra Klein?

  We can't make them all-

• 1:17:03Gavin Newsom?

  I guess they're real Americans, forgive me.

• 1:17:04Ezra Klein?

  We can't make them all Americans.

• 1:17:05Gavin Newsom?

  Forgive me.

• 1:17:06Ezra Klein?

  That there is something distinctive about an American who can trace their lineage back to people who fought in our Civil War.

• 1:17:14Gavin Newsom?

  I had a conversation-

• 1:17:15Ezra Klein?

  It was a very striking-

• 1:17:16Gavin Newsom?

  About this yesterday.

• 1:17:17Ezra Klein?

  Very striking speech to me. My father, by the way, Brazilian immigrant, so immigration is quite close to my heart. But his argument, which I think, he's doing a couple of things. He's mixing up immigration, which is a question of how many people we decide to let in, and this question of critical Americanism. But he is trying to say that this idea that being in America, 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, admit that bloodline, that length of time, numbers of your family buried in cemeteries here, as he talks about all the time.

• 1:17:55Gavin Newsom?

  God bless, yeah.

• 1:17:56Ezra Klein?

  That is what really decides it. What, what, what's your answer to that?

• 1:17:59Gavin Newsom?

  I, I, I-

• 1:18:02Ezra Klein?

  Watching you get physically uncomfortable as I lay it out.

• 1:18:05Gavin Newsom?

  I just, you know, I just, you know, I think about it. You talked about your-

• 1:18:10Ezra Klein?

  I look forward to your podcast with J.D.

• 1:18:11Gavin Newsom?

  Yeah, by the way, that should be fine. I'm trying to get Marjorie Taylor Greene on first, but, um, look, you, 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 great grandfather or my grandfather was here. He goes, 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 he was, they were immigrants, came through Indiana, came from, um, from County Cork in Ireland. I don't know, is that JD's, is that enough, or do I have to go back to 1680s? Are we real Americans? What has, what's his definition? And who's going to decide? Is this the basis of, I don't, I don't know what the, this ethno, this concerns me.

• 1:18:56Gavin Newsom?

  I just don't think this is who we are, and 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 AI researchers are Chinese. These guys are advancing some of the most, I mean, 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's some carve-out for something related to the Trump family businesses in relation to that. I mean, this is literally part of the secret sauce of this country, and they're putting

• 1:19:38Gavin Newsom?

  all of that on the line because they're looking at some sort of vulgar version of lineage and ethno-nationalism that concerns the hell out of me. And I'm just not, I don't even want to indulge too deeply in it. That said, let me say this. I think one of the mistakes, and may get in trouble for saying this about my party, is, and it's in 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. And I think-

• 1:20:07Ezra Klein?

  Within the party or within the country?

• 1:20:09Gavin Newsom?

  Within our country. I think that's a mistake. And I remember Clinton talking a lot about that. You know, it's many parts but one body, in the spirit of Father Cause at Santa Clara University. We're all bound together by this webbing me Charlie, but we have to find that thing that binds us together. And 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, I think is critical, and I think it's a missing ingredient in our party, where we need to assert that and affirm that. And that's why I talk about faith and family and patriotism, things that unite us all together.

• 1:20:54Gavin Newsom?

  And that's what it means to be an American. All those interesting differences, racial, religious, ethnic differences. 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.

• 1:21:10Ezra Klein?

  Let me ask you then what binds the Democratic Party together? I've been writing about the Big Ten Democratic Party, what it would mean to build that. You said it more pithily than I have, which is you said in a recent interview, you want to see a party that goes from Manchin to M'Ndoni. What binds together a party that goes from Manchin to M'Ndoni? I hear a lot of people say, isn't this Big Ten? Doesn't it not believe in anything? What do you think it believes in?

• 1:21:32Gavin Newsom?

  Give me a break. I mean, what my grandfather, we talked about a Democratic Party. It was a, it was a broad coalition. My kind of party. You brought people in. It's about addition, not subtraction. I mean, come on. I mean, our party needs to be many parts, one body. And so this idea of exclusion, and again, that's judgment. That's purity. That's getting into, I didn't like the pronoun you used. And I mean, we got in that we were, I mean, there was a year or two there where for all of us, I mean, it's took me aback too. I was even participating. I found myself a little bit and I got pushed back from even my own staff saying, why'd you use that word? And I'm like, I, you know, we're all sort of struggling through a post George Floyd world

• 1:22:13Gavin Newsom?

  and understandable racial justice and all these issues coming out of COVID and sensitivity. I just a little less judgmental, a little more inclusive. If you believe in the death penalty, 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 believe in late term abortion, you have an issue. I'm not going to deny that. If you have a more moderate construct as it relates to, you know, more worker centered policies or more liberal one, I, we shouldn't be excluding. You don't believe in the minimum wage, but you believe in an income tax credit? Which one are you? A Democrat or you, you're a corporate mod? Our party needs to knit back together that coalition that helped build the world's great middle class.

• 1:22:55Gavin Newsom?

  And so that's, that's, I want to, I don't want to exclude the Manchins or the M'Ndonis.

• 1:23:00Ezra Klein?

  The thing that the Manchin and M'Ndoni line made me think a bit about is what would it mean for the people who represent the Democratic Party nationally?

• 1:23:11Ezra Klein?

  To seem like they simultaneously respected Joe Manchin and Zohar Mumdani. Chuck Schumer did not endorse Zohar Mumdani, 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, guy was a genuine Democratic most valuable player, right? Holding a seat no one else could have held.

• 1:23:35Gavin Newsom?

  No one could have held.

• 1:23:36Ezra Klein?

  That gave Democrats that 50 50.

• 1:23:38Gavin Newsom?

  Yeah, drove me crazy too. I mean, we all were.

• 1:23:41Ezra Klein?

  That allowed Kamala Harris to break ties and pass the Inflation Reduction Act, right? Like Joe Manchin was the most valuable member of the Senate for Democrats.

• 1:23:49Gavin Newsom?

  But also drove us mad.

• 1:23:51Ezra Klein?

  Drove us mad. But, but that question of how does respect exist across disagreement at a time when I think social media and other things, algorithmic media, create a lot of incentive for line drawing.

• 1:24:03Gavin Newsom?

  That's right.

• 1:24:03Ezra Klein?

  A lot of incentive for saying, you know, you're out, right? And drawing our circles ever smaller.

• 1:24:08Gavin Newsom?

  I've spent my life being on the outs and then back in, on the out, back in. I don't begrudge other people's success. I don't think you could be pro job and anti-business. Same time I say businesses can't thrive in a world that's failing. And so who are you? You know, you support a progressive tax, but not a wealth tax, or then you're a corporate Democrat. So you're right, and you're right, the fine lines that are being divided online and, and these sort of filter bubbles that we're in only reinforce those lines. And of course, that's what 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 fill 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 back when I was

• 1:24:52Gavin Newsom?

  mayor of San Francisco, very familiar, and the more moderate voices that quote unquote can win those seven swing states. And so we'll work, we have to work through all these. But again, with an open hand, not a closed fist, a little less judgment and a little bit appreciation that this party, we got crushed in the last election. Donald Trump, it was Trump, I just 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.

• 1:25:32Ezra Klein?

  Here's what's made me fascinated by what you have done since the election, which is You seem more comfortable with contradiction and paradox in your own person than most people I see in politics. So I think you could have said after the election, there are two lanes for a Democrat, right? You can say, we got shellacked, a word that only exists when Democrats lose elections. I've never heard that word used in any other context. We got shellacked. 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 can be, we need the resistance. We need to fight back. We need to troll them the way they're trolling us on social media. You know, those were sort

• 1:26:16Ezra Klein?

  of two different ideas you hear. And your answer was, yeah, both.

• 1:26:22Gavin Newsom?

  Yeah, I said, look, my favorite book, one of the most influential books, interesting in my life, is called Built to Last. It's about the tyranny of war versus the genius of and, both and. Moving away, forgive me, I hate the vernacular, you know, moving away from the binaries, but I really believe that. I mean, it is both and. And it's defined. You know, look, I come from a reality-based experience as a small business person. There's a practical reality. You got to, you got to implement your ideals. Again, none of this is an intellectual exercise. And you got to deal with cards that are dealt. You can still, I mean, and I have been as progressive and adventurous in terms of progressive policies as most, if not all, Democratic governors in this country. As former mayor that did

• 1:27:05Gavin Newsom?

  same-sex marriage in 2004, where my party was attacking me for being too progressive. Same time, I was also advancing Care Not Cash program to take welfare away from 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's both and. So I was trying to show not only respect to who I am in the past, in my truth and authenticity, but also show respect.

• 1:27:35Gavin Newsom?

  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. I was probably, no one governed in the country worked with him more closely during COVID than I did. At the same time, no one's been more aggressive, to your point, trolling and attacking back on Trump. I started when he got elected, said, I want to work with him, or when he got elected. But I started with a special session of my legislature, only state that did this. As I said, I want to work with him, saying, trust but verify, and fortified our litigation posture. And this is the reason we have almost close to 50 lawsuits against the Trump administration have led the country because I knew it was going to come, both and. So I, it's to me, not a paradox necessarily. It's not a contradiction.

• 1:28:20Gavin Newsom?

  It's the human experience.

• 1:28:44Ezra Klein?

  You've been working very effectively, I think, 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 As, went to Harvard. And when you go through a lot of institutions informed by them, you become careful and cautious. The thing you don't want to do is offend everybody at a meeting.

• 1:29:09Gavin Newsom?

  Yeah, well said.

• 1:29:10Ezra Klein?

  And 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. In this era, attention comes from, although that doesn't work for me because I won't have anybody on. It's boring. Podcasts do not like people who speak in a very structured way.

• 1:29:30Gavin Newsom?

  Yeah, I agree with that.

• 1:29:31Ezra Klein?

  You can't do a podcast, a good podcast with a politician, when you can watch them buffering before they answer for you. It's, uh, in this, like, we've been talking for a long time. In this medium for this long, it doesn't work.

• 1:29:44Gavin Newsom?

  Yeah.

• 1:29:44Ezra Klein?

  It's a way that the mediums change who succeeds in them.

• 1:29:47Gavin Newsom?

  Yeah, it's true, too.

• 1:29:48Ezra Klein?

  You seem pretty comfortable with risk.

• 1:29:50Gavin Newsom?

  Yeah.

• 1:29:50Ezra Klein?

  I think of your debate with Ron DeSantis, it was on Fox News with Sean Hannity moderating. I went back and watched that the other day.

• 1:29:55Gavin Newsom?

  That's being a liberal bully. That's being a bully. Really? They had Down syndrome and you wanted to discriminate against them. Twenty-seven million dollar fine. Because they were discriminating against the athletes. They wanted to marginalize the athletes and you wanted the athletes marginalized. That was wrong what you did.

• 1:30:13Ezra Klein?

  God help us all. And I've met a lot of Democrats who don't, who they're more worried about things going wrong in their communication than something going right.

• 1:30:22Gavin Newsom?

  Ezra, I'm a, I'm a fail forward fast guy. Uh, you miss a hundred percent of the shots you don't take. I got a nine sixty 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.

• 1:30:45Ezra Klein?

  I've got a lot of facts you've been spitting me. How do you learn?

• 1:30:47Gavin Newsom?

  It's just, I, I absorb a lot. I can, I observe, I absorb. It's just harder. I have to do hundreds and hundreds of reps. For one, you know, some folks, you know, do one or two reps. But in that process, you overcompensate and you then develop all of these other skills that have been gifts. It allows you to read a room. It allows you to pivot, allows you to be a little bit more flexible. Yes, dare I say, even more authentic. And so that's who I am. I'm just, I can't be someone I'm not. I'm not good at being someone I'm not. I'm not comfortable faking it. And 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. It's, I think Trump is sort of broken through this morass.

• 1:31:30Gavin Newsom?

  It's, we're all getting roughed up a little bit here and, uh, we've all made mistakes. We haven't talked about my legendary mistakes and you got to own up to them and it's who you are, it shapes you, as long as you learn from them and don't repeat them. And 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 mindset in that respect. And I've tried to encourage that and I've tried to govern in that space. And 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 and you get a lot, you know, 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 tack in a perhaps more electorally successful space.

• 1:32:15Gavin Newsom?

  So I'm happy to be that guy. I don't need to be president. And it's, it's not about that. There's no, I didn't wake up with some strategic plan. The idea that I'm even sitting here and people talk about this 20, it's, that's beyond me. I thought I'd went last through a recall. You talk about humility. Seen your name on a recall ballot? Having your kids, one of my kids had to be homeschooled because it was so humiliating for her. Can't go outside, you can't walk the streets without seen signs. And getting through that and getting the other side and dealing, I mean, this has been a hell of a seven years as governor of California. I mean, the most blessed and cursed state from historic wildfires and droughts and floods and, you know, unrest, social unrest. I'm one of the few governors left in the COVID era.

• 1:32:59Gavin Newsom?

  There's only a handful of us that could talk about all those scars and the mistakes that were made and the lessons learned and the humility that comes with that. And so I'm on the other side. And I think people have noticed anything about me is you feel that a little bit, but I'm just, I'm like, I'm smash mouth about some of this stuff. I think Trump is one of the most destructive presidents and human beings in my lifetime. I think this republic is at real risk, this country being unrecognizable. And I have no patience for people that want to indulge it. I can't stand the corny capitalism. I can't stand all these supplicants that are sitting there bending the knee to this president. I can't stand the universities 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 at this moment. This guy is reckless, he's a wreck.

• 1:33:44Gavin Newsom?

  This country will not have a fair and free election if we don't continue to fight. I'm just, I, that's what matters to me, seriously. I'm the future ex-governor and 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 goddamn eye. I mean that, seriously. That's not like a politician thing to look them in the eye and say that I, you know, not in, not a peril of being judged not to have lived in the moment. So that's, that's what animates me, but it's not some grand plan. So paradox, bring it on. Contradictions, bring it on. Contradictions, but 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% of the people listening disagree with my position on this. But it comes from my heart, not just my head.

• 1:34:29Gavin Newsom?

  It wasn't a political evolution.

• 1:34:32Ezra Klein?

  Your position being that?

• 1:34:33Gavin Newsom?

  I don't think it's, I want to see trans kids. I have a trans godson. There's no governor that's signed more pro-trans legislation than I have, and no one's been a stronger advocate for the LGBK too many. 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. I mean, you want to talk 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. Friendships I lost on that position.

• 1:35:18Gavin Newsom?

  And that position, by the way, came to me two years prior, where I had to try to accommodate for a trans athlete and another athlete that were in the state finals in track and field, and they both dropped out because we couldn't figure out a way to make it fair. And it was so unfair to both their families, broke my heart. And I tried for two years to figure out, how do we do this? And 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, circular. It's not just politics. And I think, I just want to bring a little life back to my politics. I got a year left. I got an expiration, sell-by date, I'm on a milk carton.

• 1:36:02Gavin Newsom?

  And to the extent I want to hold the line and push back against Trump, I'll take no backseat to anybody else. And to the extent one of you's throwing 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 DGA, half them governors, the other half great senators and legislative leaders in Congress. What a humble and extraordinary thing. That's something you pinch yourself, back to that 960 SAT kid that couldn't read in the back of the class.

• 1:36:27Ezra Klein?

  I've been very careful not to ask you about 2028, so I'm not letting you go there yet. But as we sort of wrap a little bit, I do want to talk about a different tension, paradox, contradiction.

• 1:36:35Gavin Newsom?

  It was my way of getting ahead of it, so you didn't have to ask about it.

• 1:36:37Ezra Klein?

  I know, I know, I know. You're not going to say anything interesting if I ask you about 2028. One of the contradictions and tensions I do find interesting. When you were talking with my colleague Andrew Ross Sorkin, towards the end of your conversation, you talked about wanting to be a repairer of the breach.

• 1:36:52Gavin Newsom?

  Oh, Isaiah, yeah.

• 1:36:54Ezra Klein?

  And this is, I think, hell, in my own job, I feel.

• 1:37:01Ezra Klein?

  This is hard. We have an attentional world right now. We're one, 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 gonna be hard to hear. All right?

• 1:37:20Gavin Newsom?

  That's right.

• 1:37:21Ezra Klein?

  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.

• 1:37:33Gavin Newsom?

  Yeah.

• 1:37:34Ezra Klein?

  Talking about JD Vance's love of couches.

• 1:37:38Gavin Newsom?

  Yeah, forgive me.

• 1:37:39Ezra Klein?

  You know, selling kneepads.

• 1:37:41Gavin Newsom?

  Don't forgive me, you should buy them. A lot of people sold out and so have the kneepads.

• 1:37:45Ezra Klein?

  So it's a good joke, but there's a tension between getting attention by leaning into conflict and being a repairer of the breach. And I'm curious, because I think you are sincere in all these directions, how you think about that tension.

• 1:38:03Gavin Newsom?

  I think, look, there's so much situational politics now. We have to deal with the reality at hand. I can't wait to hold hands, have a candle, talk about how we can come to... Everyone that says that is right. I mean, there are plenty of people that are already auditioning for President of the United States and they say, "We just need to focus on a positive alternative agenda that economically is inclusive and address these..." And they're right. And there's a world post-Trump and they're right. 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, people are disappearing in real time. It's still happening. You have federalized National Guards still in California. You had 700 active duty Marines

• 1:38:47Gavin Newsom?

  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, uh, just a few weeks ago in California. This guy is not screwing around. We have to fight fire with fire. That's what Prop 50 is about, in that reality. So it's

• 1:39:07Ezra Klein?

  The redistricting.

• 1:39:08Gavin Newsom?

  The redistricting. And that's what we've tried to do with our social media, to enter into then these conversations that by the way, helped aid in a bit the fact that we were able to raise almost $120 million in 90 days to get Prop 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, not about me, whoever the next president

• 1:39:48Gavin Newsom?

  needs to be their parent, 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. It's really is. What's happening to our kids? Their brains are already being scrambled by social media and everything else we didn't even talk about. And but, but this, 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?

• 1:40:15Ezra Klein?

  You go back to Obama's brilliant speech at the 2004 Democratic National Convention, and you listen to it now and it sounds naive. Right? You can, you can feel the power in it, that we're not red and blue, we're not as divided as the spin, the spin meisters think.

• 1:40:29Gavin Newsom?

  So I love it.

• 1:40:30Ezra Klein?

  But we are that divided, actually. But one thing I see you like playing with, again, between the podcast and the social media, between sitting down with Kirk and Bannon and trolling Trump and Vance, is a sort of a both and politics. I don't know where that goes for you or for anybody, but I think there's some interesting question in it. What does it mean to not say that the other side of this is unity or common ground, much less an end to disagreement, but some kind of living amidst the disagreement that is more like the way a good family handles it?

• 1:41:12Gavin Newsom?

  Yeah, I mean, despite the fact we struggle every Thanksgiving, I did it again this year with some members of the family that see the world with a different set of eyes. It goes back to the fundamental point. Divorce is not a damn option. It just isn't. I mean, back to Clinton, he talked about defining the terms of our future. And so, 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. And I just think this notion of bringing humanity back, and that's not 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, it's an abundance mindset. Okay? It's not

• 1:41:55Gavin Newsom?

  a scarcity mindset. This notion goes back to what you were saying about J.D. Vance in that speech he gave, this notion that it is scarcity, it's zero sum, that something's being taken away. I mean, I don't live like that in California. It's always been abundance. There's only one dream, the American dream, oh, and the California dream. And it's all about abundant mindset. If something doesn't exist, we have to invent it. And there's a sense of limitlessness in that.

• 1:42:24Ezra Klein?

  And then also a final question, what are three books? Or given your, given your turn to podcasting through podcasts?

• 1:42:30Gavin Newsom?

  Well, I mentioned Built to Last.

• 1:42:31Ezra Klein?

  You'd recommend to the audience.

• 1:42:32Gavin Newsom?

  I gotta tell you, people really should, I wasn't joking about Built to Last. It, it, it's so interesting to have a book that shaped me early on. 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, a store with 13 investors and I had one part-time employee, Pat Kelly. And she encouraged me, she said, you have to read the book Built to Last. It was about a Stanford academic that was studying what works, what makes companies endure. And talked about being a clock builder versus a timekeeper. Talked about the genius of Anne versus the tyranny of Ohr. It changed my mindset, my outlook, political terms, not just in business terms. I hate to bring this book up because it's such a universal, obvious book. I had never read it. I've had 10 copies.

• 1:43:16Gavin Newsom?

  I finally picked it up off the shelf. I'm like, what the heck? Meditations from Marcus Aurelius. And I'm like, where the hell have I been? Or where's that book been?

• 1:43:24Ezra Klein?

  See, man, you get into podcasting and immediately the Stoics.

• 1:43:27Gavin Newsom?

  I'm telling you.

• 1:43:27Ezra Klein?

  Can't, can't be, can't be a male podcaster and not get into the Stoics.

• 1:43:30Gavin Newsom?

  How could you not? I don't think there's, 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.

• 1:43:41Ezra Klein?

  That book doesn't do it for me.

• 1:43:43Gavin Newsom?

  You've.

• 1:43:44Ezra Klein?

  I've read it, I've read it.

• 1:43:45Gavin Newsom?

  You did.

• 1:43:46Ezra Klein?

  It's not a, I, I have a feeling about it. And I think this is because I get more into meditation.

• 1:43:51Gavin Newsom?

  It was never a book for publication, as you know, so it was not intended to inspire.

• 1:43:54Ezra Klein?

  It's more about, um, 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, think, eh, you know, can't change what I can't change. I wouldn't, I, I wouldn't.

• 1:44:06Gavin Newsom?

  I read something very different. It's not, it's not about denying the existence of things.

• 1:44:11Ezra Klein?

  I don't think it's about denying.

• 1:44:12Gavin Newsom?

  It's about understanding what you can influence. But no, the opposite, I see, 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. And this notion of accountability, responsibility, agency, and taking accountability for what happened, you can't. And 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 that we can shape things and change the future.

• 1:44:44Ezra Klein?

  My inbox after admitting that.

• 1:44:46Gavin Newsom?

  Yeah, you're in trouble, buddy.

• 1:44:47Ezra Klein?

  I'm in bad shape.

• 1:44:48Gavin Newsom?

  Unbelievable, all those Stoics out there listening. Look, I'm only, I mean, I just because I was with Andrew yesterday and I did promise I was going to read 1929.

• 1:44:57Ezra Klein?

  You can't recommend it if you haven't read it.

• 1:44:59Gavin Newsom?

  No, I just started reading.

• 1:45:00Ezra Klein?

  Oh, you did start reading.

• 1:45:00Gavin Newsom?

  No, I haven't finished it, but I actually legitimately just started reading it. So it's the one that just actually, truthfully, on the proverbial nightstand.

• 1:45:08Ezra Klein?

  Governor Gavin Newsom really enjoyed it. Thank you very much.

• 1:45:10Gavin Newsom?

  Thank you, Ezra.

• 1:45:21Ezra Klein?

  This episode of Ezra Klansch is produced by Roland Hu, fact checking by Michelle Harris. Our senior audio engineer is Jeff Geld with additional mixing by Isaac Jones. Our executive producer is Claire Gordon. The show's production team also includes Annie Galvin, Marie Cassillon, Marina King, Jack McCordick, Kristin Lynn, Emma Kehlbeck, and Jan Kobal. Original music by Aman Sahota and Pat McCusker. Audience strategy by Kristina Cemiluski and Shannon Busta. The director of New York Times Opinion Audio is Annie Rose Strasser.