Ezra Klein

I'm Tamler Sommers from the University of Houston.

Dave, all I'm hearing about these days is the hugging face incident, and some guy who resigned from his job at Anthropic, and now all of a sudden Ezra Klein is writing columns, Dario from, uh, Anthropic is, is writing manifestos.

What happened, and how is this affecting your p-doom?

[laughs] Well, I, I, I can't summarize the hugging face incident-

And I think it really does apply to the apocalyptic rhetoric we've been hearing lately from tech.

And I think Ezra Klein had a really good take on it this week of just like, if you're saying that you're building something that could kill us all, don't build it.

Don't do it.

And so we're thinking, okay, what does disarmament mean in this moment where we have these different forms of WMDs? Yes, the nukes, but also the tech and also the wealth, that the wealth accumulation has become so extreme that we need to disarm some of those wealth bombs.

The money is going to existing projects like this to make sure that the unions have the money that they need to keep this thing going in perpetuity.

You know who's done a really great deep dive on the high-speed rail is the New York Times columnist Ezra Klein, who wrote that book that went everywhere, Abundance.

And there's a big chapter in it that's just about the high-speed rail.

And it was the Obama administration that was offering a whole bunch of federal dollars back in 2009 if only the state of California could figure out a way to alter this project to deal with the high rates of asthma in Fresno.

And yeah, I listen to the Pivot podcast.

Ezra Klein, the guy from the New York Times, did a big thing on AI, how worried we should be, which is worried.

Stuff that I need to know for work.

So I tend to listen more than I should.

And she's like, do you know what they're saying about you on the web? Because, of course, all of the left-wing gawker successors had lost their minds and were writing these totally bonkers things, recycling these rumors, sadly untrue, that had circulated for years before.

Like, I roomed with Ezra Klein.

Oh, no.

Oh, no.

Hannah Arendt has demonstrated similar opinions in the past, all the way back in 1946.

Ezra Klein, ironically enough, when he was defending me the last time people were calling me anti-Semitic, had said something similar to that.

And yet...

it got reduced and chopped up and turned into this thing where people were falsely claiming that I was actually advocating for violence against American Jews.

So you said, you know, this is a broad coalition supporting it, a lot of business groups, a lot of construction and, you know, developers, folks like that who obviously have an interest in building.

I'm curious, like, do you see this as coming out of the abundance movement? That's something we saw Ezra Klein, the journalist, really sort of champion the last few years, this idea that Democrats particularly need to say yes to more things.

I mean, I certainly think it's complementary to a lot of the points of the abundance movement.

And, you know, I mean, when we talk about delay, and I'll keep going back to housing just because it is such an important point of our affordability crisis and a part of this ballot initiative.

It's that idea of abundance.

You know, Ezra Klein wrote that whole book about it with Derek Thompson.

Is that the way out of this? The government starting to employ people again, to work for people, to give them a life? that they believed they were promised, Mark? Look back to the 50s, take what worked and leave what didn't?

Well, yeah, that's kind of make America great again, isn't it? We want to go back to a time in America when it worked.