Opinion | What Pete Buttigieg Learned Playing JD Vance

Pete Buttigieg has had a fascinating rise in politics. He went from being the mayor of South Bend, Ind., a small but noble town, to an unexpectedly competitive presidential candidate, winning Iowa in 2020, to secretary of transportation. This year, he’s also proven to be one of the best communicators in the Democratic Party.

So with an opportunity to sit down with him, I wanted to ask him a bunch of questions I have about the Democratic Party. And they begin with a concept that he wrote a book about in 2020 — trust. The Democratic Party has lost the trust of a lot of people who once supported it. And it has endured a sorting of Americans by trust. Donald Trump’s Republican Party is a party full of people who don’t trust the system, don’t trust the government, don’t trust Democrats. But it’s become much more than that.

So how does Buttigieg think about trust? What does he think government — and particularly the Democratic Party — has done to lose it? What can be done to gain it back?

I should say there’s a law called the Hatch Act that keeps members of the government from campaigning in their official guise, which is fine. So, in order to talk with Buttigieg more widely, I was not able to ask him a number of questions I would have liked to ask him about his work as transportation secretary. But, given the circumstances, we had, I think, a pretty fascinating conversation.

This is an edited excerpt from the conversation. For the full conversation, listen to “The Ezra Klein Show” or watch the video at the top of this page.

Ezra Klein: Back in 2020, you wrote a book on political trust. There are a million ways to show that it has declined, but what’s your explanation?

Pete Buttigieg: One of the reasons I think it’s declined has been a kind of a feedback loop between public institutions letting people down and people then hesitating to empower those public institutions to solve their problems.

If you go back to the rise of Reaganism, one of the quotes Ronald Reagan’s best known for is that the most frightening thing you can ever hear is somebody saying, “I’m from the federal government and I’m here to help.” That generation of conservatives, when they took power, didn’t just believe that government was the problem. They also stripped away a lot of the capacity of government to solve problems.

That becomes a feedback loop, where if you’re looking around and you’re seeing crumbling infrastructure or widening inequality, you might think, oh, the government sucks at fixing these problems. And then the next time you’re being asked, for example, to vote for a candidate who’s going to make sure there’s enough funding going to the government, you say, “I’m not going to put tax money into the government. Government sucks.” That, too, becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. And the next thing you know, these public institutions are less and less able to address things.

You contrast that with what you have, for example, in Nordic countries. And I know it is almost exhaustingly a go-to for liberals to point to a Nordic example. But importantly, one of the many, many things that would be nice for us to have — that they have in Sweden — is a high perception of tax fairness. Partly that’s because I think they actually have a fairer tax code, but I also think there’s been a virtuous cycle there, where public entities have done a reasonably good job of taking care of people. People therefore have a relatively high level of trust that their tax dollars will be used fairly and wisely. And therefore they allow those institutions to have the running room they need to try to solve things.

I don’t mean to reduce all of this to a debate over the size of government. I think one of the things that we’ve gotten smarter about now on the left is that it’s not just how big or how small government is. But I do think that’s an example of one of the factors that was very corrosive.

A more recent one, of course, is the way information moves around. There was a lot of hope with the arrival of the internet that the democratization of reporting was going to be empowering. And in some ways it was — some very important ways, like human rights abuses that were captured on smartphones could no longer be denied. On the other hand, what we didn’t think about was that the editorial function of identifying what is true or not true, what is newsworthy or not, is dissolved or nonexistent in those same online spaces, which meant that lots of different things — some true, some false, some worth attention, some questionable — were all kind of put into the same swirl and got imbibed as if they were all the same. And I think that’s another example of something that’s led to this world we’re in now, where people don’t even trust that we’re in the same factual reality as one another.

I would take the first explanation as a policy feedback theory — bad policy creates negative trust, good policy should create positive trust. I would say I believed something more like that at the beginning of the Biden era. But then I watched a bunch of policies that I thought would’ve created feedback loops, like the child tax credit expansion, not quite work. I was thinking about this because the Teamsters got a big helping hand in the American Rescue Plan, but they just declined to endorse a Democrat, Kamala Harris, for the first time in modernity.

And that’s putting it mildly. Their pensions were saved by Joe Biden and Kamala Harris.

So if you would have thought that policy feedback loops work anywhere, “You save the Teamsters, the Teamsters like Joe Biden and Kamala Harris better” would have been about as tight a feedback loop as you could imagine. And it didn’t work. And the reason the Teamsters gave for not making a national endorsement was that their membership is heavily pro-Trump. So how does something like that fit with your theory?

An unsatisfying — but I think very true — answer is time. The child tax credit can take effect very quickly. And the astonishing results, in terms of the swift reduction of child poverty, showed that some good policies can also work very quickly. But that doesn’t mean that it soaks into where people award political credit for that very quickly. Or even embrace the policy that was helpful.

One good example on how there was, in fact, a policy feedback, but it wasn’t quick, has to do with the Affordable Care Act. I cut my political teeth running for an obscure statewide office in 2010. I was running for state treasurer in Indiana. And that’s one of those races where your prospects pretty much depend on the generic rising or falling of your party. And, believe it or not, it didn’t seem insane to run as a Democrat in Indiana in 2010, because in 2008, Barack Obama had carried Indiana.

Yeah, you had Evan Bayh as a senator.

Don’t get me wrong, I knew it was uphill even then. But of course I got clobbered. Every Democrat just about in any even remotely competitive area, let alone a reddening state like Indiana, was clobbered. Because in 2010, the Affordable Care Act was absolutely toxic to us Democrats. It was the issue that cost many Democrats the election. By 2018, the A.C.A. was actually the winning issue for Democrats, so much so that when Kamala Harris challenged Donald Trump in the debate over his attempts to destroy it, he was avoiding his own commitment to what was very much his own policy. He definitely wanted and tried to undo the Affordable Care Act and get rid of all that. But it is now politically dangerous for him to admit it.

So eight years is a long time, and it’s not a long time. I think it’s not a long time for a major policy issue to flip its political valence. It’s not a long time for an important policy to bear enough fruit that people appreciate it and then are protective of it. But it’s also too slow for those — including members of Congress who helped get the A.C.A. passed — to, politically, live to tell the tale.

Here’s a question that may not seem related to trust but actually is: Robert F. Kennedy Jr. ran for president this year. He dropped out and endorsed Donald Trump. What do you make of that?

“Weird” doesn’t even begin to characterize how I view that campaign. I think the endorsement is less weird, actually, because anybody who wants to burn it all down is probably a crossover Trump-R.F.K. Jr. voter. There’s a particular flavor of conspiratorial style that I see that they have in common, which is, a conspiracy theory is introduced by somebody saying, “They won’t tell you this. Don’t trust them. They don’t want you to see this. They’re not reporting on this, but I’m going to tell you.” Which, ironically, is saying, “You can’t trust anybody else, but you can sure trust me.” Which should make you skeptical immediately. But that style of saying, “I know something that the establishment doesn’t, and they’re lying to you” — in R.F.K.’s case, most famously about vaccines. And there’s a lot of crossover between his famous anti-vax stances and what you get in Trumpworld, but there’s that same kind of affect, and it is a little bit post-policy. I don’t know how much they align on policies really. With each of them, for different reasons, it’s hard to pin them down on policy. But I do think in that sense, it was natural.

Two things have happened with trust over the last couple of decades. One is that it’s gone down. The other is that it has sorted.

You used to have what I would call “low trust in the system” voters in both parties. R.F.K. Jr. was a recognizably left-wing version of that — they don’t believe in vaccines and G.M.O.s, corporations are taking everything over, maybe you can cure cancer with vitamin C, that kind of thing. And you had the right-wing versions of this, going all the way back to the John Birch Society. But you had a bunch of them on both sides.

Donald Trump seems to have set off a realignment. My friend Matt Yglesias calls it the “crank realignment.” Now you have R.F.K. Jr. moving over to the right. It’s not necessarily that he’s a right-winger on policy. But there is this clustering of higher-trust voters in the Democratic Party — voters who believe in the system — and lower trust in the Republican Party. What does that do to politics?

I think that the sorting is unique to this moment. I don’t know that it’s durable. In one sense, it’s the most natural thing in the world for the more right-of-center party to be anti-government and, therefore, if the establishment means government, for you to be skeptical. But when it becomes any institution, including your county-run election administration, which is literally being run by your neighbors or — to move outside of government — medical academia saying, hey, these vaccines are working, or anything else, then I think it becomes a lot more dangerous and corrosive.

And, again, I think it puts us back in this world where people have their own realities or their own facts. And if there aren’t some agreed-on, trusted arbiters of some of this, whether it’s in the press or in the academy. It’s less likely to be in government, but one reason we have certain importantly nonpartisan institutions in government, like the judiciary is supposed to be, is for this reason. If you lose that — whether it has a partisan valence or not — it’s bad news.

This may be a good time to bring in your occasional foil, JD Vance. There’s reporting that you are playing JD Vance in debate prep with Tim Walz. As you spend time trying to get into his head and into his demeanor, what have you come to understand in him or believe about him that you didn’t before?

He’s somebody who is a product of the Midwest but, after trading off of that Midwest identity, is now, in my view, promoting policies and a ticket that would be really harmful for the industrial Midwest. And so I’m thinking a lot about what I consider to be a faux populism. This space he’s carved out, where he achieves a certain credibility by criticizing both parties, saying that Democrats and Republicans in the past have gotten things wrong, but then all the prescriptions he seems to be ready to vote for or act for are things like undercutting your right to choose or tax cuts for the rich or a lot of other things that I think are objectionable about good old-fashioned Republican policy. I’m just thinking a lot about how to penetrate that veneer.

But that doesn’t let you play him. The reason he’s a curiosity to me is I knew him a bit. He was on my show back in 2017, back in an earlier guise. I’ve watched a lot of politicians in the Republican Party go from being Trump haters to Trump supporters or something beyond Trump supporters. He’s really the only one who I’ve watched his whole temperament and personality and way of talking and being and moving through the world change. Ted Cruz had Ted Cruz’s personality in 2013. He was shutting down the government. He was not well liked by his colleagues. Marco Rubio is much friendlier to Trump now, but the same guy temperamentally.

JD Vance went through a temperamental overhaul. He became angrier and resentful and contemptuous of people who disagree with him — at the same time that things were going really well for him personally. It’s not like he was vastly rejected. His book was a best-seller. He was the toast of the town. As you’re trying to absorb his temperament — because I’m sure you’re trying to prepare Tim Walz for that — what do you make of that?

I’ve certainly seen a lot of Republicans, especially my generation’s Republicans, go through some version of this evolution. Although you’re right, I think it’s more dramatic in his case. I think it means there’s a real contradiction in him, because he is simultaneously the Republican who’s supposed to explain a new kind of conservatism to the world, including New York Times readers, and he’s supposed to embody this kind of angry populism and this facts-don’t-matter nihilism of what Trump represents, even though he eloquently called it out before he got on board with it.

But I think sometimes we make these things way more complicated than they are. I think there’s a bunch of people, including him, who know deep down how bad Donald Trump is for the country but realize that they could gain power by attaching themselves to him, and they did it. And that’s one thing that he has in common with a very different Midwesterner, Mike Pence. It worked out really poorly for Mike Pence. And that’s part of why it’s going to be JD Vance sitting on that stage.

A big part of the JD Vance theory of politics is that the liberal elite has captured the institutions and government particularly. And the thing that the MAGA movement needs to do — which is now laid out in much more detail on something like 2025 than it ever was in President Trump’s first term — is that they’re going to march through the institutions, break them, rid them of the deep state, of the liberals, of whatever, and get them back.

JD Vance once called this “debathification,” working off of what America did after the invasion of Iraq — an interesting analogy. But this is their promise to the low-trust voter. You think the system is against you. You don’t trust it. Don’t turn away from the system. We’re going to take it, break it and wield its power for you, and use that to bring corporations to heel, universities to heel — all the other institutions in American life you don’t trust anymore. That’s the unified governing theory of MAGA. How do you take it?

The problem is, what he’s saying is, “These institutions don’t work for you, the people. So we’re going to take them back on behalf of the people.” But what he means is, “These institutions don’t work for me, a right-wing politician. And so we’re going to put them under the control of right wing politicians.”

And if you look at something like what Project 2025 would do to the civil service, taking a lot of what are, importantly, nonpartisan roles, and make them directly subject to political control, it is less than plausible that is going to benefit anyone but whoever’s controlling them. Now, of course, I think it’s completely upside-down to have a political party that’s most associated with tax cuts for the rich and letting corporations have their way offer to be the ones that are going to make these institutions work better for you, precisely because we have had nonpartisan institutions handle things like regulation that we have some stability to the rule of law in this country and that it’s aligned not around the interests of any one person — political or financial interests of any one person — but around those of the public. You cannot have safety and peace and rule of law, let alone a healthy political system, if there’s this sense that the government is personally controlled by one person. That’s not safe or good. And so, I think what we have to do is see through that.

Now, you are more susceptible to believe something like that if you feel like it has failed you so completely that anybody offering to just smash it is bringing you some kind of benefit. Which is why these institutions really have to do a better job of delivering for people.

I think sometimes one way you build trust with people is owning up to failure. You and I came up in the same era of elite failure. The Iraq war is an elite failure. The financial crisis is an elite failure. There’s a lot that goes wrong in this period. What, specifically, in your view, does the Democratic Party have to own up to? Where did the Democratic Party go wrong in this era? And what lessons either has it learned or does it still need to learn?

Certainly, I think the complicity of the Democratic Party in the run-up to the Iraq war continues to be something that really helped set America onto the political trajectory that we’re on right now. Another flip in politics that’s very revealing is that I remember in 2002, as a college student, volunteering on a Democratic congressional campaign. The Democrats everywhere who were skeptical of the idea of the Iraq War were still kind of pretending to be OK with it, because they thought they had to be.

What campaign were you volunteering on?

The local congressional race where I lived in South Bend, Indiana. And we did not win. But by 2016, Donald Trump, who was for the war, is pretending he was against it. So again, it took a while, but things really shifted there, obviously partly because of the disastrous consequences of the invasion. But I think that provoked, or should have provoked, a lot of introspection on the left — or among Democrats, I should say — on how we allowed ourselves to go along with that.

There’s a lot of introspection in our party, I think, over policies that may be making it harder to build things. Housing is the one that I know you’ve paid a lot of attention to and probably gets the most attention. But there’s lots of things, from mining for materials needed for clean energy to infrastructure — which I won’t get into now because I’m here in my personal capacity — but a lot of things that — it’s not as straightforwardly clear. I think the right thinks that, well, if you got rid of all these regulations and environmental protections, then we wouldn’t have this problem. But I do think we’ve got to be a little more serious about that. I could go on. We’re a party that loves to criticize ourselves.

You can’t dangle that housing bait in front of me and not expect me to take it. Expanding housing supply, which is not a thing Democrats were emphasizing 10 years ago, was the first thing on Kamala Harris’s first major set of policy proposals. She wants to build 3 million new houses over her first term. Barack Obama, when he was at the Democratic National Convention, brought that up first in his list of new ideas for a Democratic Party. I have done a lot of work on how housing is harder to build where Democrats govern. It’s a lot easier to build a home in Texas than it is in California. That is true today. Gavin Newsom, the governor of California, has passed a lot of pro-housing legislation, but it is still harder to build in California than in Texas. Why? What did Democrats get wrong here?

I don’t want to make this out to be just a Democratic thing. But it’s clear that out of a desire — part of which, by the way, is very well-rounded — to make sure that bad things don’t happen, you wind up with a lot of measures put into place that stop anything from happening, including good things. But I also think it’s important and telling that she has led with this policy to expand housing supply, because that’s clearly a problem. And one thing that I think is especially important about this moment, and also characterizes what I would think of as, as Bidenism, is a willingness to meet a big problem with a lot of ambition and a belief that, if you get it right, good government can be part of the solution.

There’s been a tremendous amount of energy in the Democratic Party, in the Biden administration, to build more clean energy by creating subsidies, tax credits. And it’s having a big effect, and I support that hugely.

But not a lot has happened on the regulatory side to address the concern that Democrats, and maybe the government in general, has made it too hard to do good work in an effort to stop bad things like climate change. There’s not been permitting reform passed. There’s not been major changes made to things like the National Environmental Policy Act. There’s a lot of housing talk, but there’s not been much done on deregulating housing.

This seems like a thing that is sort of winning intellectually much more than it is winning at a policy level. And when I report on it, it’s because many Democrats are still very uncomfortable with this. They don’t want to unwind this. They are very worried — again, understandably — about bad things happening.

So in terms of managing something, it has been a bit of a failure. What are the ideas here that might work? In your view, what are the steps Harris could take if she were president?

Part of it is resources matter, right? That’s why she’s proposed resources going into that. I don’t want to dismiss how fundamental that is.

But yes, for that to work, you also have to have policies that accompany that. And part of it, I think that’s important, is empowering the local. And this might be another example of where, while I can give you all kinds of reasons why, in my time as mayor, I thought Democrats tended to be better allies to my city than Republicans, I will still acknowledge that Democrats have sometimes been a little quick to look at a federal solution when we really need to recognize that a lot of our salvation, socially and policy-wise, will come from the local.

Part of that is my bias, having been a mayor. But I’ve also seen many ways that that’s true. Partly because things like misinformation and disinformation — while, of course, crazy rumors happen at every level, they are less likely to dominate at the local level, because when you’re closer to home, you can see through what’s real and what’s not, whether that’s threats being invoked about what bad thing would happen if you built this. Or an example that’s live in the news right now, which is how the community of Springfield, Ohio, at a local level, is handling itself in a much more dignified way than what is being said about them and done to them in their name by people like JD Vance.

What do you mean by empowering the local level? Because on the one hand, I agree that the local politics are typically more dignified and decent than national politics. And on the other hand, when you think about what makes it hard to site transmission lines, what makes housing hard, it’s often decisions local governments are making fully rationally. Maybe you don’t want to be the city where the solar farm is placed. Maybe you don’t want to be the city where the transmission lines go through. Maybe you don’t want the big multifamily units going up. So you see, in a lot of places, governors trying to take power up to the state level.

So on the one hand, there’s this tendency in politics to want to empower local government. A lot of these decisions are local. And on the other, when I look at this, I often see the problem is that these decisions are extremely local. And so the governor of California, the governor of Maryland might need for their state to have a lot more homes built or clean energy built. But for each individual city, they don’t want it in their city, they want it in the other city.

Yeah, in that sense, it can seem like a classic collective-action problem. I guess my point is, if there is a local obstacle, there’s more choices on how to handle that than just to ram it down the local community’s throat, and one of them is to adequately set a table where mitigations or trade-offs can be set so that a local community, if it’s really being asked to swallow something that’s difficult for it on the one hand, can be made better off on the other hand in a way that’s also consistent with the bigger thing getting done.

Vice President Harris has said that she wants to build an opportunity economy. Opportunity is always one of the weird terms in American politics because you can’t find anybody who disagrees with it. What is different about the theory of it this time? If we’ve been pursuing this for so long, across so many administrations, so many sessions of Congress, and we haven’t got into a thing where people can say, look, we’ve built the opportunity economy that you’ve been promised by administration after administration, what about either the definition of opportunity here or the policies under consideration here will make that different?

I’ll tell you the yardstick I would use to see if we’re getting to the thing: social mobility. The kind of mathematical definition of the American dream, if it can be reduced to that, is the likelihood that you’re going to wind up better off than you started. If you were born in 1945, there’s a 90 percent chance that would be true. For someone your age or my age, it’s a coin flip. Changing that is, I think, the best indicator that this is an opportunity economy, that this is an opportunity society.

But I don’t know that I would accept the premise that we’re kind of still casting about for it. I’d say we’re very much underway in making it happen. There are some indications that we’re already trending toward more social mobility and economic mobility being available. I think this is especially important because I know in past political generations, opportunity has been basically a code for ideological centrism that means that you’re going to see the neoliberal framework kind of playing out. But what’s been different in the last few years, I think, is a real level of investment, recognizing that opportunity isn’t just about deregulating some space where you’re hoping to open a small business, but also making sure that by the time you’re out to open a small business, you’re doing it on a foundation of education, the infrastructure, whatever else you needed in life to get to that point.

And so to me, it’s not that we’re wandering around looking for a solution. It’s that we’re trying to reverse 40 to 50 years — depending on what metric you’re looking at — of widening inequality and, in some ways, diminishing opportunity. And in the last three or four years, there’s been an incredible amount of headway toward that. Let’s see how far we can take it. And also head off the threats to opportunity that we know are looming, most notably climate.

Donald Trump’s economic plan is, I guess in a way, straightforward. Depending on the day you hear him talking about it, it’s a 10 or 20 percent tax on all goods imported from any country and a 60 percent tax on goods imported from China. His argument is that Americans won’t pay that as higher prices, that it will be companies in other countries giving us money, sort of like a tax, that’ll fill our coffers. It’ll make sure more production happens here, and that is the way we will become more competitive. Polling shows 56 percent of Americans support the plan. What do you think of both it as actual policy and it as politics?

I think it’s terrible policy, and I think that Americans will be less supportive of that as they do the math about the estimated $3,900 a year in cost that a typical family might face if he got a chance to implement that policy.

But just as importantly, in results terms, my party needs to be talking about why it was that there was a manufacturing recession on Trump’s watch — before Covid, by the way — and what it means that actually jobs are coming back to the United States in manufacturing right now. And that is because of industrial policy. That is a huge achievement of the Biden-Harris years, and it is just getting started.

Think about where I grew up, South Bend, Ind. Still, in some ways, trying to recover from the loss of the Studebaker car company in 1963. Our downtown was haunted by huge factories with broken windows, much of which we were able to finally do something about during my time as mayor, which I’m very proud of. But we had then, and still do have, a long way to go there.

The biggest investment that I’m aware of happening in my lifetime up until recently was about $1 billion investment in a steel plant on the west edge of the county. That was such a big deal that even though it happened in 1990, people were still talking about it, and many economic development professionals were still kind of making their name on it, 20 years later when I became mayor.

Right now, there is a $3-4 billion investment in electric vehicle batteries going on right next to that steel facility. There is an $11 billion Amazon Web Services data center being built a few miles from there, and another one going up that Microsoft’s putting in that I can’t even remember how much is being invested. So, collectively, in order of magnitude beyond anything we had seen since the Kennedy administration, those are the kinds of things that Trump is falsely saying would be delivered by his all-tariffs, no-investments strategy.

Behind the all-tariff strategy is a very zero-sum theory of how the economy works: We are in competition with other countries for factories, for jobs, and the way to win that competition is to tilt the field against them. The trade theories of Trump, which go even beyond tariffs, kind of have a similar view of it, including the idea that there’s a zero-sum competition between native-born workers and immigrants for jobs, for wages. When JD Vance is not just being racist about Haitian immigrants in Springfield, Ohio, what he is saying is that they’re taking away the jobs, they are raising housing prices.

This is an old strain in economics and in politics, but I’m curious what you think about it and its appeal, because I do think it’s sort of intuitive to people that we’re in different kinds of competitions, and people do look and they think, “Well, yeah, if an immigrant gets a job, I’m probably not getting it, or somebody else is not getting it,” or “If another country gets a TSMC semiconductor factory, we’re not getting it.” How do you answer the intuitive appeal of zero-sum economics?

Two things can be true at the same time. One is that there is competition between us and other countries. And the other is that it isn’t zero-sum. And I do think another thing that really costs a lot of trust in places like where I grew up is we were told, just go along with all these things that are positive-sum. The pie will get bigger. Don’t worry about your slice. It’ll definitely be bigger because the whole pie is going to get bigger. And only half of that promise came true. The pie got bigger. But a lot of people’s slices in places like the industrial Midwest didn’t. You’ve got to understand why people have a level of receptivity to that.

And at the same time, the idea that it’s zero-sum is just clearly not true. And again, that’s why I think stories like immigration are a lot more nuanced and less fit into that narrative. When you actually look at the local level, certainly in South Bend, part of how we finally became a growing city after being called a dying city had to do with immigration. And that was also tied up with economic growth that was happening. Jobs were growing and population was growing. And it was not people were coming in to compete for the same jobs. We wound up with more jobs and more people. That’s happening in Springfield, Ohio, right now. And it’s a complicated situation there, but one thing that’s definitely happening is way more jobs than they had before and way more people in a city that had lost thousands and thousands of its people.

But I also think this is a good example of the benefits of taking politics offline. And that’s part of what I mean when I say that salvation will come from the local. Because even though obviously these attitudes can prevail at a local level too, I think actually people do have a richer understanding of how we benefit from what another person brings when it’s in the context of your own community.

This is an excerpt from my conversation with Pete Buttigieg for “The Ezra Klein Show.” In the rest of the conversation, we discuss how the conversation about immigration policy has shifted, and why the “crisis” narrative seems to resonate; what Democrats’ affirmative vision for foreign policy should look like; and more.

You can listen to our whole conversation by following “The Ezra Klein Show” on the NYT Audio App, Apple, Spotify, Amazon Music, YouTube, iHeartRadio or wherever you get your podcasts. View a list of book recommendations from our guests here.

This episode of “The Ezra Klein Show” was produced by Rollin Hu. Fact-checking by Michelle Harris, with Kate Sinclair. Our senior engineer is Jeff Geld, with additional mixing by Aman Sahota. Our senior editor is Claire Gordon. The show’s production team also includes Annie Galvin, Elias Isquith and Kristin Lin. Original music by Isaac Jones. Audience strategy by Kristina Samulewski and Shannon Busta. The executive producer of New York Times Opinion Audio is Annie-Rose Strasser. Special thanks to Jonah Kessel, Elliot deBruyn and Selcuk Karaoglan.

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