Ezra Klein on supply-side progressivism, polarization, + what SV misses about politics

think that there is a kind of unrestrained nature to him.

Yeah.

Where other people would not apply their own preferences quite so baldly. Like, he's willing to take a level of public backlash a lot of people in his position wouldn't be, right? Willing to gamble on Tesla in a way others wouldn't, right? There's a— I've met him a couple times, and there is an all-in-ness to him.

Yeah.

That is distinctive. For whatever reason, in this era, we're seeing that pay off more for more people. I think it is a personality type, particularly that is somewhat rewarded on social media. Like, if you are this kind of person, a Donald Trump and Elon Musk, you know, and there are others like them who can sort of operate at that level, at that scale, without a lot of the sense of social restraint that pulls a lot of people back. Like, I just don't want all this incoming for good and for ill. Like, this is a pretty good era for you. I sometimes joke that this is really the era of the trickster god.

Yeah.

That the kind of personality type mythically that is doing well right now, like at the very, very high levels, is a trickster god. And then on the other side, like true restraint, right? So we don't talk about them as much, but it's been a very good couple years for Joe Biden, for Tim Cook, for Jeff Bezos. Frankly, I think Mark Zuckerberg is profiting off the Elon thing quite well. All of a sudden it's like, yeah, maybe not that bad.

I'm Erik Torenberg, and this is Upstream with Erik Torenberg. Ezra Klein has been one of the most important voices in policy and politics over the last 10, 15 years. He's a policy wonk, but he also deeply understands technology and business, having founded Vox Media and having lived in California the past few years. In this episode, we cover Silicon Valley's approach to politics, new political factions within Silicon Valley, his great book Why We're So Polarized, and his growing intellectual movement focused on a politics of abundance, or as he also calls it, supply-side progressivism. Here's Ezra. Ezra, welcome to the podcast. Thanks so much for joining.

Thank you for having me.

So, Ezra, you have an upcoming book with Derek Thompson about the abundance agenda and about supply-side progressivism. Why don't you unpack what you're trying to do in that book and maybe trace a little bit of the evolution, whether it's what changed in the world or what changed in your thinking that led to the book?

Well, let me start with the idea rather than the book. The book is— upcoming is a generous way to put it given where we are in the process right now. But yeah, upcoming. Supply-side progressivism is an idea I'd been circling around, I'd say actually for a couple of years, and in many ways since moving here. And I would describe it as a coming together of 3 threads of observation or of inquiry. So one is simply moving to California and a state I'm from. I grew up in Irvine, California. I went to school at UC Santa Cruz and UCLA, and then I moved to Washington, DC when I was 21 or so, and then came back 14 years later to the Bay Area. And this is a state governed by Democrats, governed by liberals, that has a lot of pretty profound problems, that for all of its vaunted progressivism, is not getting in a lot of important areas progressive outcomes. And I would particularly say that's true around the ability to live a decent lifestyle on a normal middle-class salary. And so one thing about being focused on the political problems here separately from the national stage is when you're in Washington, like, say, in 2010 or 2011, And you're watching Republicans threaten then, as now, to breach a debt ceiling for no reason and cause a global financial crisis. You get really focused on the problems of the Republican Party. But here you have to be focused on the problems of progressive governance. So that got me thinking about, well, what is a problem in California? The problem in California continuously across a range of issues is insufficient supply of typically physical goods. We have a lot of intangible goods, a lot of knowledge economy goods and capital in California. But when you talk about enough housing, enough mass transit, enough University of California system schools, enough clean energy capacity, enough transmission lines, we have real problems. So why was supply such a problem in so many places, not just California, but you look at Washington State, you look at New York where liberals govern. That's piece one. Piece 2 is we transitioned from an era in which the big problems in the economy were demand side aftermath of the financial crisis. You're dealing with very low, very persistently low demand. You have people like Larry Summers in a previous guise talking secular stagnation and an enduring economy without enough demand. And so a lot of us were focused to cover the economy on the problems of demand for a long time. And I think it's worth not underplaying this. We more or less solved the problem of demand, and that was in part through government policy, in part through a very accommodating Fed, in part through Donald Trump and Republicans deciding they actually did not care about austerity. And as soon as he got into office, spending a shit ton of money and putting a bunch into tax cuts. So we moved from demand being the problem to supply being the problem. Inflation, obviously, which we're we're still living through, although it's curbing a little bit, prices. And behind the sharp rise in post-pandemic prices, you have what my wife Annie Lowrey called in a viral article a couple years ago, the affordability crisis, the high cost of housing, of healthcare, of childcare, of education, et cetera. So this moved what I've called in some places a politics of prices. And then the final thing I'll say is that I'd been thinking for a long time, and particularly after my first book, Why We're Polarized, about what does the politics of technology look like? And that thinking got even sharper during the pandemic when you watched political solutions to problems run out of steam fairly quickly. We cannot maintain distancing, say, for very long, or lockdowns, but technological solutions like vaccines really prove worth their weight in gold. And in particular there with Warp Speed, Warp Speed to me is a really remarkable and inspiring programme where you actually did have the government step in, say, we really want to see a supply of this invention emerge very, very quickly. We're going to make it easier to do so. We're going to provide certainty in getting there. But once we do that, we are going to ensure that distribution is equitable. And the vaccine really is remarkable in terms of, I think, how equitable that distribution was, at least early on. And add that into climate crisis, where I think most people understand that the solutions we need rely very heavily on innovation. That gets you thinking, about what other innovations we need to solve the problems we have. I'm a big animal rights and animal suffering person. I don't think we're going to make any progress on that unless we invent really remarkable alternative proteins that are tastier and healthier and cheaper and so on. And so that got me thinking a lot about the politics of technology. And sort of those are the 3 main tributaries for me into what becomes supply-side progressivism, which is how do you focus on the supply of things we need? to realize the kind of world and economy and society that progressives like me at least claim to want.

Yeah, those are 3 areas to dig into. In some ways, your explanation rhymes with, or has some rhymes with, Marc Andreessen's It's Time to Build, and in other ways, Tyler Cowen's state capacity libertarianism. And yet you guys also come at it from different perspectives. I'm curious whether on a processes perspective or whether on an outcomes perspective, where you differ from those 2 people or ideas or camps.

So I'd say a couple of things. So one, I would say one place I differ from Marc, and I wrote this in a response I did at Vox to It's Time to Build, is that I think Marc is quite distant from questions of institutions. He really framed that as almost just a kind of bizarre cultural problem. Build whatever you want. It doesn't matter what I'm building. I don't want to hear about what you think about what I'm building. Whatever you build, I'll support that too. The question of why we have difficulty building requires, among other things, a really deep engagement with what has gone wrong when we have built before. Why did people erect institutions? Why did they create processes? Why did they create blockages? Why did they create systems and bills and so on that have made it so much easier to stop things from moving forward? And by the way, it's true for a lot of VCs who are very big kind of builder types on Twitter, but in my experience, a lot of them do not live in particularly dense places. And again, worth doing a little bit of self-reflection on that and what that implies about the pervasiveness of sentiments, which are very natural, that people want their communities to be like the community they bought into when they bought into there. When I make this point, I'm not just— it's not really a cheap effort at saying hypocrite. I think most people are hypocrites across a lot of different dimensions. It's to say that it should inspire some— the generosity we bring to our own inconsistencies should also be brought to those of others. So that's maybe one place where I would differ there. I have a much more sort of institutional and sort of rational actor view of why people come to the politics they do. Tyler is a little bit different. Tyler and state capacity libertarianism, I would just say the real difference between the two of us, well, state capacity is a related but different concept to supply-sideism. State capacity is about the capacity the state has to act. Oftentimes for supply-side progressivism to work the way I want it to, you actually want to reduce the state's capacity to act. So one thing Tyler is pointing out there is that libertarians often don't think very hard about places where the state needs to be capable of achieving its goals, say, in pandemic prevention or pandemic response. I think the arguments I'm making around supply-side liberalism, they're a little bit more agnostic. There are places where you would need the government to be able to do significantly more, places where you needed to start doing significantly less, which is a complicated thing about it. But I think the main difference for Tyler and I is in the final word of the 2 ideas. Tyler is a— I don't know if I truly believe Tyler's a libertarian anymore, but he is some kind of subvariant of a classical liberal. In his own idiosyncratic kind of wonderful way. And I am a progressive. And so my views about what things we need to create supply of are very connected to my views of how society should look and be ordered and what kind of equity we should be shooting for and what kind of justice we should be shooting for. Somebody who's done work very related to me is Virginia Postrel in her book, The Future and Its Enemies. And we were both on a panel together. And somebody in the audience raised this question of, well, look, this all sounds well and good, but I've worked with these poor communities who get these smelting factories or whatever it might be that have toxic runoff put right next to them. And what do you have to say to that? And Virginia says, and it's a Breakthrough Institute panel, you can look it up on YouTube, but it's interesting. It's worth watching, I think. And she says, look, it sucks to be poor. It always has. And almost a definition of being poor is you live in an area where there is less voice and things people don't want to have are put there. And my view is that is not good enough. Like, that is not an answer to this. That is not the way I want society to be ordered. That is not the way I want voice to work. And so the progressivism side of this is not just like tacked on there for branding reasons. The values I bring to politics, the kind of nudges I'm trying to deploy on society are important to me. And so they order what comes before it.

Yeah, that's fascinating. Going back to your point on why we can't build, I want to look at a few examples, whether it's maybe education and housing. Is it much more complex than entrenched interests vetoing building because it wouldn't be Uh, in their interest, um, and, and, and the solution is to have kind of, uh, you know, remove some of that veto power, or, or shed some, some, some light on the nuance here.

One tricky thing about this for me as I've gone into this is that it's very different in different places, and entrenched interests in any domain mean really different things. The reason it's been hard to get congestion pricing in New York City off the ground is different than the reason it is hard to get something done with multifamily housing in Atherton, which is different than why Diablo Canyon almost closed and may still someday close, a nuclear power plant in California, which is different than why we haven't built a UC except for Merced since 19— there is a kind of specificity to this, which is tricky, is the only way I can put it. The Burning Man organization suing the Bureau of Land Management to stop a geothermal exploratory drill from happening outside Gerlach, Nevada. All of these are different. What it means for the Burning Man institution to be an incumbent And what it means for homeowners to be incumbents and what it means for a community to not want a beloved forest near it to be turned into solar panels. We have a lot of language like incumbents and status quo and entrenched interests and special interests, and I think that it's valuable language, but it often flattens a tremendous amount of nuance, including nuance within projects, right? Do we have actually good models of how to do community voice well and quickly?

Yeah.

Are we— so I just did a podcast with Nick Bagley, Nick Bagley, I keep saying Bagley, who's a law professor at the University of Michigan. And he's a liberal. He was chief counsel to Governor Gretchen Whitmer. And he has this very, from a liberal perspective, I think incendiary article called, I think it's called like the Liberal Procedure Fetish or something like that. But the point is procedure fetish. And his point in that Is that one problem in liberalism is that there's a tendency to try to legitimise state action through the imposition of a lot of procedure, a lot, a lot, a lot, a lot of procedure, and that that's wrong. The way state action is made legitimate is by being prompt, fast, responsive, and fair, and that procedure actually doesn't get you there. It looks like it does, it sounds like it does, it feels to the people doing it like it does, but it's not actually having that outcome. And so it is failing in making the action legitimate. And that's something really worth considering. I mean, in many cases, What you have, I think, is not really that a bunch of interests gathered together and got the exact process they want. What you often have is a process meant for a very different thing that is now running in a very different way. This is not exactly on the supply-side liberalism topic, but I think a lot about how the ballot initiative process in California was created by the progressive movement in the early 1900s because the railroad interests had bought up the entire legislature. And then a couple years ago, it is used by Uber and Lyft, who in certain ways I think one could imagine as being modern-day successors of past very large transportation interests, to put down a constitutional amendment saying that no alterations can be made around how we think about their employees except with a 7/8 vote of supermajority of the legislature. Now, maybe you love that requirement, maybe you don't, but Whatever the ballot initiative process was meant to do, it was not that. It's kind of working in the exact opposite way. So you also just do have this reality of long-running processes getting captured by whoever happens to be around and have the resources to capture them. And sometimes that's people who want money out of it. Sometimes people want preservation, sometimes safety, whatever it might be, environmental standards. But it, it, it does create a kind of difficulty in, in getting anything done. So I think of this as kind of a sociopolitical dial that has been set really high across a lot of different areas of society. But unlike in some other things I've covered, if you want the Senate to move faster, you could really just get rid of the filibuster. There isn't the one thing here, right? There isn't the one statute I would change, the one ballot initiative I would repeal, the one sort of layer of this I would elevate up to state government as opposed to local government. It's really very case by case. And the fact that it happens in so many places in so many different ways, I think speaks to there being a kind of more generalized force and sort of social evolution behind it, as opposed to being just like one mistake by a bunch of bad decision makers somewhere.

Hey everybody, I want to recommend a couple other shows that we also run. One is Moment of Zen, which I co-host with Dan Romero and Antonio Garcia Martinez. We talk about everything from tech to history, philosophy. We've also featured Marc Andreessen and Balaji on those podcasts, so I recommend you checking them out. My other show is Cognitive Revolution. It's an AI show that I co-host with Nathan Labenz. I recommend listening if you want to stay up to date with all things AI.

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It is interesting, during sort of June 2020, after George Floyd, there was this sort of demand for reformation of how police unions work. And I'm curious if you could imagine things that would also cause people to think about the teachers union or other kinds of organizations that some people might think might be holding back supply in some way. I actually don't know enough about teachers unions to say whether they are or aren't, but it was just interesting that that was an episode that caused insight into or desired change on a structural level. I'm curious if you think we might see more of that.

I think the more worrying lesson of that is I think police unions have properly been understood as having played some genuinely grotesque roles in American society. As somebody who is often supportive of labor movement, I think the particular role police unions have played and the particular way their cultures have evolved are very worrying. And how much reform did we actually see after that? I mean, for all of that energy, for all that in-the-street protest, where are we now? And I would say not that Much further, not that much different. I mean, look at the videos that have come out of Nichols' death. So look, I think on the one hand, you could certainly say that there has been energy for various reasons for systemic reform. I mean, look, when I was in DC in the aughts, that was a period of huge ferment around education reform, as it was called. God, what was the name of our chancellor there who was on the COVID of Time? She was an education reformer. I'm just blanking on her name. I'm sorry about that. But she was kind of like an anti-teachers union education reformer. She was on the COVID of Time. Bill Gates was putting all this money into it. There was this huge thing of a fight with the teachers unions that led to the Race to the Top reforms and other things. So we've had moments like this. I mean, certainly YIMBYs in California are a reaction.

Yeah.

I mean, to me, when I talk about supply-side liberalism, I am doing something descriptive as much as I am doing something proscriptive. Like, I am saying this is happening, that you can see a lot of its tendrils emerging. I mean, the sort of original article I did on this, I think it's called The Economic Mistake the Left Is Finally Confronting. I describe it explicitly there as saying this is occurring. Like, if you look at different things occurring, you can see something emergent out of that. And I'm trying to name the emergence. And then obviously I have my views about how it should shape and evolve. So one, I think we're seeing that. 2, I think we've seen it in some of these areas in the past. And 3, I think that the very analogy you give should be sobering to anybody who thinks, even with a lot of energy for reform, that reform is easy or assured.

Yeah. So you're saying on the federal level, there's some structural reforms like the filibuster. On a local level, it's much more particular and harder to find. kind of generalizable, uh, things. And so when you see, um, you know, Silicon Valley or people like David Sacks or, or others kind of enter kind of local politics in a, in a more serious way in terms of getting involved, in terms of advocacy, what do you think that, um, they, they don't quite understand when they apply kind of perhaps, perhaps the Silicon Valley perspective to, uh, local politics?

Uh, it depends on the person. I'm not, to be honest, familiar with David Sacks's, uh, local advocacy, you know, but some of them do, I think, a good job. Like, there's a group, um, I'll get their name wrong. It's like the Coalition for Effective Governance or something. But Misha Chellum and that crew, I don't agree with them on literally everything, but I think they're serious. I think they're trying to understand how the system works and where the choke points are and who to work with and how to figure it out. And I think we'll see where that evolves into, but I think they're doing a good job of that. My point is not to sit here and say this is all too complicated to get involved with. I actually think the point is you should get involved locally. And you can identify the difficulty in doing something in San Francisco or something in Fresno in a way that is hard to say across the entire country, this is what we would do about it, or this is like the generalizable way to say, here's how we would fix it. To my thinking, some of what we're doing, me and Derek, with this book and this project more broadly, is I think of it as a lens more than I think of it as a prescription. So Going back to sort of my early pieces on this, at the most basic level, I'm just trying to create the question of, or I'm just trying to pose a question of, do progressives do a good job noticing when their goals are being thwarted by supply-side obstruction or slowness or insufficiency in the same way they do on the demand side? Right. I think progressives are very good at looking around the economy and saying, hey, people cannot afford health insurance or housing or education, whatever, and we want to try to subsidise that for them, right? Subsidising on the demand side in basically any domain you can think of is something progressives do in many, many different ways. We, I mean, vouchers and, you know, cash transfers and all kinds of different things, right? We do not, I think, think about production nearly as much, and we do not think about innovation nearly as much. And so some of it is saying, Here's a lens and here are some examples that then having that example in your head, maybe you see a similar example in the city you live in or in the industry you're in or nationally or whatever it might be. On some level, this is almost a set of metaphors to be applied as much as it is, more than it is a guidebook exactly, or more than it is an attempt to be comprehensive.

Yeah. What's interesting to me about this, So I interpret it as pro-growth, pro-technology, to your point about the politics of technology. And it seems to me bipartisan, both in terms of there are people on both sides who agree with it, but also people on both sides who are uncomfortable with it, both perhaps some of the environmentalists on the left, but also some other groups. But then also on the right, you're also seeing this kind of deeply skeptical of tech, skeptical of growth. Patrick Dennehy on your podcast, that was a fascinating episode. The guys at Compact, How do you think about kind of this almost reorientation on these topics?

So my first book is about polarization, and I think 2 things from that are very relevant here. So one thing I do like about this is that I think it is a productive cleavage, right? As opposed to an unproductive cleavage that has long ago gotten into a place where nobody's going to move on it. That said, a dynamic I'm pointing out in the first book, and that will happen here too and already has happened in some areas, is the more this becomes a central issue, the more the parties will figure out which side they're on. So, I mean, we've definitely seen this around single-family zoning over the past couple of years. Think back to when Trump was in office and to the California race here, the recall race. As progressives have moved towards being explicitly against single-family zoning, Republicans are moving much more into a defence of single-family zoning. And so if single-family zoning becomes like the hot issue, I don't think for very— I don't think it'll be bipartisan for very long at all. And I mean, there are always individuals, right? But— Yeah. But these things have a tendency to find in a polarised political system, for people to figure out how to organise around the cleavage. But so long as it is existing in kind of the back of politics, or it's more salient in places with one-party government like California is, then it can have this sort of unusual, strange bedfellows coalition. So that part of it is, I think, fun and valuable and interesting right now. I'm not unbelievably confident in it sustaining itself. And that's particularly true because, again, for me, a lot of these things are yoked to particular values. So housing is a little bit different because it is so local and state-oriented an issue. But if you think of clean energy, which is something I've spent a lot of time on in this area, clean energy is a highly partisan-coded question. Or if you think about alternative proteins, meat is a highly culturally coded question that people desperately want to turn into a partisan one. There was a whole thing when the Green New Deal came out about how they were going to ban hamburgers. Then there was something about Joe Biden banning red meat. And of course, Joe Biden, not a vegetarian in any way, not an animal rights guy, not going to ban meat. But it's all to say that I wouldn't— the number of things I've watched go from, oh, what an interesting bipartisan issue with a lot of cross-cutting coalitions, to nope, same fight as always is high. So I'm a little bit jaded on that.

Yeah.

And it's interesting when the topics kind of shift, like, you know, the right, it feels like used to be more free market on immigration and trade, among other issues. And the left maybe used to be slightly more protectionist around some of these topics. To the extent that that shift has happened, feel free to correct that, is it best explained by the right By the population shifting in that the right represents a little bit more of the working class, at least from a non-college-educated perspective, or how do you see that?

The immigration shift, I think, happened before the working-class shift on the right. So you can go back to say 2005, or no, this was in '07, I think it was. And you have, I mean, you can see the division in the party on this even then, but George W. Bush and John McCain push this big immigration reform bill and the bill is destroyed by a revolt coming out of conservative talk radio. And so it's like a conservative revolt against a Republican bill that ends up dooming that project. So for various reasons, I think the right has been, as immigration has become a more polarised issue, the home of anti-immigration sentiment. I mean, Pat Buchanan was running as a Republican in 1988 and was obviously a Republican before that. So I don't think that is that new. Now, the sort of dominance of the anti-immigration sentiment in the Republican Party That's newer. And that emerges, I think, basically that's Donald Trump. If Donald Trump doesn't run in 2016, I don't know who wins the nomination, but I think it's plausible you have a Marco Rubio or a Jeb Bush or a Chris Christie. And all of them had very, very different views on immigration. And so I think that that division within the Republican Party would not have been settled in the way it was settled by Donald Trump's victory, where he ran, I don't want to say a single-issue candidacy, but a But a candidacy centrally on immigration and free trade. And so I guess it's also kind of my answer for free trade. I think these were issues that had always divided the parties internally. Both parties were quite split. I mean, Bernie Sanders was a skeptic of liberal immigration bills and a skeptic of free trade. And you could find Republicans who were like that, and you could find Democrats and Republicans who were the opposite. And Trump so fully associating the Republican Party with an attack on immigration, that made Democrats much more liberal on immigration. The interesting thing is that the skepticism of free trade, I think, has persisted. So unlike immigration, where basically Trump polarised the parties around it and Democrats became vastly more liberal on immigration by the end of Trump's presidency than they were before it in general, free trade, you know, you see Trump runs and like Hillary Clinton sort of absurdly comes out against the Trans-Pacific Partnership trade deal, which clearly she was somewhat involved with as Secretary of State and as part of the administration. And the Democratic Party never turned around on that. They have kind of maintained that position, right? It's not like Biden is resuscitating TPP. And the same is true on China. Biden has been, if anything, significantly tougher on China, at least on a policy perspective, than Trump had been. Biden has gone places which I'm, to be honest, uncomfortable with, like the view that we should hinder China's progress on semiconductors, not really because they're a national security, uh, technology, although they are that on some level, but just because we don't want them to get too good at technology too quickly. I'm not saying I can't see the logic of it, but it is a hell of an escalation. And like, it's sort of remarkable. There's a great Politico piece about, um, China trade policy under Biden, and you have these Trump national security people being like, we would— like, that is way beyond where we thought it was reasonable to be. And it's at least worth thinking about what that means, and I'm trying to do some thinking about what that means. So maybe I'm getting afield, further afield from your question here, but it is interesting to think about the ones where one party takes a really striking position on an issue and that polarises it, versus there are occasional cases where a party comes out, sort of reverses on an issue, and that becomes something like the new consensus. And on free trade and China, I think that's more or less been the case.

Yeah, it's interesting. If we were to go back a year or two and say, hey, one side is going to be pro-Ukraine and one side is going to be anti-Ukraine, or take whatever big schism, it's not always obvious which side is going to come out on which topic. Some of it is just path dependent on who Trump picks first or someone else picks first, and then the other side has to take the opposition.

I think that's right.

To that end, if your book on polarization were written in 2023, would you have added or edited anything? I'm just curious what's changed as regards to this or what's changed in your thinking as it regards this.

I think it mostly holds up pretty well. I was really pleased to see what a strong 2022 the book had, to be honest, where it got on the Bill Gates and Obama summer reading list despite Coming out a few years before. I didn't expect that. So anybody listening should feel confident picking it up because also what I'm about to say is now in the afterword that I was able to put on the new edition. But the main thing that I didn't talk enough about was education as a locus of polarization, as a dimension of polarization. So I talk a lot about different things we can be polarized on, and the one I don't talk enough about in the early version of the book is education. And one reason I don't And obviously I would now, but I still find education very hard to talk about in any kind of precise way because education seems to me to be a correlate for something we don't really understand.

Yeah.

It is our best way of tracking something that we're trying to get at that has become a very, very important driver of polarization, but it's not exactly it. So this is one reason why all the polls didn't suddenly work between 2016 and 2020 after the pollsters adjusted for education. Because education was picking up something that is some miasma, but was not fully representing something that is a miasma of low trust in institutions and a kind of cultural conservatism, like what Pippa Norris would call a cultural backlash. And the difference in politics right now is not what you learn when you attend Ohio State University. Right. And I think it's really important to remember when you think about college education, most people are not going to Ivy League colleges. They're not going to the top 50 colleges in US News and World Report. They're going to state colleges or colleges a lot of people haven't heard of, and they're getting a degree in marketing. And maybe that college is more liberal than you would like to think it is, like maybe Cal Poly, whatever, but it's not that liberal. It just isn't. And that's not what they're doing there for that matter. And so So there's something being picked up that is more than just the Marxists in the sociology department at Yale are indoctrinating all the kids in postcolonial theory.

Yeah.

But we don't really know what it is. I've done podcasts and explored the idea that maybe it's class, right? Education is maybe a closer correlate of class now than anything else is, not because it's making you so liberal, but because it is kind of acculturating you to a certain set of manners and mores, and that doesn't make you super woke, but it does make you kind of repelled by these other things. It's very hard to figure out, but education definitely would be the thing I would have wanted to explore more deeply.

Yeah.

On the topic of institutional distrust, I'm curious whether you think there's more explanatory power in the idea that, hey, there's been this kind of fearmongering among institutional decline, or Whether the institutions themselves have just become sclerotic for being around for so long and not needing to innovate, or maybe that there's been a kind of platform shift with the internet and they're no longer kind of set up for success in that era. What do you think is most explanatory for institutional distrust?

Well, it depends a little bit on what we're trying to explain. So if you want to look at a trend line of institutional distrust, the big fall happens before the internet. So I think a lot of us would want to look at the last couple of years, and so would I, because I think something important is happening. But that's not a little bit like social media can't explain polarization because most of the rise in polarization happens way before social media. And that doesn't mean it's not worsening it or accelerating it or changing it or amplifying it now. But when I wrote my book, I got all these like, so is it Facebook? I was like, it can't be Facebook because, I mean, this began decades ago. I think there's a bit of that for institutions. I would say the interesting thing about institutions is that we are polarizing around institutional trust.

Yeah.

So compared to, I just wrote a piece about this, compared to, let's call it 15 or 20 years ago, let's call it the George W. Bush era, you would say, I would've said back then that the anti-institutional strain in American life was more mixed between the two parties. So it is true, Republicans really didn't like the media. They didn't like kind of elite universities. They didn't like a couple other things we could name. But Democrats didn't like big business and Democrats didn't like— right? And you could kind of go through that. And I would say now there is a more kind of holistic anti-institutional type in the Republican Party. which is reflected in many ways by the turn against big tech and big business and cronyism. And Kevin McCarthy saying that he doesn't even think the Chamber of— he hasn't heard from the Chamber of Commerce in forever. Do they even have any power around here anymore? And you also see it, I think there's a very weird— I never know exactly how to characterise it and won't try, but this kind of anti-institutional, almost anti-big business thing happening among tech executives who themselves run or sit on boards of big businesses. And I do think there's a very profound, almost Marxist capital being really mad at labor thing playing out in Silicon Valley, which has made a lot of these folks anti-institutional because they dislike their own institutions and feel unappreciated. And their employees are always haranguing them and they can all organize on Slack now. And being a manager at a certain kind of visible, highly educated workforce, company has just become a lot less fun than it was, I think, 15 or 20 years ago. I'm not saying it wasn't hard 15 or 20 years ago, but what it means to be an upper-level manager at a major media, technology, finance, some kind of high labor force power, highly visible industry, it's really changed. It's led to a lot of resentment and a lot of backlash among the people on top of that. So I would just note too, there's just a very weird— the anti-institutionalism of Elon Musk and that particular class of VCs around him is not unknown. I mean, you can find a lot of examples of this historically, but is a fascinating turn because from a different perspective, they are the institutions.

Yeah.

But it's always been more complicated than that, and it is now too. But yeah, that's the main thing I would say. I think more than there's been a tremendous change in institutional trust in the past 10 years or 15 years, although there has been some, and things like the Supreme Court that were high are now low. I think what's more interesting is that there is a concentration of— you used to have a mix of which institutions the 2 sides trusted, and Democrats are significantly more aligned with business now than they were, and Republicans significantly more against it and basically disaligned with every major institutional structure in ways that we can talk through the implications of it, but I think they're quite profound, actually.

Yeah, it is interesting, just the different factions within tech that are forming. My friend Nadia Asparova separates it as such. There's the Davos tech elite, and maybe puts Gates or even Zuckerberg to some degree, and they are trying to spread liberal democracy via international organizations. Then there's the founder mindset or startup elite. And that's like the, it's time to build, the Marc Andreessen, the Elon. And there's some versions of that that are more right-wing than others. But then there's also the crypto elite, the Vitaliks of the world, that are trying to do something pretty different. And they're trying to do it via a different structural— they're trying to have decentralized public goods or kind of this Web3 vision. And it's interesting to see people float among the different camps. And yeah, see how that plays out.

Yeah, it's interesting. I would have to spend some real time thinking about my taxonomy. I think Davos tech is correct. I think there's definitely that sort of more institutional tech, Tim Cook, right?

Yeah.

I think I would want to cut the founders into some different categories here.

Yeah.

The politics of Elon Musk and some of the people like that, Are very different than the politics of a lot of individual founders. But there are, I think, 2 real camps of that. I think there's a sort of left founder culture emergent and a reactionary, a right founder culture emergent, and they're really in tension with each other now. But I think that the right founder culture has become very much about, in a way that people almost don't really want to directly look into, It's very much a backlash against their own employees. I mean, it's completely clear. And this is something I've always been completely fascinated by, actually. I mean, you think of it like a Brian Armstrong at Coinbase, just the level of frustration with what it is people are talking about in Slack in your own company, mixed with, to me, the sort of interesting unwillingness to take a sort of the medium is a message attitude. Towards what it means to have invented and helped fund things like Slack or rolled them out is really fascinating. So I found the whole Basecamp kerfuffle of a couple, I don't remember when it was now, but really interesting. I mean, they created, is Basecamp the name of the company or was that the product? Campfire was the product, right?

Yes, yes. The company's Basecamp.

Basecamp is a company. Campfire was a precursor I understood it at a certain point as a precursor to HipChat, but then HipChat became a precursor to Slack and to Teams and the rest of it. And everybody's like, oh, this is going to democratize everything and we're going to make it possible for everybody to talk. And then you did, and it's like, oh my God, what are these people saying? And this created, I think, a real— I mean, first there's an effort to mandate it out of existence, right? You can't talk about politics anymore on the work Slack. And then, I mean, a lot of this was happening on Twitter, so it gets literally bought by Elon Musk. And there's just something very interesting playing out in the labor politics that I think is sort of masquerading as other kinds of politics, but are a real conflict between labor and capital here. And then crypto is interesting. I mean, Vitalik is, to me, and I quite like Vitalik, and he's been on my podcast, and he's a little bit of a distinctive figure.

Yeah.

I'm not sure what crypto elite means today versus what it meant a year ago. And I mean, does Chris Dixon count as crypto elite, right? Do all the VCs who are pumping money into it not count as crypto elite? What about Brian, et cetera, et cetera? But I think that there is within crypto a lot of different subgenres between the crypto utopians who are not that interested in crypto as a financialisation mechanism, and the sort of crypto financiers who are— these are very different and to me, somewhat irresolvable visions of this. I mean, something that I have often talked about with people in crypto is that you cannot solve the problems of capitalism, which is often what people are ideologically talking about, with a technology that builds hyper-financialized capitalism into its core structure. You could solve other problems, right? You very well might be able to make remittances more efficient, But the idea that big Web2 firms emerged and developed a lot of power and then wielded that power in ways people don't like, and yet we've created another power-concentrating thing with unequal financial rewards that you then need to create middleman institutions to make safe and usable, that then become things that the same VCs who invested in Web2— the whole thing was so weird from the beginning that there's a kind of, I think, irresolvable tension at its heart for now. And which side, if either of them, wins out through that?

Yeah.

or what kind of synthesis can emerge is really going to be significant. And I think it's not quite knowable at the moment. And then I would just finally say that it's very easy. Some of this all feels old to me when we're talking about— I mean, obviously there's a lot of new news about Elon Musk and others, but certainly my impression is that there's a set of technologies that are emergent now that are different and have different internal political dynamics. than all the people who ran social media and smartphone-based either hardware or software companies. So, I mean, Musk is one of them, to be fair. But I think the amount of energy and investment now going into AI is obviously one area. And I think we really don't know what those business models will be, and that will really affect how that evolves. But green tech in particular, alt proteins for a while, we'll see where that goes. I do think there's been a little bit of a move towards other kinds, towards trying to solve other kinds of problems technologically. And my sense from knowing those industries a bit and people in them a bit is they have very, very different dynamics than both the founders and the financiers of what you might call Web2.

Yeah.

In what sense?

Say more about that.

I just think they're focused on other kinds of problems. And I think that Again, I don't love Web2, but I think that basically a set of personalities who emerged in the Web2 era, and Elon is one of those people, but all these guys you're talking about are, that is a maturing industry in a way, and a maturing culture that has now developed, as maturing industries and maturing cultures do, a set of resentments and enmities and concerns and questions and incumbents and whatever. And if you're somebody working on next-generation wind turbines or trying to figure out how to make algae that does such and such for carbon in the atmosphere, people working on direct air capture, the people working on how to create cultivated fish, right? Cultivate, make fish out of cultivated cells that has a texture. They just have a different set of concerns, in part because they don't, I think, have quite as much time to sit around fighting out related but not quite on-point culture wars when you have a lot of hard technological problems to solve. I don't want to be too idyllic about it because obviously people will— all these things will change, and people who work on all kinds of things have their own political opinions. But one thing I think has a little bit happened is that the people who dominated the last cycle of technology, the problems they were trying to solve have now matured into not that interesting, and their attention is a little bit elsewhere, right? Even when their problems are still very interesting. I mean, I think the problems for Tesla and SpaceX are interesting, but clearly Elon Musk's attention is somewhat elsewhere. Whereas the people who are building things that they're not Mark Zuckerberg yet, yeah, they actually still have to build the fucking thing.

Yeah.

And so they don't actually have a ton of time, either from the Davos or the right-wing founder perspective, to have a million other side battles on every topic under the sun. The question of who's pissing you off on Twitter today is just a little smaller. That's my impression. Maybe I'm wrong. I mean, you would know this a lot better than me, frankly.

Yeah, I think you're right. And part of it's just they don't have to focus on content moderation because that doesn't affect their everyday as much as running these platforms or investing in these platforms. I think your point about the labour versus capital is spot on. And it's no coincidence that James Burnham has become a kind of cult cult author in Silicon Valley. He talks about the differences between manager interests and owner interests. Because it's interesting that this right founder class has emerged when they don't typically have right-wing positions. They're not pro-life. They're not anti-immigration or something. They're not against gay marriage. And so how are they actually right? Is this that they're standing up against maybe Social or leftism that they think has gone too far within their companies, probably.

So I read about this a lot a couple years ago when the intellectual dark web was more of a thing people talked about before it split in a total catastrophe of vaccine conspiracy theorizing. But you would hear this all the time where people who were clearly on the right side, the No, it's not differently spelled. Clearly on what I would call the reactionary, but I want to say that in a kind of value-neutral way because it's a very loaded term, reactionary side of the political divide. How can I be a right-winger? I might be a— to use the most extreme example, because this was not the intellectual dark web, but you would have people like Richard Spence back then, who was an actual white supremacist, be like, I'm pro-universal healthcare. How can I be a right-winger? And it's a mistake, I think, to be overly literal about the way politics is organized in Washington, D.C. And the fact that one of the recurrent cleavages, the most persistent cleavage going back to James Burnham and way before that, that on some level, the left and the right are defined by either a kind of appetite for and excitement about the way power is changing or shifting or could be changed and shifted in society versus a revulsion towards or an opposition towards the way power is changing and shifting and could change and shift in society, that's not something that Silicon Valley invented in some interesting way in the year of our Lord 2019. It just isn't. So the idea that you have a huge backlash across this country, but you see it here too, Towards a set of social and power changes that come as a direct outgrowth of very, very, very rapid demographic change, right? A rapid browning of America, an increase of the number of foreign-born residents from something like 4% in the 1970s to something like 16%, 17% around now. I've not looked at those numbers in a year or two, so I could have that a little bit off. A majority of infants in the country are non-white now. That's a huge— I mean, we don't always know exactly how to translate that into politics, but basically, are you comfortable with the fact that this country is demographically changing very fast, or are you not, has created a tremendous amount of political ferment. And oftentimes, a kind of gut reaction to that is really where people fall, and it takes some time for that to get translated into a kind of coherent politics. It's not that related. to how you feel about universal healthcare being a good example, actually. And then the labor capital thing is also, and then somehow these 2 things have merged in the way that political coalitions often merge somewhat unrelated demands.

Yeah.

Why are the people who care the most about climate change also the people who want abortion to be legal? It's not a super great answer to that question, except for the dynamics of coalitions Right. And polarization and political alliances and information ecosystems and so on. And I think that's basically what has happened here too. I mean, there is a— I do think this sort of— I don't know what to call the sort of Andreessen-Musk politics versus what to call the sort of— but at the center of that is a very, very pitched battle that is simultaneously about how social mores are changing and how labour and capital are fighting it out. And weird things are getting grafted onto that, but it's a very old kind of fight.

Yeah.

To that end, someone else who wrote a book about polarisation the last few years is Chris Caldwell. And you wrote about it, I'll hear from you about it in a second. But Chris Caldwell, one of his ideas is that the, um, civil rights actually, uh, you know, created sort of a competing constitution that kind of exposed the tensions or potential tensions within liberalism around freedom and equality. And, and, and thus, um, we've been duking it out kind of ever since of these competing constitutions. And Richard Hanania has a related post where he says, uh, wokeness is just civil rights law. And, and the fact that companies have moved to the left Somehow is explained by its employees moving to the left, but in other ways it's accelerated by companies just trying to follow the law. I'm curious if you think, if you're sympathetic with any of that as a possible explanation.

I would want to go read the Hanania post before I commented on it because I haven't read that. Caldwell's thesis I'm familiar with. I haven't read the whole book and it's been a while since looked at it at all. I don't remember finding it very convincing when I read it, in part just because I think we're dealing with a lot of downstream functions, and you would want reasons things were happening at certain times in certain places. And I just find raw demographics then amplified by sort of attentional and youth-oriented industries to be a much more persuasive factor. I just think you can't follow these fights and not notice they're typically much more pitched, and they start, even if they eventually end elsewhere, at the cultural level. So the fights over Nike choosing a football player who is also understood as being very outspoken on civil rights as a spokesperson, And then a lot of Republicans burning their Nikes. I think you're just missing something if you overliteralise into policy all the time. And the idea that these are 2 competing constitutions never struck me as what was at their core. Also sort of the idea that we weren't having obvious relatives of these fights when we had a very different kind of constitution dominant in this country a couple years.

Yeah.

Anyway, but because I've not read Caldwell's full book or seen it for a couple years, I don't want to get too deep into the guts of that argument because he might have counters on some of these and I'm not being fair to him.

Sure.

Um, shifting gears a bit, Roy Teixeira and David Shore have written about how, you know, they come from the left and they are worried that in some areas the left has gone too far left, that it is, um, hurting their, their electoral chances, uh, on, in certain policies, certain races. I'm curious if you are sympathetic with that analysis, um, or where you differ from, from them.

Uh, so I wrote a 6,000-word piece about David Shore and the kind of fights over populism in the Democratic Party. So I've kind of I've allowed a lot of different voices to speak through me there. The place I've come out on that is, I mean, it is obviously true that political coalitions— let me say what I agree with David. One, that the Democratic Party in particular, though not alone, has a significant representational problem in who staffs it in terms of what their politics are compared to the median voter. But that's also, by the way, true for the Republican Party. The Democratic Party also often takes positions on things that are quite unpopular or just quite a little bit odd. But also the Republican Party has more or less united around denial of the 2020 election. So the reason I keep bringing up the Republican Party like this is to note that it's actually very hard to police parties in the way that he is implying is possible. So it is true that you could probably do a better job of tracking the median voter if you're a Democrat. It's also true you could do that if you're a Republican. And I think in general, Democrats have been a lot better at it. Who actually does win the Democratic primary in 2020? Oh, it's Joe Biden, old, known to be moderate, et cetera. And then I am very sceptical, a place where I differ with David, where I differ with my friend Matt Yglesias, I've been a policy reporter for my whole career. I think the level of policy literalism a lot of their arguments imply in the population just has no basis in fact. Obviously there's some, right? That is one of the things that makes it through. But if you asked me which would have a bigger effect, getting people who have a certain— to go back to our conversation about education, getting people who have a certain sort of cultural vibe around them, for lack of a better term, versus getting people who seem the same but have more moderate positions? I mean, I would say the first one almost every time. I think a really good example of that is Fetterman in Pennsylvania, who in general is extremely liberal. And if he had not suffered the stroke— I mean, he suffered the stroke and won a quite big victory anyway in what could have been a very tough race. I think if he had not suffered the stroke, it's possible he could have completely stomped Dr. Oz.

Right.

And it's not because— I mean, Matt will point out that there are places where he moderates, and of course that's true, as it is for every politician. But in general, he's an extremely liberal politician who nevertheless vibes like he's a guy who would back you up in a bar fight. Which is all only to say that I think that the difficulties the Democratic Party, and for that matter, again, the Republican Party sometimes have have are more about whether or not the sort of tribunes of their politics are people who kind of the median voter, whoever that is, if that's even a relevant kind of concept given the way we fracture elections, are people those voters connect to more than it is every individual policy proposal they have. I've often said that I think the thing the populists miss when they talk about this is that everything in the end is about unpopularity. Because for anybody to hear about anything, this is a big point of my book, it's actually very hard to get any kind of message out anywhere. Because for anybody to hear anything, it has to be something that generates controversy. What ends up mattering, what people hear about you, are the positions you take that inspire opposition. For some time, Shore was like a big Bernie Sanders proponent because Sanders had a pretty high favourability rating compared to other politicians. And one thing that's always been interesting about Bernie Sanders compared to a lot of other politicians is he will always bite the bullet, almost always, on his own positions. So why did Bernie's healthcare positions dominate virtually every single Democratic debate in 2020? And the reason is that he was always willing to say, I will abolish all private health insurance and I will raise taxes on middle-class people. And by biting those bullets, he was able to create a conflict that gave him agenda control. And so if you have a bunch of popular positions but no agenda control, you really don't have that much in the end. What you need is agenda control in addition to positions that ultimately make people side with you. And so the question of where you're willing to say something unpopular that creates conflict with your own side or creates conflict in the country at large becomes really central. And I do think that one of the things that they are right about, to kind of circle back to a place of agreement, is that it is almost always better for Democrats to try to create conflict around economic messages than sociocultural ones. And they've probably not been doing an ideal job of that in recent years, but it is something they've been doing more of. And a lot of the positions that certainly Joe Biden has taken, for whatever his failures as a communicator are, they are efforts to create these kinds of arguments. The final thing I would say is that I do think social media has changed this a lot on both sides. So when you think about who defines a party compared to when I entered politics, the leadership of parties is much less powerful with the exception maybe of the president in defining parties. And the people who are effective attention entrepreneurs, Matt Gaetz or Marjorie Taylor Greene or whoever you might imagine on the right, a kind of squad, et cetera, on the left, they've just become much more important. So, like, I have quite conservative family members and people I talk to regularly, and it really doesn't matter there what Joe Biden is saying exactly. In general, like, they are watching Fox News or listening to conservative media, and they are getting, like, the most inflammatory things said by the most inflammatory Democrats. And if you are a liberal listening to MSNBC, you're getting something of the reverse. And that just creates a real difficulty for parties as organisations that nobody, I think, is anywhere really even close to solving. I think the only way to solve it is to hold the presidency with a very aggressive, talented communicator. And recently Republicans held the presidency with a not very talented but very aggressive, or at least not very strategic. He is very talented.

Yeah, I'd say at least.

A not very strategic but highly aggressive communicator. And now Democrats have the presidency, and they have a highly strategic but not very talented communicator in it. And so what you want functionally is to have Barack Obama, but generationally talented politicians don't come along very often.

What is the right mental model for thinking about the powers of a president? What is the president actually capable of doing? You have someone like Elon coming into Twitter, And he lets go, rightly or wrongly, a huge chunk of the Twitter staff. And you kind of see what are the powers of a CEO. How do we think about what is the president actually capable of?

I mean, it depends. Joe Biden could launch airstrikes on China tomorrow. What he could not do tomorrow is make a minuscule change to the federal tax code. I mean, it's a very weird thing, a weird way we've set it up. And so the powers are— look, you get old things, right? Like Richard Neustadt, the power of the presidency is power to persuade, et cetera. I'm not even sure it's that anymore. The power of the president is very different in different domains. It is very different in conditions of divided and unified government. It is very different if you control the Supreme Court and if you don't. And it's very different depending on the match between president And communication medium. And so I don't know that there is as much one answer to that as people want there to be. But I guess in general, domestically, the president's power is much more limited than people want to believe it is. And on foreign policy, it's much more expansive than it probably should be. And then attentionally, it's very mixed. You can get attention, but often not for what you want attention for. And the more you make things the centre of the agenda because of various dynamics of polarisation, the more you will increase backlash to your own proposals. It's a tough job.

Yeah. And when people talk about the deep state, they're often kind of catastrophising or worse. But is it right to think about this sort of quasi-permanent government employee class That is neither accountable to the market nor democratic mechanisms?

I mean, there's definitely a civil service. I think when people call it the deep state, it's making it sound somewhat more mysterious than it actually is. There are people who work in offices, and as we were just talking about labor and capital in Silicon Valley, there's a deep state in Silicon Valley too that has infuriated all the bosses. And yes, you can take over a company with your own money and fire a bunch of people. But in 5 or 10 years, he may not be able to do that even at his own company. I think he'd have more trouble doing that at Tesla today than he did in an unusual takeover of Twitter. Yeah, I mean, there is a state. Actually, when I initially conceived of my first book, and it had a kind of different structure back then, it was called The Deep State. This was 2011, I think it was, way prior to Trump taking that term.

Wow.

Everybody's like, you can't use that. That's a term from Turkey. Nobody's going to— okay.

Wow.

But yeah, look, there is on the one hand a federal bureaucracy that needs to be used and deployed if you're going to do things, right? The president doesn't run around carrying out the activities of the federal government by themselves. That due to civil service protections and other things, it has some insulation. On certain issues. And also, unless you're being pretty extreme and typically running afoul of the law or something, a talented administrator can move it in their direction, but even the most talented administrator, even when there is alignment between them and the state, cannot move it as fast as they would like. So I remember talking to Ron Klain about Pandemic policy. And I remember him saying, I forgot what the exact point, but it was a very vivid way he put this, where he's like, even when you are the president and everybody, people are on the same side as you on an issue, and you stand up on the table yelling, this is the most important thing, you still may not be able to get the whole bureaucracy to activate in the way you want it to. So I think it got complicated. I think it got very complicated in the way people saw it because of Trump, who was not really trying to run it. He was more comfortable being in opposition to it than he was to being in charge of it. It's been a longtime frustration of Democrats that Republicans come in and are able to use the thing for their purposes. So you think of a more talented administrator, I don't know. Which is all to say that I'm sort of shadowboxing with what I think you're asking me about the deep state. And the answer is that the deep state, like any bureaucracy, is very very complicated. And one of the funny things is it often is very frustrating for liberals who want to get things done because it's sclerotic and rules-bound in other ways. And so it's like the problem for liberals is it follows the rules too much. And then the problem for conservatives, but sometimes their advantage, is they don't care about the rules and will go around them in a way the liberals often won't. And so it just kind of depends.

Yeah, it's really interesting. Sometimes I hear in the crypto community something along the lines of, hey, it's possible that this tech might not do much or might not be that transformative. But what is possible, kind of incidentally, is that it will encourage a lot of regulation innovation because you're kind of working outside the system and then forcing new regulation and innovating on regulations that were written 100 years ago or 50 years ago. that don't make sense today. And so that's kind of like a cynical take on why crypto might still work. And to the extent that that's true, it's interesting to see if there's some version of that that will exist in other spaces where there's just kind of like an opportunity to reset and say, hey, we've had these regulations or these kind of bureaucratic institutions were created 50 years ago or 100 years ago, and they did some great stuff, but they're not They're not built for this era. Maybe.

I think we'll have to see if they're effective in doing that.

Yeah.

But I don't think that would be a bad thing. I mean, a lot of regulations could use updating. So that's not a crazy theory. I'm just— you'd have to be a little less ham-handed in how you go about things because you could get the opposite, right? If you're crypto, particularly right now and given the reputation, you could get a tightening of things you don't want tightened. Yeah.

The last camp, this is a segue into basically the Patrick Olson progress studies camp. We've talked about kind of the other different kinds of camps that exist. I'm curious, there's a lot of alignment, and you had a great episode with Patrick on your work and his work. Where do you perhaps differ with him?

With Patrick? So I'm obviously just much more sympathetic to the progress studies people. And I think one thing I'll say about progress studies is People underestimate, I think, how important kind of intellectual and interpersonal virtues are in different cultures. And just one thing that I give Patrick and Tyler, who I think are sort of the founding players of progress studies, going back to that Atlantic article, a lot of credit for, is I think progress studies, to a large extent, shares some of their intellectual virtues. They're 2 people who I have disagreements with them, probably more significantly with Tyler, I actually just, I know Patrick well enough, but I don't know his— Patrick's not been blogging all day, every day for 1,000 years in the way me and Tyler have now. So I just know Tyler's views on every policy in a way I don't know Patrick's. But they both have, I think, a kind of notable intellectual openness and humility and gentleness to them that has infused the particular culture that they have helped seed. And so progress studies, even where I think it has its own variants. I mean, I do think there are sort of left progress studies types and right progress studies types and so on. I think it just has a kind of openness to it that some of the others have turned really harsh. I think a lot of these things take on the cultural and the temperamental attitudes of the people on top of them. So I was saying earlier, there are divisions in crypto. You can really see a difference between the Vitalik side of crypto and the Balaji, Chris Dixon, et cetera side of crypto. Those cultures even on Twitter begin to sound like the people on top of them. So I want to note that as a thing that I give Tyler and Patrick a lot of credit for. Where are my big disagreements with Patrick? I think I actually just don't know enough about what policies he would and wouldn't support. to really say. I think we're probably more or less in some alignment these days about a bunch of bureaucratic questions. I would say I'm probably more uncertain than he is as to whether the scientific slowdown is truly technical. I probably put more credence on the view than he does, at least in our interview, that we just can't have a doubling or tripling— I should say doubling, I think, because that's what we talked about— of the speed of science. I mean, that's Will MacAskill's view, I think, that a lot of the low-hanging fruit has been picked. But yeah, I think I don't have a good answer to this, in part because he kind of stays to a lane where he's very sure. And knowing Patrick, I think he's got a lot of opinions I disagree with, but he doesn't make them a huge part of his public persona.

Makes sense. In a recent podcast you had, you talked about— it was kind of a year wrap, 2022 wrap-up, You talked about how equality of opportunity and equality of outcome are kind of closer than people are comfortable with in some ways, that if you have grand differences in outcomes, it's harder to have equal or closer to equal opportunities. And I appreciate you saying that because I feel like it's more intellectually honest to connect the two, not that they're totally equal, but than people often do. And I'm curious, when people talk about the idea of saying, so you could do that, another path is also to focus on a sufficient floor for everybody that is dignified and real, but less worry about the differences, the inequality there. Why are you less excited about that path, if I was to guess?

If you were to guess why I'm less excited about that path?

Yeah. Or if I was to guess that you're less excited about that path.

I think I have a very strong, like, the why not both girl GIF here answer. I do believe very strongly that you should have a base level of sufficiency. And I don't believe that true equality of opportunity is possible. Like, that's my whole— that's the whole point of that long rant I went on.

Yeah.

And I don't believe that equality of outcome is desirable. Now, I think more equal opportunity is possible, dramatically more than we currently have. And I think more basic sufficiency is possible. And I also think more betterment is possible. I mean, one reason I focus so much now on questions of innovation is I think that it's really important not to get stuck in a kind of political straitjacket of imagining that all we're trying to do is redistribute the status quo along slightly more just lines. You want to quite dramatically change the status quo. I did a piece, must have been, I mean, well, I don't know when this will come out, so a couple months ago when this comes out, about energy abundance and all the possibilities that could be unlocked by having a truly energy-abundant abundant future. The idea that we just want sort of what we have now rejiggered is, I think, a sort of poverty of imagination. So, yeah, I mean, I wouldn't run around trying to choose between them. I think all of them, I think they all connect to each other too. You're going to have more sufficiency in a more opportunity-equalising world, and that will lead to better outcomes. It's complicated and it's interconnected.

Totally. But let me ask a different variation of it. Is Is the inequality of it important to focus on because inequality breeds resentment? Assuming you weren't lifting everyone significantly, but the top was lifted more, is the inequality worth focusing on because it breeds resentment?

I don't think that would be my first reason for focusing on inequality. I think my first reason for focusing on inequality, which I don't think is something I primarily do focus is that I typically am worried about— I don't think in practice you get the world you're talking about. So I think that you end up getting huge gaps in political power, which ends up creating certain kinds of political outcomes.

Right.

I think you end up with huge gaps in voice, which end up up creating certain kinds of political outcomes. But I would, in general, be less worried about a world significantly where you had more inequality, but much more rapid growth and sufficiency than in the world we're actually in. So I wrote a piece, this is, I mean, God, back in my Washington Post days, but I proposed a sort of distinction between a world where you had sort of a twice as high— I think the way I put it was like a twice as high or 3 times as high median wage, but more inequality versus the median wage we have and half as much inequality. And which world would you prefer? And I would prefer the world with twice as high or 3 times as high median wage. I mean, assuming we're adjusting for inflation and all that good stuff with more inequality. At the same time, it's not a very real choice.

Yeah.

And I worry about— I was talking, I did a fun podcast with Sam Altman a while back, and we were talking about, should the first trillionaire be something to— is that something to celebrate? And I said no then, and I would say no now. And I think you look at Elon Musk, who's come up a bunch in this conversation, and you see why I'm worried. I don't think it is a good idea, putting everything else you think aside. And I've typically been— I mean, I'm less so now because he relentlessly is making himself a political figure. But I've said for a very long time, up to and including when he bought Twitter, look, this is a guy who makes green energy technologies, has made electric cars cool, makes rockets, and is maybe being able to code these things as culturally conservative. You can do a lot wrong, and that's still actually a pretty big contribution. I still don't think, even if he did less from my perspective that was a problem that the richest man in the world should just buy one of the most important communication platforms in the world. That should be okay with anybody. You don't want this kind of concentration of power. And so I just think this stuff is not to be taken lightly. And the idea that it won't happen, right, we'll get a trillionaire, but they'll just focus on their knitting. I mean, we're seeing that that's not true. Jeff Bezos owns Washington Post. That happened when I was there. Elon Musk owns Twitter. what's his name, Benioff owns Time. And we can have debates about the relative merits of these owners, but concentrations of political power and speech power and communications power and financial power all in the same person, I just don't think there's any way you can look at all of human history and not worry about that.

Yeah, it is fascinating. There's kind of this meta debate related to labor and capital of who actually has power. Bezos owns the Washington Post, but does he really determine what's on the Washington Post? Sometimes they're criticizing Amazon. Um, you know, it is, uh, and both sides kind of saying, you know, refusing to kind of acknowledge their own power is, uh, is kind of ironic.

But, but with Bezos, that's a choice, right? Look, I don't know exactly how that deal is structured, but he could have done, I think, what Musk did, right? Which he could have come in and fired everybody he didn't like and remade it along his image. He didn't, and I think that's to, you know, his credit. Um, But I also think the Washington Post could probably only go so hard on Amazon, even under its current guise. It can do some critical of Amazon reporting, but if it became a big anti-Amazon outlet, I think that would be a problem for him. Rupert Murdoch has bought institutions, remade them much more along his lines. We're watching Musk do that at Twitter. You don't want to rely on the neutrality or gentility Yeah. Or hypothetically of trillionaires as your sole check on their behaviour or the informational commons. I think that's just a naive position. The fact that Bezos seems to have bought the Post as a kind of legacy project and semi-favour to his friend Don Graham, and Musk bought Twitter because he felt that Twitter had become too woke, The difference is not anything outside of what their intentions were. And I just think that that is not how we should accord. That's just not how this whole thing should work.

It is fascinating. Yeah, Elon's career arc or political arc in the last year has changed drastically, and it didn't seem inevitable. It hasn't happened to lots of other billionaires. And so it is a question as to So will that encourage others, or is this really just like a one-off? And it doesn't even seem deeply ideological, to your point. It seems more reactionary to the challenges he was facing uniquely.

Yeah, look, I'm not in his head, and I think that this particular journey he's been on is one a number of people have been on for different reasons. And look, you do have more liberal billionaires. I think that there is a kind of unrestrained nature to him where other people would not apply their own preferences quite so baldly. He's willing to take a level of public backlash a lot of people position wouldn't be, right? Willing to gamble on Tesla in a way others wouldn't, right? There's a— I've met him a couple times, and there is an all-in-ness to him. Yeah, that is distinctive. And look, one thing you learn, I think, as you just become a, like, a more mature person and get older, is that for everybody, the good of them is the bad of them. Like, if you look at any person you want to choose, like, particularly people like highly on the public stage who have been very successful, It is exactly what makes them successful that makes them a problem in their own personal lives or in their professional lives or whatever. And that's true for him, it's true for everyone. So yeah, there's a lack of restraint to him that allows him to make gigantic bets and fully commit himself to completely weird pathways. And some of them really pay off in ways I like, and some of them are not things I like. Most people aren't like that, but I do think something that For whatever reason in this era, we're seeing that pay off more for more people. I think it is a personality type particularly that is somewhat rewarded on social media. If you are this kind of person, a Donald Trump, an Elon Musk, and there are others like them who can operate at that level, at that scale without a lot of the sense of social restraint that pulls a lot of people back, like, I just don't want all this incoming for good and for ill. this is a pretty good era for you. I mean, maybe it's totally devastating on you personally. I don't know how it feels to them on the inside, but I sometimes joke that this is really the era of the trickster god.

Yeah.

The kind of personality type mythically that is doing well right now at the very, very high levels is a trickster god, and then on the other side, true restraint. So we don't talk about them as much, But it's been a very good couple years for Joe Biden, for Tim Cook, for Jeff Bezos. Frankly, I think Mark Zuckerberg is profiting off the Elon thing quite well. All of a sudden it's like, yeah, maybe not that bad. So you have this thing where it's like you have like the highly restrained figures and their opposites, and those are the 2 like big personality types right now. Um, but of course the, the highly restrained figures, like, they don't say that much that we talk about all the time.

Right.

But I do think the fact that, you know, temperamentally Joe Biden is such a strategic kind of finger-in-the-wind player is not an accident after Trump, right? There is something about this moment where you have either the people all in on the attentional economy or almost all out on it, but it's very hard to be half in. That's one reason I'm not really on Twitter or almost any of these places anymore. I'm too much a half-in person in that way.

Yeah.

And I prefer to be in things where I'm all in, right? Like podcasts, And so I don't know, this is a little bit of like a weird side quest for me, but I do think there's something to that. And I think that it's not just him, right? I think that there are politicians on the left and right and VCs and everybody else. It's a dynamic of the platforms.

I agree with that a lot. The good of the person is also the bad of them and the all-in versus not. That makes a lot of sense. I think that's a good note to wrap on as well. You typically end your great podcast where you ask your guests for book recommendations. I'll ask you just for one for a predominantly tech or Silicon Valley audience. What's either a book or something that they should read in addition to Why We're Polarized, of course, that you think might give them some perspective outside of their usual perspective?

I think they should read Amusing Ourselves to Death by Neil Postman.

Yeah.

I think that for most of the people we're talking about, the most important thing, like tradition to begin to unearth, is what I would call the mid-century media theorists, and they're writing at the time of television. But they understood something that I think we've really lost about— I mean, the cliché of this of course is a medium is a message, but nobody really understands what that means. They understood that how mediums change us and make us plastic in their hands is much more important than what we do on them. And more that we almost always miss that effect, that we always feel like we are the ones acting upon the medium. And it is almost always, at least as potently, the medium acting upon us and changing us. It's a huge disagreement I have with a lot of the people we've talked about in this show. If you want to read a more modern version of it, you could read The Shallows by Nick Carr. Which is a good book too and comes a little bit closer to this era. But I think it's really worth going back to Postman, who is kind of popularising and moralising Marshall McLuhan. McLuhan's great to read. You should read Understanding Media. I recognise these are a bunch of references, but it's worth reading Understanding Media, but it is hard to read, whereas Postman is a pleasure.

Yeah.

So read Neil Postman, read Amusing Ourselves to Death, maybe Technopoly, I think it's called, by But that's where I would begin.

Yeah, it was just your point on the platforms. It's funny. I mean, people started on Twitter talking about what they're eating for breakfast. And, you know, afterwards, they get what we call Twitter brain and start getting in all these fights. Ezra, thank you so much for coming on the podcast.

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