Ezra Klein on Media, Politics, and Models of the World

Just a heads up that this episode of Conversations with Tyler does contain some strong language, so listener discretion is advised. Conversations with Tyler is produced by the Mercatus Center at George Mason University, bridging the gap between academic ideas and real-world problems. Learn more at mercatus.org. And for more conversations, including videos, transcripts, and upcoming dates, visit conversationswithtyler.com. Before we get to today's conversation, I'd like to let you know of several upcoming live dates with other guests, including Steven Pinker, Joe Henrich, Chumpalahiri, Rabbi David Wolpe, and Malcolm Gladwell. All of these will be held in the DC area, and they're free to attend. For dates and for more information, just visit conversationswithtyler.com. Today's conversation is with Ezra Klein of Vox.com. I sat down with Ezra recently in DC, and I enjoyed hearing his thoughts on politics, the future of media, the ethics of eating meat, and indeed the very future of our world. This conversation is also being released on Ezra's podcast, and that's called The Ezra Klein Show. Definitely check it out. It's very, very good. And special thanks to Panoply for lending us the use of their studio to record this podcast. And now on to the conversation with Ezra Klein. I'm here today with Ezra Klein, media entrepreneur, blogger, healthcare thinker. Ezra is the creator of Vox.com, which is one of the most important up-and-coming and indeed now established media sites. Ezra himself runs a podcast series. He thinks broadly and deeply about everything, and I will stress, as I always do, this is the conversation I want to have with Ezra. Not the conversation you want to have with Ezra.

I like this podcast disclaimer. I'm gonna steal it.

Let me start with some questions about media. We'll get to politics, you, and everything else, but different formats in media. So you can do something in print. You've been a blogger. You've been involved with periodicals. Now you do Vox. Vox to me seems to be doing more and more video. So let's start with video. When you use the medium of video, what is the bias in using video in terms of what kind of material, what kind of message? How does that slant what any site, but including Vox.com, is going to do and be?

So it is much more different than I believed it was, let's say, 2 years ago. So before I came to Vox, I used to do a lot of cable news. I was a guest host on MSNBC. I came pretty close to taking a show at some point. You and I spoke, I think, during that period. And one thing about cable news is it actually isn't that different than writing. I mean, you are basically writing a script, and there are elements, and there is visual, but you are really writing a script and you read it aloud, or at least I should say the way I did it, it worked that way. When I started Vox, I had the great fortune to hire a guy named Joe Posner, who I met at a media conference and struck me from the second I met him as a real video genius. The reason Vox's video is great, and I have no compunction saying it's great because I don't have all that much to do with it, is because Joe and Joss Fong and the rest of that team they really think about video as its own form in a very different way than I had before. And they will, we will be talking through stories and I will come to them with something from the site that did really well. And I'll say, "Hey, we should make a video out of this. Look how well performed on the site." And they'll say, "Nope, it's not a visual topic." And so in terms of the bias you're talking about, the overwhelming bias in doing really good video work is stories that are fundamentally visual. A story that is two people talking to each other is not that interesting. So I'll actually give an example from podcasting. What we are doing right now is not interesting video. Early on in Vox, one of the first video series we launched was Vox Conversations, and we had me interviewing people much as I do on my podcast, The Ezra Klein Show. We had me doing long-form interviews with people often for about an hour. And we put them up and they never really performed that well. And the reason was it just wasn't fundamentally visual, what we were doing. So the thing that I have learned to take much more seriously than I did a year ago, 2 years ago, is that you actually have to begin by asking the question, why is this a good thing to watch? As opposed to in print, which is, why is this story simply interesting?

But to make this concrete, let's say news media uses much more video 5 years from now than it does today. —let's say Vox as well—what would be, say, 3 issues that people will care more about that they don't care as much about today?

It's funny because I'm usually quick on a question like this. I am trying to think through, have we learned that there are topics that work for us in video? Here's the answer I think I'll give you. International works better in video. Because international stories— Because of maps, you can show something's happened. —it's maps, it's visual. Even when you're showing something fairly mundane in another country, it looks different than it looks here, right? If you are showing man-on-the-street footage, but that man-on-the-street footage is in Saudi Arabia, it actually is somewhat visually interesting because it just is interesting to see what it looks like when people in Saudi Arabia are going about their daily lives if you're from Southern California. So I do think video has a bit more bias towards international than print. But I would say, and I'd be curious for your thoughts on this because I do think underneath this question you have a theory here, I have not seen a systematic difference yet that has influenced our coverage in the way that I did see it, say, when we moved to social being distribution mechanism, put much more of a focus on content that front-loaded identity. I haven't seen that yet in video. Doesn't mean it isn't there, I just haven't found it.

I tend to find video is good for explaining history to people. Vox had a great Syria video, I'm sure you had a lot to do with that.

I actually had nothing to do with it, it was great.

You had a lot to do with it, but the history of an event, it's easier to get people to care about it but that's partly because one makes history more emotional. And I'm always torn a bit by this notion of making history more emotional. You get more people to care about the history, but precisely because it has become emotional to them, maybe what you've taught them, they don't so easily budge from. Because it is so vivid in some way.

Well, let me give a different spin on why I think history is working in Vox videos. Uh, one thing that is gonna be very different is web video or streaming video versus traditional, what is called in one of the worst terms of art I've come across, linear video, so television. And I do think this is going to both subtly and importantly change editorial. So when you're creating a Netflix series or you're creating a YouTube channel, you are creating a kind of video that you expect to persist. And so people are going to come back to it and they're going to come back to it and they're going to come back to it. You've brought up the Syria video that was a huge hit for Vox. I don't have the numbers in front of me, but I want to say it was watched 50, 60 million times. But its major rise actually came a couple months after we first posted it, and not through anything we did. It just somehow got rediscovered during a secondary wave of fighting and news coverage of Syria, and it exploded. And the reason this is important is that when you're looking at cable news or a lot of forbear, uh, news content, that disappeared as soon as it was put on. There, it became— the competition became about having the newest thing, the thing other people didn't have, much like traditional news does. If you are trying to create things that are going to be continuously relevant 3 months from now, 8 months from now, a year from now, 5 years from now, putting more emphasis on the history of a conflict like in Syria is going to give you a better chance of having something that can be profitably rediscovered.

Going forward. So in some strange way, the original Vox vision of the card stack actually has been realized through video.

It's been realized in a lot of places. I mean, it's true in our text work too. One reason that our explainers focus on context is that it makes them very easy to reuse going forward. Just, I think if you are thinking editorially about how to make things persistent as opposed to accepting their ephemerality, you focus much more on more subterranean contextual information that you don't believe will change quickly. And history is a good example of that.

Let's say there's a bunch of different political views. There's conservatives, modern liberals, progressives, libertarians, Trumpistas, whatever, however you draw that universe. And if you had to think the medium of video overall, which of those views is A, helped the most, and B, hurt the most, and why? Not just by Vox video, but just video in general.

Yeah, no, I understand.

The video way of thinking.

I just am not sure yet. I do not know. I don't know. I could probably come up with a bad theory on the spot here, but I'm not sure. I wanna see, I do not, I am not aware of sites with different ideological leanings showing dramatically different outcomes in video. I wanna see.

But there's some subtle way that video seems to matter. So I was just in the Faroe Islands, which is a great trip by the way, But one thing they do in the Faroe Islands is every year they wade out into the water with their long boots and they club a bunch of whales to death. And the world didn't pay any notice to this, but then at one point this was caught on video and then it went viral. And now there are massive protests over— online protests over what happens in the Faroe Islands with the whales. You wouldn't quite call that a political ideology, but maybe known identifiable victims get a larger voice in some way, even if those victims otherwise literally, like the whales, have no voice whatsoever. So I sometimes tend to think it's a kind of progressivism which is favored, but there's another part of me which thinks about libertarian arguments, the seen versus the unseen, the invisible opportunity cost. That very easily gets lost in print because you've got to cite some boring cost-benefit study, but I think there are ways to show secondary consequences in the narrative of a video that typically would fail on a newspaper page.

I think you're actually somewhat mistaken about the underlying mechanism. I think that the big change from 10 years ago, 15 years ago in the story you just gave wasn't really video. It was the possibility of virality.

Okay, sure.

The kind of story you just described—

But it has to be video for people to share it.

I think that one in particular probably is better in video. It's vivid to see somebody clubbing a whale to death, I assume. I haven't seen this video, but the kind of But my guess is that in terms of making that matter, the distribution mechanism mattered much more there. When you're talking about victims, you can find victims from any ideology. I think that there would have been a time on the internet when you said that Upworthy proved— potentially Upworthy proved that a certain kind of soft cultural progressivism was going to be dominant online. Then I think we've seen sites like Breitbart and IJR, Independent Journalism Review, were able to take a form of soft to hard cultural conservatism and using almost the exact same techniques, send those super viral as well. And if you look at these two kinds of content, you find different victims, right? With Upworthy, it is a young LGBT kid who's been bullied at school. Right. With IJR, you'll see an elderly grandmother, you know, who is victimized for her Christianity.

—But that they're both victims still to me seems striking.

—Sure, but I just think— but my point, yeah, I agree with that. But I think that both of those are— they can be video or text, but what is mattering is you're using outrage people have because of shared identity to send something viral through a sharing mechanism. I think that is the real mechanism there, much more so than video to text is the difference.

—Let's say that virtual reality somehow works or takes off. It doesn't just—

Oh, I think it's definitely going to work.

Okay, I have no particular opinion.. But how will that shape which ideas succeed in the news media and which do not?

What will that slant or bias be? I am not yet a— I'm a long ways from being a believer that virtual reality is going to upend the news media in the near term. It clearly will be, in my view, for VR and AR, will clearly be how we consume content and more to the point how we communicate. Sure. 20, 30 years from now.

Okay, but let's talk about that time horizon. What's your best guess? You've thought more about different media and worked in more different media than almost anyone right now.

So a couple things. One, by the way, and I think this is true also for video, we haven't talked really about this, but one thing the move towards video being a big part of a successful media organization does, and VR I think will probably push us even further, is you're seeing rising advantages to incumbency and capital again, right? Blogs, which I was part of and a big beneficiary of, for a moment you really did flatten things out. It was really easy to publish at a pretty flat rate online. Doing good video, it just costs more money. Sure. It takes more time. Doing good animation, it costs more money. It takes more time. We have substantially lowered the level of investment needed to do it well, but it is still very different than it is in text. VR and AR, from what I know of those, and again, this will all get cheaper over time, but my sense there too is you're going to have a pretty big advantage for organizations able to afford what are increasingly real studios, which you didn't— The New York Times did not have to have a studio in 1996. Then when people were trying— When I was trying to in some way compete with a New York Times op-ed columnist as a blogger, which is not how I saw it, but I think it's some Way was what was going on, everything was flat in there. I did not need much upfront investment capital to do it. So that I think matters. In terms of how it will change coverage priorities, oof, I think we are so far from even having an idea of what will work in VR beyond gaming and porn, and I, by the way, don't mean that in a dismissive way.

No, no, not at all.

I just wouldn't know how to speculate yet.

I wonder if the news won't have to become much happier because right now, especially with TV news, there's a kind of negative bias. So no one has a story on the home that wasn't broken into today or the terror attack that didn't happen at all. It has to get far enough to be covered. So good news is played down. People think crime rates are higher than they are because it's reported a lot. But if presentation becomes that vivid, it may just be people are so put off by the actual worst news, they may want to kind of soft-pedal, almost like the kittens on the internet, they'll want everything to be gentle and pleasant.

I don't buy it. I definitely don't buy that it would make people— it would make news happier. I think if it did anything, it would lead to more substitution against news. So I could imagine that what a VR/AR world does is it makes it much more attractive to play the successor to Call of Duty in the VR world than to read Vox.com or the New York Times or whatever else.

But of the news we have in percentage terms, don't you think it has to become nicer? Like, most people will not go see horror movies, and those are not even virtual reality. It's too scary. I won't see most horror movies.

I won't see any horror movies. My wife has a No Chickens Movie Club that is mostly like a No Ezras Movie Club.

So if the news is in virtual reality, you won't watch certain things if you won't see a horror movie.

It's funny because my bias on this actually probably goes the other direction. When I watch most media, I am surprised by the discomfort people seem to seek out. So I am a fan of the part of movies before anything goes wrong. I really enjoy that first 25 minutes before any kind of conflict emerges in the plot. And I continuously wish that movies would just sort of let me hang out in that happy universe for a longer period of time. But when I watch any show recommended by anyone I know, including you, even if the show is putatively a cheery happy show, the level of discomfort that people seem to want to endure of awkwardness, of conflict, is much higher than where I am. Cable news is another good example. I do not have the constitution to wake up and watch people yell at each other about politics. I don't know where people get that capability, but I very much don't have it. My lesson from this I think is in some ways the opposite of yours. I think that people are attracted to a much higher level of conflict than I completely understand, and my sense is that that will remain true in a VR/AR world. I don't really see a reason to believe— that would change. So now I could see something that would say there will be a bias against particularly gruesome stories, right? That you will not want to— there will not be a sharp uptick in people wanting to experience what things are like in Aleppo in a VR/AR world. But I don't think that moves towards kittens and feel-good stories of, of happy events. I think you probably have a lot of what I would think of as sort of where news is now, a lot of conflict, but conflict in the space of discomfort, conflict in a space of safe outrage, conflict in a space of, you know, you think you're right and the other person is wrong, not necessarily a move towards actual cheeriness. People seem to like cheeriness a lot less than I would think they would.

So let's take podcasts. In your talk with Malcolm Gladwell, you each discussed how it can be— Tyler Cowen, you each discussed how it can be hard to use numbers in podcasts, and I agree with that, but in terms of which issues are favored, as podcasts become more and more important, what does this skew our attention towards?

I think it skews our attention towards speculation.

Speculation.

One of the things about podcasts that I really enjoy about it is that it has a very rambling, at least at this point in the— Tyler Cowen's evolution, there's much more of a rambling, looping, bullshitting quality to it. It is— you're able in a podcast to talk about something where you may not be right in a way that people are, I find, much harder on you in print for doing. And so something that I find is true in the discussions I hear on podcasts is they're much more personal, including newsmakers, by the way. The conversation that I've had with Malcolm Gladwell, or even the conversation I had with Cory Booker, ended up focusing quite heavily on the senator's spirituality, which I think if I had been writing, creating that conversation for print, I would have felt embarrassed or strange ending up that personal. But podcasting, because of the way people listen to it, as a secondary activity, as a— almost as a conversation they are part of without having to participate in while they're doing something else. I often think of podcasting as if you're walking around with your friends, but you just don't have any actual friends there. I think that is moving towards much more personal topics, a much more intimate set of ideas, and away from harder, crisper, more concrete presentations of what we already know.

Let me ask you some questions about CEOs and leadership. When you look at the data on the corporate world, there's a lot of evidence that CEOs today, they're much more likely to be generalists and to be able to switch from one sector to another, and they're less likely to be people who came up through the ranks, like producing ball bearings or running a coal mine or an oil refinery. And that's pretty well established. Do you think that's true in media? And also, what would you say is exactly your skill that makes you the CEO?

Of the part of Vox you run? I should say technically I'm not the CEO of Vox. That is Jim Bankoff.

Sure, but of vox.com. You're the editor.

Why do I run Vox? To the question of what I'm good at versus— Well, let me try to do the CEO question first and I'll try to get into what I'm maybe good at or not good at. I think that we are— You've talked about this I think on your site before. I think we are becoming much more polarized and unequal along political as well as non-political dimensions. I think we are getting much more effective and to some degree more discriminatory around the signaling around those things. I think the idea of who a CEO is and what a CEO is is more sharply defined in a way that is probably not good. Than it was 50 years ago. So I think that's a fair bit of it. I think we have professionalized the management class. I think that there has become a set of signifiers that are more often— that first you learn as a CEO, and it's one reason you're actually able to do that kind of lateral movement, because part of what is being selected for is this, do you seem like a CEO? Do you know how to work the CEO circuit? Do you know other CEOs? It has become a job unto itself and the signaling around it, a job and a set of skills unto themselves. Those things are not taught in the same way coming up the ranks. I've been very struck after I moved to running Vox because now, particularly in my first year, I went to a bunch of these conferences and I met more of these people and I just got a bit more of a sense of this and how much it's a language and how much it's a culture and how much it's a social scene of these people who see each other the same conferences. And I mean, it's a real circuit.

And that's consistent with these generalist skills. You have to be a CEO no matter how much you know about ball bearings or making shoe heels.

Yeah, you can have a lot of subject-specific knowledge, but if you are not presenting a certain way, I think that there is probably a widening penalty to that in a way, again, that I think is probably negative. I am not persuaded it's good that we have more generalist CEOs.

But probably inevitable. You have to deal with government. You have to deal with the media, social media. You may need to raise funds in some way for your business.

Well, do you? I mean— Someone has to. Somebody needs to deal with government, but I'm not sure that every company has so much government entanglement, and I'm not sure that every CEO should be dealing that much with social media. I do know at the same time there are— But the people who report to you.

Are dealing with it. If you're CEO, you may not be doing it, but you need to digest their reports and ask them the right questions. So in that sense, there's like 7 or 8 major areas that a CEO has to know really very well today. I buy that.

And I think probably the other piece of it is that particularly when— we're maybe using a bit of an idealized example in terms of ball bearings, but now if you're a CEO of an American firm that does a lot of ball bearing manufacturing, the likelihood that you're ball bearing manufacturing is done in America is probably pretty low.

You need to know the global economy, you need to know tech, right?

Yeah, I remember a piece from Justin Fox, who's a writer at Bloomberg, uh, at Bloomberg View now, uh, I believe it was by him. If it's not, I apologize. But he talked about how a— he was told by a CEO that a key skill for a CEO of a multinational firm is actually the ability to get restful sleep on an international plane flight. And I never thought of that, and you don't think of that as a, as a CEO skill, but it makes perfect makes sense, and it's not something that would have been selected for before. So I think I would want to see something more systematic about what skills CEOs really end up using and what the bulk of companies need before I totally bought into the thesis, but I'm not saying it's impossible by any means.

There's a big debate on executive pay. Are CEOs underpaid in your opinion? Not you.

No, I don't believe CEOs are underpaid.

You don't believe CEOs are underpaid.

I recognize that with within the debate that there is good evidence that in a pure market way that the returns on having a really high-quality CEO are positive and that given where we are now, it is rational for individual firms to be paying more and more and more to try to get the star CEO. So I'm not saying that individual firms are overpaying. What I am saying is that it is by the same token I think pretty clear that The compensation game has become fundamentally point-scoring, that it really isn't about the money. I don't think anybody thinks that the kinds of pay increases we're seeing among CEOs is coming from the cost of feeding a CEO's family having risen really sharply in recent decades. And so I think that what you would want is something that begins to tamp down on the collective action issue of every CEO needing to be paid more than every other CEO simply in order to prove they're a good CEO because it's become a status symbol. There's a story I love from Walter Isaacson's book on Steve Jobs, and he talks about how for years and years and years after he came back to Apple, Jobs took only $1 a year. The board for years was saying to him, "Come on, take a salary. You're doing a great job. You're building a great company. Take a salary." He wasn't and he wasn't and he wasn't. Then one day he did, and he said, "Listen, I think we've done the turnaround. It's time for me to begin taking a salary." They said, "Great," and they came to him with what they thought was a a really generous package and he told him to screw off and demanded something that was stratospheric. The point for him was not the money. He hadn't needed— he would have been taking a dollar a year. The point for him was that if he was going to get paid, that pay was going to reflect that he was better than every other CEO in the world. I think that's a very good argument for highly graduated marginal tax rates that would make that kind of thing a lot less useful for for anyone.

So getting back to you, you haven't told us what's your key skill that makes you well suited for a leadership position as you understand it.

So I think the set of things I'm good at doing are, uh, I am— I think in terms of just coming up with ideas and creating content, I've been pretty good throughout my career and hopefully continue to be at seeing where the next thing is in media, um, and what are the set of skills that you're going to need to combine to get there. From blogging and sort of— I think I was reasonably early on in figuring out how to merge a lot of new blogging with traditional journalism skills at the American Prospect, brought that to the Washington Post and was able to figure out a way to build something out of that there. Saw some things in TV that you could probably do taking some of the ethos of blogging and what we were beginning to see and what the audience was responding to and taking that to cable news. I have been reasonably good at steering a course through a pretty rapidly changing media landscape. The thing I—

I don't disagree, but it's not somehow meta enough for what I'm asking. Sure. The Ezra Klein. What's the thing about the Ezra Klein? Like I would say your key skill is self-learning. You've talked yourself about how as a student in school, you were at best indifferent, I think were your words. So you've learned all these things on your own. You're a very good self-learner, and maybe that's the key meta-skill that makes this work in the leadership position, or no?

Maybe constant anxiety would be another possibility. A lot of the— it is a surprise to me that I turned out to be— and I guess you'd actually have to ask my team if this is true— but a pretty good manager of people. That came reasonably naturally. The thing that I think I'm good at doing as a manager is understanding what the folks working with me are actually doing, and so getting a sense of what they actually need. The way I tend to work with people is by trying to figure out what the project is and what their broad project is. I don't mean literally what their task is right now, but what is their project at my organization? What are they trying to do over the course of a year? And then figuring out how to support in that. And I think compared to other people I know, and this is feedback I've gotten, I think I'm I'm pretty good at figuring out how people understand the work they are doing and then how can I support them in that. The other thing I think I'm not bad at is having a pretty clear idea that I'm able to communicate of where we're going. I didn't think this was going to be a huge issue. I didn't think a lot about branding when we started Vox. In fact, I thought media brands were probably becoming less important as content disaggregated and moved around socially. It turned out they were getting more important, uh, and that along the way we were able to define a pretty clear one. And I think that's something that I'm pretty good at doing is defining that and hopefully holding to that and communicating that. But definitely leadership and CEOing is something I'm learning as I'm going along, so it might be hard for me to get the perspective to say what I am good at or not good at from a meta level on that.

What's your best time management tip?

Tyler Cowen. To-do listing. The thing that I— the thing that honestly decides whether or not I have an effective, like a good effective day where I feel like I got things done or whether I just wasted a bunch of time was whether in the morning I wrote down what I thought I had to get done that day and throughout the day was rigorous about putting the little tasks that come up onto that same list and then checking them off. If I keep that list going and I keep it updated and I keep referring back to it, I am able to be pretty efficient, and if I don't, I get lost and overwhelmed and anxious. I don't find the big tasks to be the hard thing there. I think the thing that is really hard to do is a task that take between like 3 and 15 or 20 minutes. You keep in your head when you probably have 30 minutes where you can knock out a couple of them. They don't feel like a big enough deal. You don't remember them. You didn't write them down in a clear place, and so they just sit there causing you, or at least me, endless anxiety. When I actually have them in front of me, I will stay on top of them. And actually staying on top of them, I think, is more important certainly than I gave it credit for a year ago.

We all are looking for other talented people to work with, and you've had a whole bunch of great ones. Uh, Matt and Melissa, Dylan Matthews, a whole bunch of others, some of whom I don't know. But what's your best talent-finding tip?

Look for people who are desperate to be doing the thing they're doing. I have often found really great people by finding people who seemed, who either were literally doing what they need to be doing for free because nobody was yet paying them for it, right? And that's something that, that's an ethos that comes out of, I did that as a blogger and, you know, I found Dylan Matthews doing that kind of thing. So look for people who, you can teach a lot of skills, but you can't teach obsession. And there's a real difference between somebody who is obsessed with the work they're doing and someone who is simply skilled at the work they're doing. I will take the obsession and teach the skills over getting the skills and having to teach the obsession.

How has being an entrepreneur changed your political views? Do you have more sympathy with people starting businesses and the notion that business needs to be encouraged or liberated or the opposite?

Yeah, no, I think I was— I don't think I had Well, I don't think I ever had a— what I would think of as an anti-entrepreneur period, so I do have sympathy with starting businesses, but I don't think I did it before. Let me think on that for a minute. How has it changed my political views? I don't deal with a lot of government regulation myself, so it hasn't had some big effect there. I'm sure—

And you're in a less regulated sector.

I'm in a pretty unregulated, less regulated sector, so that isn't a huge deal for me.

But somehow your overall vision of human motivation and imperfections and what drives people, that must have, if only subtly, been altered in some way that even if it doesn't change your policy stances, your political vision must now be different.

Yeah, I'm just thinking it through. So let me offer two. The big one, I think, is not since I started an organization, but since I went to the Washington Post. Okay, and what's that? Being part of bigger organizations has given me a very different set of beliefs about about the importance of firms and firm dynamics and organizational frictions and how the economy works. I am much, much, much more sympathetic and have a much better understanding of, say, why wages are sticky. You've been talking about Bryan Kaplan's view, idea about firing aversion. Yes. Then Matt Iglesias, my co-founder, had a great set of tweets about hiring aversion.

Absolutely. I've worked so hard at those. I got the feeling you've been tasking Matt with hiring people. I have not.

But Matt is not actually the one who primarily has to hire people, but in part because hiring people is really hard and unpleasant.

But everyone does that in an organization. It's about the personal contacts of your whole network, and Matt must know a lot of people.

No, Matt is very much part of the whole thing. Sure. So I have a lot more sensitivity to that kind of thing. I have a lot more sensitivity to the ways in which— firms have trouble turning themselves around. Things that often seem mysterious to me about why a firm didn't just swoop in and take this market opportunity seem a lot less mysterious to me now that I've been in a big one and been able to see that from a lot of different vantage points at The Washington Post. And that was a firm that I think has been very successful in changing and evolving and transforming. But I also saw how hard and wrenching that was and how many ways it could have gone wrong. And didn't, I think in that case due to some really strong and good leadership. And then at Vox, this is a young firm and Vox Media itself I think is more than 600 employees now though, so it isn't that small. Vox.com is more like 70. And even there I have a sense of, my God, like just the difficulty of growth, the organizational cost of growth, the dangers it puts you into, right? The overstretchedness, the lack of slack in any of the systems. Systems so that you can deal with things that are longer range while you're trying to deal with what's going on today. So my sense of how the economy works on a micro level has changed a lot from just being inside larger firms. That I think has influenced me quite a bit. I'd say the other thing is I am probably much more— and again, I'm not quite sure this is a policy idea, but I am much more skeptical of anything anybody says about how a firm or a government organization or anything else works. My— one of my big takeaways from now having sat through a lot of meetings with consultants, a lot of meetings with people trying to sell ideas or companies to me, a lot of meetings where I was trying to sell an idea to someone else, uh, is that there is just a lot of bullshit in the economy. There's a lot of bullshit in organizations, and there is, in a way I don't totally understand, an accepted level of bullshit between everybody. I seem to be at meetings all the time where everybody seems to know that only half of whatever idea is being pitched as a savior to everything is really being implemented or really going to work. I constantly see in media now people touting some kind of great pilot project or some little innovation they came up with that is covered as if it will save media, but I can look at it and know that there's no way that's even going to absorb— there's no way that will be spread through the workflow of even the host organization, much less any other organization. So I think that I've become much more cynical about— I think of this a lot, by the way, with Snowden and the NSA. Yes. On the one hand, a lot of those revelations are really, really, really important. On the other hand, it's a lot of consultant documents about what they were doing on behalf of the government. And I often think about how much of that is really getting effectively done, which in some ways makes it scarier. But I think that one way of reading those documents was the government has become this omniscient kind of all-seeing surveillance state. Yes. And my guess is their ability to use that data and how much— Is very, very weak. Is very, very, very weak. Yes. Again, I'm not— that shouldn't— that might make your view of what's going on much worse actually. I'm not saying that it's exculpatory. I agree. I'm just saying that it's a different way of looking at those documents.

But take your view of government production. Now a lot of what governments do is pass around checks and we more or less know how that works and usually the checks show up, right? The way that works is fairly well understood. But when government produces things, are you now more cynical about that than you used to be? Oh, yeah.

I don't think— even though I am, you know, in a relative sense in American politics probably a fan of government producing things, I don't have any particular belief that it is an efficient way of producing things and I wouldn't want them to take on things that I thought were getting done well anywhere else. So I'm not sure how much my view on that has changed. I will say one thing about both government and private sector production which is Something that I do think is important is the— there is an advantage to being willing to do kludgy, difficult, somewhat unpleasant things. That is something I probably take more seriously than I did before. And let me give you an example here, because this is the way Vox particularly has really changed my view on things. If we had started Vox just bootstrapped, —right?— if we had, which is one of the things we pretty seriously considered, so just getting venture capital and doing it on our own, there are a lot of things we would have done that we did anyway, make things like card stacks, etc. But there are a lot of things that Vox Media built capacities to do that we— Already, before you— Already or contemporaneously with us being there, that we never would have had the willingness to sit through and do. So, and I think particularly here, there are a lot of Partnerships or opportunities have come through a lot of meetings, many of the meetings which went nowhere, which I just would never have done. So Vox Entertainment, which is part of Vox Media, is out in LA and is building collaborations basically with television, other things too, but television primarily. That is just something that if we had bootstrapped this, we never would have been considering because the slog to get anywhere in television, the number of meetings meetings that don't go anywhere. I just, I absolutely never would have been able to do it. And so something I actually now see as an organizational advantage of certain kinds of organizations is a willingness to do things that aren't fun and that may not turn out well, that may actually be pretty inefficient. Because when you're running really lean, things that maybe don't have a very high payoff, even if that payoff, if it comes, is pretty good, often don't look good, not because of expected value, but just because of like literally what you can bear as a human being. And I think that way with government too. So as you say, there's an attraction recognizing the government is inefficient to just saying, well, let's just do cash transfer everything. Let's go UBI for everything. But I think there is a lot that government does, often not that well, that somebody needs to be doing because a lot of the people you want to help are actually really difficult to help. And I think this is something to— now moving away from Lessons Learned from Vox. I think this is one of the things I believe strongly in policy that we underrate. A lot of what we're trying to do in government is not help people who want free stuff, quote unquote, but is help people who actually are very, very difficult to help. This is particularly true in healthcare.

And you see this with Medicaid. A lot of people don't sign up. They don't sign up. A lot of people don't have addresses. You can't even get them, whatever.

They don't like doctors. They're afraid of doctors.

This is me.

This is me. Are you afraid of doctors?

Afraid isn't the word. Averse? Maybe dislike. Averse. They should be afraid of me perhaps.

So that kind of thing, being willing to do that and being willing to go through the risk of doing that poorly, if you're going to get there, you're going to have to have not just failure, but a fair amount of inefficiency.

Now this is a very difficult question I'm going to ask. If I think about the notion of fiduciary responsibility, which any executive has, if you imagine a conservative or a libertarian in a position with fiduciary responsibility, I think it's relatively easy for them to identify that personal responsibility with the overall good of the economy. There's a story about the invisible hand and you know all of this. If you have someone who's more left-wing or more progressive or other points of view, I would think there's more of a psychological dissonance between the fiduciary responsibility to a particular group and one's political views, and that that somehow is discordant, and it does get solved. But do you ever think about that clash, and what are your thoughts on that?

No, I don't think about it in those terms. Well, first, I think it'd be good here— give me an industry and give me a group here, right?

Let's say you have a company. The manager, the executive is supposed to maximize profits, but this would involve some pollution and the pollution may not be good for broader society. But once you sign on to be the manager, you either do the pollution if you think you can get away with it, or at least you feel obliged to lobby Congress so you could pollute if they would allow, and that's part of the deal with being manager. Now people who are conservative libertarian, maybe more to the right, they tend to see less of a conflict between fiduciary responsibility and the overall good of society. So in a sense, them being a CEO is morally more of a seamless venture. That may even be the wrong view. There might be a real conflict there. Say you, you know, own some factory farms and you answer to your shareholders, correct? People who you would broadly call progressives, is there for them a greater psychological clash in principle between the CEO responsibility and what they think about politics.

So I have a couple thoughts there. So one, I think this is actually pretty industry-specific, and I think that taking that view resolves a fair amount of the clashing. So you used an example there that I think is a good example, but will cut very much towards the argument that this would be harder for somebody on the left, which is you're talking about an industry where you have as a byproduct high levels of pollution. My guess is that kind of industry will select against people who have highly environmentalist views rising to the tops of those firms. I could be wrong about that, but that would be my assumption. Whereas I think there are also industries where the— where it will cut a little bit the other way. Um, media actually might be one of those industries, uh, where it will, in order to do the things that your shareholders want you to do, it will imply pushing in a leftward direction. And I just assume that people select into industries that they basically find morally aligned with their views, at least at that top level where you have a lot of selection power. If you're going to be running one of these firms, as we talked about, CEOs can be more generalist now. So if you're at that level in the market, you probably have selected somewhere where you just don't find it to be a problem. I will say though that even as someone who I think— in contemporary American politics falls more on the center-left side of the spectrum. I have always found the amount of corporate social responsibility stuff to be a little puzzling. I don't find it intuitively appealing myself. I'm not—

But a lot of it is public relations.

Some of it is public relations, but I actually think that is somewhere where I have become a little less cynical, if anything, now that I know more of these folks. You know, something that I— as a sort of human nature thing, something that I've become more sensitized to is that you might ask, how does somebody who becomes CEO of a widget factory see their life's work as having meaning, right? Because who cares about all these widgets? Why didn't they go, if they're that talented, into whatever? And one thing that that kind of analysis will miss, the question of, you know, why does it matter if you're just creating stuff for kids or whatever, you know, toys? Is how much people end up identifying with their firm as the larger whole, how much it's the health of the firm, the health of the workers, the corporate culture that people are really proud of that bind them together. That's their community. That's their neighborhood. That's where their status comes from. And I think it is within that kind of outlook that this sort of corporate social responsibility stuff becomes very appealing, that if the place you're deriving your value is from the idea of what sort of firm did you create? Not what did your firm create, but what sort of firm did you create? Then the question of what is the moral character of your firm? How proud are the people in your firm of being there? That becomes a very important part of the way that you personally get satisfaction from your work. I have definitely run into CEOs who seem more interested in the character of the firm they're creating than anything their firm is creating. It's—

and they're often more successful than they often are. 'cause the people who work with them perceive that and respond in kind.

But the stuff that they are creating, it is almost the fuel to create the sort of firm they are interested in.

Now we have a segment in all of these chats in the middle. It's called Underrated Versus Overrated. All right. So I say a few things and you tell me if you think they're underrated or overrated. Okay. And of course you're free to pass. The movie, The Matrix, overrated or underrated?

At this point, underrated because its sequels were so bad.

Okay, the Washington, D.C. dining scene. And you live in Washington. I do. The listeners don't know that. It's hard.

It's become probably overrated by the press, but still underrated by people who live here.

And how about by people who live in New York?

Underrated. Underrated, okay. Well, I will say, when I moved to D.C. in 2005, for years I could eat at every single good restaurant that opened up, and a lot that weren't good. And now the list of restaurants that seem excellent that I have not been able to go to is longer than my arm. So I am— it's almost hard for me to rate it highly enough given how pleased I am by the development.

Bob Dylan, overrated or underrated?

I'm trying to match this with my personal ignorance. Definitely seems overrated to me, but this is me not being very into classic rock.

Okay. But that's endogenous, right? If you're not in—

you've heard some Bob Dylan. I've heard quite a bit of Bob Dylan.

And you aren't that induced to go hear a lot more? Nope. I, I—

again, what's your objection? I do not particularly have an objection. I do— it's not scratchy voice or— I really want to frame this as a subjective fact of me potentially having bad music taste as opposed to a normative claim about the worth of Bob Dylan. I do not think anybody should take my cultural viewpoints I think I am a deep fan, for instance, of the movie Wimbledon. I do not think people should follow my lead on what is good culture.

William F. Buckley. Underrated.

Why? He built a tremendous institution and I both mean that in terms of the National Review and probably in terms of the American right for quite a while. I think that it is hard now to appreciate because it feels so much with us of what an achievement fusionism there really was. I think it is also— I mean, the National Review has been an important and to some degree played a pretty consistent role on the American right for many, many, many decades. I think that's a part of Buckley that is also easy to underrate. I mean, I thought what the National Review did around Trump was very much— I don't know that it would have happened at a place that didn't have as clear an internal character as what Buckley gave that institution. I think if it had just been a more normal magazine, it just wouldn't have tried to play that role. And I think that role was something worth trying to play. So I think what Buckley achieved, whatever you think of his politics, I think He's definitely underrated at this point.

The most underrated person in the Obama administration. They don't have to be there now.

That's a great question. I would have to think for a minute here. Let me give this some thought and come back to you. Okay, we'll come back to you. I don't want to do it totally on the fly.

The name Ezra, overrated or underrated?

Oh my God, it's gotten so popular. It has.

It's a name when I was a kid I would not have thought would have made a comeback.

No, I believe if I read the site right, The name Ezra is now more popular than the name of my wife, Anne or Annie, which blew my mind when I looked it up. Yes. So always underrated. It's a great name. Always underrated.

It's a great name. Professional sports. Overrated. Why?

One, they're all too long. There is nothing I personally like less than watching a whole piece of professional sports ball.

Isn't there some other better way to consume it than to watch it all? So you watch it in parts, but it needs to be there for you to pick the right parts, and then you talk to people about the rest, and it's like the drama. It's like going to the theater, except you're free to talk to your friends about it.

It's true. I actually think, even as I think that professional sports is way overrated, I think sports journalism is continuously underrated. I think it is always some of the best journalism we're doing in America, and nearly always the best written form of journalism we do in America. And why is that?

What about the structure of sports? Makes the journalism so good and the product so good.

There is something about sports being a canvas for writing that through which we are allowed with relatively low stakes to work out other core issues in American life that is really tremendous. One of my favorite books is The Muhammad Ali Reader. It is the case that basically every great writer of the 20th century did their Muhammad Ali piece, and you can just go through there and it is an amazing tour of particularly New journalism, but there is a capacity to use sports to write about almost anything in the American experience. It is really tremendous. On the flip, I just somehow do not have the part of my brain, really just do not, and again, I want to continue to say this is not a normative claim. This is a claim about my own experience. I do not have the part of my brain that even allows me to empathetically access why someone would care what a bunch of people playing for a team that they went to because it paid them the most money— why we care about movies and novels, right?

And that's not even—

I know I'm not able to access that. I just— I, I— they're drawing me up in the storyline. I'm just telling you again, I'm not saying other people shouldn't enjoy it. I'm saying that this is a place where I have tried many, many times because I I would like to be connected to American culture in this way, and it is like I am missing a part.

Now let's try some questions about politics, and we'll come back to the most underrated in the Obama administration. Let's take models of the world. So President Obama—

Oh, I think I have an Obama administration— Sure, please.

Biden. Biden. Tell us why.

Joe Biden has been, as far as I can tell in my reporting, as far as anybody can tell, he has taken on a series of pretty important jobs for the administration going back to copying the stimulus, which actually did go out with a very, very low level of fraud. Work he did on gun control didn't really go anywhere, but in terms of the task force piece of the administration, it was well conducted. He has been very, very important in pushing through a bunch of congressional deals, and he has played a role that I respect in organizations of often being the skunk at the party, particularly in Obama's dealings with the military. Mm-hmm. Biden's role in a lot of that was to act as the counterweight. In a way that's very socially uncomfortable and is related to, I think, Joe Biden's very particular set of skills, which may not have been— are not always adaptive, but I think are adaptive in that particular circumstance. Yet at the same time that he's been, I think by all accounts, a very successful vice president, people forget that his was actually the most highly rated convention speech at the 2012 convention, even more so, if I remember correctly, than Bill Clinton. He arguably really played a big role in the election by getting their debates back on track after Obama flubbed the first debate. He is looked at in a way that I have looked into and reported on and tried to understand as sort of a joke. The gap between the esteem in his public reputation as sort of Uncle Joe and the gravity of his career and what he's done and the role he's played with Obama. I think is very, very, very wide.

Some questions about politics. Let's put aside policy conclusions, just models of the world. Yeah. You have a model of the world and President Obama has a model of the world. Your knowledge of his model is highly, highly imperfect. But just from what you know, from whatever distance you observe what he does and says, what do you think is the main difference in analytical terms between your model and his? Optimism. You have it or he has it?

He has it. Tyler Cowen: The big difference between my model and his model— and I've interviewed him and we've talked about this. At this point, I think the models of how American politics works are pretty similar. He has developed over his time in office, I think much more so than when he ran in '08, a pretty structuralist view of how Congress works, of how American politics works, of how automatic a lot of functions of public opinion and partisan opinion are. These are things that I think the sort of hope and change Obama didn't believe in '08. He thought you could really bridge these divides. There was a lot more cynicism among members of the press, including myself. I think that cynicism was borne out. I think he shares it now.

He has— But that's a similarity.

What's the difference? I know. This is where I'm coming to it. I think that the system is in very fundamental ways at this point flawed. I do not think the political system can over a long period of time absorb highly polarized political parties. I think that structural changes will need to be made if American governance is going to be high quality. He believes in ways I don't fully understand and don't think he's really able to give a good account of that there is a sort of essential goodness of the American people, that they will rise up and demand better of their leaders and maybe it just has to get to a bad enough point or something, but I think he's wrong about that. I think that you actually need to change how the system works, not expect that at some point the American people are going to say enough is enough. Again, this is my— Sure, sure. This is my best recounting of what the nature of his optimism is, but he is definitely pushes back quite strongly on I think what he calls like the jaded, easy cynicism, but I think it's correct.

There was a recent poll lately, you probably saw it, that I think American black males are much more optimistic about the future than American white males. Did you see that? I did. Do you think that's a good overall characterization? Of the poll? No, of reality. It's clear that's what the poll said.

I don't think the specific thing the poll there is— I don't think that poll is shedding a lot of light on our specific disagreement about does the American political system need structural reform.

Okay, so going back to models, your model of the world and Hillary Clinton's model? What's the main difference?

I do not understand her model as well as I think I understand Obama. OK. You had a long interview with her.

I did. It was very illuminating.

Thank you. I think that she— her model of the world I think frames American politics much more as a process or a negotiation carried out by individual parties where I'm much more of a structuralist. OK. By reaching out enough and consistently enough, which is a funny thing to say because her overall politics are quite— as a campaign are quite partisan. But when she is in office, she has a kind of real, "I will work with you on anything no matter how small endlessly to build up trust." That's kind of her approach. I think she believes you can get more out of that than I believe you can. I think that she believes there are— there's more that personal relationships can do to create grounds for bipartisan cooperation. I think that her critique of Obama would be that he doesn't spend that much time and when he does spend the time, does not evince enough enjoyment of reaching out and spending time and building relationships with opposed members of Congress. I think that if you got her late at night after she's had a couple of drinks, she would tell you that the difference between her and him is that she really will spend all that time with Mitch McConnell and even when people treat her unfairly and treat her badly, she will continue reaching out with them. She talked in our interview about her husband— people impeaching him at 4:00 PM and him having them over for a drink at 9:00 PM. I think she really sees that as something that can really work in changing outcomes. I don't really agree. I think that to a first approximation, knowing which party people belong to is basically how to predict the way they'll vote. I think that is even truer since she was last involved in legislative politics, and I think that the more— I don't think there's going to be that much margin in a more attentive personal relationship to being the legislator-in-chief.

The most striking part of your talk with her I found was when you asked her about books and she named two communitarian books from the 1990s. That's when I felt I really learned something about Hillary Clinton, and by the way, a book from a modern communitarian, right?

Chelsea named the new Putnam book.

Yes, yes, absolutely. Now Putnam, let me ask you about Putnam and also how Putnam relates to Donald Trump. As you know, Robert Putnam at Harvard, he has some work showing that when ethnic diversity goes up, that there's less trust, less cooperation, less social capital. And if you think of yourself in the role of an editor, So you have in American society diversity has gone up and a lot of people have reacted to this, I would say, rather badly. And I think you would agree with me, they've reacted rather badly. But there's still a way in which the issue could be framed that, well, diversity is actually a problem. We can't handle diversity. And Putnam almost says as such. And do you think there's currently a language in the media where you have readers who are themselves diverse, where it's possible not to just be blaming the bigots, but to actually present the positive view. Look, people are imperfect. A society can only handle so much diversity, and we need to learn this. Or what's your take on it?

I strongly agree. This is a— we do not have a language for demographic anxiety. That is not a language that is about racism, and we need one. I really believe this, and I believe it's been a problem, particularly this year. I think that it is clear. I think the evidence is clear. Donald Trump is not about "economic anxiety." Right.

A bit, but not mainly. I agree.

That said, I think that the way it is presented is a choice between economic anxiety and racism, and one, I don't think that's quite right. And two, I don't think that's a productive way of having that conversation.

Why don't we have that language? Where did it go or did we ever have it?

I don't know if we ever had it. We probably did have it. I think that we have properly been working very, very hard in this society to make racism socially intolerable. And we have a society that continues to have a lot of racism, a lot of sexism, a lot of bigotry of different kinds. What— but I do think that as a byproduct of that debate and that effort, there isn't a good way to have people discuss slightly more inchoate feelings of losing power that aren't necessarily in their view about taking it away from other people. It's more about losing it themselves. And I think that's a big— difference in this. Arlie Hochschild, who I've had on my show— Which I've heard. Very good episode. Thank you. Something she talks about in there is this kind of deep story that she found among— She's a sociologist who spent 5 years with Tea Party folks in Louisiana. She talks about this deep story of feeling like they've been waiting in line and now other people are getting in front. It's not so much that they don't want those other people to get ahead. It's that they want to get ahead themselves. Right. A loss in a zero-sum competition, and they may actually be correct about that. There are probably types of advancement in society that is zero-sum, particularly when you begin really trying to open up the floodgates. So I think that's correct, and I think that we don't have a good language for it. I don't know what it would mean to get one, but one thing that has annoyed me this year is I really dislike the use of political correctness as a language for it. I think it, one, doesn't explain very much, but two, I think that's something that has happened a lot of the time here is we have— people have somewhat either unconsciously or I think at times cynically mixed up an elite debate and a non-elite debate. I think there is a debate about political correctness on college campuses and with very sort of cutting-edge issues like transgender rights or safe spaces or trigger warnings that a lot of people who graduated from Ivy League schools particularly are very invested in, in the media, particularly people who what they like to do is write about things in a very free and untrammeled way. And they see this as an attack on them. They don't like what they see in their Twitter mentions. Whole range of reasons people get upset. I'm not even questioning the validity of that anger. I'm just saying that that is a very different set of issues than somebody who wants to be able to say Mexican immigrants are criminals too often and they shouldn't be in this country. The things that Trump is keying into are things that— like John Chait is a big critic of contemporary academic political correctness, but does not believe the things Trump is saying about Muslims being allowed to travel to the US are viable at all. There are a bunch of things that are settled among elites about what is an acceptable thing to say or not that Trump is reopening. Then there are a bunch of things that are unsettled among elites that Trump doesn't care about, and I think there's been a sort of conflation of those issues around political correctness that has been unhelpful to understanding his coalition and why there's real power there.

So this language of talking about diversity in a smarter way that would recognize costs of diversity without being racist or other bad things. Two other cultures we've talked about, and you have some connections to, one is Brazil, the other Singapore. And your father's from Brazil, correct? Mm-hmm. Do those places have in some ways a better language than we do, or are they much worse? Or when you think about Brazil and Singapore, what they've done, how it's worked, I mean, how does that all come together with the language you think we need?

I have genuinely no idea how those two societies actually do talk about these problems. I do not, unfortunately, speak Portuguese. And as much as I enjoyed going to Singapore for a couple of days on my honeymoon, my sense is not that that is a free and open discourse. But I don't think I know enough about them to answer that confidently.

What about the role of shame in our culture and also as it relates to media? So right now, I think I've read estimates 40% of children are born into single-parent families. Some of those, the father is actually around, but a lot of cases it's not. And a lot of social conservatives, they somehow want to shame this arrangement. But from a media point of view, it's very hard to shame those who are your readers. So there's maybe a tendency for stories to evolve into a language without shame. Does that ever worry you about media? What do you think is— what is the role of shame in politics and what should we be shaming more also?

I do think there's a lot of shaming in media. I don't think it's fair, nor would I want it to be there, but I think an interesting thing about Trumpism and the particular way in which I think the media really has been— we can argue about whether the media has done a good job with Trump, but the media is clearly very anti-Trump. The particular ideology he has— there are these long-standing debates about whether the media is liberal or it's conservative, and I tend to think they miss a lot of nuance on it. But what the media really is is not committed to single-payer, but committed to diversity, to pluralism, to tolerance— OK. —to things that I would think of as more cosmopolitan values and particularly liberal values. Values, or at least liberal in the contemporary political sense of values. Trumpism is a lot less conservative than it is traditionalist, restrictionist. It collides with that set of cosmopolitan urban values. One place where I think people have a lot of upset about this, there is a lot of shaming in the media. We talked about it a couple of minutes ago around racial prejudice. I think there's a lot of shaming in the media about what opinions you can and cannot hold about whether Muslims should be able to come to the US or what you can and can't say about Mexican immigrants or African Americans or for that matter, by the way, white people. There's a lot of shaming in the media against anybody who is seen as looking down on the "legitimate grievances" of Trump voters. There's a lot of, you know, "No, you need empathy for this set of people." ideas, but this other set of ideas you can confidently attack. And so I don't think the media operates without shame. I just don't think it shames single mothers, nor do I think it should.

Why shouldn't we worry more about single motherhood? It seems to be a social problem.

You might want to worry about single motherhood. I'm—

But we're not going to penalize them financially, right? We don't want to do that.

But I don't think that shaming them would make any sense either. I think that there is a—

You don't think the shame of single motherhood in earlier errors discourage the practice?

So one, it's funny— it's funny first that we go quickly to single motherhood, right? Because in theory, you want to be talking here about shaming the father. But I think that there is a view— and I should say, I'm a child of divorced parents, and I think it's good that my parents were able to get divorced. So I think there is a view that there are a large number of compensatory freedoms and types of happiness that have come from having more liberal views about marriage. I think the flip of that is that a lot of— at least people in the media believe that it has been more or less an unalloyed good, that it has become harder to express anti-gay sentiments in public. Okay. So I think that that's the kind of calculation people are making. I think that broadly people like a lot of the trends and a lot of the policy decisions that have led to the possibility of more single motherhood, and they are very, very, very uncomfortable with the kinds of things that you would have to do and say to try to turn that back, whereas a lot of the other kinds of shame, people are just making a different calculation.

Which of our current practices or views will in the more distant future seem crazy or just outright wrong? To ask the Chuck Klosterman question.

Sure. How we treat animals. I think that how we treat animals, particularly around factory farming and factory dairy production and etc., will be a genuine moral blight on this era and particularly on this era because we're at this point now where we're beginning to get very, very good at creating plant-based meats and increasingly we're moving towards lab-grown meats, so we're about to have a bunch of technological changes that will make eating very little meat or no meat, at least no factory farm meat, pretty easy and pretty affordable. That tends to be something that comes along with big changes in morality. But I always think— one of the ways I think about this is that I remember reading Ron Chernow's Washington, the biography of Washington, which is great. And I remember being surprised by the way the founding fathers talked about slavery in their letters to each other. It was the very much in vogue thing to be against slavery. They all in their letters talked about it as a moral blight and may it be gone from the earth in 50 years and a stain on this great nation. But they all just also had slaves with the exception obviously of Hamilton. And there was something in that, in that they knew it was wrong, they knew they wanted it to stop, but it was just really hard to stop it at the time. I mean, it was how the economy worked. They already had them, and they not just kept them but added more. And looking back, it's unconscionable. But when I talk to virtually anyone I know, I don't know anybody who defends factory farming as a moral part of our society. Like, I don't know anybody. You might hear it in reference to much poorer countries, but not to this one. And so we are running around knowing that we're causing immense, tremendous suffering to sentient beings. And, uh, I don't know, it's kind of a pain in the ass to eat less meat. It's just not gonna— I think it's gonna look really bad.

You're a pessimist about politics in some ways, or American politics. Why not then be a pessimist about food politics? So say you're a Darwinian. Human beings clearly evolved to eat animal meat, right?

Sure. Well, people argue, but yeah. I mean, I definitely think that's happening.

But that's not really up for— and to enjoy it and to kill animals. And we've evolved so our intuitions don't make us so squeamish about doing that. Now that may in some very long time frame change, but given that that's one of the core things that we are, much as we're evolved to, say, enjoy sex or have friends, Why think that's the one thing that's going to change? It seems to me that's one of the least likely to change.

So I don't see it that way, although I'm not sure it's the only thing that will change. Yes. But I'm using it as the thing here. Because I'm a technological optimist in a lot of ways. I'm not a political optimist. I don't think we're going to pass a bunch of laws that are going to change this. Okay. But I think that we will see technologies change it. And I think that there are things like this before. Child labor, I would actually put a little bit in this category. Where for a very long time you would say, "Well, we've always had, you know, we've always put kids to work. In fact, that's why you have kids. You have all this extra labor laying around when you need it." And then, you know, we got better at automating things and workers became much, much, much more productive. And I think that—

And families want to educate their kids.

And families want to educate their kids.

But there's no selfish sacrifice then, right?

Exactly. But that's why I'm saying that a crucial part of this story, a crucial part of my optimism on this is that we are are very much on the cusp of lab-grown meat.

So artificial meat will become so good—

Artificial meat is becoming so good that it's just going to be— that it will make it much, much easier to hold these opinions.

On that, I'm a pessimist. Maybe not forever, but I think for at least a few hundred years, any time horizon we can foresee.

Oh, you should try the Impossible Foods burger.

I've talked to some of these people. I'm like, what does your hamburger cost? $400? No, it doesn't cost $400.— to actually do it.

So not the lab-grown, the plant-based stuff is moving more towards affordability. The lab-grown—

But people don't enjoy it as much.

So the two new ones, the Beyond Meat and the Impossible Foods burgers, are both pretty good. They're not— I agree with you, they're not there. As somebody who, when I eat meat, a burger is literally one of my couple favorite foods, so I am not somebody who doubts the incredible deliciousness. You can actually Now we're getting pretty close. We're not, again, I don't want to say we're there. It's not as good as the best burger, but is it as good as a McDonald's burger?

Definitely it is. Well, that I think will disappear, but let's say I were to—

Yeah, but if that kind of stuff began to disappear, that's a big amount of meat, right?

Well, people will eat better burgers. I don't think McDonald's will disappear, not the burger. Let's say I were to defend the eating of meat, and I would say something like this. If you eat vegetables, You still need to plow the proverbial field. And you kill mice, maybe a larger number, smaller number. Let's say it's even a smaller number. But you're always doing something morally unconscionable with respect to animals. Therefore, trying to apply human-to-human morality to relations with animals can't work. We're not sure what the right morality is. We can perform some acts of mercy and grace, but the very existence of a planet with so many billions of humans mean there's some ongoing just massively cruel slaughter of animals? Yes or no? No. Say more.

I don't buy that the morality here is so complex. I'm not saying that there aren't better and worse things that we do, and I'm not saying that there's any world in which, you know, we're not going to be running over field mice as we plow fields, but we are torturing animals right now. I mean, I, I don't, I don't mean to get to much on the horse here, but like what we do to egg-laying chickens, it's just fucking crazy. And not only is it fucking crazy, but we know it is because it is illegal now to tape it. And it is so grotesque to watch it. I think that we can do better than that. I think that there are a lot of places in life and in living a moral life, environmentalism is a big one of these. Where given how complex human actions are, it is very hard to know with certainty that you're making the right decisions. I think that that's true constantly in politics. I think that's true constantly in everything we do. Nevertheless, we somehow stumble forward and try to do the best we can, and I think that eating more plants and, you know, keeping fewer animals in conditions so terrible that we can't actually bear to watch them and have had to pass laws so people stop trying to make us see them. I think that one's a fair bet. Last question, Cheerier.

You've traveled to a bunch of different countries, a lot of different parts of the United States. What's the one thing you know about travel that you feel other people underrate as a way to do it?

I do not think I'm actually particularly good at travel. I envy your skill facility here very much, but the one thing that I The one thing I really love about it that maybe is a little bit weird is I think that a lot of what is great about travel is focusing your attention on a place in a way that is not necessarily related actually all the time to being there. That oftentimes when I'm traveling somewhere, part of why I learn so much about the place I'm going is that I'm thinking about it, I'm reading about it as I'm there watching it. So a lot of it is the mustering of other kinds of attentional resources, watching movies or documentaries or consuming other kinds of culture from it before. And so there is something that you cannot— there is more than just the seeing. I think that sometimes people feel like the learning about a place is just going and seeing it. And for me, I find that a lot of the benefits of travel are actually about things that I could have done even if I hadn't been there, but I would have never focused on in the same way and with the same intensity for the same period of time.

Ezra, thank you very much, and thank you for taking the other side of the mic.

Thank you.

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