What I'm Thinking About at the End of 2022

As 2022 comes to a close, we decided to invite listeners to send in questions for an ask-me-anything episode. And boy, did you all deliver. We received hundreds of fantastic questions, and my column editor, Aaron Retica, joined me to ask some of them. Is equality of opportunity preferable to equality of outcomes? What would a better version of Twitter look like? Are Republicans more politically savvy than Democrats? What do recent advances in artificial intelligence mean for the future of our society? We also discuss why I think ChatGPT is simultaneously overhyped and deeply unnerving, whether Joe Manchin’s policy obstructionism helped Democrats at the midterms, the death of the expanded child tax credit, why I’m more bullish than ever on eliminating the filibuster, whether Mitch McConnell is actually the strategic mastermind that liberals portray him as, why I’m skeptical of Twitter as a tool for social justice, whether the advent of social media has actually made our lives better in any measurable way and more. And we end with my New Year’s resolution practices and a whole bunch of music and children’s books recommendations. Note: “The Ezra Klein Show” will be taking a break during the holidays, but we will be back with new episodes starting on Jan. 3, 2023. Mentioned: Share your guest suggestions here “The case against equality of opportunity” by Dylan Matthews “The Senate Has Become a Dadaist Nightmare” by Ezra Klein “The Time Tax” by Annie Lowrey The Sabbath by Abraham Joshua Heschel The Sabbath World by Judith Shulevitz Music Recommendations: Playlist Children’s Book Recommendations: Happy Birthday to You! by Dr. Seuss The Rabbit Listened by Cori Doerrfeld Here We Are by Oliver Jeffers The Pout-Pout Fish by Deborah Diesen Thoughts? Email us at [email protected]. Guest suggestions? Fill out this form. You can find transcripts (posted midday) and more episodes of “The Ezra Klein Show” at nytimes.com/ezra-klein-podcast, and you can find Ezra on Twitter @ezraklein. Book recommendations from all our guests are listed at https://www.nytimes.com/article/ezra-klein-show-book-recs. “The Ezra Klein Show” is produced by Emefa Agawu, Annie Galvin, Jeff Geld, Rogé Karma and Kristin Lin. Fact-checking by Michelle Harris, Mary Marge Locker and Kate Sinclair. Original music by Isaac Jones. Mixing by Jeff Geld. Audience strategy by Shannon Busta.

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

• 0:06Ezra Klein?

  I'm Ezra Klein. This is the Ezra Klein Show.

• 0:24Ezra Klein?

  Hello and welcome to our last episode for the year. This is the Ask Me Anything episode, and after this, we're going to be off for a couple of weeks. Enjoying the holidays. We'll be back in the new year. But before we get to it, we want to hear who the guest is you would most like to see on the show next year. Ideally, someone we may not have heard of. Don't suggest Joe Biden or Beyonce. Not saying they would not be great, but we know about them. But someone with a fascinating theory or framework or idea that we can explore. We built a submission form for this for nerds, so it's easy for us to keep track of your suggestions. And that form is linked in show notes. So click the link, fill it out, and send us your first round EK Show guest draft picks. We really will read them, and we do find a lot of our best guests through you, so we appreciate it.

• 1:10Ezra Klein?

  All right, but now the Ask Me Anything. And I'm joined for this today by my friend and my honored editor, Aaron Reddick, who has kindly agreed to ask your questions of me and to make sure I don't squirm away from them too much. I'll turn the mic over to him.

• 1:26Aaron Retica?

  Okay, we start with Sarah Burt, who's wondering if you could talk a little bit about what she calls a somewhat false distinction between outcome and opportunity. You know, politicians are always saying, and I'm still quoting her here, that they want to provide quality of opportunity, but not equality of outcome. So what's the difference between those two things? And how should we be thinking about that as we make our policies?

• 1:50Ezra Klein?

  Oh, that's a fun question. I think this is a very weird thing about the Washington policy debate. Because as long as I've been around it, Republicans have always said, "Look, we're for equality of opportunity, but we're not for equality of outcome."

• 2:06Ezra Klein?

  But Dylan Matthews wrote a great piece about this back at Vox, which we can link in show notes. If you take equality of opportunity seriously, it is unbelievably hard. And the amount of leveling you would have to do in society to get to anything like it probably goes far deeper in terms of government intervention, and redistribution, and restructuring than even equality of some specific outcome would go. I mean, what does it take to have equality of opportunity? First, you, in theory, would have to get people into the same material place, obviously. And this is, you know, sometimes I get asked how my politics have changed since being a parent.

• 2:49Ezra Klein?

  And one thing you really get a sense of when you're a parent is the unbelievable inequality of opportunity, simply depending on who your parents are. But then, of course, to say nothing of where you're born, what kinds of opportunities are available in the place where you're born. There's great research by Raj Chetty and others, just showing how much of social mobility and opportunity depends on the zip code you're born into, what kinds of resources there are, what kinds of models there are, and the people around you. And then that's to say nothing of the genetic dimension of our opportunities. People have probably heard me say on the show before that I just think much less of what we end up doing, that we tend to attribute to things like hard work, is actually attributable

• 3:31Ezra Klein?

  to the individual. It may be a useful social fiction, but things like determination, and discipline, and perseverance, and temperament, and judiciousness, and patience, these go way back. They're affected by everything from lead in the water to your genetic inheritance. And the fact that a lot of people who get lionized by society for things we think of as virtues, those virtues are not exactly a choice. They're something almost innate. I said this before, but it's nice that society likes to reward me for liking to read a lot, but it isn't something I choose. It just is how I am. And the idea that I deserve any special credit for it seems wrong. In some ways, there's a lot of things that society

• 4:15Ezra Klein?

  rewards that I would like to stop doing, but they're innate to me. So I don't think equality of opportunity, the people who talk about it, they believe in it at all. I think that it is such an expansive ideal that to take it seriously would require you to go way, way, way beyond the kinds of policies you would need even to get to equality of outcomes.

• 4:34Aaron Retica?

  So talking about innateness, though, how do you keep all of this? Right. You're a tinkerer, right? You want policies to change things. How do you prevent this idea about things being innate from becoming a kind of fatalism?

• 4:49Ezra Klein?

  I think everything has a margin to it. I mean, for individuals, right? Some things are innate. I don't think it makes sense to try to deny that. And then, of course, individuals can change, but we change within the structure of who we are and what is possible for us. And so I think I don't have a better answer to that exactly than we do our best. And it's one reason that my politics leans heavily towards an idea that we should not have unlimited rewards for what we do, and we should have very, quite limited punishments. It is both a good way to structure society as a story, to tell people that a lot is within their power.

• 5:35Ezra Klein?

  But you don't want policy to overly believe that. You want a pretty decent, basic standard of living for everyone, and you want a lot of compassion for everyone. And you don't want to be too impressed by the people who have the right mix of the, you know, opportunities they've been given and the inheritance they've had and their personal qualities and the way those qualities connect to the moment they're in. Those things are too fleeting and contingent for us to punish people the way I think a lot of our public morality says that we should when they don't have it. I mean, I think a lot about the question of how many people are in jail today because they grew up with lead paint.

• 6:20Ezra Klein?

  And so their executive faculties were diminished. And so they got in a bar fight, or they agreed to be part of a robbery, or whatever it might have been. That wouldn't have happened. We we know on some sort of like law of averages that it wouldn't have happened if they had not been exposed to a toxic substance that degraded their ability to control impulse. And of course, we think you can blame people for that because, you know, they were adults and so on, but it's just not that simple. So again, my politics leans a lot towards the view that we should be very, very humble about how much people can be blamed for. I think it's always good to give people reasons to want self improvement in their lives, and it's a way I live my own life. But I think what you should believe about yourself as an individual and the way society

• 7:05Ezra Klein?

  should be structured are not the same things.

• 7:07Aaron Retica?

  Okay, so that's a good segue to a question from Sarah Murphy, who was asking about the concept of administrative burden, which we should probably explain to. But she's talking about how it's a through line in her life in terms of helping her parents prepare for retirement, sorting out their pastels with 401ks. And she says, you know, like, all these things are just much harder than they should be. So could you reflect a little bit on why you think we have all these administrative burdens? And whether there's a broader phenomenon there that has echoes elsewhere in our society? And what future policymakers could do to make it less of a problem?

• 7:42Ezra Klein?

  So there are two ideas I think about here. So administrative burdens is an idea that is associated with Don Moynihan and Pamela Hurd that has to do with the degree to which, particularly in America, a lot that the state might do elsewhere, we make you do here. Filling out forms and going shuffling from office to office and proving your eligibility for this and that. And then there's another concept, which is very influential to me because it was thought up by my partner, Annie Lowry, called the time tax. And the time tax is the way those kinds of burdens, that paperwork, that deployment of your own time and mental energy is weaponized and always has been in this country to keep

• 8:27Ezra Klein?

  people from receiving. Things that they are entitled to, a social benefit, say, or keep people from participating in things that they're supposed to be able to participate in. So think of various ways we try to keep people from voting by making the lines long or making it really hard to do. And these are a pretty profound part of the American state. I think there's a tremendous amount of political possibility in focusing on the relationship between the state and the time of the population. And I think that's underdone particularly by Democrats. And one difficult thing here is that for Republicans, I think this stuff is more straightforward. They might say government is inefficient and it takes too much time, but they also want it to be inefficient and take too much time in a lot of cases

• 9:12Ezra Klein?

  because they don't want more people using it. You know, very famously, a lot of other countries, the state knows typically how much money you make. And they can just basically do your taxes for you, send it to you, and you can sign off or not sign off. And this has been blocked in the United States by a mixture of Intuit and other tax preparers who want to make sure they maintain their sort of lucrative control over the tax system, the tax preparation system. And Republicans who do not want it to be so easy to do your taxes. The fact that it's a big pain to do taxes is something that makes people mad at the government. And that's good for, in some conceptual way, if you're somebody who wants people mad at the government, that that affirms your politics and strengthens your politics.

• 9:54Ezra Klein?

  But Democrats often, I think unwittingly and for other reasons, make this much, much, much worse, in particular by means testing everything in really complicated ways. So you're constantly making people fill out a billion forms in order to get something that they could get, or because you're so worried you're going to be accused of frauds, you're trying to check everything three or four or five times. But the result is that the benefit is hard to achieve for people, or the experience of getting it is incredibly disempowering. It makes you feel humiliated by the state. And Democrats have, I think, not focused correctly on this experience of what is your relationship? What is a relationship you have when you interact with the state? Particularly if you're poor and you need help?

• 10:38Ezra Klein?

  And does it make you feel empowered and respected or disempowered and henpecked and watched over? And I think there's a lot of both political possibility, but also substantive reason to try to make that relationship a lot smoother and one that has more trust in it. And there are trade offs you have to make here. I would accept more fraud for more ease of use in the government. I'm less concerned that some people might misuse a benefit than that so many people cannot access a benefit. That is a worse problem for me. It is worse to me to have a lot of children who don't have enough to eat because their family is having trouble getting food stamps than a couple of people who use food stamps when maybe they, you know, have enough money that they don't qualify. But we've really, really,

• 11:22Ezra Klein?

  really erred on the side of trying to prevent fraud, trying to prevent waste, trying to means test to keep down the overall cost of programs. And as a result, people don't like these programs. They don't use them. The program is very complicated. So thinking a lot about, you know, the time tax on one level and where its roots come from and why it is used that way. And in another way, administrative burdens is important. I'd also add by saying this is not just obviously a problem for the government. When you're thinking about things like time taxes or administrative burdens, they're all over the private sector. I mean, try dealing with your health insurer or try submitting expenses to your employer. These things are not made to be easy. They are made to be hard. So

• 12:04Ezra Klein?

  you often won't do it. They are taxing your time, burdening you administratively in the hopes oftentimes that you'll give up and so they can save the money.

• 12:14Aaron Retica?

  So that brings us to another political question from Corey Derringer. Who wants to hear your take on the asymmetry of norms between the Republican Party and the Democratic Party? Seems like one side cares a lot about the perception of playing by the rules, according to this line of thinking, while the other, you know, openly plays what Corey calls Calvin ball, taking, you know, actual power in the ways Democrats probably wouldn't try. Corey also wants to know if you think that's in part because the GOP looks crazier to the average voter if the Democrats play it cool?

• 12:48Ezra Klein?

  I think there are a bunch of different pieces to this question. So look, if you go back 10 years, I remember getting questions like this. And I always tried to say in response to them that I did think Republicans played what gets called sometimes constitutional hardball more aggressively than the Democrats for 15 years. But Democrats do plenty of it too. I mean, if you look at, say, the big filibuster change in the past 15 years, that came under Democrats. And it was Democrats who thought very hard about getting rid of the filibuster in 2020, or I guess it was be 2021. Now, I would say that came in response to Republicans wildly overusing the filibuster, but there was a tit for tat happening. I don't think that even what is happening now in the Republican Party should be understood as continuous with that exactly.

• 13:30Ezra Klein?

  It has become a difference in degree so profound to become a difference in kind. A fundamental giving up on a lot of the the underlying institutions, a detachment from, you know, what the journalist Dave Roberts has occasionally called trans partisan institutions, institutions in American life that are not just trying to be on the side of one party or another. So I do think a difference between the two sides is Democrats really care, among other things, what say the New York Times thinks of them. And the New York Times likes to criticize Democrats to show that it is, you know, not allied with one party or the other. And so that is a check on how Democrats act, that Republicans have nothing like it.

• 14:11Ezra Klein?

  They have retreated into a media ecosystem that is, if anything, always urging them to go further and to play harder and to, you know, be more on the attack. Obviously, Trump and the big lie. But that also comes out of years of Republicans at state level, you know, in North Carolina and Wisconsin and other places, reworking the rules to maintain power, using gerrymandering to keep power they wouldn't otherwise be able to keep. I think the question, though, that I'm I'm never sure about is whether this is actually working for Republicans. And I don't just mean here in the sense that the the question are asked, which is Republicans look more crazy or they look more norms defying. I'm not sure, I mean, with the exception of things like January 6th insurrection,

• 14:55Ezra Klein?

  that the people are paying that close attention. But I do think the Republican Party has gotten itself somewhat addicted to strategies of winning through minoritarian approaches, you know, winning using redistricting, winning using the advantage they have kind of in the lean of states so they can win the Senate without winning, you know, the most votes for Senate, the electoral college stuff that happened with with Donald Trump.

• 15:22Ezra Klein?

  And the Republican Party, I think, could have a lot more power if it felt it had to win over people who didn't agree with it in the way the Democrats do. I mean, Democrats believe, and correctly so, that in order to hold power in this country, they need to win more than 50% of the vote. And Republicans don't. And in a lot of these cases, the hardball doesn't work, right? Like, we'll see what happens in 2024, but the big lie did not work. Donald Trump is not president anymore, and I think Republicans have managed to mess up their midterm as well because they can't get him shifted over to the side of the party. You know, if Republicans had forced onto themselves a narrative that they lost in 2020, that would have helped marginalize Donald Trump. But because they would not force that narrative onto their own party,

• 16:07Ezra Klein?

  Donald Trump has maintained centrality in that party in a way that I think is very difficult for them. I don't think Mitch McConnell is a great Senate leader in the way a lot of other people do. He has effectively used his power to win the court for the Republicans. So, I mean, that goes to his legacy for good and for ill. But there wasn't a tremendous innovation there. He had the votes to not vote on a nominee, and that's what he did. But in terms of what he's been able to pass affirmatively, it's not a very impressive record. And in terms of whether or not he's been able to win the Senate back, hold a majority, when it seemed very clearly possible the Republicans could have won majorities in the 2010s and going up now until 2022, given how strong the Republican advantage should be in the Senate, the fact that Democrats have

• 16:52Ezra Klein?

  held the Senate as often and as long as they have speaks to some failures in the Republican strategy. I think Democrats spend a lot of time thinking about what they're doing wrong, and Republicans do not spend a lot of time thinking about what they're doing wrong, and it sort of shows. So I don't want to be sanguine about any of this. The exact right strategy for Democrats to take in responses is tough, and it depends on also the limits that their own coalition structure places on them, which we can talk about. But I don't think that Republicans have been so successful in what they've done, with the exception maybe of the courts, that Democrats should, in general, be looking so enviously at their ruthless and disorganized approach to politics.

• 17:35Aaron Retica?

  Okay, so there are no moral victories in electoral politics, right? But if you're a Republican looking with sad eyes at what just happened in Georgia, there is a silver lining of sorts there, right? Which is, there's two things. One is that the more regular, non-election-denying candidates, you know, did very, very well. But also, I saw one Republican consultant referred to Herschel Walker's, you know, percentage of the vote, which was not 50, but very close, as like the bottom for Republicans, right? If you run a candidate who is not qualified, you can still get that percentage, right?

• 18:15Aaron Retica?

  So that's a way that maybe Democrats don't have quite that layer that they can count on, which is, I think, a part of their strategy.

• 18:24Ezra Klein?

  I don't really buy that, though. You and me have worked on columns together about this now, and I encourage people to listen to the John Sidlin-Babrick episode on calcification. This is just calcification. Really good candidates don't, for the most part, can't get the landslides in competitive elections. Different states, obviously, have their own partisan compositions, but nationally, you don't see landslides. And you don't see the kind of collapses that you would have seen in other times. The parties are so different, and people are so afraid of the other side, that you're always playing this game of inches. And I think it's actually, I mean, in a bunch of places, that seems to have helped Democrats, too. I don't think you can look at the 2022 election, which I think in its structure should have

• 19:06Ezra Klein?

  been a disaster for Democrats, and not see that as calcification and polarization paying its dividends for them. It's not that, at least in the way people saw the Biden administration, that they think Biden's doing a great job, they love Joe Biden, but Democrats and the kinds of voters who vote for Democrats looked around and said, However, we feel about inflation, however, we feel about Joe Biden, we're not letting these lunatics back into power and they came out and voted. So I mean, I think that in a, in a big way, you see the fact that this midterm was not a Democratic wipeout. I think suggested Democrats also have moved to having a pretty high floor that they have

• 19:46Ezra Klein?

  not had in previous midterms. I mean, the Democratic Party of 2010 or 1994 does not have the kind of turnout and does not survive in its congressional power in the way the Democratic Party of 2022 just did.

• 20:01Aaron Retica?

  So that brings us to another good question. And now we're moving into where I'm not completely sure how to say the names. So if you're out there and I'm butchering your name, I apologize. But Sean Corso wants to know whether Manchin's obstructionism actually helped the Democrats have a better than expected midterm election. If they had done everything they had wanted to do without him pushing back, without Kirsten Sinema pushing back, would they have had so much more to defend and explain that it would have actually hurt them in the midterms?

• 20:29Ezra Klein?

  I don't know. I know this is a view a bunch of people hold. My friend Matt Iglesias, he had this view when he was on the show that, you know, Manchin helped force the Democrats into much smaller and more defensible bills. And I do think there's enough evidence that there are backlash effects to very big policymaking pushes that, you know, one should at least take that view seriously. And on the other hand, he also robbed them of things that might have, one, activated constituencies or just made people happier with the situation. You know, would an ongoing child tax credit have expanded child tax credit have been better for Democrats? I think it would have been. I don't think the pre-K and, you know, various childcare initiatives necessarily would have had a big midterm

• 21:14Ezra Klein?

  effect one way or the other, but I'm not 100% sure they wouldn't have. Look, I'm a policy reporter going way, way, way, way back. And I think one disagreement I have with sort of the Matts and like honest like David Shores of the world, and I've covered this sort of populist view a lot, is I think it, it has a view of how much people understand and are connected to the policies that pass that I just don't believe is true anymore. Maybe it was never true. I'm, I could kind of see that going both ways. But I think that the policy feedback loops are incredibly degraded. And so people have a kind of generalized sense of what's going on.

• 21:57Ezra Klein?

  But policy, in part for all the calcification reasons we're talking about, it just doesn't move people, I think, all that much in either direction. So I don't know. Let's imagine a world where some version of Build Back Better passes, you know, eight months earlier. And it was never going to be the full Build Back Better, even if Manchin had been more open to it. It was always going to get whittled down somewhat. So let's say, you know, it ends up as a $2.5 trillion bill, or even a $3 trillion bill, but not, you know, what we ultimately saw. Then you don't have a whole half a year or a year where the media narrative, which I think people are somewhat more connected to about Joe Biden, is that Joe Biden is failing, the administration isn't getting anything done, and that they're feckless, but there's all this inflation and so on.

• 22:42Ezra Klein?

  So now maybe what you get is a sense that, you know, they passed all these big policies and that is leading, you know, inflation to be so high. But there's a reason people like Summers and Larry Summers and Jason Furman weren't against Build Back Better. It wouldn't have dramatically changed inflation this year. I think that's pretty clear. And as such, we had the amount of inflation we had. I don't think a sort of dramatically different storyline would have emerged or even mattered all that much. So I don't know. I'm not hugely of the view that Joe Manchin saved Democrats from themselves. And I think that a bunch of things that he ended up knocking out of the bills were good enough and important enough, you know? Like, I think it would have been good for Democrats if they could have run on having created some kind of paid family leave program.

• 23:26Ezra Klein?

  I think paid family leave had some real problems in the way it was designed in a version of that bill, but in a world where they could have passed it, which, you know, we can get into a bunch of reconciliation, a million things here. I think running on accomplishments is good. The other thing I would say is that the shame with Manchin and others. Is that, let's say you wanted to say at a certain point, okay, this bill has to come down, but let's like, think through what should be there. I think you could have got into something much better and more thoughtful than they did. Why Joe Manchin believed in the end that we could talk about climate and we couldn't talk about care, that childcare

• 24:06Ezra Klein?

  and pre-K and all of these things that are really, really central to, I mean, even if you just want to have a really economics oriented look at it, all these things that are very central to labor force participation among women, but, but also just central to how families operate in this world at this moment. I think you could have done better than this. I think child poverty, you know, is a big problem in this country and the expanded child tax credit is and would be good. Like, maybe you want to shift it down a bit. Like, there, there are tweaks you could make, but we didn't do that. Really, really, really big parts of the policy agenda were just abandoned. They were important parts of the policy agenda. I think a bunch of them are political winners. So I just

• 24:46Ezra Klein?

  don't buy that what Manchin did was thoughtfully slice up the democratic agenda according to the, the needs and desires of the median voter. What he did was much more unusual and weird and personalistic and opportunistic than that. You know, maybe it didn't matter that much on the margin politically, but substantively, I think you could have had both a better political, but a much better substantive package that didn't pretend that everything is okay for American families today because it isn't.

• 25:18Aaron Retica?

  Let's stay with the child tax credit expansion for a second, right? So it ends, but it actually did start. So we have evidence about what it did, right? And obviously, some of this is disputed, but we can say with some assurance that it reduced child poverty by a lot.

• 25:33Ezra Klein?

  A lot.

• 25:33Aaron Retica?

  Tremendous amount, right?

• 25:35Ezra Klein?

  Yeah.

• 25:36Aaron Retica?

  So in the politics makes you want to bang your head against the wall department, which is a big department, you have something that was working, like we saw it working in real time, and yet they still didn't do it, right? They still didn't keep it. And it's even worse than that because Mitt Romney. Marco Rubio, all kinds of Republicans have an interest in child allowances. Right. There's a lot of room to maneuver here and none of it happened. So why do you think that is? And is that a problem that can be solved? Or are we stuck with this?

• 26:17Ezra Klein?

  I mean, we've written columns on this, you and I. I don't think first, there's all that much room to maneuver. Maybe there will be one day, but I don't think Marco Rubio is eager to work with Democrats on an actual child tax credit expansion. Romney, I think, is the exception, but you need more than Mitt Romney and you don't have a lot more than Mitt Romney. And some people disagree with me on that, but I think I'm right about it. And so, one, I don't think there's a big bipartisan path there yet. I think maybe one day there will be and maybe they can find the right point of leverage. There's this kind of continuing idea that maybe the business tax credits that have to be extended because they've expired too, can be tied to the child tax credit in some way. And maybe you can sort of force a deal, but that hasn't happened yet.

• 26:59Ezra Klein?

  In terms of why it didn't create the feedback loop, I've done a lot of work on this. I've looked at a lot of work on this. I think the simplest thing to say about it is that they didn't give it enough time. And really it was only operating, you know, in a way that people could feel it and see what was going on for about a year. It's a little more complicated than that because of the design, but I think that's a reasonable shorthand. And it was operating at the same time that there was just an absolute hurricane of temporary check-based policy. So stimulus payments and expanded unemployment insurance payments and all kinds of other random things happening. And so all of a sudden people are getting also this child tax credit thing and they don't really know what it is.

• 27:45Ezra Klein?

  And then it's gone not that long after. And so you need time to create a sense of expectation and a sense of political constituency.

• 27:55Ezra Klein?

  If the child tax credit had been going for five years and then everybody just allowed it to expire, I think that would give us a different kind of information than what we ultimately got. The White House and Democrats had a view, they'd be able to revisit this and build back better and, you know, expand it for five years or 10 years or permanently. And they were wrong. And doing the credit for so little time at a time when there's so much other temporary and unusual policy happening, I don't even think we have a test of what kind of policy feedback it could have created because there just wasn't a clear enough information signal and a long enough structural runway for the policy for it to do the very difficult thing that a policy like that has to do and build a

• 28:37Ezra Klein?

  constituency, build a kind of expectation and build a sort of defensive coalition that can stop something from being allowed to expire.

• 28:46Aaron Retica?

  Right. And the history there goes with what you're saying, right? Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, all these things took a long time before they were entrenched in public life enough for people to defend them, consider them a regular part of their lives and not just a temporary measure. I'm going to ask you one last political question, then we're going to get to more of the kind of ask me anything aspect of the ask me anything. But Jackson Gorham is wondering about what he calls a core tentative Ezra Kleinism. Don't let that go to your head. Is that the repeal of the filibuster is necessary to allow the kind of feedback loops that you're talking about, about popular policy and political support. But lately, you've been talking on the show and in your column about sort

• 29:29Aaron Retica?

  of the double edged nature of elections in 2020 and populism that you were just talking about and the lackluster support for renewing the child tax credit expansion that we were just talking about. So has that changed your confidence in what the repeal of the filibuster could actually do for policy developments?

• 29:48Ezra Klein?

  No, I think you should get rid of the filibuster. You should do it now. God, I have a lot to say on this. Um, let me say first-

• 29:54Aaron Retica?

  You're going to filibuster the-

• 29:55Ezra Klein?

  Yeah, I'm going to filibuster the filibuster answer. Exactly. I don't think anything about calcification or polarization. I mean, everything that we're talking about here was true when I wrote my book, Why We're Polarized, about polarization and the way it has locked people in place. I'm jealous that John and Lynn and Krista Sanovich came up with calcification, which is a name for something I also described in my book that I should have named. But the idea that one thing that the differentiation of the parties was doing was leading to a sharp reduction in the swing of the vote. That was very, very present in my thinking in that book. And that book is, you know, ultimately is in part an argument for parties being able to win majorities, do the thing they promised to do,

• 30:40Ezra Klein?

  and then be judged by the public on it. So to me, none of this is really that new in terms of information. Now, I do think you could imagine other things about it that are new, right? You might say kind of post-Dobbs. Do you really want a world where Republicans could come into power and actually pass with 52 votes nationwide to sharp abortion restrictions? And obviously, on some level, I don't want that world. But I also believe that if they had the power to do that, because the filibuster was gone, they would be unbelievably badly punished for it. And then that would be a signal to everybody about abortion politics. And it would, you know, Democrats would be able to come in and reverse what they did and so on. So that's one thing. Two, even within a bunch of the policy we're talking about,

• 31:23Ezra Klein?

  and this goes back to what I'm saying about Build Back Better and Joe Manchin. In the time I have been watching the construction of public policy, covering it professionally, I think that the policymaking process is getting worse and worse. And I think one big reason is the filibuster. Because the way to get around the filibuster is to use this process that now a lot of major policy goes, we call budget reconciliation. And budget reconciliation has all these very weird strictures on it. It's supposed to be a way you reconcile budgets and made sure that the amount you appropriated was the amount you were actually spending and so on. But what it actually does now is it says that if you follow these rules at the beginning, right? You say, I'm going to do a budget reconciliation bill.

• 32:05Ezra Klein?

  It's going to have this effect on the budget, you know, plus $2.3 trillion, minus whatever. And it then is going to only have these policies that are about raising and lowering spending. You can do that. And, you know, once and in different ways, maybe twice a session, a year of Congress. And get around the filibuster. So that has created this incentive for the parties to focus on, one, these raising and lowering of spending bills. So other things that are really important in policy, like how elections work, paid family leave, the minimum wage, abortion, et cetera, et cetera. They can't go through this filibuster protected process. So you have this really weird push in policy towards using the spending powers and away

• 32:49Ezra Klein?

  from every other form of sort of regulation and rule setting that just distorts policy super weirdly. Second, you also have this incentive now towards mega bills, right? Build Back Better is a totally bizarre piece of legislation. It's just like, it's like 18 pieces of legislation wrapped into one. So nobody really knew what was in it, except for its $3.5 trillion price tag. It's very, very hard to message it. The ability to actually say, we're going to do a childcare bill, we're going to do a paid family leave bill, we're going to do a minimum wage bill, we're going to do a climate bill, we're going to do a this, we're going to do a that, and run each one of those bills as a policymaking process, and then bring them to the floor for an up or down vote where they pass or

• 33:29Ezra Klein?

  don't pass, instead of having to wrap everything up into this one time limited, exploding, weirdly limited reconciliation package would lead to better legislation. The one place where I'm much more sympathetic to the idea that some of the mansion strictures were useful is that a lot of Build Back Better was very badly designed. I think the childcare part of it was badly designed. I think the paid family leave part of it was badly designed, and not only badly designed, barely designed. There was no policymaking process that was in any way public, that had people going back and forth on what the best ideas would be. It was just sort of whoever happened to have a bill sitting on the shelf and enough power to jam it into the legislation congressional leadership was hastily stapling together

• 34:14Ezra Klein?

  in a back office. That's what ended up in the legislation. And so a lot of those things were not well defensible and would not have been implemented very well because they were not, again, well designed. I just think it's been a unbelievable disaster on the policymaking process. So somebody who thinks that the way this should all go is that like, Parties should get elected. They should write policy, the best policy they can, according to the promises they made. They should pass most of that because they got the power to do so. And then the public should, to the extent that it will judge them. I still think that is a better plan here and that the idea that this sort of inaction and evasion and weird processes and government through loophole is better is just, it's just weird.

• 34:59Ezra Klein?

  It's us making a virtue out of a terrible status quo.

• 35:02Aaron Retica?

  Yeah, I mean, if I could add a little bit to that, it's even worse. Because you have the rise of presidential power, which Constitution doesn't actually fully envision, right? You have a lot of initiative coming from the president when it's really supposed to come from the House. But then you have a Senate rule that is hamstringing the House, right?

• 35:21Ezra Klein?

  Yeah.

• 35:21Aaron Retica?

  Because the House doesn't have a filibuster. They just are operating with simple majorities. But it doesn't matter because they still have to get it through the Senate, right? So Article One, which is about the House and its powers and is supposed to be the most responsive to the people, is the one that has the least power because of the power of the presidency, the rising power of the courts, and this crazy rule that doesn't exist in the Constitution that was just made up. I mean, it's really nuts, actually.

• 35:47Ezra Klein?

  In some weird way, if you think the filibuster is good, and I know there are people who will bite this bullet, then bite the bullet. Get rid of budget reconciliation.

• 35:54Aaron Retica?

  Or give the filibuster to the House, too.

• 35:56Ezra Klein?

  Yeah, or bring the filibuster to the House. If you're a member of the Senate and you really think the filibuster is great, then, okay, do it. Like, let's have a filibuster. Sixty votes for anything. I mean, do you think you can do a Supreme Court nominee, a lifetime appointment to Supreme Court with 51 votes? But you can't raise the minimum wage with 51 votes for a year is completely insane. So do it or don't do it. I'm in the category of majoritarian governance works. You know, we should have protections for basic rights, but parties should be able to come into power and do what they say they're going to do beyond that. But if that's not how we feel, fine. But what we have now is insane. I mean, one of my early columns at The Times, which I really, really think is one of my best pieces, is, I think it's titled,

• 36:41Ezra Klein?

  "The Senate Has Become a Data-esque Nightmare", and it's all about this sort of government by loophole. This is not a way to run a country. It's not a way to run a legislature, not a way to run the Senate, not a way for policy to be made. The filibuster, it isn't even what we think it is anymore. It does not mean you can't get things done without 60 votes. It means you can only get some things done without 60 votes. Like you could, you know, what you can do is you can stock the Supreme Court vacancies, you know, if there is one with 51 votes. And also you could abolish Medicare or possibly nationalize all health insurance with 51 votes. But you can't pass basic abortion protections or have anything to say about the regulation of waterways with 51. Like, the whole thing is crazy.

• 37:26Ezra Klein?

  This is not the way to do it.

• 37:27Aaron Retica?

  And it reduces the power of ideas insofar as there is any in the House and the Senate, right? I mean, because-

• 37:33Ezra Klein?

  Yeah, it makes people, Scott, it makes people more cynical because politician after politician runs for office, promising to do all these things that they know they can't do. Because the whole thing, like, we are supposed to, I'm not going to keep going like this. I don't like the filibuster.

• 38:16Aaron Retica?

  Let's shift gears for a little bit. Ryan Byer says, "You've talked a lot about how the medium is the message. But if you could wave a magic wand, what changes would you make to our dominant communication platforms? And if you were to design the medium from scratch, what might it look like?" And let me just add to that, that obviously Twitter and Elon Musk, you can certainly take that in as you talk about what an ideal version of this would look like. And I'll just add the fun, I have a fun fact about Elon Musk, which is that his mother was briefly my nutritionist.

• 38:50Ezra Klein?

  Really?

• 38:51Aaron Retica?

  Yes.

• 38:52Ezra Klein?

  His mother, the model?

• 38:54Aaron Retica?

  His mother, the model is also a very legendary nutritionist. Yes.

• 38:59Ezra Klein?

  Okay.

• 38:59Aaron Retica?

  May Musk.

• 39:00Ezra Klein?

  Yeah, I don't know how to follow up on that. Actually, I'm stuck.

• 39:05Ezra Klein?

  Okay, Elon Musk and Twitter. Elon Musk, let me start with the part of this that I know and get to the part I don't know. We're talking in the aftermath of Musk tweeting that my pronouns are prosecute and Fauci. I read a piece when Musk announced that he was going to acquire Twitter. That was all about the idea that it was going to be a more profound change and upheaval for that service to have it run by someone who liked what was worst about it. Then people realized, and I think that has proven true. The thing, and this gets to the question that I have really been, I mean, I stopped tweeting back in April.

• 39:48Ezra Klein?

  I think I've tweeted a couple of times since then, and then, you know, like once a month or something occasionally. I think my last actual tweet was in maybe October, something like that. So I don't really use Twitter anymore. And that's been good for me. But I go back and forth on this question. Has people been looking for an alternative? And there isn't really one. Mastodon, which people talk about, that's not a Twitter alternative. It's something very different. Should we want that? Should we want a thing that does what Twitter does, but is not Twitter or is not run by Elon Musk? Or something of that nature? And I'm not sure that we should. I think it is worth people really reflecting on this idea.

• 40:28Ezra Klein?

  That in a matter of roughly two decades, social media has gone from being barely a thing at all to something used by billions and billions of people around the world. I mean, it has become a civilizational fact faster than almost anything in human history.

• 40:46Ezra Klein?

  And something operating that macro of a scale should show some civilizational effect. If it is good, we should be able to say, well, this is what has gotten better. GDP is growing faster because we're sharing so many more ideas and so innovation is sped up. Or we're more humane and gentle and compassionate towards one another because we're able to see each other across boundary and faction and country and generation. We're kinder because we're sharing so much more. We're happier because we're so much more connected. Something, something should have gotten better. And I would say, and I think the evidence is very clear, nothing has. You cannot point to one macro indicator that

• 41:28Ezra Klein?

  has gotten substantially better, faster, anything in the time since social media came on the scene. And I'm not saying that is 100% the fault of social media, but I am saying that it implies at least, there is not some gigantic value here that before it was offered to us, we were really struggling. So that's one thing. I think it's really worth asking, why hasn't something been better? And my answer to this, which I've kind of played with for a long time and finally wrote up, is that the flip side of all of this information and connection has been distraction and irritation. That we are, we have more that we can know and more that we can see and more content to consume, but

• 42:12Ezra Klein?

  what we don't have is a space for reflection. What we don't have are the habits of mind that tend to help us absorb a difficult question in the best way and come to a good view on it. What we don't have are the sort of temperaments and virtues, something that is helping us have the virtues of how we live, you know, small d democratically or civically with one another. Twitter is one of many things that are not good for that. It's not the only one. And I don't think there should only be a conversation about Twitter, though I do think Twitter is unusually central to politics and media and technology. And honestly, if you just want to look at everything I am saying in miniature, look at Elon Musk. You can go back in time and watch his interviews and look at the things he's done.

• 42:57Ezra Klein?

  And I have not over time been a Musk caterer, as many things he said that have annoyed me over the years, things he's done that have annoyed me, ways in which I don't think he's a great person. But he also did very important things, built very important things, rockets and cars and solar panels and so on. Does he seem to anybody like he's more focused on the important questions in life and more able to hear things from people he disagrees with and able to absorb in a space of generosity and focus that his attention span is doing really well right now? I mean, you can watch the effect it has had solely on him. And I think just generalize that out. I think a real tragedy of Twitter is that Musk is a man with many failings and many

• 43:42Ezra Klein?

  strengths, and it has amplified his failings and obsessed him with things that it is not good for him to be obsessed with, like the amount of social feedback he gets. And that is going to completely overwhelm many of his strengths and many of the good effects he could have had on the world, or was even having on the world. Like, this is not going to be good and has not been good for Tesla. And I think Tesla is and was an important company, making electric vehicles cooler, more widely acceptable, and hastening a transition to them. But he's making Tesla poison among many of the people who should be most excited to buy Tesla. So, all that said, I wonder a lot if it is good to have a Twitter.

• 44:24Ezra Klein?

  I think a lot of us are now so used to it that you think, well, what we need is something else like it, but a bit better. Maybe we don't need something like it. Maybe a platform that condenses everybody's thoughts down to bumper sticker bluntness is actually just not a good thing. Its structural build is a bad build, that the idea that we should come to expect thoughts to be that short, that we should train our minds for that kind of novelty. I mean, back in the day, I was always amazed at how easy it was for me to waste time on the internet or on my phone. I would read articles on newspapers and so on. And then, as each successive social media network got better... I enjoyed wasting time reading articles and now I look at

• 45:05Ezra Klein?

  single images and I don't really do TikTok, but in theory TikToks or tweets or whatever. And that habituation of the brain to novelty and to simplicity, I don't think is a good thing for me and I don't think a good thing broadly. So I would like to imagine things that are valuable in part and are widely used in part, not because they are so good at grabbing our attention from us, but in some way they feed our attention back to us. They help center us a little bit, that the habits of mind they encourage are habits of mind that we want. And maybe nothing staring at your phone is really like that. I'm not, I'm not sure that's true, but it's at least a question I want to play with.

• 45:47Ezra Klein?

  Maybe if you're going to insist on distracting yourself while you're standing in line at the grocery by staring at your phone, there's no habit of mind that that I think is a great one that is going to be encouraged by that. And the fact that I constantly do it is the problem and asking somebody to fix it for me without me changing my fundamental behavior is also the problem. But I think what has happened in social media at this point is a little bit tragic and it's most tragic because so few people seem willing to say that even though I don't like how this looks, my being here is what sustains it in its current form. And I think until people get over the collective action problem, that you have to leave before

• 46:27Ezra Klein?

  everybody else has left in order for it to be okay for everybody else to leave, we're a little bit stuck, but, but I don't think we're going to be stuck forever. I'm a little surprised by how long we have been stuck for though.

• 46:40Aaron Retica?

  What about the social function that it has served for the less powerful and the powerless though? In a successor technology, how do they call attention to what is happening to them? Right? Because I mean, they can't just up and start a, I mean, they can just up and start a podcast, but it's not going to necessarily be heard. I do worry about that, right? A lot of good has come from people calling attention to wrongs.

• 47:13Ezra Klein?

  I think this is a very.

• 47:16Ezra Klein?

  Difficult and important question. So let me say a couple of things about it. One is that I'm not sure, in fact, I'm quite sure that you can maintain a lot of what was good in Twitter without everything that was bad about it. I think believing that we have to be frozen in this moment with this kind of social media is a failure of imagination and we shouldn't fail like that. The second thing I think we're saying here is that there's a lot now within the people who study social movements. My colleague Zeynep Tufetti has written about this. Erica Chenoweth has written about this. A lot of people have written about this now about whether or not social media is making social movements that are built around it less durable.

• 47:58Ezra Klein?

  I think that even if you look at things like Me Too and Black Lives Matter, both of which are movements where I think the core of those movements is correct and I consider myself in alignment with them. They've had these very, very, very fast rises and the backlash has been enormous. And at this point, it's not clear where things actually stand. The amount of power that reactionaries have gotten in an immediate and sort of direct way on the very same social platforms has to, I think, be put into the analysis in a way that it often isn't. People talk about how much Twitter has done to empower the marginalized without, I think, talking about how much it has also done to empower the most powerful people or the non-marginalized.

• 48:42Ezra Klein?

  How much it has done for the alt-right and the racist right? How Elon Musk just bought it in like a reactionary fit of peak, as far as I can tell, and is now running it along those lines. Jaron Lanier, the sort of techno philosopher, basically, has always said that he believes that these mediums lead themselves to backlash that are stronger than the initial impulse. And I'm not sure he's wrong about that. Now, you can say, of course, that, you know, you can go back to the civil rights movement and other movements and say there was always huge backlash. Martin Luther King Jr. was not popular in his moment. The Freedom Riders were unpopular and so on. But I think that if you want to make this argument on behalf of Twitter specifically, then you want to say like, are the social movements that are emerging today more durable? Are they seeing more victories?

• 49:26Ezra Klein?

  Are they, does it actually seem that the balance of power has tilted? And when I look at our politics, when I look at our media, when I look at what looks to me to be where kind of opinion sits now, I'm not sure they are. I think if I saw, again, even just our country becoming radically more humane, radically more just, if it looked like Twitter was leading to really durable wins for things I cared about, I would believe this argument more. But I think that Twitter has this, and some social media in general, has this way of giving people so much feedback that it feels like they're winning. And then you take a step back, and I'm not sure anybody is winning, but a lot of people are really pissed.

• 50:10Ezra Klein?

  And, you know, our politics are getting, if anything, it looks to me like more reactionary, certainly in the Republican Party. And so I don't know, I don't know how to net it all out. I accept that I could be wrong about this, or I could be missing what's really going on. But I am, I am not sure that Twitter has proven out to be the tool for movement building and justice that people really hoped it would be. And I certainly don't think that under Elon Musk, it's going to be that thing. And so accepting, like, you now have this, you know, very muddled platform in its effect, run by a person who absolutely thinks a problem with it. Is it whatever orientation it had towards justice was way too much?

• 50:54Ezra Klein?

  And it was too woke and, you know, the reactionaries didn't have enough power on it? Like, that's where you are now. It's like, that's the reality. He owns this thing now. And the question then becomes, now what? Do you just stay on it and keep providing free labor to him? Or is there, there must be some ways to build other things. I just, I just don't buy that social movements often be trapped there forever. Even if that might have made sense at one point, I can't imagine that it does now.

• 51:19Aaron Retica?

  So let's leap off of Twitter to some of the other emerging, I don't know if technologies is even the word, but something that's really creating a lot of stir right now, right? Is the ChatGPT, artificial intelligence model that can really talk to people to some degree. Baxter Stein, I was wondering if you were going to train like a large language model on your own work, you know, what do you think it would see? And what might it learn? But I want you to take that question and tell us a little bit about how you're thinking about AI generally and the advances in AI. You mentioned Drone earlier. He's very worried that at some point AI is just gonna.

• 52:02Aaron Retica?

  Take over like Hal in the Stanley Kubrick movie. There's that great scene where the guy says to him, Hal, Hal, you know, the famous scene. And people are very worried, like seriously worried, not like joke worried. They are genuinely worried that AI is going to get so smart that it's going to take over. So could you talk a little bit about how you're seeing the rise of these really sophisticated chatbots and AI?

• 52:31Ezra Klein?

  Yeah, so if people aren't following the sort of chatbot world. So what happened is OpenAI, which is this AI creating organization meant to create AI for good and filled with people worried about AI's effects, but they keep creating stronger and stronger AIs. It's a bit of a weird situation over there. But they created this chatbot based on a language model they have called GPT-3. And what GPT-3 is, it's trained on a huge amount of human language. And based on everything it has read and absorbed, it simply predicts the next word in the sentence that it should say back to you in response to a query. What ChatGPT does is allow you to ask those queries in a very sort of straightforward way and chat back and forth with the system.

• 53:16Ezra Klein?

  And so it just turns out if you ask it all kinds of things, it'll give you really convincingly mediocre text. And I think it's really telling that what people keep doing is basically if you watch what is filled up on social media on ChatGPT, it's not things you actually ask the system straightforwardly, where you're getting an informative answer. It is you ask a straightforward question and also ask for an interesting stylistic twist on it. So, you know, tell me about Thomas Schelling's theories of nuclear deterrence, but in the style of a Taylor Swift song. Write me something about lost socks, but in the style of the Declaration of Independence. And I do think there's a tell to the fact that everything has that form right now.

• 53:59Ezra Klein?

  Because what ChatGPT can tell you informationally is very, very, very weak. It is surprisingly okay sometimes, but it doesn't know what is true and what is not. It's simply a predictive text bot. And as such, it's constantly hallucinating weird answers to questions just based on sort of its own predictive algorithms. So I mean, people have done things like asking it to, you know, explain why it's good to have crushed up porcelain in your breakfast cereal and it'll give you a sort of answer that reads like it knows something about why that's good, but of course it doesn't. It's just doing exactly what you told it to do. I'm somebody who is very interested in AI. We've done a number of AI shows so far on this podcast.

• 54:44Ezra Klein?

  We will do more, I am certain. And I found chat GPT very, very unnerving, not because I think it'll take over and not because I think it's bad or good, but you're just seeing the cost of creating not particularly true content, but that can be stylistically anything you want it to be falling to zero. And for some people that'll be great. I mean, you can imagine good ways this could be deployed. I mean, you're not that literate or you're you're like kind of English as a second language and you run a home repair business and this will help you maybe write your emails to your clients in a better way, you know, that you can imagine ways this could be very helpful to somebody. You can also imagine what the information mores of the future are going to look like, what bots are going to look like.

• 55:28Ezra Klein?

  You can imagine how hard it's going to be to know if a student paper is true. I think the idea that the cost of creating mediocre content with no intrinsic truth value is falling to zero and the cost of creating things that are truthful is if anything going up is very worrying.

• 55:47Ezra Klein?

  Then there's a bunch of other things that have come out this year in the AI world. The one that actually worries or impresses or something me the most is a system that Meta created, Meta, the the sort of new name of Facebook. And their system will play diplomacy, which is a game where you're in conversation with other players, trying to kind of trick them or convince them or cajole them or seduce them into making moves, allow you to make moves in this game to sort of win this game of, you know, imagined territorial acquisition.

• 56:19Ezra Klein?

  And they were able to create a bot that was able to play in the top 10% of players. And more than that, people didn't know usually that they were playing against an AI bot. So here you have an AI that is able to be given a goal, right? Win the game diplomacy and is able to communicate with human beings in a way where they don't know it's an AI and is able to convince them and deceive them and cajole them into doing the things the AI needs them to do to achieve this other goal. That to me is impressive and concerning, right? That's a quite remarkable system that now you have these two things together. You can tell an AI to do something or the AI can have a goal. You know, help me get elected to Congress, right? That's probably too complicated for it, but one day it won't be.

• 57:02Ezra Klein?

  And the AI is good at manipulating people to try to do that. Now diplomacy, again, there are rules in it. It's less complicated than the entirety of the world. But that gets to the other piece of all this, which is it's easy to look at these things and say, okay, this one still has these drawbacks, these problems, these flaws. But you have to recognize when you're looking at them that we're living in exponential times. By the time you're watching the demo of any one of these systems, the people behind it are on to the next one. And the next one is getting so much better so quickly than whatever we have right now. I mean, the, the learning curve on them as computing power comes down, as the amount of data we have increases, the learning curve behind them is so unbelievably remarkable.

• 57:47Ezra Klein?

  These systems are so much better than what we had four years ago that you never know where we truly are. So the, the question isn't just how good is chatbot today? Or how good is the meta system today? But how good is the thing we're going to see next year or in five years? And what will mean for it to be that good? And the answer is we have no, no idea whatsoever. And we have this incredibly weird now arms race where you have these systems that what they can do is incredible. But what they can understand is nothing, right? They can, they can do so much, but they don't know why they're doing it. They might have a goal, they might have a system, but that, that thing that for many of us, we sit there and be like, well, what is happening here? Like, what is the meaning of the thing I am doing? Doesn't exist at all.

• 58:32Ezra Klein?

  So you're either hoping that, you know, whoever is using them will have good ethics or who's using them is going to know exactly how to tell them to do the right thing and not allow them to make a mistake. This is weird and it's scary. Whether or not you believe they can destroy the entire world, I don't think you even need to believe that to believe that a lot of damage could be done. And also, even if you don't believe they're going to get so much more powerful than they are now, I don't know, you imagine what social media has done with kind of learning our algorithmic preferences and convincing human beings where, you know, we have to actually create content and make videos and so on to cater to whatever the algorithm wants. And now you turn Lucy's computers that can absorb our algorithmic preferences directly

• 59:13Ezra Klein?

  and just create completely functionally infinite quantities of content to better, you know, figure out what we want and then keep perfecting it. And the ability to grab our attention and confuse us and distract us and just anything has become so high and it's becoming so much higher. And we have so few defenses against it and we have shown so little immunity to this kind of thing already in social media that I'm very unnerved. I'm seeing actually a lot less in terms of this stuff being useful and a lot more in terms of it being dangerous than I was hoping to at this point.

• 1:00:14Aaron Retica?

  Let's go back to your listeners and this idea that you've raised a couple of times in here about reflection and getting out of these processes and away from AI and away from the information overload and from our distracted attention and from, you mentioned, you know, phones on the. On the line at the store. So Robin Salzberg asks a question along these lines where she wondering whether your, what your end of year reflection process looks like, whether you have one. Do you do some kind of looking back assessment at the whole year? What that entails?

• 1:00:52Ezra Klein?

  I don't think it'll surprise anybody to know that I do. A lot of it is sitting in a room with my best friend, drinking whiskey and talking about our years. So I'm going to keep those conversations to ourselves. But the thing I try to do is I kind of journal throughout the year. And I also at the beginning of each year, sort of right through the year and intend to have not, not always resolutions, but also kind of values that I want to align towards and try to think about how I did on that. And try to think of those for the next year, which I try to boil down to a couple of words. So that I'm not sitting there with these long, like, it's not about, you know, changing my weight or something. It's more about, am I living in alignment with my values? I'll say, because it'll come up

• 1:01:37Ezra Klein?

  on the show quite shortly, actually, that my big resolution for this year is to build a Shabbat practice that I actually follow. Because, you know, and it's, I think, recognizable if you've been following along with even this conversation, but you know, things like the Mary Ann Wolf conversation and others, that I think my own just constant immersion in digital content and kind of productivity and scheduling and to do lists and that I think I'd be a better and healthier person if it was routine within the rhythm of my own life, that I lived in a different kind of time where there was nothing to get done

• 1:02:20Ezra Klein?

  and I couldn't get anything done. And there wasn't, you know, things to follow on my phone and computer because I couldn't do it. And that I had to cultivate a different style of attention and a different way of occupying that attention. Because that was what that time was about. I'm an unbelievably big fan of Abraham Joshua Heschel's book, The Sabbath, which I've probably read, you know, a dozen times, and Judith Shulevitz's book, The Sabbath World, I think it's called. And both of those are very much in my head right now. And so there are reasons I have this particular goal. But this is for me a kind of way of instantiating, trying to live in a deeper alignment. I would like to. I would like it to be normal that I figure out a way

• 1:03:05Ezra Klein?

  to like exist as opposed to create and do. And there is a pretty deep religious ritual in my own tradition about that. And I don't think I'm going to become Shomer Shabbos, you know, and not have lights and so on. But I am trying to figure out how to be in a community that supports that and have rules that I do treat as quite unbreakable, even if they're not going to be the traditional kind of orthodox Jewish Shabbat rules, you know, and yeah, just how to have a very real practice there. And so you, you know, in a way that is probably a little bit paradoxical or ironic because it's in a way, turning this exploration into work. But I am planning a podcast on it because I am thinking about this. And I do think it's a very, a very beautiful practice

• 1:03:45Ezra Klein?

  with a lot intellectually and practically to offer in people's lives. And I've been wanting to, I've been wanting to explore it a lot more. I think it's easy enough to just talk about how things are, are bad or too much or a problem. But there's actually like quite deep wisdom traditions that have thought about this before. And it's good sometimes not to feel like you have to invent everything from scratch.

• 1:04:07Aaron Retica?

  On a superficial level, as a person who sometimes hears from you on Saturday, I encourage you deeply to.

• 1:04:14Ezra Klein?

  You can get me those edits a little earlier, man.

• 1:04:17Aaron Retica?

  Yeah, exactly. Embrace that, embrace that Sabbath feeling.

• 1:04:22Aaron Retica?

  Last time I was on the show, I asked you to recommend some podcasts. And by the way, I'll mention that I have in fact been listening to the Economist podcast on Xi Jinping, The Prince, which is in fact quite fascinating. So thanks for that. But a couple of your listeners asked questions about that. So I'm going to close out with those. Let's start with Matthew Driling, who wondered if you had recommendations for cultural things that you're anticipating next year. But let's just extend that also to just anything you're really immersed in. I'm not sure how well your list, how much your listeners know that you're a heavy music listener. So maybe start there. And actually, some, you know, you're interested in like an ambient

• 1:05:05Aaron Retica?

  sound world that fits in a little bit with what we were just talking about in terms of Shabbat. So could you talk a little bit about things you've been listening to that you really liked?

• 1:05:13Ezra Klein?

  I never thought about that, about there being a connection between my weird ambient soundscapes and Shabbat. Yeah, I'll talk about music. I'd love to talk about music. So one of the great, people have been listening to the show for a long time, may have heard me, you know, back years ago, I would sort of say like, I have terrible taste in music and movies and TV. And that may still be true for specifically movies. But I actually really love the music I've been listening to in recent years. I've gotten much more into sort of, it actually sort of came out of the show. People might have heard me on with Tyler Cowen, talking to him about trying to appreciate classical music, which I tried very hard to do and never really connected for me. And I have theories about why that might be, but it never did.

• 1:05:56Ezra Klein?

  But it led me to sort of modern classical compositions or sort of more modern compositions. You know, Steve Reich and Carolyn Shaw and Philip Glass and, you know, a lot of modern ambient and, you know, Promises, which is a new piece by Floating Points and Pharoah Sanders. And I've really, really loved that world of music, particularly over this last year. You know, I was saying a minute ago that I tried to boil down my hopes for the year, my values into single words. And one of mine for this year is beauty. I think I've done a much better job connecting to and appreciating beauty recently. You know, in nature and in culture, and I want to really lean in that direction this year.

• 1:06:40Ezra Klein?

  So some stuff I've really loved. One of my big finds of the year has been the music of Juliana Barwick. People know her. She does these really ethereal, almost devotional, they sound to me, layered vocal work. Her most recent album was called Healing is a Miracle. She also has this very beautiful album called Nepenthe, but I just really have come to love her work. It's got a name, Peter Gregson, who's a cellist, I think it is, or a violinist. And he's just done a bunch of really cool sort of reinterpretations, but also kind of ambient work. So he's got this album of Bach reinterpretations called The Chela Suites. But he's also got these series of quartets.

• 1:07:21Ezra Klein?

  And I really love one called Warmth that he did, that I've listened to just a ton this year. So then I'll also just mention two more. So I really have liked a lot of Olafur Arnold's work this year, and he's got this sort of album and then a version of a piano version of that album called Some Kind of Peace, which is really good. And then in a whole other soundscape range, like much more kind of upbeat and rich production, there's an artist called The Range, and he brought out an album called Mercury, which was, according to my streaming platform, my most listened to album of the year, which is just great and really cool. And he kind of builds these insane productions around fragments and samples. And I really, I really enjoyed his work. So I think, yeah, that's

• 1:08:06Ezra Klein?

  been the, for me, that's been the great joy. And I've managed so far to not turn my music into work. And so it has maintained a certain

• 1:08:14Aaron Retica?

  Sorry.

• 1:08:14Ezra Klein?

  A certain purity for me, which has been, yeah, which has been nice. But I hope if people follow up on any of that, and we'll put those in the show description, that they they get to enjoy them, enjoy them as much as I have.

• 1:08:27Aaron Retica?

  Okay, let me ask you one last question that's along these lines. And I'm going to combine two questions, one from Abe and one from Maritza Ruiz Kim. It actually kills me even to say this out loud, but I will. Abe wants to know whether books will still be relevant in five years. He doesn't mean reading is a source of information, right? He means specifically the thing, as he describes it, that is over 100 pages, mostly text, and seldom updated after its release. But I want to combine that with with Maritza's question, which is whether they're children's picture books, and you'll see why this is all connected. And the second, that you're are your favorites to read to your two sons, and do your kids like those books as much as you do?

• 1:09:11Ezra Klein?

  Yes, books will still be a thing in five years. I've really no doubt about that. And, you know, it's actually interesting that we've had a total leveling out of eBooks. I do read a lot on my Kindle, but most people don't. The Kindle mainly survives because a lot of people like getting romance novels on it, which I don't Is a kind of dynamic that I don't think people initially expected. The idea that eBooks would be really different than other books, that they would be, I think was implicit in the question there, that they would be updated or be richer in some way is not proven true. Books are just kind of books and they give you a version you can download to your Kindle. But books have not been disrupted at all. And for reasons people heard in the Mary and Wolf conversation, there are certain things about paper reading

• 1:09:53Ezra Klein?

  that are not replicable, at least right now digitally. And so, yeah, I've no, I've no concern about whether or not we're still going to see books in a couple of years. In terms of children's books, which listeners may remember, we started out at The Times asking guests for children's books and then I moved it back to normal books. So first, no, the books I love reading to my sons. I mean, my, my one-year-old doesn't have a huge amount of discernment yet, but, but they do not, they're not the ones they want me to read to them.

• 1:10:22Aaron Retica?

  So you say, yeah.

• 1:10:24Ezra Klein?

  Yeah, but, but I will name a couple that, that have moved me recently. So one, I don't know if I've said this before, but Happy Birthday to You by Dr. Seuss is such an unbelievable masterpiece of language. And I love reading it. I love the tongue twist of it. It's so fun. If you've never read Happy Birthday to You by Seuss, I mean, it's just a complete classic. You know, then there's this book that I just read for the first time at a friend of mine's house called The Rabbit Listened. And I, honest to God, almost cried at the end of it. It is such a beautiful book. It's by Corey Dorfeld. I might have, how you spell her name wrong? D O E R R F E L D, but The Rabbit Listened.

• 1:11:06Ezra Klein?

  And it's one of those books that a hundred percent is going over the head of your kid. But it's good for them too. And for you, it is so unbelievably profound and such a reminder to probably do something very important in your life differently than you do it right now. I don't know. I almost get emotional just talking about it. And I don't know, I might have recommended it some other point, but I really enjoy this book by Oliver Jeffers. Here we are, Notes for Living on Planet Earth, which is in terms of a book that has a real sense of wonder to it and a sense of how strange it is to be on this planet and but but also it's fun and it's fun for for my son. And we've we've read it, you know, dozens and dozens of times.

• 1:11:47Ezra Klein?

  It's just completely great and the illustrations are great and the whole thing is great. And then maybe I'll do one more. I really love the Pout Pout Fish by Deborah Deason. It's another book where where the language is just, it's so delightful and delicious. It's so fun in your mouth, but also some of these books are very therapeutic. It's a pretty interesting book about, which is something that I've been thinking a lot about in my own life, about how some problems can't really be solved by talking about them endlessly because you're too trapped in your own stories. Sometimes you just need a somatic thunderbolt to like some experiential moment that changes your whole view of the situation or yourself.

• 1:12:27Ezra Klein?

  I've seen this with myself. I've become more skeptical of words despite being somebody who primarily works with them in my in my life. But in my personal life, I've become a little bit skeptical of my ability to get out of things through words. I'm too good at telling stories, I believe. And that that wisdom was already there in the Pout Pout Fish by Deborah Deason. And upon reading it, it helped, it at least helped me see that a little bit more clearly.

• 1:12:51Aaron Retica?

  Yeah, well, I mean, fooling yourself, right, with words is a problem that everybody who does what we do. As you mentioned earlier, when you were talking about AI, that you know, we might have to depend on their ethics. And I'm here to tell you, if we're depending on their ethics, we're in trouble. What I really miss about night night, my kids are in their twenties, but what I really miss about it actually is returning to poetry and rhyme at night, right? I mean, there's so many, the lines just pop up in my head, right? And an ambassador doesn't have to pay rent, but he has to go wherever he's sent, you know? It's, uh, which is from one of the Madeline.

• 1:13:27Ezra Klein?

  Children's books love language in this wonderful way and they have fun with it in a way. You know, obviously, great novelists have beautiful language in what they do, but there's some, there's a joy to the mouth feel of words in children's books. I mean, with Dr. Seuss being the apex of this, but not only, it's really a reminder that that words are fun. Which I feel like we often think of as sensitive, they're beautiful, but not that they're fun.

• 1:13:57Ezra Klein?

  All right, that is the episode. Thank you to Aaron Reddick for being here. Thank you to all of you for sending your questions, for giving us your attention this year. If you want to do, give the show a holiday present, you can rate us on whatever platform you are listening on. It actually does matter. Give us whatever stars you think we deserve, or you can send the episode or any episode to a friend. We would be very grateful. The Ezra Klein Show is produced by Emma F. Agawu, Annie Galvin, Jeff Geld, Raja Karma, and Kristen Lynn. Fact checking by Michelle Harris, Mary March Locker, and Kate Sinclair. Original music by Isaac Jones, mixing by Jeff Geld, and audience strategy by Shannon Busta.