Biden, Psychedelics, Twitter, My New Book — and So Much More

As I head into a three-month book leave, I wanted to take some time to address a wide array of listeners’ questions. My column editor, Aaron Retica, joins me for a conversation that ranges from the content of my forthcoming book and President Biden’s climate record to the simulation hypothesis and legalized psychedelic therapy. We also discuss what the I-95 collapse — and remarkably quick repairs — tell us about government’s ability to build quickly, the problems with everything-bagel liberalism, what it would mean to treat climate change like the emergency that it is, why I dislike analogies between Biden and Franklin Roosevelt, why health care reform has receded from the center of American political debate, whether liberals are being too soft on Hunter Biden, why I am staunchly against term limits for Congress, what kinds of work are most undervalued in American society, why I’ve become less pessimistic about artificial intelligence disinformation, why I left Twitter but have been enjoying Threads, the challenges of keeping a Sabbath practice and more. This episode contains strong language. Note: Starting next week, “The Ezra Klein Show” will be releasing episodes only once per week, every Tuesday, until Ezra returns from his book leave in early November. These episodes will be hosted by a range of guest hosts. Mentioned: “The Problem With Everything-Bagel Liberalism” by Ezra Klein “The Book I Wish Every Policymaker Would Read” by The Ezra Klein Show, with Jennifer Pahlka “Two Theories of What I’m Getting Wrong” by Ezra Klein “The Greens’ Dilemma” by J. B. Ruhl and James E. Salzman “Not Everyone Should Have a Say” by Jerusalem Demsas We’ve Got You Covered by Liran Einav and Amy Finkelstein “This Is Your Brain on ‘Deep Reading.’ It’s Pretty Magnificent.” by The Ezra Klein Show, with Maryanne Wolf “Elon Musk Got Twitter Because He Gets Twitter” by Ezra Klein “Sabbath and the Art of Rest” by The Ezra Klein Show, with Judith Shulevitz Music Recommendations: “Orange” by Caroline Shaw and Attacca Quartet Fred again..: Tiny Desk Concert on NPR Music “USB” by Fred again.. “Midas” by Maribou State Thoughts? Guest suggestions? Email us at [email protected]. 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. This episode of “The Ezra Klein Show” was produced by Annie Galvin. Fact checking by Mary Marge Locker and Kate Sinclair. Our senior engineer is Jeff Geld. Our senior editor is Rogé Karma. The show’s production team also includes Emefa Agawu, Rollin Hu and Kristin Lin. Original music by Isaac Jones. Audience strategy by Kristina Samulewski and Shannon Busta. The executive producer of New York Times Opinion Audio is Annie-Rose Strasser. And special thanks to Sonia Herrero.

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

• 0:03Ezra Klein?

  From New York Times Opinion, this is the Ezra Klein Show.

• 0:23Ezra Klein?

  Welcome to the Ask Me Anything episode. I'm here with my revered editor, the bringer of gravitas, Aaron Reddick. We've got tons of questions from the hundreds that you all sent in, which I'm always grateful for, that I'm about to get peppered with. Aaron, it's good to actually see you in person.

• 0:40Aaron Retica?

  I know, we're live in New York. It is not Saturday night, however. Let's just get rolling. There's so many questions, let's not waste time. So you're going on book leave, and many of your listeners were curious what the book is about.

• 0:54Ezra Klein?

  I don't think this will surprise anybody listening to the show. So I'm co-writing a book with Derek Thompson of The Atlantic, who, if you don't read him, he's great. And it's a book about what I often call supply-side progressivism, or liberalism that builds, what Derek calls, you know, abundance, or the abundance agenda. But at its core, where do we have problems? Where the fundamental problem is scarcity. We don't have enough of something we need. And when that problem is located, how do we fix it? Sometimes, the necessity here is for the government to create more of something we need, right? To do clean energy tax credits, or a warp speed for vaccines. And sometimes, the government is actually making it impossible, or very difficult, to create the thing we need, say, housing

• 1:37Ezra Klein?

  in California. And so those are the sort of layers of the project. And I think the other layer of it is how did liberalism, and particularly places where liberals govern, become so bad at building? How did the coalition that imagines itself as behind a strong and effective government? Actually become often unable to run governments that are strong and effective. And so some of the project is unearthing the secondary history of sort of post 20th century liberalism, sort of the rise of the new left, the rise of Naderite and so on movements that created a lot of ways in which liberals both want an activist government

• 2:19Ezra Klein?

  and then want a lot of ways for people to stand in front of that government and say, "Stop, you're not listening to my needs, you're going to hurt the environment, etc." And the point is not that one of these sides is right and one of them is wrong, but you have to understand the way they've collided in governance to understand a bunch of the problems we have now and to maybe say, "Okay, the balance on this is off, given what we're facing." So that's the project of the book. I'm going to be off for about three months. Hopefully I'll get the book done or finished in that time. We'll see, but I'm excited about it.

• 2:48Aaron Retica?

  I'm going to push into the content there in a second, but I wanted to ask you one question about collaborating with Derek. So you are a person who is at the center of the process, both for your show and your column. How are you envisioning doing it, a book with someone? I'm just very curious about that. And there are a lot of process questions from your listeners, so I thought I'd ask that.

• 3:07Ezra Klein?

  He's been on Bookly first due to his schedule and then I'm going on. One of the reasons I wanted to co-write this book is I found writing my first book, Why We're Polarized, to be an incredibly lonely experience. Almost every creative project I've done in my life that I've really enjoyed has had somebody else at the center of it with me. In my column, it's you. On the podcast, it's the team and particularly Roger, who's been with the show for so long, Roger Karma, our senior editor. When I launched Vox, I did that with Melissa Bell and Matthew Iglesias. When I did Why We're Polarized, it was really just me. It's not that I didn't have an editor, Ben Lane, who's great, but for months, it was just me struggling with the page. And a lot of my best thinking is done when I talk, a lot of my best thinking is done in relationship to other people.

• 3:52Ezra Klein?

  And I just think it makes me smarter to be working with other people. And I think that it also helps me actually get things done. And I just wanted it to be a less lonely process. There's obviously advantages to doing projects on your own because you have full creative control over them. But there are real disadvantages to it, too. So this was an experiment that I wanted to at least attempt.

• 4:15Aaron Retica?

  Yeah, we spend a lot of time on the phone. It's like old school columnist editor relationship. All right, let's dig into the actual material, though, because you and I have worked a lot on this and there's been a ton on the show as well. So Josh Shapiro, the governor of Pennsylvania, faced a sharp crisis very recently where a section of I-95 collapsed. And Joel D. has written in asking us whether the fact that they were actually able to get the section of I-95 that fell opened 12 days after it collapsed, what the implications are for a liberalism that builds in that sequence.

• 4:49Ezra Klein?

  So I think this has been a really interesting model because Shapiro's bragging about it. The Biden administration likes to tell me about the role they played in it. And I think it's also important to say they did this with union labor. That's actually been a big part of how they intended it and also how they've narrativized it. It wasn't just that they got this portion built, which was estimated to take months. It's not at all unusual for a government project, infrastructure project, estimated to take months to take years. And instead, it took days. They were going around the clock. They had a live stream on it. But you have to take seriously what he did. So the Pennsylvania governor has emergency powers during a disaster. And Shapiro signed a proclamation that reads, quote, "I hereby suspend the provisions

• 5:34Ezra Klein?

  of any other regulatory statute prescribing the procedures for conduct of Commonwealth business or the orders, rules, or regulations of any Commonwealth agency if strict compliance with the provisions of any statute, order, rules, or regulations would in any way prevent, hinder, or delay necessary action in coping with this emergency event." So I did a piece with you a couple of months back called "Everything Bagel Liberalism." And the point of that- Is that liberals often put a huge number of secondary objectives into a single project. So they want to restore American dominance in semiconductor manufacturing. But then there are also these rules in there for onsite childcare and you know,

• 6:18Ezra Klein?

  how to break the contracting into small tasks. So you can have a more diverse set of subcontractors. And you know, what sort of community investments you need to make and your climate action mitigation plan and so on. And one of the points of that piece was you can choose some. Here they chose unions, but you can't choose all of them. And what they did here, what Shapiro was able to do in Pennsylvania was he wiped out functionally everything else. You could not sue and stop this project using, say, environmental litigation, which is happens on a lot of different projects. They just went too fast and they wiped a lot of things out. If you listen to the Jen Polka episode, all these different states and of course, the federal government have very complicated procurement and contracting rules meant to

• 7:00Ezra Klein?

  make sure things are fair, that people who aren't chosen can challenge. All that was out the window. So I think it's relevant what they did, but it is also relevant that usually you cannot do this, right? What they did was radically alter the process by which building happens. And I'll make one other point about it that I think is a good way to think about it conceptually. What Shapiro ultimately said here is that I, Josh Shapiro, who won election with a majority of the vote from, you know, the voters in Pennsylvania, I should be trusted with acting in a way that ensures the electorate gets what it wants. And in his view, in that point, it was the quick rebuilding of I-95.

• 7:43Ezra Klein?

  The processes we have are a way of saying, we think that the elected representatives cannot be trusted on this. And so we're going to hamstring them or tie them up with a lot of other processes meant to allow more voice, meant to allow more opposition, meant to allow more litigation. And you could think that's right or wrong, but what's I think valuable about seeing what happened in Pennsylvania is that there's nothing about government doing projects. It means they can't be done fast. There's nothing about unions doing projects. It means they can't be done fast. But you have to make some choices. So you could just give more governors and give the president more emergency powers and wipe out a lot of procurement rules, but that would upset a lot of people. And so what Pennsylvania shows is it is possible.

• 8:26Ezra Klein?

  But what the invoking of these emergency powers also shows is it cannot be done under the normal policies that the governors use. And the obvious thrill that everybody involved in it now feels should make us wonder if we're not missing something in our normal processes. Emergency processes shouldn't make you feel so much happier than normal processes. That's not normally how that goes.

• 8:49Aaron Retica?

  Right, but okay, virtually no one would say, well, we really would like to have I-95 be collapsed. No one wants that, right? So the emergency is going to override very happily the conditions that normally would obtain, right? But how are you going to transfer that kind of emergency process to an ordinary process where people are going to have objections, some of which are going to be reasonable, many of which are going to be unreasonable? I mean, it's easy to say, okay, great, they did it in 12 days, but it was an emergency and so they acted like it was an emergency.

• 9:21Ezra Klein?

  I think first there's a question of what in our minds should be an emergency, right? I mean, my interest in this topic is driven more than anything else by decarbonization. If you believe that climate is an emergency, and I do believe it's an emergency, now it's an emergency playing out over years and decades, not days.

• 9:38Aaron Retica?

  The summer seems to agree with you.

• 9:40Ezra Klein?

  The summer seems to agree with me. Then I think you need to, and this is the, you know, the big argument inside, I think, this whole area, then I think you need to begin saying our processes don't work for this kind of emergency. This is a point now I've made in podcasts and columns, but the largest solar farm in America is something on the order of 585 megawatts. We're going to need to build two 400-megawatt solar power facilities a week for 30 years to hit a middle-of-the-road renewables pathway.

• 10:11Ezra Klein?

  We do not have the capacity to do that. That should be understood as an emergency, not something we can approach with business as normal. This is a point, as you know, I'm making a column that will probably be out by the time this the show comes, but to not choose to change processes is to choose right now. It is to choose to absorb the problems of climate change at a higher level. Now, look, everything is about where you put the dial and you're not going to go to full, you know, wipe out all the procurement rules and nor should you. You're not going to go to full, you know, wipe out all the environmental litigation, nor should you. But there is space between here and there. And if we want to do a bunch of things that I think we should want to do, then we're going to have to move in that direction. And if we don't want to do it, then we're just going to have to say, okay, you know,

• 10:54Ezra Klein?

  we're okay with the housing markets looking like they do in superstar cities. We're okay with missing our Paris Climate Accord targets by a lot, not by a little. You know, we're okay with a lot of things that we could fix and we're okay with liberal government having the accurate reputation, at least in America, that it cannot build the projects it promises to build, right? You can't have high-speed rail in California. You can't get the big dig done, you know, at the cost and time you said it would. The Second Avenue subway is going to be a total cost disaster. Maybe if you try to build a bunch of miles of bike lanes in San Francisco, it's going to take you a decade. That is also a choice to say that's okay. And, you know, we prefer the outcome of these processes because we think there's enough

• 11:37Ezra Klein?

  voice and we think that preventing the bad projects is worth it. You can also hopefully make things quicker for good projects and slower for bad ones. I mean, it doesn't have to be a process. It cannot make any distinctions between what you're building.

• 11:49Aaron Retica?

  Okay, so that brings us to Joel's follow-up question. Joel is the star of the beginning of the show here. So is there a version of permitting reform that would actually be a win-win for environmental justice, community input and for building faster? Or do you see the values as inherently zero-sum?

• 12:07Ezra Klein?

  I think it depends a little bit on which values we're talking about. But let's take environmental justice and building faster before we take on community input. And there, I think it's pretty straightforward. People sometimes talk about this as a, quote, "green pass."

• 12:21Ezra Klein?

  I think we know which projects are meant to be environmentally more sustainable. And I think those should have a streamlined way forward. So there's a good paper that I mentioned in the podcast with Robinson Meyer called The Green Dilemma. And the law professors who wrote that paper, they talk about a number of examples within government. A very famous one is base closing commissions that basically identifies questions around military base closing. And it has a streamlined, fast-tracked, up or down vote way of doing that. And you can imagine a certain set of processes that would be fast-tracked into that. You know, if you're working on decarbonization, for instance, you know, it's renewable energy, not fossil fuel energy, maybe you have a quicker path through environmental review.

• 13:05Ezra Klein?

  Now, there are a lot of things that aren't just environmental review here, so it does depend on what you're talking about, but we're seeing this begin to happen. Affordable housing in California has been sped past a bunch of points in the process it used to have to go through, whereas market rate housing doesn't always get that. So you can make decisions about what it is you're trying to speed up. Community input is just tough because I think a lot gets hidden in that term. Which community, having what kind of input? There are times when the processes we have allow communities, you know, and particularly affected communities, to come to the table, for instance, or come into the process and be heard in a way they wouldn't otherwise. There are also a lot of ways in which these processes often create space for the status

• 13:50Ezra Klein?

  quo to take something over. You know, very famously, I think, all over the country, wealthy homeowners are very good at manipulating the planning process. You can't build below market rate homes and you can't build many homes at all in very, very desirable and very, very economically important areas. So which community is getting input? The community that lives there now? The community that would like to live there? The community that has time to show up to all these meetings that most people don't even know are going on? There's a huge amount of power that is wielded in meetings around the regulatory process for basically any major bill you can think of. Most people never know those meetings happen, but every lobbyist knows when those meetings happen.

• 14:30Ezra Klein?

  And moneyed interests spend a lot of money making sure their interests are heard and their thinking is heard at these meetings. So this is a very tough thing to get right, but a critique that many in this area make, Jerusalem Demsas at the Atlanta, because I think bring great pieces on this. And that I agree with is that there is a difference between input and representative input processes get captured. And so there is often a question of what level and layer you're having people get engaged at. The fact that there wasn't meeting and some people showed up does not mean that what got heard at that meeting was the sentiment of the community. Like I've sat in SF City Council meetings and one thing that came up was whether or not a 5G tower was going to get built. And person after person after person after person there attacked the 5G tower.

• 15:15Ezra Klein?

  The only people who showed up at the 5G tower part of this planning meeting were people who think 5G towers potentially give you cancer. Now, most people I think don't care that much about 5G towers and to the extent they had to make a choice, they would have, you know, they want to have faster internet. And so in the end, the 5G tower won, but whatever was happening at that meeting, it was community input, but it wasn't representative of the community. And this is a place where we do have representative government and to my point about Shapiro. A minute ago, oftentimes I think a good way to have broader community input is to actually give power to elected representatives. I mean, there should be checks on that, but they shouldn't be completely unable to do the things that they just got elected by, you know, most of the voters in a much higher turnout kind of political participation domain to do.

• 15:59Ezra Klein?

  So again, it's all about where you hit the dial here, right? You can go too far in any direction, but I think community input is complicated. Oftentimes we are not hearing from the community. We are hearing from a subset of affected interests who know how to manipulate the levers of power. And we should be careful about analogizing those.

• 16:17Aaron Retica?

  This goes right to what Tony C wants to know about, which is how should a climate conscious member of society think about? The Biden administration in the context of climate change? Do you think of Biden as a net positive or a net negative for our environment? And he's thinking, of course, about permitting fossil fuel extraction and so on.

• 16:40Ezra Klein?

  I just put this on, and this is meant as no critique of Tony. I just put this on because if you're in a, an information loop where this question feels really possibly like it could come out either way to you, right? Is Joe Biden, who has presided over the single largest set of climate investments ever and created a whole new structure in which climate infrastructure will be built? You know, the IRA alone at this point is judged at something like 380 billion over 10 years. But as, you know, we talked about in the Robinson Meyer episode, maybe it's really going to be 500 billion, maybe a trillion dollars in climate investments. And on the other side, they've permitted some near term drilling and made it a little bit easier during an energy crunch to build more.

• 17:22Ezra Klein?

  These things are so out of proportion to each other that I think the way in which people get upset about the places Biden diverges from them, say on social media, it's hard sometimes to keep things in perspective. But Biden is the most successful pro-climate president there has ever been in this country, right? I mean, climate is a relatively new issue, but obviously Trump was a disaster. He's done far more than Obama, just because of where the issue is and where the political coalitions are, far more than Clinton, certainly far more than George W. Bush. And he's given us a shot at building this stuff. We may fail, but Biden has completely changed the game.

• 18:03Ezra Klein?

  For so long, the, the whole of the environmental fight on climate was, can we just figure out some way to get the money to do what we need to do? Now, to everything we're talking about, the conversation has actually changed to, the money is there, can we actually build it? Can we actually translate all this legislation into the decarbonization infrastructure we need in the real world? That is an astonishing achievement. And it actually slightly saddens me that anybody would look at the Biden administration and what they've done at this point, where they really, they got this over the line. Maybe it's not everything everybody wanted because they had a 50 50 Senate, but they got it over the line and now the work can really happen. We'll see what happens. We'll see if it all works out. Implementation is really tough. This all has to happen in the real world. It's not just sending checks out from the government.

• 18:48Ezra Klein?

  But they have been extraordinarily successful on a pretty hard issue. Climate is not an easy political issue. It's not one where you have naturally very large constituencies, people who will be immediately benefited by it. They prioritized it. They figured it out. They passed it. They deserve to be applauded and now they deserve to be watched over and scrutinized as the real work has to happen. But the stuff they did on the margin to keep energy costs down, to not like completely destroy their power in the midterms, that's just politics. But the bulk of their legislation, it's been an extraordinary climate presidency, given what is actually possible in American politics, not just possible in people's minds. They deserve the credit on that one.

• 19:30Aaron Retica?

  So TJM has a really interesting question. This was brought up a lot before Biden actually took office. But let me ask you now, are comparisons between Joe Biden and FDR justified? Have their presidencies been broadly similar?

• 19:46Ezra Klein?

  They're not justified. I take it, yeah, you're right that before Biden came in and as his agenda expanded and as also Democrats began in 2020 to think they might get huge congressional majorities, you had this moment of maybe it'll be an FDR-sized presidency. And this happened with Obama, too. There was like, maybe Obama is an ex-FDR. And I just have a bugaboo about this, that FDR was only FDR because of the size of the congressional majority he got in '32, because the Great Depression and the anger at Hoover destroyed the Republican Party. So FDR, when he comes in, he has 58 Democratic senators to 36 Republican senators in a much less polarized time. So he could actually get more from those 36 Republicans.

• 20:31Ezra Klein?

  But still, 58 to 36. Biden has a 50-50 Senate, where Vice President Kamala Harris is a tie-breaking vote.

• 20:40Aaron Retica?

  When he first comes in.

• 20:41Ezra Klein?

  When he first comes in, right. And in the House, FDR had 311 Democrats to 117 Republicans. And for Biden, when he first comes in, Democrats have a majority in the single digits. You can't have an FDR-sized presidency in a polarized political time, in a closely divided Congress. And I think this is what people just often miss when they're trying to judge other presidents against FDR. How much legislation a president can pass is dependent on what Congress does. Congress writes legislation and passes it. President can only veto it. And so what FDR had was a destroyed Republican Party. And that wasn't true for Biden. It wasn't true for Obama, probably will not be true for the next Democratic

• 21:23Ezra Klein?

  president. And that just makes the possibilities more narrow. I think it is really remarkable how much policy Biden and the Democrats passed with a 50-50 Senate. If you had told me in January 2020 that Democrats are going to have a 50-50 Senate, what are they going to get done? I would have said a lot less than they did. A 50-50 Senate is never going to get you a New Deal-sized presidency. It just can't.

• 21:49Aaron Retica?

  You mentioned Obama. Michelle O. wants to know why you think US healthcare reform is not much of a hot political item right now.

• 21:59Ezra Klein?

  My first love, my first love in policy. So, yes, I covered, for people who have not followed my work, in the past, healthcare reform for years. That was my first kind of major policy issue. And I think there's a couple of reasons. I mean, one is Obama, and how successful he actually was. So, they passed the Affordable Care Act. If you look at current levels of uninsured, non-elderly Americans, because the elderly have Medicare, you have about 27.5 million are uninsured. That's down from about 50 million, or almost 50 million, before the Affordable Care Act passed. And if you look at who that is, you have a bunch of people in the 10 states that have an expanded Medicaid. You do have a lot of people who still can't afford it. They maybe don't get employer insurance, but

• 22:41Ezra Klein?

  they make enough money that they're not really eligible for subsidies. So that's some of the people, too. You do have a kind of big issue among non-citizens, who, if they're newly non-citizens, are not eligible for some of the subsidies or Medicaid in the program. And of course, undocumented immigrants often are usually ineligible.

• 23:02Ezra Klein?

  To mop up the end of the uninsured population, it's pretty tricky and you're dealing with a lot of sort of random issues. Medicaid issue and states that are fighting Medicaid and so on. So I think that the approach was successful enough that it has drained a lot of the energy from healthcare reform. That's one thing. So then there's another thing, which is that one reason that healthcare reform had so much energy for so long was that healthcare cost growth, year after year, was growing so much faster than inflation, so much faster than GDP growth. There's been a pretty big slowdown in that over the past 10-ish years. The reasons for it are debated, but the huge cost growth problem we had that led to all this bending the cost curve talk in the Obama administration that made this a huge

• 23:45Ezra Klein?

  problem for employers, it's not that it is entirely gone, but it is not really the fundamental problem anymore. So that doesn't mean there aren't ways you can imagine healthcare being way better, right? I mean, during the 2020 primaries, we had a lot of debates over a single payer in the Democratic Party. There's a new interesting book by Laron Anev, and I might be mispronouncing that, and Amy Finkelstein, who are both great health economists, called "We've Got You Covered: Rebooting American Healthcare." You can definitely come up with root and branch reforms of the system that would make something more efficient, more fair, that would cover something closer to everybody. But the system is working well enough for enough people that it is hard to imagine that getting prioritized in the near future.

• 24:27Ezra Klein?

  When I think of what I would want, any kind of Congress, right? Any kind of unified Congress and presidency to make their top priority, it is hard for me to say further health reform. I'd be much more interested in universal baby bonds, as with the episode we did recently with Derek Hamilton. I'd be much more interested in universal pre-K. It's not that healthcare is great in this country. It's not. But political capital is so limited and enough people here are doing well enough and the sort of moving it that last couple of miles would be so difficult that I think when you imagine what are the single bills you could pass that would lead to the largest well-being improvements, it's hard for me now to say that it's healthcare reform, both because

• 25:10Ezra Klein?

  its status as an economic problem has abated somewhat and its status as such, like we have this huge uninsured population, has abated somewhat. So I think it's just become more of one issue among many, rather than the central issue that is causing both employers and budget wonks and normal people incredible amounts of pain.

• 25:31Aaron Retica?

  Although it hasn't solved the problem of drug addiction that's leading to more than 100,000 people dying every year, right?

• 25:38Ezra Klein?

  But that's a big thing, right? I mean, when we talk about healthcare reform, we're typically talking about financial insulation from healthcare costs. So when you think about what would do the most to improve health now, I think it's often not healthcare reform. I think things like an expanded child tax credit would do a lot for people's health. I mean, we know giving people money is good for their health. And baby bonds, I think, have that quality, too. I could think of a lot of things that would be really good for the health of the American population that would probably have a bigger per-dollar payout than health insurance reform, which is what we are really talking about when we talk about healthcare reform.

• 26:37Aaron Retica?

  Shifting gears a little, Doug A. wants to know what your view on the popular goal of imposing term limits on Congress is, whether you thought about it much either way, and obviously would require probably a constitutional amendment to do it, maybe not necessarily, but probably. So what are your thoughts on that?

• 26:54Ezra Klein?

  I would say, look at a couple of things. For instance, look at California, where you have term limits for the legislature. I don't think in California or other states where you have that, the legislatures are dramatically better or more effective. I think if you look at Congress, a lot of really great legislators would have been term limited out in a way I don't think we should think of as a good thing. It takes time to become good at being a member of the House or being a member of the Senate. I don't think the country would have been better off if Senator Ron Wyden had had to retire after two terms, or if Senator Dick Durbin had had to do the same. There is a return on experience here and on connections and on skills.

• 27:37Ezra Klein?

  Like, Joe Biden was in part a good legislator over time because he learned Things that he didn't know in his first term or two, he got much more effective over time. So I don't think when I look at the House, say, and I look at people there, a lot of the legislators, I think, are the worst, are the newest there. They're just trying to get booked on Fox News or social media. A lot of legislators who are pretty solid there have been there a long time. So even if you take away the sort of political science argument, the term limits end up giving a lot of power to the unelected lobbyist staffer class. I just think if you look at it, it doesn't look great. I think that most people would come to the conclusion that the better members of both the House and Senate are the ones who have had time to be there longer.

• 28:22Ezra Klein?

  Now, there is a problem that incumbency can just feed on itself and people can be there too long. Look at Dianne Feinstein in California for a very extreme example. I think it's hard to know what to do about that exactly. I will say the place where I strongly support term limits is for the Supreme Court, where I think you should have 12 or 18-year term limits so that the vacancies that come up are fairly reliable, so that different presidents get roughly the same amount per term, so that you don't have this incentive to name very young people to the Supreme Court, so that things aren't just tricks of when people die or when they become too incapacitated. I think that lifetime appointments are a dumb idea, just in general. And partly when you don't have something like elections, it do at least oppose some

• 29:06Ezra Klein?

  level of accountability, you want to think about term limits. Where you do have elections imposing some degree of accountability, yeah, the incumbency advantage is a real thing. It is also a real thing that voters are participating in. So I think that it is a little bit weird to say that we abstractly know voters are wrong, to give the person representing them a third term, and we sitting here should tell them they can't. So yeah, I've never been a term limits fan.

• 29:31Aaron Retica?

  Yeah, I mean, that's exactly what you're saying, right? It devalues elections in both ways, the lifetime appointments for Supreme Court justices and term limits. Yeah, Rob's the people of their power. Tom C has a hard question for you. He says, I seem to be the only liberal alarmed by the real scandal involving Hunter Biden. But perhaps you feel the same. Seems to have amassed between 10 and 20 million dollars in investments from a coalition of very sketchy Chinese, Ukrainian, Romanian sources, none of which seem to have produced any work product anyone can point to. Then it sounds like Hunter and maybe his uncle Jim as well, were trafficking in Joe Biden's

• 30:14Aaron Retica?

  name, as Tom C puts it, by implying to their Marx that the Marx would somehow gain access to Joe Biden with their investments. Biden himself simply says that he didn't involve himself in the Sun's Business Affairs, but are we really just going to let it go at that? And would we if these were Republicans?

• 30:30Ezra Klein?

  I think in some ways that last bit is too easy in and out.

• 30:34Aaron Retica?

  Okay.

• 30:35Ezra Klein?

  We did when it was Republicans. I mean, I actually think in many ways what Jared Kushner did, raising billions for an investment fund with Saudi Arabia, the amount of direct influence peddling Donald Trump did in office, the way people would try to get access to him by being part of Trump company investments and staying at Trump hotels and everything. I mean, it was more direct, it was much worse, it was much more serious. I think the Hunter Biden scandal is real in the sense of Hunter Biden, the things he's done are really unsavory. And the thing that has made it not yet a political scandal that is consequential for Joe Biden, except on the right, where I think people want to believe something went wrong,

• 31:16Ezra Klein?

  is that nobody can quite point to anything that came out of it from Joe Biden's governance. No work seems to have come out of this influence peddling, and also not much influence seems to have gotten peddled out of the influence peddling. Now, I'm not against something coming out that shows this was different, right? If I mean, if it turns out that President Biden colluded with Hunter, and there was some kind of email exchange or some kind of handshake, where if they would give Hunter this job, they would get this amendment put on the bill, or this thing they wanted done, I think that would be a real problem. Correctly so, like, that would be a real problem. The thing where Biden has had a somewhat laissez faire attitude

• 32:00Ezra Klein?

  towards the activities of his absolute mess of an adult son. I think there's a kind of sympathy that emerges for people in that towards Biden. I mean, what was Biden to do exactly? He probably didn't actually know about a lot of this. A lot of the details coming out with Hunter Biden, you know, the seventh granddaughter. I mean, it's very sad. It's incredibly sad. It's incredibly sad. You're watching somebody who was never able to get his life back on track or on track. He definitely influence peddled. He has hurt a lot of people. He's clearly hurt himself. He's clearly hurt his father. And if you read Biden's book that he wrote some years back when running for president,

• 32:43Ezra Klein?

  and I think it is in 08, actually, I mean, the love he has for Beau and Hunter, his belief that Hunter Biden would become part of Beau Biden's kind of kitchen cabinet and they would protect each other. And then you see how it turns out. I mean, the tragedy of it is immense. But it's not a scandal for somebody's son or one of their sons to be a fuck up. It's a scandal for that to become part of how the federal government wields power. I don't think the fact that Trump did much worse than this in a very obvious and direct way absolves Biden. What absolves Biden so far is that he doesn't seem to have done it. And if it comes out that he did it, right? If it comes out that the way Hunter was getting these deals was that he wasn't just kind of wink, wink, nod, nodding, that he could get some access to Joe Biden, but you

• 33:28Ezra Klein?

  were actually getting the access to Joe Biden, like that would be worse. There's a part of this question that we didn't, just to make it shorter, that we didn't bring up, but Thomas C. brought up the old idea of the real scandal is what's legal. And one thing I would say is that the thing that Hunter Biden here is accused of doing actually does happen all the time in a much more efficacious way. So in Congress and in administrations, people who are very high up aides to senators and, you know, chairs in the House and of course to presidents do become lobbyists. And then they do work on behalf of other governments and other companies. And they do use their preexisting relationship with, you know, people in power to try to push forward those ideas.

• 34:12Ezra Klein?

  Now Biden wasn't correctly registered to be a lobbyist and all this different stuff. But the thing being described here happens all the time, not from idiot adult kids who don't know what they're actually doing and can't deliver. But you know, Bob Dole, the late Bob Dole was lobbying on behalf of Taiwan, right? And was able to get Trump to sort of break with presidential practice and talk to the leader of Taiwan on the phone very quickly after being elected. These things actually do occur and they're in a kind of much broader world of more efficacious influence peddling. The Hunter Biden case is sort of a weird version of that turned into an absurdity that looks worse because it's Biden's son. But is probably less bad because it doesn't appear to have worked.

• 34:54Ezra Klein?

  But again, evidence could come out that it worked in some consequential way and that would somewhat change my opinion of it. I will say that if Republicans want to make hay of this, they're going to have to nominate not Donald Trump. Right? If this becomes a fight over where was the influence peddling in family oriented business happening? In an administration and it's Trump running against Joe Biden. And the scrutiny is now on Jared Kushner's Saudi backed venture fund. That's not going to work out. So in a lot of ways, and it's been a kind of theme on the show recently. Republicans are going to have to decide, do they want to choose a candidate who is strategically positioned? To take advantage of Joe Biden's weaknesses or not?

• 35:36Ezra Klein?

  So far it seems not, but that's going to be consequential here too.

• 35:41Aaron Retica?

  All right. There are just so many good questions here, but I'll plunge into another one. This one's coming from Colton L. What kind of work do you think is the most undervalued in contemporary American society? Based on the pay, the social prestige and everything else that comes with work, that the work requires?

• 35:56Ezra Klein?

  Anything and everything with children.

• 35:59Ezra Klein?

  Anything and everything with children, being a social worker who works with children, being a teacher, being somebody who's a guardian in the foster care system, given how important that work is, it is badly compensated. It doesn't have terrible prestige compared to, I mean, some other things, but it doesn't have nearly the prestige it should. It doesn't have the rungs as high on the ladder as it should, right? There isn't a kind of elite teacher designation that is sort of like being partner at a very big law firm where everybody knows, like, you've really made it and you're one of the best at one of the most important things that happens in American or, you know, human life. We just really undervalue things with children. We talk about how their children are our future

• 36:40Ezra Klein?

  and we treat them in many ways like an afterthought. We certainly treat the people who are in charge of helping them as an afterthought. The pay and benefits and prestige in childcare work for young children are just terrible. It's a total disaster of an industry. This is a place where money really matters. I mean, and I've said this before on the show, that I think in American life, for the most part, prestige follows money. We give the most prestige to things that make the most money. And there are some, you know, counterexamples. Academia has a little bit more prestige and it has money oftentimes, but prestige typically follows money. And in not paying well for this stuff, we rob it of prestige. We rob it to some degree, though of course there are amazing people in these industries of

• 37:24Ezra Klein?

  talent. And it's just not the right societal structure. And not something I think we should leave up to the market. Yeah, children can't pay a lot, you know, and the children who need the most help really can't pay the most. I think, you know, the kids who are in, you know, highly selective colleges, who tell their parents they're going to law school, that is much more comfortable for their parents than, I'm going to become a social worker working with children, or I'm going to work in early childhood education, because you're assuring, insuring yourself a higher salary in the future. And that's a problem, right? It should be that when you say to somebody, I'm going to go become a teacher, what they hear from that is both you're going to be doing great work, and you're going to be really well off, because we've decided to compensate that really well, because we want

• 38:06Ezra Klein?

  the best people becoming teachers. And yeah, it's just a place where I think we're failing.

• 38:10Aaron Retica?

  Yeah. I mean, it's just an incredible thing that in other countries, actually, teachers do, you know, you might be deciding, I'm going to be an engineer, I'm going to be a lawyer, or I'm going to be a teacher, right? And you rarely hear that. Here, which I do think is a critical part of it.

• 38:25Ezra Klein?

  Right. Just like imagine hearing from, you know, a graduate from UC Berkeley, right? I'm going into dermatology, right? What that calls up versus I'm going into, I'm going to work in a preschool.

• 38:36Aaron Retica?

  Right.

• 38:37Ezra Klein?

  There's nothing wrong with dermatologists. They do great work, but we know what is being said when you say, I'm going to work in preschools. And that's, that sounds great, but you're not going to make much money.

• 38:46Aaron Retica?

  Yeah, no. And then the social prestige thing is more important, even than I think you made it sound actually. I gather that the prestige follows from the money, but it's still a critical part of it.

• 38:56Ezra Klein?

  And you're married to a teacher?

• 38:57Aaron Retica?

  I am married to a teacher. I was going to accuse you of pandering on those grounds. I am married to someone who it works in early childhood and did face that where you have people who are like, well, why aren't you a lawyer? Why aren't you a professor? Why are you a teacher, you know? And meanwhile, she's doing all this incredible work with public school second graders.

• 39:18Ezra Klein?

  I'm curious if you see it in the world, right? When you tell people that you babysit New York Times columnists who act like children. Your wife says she works with children, right? Like.

• 39:26Aaron Retica?

  I was going to make a different version of that joke earlier. I was going to ask whether you believe in lifetime tenure for New York Times columnists and podcasters.

• 39:33Ezra Klein?

  Absolutely not. Are you kidding me?

• 39:35Aaron Retica?

  No, I know you don't. Okay, we're going to switch gears here into psychedelics to bring a little California into our New York studio. Jope F. is asking whether you've been following the scientific developments and media hype surrounding psychedelics in the last years. And I will answer that part and say, I know you have, because we've written about it. But from critical trials to microdosing to legalization processes in Colorado, Australia. He doesn't mention Oregon, but also Oregon indigenous communities. Like, what do you make of all this? What do you think about it?

• 40:07Ezra Klein?

  I have a lot of contrasting thoughts on where psychedelic therapy and help is right now. So one is that the, the work I'm most interested in, I did a piece on this a while back, and I'd like to check in on it next year sometime, is in Oregon where they are trying to create a legal, although it will not be federally legal, but a legal pathway and structure for support. Psychedelic experiences, which notably, it's not just psychedelic therapy. You don't need a diagnosis to do it, right? You can just go. They're trying to figure out how to do the licensing. They're trying to figure out how to do the support. It looks like it'll be fairly expensive. That's going to be really important because it's not just about whether or not you can legalize them,

• 40:48Ezra Klein?

  but whether or not you can create a structure in which they can be well used. When I look at the, the research, I think the research on them at this point is, is quite extraordinary. I would expect them in the real world to underperform the research because the research is being so carefully done. But we're seeing studies that are suggesting really profound effects on treatment resistant major depression, profound effects on different kinds of addictions, profound effects just on people's lives. Putting aside the question of what recognized illnesses and maladies you can help people fix. We have these substances that cost functionally nothing.

• 41:29Ezra Klein?

  I mean, in terms of how much it costs to grow psilocybin containing mushrooms or synthesize LSD. And we can routinely induce experiences that people count as among the most meaningful of their entire lives. And that's a pretty remarkable thing to keep locked up. I find it kind of astonishing and it's not that there aren't risks, but you can go base jumping legally, you can legally be a base jumper, but you cannot legally take a tab of acid and sit in your room and listen to music and have a sublime musical experience. Like, it just actually strikes me as a very strange way. We let people take all kinds of risks in society.

• 42:11Ezra Klein?

  Now, the thing that worries me a lot is the financial land rush here. The number of companies trying to patent it, the number of companies trying to distill these into even more potent and powerful and usable, maybe even appealing forms. And we're going to see where that goes because it has not yet been legalized enough that you can do that. There's all this money and investment that is sort of jockeying for the day of legalization. Whether that legalization be medical, which is probably going to be at least nationally, the, the first step, right? It seems very plausible that you're going to get FDA approval for certain kinds of MDMA and psilocybin treatments in the coming years. But eventually, if it does become legalized, right? The way, say cannabis is in a, a number of states.

• 42:56Ezra Klein?

  The effects of commercialized cannabis, though some of them have been specifically to my benefit, are not, in my view, an unalloyed good. The amount of money going into very potent edibles and much more potent strains and packaging and formats that are much friendlier to kids and any kind of user, it's fine if you're somebody who has a fair amount of self-control around these things, but people do get addicted. I mean, people say pot isn't physiologically addicting, but people very much get addicted. And the most money is made on the people who buy the most of them. There are certain breaks in psychedelics that make it a little less likely to go down

• 43:38Ezra Klein?

  the same route, but I worry about the amount of money being spent on trying to figure out ways to basically get around the fact that it's actually really hard on the body and the mind and you develop tolerance to trip a lot, right? If you get into a situation down the road where the money is made by people who have an out-of-control relationship, that could be very psychologically damaging to people. So I think there's a lot of promise here and I think there's a lot of peril here. But I'm overall optimistic. I do think these are really powerful compounds that can create experiences in people's lives that both help them get over terrible problems, but also help them live a kind of deeper life in relationship to themself and to the world and to nature.

• 44:19Ezra Klein?

  And I think getting that right is going to require, though, not just the question of how do you legalize psychedelic compounds, but how do you create structures for their productive use? How do you create good guides? How do you make integration possible? That kind of period after you've had an experience and now you have to sort of figure out what that means for your life? How do you make that affordable to people? That, I think, is where a lot of the rubber is going to hit the road, which is, again, why I think what Oregon is doing is really interesting, but it's not been untroubled there. But if in 10 years you told me this did not go well, I would not be surprised by that. I'd be saddened by it, but not surprised.

• 44:57Aaron Retica?

  We're going to shift gears again into the heartland of the Ezra Klein show recently, which is AI. And Joseph C. is wondering how much, if any, credence you give to the simulation hypothesis first discussed about 20 years ago by Nick Bostrum. And obviously, you'll have to tell us what that is, because many people will not know.

• 45:18Ezra Klein?

  I don't. Just for the record, I really don't. So the simulation hypothesis is basically the idea that, look, imagine we became a society capable of running sufficiently technologically advanced. We're capable of running simulations of whole societies. We're not just running SimCity or playing video games, but we can just fire up on the computer and fire up as many of them as we want, you know, whole universes. Obviously, in Bostrum's view, we would want to do that. And obviously, the simulants within those universes would outnumber the people in base reality. And so if you just assume those two things are true, then you come to the conclusion that, well, probably we're a simulation because there's going to be more simulated people than real people. And so why should you think

• 46:03Ezra Klein?

  you're one of the real people? Here's what I will say about it. And I've said this, I think, probably in AMAs before. I think this has a quality of watching a very crude form of monotheism get reinvented by computer programmers, which is why it's very popular in Silicon Valley. If you take the very crude form of monotheism as God is like us, like bigger, you know, big throne, long white beard, more powers. This is God is like us, but bigger. Computer programmer with more powerful computers, player of simulation video games, but with a stronger video game system. And the reason I just don't buy it, and you know, maybe this is not a good reason, right? I'm not a credentialed philosopher.

• 46:48Ezra Klein?

  I think it is such an extraordinary lack of imagination about how weird ultimate reality probably is. Just the idea that like the true answer to what's going on here is so unbelievably simplistic, just like not what is going on here is exactly what we are already doing, just with more GPUs underneath the system.

• 47:11Ezra Klein?

  I just think it's so unlikely that that is like the full effect here. I think it's a kind of a lack of humility about what we do, what we almost certainly don't know. Why in the simulation have we created all these other planets? Why have we created a physics with such weird rules as such that the world is possibly constantly expanding? Why are there, is there not more life on nearby planets? Is that really how we would create a simulation? A gigantic, unimaginably large system of space in which, at least so far, we only know of this one planet with life on? Like, the whole thing just strikes me as so incurious in a way that I just don't buy it. I've always had a negative reaction to it, but it's because I think it basically takes

• 47:55Ezra Klein?

  our reality, holds what we know about it steady, and then asks a toy question within that. We don't know anything. We don't understand how quantum physics works yet. Reality is going to be so much weirder, so much more astonishing than it's just like us but bigger, just like us but more power. I just don't buy it.

• 48:17Aaron Retica?

  So, talking about power of generative models overall, Jordan A. is wondering, given the power of the AI models, we already know about it, and of course, there's lots in development as well, to produce convincingly human text at virtually no cost. It seems like we're likely to see a huge proliferation of AI astroturfing in the run up to the 2024 election, which is already upon us. In recent years, we've already seen misinformation and disinformation be big issues, both generally and with regard to elections. And so what Jordan A. is asking is what your thoughts are on if there is anything we can do to get ahead of this problem?

• 48:58Ezra Klein?

  I personally go back and forth on this problem. So, there's no doubt that in AI, we are creating really powerful machines for creating the raw materials of disinformation. Deep fakes and endless amounts of auto-generated textual content and images and videos and sound that sound like they came from a person, you know, you're trying to smear. And the various solutions I'm hearing from within the AI world strike me as very unconvincing. The main one you typically hear is that they're going to try to figure out a way to do digital watermarking, such that something came out from an AI, or maybe something comes out from something real, it gets a watermark of a certain kind, such

• 49:39Ezra Klein?

  it can be digitally read to verify its authenticity. The issue, I think, with the solution is also why I'm becoming a little bit somehow less worried about the problem, which is that the people who you're worried about picking this stuff up, they don't care about your digital watermark. That's actually misunderstanding, I think, quite profoundly the fake news problem. Fake news works when you're giving people something they already want to believe that they do not want to check. That is like the main way fake news works. It's not like people can't go to the New York Times to check something. They don't want to. They don't want to be told this isn't true, or they don't trust the New York Times, or whatever. The reason people believed in QAnon isn't because nobody

• 50:22Ezra Klein?

  had said to them, 4chan is not a reliable source of information. And so we actually also already have so much capacity to alter photographs, to spread misinformation, to send around email forwards full of bullshit. I'm not sure what the delta is. I'm not sure what the open space is in terms of people who are the market for this kind of disinformation, and like, don't have enough of it to work with. Another way of putting it is, is it the boundary on disinformation and misinformation at this point in human history, really that it is too hard to produce? I don't really think it is. And I think it's much more likely that you enter into a kind of cynical collapse of trust than an era of like rampant disinformation,

• 51:06Ezra Klein?

  right? If you don't believe that you can trust these videos coming around, and you often can't already, right? I mean, there are all these edited videos made to make it look like Joe Biden is having much more trouble speaking than he actually is. I mean, this stuff is already around if you want it. We're perfectly good at creating it now. It becomes easier, but I think the issue is actually the audience. And maybe better stuff increases the audience a little bit, although also the knowledge that there's better disinformation floating around. And might make the audience a little bit more skeptical. But I think the issue is an audience problem, like a demand problem, not a supply problem. And worrying too much about the AI side of it. Frames it as a supply problem and not a demand problem. So that's kind of my slightly more optimistic take. I think that the demand for this is already being fairly well met.

• 51:49Ezra Klein?

  And I'm a little skeptical, at least in the near term, that shifting the supply on it is going to radically change the equilibrium.

• 51:57Aaron Retica?

  I just saw this really interesting documentary about Roberto Echo and he talks in there about all these fake documents that have profoundly affected real history.

• 52:05Ezra Klein?

  Right, Protocols of the Elders of Zion.

• 52:06Aaron Retica?

  That's the example that he gives, yeah.

• 52:08Ezra Klein?

  I always say this about fake news. Fake news is not worse today than it has been at other points in history.

• 52:34Aaron Retica?

  So I mentioned earlier that we were gonna, that there were a lot of questions about the show and your process and how you think about things. And we're going to go into a sequence of those now. Let's start with Audrey C. A big chunk of what I seem to take out of listening to the podcast is an understanding of what it is to have a good conversation. So example, you push back on something a guest argues in an elaborate and a gentle way. In response, the guest doesn't always really address your point, but instead reformulates something that the guest has already said before. My brain goes, this person should get a second pushback. He's not answering, but then you don't go for it, which I come to appreciate very much as the guest is smart and honest enough. If they didn't answer, there has to be a reason, maybe that there just is no answer.

• 53:16Aaron Retica?

  So the question that Audrey actually wants to ask is, while making the show, what is it that you're learning about what makes a good conversation?

• 53:24Ezra Klein?

  I just so enjoyed this question because it answers itself so well. That's exactly true. There are certain kinds of conversations where pinning somebody down and making it unbelievably clear that they're not answering a question is important. The meet the press approach. Yeah, the meet the press approach. When you're trying to understand how somebody thinks, if they're not answering a question, they often have a reason. Sometimes their non-answer is the answer. It's what they know on the topic. It's how far their thinking goes. Like, if they don't have a great answer for it, that's where their thinking is at that point. So I tend to have a, personally, and I think this is like how conversations work between people. If I've asked somebody a question twice and I find the answer unsatisfying, but I think

• 54:09Ezra Klein?

  that's the answer they have to give me, I'm not asking them three or four or five times just to show that I can embarrass them. I don't want to say there's never a time for that. There is, right? If I had the president on, right? That requires a different kind of interviewing. But I do think there is a problem in a lot of interviewing around politics. It becomes performative. I think the audience is smart, right? Like, it's why I love this question. Audrey understands exactly what's happening here. The audience is a full engaged intellectual participant in the conversation. They're not talking, but they are evaluating. Oftentimes, I will get emails that are really like, "Why didn't you throw the final punch?" And the answer is like, "That's not what we're doing here.

• 54:54Ezra Klein?

  I'm not trying to embarrass the person in front of you." So then I just say, you know, in terms of what makes a good conversation, I think that's a very big question. And I don't have any one answer to it, but sometimes I think it's knowing what you want out of a conversation. And I think people are tuned to expect in politics that what makes a good conversation is some kind of persuasion. People really want to see somebody persuaded of something they don't believe, or see an argument torn down, or... And I don't think that's mostly what makes for good conversations. And I also don't think that typically works or even makes for good persuasion. I think a lot of the persuasion that has happened as a result of this show happens after it ends, is people think about what they've said, or what they haven't said, or people, you know, reflect on it. Certainly, it's true for me.

• 55:38Ezra Klein?

  And I think a good conversation is often people showing up in the same spirit of openness and exchange. And if you don't model that as a host, they're not going to bring that to you as a guest.

• 55:50Aaron Retica?

  When we were talking about the midterms last year, we talked a little bit about this, right? You just alluded to it at the beginning of the show about how so many public conversations, as you were talking about, community board meetings, or as we call them here in New York, are so performative and non-real. And I think one of the things that's interesting about the show, and not just your show, but just the whole podcast revolution, is that you have like these semi-private conversations that are happening in public, right? Which is much more interesting than the conversations that are happening in public. And I think that's a big part of what's interesting as well, which actually leads us, interestingly, to the next question from Chris M. Could you share details around your process for

• 56:32Aaron Retica?

  digesting and retaining information around such a broad array, wide array of topics? Or you would have a note taker? And if so, what have you found works best?

• 56:43Ezra Klein?

  This is a question I think we get basically every AMA. And the reason I'm doing it this time is something in my process changed. So we'll talk about this more in a minute, but I moved to New York. I now work out of the New York Times office in beautiful Times Square. And there are some advantages of coming into the office and some disadvantages. Commute is a lot of time. I get to work near you was a more positive thing. But the unexpected advantage is the access to an industrial strength printer. And Aaron's probably laughing because just my, my desk is just covered in paper now. And I had a laser jet at home and I would print things out, but it felt wasteful somehow to print out every article

• 57:23Ezra Klein?

  I'm reading for a podcast. But I think I get 50% more, 100% more out of my prep, doing it on paper, particularly when it's articles and shorter things as opposed to books, doing it on paper than doing it on a screen. Doing any prep on my actual computer where I have that many distractions, I can do it and I get something out of it, but it is much worse. And so I don't have a extremely structured process in the sense of, you know, this is how I take notes, or, you know, here's my system of markings or whatever. But at this point, my process is I print everything. I have this huge pile of paper and I Sit at a small table with a pen and I go through it.

• 58:03Ezra Klein?

  And the focus that that has offered has actually been a really big step forward for me. And perhaps from a very simple thing. So that's been nice and been a change. And obviously something that connects to things like the Mary Ann Wolf conversation. If people want to go back to that, and just very much about the way reading in different mediums will change the way you read, absorb and engage with information. But I've been surprised how true I've been finding that.

• 58:28Aaron Retica?

  Yeah, that episode is a favorite of mine and the prison squid. Her book is also incredible on that subject. Okay, so let's talk about diminishing focus. Sam M. asks, well, says, I used Twitter for a long time. I talked about how it was great for three things I like to stay up with news, politics and sports. The latter of which I will just inform the Ezra Klein audience. Ezra Klein has no interest in.

• 58:53Ezra Klein?

  So we'll focus on.

• 58:53Ezra Klein?

  Interesting. It's a lack of knowledge and interest.

• 58:59Aaron Retica?

  Yeah, exactly. I know Ezra logged off long ago and that's why I'm writing. Since leaving, I found a much better attention span for reading articles. Right. So that gets to what you were just talking about. With all that, I still feel like I'm missing things that I did get from Twitter. I'm missing people's thoughts on issues they don't write articles or podcasts about. I'm missing that collective feeling when it seems like everyone on Twitter is reacting to the same thing. So Sam wants to know what your thoughts are and how you handled leaving Twitter. Is there anything about it that you missed? What did you do to compensate for what you missed? And how do you stay up to date on current events?

• 59:35Ezra Klein?

  I did leave Twitter and I'll note that I've been playing around with threads a bit and I want to come back to that. And one reason I left Twitter, which is sort of, you know, before Musk completed his purchase of it. But when that was in the offing, but the problems with her for me predated Elon Musk. That I did a piece about Musk buying Twitter called Elon Musk will get Twitter because he gets Twitter or something like that. People can search it. I think it has proven like my most prescient piece of that year. And the point was that he was going to take what was worst about Twitter. Because he was somebody who likes what was worst about Twitter. Accelerate that and so heighten the contradictions of an already troubled platform that it would just slowly drive lots of people off of it.

• 1:00:20Ezra Klein?

  Not everybody, but it was just going to turn the balance enough that people were going to leave something or want to leave something they already didn't like. But I will die on this hill. Twitter is a bad way to be informed about the world. It's just a bad way to do it. And it's to the point I was making a minute ago about printing out your articles. It's about what you're not doing when you're on Twitter. And the best way I've found to articulate this is I think there's a really profound difference between feeling informed and being informed. And I think Twitter and frankly, a lot of things in social media specialize in giving people particularly jittery, info-hungry journalistic types, the feeling of being informed. But the people who I think of as most informed are the ones who seem the best at not doing

• 1:01:04Ezra Klein?

  things on Twitter. There's almost nobody whose knowledge of things is really Twitter-based knowledge or communicated primarily through Twitter, who I find like that is where I get my information and really value it. Like for instance, Sam misses a feeling when it seems like everyone on Twitter is reacting to the same thing. And I would say typically what they are reacting to is the wrong thing to be reacting to. So I have a burner account on Twitter for when I need to read something that's on there. And I happened to have to use it on the day there was a huge amount of debate about Joe Rogan demanding or challenging or offering money for this vaccine specialist to debate RFK Jr. on Rogan's show.

• 1:01:47Ezra Klein?

  And I mean, everybody in my feed, you know, like Nate Silver, everybody was commenting on this and they're all on the same thing. And in a way, being there made me feel like I was informed, right? I knew what the zeitgeist was that day. Like I was seeing the conversation and it was an extraordinarily dumb conversation.

• 1:02:06Ezra Klein?

  It was just a bad thing to allow into your mental space for that whole day. You would have just been better off reading a report about homelessness or whatever. And so to me, in terms of being informed about the world, actually, one of the really difficult disciplines is not letting the wrong mediums or the wrong people decide what you're thinking about. Not being too plugged into a conversation if you think that conversation has turned toxic, or you think that conversation has turned trivial, or you think that conversation is being driven by algorithmic dynamics that do not serve you. That's my view on Twitter. I've been playing around with threads, which I enjoy at this moment in time and may not continue to. We'll see how it evolves. But I don't fool myself into thinking what I'm doing there is informing

• 1:02:50Ezra Klein?

  myself. I would be much better off reading the paper, New York Times, than screwing around on threads. Threads is a fun way for me to sometimes screw around when I have a couple of minutes. The reason I answer this with some passion is I think this has become a really bad meme inside journalism that has been bad, in particular for young journalists, who their colleagues are on Twitter, their future and current bosses are often on Twitter. It feels like you're supposed to be there, or threads, or whatever. And that is time, you know, when you're spending a lot of time on Twitter, that, you know, you may not be spending doing the reading, doing the reporting, seeing things that other people aren't seeing because they're inside the newspaper, the magazine. In many ways, reading an issue of The Economist doesn't give me the same

• 1:03:35Ezra Klein?

  feeling of being informed that being on social media does, because I don't feel like I know what all the people who I'm supposed to know are thinking or thinking about. But I think it leads me to be much more informed, like actually informed. I'm reading about things I didn't already know about. I'm getting ideas for things I didn't have ideas on before. So I don't want to say you can't learn anything on Twitter. I mean, it does give you some good links and this and that, but there are better places to find that stuff, in my view. And I would say the same thing about threads, by the way, and the same thing about Blue Sky and Mastodon and Facebook and all the rest of it. I don't think, if you just look at the evolution of the news media and like information, I don't, I just don't think you can look at us today and look at us like 10 or 15 years ago and say, this has definitely gotten better.

• 1:04:21Ezra Klein?

  Like, we're just more informed or focusing on more of the right things. The public has a better sense of what's going on. There's more agreement on the fundamental questions being debated. And if things aren't getting better, then I think it should lead you to really be skeptical of claims that the platforms on which people are operating are improving things.

• 1:04:42Aaron Retica?

  So, besides getting to hang out with me, which you mentioned earlier, it's a small part of your move. Laura C. is wondering why you moved to New York, where I will just say you have not lived before. And she's saying, I may have missed it, but haven't heard you explain it. So can you tell your listeners why you're here?

• 1:05:00Ezra Klein?

  Yeah, I think this is probably our most popular question on this.

• 1:05:03Aaron Retica?

  Yeah, there were a lot of these.

• 1:05:04Ezra Klein?

  And there were some that were sort of offended, that had this quality of, how dare you move to New York and not explain why? And the answer is largely that it's personal, that we moved to be closer to my wife's family. There were relevant considerations around both of our offices. And so, New York just made a lot of sense, right? We had more, we have and had more family support. We have a good community here, and we have offices here. And that kind of explains all of it.

• 1:05:32Aaron Retica?

  So, Nolan M. is wondering about something that you and I talked about the last time we did this, actually. At the end of last year, you talked about a goal of incorporating a Sabbath or a day of rest into your life for 2023. And Nolan is wondering if you have routinely incorporated a kind of Sabbath into your life, and what the challenges have been that have prevented you from doing so. So you and I talk about this constantly, right? Because we try to leave Saturday sacrosanct without being particularly religious about it, but we have sometimes failed, because your column, of course, appears digitally on Sunday morning, although we're pretty good about it. But you feel very deeply about stopping time, so could you talk about that?

• 1:06:11Ezra Klein?

  Yeah, I put this mainly in to be accountable, having done this Sabbath episode. And the answer is, I have tried a lot of things that have not yet worked. And the issue is that what I would like is a day of rest, a cathedral in time, a space to slow down. And what my children would like is not that.

• 1:06:32Ezra Klein?

  And so we've done some, you know, tashabats and this and that kind of thing. And I tried pretty hard, as you say, not to work on, on the Saturday. But I've definitely found that there is a tension between the thing that I'm often seeking to feel personally, like as an individual individuated human for my children. And the thing that just being a parent of a four year old and a 22 month old demands, which is, you know, my Saturdays are spent. I mean, I've taken them to tashabats and things, but they just run around the whole time, which is what a tashabat is. And that's really beautiful. And I try to have Saturday be more of a family day. And all that works out pretty well. And it's really still just a lot of going to playgrounds and managing nap times.

• 1:07:17Ezra Klein?

  And all the other kids have their birthdays on Saturdays. You got to take your kid to the birthdays and it's not bad. But I have found the difficulty of actually getting over the hump as a young family to kind of finding a little bit more of that quieter, out of time feeling. Like the kids still need their routine. And I've taken a fair amount of comfort from Judith Shulevitz, who was my guest on the Sabbath episode, saying that, you know, until her kids were about five, it was kind of catch as catch can. And they were, they were working at it. So I, you know, I hope that I am building some foundations and intentions that are a good base on which to work in the future.

• 1:07:57Aaron Retica?

  What do you want from not working? Like, what is it you're trying to get?

• 1:08:00Ezra Klein?

  It's not the not working. I would like to have a day where I have a different experience and relationship to time and productivity. And I don't mean productivity just in what I create for the New York Times. I mean, it just the constant getting things done, the constant feeling that the sand of my hourglass is slipping into Google Calendar blocks endlessly. And that my time is almost always spoken for.

• 1:08:26Aaron Retica?

  Right. What am I doing today?

• 1:08:27Ezra Klein?

  Yeah. Look at the calendar. I have a real, I mean, real discomfort with modern Google Calendar culture. I think the fact that anybody can just put anything on your calendar, just that this has become the way we act.

• 1:08:40Aaron Retica?

  There's a killer there, right? They say, I'm going to put some time on your calendar. And I always think, well, actually you were doing the exact opposite. You are taking time away from me.

• 1:08:50Ezra Klein?

  It'd be a little bit to me like if everybody had sort of access in a way to your bank account and they could say like, you're going to spend, I'd like you to spend $80 on this and you could go and say, no, I'm not going to, but then anybody could allocate your money however they wanted if they had access and then you had to go in and affirmatively take it back. It's not a problem exactly. I mean, I understand why, you know, modern organizations have to work like this, but I would like a different relationship to time. I'm really moved by the Heschel kind of cathedral and time kind of thing, but it does require a certain amount of autonomy. And I think the nature of being a parent of young kids is it, it's just not much autonomy. And, you know, weekends are really for them. I mean, during the week, we have to work or both my partner and I work full time or

• 1:09:35Ezra Klein?

  even more than that. And so, you know, it does have to be kind of oriented around their needs. So I think the fundamental tension between like what I wanted out of Shabbat and what I've been able to get with it is that I think what I want is about what I want and what is possible is what my family needs. And like, that's totally okay. That is a phase of life.

• 1:09:52Aaron Retica?

  Something you and I talk about a lot and that we both, this is also another way of stopping or experiencing time that we don't get to talk about really in the column is music. I have failed so far in my attempts to get you interested in earlier classical music and jazz and I've been trying to get as interested in Keith Jarrett without success. But I did want to ask you for three music recommendations for your listeners because I know you're always pushing that thinking in that kind of way.

• 1:10:26Ezra Klein?

  Always my favorite question. So yeah, so I came prepared. So somebody we both quite like, my first recommendation was just probably the deepest music experience I've had, you know, over the past six months. I'm a big Caroline Shaw fan and she did an album with the Attica Quartet, who are also amazing called Orange. It won a Grammy a year or two ago. And there are a sequence of songs on that album called Plan and Elevation, but I really like this one called The Urbaceous Border and it's all strings. And

• 1:11:00Ezra Klein?

  I think I'm gonna try to sell it because I'm worried if I don't sell it, people won't try to listen to it. But one reason, and actually unites the conversation we were just having, is somehow it's become a song for me very associated with my children. So Shaw has talked about Summer for Music as being motivated by, you know, what would it be like to be an ant going through the forest? And I can kind of hear that in this sequence of songs. And in this one in particular, there's this moment in which it ends up in frenzy. And then it's like it stops. And it starts to come back very slowly and almost playfully and curiously. And for some reason, I'm very moved by it. It always makes me think of my children waking up in the morning. Right?

• 1:11:41Ezra Klein?

  You have these days and oftentimes to me, the day feels like it ends in a kind of frenzy between dinner and bedtime and you're exhausted and everybody needs a bath and somebody's crying. And then it's like every day with them, not with me, right? Me, I wake up, I'm like, what's on the calendar? What's happening, you know, in the news? Like, what do I have to do today? I hold everything of the day before with me. And they wake up and it's like, what's today's adventure? What are we doing today? They wake up fresh in this way that to me is really beautiful. And somehow this particular song has become very moving to me in wanting to sort of meet them in that. So you'll know, I think, what I mean or what part I mean when you listen to it, which I hope you do. So then the other, probably the thing I've listened to most this year, and this was a

• 1:12:26Ezra Klein?

  recommendation from our engineer, Jeff Geld. But Fred again, who is kind of known for sample heavy dance music, he's a protege of Brian Eno. But he did, if you ever follow NPR's Tiny Desk series, he did the best tiny desk I've ever seen. And he live loops his music built entirely out of instruments he can play there. There are vocal samples, but the instruments are things he can play in that little room. So it's functionally analog. And it's just virtuosic. It's amazing to watch on YouTube. It's great to listen to. A friend of mine made the point that it sounds in ways like Steve Reich, which I think is absolutely true, which I didn't notice until he said it. But, you know, people on the show know I love Steve Reich.

• 1:13:10Ezra Klein?

  And I just think it's awesome. I kind of can't imagine the person who would watch it and not think it's cool. So check out Fred again's Tiny Desk on YouTube. I'll say if you want something much dancier and a little harder, his album USB kind of didn't connect for me initially, but lately it's been very much living in my head. And then the final one, which is just a little easier than the other two is Maribou State. I find I go back to them a lot for music that is instrumentally interesting, but also very warm and very inviting, something, you know, you don't really put on Carolyn Shaw when you're cooking dinner with your friends, but this really works for that. But I figure the song I'll go with here is Midas.

• 1:13:47Aaron Retica?

  Okay, great. Well, on behalf of everyone here and all your listeners, we wish you a very merry book leave and hope you get a lot done. Hope time stops for you in just the right ways so that you can dig down deep, which is, as we've been talking about in a million different ways today, really the hardest problem of all, right? How to focus, how to concentrate and how to really drill down into the things that actually make the world what they are.

• 1:14:15Ezra Klein?

  I appreciate that. I appreciate you and being here and all the questions. I'll be gone for about three months. We're gonna have a great sequence of guest hosts who are gonna do, we were sort of working with them on the guests and my team is working with them on the questions. So we've done this before. I think the shows are gonna be great. So keep an eye on it. We're gonna be going down to one a week for this period. So it'll be a little bit easier for everybody to manage. But I hope you enjoy it.

• 1:14:48Ezra Klein?

  This episode of The Esso Clan Show is produced by Annie Galvin, fact checking by Michelle Harris, Kate Sinclair and Mary Marge Locker. Our senior engineer is Jeff Geld. Our senior editor is Roche Karma. The show's production team also includes Emma Fagou, Roland Hu and Kristin Lin. Original music is by Isaac Jones. Audience strategy by Christina Samulski and Shannon Busta. The executive producer of New York Times opinion audio is Annie Rose Strasser. And special thanks on this one to Sonia Herrera.