Elon Musk Might Break Twitter. Maybe That's a Good Thing.

If Elon Musk’s bid to purchase Twitter comes to fruition, the world’s richest person will own one of its most important communications platforms. Twitter might have a smaller user base than Facebook, Instagram and even Snapchat, but it shapes the dominant narratives in key industries like politics, media, finance and technology more than any other platform. Attention — particularly that of elite leaders in these industries — is a valuable resource, one that Twitter manages and trades in. Musk understands Twitter’s attention economy better than anyone. On numerous occasions, his tweets have sent a company’s stock or a cryptocurrency’s value skyrocketing (or plummeting). So what would it mean for Musk to own Twitter? How would that change the platform? How might he use Twitter to change, well, everything else? Felix Salmon is the chief economics correspondent at Axios, a co-host of the Slate Money podcast and someone who has spent a lot of time thinking about the economics of attention, the way modern financial markets work and how money impacts the technologies we use. We discuss Musk’s possible motivations for owning Twitter, how Musk’s distinct brand of tweeting has reaped financial windfalls, what Musk understands about finance and attention that many others don’t, why Twitter is so powerful as a storytelling machine, why journalists are turning away from it, what a decentralized Twitter might look like, how Web3 resembles the 1960s “back to the land” movement, how Musk could break Twitter — but why that might end up saving Twitter — and more. Mentioned: “Elon Musk Got Twitter Because He Gets Twitter” by Ezra Klein "A Crypto Optimist Meets a Crypto Skeptic” on The Ezra Klein Show “A Viral Case Against Crypto, Explored” on The Ezra Klein Show “The Way the Senate Melted Down Over Crypto Is Very Revealing” by Ezra Klein Book Recommendations: The Bond King by Mary Childs Typeset in the Future by Dave Addey The Surprise of Cremona by Edith Templeton 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. “The Ezra Klein Show” is produced by Annie Galvin, Jeff Geld and Rogé Karma; fact-checking by Jenny Casas, Michelle Harris, Rollin Hu and Kate Sinclair; original music by Isaac Jones and Carole Sabouraud; mixing by Jeff Geld; audience strategy by Shannon Busta. Our executive producer is Irene Noguchi. Special thanks to Kristin Lin and Kristina Samulewski.

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.

• 0:22Ezra Klein?

  So I'm recording this Thursday, April 28th. As of today, it's been a wild week. Elon Musk is poised to buy Twitter in a roughly $44 billion deal. If the sale completes, the world's richest person is going to own one of the most important communications platforms there is, a platform that shapes narratives in politics and media and finance and technology and so much more. You may not care about Twitter or use it. I know many of you don't. I admire that. But what happens there affects you anyway. I'd argue that Donald Trump rode his Twitter account to the presidency and of course, used his Twitter account very aggressively throughout his presidency. It was arguably his main communication channel. So things that happened there end up affecting the

• 1:06Ezra Klein?

  whole world, whether or not the rest of the world wants to be there. What makes Twitter powerful is attention. It's a very liquid market for attention. And I've been interested for a long time in the economics of attention and how they're changing. The classic analysis of this is that when information becomes abundant, as it has become in our era, it is attention that becomes scarce and thus attention that becomes really valuable. And attention is what Twitter manages and trades in, particularly the attention of elites in really key industries. Elon Musk is one of the most sophisticated users and channelers and focusers of attention in the world right now.

• 1:52Ezra Klein?

  Some of it in the service of his companies and arguably his profits, some of it just because he seems to like using it, telling stories, keeping things where he wants them to be, being the center of it. So how does it change for him to be maybe the most important user of this platform to its owner? How does that change Twitter? How can he use Twitter to change maybe everything else? And what does all of this tell us? What light does it reflect on the value of attention today? Felix Salmon is a chief financial correspondent for Axios. He's co-host of the podcast Slate Money and someone who has thought a lot about the economics of attention, the way modern financial markets work and the intersection of the two. So this is one of those conversations that went in directions that I didn't predict,

• 2:37Ezra Klein?

  which made it a real delight to have. As always, my email, as for Klein Show at nytimes.com.

• 2:47Ezra Klein?

  Felix Salmon, welcome to the show.

• 2:49Speaker 01

  It's a great pleasure.

• 2:51Ezra Klein?

  So as of Monday, Twitter looks like it's going to be sold to Elon Musk in a roughly $44 billion deal, a big deal for Twitter. Why do you think he wants it?

• 3:02Speaker 01

  So I think Elon Musk is like the classic YOLO investor slash entrepreneur. He always goes full out, puts himself on the sort of edge of the envelope as much as possible, tries to do things that everyone says is impossible. When he first invested in Tesla, he basically put all of the money he had in the world, all of the money he made from selling PayPal into that. He is not the kind of billionaire who likes to just see the numbers on his bank account go up. He doesn't actually spend a lot of money on sort of personal Googles. He famously sold all of his properties because he didn't really care about them.

• 3:45Speaker 01

  And what he wants to do, what he feels happiest is when he's like on the edge doing something dangerous and impossible. And so if he spends all of his free cash on...

• 3:57Speaker 01

  Buying Twitter and then tries to do something dangerous, impossible, and puts himself in a position where everyone is going to hate him. And he has this vague sort of notion of free speech, something, something that he probably got from a late night bull session with Peter Thiel 20 years ago. That is what makes him feel alive. I think he's just really excited about doing something dangerous again. When, you know, when you are worth $200 billion, nothing is really dangerous.

• 4:27Ezra Klein?

  I take Musk's stated view, stated purpose, that he's buying Twitter because he thinks Twitter is important and he thinks free speech is very important. Seriously, I think that the first thing you should do when people make moves is to listen to what they're saying about the move. What is perplexing about it to me is that Twitter is a place where speech is relative, it is quite free, actually, compared to when I was coming up in journalism or when I was younger. I don't think there's anything like the speech madness of Twitter. Now, there are margins. There are things you can say, should they have gotten rid of Donald Trump when he was spreading election disinformation? But those become really, really hard cases and deciding them differently on the margin. There are speech issues in both directions.

• 5:12Ezra Klein?

  For instance, if elections are no longer credible, that's actually bad for speech and bad for political representation and bad for a bunch of the linked values you might have. Or if it's really easy to spread what people believe at the time, to use a tough example, that I think Twitter decided wrongly, but to use a tough example of suppressing the New York Post reporting on the Hunter Biden laptop. If it's really easy for what you believe to be foreign government disinformation or hacking to be spread on Twitter, that's also a kind of speech problem, not just a letting them do it is not simply a speech answer. So I think that's where some of the confusion comes in.

• 5:47Speaker 01

  Although I think, I think as far as Elon is concerned, he has a very simplistic view of this. He has the view that like, let all of the misinformation flow and as long as it's legal, you can do it. He hasn't struggled with the complexities. He hasn't done this in practice and he certainly hasn't looked at all of the European Union laws against various forms of speech, which will actually severely constrain what can be put on Twitter if he has to comply with those. He's still in sort of honeymoon, hearts in his eyes phase right now in terms of what he thinks Twitter can be. But the one thing that we can look to is not so much what Elon has said about Twitter, but what Jack Dorsey has said about Twitter. And Jack Dorsey-

• 6:30Speaker 01

  The former CEO and, and co-founder. And the co-founder. And he has always been upset at Twitter being a public company and the need to make money. And of course, it was his predecessor, CEO, Dick Costolo, who really moved it into the advertising business. And that was financially reasonably successful, but it did move Twitter away from the Jack Dorsey dream. And we know that Jack Dorsey and Elon Musk are very close. And it is conceivable, if what Elon Musk says about him not doing this for money and not really caring much about the economics

• 7:10Speaker 01

  is correct, that we could get a purer and cleaner and in a weird way, better Twitter. For instance, let's just say, he gets rid of the retweet counts. He gets rid of the public follower counts. He gets rid of the likes, you know, he gets rid of all of that gamification, which makes Twitter such a terrible place and just makes it a platform for free speech. That would make it hard for him to service the debt that he's taking on to buy Twitter, because it needs to make a lot of money in order to do that. But it would become closer to the dream that Jack Dorsey has, and I think he probably has as well.

• 7:50Ezra Klein?

  I want to put a pin in the way you described that dream because I don't think Dorsey's dream and I don't see any evidence of Musk's dream is that you de-gameify Twitter. The like button, the retweet button, the quote tweet feature, those are all there and used and enjoyed by those folks. What I do though, want to say about that is you brought up something I think is important in the financing of the deal, which is the way Musk is doing it puts a pressure on Twitter to make money or a pressure on Musk to lose money that wasn't there before. So, so can you expand a bit on that piece?

• 8:23Speaker 01

  So there are three ways that Musk is paying for Twitter. One is that he is putting up $21 billion of cash and no one really knows where he's going to get $21 billion of cash, although he did just get about $20 billion worth of options vested as part of this incredible pay package that he received in 2018. So he might wind up using that and a bit of other money. So anyway, he's going to have to raise the cash probably by selling a bunch of Tesla stock in one way or another. The next part is that he's going to hold on to a bunch of Tesla stock but borrow against it. And so roughly $12 billion is going to be borrowed against his existing Tesla stock.

• 9:08Speaker 01

  He's going to have to pay interest on those borrowings and that interest is going to be, I don't know, $400 million, $500 million a year, which is a significant amount of money. And in theory, he's going to want Twitter profits to pay for that interest. But then on top of that, he's using Tesla itself to borrow money. This is a classic leveraged buyout move where you basically mortgage the company that you're buying and then you use the profits of the company to pay the mortgage. And he is borrowing so much money against.

• 9:45Speaker 01

  Twitter itself, that in order to just pay the mortgage on the company, Twitter is going to have to make more money than it's making right now. So add that all together and it's going to be hard for him to demonetize it, to reduce the reliance on advertising unless he comes up with some other revenue model, like, you know, making people like you and me pay for this thing that we're addicted to. He's going to need to find ways for Twitter to make a lot of money, unless he is happy losing a few hundred million dollars a year on Twitter, which maybe he is. If you're happy spending forty four billion dollars on an asset, if it's a consumption good, if it's just something you're buying

• 10:28Speaker 01

  because you think it's important to own it and you have a dream for what it can be, maybe he's okay, you know, spending forty four billion and then also a few hundred million a year.

• 10:38Ezra Klein?

  Well, the other argument, and this does get to the point that the tech writer Ranjan Roy was making. Nobody has made more money arguably through Twitter than Elon Musk. Can you talk a bit about the way that he has understood consciously or subconsciously to how he can use Twitter's attentional power to increase evaluations of things he owns, buys, invests in, or simply cares about or enjoys?

• 11:09Speaker 01

  I'm not entirely sure I agree with Ranjan on this one. There is no doubt that there is a correlation between the velocity with which Elon Musk tweeted and the point in time that Tesla stock went to the moon. And Ranjan's thesis is that somehow there's a causal relationship here and that the tweeting caused the Tesla stock to go up. And I

• 11:41Speaker 01

  Don't really buy it. Like, the idea is that Elon Musk becomes this one-person PR and marketing campaign by dint of being big on Twitter, and that's all he needs for the stock to go up, and he becomes this meme stock, and all the Elon Musk fanboys love his Twitter account, wind up buying Tesla stock in their Robin Hood accounts. And if we were talking about a company the size of GameStop, say, then I would buy that. But we're not talking about a few-billion-dollar company like GameStop. We're talking about a trillion-dollar company like Tesla. And when you're talking about a trillion-dollar company, I just don't believe that the massive institutional investors who are buying and

• 12:26Speaker 01

  selling that stock are doing so on the basis of Elon tweets.

• 12:31Ezra Klein?

  So I buy that for Tesla largely, which is to say, I don't really agree with you that the way Musk has built himself into a real-life version of Tony Stark in the media is irrelevant to the incredible, incredible multiple Tesla trades at over profits. I mean, it is a very strong stock against its fundamentals. But I do think, long-term, Tesla makes cars and it sells them. It isn't a stock where I worry that, over any very, very extended period of time, it can be wildly out of step between its valuation and its value. But Musk is somebody who has experimented and enjoyed using primarily Twitter to move

• 13:15Ezra Klein?

  all kinds of markets around. I think the very fun version of this is Dogecoin, where he clearly had a hobby of just getting people to invest in this weird meme coin, and he sent its value up billions and billions of dollars. There's a famous case where he told people to use Signal, which is an encrypted text messaging service, but a company called Signal, its stock began multiplying because people misunderstood what he was saying. In general, there is something that he seems to see and at least play with experimentally around attention, valuation.

• 13:51Ezra Klein?

  Crypto Tesla bought a bunch of Bitcoin and by announcing that buy Bitcoin went way up making the value of Tesla's Bitcoin buy worth a lot more. There's something there that I think whether or not you think it's why he bought Twitter, it's actually not why I think he bought Twitter, but it is relevant to what Twitter is doing and to a weird intersection between finance, attention and social media that seems increasingly central to a lot of markets right now.

• 14:17Speaker 01

  Yeah, this is what's known as the Elon Musk meme lord thesis, basically. And he is the Uber meme lord and he can move things like Dogecoin just by tweeting and he is a master shitposter and he takes a lot of joy in shitposting and good for him, right? And there are financial consequences in relatively minor shitcoins like Dogecoin or in tiny little stocks like this company called Signal that went up. And one of the curious things about Elon's tweeting is that while he is surely

• 14:59Speaker 01

  aware that there are financial consequences to his tweets, he doesn't seem to have any particular interest in monetizing those. In fact, if you look at the Dogecoin escapade, when he tried to make Dogecoin hit a dollar when he appeared on Saturday Night Live, he failed, right? It actually went down when he appeared on SNL. He doesn't quite have the unlimited meme lord powers that people sometimes ascribe to him. And when you're as rich as Elon Musk and you are doing as big, ambitious things as Elon Musk is doing in space and electric vehicles, in batteries,

• 15:40Speaker 01

  in solar power, and you know, you name it, this is a hobby. This is not a core financing mechanism.

• 15:48Ezra Klein?

  I want to think about the difference here between a financing mechanism and a storytelling mechanism, because I think there's some connection there that's a little bit fuzzy. It's always nice for me when people come on the show and don't say what I'm expecting them to say. Because one thing that was in my head with you is a quote that you've written, which is, "Attention is a commodity, which means that memes, a way of focusing and scaling attention, are a way to create value. No one understands this better than Elon Musk." And to put my cards down a bit, one thing I'm interested in this conversation is this idea of attention as a way to create value, at the very least, to create valuation. So

• 16:30Ezra Klein?

  you sound pretty skeptical of this idea now, but when you wrote that, what were you thinking about?

• 16:36Speaker 01

  So I think, no, that's true. He understands the attention economy. He did achieve something with Tesla. And I'm saying like, maybe a year ago, especially when Tesla's stock was going through the roof, it did feel like Tesla was the only game in town when it came to electric vehicles. And they were like coterminous. It was like vacuum cleaners and Hoovers or copiers and Xerox, you know? Everyone who wanted to believe in the future, the dream future that Elon Musk was painting, had to perforce believe in Tesla. And his incredibly

• 17:15Speaker 01

  high public profile was certainly instrumental in helping to solidify that connection. The way that Tesla gets the trillion dollar valuation is basically by getting monopoly power in electric vehicles, being three years ahead of any other EV manufacturer for the foreseeable future. And I think one of the reasons the other EV manufacturers like Rivian and Lucid are now trading at very high valuations, although lower than they were, one of the reasons why people are very excited about Ford in particular, when it comes to the traditional auto manufacturers, is that people are thinking, whoa, actually, if you look at all of the EVs out there... Tesla doesn't necessarily have the best ones anymore.

• 18:00Speaker 01

  It's not necessarily three years ahead of everyone else. It might still be probably the best, best value if you put everything together. But there's no particular reason to believe that that's going to be the case. The love of the EV market, the love of the EV story, the power of that storytelling, no longer automatically just results in Tesla stock going up because it could just as easily result in Ford stock going up.

• 18:27Ezra Klein?

  I think this point about storytelling is really important. And I want to maybe steel man my view of why he bought Twitter, which is related to what you just said, which is, I don't think he needs a financing mechanism for Tesla. It's very well financed. In fact, he's taken a bunch of money out and losing some valuation in Tesla by doing this. I do think that when he talks about the importance of speech, he is not just thinking about how easy it is for, say, I don't know, neo Nazis to post on Twitter. Like not that many people actually get banned on Twitter for what they say.

• 19:06Ezra Klein?

  So the speech gains of unleashing moderation strike me as relatively marginal. If you believe, and I think this is roughly correct, that Twitter is the most important narrative setter in the most important industries in the world, politics, finance, entertainment, media, technology, and you are somebody like Musk who believes it is very important that people have narratives of the future that he thinks are good ones because he's trying to instantiate a particular idea of the future in the present. And Twitter is a place those narratives are really at war.

• 19:49Ezra Klein?

  Then how that place evolves, whatever the near term question of, you know, an edit button is, becomes really, really important. And beyond the valuation of any particular stock, I think his view, and I think it's a reasonable view, is that Storytelling drives much more of the economy, much more of politics and much more of long-term investment and even buying decisions than people want to believe. And that storytelling now happens on these social platforms, like the billionaires before Musk bought newspapers, but he sees further than they are. So he's buying the platform.

• 20:28Speaker 01

  100%. And that I completely agree with, that the billionaires before him, the short-sighted billionaires who only had single-digit billions to waste on media whimsy, would do something like Jeff Bezos buying the Washington Post, or Marc Benioff buying Time Magazine, or Pat Sundong buying the LA Times. You have a certain amount of money that you can afford to lose, and you buy a media outlet and you feel important. And you're absolutely right, that Twitter is a meta-media outlet. It is much bigger. It is the platform that undergirds all of those.

• 21:11Speaker 01

  It is more akin to something like Rupert Murdoch owning Fox News. It is a very powerful tool for anyone to spread narratives that everyone has to pay attention to, and owning that makes you probably the most powerful billionaire in the world. Up until now, it's been Mark Zuckerberg, right? Because Mark Zuckerberg controls Facebook and Instagram, which are vastly larger than Twitter. But they don't have quite the same narrative power that I think you correctly ascribe to Twitter.

• 21:51Speaker 01

  And then if you take the narrative power of Twitter and you add it to the narrative of Elon Musk as Tony Stark, the man who can shape the future, who is going to space, who's single-handedly created the EV industry, and so on and so forth, that gives Elon Musk a level of influence and power that I don't think we've seen in one man in our lifetimes.

• 22:18Ezra Klein?

  Why does Twitter have that level of narrative-setting power? I obviously believe it does. You believe it does, but... Facebook is bigger and I don't think we believe it does TikTok, I think at this point is probably bigger or is at least going to be bigger. I haven't looked at the numbers. I think it's bigger. I don't think we believe it has that narrative setting power. So what is it about Twitter? Because people listen to this, they're not going to, a lot of people are not on it who listen to the show. I know this because I get their emails.

• 22:44Speaker 01

  Well done. Congratulations.

• 22:45Ezra Klein?

  Yeah, there's this weird dynamic where everybody who's a power user is self loathing about it. What makes Twitter powerful in your view?

• 22:53Speaker 01

  The thing that makes Twitter powerful is it's A, public in a way that none of the other ones, except for maybe Instagram are. And B, there's a network effect where everyone is on it because everyone is on it. So Jack Dorsey replied to one of my tweets last week, right? And that kind of, I put up a tweet, Elon Musk replies, Jack Dorsey replies, Marc Andreessen replies, Tim Geithner. I had notes that you can get a whole bunch of people coming into a conversation.

• 23:27Ezra Klein?

  Tim Geithner does not reply to things on Twitter.

• 23:29Speaker 01

  Tim Geithner does not, but like Neil Kashkari might, you know?

• 23:32Ezra Klein?

  Yeah, absolutely. We know Jerome Powell, the Fed chair, reads a bunch of financial Twitter tweet writers.

• 23:39Speaker 01

  And so, yeah, there's a lot of people read it, but even the people who are writing manage to find themselves in high level conversations that they used to, you know, have to go to Davos to have and pretend to be polite. And these ones are much more honest, much more freewheeling. And between them, they really do create narrative. There is like a VC Twitter narrative. You know, there's a big anti-woke narrative on Twitter, which where it's where these things often coalesce.

• 24:10Ezra Klein?

  And woke narrative.

• 24:11Speaker 01

  And there's also a very strong woke narrative on Twitter. Absolutely, you know? And it used to be that the woke narrative would be born and develop. Maybe on Tumblr. Tumblr barely exists anymore. Now, all of that has moved to Twitter. There's been this giant sucking sound that if you want to be part of the public conversation on any subject, you need to be on Twitter. There's no other platform for that kind of town square. Everyone who's anyone is talking about the things that matter.

• 25:11Ezra Klein?

  So here's a very simple model of all this. We could say that attention has always been a valuable resource. It's always been something that, at some level, can be traded into currency. Elite attention is a particularly valuable form of that resource. And there has never been a market as liquid with elite attention and with as low a barrier to entry to get near that attention, particularly if you already have some purchase, as Twitter. It's why people used to go to Davos, but now it happens all the time, right from your computer or your phone, more to the point.

• 25:56Ezra Klein?

  And you can do it and take your shot a million times a day while you're bored, trying to procrastinate on something else. But it's that that liquid attentional market seems new. The ability to manipulate that and participate in it at scale seems like a genuine change to how media is run, how financial narratives are created, how things are valued, how they're understood, et cetera. That feels to me like the relevant change here.

• 26:25Speaker 01

  I think it's hard to manipulate. I think Donald Trump managed. I think Elon Musk has managed and probably maybe Mark Andreessen is managing on the margins. But beyond that, it's hard to think of people who are really changing Twitter. You participate in it. You are on a largely equal footing with everyone else. And it's particularly difficult to monetize. Right? I think Twitter has done a very bad job of selling the attention of those power users to people who want that attention. Given the number of incredibly important people on Twitter, they can't be targeted.

• 27:09Speaker 01

  Twitter is not like saying you can put an ad in front of Jay Powell and he's going to see it. I think probably, given his web three evangelism, Elon Musk has a plan to try and use crypto somehow to make every human authenticated and then to somehow be able to monetize that more effectively. But I think that's still in super, super early days.

• 27:35Ezra Klein?

  I think I'm using manipulated more neutrally than you are, which is simply to say, I think I'm probably using it more similarly to participate. But I do think people are able to monetize it in small ways. I think a lot of journalists get jobs because they're known by other journalists and seen by people on Twitter. I think that a lot of people in the tech industry get known by each other on Twitter. The reason I think it tends to be powerful in industries where it has high penetration is that it becomes part of your status in the collective psyche of people who might hire you or work with you. And so that is something that at key moments can really matter in terms of the amount of money you make. I know a lot of Substack writers and Casey Newton, for one, who writes the great Substack

• 28:19Ezra Klein?

  Platformer, which is a fantastic tech industry newsletter. But he said in order to get People to pay him for his newsletter, he's got to be on Twitter a lot, plump in the newsletter. And so I think there's a lot of that, which is more modest than, you know, the Elon Musks who can dominate it. But, you know, years ago, Sean McElwee, the head of data for Progress Now, who's like become a more moderate guy, but he used Twitter to get abolish ICE into a line that people really use. Like, I'm watching Catholic integralists on Twitter become a thing where you actually can say the words Catholic integralists. And some people might know what you mean. One thesis I have, and you can tell me if you think it's wrong, I think attention matters.

• 29:00Ezra Klein?

  I think it is mattering more because you can now get more of it at scale more often than was possible to do before.

• 29:09Speaker 01

  I think that's right. And I think there's a case to be made that Travis Kalanick might still be running Uber today if it wasn't for the delete Uber hashtag taking off on Twitter.

• 29:20Ezra Klein?

  The Me Too hashtag took off on Twitter. The Black Lives Matter hashtag took off on Twitter.

• 29:25Speaker 01

  Yeah, if you can distill a concept down to a hashtag, if you can create Black Lives Matter as a hashtag, you can start a movement and that can really change the world for sure. That's 100% a thing that happens. And again, happens really overwhelmingly on Twitter as opposed to other social networks. It's a bit weird to me how central Twitter is, although I think there's a case to be made that we think it's central just because it's the most visible part. That if a bunch of people are saying delete Uber on Facebook because it's private and no one sees it,

• 30:07Speaker 01

  the effect is there, but it's invisible. It's like dark matter. It's like traffic that websites get from people sharing emails with each other. And so we underestimate how important it is. And we take a bunch of that power from Facebook and attribute it to Twitter. So maybe we're overestimating, but there's no doubt that it definitely is powerful.

• 30:31Ezra Klein?

  Well, I think it's funny, it's not the conversation I'd intended to have, but I like having this one because I do think about this a lot. I think we're in the turn now. I think it was more central four or five years ago. And I think we're currently in the lag as it's becoming less central. And the reason I think it's becoming less central is I think more industries and institutions have developed different kinds of immune systems to what's going on on Twitter. It's notable that my own institution, The New York Times, on the newsroom side, just put out this big memo saying, "We really encourage you, reporters, not to be on Twitter that much, not to imagine what is happening there is what is really happening in the world." And I think that's a response to the view The New York Times has actually been too responsive

• 31:16Ezra Klein?

  on Twitter, too open to Twitter as a coverage-setting agenda driver. But one thing I think is happening, actually, is that the feeling of being deluged by a public on Twitter, a micro-public, was really shocking and new a couple of years ago to institutions, and they didn't know how to react. So in general, they overreacted, they overread what it meant, they followed it too closely, both when it was aimed at them and just when as a signal of sentiment elsewhere. And when I look at a lot of different places now, politics also being one of them, I see much more pushback to that than there was, you know, even in 2018.

• 31:54Speaker 01

  You know, you and I are bloggers, and we understand you shouldn't read the comments. You know, your comments are not your readers. And we kind of get that, but it's true. Like, when you are the subject of a Twitter pile-on, and I'm sure it's happened to both of us, like, it feels terrible and it's, you do feel like everyone is attacking you, even when everyone is really not attacking you. It's a very disproportionate, unrepresentative part of Twitter mob. So it's good that what you're saying is happening. Personally, I use it much less than I used to. I find myself in private Slacks and other, you know, text message groups and stuff. The stuff that I want to say, which is a little bit trolly...

• 32:40Speaker 01

  I don't need to say that on Twitter and it feels good and I don't need to be feeding that particular beast. So I am with you. I would love Twitter to become less important. I think and I hope that it will, that places like the New York Times will continue to underweight it compared to where they were.

• 32:59Ezra Klein?

  It's funny because this is, as somebody who wants to see Twitter become somewhat less influential, I actually think it's good Elon Musk is gonna own it. Because my somewhat counterintuitive take, and I would call this a hypothesis much more than a prediction, is that he's gonna make some of these contradictions and weirdnesses very difficult to ignore. You mentioned earlier Twitter is a public square, which on some level it is, but what it really is, is a gamified conversation played for the benefit of a corporation that has somehow come to serve as a public square in a way that I think is very bad for public discourse. I don't think most people are their best selves on Twitter. I really love

• 33:41Ezra Klein?

  listening to Elon Musk in a lot of forums. I think he's a really interesting, thoughtful person and I really don't like the person he is on Twitter, where he often bullies people and is shitty to folks with a lot less power than he has. But what's gonna be weird to me when Musk owns it is, as he continues to use it, and he's very unleashed there, he indulges his resentments, he goes on the warpath against Senator Elizabeth Warren, calling her Senator Karen, he calls people who question him pedophiles, et cetera, et cetera. It's gonna feel really weird to people when they're upset at what the owner of Twitter is doing to provide free labor to the owner of Twitter. And that's not gonna lead to

• 34:22Ezra Klein?

  some collapse of the platform or everybody to leave it immediately. But to what we're saying, in a world where I think there's already a lot of skepticism, a lot of tipping point dynamics around how a lot of influential Twitter users feel about being there, when Musk inevitably turns on them for one reason or another, it's gonna be very hard to come back the next day and say, well, I'll continue writing popular content for this thing that the more I create for it, the more money on the very, very small margin, but collectively in a real way goes into your pocket. Having your biggest and most aggressive user be the owner forces you to really ask, do you like the owner and do you want to keep working for him?

• 35:04Ezra Klein?

  And being on Twitter is now on some level, working or at least volunteering for Musk Industries, or it will be if the acquisition goes through.

• 35:13Speaker 01

  I feel like a lot of people have been making this argument about Facebook and Instagram for a while. They're like, why am I providing all of this money and power to Mark Zuckerberg, who is the person who I don't really agree with and I don't want to enrich? And yeah, sure, it works at the margin. You know, I have a bunch of people I communicate with over Signal rather than WhatsApp, because he owns WhatsApp and not Signal. So it does happen, but I don't think it happens to a degree that it's really going to move the needle. I mean, let me ask you, right? Donald Trump came out, told Fox News that even if and when Elon Musk allows him to rejoin Twitter, he won't.

• 35:58Speaker 01

  Do you believe that?

• 36:00Ezra Klein?

  No, I don't believe that, but I don't think that's the same situation. I have very complicated feelings about Elon Musk, the person. I think he has acted in a lot of ways where for somebody of his power, it was intolerable for him to act that way, like calling the guy who questioned him a pedophile or some of the union busting stuff. But I also think he's done tremendous good in the world. What he's done in the electric car market, in the solar panel market, in the rocket market, what he tried to do in helping cofound OpenAI, what he's trying to do with Neuralink. I'm somebody who thinks that his overall effect on the world has largely been quite good. And in some ways, I worry this will distract him from better pursuits. So when I make this analogy, I don't make it fully.

• 36:46Ezra Klein?

  I would not be on a network owned by Donald Trump if he bought it. I just wouldn't be. I won't go on Truth Social and try to become a big tweeter on Truth Social or whatever, truther, I guess. Zuckerberg, I think, is an interesting counter example to me. He works very hard to try to be personally non-controversial. Now, he's not because his platform is so important, so he actually cannot be. But Mark Zuckerberg is not out there in, as Elon Musk calls it, going goblin mode against the people he doesn't like on Instagram. It just doesn't happen. And if he was, if he unleashed routinely and used it as much more of a venue for his

• 37:28Ezra Klein?

  interests and weighted himself in the algorithm, I think that would actually cause a lot of problems for Facebook. I think, as you say, some people, not that many, have backed off of Facebook already. If he raised the contradictions there to intolerable levels, if he really personified it himself and made himself more controversial, it wouldn't be enough to destroy it. I just think it would matter.

• 37:51Speaker 01

  So what you made me think of there was this perennial debate, which Elon Musk is at the center of, between being public and being private. And Elon Musk famously hated Tesla being a public company. He tried to take it private. He failed to take it private. With hindsight, he would have made an insane amount of money if he'd succeeded in taking it private. But he doesn't like the way that the public markets have the attention span of a gnat. And he doesn't like the fact that the public markets allow Bill Gates to put on a short position, betting that Tesla stock is going to go down. He doesn't like shorts in general.

• 38:34Speaker 01

  He does like running companies like The Boring Company or SpaceX, which aren't public. And he just gets to control without all of the noise associated with public companies. He just gets to do what he wants and not get second guessed the whole time. It seems to me that what you're saying is that all of that noise and the fact that public companies are owned by millions of people, literally millions of people, everyone with a S and P 500 index fund owns some little sliver of Tesla, that that kind of broad distribution of ownership is a good thing for something which is akin to a public utility

• 39:18Speaker 01

  like Twitter, and that any kind of private ownership is a bad thing.

• 39:24Ezra Klein?

  I think you could always imagine the benevolent dictator.

• 39:29Ezra Klein?

  It's just that, as we've seen in governments around the world, it is hard to actually have far sighted benevolent dictators.

• 39:37Speaker 01

  What I would say about the, I would say about the public ownership of Twitter is that that is far from benevolent.

• 39:46Ezra Klein?

  Well, that's why I would like to finish the point.

• 39:48Speaker 01

  The imperative of being public, permanent growth, that no matter how big you are, no matter how much money you make, no matter how successful you are, your shareholders are always going to want you to be bigger and more successful and make more money next quarter, next year, next decade. And that imperative to keep on growing is, I believe quite strongly, one of the big reasons why social media has become so poisonous. That that imperative for growth has created an economic necessity to optimize for attention and the way you optimize for attention

• 40:30Speaker 01

  is by creating outrage and mobs and, you know, shitposts.

• 40:35Ezra Klein?

  So I don't know that I buy that, but I also, the second half of what I was going to say is, I don't believe public ownership of these things is good either, but I think I would put the equation differently than you do. You're saying, given that social media companies are the public square, do you prefer private or public ownership? And I think I'm saying, I guess it a little bit depends on which private and public ownership, but, but still, my question is always how to not have these institutions, these platforms be as central as public squares. I think it should be much more fractured than it is. And I think they're bad. And I think, I mean, this is my column of the Times today,

• 41:19Ezra Klein?

  but I think Twitter specifically is a terrible public square. I have this whole riff that a couple of years ago, Jack Dorsey, who clearly always has had a complicated relationship with Twitter a bit, obviously finds what he has built remarkable, but also seemed a little bit appalled by it the whole time. I think he's somebody who sees both the good and the bad of it relatively clearly. He tried to rebuild Twitter's

• 41:45Ezra Klein?

  Mission around promoting healthy conversations. And they commissioned a bunch of research on how to measure the health of conversation and gave this congressional testimony about, you know, we're here to serve the public conversation and increase its civility and its health and its blah, blah, blah, blah. The reason that can never work is that this is never how you would build something for public conversation. I mean, we know a lot actually about what makes people talk to each other well and reflect and be open to change and having quote tweet functions, but even having 280 characters to say nothing of 140 that came before it is never how you would do it. Because by design, you actually have to strip nuance out of what you're saying just to fit it in the box.

• 42:28Ezra Klein?

  And so more so than I think the, the great difference here is private or public, the question I'm always asking myself as somebody in politics where I think Twitter is particularly a poison is what are the conditions that would have to arise for it to be only 60% as influential in the minds of political decision makers and actors as it is today? I don't think the great question is, is it on the stock market or has it become the private playground of a very, very strongly opinion billionaire who is mega billionaire, who is also its biggest and most aggressive user? Those both seem like frankly, bad outcomes to me.

• 43:12Speaker 01

  Well, let me, let me give you an example of a social network that is not optimizing for attention, LinkedIn, where you can post at whatever length you like, you can have long thoughtful conversations that has astonishing reach in the professional world. People really do go there every day to read what's happening in the industry and to be part of that conversation where conversations are astonishingly civilized. There's very little controversy over what gets posted there. And all of that stuff is basically just a way to keep people.

• 43:53Speaker 01

  On the platform and engaged with the platform so that if and when they want to get a new job, they will be easily reached there and they'll keep their CV up to date, their resume up to date on the platform. That seems to work quite well. Like, I don't think Microsoft, which owns LinkedIn, is trying to optimize LinkedIn as a social network. And precisely for that reason, I think it is probably one of the healthiest social networks out there.

• 44:50Ezra Klein?

  You know, I was having a conversation yesterday with Eli Perizer, who founded Upworthy. He's a guy who has popularized the idea of filter bubbles and now he works on thinking about ways social media can become healthier. And he said something to me that I've been reflecting on since, and I'm paraphrasing here, but that it's easier to imagine going to Mars than having a truly public square again. And something in this conversation, and I'm not saying it's wrong, but that it is depressing to me, is that our set of ideas for what might create a place people could gather and discuss the issues of the day.

• 45:33Ezra Klein?

  It's like the one Elon Musk runs, the one Mark Zuckerberg runs, the one Microsoft owns. Some things shouldn't be.

• 45:44Ezra Klein?

  In either of the versions of private here, when they're playing such a central role in things that are public. Now, I'm not somebody who has some vision of how you would build any kind of public alternative here. But I do think it is worth not being so trapped in the way we do things now is to think that any of these are good outcomes. I mean, some goods should be public. I actually feel the same way about building libraries. And it's easier to imagine today that we would go to Mars and that we'd create the library, the public library system from scratch, because our vision of actually having public goods is so attenuated that the imaginary work you would have to do to get there, it just seems a little bit impossible.

• 46:29Ezra Klein?

  But I think that how weirdly dystopic things are getting, where the world's richest man just buys the world's most important meaning-making communications platform. And we're all just like, well, hope it goes well. It's really quite strange.

• 46:47Speaker 01

  I totally agree with with all of that. And I do agree that it would be almost impossible to build public libraries today. I think honestly, it would be almost impossible to put fluoride in water today. You know, basic public health interventions would be impossible. Or iodine in salt. But I do need to mention, and I'm not saying I am one of these people, but Elon and Jack are definitely two of these people. There is a strong belief in the web three slash crypto community that web three solves this problem. And that it is precisely the alternative collectively owned,

• 47:31Speaker 01

  decentralized, public square slash structure that you are looking for. And that something, something crypto, something, we will get there. And we have a bunch of people in Silicon Valley who are investing a lot of time in it. There are a bunch of billionaires out there, crypto billionaires, who are trying to create precisely that world. I have not yet been persuaded, but that is obviously, I think, in the back of Elon Musk's mind somewhere when he's buying Twitter.

• 48:02Ezra Klein?

  So I spent a lot of time over the past year talking to crypto people. And there's a lot in the culture I find genuinely inspiring and something I have spent a lot of time thinking about just over the last month is an analogy of crypto as a back to the land movement for tech, not the VC class, but a lot of the people who are really excited about decentralized rebuildings of all of the modern conveniences of the web, but in some way where you kind of have to do all of it yourself now, because that's what it means to be decentralized at that level. It looks to me a lot like a back to the land movement in the 60s and 70s, just a digital one. And I have a lot of sympathy for that kind of desire for authenticity and

• 48:46Ezra Klein?

  desire for participation. But then when I actually ask the people how anything is going to work, like for instance, this, you started that sentence by saying, they, Jack and Elon, have this idea of a decentralized, but that's not what's happening. The move from public to private is a centralization. Elon Musk has become, or is about to become, it seems, the sole owner of Twitter. And then I haven't heard any version of where he's going to give back its voting into some kind of, I've heard him talk about how he believes a Mars colony should have direct democracy and a kind of much more radical form of voting on every initiative.

• 49:29Ezra Klein?

  Maybe he'll bring that into play. It would be kind of interesting, but he does not actually run any of his companies that way. He runs his companies through incredible fiat. He fires people with incredible vigor. When he doesn't like how people are treating him, there's at least a lot of allegations of pretty intense retaliation. And what I see in crypto is a lot of people using a vision of decentralization, using ideals of decentralization to invest in new centralizing functions, right? You know, OpenSea, Coinbase, et cetera. I'm not even necessarily against it. I don't consider myself a crypto hater, but there's a lot of

• 50:08Ezra Klein?

  Wanting to solve problems of power through code, even while the people who are financing that seem to be doing it in a way that is going to give themselves more money and more power to do things like buy critical communications platforms. And so my head spins when I try to give an actual account of what anybody's thinking here, but maybe you can give it to me.

• 50:31Speaker 01

  So I'm really not the person to ask about this because I basically agree with you on all of that. But if I had to sketch it, what I would say is Elon Musk has said that he wants to make the Twitter algorithm open source. There is no Twitter algorithm that matters. Like, you know, what this ignores the huge amount of manual labor involved in moderating Twitter. He thinks that you it can all be put on an algorithm. But let's just say for the sake of argument that you can algorithmize Twitter. He has said that he wants to authenticate every human on Twitter, basically give every

• 51:14Speaker 01

  human on Twitter their own blue checkmark. Put those two things together. Take all of the humans on Twitter. Give them a blue checkmark that is also a little bird coin, a crypto token. Make the algorithm open source, decentralized and outside his control. Create the window onto that discussion, which is the Twitter app or the TweetDeck app that he still continues to own, but say that anyone else can also create apps. And this is, by the way, what Twitter was for a few years before it killed off its API. And we don't need to get into the history of Twitter here, but allow anyone else to

• 51:59Speaker 01

  create windows onto what people are doing with their bird coins and doing with that algorithm. And he gets to continue to monetize via the app and via selling ads or even selling bird coins. But other people can do that, too. And it becomes, other people get to engage in the conversation using whatever means they like, whatever RSS reader slash Twitter reader you want, you want to invent. It all lives in some crypto utopia. And he makes lots of money on Birdcoin because he issued Birdcoin.

• 52:37Ezra Klein?

  That vision is totally fine for me. But genuinely, this is always my question. What role is crypto playing in that vision? Because what you just described largely, like to say it another way, is rewind the clock to when the Twitter APIs opened. See, so developers can create third-party apps for using Twitter. 100% agree. I think it was terrible that they shut that down and destroyed a huge class of innovation in companies. But that was before crypto was a thing it is today. So you don't need crypto to do that. You just need to reverse a decision Twitter made. Then there's something about giving every human being a checkmark, but I don't understand at all what crypto is doing there either. It's not like you cannot have bots that try to sign up for dot ETH accounts or something.

• 53:19Ezra Klein?

  So verification is a complicated problem that I have never seen crypto actually solve. I understand how crypto helps solve, like, it can give me the ability to move around the internet and verify using my public key who I am. But the question of how you are verifying who has signed up for public keys is the hard problem there. And then the control over the algorithm, of course. I mean, if they wanted to let people vote on how the algorithm works now, that is a completely possible thing to do. And I hope he does it, or I hope he lets people have algorithms they change. I've always wanted these places to give me some control of the algorithm. You know, let me run some little sliders so the algorithm now knows to show me more

• 54:02Ezra Klein?

  things that are on like a six on the engagement scale, not a 10. But nevertheless, I'm always very confused when I hear some of these visions about literally what technological role crypto is playing in them, because it seems like things we can do now that companies have chosen not to do for a bunch of reasons. And then it's like something crypto and they're going to make different choices. And maybe they will. I could just be too dumb to get it.

• 54:27Speaker 01

  I think, I mean, I, again, I broadly agree with you. I'm not going to push back on that. I, I think that in theory, having a DAO built on everyone with a bird coin.

• 54:40Ezra Klein?

  A DAO, a DAO being a crypto structure that has sort of self automating governance mechanisms.

• 54:47Speaker 01

  Right. It would be very hard to get the existing Twitter user base to effectively vote on anything. If it was all based in crypto, I think it probably would be easier. And then I think the other part of Web three and the promise of Web three is that there is this financial aspect to it. The, the bird coin would have some kind of financial value. And Elon Musk could monetize not just by Twitter's cash flow, but by monetizing bird coin. The individuals on Twitter could accumulate, bird coin could speculate in bird coin and would be more engaged that way. And do I understand how it would all work in practice? Do I have a vision for this? Hell no, I really don't.

• 55:31Speaker 01

  But I do think that doing it with a sort of crypto underpinning would change things and could make it theoretically profitable in a way that doing it without crypto underpinnings wouldn't. A whole bunch of random crypto projects that don't have any intrinsic value have a lot of actual value because coins are worth lots of money for no obvious reason.

• 55:56Ezra Klein?

  Which in a way gets us back to where we started and where I had more intended for us to go. Because if you believe that vision, and Elon Musk is certainly better than almost anyone else has been at driving attention to cryptocurrencies. And attention creates valuation in these currencies. It wouldn't need to serve a particularly important technological purpose to just create a lot of interest hype. It's a wholly new way of running something. People invest in that because they're fascinated and because they're, they're there and they want to be part of this new thing. And that could be interesting, right? That's a way that Musk could turn both his and Twitter's capacity for generating attention,

• 56:36Ezra Klein?

  turning that attention into the valuation of currencies into something that could be somehow through mechanisms. I don't fully grok a way of financing or compensating people for tweets and then engaging them more deeply in the platform.

• 56:50Speaker 01

  Right. Attention is a currency, but actually a currency is a currency. A cryptocurrency really is a currency and it's a lot easier to monetize.

• 56:59Ezra Klein?

  To me, this always ends in the same place, though, which is, which is like a genuinely interesting question about the future of crypto, of the web, of these companies, which is, it's my refrain in this area, that you can't solve power problems through code. And a very fundamental question is whether the people with a lot of power over the technology industry today, your Elon Musks, your Mark Henry sins, your Jack Dorsey's, et cetera, really want less of it. The way they act, I don't exactly see it, but you know, it's not impossible. And it's not impossible that they've looked at what they built and don't

• 57:42Ezra Klein?

  like the way it all looks now, and that they want to try out radically different governance structures. Nothing forces them to do that. But that's why, to me, these are not really problems of code. They're questions of ideology and they're questions of power. Do these people actually want to give up power? I think it'd be a really remarkable way for this story to play out. If Elon Musk spent $44 billion on Twitter to have less control over it than the CEO he bought it from has. I'm skeptical, but it would be really interesting. That would be quite a way for the story to unfold.

• 58:16Speaker 01

  It would be, and I don't even think it's technically possible. I think I agree with you on the crypto technology not being there to be able to pull this off. And yet, on some level, if the crypto technology did evolve to that place, and if he could pull it off, and if he could actually make money by giving up that power and decentralizing and putting Twitter onto the blockchain in such a way that it was absolutely censorship resistant by any government.

• 58:53Speaker 01

  I think he would be very attracted by that vision.

• 58:56Ezra Klein?

  It's really interesting because it's one place where some of the rhetoric about the freedom decentralization offers and the realities of what decentralization does have always been in interesting tension. I don't remember the name of it right now, but there's a fairly large DAO where some of the key early players in it were ejected by the community for what I think that Musk and others would understand as woke cancellation reasons. Things that they had written and said elsewhere were pretty offensive and the community decided they did not want these people running their place. And to be on the one hand, a sort of free speech absolutist, whether or not you believe Musk is, I think

• 59:39Ezra Klein?

  it's how he understands himself to be, who wants to make sure the boundaries of speech on Twitter are as wide as the constitutional boundaries of speech are. But then, if you really want to give the community power, the community might vote for moderation, might choose moderation pathways you would not support. And so what do you do in that case, right? Which is of course always a question of dictatorships and democracy. What do you do if you think the people might make decisions you would not make? What do you think would happen if the majority would turn against your views? That's always a place where I think some of the tensions that are likely to arise if things like DAOs really emerge as central vehicles are very unresolved.

• 1:00:24Speaker 01

  Absolutely. And my big take on crypto is that it is so far behind where everyone thought it would be at this point, that yeah, all of these questions which we might have thought a few years ago should start being resolved by now and not being resolved by now, because crypto is actually evolving surprisingly slowly, except for in like purely financial ways where like, you know, you've got all manner of decentralized finance and yield farming and purely speculative activity. But in terms of the stuff that is really happening, it's very nascent. We can't really see how it works. A lot of what we do see doesn't make any sense. My favorite DAO story is the one that tried to buy the constitution

• 1:01:09Speaker 01

  for $30 million, got outbid by like an old fashioned billionaire. But those $30 million that they put in there. In return for those thirty million dollars, they got tokens, even though they do nothing. There's just a glorious messiness to it. So yeah, I think we can dream of a world where Elon Musk decides to let the users of Twitter with their bird coins make all the decisions about who should be kicked off the platform. And then the users all decide to kick Elon Musk off the platform and it becomes like this great ironic move. And it would be a great story and it's not impossible, but it's right now. That's all of this. It's like science fiction, you know?

• 1:01:53Speaker 01

  We have no idea how it would turn out because it's so nascent right now.

• 1:01:59Ezra Klein?

  I think this is going to play out somehow or another in a way none of us expect. I think this one's going to be

• 1:02:04Speaker 01

  I think that's almost

• 1:02:05Ezra Klein?

  going to be very, very weird. Always our final question. Felix, what are three books you'd recommend to the audience?

• 1:02:11Speaker 01

  As a good blogger, I need to, number one, plug The Bond King by Mary Childs that came out a few weeks ago. She is the greatest financial journalist in the world when it comes to trying to explain the bond market to normal people. The bond market is the thing that almost no one understands, especially the contemporary bond market. I also wanted to, one of the things I think that people don't do enough when they recommend books is recommend books with it are mostly pictures rather than words. Pictures are very important. So I thought I would say that everyone should go out and buy a book by a blogger, Dave Addy.

• 1:02:52Speaker 01

  It's called Type Set in the Future and it is an absolutely wonderful book where he goes through all of the great science fiction movies like Alien or Aliens or Star Wars or 2001 and looks at the fonts.

• 1:03:10Speaker 01

  In those movies and basically explains which fonts to use, why they're used, what they mean and how that like reflects our visions of the future. And it's nerdy as all hell, but it is absolutely glorious and I love it. So that's Type Set in the Future by Dave Addy. And then for my third book, I need to recommend, and I do apologize for this one a little bit because it is hard to find, my favorite book of all time, which is The Surprise of Cremona by Edith Templeton. Edith Templeton was this incredibly poshly educated Englishwoman who grew up in Prague, spoke many languages, was quite risque in many ways, grew up in, in, you know, around

• 1:03:55Speaker 01

  the time of the war. And then after the war in the 1950s, decided to take this journey through northern Italy. And she, and she wrote it up and she went to all of these little towns in North, in, in Italy, like Cremona and Parma and Ravenna and Arezzo. And it's her travelogue of what was then a very young country post-war, talking about the culture, talking about the architecture, talking about the food. I love when she arrives in Parma and she's like, they have this cheese here. It's like no cheese you've ever had before. You have to try it out. And it is written in this incredible dry English wit and it is very funny and very erudite and just lovely. So it's called The Surprise of Cremona by Edith Templeton.

• 1:04:39Ezra Klein?

  Felix Salmon. Thank you very much.

• 1:04:41Speaker 01

  Thank you.

• 1:04:54Ezra Klein?

  The Isaac Klein Show is a production of New York Times Opinion. It is produced by the great Raja Karma, Annie Galvin and Jeff Geld. This episode is fact checked by Michelle Harris, Kate Sinclair, Roland Hugh and Jenny Cassis. There's original music by Isaac Jones and Carol Sabaro. Mixed and engineered by Jeff Geld. Our executive producer is Irene Noguchi and special thanks to Shannon Busta, Kristen Lynn and Christina Semuluski.