To Understand This Era, You Need to Think in Systems

As my colleague Ben Smith wrote in an August profile, sociologist Zeynep Tufekci has “made a habit of being right on the big things.” She saw the threat of the coronavirus early and clearly. She saw that the public health community was ignoring the evidence on masking, and raised the alarm persuasively enough that she tipped the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention toward new, lifesaving guidance. Before Tufekci was being prescient about the coronavirus, she was being prescient about disinformation online, about the way social media was changing political organizing, about what election forecasting models could actually tell us, about the rising threat of authoritarianism in America. Tufekci attributes this track record to “systems thinking,” which she believes holds the key to forming a more accurate understanding of everything from pandemics to social media to the Republican Party. So I asked Tufekci to come on a podcast for a conversation about how she thinks, and what the rest of us can learn from it. In answering those questions, we discuss why public health experts were slow to change guidance on disruptive measures like masking and travel bans, the logic of authoritarian regimes, why Asian countries so decisively outperformed Western Europe and America in containing coronavirus, why Tufekci thinks media coverage of the vaccines is too pessimistic, the crisis of American democracy, whether a more competent demagogue will succeed Donald Trump, and much more. Mentioned in this episode: “How Zeynep Tufekci Keeps Getting the Big Things Right” by Ben Smith “Why Telling People They Don’t Need Masks Backfired” by Zeynep Tufekci “Can We Do Twice as Many Vaccinations as We Thought?” by Zeynep Tufekci and Michael Mina “America’s Next Authoritarian Will Be Much More Competent” by Zeynep Tufekci Recommendations: "Groundhog Day" (movie) "Normal Accidents" by Charles Perrow "The Dispossessed" by Ursula K. Le Guin 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. Thoughts? Guest suggestions? Email us at [email protected]. “The Ezra Klein Show” is produced by Rogé Karma and Jeff Geld; fact-checking by Michelle Harris; original music by Isaac Jones; mixing by Jeff Geld.

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

• 0:05Ezra Klein?

  I'm Mr. Klein, and this is the Ezra Klein Show.

• 0:15Ezra Klein?

  As a million media theorists before me have argued, in a few short decades, or depending on how you want to rate it, a few centuries, we've moved from the defining problem of human civilization being information scarcity, we didn't know enough, to the defining problem being information abundance. We know too much, and it's paralyzing.

• 0:39Ezra Klein?

  The people we're following right now are the ones who don't just seem to have a lot of knowledge, but who seem to actually know what to do with all that knowledge. Who seem able to find the signal in the noise. And few have a better track record on this in the last couple of years than Zeynep Tufekci. As my colleague Ben Smith wrote in an August profile of Tufekci, "Tufekci has made a habit of being right on the big things. She saw the threat of coronavirus early, and she raised the alarm. She saw that the public health community was ignoring the evidence on masking, and she wrote about that persuasively enough that she actually tipped the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention towards new lifesaving guidance." But, and I think this is really important, some people are just right in a pessimistic direction. They always think things are going to go wrong, and so they're right whenever they do. That's not true for Tufekci.

• 1:23Ezra Klein?

  Recently, she's been pushing the media on the fact that it's become too pessimistic in everything it reports on coronavirus. And in particular, it is over-reporting what we don't know about vaccines and under-reporting how good they actually are. But before Tufekci was being prescient about coronavirus, I knew her because she was prescient about disinformation online, about the way social media was changing political organizing, about the way the YouTube algorithm was radicalizing, about the rising threat of authoritarianism in America. She is unusual in being able to say important, ahead-of-the-curve things in a lot of different areas and spheres. So I asked Tufekci, who's a sociologist at the University of North Carolina and a columnist at The Atlantic and a contributor at the New York Times Opinion section, to come on

• 2:06Ezra Klein?

  the show for a conversation about metacognition. How does she think about what she knows? And how can the rest of us learn to think a little bit more like her? As always, my email, if you want to tell me what you think, is [email protected]. Here's Zeynep Tufekci.

• 2:26Ezra Klein?

  So I want to begin where you begin, which is in systems thinking. What does it mean to think in systems? What's even the alternative?

• 2:33Speaker 01

  When I say systems thinking, I'm saying looking at the whole and its interactions as much as possible to understand both each part of it, but also how it all comes together. For example, you have something called the case fatality rate in epidemiology, right? Like this virus, what percent of the people who are infected go on to have severe disease? And what percent of them have terrible outcomes like death? Now, that's not like a fixed number that occurs the same way everywhere. Because like, how's your hospital capacity? How's your ICU capacity? How many nurses do you have for people? How's your clinical understanding?

• 3:17Speaker 01

  I mean, even if you have the same set of medical tools, which in the beginning, that's what we had. We had the same set of medical tools, which was not a lot. If you have an overloaded hospital, that means that people are getting oxygen too late because they're not admitted, because they're just overloaded, that they're not being checked up as often. Now, all these other things that happen that increase the fatality, right?

• 3:42Ezra Klein?

  The difficulty of thinking in systems is that you need to learn about systems. And in part, you need to learn about many different systems. So how do you do that? You're a sociologist. I follow your work on politics. It's very good. That's my system that I know pretty well. You've been way ahead on coronavirus. You're very good at moving into new disciplines and understanding how those systems work. And I'm curious what your approach to that is. How do you learn about new systems when you identify one you need to understand?

• 4:11Speaker 01

  So I try not to move into completely new stuff, of course, because that's how you get into epistemological trouble, where you try to think about things you don't really understand well. And I did kind of move into pandemic writing. Partly because it was an emergency. There needed to be more writing on certain aspects and I was in a position with a platform to do so, so I ended up doing that. And I don't really have like a formula, but one of the things I do do is I read a lot of things directly. I mean, I don't just read newspaper articles or press releases about a paper.

• 4:54Speaker 01

  I go read the paper and I have enough of a background to at least understand some of the statistics or methods, especially if it's a field like epidemiology, which has a lot of relationship to sociology. And plus, it was something I taught a lot as part of, you know, teaching people sociology. I used to teach pandemics. I wasn't completely unfamiliar with it. And then I go out of my way to try to find experts in the field to keep asking questions to. To give you an example, like before January 2020, the news coming out of China, which was repeated to us by the World Health Organization, was that there is no human to human transmission

• 5:35Speaker 01

  or that there's no evidence for it, which I thought was not true at the time because we were seeing all these news coming out of Wuhan. It was clearly spreading. Taiwan, which took action very early, had some experts on the ground. They were saying that it probably had human to human transmission. We had a case in Thailand, I think on January 14th, and she had never been to the Wuhan seafood market. So it was clear she had gotten someplace. So till then, I didn't really believe the pronouncements. When China announced that they were closing Wuhan, my conclusion was that this was very real. It was a big deal because I understand authoritarian systems and one rule for what they do is

• 6:20Speaker 01

  you want to look at what they do and not what they say. So if a country like China is closing down a city of 11 million, this is a big deal. It is spreading, it is deadly and we're going to get hit. So from that moment on, we started getting these papers coming out of China saying and Chinese officials telling us and Chinese scientists telling us that not only was there human to human transmission, that they were seeing asymptomatic transmission.

• 6:52Speaker 01

  That they were seeing incubation periods be infectious. And that was met in the US with great skepticism. I have quotes from some of the top public health officials in this country who say, "That doesn't sound right. We don't think China can back this up." Now, I mean, obviously, there are like medical people. Obviously, they know the medical part better. But at that point, I thought there's a principle called the principle of embarrassment when trying to understand the historical accuracy of stories. Is that if a story is really embarrassing to the teller, you kind of think they might be telling the truth.

• 7:37Speaker 01

  Because otherwise, it's the kind of thing that people don't usually admit about themselves or institutions. So when China was telling us after January 20th that it was spreading during the incubation period from people that didn't have symptoms, that was actually making it look very bad. Because they had told us until then, you know, it wasn't happening at all. And all of a sudden, they're telling us something. And I thought, you know what? They're telling us the truth. Because right now, they just really want to prevent the pandemic. Because they covered it up for too long. They kind of got caught. Now it's going to spread to the world and they're going to get blamed for it. And now they're telling the truth.

• 8:22Speaker 01

  So I had a completely different sense of what they said before January 20th. When they lied and covered up and it was kind of not treated with the correct suspicion compared to what they said afterwards. Now, the reason I'm telling you all this is like, there's these ways in which even if you don't necessarily have direct evidence.

• 8:46Speaker 01

  On the medical side, if you kind of understand how institutions and authoritarians work, there's a way in which you get more information about their claims.

• 8:57Ezra Klein?

  This is a very useful framework, and it helps me contextualize something you've been arguing recently. So the media is an institution, public health in America is an institution, and both institutions regret not raising the alarm on this and being more pessimistic or realistic in their outlook right at the outset. But something you've been arguing recently is that these institutions have become too pessimistic now. They're downplaying optimistic findings, they're downplaying things that are actually getting better. Can you talk a bit about that, what you see that is getting better, and then how you think of that as interacting with some of the incentives for these players and institutions now?

• 9:35Speaker 01

  So I think there's a lot of what we would call like hurting effects, or versions of group think effects. These are like sociological concepts where the players in the institution kind of look at each other to decide what the norm is, and then they kind of reflect it. And by the norm, I mean like just their zeitgeist, the mood, how you feel about it. They have a framework through which they interpret stuff. And very often, they don't move fast enough, because such frameworks, such heuristics, such ways of looking at the world have a lot of inertia to them. When the sort of news out of Wuhan came out

• 10:15Speaker 01

  on January 20th, and I thought, that's it, like if they're closing this, and we had like millions of people travel around the world, you know, since the beginning of January. And then, you know, on January, like the next week or so, I saw a paper, there was a paper in Lancet, and there was a New England Journal of Medicine report that were saying, yeah, you know, transmission without symptoms, we started seeing cases pop up. And I thought, okay, we're going to get hit with a pandemic. This is serious. It's a novel coronavirus. And then I spent a lot of February kind of living in an out of body experience, because a lot of journalists, friends of mine, were talking about the harms of the panic, rather

• 11:00Speaker 01

  than talking about, you know, the pandemic, the thing that was about to hit us. So they were conflating.

• 11:09Speaker 01

  Alarmism with misinformation. And sometimes alarmism is misinformation, right? Like if it's unwarranted, but accurate alarm isn't misinformation. Like if there's a tsunami about to hit you, then it's not misinformation or alarmism to get worried and say, we gotta get to high water. We gotta get to high water. You know, it hasn't hit you, but you know, it's gonna hit you. So I was seeing like articles that were saying things like, travel was fine. I saw like a op ed by a travel industry person in the New York Times, saying, don't try to, you know, create fear around travel. When in a pandemic, it's not fear. It's completely realistic to say, all right, huh? You know, how are we gonna adjust to this?

• 11:53Speaker 01

  Because travel's gonna carry the virus. There is a lot of conflating of the fact that Trump's racism against China meant that we couldn't discuss anything about this virus as a threat originating in Wuhan. It was really weird. It was sort of seen as a racist thing sometimes because Trump is racist, right? It is, there's just no doubt the way he's talked about the virus and all his, uh, the ways he's gone about it isn't healthy at all. But the opposite of that isn't acting like there is no pandemic coming our way that originated in one part of the world, which is Wuhan, China. And that's, you know, where initially, at least,

• 12:38Speaker 01

  where a lot of sort of the cases were coming out from. And then, of course, since then, it's just caught in lots of places. I even got like told this was some just an elite panic. There were articles in the New York Times saying, it's the pandemic panic. That's the real problem. We're gonna overreact and do more harm. And I'm like, no, we're under, underreacting. It's a pandemic. Pandemics are a regular feature of human societies. And we're about to get hit with one. So I spent February completely.

• 13:10Speaker 01

  Separated mentally and psychologically from the people that I am normally friends with and normally the people I read and I hang out with because they were just acting like this was just a panicky thing and what about the flu? Now, if you want to fast forward to January of 2021, it's a complicated, different thing because on the one hand, it's certainly true, the winter is grim. The case numbers are finally going down a little bit. They're still very high. Like, you, United States has very high levels of community transmission, which changes

• 13:51Speaker 01

  the calculus because the odds that you're going to interact with someone who's infected is directly related to how many people are there, you know, getting infected. And we also have these new variants that are more transmissible. And they're not exactly sure why they're more transmissible, but basically it means that they're evading something better, right? Whatever that is, till we figure it out, it just kind of means you have to be even more careful because you're not going to get away with things you got away with before the same way. So we have a grim winter coming ahead of us that, and you know, all the things.

• 14:27Speaker 01

  But on the vaccine front, we have hit home runs that were so unlikely, if you look at the history of this, that once the history of this is written, they are going to be referred to as some of the greatest achievements of science. To sort of give a context to this, in May of 2020, when people like Dr. Fauci were saying, maybe we'll have vaccines in about 18 months, meaning September or something like. Eight months into the future, people thought, no, that's too optimistic. Because usually it takes longer.

• 15:10Speaker 01

  And when the Food and Drug Administration was deciding the threshold for sort of clearing vaccines for emergency use authorization, they thought 50% efficacy would be good. Now, what did we get with Pfizer, BioNTech and Moderna? We have 95% efficacy against any symptomatic disease, meaning 95% of the people develop nothing if they're vaccinated, no symptoms. And I went and read, like, this is the thing that I really think helps inform how I think is that I go read all the documents, which is pretty time consuming, but it's really amazing how much more you learn if you go read the whole thing, appendixes and all.

• 15:54Speaker 01

  What I found was that even in the 5%, so if you combine on the Moderna trial, there's not a single severe case. On the Pfizer trial, there's one, that is one out of 30,000, 30,000 something. And that one, the detail is in the appendixes, is a woman who developed a 93% oxygen saturation. So if that had been 94%, it wouldn't even count as severe. She was like right at the cutoff and she needed no medical care. She needed no hospitalization. Like, so when you hear severe, you're thinking ICU, you know, ventilator, none of that was necessary.

• 16:38Speaker 01

  So a doctor described it as a clinical nothing burger. Actually, she just had a low reading on our pulse ox, which, and then it passed, she got better. So that's just amazing. By vaccine standards, to have something that amazing is wonderful. And, you know, it's the kind of thing you would have, you know, national celebration and fireworks and church bells ringing and all of that. And then I spent the last couple of months. Reading a lot of doom and gloom about the vaccines that I'm just like, I wake up every day and I think this is amazing. This is so exciting. And instead, you know, we're flooded with articles

• 17:21Speaker 01

  about like, you can't do this, you can't do that, you can't take off your mask. We don't know if they prevent transmission. We don't know this, we don't know that, which they're not like technically wrong, but to put the emphasis on some temporary limits and some temporary limits to our knowledge, rather than emphasizing how amazing they are. And then when the variants came, of course, the obvious question was, how will this affect vaccine efficacy? And people just went to look at it clearly, because it's an important thing. And the news was great. There was some drop in neutralizing antibody titers, but vaccines aren't drugs, right? So they don't work the same way,

• 18:01Speaker 01

  but they still cleared the bar required for them to be effective. So to the degree their efficacy might be affected, like people think it's not going to be a lot. But I saw these scary, doomy, grim headlines talking about neutralizing antibody titers dropping as if that's what the public should care about, rather than saying, good news, they're expected to be effective, and it's great. And they're already working on the booster of, you know, full. So this is kind of like, I'm now having this other out of body experience.

• 18:34Ezra Klein?

  And I think that's one of those herd dynamics. Nobody wants to be in the position of underselling how wrong it can go again, right? That's something that the media say learned, right? And now it becomes hard to say, well, maybe we could actually be surprised to the upside. But one way I've been thinking about this period, I just wrote an op ed about this, is the picture for six months from now, because of how good the vaccines are, is significantly brighter than we had any reason to expect. But the picture for six weeks or three months from now could be much grimmer than we expected. And that gets to another way that is hard to think in this, which is trying to think in terms of exponential time. The virus grows exponentially.

• 19:18Ezra Klein?

  We know these new strains are here. It seems reasonable to say that the UK strain, the B117, is something around 50% more transmissible. And if that's true, then for a little while, it doesn't seem like anything is happening. And then all of a sudden, everything is happening. And I think we've had a lot of trouble, the media, policymakers, human beings. Operating in that way, right? Feeling that the times when things are quiet does not necessarily mean they're quiet. Can you talk a bit about that? The question of how the world changes if you begin looking at things through exponential growth and decay?

• 19:49Speaker 01

  That's a very good point. You're just flattening the curve is just trying to explain exponential growth, basically. And so I've been writing about the power of exponential growth for a long time now on the pandemic side. But of course, you know, my original area of study, social media, public sphere, there are other exponential growth phenomena like Facebook, network effects, all of those things. So it's concepts I was familiar with. But it's very hard to think like that because like in February, when I was really worried, I think the US had a single death in all of February from the coronavirus. But again, that was misleading because that's kind of like, you know, the waters are receding

• 20:33Speaker 01

  because we're going to get hit with a tsunami. So that's not really your indicator. But it's very hard for normal people to think about exponential growth because it's ordinarily not a part of our everyday experience. I wrote about the transmissible variant for an article for The Atlantic on December 31st. Like I spent New Year's Eve writing it out because I was worried. I was seeing like health departments tweet things like, there's a new variant, but it's not more deadly. It's just more transmissible. And I was like, wait, that's worse. Right? More deadly only affects the people infected. And that's a tragedy for them. But more transmissible is an exponential process and it's going to end up with a lot more people dead.

• 21:18Speaker 01

  If you just do the math, you would prefer more deadly for the infected, which again is an individual tragedy, but at the population level, more transmissible is going to result in much more deaths. And interestingly, like some of the early examples and warning came from the tech industry. They think in exponentials because like network effects, like Facebook's growth and things are exponential processes. And a lot of venture capitalists and, you know, sort of the VC world and the software people, they're looking for that next exponential effect. So I think they might've had a natural affinity to thinking in exponentials because it's a very lucrative way to get paid. So they were in a position, almost they had some intuition because of the field they

• 22:03Speaker 01

  were in. The Western pandemic playbook.

• 22:07Speaker 01

  Was very flu based because we are used to flu epidemics and we were expecting a flu pandemic. Whereas Southeast Asia and East Asia, their pandemic playbook was more SARS, MERS kind of playbook, the over dispersed pathogen and all of that, because that's what they lived through in 2003, you know, in Hong Kong and Japan. So they had a much more SARS-y playbook. And I kind of say this because sometimes there's a tendency to think everything that weren't wrong in the United States is the fault of Donald Trump. And clearly, the administration has been terrible in managing this pandemic. But if you look at Western Europe, they're not doing that great either.

• 22:51Speaker 01

  Their vaccine performance is terrible. I don't understand what's going on with Europe at the moment. And UK's vaccine performance is not terrible at all, but in summer, not only did they lift the restrictions, they gave everybody coupons, like the government encouraged everybody coupons so they could go eat in restaurants, takeout not allowed. Like, that is not what you do if you understand how exponents work. Like, this is insane, like, because we know this trans was indoors, you don't sort of lift the lid early. So a lot of Europe and Western Europe, in different ways, kind of failed. And I think there's a bunch of things going on here. And one reason is really the flu pandemic playbook in our head rather than the SARS

• 23:35Speaker 01

  pandemic playbook, like, understanding the virology and epidemiology of this pathogen. Like, you fight the war you got, not the one that you have the playbook for. We weren't, I think, good at that. And partly, you get what you get, so everybody gets surprised, but we didn't adjust fast enough. So here we are.

• 24:23Ezra Klein?

  These next six weeks, 10 weeks with these variants circulating will become really, really important. And there are things that we could do that we haven't done yet. You made a really important point, which is, I think Donald Trump's failures, they were so visible and so profound, anyway, so offensive, that they can really distract from other things, other institutions, other players that are failing. And I want to talk about the FDA, and I don't want to be too hard on them, but there are a bunch of things where it seems to me that, given the costs, they are being way too cautious and conservative. And one that Dr. Mina talks about a lot is rapid at-home antigen testing, where we could have these little strips, they don't cost very much, we could constantly test ourselves.

• 25:06Ezra Klein?

  Then if we got a positive, we could double-check it, and if we were positive, then begin to self-isolate. Can you talk a bit about that, and why, in your view, the FDA has been so recalcitrant on approving those?

• 25:19Speaker 01

  I'll say a yes and no. I think, for example, the vaccine approval process in the United States has been pretty healthy. So FDA did a lot of things right, moved fast, and intervened early with the making sure underrepresented groups were in the trial. The hearings were really transparent and great. Like, right now, there's all these questions about AstraZeneca approval in Germany and UK, and I can't really find detailed data, and I don't know what on earth is going on. And US FDA was like, no, we don't really do it that way, which is great for that, because vaccines are serious things, and

• 25:58Speaker 01

  you do not want to sort of appear to have rushed or not have full data. Now, on the rapid tests, I think that's an example of Not being able to shift thinking properly because as far as I can tell, they keep comparing it to PCR tests, which are the ones where you look at an individual to try to find, you know, if they have any of the virus, right? You're trying to find, I mean, let me put it this way. You're trying to find if the, you can find the fingerprints of the virus. Now, if I am about to operate on someone, right? And I need to know, is that person infected with it? Do they have COVID?

• 26:43Speaker 01

  That test is really appropriate. I want that kind of accuracy. But at the population level, if you are using it as a population screening tool, speed is much more important than, does it miss a few cases? Because if you don't have speed, you're missing all the cases, right? If you don't have like rapid return to your test, like if it's like what Dr. Mina is thinking is like you have almost like pregnancy tests, right? Immediately tells you something. And the reason FDA doesn't seem to be approving it is that it's not gonna catch every last case like that, which is fine.

• 27:25Speaker 01

  Like whatever it catches is something that it's catching. And the fact that it's not as accurate as the individual test is not a problem because we can then tell people, well, do it again. You know, you can, there's all these ways of sort of combining it with other versions of these tests to get, you know, better and better in the accuracy. Because it's something, if you do it every day at the population level, then you can kind of say, all right, let me reduce my risk. So if, let's say, you know, you have a scenario in which these rapid tests allow us to warn. Fifty percent of the people, when they're at their most infectious stage,

• 28:08Speaker 01

  which is another important thing because like the PCR test will catch that fingerprint long after you're infectious. Right? Because you just have some remnants of the virus that's still kind of working its way out of your body. Whereas these tests are better at catching you exactly when you're symptomatic and infectious. But even if you caught like half the time, that's more than zero. That's a lot more than zero. And you could rapidly, and I think Dr. Mina is right about this. You could rapidly get this under control. But the way we had it has just been wrong because there's a couple of them that are approved. But they're approved in the worst possible way.

• 28:50Speaker 01

  They require a prescription and they come in this expensive $25 setup. I mean, the real thing you want is this stripped. Right? You don't really need the fancy casing for it and you're paying for it. Plus needing a prescription means you have to go to a doctor. And that's exactly what we don't want. We want people to be able to buy a hundred of these strips and use one every day. And if it's giving you a warning signal, depending on the type of test, you can tell people, hmm, looks like there's something here. And now the next step is you do another one and you do this and you do that. So I think it's kind of this way of thinking that we saw this with masks too. There was all this discussion about should we recommend it or not?

• 29:33Speaker 01

  And I was like, what's the downside? Like even if you're not convinced they're going to be perfect. And everybody's pretty convinced that they're going to be somewhat helpful. Like there's no big downside, especially early on when we didn't understand things very well to start sort of thinking about this. So they're different. Like the way you think about drugs is you want to have them be accurate and you know, you want them to be safe. You want them to be effective because there's a lot of harm you can do. With something like rapid tests, you want them to work for what you need them to do, which is help us at the population level, even if it's not as accurate as a PCR

• 30:17Speaker 01

  at the individual level. So it's kind of this sort of mixing and matching of tools that I think FDA has been good on one kind.

• 30:26Speaker 01

  And not so good on being more flexible on another kind of tool, which is the population health approach, which kind of goes back to thinking about like, maybe it's a sort of a individualistic mindset in clinical medicine. Clinical medicine, especially in Western countries, we tend to really think about individual outcomes rather than public health and what we need at the population level. You know, something that helps society in general versus what you need to do when you have a patient in front of you are not always like identical ways of thinking. And the trick is like sort of matching them at each level. And I don't think we've done a really good job of it in the United States.

• 31:12Ezra Klein?

  One of the things that the Trump administration doesn't get enough credit for here is warp speed, which really compared to what we're seeing in the EU right now, it did accelerate vaccines. It did get us a bunch of doses that we needed. They did a bad job at distribution, but I do want to call out that warp speed seems like it was actually an important advance on what other countries did and how this has played out in the past. But, but, but given that and given what you said about the FDA being pretty good on vaccines, you've been pushing the FDA and public health authorities to make some different decisions there, to go with first doses very, very rapidly and allow second doses to push farther back on the calendar in order to increase supply. Others, or maybe you as well, have talked about half dosing Moderna for, for young people in particular.

• 31:57Ezra Klein?

  And what you hear is pushback from regulators and others is, well, we don't have the, the evidence on that. Can you talk a little bit about that distinction?

• 32:04Speaker 01

  Sure, let me clarify first. I did write an op ed with Dr. Mina, and we called for the evidence. We called for the trial. So like I, I'm not in a position to advocate for the timing of the second dose, but I, when we saw the data that came out of Pfizer and Moderna, it was pretty clear that there was protection from clinical disease after the first shot. And the question was, how long does this last?

• 32:35Speaker 01

  How far can we push the booster, right? Because if you look at history of vaccination, delaying the booster or fractional dosing in the face of shortages is commonly done. So we weren't really proposing something really unusual, right? Because this is what we have done with, you know, yellow fever vaccines facing shortages. And lots of vaccines, the four weeks is a minimum, right? It's not necessarily the maximum. So we wrote an op ed saying, you know what? Let's go get this data as soon as possible. Because if we get the data, and if we find that, you know, we can push the booster to eight weeks or 12 weeks or six months.

• 33:19Speaker 01

  I, you know, whatever we kind of find, especially for younger populations. Because from the phase one and phase two trials, the elderly who are more susceptible to severe disease weren't having as good a response to the vaccine. So, you know, you might want to not do that on them because they need the maximum protection. But for young people, that might be a viable thing. So we wrote a thing saying, you know, this is really important to get data for so we can have the grounding to make the decision. And I mean, you would have thought we had proposed something outrageous. Because then we're just sort of calling for a proper randomized trial of a practice that's not even uncommon in the world of vaccines.

• 34:02Speaker 01

  And there was all this like, you can't even propose this kind of pushback because it's dangerous or it's this or that. And we were really like scratching our heads thinking, how is it dangerous to propose a trial for a practice that is not uncommon? And then after sort of it was met with, this is outrageous, how can you think about it? Shortly afterwards, what happened was a lot of, you know, leading immunologists and sort of.

• 34:32Speaker 01

  Pretty important people in the field started proposing, forget the trial, let's just go ahead and do it. We had proposed, you know, trial and get the data, but there are a lot of experts who thought we had enough data to proceed, given what we know about how the immune system works. And there were others who disagreed. So it was this contentious thing in that there were reasons to think and, you know, complicated things, but it was the kind of thing that clearly there was a merit to all the arguments, right? Because you have an unhappy situation, which is shortages. So you're doing something less than ideal and there's merit to both of the ideas. Because if you cover more people

• 35:11Speaker 01

  quickly, you can get the deaths down really quickly as opposed to, like, if you had two kids, would you give a prime and a booster to one and leave the second one unvaccinated? Right? That's kind of the question that we're facing.

• 35:28Ezra Klein?

  That is a really clarifying way to put that.

• 35:30Speaker 01

  Well, that is exactly the question, though. Like, if you have two kids, are you going to leave one completely unvaccinated if you can give one of them 95% efficacy? Or if you think the vaccine efficacy goes down to 80%, are you going to vaccinate both? That's the question we're facing. Are there like other dangers like immune escape and other things? So I mean, it's simplifying somewhat, but that is essentially the question. And there were arguments on both sides. So I'm not going to sort of pretend to have the answer myself, especially since this is not my field. But we had proposed the trial. So after we proposed the trial, I saw lots of leading people kind of say, yeah, you don't even need the trial. You know, we have efficacy data from the existing trials

• 36:15Speaker 01

  and, you know, you're facing that question of two kids and you're going to leave one unvaccinated. We wouldn't do that for our kids. Why are we doing this for the population? So people were saying things like that. The metaphor is mine, but they were essentially saying, yeah, go ahead. And others were disagreeing strongly. There was a lot of back and forth. And then, lo and behold, the United Kingdom said, all right, you know, we're going to allow 12 weeks. And then the CDC, after the new administration came, said, okay, six weeks is, you know, delay up to six weeks is fine. So here, another interesting thing happened, like all these people that were so mad at us for suggesting even a trial, kind of stopped discussing some

• 36:57Speaker 01

  of this after the World Health Organization said six weeks, okay, too. And the CDC said, okay, so it wasn't actually that controversial. And right after, like, just last week, the person from Oxford who runs the UK recovery trial, he was saying, yeah, let's randomize this sort of delaying booster thing to see what happens, which is exactly our original position. So to me, that was kind of an interesting turn of events in the epistemology sense, in that things that sometimes appear really controversial at the time, actually aren't.

• 37:35Ezra Klein?

  Oh, this is, I think, such a, such a good and important space, and also so tricky to, to talk about well, so I'll try to do it carefully. One of, I think, the more poisonous lines in this whole conversation is we need to listen to the science. It is almost always said on things where the science cannot give you a full answer, where there are values at play, differing equities, things that we don't fully know. But I think the idea of science operates on, on two level. There are things where the science really can tell us things, right? Do these vaccines work? The science has an answer. The science cannot tell us exactly how to structure, who gets them first, and who gets them next, and, and which direction we go in. I have to think, though, there's a, a difference between this

• 38:20Ezra Klein?

  idea of listen to the science and then listen to the scientists. And particularly on Twitter, I think that public health authorities, who've been, in many ways, phenomenal and are doing incredibly, incredibly difficult work, but you can sometimes see, like, a group dynamic of, it's important that people listen to us. So if you question us, you're creating a bigger problem, and you need to stop. And I, I got the sense that sometimes that op-ed and some other things are taken as questioning, right? That, like, there's this bigger issue. Of keeping the science credible. But in the long run, I don't think it's good for science, capital S, to react too badly when challenged. And then, on the other hand, of course, in a world of anti-vaxxers and rampant disinformation,

• 39:04Ezra Klein?

  you can understand, and for that matter, by the way, harassment. You can understand why people get defensive.

• 39:11Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's very challenging. So let me put it this way. I am like completely hundred percent wholly body and soul on the side of science. Right. It is that that's how you understand these things. That's how you think about it. That's how we get out of this. But that's not really saying much. That doesn't tell you how to go about it. Because if it's listen to the scientists, I'll find you a scientist saying anything. In this topic, there are scientists with the credentials making any claim you want, including anti-vaxxers. Like there are medical doctors who are anti-vaxxers. It's terrible, but they exist. So when you say, listen to the science and listen to the scientists,

• 39:55Speaker 01

  you have to say, well, what does it mean? Ideally, it means that we have a process in which we earn that trust, where the science is, as you say, for example, it can tell us the efficacy of these vaccines. Epidemiology can tell us the sort of the distribution of risk. After that, when you have a shortage, you have these really tough questions on prioritization and what are the goals you're looking at? And how do you deal with the shortage and all of that? And those things absolutely require a scientifically informed debate. And the science itself should explain.

• 40:43Speaker 01

  Why and how we think something because just say, listen to the scientist doesn't work because as I said, there are scientists who hold really terrible and wrong views and the fact that they have the medical degree or the PhD doesn't exempt them from, you know, basically promoting snake oil, it happens. So you have to say like, what is the process through which we earn that trust and say, this thing we're injecting into your body, it is going to help protect you from this disease, it's going to help protect you from the severe disease. We've gone to great amount of effort to make sure it's safe and we're doing it in a medical clinic or setting with nurses standing by because

• 41:27Speaker 01

  there are these very, very rare side effects with allergies, but we know how to deal with them too. And here's what happened so far. You know, that kind of sort of earning the trust in the institutions that I think is the key process here. And I understand the defensiveness, people, the public health people, they're getting, you know, death threats sometimes and, you know, they're dealing with the quackery and things like that. But how dare you question us is not a way to earn trust.

• 41:57Ezra Klein?

  Yeah. And I would say, and this is in politics too, particularly in progressive politics, that sometimes I think there is an aesthetic of scientism that is using like the performance of science as a way of, of developing authority that you can use to end a debate. And that almost never works, in fact.

• 42:13Speaker 01

  The thing is, that is not even necessary. Science is amazing. And while medicine is not perfect by any means, like it suffers from not listening to the people occasionally. There have been missteps. A lot of, you know, especially underrepresented minority groups have been mistrusted and not listened to. And you go back and, and it's experimented on. So there's all these things, but on the other hand, it is also a spectacularly successful endeavor, right? We don't need to play performing games here. We have the real thing. We just

• 42:53Speaker 01

  have to kind of, I think, defend it the right way. The way I try to explain it is if my son gets a step throat.

• 43:03Speaker 01

  I mean, I just go get antibiotics from the pharmacy. And, you know, before the pandemic, it would be like, okay, he can't go to school for a day. You know, if you go back to seventy, eighty years ago, I'd be thinking about his funeral. And that's the reality. That's where science has taken us. Things that used to be devastating are now minor inconveniences. If you read any history, like from the nineteenth century, early twentieth century, people lost their kids all the time. It was a routine thing. It was terrible and it was routine. If you walk in a cemetery, which I like doing things like that,

• 43:46Speaker 01

  you will see a lot of children and babies who died very young. And if you look at sort of what we have achieved with vaccination, with antibiotics, it is spectacular. And it doesn't require that we call blind obedience. It requires that we kind of explain it and we fix what's wrong with it. Like, we fix the parts that are wrong. The statistics about just something like the amount of infant mortality among black people is a shame of this country. And it is clearly just the structural inequality and the racism and the lack of health services. And plus, the way health providers treat black people, right?

• 44:30Speaker 01

  That's what's going on. That is terrible and we should call it out. But on the other hand, we can defend, you know, the good things, the antibiotics, the vaccinations and all the things and just work to earn that trust. And so that's kind of what I mean, like what you call scientism. I completely agree. Like, I listen to science as a way to shut people up. Doesn't work and isn't necessary and doesn't make science better, right? We need to make the practice of science and its benefits be more equitable. So that doesn't help with that. Just telling people, "Just shut up," never works. I mean, it's not even effective. It was effective, maybe I would say, "Okay, this is terrible messaging," but it doesn't even work.

• 45:36Ezra Klein?

  You've done a lot of work on social media, on social media algorithms. How in the end did you feel about Twitter and Facebook's decision to ban Donald Trump?

• 45:46Speaker 01

  Well, let me say that to give an answer would be starting the story very late. So that's the problem is like by the time we got to the point of needing to deplatform the President of the United States, like it's almost too late to be talking about it. Like, so whether or not one thinks it's justified or not, the real question is how on earth did we get here? And what role did our information ecology from Facebook to Fox News play in this? To the past decades of everything from the financial crisis to the Iraq war.

• 46:31Speaker 01

  So I almost feel like we're focusing on the period at the end of a sentence rather than trying to understand how we got to that point. Because, I mean, this is a man that travels with the nuclear football, the power to end life on Earth, basically. And by the time you're discussing like, should he be allowed to tweet? I'm kind of like, I think we lost the plot here. Like, how did we get here is the more important question. It's almost more important than what do you do in the last two weeks? You know, can he tweet or not? But if I were running that place as an emergency measure, I would too. Right?

• 47:14Speaker 01

  I would have said, I am pulling this megaphone.

• 47:20Speaker 01

  But that is not how it should be, obviously, right? Because it is an emergency that is partly of those companies making. It is a failing of our own society that we got to that point. And as I keep writing about, there is 66% of the House GOP voted to overturn the election right after the storming of the mob happened. We have like these problems with minority rule, the structural minority rule in the Senate, the opportunistic minority rule through gerrymandering, all those things kind of democratic backsliding, combining. So it is, even though I studied the social media part of it, the question of what do

• 48:04Speaker 01

  you do on that day in an emergency? Like, every answer is wrong at that point, right? Like, because deplatforming the President of the United States is clearly wrong. But at that point, not deplatforming is also wrong, right? There is no good answer once you get to that point. So the question should be, how on earth did we let things get to this point? Which is important, because that's how you can start thinking, how on earth do we get out of that point? And that's kind of where, that's why I'm kind of hesitant to say, like, it was a good choice or a bad choice, because at that point, every choice is a terrible choice.

• 48:45Ezra Klein?

  I very much agree on this. It's a very hard cases make bad law kind of moment. But Trump is interesting from the worldview's perspective we've been talking about here in that he's a place where systems thinking and individualistic analysis collide. So I wrote a book about polarization and radicalization in politics, and it's framed entirely at the beginning around systems thinking and seeing American politics as interlocking systems. And at the same time, that I think Donald Trump is a product of those, certainly a product of, say, the Electoral College and its preference for Republican-leaning areas. Without that, he never wins the election. He's also distinctive. You've written some really, really great stuff that I agree with on the ways in which Trump could be succeeded

• 49:29Ezra Klein?

  by a much more effective kind of authoritarian. But the pushback I always get on that idea, which I hold as well, is it Trump's celebrity, his particular personality, made him capable of doing this in a way that just somebody else who's a more normal, capable politician would not be able to? That you can't separate what made him win from what made him, in certain ways, ineffective? And I'm curious how you think about that, how you think about balancing clearly individual qualities of leaders from the systemic things that create them?

• 50:01Speaker 01

  So I love this question because this is exactly the kind of thing I like thinking about. And what I'd like to say is that history creates its personalities in that there is a tendency to highlight heroic efforts to do something good, especially in poorer countries. You know, the teacher who's going out of their way to sort of, you know, walk for miles, go to that village school and, you know, do their best and like the sort of above and beyond the call of duty kind of thing. And usually, mind, I like, I'm from like a third world country myself and have spent a lot of time here and there. And usually what I

• 50:46Speaker 01

  think is like, in a lot of those places, like you have a lot of heroes, but you, what you don't have is the sort of the opportunities, like the routine opportunities that people in better off countries have. And that's what needs fixing. Like, you don't want to send more heroes to that place. You just want to make them unnecessary. There's a Bertolt Breit play, The Life of Galileo, where one of the sort of secondary characters talks about Galileo's heroism. And his response in, you know, from Breit's phrasing of it is that pity the land that needs the heroes, because it means something's wrong and you

• 51:27Speaker 01

  need the heroism, right? Ideally, things work. So flip that thinking around. And if you have what we had, which is...

• 51:38Speaker 01

  Bunch of things, the elite disconnect, the divergence of trajectories of this country where the stock market can be doing great, even as the bottom 20, 40% of the country is not increasing their wealth. The way that the Republican Party can keep a river of losing the popular vote and have a good shot at the presidency nonetheless. The Iraq war that, you know, we just don't ever talk about anymore as if it never happened. And there's all these things that have led to the moment in which you got Donald Trump. If you don't have all of those things, you don't have Donald Trump having a shot at this.

• 52:21Speaker 01

  So instead of trying to figure out who the next Donald Trump might be, I'm kind of like, I don't care who it might be. I just want to make sure there's no circumstances under which that person, he or she. And if I had to bet, I would bet it would be a woman. I don't want him to have a shot. It's not some sort of casting call where we're trying to find the next star or anti-star in this case. If you're kind of looking at the world and thinking, how do we make sure nobody has a chance at this? Because if the ground is amenable to it, somebody will rise to the occasion, unfortunately, or go sink to the occasion, whatever you want to call it. And that I thought was more important.

• 53:04Speaker 01

  And when people point out to me all the things that are unique about Donald Trump, I point to them all the things that are extremely common in history about elite failure. Right? Donald Trump might have been unique, but having elite failure have catastrophic consequences for your country or your civilization.

• 53:29Speaker 01

  Is very common in history. And so that's the part you need to worry about rather than thinking you will the next one, you know, have a show in NBC or not, you know, fine, that's specific. But the pattern is kind of like pandemics. You don't know what the next pandemic will necessarily be, but you know, you're going to have pandemics like that. If you look at human history, they're there all the time and you know, they happen all the time. So while you might not be able to exactly predict what the next pathogen that's going to threaten us will be the flu or a coronavirus or something else. You know that you need the infrastructure to whack it as fast as it tries to appear. Otherwise you're going to get hit. It's the same thing.

• 54:13Speaker 01

  So the place we were at in 2016 was conducive to this specific threat. If that hadn't happened, I think we would have had a version of it in 2020.

• 54:26Ezra Klein?

  I, I, I think that's right. And one thing that strikes me as very underplayed in the analysis here is the way in which the, the, the systems here were changing and we knew some of them, but I don't think people had taken them seriously enough. And in particular, what was changing was that for a variety of different reasons, the base of the two parties, but in this case particularly the Republican Party was developing more power to demand and get what it wanted. It was developing more power to over information because social media and other things have taken apart the, the monopoly of information that a few media companies and, and, and parties had. Small donor fundraising was changing, you know, who could be a viable candidate.

• 55:08Ezra Klein?

  Social media was changing, what, what kinds of things worked, the more competitive media environment through Fox News and Breitbart was changing the ways in which different political actors saw what the conservative base wanted. There's much more of a market in, in, in giving conservative voters the, the kinds of media and information they're looking for. And Donald Trump just went out and market tested. I mean, he market tested with birtherism, with immigration. He saw that the things that were motivating base Republicans were really different than what Paul Ryan wanted them to be, were really different than what Mitt Romney wanted them to be. And, and he was summoned, right? Donald Trump, in his own ways, was a response to the market. And something that is scary about that then is if you take that seriously and you listen

• 55:50Ezra Klein?

  to what Republicans are saying and doing now, you, you get somewhere very concerning. You, you wrote a really chilling line in a recent piece that I'm going to read here. What people believe they should do is how they will eventually act. This is especially important because institutions, the courts, the political parties, the elections offices, the legislatures are merely people collectively deciding to act in a particular matter. When people change their mind about the rules, those will be the new rules. The Republican Party has very clearly changed its mind about the rules of how elections should work. And it was the case that key people in the Republican Party who are in positions of authority were operating by the old rules.

• 56:35Ezra Klein?

  But the GOP is trying to replace them right now. They are trying to get the people in those positions for next time to be in alignment with where the party has moved, with the sort of post-Donald Trump idea that elections are legitimate only when we win them, rather than the pre-Donald Trump idea that elections are legitimate if they were done according to the rule set in advance. So how do you see this playing out, looking at the GOP as a system?

• 57:01Speaker 01

  Right. So the problem we have here is that this sort of overturning of the election attempt, which was kind of incompetent and ridiculous, but also deadly and very serious, came at the heels of increasing and persistent minority rule in this country. And that's the problem. We have multiple things coming together. One of them is the Senate is structurally minority rule. And traditionally, that didn't correspond to an exact political line, right? The Democrats had some rural states and the Republicans had some rural states. But it has since solidified into Republicans have the small white states, which means

• 57:46Speaker 01

  that they basically have enormous control over the Senate without...

• 57:53Speaker 01

  A majority. They have used that to affirm their control over another branch of the government, which is the judiciary. We saw this when Obama tried to appoint a Supreme Court Justice. He couldn't even get a hearing. Like, he didn't even get downvoted. He couldn't even get a hearing. But, you know, the same Senate could get another Supreme Court Justice they liked in like, couple of weeks right before the election. So they have used their Senate's control through the minority, like they're, they don't have numbers, but they just have the senators, to extend their control over another branch of government. And through

• 58:35Speaker 01

  gerrymandering, they are getting disproportionate control of the Congress. Plus, the gerrymandering means that since the seats aren't competitive, the real competition is in the primary, right? It's not like which party's gonna get it. It's which party's candidate. And that means like, a small group of mobilized extremists can take over a primary much more easily. On top of that, you have cases in North Carolina, Wisconsin, and other places where when they do lose statewide office, which they can't gerrymander, like the governor's office, the lame duck state legislature, which they have gerrymandered, will go in and take away

• 59:20Speaker 01

  powers the previous Republican governor had, right? So even when you win elections, they go in using the gerrymander. It's just this way the Senate has been used to take over the judiciary. You see these gerrymandered state legislatures kneecap statewide offices that they can't gerrymander and they lose. So you've seen this in a lot of places. It's not one place, it's not two. And right after they lost the presidency, this time you're seeing, I believe in Wisconsin and a bunch of other states, they now wanna gerrymander their Electoral College votes to try to give advantages. So these are not, this is like

• 1:00:01Speaker 01

  what we'd call democratic backsliding. In any other country, we would recognize this as a grave

• 1:00:10Speaker 01

  Threat to the idea of free and fair elections and representation, but that's how we've been doing it. And I didn't even get into voter suppression. So that this is like, at every level, we have non-representative rules entrenching itself as an idea and as an ideal and as sort of like legitimate. We almost need like the political scientists to study our eroded democracy, the way they would have done it if it were any other place. So for the Democrats, it creates its own kinds of dysfunctions, difficulty, holding their own coalition, the frustration, the detachment of parts of the wings of the party, because you're not allowed to govern. And they're like, it becomes harder to mobilize people

• 1:00:55Speaker 01

  when there's no outcome to all the efforts that you put in and there's despair. So it's just, I know I painted a difficult picture, but I think it's really important to be realistic about how terrible things are so that we can kind of go back to the crucial idea here in that people should be represented in government and government should be accountable to the people that the government's supposed to represent, not to the wealthy, not to the minority that just happens to have structural advantage, not to this, not to that.

• 1:01:36Speaker 01

  So there's this fundamental idea that is being undermined and you don't have rest of liberal democracy. I mean, liberal democracy isn't just that. But if you don't have that part, you can't even start fixing all the other things that one is supposed to have to make a liberal democracy healthy.

• 1:01:54Ezra Klein?

  Yeah, I always think about this in terms of threshold questions. There's so much we debate in terms of this policy or that policy or this messaging decision or that strategic decision. But then there are threshold questions. And if the system simply doesn't work, if it doesn't work to create the conditions under which those other questions can be handled well, then it almost doesn't matter what answers you come to, because you'll fail to that threshold. I think it's a good place actually to come to the final section here, which we call recommendation engine, which I ask you for a couple of book movie, in one case here, recipe recommendations on things that I think you'll, I think you'll be able to guide us a bit. Are you ready?

• 1:02:32Speaker 01

  Okay, go for it.

• 1:02:33Ezra Klein?

  All right. What is the best book in your opinion about systems thinking?

• 1:02:38Speaker 01

  One of my favorite books, I think, is Normal Accidents by Charles Perrow, which is living with high-risk technologies. And it's about like, you know, sort of accidents like Three Mile Island. But it's really a nice sort of example of how things interact with each other. Like, there's a lot of concepts there about, you know, how things interact with each other in complex systems. And it's looking specifically at systems that have potential catastrophic outcomes. But you don't have to apply it just to that. You can apply that kind of thinking to a lot of things. And in fact, ideally, you'd have a field called systems thinking. And how do you think about these big systems? But you don't.

• 1:03:23Ezra Klein?

  Don't some people say they're in systems thinking, the field, right? Like, aren't there people who teach that? I like Sidney Decker, who comes out of Safety Work. He has a good book called Drift Into Failure. But don't some people say they're complex systems thinkers and have a whole subfield about that?

• 1:03:38Speaker 01

  Right, but there's no academic departments about it. Like, complex systems thinking is another term for it. Like, I learned a lot, for example, from ecology and biology. See what I'm saying? Like, I get the concepts from across many fields because ecological systems have a lot of complex systems examples. I've always read about epidemics and pandemics. It wasn't like I was completely new to it. But I had read about them, the way I read about ecology in that it's very good for thinking and teaching systems thinking, right? I would use them as examples in my own classes to try to get my students to think about systems and complex systems.

• 1:04:22Speaker 01

  So it's like distributed across many fields. It's kind of like, it's almost like the scientific method kind of thing, I think, but for the world.

• 1:04:32Ezra Klein?

  What's your favorite work of science fiction?

• 1:04:33Speaker 01

  Now, that one is easy because I'm an Ursula Le Guin fan. And hands down, like, Dispossessed, as always, is my favorite work of science fiction, partly because I read it as one of the first books I read after learning English, speaking, learning to read in English. So I just love that kind of ambivalent utopia, as I believe that's the subtitle for it. But it's really interesting in about like, how do you?

• 1:05:03Speaker 01

  Try to change things and how does it not work? And how does it work? And all those sort of complicated fun things that I like thinking about.

• 1:05:12Ezra Klein?

  It's such a good book. If I've never read much sociology, which thinker should I start with?

• 1:05:17Speaker 01

  Oh, that's a hard one. Um, so sociology is traditionally described to have three founders, which is like Weber, Durkheim, Marx, but they're not the best writers and they're not all correct. So, uh, but they are like really foundational thinkers there. But since then, we've had a lot of sort of important contributions. Like, uh, we have like a very, um, rich American tradition, uh, to, you know, so the W E B Du Bois is an American sociologist and very important civil rights leader activist as well for understanding this country, I think.

• 1:06:01Speaker 01

  So you kind of have to, um, this is part of the problem is I think one of the things that sometimes I try to communicate is that I do what I do, I think best, partly because I don't have too many favorites. Rather, I read like across the board a lot. So it's very hard for me to say, here's the good one, because I'm going to like read a hundred and try to get what I can out of each one of them. So I, I can't give like a single current one, but I think even just reading some of the introduction to sociological theory kind of books, which kind of try to bring

• 1:06:42Speaker 01

  that together, a lot of them are very good and kind of way of thinking about the world that I think is useful because it's not just about humans like as individuals, but humans in social groups and institutions, which is how we live.

• 1:06:56Ezra Klein?

  Final question here, which is what's your favorite vegetarian Turkish food?

• 1:07:00Speaker 01

  Ha, so, okay, I'll give you like a couple of things because it depends on if people want to cook them. So the Turkish cuisine has a whole range of chilled olive oil dishes that are all vegetarian. Like, and you can do them with green beans, you can do them with eggplants. There's like all these versions of them that are not, uh, hard to do. And that are completely outside of the Western experience because it's a vegetable dish that is cold and cooked in olive oil. So you cook it, you know, like it'll be have green beans and tomato and tomato paste and then you chill it and you eat the cold

• 1:07:45Speaker 01

  version very often with bread. And it's absolutely doable. Like, it's not something you need to kind of be very good at to cook. Another thing we have is like lentil meatballs, which are vegetarian and that are really easy to make. Now, if you are really good at it, you would make the stuffed grapevine leaves, the dolmas. Those are also in Turkish cuisine, as they are in many other cuisines, like Greeks and Armenians and sort of Middle Eastern cuisines have versions of it. It's usually fairly similar. Those are difficult. So I love those two, but I don't try to make them because they're challenged to find the

• 1:08:30Speaker 01

  right grapevine leaf and like do it and very time consuming. So that's why I said a couple because if you want to cook, there's like a whole range of amazing, easy to make Turkish vegetarian food that is great. And then there's the difficult ones, which I try to buy.

• 1:08:49Ezra Klein?

  Probably always good advice. This has been wonderful. Zeynep Tufekci, thank you very much.

• 1:08:52Speaker 01

  Thank you for the conversation.

• 1:09:03Ezra Klein?

  Thank you to Zeynep Tufekci for being here. Thank you to all of you for being here. As always, if you enjoyed the show, please give us a rating wherever you are listening to your podcast. It helps us jump up in the algorithm. And as for building up the new show, it really does make a difference. The Ezra Klein Show is a production of New York Times Opinion. It is produced by Roji Karma and Jeff Geld, fact checked by Michelle Harris, original music by Isaac Jones and mixing by Jeff Geld.