AMA: Peter Thiel, Chris Rufo and the D.S.A.

The show’s executive producer, Claire Gordon, joins me in the studio to ask me your questions. Topics include: whether my views on “woke” issues have changed; the feedback we got on our episode with Chris Rufo; the D. S. A. insurgency; my first singing lesson; and the story that I’m in a “secret society” with Peter Thiel. Thank you to everyone who sent in questions; we read them all and wish we’d been able to get to more of them! Mentioned: “What Has Chris Rufo Wrought?” The Ezra Klein Show “White threat in a browning America” by Ezra Klein Why We’re Polarized by Ezra Klein ““Yes Means Yes” is a terrible law, and I completely support it” by Ezra Klein Music Recommendations: Four Tet “Wingdings” “Mas Amable” by DJ Python “Reckoning” by Jon Hopkins and Imogen Heap Thoughts? Guest suggestions? Email us at [email protected]. You can find transcripts (posted midday) and more episodes of “The Ezra Klein Show” at nytimes.com/ezra-klein-podcast, and you can find Ezra on Twitter @ezraklein. Book recommendations from all our guests are listed at https://www.nytimes.com/article/ezra-klein-show-book-recs. This episode of “The Ezra Klein Show” was produced by Claire Gordon, Kristin Lin and Emma Kehlbeck. Fact-checking by Michelle Harris and Julie Beer. Our senior engineer is Jeff Geld, with additional mixing by Johnny Simon. Our recording engineer is Johnny Simon. Cinematography by Kyle Kelley. Video editing by Dani Dillon and Steph Khoury. Our executive producer is Claire Gordon. The show’s production team also includes Marie Cascione, Annie Galvin, Jack McCordick Rollin Hu and Emma Kehlbeck. Original music by Pat McCusker. Audience strategy by Shannon Busta. The director of New York Times Opinion Shows is Annie-Rose Strasser.

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

• 0:26Ezra Klein

  Welcome to one of our Ask Me Anything episodes. I am here joined by our fantastic executive producer, Claire Gordon, who has sharpened all of your questions into darts she will throw at me for some to answer. But we appreciate everything you all send in. We have tried to look at the questions to see which ones were the most common, which seemed to have the most interest. And we're going to get started. Claire, welcome to the other side of the show.

• 0:49Claire Gordon?

  Thank you. Thank you for having me. It's uncomfortable to be here. We will be getting to the question on everyone's mind, which is the secret society you're a member of, dialogue.

• 0:59Ezra Klein

  When have I spoken to Peter Thiel? And what did we say?

• 1:02Claire Gordon?

  Exactly. But first, this is from Scott K., who's noticed that you seem to have a very intense relationship with electronic music, as we all have. Quote, "Is musicianship something you've ever been drawn to? You are clearly not a passive listener. What does music do to your craft? And why do you think you feel so at home in such a specific genre of music?"

• 1:25Ezra Klein

  Hmm. Musicianship is not something I've been heavily drawn to, but I did, for the first time ever, recently take a singing lesson.

• 1:32Claire Gordon?

  Really?

• 1:32Ezra Klein

  And it was such a beautiful experience because I've never felt I can sing at all. And the fact that I make my living a part now of my voice is surprising because it was always the way I speak and how I sound has always been like a point of real insecurity for me when I was growing up particularly.

• 1:47Claire Gordon?

  What about it?

• 1:48Ezra Klein

  A lot about it, without letting people into my private insecurities. But it's really amazing to take a singing lesson. And I'd always thought I could not ever find like a tune or a note. And it turned out I could. I was just wrong about that, about myself, which was a cool thing to learn. I played the flute a bit when I was young, but you know, as a kid. I tried to learn the guitar when I lived in DC as an adult and I loved doing that. I loved it. I should really pick it back up.

• 2:16Claire Gordon?

  Like playing it out at parties?

• 2:18Ezra Klein

  Playing Crash into Me for women. No, I did not play in front of other people. But the guy who's teaching me was just hungover too often to come. And so it kind of like just filtered out. I'd like to learn something. I wouldn't try to learn how to do electronic music. This show in particular can colonize like everything I love. You know, I can read a great novel and then it's like, well, we should have the novelist on the show. And I think it's good to be an appreciator of some things and not try to make them another thing you're learning how to do. I have, in my life, like an excess of energy that is oriented towards productivity, accomplishment, doing, being angry at myself for not doing things well enough or not doing enough of them.

• 3:00Ezra Klein

  And so having spaces where I am an experiencer, not a creator, is important for me. I don't really know how to answer why I feel at home in it. It just is the music. I mean, I've been listening to, oh my God, it's so good. But it's such an even hard album to tell people how to find. So Forte, who's an amazing producer, has an alias that is entirely composed out of wingdings. Like, I recognize how this sounds. So he's got this new album out, but both the artist on the album and every song on the album cannot be pronounced or even searched. But you can find it on platforms by searching Forte.

• 3:45Claire Gordon?

  But it means 9/11 was an inside thought.

• 3:48Ezra Klein

  It means Ezra Klein and Peter Thiel and the secret society. And I just love the album. I've actually had two experiences like this on the show. One with Jeff Tweedy of Wilco, another with Brian Eno, talking to them about individually a song they had done for Tweedy, "Impossible Germany," I think it's called.

• 4:15Ezra Klein

  And for, you know, "Come On" with Fred again.

• 4:23Ezra Klein

  And learning that the incredibly intense experience I had with that music was totally different than the way they understood that music. And I find that really beautiful. And so whatever my experience is with music I like here, it's just mine. It's not, I think, legible, other people don't have the same one. But why these songs do this set of things to me, the ones that I like, which is not all of them. I mean, there's a lot of, there's both a lot of bad electronic music, but also a lot of electronic music that just doesn't do it for me. And, but I think it is a thing best left illegible even to the self.

• 5:05Ezra Klein

  Like, there's a lot of art that what you want to do is just allow yourself to feel differently and not, not try to pin the different feeling like a butterfly to a board. But yeah, I, I feel at home in this music because it makes me feel things I don't feel elsewhere.

• 5:26Claire Gordon?

  Happy.

• 5:28Ezra Klein

  No, often not. I don't actually go for that much music that primarily makes me feel happy. In some ways, I think I use the music to feel things I have more trouble feeling. A lot of the music I like is a little bit discordant and difficult for me. You know, other people can experience it how they experience it.

• 5:45Claire Gordon?

  I've noticed when you take out your headphones or I actually hear it blasting from your laptop. I'm like, that's a choice. That's a choice of mine for your Tuesday afternoon.

• 5:54Ezra Klein

  And I think the music holding very contrasting emotions actually is important for me because the work I do often has to hold very contrasting emotions. There can be beauty and fear and anxiety and hope and all these things at the same time. And so a lot of the music I go for, I mean, some of it I just use to calm down my nervous system. I love all of Arnold's work and most of it for me is very soothing. There's a lot of music I do listen to that's soothing. My wife is always like, that's really sad, really. But like, I don't find it sad. I find it like sometimes a little bit melancholy, but in a way I enjoy. And then oftentimes really, really calming and really beautiful.

• 6:43Ezra Klein

  But then a lot of the music is actually helping me hold things that are hard to feel at the same time, so that I can infuse the work I'm doing with the kind of contradictory emotions that it sometimes needs to have.

• 6:56Claire Gordon?

  Whoa. Let's talk about the feedback to the Chris Rufo episode, which of our recent episodes got the most questions, the most comments.

• 7:09Ezra Klein

  Bifurcated feedback?

• 7:10Claire Gordon?

  Bifurcated feedback. So this question is from Jason and it requires a little bit of setup. I listened to your recent episode with Chris Rufo. Then, out of curiosity, I went and listened to a few episodes of his podcast, Rufo and Lómez. And one of the episodes, Rufo reflected on his conversation with you. I found his interpretation of the conversation wildly different from mine. So I'm going to play two clips here. And so the first clip, this is from our episode with Chris Rufo. And you described Tucker Carlson as a white nationalist. Rufo then asked you to define white nationalism. And this is what you said.

• 7:51Ezra Klein

  In some versions, Jews are included in that white race.

• 7:53Claire Gordon?

  Sure.

• 7:54Ezra Klein

  In some versions, they are not included in that white race. In some versions, we are talking about something I would describe primarily as a kind of nationalism, right? The, you know, if you have too much of a country not sharing a common heritage, you lose solidarity. In some cases, we're talking about something much darker than that, right? There are people who just don't like the way their community is changing. And there's the KKK, right? Everything exists on a spectrum.

• 8:21Speaker 02

  But, but would you say someone who is like, for example, hesitant about rapid, large scale demographic change is just a kind of 1% white nationalist? Yeah, because that would be like the majority of the country.

• 8:33Ezra Klein

  Yes, I don't think it is a problem or unfair or even wrong to worry about large scale, rapid demographic change.

• 8:42Claire Gordon?

  And then here's Rufo's response.

• 8:44Speaker 02

  A couple of years ago, you would not hear a prominent New York Times voice saying that it is totally legitimate, reasonable and understandable to be concerned about large scale, rapid demographic change. I mean, you know, that was a right wing talking point for many years. And the left wing criticism was that was the great replacement theory. That was white nationalism. That was KKK style white supremacy. And so is this a concession? Is this going to be the left's, kind of moderate left's or the establishment left's new position moving forward?

• 9:18Claire Gordon?

  I'll also add that that episode of Rufo and Lómez was called, Ezra Klein Admits The New York Times Was Wrong on Woke. And the first two chapters on YouTube were called, Ezra Klein's Great Replacement Moment and What Ezra Now Admits Was Once Branded White Nationalism. So with all that setup, Jason's question is, "It seemed that Rufo and Lómez equated your statement with a full endorsement of the great replacement theory. To me, this is a ridiculous misinterpretation of your point. When you have guests with broad platforms like Rufo, do you engage with them after an interview? And if so, how at all do you respond if you feel that someone is misrepresenting your position?"

• 9:59Ezra Klein

  I don't, for the most part. I'll say a couple of things here. One is that a major thread of my interview with Chris Rufo is that Rufo is a propagandist. We begin with his discussion of agitprop. And then a lot of the conversation is me unspooling with him the way he does that and the consequences I think it has and the way it often misrepresents and then worsens reality and is worse in the political party that he's part of.

• 10:29Ezra Klein

  But I'm not thinking to like, sit here and be surprised that a person who is like a proud propagandist, maybe the way he responds to that interview is by focusing on the parts he thinks he can turn into propaganda. I did find that particular take, which I actually saw from other people too, very surprising. I have for many, many, many years, and in fact, it's part of my first book, Why We're Polarized, not just believed, but talked a lot about how the immigration issue gets sanitized as about economics, but it is actually about people's discomfort with demographic change. I wrote a big piece for Vox called White Threat in a Browning America.

• 11:12Ezra Klein

  I think I've been very attentive for a long time to the fact that it is very politically destabilizing for the nature of a place for who lives in it to change fairly rapidly. And it has changed on a kind of generational level fairly rapidly. So in the 1970s, 4% dish, 4.5% of America was foreign born. Now it's around 15%. So it's went from, you know, sort of a low to either it is or it is near a high.

• 11:42Ezra Klein

  I have written a lot over the years about how that is a major driver of what Donald Trump is. I do not believe, and I just like, I cannot say this more flatly, that it is a normal, constant and legitimate dimension of politics in a nation for people to have views on who lives in the community and how it's changing. I think great replacement theory is a white nationalist theory. The thing that I'm critiquing Rufo for in that section is footseeing with Tucker Carlson at the time when Tucker Carlson is offering all these theories and then later on being shocked that Tucker Carlson has gone as far as he has.

• 12:24Ezra Klein

  So I'm saying, this was all happening and you seemed perfectly happy with the trend that it was on. And now you're like, oh my God, like, how did we end up with this conspiratorial racialist right? And I'm saying, it was right there in front of you.

• 12:37Claire Gordon?

  To follow up on that, I disagreed with Jason and his question of saying that Rufo was suggesting that you were fully endorsing the great replacement theory. He's saying that what you said you believe is what people on the right, like him, have been saying for years, and they have been branded white nationalists for it.

• 12:57Ezra Klein

  It's hard for me to know, like, which position Rufo was trying to ascribe to me or even to the broader left here. But I guess like, the only thing I can say is, I think you can have normal concerns and it's just a normal part of politics that people notice and have views on when their communities change. I think you can do that without it being understood as white nationalism. I think if you brand that white nationalism or any kind of, you know, racial's view, then you have basically taken a huge amount of contestation in every nation we know of and tried to make it, you know, politically unsayable. I have personally never done that and have never believed that's like a usable way to think about politics.

• 13:38Ezra Klein

  Of course, you can then take that and turn it into a white nationalist version. And the white nationalist version is there are white people, they are the true builders and inheritors of our society. The people coming in are genetically or culturally inferior and that it is a threat to the fundamental success of our society to have it not dominated by a certain percentage of ethnically, you know, you're Northern European or something descendants. That to me is white nationalism. I think it is very important to be able to delineate these things. I think it's important for the left.

• 14:23Ezra Klein

  I think it's important for the right. If the right can't see the difference that I'm talking about, then of course it's not able to police white nationalism because it wants to say there's no difference in anything, which means you cannot like, see the thing you're trying to look for.

• 14:36Claire Gordon?

  The point that you said about it's reasonable to be worried about large scale, rapid demographic change. And you've said that several times before in the past, going back years. Why do you think Rufo expressed surprise at you saying it?

• 14:51Ezra Klein

  I mean, I don't want to speculate on why Rufo is pretending to be surprised about. I think on that one, he, again, I don't want to interpret him for him. I really try not to argue with guests after they've left the, the room.

• 15:07Ezra Klein

  I actually don't even think my views on immigration are that different than they've ever been. The Democratic Party has definitely moved on immigration. It shot really far left in 2020, you know, with Julian Castro pushing the primary field to raise their hands or the, you know, the debate moderators pushing them to raise their hands around Julio Castro's argument that illegal immigration should be decriminalized, that the movement across the border should be decriminalized. And I think even many of the people on that stage would agree with the way I am talking about immigration, but at that point, they were not willing to stand up to parts of their party that were, one, very, very appropriately angry at the cruelty Trump showed towards

• 15:52Ezra Klein

  immigrants, but also were trying to make an argument that pretty normal views on immigration that most Americans held were on some level racist. I just think that happened before, right? And I don't think it's about, I don't think that the concession there actually had to do with whether or not it's legitimate to worry about or have feelings about change inside of community. I think the concession there from the left, which in general was a mistake it was making in 2020, and we certainly did episodes on this, like, you know, going into the next election, is that order is very, very important to people. And if what they feel is that when you are in power, the world is disordered, that prices

• 16:36Ezra Klein

  are out of control, that all of a sudden there are migrants everywhere, you know, on the subways in New York selling candy and like, putting aside how much immigration there is, is it orderly? Is the border like controlled?

• 16:49Claire Gordon?

  So Jason, in that question, he was defending you against what he thought was Rufo twisting what you said. We did get some feedback that was critical of you and Rufo, and specifically people feeling like you didn't push back enough. This is Matthew W. How do you decide, especially in the moment, when to push back on a guest versus let a claim go?

• 17:13Ezra Klein

  I come into episodes typically with a broad structure I want to be able to, to tease out. And I try to let people talk. I'm having people on so you can hear what they think and you can come to your own judgments. Again, I push back on people when I think it serves the episode, when I think you don't know what they think yet, when I think what they think is not clear, when I think what they think has not been tested. But if it begins to fail some set of that tests, right? And, and sometimes I can't test it in the moment because I'm trying to go somewhere else and that's going to take us down a, a path for 25 minutes and we don't have that 25 minutes.

• 17:54Claire Gordon?

  Yeah, I mean, the episode was already two hours.

• 17:56Ezra Klein

  So I just don't.

• 17:57Claire Gordon?

  And I think, and if people like, didn't listen to it or didn't make it to the end, I would recommend making it to the end because it's very revealing.

• 18:06Ezra Klein

  We, we were saying at the beginning, we got very bifurcated feedback on Rufo. And, you know, from my perspective, there was feedback that like, really saw like, what the structure of that episode was and the way things were playing against each other and people who, their interpretation of it was different from mine. But that's also, I think, okay, like, I try to keep the episodes from becoming so legible that there is not room for independent thought. I have a lot of faith and trust in the audience. And even where I understand there's going to be like a contested interpretation of something, I'm trying to create something here where you can have contested interpretations of it because it's supposed to be a space for you to think in, not for me to tell you what to think.

• 18:52Ezra Klein

  I write columns, I write books, I occasionally do like essays on the show. When I want to tell you what to think or try to persuade you of what I think, I do that. I don't want this show to be that. Like, I think that there is a tremendous amount of very didactic work out there. And I think Twitter and social media in general has made it much worse where it's like, people, they've gotten used to every time something is bad or somebody coming and telling them, and just to be clear, what you just heard is bad and you should be a bit like, I don't, I don't think that makes people smarter, richer. And also, one thing I try to leave room for is that people legitimately come to things

• 19:34Ezra Klein

  with different values and different interpretations, and they should be able to see different things in the same episode. I think that episode is really good. And I think that if you follow it through its entire arc around corruption, around what is turning the right into this racialist right that he seems concerned about on his own show, I think there is both like an argument being made there and a thing being revealed there that to me worked really well.

• 20:10Ezra Klein

  But I'm not going to tell you if it worked for you, right? If you don't like the episode, you don't like the episode. You know, Tyler Cowen has a line, I don't know if he still says it before his episodes, but he often says before them, this is a conversation I want to have with this person, not necessarily the conversation you want me to have with this person.

• 20:29Ezra Klein

  And I think there's a truth to that. There are episodes that from my perspective go totally off the rails or they end up with something totally different than what I thought they were going to be. That's not the case for that one. So again, I don't want to break my own rules here and go like point by point and tell you what I think you should think of it, but I can tell you that.

• 21:08Ezra Klein

  If you're not a subscriber to The New York Times, we have some news for you. You can now explore The Times for free without any paywalls at all during your first month in the New York Times app.

• 21:21Claire Gordon?

  This is from Kevin T. I'm a listener going back well into the Vox days. I love your show because while you are definitely to the left of me on some things, I think you're a solid guy. You operate in good faith. You're not a bullshitter. I'm wondering if, over the years, you've come to see any of your more woke positions as mistaken, e.g., your infamous Vox article from the Me Too era, where you suggested that it might not be so ultimately bad if some men were falsely accused of things if it led to progress. Parentheses, feel free to quibble with this interpretation if you like. I'm sure you will. Or your conflict with Sam Harris, who I am closer to ideologically. In this space in particular, identitarianism, wokeness, or whatever you want to call it, are there any positions you've changed your mind on in the last five to 10 years?

• 22:06Ezra Klein

  I would quibble with that description. There's a, that's a piece about affirmative consent rules in colleges. And I would probably quibble with that view of it. Like, it's not that I think it's good for people to be falsely accused of things. I guess, like, to the broad question being asked here, I often see people ascribing a lot of movement to me on all of this, and I actually don't think I-

• 22:26Claire Gordon?

  Yeah, this has become a thing that people are saying about you.

• 22:28Ezra Klein

  Yeah, I get it, but I, my positions, to me, haven't changed that much. I think probably what gets emphasized has a little bit.

• 22:36Ezra Klein

  But here's what I'd say. I think that if I could go back, there's probably two things that I was less alert to than I am now. One is that an argument you would often hear people make, and that I probably made somewhat, had to do with, well, there's no First Amendment right to amplification on Twitter or Facebook or something like that, right? That if it's not something that is affecting, like, the actual legal system or government policy, you don't need to worry about it all that much.

• 23:10Claire Gordon?

  Like, the mob yelling at you at Twitter or being shadow banned because you said something that, like, was like hate speech?

• 23:15Ezra Klein

  And I think cultural power like that is, I didn't think it was totally unmeaningful at the time. I mean, one thing you'll see in my 10-yard Vox, we never fired anybody for speech. Never happened, right? I, like, I wrote pieces in that era about, like, the difference between, in my view, cancel culture, which I always thought was like a poorly defined thing, and cancel behavior, which I thought was very real, which is people acting in a way that was going to lead to people losing their jobs. Now, they only lost their jobs when it combined with power. And something that I tried to be alert to then, and I still believe now, is that a lot of things where people were saying what they cared about was free speech, what they cared about was power and losing power.

• 23:58Ezra Klein

  And I think the Trump administration has proven me 100% right on that. 100%. That Donald Trump and all these people came in saying they were going to restore free speech, and they did nothing of the kind. In fact, they've used state power more aggressively than Democrats ever did to chill speech, to punish people for speech, to scare people, to deport people. So, one thing that I just got into a lot of fights about, and it put me, like, in the way people categorize my opinions, like, very much on the woke side, so it's like, there is a big fight over power here.

• 24:34Claire Gordon?

  And there's a real threat to free speech here.

• 24:36Ezra Klein

  But I do think that the people who are arguing that the way that power is being deployed on platforms and, you know, in spaces like colleges, that it was fundamentally illiberal, and that it wasn't going to be contained there, it actually was going to leak into society, they had more of a point than I thought then, right? This is a point John Height made, and we had a debate about it back in the Vox days. And, you know, there's all these debates about college campuses, and a lot of my views, like, who cares? Like, I just don't want to hear that much about what happens at Yale.

• 25:09Ezra Klein

  And the view of Height and some other people was, it's not going to stay at Yale. Like, you're training the next generation of, you know, staffers and leaders, and like, this is going to come out of there. I think, one, that was basically true, right? That the spillover effect was very real. And, two, that, uh, that it also, the application of cultural power caused such backlash that it arguably more than wiped out the gains. The number of people who I've seen who I think were truly radicalized by just stuff that happened to them on Twitter, on Facebook, on Instagram, on places like that, in part

• 25:51Ezra Klein

  because I always looked at those places as kind of cesspools, to just be blunt.

• 25:59Ezra Klein

  I think I was, like, just less concerned about what was happening there.

• 26:02Claire Gordon?

  Yeah.

• 26:02Ezra Klein

  So, but, but I always want to say this, because I think this other side of it is important. The reason I was sympathetic to what gets called wokeness, I actually still believe all that. I believe systemic racism is very real. I believe that our society is fundamentally unequal in very, very, very deep ways. I believe that we often have very difficult trade-offs between who gets justice, and that as those, as the power moves, right? I mean, the, the sort of piece about affirmative consent was trying to grapple with something that I still find is very hard to grapple with, which is the equilibrium that existed, you know, that people were trying to alter in affirmative consent laws, wasn't an equilibrium where there were no harms.

• 26:47Ezra Klein

  It was one where there was rampant sexual assault that went unpunished, and many, many, many women I know have been sexually assaulted and traumatized by it and harmed by it in spaces where there was not really a recourse. Did affirmative consent laws find, like, a great equilibrium? They didn't. So I think you could say, like, it's a hard problem. But I don't want to just say, no, this was all wrong. One of the, the things happening when you begin to sort of unearth the way we have settled into unjust structures in society is you don't always know how to change those structures in a way that will work. And I think a lot of things failed. I think a lot of things failed.

• 27:30Ezra Klein

  But the things people were trying to change were very real. I mean, the level of just overwhelming workplace and social harassment that, you know, primarily women faced and face, right? It's not gone, was real. I think racism remains a problem we don't really know how to deal with. I think that I actually have, like, mostly the same views on what it is we're trying to fix in society. But I think I take more seriously the people who said that using illiberalism to create something more liberal, even if the illiberalism is not coming from the state, is you're, you're imperiling more than you realize you're imperiling.

• 28:16Claire Gordon?

  I mean, I also think it's an emphasis thing, that in 2014, as we're, like, ratcheting up into this big woke moment, but it's also a moment of progressive tailwinds, and you're weighing in all the time on talking about the finer points of these issues, the political moment right now is not that.

• 28:32Ezra Klein

  Yeah, although I guess maybe the one thing I would say is that, as I understand my own work over time, I understand myself as trying to figure out how to make progress on things that have remained pretty consistent. And if an approach fails, and I think a lot of those approaches failed, and they particularly failed politically, I think it'd be crazy not to try to ask, well, why did this fail? And what did we learn from it? And the thing you maybe hear me saying a lot about how do Democrats win in Iowa and Ohio and Nebraska and South Dakota and North Dakota and Arkansas, and these places they used to win, and thinking, okay, like, what kind of a tent do you need to do that? What kind of a party brand do you need to do that? To me, I'm trying to make progress on the same issues. I think one of the very, very bad habits people pick up, learning their politics in

• 29:17Ezra Klein

  online discourse, online, algorithmically structured, like, discourse holes, is they begin to equate political change with political position-taking, and that your commitment to something is defined by how stridently you express your opposition to the thing you don't like. Not how effectively you build power to fix it. And I understood, like, again, what we call wokeness as a, an effort to build power to fix something. And it went in directions that even at the time, like, I was not on board of. But I think you can't look around without saying that you were trying to do persuasion and the persuasion failed.

• 30:01Ezra Klein

  And now things are quite a bit worse than they were even, I think, then. And so you have to ask, okay, like, what failed? And what have you learned? I think if you have a politics over an extended period of time that is not learning things about the world, something is wrong with it. You should be changing your emphasis, you should, but you should also be changing your approach. And I guess the only other thing I'll say, and this is a very consistent theme for me back then, too. I just think a lot of what went wrong then and what is going wrong now has to do with these fights taking place in fundamentally deranging spaces. Spaces that have only become more deranged after Elon Musk bought Twitter,

• 30:45Ezra Klein

  become more deranged as they've all become much more algorithmic and less focused on your friends and the people you follow. And I think if you go back to my work then, if you go to it now, I have an extremely clear through line of just somebody who has been very, very, very concerned that if, that attention is the fundamental capacity we bring to politics. What we pay attention to shapes what we see, it shapes how we act, it shapes what we believe about other people. And if the way we pay attention, like, the space it mediates our attention, deranges it, focuses it on the wrong things in the wrong ways, then our politics is not going to be good. And the reason I think both there were pretty bad excesses in a political movement I fundamentally agreed with.

• 31:29Ezra Klein

  And now there are really bad excesses in a political movement I fundamentally disagree with. I think the fact that both are sort of, were taking place primarily, first and foremost, on then Twitter, now X, is inseparable from what has gone wrong.

• 31:44Claire Gordon?

  Just so we don't end on an entirely down note about how woke went. I went back and read your Yes Means Yes, this is your affirmative consent article in Vox. Yes Means Yes is a terrible law and I completely support it, is the article. I thought there wasn't anything that jumped out at me, but you used to have a false accusations.

• 32:02Ezra Klein

  But I have not read this piece. I didn't even know we were going to talk about this. So I've not read this piece, like, in many, many, many, many, many years.

• 32:07Claire Gordon?

  Also, I don't think affirmative consent law makes false accusations more likely or more likely to lead to guys being, like, railroaded. But there was something that did jump out at me as feeling actually quite radical in what you said in that article.

• 32:18Ezra Klein

  Well, can you say what I said? Because I would like to know what I said.

• 32:22Claire Gordon?

  What you said, which is the thrust of your argument, is for one in five women to report an attempted or completed sexual assault means that everyday sexual practices on college campuses need to be upended. And men need to feel a cold spike of fear when they begin a sexual encounter.

• 32:39Ezra Klein

  I definitely don't remember myself as writing that false accusations are not a big deal. I mean, that's what I remember people being mad about, that cold spike of fear line. And I'm not sure, I think I phrase that a little bit more vividly than I would. And it's not that I want anybody to feel fear when beginning sex.

• 32:58Claire Gordon?

  There has been a cultural shift to a lot of anxiety around consent. I recently saw Obsession, the blockbuster horror movie by this Gen Z director that is all about, this is my interpretation, turning that anxiety into supernatural horror. And there's also very little data about how sexual assault on college campuses has actually shifted in the years since. But there is one study of 10 universities, like Harvard, Yale, that does show that self-reporting sexual assault has gone down significantly. But like, what you argued for here, it kind of happened and it maybe worked?

• 33:37Ezra Klein

  Maybe. I mean, I'm not sure the affirmative consent laws were a good idea. I don't, I don't know.

• 33:41Claire Gordon?

  I don't know what, how much difference they.

• 33:43Ezra Klein

  Yeah, I don't know how much difference they made. So I think, like, what you could say about this was that I'm not sure what to think about what colleges should do. And I thought they were worth trying. And, you know, amidst this debate, I made an argument for it. And that argument was very informed by things people near me had gone through, to just be very blunt about it. And I still believe that the difficult thing here is that, I mean, sex itself is like a very complicated interaction between human beings and a very vulnerable and a very intimate one. I think what I'd say after writing that piece, in the years that followed amidst Me Too and everything else, is like, it all became much more sort of widespread and seen,

• 34:25Ezra Klein

  is that I do think the way this got seen and treated really changed. I think a lot of those changes were for the better. I also saw a lot of stories where ambiguous interactions, you know, got interpreted as, like, the worst form of interaction. And I don't, like, you need a way to protect against that, too. And like, I'll just, I don't have an answer to all this, right? I don't know how to fix the, like, constant reality of sexual assault and also the reality that if you, like, yeah, I don't know how to fix the mix of the constant reality of sexual assault and, like, the ambiguous way in which two people might understand the same thing happening. I think it's really hard.

• 35:09Claire Gordon?

  This is a question from Javan S. with the Democratic Party now splitting into center Dems and DSA. Is DSA just now becoming hip to anti-establishment politics in a way that MAGA did a decade ago? Are both movements just different flavors of populism? Where populism is the real current of politics dressed up in different outfits?

• 35:29Ezra Klein

  I wouldn't focus this question on the DSA because a lot of the candidates we are talking about in this populist moment are not, to my knowledge, DSA candidates. Graham Plathner's out of the race, but he was not a DSA candidate. Abdul al-Sayed, to my knowledge, is not a DSA candidate. A lot, I mean, there are some populists running who are DSA affiliated and some who aren't. Populism classically is a political perspective that is more about seeing a small group of elites hoarding power and believing that in order to have a better society, better politics, you need to break the power they hoard. And so you can have, you know, your right wing variants, your left wing variants. I think it's sort of fairly widely believed that the most electable form of candidate you can run right now

• 36:14Ezra Klein

  is economically populist and culturally moderate, right? That's sort of the Dan Osborne formula in Nebraska. And Dan Osborne is a candidate who really did wildly overperform in a red straight. Now, he also ran as an independent, but that meant he wasn't dragged down by the Democratic Party's baggage.

• 36:28Claire Gordon?

  Graham Plathner wasn't culturally moderate.

• 36:32Ezra Klein

  I'm not sure he was the most kind of electable form of candidate you could run. So this is what I mean, right? I think the problem with seeing all this as populism is that it's more than that, too. I don't think populism necessarily has a lot to say about Israel Gaza. You can have, you know, populists who end up on both sides of that issue. And in fact, you do in current American politics. And I think at some deeper level, populism is about listening to whatever group you are saying it is that is the mass, right? Whatever group you believe represents, like, the real people. For the right, populism tends to be a more native-born phenomenon, right? They're like the real Americans and then the kind of fake elites. On the left, it's often more economic.

• 37:17Ezra Klein

  But a lot of these candidates have a bunch of other positions that are a kind of linked and more elite set of ideas, right? On climate, on other things, that put them pretty out of step with working-class voters. And it's why, when you look at who they went over, a Graham Plathner was not overperforming with working-class voters. Abdul al-Sayed is not overperforming with non-college voters in Michigan. Like, his electorate doesn't look like that. There's been a lot of people noting that the DSA sweet spot is downwardly mobile, highly educated voters. So I think we're going to see a lot of people making the argument again, like, real populism has not been tried. Because what the DSA is, is leftism, and that's something different.

• 37:58Claire Gordon?

  Sarah V. wrote in with a question. I'm a registered Democrat and have been doing a deep dive into the DSA website and what democratic socialists believe. I consider myself a progressive, but more Bernie Sanders type. What is your understanding of the clear disconnect between what is on that website? No more jails, defund police, open borders, and what Mumdani and others actually do when they are in office? I've been really enjoying watching Mumdani govern since he took office. It feels like a good path so far, but it definitely doesn't reflect the tenants of that organization, of which he's a member.

• 38:31Ezra Klein

  I find it hard to know how seriously to take the DSA website or platform without getting into incredibly tedious detail that has become a constant topic in our Slack. Trying to say who speaks for the DSA and who is speaking when you look at what the national DSA says or what a local chapter says. It's a very unusually structured organization. I do think it is valuable to look at what somebody like Mumdani does in power, right? We've had a number of members of Congress who are DSA-associated or, you know, people in state senates and assembly. And when you're in power, you are working coalitionally to pass legislation

• 39:15Ezra Klein

  or executive orders or regulations, whatever it might be, through a system that does not have entire agreement with you. I don't know what Zohar Mhamdani or anybody else would do if they had king-like power, but I would say Mhamdani, in terms of if you knew nothing about what he has said or what he believes, if you just saw what he has done governing, this would not look very different if another liberal candidate in that primary had won. Yes, they have added a tax on pricey second homes. And I think, and I know he would like to add more taxes on the rich than that. He's also being very, very, very careful and doing

• 39:56Ezra Klein

  a lot of both private and semi-public outreach to people who run investment banks, to the business elite of New York City, because he actually does not want to infuriate them and run them out of the city. If you begin to dry up the tax revenues, the rest of his agenda falls apart immediately. I don't see the Mhamdani era as reflecting an incredibly sharp break from, say, de Blasio. And you can, I think, say that sometimes of Bernie Sanders, too. And that's not a hit on them. I think one of the valuable things about more leftist figures getting into powers of getting into offices where they have executive

• 40:35Ezra Klein

  authority or legislative authority is you actually see the give and take between ideology and power. The one thing that I sometimes find frustrating is that people on the left don't recognize that that is happening everywhere else, too. So liberals often want more ambitious and sweeping changes than they are able to get one in power, too. But there's a tendency to look at what, say, an Obama is able to get done, dealing with a Senate riven by the filibuster, and say, that's all Obamaism was or intended to be, which it isn't. There is a lot that if Barack Obama were king, he would have done that he was not able to do. And with Mhamdani, it's very similar. With Bernie Sanders, we had Faz Shakir, Bernie's

• 41:19Ezra Klein

  former campaign manager on the show, and he said on the show, "Look, we knew that if we got into power, we weren't going to be able to pass Medicare for All."

• 41:26Speaker 03

  There's a high degree of pragmatism there. So while he's pushing, let's take Medicare for All. Then he gets into Congress, and can we at least lower the age from 65 to 60? Can we talk about Medicare expansion so that it covers home care, dental, hearing, and vision, even if you can all move with me to Medicare for All? That actually is how President Bernie Sanders would have governed.

• 41:45Ezra Klein

  We would have expanded Medicare, expanded what it covers, dropped down the age range. And so there is this constant compromise when you're governing. I think it is healthy to watch that playing out. How much to take the DSA as a signal of where these candidates even want to go, that I'm less sure-footed on.

• 42:07Claire Gordon?

  What do you think of the critique that just this platform on their website is really politically damaging for other Democrats, is going to be weaponized by Republicans? And if it's not actually meaningful for how DSA-electors govern, then what is the point?

• 42:26Ezra Klein

  I think you would have to ask a member of the DSA that. I don't know to what degree Democrats broadly are going to be forced to answer for what the DSA believes. My suspicion is not that aggressively, because I do think people understand the DSA is a distinctive thing. And so the idea that in North Carolina, they're going to run a bunch of ads against Roy Cooper, saying he believes in what, like, the DSA website, I don't think anybody buys that. I don't think it really works. Now, it will matter what DSA candidates do when they come into Congress. So if you have some of these newer members of Congress

• 43:06Ezra Klein

  who are DSA-affiliated, putting forward a lot of bills to abolish police or abolish prisons, then, and demanding Democrats vote on them, then you're going to start to see more effort to define the party by what its kind of high-attention left flank is doing. Mhamdani coming out and giving that sort of direct-to-camera address on how he would like to arrest Benjamin Netanyahu and calls on the federal government to do that.

• 43:35Speaker 04

  It is clear that we do not have the independently legal authority to enforce this warrant. The federal government, however, does. And I call on them to join the ICC and execute this warrant. And I want to be equally clear. Benjamin Netanyahu is not welcome in New York City, nor is any other war criminal at large.

• 43:53Ezra Klein

  That is going to be an issue for, that the Republican Party will try to weaponize against voters who are maybe cross-pressured and are maybe even critical of Israel, but do not want to go where Mhamdani and the DSA want to go on Israel. Mhamdani being a central figure in the Democratic Party and making that statement, that is something other Democrats are going to have to deal with. The DSA having stuff on its website, I'm just skeptical. That's going to become a major political issue.

• 44:46Claire Gordon?

  So we got a bunch of questions that were all the same question. So this one is Amy T. Is this true that you are part of the Dialogue group sponsored by Peter Thiel?

• 44:56Ezra Klein

  Okay, Dialogue. Let me start here. What happens is that, as best I understand it, some hacker goes on Blue Sky and is like, "I got the membership roles of Peter Thiel's secret society," and includes all these people: Elon Musk and Peter Thiel and Reid Hoffman and Joseph Gordon-Levitt and Josh Brolin and me and Julian Castro and Cory Booker. And like, just like, tons of people with very, very different roles in the world, different politics.

• 45:26Claire Gordon?

  Cool hang.

• 45:27Ezra Klein

  Cool hang, right? And then this gets picked up, like, pretty credulously by Wired. This was surprising to live through. Dialogue is a pretty banal conference. It is not secret. Just like, flatly, it's not secret. Nobody ever asked me to keep my presence a secret. I went twice, I think. Now I'd have to remember the dates, but I think it was 2018 and 2022, or something like that? It was like, one pre-pandemic, one kind of post-pandemic.

• 45:55Claire Gordon?

  Then why did you never speak about it?

• 45:57Ezra Klein

  Because why would I have spoken about it? I mean, I don't speak about most conferences I go to. It is off the record, in the way most conferences are. I mean, you can quote somebody if they let you. But, so, okay, so Dialogue, it's a conference, sort of like an unconference style. I went because, at that time, I was trying to do more coverage of tech.

• 46:16Claire Gordon?

  What is unconference?

• 46:18Ezra Klein

  Oh, sorry, unconference style. There aren't panels. Like, people kind of self-organize. You write up on a board, like, "I would like to have a session on being a working parent, or better sleep hygiene, or are there any real uses of crypto," or whatever it might be. So you don't go and sit there and listen to people talk at you.

• 46:34Claire Gordon?

  This is like a genre, and you are deep in conference role, my friend.

• 46:38Ezra Klein

  I've done a lot of conferences. That is part of my job, to go places and meet people and listen to them and see if they'd be, one day, good guests on my show. And that is, as you know, part of what I do. But Dialogue was a conference. The one I went to, the first one was for people under 40, I think it was. And so it was sort of like, young, more up-and-coming people. Like, my favorite person I met there was a kind of lefty anarchist. It wasn't like, any of those bold-faced names who I then was told I was in a secret society with. Like, there was no Elon Musk. I've never heard of him as involved with it, or Reid Hoffman, or any of those people. I went again a couple of years later and just found it, like, the second one I went to, kind of like, lame, and it was reflecting the curdling

• 47:22Ezra Klein

  anger of the tech right in that era. And I just found the energy pretty unpleasant, and I didn't go back. By the time I went, my understanding is Peter Thiel is not involved. He was one of the multiple co-founders of Dialogue. I never saw him at it or heard from him in respect to it. I do want to say, because I think people could get the wrong idea, I'm not saying I think there would be a problem if Peter Thiel was still involved. I've invited Peter Thiel on this show. He has not come on. I have had reporting meetings with Peter Thiel. That is my job. I do not see Peter Thiel, or anybody in our society, as somebody I cannot or should not talk to. So Dialogue, when I went, no Peter Thiel, not a society.

• 48:06Ezra Klein

  It was like a conference you went to, also not a secret. And so then to continuously see this thing that is being believed by people, that I'm in the secret society with Peter Thiel, and like, what would that, without anybody even being clear of what that would mean, like, what would it mean for Julian Castro, who, again, he came up earlier in our conversation, like, really pushed the Democratic Party left on immigration, and Peter Thiel was supporting Donald, like, why would you think those two people are doing the same thing? Which is to say that there is a way of looking at the world that I was really surprised how many people seem to buy into this. And then I was particularly surprised to have it be around this conference Dialogue, because what I will say in Dialogue's

• 48:51Ezra Klein

  favor, actually, is that it was a conference that invited a wide variety of people, from a very wide variety of industries and ideologies, to do what it said on the tin, to go to a place and be in dialogue with each other for the weekend, or for a couple of days or whenever it was held. And it did an okay job at that. Like, in conferences I've gone to, it's not the best. It's definitely not the worst. And its fundamental nature was fractious. In part, its fractiousness is why I didn't really want to go back, because I just found some of the conversations very unpleasant. There's like a big focus in that second one I was at, about like, your most unpopular opinion, and it just felt very performative to me.

• 49:35Claire Gordon?

  I think the thing that bothers a lot of people about this, or that it taps into on some level, is this feeling of elites who people understand as having radically different politics and being from radically different worlds, just like, all hanging out in a chummy way. And it feeling like then they're on the receiving end of this performance, when actually elites are all hanging out and have this kind of a class solidarity with each other. And it was a thing that, like, in the episode with Anand Giridharadas on Jeffrey Epstein and what it revealed about elite networks, he's kind of saying this,

• 50:17Claire Gordon?

  and that there was a kernel of truth to it about how elite networks work.

• 50:22Speaker 05

  Even if these people were on cable, you're sitting at home, you're watching cable at the end of the day, and you're seeing these two talking heads fight. But that's for you. That's the spectacle for you at home to keep you entertained. What they're actually doing is revealed in these files, which is hanging out, breaking bread, colluding, sharing information, giving each other tips on deals, giving each other PR advice, making introductions to each other.

• 50:47Claire Gordon?

  That's the thing I think this could not.

• 50:49Ezra Klein

  I don't really buy this, to be honest. I mean, or let me put it this way. If somebody wants to make this critique of like functionally all conferences, that they collect people from like within an industry or across industries and put them together. And you think that's bad, that's fine, right? Like, that's a totally legitimate view to hold about the world. I don't think that is bad. I do that work here in public. I try to have conversations with many different kinds of people across industries, across ideologies, in a way that is simultaneously honest and like fundamentally gracious. I believe that is not just not a bad thing. I believe it is a democratic habit that should be cultivated.

• 51:34Ezra Klein

  I think civic friendship, even across real difference, is more than beautiful, it is necessary. And it's not that I think Dalai was doing something like amazing for the world, but you are definitely not going to get me to sit here and say that the problem is that there might be a space where, I don't know, Ted Cruz and Joseph Gordon-Levitt and somebody who works on cybersecurity risk at Microsoft might have a conversation with each other. I think that's helpful. Like, I think that's good. Epstein, the problem was it was a transactional network built around protecting a pedophile.

• 52:16Ezra Klein

  The output of the network is the problem. And my critique of people who are in the Epstein files late, by the time that they had to know what he was doing, or at least had information that they had to reject about what he had done, is that they were protecting a pedophile. It is not that there is some world in which Noam Chomsky and Steve Bannon might have dinner. Like, that seems interesting on some level. Or Peter Thiel, Noam Chomsky, whoever it might have been. I think people should talk to people they don't agree with. But if your belief is that these people should not get to know each other, then I just don't agree. The reason dialogue became, or this thing became what it is,

• 52:59Ezra Klein

  is because it was called like a secret society. And so like spin was put on the ball to suggest that, oh, in public Ezra Klein and Peter Thiel are pursuing different agendas. In private, they're dressing up in robes and sacrificing a goat and trying to do the same thing. And that's not true. It's just not true. Technocratic liberals, managerial professional class liberals, they can sometimes make the world too complicated to understand. Conspiratorial populism makes it too simple to understand. That is not how the world works. People are mostly doing in private what they're doing in public. There would not be safety

• 53:41Ezra Klein

  among a bunch of people who disagree that much to like coordinate or like say what's really on their minds or anything. Like, I can't even get Peter Thiel to come on the show. And I kind of understand why he doesn't want to come on the show.

• 53:53Claire Gordon?

  Say one thing that you disagree with Peter Thiel about.

• 53:57Ezra Klein

  That democracy and freedom and capitalism are incompatible, that Donald Trump should be president, that Palantir should exist in the way that it currently does. Like, I find Peter Thiel's functionally his entire agenda reprehensible.

• 54:15Claire Gordon?

  That Gawker was a cool website.

• 54:16Ezra Klein

  Gawker was a cool website. That Blake Masters should be a senator, that JD Vance is a good political actor. Like, Greta Thunberg is like a correct model to think about the Antichrist. I disagree with Peter Thiel. Like, his whole agenda is functionally like the opposite of mine. But I will absolutely talk to Peter. And so the dialogue thing, the main thing it did for me, I mean, there's also like the reality, like I can't go and like knock on the doors of everybody who believes something untrue now and like correct the belief. Then like a few days ago on the internet, I was accused of being like a Chinese communist agent or spy or something. Like, the kind of constant cycle now of bullshit that you have no real way to correct

• 55:01Ezra Klein

  is a challenging thing I find to deal with. But I think it reflects something pretty negative. I don't think it said anything good about the way people, a lot of people are absorbing information about the world at the moment.

• 55:16Claire Gordon?

  They could also violate the New York Times, like, employee handbook.

• 55:20Ezra Klein

  Yeah, it would be. I think I'm not supposed to be in a secret society. But what even is a secret society? Like, what makes it a society? What makes it a secret? I find to be an intellectually interesting question, but I don't think.

• 55:33Claire Gordon?

  I mean, there needs to be an initiation ritual.

• 55:35Ezra Klein

  Sure.

• 55:36Claire Gordon?

  You can't tell people you're in it. And I think besides that, you can do whatever.

• 55:42Ezra Klein

  Anyway, I'm not in any of those. I can say right now, to my knowledge, I'm not in any secret societies.

• 55:47Claire Gordon?

  And you have to stay on an email distro for the rest of your life.

• 55:50Ezra Klein

  Yeah, sure.

• 55:52Claire Gordon?

  Last question. So what are three musicians or songs or albums that you would recommend to the audience?

• 56:00Ezra Klein

  Ooh, so the four, the four Tet Wingding album you should go find. And then maybe I really into, and I find this like very hypnotic, this particular album, Mass Amable, I think it's called, Mass Amable by DJ Python, really cool, very strange music. And then maybe to offer a song rather than a whole album, there's a John Hopkins, Imogen Heap collaboration that just came out called Reckoning. Both of them are amazing on their own. Like, Imogen Heap, longtime, one of my favorite artists, John Hopkins, like, his stuff is really, really cool. But Coming Together was, I was very excited when I saw it and I have listened to it a lot since it came out.

• 56:40Claire Gordon?

  Like you and Chris Rufo.

• 56:44Ezra Klein

  Claire Gordon, thank you very much.

• 56:46Claire Gordon?

  Thank you, Ezra.