Ask Ezra Anything: Degrowth, Third Parties, Reading and More

We asked for your questions, and you answered. Hundreds and hundreds of fantastic questions poured in, and our producer Annie Galvin joined me to ask some of the best of them. Does the infrastructure bill mean there’s more hope for bipartisanship than we thought? What’s my view on the degrowth movement? What do I think my book, “Why We’re Polarized,” got right, and what did it get wrong? Will plant- and cell-based meats ever be cheaper than eating animals, given the subsidies the meat industry gets? Why hasn’t any blue state created a single-payer health care system? Can you really build more housing without creating a biodiversity crisis? We also get into reading habits, comic books, meditation, children’s books, why I spend a lot of time thinking about death and much more. So here it is: the “Ask Me Anything” episode. Mentioned: "What Does Degrowth mean? A Few Points of Clarification" by Jason Hickel "The Ugly Secrets Behind the Costco Chicken" by Nicholas Kristof "The Number of Parties" by Maurice Duverger Breaking the Two-Party Doom Loop: The Case for Multiparty Democracy in America by Lee Drutman "Forget Obamacare: Vermont Wants to Bring Single-Payer to America" by Sarah Kliff "What the Rich Don't Want to Admit About the Poor" by Ezra Klein Buddhism Without Beliefs by Stephen Batchelor Seeing That Frees by Rob Burbea The Sandman: Overture by Neil Gaiman Supergods by Grant Morrison Book Recommendations: Here We Are by Oliver Jeffers Cars and Trucks and Things That Go by Richard Scarry Happy Birthday to You! by Dr. Seuss 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.html. Thoughts? Guest suggestions? Email us at [email protected]. “The Ezra Klein Show” is produced by Annie Galvin, Jeff Geld and Rogé Karma; fact-checking by Michelle Harris; original music by Isaac Jones; mixing by Jeff Geld, audience strategy by Shannon Busta. Special thanks to Kristin Lin.

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

• 0:05Ezra Klein?

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

• 0:20Ezra Klein?

  Hello and welcome to the Ask Me Anything episode. Thank you to all of you who sent in hundreds, thousands of fantastic questions. I'm going to be joined today by my great colleague, Andy Galvin, who's a producer on the show, who's going to be here for you, the listener representative, asking your questions, making sure I don't squirm away from them too much. Andy, thank you for being here.

• 0:42Speaker 01

  Yes, thank you for having me and thank you for answering so many of these great questions that we got. So we're going to start with some questions about Ezra's opinions on politics and social issues, and then we're going to get into some personal questions for Ezra. So definitely stick around till the end.

• 0:59Ezra Klein?

  Or don't, it's fine.

• 1:03Speaker 01

  Either way. All right, so let's start with a question from Matt. And Matt asks a timely question. Does the infrastructure deal change your mind about to what extent bipartisanship is possible?

• 1:16Ezra Klein?

  It doesn't really. So the first thing I'd say on this is that there have been a bunch of bipartisan deals in recent years. People are treating this like it is the first time anything is passed to the Senate in a bipartisan way, but it isn't. If you look during Trump's presidency, he didn't try to do that much through legislation, but he did get the NAFTA deal passed in a bipartisan way, the NAFTA revisions. If you go back to Obama, as polarized as that period was in 2015, there is this very big overhaul of No Child Left Behind called the Every Student Succeeds Act. That was a very bipartisan bill. It was jointly negotiated by Lamar Alexander, a Senate Republican, and Patty Murray. Republicans held the Senate at that point.

• 1:57Ezra Klein?

  If you go to 2013, after the presidential election, there's a big comprehensive immigration reform bill that passes in a bipartisan way out of the Senate. Which is all to say that even in periods of high polarization and party division, you tend to have the Senate doing a couple of things in a bipartisan way. This infrastructure bill is what I would call lowest common denominator bipartisanship. So what they've done is they've taken out of the American Jobs Act and the Families Plan, all of the things on which the two parties disagree. Childcare, human infrastructure, healthcare, all of it. And they've basically left spending on hard infrastructure, roads, bridges, water pipes, that kind of thing.

• 2:41Ezra Klein?

  And they're just going to pass that, which is fine. It's good. I'm, I will be happy to see that bill pass. But this is not an example of how bipartisanship can work. To me, it's actually an example of how one it is. If you can't use compromise to find a way to pass things that are priorities, controversial priorities for the two sides, all you can do is the very narrow world of, we all agree that we should spend money on roads. You really can't do that much through it. The only thing I will say in its defense as an interesting political moment is that the pincer move that seems to have been agreed to is interesting. The Republicans are still going to vote for this bill, did vote for it in the Senate, despite knowing that there will also be this partisan budget reconciliation bill coming.

• 3:26Ezra Klein?

  That was striking to me. That suggested there's a little bit more space to pass simultaneously bipartisan and partisan parts of bills, just using different processes. And it would be interesting if that became a normal political strategy. But I see that as a political innovation on the margins, not the dawning of a new era of good feeling.

• 3:48Speaker 01

  So from bipartisanship to polarization, Ara asks a question about your book, Why We're Polarized, out now in paperback.

• 3:57Ezra Klein?

  Thank you for saying that. I'll sip you a 20 after.

• 4:02Speaker 01

  Thank you. So Ara asks, has anything changed in how you view Why We're Polarized since its publication? Have events, observations, and conversations you've had since then altered your thesis or conclusions at all? And if so, to what extent?

• 4:19Ezra Klein?

  So one fun thing about the paperback, a reason to run out of bite, is there is an afterword in the paperback, a new afterword about what I think the book got right and what I wish I had done differently in it. But to give a shortened version of this, first, not that much in my thinking has changed. I say this in the afterword, "The single biggest mistake I made was not believing the book's thesis enough." And I recognize how much that just sounds like me puffing up my own book, but that's the truth of it. I would have told you, even having published a book about how polarization structures, not just the way we look at politicians, but also the way we look at real things in the world, the economy,

• 5:03Ezra Klein?

  who to trust, what to believe in, I still would have told you, if you had described to me what would happen over the next year after I published the book, the pandemic, 500,000 to 600,000 American deaths in that period of time, the second impeachment, the January 6th insurrection, I would have told you that more would change within the structure of political opinion. But for everything that happened with the pandemic, all the death, for all that happened, the 2020 election looked extraordinarily like the 2016 election. There was a small swing towards Joe Biden, there were some interesting compositional differences, but it was not either a mass move towards Joe Biden or a mass move towards

• 5:48Ezra Klein?

  Donald Trump. For all that happened in the Trump presidency, he had an incredibly narrow band of approval from the day he was inaugurated to the day of the 2020 election. So one of the things I said in the book is that we are creating a political system through polarization that is almost immune to new evidence, where there is very little accountability because very little can change minds. And in order for accountability to work, you really do need people to change their minds. You need swings in the political system such that politicians begin responding to new incentives.

• 6:22Ezra Klein?

  I wrote a whole book about how locked in place we are and I underestimated it. Now, the thing that I did not focus on in the book that ends up being a pretty important omission is that I talk about a lot of different dimensions upon which we can be polarized. Race, geography, psychology, ideology, partisanship, et cetera. Something I did not talk about nearly enough is educational polarization, which has become a really central form of polarization. It is a hard thing to talk about because educational polarization seems to me to be picking up some other factors. It's not simply education. As a way of thinking about this, if it were simply education, the polls would not have been wrong again in 2020 because the pollsters had corrected by that point

• 7:07Ezra Klein?

  or were trying very hard to correct for education. But whatever was polarizing, education was only one piece of this sort of low trust voter who doesn't like to talk to pollsters. But nevertheless, educational polarization is really, really important. It's changing the Democratic Party in profound ways or Republican Party in profound ways. It is part of why racial polarization unexpectedly went down a little bit in 2020 because you had people of all races getting pulled more in the educational polarization direction. Joe Biden did better, particularly among college educated whites. Donald Trump did better, particularly among non-college Black Americans and Latinos. And so that's a piece of the book that I think I didn't get right. I didn't see how central educational polarization was becoming.

• 7:53Speaker 01

  Yeah, that's interesting. I just have a kind of a follow up question. Were you surprised by the extent to which the pandemic sort of polarized people? You know, just in terms of masks and vaccines, but also just even in terms of how seriously to take it. Because I think there was a moment at the beginning of the pandemic where I thought, well, it's a virus. I mean, it's going to affect communities differently, but it's sort of a great equalizer in a biological sense. But I think we've just seen increased polarization in a lot of ways. Did that surprise you at all or was this just totally predictable based on what you'd written?

• 8:26Ezra Klein?

  It was predictable based on what I had written and it surprised me because I thought there was a limit. I would have told you that one of the reasons that polarization can shape so much of how we see the world is that so much in politics is an abstraction. It is happening far away. It's complicated. You're not out there taking the measure of the precise amount of carbon in the atmosphere. You're not out there studying what it means for China to be a currency manipulator. It's easy for these questions of group affiliation and who you trust to become dominant when these are complicated secondhand questions that their effect on your own life is diffuse. The virus wasn't, isn't like that. You could

• 9:10Ezra Klein?

  die, the people you know could die, you could get sick, you could get long COVID. And I was and am a little bit astonished that even that form of direct life and death stakes could polarize as sharply as it did. One of the questions I continue to have is whether or not that was baked in, or whether or not that was a secondary mutation in the system based on Donald Trump's bizarre erratic reactions to COVID. The counterfactual I always offer here is what if we were in the second term of Mitt Romney's presidency? And he'd been up there wearing a mask and pushing for very science-based interventions,

• 9:52Ezra Klein?

  which is what he would have been doing. Would Republicans have taken that as their position? And would you actually have a certain amount more of woo-woo liberal worries about vaccinations and masks and breathing carbon dioxide? I genuinely don't know the answer to that, but it's an interesting counterfactual to think about.

• 10:11Speaker 01

  Yeah. Well, a lot to write about for the second edition when it comes out. All right. So now we're going to move into some questions about climate and economics. So Simon has a really interesting question. What does Ezra think of Jason Hickel's argument that degrowth is humanity's best hope for addressing climate change? So maybe could you just quickly gloss what degrowth is and then give your opinion on it?

• 10:36Ezra Klein?

  Yeah. And maybe we should do an episode on this. I have very complicated feelings about degrowth. So one is that it is tricky to talk about, as you say. Because I find its advocates will continue to say that you're defining it wrong. But so let me use a definition from Hickel, which is, and I'm quoting him here. Degrowth is a planned reduction of energy and resource throughput, designed to bring the economy back into balance with the living world in a way that reduces inequality and improves human well-being. And so I'd note two things here. One is designed. Degrowth is, as its advocates understand it, an act of global economic planning,

• 11:19Ezra Klein?

  really without equal anywhere in human history. It is an act of extraordinary central planning. So that's one thing that is going to become important in my answer. I'd say there's part of this vision I'm sympathetic to, and then part of it that I just don't think holds together. I would distinguish a critique of want and a critique of growth. And the way I would do that is that, as you hear, if you listen to the show, I'm pretty critical of a lot of the ways capitalism generates desire. Desire is something we build through advertising, through social mimicry. This is a show that is supported by advertising, right? This is part of the desire generation complex in its business model.

• 12:04Ezra Klein?

  And we are told and taught to want a lot of things, not only that we don't need, but that don't make us happier. And so not all growth, as measured by GDP, is good growth. But a lot of what people want is fine, or great, or whatever. It's their desire, and it's not for me to tell them the genes are interested in or are incorrect. And a lot of it, I don't think, is under the power of policymakers to control. I don't think it's all advertising. I don't know that if you cut down advertising, the amount of people would spend on consumption would go way down. They might simply consume other things. And so I want people to have, like, rich, materially fulfilling lives. And I think it'll be a very hard piece to change.

• 12:49Ezra Klein?

  So in terms of having a counterweight to the materialism, the ideology of materialism in modern society, that's a part of degrowth that I'm very open to. But now let me talk about degrowth more in the terms of it as a direct political project, which is as an answer to climate change. I would cut this into a few pieces. Is degrowth necessary for addressing climate change? Is it the fastest way to address climate change? And is it desirable? It has to be at least one of those things to be the strategy you'd want to take. And I don't think it is. Let's start with necessary. Many countries in Europe, even the United States, are growing while reducing their carbon footprint.

• 13:31Ezra Klein?

  Now, you could say they're not doing so fast enough, depending on the country, but they could all do so much faster if there was enough political will to deploy more renewable technology, to tax carbon, to do a bunch of things that we have not been able to pass. So it is clearly true that we can decouple growth and energy usage. Hiccup, to be fair, will say that that may be true, but given the speed at which we need to act, we can't just be deploying renewable energy technology. It would also help the situation if we stopped using as much through material consumption. That is, I think, conceptually true and politically false. I mean, let's just state that speed is a, first and foremost, a political problem.

• 14:16Ezra Klein?

  There is a delta between where we are right now in terms of what we are doing on climate change and where we could be. That delta is big. And that delta gets bigger every year because it gets harder every year. And the time we have to act before we start getting some of the really truly catastrophic feedback loops in play is shortening. So you're now talking here about the speed at which you can move politics. So for something to be faster, it doesn't just need to be faster if you implemented it. It needs to be something you can implement such it accelerates the politics of radical climate action. And that's where I think degrowth completely falls apart. And I have tried to look for the answer people give on this, and I've never found one that is convincing. So again, I'll quote Hiccup on this.

• 15:02Ezra Klein?

  "The growth has a discriminating approach to reducing economic activity. It seeks to scale down ecologically destructive and socially less necessary production, i.e. the production of SUVs, arms, beef, private transportation, advertising, and planned obsolescence," by which he means there the fact that expiration dates are built into a lot of our electronics, "while expanding socially important sectors like healthcare, education, care, and conviviality."

• 15:29Ezra Klein?

  And I urge people to think about that for a minute. I mean, you can listen to that and you can, you will assume correctly that I am sympathetic to the idea that a lot of those goods are not great. I'm a vegan, I don't eat beef, I would like nobody else to eat beef. I think that if the political demand of the climate movement becomes you don't get to eat beef, you will set climate politics back so far so fast, it would be disastrous. Same thing with SUVs. Like, I don't like SUVs, I don't drive one, but if you are telling people in rich countries that the climate movement is for them not having the cars they want to have, you are just going to lose. Like, you're going to lose fast. We watched this happen for years before Elon Musk and some others began inventing cars

• 16:14Ezra Klein?

  that were both electrified and were actually cool cars. Like, you weren't going to get everybody in a Prius, you might, over time, get them into the post-Tesla generations of electronic vehicles. This is where the politics have been, for me, fall apart. I'd at least like to see some empirical evidence for the claim that the growers are right and that their appeal will speed the politics of doing hard things on climate change, because I think it will do the opposite. And I don't see politicians winning in the countries they would need to win on, on anything like this platform, like, quite the contrary. I watched the most effective attack against Joe Biden's climate policies, it dominated

• 16:55Ezra Klein?

  the news for a day or two, was Fox News just making up, completely making up a false claim that Biden was going to limit or restrict red meat.

• 17:05Speaker 01

  Right.

• 17:06Ezra Klein?

  So, my worry with the growth is that it is trying to take the politics out of politics. It is attacking the flaws of the current strategy as not moving fast enough, when the impediments are political, but then not accepting the impediments to its own political path forward. I will say, because I think it'll be weird to people if I don't mention this, that there is the big problem, of course, that the rising generation of emissions is coming from China, from India. I think it's something like two thirds of emissions are now from middle income countries. That is only going up. Hickel and other degrowthers will say that, yes, the point of this is that the rich countries, which have already used more than their fair share of the carbon budget, should cut their carbon usage so

• 17:49Ezra Klein?

  poorer countries can grow. I cannot imagine how you are going to enforce this as a political and economic planning regime, how you will get rich countries to agree to do less so poor countries can have more. I mean, look at what is happening with vaccine hoarding. I don't want to say that this isn't a good moral weight on the conversation, or in the long term, a good push for people to think about different ways of having growth, different ways of human flourishing. But the entirety, as the degrowth people will agree, the entire question of the climate change conversation is speed. And I just don't see the argument for degrowth as being anything but an extraordinarily slower way of approaching the politics, a

• 18:32Ezra Klein?

  way probably counterproductive compared to what we're doing, which is, I think you can make tremendous strides on climate change by deploying renewable energy technologies and giving people the opportunity to have a more materially fulfilling life atop those technologies. And by the way, when that happens in rich countries, as we have seen, it ends up subsidizing these renewable energy technological advances for poorer countries. So it is a fact that Germany and other countries did so much to subsidize solar for themselves, it has also made it possible for countries like China and India to have such a rapid advance in solar technology that it's affordable for them to do a lot of their growth on that platform. So I also think there are cross subsidies in rich countries trying to maintain

• 19:14Ezra Klein?

  renewable, growth renewable energy deployment that end up helping poor countries change what they're doing in a useful way, too. So that's my take on degrowth. But it's a, it's, you know, I understand its appeal. I just don't understand its politics.

• 19:29Speaker 01

  So Eric had a question that relates to this as well. So Eric asks, how responsible are individuals for decreasing their personal consumption? And what role should government policy play?

• 19:42Ezra Klein?

  The way I try to think about this is don't think about consumption, even your consumption as individual. Think of yourself as a node for social, political and moral contagion.

• 19:57Ezra Klein?

  I don't think my personal decision to not eat meat is that important. On the scale of the global animal trade, it's meaningless. But I caught my veganism from my wife. Other people have caught veganism or vegetarianism from me. And it's in that way that individual attitudes ladder up to social attitudes and then to social and political change. Sometimes I'll see people cut what individuals do and what happens in politics. But I think that's a cut that you need to be very careful making. It is very hard to impose through politics outcomes and social mores that individuals do not already believe in their private lives.

• 20:42Ezra Klein?

  You can do it sometimes. I mean, we've had times, you know, like say Brown v. Board where that has to happen. But it's a very difficult way of going about it. And oftentimes, the way politics changes is it enough individuals have changed. I think this is true also for civil rights and a lot of the examples of what sometimes get looked at as legislative or legal change. Oftentimes enough individuals have changed. They are now open to the idea that the policy regime will move into accordance with their values. But if you're someone who, say, loves eating meat, the idea that the government is going to come tomorrow and tell you you can't is just not going to fly. So taking seriously the ideas and morals and views of individuals,

• 21:28Ezra Klein?

  that's not a different sphere than what ends up happening in politics. And it's not just individual. All of this stuff catches. And it is why I'm a fan of people not being quiet about the way they try to instantiate their political ideals in their individual lives. I think that a lot of the value of the choices we make is in our willingness to try to use those to change the choices other people see as normal for them to make.

• 21:57Speaker 01

  Just to make sure that we answer Eric's question, is there a role for government policy to play at all in reducing consumption?

• 22:06Ezra Klein?

  Yes, there are many ways. I mean, one simple way government policy can help reduce consumption that is negative is to correctly, I'm going to sound very economic here, correctly price in negative externalities, but correctly price what things cost. I am still somebody who believes it would be valuable, even though I don't think it is politically possible to tax carbon, or certainly to have put a tax on it years ago. There are all kinds of ways we can tax things that are actually bad for the world, bad for the environment. I mean, we do this to cigarettes right now at a pretty, pretty high level. So the government can often nudge people to make different decisions than they otherwise would. Occasionally, it can ban. I mean, it can ban the worst things, and it

• 22:47Ezra Klein?

  often should. But yeah, government can use taxes and other kinds of pricing mechanisms to make sure that the prices people see and somewhat reflect the social cost of what they are doing. And also, in the other direction, I mean, the amount we have spent to subsidize oil and gas exploration, or defense technology, or all kinds of other things that are not my favorite parts of our economy, compared to what we have spent subsidizing better choices, I think should make us sit up and wonder about what our priorities truly are. So it isn't just you can price the bad things, but you can pump a lot of money into making sure there are good options for people to have. It is very difficult to live in a way

• 23:32Ezra Klein?

  your society is not set up for you to live in. And that's asking a lot of people individually, maybe not more than should be asked of us, but nevertheless, more than most are willing to pay. So the government can often create other, better options. And there are all kinds of ways to do that, including something I think we're going to get to in the next question.

• 23:52Speaker 01

  Yes, yes. Jack asks a good question that's also about pricing and externalities. Jack asks, in thinking about the hopefully coming rise of plant-based products, how are they supposed to out-compete animal products on cost when the latter, animal products, rely on so many externalities and so much suffering in order to save money?

• 24:12Ezra Klein?

  I really want to say good on Jack for recognizing and saying that animal cruelty is a cost that we just don't pay the animals to. It's been something that I've tried to bang on for years, and I think it is so important. Cheap meat is not cheap. There was a great Nick Kristof column some months back about the very, very, very low-priced rotisserie chickens at Costco and how horribly those chickens are treated. And so, yeah, you walk into Costco, you're like, I can't believe how cheap that chicken is. But that chicken isn't cheap. It's just that the cost was paid by the chicken.

• 24:50Speaker 01

  Hmm, yeah.

• 24:51Ezra Klein?

  And to some degree, within the broader world of meat, is being paid by deforestation and all that comes with that, is being paid in climate costs, is being paid in antibiotic resistance and the people who die from that. I mean, there are a lot of costs that are not paid when people purchase a steak or a burger, or whatever it might be. That said, I don't think even with all of that unpriced suffering and all those unpriced externalities, it is impossible to imagine plant-based or cultivated meat products undercutting the price of meat in the market, simply because the problem with raising animals for food is that it is incredibly inefficient. I was looking at some numbers from an article from Yale.

• 25:36Ezra Klein?

  It's about 25 calories of feed required to create just one calorie of beef. The ratio for pork, it's about 15 to one. Even the most efficient meat chicken is about nine to one. So the promise of these plant-based and cell-based meats is that you don't have that crazy math behind them. That the amount of energy and calories and time you put in to make the food is much closer to the food you get out. The amount of land that you need for the food is much, much, much smaller. And if you can do that, then you can undercut them on price, even if you're not correctly, I would say, pricing the externalities of meat.

• 26:15Ezra Klein?

  And then what I would say is that as the options in the market get better, because we're still pretty early in the current generation of plant-based food products, and we haven't even seen the first truly cultivated meat products go on wide sale. Like, that's still going to be a couple of years out. But imagine 10 years into the future, when there really is a healthy market for these things. And then maybe you can do what we talked about in the previous question of beginning to equalize a pricing a little bit more. Removing some of the subsidies that the current meat industry gets, or that the feed for animals get. Putting in place stronger protections for animal welfare, which might lead prices to rise on animal-based meat, but it wouldn't lead prices to rise on plant-based or cultivated meat.

• 26:59Ezra Klein?

  So as people begin to have other options with which to eat the meat they want, and by the way, this is a very global issue. Going back to the growth conversation, the trend of countries getting richer and wanting much more meat just seems unstoppable. I don't know what you do about that, except to give them options for meat that are not as ecologically destructive. But as people get options that can fulfill the desire they have for meat without it always having to come from animals, they might be more open to demanding better treatment for animals, which in general is a very popular position. People believe animals should be treated well. They just often don't want to think about it or think about the trade-offs that are actually being made because they like stuff that's cheap, as we all do.

• 27:43Speaker 01

  What are your thoughts about things like the Impossible Burger? Where, you know, people have criticized those kind of meat simulacrum products for relying on some of the same industrial processes that can be harmful in other food production? Like, do you have a take on products that are meant to sort of simulate the taste of meat versus just trying to move to a diet where you eat a lot of beans and other legumes and that kind of thing?

• 28:09Ezra Klein?

  Yes, I think these people are, I want to say this gently because I like some of these folks, I think they're very wrong. Mark Bittman is a friend of mine, he's a food writer, he's been on this show. He wrote a response to a piece I did called, you know, Moonshot for Meat, where I was arguing for the beginnings of government subsidies for plant-based and cell-based meat research. And he wrote this whole piece and he said, "We already have a replacement for meat. It's legumes." And it's like, yeah, man. But there's a reason that at Burger King, you can now get an Impossible Whopper and they never let you get a lentil Whopper.

• 28:51Speaker 01

  Right.

• 28:52Ezra Klein?

  I like legumes too. I like beans. I am very skeptical of the part of the food movement that wants to impose its culinary preferences on other people. I don't see that as in general successful. I am not somebody who is naturally down on the industrial production of food. We are supporting billions and billions of people and I want us to be able to support more. I know we get questions about this that, you know, maybe I'll deal with another day. I'm, I'm somebody who believes in human population growth. I want to see it done in a more sustainable way, but, but I believe human life is a good thing. Just the animals who are getting killed right now and tortured, they don't have time for

• 29:35Ezra Klein?

  us to convince the entire world that meat is gross. And since nobody has been even a little bit successful at doing that at all, except for certain religious movements, and even those are losing their potency, a lot more meat is eaten in India now than used to be. I am extraordinarily skeptical of that as a...

• 29:53Ezra Klein?

  Strategy going forward. The people I know in the animal rights movement who have been doing this for decades and decades and have only watched the horrors of the industrial animal production process get worse. There's a reason they've moved in these directions. And I think they are right to. So yes, you have to be careful with your industrial processes, but there's no version of modern life with nine billion people on earth that does not have a lot of industrial processes. You can have good ones, you can have bad ones, but I am not. I think this is going to come clearly through this Ask Me Anything. I'm not anti-technology. I recognize that we are going to create more problems, but we're going to create more problems in all kinds of ways. And we would also create more

• 30:32Ezra Klein?

  problems by trying to run a quick turnaround on this stuff. And so the idea that impossible and whatever is a simulacrum, I just, yeah, it's a simulacrum. So are the animals we eat pumped full of antibiotics and bred to grow to sizes we would have never seen in nature. And meanwhile, you have the rise of cultivated meats, which are really, really very interesting. I went to Upside Foods, which used to be Memphis Meats, and tried some of their chicken. And it's just chicken.

• 30:59Speaker 01

  It's just chicken.

• 31:00Ezra Klein?

  I just ate a piece of chicken for the first time in however many years. And I said that and there I said, yeah, it tastes like chicken. And they're like, because it is chicken. And I realized they do that bit with everybody who comes in the door.

• 31:10Speaker 01

  Yes, for sure.

• 31:10Ezra Klein?

  But it is a remarkably unremarkable eating experience. And so if we can grow chicken breasts on scaffolding, using clean ingredients without pumping them full of antibiotics, without killing a chicken, I am all for it. And I do not see a way, I will say this flatly, this, again, it's related to my thing on to growth. I am very skeptical of our ability to change people's long time, deeply embedded preferences at high speed.

• 31:41Speaker 01

  So one more question that relates to the environment. Alyssa asks, how do you reconcile the need to build more housing for people with catastrophic biodiversity loss that might come along with that effort to build?

• 31:54Ezra Klein?

  So I don't think those are in tension, really. A lot of the pressure to build more housing comes from people who want to see dense places zoned so you can build up. And I don't think it's a case that if we just made it easier to add stories to buildings in San Francisco, you would have anywhere biodiversity loss. I mean, the biodiversity in San Francisco proper is it's already pretty lost. What's happening right now is what's creating a lot of biodiversity loss. So in California, because this zoning is so terrible and it is so hard to build a house in the places people want to live, you've had tremendous outflow into what gets called now the urban wildland interface,

• 32:36Ezra Klein?

  which is, say, building more homes in these more wooded exurban or rural or even until now relatively empty areas of wilderness. And like, that does have a lot of biodiversity loss, but it's also bad for the climate because people are driving more. It's bad for fires for a bunch of different reasons. It's just bad, but it is happening because we won't build up in the cities where they actually want to live. And so we are pushing poorer people out to these more vulnerable, more ecologically difficult places. So, you know, as a first approximation on housing, I would like to see more dense housing in areas people are already living in and want to live in. I would add, by the way, that

• 33:18Ezra Klein?

  in terms of biodiversity loss, the amount of land we give to animals, to grazing animals, is just, it is beyond comprehension. It is so much of the land that is habitable on planet Earth. Like, people have no idea how much this is picking up. And so one of the best things we can do is to move to foods that don't require so much land. If it's legumes, great, but also if it's plant and cell-based meat's great. But either way, I don't think there's really a tension between housing and biodiversity. But I think there are a lot of places where our current policy is creating terrible, terrible biodiversity

• 33:55Ezra Klein?

  outcomes. And denser housing and a move away from industrial animal agriculture would be two things that could really help.

• 34:05Speaker 01

  Hmm. How many stories high do you think buildings in San Francisco should be allowed to be?

• 34:11Ezra Klein?

  A lot higher than now. I don't care.

• 34:15Speaker 01

  Higher than like three.

• 34:16Ezra Klein?

  I mean, I'd start with higher.

• 34:19Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 34:20Ezra Klein?

  I have been to cities like New York where buildings get pretty high and it's fine. I don't love everything about the architecture, but people do enjoy New York.

• 34:32Speaker 01

  That's true.

• 34:33Ezra Klein?

  I don't know. Make it easy to build 10-story apartment buildings. Let's start there before we get to skyscrapers. I just, I, I understand the ways in which people like the aesthetic and even population level characteristics of the places they live. But when you have places that are economically central, some of these cities like San Francisco, where so many people work, and so the reality is you have an entire service class in the city that is made to commute in so you can have your view, I don't like it. And I think it's, I think it's unjust.

• 35:31Speaker 01

  All right. So shifting gears a little bit, Eric asks a really great question that I think builds on some of our recent episodes, like the ones with Ross Douthat and Ta-Nehisi Coates and Nikole Hannah-Jones. So Eric asks, does the United States need a shared sense of purpose, history, and patriotism in order to thrive?

• 35:52Ezra Klein?

  Absolutely. I say full-throatedly absolutely.

• 35:55Speaker 01

  Oh, okay.

• 35:55Ezra Klein?

  And I just don't agree with what a lot of people seem to think that means. I do not believe that the only way to have a shared sense of purpose, history, and patriotism is to have a gauzy, nostalgic, idealistic view of your own country's past. I think a lot of countries have a sense of themselves as flawed. I mean, the most at-hand example is Germany, but by no means is Germany the only one. And I don't think there's a view that Germany lacks the ability to have a unified national identity. I would say that this is why Barack Obama scared the right so much. And I think this is an undernoticed fact about his presidency.

• 36:41Ezra Klein?

  His particular political genius was for fashioning a narrative of American history and politically weaponizing that narrative, I should say, but but fashioning a narrative of American history in which he cast as the true American identity, the people who are working to overcome the sins of our past and then the injustices of the status quo. Whatever you think of his policies, that was his political genius. He actually took back the American story and this is a patriotism for a more liberal or or or left view of America and built inside that view is that we are an imperfect country that has much to atone for and much to live up to. And that those of us in this moment

• 37:26Ezra Klein?

  have a great purpose to do together. We have a great mission to build the world's first true multi ethnic democracy to achieve a level of economic flourishing and political equality we have never seen before. When I had this conversation, Nicole Jones pushed back on the idea that this sucks. Nobody should look at this as a as a celebration that we still have not achieved a true multi ethnic democracy. And she's of course right about that. But given that America is what it is, the idea that there cannot be purpose and patriotism in living up to our ideals is absurd. And not only is it absurd, but we have seen, not just in living memory, but a couple of years ago, his vice president

• 38:11Ezra Klein?

  is currently the president, we have seen the crafting of that narrative and we have seen its extraordinary political potency. Barack Hussein Obama, seven years after nine 11, won the presidency, the first black man to ever do it in this country, based on that narrative. The right understood what an extraordinary threat that was to them and they were correct about that. And I do think it's something the left misses in Obama's political legacy and in the the lessons he he taught. There are many things he wasn't able to or didn't achieve. And there are all kinds of reasons to be disappointed with how fast you can move in American politics or how fast American politics did move in

• 38:55Ezra Klein?

  that period. And then what happened with Donald Trump afterwards. But just as a simple question of can you craft a politically powerful national identity around a view of America that says first and foremost? We are a country that has been deeply unjust. And the people who are most American are those who have fought in every single age to make it more just. You absolutely can. And we just saw it done a couple of years ago.

• 39:27Speaker 01

  Okay, so let's turn now to electoral politics. And this is a great question. I'm actually kind of curious for your thoughts on this, too. So Allison asks, what happened to the Green Party in the US? And Allison says, I mean, I know it's still around, but where did it go so wrong? It's to become pretty irrelevant.

• 39:46Ezra Klein?

  So there is a political science maxim called, I think I'm going to get the pronunciation here right, Duvergerie's Law. He's a French political scientist. And in its technical form, it is something like, single ballot plurality rule elections, such as first past the post, structured within single member districts, tend to favor a two-party system. But to put this more simply, when you have a system where you have winner take all outcomes, third parties are destined to be spoilers, which means the better they do, the more backlash they end up facing. So imagine a world where Democrats in a, in a given election win 40% and Greens, due

• 40:32Ezra Klein?

  to unbelievably charismatic leadership and political strategy, win 15% and Republicans win 45%. Now, in a proportional representation system, which is what you have in a lot of places in Europe, what would end up happening there is that Democrats and the Greens would govern in coalition with each other. In our system, the Republicans win.

• 40:51Speaker 01

  Yeah, right.

• 40:52Ezra Klein?

  And then the Democrats and many of the people who voted for the Greens are furious because we saw this in 2000, you know, George W. Bush did a lot of things people on the left didn't like, correctly so. And the promise is made never again, like we're never again going to let that happen. So if you want to have multi-party systems, you need proportional representation. The reason we don't have stronger third parties is not a bunch of just tactical errors. It is because paradoxically, the more effective a third party is in this country, the more backlash it will face and the weaker it will become. Outside of a complete level of party schism that ends up destroying one of the the main two parties. If you want to read a very good book on this, I recommend Lee Drutman's Breaking the Two-Party Doom Loop,

• 41:37Ezra Klein?

  which is about arguing that much of America's polarization problem is coming from our inability to have a strong multi-party democracy. He gets into a lot of the research here. It's very readable. I don't fully agree with him on the polarization side of it, but I do agree with him on the broader analysis. And I think his solutions are completely correct. And I think people should should check that out.

• 42:00Speaker 01

  So Brian asks kind of a series of questions and I'm just going to read them all. What is holding blue states back from implementing many liberal policy wishlist items or even Biden's platform at the state level? For example, in California, why don't we have universal healthcare or childcare? Is it a good idea for states to implement such large and expensive policies when they themselves generally can't take on the kind of debt that the federal government can?

• 42:27Ezra Klein?

  I don't think you can chalk it all up to money and the debt issue. So what what Brian is getting at there is that the federal government can issue debt and state governments in almost all cases need to balance their budget every single year. So their ability to put things on the credit card is much diminished. If you wanted to say have a single payer healthcare system in the states, where in a state, unlike the federal government, the state would probably have to pay for all of it. While the federal government might say, eh, we're going to pay for it over 15 years or not pay for all of it or whatever it might be. But I think that's a bit of a dodge. There have been a lot of states that have attempted to pass some kind of single payer system.

• 43:11Ezra Klein?

  California is one of them. There was recently a very big push in Vermont, and they have failed in every single case. Whereas, say Obamacare started in Massachusetts with the Romney Care reforms. Single payer in Canada began in a single province. And this is an argument I have with a lot of people who, in terms of the system they would like to see, we agree. And in terms of how healthcare politics work, we disagree. But these policies are often not popular once you try to pass and implement them. They might become popular if they were implemented. And in the rearview mirror, I actually believe that to be true. But when you ask people to pay the full cost of single payer,

• 43:54Ezra Klein?

  as they did in Vermont, they blanch. I highly recommend Sarah Cliffs' two big articles on the Vermont's single payer effort that she wrote in Vox a couple of years ago. It's a very, very good and telling look at why that failed in Bernie Sanders' home state. In Bernie Sanders' home state, in California, there have been years of trying to pass single payer. And Gavin Newsom ran on single payer, and it is not happening. And it's not not happening because imagining the financing is completely impossible. As California politicians never cease to point out, California is, if it were its own economy, it would be something like the fifth largest economy in the world. The fifth largest economy in the world can afford a national healthcare system. And arguably, as a single payer, people like to point out,

• 44:39Ezra Klein?

  it would be cheaper because you could negotiate down pricing. But actually going all the way there is very, very, very politically difficult. A lot of the cost in the current system is hidden right now. It's hidden in tax deductions. It's hidden in employer payments. People who have employer-based healthcare pay roughly 30% of the full cost of their health insurance. That changes a bit year to year, but that's in the ballpark. So then, all of a sudden, when they're presented with a price tag that would be 100%, even if that is being split also to business taxation, it's really shocking because people don't know how much the system currently costs. And it's hard to get over that. That makes it very easy to demonize. People don't like the idea they're not going to be able to have the health insurance they might currently like, even if it is unstable.

• 45:24Ezra Klein?

  They worry about doctor choice. So it is both the case that I would like to see blue states being much more aggressive on governance and also that there are lessons in the fact that these efforts keep failing that I think people don't want to take seriously or learn. Now, that doesn't mean you don't want to try something just because it has failed a bunch of times before. That isn't how I see things, but there is information in the fact that this has happened repeatedly. I would also just say, I think blue states are unduly cautious and fragmented in their policymaking. Like, for instance, people don't know this, but in order to raise taxes in California, you need a two-thirds vote in the legislature.

• 46:06Ezra Klein?

  So it's just really hard to raise taxes in California, which means that there are certain policies you could do if you could raise taxes that you can't. Now, you can get around that by doing propositions, but it's all a tough road to hoe when you're doing complex legislating that requires a fair amount of horse trading and interest groups and so on. And then one advantage that the federal government's debt capacities give it is that being able to put at least some of it on the credit card allows you to give out more benefits while asking for less in taxes or other kinds of costs. And so that's one reason that you end up seeing a lot of these things happen federally first.

• 46:43Speaker 01

  Yes, and we can link Sarah Kliff's pieces in the show notes because I think that would be really great for people to look at.

• 47:11Speaker 01

  Okay, so let's move into some questions about you, Ezra.

• 47:15Ezra Klein?

  Oh, good.

• 47:17Speaker 01

  Yes, now is the exciting part. So we'll start with one actually more about the show. So Josh is asking about the shift that the show has gone through since it was at Vox, and now it's at the New York Times. So Josh asks, it seems to me that your show has shifted away from what I always felt was your emphasis on political theory and political philosophy. Am I reading too much into that? Or has there been a conscientious shift in your approach to your podcast upon starting at the New York Times?

• 47:46Ezra Klein?

  I think there's been a shift, and certainly an ability to make good on ambitions I've had for a long time. I don't think of the show as first and foremost, a political podcast. I think of it as a show about ideas. And the ideas that matter, by the way, including ideas that matter for politics, are much broader than just what is happening in Congress, or what frames itself as explicitly political. You know, as an example of this, if you think back to the episode we did with Simon Montgomery about octos, octopi, octopuses. I was so sure you couldn't do octopi. And then a lot of people made the good point that, you know, it's in the dictionary, words are all made up. We do a lot of stuff where we mix different kinds of cognets. So maybe I can't say octopi. Anyway, if you look at

• 48:29Ezra Klein?

  that show, I think that's a good example of one that looks like a move away from politics. Except I consider that show very political. If we took seriously the remarkable mental capacities and lives of octopuses, doesn't that have profound implications for how we treat the sea, for how we treat them, for how we treat the climate that they that they live in? So I'm not always sure that the shows that don't appear political truly are not. You know, if I think back to, say, the George Saunders episode, which I love, and Saunders is a novelist, that's a very political show, even as most of it is not specifically about politics. It's about novels and empathy. So I see these worlds

• 49:13Ezra Klein?

  as more connected. But if I'm being really honest, I started my political blog when I was 18 and in college. And starting right then, I wrote about politics every single day, every day, with the exception of a couple weeks a year of vacation, which I don't even always take fully without writing about politics, for 18 years.

• 49:39Ezra Klein?

  By the time I left Box. So now I'm 37. So I've spent more than half my life covering politics, really every weekday and frankly, more than that. And I want to think about more things like that. It's kind of as simple as that.

• 49:53Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 49:54Ezra Klein?

  And I also think in certain ways that the focus on politics also led me to missings that ended up becoming very important in politics. So I want the show to be broader because I think the world is broader. And sometimes I want to do this at Box, but between my management roles there and just other responsibilities I had, it's very difficult for me to prep. As you know, because Annie, Annie often has to prep with me on these, these more cultural shows. It's easy for me to prep a fellow political pundit, you know, and talk about what's going on in Congress. To prepare, I mean, we're about to prepare for a series of novelists. I'm terrified. Like, I am terrified.

• 50:37Speaker 01

  Don't worry.

• 50:37Ezra Klein?

  But I think that leads to good shows.

• 50:39Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 50:39Ezra Klein?

  And I think that leads to growth for me and for the show and new vistas for, for the audience. And so that is time I didn't have before, but now that I have it, I want to use it.

• 50:52Speaker 01

  Yeah, I think you've said before that one thing you try to do on the show is kind of help create these maps for understanding the world and sort of how to live. And I really love the idea that politics can be more than just policy and that even, you know, an episode like the Jeff Tweedy one, I mean, that's not a political episode, but it's sort of about how to relate to the world around you and how to relate to other people and your own kind of autobiography. And I think it's not totally unrelated. So the next question is from Ashley and Ashley asks, what is a critique of your work that you took to heart? How did you react to it? Or how did you change?

• 51:31Ezra Klein?

  So a critique I've taken to heart in the past, let's call it decade, is that sometimes in focusing coverage on what is politically possible, you also enforce the boundaries of what is possible. And I want to say that I don't agree with the very strong version of this critique, which imagines that there are almost no boundaries on what you can get done, except what pundits and the media are saying. That's not really where I am. I think, and we've talked about this, I think there's a lot in public opinion that is not easy to change. And I think there's a lot in our political institutions that make change hard. But I think at other times, like particularly when I ran Wonk Blog at the Washington Post, and to be fair, my job there was to cover policymaking in Washington, but I think I

• 52:14Ezra Klein?

  took the boundaries too much for granted. And so something I've tried to do is hold intention that on the one hand, a lot of good ideas are basically politically non-starters or even politically counterproductive. And you can't seriously be somebody who wants to improve the world and not worry about that kind of consequentialist analysis. If you go back to my show with Abraham X. Kendi, there's a lot of that in there. If you want to take a consequentialist approach to anti-racism, then you have to take seriously electoral politics. I remember somebody who I like, Perry Bacon Jr., said on Twitter, he's at the Washington Post, that, you know, he liked that show, but he felt the focus on electoral

• 52:56Ezra Klein?

  outcomes was misguided because Kendi isn't a politician. But I don't. I think that if you are saying that the only thing that matters is whether something raises or lowers racial inequality, then you cannot, you cannot write political consequences out of your analysis, because that's where all this policymaking that we're supposed to be focusing on comes from. So I try to hold pressure on that idea. At the same time, I don't want that to be an excuse for me to not write about, or podcast about, or think about ideas that are not currently politically possible. So I try to do shows that are well outside the, you know, what is going to pass in Congress. And I think practically nowadays we do, and increasingly columns like that. Like a few months ago, I wrote a column about

• 53:40Ezra Klein?

  a negative income tax, which is a form of universal basic income that is means tested. Like, that's not going to pass anytime soon, but it's a good thing to inject into the conversation. So I've tried to do a better job than I think I have at some other points in my career at balancing my focus on institutions and constraints and a pragmatic view of how to make change. Without letting that wall off, like, large areas of needed discourse or ideas that might become very important in the future, or just a good thing to think about, even if they're, even if they're not going to happen. But that's a, that's a, a balance I try and, you know, probably only sometimes I'm able to strike.

• 54:25Speaker 01

  So this is actually sort of related, but we did get a lot of questions about your reading habits, Ezra, which are quite impressive. And so we just picked one of those many questions from Ashley. And Ashley asks, how much of your day do you spend reading? Every episode you talk about the things you read and I'm constantly amazed. How do you find the time in your day? Are you a really speedy reader? So questions along those lines.

• 54:49Ezra Klein?

  I want to bring down how impressed people seem to be with me on this score. So one thing is-

• 54:54Speaker 01

  Make us all feel better, yeah.

• 54:56Ezra Klein?

  One, one, well, you do a lot of reading, Eddie. You're being, you're being modest.

• 54:59Speaker 01

  I like TV too, though, that's the problem.

• 55:03Ezra Klein?

  So one thing is, part of my job is to read books. Like, that is a great blessing for me and it's one most people don't have. My reading is not confined to 25 minutes before I go to bed.

• 55:16Ezra Klein?

  Now, I'm a weirdo. I will often wake up early to read things like that, but part of my job is to spend time during the day reading and that's part of why I get a lot of reading done. There's no, I'm clearly a reasonably quick reader, but I know truly crazily fast readers. Like, I'm not that fast, but I just spend a lot of time at it. And so that's kind of everything. But I was reflecting on this question and, and I realized that that's probably also a bit of a dodge, which is the biggest thing for me on reading is that I love it in a way I cannot express. Anyway, it's probably not always healthy and it is the bedrock of everything else for me. There's an old joke in my family. I went, I was probably nine, 10.

• 55:58Ezra Klein?

  I went on a vacation or a trip, an international trip with my older brother and my grandparents. And everybody joked that I didn't go to any of the places we went. I only went to Pern because at that time I was obsessed with Anne McCaffrey's The Dragon Riders of Pern trilogy. And I just would not take my nose out of the book. And that's kind of been how I've been my whole life. And that doesn't come from somewhere. I didn't create that. I don't get credit for that. The fact that I find it incredibly calming to read, that I like to spend in non-COVID times, my free time in bookstores, I feel comfortable there in libraries. I didn't get that. And it's a gift to me that I have it.

• 56:43Ezra Klein?

  But that's kind of the key thing. It's easy to say, well, you should spend a lot of time reading, but it's hard to spend a lot of time reading if you don't like to read. But for whatever reason, I love to read. I don't like to do other things. And I've wondered too, if it has to do with a weird information processing thing. I mean, you joked about watching TV because I don't watch, I watch almost no TV. And it's hard for TV to hold my interest. And I've always had trouble just listening to people lecture. And I have a weird attention thing where I'm really good at taking in information while reading and just not good at watching things happen. I just do not process well that way. I get bored really easily. This is why I did badly, or a big part of the reason I did so badly in school.

• 57:23Ezra Klein?

  But again, I don't get moral credit for the fact that I have a, like, an intentional quirk that has worked out for me later in life. Like, that just is how it is for me. And so I spend a lot of time reading. I like reading. I would like to spend more time reading than I do. But, you know, the great gift for me is I have a job that gives me time to do it and that I have an innate drive to do it. So even when I'm just resting, what I want to be doing is reading. And that makes me in many ways, an annoying person to be around, but it's a good habit for a podcast host.

• 57:57Speaker 01

  Do you have any, like, guilty pleasure activities that we can all feel better about? Do you play video games?

• 58:04Ezra Klein?

  I used to play a lot of video games. I've tried to get back into them a bunch of different times during the pandemic. A podcast listener sent me a recommendation for Kentucky Route Zero and I picked that up. And I'm trying to play it. I'm having a little bit of trouble holding on because it's a bit slow moving and I'm not used to that kind of game, but I'm sure I'll get there. So I play video games. I listen to a lot of music. I go to a lot of, I mean, again, back when I could. I can't, I've really missed, I've really missed this. I go to a lot of shows. I have a lot of friends. My life is not, you know, I go out drinking like I don't wanna, I don't like the the view of me that I'm some kind of reading automaton. I like to read. And then, you know, other than that, if you watched me for a week, things would look

• 58:46Ezra Klein?

  very, very, very normal. And in some cases, you know, a little silly. I spend a lot of time with my kid. I mean, it's, it's just, I just, I just read a lot. It's, people should be, I don't want so much credit for that.

• 58:59Speaker 01

  Yeah, no, that makes sense. And it is, it is a huge blessing to have a job where you, to some extent, get paid to read. So that that is part of it. Okay, so another question about some of your practices. So Rob asks, I'd like to hear more about your journey with meditation. How did you get started meditating? What does your daily practice consist of? And what resources have you found helpful?

• 59:22Ezra Klein?

  So I'm always, I'm always a little cautious about how much of my own spirituality I like to expose on the show, because it's not something I really want to expose to critique. But I obviously mentioned my meditation a fair amount, so so I feel like I should do it. So I got started, at least in in the period of practice, I think of myself as still in, which has now been going on for pretty seriously for more than a decade. I got started because I was just going nuts. I was just super anxious. This was a period of time around starting Vox, and that just took a lot out of me. And I began meditating, and I began meditating as a stress management technique,

• 1:00:05Ezra Klein?

  which it works somewhat for, although it's by no means a silver bullet on that. But the practice caught for me, and over time, it's become many other things. I mean, more than it manages my stress, it often helps me identify what is actually happening in my psyche, so I can work with that, which is more important, in my view. More recently, the question of what does your daily practice consist of? It's a bit of an intense moment in which to ask me that, but I'll give an honest answer. I've been thinking recently and feeling that my, my practice was a little stagnant, or maybe a lot stagnant. And also it felt like I was using meditation to anesthetize myself.

• 1:00:50Ezra Klein?

  That, you know, the point was to feel calm and stabilized and, you know, focus on your breath. And that I wasn't getting out of it, a deeper sense of the world or clarity about the world that I, I thought was there and have occasionally glimpsed on retreat. And so I actually recently went to a hermitage for a few days where I just sat in a room on my own for, for three nights. It was great. And among the things I did there, taking something out of Stephen Bachelors book, Buddhism Without Beliefs, which I highly recommend, is I spent a lot of time just meditating on death, which is a pretty core practice in a lot of Buddhist traditions. And of course it is core in a lot of other traditions, a lot of death in Christianity,

• 1:01:34Ezra Klein?

  a lot of death and suffering in Judaism, lot going on with death. If you, if you dig into almost any spiritual tradition that you're familiar with. But most of the ways traditions have been recast from modernity, they go away from that. There is an effort to push it away. And I've found it really potent to spend time in that place and to really try to talk myself into the idea that all of this will go away, that my body will betray me, that I will lose people I love, that I will die, that I will just go back to the earth. And then to ask the question of, well, what does that imply for how I should be living now? And I'm not here to tell I'm not enlightened. I don't know. But it's a hell of a practice. I'll tell you that.

• 1:02:19Ezra Klein?

  And so I've been spending a lot of time in meditation using questions like that to try to think more about suffering, to try to feel into other people's suffering more, more fully. And that's been, you know, that's meant a lot to me recently. In terms of resources, when I was starting out meditating, I used a lot of the apps, you know, I liked guided meditations. Over time, I don't really do them anymore. I use the inside timer and I just set the bell. But I do recommend the apps. I always thought 10% happier was a particularly good one. If you want to, if you want to check that out, it's very friendly and it has just some very, very good guided meditations. If you're a real nerd about stuff and you want a very intense meditative program, I found the mind illuminated was really helpful for a while. At a certain

• 1:03:02Ezra Klein?

  point, it wasn't for me anymore, but, but it really did supercharge or put my practice on a track where it felt like it was making for progress for a while. And I found that really valuable. I like the book, Seeing the Freeze, I think it's called by Robert Beyer. You know, there, there are a bunch out there, but I like reading sort of more scholastic forms of Buddhism that are, I wouldn't call myself a Buddhist, but I spend a lot of time, you know, thinking about some of its ideas.

• 1:03:29Speaker 01

  So another question about the show from Colton, and I think this is a really interesting question that I'm kind of interested in as well. So Colton observes, while the podcast is part of your work life, personal anecdotes and simply listening to your thoughts on topics over a long period of time, provide a good illusion of knowing you as a host. And Colton asks, I'm wondering what the quality of that relationship feels like on your end. Do you have any thoughts on that?

• 1:03:56Ezra Klein?

  Yeah, it feels really weird. Compared to everything I've done in journalism, the podcast has the highest quality of people feeling like they know me when they don't. I am an awkward person. If you meet me for a little while and I don't know you. And so, yeah, that part of it is a, is a strange interaction. I will say the strangest part of it is actually for people who do know me, which is to say that there are people in my life who are actual friends of mine. They feel like we talk a lot because they listen to the podcast, but I feel like we don't talk at all because we don't. And I'm right about this, but they don't feel as much the need to check in. And so then we will and

• 1:04:35Speaker 01

  They're all caught up.

• 1:04:36Ezra Klein?

  They'll be like, oh yeah, you know, you're, yeah, they're all caught up in what I'm thinking about. And I don't know anything about them. So it can cause, the funnier thing is that the asymmetry it can cause in actual relationships I have.

• 1:04:48Speaker 01

  Yeah. And it's, it's kind of a cliche to say that podcasts are the, such an intimate medium, but it is really weird. I mean, as a listener, I definitely feel like I know all these people that I definitely don't know.

• 1:04:58Ezra Klein?

  And you just heard about that I'm meditating on death. And I mean,

• 1:05:01Speaker 01

  Right. Yeah.

• 1:05:02Ezra Klein?

  It encourages a confessionality that, of course, it does create intimacy and like, that's purposeful, right? I mean, I do want it to be an honest expression of who I am, but it is then hard to hold up the other side of the bargain well.

• 1:05:19Speaker 01

  Yeah, that makes sense. All right. So one more before we get to our final question. Nathan asks, can you describe your comic book fandom? What are your favorite characters, writers, artists, et cetera? How much do you read? And how do you read? Do you read floppies, trades or digitally?

• 1:05:37Ezra Klein?

  So I've been a comic book fan going, going way back when I was a little kid. I made a deal with my parents where instead of getting an allowance, they were willing to give me a higher real value of comic books than allowance, because they wanted to encourage reading, which is a good trick. And so, I mean, my, I remember getting the Infinity Gauntlet trade paperback when I was sick one time. And that was, I mean, you never, you never forget your first brush with a gauntlet. So nowadays I don't read actual comics. I have subscriptions to the Marvel Unlimited and DC Infinity apps, where you can pay a yearly rate and then you can read basically everything they have ever published. But it's like three months behind where things currently are, which I don't care about.

• 1:06:20Ezra Klein?

  And so I just drill through comics like that.

• 1:06:25Ezra Klein?

  In terms of favorite characters and writers and artists, I'm not as deep a comics nerd that I have all of that, to be honest with you. I think that probably my reputation overstates me on that because I'm a Jewish guy who wears glasses and talks about comic books sometimes. But if I're gonna recommend a couple, I love Peter David's X Factor run from a number of years back. You can get that all in Marvel Unlimited, which is where I found it. All the Neil Gaiman Sandman stuff is great, but I recently read Sandman Overture and it blew my mind. And that's a trade paperback, too. So if you want to just get that all in one, I really can't recommend that one enough. I completely loved it. In terms of things that have been going on more recently, I really have loved the John

• 1:07:07Ezra Klein?

  Hickman X-Men universe that happened from, I think it's called Dawn of the Age of X or Dawn of X and then Into Reign of X and so on. And that's just been a cool, very, I would say fantasy world inflected take on the X-Men. It has a whole economic structure to it. It's very much about relationships between nations and power and superpower. If you want to listen to extraordinary levels of deep nerdy, but pretty entertaining analysis of X-Men, by the way, one of my guilty pleasures, not that guilty, just one of my pleasures, is the Cerebro podcast. A good way to get into that, if you like the Spencer Ackerman episode from a couple of weeks ago, is go listen to Spencer do that show on either

• 1:07:51Ezra Klein?

  Magneto, which is a great one, or The Beast. But you really get a sense for how deep the rabbit hole on this stuff can go.

• 1:07:59Speaker 01

  That's such a good concept for a podcast, to just do these studies of like one character. I love that idea.

• 1:08:04Ezra Klein?

  Oh, it's so good. I'll also say, just while I'm talking about comics, that I recently read, actually just while I was on vacation, Grant Morrison's book, Super Gods, which is both a wonderful memoir of their development as a comic writer and a person, and they're dabbling in magic and all kinds of wild, fascinating stuff, and also just a great history of comics and the different ages and what they have meant and what they mean in our culture and why they've attained the centrality they have. And it's a real fun. It's a real fun book. I'd like to try to get them on the show sometime, but Grant Morrison's Super Gods, I highly recommend.

• 1:08:42Speaker 01

  All right, Ezra, so now, always our final question. What are three books you'd recommend to the audience? And Jacob requests that you do children's books.

• 1:08:52Ezra Klein?

  I would love to do children's books and some of these will reflect what age my kid is at, but here we are. Notes for Living on Planet Earth by Oliver Jeffers, which is just a wonderful little book of awe and manages to look at living on planet Earth at both child scale somehow, but with the appropriate level of wonder. I really think that's just a lovely piece of work. My son, he loves trucks. My whole life is trucks, heavy machinery. I can now identify skid steers and backhoe loaders and all kinds of heavy machinery that I didn't really understand before. Cars and Trucks and Things to Go by Richard Scarry is

• 1:09:32Ezra Klein?

  a classic, but man, the world building of that is wonderful. The mixture in those books, the scary books, but particularly that one of realism and magic, right? It is magical realism. It's just a real delight. That guy was a genius. And then speaking of geniuses, Happy Birthday to You by Dr. Seuss is one of the truly great accomplishments of the English language. My poor son, I'm always, it's always book time and he's always like, truck book? And I'm like, happy birthday to you, baby. Because I enjoy reading it. It's such a fun, playful thing to read. One thing I just love about children's books is the sense of delight in language. Just the delight in turning around language and

• 1:10:15Ezra Klein?

  playing with it. And Dr. Seuss, of course, being the unbelievable master of that. So if you've never read Happy Birthday to You, you should read Happy Birthday to You. And just know that I wish we could do for you what they do in Ketrue.

• 1:10:30Speaker 01

  The real fans will know. Ezra Klein, your podcast is The Ezra Klein Show. Thank you for doing this.

• 1:10:37Ezra Klein?

  Thank you, Annie, and for all you and Roger and Jeff and Michelle do. People don't always get to see the work behind the show, but it's remarkable and it's good to have you in front of the mic.

• 1:10:49Speaker 01

  Oh, thank you. Thank you.

• 1:11:01Ezra Klein?

  The Ezra Klein Show is a production of New York Times Opinion. It is produced by Jeff Geld, Prashyek Karma, and Annie Galvin. It is fact-checked by Michelle Harris. Original music by Isaac Jones and mixing by, once again, the great Jeff Geld.