a16z Podcast - a16z Podcast: On Productivity, Immigration, Trump, and Media

Episode Date: May 12, 2016

Sometimes, our career paths are accidental not intentional... but then it all fits together and makes perfect sense in hindsight. This was especially true for Ezra Klein, who went from writing for his college's alternative paper The Fish Wrap Weekly in the early days, to blogging, and then went to The American Prospect; Washington Post (where he started the very popular policy blog Wonkblog); and now, Vox, where he is the editor-in-chief. All without quite knowing, until after the fact, that he happened to be very interested in policy. In this episode of the a16z Podcast -- the first of our podcasts from our most recent on-the-road trip, this time from Washington, D.C. -- Klein shares his views on tech, policy, and more, including: the productivity (measurement) debate, immigration, the Trump x media phenomenon, and media entrepreneurship overall. Oh and on full-stack startups, too.

Hi, everyone, welcome to the A6 and Z podcast. I'm Sonal, and today Michael and I are in Washington, D.C., and we are doing our very first of our podcast on the road, our second road trip from the UK last year. And our first guest that we're honored to have is Ezra Klein. How's it going? Hi. And Ezra is the editor-in-chief of Vox? Previously, do you want to just tell us a bit about your background and how you came today to where you are? Well, in the beginning, I was a small child. Yeah, so I'm currently editor-in-chief of Vox. box because I'm on a podcast. I'm also a podcaster. I have the Ezra Klein Show where I do interviews with folks. But pathwise, I was at the Washington Post previously where I ran, I found it and ran Wonk Blog, which was a policy heavy section, digital only. And I was a contributor to Bloomberg View and a policy analyst at MSNBC. Before that, I was at the American prospect. And before that, I was a pretty early blogger. Back when saying the word blog was a really weird thing to do when people looked at you funny and asked you what you were talking about. And so those were good times. Tell us a little bit about how you have made this transition. I mean, you've

gone from being like totally independent to being essentially a media entrepreneur. How has that been for you? I'm accidental at almost all levels. So I am, I did not ever intend to become a journalist. This is a slew of surprises for me in my life. When I started a blog, it wasn't something you did because it was a career path. I began a blog. in my freshman year of college at UC Santa Cruz. It was 2003. I had been rejected from an internship on my school newspaper. So it's not like my journals of skills were in high demand. But I caught blogging at a really good moment when there was a big first mover advantage. I did an internship of the Washington Monthly, which is a DC magazine, but also had blogs and was part of that world.

Kind of cutting edge, actually, even back then to have blogs. Yeah. And that I think was sort of the key thing for me And for a bunch of people who were in my cohort, Matt Iglesias, who's a co-founder-minded boxes, another, but there are many more. I was in a space where you had small publications, we're beginning to look at blogging, which was particularly if you're an opinion-oriented publication, blogging was beginning to compete with you pretty directly. And so they decided, hey, we need some people who know how to do this. And because I was a college student, young and cheap, were pretty much my primary qualifications

for a job. And so I was very lucky to come in at a time when you. you could get noticed, but also very lucky to be at a stage in my life, which is different than people who had families or people who were academics, where I could go take a very, you know, internships or very low paid jobs and use that apprenticeship or training to learn skills that blogging alone wasn't teaching me. So I went to the American prospect and became a writing fill and I kept blogging. But at the American prospect, I learned how to report. I learned how to structure a magazine story. I learned how to edit. I learned a lot more of the traditional

journalistic skills. And I think that something that has been really lucky in my career have had the opportunities and that I think have had the ability to merge a bunch of those techniques. Do you think that part of your success as an early blogger was that you were focused on not only one area, but broadly speaking, like policy and politics? And by the way, when you didn't intend to become a journalist, what was your intention? Were you going to be a policy analyst? It's hard to say no. So policy, again, is another thing that I fell into. It wasn't a pre-existing interest, although I did recently go back and see some columns I wrote for the alternative school paper at Santa Cruz called Fish Rap Weekly.

Let's back up. If you know you see Santa Cruz, the fact that it even has an alternative newspaper is very alternative. City on a Hill Press, the student newspaper. That's the establishment. So let's also talk about the name. It needs an alternative. Yeah, yeah, because newspapers used to be fish rap. But I was looking back at them, and this is before I would have told you I was interested in policy. And I was surprised to find that during the O4 election, my columns were actually pretty policy-heavy. Early on, I was writing, as a lot of people were back then, about the Iraq War. And my opinions on that were disastrously wrong and bad.

But policy came, I'd say for me, this sort of origin story. And again, I note the Fischerap bit because I'm not sure this origin story is true. But I got interested in a health care proposal released, I think, in 2005, by the Center for American Progress. And so I wrote it up a bit. And then I noticed in my comments, a lot of people arguing about the Canadian system and the British system. And I thought to myself, I don't know anything about the Canadian or British systems. And so I did this series where I actually went, I was at UCLA at this point. I went to the library.

I checked out a bunch of books on international health care policy. And I wrote up what, you know, I recognize now in retrospect is really Wikipedia summaries of how other countries health care systems worked. And I called it the health of nations. And it was just like, here's how the British system works. Here's how the Canadian system is structured. here's how Japan looks and it was very, very popular. But more than that, it was a lot of fun. It just was much more interesting than the other things had been doing. And that, at least the way I understand my own path, and again, recognizing that I'm not sure my memory is infallible

here was what sort of took me in a different direction. Why couldn't people have gone to a Wikipedia article to get a summary like that? Like, what itch were you scratching? So one, at that point, Wikipedia is not as comprehensive as it is now. So it wasn't that there were good, or at least I didn't find good summaries of these systems there and just not know to not use them. They just weren't there. I was creating a resource I couldn't find. And I think something that has been consistent in the way I approach policy writing is that I actually

like to take the reader on my own journey of learning. So what I find fun about it is actually not the writing. I'm not somebody who got into writing because it makes me feel super a lot. or something. I don't think I'm a very good writer, actually, on a sentence level. A lot of my friends, certainly my wife, are a lot better than I am. What I am, I think, good at doing and interested in doing is structuring questions and finding the answers to them, kind of figuring out where is the core bit of uncertainty. I'm often looking for what is the question on which a debate turns. What is a question that if you come to this answer versus that answer, you get a

different total policy recommendation. And so, you know, as I tried to figure out an area like health care, one great thing about blogging, and particularly blogging at that time, was it could be very provisional. I could just learn about things. I could in a way that did not bespeak or try to assume any kind of authority, just summarize think tank papers I read. I could write things up that ended up being wrong. Something I really miss in writing right now is as my career has progressed, now I run Vox. I have to write in a way where the writing has to have more authority to it. I can't just be wrong all the time. Or if I am wrong, it has to be wrong in socially acceptable reputational protecting ways. And that's actually a lot

less fun for me. It means that learning about things is much more difficult because you can't just take the readers along with you as you try to figure things out. And it turns out, oh, no, that wasn't the answer. You just hadn't read the next paper. But back then, I could do that. And so I think that blogging allowed me to do that in a provisional iterative and often very nerdy way in a way that was not built to scale, not built to go viral. But that built up an audience and it built up a reputation. You sound exactly like Chris Dixon, one of our partners, who was also an early blogger. It's terrible. And Chris is one of my favorite writers at injuries in Horowitz. Oh, that's great to hear. So, you know, you mentioned some questions that

were preoccupying you at the time and that you were writing was a journey to ask and answer those questions. What are some of the questions that are top of mind for you right now, like especially in the policy and tech side? All the questions that are really top of mind for me right now are how do you manage people and how do you make money? The old simple days when I just thought about policy sound really idyllic. But in terms of what are the, so right now, the questions I am structured around

that my own personal work is structured around are less immediate than they used to be. I've become very interested in the question of productivity and technology. Oh, we love that topic. Yeah, a lot of your people are really wrong about it. Just like astonishingly wrong about it. What are they wrong about and why do you think you're right? So I don't think I'm right.

I don't think that we know that much. I think that I have a couple current opinions. I've not finished my reporting here, so this is provisional. But Mark Andreessen and Bill Gates are a bunch of folks out there who are absolutely certain because they look around them that there is a tremendous advance in technology that is simply not being caught up in productivity statistics. There are other people I should know, also in Silicon Valley like Peter Thiel, who do not believe this. Which is to say that the productivity is there, it's just not being measured.

Yeah. So there are a couple versions of this argument when you begin to break it down. One is that there's, as you say, productivity mismeasurement. Everybody agrees that productivity is always mismeasured. There is no doubt about that. The question is, is there reason to believe it is more mismeasured now than it has been before? Because of software and our view. Because of software, yes. There have been a lot of careful analysis of this now, including by Chad Severson, which is a paper I recommend. and people really interested in this lookup, you can get, you know, some amount of money out of

mismeasurement. The problem is it just, it's very hard, even with incredibly optimistic underlying assumptions, to get very much. And the other thing is that how do we know we weren't being terribly mismeasureed before when we invented the toilet, when we invented the automobile, when we invented the jet plane? There's a lot going on here that is, productivity statistics have, have nothing else been consistent. And a lot of the arguments you get into, like, oh, nobody's correctly measuring the value of my phone because I spent all this time on it, but it didn't cost me that much money. Look how much time people spend on televisions.

It was hours and hours of their day. And televisions also were not that expensive and kept getting cheaper and kept getting better. Look at how much time people spent in cars. Look at how much time they spend being around their family. I mean, it's very, or are on telephones. I mean, we have always had this problem. Then you have another set of arguments, right? right, which is productivity is not measuring the right thing.

The big difference between the examples you just shared and software is that it's this question of the dematerialization of the goods, which is that a car, there's two ways to look at the car. Like, there's a car that was this mechanical object. There's a car today that is increasingly becoming more software than hardware. And then you actually have just pure software that is not in any kind of physical form. Like, do you not buy the dematerialization of good arguments? I don't think that.

I definitely buy that we are dematerializing our goods. I don't buy that it's all that important. And I don't think there's a reason to think it would be that important. But think about this another way in terms of what we are. Because one thing that I think is problematic, and my colleague, Matt Iglesis has made this point. I think it's a really important point for this debate. There is a technical economic concept called productivity. That technical economic concept is really important for a lot of other things in the economy.

But it's not the only thing that matters. And in a bit of linguistic imprecision, we often let it stand in for technology. You can have technology advancing and it doesn't do anything for productivity. And clearly, to some degree, we have that. I'm not sure we have it more than we have at other times, but we clearly have it to some degree. But the thing about productivity mismasurement, the argument to me that I can't get away from is if what we were seeing was really a problem in productivity numbers, I would

want to see the effects of increasing productivity showing up in other indicators. So maybe we're not measuring productivity well. But we're measuring wages perfectly well, and they're not going up. Maybe we're not measuring productivity well. But we're definitely measuring the number of Americans who are employed perfectly well. And that's really not in great shape. Maybe we're not measuring productivity well. But we are able to poll people and say, do you think things are on the right track?

Do you think the country is on the right track or wrong track? How do you think your children will be richer than you are? Are you talking about self-reported polling? Now I'm talking about self-reported polling. Why would that be any more valid than anything else? So what I'm saying is that you can imagine a world where we're having tremendous productivity increases that are not being tracked. What you would imagine to see in that world, though, is the reason we care about productivity increases is that they grow the economy. They lead to higher wages.

They lead to more jobs. They lead to people feeling like things are getting better. We are not seeing any of that either. And that makes productivity mismeasurement, in addition to all the technical arguments against it, very unlikely to me. So you're now talking about, you're not talking about a kind of productivity that is not leading to any of the things that we care about productivity for. Right. So productivity is sort of this series of input. At some point, the outputs are what we recognize and what we have always looked toward.

And productivity has an input where it's just productivity swirling around and being more productive, but it doesn't translate to these things that you're describing. I can see how that would give people pause. Right. When you talk to folks about why they care about productivity, they'll make, they'll say if we had had productivity between 2005 and 2014 that we had in the 10 years prior to that, we know that output isn't there. Right? Whatever we're mismeasuring, it's not that we're not finding output. We know the wages that we would expect from that output, the jobs we'd expect from that output didn't come. So that's where whatever is going on in technology, and a lot of great things are the questions that productivity is structured to ask and the outcomes that we care about it leading to, they are not happening in the economy. Do you think that's partly, though, also, I think we're living in an incredibly interesting time in terms of technological change, but that we're in this in-between period where people are just, it hasn't, it hasn't, we're in that troubling period where it hasn't quite shifted to your point. Like, it hasn't quite shifted to people making jobs. And the other thing I'd add to this is that our palette in the past or our canvas has really been the U.S. and which is the point. But we're also talking here about maybe those productivity shifts are happening globally. And that's what's completely different. different than any time before and be able to sort of distribute that. I mean, I don't mean to put a red herring in this. We are seeing, by the way, a global productivity slowdown,

at least in developed countries. Well, I'm talking about the developing countries, for sure. I think you get to something super important, which is there is a pessimistic and an optimistic version after you sort of put aside the mismeasurement thesis. The pessimistic version, which you're seeing from some economists like Tyler Cohen, like Robert Gordon, is we are in an extended and likely persistent technological slowdown, where we have picked a lot of the easy fruits of technological advancement. And while it's awesome that things we can do on screens are getting so much better, we are in Peter Thiel's formulation, we're not moving faster, we're not anymore seeing

big gains in life expectancy, that all sorts of other areas that used to be things we called technology are not moving. So that's the scary version. The less scary version, the happier version, is to say, okay, there is some deep feeling of confusion here because we look around us and we seem to be seeing all these advances. We seem to be hearing about all these advances, but we're not seeing them show up. And what is possible is that we are in a deployment phase. In the Carlota Perez.

A lot of things have happened. A lot of innovations have been made. We have discovered quite a bit that's going to be important. But for some reason, deployment is slowed down. There's actually some evidence behind this too. And this is a place where I, I want to be a little careful because I'm really digging into this and I don't understand it. That's okay. This is a provisional blogging podcast. But it's an interesting argument. And if the argument is correct, it would imply we're going to see faster than average productivity growth starting who knows when.

And they know talk to people like Bill Gates, who's on my podcast, all back and talked about this. And I mean, his view is it the stuff that is being discovered now, you're going to see his convergence of AI, of material research. That's actually my view, too, on this. I think there's going to be this compounding. We're actually at the very beginning. Like when people talk about the mobile phone and this arrival, it's not the end. It's the beginning and the compounding effect hasn't even begun yet. So the thing there is that which of those you believe, I think, structures how optimistic or pessimistic you are.

I do want to note that that saying like, it's coming, we're sure isn't of much help to someone who's living in Ohio and lost a manufacturing job. I totally agree with that. The hard part there is we just don't know. But the really, really difficult part there is we just don't know. And I am excited about things like AI, but deployment phases can be very, very, very long. And they can go in directions that we're not expecting also. Then there's a question of headwinds, right? The American economy's demographics are not unbelievable right now.

There are questions of what we're going to do with immigration. There's also issues, the quality of our governance, what is going to happen that would hold things back that might otherwise happen that are very positive. So the place that I am trying to figure out is I'm not at all convinced by mismeasurement. But I do take seriously the fact that things feel very different than what we're seeing. One thing that would explain feels very different than we're seeing is a disconnect between innovation and deployment. But the fact that we're seeing them does not make deployment easy. So I've spoken with Chris about full-stack startup arguments.

The reason I'm interested in arguments around full-stack startups is they speak to this debate. Oh, that's an interesting angle. If you go into places where most people actually work, which is not Facebook, if you go into a retail store, if you go into the back of a restaurant, right? If you go and check out what some home health care rates, you just don't see their work changing tremendously from 10 or 15 years ago. It's just not been upended that much. One thing that we, I think, have found is that inventing cool new software actually is not the answer. that in order for a lot of these cool new software companies to begin to change their markets, the workflow is much, much tougher than people realize.

And so the rise of some of these full-stack startups like Uber is interesting to be because it speaks to one mechanism by which deployment will happen, that, yes, we've had tremendous advances in software, but one reason deployment doesn't happen is it grafting those onto existing businesses is harder and less certain than people thought. The full-stack players, they create businesses from the ground up that are built around how you use the software. And I see this in Vox, like, we built to use new software. And I realize how hard it is even having built an organization specifically for that purpose.

So to do that at an organization that's not built for that purpose is very, very, very challenging. Well, something else you're alluding to something we talk about a lot on our podcast among many different guests is that it does also reinvent the organizational structure that forms around it. But you also see the pressure that when whatever the vertical is, whether it's transportation like Uber, Uber and Lyft or if it's retail or something, when those full stack, you know, instantiations come out and are super successful, the pressure on the folks that aren't that way just ratchets up, you know, massively. And you start to see things change quickly, I think, in sort of verticals and in silos. And maybe that's the deployment phase where, you know, you need the first couple of examples and there it goes in transportation and there it goes in health care.

Right. I mean, although I do suspect different industries. are going to be different. I am definitely waiting for the hope there it goes in health care. Health care is a fascinating sector that is simultaneously incredibly technologically advanced and then very, very, very resistant to new technologies. They will fire proton beams at your cancer, but then they will write down what they did on paper and filed in a large cabinet. There's a lot more existing processes in place to approve hardware than there is to navigate software. I mean, that definitely just described boils down to hardware and software. for atoms and bits. My colleague, Matt, has made an interesting argument where he argues that

one thing that led to the big advances for Uber was that it was sort of a regulatory hack. It wasn't just software. It said it created space in a area that was consumer facing and incredibly, incredibly badly regulated, incredibly subject to regulatory capture, which is ride hailing to really upend that. The question of how many of those there are is difficult. Healthcare obviously is incredibly regulated, but people get very, very, very upset when they take a medicine that kills them. It may not prove to be the case. A consumer pressure in healthcare is in the same direction. So I think that there are, again, there are reasons for optimism and there are arguments that will lead you to more optimism, but I think it is worth taking them with some caution. Those of us who have benefited

from this economy are going to be very likely to say this economy is good, right? That it's actually much better than people realize. And I think it's important to be conscious of that bias in our perspective. The perspective that I come from is that I was born and raised in this country, but I come from immigrant parents. And we spent a lot of time in India. There's nothing like coming from a place like that or seeing a place like that. And then seeing the stark contrast of opportunity in this country that just sort of, not to get all like, you know, plat, like platitudeish about it by any means. But truly, like I think that provides a really useful contrast. And I think a lot of people or just not exposed, like they can't even conceive of what their reality is, how different it is

than in other places. I am curious to hear your thoughts on that note on immigration, which is the topic that you've talked about a lot. So I'm also a child of immigrant. My mother is from the States, but my father is Brazilian, and I go back there a lot as you do. So I am emotionally, incredibly pro-immigration. I'm also Californian. I grew up in Southern California. Where I grew up was very heavily Hispanic, very heavily Asian, the diversity of this space I grew up in was an incredibly an incredibly important part of the culture and a part I valued. I don't have reservations about the cultural changes from immigration. That, to me, separate from all the arguments about productivity, which I think of productivity and economic growth, which I think are absolutely

slam dunk. So on immigration, I am pretty far towards opening up. Like, I don't just think we want to reform the immigration system. I don't just think we want to find a way to create a path to citizenship for unauthorized immigrants. But I think we really want to increase flows to this country by a quite large amount. Now, there are ways to do that that are, I think, smarter and savier and make more sense than other ways. So it's not that designing smart policies doesn't matter, but I would design policies that would increase inflows quite dramatically, not that would just try to restructure the inflows we currently have or just try to look at it as a problem we currently have to be solved.

I see it as a tremendous opportunity. The other thing that I always find funny about this debate is I think it shows a place where intuitions change dramatically, depending on words you use. So I think Americans have for some time understood that Europe's lack of low fertility rate is an economic problem for Europe. Japan's low fertility rate is an economic problem for Japan. You read these things like in Japan, adult diapers are now outselling children's That economy is not going to be in good shape.

In America, we've had higher fertility rates than some of our developed peers, although, again, that too, by the way, is largely due to immigrants. But people understand that, and they recognize that as a strength for America. And then they look around and they look at immigration. And immigration, in an abstracted way, is the exact same thing. It is adding more workers to your economy. The reason high fertility rates are good is more workers, more people, more demand. More entrepreneurship, too. more entrepreneurship.

Immigrants do that, and not like that, but it does it in a way where there's actually a little bit less competition with native-born workers. When you think about competition for jobs, higher birth rates mean, again, quote-unquote, more competition for jobs in a way that adding immigrants, you usually have less competitive labor there. They often fill jobs that otherwise wouldn't be filled or otherwise wouldn't exist. There's a lot of good research out of UC Davis around this. And so it's a place where I think people's intuitions are very strange.

We know that it would be good to have more baby. for the economy, because that means more workers, but our intuitions completely flip when those workers are coming in through a gate. You know, we're all from California. There's the national discussion on immigration, and then there's what's happening in California, and we'll continue to happen regardless, because that's how immigration occurs in California. It's just not, you know, been put into policy.

And yes, some of it, much of it's illegal. But that's just the way that state and that economy and that culture. works and to maybe like learn from that and extrapolate and make it into a more generalized national policy would be interesting. So I think the problem is a lot of the country does not want California's immigration policy. I mean, I mean, that's in some ways like the core of it. And you know, and California, I think, doesn't want the nation's immigration policy, right? They don't want all these, all these people to be unauthorized. When you talk about labor competition, one real problem when you have a lot of unauthorized workers is that they can be

exploited in a way workers who are within the protection of the law can. If they begin to unionize or ask for higher wages, you can literally just call the INS and have a raid on your factory. And, oops, I don't know, I had all these unauthorized immigrants here. When you're talking about undercutting American labor, like you're talking about that being a much worse situation. Okay, well, let's briefly talk about politics. What do you think of this view that we're shifting to more of like a European-like model for political parties where instead of two dominant parties, we now have four parties, you know, like a hard right authoritarian, a hard left socialist, and then the mainstream Democratic Republican parties.

Those two parties have always included more parties than people can't realize. So if you go back to the 80s and 90s, you had new Democrats, right, the wing of the party that Clinton led. You also had the wing of the party of the Jesse Jackson led. If you go back before that, there was a continuous governing coalition between conservative Democrats and Republicans because the Democratic Party included this Dixiecrat, did not faction that was nothing like what you had from, say, you know, Northern Democrats. So the idea that the two parties are going to have distinct wings within them is just not that new. The part,

what is new and is increasing is the way that the parties are sorted by ideology. So those distinct wings, previously you had a liberal wing in the Republican Party, a conservative wing in the Republican Party, a liberal wing in the Democratic Party, conservative wing in the Democratic Party. And when you ran the numbers, when you actually looked at voting coalitions, you had many Democrats, who are more conservative than some Republicans, more many Republicans, more liberal than some Democrats in Congress. Now there are zero crossovers like that. Yeah, those Dixie Crats are all Republicans now, right?

So there's zero Democrats now who are more conservative than any congressional Republicans. And so what that's done is that you have a liberal party and a conservative party, and that has allowed them to polarize and act as much more unified institutions. And what used to happen is you had these internal coalitions that fractured the party's capacity to act in a unified way. What the liberal Democrats wanted to do was not what the conservative Democrats wanted to do. Now, everybody's more or less on the same side and getting further and further and further away from the other side. The way in which we are becoming more like Europe is polarized parties, right? That is how everything else worked. And there are complex

reasons we didn't have them in this country, ideologically polarized parties for a long time. The problem is Europe has political systems built for polarized parties. You have parliamentary systems usually that ensure that sort of whoever is a majority can govern. We have a political system that is built for non-polarized parties that require very high levels of consensus or compromised to exist across the two parties. And in an age when that compromise is becoming harder and harder and harder to find, the political system is beginning to fracture under the stress. And I think the outcomes of the system are getting worse and worse. Do you think that's what's explaining some of this? I mean, is this rise of Trump a new phenomenon? I mean, what's going on here?

I was want to be careful confidently proclaiming about Trump because I did not predict this and the degree to which you should listen to me is probably limited. I will say that when I first saw what was happening. Everyone was kind of mocking as if it was a joke and I was like, why is anyone not taking this more seriously? What I think you're seeing with Trump, so one, the faction of the Republican Party Trump represents is by no means no. It is the faction that was voting for Pat Buchanan. It's very similar to the pro coalition, which drew not exclusively but quite heavily from the Republican Party. and I think many of the Democrats who were attracted to pro are now Republicans, are part of that shift over in the South.

So this is not new. What is interesting about what Trump is doing is that he is able to completely divorce himself from the party apparatus while running within the party. Usually the party would, the party has traditionally suppressed this part of itself, right? The fact that you had a lot of downscale white voters in the Republican Party who like Medicare, who like Social Security, who are happy to tax rich people. who are skeptical of trade, but who are also socially conservative, heavily nationalistic, and very, very upset about immigration.

Trump didn't discover that. We knew that. The Republican Party suppressed those kinds of candidates by its control of money, its control of information, its control of who gets taken seriously, of who gets good jobs, of who gets good positions. Trump, for unusual reasons, his media celebrity, his money, et cetera, has been able to subvert all of that. He has both been able to be a candidate on the stage in Republican debates. and a candidate hated by the Republican donor class,

but still run as a Republican in good standing. So in all this discussion about that institution being, you know, ripped apart, does it, I mean, and you talked about how, yes, we are European and sort of thought and, you know, kind of ideology, but not in terms of process and structure. Does the structure start to change? I mean, is this the thing that can change the structure? Does a Republican Party, like, literally get ripped apart? I don't think so.

So these institutions tend to be pretty durable. It doesn't mean it can't happen. What will then happen is one of two things. He will either win and he will take over the Republican Party from the inside or he will lose and the Republican Party will close ranks. And what's going to happen then is Trumpism will survive. He himself is not a movement builder. He will go and like endorse another line of stakes or whatever the hell he does. But there are going to be people who look at this and the next round of ambitious young Republican politicians.

and they're going to take parts of Trumpism without Trump, right? They're going to professionalize it. They're going to do it in a way that it is more acceptable to elites, more acceptable to the Republican Party, has less comments, makes fewer incredibly misogynistic comments. And so you're going to see a more elegant version of Trump emerge, which, by the way, I think you'll see in the Democratic Party around Sanders too. Right. One of the reasons the two-party system works in this country is the parties end up being

you know, reasonably flexible in terms of their ability to appropriate movements. It's happened before, it'll happen again. And I expect we're in one of those times. So, Ezra, speaking of some of those unusual factors that you were talking about, what do you think of all these confessions that the media is writing about their own role, its own role, in the Trump phenomenon? I mean, you're saying that phenomenon existed regardless, but Trump being Trump, what's your take on that? So to some degree, I'm a little unsympathetic to all this, or at least unsurprised. One is that the media has a major role in all elections.

and we don't like to talk about it. It has always been the case that the media and who the media covers and how they cover them are a really important contributor and who wins and who does. And who we take seriously from the beginning really matters. The media's coverage of Al Gore, I think, really contributed him losing the election in 2000. The media, not giving a damn about all kinds of candidates, has strangled all sorts of insurgencies in the crib. Because we in the media, and I use we a little bit loosely here because this side I run

in the way I've done my work is a little bit more opinionated. But broadly speaking, the media has in general wanted to portray itself as a completely neutral observer, as simply a reflection of events. But we are obviously a powerful factor. And Trump is forcing, I think, us to reckon with that in ways normally we don't because normally the candidates we give a lot of attention to, nobody is upset about that, right? We have found ways to give attention to candidates who are endorsed by their party structures who are leading in the... legitimatized, being legitimate, further legitimized. In giving a lot of attention to Trump, we have been giving attention to the candidate who's leading in the polls, but is not endorsed by his party structure, right?

So that's where some of the confusion comes in, because usually you would have those two things aligned, so there wouldn't be a lot of criticism. Currently, there's a lot of criticism because a lot of Republicans upset about what's happened are trying to blame it on the media, as opposed to their own party, which I think really did create conditions for Trump to rise and also did not unify behind any other candidates early. What I think is, if I were to say what I think is interesting about the relationship between Trump and the media, which is clearly, by the way, symbiotic, right? We're both benefiting. Trump is benefiting from media coverage and the media is benefiting from covering

Trump. But I think what Trump has figured out, candidates usually believe that bad media coverage is bad. So Trump's innovation, so far as there is one, is that valence of media coverage doesn't really matter. It's not how it, what matters is not how the media covers you. It's whether the media covers you. And he's willing to absorb. a tremendous amount of incredibly negative coverage so long as he's getting all of the coverage. And a place where you saw this very vividly, there was a day a couple of months ago when Ted Cruz began leading in the Iowa polls for the first time. Two came out just right at the same time.

And all of a sudden, it looked like Trump who'd been, you know, leading in Iowa for so long, maybe he actually was vulnerable. And maybe this was the long expected end of Trump. Cruz would have been Iowa. He would blow past Trump. Everything would be different. Donald Trump walks out that day in front of cameras. And he does something very unusual.

And he unfurls a statement. And Trump never reads from prepared statements. And he says, I, Donald J. Trump, hereby, endorse a complete ban on travel from Muslims to and from the United States. And what he did there was he, Ted Cruz was about to get all the media coverage. Ted Cruz was ascendant. He was on the rise. Trump came out with something so controversial.

So blatant. They made people so angry. He basically rolled a grenade into the middle of the election. And then so all of a sudden, instead of Ted Cruz getting that coverage, all the cameras pivoted right back to Trump. And, you know, he, like, got yelled at, but he stood up for, you know, his idea. And it was sort of brilliant. And he's done this a number of different times. I've seen, you've seen him begin to sag and then he'll do something extremely controversial. And you got to remember, this guy's actual experience is not primarily recently as a real

estate developer. He's a reality television star. And what you do on reality television is you do crazy and sometimes very upsetting villainous things to get attention. The people who are successful in reality television are often the ones who went there and were not quote unquote there to make friends, right? They did really nasty things to people. The folks who just went and like played nicely, like we can't remember any of their names. No, we can't. And Trump has taken the lessons of reality television and taking them to a presidential election. It doesn't matter if you're, if you're getting good coverage. It matters if you're the guy in front of the cameras all the time. Getting the coverage. And you changed coverage. He also,

Also, he learned from Kanye, I think, who's a master at this, too, where, you know, people are getting down on Kanye for doing one thing. And then he's like, you know what? I'm running for president. And then all of a sudden, that's all anyone cares about. He's setting up his game, too. Okay, so one last question then to wrap up. Speaking of media and your role now is the editor-in-chief of Vox, and we started talking about this in the beginning, coming full circle. Like, what do you think is happening next, not just for you personally, but in this space?

So I'm pretty optimistic about the business. but it is changing. One thing I did not expect was actually how fast some parts of it would change. I think the thing that's going to be very, it might be great, but it's going to be, I think, difficult is how much we are going off platform. When we started Vox, a lot of the theories about Vox were about, you know, Vox.com, frankly, when we talked about card stacks and created card stacks, card stacks are something, and those are a product we have to attach contextual information to our news story. So if you're reading something about, say, the Trans-Pacific Partnership Trade Deal, we can cover the new news in that, and then also let you see this set of cards that you can swipe through that give you all the background information. So if you've not been following that, you can catch up very quickly.

But card stacks cannot be imported to our Snapchat Discover product. They can't be put on at the moment Facebook instant articles. They're not relevant for a lot of the places people are now discovering our content. And as that happens, as we have less control over the platforms on which we publish, I actually do worry about the way it will choke off innovation. Because all of a sudden, I mean, let's say we create a great data interactive, which is something we do a lot at Box. And that interactive, it can't be in a Facebook internet or it can't be on Snapchat. So what do you do in a world where you're the more complex and innovative some of the work you do is the smaller the fraction of your. audience it can actually reach. So on the one hand, I think that the new platforms are giving us

this capacity to reach a tremendous number of people. I mean, we had 99 million Facebook video plays in what was it February. So that's amazing the number of people we can now reach. And it's good for our business in very, very profound ways. But in terms of, you know, inventing journalism the way we would have invented it if we'd started in the internet age, I do worry that some of that innovation, which really was beginning to happen, really is beginning to happen, is going to get a little choked off. I just wonder then if, do you need to refocus on distribution? And maybe it's not that you can reach a billion or two billion people, but it's that you can reach, you know, the 200 million people that really build an audience and a following and a, you know, cycle of, you know, business, for

that matter. One thing that we are becoming, I think that a lot of us are becoming is super, super multi-platform. One of my favorite stories is we did a video, a six-minute explanation of a Civil War in Syria, which is just an incredible video. And we put it up on YouTube, and then we put it up on Facebook, and I put it up, included on my Facebook account. And it did crazy well there. I think got like 40 million plays. And then there was a guy who was a fan of Ox on YouTube who began tweeting at a bunch of my writers and saying, hey, there's this asshole, Ezra Klein, who is jacking your YouTube videos and putting them on Facebook. Facebook and is getting all these views and you guys need to do something about it.

And this guy was a serious fan of Fox YouTube and just didn't know anything else about Vox. And that was great. And we see it all the time. Like a lot of our Snapchat audience does not know the other parts of us. They just know us as a Snapchat organization. So that's wonderful. And there's tremendous amounts of innovation happening within these places. But I do think, you know, in terms of what has been different about the business and what

is changing about it, not controlling your own platforms, being on so many platforms or so many different publishing systems that have so many different, both advantages and limitations, means that there is a disincentive to forging forward and really trying to build new things. So when you talk about the full stack questions, we own increasingly less of the stack, right? It is not chorus our publishing software that is putting us on YouTube. It's not chorus our publishing software that is driving our podcast. So that, I think, is one way in which our ability to innovate things and change them is

is being reduced. What you find stressful, probably, and promising at the same time as someone who manages and leads an organization around that, I find incredibly exciting as a consumer. It is really exciting. I mean, we are getting to do more things in more different formats for more people than we ever imagine. It's a way in which I think the media business is getting better, but it is being changed very dramatically.

And I don't think we are certain of where these changes will go. I think time will only tell. Thank you, Ezra, for joining the A6 and Z podcast. Thank you.