The Tim Ferriss Show - #208: Ezra Klein -- From College Blogger to Political Powerhouse

Episode Date: December 13, 2016

Ezra Klein (@ezraklein) is founder and editor-in-chief of Vox, an explanatory news organization that now reaches more than 100 million people each month through articles, videos, newsletters, and podcasts. Previously, he was a columnist and editor at The Washington Post, a policy analyst at MSNBC, and a contributor to Bloomberg. He was named one of the 50 most powerful people in Washington by GQ. He's written for The New Yorker and The New York Review of Books, and his primary podcast, The Ezra Klein Show, is a long-form interview show where he talks to the smartest people he can find, including past guests like Bill Gates, Rachel Maddow, Andrew Sullivan, Atul Gawande, Slack founder Stewart Butterfield, The Daily Show's Trevor Noah, and more. He also co-hosts The Weeds, a weekly policy podcast with his colleagues Matt Yglesias, and Sarah Kliff. In this episode, we discuss: Influencing the rules of the game by which this country is run (overall politics -- not partisan) How Ezra lost 60 pounds Ezra's ascension into the ranks of the most respected media companies in the world And much, much more Please enjoy my conversation with Ezra Klein! Show notes and links for this episode can be found at www.fourhourworkweek.com/podcast. This podcast is brought to you by FreshBooks. FreshBooks is the #1 cloud bookkeeping software, which is used by a ton of the start-ups I advise and many of the contractors I work with. It is the easiest way to send invoices, get paid, track your time, and track your clients. FreshBooks tells you when your clients have viewed your invoices, helps you customize your invoices, track your hours, automatically organize your receipts, have late payment reminders sent automatically and much more. Right now you can get a free month of complete and unrestricted use. You do not need a credit card for the trial. To claim your free month and see how the brand new Freshbooks can change your business, go to FreshBooks.com/Tim and enter "Tim" in the "how did you hear about us" section. This podcast is also brought to you by Four Sigmatic. I reached out to these Finnish entrepreneurs after a very talented acrobat introduced me to one of their products, which blew my mind (in the best way possible). It is mushroom coffee featuring chaga. It tastes like coffee, but there are only 40 milligrams of caffeine, so it has less than half of what you would find in a regular cup of coffee. I do not get any jitters, acid reflux, or any type of stomach burn. It put me on fire for an entire day, and I only had half of the packet. People are always asking me what I use for cognitive enhancement right now, this is the answer. You can try it right now by going to foursigmatic.com/tim and using the code Tim to get 20 percent off your first order. If you are in the experimental mindset, I do not think you'll be disappointed.***If you enjoy the podcast, would you please consider leaving a short review on Apple Podcasts/iTunes? It takes less than 60 seconds, and it really makes a difference in helping to convince hard-to-get guests. I also love reading the reviews!For show notes and past guests, please visit tim.blog/podcast.Sign up for Tim’s email newsletter (“5-Bullet Friday”) at tim.blog/friday.For transcripts of episodes, go to tim.blog/transcripts.Interested in sponsoring the podcast? Visit tim.blog/sponsor and fill out the form.Discover Tim’s books: tim.blog/books.Follow Tim:Twitter: twitter.com/tferriss Instagram: instagram.com/timferrissFacebook: facebook.com/timferriss YouTube: youtube.com/timferrissPast guests on The Tim Ferriss Show include Jerry Seinfeld, Hugh Jackman, Dr. Jane Goodall, LeBron James, Kevin Hart, Doris Kearns Goodwin, Jamie Foxx, Matthew McConaughey, Esther Perel, Elizabeth Gilbert, Terry Crews, Sia, Yuval Noah Harari, Malcolm Gladwell, Madeleine Albright, Cheryl Strayed, Jim Collins, Mary Karr, Maria Popova, Sam Harris, Michael Phelps, Bob Iger, Edward Norton, Arnold Schwarzenegger, Neil Strauss, Ken Burns, Maria Sharapova, Marc Andreessen, Neil Gaiman, Neil de Grasse Tyson, Jocko Willink, Daniel Ek, Kelly Slater, Dr. Peter Attia, Seth Godin, Howard Marks, Dr. Brené Brown, Eric Schmidt, Michael Lewis, Joe Gebbia, Michael Pollan, Dr. Jordan Peterson, Vince Vaughn, Brian Koppelman, Ramit Sethi, Dax Shepard, Tony Robbins, Jim Dethmer, Dan Harris, Ray Dalio, Naval Ravikant, Vitalik Buterin, Elizabeth Lesser, Amanda Palmer, Katie Haun, Sir Richard Branson, Chuck Palahniuk, Arianna Huffington, Reid Hoffman, Bill Burr, Whitney Cummings, Rick Rubin, Dr. Vivek Murthy, Darren Aronofsky, and many more.See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

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that's tim.blog forward slash Friday. And thanks for checking it out. If the spirit moves you. Hello, ladies and germs, reindeer and elves, crazy Bulgarians sitting across from me. That's a long story, folks. This is Tim Ferriss, and welcome to another episode of The Tim Ferriss Show, where it is my job to sit down metaphorically or physically with smart people, excellent people, those who know what they're doing in various worlds and tease out the habits, routines, favorite books, et cetera, that you can use. And this time we did something that I'm usually allergic to. We actually talked about politics. Now we did talk about how this gent lost 60 pounds. We did talk about his ascension into the ranks of the best respected media companies in the world. Top 15 companies, according to Inc. Magazine recently in the last week. In fact, I'm talking about Ezra Klein. And before you cut bait and run, because I said politics,

realize that I never talk about politics. I feel like an ignoramus. And that is by design. We don't talk about the T word. You don't talk about presidential stuff. We talk about how can you influence the rules of the game by which this country is run or your city or your state, because I've decided that it's time for me to perhaps jump in the fray. Ezra, at Ezra Klein on Twitter and other socials like the Facebook, is founder and editor-in-chief of Vox.com, an explanatory news organization that now reaches more than 100 million people each month through articles, videos, newsletters, and podcasts. Before that, or I should say previously, he was a columnist and editor at the Washington Post, a policy analyst at MSNBC, and a contributor to Blurm. Oh my God. Hey, crazy Bulgarian, do I need more caffeine? I think I do. He was named one of the 50 most powerful people in

Washington, DC by GQ. Esquire says he, quote, gives economics columnists a good name, end quote, which Ezra hopes is accurate. He's written for The New Yorker and The New York Review of Books. And his primary podcast, The Ezra Klein Show, very, very popular, is a long-form interview show where he talks to the smartest people he can find, including past guests like Bill Gates, what? Rachel Maddow, Andrew Sullivan, Atul Gawande, love to interview him too. Slack founder, Stuart Butterfield, the Today Show's Trevor Noah, and many more. He also co-hosts The Weeds, a, or maybe it's weeds, but the is lowercase. So I'll call it The Weeds, a weekly policy podcast with his colleagues, Matt Iglesias and Sarah Cliff.

We talk about a whole lot here. It's a shorter episode, perhaps around an hour, hour and 15 minutes, and we cover a lot of ground. So I think you guys will enjoy it. And this really came from a personal place. I have opted out of political discussion for a long time. Do not worry. This podcast is not going to turn into any type of ranting machine. Really, it's very proactive. How do you influence policy? If you

don't like, well, let's say sharks having their fins cut off because someone granted Chinese fishing rights to Costa Rica, what can you do? That actually is something that happened related to me. Or if something you care about, like a startup or anything is about to be snuffed out by some questionable tactics in a place like DC, which happened to me once or elsewhere, what can you do? And it turns out there are things that you can do. And this is, this is about the tactics and strategies you can use to not just be a chess piece on the chessboard, not just to be a good chess player, but perhaps to actually change the rules of chess so that you can stack the deck in some respect. That is it. So without further ado, please enjoy my conversation with Ezra Klein.

Ezra, welcome to the show. Thank you for having me. I always think that you live in New York City, which you do not, but we happen to coincide. In this case, I'm living in New York City for the show. Thank you for having me. I always think that you live in New York City, which you do not, but we happen to coincide. In this case, I'm living in New York City for the day. And I want to set the tone or set the visual for people who are obviously not here, besides my imaginary friends, at least. I am wearing a shirt that Jocko Willink gave me, and you can Google him to figure out who he is. And it says, know the darkness. And we're in a room in a hotel that was set aside to be quiet.

And we had to close the blinds. So it is literally dark. Slash romantic. Slash romantic. There are hearts on the walls. We were in hipster penthouse prison in New York City. So the question that I really wanted to jump into first, and this may be an odd jumping off point, but I had read that you were bullied when you were a kid.

Tell us about it because I really don't have any of the details, but I've been asked a lot about bullying recently. And so I've been exploring in my own head. Basically going back as far as I consciously remember in school. I was not an unpopular kid, but the least popular kid. And when I was a kid, I changed schools a number of times because I was being bullied at different places. I changed it and then went back. And when you do that, by the way, something important about when you leave one place because something is going wrong, then the same thing goes wrong. So you leave that place, then you go back and the same thing goes wrong, is that you do get a sense, rightly or wrongly, that it is that relentlessly I was teased or mocked or kept out of things. I had my stuff hidden. I mean, it's very sort of common kid stuff.

But it is a painful way to grow up. One of the things about that experience, which I would say lasted more or less into mid-high school for me, and then a lot of things changed for me, and we can talk about what they were, but was that it gave me a real appreciation of the way context decides people's lives. Because in a lot of contexts when I was young, and particularly I think for me in the school context, which really didn't fit for me, things went very badly. I failed at everything. It wasn't, by the way, just that I was being bullied. I also did a terrible job in school. I barely graduated. I barely got into college. And then when I was able to change the context of my life later on, change it in college,

change it with blogging, change it by going into journalism, by moving to Washington, D.C., my life transformed really dramatically. And that too was a bit of a lesson where I had to find a place, a context where the qualities that I have were adaptive rather than maladaptive. That wasn't school, but it did exist. Let's dig into that a little bit. When you were going from place to place what did you think at the time was wrong with you or what were you routinely teased for so a bunch of things so i was very heavy growing up um i was uh so i weighed in my sophomore year of high school 60 pounds more than i do now to give a a number on it so one just being fat as a kid gets you bullied. Maybe not in every case, but certainly in a lot. I would not say I was a perfectly great dresser. Although one thing I will

say on that is I did as part of my trying to get away from this, go to a school for a couple of years that had a dress code, not that I thought that was the issue. That didn't really help anything. So clearly that was not the operative variable. Right. But I was not a great dresser. I am a sort of loquacious, argumentative person. Yeah. And I think that the edges of that were probably even harsher when I was young and stranger in the context in which they were applied. Right. So it's one thing to be a bit of an argumentative person when you work in journalism and politics. It's another thing to do it in elementary school. So that probably didn't help. Another thing though, that when I look back, if I could have, and I'm not sure I would change

my life because I like how it's worked out, but if I were giving advice to my younger self, something that I didn't do, something that I do regret is that I didn't go and find and take comfort in spaces that might have been more natural to me. So that wasn't really possible, I think, in elementary school. By the time I was in high school, I didn't leave the situation and find another, which is to say I didn't go into theater or go into try to work for the school newspaper or do things that would put me in a context that was maybe a little more suited to me. Instead, I tried to be on the football team. I was on the football team. I was a wrestler. I was really trying to find acceptance. And so I kept also butting myself into these situations that put me at risk isn't exactly the word, but in space where this would happen. That isn't to

blame myself for it, but it is to say that I don't think I almost somehow understood that I had choices. And so I didn't make any. It had become in my head as if the only option was to succeed in this one context that was repeatedly and continuously rebuffing me. Now, so the word context is something I want to define for folks in this particular case, in this instance. I'm not going to do it. I'm going to ask you to do it. But is that simply choosing where you are, who you surround yourself with, basically the intra-organism of journalism, if you were to answer those for yourself, is that the context that you then created for yourself in college later? Is that what you mean by context? Yeah, I think I mean a lot of things by it,

but I mean the situation you're in. So let me use a non-bullying example. I mentioned that I did poorly in school and I really did. I'm not one of these kids who's coming here and saying, oh, I had a 3.5 in high school, but everybody else had a 4. I graduated high school with a 2.2. I failed out a lot of classes. I was in remedial math by the end. And I've done a lot of thinking about why that was. And I really think that I had basically a learning disability. I have a tremendous amount of trouble absorbing information from someone lecturing. If you put me even now, when I'm older and more disciplined and have much more reason to absorb the information that is coming at me, as a journalist, I basically won't call

into a teleconference call because I just know I can't absorb anything. And so I would spend all day sitting in this classroom where somebody was talking at me and I just couldn't. I couldn't focus on it. I couldn't absorb any of it. And because there is this cultural message in America where when you see kids in school on television, everybody's always doodling and daydreaming and, you know, thinking about something else. And I mean, that's the meme about it. So I thought everybody was actually doing what I was doing and never, ever under any circumstances paying attention for even two minutes. And that wasn't true, obviously. Other people were paying attention.

They were taking notes. They did know what the hell was going on when they looked at their homework. Later, when I went to college, college doesn't really ask that of you. You don't really have to attend class if you don't want to. You can read the book and then you can write an essay. There are other ways for me of absorbing information that I am much better than average at. I'm really, really good at absorbing information in conversation. I'm really good at absorbing information from reading. And so the extent that I could be in a place where I could do that, I could actually succeed academically. And so it was the difference between those. I was the same person, but in one, the particular set of strengths and weaknesses I had led me to be one of the worst performers. And in another, the exact same set of strengths and weaknesses put me, I wasn't the best performer

in college, but I was, I did very well. And that to me was a big lesson. What was your, what was your major in college? Policy. That makes sense. You know, I wish I hadn't done it. Even though nowadays I love political science, it is at the core of my work, and I think among journalists I am unusually focused on it as a way of understanding American politics. I had a lot of trouble in college understanding how it related. I was already doing political writing then, and it just somehow didn't click. And I do wish I had spent that time learning about a discipline or a topic that I did not plan to go into. So if I could go back, I think I would have been a philosophy major. A surprising number of people I've interviewed on this podcast ended up being philosophy majors, which I think is an excellent choice. sentiment or romanticizing quite a bit what kids should do or parents sometimes ask me about what

they should do as it relates to college and their kids and the only answer i've been able to come up with that i've been reasonably happy with is that the goal of a liberal arts education is to make you a well-rounded human being not to prepare you for maybe to equip you with the meta skills but not to prepare you necessarily for a specific trade. And the follow-up that I wanted to ask was, you went from elementary school, high school, not realizing that you didn't have to accept option A in front of you. You had other choices, like you said. Was there a moment when you realized a specific conversation or something your parents said to you, anything in college where you said, Oh, wait a second, I can actually pass or do well

in this class by simply writing the essays and taking the tests. And I can choose the type of information, the format that I absorb. Yeah. So let me say a couple of things here. One is that I was lucky and privileged to have other choices. So, um, my family wasn't rich by any means, but my father is a university professor. And so the SATs were a thing in my household. My parents could pay for me to go to a prep course, which I also had trouble paying attention to. But nevertheless, so I do want to say one thing here, which is that I'm very conscious that the second chances I got not everybody would have gotten sometimes if for a lot of people if you don't do well in high school that's just it for you you get tracked into something very very different and I was lucky

I did well on I had always taken tests very well it's something I'm you know just good at and that got me into the UC system I also was lucky to be in a state California that has a great college public college system. And the UCs, at least at that point, had something called eligibility where if you got – it was a sliding scale of GPA and SATs. But if you got above a 1400 on your SATs, you got into Santa Cruz or UC Riverside just automatically. And I was able to do that. So I went to Santa Cruz, which is great. But so that's one thing.

Having those choices isn't always fully under your control. But the other thing is that I don't think there was an epiphany moment. And to some degree, I wasn't shocked. It wasn't that I thought I was dumb. I knew I was a good writer. And I knew that I was actually pretty smart. I could talk to people about things. During high school and even before that, I was a pretty voracious self-learner. And so when I got to a place where I could actually choose what I was learning about, which I also think is a non-trivial dimension of this, being able to say, I want to learn about politics. I see the relevance of it to my life, as opposed to, and now you're in chemistry. And that isn't to downgrade chemistry. Actually, at this point, I wish I knew a lot more about chemistry. But I had thought that would work a bit better for me. And so I wasn't shocked when it did. I can help you with the chemistry, but it's purely

breaking Benjamin type of ad hoc experimentation, which is probably not what you're looking for. You mentioned in high school not writing for the school paper, correct? You were trying to do football, wrestling, and so on. At some point, you did try to write for school paper, correct? Santa Cruz City on a Hill Press, man. All right. I've heard of it. I've heard of it.

I'm a subscriber. No, that's not true. But what happened what happened how'd that go i got nothing happened the whole the whole story there is nothing happened um i got to santa cruz which is an awesome awesome place by the way and if you're even just able to visit man college is wasted on the young yeah yeah santa cruz is this place where it is built in a redwood grove. I may get the exact details of this wrong, but no building is allowed to be higher than two-thirds of the height of the tallest nearby redwood. So everything is just dominated by these amazing trees and this amazing land. It's just this phenomenal grant of land.

There are dorm rooms in Santa Cruz that have a Redwood and Ocean View dorm rooms. So Santa Cruz is great. And I, yeah, I just got in there. I was trying to figure out what I would be doing or what I wanted to be doing. And I applied to work at City on Hill Press, which is the student newspaper. And I just got rejected, which was not strange. I mean, I didn't do the student newspaper in high school. I had no obvious aptitude in that. I will say, though, there are different ways you can frame the story of your life. One of them is through the things you achieved. It often feels to me that the true one for me, or at least an as true one is through the things that I wanted and didn't get that turned out to be extreme blessings.

So at about the same time I applied for Santa Cruz city on Hill press. Uh, I don't know why I just said that so formally the student newspaper I'm sold. I'm sold. It's still, it has this vaunted space in my imagination. I had started what at that point was an unknown thing, which was a blog. We were right in the beginning of the early political blogosphere. This is 2003. You started the blog before you tried to pitch the press. I was bored. I went to Santa Cruz and it was great, but I was a college kid and I just didn't have that much to do. So I had begun reading some of these bloggers. And in particular, there was a kid at another college across the country named Matt Iglesias who had a really good blog that I really liked. What was it about? writing about politics. And it'd become a pretty, again, in the early blogosphere, a pretty central blog. It was him, there was a guy named Kevin Drum, who was actually in my hometown of Irvine, California. But I looked at Matt and I thought, well, if this college kid can

have a blog, then maybe I can. But if I had gotten into City on a Hill, I'm sure I would have just done that, right? It would have been much more absorbing. It would have had a big, big social component. The people I know who did student newspaper work, they really got into it, but I didn't get that. And so I spent it. Nobody ever told me. I don't think it was a big deal for them in life. I think I just didn't get it. Yeah. Okay. Got it. But that left me with a lot of time to focus on blogging, which at that moment didn't at all seem like a good trade. Nobody in 2003 thought blogging was going to be a pathway into journalism or into anything else. Nobody even knew the word, but turned out to be

arguably the central pivot moment in my life. How much time did you spend on it? When I took to that, it's funny because we talked about context changes before, but the real context change for me wasn't high school to college. It was high school to blogging. When I found that, something happened to me where I was writing. I wasn't writing for a big audience. I had by 2004, let's say. What year of college would that be? This would be going into my sophomore year sometime. By 2004, I was getting, I think, 35 readers a day. And I think that I cared more about those 35 readers a day than I have ever cared. I mean, I love the audience,

but I felt so amazed that 35 people, and on some days when I got in Mataglaces, like 150 people would come to the site. It blew me away. And when I found that, when I found the space where what I could do was read what I was interested in and then process it through writing. And that's an important thing for me because going back to this idea of how do you absorb information, I'm good at absorbing it by reading reading but the real way i come up with ideas is by talking about or writing about what i have definitely uh the inputs that's what kevin kelly the founding editor of wired says too he says i i write to find out what i'm thinking i think that's a joan didion line yeah i'm gonna blow up kevin kelly's spot here i

may actually be misappropriating a quote attributing it to Kevin, but he elaborates, obviously, but it's something like, I don't know what I think until I start writing. I think that's deeply true. And I found blogging and, you know, again, I'm writing for 15, then 30, then 45 people a day. And I just took it from the beginning. I just got addicted, like really addicted. It was a little blog spot blog. And I would wake up at seven in the morning as a college student and be writing blog posts so that my East Coast audience, all nine of them had something to read. I was writing in college, I was writing 15 things a day on the blog. Wow. I barely ever partied in part because I still

actually, I did not figure things out socially for a couple of years till a couple of years later still. So I didn't have many friends. When did you lose your weight? Sophomore year of high school. So around the same time. Oh, of high school. Of high school. That was a big turning point in my life too. How did you lose the weight? What was the trigger also? I got rejected by a girl I really liked. Ah, yes. So that was a trigger. this is a perennial so i had the

option to absorb that as um i am not a likable person or you know not not a lovable person or you know this beautiful girl didn't want to be with me because i'm heavy uh and i i'm not saying correctly by the way i don't want to suggest that as an objective view of the reality, but that is the way I absorbed it. But it was a choice between she rejected me for reasons or due to factors I can't change or due to factors I can't change. Yeah, and this was the face-saving way to do it. And so something kind of clicked there.

I'm not really sure what or why, but for six months i ate the exact the exact same thing every day and i ran three miles a day would you eat uh i'd have to all right i'm going to try to remember this i woke up and i ate a what did i have oh i had two eggs with salsa for breakfast every day and then at 10 a.m scrambled eggs no they were just like fried okay and i was not a good cook right fried eggs with salsa for breakfast every day. And then at 10 a.m. Scrambled eggs? No, they were just like fried. And I was not a good cook. Right, fried eggs with salsa.

I had not read The Four Hours Chef. So fried eggs with salsa. And then at 10 a.m., whenever sort of break was at my high school, I had a pure protein bar, which I still eat those today. But back then, those tasted like garbage. Let me be real clear about that.

And I don't know why this was what it was, but a mini bobbly pizza crust with two slices of deli meat turkey on it. I'm quickly running out of remembering. I don't remember what I did for lunch, actually. I would get home and I think I had a snack of popcorn usually. And then I would microwave two lean cuisines for dinner. That was what I ate every day. How did you decide on that particular regime? told, I went and saw, I think I went and talked to a trainer at the gym. I got like a free trainer thing, you know, like you can go and have a consult at a gym. And he told me like how many calories I should be eating. And I just literally figured out a count to get there. And then I didn't stop. I don't think I could do that today. I don't really know where that came from in me,

but it happened. And that was, that was also the first time in my own life that I had been able to take control of something and really succeeded at it. And a lot of confidence emerged from that for me. Because until then, there were a lot of things about me that just seemed to be immutable. They were how I was. And then all of a sudden, it turned out that that wasn't how I was. That was just how I had been until I made a series of changes. And out of that, I've become in my life and in my attitude towards life, probably obsessively calibrating and hopefully self-improving, but I'm, I always have, you know, and I'm, I'm talking to somebody who's much more than that. I don't know anything about

that, but I always have sort of three or four things that I'm constantly trying to track and change and play with because it just gave me a real sense that you are who you make yourself to be. There are a few things I want to highlight. So you, you, you figured out a number of things in high school and then in college, one of which which was do i have to pay for this therapy session or is it first one's an intro first one's free uh the one of which was the the format of information that you absorb best and what what i want to just mention for people is that this is a critical piece of the puzzle to figure out so i was chatting with ed Catmull, president of Pixar. His book, Creativity, Inc.

Yeah. An amazing, amazing book. Fantastic book. And he had, in a sense, the exact opposite experience that you had. So he found that he could not absorb. He was trying to read, and I'm making up this example, let's say The Odyssey or any type of poetry or anything that actually began with being transmitted as an oral tradition, he couldn't absorb it in print. And he started listening. And so that is, he went in the exact opposite direction and started listening to, I think it was the teaching company while he was on commutes to absorb information.

Well, actually, it's funny related to that. Something I've learned later in life is that I can absorb information from listening extremely well if it is the secondary thing I'm doing. So I cannot sit, I actually cannot sit at my computer and watch a Ted talk. I can't do it, but I can listen to a podcast while I walk my dogs or clean my house or whatever. And so I absorb now, particularly because I have less time to read because my job has more of a management schedule. I absorb a tremendous amount of information through podcasting while I am doing other things. And I don't know why that makes it possible for me, but it somehow does. Similarly in my office

at work, I have a lot of trouble paying attention during meetings. So my office is littered with things that I can play with in my hands. It's just full of squeeze balls and magnets. And I just, every so often just go on Amazon and search fidget toys and I will buy any fidget toy I can find. And it's full of them. And people think, oh, you have this quirky little office. And the actual reason is that I can pay attention much better if I'm absorbed physically somewhere else. It makes me think, I don't know why this flashed to mind, but you've seen the movie Big with Tom Hanks. I have. When he has one of his first meetings and they walk in, when he's at the toy company and he's crashing these cars together as they're trying to talk to

him. But let's flash forward to the present for just a moment, and then we'll backtrack again. So the first is, what have you listened to most, say, in the last year in terms of... Are you just fishing for compliments? No, no, no. I did slip Ezra at 20, but he doesn't... I need to tip hundreds with Ezra. So I'm a fan of your show. So I can actually pull out my podcast list here.

Yeah, let's check it out. Oh, of course, I always listen to the Ezra Klein show in the weeds, the two greatest non Tim Ferriss podcasts in American life today. So podcasts I like listening to are like your show. I'm a big fan of you made it weird. The Pete Holmes podcast, which is just a great interview. I like the long form podcast, Reply All, Recode Decode, Kara Swisher, who's part of Vox Media, has a great interview show. Particularly in the election season, I listened to a lot of The Axe Files,

which was David Axelrod's, is David Axelrod's interview show. It's great. That's a good one. Off Message by Glenn Thrush, I think is good. That's a political show. I love Conversations with Tyler Cohen. Tyler is brilliant. He's a guy I know well. I've actually been on that show with him. And he just has a mind that works unlike any mind I've ever come into contact with before. What makes his mind different? He's a polymath in a truer sense. So I'll just give you an example from when I was on his show. We were talking about the conversation in America about diversity and inclusion and tolerance and pluralism and multiculturalism, right? It's a Trump campaign-related conversation. And Tyler, who knows that during my honeymoon, I went to Singapore for two days and knows that

I'm half Brazilian, so I've been to Brazil a lot, says, well, Brazil and Singapore have such different conversations about multiculturalism and diversity. When you look at the way they experience these issues versus America, do you think they have figured something out that we haven't? And embedded in that question is one that Tyler is so smart that he actually has a distinct point of view about the discourse around multiculturalism in Singapore, but also thinks other people might also have that view. So just listening to him is a real tour through somebody who is smarter, the mind of somebody who's smarter than you are. I love death, sex, and money. That's a great show.

It just makes me also think what you just said about Tyler, but some of my conversations with Eric Weinstein, he's the managing director of Teal Capital, but he's, I don't know why Teal's coming up so much. But the, he's a, he's a mathematician, a physicist,

and he'll say something like, well, of course, you know what a mirror orchid is. And then he'll just continue on. He's got that. He's not going to pipe up. Switched on pop is great.

By Charlie Manning and nate i'm blanking on his house name but it's a good pop culture podcast so i probably have a bunch more you have a vast selection of podcasts i know a lot of people get overwhelmed with input maybe they just feel like there's too much to read too much to listen to how the exponent by ben thompson i like that one how do you choose how do you choose which episodes come up they you you look at what's come up you see what's interesting i actually find most days i don't have one i want to listen to uh i it's not that everything every episode of every one of these podcasts is interesting to me hopefully there are enough so what is interesting and i'll catch that

it's probably not properties of the word the word, but in the question... I feel bad about all the ones I didn't mention. No, that's okay. There were a lot there. If you had to give a, not listen to a TED Talk, but give a TED Talk on something that you're not known for at all, so no politics. Something that you are very interested in that is is not something people readily associate you with something maybe you read about on the weekends or evenings whatever it is what would that be what might you talk about it would probably be about some angle on the ethics of meat eating which i feel real strongly about and and not not simply eating meat is bad, but one thing that I've become really convinced by,

and I've become convinced by a guy named Bruce Friedrich, who's actually on my podcast and said this to me, I've been thinking about it ever since. So one, I think what we eat is a very profound moral choice. And I've argued, and I do believe elsewhere, that 50 years from now, 100 years from now, when it's really easy to not eat factory farm meat, because there's all this lab-grown meat and really tasty synthetic meat, people will look back on the way we treated animals in this era and judge us very, very harshly. I agree with that. I think we are going to look very bad, because we're torturing a lot of sentient beings constantly. But that said,

one thing that I've become convinced by is that if you want, I don't think that it is good that the only ways here you can be quote unquote ethical is to become a vegetarian or a vegan. One, I think it's just too hard for a lot of people. And two, it's actually not the right way to think about what you're trying to do here. You're not being consequentialist enough about it. If we get everybody to cut meat consumption by half, that is so much better than quadrupling the number of vegetarians from, I think it's roughly around 5% now to where it would go. So one, I think we need to be thinking just really about reduction here. But the thing that Bruce explained to me, which I hadn't thought about a lot before, was that people think that what they should do is go vegetarian.

And that's actually not a great equilibrium in terms of animal suffering, particularly because eggling chickens are arguably the worst treated of all of the animals. So if you've cut out a lot of other kinds of meat and you're eating a lot of eggs, there are some contexts in which you're buying backyard eggs from a farmer. I mean, you can come up with the examples here where the animal is treated really, really well and great. If you're able to source like that, God bless you. But I think a lot of people have ended up a little bit accidentally in spaces where they've maybe cut out red meat, so they're eating a lot of chicken, but it turns out you can finish a chicken in a night. It takes a family of four like a year or two years to finish a cow. And what Bruce, who used to run campaigns for PETA, now does investing around, I think he likes to call it clean meat. What he argued to me was if everybody just ate beef,

cut out eggs, cut out poultry, cut out fish, cut out all the rest of it, if everybody just ate beef, you would reduce the number of animals killed for human consumption by something in the order of 95 to 98%. So it actually really matters how big the animal is. And cows, because you do need to raise them for all, they're actually treated, even the ones not treated well, better, particularly better than chickens and other kinds of poultry. There's no effort really anywhere to figure out a humane way to raise and kill fish because we just don't jump the species barrier and sympathy that way. And I do know there are people, I think there's a guy named Matt Ball, I think his organization is called First Step. And if I have that wrong, I'll send it to you for your show notes, who's been making a similar argument. So this is very much not my argument.

But I think that it would not be that hard for a lot of people to switch over to beef consumption and to go from there. Now, I do want to say there's cross-cutting environmental concerns. People argue about whether a pound of beef is significantly worse for the environment than a pound of chicken or fish. I've heard that both ways. I've not looked into it enough to know. Right now, what i'm saying is just about animal suffering yeah it's this is uh we could talk about this for a long time i uh have read quite about quite a bit on both sides of the uh fence if if you will just on the the meat eating versus non-mediating if we're looking at it in a binary fashion. And what's been philosophically interesting for me, at least to hear and listen to, are how the reasons dictate what you consume on the less meat side of the equation. So you have people who are, say, optimizing for number of animals killed.

Then you have people who have some distinction in cognitive ability that determines what they'll eat or not. And then there's the, the carbon say emissions component, which I think is actually kind of falls apart with cows in the sense that they're often on grazing lands that couldn't otherwise be utilized for many agrarian purposes. Uh, but then you run into all these thorny things, and I'm not going to get into deep Peter Singer land, but if you look at some of the monocrops, so for instance, you were mentioning how

with incomplete information, if you're trying to minimize suffering in the total number of animals, if you go lacto-ovo-vegetarian and suddenly you're quadrupling your egg intake, that you might be, in fact, netting on the side of doing more damage than just saying having one cow or a quarter of a cow. And with the monoclops, so on and so on, if you look at the threshers and the number of animals they end up killing, these small rodents and whatnot, then it just becomes a very complex moral decision. Or it seems that

it can become a very nuanced, I should say, moral decision. I'm not super convinced by the monocrop thresher arguments. These feel to me a little bit like an argumentative move meant to paralyze the conversation in a place of information abundance. It's true that we can never have perfect knowledge about all of the consequences of our decisions, but I think this is one where people's moral intuitions here are pretty clear and actually should be followed. I just never meet anybody who says, yeah, factory farming's okay. No, no, no. But I will sometimes meet people who say, and I'm not saying you're doing this here, who begin bringing a level of, well, what about this? Well, what about that? And it's true, but it would be wonderful if we all decided to treat

the way we eat as enough of an ethical choice that we're actually trying to gather that information in a really strong way. But I think that people can make, I think the important thing to me and the thing that I've thought a lot about in my own life is people can make moves that are not that painful that appear with our best knowledge to have a really big first order effect on, on suffering and that, and that it's worth doing. And that the, the sort of equilibrium of it just being about vegetarianism or veganism, I think it's probably made this a lot harder because it's just hard for folks to make jumps that big yeah the adherence is really low right so if you're trying to move the needle it's it's i mean i think about this a lot as it relates to behavioral change just since i've thought about it and spent so much time with people who are studying this in labs uh the you run into this conundrum with say very

strict vegans or very strict paleo for that matter. If you try to take someone from zero to 60 from standard American diet to either of those sides, the, the drop-off that you're going to have is going to probably be above 90% after a few weeks. And then what absolutely good have you accomplished? It's, it's a lot easier to get people say one step further it's like hey try moving to this protein and consuming if either fewer eggs or really paying attention specifically to how you're sourcing and it's an interesting thing there there's a fair amount of behavioral science evidence that it's important to people to act in ways reasonably consonant with the identities they have for themselves. And so something I found, because I flitted back and forth between vegetarianism and

not for a long time, and now have been pretty dependent for a bit, but was that what would happen is I would say, I'm going vegetarian. And then at some point I would fail. And having failed, it's not like what would happen is that I would go to 95% vegetarian. I would completely, then was not is almost the same kind of failure, no matter how much meat I was eating, what kind of meat I was eating, all of it. And so the way this actually stuck for me this time was that the way I went vegetarian a couple of years ago now was with a tremendous number of caveats. I'm vegetarian except when I travel, because I know when I travel, I often have a lot of trouble sticking to vegetarianism. So if I'm vegetarian except when I travel, and when I travel, then I eat meat, well, then it doesn't offend my identity at all. And now I'm mostly

vegan. I eat vegan at home, except when I travel, I'm vegetarian. And there are a couple points in the year, it's like my best friend's mother, I've been having sushi with her since I was a kid. And it is important to me that I'm able to continue that tradition. And so as opposed to going and having sushi with her twice a year and then collapsing out of all of my other eating habits because of it, it's just that's built into it. That's the exception. And so I've actually found that personally very helpful to create, to not be so strict on myself that when I make decisions that I can pretty well predict I'm going to make, that they have this identity collapsing effect on me. So let's take a left turn and go back to college. What were some of the...

I don't sound enough like a Santa Cruz banana slug to you? No, I'm enjoying that. Not that much of a left turn. No, yes. I had a lot of campaign college. That's true. Back to Garden of Life. Did you ever go to Garden of Life in Santa Cruz?

Back to Santa Cruz and a very good writing school and people playing didgeridoos in the street. What were the decisions or lucky incidents that were really defining moments? Once you started the blog, when did you go from 35? Okay. If you got a lucky link, 150. When did that start to change? A couple of key things happened. So one is, I mentioned this other college kid. So that's Matt Iglesias. And Matt is my co-founder at Vox. We work together now and actually have worked together for a lot of our adult lives also at the American Prospect and is in a very important way, my mentor. But he was, he continuously, as someone with a bigger site linked to me sent people to my site and the patronage i think is actually a fair term for it the the attention of someone i respected that much

was a tremendous kind of positive feedback for me how did he find yourself i emailed him okay uh very early on i emailed it to him and and he linked to it. He was very generous in that way. What did you say in your email? Oh, God, I genuinely don't remember. Was it a picture? Was it, hi, Matt, love your stuff? I think it was, hi, Matt, I love your stuff. I think it was probably, hi, Matt, I love your stuff. I've also started a blog where I'm saying things

that are going to prove to be wildly incorrect and embarrassing about American politics. Although I probably didn't say that at the time. That did, however, prove out to be the truth of it. But I've started a blog. Also, I'd love to, if you checked it out. And he checked it out. So that was really important. And I remember, I mean, in my early years, I remember it took me, I think, a year and a half, maybe more, to get my first Kevin Drumlink. My first Kevin Drumlink was a big deal to me. Andrew Sullivan, I think, came later even than that. And the blogosphere then was small. I mean, it was a personal place. There was Instapundit, who was the big link aggregator on the right and had the sort of

war hawk right. And you had Atreus, who was the big linker on the left. And it sort of went on like that. So I did pretty assiduously try to get my stuff in front of those people for a period of time. And all that mattered to me, that escalating series of accomplishments. Hey, I finally achieved a Kevin Drum. Like now I've really made it really matter to me. I went and did a, I'll back up a little bit here. The reason I started a political blog is that I was into politics. The reason I was into politics is my brother, who lives in Los Angeles and is an environmental attorney out there, was also into politics and was incredibly, incredibly, insanely generous to his fat, socially awkward 12-year-old brother. And when he did political work in LA, it would take me along. And I'll never forget and will never stop being grateful.

During Bill Bradley's 2008 campaign for the presidency, my brother was driving around Senator Paul Wellstone, the late Senator Paul Wellstone, who's an amazing figure in American politics. He died in a plane crash. I think it was in 2002. And my brother had this opportunity. My brother at this point must have been 26, something like that, 28. He's a lot older than I am. And he had the opportunity to drive Wellstone and his wife around LA for a day. And he had me come with him. And I still almost can't believe that moment. Here's my brother Gideon, who has this opportunity as a young up-and-coming politico to spend a whole day with a U.S. senator. Like, that's a real opportunity. I think most people would take that opportunity for themselves. And to spend that time trying to impress a senator with how smart they are. And he took me and I spent that day talking with Paul Wellstone about wrestling

because Wellstone was a high school and college wrestler. That's such a great magic trick. Wrestling is a great connector. But yeah, continue. So, but I was into politics and I started a blog because... Can I interrupt for one second just to ask two things? For those people, quite quite frankly myself who are wondering because i have always had maybe the the exact opposite inclination i developed mostly due

to family but who talked a lot about politics all the time and got into huge fights i developed an allergy to it but i never really knew what in the first place they meant by politics. What is politics? When you say you had an interest in politics, what does that mean? I was interested in the decisions politicians were making to move power, resources, and personnel into different spaces in the American and international space. So in this era, I graduated high school in 2002. So the year before I graduated is 9-11. And 9-11 was a moment that certainly woke me to the idea that politics cared about me, even if I didn't care about it. We were starting wars, which, and I think people forget this, there was talk at that time of a draft. And in some ways, I think arguably, there were good arguments for one, that at least it would have, I don't come from a political family. I think the reason that I got engaged in politics was it was a very, very political time. And I found those questions to be enormously interesting and

obviously, obviously consequential. I'm not sure that if I had been in this formative period of my life in 1996, I would have found it as obviously consequential. I'm not sure it was as obviously consequential. It was exactly the timeframe that I was in. The period of time in which I sort of came of age, I think of 2000, I actually thought it would have calmed down and now it looks like it's ramping back up. But politics got a lot more central to the lives of most people starting in roughly 2001. We've had since then a period of time that when the history of this era is written,

they're not going to spend much time on the Clinton years. They're not going to spend much time on the George H.W. Bush years. That era is going to be interesting for the rise of China, the dissolution of the Soviet Union, but it's not going to be interesting for the rise of China, the dissolution of the Soviet Union, but it's not going to be interesting for what happened in America. But starting with 9-11, going through the financial crisis now, the election of Trump, we are a country that is... I had a history professor, I transferred to UCLA in my junior year, and I had a history professor there who said, I don't know if you know this, but the grip, the fist of history is tightening around all of you right now. And I've always remembered that because I think it's true.

She meant that this is a moment that is capital H history. This is a moment that when people write about the 21st century, they're not going to skip over. A moment when America is going to war, when there's talk of a clash of, this was in 2000 and probably three or four, or maybe a little bit later. This is when America is going to war. People are talking about clash of civilizations.

I mean, it was a moment that felt like history. And similar to, you know, we have reshaped the framework of the American social state. We created a near universal healthcare guarantee in America for the first time. Now we're talking about whether or not we're going to dissolve that just a couple years after it was launched. This doesn't happen all the time. This is not the velocity at which politics normally operates in this country or really any other. So if we go back to then your exploration, which you said turned out largely inaccurate on the blog in the early days, was there a piece that first felt you made that you'd cracked through? And I remember, for instance, the first post on my blog that ever at the time reached the front page of Dig,

and it crashed my site immediately, but that was a big deal. When did you crack out of, or what was the first piece that really, do you remember the first piece that really popped for you? I don't actually, but I'll give a different version of when I knew maybe something was beginning to happen here. And it's a fairly funny story actually. So in 2004, or maybe this is 2003, but it's the run-up to the 2004 election, and things feel very consequential. Bush is a very polarizing president. I was at the University of Santa Cruz. You can imagine which side of that polarization I was on. And there's a lot of talk in the blogosphere, a I had read, and I cannot recommend this book highly enough.

Richard Ben Kramer, a great, great journalist who died, unfortunately, a couple of years ago. He wrote a book, a mammoth book about the 1988 election, which is considered one of the landmark books in new journalism. Just the way it is written is extraordinary what is new journalism new journalism was a way of doing non-fiction journalism using the techniques of literary fiction at least the more modern techniques of literary fiction and i want to say i'm not an expert on this so there's probably much more precise definition but people like tom wolf andfe and Norman Mailer and Richard Ben Kramer, it was a way of writing about the world as it happened, but with a informality and an experimental style that you'd really only seen in fiction until then. And I do want to say,

actually, that these things, these books, these changes in language and how you talk about things, these are actually really important to people, more so than I think folks realize. One reason I got into blogging is I remember coming across a blog post where somebody, I don't know how old the person was, but it was clearly young, wrote about American politics and used the word props to say that somebody was doing something good, right? Props to them. It sounds dumb, but it actually hit me like a thunderbolt. The idea that you could talk about politics not in the language that George Will talked about it on the Washington Post op-ed page, or that people talked about it on Crossfire on CNN, or that Paul Krugman talked about it. The idea that you could talk about it in the language that you just talked, it seems so obvious now because now so many people do it, but it wasn't then.

One of the really big things blogging contributed was a breakdown and experimentation with tone. Political tone was very formal and mannered and structured, and it's much more opened up now, including now at very big institutions that previously had a much more mannered, formal, structured tone. So that matters to me. But Ben Kramer, he wrote this book, and this book is just... Do you remember the title? What It Takes. What It Takes, yes. The book is called What It Takes. Everybody should should read it and Gary Hart is really the hero of what it takes he is the person who he's brought down by sexual scandal and a scandal by the way that seems in the era of grab them by the pussy so

unbelievably he bit of a hole so Gary Hart comes out as a hero of what it takes and Hart has a lot of fascinating dimensions to him. But one of the fascinating dimensions to him is he was very early through a commission he co-chaired with another Senator Warren Rudman, I think Warren Rudman, at seeing the threats that were going to be coming. The threats from terrorism, from non-state actors, the way the American military needed to reorganize to meet those threats. I apologize. What is a non-state actors, the way the American military needed to reorganize to meet those I apologize. What is a non-state actor? A non-state actor. So Al-Qaeda is a non-state actor. So previously the Soviet Union versus America is two states going to war with each other.

Al-Qaeda or ISIS in America are American non-state actors. Understood. Which are very, very different. There are very, very different ways you need to organize yourself to deal with non-state actors. So Hart had been pretty visionary on this and was somebody who seemed like at a time when Democrats needed a national security voice, he had actually had enough of acclaimed oppressions here that he might be a strong candidate. So Hart actually begins thinking about running for president that year. And I somehow get signed up with an organization for him that doesn't yet exist. And I'm an intern in this shadow Gary Hart organization. And Hart is testing the water. So I have now set up in Northern California a couple of events for him. One in, I think one in Oakland and one in San Francisco, or maybe it was one in, I think one in Oakland and one in San

Francisco, or maybe it was one in, I think maybe it was one in Palo Alto and one in San Francisco. And I am driving him. And this is so great. So I have my little blog. I am the blogosphere's only heart supporter, certainly the only heart supporter who is under the age of 20 that anybody has met recently. And I am writing about him and now I'm driving this guy around and it's just so, so fucking exciting. But I'm not an experienced planner of political events and certainly not experienced in the logistics of getting people to and from them.

So these events are not that far apart from each other, either in time or in space. I'm driving Hart around. I had a blue Ford Focus with a stick shift. And I had never driven in San Francisco at all. And definitely not in San Francisco traffic. And so I'm taking Hart from Palo Alto to San Francisco. And we are super late

because it's at rush hour. And so it's not taking however long it would have taken, but taken three times that long. And we were on these hills and I'm burning out the transmission on every one of them. So the car is filled

with this acrid stench of the destruction of the undercarriage of this vehicle. Some of these hills for people who haven't been to San Francisco, I mean, they feel like they're 45 degrees. Yeah, they're vertical. And he is understandably, not unkindly, getting agitated.

At one point he asks if I would like him to drive. Eventually get him there. All the events themselves went fine. But it was an unpleasant experience for everybody involved. It was stressful. It was the next day he announces he's not running for president. And I have all, it's probably not, but I have always wondered if he was like, I am too old for this shit. I do not need idiot kids burning out their transmissions, getting to be late.

Like I just, that's not what I, that's not the life I need to lead as a human being. But so Gary Hart drops out and I write on my blog, which again, 35 people a day at this point, that I'm really bummed. The candidate I support, it is not in the race anymore. I get an email from Joe Trippi, who is the campaign manager for Howard Dean's campaign. And Howard Dean's campaign is really taking off at this point. And Joe Trippi worked for Hart in 88 and was very involved in the early blogosphere and was very fascinated by the idea that there was this college kid somewhere writing about how Gary Hart is great. That just seemed so incongruous to him. And he invited me

to come out and work on the Dean campaign, to intern for the Dean campaign that summer, which I did. Now, I had thought that I wanted to work in politics. I actually wanted to be on campaigns or somehow be involved in the actual work of politics. And what I learned that year was that I actually hated working in campaigns and being in politics. I didn't like supporting a candidate because it meant I had to support them even when they said or did things that I didn't like. Not that Dean did so many terrible things. It's just I wasn't 100% on that campaign or any campaign. Meanwhile, my blog was beginning to take off. People were listening to me. I was now at hundreds of people a day, occasionally when I got a couple big links, a thousand. And I loved it. It was really satisfying to me. It was really fascinating to learn about things and go where my interests wanted to take me. And so that was really the pivot moment in my understanding of my own career where I went from thinking I would work in politics to I would write about it. And also recognizing that I was not built or cut out to support candidates. That wasn't a personality that I had. And so that wasn't going to work for me in the long run. So if we then flash forward to say Vox, or actually, no, let's not approach it that way. What are, from that point forward, some of the decisions,

most important decisions that helped lead you to where you are now? So a bunch of things happen and often they relate to not getting something I wanted. So I did not get an internship at the American Prospect that I wanted. But then when I was panicking, I got an internship at the Washington Monthly, which is, it was and is a small policy. I think now, well, I don't know how often it publishes now, but it's a small policy magazine out of DC, as was the American Prospect for that matter. And the Monthly was an amazing place to do an internship. I mean, that's where it cemented for me that I wanted to be a journalist. And I was there. It was edited by, it is edited by a guy named Paul Glastris. So one, it's a very policy-centric place. It is a place that is interested in how government works,

in the mechanics of it, in the functioning and quality of the bureaucracy. So it just, it takes policy and politics seriously. I think something really important about the work I've done, including at Vox, is I emerge, my background is in the policy blogosphere and then in the world of policy magazines, as I'll explain. And those are very idiosyncratic worlds that used to be extremely small. And my career, as much as anything, has been about expanding the audience for that kind of coverage. From seeing it as a bout of coverage from seeing it as a boutique thing to seeing it as a mainstream thing. And that's the thing I think I'm proudest of doing. But so I was at the Washington Monthly, Paul Glastris, who is the editor of it now, I believe, was the editor. He's fantastic. But the two senior editors, and they seemed so senior to

me now, but I realized now they were just in their twenties. But were Nick Confessore, who is at the New York Times now, and Ben Wallace-Wells, who's at The New Yorker. And both of them are just extraordinarily talented journalists who were also extraordinarily kind to their interns and actually gave us real work to do. And so I got a sense of what it would be like to be a journalist. So I didn't get to go to the slightly bigger place. I ended up at the slightly smaller place. And being at the smaller place, it meant I had a lot more contact with the people working there, a lot more opportunity to do things. It was a fantastic experience. to ucla turned out what i didn't like was college i just don't really like being in school and my junior year one night i was sitting up complaining to i was friend friends with madagascar at this point uh and we were i amming uh because back in the day you i ammed so i was like asl matt hey you're too old you don't know what asl is i don't know what h sex location

oh that's a useful one. Yeah. Well, I'm not sure it is anymore because I think it's now all on your Facebook profile. But that's what you did back then. Find me on IRC chat. So I'm talking to Matt and I was complaining about that I didn't want to be doing some midterm paper I was doing.

And he's like, we should apply for the American Prospects Fellowship. I said, well, I'm a junior. He said, yeah, but do it. Whatever, leave college. And I actually looked, and it was possible for me to finish up, to do enough in the summer that I could graduate if I needed to. So I applied for the Prospects Fellowship,

and I also applied actually for the New Republic's reporter researcher position. I never got a call back from the New Republic, which was a slightly more prestigious magazine at that point, so I might have taken that instead. But their reporter researchers actually did a lot more base level work for the institution. So they did a lot more copy editing and fact checking would have been a much worse job for me at a place would have been much more ideologically difficult for me to be. At that point, the New Republic was extremely pro Iraq war. I was quite against it. By then, I wasn't originally.

So it would have been a very awkward fit. But I didn't even get called back for that. So that went nowhere. I did get the American prospect job, which was amazing and was the perfect first job in journalism for me. The next year, if I had just done what was normal, the next year, the American prospect ran out of funding for that job and it didn't exist. So the next year, the only two journalism jobs I had any shot of getting to, because they're the only ones that cared about bloggers were the prospect and the New Republic and the New Republic didn't want me and the prospect wouldn't have been able to take me. And so my whole life could have been different if I hadn't done this in my junior year, unusually. So I did that then.

I went to the prospect. The prospect was, is a great magazine. And again, it is part of this small collection of policy magazines. The first thing that happened to me when I went to the American Prospect, the editor was a guy named Mike Tomasky, who does a great column for the Daily Beast now and runs a journal called Democracy. But Mike called me into his office, and he always had his feet up on his desk. And he called me in, and I think this is my first day there, a week there. And he says, you know, Katrina happened. This is post Katrina. This is 2000,

late 2005. And he says, there's a big conversation about what to do about poverty in this country. Go, go find out what's happening in that conversation. I don't really now with more experience recognize that as an article pitch. And, and yet it was such a a place where that could happen is such a great place one a place that thinks what is hot in poverty is a sentence that makes sense right right a lot of places would not consider there to be such a thing as hot in the poverty reduction community to a place that would just send a young reporter with very with really no experience to learn about that give them a piece that became a feature um for them and so my time at the american prospect and then the third thing that happened there which was really really really important um and it was key to my career is key to my career is i was a really good blogger i'm

willing to say that at that point and what blogging was and I was good at that. But I didn't know how to do anything in journalism. I didn't know how to structure an article. I didn't know how to report. I didn't know how to pitch. I didn't know anything. Now, I'd written for, you know, like op-ed-like columns for the LA Week. I'd done a couple little things, but I didn't really have any skills aside from write my opinions on the internet. And the American Prospect was a place that was willing to take me on the strength of my blogging because they were very early into the blogosphere and wanted to get some of these young bloggers. And in return for that, and in return for paying me extremely little, teach me how to be a journalist. And they did that.

Mike Tomaski, what was the acronym? It was pick up the damn phone, P-U-T-D-P. He would always say, pick up the damn phone to you. And you learned, okay, like one of the tools here is reporting. When you pick up the damn phone, as a blogger, you don't expect anyone to answer your calls because they probably wouldn't, particularly not at that point. But if you're calling from the American prospect, they will. And one of the things that was really important in my career was I was pretty early in merging the techniques and ideas and ideologies and sensibility of blogging with the processes and skills and tools of journalism. And a lot of what I've been doing in different places is pulling those two threads together, not in ways that are unique to me, but in ways that not many people were doing.

Because most people who are blogging were not young enough and free enough to go take entry-level, underpaid jobs where they could develop these skill sets and then spend all their time working on them. And most people in journalism did not want to develop the tools of blogging because the tools of blogging were in many ways partly in opposition. They were partly based on a critique of journalism. And so I was in this very lucky space. And I do want to say it was a lucky space. It was a product of timing. I happened to start blogging when the wave began to build. And at a moment when people would hire folks who had that kind of experience, if I'd been five years later or five years earlier, who fucking knows. But I also then had the personality to bring those things together. Let me ask a question about that. So if you were now, and I don't know how you feel about teaching as opposed to learning in an academic setting,

but let's just say you had an opportunity to teach a freshman seminar at some type of college to just an incredible set of 15 students, just really receptive, brilliant students that could change the world. And you were teaching them this combination of, well, perhaps, uh, it's a writing course for those who intend to work in politics in some fashion. What would the first, what might the, the first lessons or areas of focus look like? Like what kind of exercises would you have them do? The first half of the course would not be about writing at all. One of the criticisms I have of journalism is that we are too focused. And it's funny because it's a little bit distinct, maybe even contrary to what I just said.

But we are too focused on journalism as a universally applicable skill set, tool set. Now it is that, but because we have so much confidence in it, we do not demand enough subject issue knowledge out of journalists. And the first half of the course would be about how to learn, how to learn about policies, how to learn about campaigns, how to find the right information sources, how to know what kinds of information are credible, and how to develop a... I often think of my writing as having sort of an iceberg metaphor. Any individual piece is the tip of the iceberg. But the pieces only work because of what's beneath. They work because of the superstructure of knowledge that hopefully, hopefully, if I've done my job right, I've developed over a period of time.

The subject matter expertise. So the place where I broke through, you asked earlier about actually breaking through. And in my head where I broke through came much later. The story that I broke through on was Obamacare and healthcare policy generally. And the reason I broke through on it was that long before it was an issue, I had developed an idiosyncratic interest in it. This was when I was at UCLA on my blog. And I had just for no particular reason begun reading think tank healthcare policy proposals. And then I checked out a bunch of books from the UCLA library and wrote a series, which is probably the most popular thing I'd done until that time called

the health of nations, where I wrote up what now I think you would characterize really as Wikipedia summaries of how does the German healthcare system work, the French healthcare system, the Canadian Japanese healthcare systems. And I'd spent all this time over those next couple of years just writing and arguing with people about healthcare. And what that meant was that by the time it actually became an issue in American politics to report on, I had a very unusually deep knowledge of healthcare policy, not healthcare politics. I didn't have great sources. I wasn't the person who could break stories necessarily.

But I had read a lot of Congressional Budget Office reports, a lot more than a lot of the people who, in theory, were actually the folks covering healthcare. And so when that began happening, I could deliver pretty good news reporting and analysis very fast. Because when somebody said something or they released something, I had a model to put it into. I recognize this is getting a little bit rambly, but I think this is that the product is the reporter's body of knowledge, not primarily the new piece of information. I think that a lot of journalism and a lot of reporter processes, workflows, approaches, etc. It is not a bad thing, by the way. I just think there's room for different models. It is all built on finding the next nugget of news. And what people are really good at and the way stories are structured is to highlight the next

nugget of news. And that is, I do want to be clear, that's an incredibly, incredibly important role. We absolutely need that. But I think kind of everybody was that. I think that's an incredibly, incredibly important role that we absolutely need that. But I think kind of everybody was that. I think that's how the whole industry was. When, in my view, one of the really important roles that we can play is to surface and expose the body of knowledge, the model, as I think about it, the context that makes that news make sense to us. So a lot of Vox's formats, our explainers, our card stacks, our videos, our posts where we do 15 graphs on something, what we are actually doing there, the meta point of all that, is that we are building out ways to expose more of the iceberg, more of the reporter's body of knowledge, so that when we give you a new piece of information, we are laying out more and more clearly why we understand and believe that information to be

important. And that actually does require you to think and learn and work in different ways. And now I'll connect this a bit back. The thing that I think journalists often don't do enough of is they're so focused, particularly when they get moved onto a beat, on finding out what's going on on that beat, they don't build enough of the underlying superstructure. They don't read the foundational textbooks on just how does health policy work? How does moral hazard work? How do actuarial rulemaking work? And when you don't do that, you often cannot communicate policy topics or complex topics clearly because they're not

actually clear to you. You know the part that's new. People are telling you which part is new. But if it doesn't fit really neatly into a broader structure for you, then it and otherwise, who know this stuff backwards and forwards. This is not a systemic critique. But it is something that happens a lot. And it happens particularly when we just move people around to beats. Because we figure the journalistic toolkit will carry them through in getting the news. And we'll give them the sources. And we'll have the person who was there before help them. When often I think you actually need to spend some, you almost need to go into a room for a couple months.

When I move somebody on a beat, often I will assign them articles that are not about something new, but that are about something really foundational in that area, just so they will have to do the work of learning a lot of the basic knowledge. And the article, it's not gonna break any new ground,

but I'll know at the end of it, they have that. Well, this makes me think of Sebastian Junger also, who said to me once, I asked him how he dealt with writer's block. And he said, writer's block just means I don't have the ammo. He said, and I'm paraphrasing here, but you never want to fix a gap in your research with a cute twist of prose. And you just need to do more research. And I, I, and I will, this is a bit of a different episode, uh, than a lot of my episodes. So

I'll dive into it. I've, I will make it a systemic critique. So I will go there because I have an deep rooted insecurity about feeling ignorant of politics. And it's been largely by choice because I've felt like I can't distinguish, I can't distinguish oftentimes theater and posturing from fact. I don't know how to find what is reliable and what is not. I mean, I have a few ideas, but the point being that when I ask sometimes the dumb questions in say at, at dinners, because something has been unclear to me. Um, I often do get sort of a side eye from, I'm not going to name names, but people in the media who have presented it themselves in a very unclear way. And so one of the questions I wanted to ask you is, you know, I'm not the smartest guy, but I feel like I could maybe wade through this and figure, at least establish a basic understanding of how this democracy and government that we live under functions. But I imagine it being like reading the IRS tax code and just being this impenetrable

text. So for someone who said, you know what, I'm actually not only relatively historically uninterested in politics, I've actively avoided it, but I feel like I want to understand how this machine works. What books or resources, what approach would you recommend if I don't, if I'm not going to make it a 20 hour a week thing? So aside from reading Vox. Aside from reading Vox. Let me say a couple of things, because everything you said there, I think is right on and it breaks my heart. My foundational experience, the thing that I've always been trying to correct is after 9-11, when Leader Tom Daschle. I didn't know much about the Senate. I don't really know what the Minority Leader does. I don't know anything about Tom Daschle. But he's the key character.

So I am not getting this. And I remember slowly, I was like, now it's 55%. And then it was 65%. And then it was 75%. And now it's 140%. Because there's a lot of stuff that just isn't in the article at all, but I'm able to see. And I remember a very experienced editor once saying to me, it took me 10 years to learn how to read a newspaper story. And he meant that as like, I'm great. I've learned how to, I thought we are fucking up if it needs 10 years of training to learn what's going on here and understand like the game behind the game, the story behind the

story. So a couple of things. This is, we have an internal documented Vox called the Vox voice about who are we supposed to be to the audience? And one of the premises here is that if we have made, if we have taken something important and made it uninteresting, it is always our fault and it is never theirs. That is the idea that, you know what's interesting? The fucking IRS tax code. important and made it uninteresting, it is always our fault and it is never theirs. That is the idea that, you know what's interesting? The fucking IRS tax code. I have written about that a lot. It is a fascinating place. That is a place where we translate a lot of our values and ideas as a country into actual policy. And the stories encoded in that are fascinating, but we often don't write them well. So in terms of how do you do this,

the first thing I would say is that it is helpful to find guides. It is helpful to find people whose tone, whose sensibility, whose approach you connect to. It's often said that people think in stories, but I also think that they prefer to think through social relationships. And if you are able to build a relationship, an intellectual relationship with Matt Iglesias or Paul Krugman or Ross Douthat or Rebecca Traister or Annie Lowry, my wife is an amazing economics reporter, I think that actually helps. That's why blogging was really good for me, because there were these people who I connected to, and even when I didn't understand exactly what they were saying, I had this relationship with them that carried me through.

The second thing that I do think is important, and this might be me talking through how I think, but it's really helpful for me to be writing. Now, comment sections are a bit of a dying thing online, but Twitter isn't, and Facebook threads aren't. And I think there's a lot of shit talking about, oh, these terrible political Facebook threads where nobody knows anything. But you know what? Writing half-informed comments about politics on Facebook, that is a legitimate form of engagement in a way that you learn about political life. And then I do think, I really think this has gotten better. I really fundamentally at my soul believe this has gotten better. I think that in the last 10 years, both a number of outlets, again, I really think like Vox, but also a number of traditional outlets

who used to be much more mannered and buttoned up and for the experts have opened up their writing styles a lot and made it a lot easier to read what they're doing. Let me jump in just because I feel like you are one of the people I've developed somewhat of a relationship with. So I want to lean on you since I'm not going to delve into it with a lot of time on the internet because I'm just averse to it for a lot of reasons. But my primary interest, I'll just tell you to it for a lot of reasons. But my primary interest, I'll just tell you, is that I've worked on a few specific things, meaning legislation in

a number of states related to say like shark fin importation and some other things which have actually proven effective. But outside of that, my interest in politics is, I guess, twofold now at this point. One is that it's become clear to me, you can be a great chess player, but it's on some level much more interesting if you are able to influence the rules of chess itself. So I feel an obligation to gain a better understanding of how it works also from an intellectual standpoint. So if there are any books that a, a, someone who has been actively avoiding politics for a long time would read that could increase my level of understanding, that would be amazing. And then the second thing, and we may not have time for it today, cause this is going to wrap up in just a few minutes. We'll probably do a follow on is my interest is in active change. And, and I remember I was told

once, I'm not going to name the person, but the right-hand man of a very well-known politician said to me, he said, because I was talking to him about this and he said, just imagine that you have maybe maximum six bullets per year, you get to shoot six. And what I see on the internet is a, I don't want to engage in any religious war conversations over politics where no one is going to change their mind. It's a waste of my time. I don't want to engage in dialogue where the end product is not going to be change for the better of some type. So for me, I want to figure out how I can pick my shots and using the assets that I have and so on. This doesn't mean becoming

a political writer, which I don't want to do. How I can influence the rules of the game, right? And I've, one of the, well, I'm meandering a bit, but part of the challenge that I have is that I get hit with so many asks. I get hit with hundreds of asks for different propositions. This, uh, I mean, one I did stand up for and unfortunately passed was the, the, uh, foreign intelligence surveillance act way back in the day. I had a long conversation with Daniel Ellsberg. Some of you may know from penning on papers about this and went public with it. I didn't change the course of history, but I also alienated half of my audience immediately. And I'm trying to figure out how to play with all those factors, but it

seems to start with at least figuring out what the fuck is going on and how it actually works. What are your thoughts? So a couple of things. In terms of books, and I should do more thinking on this. The book that is probably the most influential for me in thinking about how American politics really works is not the easiest read, but it's a book by a political scientist named Francis Lee called Beyond Ideology. And the basic argument of this book, which is very, and if you want a condensed version of it, I actually wrote a New Yorker piece called The Unpersuaded, which leans on this book very heavily. So you can read that too. But this book, what it shows is that a lot of our intuition about politics, which is that when the president comes out and leads on an issue,

that is how things get done, is flatly wrong. That actually, we have a system in which governmental power is usually divided. It's very, very easy to block things. And usually you have different parties controlling things. When the president talks about anything, the chance of the other party polarizing against it automatically becomes higher. And she has this great data set where she uses non-controversial issues and shows that whenever the president talks about a non-controversial issue, an issue where the two parties don't have positions, like should we fly a rocket ship to Mars? The president talking about it leads to a sharp increase in party line vote. So there's a lot of good information in some of those books. The Gamble, which is by a series of political scientists on the 2012 election, I think is really helpful. There's a guy named Bob Edwards who's written a series of books on presidential rhetoric. Those are books that they're not the friendliest tours through American politics, but they are the most information rich that come to mind immediately.

So that's one thing. The other, I do not think there's a way to invest in politics aggressively that will not lead to some controversy. These are things where disagreement is real. But I will say that people overinvest in the headline issues. They are unlikely to change minds on issues where everybody already has a very intense position. Where there is a lot of room in politics to change things is to raise the salience of issues that people do not currently care a lot about. So I think that something that I and others have tried to do over the last couple of years is raise the salience of the filibuster as an issue that is important in American politics that people should care about more. And that actually has changed. The filibuster has weakened a little bit. My friend Matt Iglesias and others have been very aggressive, Ryan Avent and others, in talking about housing density, zoning policies, occupational licensing. These are city-level policies that people weren't really thinking of as big problems in the American growth story 10 years ago, but I think are now developing an appreciation for them.

And neither party is particularly polarized on them. In fact, there's a lot of agreement. So just by raising them as issues, there's been, I think, a lot more opportunity to get things done. So to the extent that you can take people and convince them to care about something new, where maybe the battle lines in American politics are not already extremely drawn, that can be very, very powerful. So if I were you thinking about this, I would be not looking to weigh in on somewhere where there is already a raging war, but to weigh in somewhere where maybe people haven't thought about this, or maybe they underrate the importance of it, but would be open to deciding that this should be higher on their priority list. Because that can be a very powerful thing. And there can still be the chance to create

an equilibrium around it that is non-polarized. So I definitely want to have more conversations with you about this. I'm going to do some reading first, so I'm not a complete idiot. And just, we're going to wrap up in a minute, but, uh, I'll tell you another reason why which, which at the end closes with a discussion of education reform, really dove into it for a number of years and looked at public school education in the U S spent a ton of time. I met with some lawmakers and I remember at one point being really just beaten down and exhausted, involved teachers unions, this, that, and the other thing. And, uh, I won't bore you with the details, but I ended up having lunch with the Senator and, uh, he said to

me, look, a lot of people come out of say entrepreneurship business, Silicon Valley. They think they've figured out how to do one thing. They come in here, they try to change it and they get chewed up and spit out by this bureaucracy. They don't make any lasting change. He said, perhaps what you should think about, and he wasn't talking about himself, but he said, I hate to put it this way, but perhaps you should just raise a bunch of funds and buy yourself a lawmaker, meaning the support and whatever it might be, uh, campaigning and so on. And I thought to myself, a, I was thankful to this guy. Cause we'd actually spent quite a bit of time together i was

like for just like saying it how it is if that's how it is and then b that's fucked up that's horrible and really depressing and c if that's the way it actually is i need to learn how to deal with that i have a couple thoughts on this okay and so and then we'll wrap up and we'll we'll do a follow-on because we have so much more so number one money in politics is toxic and it is poisonous and you can hear it right there it erodes trust in the system and it doesn't work like that it is not impossible to bribe your way into some kind of political outcome but it is quite difficult particularly anything that people are thinking about and hearing about. No, just to be clear, I'm not talking about bribes. No, I know.

But I think the way people imagine that going when you say buy a politician is that you give the politician X amount of dollars or you fund a super PAC for them. And then, you know, basically there's money changing hands so that they will vote a certain way on an issue. On some issues where practically issues that are more or less out of the public eye, that stuff does happen. On the big issues, polarization, party incentives, electoral incentives are just much more powerful. And I'll just say this year has been a powerful way of thinking about what money can and can't buy. Because across all of the elections,

Jeb Bush was the best-funded Republican. Hillary Clinton was by far the better-funded general election challenger. Money, it is a bad thing in American politics. There's almost no version of campaign finance where you can propose that I won't support, but I think people overrate its power. So let me give you a different twist on that, though. The thing people really underestimate and really underinvest in is city and state politics. Tremendous amounts of change can happen there. Tremendously important things can begin there. And there's a lot less polarization, a lot less opportunity to access your legislators or the other relevant decision makers, and a lot of opportunity then for things to spread. So, I mean, you think about the way in which marijuana is being legalized slowly but

surely across the country, that is beginning in states. You wouldn't have been able to fight it in Congress first, but by starting in a couple of states, you're able to have a national impact. And one thing, if I could change the way people, if I could change anything in the way people engage with politics, this is actually probably a good thing to say. I wish people thought less about the president and more about Congress and less about national politics and more about state and local politics. I think at every level, we tend to try to default to treating politics like an episode of the West Wing where the president is a main character. Then there are all these other supporting characters. And the question is, can he make a stirring enough speech? That isn't how it works.

And that also isn't where most of our power is individually. Look, you live in a big state. California is an important place. Where California goes, oftentimes so too does the nation. And you have a much, and also you have the insane, totally fucked up California ballot proposition process, which for all of its problems does create a much easier access point to potentially hosting very, very large experiments that maybe the political system would not want to host normally. So I would think less about Congress and more about the place you actually live with people who will actually listen to you, who don't have as many folks vying for their attention, uh, and who maybe actually have a little bit more space to run because of it. All right,

guys, I'm going to do a bunch more thinking on this. I'm going to try to get over my lifelong allergy to the word and the concept, uh, and all of the dinner brawls that I witnessed to my relatives having to actually figure out how this works and do some good. So to be continued, Ezra, where can people find you, connect with you, and so on? So on the internet, it's at Vox.com. That is our website. And it has all the normal

social media manifestations you'd expect. I'm on Twitter at twitter.com slash Ezra Klein. I have two podcasts that if particular people enjoyed the politics section of this, they might enjoy. The Weeds, where I talk policy with Matt Iglesias and Sarah Cliff every week. And then the Ezra Klein Show, where I do long interviews with very smart people. And I'll try one closing question. If you could put short message on a gigantic billboard to get a message out to millions of people, what would it be? So actually, I thought about this question when you've asked it before. My belief in the persuadability of people is extremely low. I think it is very hard to persuade anybody of anything, particularly if you can only do a drive-by. So I'm not going to try to persuade anybody with my billboard. But I put a billboard somewhere on the 405 where there's a lot of traffic. And I'm going to find somebody more visually creative than me to create a billboard that brings a little bit of wonder and happiness and levity into a long, shitty drive that people have to do every day.

Maybe it'll just say, you're almost there. I like it. I like it. That's actually, that's a very good one. You're almost there. Ezra, thank you so much, man. Thank you, man. Really fun. And to be continued, this, this is going to be offline or online for the podcast or not for the podcast. So you guys let us know, let me know. I will have a lot of follow-up questions and for everybody listening, you can certainly find the show notes everywhere. It doesn't make any sense at all. You can find the show notes on everything we talked about at 4hourworkweek.com forward slash podcast as per usual. And as always, thank you take off. Number one, this is Five Bullet Friday. Do you want to get a short email from me? Would you

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