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

[Claire Gordon]: Uh thank you. Thank you for having me. Um it's uncomfortable to be here.

[Claire Gordon]: Um, we will be getting to the question on everyone's mind, which is the secret society you're a member of dialogue.

[Ezra Klein]: When have when have I spoken to Peter Teal and what did we say?

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

[Ezra Klein]: Um, musicianship is not something I've been heavily drawn to, but I did for the first time ever recently take a singing lesson.

[Claire Gordon]: really.

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

[Claire Gordon]: But like how you thought you sounded like what about it?

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

[Claire Gordon]: like pulling it out at parties.

[Ezra Klein]: Playing crash into me for women. Um, no. Uh, I did not play in front of other people, but the guy who's teaching me was just hung over too often to come and so it kind of like just filtered out. Uh, I'd like to learn something. I wouldn't try to learn how to do electronic music. Uh, I it is if this show in particular can colonize like everything I love. You know, I can read a great novel and then it's like, well, we should have the novelist on the show. And I think it's good to be an appreciator of some things and not try to make them another thing you are learning how to do. I have in my life like an excess of energy that is oriented towards productivity, accomplishment, doing, being angry at myself for not doing things well enough or not doing enough of them. And so having spaces where I am an experiencer, not a creator, is important for me.

I don't really know how to answer why I feel at home in it. Uh it just is the music. I mean, I've been listening to Oh my god, it's so good. But it's so such an even hard album to tell people how to find. So Fortet, who's an amazing producer, has an alias that is entirely composed out of wingings. Like I I recognize how this sounds. So, he's got this new album out, but both the artist on the album and every song on the album cannot be pronounced or even searched, but you can find it on platforms by searching Foret.

[Claire Gordon]: but it means 911 was an inside job.

[Ezra Klein]: It means Ezra Klein and Peter Taylor and the Secret Society. Um, and I just love the album. I've actually had two experiences like this on the show. One with um Jeff Tweety of Wo, another with Brian Eno talking to them about individually a song they had done. um for Tweety. Impossible Germany I think it's called. and for you know come on with Fred again. and learning that the incredibly like intense experience I had with that music was totally different than the way they understood that music. And I find that really beautiful. And so whatever my experience is with music I like here, it's just mine. It's not, I think, legible. Other people don't have the same one, but why these songs do the this set of things to me, the ones that I like, which is not all of them. I mean, there's a lot of there's both a lot of bad electronic music, but also a lot of electronic music that just doesn't do it for me. Uh, and but I think it is a thing best left illeible even to the self. Like there's a lot of art that what you want to do is just allow yourself to feel differently and not not try to pin the different feeling like a butterfly to a board. But yeah, I I feel at home in this music because it makes me feel things I don't feel elsewhere.

[Claire Gordon]: Happy?

[Ezra Klein]: No, often not. I don't actually go for that much music that primarily makes me feel happy.

[Claire Gordon]: In some ways, I think I use the music to feel things I have more trouble feeling.

[Ezra Klein]: A lot of the music I like is a little bit discordant and difficult for me. Um, you know, other people can experience it how they experience.

[Claire Gordon]: I've noticed when you took out your headphones or I accidentally hear it blasting from your laptop, I'm like, that's a choice. That's a that's a choice of vibe for your Tuesday afternoon.

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

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

[Claire Gordon]: Whoa. Um, let's talk about the the feedback to the Chris Rufo episode, which um of our recent episodes like got a lot got the most questions um the most comments.

[Ezra Klein]: Bifrocated feedback.

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

[Ezra Klein]: In some versions Jews are included in that white race.

[Claire Gordon]: Sure.

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

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

[Ezra Klein]: Yes. I don't think it is a problem or unfair or even wrong to worry about large scale rapid demographic change.

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

[Ezra Klein]: I'll also add that that episode of Rufo and Lomez was called Ezra Klein admits the New York Times was wrong on woke and the first two chapters on on YouTube were called Ezra Klein's great replacement moment and what Ezra now admits was once branded white nationalism.

So with all that setup, Jason's question is, "It seemed that Rufo and Lomez equated your statement with a full endorsement of the great replacement theory. To me, this is a ridiculous misinterpretation of your point. Uh, when you have guests with broad platforms like Rufo, do you engage with them after an interview? And if so, how at all do you respond if you feel that someone is misrepresenting your position?"

[Ezra Klein]: I don't for the most part. Um, I'll say a couple things here. One is that a major thread of my interview with Chris Rufo is that Rufo is a propagandist. We begin with this discussion of agitrop and then a lot of the conversation is me unspooling with him the way he does that and the consequences I think it has and the way it often misrepresents and then um worsens reality and has worsened the political party that he's part of. But I'm not then going to like sit here and be surprised that a person who is like a proud propagandist. Um maybe the way he responds to that interview is by focusing on the parts he thinks he can turn into propaganda.

I I did find that particular take which I actually saw from other people too very surprising. I have for many many many years and in fact it's part of my first book why we're polarized not just believed but talked a lot about how the immigration issue gets sanitized as about economics but it is actually about people's discomfort with demographic change. I wrote a big piece for Vox called white threat in a browning America. I think I've been very attentive for a long time to the fact that it is very politically destabilizing for the nature of a place for who lives in it to change fairly rapidly. And it has changed on a kind of generational level fairly rapidly. So in the 1970s 4%ish 4.5% of America was foreign born. Now it's around 15%. So it's went from you know sort of a low to either it is or it is near a high.

I have written a lot over the years about how that is a major driver of what Donald Trump is. I do not believe and I just like I cannot say this more flatly. Um that it is a normal constant and legitimate dimension of politics in a nation for people to have views on who lives in their community and how it's changing. I think great replacement theory is a white nationalist theory. The thing that I'm critiquing Rufo for in that section is footsying with Tucker Carlson at the time when Tucker Carlson is offering all these theories and then later on being shocked that Tucker Carlson has gone as far as he has. I'm saying this was all happening and you seem perfectly happy with the trend that it was on and now you're like, "Oh my god, like how did we end up with this conspiratorial racialist right?" And I'm saying it was right there in front of you. To follow up on that, I disagreed with Jason in his question of saying that Rufo was suggesting that you were fully endorsing the great replacement theory. He's saying that what you said you believe is what people on the right like him have been saying for years and they have been branded white nationalists for it.

It's hard for me to know like which position Rufo is trying to ascribe to me or even to the broader left here. But I guess like the only thing I can say is I think you can have normal concerns and it's just a normal part of politics that people notice and have views on when their communities change. I think you can do that without it being understood as white nationalism. I think if you brand that white nationalism or any kind of um you know racialist view then you have basically taken a huge amount of contestation in every nation we know of and tried to make it you know politically unsayable. I have personally never done that and have never believed that's like a usable way to think about politics. Of course you can then take that and turn it into a white nationalist version. And the white nationalist's version is there are white people. They are the true builders and inheritors of our society. The people coming in are genetically or culturally inferior and that it is a threat to the fundamental success of our society to have it not dominated by a certain percentage of ethnically, you know, northern European or something um descendants. That to me is white nationalism. I think it is very important to be able to delineate these things. I think it's important for the left. I think it's important for the right. If the right can't see the difference that I'm talking about, then of course it's not able to police white nationalism because it wants to say there's no difference in anything, which means you cannot like see the thing you're trying to look for.

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

[Ezra Klein]: I I mean, I don't want to speculate on why Rufo is pretending to be surprised. about I think on that one he again, I don't want to interpret him for him. Um, I really try not to argue with guests after they've left the the room. Um, I actually don't even think my views on immigration are that different than they've ever been.

The Democratic party has definitely moved on immigration. It shot really far left in 2020, you know, with Julian Castro pushing the primary field to raise their hands or or the, you know, the debate moderators pushing them to raise their hands around Julio Castro's argument that illegal immigration should be um decriminalized, that the movement across the border should be decriminalized. And I think even many of the people on that stage would agree with the way I am talking about immigration, but at that point they were not willing to stand up to parts of their party that were one very very appropriately angry at the cruelty Trump showed towards immigrants, but also were trying to make an argument that pretty normal views on immigration that most Americans held were on some level racist.

I just think that happened before, right? And I don't think it's about I don't think that the concession there actually had to do with whether or not it's legitimate to worry about or have feelings about change inside of community. I think the concession there from the left which in general was a mistake it was making in 2020 and we certainly did episodes on this like you know going into the next election is that order is very very important to people and if what they feel is that when you are in power the world is disordered that prices are out of control that all of a sudden there are migrants everywhere you know on the subways in New York selling candy and like putting aside how much immigration there is is it orderly? Is the border like controlled?

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

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

[Claire Gordon]: Yeah. I mean, the episode was already two hours. So I just

[Ezra Klein]: and and I think and if people like uh didn't listen to it or didn't make it to the end, I would recommend making it to the end because it it's very revealing.

[Claire Gordon]: We we were saying at the beginning we got very bifrocated feedback on Rufo and you know from my perspective there was feedback that like really saw like what the structure of that episode was and the way things were playing against each other and people who their interpretation of it was different from mine. But that's also I think okay like I try to keep the episodes from becoming so legible that there is not room for independent thought. I have a lot of faith and trust in the audience. And even where I understand there's going to be like a contested interpretation of something. I'm trying to create something here where you can have contested interpretations of it because it's supposed to be a space for you to think in, not for me to tell you what to think. I write columns. I write books. I occasionally do like essays on the show. When I want to tell you what to think or try to persuade you of what I think, I do that. I don't want this show to be that. Like I think that there is a tremendous amount of very didactic work out there. And I think Twitter and social media in general has made it much worse where it's like people they've gotten used to every time something is bad or somebody coming and telling them and just to be clear what you just heard is bad and you should be a bit like I don't I don't think that makes people smarter richer. And also one thing I I try to leave room for is that people legitimately come to things with different values and different interpretations and they should be able to see different things in the same episode.

I think that episode is really good. And I think that if you follow it through its entire arc around corruption around what is turning the right into this racialist right that he seems concerned about on his own show. I think there is both like an argument being made there and a thing being revealed there that to me worked really well. But I'm not going to tell you if it worked for you. Right? If you don't like the episode, you don't like the episode. You know, Tyler Cowan has a line. I don't know if he still says it before his episodes, but he often says before them, "This is a conversation I want to have with this person, not necessarily the conversation you want me to have with this person."

And I think there's a truth to that. Um, there are episodes that, from my perspective, go totally off the rails or they end up as something totally different than what I thought they were going to be. That's not the case for that one.

So again, I don't want to break my own rules here and go like point by point and tell you what I think you should think of it, but I can tell you that if you're not a subscriber to the New York Times, we have some news for you. You can now explore the Times for free without any payw walls at all during your first month in the New York Times app.

[Claire Gordon]: Uh, this is from Kevin T. I am a listener going back well into the Vox days. I love your show because while you are definitely to the left of me on some things, I think you're a solid guy. You operate in good faith. You're not a bullshitter. I'm wondering if over the years you've come to see any of your more woke positions as mistaken. Eg. Your infamous Vox article from the Me Too era where you suggested that it might not be so ultimately bad if some men were falsely accused of things if it led to progress. Feel free to quibble with this interpretation if you like. I'm sure you will. Uh or your conflict with Sam Harris, who I am closer to. ideologically um in this space in particular, identitarianism, wokeness, or whatever you want to call it. Are there any positions you've changed your mind on in the last 5 to 10 years?

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

[Claire Gordon]: yeah this has become a thing that people are saying about you.

[Ezra Klein]: I get it. But I my positions to me haven't changed that much. I think probably what gets emphasized has a little bit. Um but here's what I would say. I think that if I could go back there's probably two things that I was less alert to than I am now. One is that an argument you would often hear people make and that I probably made somewhat had to do with well there's no first amendment right to amplification on Twitter or Facebook or something like that, right? That if it's not something that is affecting like the actual legal system or government policy, uh you don't need to worry about it all that much. like the mob yelling you at Twitter or being shadowbanned because you said something that like was like hate hate speech.

[Claire Gordon]: And I think cultural power like that is I didn't think it was totally unmeaning at the time. I mean, one thing you'll see in my tenure box, we never fired anybody for speech. Never happened, right? I like I wrote pieces in that era about like the difference between, in my view, cancel culture, which I always thought was like a poorly defined thing, and cancel behavior, which I thought was very real, which is people acting in a way that was going to lead to people losing their jobs. Now, they only lost their jobs when it combined with power. And something that I tried to be alert to then and I still believe now is that a lot of things where people were saying what they cared about was free speech. What they cared about was power and losing power. And I think the Trump administration has proven me 100% right on that. 100%. That Donald Trump and all these people came in saying they were going to restore free speech and they did nothing of the kind. In fact, they've used state power more aggressively than Democrats ever did to chill speech, to punish people for speech, to scare people, to deport people. So, one thing that I just got into a lot of fights about and it put me like in the way people categorize my opinions like very much on the woke side. So, I was like there is a big fight over power here and

[Claire Gordon]: but and there's a real threat to free speech here.

[Ezra Klein]: But I do think that the people who are arguing that um the way that power is being deployed on platforms and you know in spaces like colleges that it was fundamentally illiberal and that it wasn't going to be contained there. It actually was going to leak into society. They had more of a point than I thought then. Right? This is a point John height made and and we had a debate about it back in the Vox days and you know there's all these debates about college campuses and and a lot of my viewers like who cares? like I just don't want to hear that much about what happens at Yale. Um and the view of height and some other people was it's not going to stay at Yale like you're training the next generation of you know staffers and leaders and like this is going to come out of there. I think one that was basically true, right? That the um spillover effect was very real and two that uh that it also the the application of cultural power caused such backlash that it arguably more than wiped out the gains. the number of people who I've seen who I think were truly radicalized by just stuff that happened to them on Twitter, on Facebook, on Instagram, on places like that. In part because I always looked at those places as kind of cesspools to just be blunt. Um I think I was like just less concerned about what was happening there.

[Claire Gordon]: So but but I al I always want to say this because I think this other side of is important.

[Ezra Klein]: The reason I was sympathetic to what gets called wokeness, I actually still believe all that. I believe systemic racism is very real. I believe that our society is fundamentally unequal in very very very deep ways. I believe that we often have very difficult trade-offs between who gets justice and that as those as the power moves, right? I mean the the sort of piece about affirmative consent was trying to grapple with something that I still find is very hard to grapple with which is the equilibrium that existed you know that people were trying to alter in affirmative consent laws wasn't an equilibrium where there were no harms. It was one where there was rampant sexual assault that went unpunished and many many many women I know have been sexually assaulted and traumatized by it and harmed by it in spaces where there was not really a recourse. Did affirmative consent laws find like a great equilibrium? They didn't. So I think you could say like it's a hard problem. But I don't want to just say no, this was all wrong. One of the the things happening when you begin to sort of unearth the way we have settled into unjust structures in society is you don't always know how to change those structures in a way that will work. And I think a lot of things failed. I think a lot of things failed. But the things people were trying to change were very real. I mean the level of just overwhelming workplace and social harassment that you know primarily women faced and face right it's not gone was real I think racism remains a problem we don't really know how to deal with I think that I actually have like mostly the same views on what it is we're trying to fix in society but I think I take more seriously the people who said that using illiberalism to create something more liberal even if the illiberalism is not coming from the state is you are you are imperiling more than you realize you're imperiling.

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

[Claire Gordon]: Yeah. Although I guess maybe the one thing I would say is that as I understand my own work over time, I understand myself as trying to figure out how to make progress on things that have remained pretty consistent. And if an approach fails, and I think a lot of those approaches failed and they particularly failed politically, I think it'd be crazy not to try to ask, well, why did this fail and what do we learn from it? And the thing you maybe hear me saying a lot about how do Democrats win in Iowa and Ohio and Nebraska and South Dakota and North Dakota and Arkansas and these places that used to win and thinking okay like what kind of a tent do you need to do that? What kind of a party brand do you need to do that? To me I'm trying to make progress on the same issues. I think one of the very very bad habits people pick up learning their politics in online discourse, online algorithmically structured like discourse holes is they begin to equate political change with political position taking and that your commitment to something is defined by how stridently you express your opposition to the thing you don't like, not how effectively you build power to fix it. And I understood like again what we call wokeness as a an effort to build power to fix something. And it went in directions that even at the time like I was not on board of but I think you can't look around without saying that you were trying to do persuasion and the persuasion failed and now things are quite a bit worse than they were even I think then. And so you have to ask okay like what failed and what have you learned. I think if you have a politics over an extended period of time that is not learning things about the world something is wrong with it. You should be changing your emphasis. You should but you should also be changing your approach. And I guess the only other thing I'll say and this is a very consistent theme for me back then too. I just think a lot of what went wrong then and what is going wrong now has to do with these fights taking place in fundamentally deranging spaces. Spaces that have only become more deranged after Elon Musk bought Twitter become more deranged as they've all become much more algorithmic and less focused on your friends and the people you follow. And I think if you go back to my work then, if you go to it now, I have an extremely clear throughine of just somebody who has been very very very concerned that if that attention is the fundamental capacity we bring to politics, what we pay attention to shapes what we see. It shapes how we act. It shapes what we believe about other people. And if the way we pay attention, like the space that mediates our attention deranges it, focuses it on the wrong things in the wrong ways, then our politics is not going to be good.

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

[Claire Gordon]: Just so we don't end on a entirely just down note about how woke went. I went back and and read your yes means yes. This is your affirm of consent article in Vox. Yes means yes is a terrible law and I completely support it is the article.

[Ezra Klein]: I thought there wasn't anything that jumped out of me but your what you said about false accusations.

[Claire Gordon]: What did I have not read this piece? I didn't even know we were going to talk about that. So I've not read this piece like in many many many many years.

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

[Claire Gordon]: Well, can you say what I said because I would like to know what I said.

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

[Ezra Klein]: Yeah, things get warped. I definitely don't remember myself as writing that false accusations are not a big deal. I mean, that's what I remember people being mad about, that cold spike of fear line. And I'm not sure I think I phrase that a little bit more vividly than I would. And it's not that I want anybody to feel fear when beginning a sex. Um, there has been a cultural shift to a lot of anxiety around consent. Um, I recently saw Obsession, the blockbuster horror movie by this Jenzie director that is all about, at least my interpretation, turning that anxiety into supernatural horror. And there's also very little data about how sexual assault on college campuses has like actually shifted in the years since. But there is one study of 10 universities like elite like Harvard, Yale that does show that self-reporting sexual assault has gone down like significantly. But like what you argued for here like it kind of happened and it maybe worked

[Claire Gordon]: maybe. I mean I'm not sure the affirmative consent laws were a good idea. I don't I don't know.

[Ezra Klein]: I don't know what a how much difference they

[Claire Gordon]: Yeah. I don't know how much difference they made. So I think like what you could say about this was that I'm not sure what to think about what colleges should do and I thought they were worth trying and you know amidst this debate I made an argument for it and that argument is very informed by things people near me had gone through to just be very blunt about it and I still believe that the difficult thing here is that I mean sex itself is like a a very complicated interaction between human beings and a very vulnerable and a very intimate one.

I think what I'd say after writing that piece in the years that followed amidst me too and everything else is like it all became much more sort of widespread and seen is that I do think the way this got seen and treated really changed. I think a lot of those changes were for the better. I also a lot of stories where ambiguous interactions um you know got interpreted as like the worst form of interaction and I don't like you need a way to protect against that too. And like I'll just I don't have an answer to all this, right? I don't know how to fix the like constant reality of sexual assault and also the reality that um if you like yeah I don't know how to fix the mix of the constant reality of sexual assault and like the ambiguous way in which two people might understand the same thing happening. Uh I think it's really hard.

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

[Ezra Klein]: I I wouldn't focus this question on the DSA because a lot of the candidates we are talking about in this populist moment are not to my knowledge DSA candidates. Graham Platner's out of the race but he was not a DSA candidate. Abdul Elsa to my knowledge is not a DSA candidate. A lot I mean there are some populists running who are DSA affiliated and some who aren't. Populism classically is a political perspective that uh is more about seeing a small group of elites hoarding power and believing that in order to have a better society, a better politics, you need to break the power they hoard. And so you can have, you know, your right-wing variants, your leftwing variants. I think it's sort of fairly widely believed that the most electable form of candidate you can run right now is economically populist and culturally moderate. Right? That's sort of the Dan Osborne formula in Nebraska. And Dan Osborne is a candidate who really did wildly overperform in a red straight. Now, he also ran as an independent, but that meant he wasn't dragged down by the Democratic party's baggage.

[Claire Gordon]: Graham Platner wasn't culturally moderate.

[Ezra Klein]: I'm not sure he was the most kind of electable form of candidate you could run.

[Claire Gordon]: So, this is what I mean, right? I think the problem with seeing all this as populism is that it's more than that, too. I don't think populism necessarily has a lot to say about Israel Gaza. You can have, you know, populists who end up on both sides of that issue and in fact you do in current American politics. And I think at some deeper level, populism is about listening to whatever group you are saying it is that is the mass, right? Whatever group you believe represents like the real people. For the right, populism tends to be a more nativeorn phenomena, right? They're like the real Americans and then the kind of fake elites. On the left, it's often more economic. But a lot of these candidates have a bunch of other positions that are a kind of linked and more elite set of ideas, right? On climate, on other things that put them pretty out of step with working-class voters. And it's why when you look at who they went over, Aram Platner was not overperforming working-class voters. Abdul sayed is not overperforming with nonol voters in Michigan. like his uh elector doesn't look like that. There's been a lot of people noting that the DSA sweet spot is downwardly mobile, highly educated voters. So, I think we're going to see a lot of people making the argument again like real populism has not been tried because what the DSA is is leftism and that's something different.

[Claire Gordon]: Sarah V wrote in with the question, I'm a registered Democrat and I've been doing a deep dive into the DSA website and what democratic socialists believe. I consider myself a progressive but more Bernie Sanders type. What is your understanding of the clear disconnect between what is on that website, no more jails, defund police, open borders, and what Mumani and others actually do when they are in office? I've been really enjoying watching Mdani govern since he took office. It feels like a good path so far, but it definitely doesn't reflect the tenants of that organization of which he's a member. I find it hard to know how seriously to take the DSA website or platform uh without getting into like incredibly tedious detail that has become a a constant topic in our Slack trying to say who speaks for the DSA and who is speaking when you look at what the national DSA says or what a local chapter says. It's a very unusually structured organization.

I do think it is valuable to look at what somebody like Mandani does in power. Right. We we've had a number of um members of Congress who are DSA associated or you know people in state senates and assembly and when you're in power you are working coalitionally to pass legislation or executive orders or regulations whatever it might be through a system that does not have entire agreement with you. I don't know what Zoran Mani or anybody else would do if they had king-like power. But I would say Mdani in terms of if you knew nothing about what he has said or what he believes, if you just saw what he has done governing, this would not look very different if another liberal candidate in that primary had won. Yes, they have added a tax on uh pricey second homes and I think and I know he would like to add more taxes on on the rich than that. He's also being very very very careful and doing a lot of both private and semi-public outreach to people who run investment banks to the business elite of New York City because he actually does not want to like infuriate them and run them out of the city. If you begin to dry up the tax revenues, the rest of his agenda falls apart immediately. I don't see the MDI era as reflecting an incredibly sharp break from say Delasio.

And you can, I think, say that sometimes of Bernie Sanders, too. And that's not a hit on them. I think one of the valuable things about more leftist figures getting into powers of uh getting into offices where they have executive authority or legislative authority is you actually see the give and take between ideology and power. The one thing that I sometimes find frustrating is that people on the left don't recognize that that is happening everywhere else too. So liberals, you know, often want more ambitious and sweeping changes than they are able to get one in power too. But there's a tendency to look at what say an Obama is able to get done dealing with a Senate riven by the filibuster and say that's all Obamaism was or intended to be which it isn't. There is a lot that if Barack Obama were king he would have done that he was not able to do. And you know with M Donnie it's very similar with Bernie Sanders. We had Fasier, Bernie's former campaign manager on the show and he said on the show, look, we knew that if we got into power, we weren't going to be able to pass Medicare for all. There's a high degree of pragmatism there. So, while he's pushing, let's take Medicare for all. And he gets into Congress and can we at least lower the age from 65 to 60? Can we talk about Medicare expansion so that it covers home care, dental, hearing, and vision even if you can't all move with me to Medicare for all? That actually is how President Bernie Sanders would have governed. we would have, you know, expanded Medicare, expanded what it covers, dropped down the age range. And so there is this constant uh compromise when you're governing. I think it is healthy to watch that playing out. How much to take the DSA as a signal of where these candidates even want to go that I'm less sure-footed on.

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

[Ezra Klein]: I think you would have to ask a member of the DSA that I I don't know to what degree Democrats broadly are going to be forced to answer for what the DSA believes. My suspicion is not that aggressively because I do think people understand the DSA is a distinctive thing. And so the idea that in North Carolina they're going to run a bunch of ads against Roy Cooper saying he believes in what like the DSA website, I don't think anybody buys that. I don't think it really works. Now they will matter what DSA candidates do when they come into Congress. So, if you have, you know, uh, some of these newer members of of of Congress who are DSA affiliated putting forward a lot of bills to abolish police or abolish prisons, then and and demanding Democrats vote on them, uh, then you're going to start to see more effort to, you know, define the party by what it's kind of high attention left flank is doing. M Donnie coming out and giving that uh sort of direct to camera address on how he would like to arrest Benjamin Netanyahu and calls on the federal government to do that.

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

[Ezra Klein]: that is going to be an issue for that the Republican party will try to weaponize against voters who are maybe crossressured um and are maybe even critical of Israel but do not want to go where Mamani and the DSA want to go on Israel. Mamani being a central figure in the Democratic party and making that statement that is something other Democrats are going to have to deal with. The DSA having stuff on its website um I'm just skeptical that's going to become a major political issue.

[Claire Gordon]: So, we got a bunch of questions that were all the same question. So, this one is Amy T. Is this true that you are part of the dialogue group sponsored by Peter Teal?

[Ezra Klein]: Okay, dialogue. Let me start here. What happens is that as best I understand it, um, some hacker goes on Blue Sky and is like, I got the membership roles of Peter Teal's Secret Society and includes all these people, Elon Musk and Peter Teal and Reed Hoffman and Joseph Gordon Levit and Josh Brolan and me and Julian Castro and Corey Booker and like just like tons of people with very very different roles in the world, different politics.

[Claire Gordon]: Cool hang.

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

[Claire Gordon]: And why did you never speak about it?

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

[Claire Gordon]: what what is unconference style?

[Ezra Klein]: Oh sorry unconference style there aren't panels like people kind of self-organize. is you like write up on a board like I would like to have a session on being a working parent or better sleep hygiene or are there any real uses of crypto or whatever it might be. Um so you don't go and like sit there and like listen to people talk at you.

[Claire Gordon]: This this is like a genre and genre. You are deep in conference world my friend.

[Ezra Klein]: I've done a lot of conferences. That is part of my job to go places and meet people and like listen to them and see if they'd be one day good guests on my show and like that is like as you know like part of what I do. But dialogue was a conference and the one I went to the first one was for like people under 40 I think it was and so it was sort of like young more up and cominging people like my favorite person I met there was an kind of lefty anarchist. Uh it wasn't like any of those bold-faced names who I then was told I was in a secret society with. like there was no Elon Musk. I've never heard of him as involved with it or Reed Hoffman or any of those people. I went again a couple years later and just found it like the second one I went to kind of like lame and it was reflecting the curdling anger of the techright in that era and I just found the energy pretty unpleasant and I didn't go back. By the time I went my understanding is Peter Tiel was not involved. uh he was one of the multiple co-founders of dialogue. I never saw him at it or heard from him in respect to it. I do want to say because I think people could get the wrong idea. I'm not saying I think there would be a problem if Peter Teal was still involved. I've invited Peter Teal on this show. He has not come on. I have had reporting meetings with Peter Teal. That is my job. I do not see Peter Teal or anybody in our society as somebody I cannot or should not talk to. So dialogue when I went no Peter Teal not a society it was like a conference you went to also not a secret and so then to like continuously see this thing that you know is being believed by people that I'm in this secret society with Peter Teal and like what would that without anybody even being clear of like what that would mean like what would it mean for Julian Castro who again he came up earlier in our conversation like really push a Democratic party left on immigration and Peter supporting like why would you say that there's a way of looking at the world that um I was really surprised how many people seemed to buy into this and then I was particularly surprised to have it be around this conference dialogue because what I will say in dialogue's favor actually is that it was a conference that invited a wide variety of people from a very wide variety of industries and ideologies to do what it said on the tin to like go to a place and be in dialogue with each other for the weekend and or for a couple days or whenever it was held. And it did an okay job of that. Like on conferences I've gone to, it's not the best. It's definitely not the worst. And its fundamental nature was fractious. In part, its fractiousness is why I didn't really want to go back because I just found some of the conversations very unpleasant. there's like a big focus in that second one I was at about like your most unpopular opinion and it just felt very performative to me.

[Claire Gordon]: Well, I think I think the thing that um bothers a lot of people about this or that it taps into on some level is this feeling of elites who um people understand as like having radically different politics and being from radically different worlds just like all hanging out in a chummy way. Um, and it just feeling like then they're on the receiving end of this performance when actually like elites are all hanging out and have this kind of like class solidarity with each other. And it was a thing that like in the episode with uh Anan Gerodardos on Jeffrey Epstein and what it revealed about elite networks, he was kind of saying this and that there was like a kernel of truth to it about how elite networks work.

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

[Claire Gordon]: That's the thing. I think this

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

I think civic friendship even across real difference is more than beautiful. It is necessary.

And it's not that I think Dialogue is doing something like amazing for the world, but you are definitely not going to get me to sit here and say that the problem is that there might be a space where I don't know Ted Cruz and Joseph Gordon Levit and um somebody who works on cyber security risk at Microsoft might have a conversation with each other. I think that's helpful. Like I think that's good.

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

The reason dialogue became or this thing became a what it is is because it was called like a secret society. And so like spin was put on the ball to suggest that oh in public Ezra Klein and Peter Teal are pursuing different agendas in private they're dressing up in robes and sacrificing a goat and trying to do the same thing. And that's not true. It's just not true. Technocratic liberals, managerial professional class liberals, they can sometimes make the world too complicated to understand. Conspiratorial populism makes it too simple to understand. That is not how the world works. People are mostly doing in private what they're doing in public. There would not be safety among a bunch of people who disagree that much to like coordinate or like say what's really on their minds or or anything. Like I can even get Peter Teal to come on the show and I kind of understand why he doesn't want to come on the show.

[Claire Gordon]: say one thing uh that you disagree with Peter Chiel about

[Ezra Klein]: that democracy and freedom and capitalism are incompatible that Donald Trump should be president that um that Palunteer should exist in the way that it currently does like I find Peter Thiel's functionally his entire agenda reprehensible

[Claire Gordon]: was a cool website

[Ezra Klein]: uh Baker was a cool website that Blake Masters should be a senator that JD Vance is a good political actor like Greta um Thunderberg is like a correct model to think about the antichrist. I disagree with Peter too. Like his whole agenda is functionally like the opposite of mine, but I will absolutely talk to Peter. And so the dialogue thing, the main thing it did for me, I mean, there's also like the reality like I can't go and like knock on the doors of everybody who believes something untrue now and like correct the belief. Then like a few days ago on the internet, I was accused of being like a Chinese communist agent or spy or something. Like the kind of constant um cycle now of that you have no real way to correct is a a challenging thing I find to deal with. But I think it reflects something pretty negative. I I don't think it said anything good about the way people a lot of people are absorbing information about the world at the moment. I think it would also violate the New York Times like employee handbook.

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

[Ezra Klein]: I mean there needs to be an initiation ritual.

[Claire Gordon]: Sure,

[Ezra Klein]: you can't tell people you're in it.

[Claire Gordon]: And I think besides that, you can do whatever.

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

[Claire Gordon]: And you have to stay on an email distro for the rest of your life.

[Ezra Klein]: Yeah, sure.

[Claire Gordon]: Last question. So, what are three musicians or songs or albums that you would recommend to the audience?

[Ezra Klein]: Oo. So, the four the Fort Wing album you should go find. And then maybe um I really into and I find this like very hypnotic this particular album. Mass Amable, I think it's called Mass Amab by DJ Python. Really cool, very strange music. And then maybe to offer a a song rather than a whole album. There's a John Hopkins Image and Heap collaboration that just came out called Reckoning. Both of them are amazing on their own. Like Image and Heap, longtime one of my favorite artists, John Hopkins, like his stuff is really, really cool. But coming together was I was very excited when I saw it and I have listened to it a lot since it came out.

[Claire Gordon]: Like you and Chris Rufo.

[Ezra Klein]: Thank you Ezra.

[Claire Gordon]: Claire Gordon. Thank you very much.