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0:32

From New York Times Opinion, this is

0:34

the Ezra Klein Show. Welcome

0:51

to the Ask Me Anything episode. I'm

0:54

here with my revered editor,

0:56

the bringer of gravitas, Aaron Reddicka.

0:59

We've got tons of questions from the hundreds

1:01

that you all sent in, which I'm always grateful for that

1:04

I'm about to get peppered with. Aaron, it's good

1:06

to actually see you in person. I know, we're

1:09

live in New York. This

1:11

is not Saturday night, however. Let's

1:13

just get rolling. There's so many questions, let's not waste time.

1:16

So you're going on book leave, and

1:18

many of your listeners were curious what

1:20

the book

1:21

is about. I don't

1:23

think this will surprise anybody listening to the show. So I'm co-writing

1:25

a book with Derek Thompson of The Atlantic, who,

1:28

if you don't read him, he's great. And it's

1:30

a book about what I often call supply-side

1:32

progressivism or liberalism that builds,

1:34

what Derek calls abundance or the abundance

1:37

agenda. But at its core,

1:39

where do we have problems where

1:42

the fundamental problem is scarcity? We don't have enough

1:44

of something we need. And when

1:46

that problem is located, how do

1:48

we fix it? Sometimes

1:50

the necessity here is for the government

1:53

to create more of something we need, to

1:55

do clean energy tax credits

1:57

or a warp speed for vaccines. And

2:00

sometimes the government is actually making it impossible

2:03

or very difficult to create the thing we need, say housing

2:05

in California. And so those

2:07

are the sort of layers of the project. And I think

2:09

the other layer of it is

2:12

how did liberalism

2:13

and particularly places where liberals govern become

2:16

so bad at building? How did

2:18

the coalition that imagines

2:20

itself as behind

2:22

a strong and effective government actually

2:25

become often unable to run

2:27

governments that are strong and effective? And so

2:29

some of the project is unearthing the secondary

2:31

history of sort of post 20th century

2:34

liberalism, sort of the rise of the

2:36

new left, the rise of nadirite

2:39

and so on movements that

2:41

created a lot of ways

2:44

in which liberals both want

2:46

an activist government and then want a lot of ways

2:49

for people to stand in front of that government and say,

2:51

stop, you're not listening to my needs, you're

2:53

gonna hurt the environment, et cetera. And

2:56

the point is not that one of these sides is right and one of them

2:58

is wrong, that you have to understand the way they've collided

3:00

in governance to understand a bunch of the problems we

3:03

have now and to maybe say, okay, the

3:05

balance on this is off given what we're facing.

3:08

So that's the project of the book. I'm gonna be off for about three

3:10

months. Hopefully I'll get the book done or

3:12

finished in that time. We'll see, but I'm

3:15

excited about it.

3:16

I'm gonna push into the content there in a second,

3:18

but I wanted to ask you one question about collaborating

3:20

with Derek. So you are a person who

3:23

is at the center of the process, both

3:25

for your show and your column. How

3:28

are you envisioning doing it, a book with someone?

3:30

I'm just very curious about that. And there are a lot of process questions

3:33

from your listeners, so I thought I'd ask that.

3:35

He's been on Bookly first due to his schedule

3:37

and then I'm going on. One of the

3:39

reasons I wanted to co-write this book is

3:42

I found writing my first book, Why We're Polarized, to be an incredibly

3:45

lonely experience. Almost every

3:48

creative project I've done in my life that I've

3:50

really enjoyed has had somebody else at the center

3:52

of it with me. In my column, it's you. On

3:55

the podcast, it's the team and particularly

3:57

Rojai, who's been with the show for so long, Rojai

3:59

Carmel. I was a senior editor. When I launched

4:02

Vox, I did that with Melissa Bell and Matthew Iglesias.

4:04

When I did Why Were Polarized, it was really just

4:07

me. It's not that I didn't have an editor, Ben Lane,

4:09

and who's great, but for months it was just

4:11

me struggling with the page. And

4:14

a lot of my best thinking is done when I talk. A

4:16

lot of my best thinking is done in relationship

4:19

to other people. And I

4:21

just think it makes me

4:24

smarter to be working with other people, and I think

4:26

that it also helps me actually get things done.

4:29

And I just wanted it to be a less lonely

4:32

process. There's obviously advantages

4:35

to doing projects on your own because you have full

4:37

creative control over them. But there are real

4:39

disadvantages to it, too. So this was an experiment

4:41

that I wanted to at least attempt. Yeah,

4:43

we spend a lot of time on the phone. It's like an

4:46

old school communist editor relationship.

4:49

All right, let's dig into the actual material, though, because you and

4:51

I have worked a lot on

4:51

this, and there's been a ton on the show as well. So

4:54

Josh Appear, the governor of Pennsylvania, faced

4:56

a sharp crisis very recently

4:58

where a section of the I-95 collapsed.

5:02

And Joel Dee has written in asking

5:04

us whether the fact that they were actually able

5:06

to get the section

5:08

of I-95 that fell open 12 days

5:11

after it collapsed, what the implications

5:14

are for a liberalism that builds in

5:16

that

5:17

sequence.

5:18

So I think this has been a really interesting

5:20

model because Appear is bragging about it. The Biden

5:23

administration likes to tell me about the role they played

5:25

in it. And I think it's also important to say

5:27

they did this with union labor. That's actually been a

5:29

big part of how they intended it and also

5:31

how they've narrativized it. It wasn't just that they

5:34

got this portion built, which was estimated

5:36

to take months. It's not at all unusual

5:39

for a government project, infrastructure project,

5:41

estimated to take months to take years, and

5:44

instead it took days. They were going around

5:46

the clock. They had a live stream on it. But

5:50

you have to take seriously what he did. So

5:52

the Pennsylvania governor has emergency powers

5:55

during a disaster. And Shapiro signed

5:57

a proclamation that reads, quote,

6:00

I hereby suspend the provisions of

6:02

any other regulatory statute prescribing

6:05

the procedures for conduct of Commonwealth

6:07

business or the orders, rules, or regulations

6:10

of any Commonwealth agency. If

6:13

strict compliance with the provisions

6:15

of any statute, order, rules, or regulations

6:18

would in any way prevent,

6:20

hinder, or delay necessary

6:23

action in coping with this emergency event." So

6:25

I did a piece with you a couple months back called

6:28

Everything Bagel Liberalism. And

6:30

the point of that is that liberals often

6:32

put a huge number of secondary

6:35

objectives into a single project. So they

6:37

want to restore American dominance in

6:39

semiconductor manufacturing. But then there

6:41

are also these rules in there for onsite

6:44

childcare and how to break the contracting

6:48

into small tasks so you can have

6:50

a more diverse set of subcontractors. And

6:54

what sort of community investments you need to make and

6:56

your climate action mitigation plan and so

6:58

on. And one of the

7:00

points of that piece was you can choose some.

7:02

Here they chose unions, but you can't

7:05

choose all of them. And what they did here,

7:07

what Shapiro was able to do in Pennsylvania, was he wiped

7:09

out functionally everything else. You could

7:11

not sue and stop this project

7:13

using, say, environmental litigation, which

7:16

happens on a lot of different projects. They just went too fast

7:18

and they wiped a lot of things out. If you listen

7:20

to the Jen Paulka episode, all these

7:22

different states and of course the federal government

7:25

have very complicated procurement and contracting

7:27

rules meant to make sure things are fair,

7:30

that people who aren't chosen can challenge,

7:32

all that was out the window. So

7:34

I think it's relevant what they did, but

7:37

it is also relevant that usually you cannot do

7:39

this, right? What they did

7:41

was

7:42

radically alter the process by which building

7:44

happens. And I'll make

7:46

one other point about it that I think is a good

7:49

way to think about it conceptually. What

7:51

Shapiro ultimately said here

7:53

is that I, Josh Shapiro,

7:55

who won election with a majority

7:57

of the vote from the voters in Pennsylvania.

8:01

I should be trusted with acting

8:04

in a way that

8:05

ensures the electric gets what it wants. And

8:07

in his view, in that point, it was the quick

8:10

rebuilding of I-95. The processes

8:12

we have are a way of saying, we

8:15

think that the elected representatives cannot

8:17

be trusted on this. And so we're going to hamstring

8:19

them or tie them up with

8:22

a lot of other processes meant to allow more voice,

8:24

meant to allow more opposition, meant to allow more

8:26

litigation. And you

8:29

can think that's right or wrong. But what's, I think,

8:31

valuable about seeing what happened in Pennsylvania

8:33

is that there's nothing about government doing

8:35

projects.

8:35

It means they can't be done fast. There's

8:37

nothing about unions doing projects. It means they can't be

8:39

done fast. But you have to

8:41

make some choices. So

8:44

you could just

8:45

give more governors and give the president more

8:47

emergency powers and wipe out a lot of procurement

8:49

rules. But that would upset a lot of people. And

8:52

so what Pennsylvania shows is it is possible.

8:54

But what the invoking of these emergency

8:56

powers also shows is it cannot be done

8:59

under the normal policies

9:01

that the governors use. And

9:03

the obvious thrill that everybody

9:05

involved in it now feels should make

9:08

us wonder if we're not missing something

9:10

in our normal processes. Emergency

9:12

processes shouldn't make you feel so much happier

9:14

than

9:15

normal processes. That's not normally how that

9:17

goes. Right. But okay, virtually no

9:19

one would say, well, we really would

9:21

like to have I-95 be collapsed. No

9:24

one wants that. So the emergency is going

9:27

to override very happily

9:30

the conditions that normally

9:32

would obtain. Right. But

9:34

how are you going to transfer that kind of emergency process

9:36

to an ordinary process where

9:39

people are going to have objections, some of which are going to be reasonable,

9:41

many of which are going to be unreasonable? I mean,

9:44

it's easy to say, okay, great, they did it in 12 days, but

9:46

it was an emergency. And so they acted like

9:49

it was an emergency. I think first there's a question

9:51

of what in our minds should be

9:53

an emergency. Right. I mean, my interest

9:55

in this topic is driven more than anything

9:57

else by decarbonization.

9:59

I believe that climate is an emergency, and

10:02

I do believe it's an emergency. Now it's an emergency playing

10:04

out over years and decades, not

10:06

days. The summer seems to agree with

10:08

you. The summer seems to agree with me. Then

10:11

I think you need to, and this is the big argument

10:14

inside I think this whole area, then

10:16

I think you need to begin saying our processes don't

10:18

work for this kind of emergency. This is a point now I've

10:20

made in podcasts and columns, but

10:23

the largest solar farm

10:25

in America is something on the order of 585 megawatts.

10:29

And you need to build two 400 megawatts solar

10:32

power facilities a week for 30 years

10:35

to hit a middle of the road renewables

10:38

pathway. We do not have the capacity

10:41

to do that.

10:42

That should be understood as an emergency, not

10:45

something we can approach with business as normal. This

10:47

is a point, as you know, I'm making a column that will probably be up by

10:49

the time this show comes, but to not choose

10:52

to change processes is to choose right now.

10:54

It is to choose to absorb the problems of

10:57

climate change at a higher level. Now look, everything

10:59

is about where you put the dial and

11:01

you're not gonna go to full, wipe out all the

11:03

procurement rules and nor should you. You're not

11:05

gonna go to full, wipe out all the environmental

11:08

litigation nor should you, but there is

11:10

space between here and there. And

11:14

if we want to do a bunch of things that I

11:16

think we should wanna do, then

11:18

we're gonna have to move in that direction. And if we don't

11:20

wanna do it, then we're just gonna have to say, okay, we're

11:22

okay with the housing markets looking

11:25

like they do in superstar cities. We're

11:27

okay with missing our Paris

11:29

climate accord targets by a lot, not by

11:31

a little. We're okay with a

11:33

lot of things that we could fix and we're okay with

11:35

liberal government having the accurate

11:38

reputation, at least in America, that

11:40

it cannot build the projects it promises to build.

11:43

You can't have high speed rail in California. You

11:45

can't get the big dig done at the

11:47

cost and time. You said it would, the second Avenue

11:49

subway is gonna be a total cost disaster.

11:52

Maybe if you try to build a bunch of miles of bike lanes

11:55

in San Francisco, it's gonna take you a decade.

11:58

That is also a choice to say that.

11:59

that's okay. And we prefer

12:02

the outcome of these processes

12:04

because we think there's enough voice and we think that preventing

12:07

the bad projects is worth it. You can also

12:09

hopefully make things quicker

12:11

for good projects and slower for bad ones.

12:13

I mean, it doesn't have to be a process. It cannot make any

12:16

distinctions between what you're building. Adamus

12:18

Okay. So that brings us to Joel's follow-up

12:20

question. Joel is the star at the beginning

12:22

of the show here. So is there a version of permitting

12:25

reform that

12:26

would actually be a win-win for environmental justice,

12:29

community input and for building faster?

12:31

Or do you see the values as

12:34

inherently zero sum? Joel I think it depends

12:36

a little bit on which values we're talking

12:38

about. But let's take environmental justice and

12:40

building faster before we take on community input.

12:43

And there I think it's pretty straightforward. People

12:45

sometimes talk about this as a quote, green pass.

12:49

I think we know which projects

12:51

are meant to be environmentally more

12:54

sustainable. And I think

12:56

those should have a streamlined way forward.

12:58

So there's a good paper that

13:00

I mentioned in the podcast with Robinson

13:02

Meyer called The Green Dilemma. And

13:04

the law professors who wrote that paper, they talk

13:06

about a number of examples

13:09

within government. A very famous one is base closing

13:11

commissions that basically

13:13

identifies questions around military base

13:15

closing. And it has a streamlined,

13:18

fast-tracked, up or down vote way of doing that.

13:21

And you can imagine a certain set of processes that would be

13:23

fast-tracked into that. If you're

13:26

working on decarbonization, for instance, renewable

13:29

energy, not fossil fuel energy, maybe

13:31

you have a quicker path through environmental review. Now,

13:34

there are a lot of things that aren't just environmental review here.

13:36

So it does depend on what you're talking about. But we're

13:38

seeing this begin to happen. Affordable housing in

13:40

California has been sped past

13:43

a bunch of points in the process that you have to go through,

13:45

whereas market rate housing doesn't always get that. So

13:48

you can make decisions about what

13:50

it is you're trying to speed up. Community

13:53

input is just tough because I think

13:55

a lot gets hidden in that term. Which

13:58

community, having what? kind of input.

14:01

There are times when the processes

14:04

we have allow communities, you know,

14:06

and particularly affected communities to

14:08

come to the table, for instance, or come

14:10

into the process and be heard in a way

14:13

they wouldn't otherwise. There are also a lot of ways

14:15

in which these processes often create

14:17

space for the status quo to take something over. You

14:20

know, very famously, I think all over the country,

14:23

wealthy homeowners are very good at manipulating

14:27

the planning process. You can't build

14:29

below market rate homes and you can't build many homes at

14:32

all in very, very desirable and very,

14:34

very economically important areas. So

14:36

which community is getting input? The community that

14:38

lives there now, the community that would like to live

14:40

there, the community that has time to show

14:43

up to all these meetings that most people don't even know are going

14:45

on. There's a huge amount of power that

14:48

is wielded in meetings around

14:50

the regulatory process for basically any

14:52

major bill you can think of. Most people never know those

14:55

meetings happen, but every lobbyist knows

14:57

when those meetings happen and moneyed

14:59

interests spend a lot of money making sure their

15:01

interests are heard and their thinking is heard at

15:04

these meetings. So this is a very

15:06

tough thing to get right, but a critique that many

15:08

in this area make drew some demsis at

15:10

the Atlantic, because I think we're in great pieces on this, and

15:13

that I agree with is that there is a difference

15:15

between input and representative input. Processes

15:18

get captured. And so there is often

15:20

a question of what level and layer

15:23

you're having people get engaged at. The

15:25

fact that there wasn't meeting and some people showed up

15:28

does not mean that what got heard at that meeting was

15:30

the sentiment of the community. Like I've sat

15:33

in SF City Council meetings and

15:35

one thing that came up was whether or not a 5G tower

15:37

was going to get built. And person after

15:39

person after person after person there

15:42

attacked the 5G tower.

15:44

The only people who showed up at the 5G tower

15:46

part of this planning meeting were people who think

15:48

5G towers potentially give you cancer. Now

15:51

most people don't care that much about 5G towers and

15:53

to the extent they had to make a choice they would have, you know, they want

15:55

to have fast internet and so in the end the 5G

15:58

tower won. But whatever was happening... that

16:00

meeting, it was community input, but it wasn't representative

16:03

of the community. And this is a

16:05

place where we do have representative government. And

16:07

to my point about Shapiro, a minute

16:09

ago, oftentimes I think a good way to have

16:11

broader community input is to actually give power to

16:14

elected representatives. I mean, there should be

16:16

checks on that, but they shouldn't be

16:18

completely unable to do the things that they just got

16:20

elected by, you know, most of the voters

16:22

in a much higher turnout kind of political participation

16:25

domain to do. So

16:27

again, it's all about where you hit the dial here,

16:30

right? You can go too far in any direction, but I

16:32

think community input is complicated. Oftentimes

16:34

we are not hearing from the community. We are

16:37

hearing from a subset of affected interests

16:39

who know how to manipulate the levers

16:41

of power. And we should be careful

16:43

about analogizing those.

16:45

This goes right to what Tony C wants

16:48

to know about, which is how should

16:50

a climate conscious member of society

16:52

think about the Biden administration

16:55

in the context of climate change? Do

16:57

you think of Biden as a net positive

16:59

or a net negative for our environment?

17:02

And he's thinking of course about

17:03

permitting fossil fuel

17:06

extraction and so on.

17:08

I just put this on, and this

17:10

is meant as no critique of Tony. I

17:12

just put this on because if

17:15

you're in an information loop where this

17:17

question feels really

17:19

possibly like it could come out either way to you, right?

17:22

Is Joe Biden, who has presided over

17:24

the single largest set of climate investments

17:26

ever and created a whole new structure

17:28

in which climate infrastructure will be built.

17:31

The IRA alone at this point is

17:33

judged at something like 380 billion over 10 years.

17:36

But as we talked about in the Robinson Meyer episode,

17:39

maybe it's really going to be 500 billion, maybe a trillion

17:41

dollars in climate investments. And on

17:44

the other side, they've permitted some near

17:46

term drilling and made it a little bit easier

17:48

during an energy crunch to build more. These

17:50

things are so out of proportion to each other

17:52

that I think the way

17:55

in which people get upset about the

17:57

places Biden diverges from them, say

17:59

on social media.

17:59

It's hard sometimes to keep

18:01

things in perspective, but Biden is

18:04

the most successful pro-climate

18:06

president there has ever

18:09

been in this country, right? I mean, climate is a relatively

18:11

new issue, but obviously Trump was a disaster.

18:14

He's done far more than Obama just because

18:16

of where the issue is and where the political coalitions

18:18

are, far more than Clinton, certainly

18:21

far more than George W. Bush. And

18:23

he's given us a shot at

18:25

building this stuff. We may fail,

18:28

but Biden has completely changed

18:30

the game. For so long, the

18:33

whole of the environmental fight on climate was, can

18:35

we just figure out some way to get the money to do what we

18:37

need to do? Now to everything we're

18:39

talking about, the conversation has actually changed

18:42

to the money is there. Can we actually

18:44

build it? Can we actually translate all this legislation

18:47

into the decarbonization infrastructure we need

18:49

in the real world? That is an astonishing

18:51

achievement. And it actually

18:53

slightly saddens me that anybody would look at

18:55

the Biden administration and what they've done at this point,

18:58

where they really, they got this over the line. Maybe

19:00

it's not everything everybody wanted because they had a 50-50

19:03

Senate, but they got

19:05

it over the line and now the work can really happen.

19:08

We'll see what happens. We'll see if it all works out.

19:11

Implementation is really tough. This all has to happen in

19:13

the real world. It's not just sending checks out from the

19:15

government, but

19:17

they have

19:18

been extraordinarily successful

19:20

on a pretty hard issue. That is not an easy

19:22

political issue. It's not one where you

19:24

have naturally very large constituencies,

19:27

people who will be immediately benefited by it.

19:30

They prioritized it. They figured it out. They

19:32

passed it. They deserve to be applauded. And now

19:34

they deserve to be watched over and scrutinized

19:37

as the real work has to happen. But the

19:39

stuff they did on the margin to keep energy costs

19:41

down, to not completely destroy

19:44

their power in the midterms, that's just politics.

19:47

But the bulk of their legislation, it's

19:49

been an extraordinary climate presidency,

19:52

given what is actually possible in American politics,

19:54

not just possible in people's minds. They

19:57

deserve the credit on that one.

19:59

a really interesting

20:01

question. This was brought up a lot before

20:03

Biden actually took office. But

20:05

let me ask you now, are comparisons between Joe

20:07

Biden and FDR justified?

20:10

Have their presidencies been

20:12

broadly similar?

20:14

They're not justified. I take it. Yeah,

20:16

you're right that before Biden came in and

20:18

as his agenda expanded and

20:21

as also Democrats began in 2020 to think

20:23

they might get huge congressional majorities, you

20:25

had this moment of

20:28

maybe it'll be an FDR-sized presidency. And

20:30

this happened with Obama too. There was like maybe Obama

20:32

is an extra FDR. And I

20:34

just have a bugaboo about this, that FDR

20:37

was only FDR because of

20:40

the size of the congressional majority he got

20:43

in 32 because of Great Depression and

20:45

the anger at Hoover destroyed

20:48

the Republican Party. So FDR

20:50

when he comes in, he has 58 Democratic

20:53

senators to 36 Republican

20:55

senators in a much less polarized time. So he could

20:57

actually get more from those 36 Republicans, but still 58

21:01

to 36.

21:02

Biden has a 50-50 Senate where

21:05

Vice President Kamala Harris is a tie breaking vote.

21:08

When he first comes in. When he first comes in, right. And

21:11

in the House, FDR had 311 Democrats

21:13

to 117 Republicans. And

21:18

for Biden when he first comes in, Democrats

21:20

have a majority in the single digits. You

21:23

can't have an FDR-sized presidency in

21:25

a polarized political time in a closely

21:27

divided Congress. And I think this is what people

21:30

just often miss when they're trying to

21:32

judge other presidents against FDR. How

21:35

much legislation

21:35

a president can pass is dependent on what

21:38

Congress does. Congress writes legislation

21:40

and passes it. President can only veto it. And

21:42

so what FDR said

21:44

was a destroyed Republican Party.

21:47

And that wasn't true for Biden. It wasn't true for Obama.

21:49

Probably will not be true for the next Democratic president.

21:52

And that just makes the possibilities

21:55

more narrow. I think it is really remarkable

21:58

how much policy Biden Democrats passed

22:00

with a 50-50 Senate. If you had told me

22:03

in January 2020 that Democrats

22:06

are going to have a 50-50 Senate, what are they

22:08

going to get done? I would have said a lot less than they did.

22:11

A 50-50 Senate is never going to get you a New

22:14

Deal-sized presidency. It just

22:16

can't.

22:17

You mentioned Obama. Michelle

22:19

Oh wants to know why you think

22:22

U.S. healthcare reform is not

22:24

much of a hot political item

22:26

right now. My first love. My

22:29

first love in policy. So yeah,

22:31

so I covered for people who have not followed my work in

22:34

the past healthcare reform for years. That

22:36

was my first kind of major policy issue. And

22:38

then there's a couple reasons. I mean, one is Obama and

22:41

how successful he actually was. So they passed

22:43

the Affordable Care Act. If you look

22:45

at current levels of

22:47

uninsured non-elderly Americans, because

22:49

the elderly have Medicare, you have about 27.5

22:52

million are uninsured. That's

22:54

down from about 50 million or almost 50 million

22:57

before the Affordable Care Act passed. And

22:59

if you look at who that is, you have a

23:01

bunch of people in the 10 states that have an expanded

23:04

Medicaid. You do have a lot of people who

23:06

still can't afford it. They maybe

23:08

don't get employer insurance, but they make enough money

23:11

that they're not really eligible for subsidies.

23:14

So that's some of the people too. You do have a kind

23:16

of big issue among non-citizens

23:19

who, if they're newly non-citizens, are not eligible

23:21

for some of the subsidies or Medicaid

23:23

in the program. And of course, undocumented

23:26

immigrants often are usually ineligible.

23:30

To mop up the end of the uninsured population,

23:33

it's pretty tricky and you're dealing with a

23:35

lot of sort of random issues, the Medicaid issue

23:37

in states that are fighting Medicaid and so on. So

23:40

I think that

23:41

the Affordable Care Act was successful enough that

23:44

it has drained a lot of the energy from healthcare

23:46

reform. That's one thing. So then

23:48

there's another thing, which is that one

23:50

reason that healthcare reform had so much energy for

23:53

so long was that healthcare cost growth year

23:55

after year was growing so much faster than

23:57

inflation, so much faster than GDP.

23:59

growth.

24:01

There's been a pretty big slowdown in that over

24:03

the past 10-ish years. The

24:05

reasons for it are debated, but the huge

24:08

cost growth problem we had that led

24:10

to all this bending the cost curve talk in the Obama

24:12

administration that made this a huge problem for employers,

24:15

it's not that it is entirely gone, but

24:17

it is not really the fundamental problem

24:19

anymore. So that doesn't

24:21

mean there aren't ways you can imagine healthcare being

24:24

way better, right? I mean, during the 2020

24:26

primaries, we had a lot of debates over single payer

24:28

in the Democratic Party. There's a new interesting

24:31

book by Laurent Inev,

24:33

and I might be mispronouncing that, and Amy Finkelstein,

24:36

who are both great health economists, called

24:38

We've Got You Covered, Rebooting American Healthcare.

24:41

You can definitely come up with root and branch reforms

24:43

of the system that would make something

24:45

more efficient, more fair, that would cover

24:47

something closer to everybody. But

24:50

the system is working well enough for enough people

24:52

that it is hard to imagine that getting prioritized in the near

24:54

future. When I think of what

24:56

I would want, any kind of Congress,

24:59

any kind of unified Congress and

25:01

presidency, to make their top priority,

25:03

it is hard for me to say further

25:06

health reform. I'd be much more interested

25:08

in universal baby bonds, as

25:11

with the episode we did recently with Derek Hamilton.

25:13

I'd be much more interested in universal pre-K.

25:15

It's not that healthcare is great

25:17

in this country, it's not. But political

25:20

capital is so limited, and enough

25:23

people here are doing well enough, and

25:25

the sort of moving it that last couple of miles

25:27

would be so difficult, that I think when you

25:29

imagine what are the

25:32

single bills you could pass that would lead to the largest

25:34

well-being improvements, it's hard for me now to say

25:36

that it's healthcare reform, both because its

25:39

status as an economic problem has abated somewhat,

25:41

and its status as such, like we have this huge

25:43

uninsured population, has

25:46

abated somewhat. So I think it's just

25:48

become more of one issue among many, rather

25:50

than the central issue that is causing both

25:53

employers and budget

25:55

wonks and normal people

25:57

incredible amounts of pain.

25:59

Hello. It hasn't solved the

26:01

problem of

26:03

drug addiction that's leading to more than 100,000 people dying

26:05

every year, right? So. But that's a

26:07

big thing, right? I mean, when we talk about health care reform, we're typically talking

26:10

about financial insulation

26:12

from health care costs. So when you think about

26:14

what would do the most to improve health now, I

26:16

think it's often not health care reform. I

26:18

think things like an expanded child tax credit

26:21

would do a lot for people's health. I

26:23

mean, we know giving people money is good for

26:25

their health. And baby bonds, I

26:27

think, have that quality, too. I could think of a

26:29

lot of things that would be really good for the health

26:31

of the American population that

26:33

would probably

26:35

have a bigger per dollar payout than

26:38

health insurance reform, which is what we are really talking

26:40

about when we talk about health care reform.

26:56

Hello, this is Ywande Kamalathia from New

26:59

York Times Cooking, and I'm sitting on a blanket

27:01

with Melissa Clark. And we're having a picnic using

27:03

recipes that feature some of our favorite summer

27:06

produce. Ywande, what'd you bring? So this

27:08

is a cucumber agua fresca. It's

27:10

made with fresh cucumbers, ginger,

27:12

and lime. How did you get it

27:15

so green? I kept the cucumber skins

27:17

on and pureed the entire

27:19

thing. It's really easy

27:21

to put together, and it's something that you can do

27:23

in advance. Oh, it is so refreshing. What'd

27:26

you bring, Melissa?

27:26

Well, strawberries are extra delicious

27:29

this time of year, so I brought my little strawberry

27:31

almond cakes. Oh, yum. I roast

27:33

the strawberries before I mix them into the batter. It

27:35

helps condense the berries' juices and stops

27:38

them from leaking all over and getting the crumb too

27:40

soft. You get little

27:42

pockets of concentrated strawberry flavor.

27:44

It tastes amazing. Oh, thanks. New

27:47

York Times Cooking has so many easy recipes

27:49

to fit your summer plans. Find

27:51

them all at NYTCooking.com. I

27:53

have sticky strawberry juice all over my fingers.

28:05

Shifting Gary's a little dug, A wants to

28:07

know what your view on the

28:10

popular goal of imposing term limits

28:12

on Congress is, whether you thought

28:14

about it much either way, and obviously would require

28:16

probably a constitutional

28:18

amendment to do it. Maybe not necessarily,

28:20

but probably. So what are your thoughts on that?

28:23

I would say look at a couple things. For instance, look

28:26

at California where you have term limits for the legislature.

28:29

I don't think in California or other states where you have

28:31

that the legislatures are dramatically

28:33

better or more effective. I

28:36

think if you look at Congress, a lot of really great

28:38

legislators would have been term limited

28:41

out in a way I don't think we should think

28:43

of as a good thing. It takes time

28:45

to become good at being a member of

28:47

the House or being a member of the Senate. I

28:50

don't think the country would have been better off if Senator

28:53

Ron Wyden

28:53

had had to retire after two terms

28:56

or if Senator Dick

28:58

Durbin had to do the same. There is

29:00

a return

29:02

on experience here and on connections

29:05

and on skills. Joe Biden was

29:07

in part a good legislator over time because he

29:09

learned things that he didn't know in his first term

29:11

or two. He got much more effective over time. So

29:14

I don't think when I look at the House,

29:16

say, and I look at people there,

29:18

a lot of the legislators I

29:20

think are the worst are the newest.

29:23

They're there. They're just trying to get booked on Fox

29:25

News or social media. A lot

29:27

of legislators who are pretty solid there have been

29:29

there a long time. So even if you take away

29:31

the sort of political science argument, the term limits

29:33

end up giving a lot of power to the unelected,

29:37

lobbyist, staffer class. I

29:40

just think if you look at it, it

29:42

doesn't look great. I think that most

29:44

people would come to the conclusion that the better

29:46

members of both the House and Senate are

29:49

the ones who have had time to be there longer. Now

29:51

there is a problem that incumbency can

29:53

just feed on itself and people can be there too long.

29:56

Look at Dianne Feinstein in California for a very extreme

29:58

example. I think

30:00

it's hard to know what to do about that exactly.

30:02

I will say the place where I strongly support term limits

30:05

is for the Supreme Court, where I think you should

30:07

have 12 or 18-year term

30:09

limits so that the vacancies that come up

30:11

are fairly reliable, so that different

30:14

presidents get roughly the same amount per term,

30:16

so that you don't have this incentive to

30:19

name very young people to the Supreme Court, so

30:21

that things aren't just tricks of when people

30:23

die or when they become too incapacitated.

30:26

I think that lifetime appointments are

30:29

a dumb idea, just in general. And

30:32

partly when you don't have something like elections, it do at least

30:34

suppose some level of accountability. You want to think

30:36

about term limits. Or you do have elections

30:38

imposing some degree of accountability. Yeah, the incumbency

30:40

advantage is a real thing.

30:42

It is also a real thing that voters are

30:44

participating in. So I think

30:47

that it is a little bit weird to

30:50

say that we abstractly know voters are wrong,

30:52

to give the person representing them a third

30:54

term, and we sitting here should tell

30:57

them they can't. So yeah, I've never

30:59

been a term limits fan. Yeah, I mean, that's exactly

31:01

what you're saying, right? It devalues elections in both

31:03

ways. The lifetime appointments for Supreme

31:06

Court justices and term limits,

31:08

yeah, it robs the people of their power.

31:12

Tom C has a hard

31:14

question for you. He says,

31:16

I seem to be the only liberal alarm by the real

31:18

scandal involving Hunter Biden,

31:20

but perhaps you feel the same.

31:23

It seems to have amassed between 10 and $20 million

31:26

in investments from a coalition of very sketchy Chinese,

31:29

Ukrainian, Romanian sources, none

31:32

of which seem to have produced any work product

31:34

anyone can point to. And it sounds

31:37

like Hunter and maybe his

31:39

Uncle Jim as well were

31:41

trafficking in Joe Biden's name, as Tom C

31:43

puts it, by applying to

31:45

their marks that the marks would somehow gain access

31:47

to Joe Biden with their investments. Biden himself

31:50

simply says

31:50

that he didn't involve himself in the sudden business

31:52

affairs, but are we really just going to let it go at that?

31:56

And would we if these

31:58

were Republicans?

31:59

I think in some ways that last bit

32:02

is too easy in and out. We did

32:04

when it was Republicans.

32:05

I mean, I actually think in many ways what Jared Kushner

32:08

did, raising billions for

32:10

an investment fund with Saudi Arabia, the

32:12

amount of direct influence, pendling Donald

32:14

Trump did in office, the way people would

32:16

try to get access to him by being

32:19

part of Trump

32:20

company investments and staying at Trump hotels

32:22

and everything. I mean, it was more direct, it was much

32:25

worse, it was much more serious.

32:28

I think the Hunter Biden scandal

32:31

is real in the sense of Hunter Biden,

32:34

the things he's done are really unsavory. And

32:37

the thing that has made it not yet a political scandal

32:40

that is consequential for Joe Biden, except

32:42

on the right where I think people want to believe something

32:44

went wrong, is that nobody can quite point

32:46

to anything that came out of it from

32:49

Joe Biden's governance. No

32:52

work seems to have come out of this influence peddling. And

32:54

also not much influence seems to have gotten peddled

32:57

out of the influence peddling. Now I'm not against

33:00

something coming out that shows this was different,

33:02

right? If I mean, if it turns out

33:04

that President Biden

33:06

colluded with Hunter and

33:08

there was some kind of email exchange or some kind

33:11

of handshake where if they would give

33:13

Hunter this job, they would get this amendment put on the

33:15

bill or this thing they wanted

33:17

done, I think that would be a real problem. Correctly

33:20

so, like that would be a real problem.

33:23

The thing where Biden has

33:25

had a somewhat laissez-faire attitude

33:28

towards the activities

33:30

of his absolute mess of

33:33

an adult son, I think

33:36

there's a kind of sympathy that

33:38

emerges for people in that towards

33:40

Biden. I mean, what was Biden to do exactly?

33:43

He probably didn't actually know about a lot of this. A

33:46

lot of the details coming out with Hunter Biden,

33:49

the seventh granddaughter, I mean, it's

33:51

very sad. It's incredibly

33:53

sad. It's incredibly sad. You're watching

33:55

somebody who was never able to get his life back

33:57

on track or on track. He definitely,

33:59

influence peddled. He has hurt a

34:02

lot of people. He's clearly hurt himself. He's

34:04

clearly hurt his father. And

34:06

if you read Biden's book that

34:09

he wrote some years back when running for

34:11

president and I think it is an OA, it actually, I mean,

34:13

the love he has for Beau and Hunter, his belief

34:16

that Hunter Biden will become part of Beau Biden's

34:18

kind of kitchen cabinet and they would protect each

34:20

other. And then you see how it turns

34:22

out. I mean, the tragedy of it is immense, but

34:26

it's not a scandal for somebody's son or

34:28

one of their sons to be a fuckup. It's

34:31

a scandal for that to become

34:33

part of how the federal government wields power.

34:37

I don't think the fact that Trump did much worse

34:39

than this in a very obvious and direct way absolves

34:41

Biden. What absolves Biden so far

34:44

is that he doesn't seem to have done it. And

34:47

if it comes out that he did it, right, if it comes

34:49

out that the way Hunter was getting these deals

34:52

was that he wasn't just kind of wink, wink, nod, nodding,

34:55

that he could get some access to Joe Biden, but

34:57

you were actually getting the access to Joe Biden, like that

34:59

would be worse. There was a part of this question

35:01

that we didn't just to make it shorter that we didn't bring up,

35:04

but Thomas brought up the old idea of the

35:06

real scandals, what's legal. And

35:08

one thing I would say is that the thing that

35:10

Hunter Biden here is accused of doing actually

35:13

does happen all the time in a much more efficacious

35:16

way. So in Congress

35:18

and in administrations, people

35:20

who are very high up aides to

35:23

senators and chairs

35:25

in the House and of course, the presidents do become

35:28

lobbyists. And then they do work on

35:30

behalf of other governments and other companies.

35:33

And they do use their preexisting relationship

35:35

with people in power to try

35:38

to push forward those ideas.

35:40

Now, Biden wasn't correctly registered to be a lobbyist

35:42

and all this different stuff. But

35:44

the thing being described here happens all the time,

35:47

not from idiot adult

35:50

kids who don't know what they're actually doing and can't

35:52

deliver. But, you know, Bob Dole, the

35:54

late Bob Dole was lobbying on behalf of Taiwan,

35:57

right, and was able to get Trump to sort of break

35:59

with President Trump. and talk to the leader

36:01

of Taiwan on the phone very quickly after being elected. These

36:04

things actually do occur, and they're

36:07

in a kind of much broader world of more efficacious

36:09

influence peddling. The Hunter Biden

36:11

case is sort of a weird

36:14

version of that turned into an absurdity

36:16

that looks worse because it's Biden's son,

36:18

but is probably less bad

36:21

because it doesn't appear to have worked. But

36:23

again, evidence could come out that it worked in

36:25

some consequential way, and that would somewhat change my

36:27

opinion of it. I will say that

36:30

if Republicans want to make hay of this,

36:32

they're going to have to nominate not Donald Trump,

36:35

right? If this becomes a fight over

36:37

where was the influence peddling

36:40

in family-oriented business happening

36:42

in an administration, and it's

36:45

Trump running against Joe Biden, and

36:47

the scrutiny is now on Jared Kushner's Saudi-backed

36:50

venture fund, that's not gonna

36:52

work out. So in a lot of ways, and

36:54

it's been a kind of theme on the show recently, Republicans

36:57

are gonna have to decide, do they want to choose a

36:59

candidate who is strategically positioned

37:02

to take advantage of Joe Biden's weaknesses

37:04

or not? So far, it seems

37:06

not, but that's gonna be consequential here

37:08

too.

37:09

All right, there are just so many good questions here, but

37:11

I plunge into another one. This one's coming from

37:14

Colton L. What kind of work do you

37:16

think is the most undervalued and contemporary

37:19

American society based on the pay,

37:21

the social prestige, and everything

37:23

else that comes with work that the work requires? Anything

37:25

and everything with children.

37:27

Anything and everything with children being

37:29

a social worker who works with children,

37:32

being a teacher, being somebody

37:34

who's a guardian in the foster care system. Given

37:37

how important that work is, it is badly

37:39

compensated. It doesn't have terrible

37:41

prestige compared to, I mean, some other things,

37:43

but it doesn't have nearly the prestige it should. It

37:46

doesn't have the rungs as high in

37:48

the ladder as it should, right? There isn't a

37:50

kind of elite teacher designation

37:52

that is sort of like being a partner at a very big law firm

37:55

where everybody knows you've really made it and

37:57

you're one of the best at one of the most important things.

38:00

happens in American or human life,

38:03

we just really undervalue things

38:06

with children. We talk about how the children are

38:08

our future and we treat them in many ways

38:10

like an afterthought. We certainly treat the

38:12

people who are in charge

38:14

of helping them as an afterthought. The pay

38:17

and benefits and prestige in child

38:19

care work for young children are just terrible.

38:22

It's a total disaster of an industry.

38:25

This is a place where money really matters.

38:28

And I've said this before on the show that I think in American

38:30

life, for the most part, prestige

38:33

follows money. We give the most prestige

38:35

to things that make the most money. And

38:37

there's some, you know, counter examples. Academia

38:40

has a little bit more prestige and it has money oftentimes.

38:43

But prestige typically follows money and in

38:46

not paying well for this stuff, we

38:48

rob it of prestige. We rob it to some degree,

38:50

though, of course, there are amazing people in these industries of

38:52

talent. And it's

38:54

just not the right societal structure.

38:58

And not something I think we should leave up to the market. Yeah, children

39:00

can't pay a lot. And the children

39:02

who need the most help really can't pay the most.

39:05

I think the kids who are in highly

39:08

selective colleges, who tell their parents they're going to

39:10

law school, that is much more

39:12

comfortable for their parents than I'm going to become a social

39:14

worker working with children or I'm going to work in early

39:17

childhood education because

39:19

you're ensuring, ensuring yourself a higher salary

39:21

in the future. And that's a problem,

39:23

right? It should be that when you say to somebody, I'm

39:25

going to go become a teacher. What they

39:28

hear from that is both you're going to be doing great work and

39:30

you're going to be really well off because we've decided to

39:32

compensate that really well because we want

39:34

the best people becoming teachers. And

39:37

yeah, it's just a place where I think we're failing.

39:39

Yeah, I mean, it's just an incredible thing

39:42

that in other countries, actually, teachers do

39:44

you know, you might be deciding I'm going to be an engineer,

39:46

I'm going to be a lawyer, or I'm going to be a teacher, right? And

39:48

you rarely hear that here,

39:51

which I do think is a critical part of it.

39:54

So I can imagine hearing from, you

39:56

know, a graduate from UC Berkeley, right?

39:58

I'm going into dermatology.

39:59

right, what that calls up versus

40:02

I'm going into, I'm going to work in a preschool.

40:05

Right.

40:05

There's nothing wrong with dermatologists. They do great work,

40:08

but we know what is being said when

40:10

you say I'm going to work in preschools. And

40:12

that's, that sounds great, but you're not going to make

40:14

much money.

40:15

Yeah, no, and then the social prestige thing is

40:17

more important even than I think you made it

40:19

sound, actually. I gather that the

40:21

prestige follows from the money, but it's still a critical

40:24

part of it. And you're married to a teacher.

40:26

I am married to a teacher. I was going to accuse you of pandering

40:29

on those graphs. I am married to

40:31

someone who works in early childhood and

40:33

did face that

40:34

where you have people

40:37

who are like, well, why aren't you a lawyer? Why aren't you

40:39

a professor? Why are you a teacher? And

40:42

meanwhile, she's doing all this incredible work with

40:45

public school second graders. I'm curious

40:47

if you see it in the world, right? When you tell people that you

40:49

babysit New York Times calmness who act like

40:51

children, and your wife says she works with children, right?

40:55

I was going to make a different version of that joke earlier.

40:57

I was going to ask whether you believe in lifetime tenure

40:59

for New York Times calmness and podcasters.

41:01

Absolutely not. Are you kidding

41:04

me? No, I know you don't. Okay,

41:06

we're going to switch gears here into

41:08

psychedelics to bring a little California

41:11

into our New York studio. Joe

41:14

F. is asking

41:15

whether you've been following the

41:17

scientific developments and media hype surrounding psychedelics

41:19

in the last year. So I will

41:21

answer that part and say, I know you have, because we've written about

41:23

it. But from critical trials to microdosing

41:27

to legalization processes in Colorado,

41:29

Australia, he doesn't mention Oregon,

41:32

but also Oregon, indigenous communities, like

41:34

what do you make of all this? What do you think about it?

41:36

I have a lot of contrasting

41:38

thoughts on where psychedelic therapy

41:41

and help is right now. So one

41:43

is that the work I'm most interested in, I

41:45

did a piece on this a while back, and I'd like to check in on

41:47

it next year sometime, is in

41:49

Oregon where they are trying to create

41:54

a legal, although it will not be federally legal,

41:56

but a legal pathway and structure

41:58

for... supported

42:00

psychedelic experiences, which notably

42:02

it's not just psychedelic therapy. You don't need a diagnosis

42:04

to do it, right? You can just go. They're

42:07

trying to figure out how to do the licensing. They're trying to figure

42:09

out how to do the support. It looks like it'll be fairly expensive.

42:12

That's going to be really important

42:14

because it's not just about whether or not you can legalize

42:16

them, but whether or not you can create

42:18

a structure in which they can

42:20

be well used. When

42:23

I look at the research, I think the research

42:25

on them at this point is quite extraordinary. I

42:27

would expect them in the real world to underperform the

42:29

research because the research is being so carefully done.

42:32

But we're seeing studies that are suggesting

42:34

really profound effects on treatment-resistant

42:37

major depression, profound effects

42:39

on different kinds of addictions, profound

42:42

effects

42:42

just on people's lives. Putting

42:44

aside the question of what recognized

42:47

illnesses and maladies you can help people fix,

42:51

we have these

42:53

substances that

42:55

cost functionally nothing,

42:57

I mean, in terms of how much it costs

42:59

to grow psilocybin-containing mushrooms

43:02

or synthesize LSD. And

43:05

we can routinely induce

43:07

experiences that people count as

43:10

among the most meaningful of their entire

43:12

lives. And

43:14

that's a pretty remarkable thing to keep

43:17

locked up. I find it

43:19

kind of astonishing, and it's not that there aren't risks,

43:21

but you can go base-jumping legally,

43:24

you can legally be a base-jumper, but

43:26

you cannot legally take a tab of acid

43:28

and sit in your room and listen

43:30

to music and have a sublime musical experience.

43:34

It just actually strikes me as a very strange

43:36

way. We let people take all kinds

43:38

of risks in society. Now the

43:40

thing that worries me a lot is

43:43

the financial land

43:45

rush here. The number of companies

43:47

trying to patent it, the number of companies trying

43:50

to distill these into

43:52

even more potent and powerful

43:55

and usable, maybe even appealing forms.

43:58

And we're going to see where that goes.

43:59

it has not yet been legalized enough that you

44:02

can do that. There's all this money and investment

44:04

that is sort of jockeying for the

44:06

day of legalization, whether that legalization be

44:08

medical, which is probably going to be at

44:11

least nationally the first step, right? It seems

44:13

very plausible that you're going to get FDA approval

44:15

for certain kinds of MDMA and psilocybin treatments

44:17

in the coming years. But eventually,

44:19

if it does become legalized right the way say

44:22

cannabis is in a number of states,

44:25

the effects of commercialized cannabis,

44:29

though some of them have been specifically to my benefit,

44:32

are not in my view an unalloyed

44:35

good. The amount of money going into

44:38

very potent edibles

44:40

and much more potent strains and packaging

44:43

and formats that are much friendlier to kids

44:46

and any kind of user, it's fine if you're somebody

44:48

who has a fair amount of self-control around

44:50

these things, but people do get addicted. I mean, people

44:52

say pot isn't physiologically addicting,

44:55

but people very much get addicted and

44:57

the most money is made on the people who buy

44:59

the most of them. There

45:01

are certain breaks in psychedelics

45:03

that make it a little less

45:06

likely to go down the same route, but

45:08

I worry about the amount of money being spent on trying to

45:10

figure out ways to basically get around the

45:13

fact that it's actually really hard on the body and

45:15

the mind and you develop tolerance to trip a lot,

45:17

right? If you get into a situation down the road

45:20

where the money is made by people who have an out

45:22

of control relationship, that could be very

45:24

psychologically damaging to people. So

45:26

I think

45:27

there's a lot of promise here and I think there's a lot of peril

45:30

here, but I'm

45:32

overall optimistic.

45:35

I do think these are really powerful compounds

45:37

that can create experiences

45:39

in people's lives and both help them get over terrible

45:41

problems, but also help them live a

45:43

kind of deeper life and relationship to themselves

45:46

and to the world and to nature. And

45:48

I think getting that right is going to require

45:50

though not just a question of how do

45:53

you legalize psychedelic compounds, but

45:55

how do you create structures for their productive

45:58

use? How do you create good God? How

46:00

do you make integration possible?

46:03

That kind of period after you've had an experience, and now

46:05

you have to sort of figure out what that means for your life. How

46:07

do you make that affordable to people? That

46:10

I think is where a lot of the rubber is gonna hit the

46:12

road, which is again, why I think what Oregon is doing is

46:14

really interesting, but it's not been untroubled

46:17

there. But if in 10 years

46:19

you told me this did not go well, I

46:21

would not be surprised by that. I'd be saddened

46:23

by it, but not surprised.

46:25

We're gonna shift gears again into

46:28

the heartland of the Ezra Klein

46:30

Show recently, which is AI. And Joseph

46:33

C. is wondering how much, if any

46:35

credence you give to the simulation

46:38

hypothesis first discussed about 20 years

46:40

ago by Nick Bostrom. And obviously

46:42

you'll have to tell us what that is, because

46:44

many people will not know.

46:46

I don't, just for the record, I really don't.

46:49

So the simulation hypothesis is basically the idea

46:51

that, look, imagine we became a society

46:54

capable of running, sufficiently

46:57

technologically advanced, and we're capable of running simulations

47:00

of whole societies. We're not just running SimCity

47:03

or playing video games, but we can just fire

47:05

up on the computer and fire up as many of them

47:07

as we want, whole universes. Obviously

47:10

in Bostrom's view, we would want to do that.

47:13

And obviously the simulants within those

47:15

universes would outnumber the

47:18

people in base reality. And

47:20

so if you just assume those two things are true,

47:23

then you come to the conclusion that, well,

47:26

probably we're a simulation, because there's gonna

47:28

be more simulated people than real

47:30

people. And so why should you think you're one of the

47:32

real people? Here's

47:35

what I will say about it.

47:36

And I've said this, I think probably in AMA's before, I

47:39

think this has a quality of watching

47:43

a very crude form of monotheism

47:45

get reinvented by computer programmers, which

47:48

is why it's very popular in Silicon Valley. If you take

47:50

the very crude form of monotheism as God

47:53

is like us,

47:54

like bigger, big throne,

47:56

long white beard, more powers. This

47:59

is God is like us.

47:59

like us, but bigger

48:01

computer programmer with more powerful

48:04

computers, player of simulation

48:06

video games, but with a stronger video

48:08

game system. And the reason I just don't

48:11

buy it and you know, maybe this is not

48:13

a good reason, right? I'm not a credentialed philosopher.

48:17

I think it is such an extraordinary lack

48:19

of imagination about how weird

48:22

ultimate reality probably is. Just

48:25

the idea that like the true answer to

48:27

what's going on here is so unbelievably

48:30

simplistic. Just like not what is

48:32

going on here is exactly what we are already

48:34

doing just with more

48:37

GPUs underneath the system. I

48:40

just think it's so unlikely that

48:42

that is like the full effect here. I

48:45

think it's a kind of a lack of humility about

48:47

what we do, what we almost certainly don't know.

48:50

Why in the simulation have we created all these other

48:53

planets? Why have we created a physics

48:55

with such weird rules as to

48:57

the world as possibly constantly expanding?

48:59

Why are there not more

49:02

life on nearby planets? Is that really how

49:04

we would create a simulation, a gigantic,

49:07

unimaginably large system of space

49:10

in which

49:10

at least so far we only know this one planet

49:13

with life. Like the whole thing just

49:15

strikes me as so incurious

49:17

in a way that I just don't buy it. I've

49:19

always had a negative reaction to it, but it's because

49:22

I think it basically takes our reality,

49:25

holds what we know about it steady,

49:28

and then asks a toy question within

49:30

that. We don't know

49:32

anything. We don't understand how quantum physics works yet.

49:35

Reality is going to be so much weirder, so

49:37

much more astonishing

49:39

than it's just

49:42

like us but bigger, just like us but

49:44

more power. I just don't buy it.

49:46

So, talking about power of generative

49:49

models overall, Jordan A

49:51

is wondering, given the power of the

49:53

AI models, we already

49:56

know about it and of course there's lots of development as

49:58

well to produce, convince and

49:59

human text at

50:02

virtually no cost. It seems like we're

50:04

likely to see a huge proliferation of

50:07

AI astroturfing in the run-up to the 2024

50:10

election, which is already

50:13

upon us. In recent years we've already seen

50:15

misinformation and disinformation be big

50:18

issues, both generally and with regard to elections. And

50:20

so what Jordan A. is asking is

50:22

what your thoughts are on if

50:24

there is anything we can do to get ahead of this problem.

50:27

I personally go back and forth on this problem. So

50:29

there's no doubt that in AI

50:32

we are creating really powerful

50:34

machines for creating the raw materials of disinformation,

50:37

deepfakes and endless

50:39

amounts of auto-generated textual content

50:42

and images and videos

50:44

and sound that sound like they came from a person

50:47

you're trying to smear. And

50:49

the various

50:52

solutions I'm hearing from within the AI

50:54

world strike me as very unconvincing.

50:56

The main one you typically hear is that they're going to try to figure

50:58

out a way to do digital watermarking such

51:01

that something came out from an

51:03

AI or maybe something comes out from something

51:05

real. It gets a watermark of a certain

51:07

kind such it can be digitally read to

51:09

verify its authenticity. The

51:12

issue, I think, with the solution is also

51:14

why I'm becoming a little bit somehow less worried about

51:17

the problem, which is that the people who

51:19

you're worried about picking this stuff up, they don't care

51:21

about your digital watermark.

51:22

That's actually misunderstanding, I think quite

51:25

profoundly the fake news problem. Fake

51:27

news works when you're giving

51:30

people

51:31

something they already want to believe that they

51:33

do not want to check.

51:34

That is like the main way fake news works.

51:37

It's not like people can't go

51:39

to the New York Times to check something.

51:41

They don't want to. They don't want to be

51:43

told this isn't true or they don't trust the New York

51:46

Times or whatever. The reason people believed

51:48

in QAnon isn't because

51:50

nobody had said to them 4chan

51:53

is not a reliable source of information.

51:55

And so we actually also

51:57

already have so much capacity to alter

51:59

photographs. photographs, to spread misinformation,

52:02

to send around email forwards full of bullshit.

52:05

I'm not sure what the delta is. I'm not sure what

52:08

the open space is in terms of people who

52:10

are the market for this kind of disinformation and don't

52:13

have enough of it to work with. Another way of putting

52:16

it is, is the boundary on disinformation

52:18

and misinformation at this point in human history

52:21

really that it is too hard to produce?

52:24

I don't really think it is.

52:26

And I think it's much more likely that

52:28

you enter into a kind of cynical collapse

52:30

of trust than an

52:33

era of rampant disinformation. If

52:35

you don't believe that you can trust these videos

52:37

coming around, and you often can't already.

52:40

There are all these edited videos made to make it look like

52:42

Joe Biden is having much more trouble speaking than he

52:44

actually is. This stuff is already around

52:46

if you want it. We're perfectly good at creating it now. It

52:49

becomes easier, but I think the issue is actually

52:51

the audience. And maybe better stuff increases

52:53

the audience a little bit, although also the knowledge

52:56

that there's better disinformation floating around

52:58

might make the audience a little bit more skeptical. But

53:01

I think the issue is an audience

53:03

problem, like a demand problem, not a supply

53:05

problem. And worrying too much about the AI

53:07

side of it frames it as a supply

53:10

problem and not a demand problem. So that's

53:12

kind of my slightly more optimistic take. I

53:14

think that the demand for this is already being fairly

53:16

well met. And I'm a little skeptical,

53:19

at least in the near term, that shifting

53:21

the supply on it is going to radically change

53:24

the equilibrium.

53:25

I just saw this really interesting documentary about Humberto

53:28

Eco, and he talks in there about all

53:30

these fake documents that have profoundly affected

53:32

real history. Right. Protocols

53:35

of the Elders of Zion. That's the example that he gives, yeah. I always

53:37

say this about fake news. Fake news is

53:39

not worse today than it has been at other points

53:41

in history.

54:02

So, I mentioned earlier that we were going to, that there were a lot of questions

54:04

about the show and your process and how you

54:07

think about things, and we're going to go into a sequence

54:09

of those now. Let's start with Audrey

54:11

C. A big chunk of what I seem to take

54:13

out of listening to the podcast is an understanding of

54:15

what it is to have a good conversation.

54:18

So, for example, you push back

54:20

on something a guest argues in an elaborate

54:22

and a gentle way. In response,

54:25

the guest doesn't always really address

54:27

your point, but instead reformulates something

54:29

that the guest has already said before, my brain

54:31

goes, this person should get a second pushback, he's not

54:34

answering. But then you don't go for it, which

54:36

I come to appreciate very much as the guest is smart

54:39

and honest enough. If they didn't

54:41

answer, there has to be a reason, maybe, that there

54:43

just is no answer. So, the question

54:45

that Audrey actually wants to ask is, while

54:48

making the show, what is it that you're learning

54:50

about what makes a good conversation?

54:52

I just so enjoyed this question because it answers itself

54:54

so well. That's exactly true.

54:58

There are certain kinds of conversations where

55:01

pinning somebody down and making it unbelievably

55:03

clear that they're not answering a question

55:05

is important. The Meet the Press approach. Yeah, the Meet the

55:07

Press approach.

55:09

When you're trying to understand how somebody thinks,

55:12

if they're not answering a question, they often have a reason.

55:15

Sometimes their non-answer is the answer. It's

55:17

what they know on the topic. It's how

55:19

far their thinking goes. Like, if they don't have a great answer

55:21

for it, that's where

55:24

their thinking is at that point. They kind

55:26

of have a, personally, and I think this is

55:28

like how conversations work between people.

55:32

If I've asked somebody a question twice

55:34

and I

55:35

find the answer unsatisfying, but I think that's the

55:37

answer they have to give me, I'm

55:40

not asking

55:41

them three or four or five times just

55:43

to show that I can embarrass

55:46

them. I don't want to say there's never a time

55:48

for that. There is, right? If I had the

55:50

president on, right, that requires a different

55:53

kind of interviewing. But

55:55

I

55:56

do think there is a problem in

55:58

a lot of interviewing around politics.

55:59

it becomes performative.

56:02

I think the audience is smart, right? Like, it's

56:04

why I love this question. Audrey

56:06

understands exactly what's happening here. The audience

56:09

is a full-engaged intellectual participant

56:11

in the conversation. They're not talking, but they are evaluating.

56:15

Oftentimes, I will get emails that are really

56:17

like, why didn't you throw the final punch? And

56:20

the answer is like, that's not what we're doing here. I'm

56:23

not trying to embarrass a person in front of you. So

56:25

then I just say, in terms of what makes a good conversation,

56:29

I think that's a very big

56:31

question.

56:32

And I don't have any one answer to it, but sometimes

56:34

I think it's knowing what you want out of a conversation. And

56:37

I think people are tuned to expect

56:40

in politics that what makes a good conversation is some kind

56:42

of persuasion. People really want

56:44

to see somebody persuaded to something they

56:46

don't believe, or see an argument torn down,

56:48

or, and I don't think that's mostly what

56:51

makes for good conversations, and I also don't think that typically

56:53

works or even makes for good persuasion. I

56:56

think a lot of the persuasion that has happened as a

56:58

result of the show happens after

57:00

it ends, as people think about what they've said

57:02

or what they haven't said, or people reflect

57:04

on it. Certainly it's true for me. And

57:07

I

57:07

think a good conversation is often people

57:10

showing up in the same spirit

57:12

of openness and exchange. And

57:15

if you don't model that as a host, they're not gonna bring

57:17

that to you as a guest.

57:19

When we were talking about the midterms last year, we talked a

57:21

little bit about this, right? And you just alluded to it at the

57:23

beginning of the show, about how so

57:25

many public conversations, as you were

57:27

talking about community board meetings, or as we call them

57:29

here in New York, are so performative

57:32

and non real. And I think one of the things that's

57:34

interesting about the show, and not

57:37

just your show, but just the whole podcast

57:40

revolution is that you have these semi

57:43

private conversations that are happening

57:45

in public, right? Which is much more interesting

57:47

than the conversations that are

57:49

happening in public, and I think that's a big part of

57:51

what's interesting as

57:53

well. Which actually leads us interestingly

57:56

to the next question from Chris M. Could

57:58

you share details around

57:59

around your process for digesting

58:02

and retaining information around

58:04

such a broad array, wide array of topics.

58:07

Or you would have a note taker, and if so,

58:09

what if you found works best?

58:12

This is a question I think we get basically every AMA,

58:14

and the reason I'm doing it this time is something in my process

58:16

changed. So we'll talk about this

58:18

more in a minute, but I moved to New York, and I work out of

58:20

the New York Times office in beautiful

58:23

Times Square. And there

58:25

are some advantages of coming into the office

58:27

and some disadvantages that commute is a lot

58:30

of time. I get to work

58:32

near you was a more positive thing.

58:35

But the unexpected advantage is the access

58:37

to an industrial strength printer. And

58:41

Aaron's probably laughing because just my desk is

58:43

just covered in paper now. And

58:46

I had a laser jet at home, and I would print

58:48

things out, but it felt wasteful somehow

58:50

to print out every article I'm reading for

58:53

a podcast. But I think

58:55

I get 50% more, 100% more out of my

58:57

prep, doing

59:00

it on paper, particularly when it's articles

59:03

and shorter things as opposed to books, doing

59:05

it on paper than doing it on the screen, doing any prep

59:07

on my actual computer where I have that many distractions.

59:11

I can do it and I get something out of it, but

59:13

it is much worse. And so I don't

59:16

have a extremely structured process in

59:18

the sense of, this is how I take notes, or

59:20

here's my system of markings or whatever. But

59:23

at this point, my process is I print everything.

59:26

I have this huge pile of paper, and

59:28

I sit at a small table with a pen, and

59:30

I go through it. And the

59:33

focus that that has offered has actually been

59:36

a really big step forward

59:38

for me, and perhaps from a very simple

59:40

thing. So that's been nice and been a change.

59:42

And obviously something that connects to things like the Marianne-Wolf

59:45

conversation, if people wanna go back to that, which

59:47

is very much about the way reading in different mediums

59:50

will change the way you read, absorb, and

59:52

engage with information. But I've been

59:54

surprised how true I've been finding that.

59:57

Yeah, that episode is a favorite of mine. And the

59:59

person who squared her book.

59:59

focus also are incredible on that subject.

1:00:03

Okay, so let's talk about diminishing focus.

1:00:05

Sam M. asks, well

1:00:08

says, I used Twitter for a long time. I talked about

1:00:10

how it was great for three things. I

1:00:12

like to stay up with news, politics, and

1:00:14

sports. The latter of which I will

1:00:16

just inform the Ezra Klein audience.

1:00:19

Ezra Klein has no interest in. So

1:00:22

we'll focus on- That's interesting. It's a lack of knowledge

1:00:25

and interest. Yeah,

1:00:27

exactly. I know

1:00:29

Ezra logged

1:00:29

off long ago and that's why I'm writing. Since

1:00:32

leaving, I found a much better attention span for reading

1:00:34

articles, right? So that gets to what you were just

1:00:36

talking about. With all that, I still feel like I'm missing

1:00:38

things that I did get from Twitter. I'm

1:00:40

missing people's thoughts and issues they don't write articles

1:00:42

or podcasts about. I'm missing

1:00:45

that collective feeling when it seems like everyone on

1:00:47

Twitter is reacting to the same thing. So

1:00:50

Sam wants to know what your thoughts are and how

1:00:52

you handled leaving Twitter. Is there anything

1:00:54

about it that you missed? What did you

1:00:57

do to compensate for what you missed?

1:00:59

And how do you stay up to date on current

1:01:02

events?

1:01:03

I did leave Twitter. And I'll note that I've

1:01:06

been playing around with threads a bit and I want to come back

1:01:08

to that. And one reason

1:01:10

I left Twitter, which is sort of before

1:01:14

Musk completed his purchase of it, but when

1:01:16

that was in the offing. But the problems with Twitter for

1:01:18

me predated Elon Musk. I

1:01:20

did a piece about

1:01:22

Musk buying Twitter called,

1:01:24

Elon Musk will get Twitter because he gets Twitter

1:01:26

or something like that. People can search it. I think it

1:01:29

has proven like my most prescient

1:01:31

piece of that year. And

1:01:33

the point was that he was gonna take what was worst

1:01:35

about Twitter. Because he was somebody who likes

1:01:37

what was worst about Twitter. Accelerate

1:01:40

that and so heighten the contradictions

1:01:43

of an already troubled platform that

1:01:46

it would just slowly drive lots of people

1:01:48

off of it. Not everybody, but it

1:01:50

was just gonna turn the balance enough that

1:01:52

people are gonna leave something or want to leave something they

1:01:54

already didn't like. But

1:01:56

I will die on this hill. Twitter is a bad

1:01:59

way to be informed about the world.

1:01:59

world.

1:02:00

It's just a bad way to do it. And

1:02:03

it's to the point I was making a minute ago about

1:02:05

printing out your articles. It's

1:02:07

about what you're not doing when you're on Twitter. And

1:02:10

the best way I've found to articulate this is I think

1:02:12

there's a really profound difference between

1:02:14

feeling informed and being informed.

1:02:17

And I think Twitter and frankly a lot of things in social

1:02:19

media specialize in giving people particularly

1:02:22

jittery,

1:02:24

info-hungry journalistic types the

1:02:26

feeling of being informed.

1:02:29

But the people who I think of as most informed

1:02:31

are the ones who seem the best at not doing things on

1:02:33

Twitter. There's almost nobody whose

1:02:36

knowledge of things is really Twitter-based knowledge

1:02:38

or communicated primarily through Twitter who

1:02:40

I find like that is where I get my information

1:02:43

and really value it.

1:02:45

Like for instance, Sam misses a feeling

1:02:47

when it seems like everyone on Twitter is reacting to the same

1:02:50

thing. And I would say, typically

1:02:52

what they are reacting to is the wrong thing to be reacting

1:02:55

to. So I have a burner account on Twitter

1:02:57

for when I need to read something that's on there. And

1:02:59

I happen to have to use it on the day there was

1:03:01

a huge amount of debate about

1:03:03

Joe Rogan demanding

1:03:06

or challenging or offering money for this

1:03:09

vaccine specialist to debate

1:03:12

RFK Jr. on Rogan's

1:03:14

show. And I mean everybody in

1:03:16

my feed, you know like Nate Silver, everybody

1:03:19

was commenting on this. And

1:03:22

they're all on the same thing. And in

1:03:24

a way being there made me feel like I

1:03:26

was informed, right? I knew what the zeitgeist

1:03:28

was that day. Like I was seeing the conversation

1:03:31

and it was an extraordinarily dumb conversation.

1:03:33

It

1:03:34

was just a bad thing to allow into your mental

1:03:37

space for that whole day. You would have just been better off

1:03:39

reading a report about homelessness or whatever. And

1:03:42

so to me in terms of being informed about

1:03:44

the world, actually one of the really

1:03:46

difficult disciplines is

1:03:48

not letting the

1:03:50

wrong mediums or the wrong people

1:03:52

decide what you're thinking about. Not

1:03:54

being too plugged into a conversation if you think that

1:03:56

conversation has turned toxic or you

1:03:58

think that conversation is turned. are you

1:04:00

thinking that conversation is being driven by

1:04:03

algorithmic dynamics that do not serve

1:04:05

you? That's my view on Twitter.

1:04:08

I've been playing around with threads, which I enjoy

1:04:10

at this moment in time and may not

1:04:12

continue to. We'll see how it evolves.

1:04:15

But

1:04:15

I don't fool myself into thinking what

1:04:17

I'm doing there is informing myself. I

1:04:19

would be much better off reading the paper New York

1:04:22

Times than screwing around

1:04:24

on threads. Threads is a fun way for me to

1:04:26

sometimes screw around when I have a couple of

1:04:28

minutes. The reason I

1:04:30

answer this with some passion is I think this has

1:04:33

become a really bad meme inside journalism

1:04:35

that has been bad in particular

1:04:37

for young journalists who their

1:04:39

colleagues are on Twitter, their future

1:04:42

and current bosses are often on Twitter. It

1:04:44

feels like you're supposed to be there or threads or whatever.

1:04:47

And that is time. You know, when you're spending

1:04:49

a lot of time on Twitter that, you know, you may not be spending

1:04:51

doing the reading, doing

1:04:52

the reporting, seeing things that other

1:04:54

people aren't seeing because they're inside the newspaper,

1:04:56

the magazine, in many ways reading an

1:04:58

issue of The Economist

1:05:00

doesn't give me the same feeling

1:05:02

of being informed that being on social media

1:05:05

does because I don't feel like I know what all the people who

1:05:08

I'm supposed to know are thinking or

1:05:10

thinking about. But I think it leads

1:05:12

me to be much more informed, like actually informed.

1:05:15

I'm reading about things I didn't already

1:05:17

know about. I'm getting ideas for

1:05:19

things I didn't have ideas on before. So I don't

1:05:22

want to say you can't learn anything on Twitter. I mean,

1:05:24

it does give you some good links and this and that. But

1:05:27

there are better places to find that stuff in my view. And

1:05:29

I would

1:05:30

say the same thing about threads, by the way, and the

1:05:32

same thing about Blue Sky and Mastodon and Facebook and all the rest

1:05:34

of it. I

1:05:36

don't think if you just

1:05:38

look at the evolution of the news media and like information, I don't,

1:05:40

I just don't

1:05:41

think you can

1:05:43

look at us today and look at us like 10 or 15 years ago

1:05:46

and say, this has definitely gotten

1:05:48

better. Like we're

1:05:50

just more informed, we're focusing on more of the right things. The

1:05:54

public has a better sense of what's going on. There's

1:05:56

more agreement on the fundamental questions being

1:05:59

debated. And if things aren't

1:06:02

getting better, then I think it should lead you to

1:06:04

really be skeptical of claims that the

1:06:07

platforms on which people are operating are

1:06:09

improving things.

1:06:10

So besides getting to hang out with

1:06:12

me, which you mentioned earlier, a

1:06:15

small part of your move, Laura C is wondering

1:06:18

why you moved to New York, where I will

1:06:20

just say you have not lived before. And she's

1:06:23

saying, I may have missed it, but haven't heard

1:06:25

you explain it. So can you tell

1:06:27

your listeners why you're here? Yeah,

1:06:29

I think this is probably our most popular question

1:06:31

on this route. There were a lot of these. And there were

1:06:33

some that were sort of offended, that had

1:06:36

this quality of, how dare you move to

1:06:38

New York and not explain why? And the answer is largely

1:06:40

that it's personal,

1:06:40

that we moved to be closer

1:06:42

to my wife's family. There

1:06:45

were relevant considerations around both of

1:06:47

our offices. And so New York

1:06:49

just made a lot of sense, right? We had

1:06:51

more, we have and had more family support.

1:06:54

We have a good community here, and

1:06:56

we have offices here. And that

1:06:58

kind

1:07:00

of explains all of it.

1:07:01

So

1:07:02

Nolan M is wondering about something that you

1:07:04

and I talked about the last time we did this actually.

1:07:06

At the end of last year, you talked about a

1:07:08

goal of incorporating a Sabbath or a day of rest

1:07:10

into your life for 2023. And

1:07:13

Nolan is wondering if you have

1:07:15

routinely incorporated a kind of Sabbath into your

1:07:17

life, and what the challenges have

1:07:20

been that have prevented you from doing so.

1:07:22

So you and I talk about this constantly, right? Because we

1:07:24

tried to leave Saturday sacrosanct without

1:07:27

being particularly religious about it. But we have sometimes

1:07:29

failed because your column, of course, appears

1:07:32

digitally on Sunday morning, although we're

1:07:34

pretty good about it. But you feel very

1:07:36

deeply about stopping time. So

1:07:38

could you talk about that? Yeah, I put this

1:07:40

mainly in to be accountable, having done

1:07:43

this Sabbath episode. And the answer is

1:07:45

I have tried a lot of

1:07:47

things that have not yet worked. And

1:07:50

the issue is that what I would like

1:07:53

is a day of rest, a cathedral in time,

1:07:55

a space to slow down, and what

1:07:57

my children would like is not that.

1:07:59

And so we've done some, you know, touch-a-bots

1:08:02

and this and that kind of thing. And

1:08:04

I try pretty hard, as you say, not to work on the

1:08:07

Saturday. But

1:08:09

I've definitely found that there is

1:08:11

a tension between the thing that I'm often

1:08:14

seeking to feel personally, like

1:08:16

as an individual, individuated

1:08:18

human for my children, and the

1:08:21

thing that just being a parent of a four-year-old

1:08:24

and a 22-month-old demands,

1:08:26

which is, you know, my Saturdays are spent. I mean, I've

1:08:28

taken them to touch-a-bots and things, but they just run

1:08:31

around the whole time, which is what a touch-a-bot is. And

1:08:33

that's really beautiful. And I try to have Saturday

1:08:36

be more of a family day. And

1:08:38

all that works out pretty well.

1:08:39

And it's really still just

1:08:41

a lot of going to playgrounds and

1:08:44

managing nap times. And all the other kids

1:08:46

have their birthdays on Saturdays. You got to take your kid

1:08:48

to the birthdays. And it's not bad.

1:08:51

But I have found the difficulty

1:08:53

of actually getting over the hump as a young family

1:08:55

to kind of finding a little bit more of that quieter,

1:08:59

out-of-time feeling. Like

1:09:02

the kids still need their routine. And I've taken

1:09:04

a fair amount of comfort

1:09:07

from Judith Sholovitz, who was my guest

1:09:09

on the Sabbath episode, saying that, you

1:09:11

know, until her kids were about five, it was kind

1:09:14

of catch-as-catch-can. And they were working

1:09:16

at it. So I, you know, I hope that I

1:09:18

am building some foundations and intentions that

1:09:21

are a good base on which to

1:09:23

work in the future. What

1:09:25

do you want from not working? Like, what is it you're

1:09:28

trying to get? It's not the not working. I

1:09:30

would like to have a day where I have a

1:09:32

different experience

1:09:33

and relationship to time and productivity.

1:09:36

And I don't mean productivity just

1:09:38

in what I create for the New York Times. I mean it in just the constant

1:09:41

getting things done, the constant feeling

1:09:43

that the sand of my

1:09:46

hourglass is slipping into Google

1:09:48

calendar blocks endlessly. And

1:09:52

that my time is almost always spoken

1:09:54

for. What am I doing today? Yeah,

1:09:56

look at the calendar. I have

1:09:58

a real, I mean.

1:09:59

real discomfort with modern

1:10:02

Google Calendar culture. I think the fact

1:10:04

that anybody can just put anything on your calendar,

1:10:07

just that this has become the way we act. There's

1:10:09

a killer there, right? They say, I'm gonna put some time

1:10:11

on your calendar. And I always think, well, actually, you're

1:10:14

doing the exact option that

1:10:16

you are taking time away

1:10:18

from me. It'd be a little bit to me. Like

1:10:20

if everybody had sort of access in a way to

1:10:23

your

1:10:23

bank account, and they could

1:10:25

say, like, you're gonna spend, I'd like you to spend $80

1:10:27

on this. And you could go and say,

1:10:30

no, I'm not going to. But then anybody

1:10:32

could allocate your money however they wanted,

1:10:34

if they had access. And then you had

1:10:36

to go in and affirmatively take it back. It's

1:10:38

not a problem exactly. I mean, I understand why

1:10:41

modern organizations have to work like

1:10:43

this. But I would like a different relationship

1:10:45

to time. I'm really moved by the Heschel

1:10:48

kind of cathedral and time kind of thing. But

1:10:51

it does require a certain amount of autonomy.

1:10:53

And I think the nature of being a parent

1:10:55

even kids is that it's just not much autonomy. And

1:10:58

weekends are really for them. I mean, during

1:11:00

the week, we have to work, or both

1:11:02

my partner and I work full time, or even more than

1:11:04

that. And so it does have to be

1:11:07

kind of oriented around their needs. So

1:11:09

I think the fundamental tension between

1:11:11

what I wanted out of Shabbat and what I've been able

1:11:13

to get with it, is that I think what I want is about what

1:11:15

I want and what is possible is what my family

1:11:17

needs. And that's totally okay. That is a phase

1:11:20

of life.

1:11:21

Something you and I talk about a lot, and that

1:11:23

we both, this is also another way of stopping

1:11:25

or experiencing time that we don't get to talk

1:11:27

about really in the column is music. I

1:11:30

have failed so far in my

1:11:32

attempts to get you interested in earlier

1:11:35

classical music and jazz. And I've

1:11:37

been trying to get as you're interested in Keith Jarrett

1:11:39

without success.

1:11:41

But I did wanna ask you for

1:11:44

three music recommendations for

1:11:46

your listeners, because I know you're always

1:11:50

pushing that thinking in

1:11:52

that kind of way.

1:11:54

Always my favorite question. So

1:11:58

yeah, so I came prepared.

1:11:59

So somebody we both quite like, my first

1:12:02

recommendation, which is probably the deepest music experience

1:12:04

I've had, you know, over the past six months, I'm

1:12:07

a big Caroline Shaw fan. And she

1:12:10

did an album with the Attica Quartet,

1:12:12

who are also amazing, called Orange. It won

1:12:14

a Grammy a year or two ago. And

1:12:17

there are a sequence of songs on that

1:12:19

album called Plan an Elevation. But

1:12:21

I really like this one called the Herbaceous Border.

1:12:25

And it's all strings.

1:12:27

And I think I'm gonna try to sell

1:12:29

it because I'm worried if I don't sell it, people won't try to listen

1:12:31

to it.

1:12:32

But one reason it actually unites the conversation

1:12:34

we were just having, is somehow it's

1:12:37

become a song for me very associated

1:12:39

with my children. So Shaw has talked about

1:12:41

summer for music as being motivated by, you

1:12:44

know, what would

1:12:46

it be like to be an ant going through the forest? And

1:12:48

I can kind of hear that in this sequence of songs.

1:12:50

And in this one in particular, there's this moment in which

1:12:53

it ends up in frenzy.

1:12:55

And then

1:12:56

it's like, it stops.

1:12:59

And it starts to come back very slowly

1:13:01

and almost playfully and curiously.

1:13:04

And for some reason, I'm

1:13:05

very moved by it. It always makes me think of

1:13:07

my children waking up in the morning, right? You

1:13:10

have these days and oftentimes

1:13:12

to me the day feels like it ends in a kind of frenzy

1:13:14

between dinner and bedtime and you're exhausted

1:13:17

and everybody needs a bath and somebody's crying. And

1:13:20

then it's like every day with them, not with me, right?

1:13:22

Me, I wake up, I'm like, what's on the calendar? What's happening,

1:13:25

you know, in the news? Like, what do I have to do today? I

1:13:28

hold everything of the day before with me. And

1:13:31

they wake up and it's like, what's today's adventure?

1:13:34

What are we doing today? They wake up fresh

1:13:36

in this way that to me is really beautiful. And

1:13:39

somehow this particular song has become very

1:13:42

moving to me in wanting to sort of meet them

1:13:45

in that. So you'll know, I think what I mean

1:13:47

or what part I mean when you listen to

1:13:49

it, which I hope you do. So

1:13:52

then the other, probably the thing I've listened to most this

1:13:54

year, and this was a recommendation from our engineer,

1:13:56

Jeff Geld, but Fred again,

1:13:59

who is...

1:13:59

kind of known for sample of the dance

1:14:02

music. He's a protege of Brian Eno, but

1:14:04

he did, if you ever follow NPR's

1:14:06

Tiny Desk series, he did

1:14:09

the best Tiny Desk I've ever

1:14:11

seen. And he live

1:14:14

loops his music built entirely

1:14:16

out of instruments he can play there. They're vocal

1:14:18

samples, but the instruments are things he can play in that little

1:14:21

room. So it's functionally analog. And

1:14:24

it's just virtuosic. It's amazing to watch

1:14:26

on YouTube. It's great to listen to. A friend

1:14:28

of mine made the point that it sounds in

1:14:31

ways like Steve Reich, which I think is absolutely

1:14:33

true, which I didn't notice until he said

1:14:35

it. But people on

1:14:37

the show know I love Steve Reich. And I just

1:14:40

think it's awesome. I kind of can't imagine the person

1:14:42

who would watch it and not think it's cool. So check out

1:14:44

Fred again's Tiny Desk on YouTube.

1:14:47

I'll save you on something much danceier and a little harder.

1:14:49

His album, USB, kind of didn't connect

1:14:51

for me initially, but lately it's been very

1:14:54

much living in my head. And then the final one,

1:14:56

which is just a little easier than the other two, is

1:14:59

Marabu State. I find I go back to them a lot

1:15:01

for music that is instrumentally

1:15:04

interesting, but also very warm and very

1:15:06

inviting, something you don't really

1:15:08

put on carol and shaw

1:15:09

when you're cooking dinner with your friends, but this really

1:15:12

works for that. But I figure the song

1:15:14

I'll go with here is Midas. Okay,

1:15:16

great. Well, on behalf

1:15:18

of everyone here and all your listeners,

1:15:21

we wish you a very merry book leave and hope

1:15:23

you get a lot done. So

1:15:25

time stops for you in just the right ways

1:15:28

so that you can dig down

1:15:31

deep, which is, as we've been talking about

1:15:33

in a million different ways today, really the hardest

1:15:35

problem of all, right? How to focus, how

1:15:37

to concentrate, and how to really drill

1:15:39

down into the things

1:15:41

that actually make the world what they are. I

1:15:44

appreciate that. I appreciate you and being

1:15:46

here and all the questions. I'll be gone for about three

1:15:48

months. We're gonna have a great sequence

1:15:50

of guest hosts who are gonna do, we

1:15:53

were sort of working with them on the guests and my

1:15:55

team is working with them on the questions. So we've done this

1:15:57

before. I think the shows are gonna be great. eye

1:16:00

on it. We're going to be going down to one a week for

1:16:02

this period so it'll be a little bit easier for everybody

1:16:04

to manage but I hope you enjoy

1:16:06

it.

1:16:17

This episode of The Essek Rancho is produced by Annie

1:16:19

Galvin. Back checking by Michelle Harris, Kate

1:16:21

Sinclair and Nari March Locker. Our

1:16:23

senior engineer is Jeff Geld. Our senior editor

1:16:26

is Roshik Karma. The show's production team also

1:16:28

includes Emma Fagau, Roland Hu and

1:16:30

Kristen Lin. Original music is by

1:16:32

Isaac Jones, Audience Strategy by Christina

1:16:34

Samuluski and Shannon Busta. The

1:16:36

executive producer of New York Times opinion audio

1:16:38

is Annie Rose Strasser. And special thanks

1:16:41

on this one to Sonia Herrera.