just a heads up that this episode of conversations with Tyler does contain some strong language so listener discretion is advised conversations with Tyler is produced by the mercada center at George Mason University Bridging the Gap between academic ideas and real world problems learn more at marcus.org and
for more conversations including videos transcripts and upcoming dates visit conversations withth tyler.com before we get to today's conversation I'd like to let you know of several upcoming live dates with other guests including Steven Pinker Joe Henri jul ahiri Rabbi David walpy and malcol
Gladwell all of these will be held in the DC area and they're free to attend for dates and for more information just visit conversations withth tyler.com today's conversation is with Ezra Klein a bo.com I sat down with Ezra recently in DC and I enjoyed hearing his thoughts on politics the future of media the
ethics of eating meat and indeed the very future of our world this conversation is also being released on Ezra's podcast and that's called the Ezra Klein show definitely check it out it's very very good and special thanks to panoply for Lending us the use of their studio to record this podcast and
now onto the conversation with Ezra Klein I'm here today with Ezra kleene media entrepreneur blogger Healthcare thinker Ezra is the creator of vox.com which is one of the most important upand cominging and indeed now established media sites Ezra himself runs a podcast series he thinks broadly and deeply
about everything and I will stress as I always do this is the conversation I want to have with Ezra not the conversation you want to have with Ezra I like this podcast disclaimer I'm going to steal it let me start with some questions about media we'll get politics you and everything else but different formats in
media so you can do something in print you've been a blogger you've been involved with periodicals now you do Vox Vox to me seems to be doing more and more video so let's start with video when you use the medium of video what is the bias in using video in terms of what kind of material what kind of message
how does that slant what any site but including vox.com is going to do and be so it is much more different than I believed it was let's say two years ago so before I came to Vox I used to do a lot of cable news uh I was a guest host on m7c I came pretty close to taking a
show at some point you and I spoke I think during that period and one thing about cable news is it actually isn't that different than writing I mean you are basically writing a script and there are elements and there's visual but you are really writing a script and you read it aloud or at least I should say the
way I did it worked that way uh when I started Vox I had the great Fortune to hire a guy named Joe postner who I met at a media conference and struck me from the second I met him as a real video genius and the reason vox's video is great and I have no compunction saying it's great because I don't have all that
much to do with it is because Joe and Jos Fong and the rest of that team they really think about video as its own form in in a in a very different way than I had before and they will we will be talking through stories and I will come to them with something from the site that did really well and I'll say hey we
should make a video out of this look how well performed on the site and I'll say nope it's not a visual topic and so in terms of the bias you're talking about the the overwhelming bias in doing really good video work is stories that are fundamentally visual a story that is
two people talking to each other is not that interesting so I'll actually give an example from podcasting what we are doing doing right now is not interesting video uh early on in Vox one of the first video series we launched was Vox conversations and we had me interviewing people much as I do on my podcast the
Ezra Klein show we and me doing long form interviews with people often for about an hour and we put them up and they never really performed that well and the reason was it just wasn't fundamentally visual what we were doing so the thing that I have learned to take much more seriously than I did uh a year ago two
years ago is that you actually have to begin by asking the question why is this a good thing to watch as opposed to in print which is why is this story simply interesting but to make this concrete let's say news media uses much more video five years from now than it does today let's say Vox as well what would
be say three issues that people will care more about that they don't care as much about today I it's funny because I'm usually quick on a question like this I am trying to think through have we learned that there are topics that work for us in video here here's the answer I think
I'll give you um International works better in video because interational stories Maps it's visual even when you're showing something fairly mundane in another country it looks different than it looks here right if you are showing man on the street footage but that man on the street footage is in
Saudi Arabia it actually somewhat visually interesting because it just is interesting to see what it looks like when people Saudi Arabia are going about their daily lives if you're from Southern California so I do think video has a bit more bias towards International than uh than print but I would say and I'd be curious for your
thoughts on this because I do think underneath this question you have a theory here I am I have not seen a systematic difference yet that has influenced our coverage in the way that I did see it say when we move to social being distribution mechanism put much more of a focus on content that
front-loaded identity I haven't seen that yet in video doesn't mean it isn't there I just just haven't found it I tend to find video is good for explaining history to people Vox had a great Syria video I'm sure you had a lot to do with that I actually had nothing to do with it it was great you had a lot
to do with it but the history of an event it's easier to get people to care about it but that's partly because one makes history more emotional and I'm always torn a bit by this notion of making history more emotional you get more people to care about the history but precisely because it has become
emotional to them maybe what you've taught them that don't so easily budge from because it is so vivid in some way well let me give a different spin on why I think history is working in box videos uh one thing that is going to be very different is web video or streaming video versus traditional what is called
in one of the worst terms of art I've come across linear uh videos of television and I do think this is going to both subtly and importantly change editorial so when you're creating a Netflix series or you're creating a YouTube channel you are creating a kind of video that
you expect to persist and so people are going to come back to it and they're going to come back to it and they're going to come back to it you brought up the Syria video that was a huge hit for VX um I don't have the numbers in front of me but I want to say it was watched 50 60 million times but its major rise
actually came a couple months after we first posted it and not through anything we did it just somehow got rediscovered during a secondary wave of fighting and news coverage of Syria and it exploded and the the reason this is important is that when you're looking at cable news
or a lot of forbear uh news content that disappeared as soon as it was put on there it became the the competition became about having the newest thing the thing other people didn't have much like traditional news does if you are trying to create things that are going to be continuously relevant 3 months from now
8 months from now a year from now 5 years from now putting more emphasis on the history of a conflict uh like in Syria is going to give you a better chance of having something that can be profitably rediscovered going forward so in some strange way the original Vox vision of the card stack actually has
been realized through video it's been realized in a lot of places I mean it's true in our text workor too one reason that uh one reason that our explainers focus on context is that it makes them very easy to reuse going forward just I think if you are thinking editorially about how to make things persistent as
opposed to how as opposed to accepting their ephemerality you focus much more on more Subterranean contextual information that you don't believe will change quickly and history is a good example of that let's say there's a bunch of different political views there conservatives modern liberals
progressives Libertarians Trump EAS what however you draw that universe and if you had to think the medium of video overall which of those views is a help the most and B hurt the most and why not just by Vox video but just video the video way of thinking I just am not sure yet I do not know so I don't
know I could probably come up with a bad theory on the spot here but I'm not sure okay I I want to see I do not I am not aware of sites with different ideological leanings showing dramatically different outcomes in video but there's some subtle way that video seems to matter so I was just in the
Pharaoh Islands which is a great trip by the way but one thing they do in the Pharaoh Islands is every year weigh out into the water with their long boots and they Club a bunch of whales to death and the world didn't pay any notice to this but then at one point this was caught on video and then it went viral and now
there are massive protests over online protests over what happens in the Pharaoh Islands with the whales you wouldn't quite call that a political ideology but maybe known identifiable victims get a larger voice in some way even if those victims otherwise literally like the whales have no voice
voice whatsoever so I sometimes tend to think it's a kind of progressivism which is favored but there's another part of me which thinks about libertarian arguments the seen versus the Unseen the invisible opportunity cost that very easily gets lost in print because you've got to site some boring cost benefit
study but I think there are ways to show secondary consequences in The Narrative of a video that typically would fail on a newspaper page I think you're actually somewhat mistaken about the underlying mechanism I think that the big change from 10 years ago 15 years ago in the story you just gave wasn't really video
it was the possibility of virality okay sure the kind of story you just described but it has to be video for people to share it I think that one in particular probably is better in VI in video it's Vivid to see somebody clubbing a whale to death I assume I haven't seen this video but the kind of
the distri but I my guess is that in terms of making that matter the distribution mechanism mattered much more there when you're talking about victims you can find victims from any ideology I I think that there would have been a time on the internet when you said that Upworthy proved potentially
Upworthy proved that a certain kind of soft cultural progressivism was going to be dominant online and then I think we've seen sites like Breitbart and uh igr independent journalism review were able to take a form of soft to hard cultural conservatism and using almost the exact same techniques send those
super viral as well and if you look at these two kinds of content you find different victims right with Upworthy it is a young LGBT kid who's been bullied at school right with uh igr you'll see a elderly grandmother you know who was victimized uh for her Christianity but that they're both victims still to me
seems striking sure but I I just think but my point yeah I agree with that but I think that both those are to they can be video or text but what is mattering is you're using outrage people have because of shared identity to send something viral through a sharing mechanism I think that
is the real mechanism there much more so than video to text is a difference let's say that virtual reality somehow works or takes off it doesn't just defin going to work okay I have no particular opinion but how will that shape which ideas succeed in the news media and which do not what will that slant or
byas I I am not yet a i a long ways from being a believer that virtual reality is going to upend the news media in the near term it clearly will be in my view ver VR and AR will clearly be how we consume content and more to the point how we communicate sure 20 30 years from now okay but let's
talk about that time harizon what's your best guess you've thought more about different media and worked in more different media than almost any anyone right now so a couple things one by the way and I think this is true also for video we haven't talked really about this but one thing the move towards
video being a big part of a successful media organization does and VR I think will probably push us even further is you're seeing Rising advantages to incumbency and capital again right blogs at which I was part of and a big beneficiary of for a moment you really did flatten things out it was really easy to publish it a
pretty flat rate online doing good video it just it just costs more money um it takes more time doing good animation it costs more money it takes more time we've substantially lowered the level of investment needed to do it well but it is still very different than it is in text VR and AR um from what I know of
those and again this will all get cheaper over time but my sense there too is you're going to have a pretty big Advantage for organizations able to afford what are increasingly real Studios uh which you didn't the New York Times did not have to have a studio in 1996 and then when people were trying
when I was trying to in some way compete with you know a New York Times uped Colonist as a blogger which is not how I saw it but I think in some way was what was going on everything was flat there I did not need much upfront investment Capital to do it so that I think matters
um in terms of how it will change coverage priorities oof um I think we are so far from even having an idea of what will work in VR Beyond gaming and porn and I by the way don't mean that in a dismissive way no no not at all uh that I just wouldn't know how to speculate yet I wonder if the news won't have to
become much happier because right now especially with TV news there's a kind of negative bias so no one has a story on the home that wasn't broken into today or the terror attack that didn't happen at all it has to get far enough to be covered uh so good news is played
down people think crime rates are higher than they are because it's reported a lot but if presentation becomes that Vivid it may just be people are so put off by the actual worst news they may want to kind of soft pedal almost like the kittens on the internet they'll want everything to be gentle and pleasant I
don't buy it I I definitely don't buy that it would make people ha it would make news happier I think if it did anything it would lead to more substitution against news so I could imagine that what a VR AR world does is it makes it much more attractive to play the successor to Call of Duty in the VR
world than to read box.com or the New York Times or whatever else but of the news we have in percentage terms don't you think it has to become nicer like most people will not go see horror movies and those are not even virtual reality it's too scary I won't see most horror movies I won see any horror
movies my wife has a no chickens movie club that is mostly uh like a no Ezra's Movie Club so if the news is in virtual reality you won't watch certain things if you won't see a horror movie my it's funny because my bias on this actually probably goes the other direction when I watch most media I am
surprised by the discomfort people seem to seek out so I am a fan of the part of movies before anything goes wrong I really enjoy that first 25 minutes before any kind of conflict is emerges in the plot and I continuously wish that movies would just sort of let me hang out in that happy Universe for a longer
period of time but when I watch any show recommended by anyone I know including you uh even if the show is putatively a cheery happy show the level of discomfort that people seem to want to endure of awkwardness of conflict is much higher than where I am cable news is another good example I do not have
the Constitution to wake up and watch people yell at each other about politics I I I don't know where people get that capability but I very much don't have it and my lesson from this I think is in some ways the opposite of yours I think that people are attracted to a much higher level of conflict than I
completely understand and my sense is that that will remain true in a VR world I don't really see a reason to believe that would change so now I could see something that would say there will be a bias against particularly gruesome stories right that you will not want to there will not be a sharp uptick in
people wanting to experience what things are like in a leppo in a V our world but I don't think that moves towards kittens and feel-good stories of of happy events I think you probably have a lot of you know what I would think of is sort of where news is now a lot of conflict but
conflict in the space of discomfort conflict in a space of safe outrage conflict in a space of you know you're you think you're right and the other person is wrong not necessarily a move towards actual cheeriness people seem to like cheeriness a lot less than I would think they would so let's take podcasts
in your talk with Malcolm Gladwell you each discussed how it can be you each discussed how it can be hard to use numbers and podcasts uh and I agree with that but in terms of which issues are favored as podcasts become more and more important what what does this skew our attention towards I think it skews our
attention towards speculation speculation one of the things about podcast that I really enjoy about it is that it has a very rambling at least at this point in the um format's Evolution there's much more of a ram a rambling looping bullshitting quality to it it it is you are able in a podcast to talk
about something where you may not be right in a way that people are I find much harder on you in print for doing and so something that I find is true in the discussions I I hear in podcast is there much more personal including with newsmakers by the way the the conversation that uh I've had with
Malcolm gladell or even the conversation I had with Corey Booker uh ended up focusing quite heavily on the Senator's spirituality which I think if I had been writing creating that conversation for print I would have felt embarrassed or strange ending up that personal but podcasting because of the way people
listen to it as a secondary activity as a almost as a conversation they are part of without having to participate in while they're doing something else I often think of podcasting as if you're walking around with your friends but you just don't have any actual friends there I think that is moving towards much more
personal topics a much more intimate set of ideas and away from harder crisper more concrete presentations of what we already know so let me ask you some questions about CEOs and Leadership when you look at the data on the corporate world there's a lot of evidence that CEOs today they're much more likely to
be generalists and to be able to switch from one sector to another and they're less likely to be people who came up through the ranks like producing ball bearings or running a coal mine or an oil refinery uh and that's pretty well established do you think that's true in media and also what would you say is
exactly your skill that makes you the CEO of the part of Vox you run so I should say technically I'm not the CEO of Vox that is Jim bov sure but box.com you're the editor why do I run Vox um so to the question of what I'm good at versus well let me try to do the CEO question first and I'll try to get into
what I'm maybe good at or not good at I think that we are and you've talked about this I think on your site before I think we are becoming much more polarized and unequal along political as well as nonpolitical dimensions and I think we are getting much uh more effective and to some degree more
discriminatory around the signaling uh around those things I think the idea of who a CEO is and what a CEO is is more sharply defined in a way that is probably not good uh than it was you know 50 years ago so I think that's a fair bit of it I think we have professionalized the management class I
think that there has become a set of signifiers that are more often um that first you learn as a CEO and it's one reason you're actually able to do that kind of lateral uh movement because part of what is being selected for is this do you seem like a CEO do you know how to work the CEO circuit do you know other
CEOs it has become a job unto itself and the signaling around it a job and a set of skills unto themselves those things are not taught in the same way coming up the ranks uh I've been very struck uh after I moved to to running box because now uh particularly in my first year I
went to a bunch of these conferences and I met more of these people and I I just got a bit more of a sense of this and how much it's a language and how much it's a culture and how much it's a social scene of these people who see each other at the same conferences and I mean it's a real circuit and that's
consistent with these generalist skills you have to be a CEO no matter how much you know about ball bearings or making shoe heels yeah you can have a lot of subject specific knowledge but if you are not presenting a certain way I think that there is probably a widening penalty to that in a way again that I
think is probably negative I am not persuaded it's good that we have more generalist CEOs uh and this is probably inevitable you have to deal with government you have to deal with the media social media you may need to raise funds in some way for your business well do you I mean that someone has to
somebody needs to deal with government but I'm not sure that every company has so much government entanglement and I'm not sure that every CEO should be dealing that much with social media uh I know I I do know at the same time there are the people who report to you are dealing with it if you're CEO you
may not be doing it but you need to digest their reports and ask them the right questions so in that sense there's like seven or eight major areas uh that is CEO has to know really very well today I buy that and and I think probably the other piece of it is that particularly when we're maybe using
a bit of an idealized example in terms of ball bearings but now if you're a CEO of an American firm that does a lot of ball bearing manufacturing the likelihood that your ballbearing manufacturing is done in America is probably pretty low you need to know the global economy you need to know Tech
right yeah I remember a piece from Justin Fox who's a writer at Bloomberg uh at Bloomberg view now uh I believe it was by him if it's not I apologize but he talked about how a he was told by Co that a key skill for a CO of a multinational firm is actually the ability to get restful sleep on an
international plane flight and I never thought of that and you don't think of that as a as a CEO skill but it makes perfect sense and it's not not something that would have been selected for before so I I can I think I would want to see something more systematic about what skill CEOs really end up using it what
the bul of companies need before I totally bought into the thesis but I'm not saying it's impossible by any means there's a big debate on Executive pay are CEOs underpaid in your opinion not you I don't believe CEOs are underpaid you don't believe CEOs are underpaid I recognize that within the debate that
there is good evidence that in a pure Market way that the Returns on having a really high quality CEO are positive um and that given where we are now it is rational for individual firms to be paying more and more and more to try to get the star CEO so I'm not saying that individual firms are overpaying what I
am saying is that it is by the same token I think pretty clear that the compensation game has become fundamentally Point scoring that it really isn't about the money I don't think anybody thinks that the kinds of pay increases we're seeing among CEOs is coming from the cost of feeding a CEO's
family having risen really sharply in recent decades and so I think that what you would want is something that begins to Tamp down on the collective action issue of every CEO needing to be paid more than every other CEO simply in order to prove they're a good CEO because it's become a status symbol
there's a story I love from Walder isaacson's book on Steve Jobs and he talks about how for years and years and years after he came back to Apple jobs took only a dollar a year and the board for years was saying to him come on take a take a salary you're doing a great job you're building a great company take a
salary and he wasn't and he wasn't and he wasn't then one day he did and he said listen I think it you know we've done the turnaround it's time for me to begin taking a salary they said great and they came to him with what they thought was a really generous package and he told them to to screw off and
demanded something that was stratospheric and the point for him was not the money he had needed he would been taking a dollar a year the point for him was that if he was going to get paid he was going to that pay was going to reflect that he's better than every other CEO in the world um I think that's
a very good argument for highly graduated marginal tax rates that would make that kind of thing a lot less useful for anyone so getting back to you you haven't told us what's your key skill that makes you well suited for a leadership position as you understand it so I think the set of things I'm good at
doing are uh I am I think in terms of just coming up with ideas and creating content I've been pretty good throughout my career and hopefully continue to be at seeing where the next thing is in media um and what are the set of skills that you're going to need to combine to get there uh
from blogging and sort of I was think I was reasonably early on and figuring out how to merge a lot of traditional a lot of new blogging with traditional journalism skills of the American Prospect um brought that to the Washington Post and was able to figure out a way to build something out of that
there you know saw some things in TV that you could probably do taking some of the ethos of blogging and what we were beginning to see and what the audience was responding to and taking that to cable news I think that I have been you know reasonably good at steering a course through a pretty rapidly changing media
landscape uh the thing I so I don't disagree but some it's not somehow meta enough for what I'm asking the EZ recline what's what's the thing about the EZ recline like I would say your key skill is self-learning you've talked yourself about how as a student in school you were at best indifferent I
think were your words so you've learned all these things on your own you're a very good self-learner and maybe that's the key meta skill uh that makes this work in the leadership position or no maybe constant anxiety would be another possibility uh a lot of the it is a surprise to me that I turned out to be
and I guess you'd actually have to ask my team for if this is true but a pretty good manager people that came reasonably naturally the thing that I think I'm good at doing as a manager is understanding what the folks working with me are actually doing and so getting a sense of what they actually
need uh the way I tend to work with people is by trying to figure out what the project is and what their broad project is I don't mean literally what their task is right now but what is their project at my organization what are they trying to do over the course of a year and then figuring out how to
support in that and I think compared to other people I know and this is you know feedback I've gotten I think I'm pretty good at figuring out how people understand the work they are doing and then how can I support them in that um the other thing I think I'm not bad at is having a pretty clear idea that I'm
able to communicate of where we're going I didn't think this was going to be a huge issue I didn't think a lot about branding when we started Vox in fact I thought media Brands were probably becoming less important as content disaggregated and moved around socially it turned out they were getting more
important uh and that along the way we were able to define a pretty clear one and I think that something that I'm pretty good at doing is defining that and hopefully holding to that and communicating that but definitely leadership and ceoing is something that I'm learning as I'm going along so it
might be hard for me to get the perspective to say what I am good at or not good at from a meta level on that what's your best time management tip to-do listing uh the thing that I the thing that honestly decides whether or not I have an effective like a good effective day uh where I feel like I got
things done or whether I just wasted a bunch of time was whether in the morning I wrote down what I thought I had to get done that day and throughout the day was rigorous about putting the little tasks that come up onto that same list and then checking them off if I if I keep that list going and I keep it updated
and I keep referring back to it I am able to be pretty efficient and if I don't I get lost and overwhelmed and anxious I don't find the big tasks to be the hard thing there I think the thing that is really hard to do is a task that take between like three and 15 or 20 minutes you keep in your head when you
probably have 30 minutes where you can knock out a couple of them they don't feel like a big enough deal you don't remember them you didn't write them down in a clear place and so they just sit there causing you or at least me endless anxiety when I actually have them in front of me I will stay on top of them
and actually staying on top of them I think is more important certainly than I gave a credit for a year ago we all are looking for other talented people to work with and you've had a whole bunch of great ones uh Matt and Melissa Dylan Matthews a whole bunch of others some of
whom I don't know but what's your best talent finding tip look for people who are desperate to be doing the thing they're doing uh I have often found really great people by finding people who seemed who either were literally doing what they need to be doing for free because nobody was yet
paying them for it right and that's something that that's an ethos that comes out of I did that as a blogger and you know found Dylan Matthews doing that kind of thing uh so look for people who you you can teach a lot of skills but you can't teach Obsession and there's a real difference between somebody who is
obsessed with the work they doing and someone who is simply skilled at the work they're doing I will take the obsession and teach the skills over getting the skills and having to teach the obsession how has being an entrepreneur changed your political views do you have more sympathy with
people starting businesses and the notion that business needs to be encouraged or liberated or the opposite yeah no I think I was I I don't think I had a I don't think I ever had a what I would think of as an anti- entrepreneur uh period so I do have sympathy with starting businesses but I don't I don't
think I did it before let me think on that for a minute how's it changed my political views I don't deal with a lot of government regulation myself so it hasn't had some big effect there I'm sure and you're in a less regulated sector I'm in a pretty unregulated a less regulated sector so that isn't a
huge deal for me but somehow your overall vision of human motivation and Imperfections and what drives people that must have if only subtly been altered in some way that even if it doesn't change your policy stances your political Vision must now be different I'm just thinking it through so let me
offer two the big one I think is not since I started an organization but since I went to The Washington Post okay and what being part of bigger organizations has given me a very different set of beliefs about the importance of firms and firm Dynamics and organizational frictions and how the
economy works so I am much much much more sympathetic and have a much better understanding of say why wages are sticky um or you've been talking about Brian kaplan's view uh idea about firing aversion yes and then Matt uhaus my co-founder had a great set of tweets about hiring aversion absolutely I I laughed so hard
at those I got the feeling you've been tasking Matt with hiring people I have not but Matt is mat Matt is not actually the one who primarily to hire people but in part because hiring people is really hard and unpleasant everyone does that in an organization the personal contact of your whole network and Matt must know
a lot Matt is very much part of the whole thing so I am I have a lot more sensitivity to that kind of thing I have a lot more sensitivity to the ways in which uh firms have trouble turning themselves around uh things that often seem mysterious to me about why a firm didn't just swoop in and take this
Market opportunity seem a lot less mysterious to me now that uh I've been in a big one and been able to see that from a lot of different Vantage points with the Washington Post and and that was a firm that I think has been very successful in changing and evolving and transforming but I also saw how hard and
wrenching that was and how many ways it could have gone wrong um and and and didn't I think in that case due to some really strong and good leadership and then at Vox this is a young firm and we VOX media itself I think is more than 600 employees now though so it isn't that small uh vox.com is more like 70
and even there I have a sense of my God like the just the difficulty of growth the organization cost of growth um The Dangers it puts you into right the overstretched the lack of slack in any of the systems so that you can deal with things at are longer range while you're trying to deal
with what's going on today so my sense of how the economy works on a micro level has changed a lot from just being inside larger firms uh that I think has influenced me quite a bit I'd say the other thing is I am probably uh much more and again I'm not quite sure this is a policy idea but I am much more skeptical
of anything anybody says about how a firm or a government organization or anything else Works my one of my big takeaways from now having sat through a lot of meetings with Consultants a lot of meetings with people trying to sell ideas or companies to me a lot of meetings where I was trying to sell an
idea to someone else uh is that there is just a lot of in the economy um there's a lot of in organizations and there is in a way I don't totally understand an accepted level of between everybody uh I I seem to be at meetings all the time where everybody seems to know that only half of whatever idea is being pitched
as a savior to everything is you know really being implemented or really going to work I constantly see in media now people touting some kind of great pilot project or some little innovation they came up with that is covered as if it will save media but I can look at it and
know that there's no way that's even going to absorb that's there's no way that will be spread through the workflow of even the host organization much l any other organization so I think that I've become much more I think cynical about um I I think of this a lot by the way with Snowden and the NSA yes uh on the
one hand a lot of those Revelations are are really really really important on the other hand it's a lot of consultant documents about what they were doing on behalf of the government and I often think about how much of that is really getting effectively done which in some ways makes it scarier but I
think that one way of reading those documents was the government has become this omniscient kind of allseeing surveillance State yes and my guess is their ability to use that data and how is very very very weak again I'm not that shouldn't that might make your view of what's going on much worse actually
I'm not saying that is exculpatory I'm just saying that it's a different way of looking at the uh of looking at those documents but take your view of government production now a lot of what governments do is pass around checks and we more or less know how that works and usually the checks show up right that
the way that works is fairly well understood but when government produces things are you now more cynical about that than you used to be oh yeah um I don't think even though I am you know in a relative sense in American politics probably a fan of government producing things I don't have any
particular belief that it is an efficient way of producing things and I wouldn't want them to take on things that I thought were getting done well anywhere else so I'm not sure how much my view on that has changed I I will say one thing about both government and and and private sector production which
is something that I do think is important is the there is an advantage to being willing to do cluggy difficult somewhat unpleasant things uh that is something I probably take more seriously than I did before and and let me give you an example here because this is the way Vox particularly has really changed my view on
things if we had started Vox just bootstrapped right if we had which is one of the things we pretty seriously considered so just getting venture capital and doing it on our own there are a lot of things we would have done that we did anyway make things like card Stacks Etc but there are a lot of things that
VOX media built capacities to do that we already already or contemporaneously with us being there that we never would have had the willingness to sit through and do so and I think particularly here there are a lot of Partnerships or opportunities that have come through a lot of meetings many of the meetings
which went nowhere which I just would never have done so Vox entertainment which um is part of VOX media out in LA and is building uh collaborations basically with television other things too but television primarily that is just something that if we had bootstrapped this we never would have
been considering because the slog to get anywhere in television the number of meetings that don't go anywhere where I just I absolutely never would have been able to do it and so something I actually now see as an organizational advantage of certain kinds of organizations is a willingness to do
things that aren't fun and that may not turn out well that may actually be pretty inefficient because when you're running really lean things that maybe don't have a very high payoff even if that payoff if it comes is pretty good often don't look good not because of expected value but just because of like
literally what you can bear as a human being um and I think that way with government too so as you say there's an attraction um recognizing the government is inefficient to just saying well let's just do cash transfer everything let's go Ubi for everything but I think there is a lot the government does often not
that well that somebody needs to be doing because a lot of the people you want to help are actually really difficult to help and I think this is something to now moving away from um lessons learned from from Vox I think this is one of the things I believe strongly in policy that we underrate a
lot of what we're trying to do in government is not help people who want free stuff quote unquote but is help people who actually are very very difficult to help this is particularly true in healthcare you see this Medicaid A lot of people don't sign up a lot of people don't have addresses you can't
even get them whatever they don't like doctors they're afraid of doctors this is me are you afraid of doctors afraid isn't the word um maybe dislike a verse they should be afraid of me perhaps so that kind of thing being willing to do that and and being willing to uh you know go through the the risk of or the
risk of doing that poorly if you're going to get there you're going to have to have not just failure but a fair amount of inefficiency now this is a a very difficult question I'm going to ask if I think about the notion of fiduciary responsibility which any executive has if you imagine a conservative or a
Libertarian in a position with fiduciary responsibility I think it's relatively easy for them to identify that person personal responsibility with the overall good of the economy there's a story about the invisible hand and you you know all of this if you have someone who who's more leftwing or more Progressive
or other points of view I would think there's more of of a psychological dissonance between the fiduciary responsibility to a particular group and one's political views and that that somehow is discordant and it does get solved but do do you ever think about that clash and what are your thoughts on
that no I don't think about it in those terms in the well first what I think it'd be good here give me an industry and give me a group here right let's say you have a company uh the manager the executive is supposed to maximize profits but this would involve some pollution and the
pollution may not be good for broader Society but once you sign on to be the manager you either do the pollution if you think you can get away with it or at least you feel obliged to Lobby Congress so you could pollute if they would allow and that's part of the de deal with being manager now people who are conservative
libertarian maybe more to the right they tend to see less of a conflict between fiduciary responsibility and the overall good of society so in a sense them being a CEO is is morally more of a seamless Venture that may even be the wrong view there might be a real conflict there say you
you know own some factory farms and you answer to your shareholders correct uh people who you would broadly call progressives I is there for them a greater psychological clash in principle between the CEO responsibility and what they think about politics so I have a couple thoughts there so one I think this is
actually pretty industry specific and I think that taking that view resolves a fair amount of the clashing so you used an example there that I think is a good example but will cut very much towards the argument that this would be harder for somebody on the left which is you're talking about a an industry where you
have as a byproduct high levels of pollution right my guess is that kind of industry will select against people who have highly environmentalist views rising to the tops of those firms um I could be wrong about that but that would be my assumption whereas I think there are also Industries where the uh where
it will cut a little bit the other way um media actually might be one of those Industries uh where it will in order to do the things that your sharehold want you to do it will imply pushing in a like left or Direction and I just assume that people select into industries that they
basically find morally aligned with their views at least at that top level where you have a lot of selection power right if you're going to be running one of these firms as we talked about CEOs can be more generalist now so if you're at that level in the market you probably have selected somewhere where you just
don't find it to be a problem I will say though that even as someone who I think uh in contor American politics Falls more on the centeral left side of the spectrum I have always found the amount of corporate social responsibility stuff to be a little puzzling I don't find it
intuitively appealing myself I'm not but a lot of it's public relations some of it is public relations but I actually think that is somewhere where I've become a little less cynical if anything now that I know more of these folks you know something that I it as a as a sort of human nature thing something that
I've become more sensitized to is that you might ask how does somebody who becomes CEO of a widget Factory see their life's work as having meaning right because who cares about all these widgets um why didn't they go if they're that talented into whatever and one thing that that kind of analysis will
miss the the question of you know why does it matter if you're just creating stuff for kids or whatever you know toys is how much people end up identif Ying with their firm as the larger whole how much it's the health of the firm the health of the workers the corporate culture that people are really proud of
that bind them together that's their Community that's their neighborhood that's where their status comes from and I think it is within that kind of Outlook that this sort of corporate social responsibility stuff becomes very appealing that if the place you're deriving your value is from the idea of
what sort of firm did you create not what did your firm create but what sort of firm did you create then the question of what is the moral character of your firm how proud are the people in your firm of being there that becomes a very important part of the way that you personally get satisfaction from your
work um I have definitely run into uh CEOs who seem more interested in the character of The Firm they're creating than anything their firm is creating it's and they're often more successful that way they often are because the people who work with them perceive that and respond in kind but the stuff that
they are creating it it is almost the fuel to create the sort of firm they are interested in now we have a segment in all of these chats in the middle it's called underrated versus overrated right so I say a few things and you tell me if you think they're underrated or overrated and of course you're free to
pass the movie The Matrix overrated or underrated at this point underrated because its sequels were so bad okay the Washington DC dining scene and you live in Washington I do the listeners don't know that it's hard it's become probably overrated by the Press but still underrated by people who
live here and how about by people who live in New York underrated underrated okay well I will say when I moved to DC in 2005 um for years I could eat at every single good restaurant that opened up and a lot that weren't good and now the the list of restaurants that seem excellent that I've not been able to go
to is like longer than my longer than my arm so I am it's almost hard for me to to rate it highly enough given how pleas down by the development Bob Dylan overrated or underrated uh I'm trying to match this with my personal ignorance this definitely seems overrated to me but this is me not being
very into classic rock okay but that's endogenous right if you're not you've heard some Bob Dylan I've heard quite a bit of Bob Dylan and you weren't that induced to go hear a lot more nope I I again what's your objection I do not particularly have an objection I do I it's not scratchy Voice or I really want
to frame this as a subjective fact of me potentially having bad music tastes as opposed to an as opposed to a normative Claim about the worth of Bob Dylan I do not think anybody should take my cultural viewpoints I think I am a I'm a deep fan for instance of the movie Wimbledon I do not think people should
uh follow my lead on what is good culture William F Buckley underrated why he built the tremendous institution um and I both mean that in terms of the national viiew and probably in terms of the American right for quite a while I think that it is hard now to appreciate because it feels so much
with us of what an achievement fusionism there really was uh and I think it is also I mean the National Review has been an important and to some degree played a pretty consistent role on the American right for many many many decades and I think that's a part of Bucky that is
also easy to underrate I mean I thought what the National Review did around Trump was very much I don't know that it would have happened at a place that didn't have as clear an internal character as what Buckley gave that institution I think if it had just been a more normal magazine it just wouldn't have tried to
play that role and I think that role was something worth trying to play so I I'm a I'm a I think what Buckley achieved whatever you think of his politics I think think he um I I think he's definitely underrated at this point the most underrated person in the Obama Administration they don't have to be
there now oh that's a great question I would have to think for a minute here let me give this some thought and come back I don't want to do it totally on the Fly the name Ezra overrated or underrated oh my God it's gotten so popular it has uh it's a name when I was a kid I would not have thought would
have made a comeback no my I believe if I if I read the site right that the name Ezra is now more popular than the name of of my wife an or Annie which is blew my mind when I looked it up yes uh so always underrated it's a great name always it's a great name professional sports overrated why uh there's they're
all one they're all too long there is nothing I personally like less than watching a whole piece of professional sports ball isn't there some other better way to consume it than to watch it all so you watch it in Parts but it needs to to be there for you to pick the right parts and then you talk to people
about the rest and it's like the drama it's like going to the theater except you're free to talk to your friends I actually think even as I think that professional sports is way overrated I think Sports journalism is continuously underrated I think it is always some of the best journalism we're doing in
America and nearly always the best written form of Journalism we do in America and why is that what about the structure of sports makes the journalism so good and the product there something about sports being a canvas for writing that through which we are allowed with relatively low stakes to work out uh
other core issues in American life that that is really tremendous one of my favorite books is the Muhammad Ali reader it is a case that basically every great writer of the 20th century did their Muhammad Ali piece and you can just go through there and it is an amazing tour of particularly new
journalism but there is a capacity to use Sports to write about almost anything in the American experience it it is really tremendous on the flip I just somehow do not have the part of my brain really just do not and again I I I I want to continue to say this is not a normative claim this is a claim about my
own experience I do not have the part of my brain that even allows me to empathetically access why someone would care what a bunch of people playing for a team that they went to because it paid them the most money why whe about movies and novels right and that's not even able to access
that I just I I they're drawing me up in the story line I'm just telling you again I'm not saying other people shouldn't enjoy it I'm saying that this is a place where I have tried many many times because I would like to be connected to American culture in this way and it is like I'm missing aart now
let's try some questions about politics and we'll come back to the most underrated in the Obama Administration let's take models of the world so president OB I think I have a Obama administration please Biden Biden tell us why Joe Biden has been um as far as I can tell in my reporting as far as
anybody can tell he has taken on a series of pretty important jobs for the administration going back to coping the stimulus um which actually did go out with a very very low level of fraud uh work he did on gun control didn't really go anywhere but in terms of the task force piece of the administration it was
well conducted he has been very very important in uh heral uh pushing through a bunch of congressional deals and he has played a role that I respect in organizations of often being the skunk at the party particularly in Obama's dealings with the military Biden's role in a lot of that was to act as the
counterweight um in a way that's very socially uncomfortable and is related to I think Joe Biden's very particular set of skills which may not have been uh are not always adaptive but I think are adaptive in that particular circumstance and yet at the same time that he's been I think by all accounts a very
successful vice president um people forget but his was actually the most highly rated convention speech at the 2012 convention even more so if I remember correctly than Bill Clinton he arguably really played a big role in the election by getting their debates back on track after Obama flubbed the first
debate he is looked at in a way that I have looked into and reported on and tried to understand as sort of a joke the gap between the esteem in his public reputation as sort of Uncle Jo and the gravity of his career and what he's done and the role he's played with Obama I think is very very very wide some
questions about politics let's put aside policy conclusions just models of the world you have a model of the world and President Obama is a model of the world your knowledge of his model is highly highly imperfect but just from what you know from whatever distance You observe
what he does and says what do you think is the main difference in analytical terms between your model and his optimism you have it or he has it he has it uh the big difference between my model and his model and I've interviewed him and we've talked about this yes he we at this point I think the models
of how American politics works are pretty similar he has developed over his time in office uh I think much more so than when he ran in '08 a pretty structuralist view of how Congress works of how American politics works of how automatic a lot of functions of public opinion and partisan opinion are these
are things that I think the sort of Hope and change Obama didn't believe in ' 08 he thought you could really Bridge these divides um there was a lot more cynicism among members of the press including myself uh I think that cynicism was born out I think he shares it now he has a but that's a similarity what's what's
the difference I this is where I'm coming to it I I think that the system is in very fundamental ways at this point flawed I do not think the political system can over a long period per of time absorb highly polarized political parties and I think that structural changes will need to be made
if American governance is going to be high quality he believes in ways I don't fully understand and don't think he's really able to give a good account of that there is a sort of essential goodness of the American people that they will rise up and demand better of their leaders and maybe it just has to
get to a bad enough point or something but I think he's wrong about that I think that you actually need to change how the system works um not expect that at some point the American people are going to say enough is enough again this is my this my best recounting of of what the nature of his optimism is but he is
he has definitely push his back quite strongly on um I think what he calls like the jaded easy cynicism but I I think it's correct there was a recent poll lately you probably saw it that I think American black males are much more optimistic about the future than American white males did you see that
think that's a good overall characterization and are you you and no of reality it's clear that's what the Paul said I I I don't think the specific the poll there is I don't think that poll is shedding a lot of light on our specific disagreement about does the American political system need
structural reform okay so going back to models your model of the world and Hillary Clinton's model what's the main difference I do not understand her models well as I think I understand Obama so let me you had a long interview with her is very Illuminating thank you um I think that she her model of the
world I think frames American politics much more as a process or negotiation carried out by individual parties where I'm much more of a structuralist okay so I think that Hillary Clinton believes that by reaching out enough and consistently enough um which is a funny thing to say
because her overall politics are quite as a campaign or quite partisan but when she is in office she has a kind of real I will work with you on anything no matter how small endlessly to build up trust that's kind of her approach I think she believes you can get more out of that than I believe you can I think
that she believes there are there's more that personal relationships can do to create grounds for bipartisan cooperation I think that her critique of Obama would be that he doesn't spend that much time and when he does spend the time does not evince enough enjoyment of reaching out and spending
time and building relationships with opposed members of Congress I think that if you got her late at night after she's you know had a couple drinks she would tell you that the difference between her and him is that she really will spend all that time with Mitch McConnell and even when people treat her unfairly and
treat her badly she will continue reaching out with them she talked in our interview about her husband uh you know people impeaching him at 400 p.m. and him having them over for a drink at 9:00 p.m. I think she really sees that as something that that can really work in changing outcomes I don't really agree I
think that to a first approximation knowing which party people belong to is basically how to predict the way they'll vote I think that is even truer since she was last involved in legislative politics and um I think that the more I don't think there's going to be that much margin in a more attentive personal
relationship to being the legislator and chief the most striking part of your talk with her I found was when you asked her about books and she named two communitarian books from the 1990s that's when I felt I really learned something about Hillary Clinton and by the way a book from a modern
communitarian right chel name the new putam book absolutely now now putam let me ask you about putam and also how putam relates to Donald Trump as you know Robert putam at Harvard he has some work showing uh that when ethnic diversity goes up that there's less trust less cooperation less social
capital and if you think of yourself in the role of an editor so you have in American society diversity has gone up and a lot of people have reacted to this I would say rather badly and I think you would agree with me they've reacted rather badly but there's still a way in which the issue could be framed that
well diversity is actually a problem we can't handle diversity and putam almost says as such and do you think there's currently a language in the media where you have readers who are themselves diverse where it's possible not to just be blaming the bigots but to actually present the
positive view look people are imperfect a society can only handle so much diversity and we need to learn this or what what's your take on that I I strongly agree uh this is a we do not have a language for demographic anxiety that is not a language that is about racism and and we need one I I really
believe this and I believe it's been a problem particularly this year I think that it is clear I think the evidence is clear Donald Trump is not about quote unquote economic anxiety right a bit but not mainly I agree that said um I think that the way it is presented as a choice between economic anxiety and
racism and one I don't think that's quite right and two I don't think that's a productive way of having that conversation um why don't we have that language where did it go did we ever have it I don't know if we ever had it um I we probably did have it I think that I think that we have properly been
working very very hard in the society to um make racism socially intolerable and we have a society that continues to have a lot of racism a lot of sexism a lot of bigotry of different kinds what but I do think that as a byproduct of that debate and that effort there isn't a good way to have people discuss
um slightly more incoit feelings of losing power uh that aren't necessarily in their view about taking it away from other people um it's more about losing it themselves and I think that's a big difference in this um Arley hook who I've had on my show which I've heard very good episode thank you and
something she talks about in there is this kind of deep story that she found among she's a sociologist who spent five years with Tea Party folks inou Iana and she talks about this deep story of feeling like they've been waiting in line and now other people are getting in front it's not so much that they wanted
that they don't want those other people to get ahead it's that they want to get ahead themselves they are feeling a loss in a zero some competition and they may actually be correct about that um there are probably types of um there are probably types of advancement in society
that is zero some particularly when uh you begin having when you begin really trying to open up the flood Gates so uh so I think that's correct and I think that we don't have a good language for it I don't know what it would mean to get one but one thing that has annoyed me this year is I I really dislike the
use of political correctness as a language for it I think it one um doesn't explain very much but two I think that's something that has happened a lot of the time here is we have people have somewhat either unconscious or I think at times cynically mixed up an elite debate and a non-elite debate I
think there's a debate about political correctness on college campuses and with very sort of Cutting Edge issues like transgender rights that uh or safe spaces or trigger warnings that a lot of people who graduated from Iva League schools particularly are very invested in in the media particularly people who
what they like to do is write about things in a very free and untrammeled way and they see this as a um attack on them they don't like what they see in their Twitter Twitter mentions whole range of reasons people get upset I'm not even questioning the validity of that anger I'm just saying that that is
a very different set of issues than somebody who wants to be able to say Mexican immigrants are criminals too often and they shouldn't be in this country that the things that Trump is keying into are things that um like John shate is a big critic of of contemporary academic political correctness but does
not believe the things Trump is saying about Muslims being allowed to to the US are viable at all there are a bunch of things that are settled among Elites uh about what is an acceptable thing to say or not that Trump is reopening then there are a bunch of things that are unsettled among leites that Trump
doesn't care about and I think there's been a sort of conflation of those issues around political correctness it has been unhelpful to understanding his Coalition and why there's real power there so this La language of talking about diversity in a in a smarter way that would recognize costs of diversity
without being racist or other bad things two other cultures we've talked about and you have some connections to one is Brazil the other is Singapore and your father's from Brazil correct do those places have in some ways a better language than we do or are they much worse or when you think about
Brazil and Singapore what they've done how it's worked I mean how does that all come together with the language you think we need I have genuinely no langu uh idea how those two societies actually do talk about these problems do not unfortunately speak Portuguese and as much as I enjoyed going to Singapore for
a couple days on my honeymoon my sense is not that that is a free and open discourse but I don't think I know enough about him to to answer that confidently what about the role of shame in our culture and also as it relates to Media so right now I think I've read estimates uh 40% of children are born
into single parent families some of those the the father is actually around but a lot of cases it's not and a lot of social conservatives they somehow want to shame this Arrangement but from a media point of view it's very hard to shame those who are your readers so there's may be a tendency for stories to
evolve into a language without shame and does that ever worry you about media and what do you think is what is the role of shame in politics and what should we be shaming more also well so I do think there's a lot of shaming in media I don't think it's there nor what I want it to be there but I think an
interesting thing about trumpism and the particular way in which I think the media really has been we can argue about whether the media has done a good job with Trump but the media is could very anti-trump and the particular ideology he has um there are these long thingss debates about whether media is liberal
or it's conservatives and and and I tend to think they miss a lot of uh Nuance on it but what the media really is is not committed to Single Payer but committed to diversity to plural ISM to tolerance to things that I would think of as more Cosmopolitan values and particularly
liberal values okay and or at least liberal in the Contemporary political sense values and trumpism is a lot less conservative than it is traditionalist restrictionist it it collides with that set of sort of Cosmopolitan Urban values and one place where I think people have a lot of upset about this there is a lot
of shaming in the media we talked about it a couple minutes ago around um yeah I think there's a lot of shaming in the media about what opinions you can and cannot hold about whether Muslims should be able to come to the US or what you can and can't say about Mexican immigrants or African-Americans or for
that matter by the way white people there's a lot of shaming in the media against anybody who is seen as looking down on the quote unquote legitimate grievances of trump voters right there's a lot of uh you know know you you need empathy for this set of ideas but this other set of ideas you can confidently
attack and so I don't think the media operates without shame I just don't think it shames single mothers think it should why shouldn't we worry more about single motherhood it it seems to be a social problem you might want to worry about single motherhood I'm but we're
not going to penalize them financially right we don't want to do that but I don't think that shaming them would make any sense either I think that there is you don't think the shame of single motherhood and earlier eras discouraged the practice so one it's funny it's funny first that we go quickly to single
motherhood right because in theory you want to be talking here about shaming the father sure um but I think that there is a view and I'm I should say I'm a child of divorced parents um and uh I think it's good that my parents were able to get divorced uh so I think there is a view that there are a large number
of compensatory freedoms and um and types of happiness that have come from having more liberal views about marriage I think the flip of that is that a lot of at least people in the media believe that it has been more or less an unalloyed good that it has become harder to express anti-gay sentiments in public okay and
so I think that that's the kind of calculation people are making I think that broadly people uh like a lot of the trends and a lot of the policy decisions that have led to the possibility of more single motherhood and they are very very very uncomfortable with the kinds of things that you would have to do and say
to try to turn that back whereas a lot of the the other kinds of Shame people are just making a different calculation which of our current practices are views will in the more distant future seem crazy or just outright wrong to ask the Chuck claer question sure um how we treat animals uh
I think that how we treat animals particularly around factory farming um and Factory Dairy production and Etc will be a gen genuine moral blight on this era and particularly on this era uh because we're at this point now we're beginning to get very very good at creating uh plant-based meats and you
know increasingly we're moving towards lab growing Meats so we're about to have a bunch of technological changes it will make eating very little meat or no meat um at least no factory farm meat pretty easy and pretty affordable that tends to be something that comes along with big uh changes in Morality but I think one
of the ways I think about this is that I remember reading uh Ron Cho's Washington uh the biography of Washington which is great and I remember being surprised by the way the founding fathers talked about slavery in their letters to each other it was the very much invogue thing
to be against slavery they all in their letters talked about it as a moral blight and may it you know be gone from the earth in 50 years and to stay on this great nation but they all just also had slaves with the exception obviously of Hamilton and there was something in that in that they knew it was wrong they
knew they wanted it to stop but it was just really hard to stop it at the time I mean it was how they you know it's how the economy worked they already had him and they not just kept him but added more and looking back it's unconscionable but when I talk to you know virtually anyone I know I don't
know anybody who defends factory farming as a moral part of our society like I don't know anybody you might hear it in reference to much poorer um countries but not to this one and so we are running around knowing that were causing immense tremendous suffering to sension beings and uh I don't know it's kind of
a pain in the ass to to eat less meat I it's just not going to I think it's going to look really bad you're a pessimist about politics in some ways or American politics uh why not then be a pessimist about food politics so say you're a darwinian human beings clearly evolved to eat animal meat right well
people argue but yeah I mean but that's not really up for and to enjoy it and to kill animals and we've evolved so our intuitions don't make us so squeamish about doing that now that may in some very longtime frame change but given that that's one of the core things that
we are much as we're evolved to say enjoy sex or have friends well I think that's the one thing that's going to change it seems to me that's one of the least likely to change so I I don't see it that way although I'm not sure it's the only thing that will change but I'm using it as the thing here uh because
I'm a technological Optimist in a lot of ways I'm not a political Optimist I don't think we're going to pass a bunch of laws that are going to change this but I think that that we will see Technologies change it and I think that there are things like this before uh child labor I would actually put a
little bit in this category where for a very long time you would say well we've always had you know we've always put kids to work in fact that's why you have kids you have all this extra labor laying around when you need it and then you know we got better at automating things and workers became much much much
more productive and I think that and families want to educate their kids there's no selfish sacrifice then exactly but that but that's why I'm saying that a crucial part of this story a crucial part of my optimism on this is that we are very much on the cusp of lab grown meat so artificial meat will
become so good artificial me is becoming so good that it's just going to be that it will make it much much easier to hold these opinions on that I'm a pessimist maybe not forever but I think for at least a few hundred years anytime Horizon we can foresee impossible Foods Burger I've talked to some of these
people I'm like what does your hamburger cost $400 they say no it doesn't cost $400 do actually do it um so not the lab growing the plant-based stuff is the stuff plant based is moving more towards affordability um the lab grown people don't enjoy it as much the so they're
the the two new ones the the beyond meat and the impossible Foods burgers are both pretty good they're not I agree with you they're not there as somebody who when I meet a burger is literally one of my couple favorite food so uh I have I I am not somebody who doubts the incredible deliciousness you can
actually now we're getting pretty close we're not again I don't want to say we're there it's not as good as a best burger but is it as good as a McDonald's burger definitely it is well that I think will disappear but let's say I would yeah but if that kind of stuff began to disappear that's a big amount
of meat right well people will eat better Burgers I don't think Donald's would disaar not the burger let's say I were to defend the eating of meat and I would say something like this uh if you eat vegetables you still need to plow the proverbial field and you kill mice maybe a larger number smaller
number let's say it's even a smaller number but you're always doing something morally unconscionable with respect to animals therefore trying to apply human to human morality to relations with animals can't work we're not sure what the right morality is we can perform some acts of mercy and Grace but the
very existence of a planet with so many billions of humans mean there's some ongoing just massively cruel Slaughter of animals yes or no no say more I don't buy that the morality here is so complex I am not saying that there aren't better and worse things that we do and I'm not saying that there's any world in which
you know we're not going to be running over field mice as we plow Fields but we are torturing animals right now I mean I I don't I don't mean to get too much on the horse here but like what we do to egg laying chickens it's just crazy and not only is it crazy but we know it is because it is illegal
now to tape it and it is so grotesque to watch it um I think that we can do better than that I think that there are a lot of places in life and in living a moral life environmentalism is a big one of these where given how complex human actions are it is very hard to know with certainty that you're
making the right decisions I think that that's true constantly in politics I think that's true constantly in everything we do um nevertheless we somehow stumble forward and try to do the best we can and I think that uh eating more plants and you know keeping fewer animals in conditions so terrible
that we can't actually Bear to watch them and have had to pass laws so people stop trying to make us see them I think that one's a fair bet last question cheor you've traveled to a bunch of different countries uh a lot of different parts of the United States what's the the one thing you know about
travel that you feel other people underrate as a way to do it I do not think I'm actually particularly good at Travel I envy your uh skill facility here very much but the one thing that I the one thing I really love about it uh that maybe is a little bit weird is I think that a lot of what is great about
travel is focusing your attention on a place in a way that is not not necessarily related actually all the time to being there that often times when I'm traveling somewhere part of why I learn so much about the place I'm going is that I'm thinking about it I'm reading about it as I'm there watching
it so a lot of it is the mustering of other kinds of intentional resources watching movies or documentaries or or consuming other kinds of culture from it before and so there is something that you cannot there is more than just the seeing I think that sometimes people feel like the learning about a place is just going
and seeing it and for me I find that a lot of the uh benefits of travel are actually about things that I could have done even if I hadn't been there but I would have never focused on in the same way and with the same intensity for the same period of time Ezra thank you very much and thank you for taking the other side
of the mic thank [Music] you thanks for listening to conversations with Tyler you can subscribe to the podast in iTunes Stitcher or your favorite podcast app and if you like this podcast please consider rating it on iTunes and leaving a review this helps other people find the [Music] show