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learn more at marcus.org and for more conversations including videos transcripts and upcoming dates visit conversations withth tyler.com today we are here with Ezra which of course means Ezra Klein Ezra is editor at large at Vox he has a new book out which I like very much called why we're polarized and he too runs his own
podcast called believe it or not the Ezra Klein show Ezra welcome pleasure to be here so let's start right in on polarization are American religions more polarized than they used to be are American religions were polarized Catholics hating the Protestants vice versa I doubt it's certainly not then we
used to be right depends I think one of the questions when you're talking about polarization of any kind is how long you're used to be implicitly is so I think a lot of people and it's true in my book they implicitly Baseline against mid 20th century America right which is a Time across a lot of dimensions of low
polarization may or may not be true for religion I I'll get to that in a moment but compared to say 19th century America where we are in pretty important ways a lot less polarized so I think one thing to always be careful on is that like history is long even American history though shorter than a lot of other
countries history is reasonably um has been going on for some time and so we have had really really high highs in enmity between different groups here and reasonably low lows and the 20th century which is a part that is in memory for a lot of people was oftentimes a more low low and so I just want to note that um
in terms of whether or not the religions are more polarized I don't think so though I'm not learnning in enough on that to be confident in my answer here what I would say is that the fundamental form of polarization seems to me to be changing that the polarization now that has a religious Dimension is sort of secular people versus um religious
people and so there's been a collapsing of say the political leanings of more devout Protestants and Catholics in a way where they might have used to be thought of as a division but now they much more often are in Coalition against the more left leaning Coalition which the single biggest religious group is
people who don't have religious affiliation and then you have people who are more spiritual and MaryAnn Williamson um and liberal Christians and so on or Sports more polarized so in the old days Celtic and Nick fans maybe hated each other or they hated each other's teams is that gone does anyone even care I don't know as we all just
watch gifts on on Twitter as I admit in the book I am not now and never have been a sports fan so anything I could say on that would be such like talking out of my hat that it wouldn't be worth you hearing the answer but here's what I'm getting at it seems many parts of American Life are not more polarized but
some parts of politics is more polarized what makes for the difference so the way I would think about this is that the story I'm telling in the book is in a collapsing of a lot of different forms of polarization into a single point and so to me the concept that was really helpful here is thinking about
crosscutting forms of polarization versus unified forms of polarization so imagine in some of the ways you're talking about here someone who's mid-century right there might be a lot of polarization in say the Catholic Protestant Dimension or maybe the Jew Protestant Dimension they might be polarized on sports team they might be
polarized in terms of they belong to a union and they're angry at their bosses or they're angry at people who don't belong to the union they might be polarized regionally one of the things though that was happening certainly again mid-century in America is those forms of polarization tended to be
non-correlated with each other or at least a lot less correlated than they are today so maybe you're a republican but you also belong to a union and you're also a Protestant and you were also um living in a city and so on now if I know one of those things about you I'm much more likely to know the others about you and so when you have the forms
of polarization stacking on top of each other they exert a much greater weight and they tend to be activated by a much broader range of conflicts Sports in this way actually is I think a kind of interesting example so I guess now a couple years ago but you had the period of time when you had call Kaepernick um
leading uh NFL players kneeling during the national anthem Donald Trump of course got involved NFL is something that was actually quite non-polarized there was actually polling on this somewhat randomly that Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump supporters had about the same level of approval of the NFL and then after that began happening you
just had a plummet among Donald Trump's supporters and what they thought of the NFL and a rise or a steadiness among Democrats and what they thought of the NFL and so all of a sudden instead of sports becoming crosscutting it became one more thing at least for that moment that was pulled into this broader sense
of polarization but is NFL attended down that that seems I haven't looked at the numbers but that seems robust to me aren't we in a sense polarizing more efficiently there used to be seven things you had to worry about which sports team do I hate what breed of dog is awful and add there's just one it's
like left wi right wing I think that's right and you get it out of the way and then you can enjoy all the sports or all the dogs you want it's actually a kind of advance I think that might be right but like a lot of things in life if you make them too efficient they begin to develop other problems right I would say
that that inefficiency in human identity probably had a lot of good parts to it it created one of the stories and lines of research I'm going through in the book quite a bit it's the idea that if you look at um Republicans whose policy preferences seem to place them in the Democratic party Or democrats whose
policy preferences seem to place them in the Republican party they will be angrier at the other side they will like hate the other side more even though they agree with them on policy then if you look at people whose identities place them um in crosscutting ways with the other party so policy polarization what we would think of is sort of the
most important kind of subst div polarization ends up being a lot less powerful than these identity dimensions and so once you get those identities efficiently working together you develop a kind of difference that is very hard for people to overcome and that our political system is pretty bad at handling again I don't think it's
necessarily the case of polarization is a problem you can one story I tell in the book is number one I think it probably makes sense that we're polarized number two I think that um you at the very least have to give credit to polarization as something that happens in most systems in most ways or reasons
we weren't polarized mid-century had a lot to do with race and they were not great they we had a depolarized system built on segregation but we have a political system that requires high levels of consensus to operate and so I think the question is not so much how do you get polarization down but how do you
change things around it so that the system can operate well amidst polarization we would agree that what is called effective negative polarization is way up professing a dislike of the other side right not wanting your Republican kid to marry a democratic wife and so on but in terms of actual policy polarization what if someone says
well that's down and they say this well the main issue in foreign policy today's China that's actually fairly bipartisan or if people don't agree they don't disagree by party domestic spending Social Security Medicare like no one wants to cut those that's actually consensus the other main issue is like how we deal with or regulate Tech
America has its own system it's happened Through The Regulators it's not really that partisan one may or may not like it but again disagreement about it doesn't fall along normal party lines so the main foreign policy issue the main like substantive social issue we less polarized and then domestic spending it
seems we kind of all mostly agree why is that wrong so I think the I'm not sure it is wrong two things I would say about it one is I think a lot I think the word main is doing a lot of work in that argument the question is how do you decide what are the main issues I wouldn't say domestic regulation of tech
is a main issue for instance I think it's important but compared to things like immigration and Healthcare at least in the way people experience that and think about that or if you ask them what are their main issues I mean domestic regulation of tech doesn't crack the top 10 but even healthare like the party of
repeal and replace is now the Democrats and that's shifted so at any second it's the way repeal and replace actually is meant in American politics Democrats do not believe you should repeal Obamacare and basically replace it with nothing like that's what single repeal replace so but that's a place where actually
seen a sharp increase in polarization right so you've seen people who are now much more structured around the polls of that argument look when they started the Affordable Care Act there was an idea that you could build on what M Romney did in Massachusetts which was at least at that time a republican endorsed plan and
Democrats could take some version of it and like both parties would come around a center now what you have is a Republican party that is much more truthfully admitted it does not want to have any form of a universal healthcare insurance scheme and then the Democratic party that's is moving much more towards
Medicare for all or a Single Payer scheme not even just universal healthcare but actual Single Payer so I mean that's a place where I think it's pretty clear that the polarization has increased sharply but again at any point in time but if positions are shifting rapidly as they are say on trade if you took all of GDP even Healthcare that's
what maybe 18% of GDP but a lot of the system a lot of people in both parties agree on even if they disagree on Obamacare Obamacare is only part of that 18% like over what percent of GDP Are we more polarized than we used to be as compared to less polarized what's your like gu I I like that I like that
question let me try to think about this I don't think I have a GDP answer for you but let me try to give you more what I think of as a mechanism I think a like a useful horis here people don't have nearly as strong views on policy qua policy as certainly people like you and I tend to assume they do the way that
Washington DC talks about politics is incredibly projection oriented um we talk about politics as if everybody is a political junkie with highly distinct ideologies political scientists done a lot of polling on this going all the way back to the 1960s and it seems like something like 20 to 30 % of the population has what we would think of as
a coherent policy oriented ideology where things fit together and they like have everything lined up most people don't hold policy positions all that strongly so what happens is that they do hold to the extent they're involved in politics identity strongly political affiliations quite strongly they know
who is on their side and who isn't the pattern that I see here again and again is that when things are out of the spotlight when they are not being argued about when they are not the thing that the parties are disagreeing about they're actually quite non-polarized you'll sit there in rooms of experts there'll be a panel here George Mason
whatever it might be and everybody will have some good ideas about how you can make the system better for everyone and then what will happen is like the eye of Sauron of the American political system will turn towards whatever the policy issue is maybe it's Obamacare maybe it's climate change remember climate change
was not that polarized 15 20 years ago John McCain had a big cap and trade plan in his 2008 platform but it's easy for things not to be polarized when we're not about to do anything about that but that's exactly the point so that I think it's actually misleading to look at things where we are not really focusing on them
in a popular way and say hey people aren't that polarized once they get into the political system they collapse down to this unit of fundamentally the zero some question in American politics is who will win the next election or maybe even to to use more of a Tyler cism whose status should be raised or lowered
in this debate and once things get jammed into that Groove then they become highly highly polarized almost no matter where they were before Francis Lee and others have very good research on this you can just see it sort of in the background of American politics operating again and again immigration by the way is a very good example you go
back to say Bill Clinton and you read the Clinton 1996 Democratic National Committee platform that sounds like Donald Trump's immigration platform it sounds so much more conservative than where Democrats are on immigration today um today as it's become a much more core Central issue as the Democratic party's
got in a much larger Hispanic base inside of it that issue is polarized dramatically so I think if you're looking a couple years ago you might have said hey look George W bush tried to do immigration reform 2013 you have the gang of eight doing immigration reform in the Senate immigration is a good example of something we're not
polarized that was true until it became the thing we were actually doing and then it became a central driver of polarization in the country but maybe polarization is the opiate of the masses and this gets back to it being efficient so everyone's all upset about this that and the other you know you can check
your Twitter feed and see what's on that list but if you take say gay marriage not that long ago Republicans went crazy about the idea they tried to run elections on it they totally lost right and now they've surrendered so again Moment by moment it looked super polarized but what actually happened was
there was a big shift it took say about a decade uh it's not a story of gridlock it's a story of radical change where the masses are still consuming their opiate and now maybe they're arguing about you know threats to Ukraine rather than gay marriage and uh we change policy towards China and develop a tech sector Supreme
Court supports gay marriage and progress moves on including political progress is that wrong I think so I think it is wrong but not entirely so the way I think about it this is one I think a marriage is an idiosyncratic issue the way public opinion flipped on that and the way that flip has been durable is
unusual in most issues uh it's something that political scientists study I I think game marriage is something where it's not that you can't think of anything else where there's been public change but the speed with which it happened you were saying Republicans didn't win elections on it but what's amazing about that issue is right before
it actually changed they did right you remember after the 2004 election there was a lot of talk I think UL didn't turn out to be true but that perhaps George W bush had won because of gay marriage ballot initiative so I just want to note that that was actually an issue that has its own unusual Dynamics to it but I
think to your broader point I wouldn't call it an opiate in the sense that I don't believe that what is happening is that people are amusing themselves with polarization over here whereas the political system is being run people cannot see me making hand motions at the moment but over here on the other side
that what is happening is actually the political system when it like runs into these issues ends up being largely for the most part foiled and that has tremendous implications for governance climate change in my idea being a pretty good example of that so I do think systems move on I don't think that what
I I would not claim that what I'm describing here that if somebody comes and writes a book about the American political system in 30 years it will hold to the exact same Dynamics I'm describing right now demographic change has a lot to do with this I think generational change is a very under it is a very underd discussed force in
politics a lot less changes through persuasion than through cohort replacement to put put a a nice euphemism on it people aging out of the El euphemistic and so things do change but in terms of describing where we are right now I think that polarization is driving political outcomes in a quite
profound way and so you're not dealing with something where people are being distracted by polarization while the system works well in the background abortion aside at the state level is policy polarization going up I know people vote more according to the National party's reputation but in terms of actual policy doesn't it just not
matter that much again abortion aside I know there's Medicaid extension most of those will probably happen but for most of the budget it seems it doesn't matter my understanding is that policy polarization at the state level actually has gone up quite a bit and certainly that partisan polarization I know in
state legislators has gone up a lot again one of the tricky things about this conversation and people will will kind of hear it going on when you say the word polarization you could be referring to a bunch of different things are we talking about how legislators vote in Congress are we talking about how people feel about the other side are
we talking about issue outcomes and so the question a little bit is what dimension of polarization we'd be looking at there um and different ones probably have different answers but say what a state government does again abortion aside but if 80% of the voters more or less support it and then when a change of government comes you don't
notice a change in the budget I would say that's not so polarized in terms of policy though the opiate of the effect of polarization clearly is going on yes no I'm trying to think about it I'm not sure so one question is about the budget here I take your point on asking this in terms of GDP and I would just have to do
um a level of looking into that that I haven't done so I'm just not sure I can give you a good answer on that I think it's it's notable to say sort of abortion aside because there's clearly been a very strong level of polarization on the abortion issue let's call it here because I think what we're talking about
here is basically policy Divergence is what you're talking about I am not sure that I think the right way to measure what polarization does at any level is policy Divergence and here's why to a first approximation what I think polarization tends to do is make it harder to pass anything because most of the American political system both of
the state and the national level is built on requiring reasonably high levels of compromise to work and so if what you assume polarization does in its first Dimension is make it much harder to get compromise what you're going to do is simply reduce the ability to make very high levels of policy change at the
state level now so I think what you'd want to do here is you'd want to look at states that have had extended periods of unified governance right Trifecta governance and see whether they've diverged and if so how much um that would be an interesting thing and I just haven't done it but my guess is that for
Most states what you're seeing just like you're seeing at the national level is probably a little bit less getting done if anything because what polarization does again is make it harder to make anything happen and make it harder for anything to stick it's a common view that white women have much more cultural
influence today than they did 20 or 30 years ago is that possibly one reason why political polarization has gone up unmarried women tend to vote strongly toward the left and married women again white women tend to be more conservative that's a big split that you don't quite see the same split in the voting behavior of white
men I'm not sure that I would cut it quite that way I'm not sure it's wrong but it just if the question is only white women um no not only but one factor out of seven I don't know as the answer how well does Jonathan he's moral foundations theory explain polarization I so I like a lot of uh John's work he's mentioned in the book a couple times
he's actually a blubber on the book um which I'm grateful to him for I think the disagreement I have with moral foundations theory is that I learned a lot from John about motivated reasoning and about the ways in which human beings end up uh using their reasoning more as he puts it as a press secretary than a
kind of disinterested Searcher for truth and my concern with moral uh foundations Theory which I know has also been under some academic challenge although I don't actually feel super qualified to adjudicate that debate my concern with moral foundations theory is that it is pretty easy to imagine how people if
they're motivated by Elite cues or motivated by partisan interest or something else could argue their way into justifying a lot of different kinds of policy perspectives under different moral foundations and I do buy this part of it um to the extent you do have different moral foundations for people who are on different sides of the debate
I talk a lot about there's a very clear in the data increasing polarization by political psychology sort of resounding down to open versus closed versions of psychology right where you on open is to experience versus uh conscientiousness that is polarizing but because we are so good at arguing ourselves into the
position we need to take and because a lot of people's policy perspectives are actually reasonably weak I'm just not sure how much in a kind of abstract way that actually tells you about where people are going to end up and maybe a very simple way of putting it is given the stated views of both the Democrats
and Republicans on questions like harm and sacredness and so on um where John would put them in moral foundations or other people would put them just in terms of caring about government interference it seems very plausible that you could have had the two parties reverse their position ultimately on abortion right that you could have had
had a Republican party was much more pro-choice because it was worried about government interference in people's lives a Democratic party that had taken the other position for other reasons the fact that we didn't always makes me wonder how much of uh positions are actually being explained by people's
underlying psychologies versus that their underlying psychologies end up helping them explain how they're going to argue for the positions they've taken for other demographic and historical reasons let's say we put aside the GDP metric and move to an influence in the world metric and let's just say I suppose like
85% of the import of what the US government does is foreign policy or some pretty high percentage right this is America we have a lot of impact on the world and if I look at foreign policy things to me seem less polarized now I get on any moment oh we talk about Russia Putin Ukraine people go crazy being polarized but they almost don't
even know what the places are they're talking about and it can fade in an instant and when you ask what does each party actually want to do when it's in charge I'm not sure I could even describe the differences and the parties seem in a way incoherent on foreign policy both of them to me do you think
that's a fair characterization that in foreign policy putting aside Moment by moment that polarization has gone down I I don't know it's gone down but I agree that it is incoherent and I'm not sure it's gone up I don't think in general we are super polarized on foreign policy but again I'm not sure it's gone down so
for instance something I note in the book is that opposition to the Vietnam War when opposition to Vietnam War was at its height was actually pretty evenly distributed between the Democratic and Republican parties during that period when he was running as uh Ford's vice president Bob Dole famously said the
Democratic party is a party of war and people were very upset about that but but there was a reason you said it right a lot of the wars have been launched by democrats and so while I agree with you that I don't think foreign policy is highly polarized in the way that some other things are um I'm not sure it was more polarized in the past as you
probably know our mutual friend Josh Barrow once wrote a piece saying Rhode Island was the least polarized state is that something they should be proud of is it a problem how do you view Rhode Island within the framework of your book that's a good I I did not have somehow the the big Rhode Island chapter got
cut um this actually I think is an important point I do not think that abstractly polarization is a problem and I think it's really important to say this and be clear about it because particularly in Washington and in a lot of contemporary political discourse polarization or being polarized operates as a kind of epithe to be polarized is
bad polarized um operates as a synonym for extreme which it very much is not and one of the arguments I make in the book is that a the alternative to polarization is often suppression of disagreement so what you tend to get in um multi-party or um even more to the point two-party political systems is it
when disagreements are located within a political party they are handled by an effort to either suppress a disagreement or to find compromise on the disagreement when they are located between the political parties they tend to lead escalation as a party sharpened the differences between them in an effort to beat the other party to show
who they are to differentiate Etc and so a lot of what was depolarized in the mid 20th century um had to do with the Democratic party being the home of a racist Southern Dix crat uh block which ended up controlling a lot of the democratic parties's outcomes and approaches and as part of that the Republican Party having this sort of
liberal Northern and to some degree even Western Dimension and so that was built on an agreement that American politics was not going to do anything about the southern white supremacist hierarchy and like that was bad that was not a good thing we had a a more depolarized and you can argue in certain ways what
looked like a more functional politics but is built on blood and so when things are polarized on the one hand they often don't work that well in our political system due to the requirement for consensus but you often are getting arguments and debates you wouldn't have otherwise immigration here's a good
example immigration is something that has traditionally split the parties internally um trade being another one and both parties for their own reasons have suppressed that internal debate and so Donald Trump who for his own reasons due to the kind of media coverage he could attract due the amount of money he
had due to his own personal celebrity he came in on something where people there was a large number of Americans who felt unrepresented by the two political parties on immigration and trade and he was able to break through the suppression on that and he was able to polarize around those two issues which particularly immigration is a very very
powerful Locust of polarization not just in our country but in all of Western Europe and Canada and so on and so polarization is not in and of itself bad political systems can work well or poorly with it happening I have a little bit of familiarity with the Rhode Island political system and it seems like quite
a working class state right I do not know its demographics well enough to say not many billionaires it's very small but it's very small it does have some big it does have some important universities in it so I actually don't know if it's a workingclass state I just don't want to say something wrong on
what issue are you most polarized and does it fit your own Theory I'm Pro I mean if you dig in I'm polarized on a lot of issues I guess probably the issue I'm most polarized on at this point is animal rights issues where it probably doesn't fit my theory in the sense that it operates a little bit outside um sort of normal political
divisions but I am emotionally and intellectually very very polarized on healthc Care on immigration um particularly those two I feel very strongly about um I'm the son of an immigrant I grew up in Southern California I grew up in Irvine where you taught for a while um it's a very uh immigrant heavy Community I feel both on
the like the empirical evidence of what it does for growth and what kind of communities it builds and on the um big picture sort of emotional questions very very deeply pro-immigration um and so that's a place where I'm probably a lot more polarized than most people are and you're written a lot on Healthcare and
been influential on Healthcare right so taking n equals one Ezra Klein uh for n equals one biography really matters for polarization for you I would say oh interesting um now do you think for me it would explain healthare and immigra it wouldn't explain healthare you've done so much on healthare but
it's not very related to my own biography well not as early as being the son of an immigrant but in your earlier years you made your name writing on Healthcare and had a big impact on Obamacare oh so that's interesting so people oose that they're opposing your work oh maybe I don't understand the question are you asking what I am
polarizing on or what I am personally polarized about is this a question about my views or about question about your views where you react most negatively to people disagree with you so I don't think actually Healthcare is probably not a good example because I'm so deep in that issue and I've spent so long covering it
that I'm pretty used to the disagreements there I think that it is let me think about this it's a good question I I need to reflect on for a minute I I think certainly immigration if I feel that people are dehumanizing immigrants or speaking about people who risk everything to come here as if they're somehow just criminals who
should be dismissed I have a very very negative reaction to that I've mentioned animal rights issues I have a very like very strong emotional reaction to the way people talk about those issues and and think about them and act on them and then around a bunch of the economic issues one thing that has been
interesting to me more recently is that as economics has become more polarized I have become I think that debate has become more polarized and I have found myself in a slightly weird position in it where I think I still operate in a pretty I'm a pretty big fan of markets as a policy mechanism but I've become a
lot more convinced by the arguments against neoliberal as a form of not policy agenda but as a kind of ideological water we swim in that we sort of don't notice how often we talk about those so I think I'm probably becoming personally a little more polarized on that and a little bit and quite a bit more sympathetic to the much
more polarized critique of just the way we approach issues of how to wait who deserves what now many conservatives and I don't mean trumpian conservatives but sort of actual literal conservatives Michael oaka some phases of Andrew Sullivan some phases of Hayek uh they will claim they are epistemically more
moderate than are those on the left or progressives uh but that's a contentious claim I'm not saying do you agree with the views of those conservatives but do you agree with their self-description that they're epistemically more moderate because they don't want these big quick radical changes it would depend who
we're talking about and when we're talk in theory that I think is an epistemically somewhat more moderate claim I just find that a lot of people who claim to hold that temperament don't actually hold it in um practice and so should we aspire to be more like those people we they're a Vanishing breed right we could make if they were ever
that real in the beginning right there's a few I've known a yes gra of stus is that your next book so I've been thinking about this a lot recently and I've been thinking about it in the sense of understanding temperament as a separate axis in politics from idology and this being something that is particularly hard for
us to keep an eye on because we use the same words to describe different things so we use the word conservative to describe both an ideology in terms of lower taxes smaller government Etc and this sort of conservative temperament that you're discussing this Michael Oak shot some faces of Andrew Sullivan like let's just move slowly here like let's
think about what we've built and like let's be careful about what we're tearing down and we are often talking about people have a conservative ideology but not a conservative temperament in a confusing way so Paul Ryan I would say somebody within many ways what we'd understand as a conservative ideology but if anything he
has a very Progressive temperament he wants to make big changes reconstruct the budget go back to a whole like go in a whole different direction Medicare is working fine let's change it entirely so he's somebody who I think you would understand is like conservative in ideology um Progressive of anything in
temperament someone like Joe Biden is almost the reverse I think he's relatively like he's between moderate and Progressive in his ideology I think he's somewhat conservative in temperament um and then there are people who don't have much ideology but are almost reactionary in temperament where I would put say Donald Trump Bernie
Sanders I think is confusing on this too I think he's I mean he's obviously relatively socialist or at least Democratic Socialist in ideology he is not that revolutionary in temperament I mean I've covered him as a legislator for a very long time he's not one of the people who's always trying to blow up
the chamber there are people like that he's not calling General strikes he's not using every parliamentary maneuver he can to stop anything he doesn't like and so I think that it is worthwhile to think very hard about the temperament people bring to politics I think that the number of people who end up having
strong ideologies and hu to a genuinely concer ative temperament is quite small if you could engineer your own political temperament would you change it from how it is mostly we're stuck with what we've got I say but if you could press the button more passionate less passionate something else I think I like my I think
I like my political temperament I think probably for the era of politics we're moving into and for my job it would almost be better to be of a more conflict oriented temperament than I am that I think that we are moving into something that at least in the short term is rewarding or is going to reward those who really like getting in fights
all the the time and I don't like that I'm more consensus oriented I like sort of hearing people out and you know I I I think I probably have a little bit more of a moderate temperament in that way but I wouldn't really change that about myself I think it's a shame that so much of politics happens on Twitter now but
you know that's the way it is I wouldn't change me to operate to that I'm fascinated by something called conquests Second Law which actually comes from a guy named O Sullivan but it's known as Conquest Second Law and it says something like those institutions that are not explicit itely right-wing will become more leftwing over time and you
see this with Ford Foundation Rockefeller Foundation you see it with universities a lot of conservatives believe very strongly in Conquest Second Law and they see it more and more they view it as a kind of curse and I think they would claim it polarizes them like my goodness we've got to do something or
we're going to lose is that one of the seven or X number of factors behind polarization the perception that my side is losing left or right on what dimension culturally most of all I think that because I think that's actually an important distinction here I think it really is the case that a lot of big
institutions over time are moving um left culturally in part because I think the demographics tend to move left culturally and institutions are both very worried about um young audiences and tend to be very captured by Young employees but we're aging though so I know um we we are definitely we are definitely aging but society as a whole
is aging sure but I I still think that part is true that I mean it's aging but it keeps replacing itself we've not like we've not run out of people here but at its age he would think the younger erors would be more leftwing whereas now we have an older America and there's a claim it could be a false claim that
institutions are becoming I see it more as a kind of historical not Arc in the sense of it being deterministic but I don't think it I don't think it would be the case that the way you would rate this is that if a society had an average age of 32 it would be more leftwing than a society with an average age of 46 I
think things like economic growth and average wealth and so forth have a very big impact here but the thing I wanted to to say on this cuz I've been thinking about it since we were chatting about it the other day is it seems to me that we rate how left or right an institution is by where it is on some of these cultural
questions like how do you feel about gay marriage I don't almost call it like a Cosmopolitan divide like how Cosmopolitan are you or in your fundamental orientation but that a lot of these institutions that people think of as Left Right are also growing at the same time as they get older more conservative on other dimensions so they
become more conservative on how things work there's tends to be with Bernie Sanders being an interesting examp counter example to this a although given how he feels about the filibuster and so on maybe not actually there tends to be a conservatism that emerges on how things get done in complicated systems
be they legislatures or bureaucracies that happen after people been in those systems a very long time they begin to be very used to how the thing works and it's hard for them to imagine it working another way my colleague mat glacy has sometimes makes a point that everybody calls Hollywood very leftwing but if you
actually think about Hollywood's um veneration of soldiers police you know other kinds of the government authority figures there are dimensions where it's actually quite right-wing economics you know I'm more used to this one from being in newsrooms but newsrooms don't in my experience they are leftwing in
the sense of some of their Cosmopolitan orientations but they have a sort of Morning Joe approach on economics it tend to be quite uh biased towards deficit reduction towards a like committee for responsible federal budget view of the world I think there is something very interesting and important I actually try to talk about it in the
book in the way we actually key left right increasingly to this cultural Dimension but it is very far from the only Dimension operating and I think that one of the destabilizing tensions of American politics right now is that the right feels like they are losing on culture which is what they care about
most and the left feels like it is losing on economics which is what it cares about most and so everybody simultaneously both in this and some other respects feels like they are losing power even as the other side sees them endlessly winning power and that feeling of nobody being quite sure who is winning and who is losing is quite
disorienting it's time for a round of overrated versus is underrated are you game I'm game Manhattan let's do it oh overrated why cuz it's not a livable City like it's just I I what's the main problem Subway garbage pickup yeah some of that um it's hard to ever get natural light in there I have I have spent a lot
of time in Manhattan over the years and I I want to admit that I think some of my dislike of New York City is based on the fact that I end up being in Midtown a lot just because I'm there for work but I have just never felt a connection to Manhattan I don't like the subway I I don't like the level of density I just
it just doesn't work for me I wish I had a I wish I had a better and more thought through answer but I think in some ways my feelings towards Manhattan have always been so deeply visceral that I've never had to create I'm very polarizing on this that I've never had to create another um argument for it I think the
other way by the way and this gets to Identity polarization as somebody who's from outside of Los Angeles I have always had a kind of competitive and annoyed reaction to Manhattan where like I feel like Los Angeles is one of the Great American cities it drives our culture drives you know California in general drives so much of both our
culture and our economy but the endless feeling of superiority that Manhattan has um also like look how much it end ends up controlling politics we've had no fewer than three former New York Mayors involved in this year's presidential campaign and a number of southern district prosecutors um drives
me crazy and then when I lived in DC for a long time people DC has a lot of people who grew up in New York and they're just endlessly on DC and I like DC so I have a somewhat reflexive dislike of Manhattan that is built in response to people from Manhattan always talking about how great Manhattan is visiting Pakistan overrated
or underrated oh it's underrated why it's just an amazing fascinating place I mean as as this question implies I was there recently and I had a distinct experience there I was there for a friend's wedding um and so I got to see a part of it that I would not in any way call Representative but I mean if nothing else um I was in laor for a lot
of it and the level of air pollution there recognizing what people are living through in a daily way is I think a very sobering moment you know everything we know sorry this is probably not where you were trying to go with this question but everything we know about air pollution as our science gets better on
this is just year after year we do more science on it and year after year what we find is it is worse for you in more ways at smaller levels parate matter than people thought air pollution is a much bigger problem than we give credit to both in American and in global politics and being there and recognizing
like what children are growing up in there is hor is genuinely horrifying um and then beyond that I think just Pakistan is a very interesting political system you've recommended this book on your on your um blog but I'll recommend it too ANL lens um Pakistan a hard country is just a really wonderful book
and then there's a book of short stories called in other rooms other Wonders that I just think is a really beautiful evocation how do I say that EV evocation of what is like to live in a functionally feudal society so the kind of mixture of sort of advanced parts of Pakistan and more developing parts of
Pakistan is interesting and disorienting but I want to say that I spent my time in lore there I you know it's a very different country outside of those areas so I would love to do more traveling there it's a it's just an amazing place to be writing a book I don't mean publishing a book that's clearly a wondrous thing right but writing a book
oh I suspect publishing a book is going to be the overrated part okay how about writing a book I don't know how to rate whether or not writing a book is overrated or underrated because I don't exactly know how people rate it it was underrated for me um I signed on to do a book with Simon and chuster probably six
years ago now I put it down to launchbox um the book I ended up writing is very different than the book I intended to write it was one of the most generative intellectual experiences I've ever had it forced me I mean this book is very much a it is me kind of pulling the Deep model and me building the Deep model I
have of how American politics works and functions and one of the humbling things about that is recognizing how much in my model that I thought was there actually wasn't or it was working off of intuition but it wasn't strong enough or it wasn't built on good evidence there like a a really sobering thing for me
just in doing this book was I to do a chapter on asymmetric polarization because that's a big part of this um if you're talking about polarization you have to talk about why the Republican party has become a very different institution from the Democratic party and it was really to my surprise to find that for all that political science had
a strong view that there was asymmetric polarization going on they did not have a good story for why it was happening the kind of causal mechanism was extremely underdeveloped and I had to go through a lot of different drafts and a lot of recing and a lot of reading on that chapter to come up with something
that I found convincing but asymmetric polarization was a very big part of my story of American politics and recognizing how under theorized it was in my head was striking so I think that writing a book it forces you to pull forward things that you might assume are pretty settled because you know some level of Intuition or value or just
hearing other people talk about it has made you think it is more sure than it is and then when you actually have to put it in a coherent framework you find out that there's a lot of blank space in there telecommuting how far can we extend the principle I am struck that so Tel Community is clearly overrated um I
am struck by what a failure it is of Silicon Valley and what goes wrong with it that I am not as sure I understand um why there's been such a why the tech revolution has concentrated wealth and and location so much is I think one of the I don't exactly want to call it underexplored because definitely some
people have explored it and it's well talked about but I've not seen a very convincing explan for it and it is a I think an increasingly large problem as more and more wealth uh and income concentrate in a smaller number of places but why doesn't it just work you pay people by performance right set them loose is it that they feed the dog all
day weakness of will something else I am not sure it doesn't just work I mean this is one of the things I wonder about I think that it may fail more at the level of the people managing the organization who maybe don't feel like it's working or want to be able to exert more control than whether or not it's
not working look my experience is in media um my organization has a lot of people working in different places we have offices in New York in Austin and DC and California in a number of other places um we have a lot of people who just work from home in in different areas of the country and a lot of those
people are really really excellent performers um now that is individual right some people work well in that context some don't I'm now basically telecommuting I'm in the SF office for Vox but my team is primarily in DC um with with a number of them in New York and I think that my work has remained actually quite you know hopefully quite
good in a lot in most ways although there are certainly things I'm worse at than I was before I think that I think that the two things that are hard about it is one it is pretty difficult to run an organization that is like 7030 I think that running an organization that is entirely telecommuting is probably I don't want
to call it easy but it's it's a lot easier than running an organization where most people are in one place and then some significant but not near majority percentages of them are not because what you end up having then is like dual processes where a lot of things are built for everybody being around each other and then the people
who are not around everyone else are at somewhat of a disadvantage so I think that's one issue that often times what people want to do is not create a telecommuting equilibrium but they want to create a 7030 equilibrium and that one doesn't work that well and it certainly doesn't work that well if you're ambitious and want to advance
within the company particularly within its bureaucratic hierarchy but then the other piece of it that I think is is very real is that you just lose a lot of information even in the very best telecommuting software and this isn't even just a question of it being buggy it's a question of I'm sure do you ever
do this podcast remote never we refuse why is that there's something about picking up the vibes from a person from their body language from how they look at you from the dynamic in the room which is hard to pin down that's important and I feel I'm better live and probably they are too so I do my podcast
probably 7030 remote something like that I most of the time I'm remote with somebody but I try to have people in when I can I don't think that to the audience the podcasts that are happening where somebody isn't in the room or on average worse but there's absolutely no doubt that I feel worse while doing them
and part of that is that um I find it much harder to concentrate if you don't believe meetings have a very high marginal product in general the fact that maybe you're having trouble concentrating on them when you're far away is maybe not a huge problem but in terms of how it feels to be in a meeting on Telecom meting software is how it
feels to be in a meeting in person it's a 100 times different and so I think that this may not be a marginal economic product question so much as it may be the preferences people ultimately feel question there's just a preference for being in person where Human animals a lot is lost maybe what is lost is not
that important but in terms of how it feels on the other side of it it matters quite a bit working for McKenzie overrated or underrated I think it's overrated and always has been I think that it there's a the level of backlash right now is pretty high so it is possible that if you are in like the top
echelons of that bash of that backlash it's become I don't exactly want to call it underrated but the level of um vitriol is going up but I was writing on this years ago before the sort of current Pete budajudge backlash was in in in gear and what seems to me to be happening there and this was what I found when I was reporting with kids on
college campuses about it is that basically McKenzie has arbitraged as have some Wall Street firms other consulting firms the ways in which a lot of particularly liberal arts Majors feel like they're graduating college without usable skills and I don't think it number one is that true that they're graduating college without usable skills
but Mackenzie has the money to have very very sophisticated recruiting infrastructures that are hiring people at good salaries very early in the senior year and so if you're somebody who is there you're feeling anxious about what's going to come next McKenzie swoops in it's like fall you get a great
job that you know your parents are going to be happy with good no I think it's bad I think is it bad well you're a big fan on people being weird right and I think people going out and actually finding jobs that fit them well and are not just a delaying of the question of how do you find a job that fits you
where you're making a kind of distinct contribution but maybe these people aren't weird we've got to put them somewhere and that's McKenzie I don't I don't think that ISD I think that the Arbitrage here is a bad one I think people need to sit with their anxiety and find a better job if you are able to get hired by Mackenzie you are able to
get hired somewhere else I don't think I think to a first approximation there are zero people who it's like you're a Yale English Lit grad um but you have a great like you you know you won your thesis Prize or whatever and you don't really know what you're going to do and MacKenzie's willing to make you a great
offer if you waited you would get another job you're a great communicator you're a smart person don't go to Mackenzie the Noah banach Netflix movie Marriage story oh I loved it um I don't I don't know that I can say that it's underrated because I think it's probably the most highly rated movie of the year
but why did I love it because in a way that I think only I actually wrote this about that it it felt more like a great novel than a great film and that might say something about where film has gone but it felt like it was an access to the interiority of something that was quite profound and that people really go through and I'll
just say somebody who's a a new father my son is 10 months old having to live in that idea of what it would be like to be divorcing and feeling your kid falling further away from you I felt I could feel that Agony and such an intense way that my emotional reaction to that movie was probably much more
specific than I don't want to say than it was for other people but then it would have been at another time in my own life and so the way in which that movie um spoke to me emotionally was much was very very intense has being a parent made you more conservative in the small CA literal sense no I think it's actually made me a lot more liberal why
two things so one which I think is maybe a little less obvious to people is it made me more more pro-choice which I wasn't actually expecting so we had uh dangerous pregnancy my wife had um both very very intense um Health reactions to the pregnancy including some that were just unbelievably horribly painful for
the whole time for almost whole time what's called 6 months of it and then some that were life-threatening towards the end um both for her and for her child and the idea that you would force anyone to go through that is now to me so barbaric like having seen like that's just it's not somebody else's right like
almost whatever you think about it that the idea that you would demand that of somebody is just too much for me and then the other thing is that I adore my son to the ends of the Earth there's nothing I can say that is as important to me as you know how I feel about him and also there you know when you're going through pregnancy you realize that
in that first 6 12 10 even 20 weeks miscarriages are very common things go wrong you're not I don't I don't believe you're dealing with a person till relatively later in that game and so the combination of those two experiences seeing the way in which it's really like it's a developing embryo um but then
also you're dealing with a full human being who you're putting through something both medically dangerous and very very very emotionally and physically difficult it just made me a lot more um pro-choice and the other piece of it is it's made me I mean this is a way in which it just I think affirms something in me
but it's made me much more egalitarian in my politics I think that's actually the wrong way to say it I don't think it's changed him except it's affirmed them and I don't mean to say that ah being a parent has confirmed everything I thought about life but when I see what I am willing to do for my son the amount
of time I'm willing to give him the environment I'm going to try to create for him the fact that both of his parents have say flexible schedules so we can be there for him take him to the pediatrician if he needs it you know like pick him up from something if he needs to be picked up make sure he's got
great child care you know on and on and on and on that we have like family networks that will help friend networks that will help our transportation is not bad so we're able to get to him and get him where he needs to go the idea that this is in any way a fair race is so ridiculous when you just look at that
around you when you just see what people what is happening to people from the moment they come out of the womb and even before that that you know the amount of redistribution we do on the back end just seems ridiculously small to me some politics questions let's say that we managed to settle Mars what country system of government would be
best for Mars at least in the early days or it doesn't have to be a country it could be a corporate chart or how how should we do it that's such an interesting question I mean I think it would depend for me on the question of how we settled Mars I mean are you saying that we have commercially everyone's a volunteer nothing too weird
but I mean what what level are we talking about because I think different 10,000 people oh I think you want to deal with something um I almost wouldn't think about that as a form of government in the sense that America or even New Zealand has a form of government with 10,000 people I think you are dealing
with something there a 10,000 people that is a lot more like how a corporation is governed you'd want it to be Democratic so maybe it's more like how a co-op is governed why Democratic I mean cruise ships can have thousands of people maybe not 10,000 and those are run in a dictatorial but somewhat Market friendly sort of because if you had
because I think that even if it's going to be a little bit less efficient at some level assuming you had a wise benevolent dictator there if you have high levels of unrest or dissension among 10,000 people living on Mars with somewhat difficult Supply chains Etc the cost of that could be quite catastrophic
uh you really don't want to be living in the aftermath of the revolt on Mars the recent election in the United Kingdom there are clearly many particular reasons why labor did so badly but many of those are endogenous to the broader situation what's the ultimate reason why labor did badly and Social Democratic
parties in most of Continental Europe are in Retreat often hovering at 20 22% not obviously making big comebacks what's your theory so I have a couple theories so one I think that it just you just have to it is just one of the lessons of the period that the theory that having a more pure form of Social Democratic Politics as an answer to
right-wing nationalistic populism that that is going to work that the sort of right-wing populism is an answer to people's economic concerns that is sort of countering the neoliberalism that is making them worse that's wrong right is just flatly wrong I think we can say that at this point it may be good to
have a Social Democratic set of policies but it does not somehow inoculate you from the power of that right-wing populism I remember when Corbin was being uh hailed as showing a politics that could truly work um you know that this is what Americans had to do too and I think that you have to take that with almost as much force in the other
direction he's in some ways maybe a uniquely bad politician the fact that he didn't have a clear position on brexit was quite bad but there's a very deep potency to the form of politics that is being played with around brexit also in America also in a bunch of other places I think needs to be taken seriously I
will say that Finton UL just wrote a book called the politics of pain that I thought was really remarkably sharp on this um and as an analysis of the British psyche was sort of one of the most convincing things I've read sort of making an argument going way back in in sort of Britain's history that there's a
deep unresolved set of psychic questions around Britain won World War II and then somehow feels like it lost the piece that it it deserved to sort of if not own Europe then be understood as a savior of Europe in an ongoing way and instead here you have the European Union emerge in many ways European Union is
dominated by Germany the sort of aggressor in World War II um there's some interesting stuff about colonialism in the in the British psyche he does a lot of very deep analysis of of popular British television and literature I think shows this an interesting way I recognize that gets at some endogenous dimensions of the brexit question but I
think it's a it's a recommendation worth following for readers the other thing that I will say is that in terms of things that I think are broad based and this gets to sort of Martin G Revolt of the um public kind of thesis is that Boris Johnson clearly shares quite a bit as does brexit with Donald Trump um a
lot of the national populist politicians seem to me to share certain Dimensions with each other and one of the core things they share is one that I think we're in an age technologically and for other reasons where extremely strong outrageous conflictual forms of politics are at least somewhat advantage
certainly on the right they're very good at practically dominating agendas so I think that the media has not in any way effectively adapted to sort of the social media age and so the way in which we've been overturned is that among other things we think that our primary power as an institution is that we can
cover things positively or negatively that the thing we're covering doesn't so much matter so much as how we are covering it you know so we're covering somebody's lies right Boris Johnson say lies a lot so we're factchecking that all over and like well that's really going to show them and instead what we're actually doing is amplifying the
lie and so what a lot of these players have understood is it um to actually use something that um Mike cernovich the sort of right-wing Civic nationalist I guess uh uh guy says conflict is attention and attention is influence and so highly conflictual politicians seem to me to be advantaged politicians who
lie a lot they're able to use that level of very Brazen lying as a way to hijack the media narrative because a media will cover somebody who has said something incredibly untrue over someone who said something kind of Bolly true um you could think about this in America as a sort of difficulty for an AB kachar going up against like a Donald Trump
right a politician like Amy kachar is very popular she highly overperforms in Minnesota she um is a very effective politician in the Senate but if you go back a couple years she wasn't getting very much coverage whereas like the people who are more provocators were and so that way in which the coverage
dimensions are shifting away from like what does a consensus of party Elites tell you about who to pay attention to versus who goes most viral on social media that has really changed who is succeeding in politics and the kind of people willing to play that game tend to be either highly ideological or highly conflictual why isn't California a
better run State than it is I think it's actually a pretty pretty deep question and this is a question I'd like to have a better answer to and hope over the next year now that my book is done to find a better answer to but I will say in a big level that I think the failures of governance in California are much
more profound failures for the left and for progressivism than people give them credit for the fact that California cannot figure out how to make it affordable to live in its major cities or usable to get around as a state not just sort of inside the cities where transportation in LA and San Francisco really bad but the failure of High-Speed
Rail in California is such a cosmic embarrassment for the left that I think it really needs to be taken a bit more seriously is something that needs to be the left needs to figure out how to change right if they can't build highspeed rail with the billions and billions and billions of dollars the are
marked for that project why should people um trust them on the green new deal etc and it's not like it's going to be easier outside of California California had very big Democratic majorities so the failes of government in California I mean I can tell you about them at some levels right you have very powerful nimbis politics there Prop
13 has certainly made taxation hard California for a very long time had extremely sharp um strictures through the proposition process and through some other constitutional changes on what you could do even in the legislature so not only is a lot of the money already earmarked through propositions but you
had for a long time and I might get these numbers a little bit wrong from memory but I think you needed a two3 vote to raise taxes in the legislature I think you needed something similar to do budgets I haven't looked at these rules for a little while and I think at least they've been partially though not in any
way fully repealed but California actually had a kind of super filibuster operating that made it much harder to govern um the way uh Power is distributed between the governor sort of the state level and the local level is a little bit unusual in California so there are a bunch of reasons but I think that those reasons do not fully explain
the level of the failure here and then I think there might be some interesting things in actual liberal psychology that are operating so I think that if to a little bit go back to sort of a John height moral foundations theory of Californians it is true that California is quite liberal and people when I say
California liberal something is going to come to mind for people there's a certain stereotype there that is maybe a little bit different than a New York liberal maybe a little bit different than what you would imagine say a um a Colorado liberal even to be in but that kind of preservationist a little bit
skeptical for all that Silicon Valley has sort of taken over a lot of the the economy a little bit skeptical of certain kinds of progress I think those are pretty strong undercurrents in California that oriented against certain kinds of change um oriented towards protecting people who are already there and the status quo is somehow kind of
more natural um oriented against a lot of important housing and building structural reforms that we need to do and so you know you may be seeing things that are not just at the legislative social political Dynamics level but also a little bit in the psychology of liberalism that creates real real problems for the progressive agenda at
large I have a few questions about media all of them super simple in the age of the internet not to mention Boris Johnson what's the future of publicly funded broadcasting PBS BBC are they still relevant what will they do for us should we be worried I I mean worry depends on whether you think they're
overrated or underrated um do they even matter I think they matter a lot less than they used to look in America that's been true for a very long time PBS was never as powerful as BBC is and PBS has been just shrinking an influence as every single individual channel has been in America forever right you've read the
media chapter of my book and so you know that a lot of what I'm talking about there is the effect of incredibly intense forms of competition on the broader media sphere and so PBS NPR I mean all public media is undergoing some of the same Dynamics as everybody else which is they are just in a war for
attention and in some ways it might be good for them and their trust in the long run they're also a little bit less able to fight that War because they need to hold their political sponsors in place and so you can't become quite as outrageous on PBS as you I think say the New York Times or the Washington Post
have made more moves to be say viral than PBS has and I'm not saying that's a wrong thing for PBS to do um I like PBS a lot I admire what they do greatly but I think a problem for PBS is that they're widely admired and that sometimes they're like not as widely shared long term it's probably good for their trust short term that's probably
quite bad for their influence in England I'm a little less sure of what the future of the BBC is I know Boris Johnson is not a fan um and so I could imagine it weakening in terms of its power and its influence I also know at the same time that the way that Johnson was covered on the BBC has created incredible levels of anger on the UK
left which is probably weakening the BBC's hold on that constituency as well so I suspect that the BBC is um both subject to the same competitive Dynamics as you're seeing here although it starts from a place of more kind of power and centralization and funding um than PBS does here than NPR does here and then
secondarily is in a more intense form of its political Vis than those players are here in part because it's more important and so there's more margin for different political players in attacking or weakening it they'll never cover brexit well perhaps right I think that's probably right now Facebook has a plan
as you know to set up a kind of supreme court it's called that would issue judgments on what should be allowed on Facebook or not what do you think of this idea so I think it's interesting I think Zuckerberg actually if I believe floated the idea the first time on a I did with him so I'll I'll take a little
plug there but I don't think it's going to solve the underlying problem um in part because I don't think that is the underlying problem I think that social media and the way we deal with it and this is true in a lot of places we end up focusing on one the easy cases rather than the hard cases like fake news as
opposed to real news everybody agrees that fake news is bad and you shouldn't have it real news can also be very bad in terms of what it emphasizes or the quality of the work and so on but the question of how to handle it is much much harder and it's not going to be something that a Facebook Supreme Court handles I think the underlying and very
deep problem with Facebook with Twitter with a bunch of them is building our the future of our communication Commons a top of business model that is about engagement mediated through the intensity of the viewers or audience's emotional reaction I don't think that's something the Facebook Supreme Court can
solve and I also don't think it is a good thing for the future but nobody really seems to want to fight it the questions about privacy I think they're important the questions about fake news are important the questions all the questions people bring up in these cases are important but I think all of them are also less important than the
question of is the future of how we will communicate with each other of how politicians will communicate with the public of how basically all important communication will be structured and incentivized is it what gives you the strongest emotional countercharge and if so I think that we are just in for this period where um a lot of energy is going
to go towards the most outrageous and most defensive players because they both get the energy of the people they Inspire and the people who hate them and it's like the combination of the energy and counter energy that gives him so much control of the conversation Twitter also kicks people off its site and you
and I both know they're not going to get it exactly right would you rather live in a world where there were too many or too few people on Twitter oh I mean I've said this before and I think we would be better off if there was no Twitter sure but there is a TW so everyone off at the margin let me think about this for
moment I don't think it matters hugely is the answer so then why shut it down oh because I think that in terms of if we're just asking like should the edge cases be decided in um a little bit more towards censoriousness or a little bit more towards permissiveness I just don't think it hugely matters like I don't
thinked cases don't matter and they let you and I continue then it seems you should be I think you and I are worse on Twitter worse than what worse than we would be if we just weren't on it but we both benefit from being on Twitter I know I don't think all the things you benefit from are great look I have a lot
of Twitter followers so I'm speaking against an interest here like in some ways with Twitter I have a I have an early mover Advantage I think that I have watched this and look like I'm very influenced by my world being politics and the media so that's more what I'm talking about than anything else I think
virtually every politician and media figure who goes on Twitter is a worse version of themselves on it than off of it and that we are in a collective action PR where it is individually rational for everybody to be on it and it is collectively bad for all these institutions to be on it among other things again in a slightly Martin G way
I think that one of the things Twitter is doing particularly for the media is making extremely clear some of our um as somebody who's not a big fan of object of like quote unquote objective media I think it's a even a bad version of this it's making extremely clear our biases the ways in which we're clickish the
ways in which we are um reactive I think for politicians it incentivizes a lot of their worst behavior again it is good for individuals and that's one reason that like I still am on it but I feel like there are things in society that I think are not good for society but that in order for me to play my role in society I still have to participate in
and that's one of them you're now out in the Bay Area how has living amongst you know the so-called world of tech changed your non-political views it's a good question I don't feel I live too much in the world of tech because over the last year I've mostly just become a parent and haven't gone out that much so my
belief that I was going to spend end with the election and impeachment and everything I've not dug into some of the tech questions I'd like to dig into as much as I would like to it is definitely been a it has definitely changed some of my views on California governance we were talking about that earlier and just
watching it up close I've gone to planning meetings and stuff and and that's been an education in its own way um I think the the view it has changed uh more than any other is it is a really interesting intellectual culture to see up close and in a lot of ways for all that it gets lionized I actually think I prefer the
way DC thinks about problems I think the tech the tech conversations that I'm part of when you know you go to these dinners and so on it's interesting it's like an intellectual culture that is very venture capitalist in its approach so it's like here are 20 ideas they're all very interesting 19 of them are
probably quite wrong like not even a little wrong like very wrong but that last one might be great really important and if you can just figure out which one it is now that works really well when the question is money and it works less well when the question is you're trying to rebuild Society in the image of your
own ideas and so on the one hand I've heard you on Eric Weinstein's podcast recently and the the word you use for Eric was generative and I think that's actually a good word for what is prized out there there's a kind of generative thinking um like here's a bunch of ideas like and they're all like kind of cool
kind of interesting and they're all may very ungrounded in the bureaucratic or emotional or human or social realities of the thing they're talking about they're sort of very smart people puzzling about how a system works from the outside and so on the one hand that sometimes lets you cut away a lot of the BS and see what is going on but often
times it just makes you miss why the system works the way it does it makes you sort of Miss like the chesterton's fence dimensions of a system and so I have been struck by the way I a little bit like instinctually recoil from that way of thinking even as I um you know find a lot of what it comes up with
interesting and so I think that the thing it has probably changed the most is I have a little bit more appreciation even than I did before for the work that people do when they are actually doing the hard work to understand bureaucratic and human and social complexity because that is something that when you're
trying to build things that'll scale or build ideas that like really sound great when you say I'm at a party or something you tend to underrate now again I want to note that you really can go too far in the other direction and get trapped in the realities of how things exist now and so be unable to imagine how they
could exist in another dimension or another reality or in a future that you have built by creating Uber or whatever it might be but what is great as a way of thinking about ideas for new businesses or even great as a way of thinking about Investments is not always great as a way doing big picture political and social analysis the very
last question comes from a reader and I quote as a researcher with kids I want to know about the post kid EZ recline production function so the post kid as recline production function has been to feel really bad about how much I am under um under serving anything that I'm not currently working on so let me answer this two ways over the
last year I've just kind of been in a scramble um we had our son um I've been finishing this book I've also been working on box I had the impeachment podcast and so on the actual number of hours I work has become shorter um there just is no doubt that I cannot work weekends and nights in the same way I
did and to the degree I can I've had to do it on the book and it's this kind of endless thing of like doing the book for four hours then like when I would normally or in my past life rest I go on to child care for four hours and I do the book for four hours and I do it's not been good and I wouldn't recommend
it to anybody I think the thing that I have heard from other parents and it is proving to be true in my own life is that I'm I just have to pair down my number of projects there is just a ruthlessness to the way that you have to make choices between time which is ultimately quite Zero Sum and I'm starting to have to make those choices
so where before I sort of would get involved in an almost unlimited number of things now I'm having to say like ask myself truly the question can I sustain an involvement in this project if I get involved in it if I say yes to this am I really going to be able to handle at the back end knowing that I can't just
Accord in my time out and tell my partner I'm not going to see her for a couple days cuz I have to work sort of around the clock so that's probably healthy thing for me in the long run but you know there are there are genuine trade-offs here I have found it personally um good I've had trouble kind of turning down the part of myself that
always wants to do more even when I know it's not the best thing for me um and so the way in which now I emotionally am more in alignment with that part of myself that wants that knows it needs to do a little bit less like that feels good the degree to which I still have to work through the projects I have already
in the system has been really hard I'm a little bit um dreading the book tour I'm about to go on all of that just feels tough to me uh and so ask me a year and maybe things will be settled into a new equilibrium but currently I have like a lot of good ideas about how to do less and I've not quite been able to put them
into play yet the only other thing I would say on this is that boy does he teach you the value of sleep and I don't just mean in the sense of you know with a K you sleep less I I'm more mean in the sense of having spending a lot of time being being truly underr rested just really forces you to confront how
different you are when you are deeply underslept and that isn't just in terms of what you can get done I actually don't find what I can get done is the is the key um change there it is how I am with the people in my life it is how short I am with people it is how I react to adversity it is how I feel when I'm
doing things just I used to have a very sleep as a cousin of death approach to my life I really did not want to sleep and I resented the time I had to sleep and it has really cured of that particular emotional or psychological disease Ezra thank you very much again the book why we're polarized I'm very
happy to have read it twice by Ezra Klein and see you all next [Music] episode thanks for listening to conversations with Tyler you can subscribe to the podcast 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