Cancel Culture & Political Dysfunction with Ezra Klein [S2 Ep.24]

Summary

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Podcast Summary

Podcast: Conversations With Coleman
Host: Coleman Hughes
Guest: Ezra Klein
Episode: Cancel Culture & Political Dysfunction with Ezra Klein [S2 Ep.24]
Date: July 30, 2021

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Episode Overview

In this wide-ranging discussion, Coleman Hughes chats with journalist and New York Times columnist Ezra Klein about cancel culture, structural dysfunction in American politics, and personal background stories that shaped Klein's worldview. The conversation delves into Cancel Culture’s mechanics, the influence of social and technological factors on speech and politics, the limits of public policy in addressing complex social issues, and the adaptability required of new writers and thinkers today. Both speakers aim for nuance, regularly critiquing the oversimplification common in today’s discourse.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. Ezra Klein’s Educational Background & Attention Issues

[02:08 - 09:45]

• School as a Misfit Context:

  • Klein describes his poor GPA (2.2 in high school) as the product of an attention issue, where he was “hyper focused in some ways and I have a lot of trouble learning in others.” [03:05]
  • He didn’t realize his inability to focus was unusual:

    “I didn’t understand that not everyone was like this...If you are actually like that, I don’t think you realize, or I didn’t realize how weird it was how other people were not struggling in the same way to listen the way I was.” [04:05]

  • His strengths—in reading and synthesizing information—only emerged as adaptive later, in the right contexts.

• Impact on Politics and Policy View:

  • Klein’s direct experience with context-dependent success shaped his politics:

    “I am extremely viscerally emotionally acquainted with the fact that there are contexts you can put me in in which I am simply a failure… and then there are others where I look like a success.” [05:18]

  • He doesn’t advocate for optimizing schools for outliers like himself but recognizes systemic limitations.

• On ADHD and Adderall:

  • If he'd grown up today, Klein suspects he would have been medicated for ADHD, though his “hippie” mother might have resisted.
  • Both Hughes and Klein express shock at Adderall’s prevalence and intensity relative to other drugs, especially for children:

    “The fact that we give kids 25 or 30 milligrams of that stuff is wild to me. Totally wild.” – Klein [07:36]
    “This is pretty much as intense as Molly, as MDMA...just the intensity of this is absolutely insane.” – Hughes [09:45]

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2. Cancel Culture: Mechanisms & Misunderstandings

[12:28 - 33:18]

• Defining Cancel Culture as Economic/Technological, Not Ideological:

  • Klein argues that cancellations result from “an employee speech infraction [that] generates public attention that threatens an employer’s profits, influence or reputation,” making the issue primarily economic and technological, not just ideological. [13:33]
  • He notes the “valence” of cancellations (i.e., which side wields them most) changes with societal context.

• Why More Cancel Culture from the Left (Right Now):

  • Corporate America is staffed by more highly educated, urban, liberal demographics, aligning with “woke” concerns. Current cultural trends, like Black Lives Matter, amplify this dynamic.

    “Corporations are much more comfortable saying they want to be anti-racist than...that they want to be pro universal health care.” [18:58]

  • The trend is not static—future issues (e.g., China controversies) may shift the direction of cancellations.

Cancel Culture vs. Cancel Behavior

• Klein distinguishes between “cancel culture” (speech climate creating fear of shame/loss) and “cancel behavior” (individual actions that participate in algorithmically amplified mobbing).
  • He critiques both left and right for hypocrisy:

    “A lot of the people who are most ideologically anti cancel culture constantly engage in what I think of as canceled behavior.” [21:53]

  • The collective “pile-on” effect often has life-altering consequences, even as no individual feels responsible.

    “No individual person feels guilty like in a firing squad, but the victim feels like a life-changing event has just happened to them because it has.” — Hughes [25:01]

Modeling Generosity & Restraint is Hard

• Hughes confesses to contributing to a public shaming of Naomi Wolf, feeling guilty in retrospect. Both agree that participating in pile-ons is easier than resisting them, and that technological incentives (i.e., Twitter) reward the former.
  • Klein expands on how new media shapes personhood:

    “We become more like [the] mediums...I know people...become more like Twitter in their normal human interactions.” [31:27]

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3. Technology’s Outsize Influence on Culture and Speech

[33:18 - 38:58]

• Social Media as Shaper, Not Neutral Channel:
  • Both note that instant feedback, viral outrage, and the algorithmic elevation of the most provocative takes damage real-life discourse.
  • Example: Workplace platforms (like Basecamp) unwittingly transformed company cultures, making it impossible to “turn off” politics by fiat.

    “You seem to have so little self-reflection over what your technologies...are actually doing that you think you’ll just turn it back by saying no, stop it. I think we need a much more technological sense of...how [our] technologies…change, the way we act, treat each other, and think.” – Klein [35:00]

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4. Double Standards & Power in Speech Climates

[38:58 - 44:36]

• Policies with Racial Double Standards:

  • Hughes raises Reddit’s hate speech policy—explicitly protecting minorities, not majorities—and worries about “no line even in principle” for anti-white speech.
  • Klein sees kernels of truth, criticizes such policies as “not politically effective,” and says they can drive backlash, but he pushes back against the notion there are no practical limits on anti-white speech.

    “I don’t agree there is no, in principle, much less de facto lines that people can cross in terms of anti-white speech.” [39:26]

• Mismatched Power in Culture vs. Politics:

  • Klein observes that cultural power (e.g., in corporations, advertising) is youthful, urban, and diverse, often outpacing slower, more conservative political-legal power.

    “Cultural power leans ten or twenty years into the future…Our politics works the opposite way and is a time machine backwards fifteen, twenty years back in our demography.” [41:53]

  • This leads to widespread feelings of disempowerment on both left and right, fueling conflict and mutual victimhood.

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5. The Scarcity Mindset, Policy Paralysis, and Zero-Sum Thinking

[44:36 - 56:42]

• Victimhood and Zero-Sum Dynamics:
  • Both speakers note that different constituencies latch on to limited real-world examples (e.g., targeted COVID relief or UBI-style pilots favoring marginalized groups) to justify a narrative of loss or victimhood.
  • Klein argues that the scarcity (of legislative progress, redistribution, creative policymaking) fuels this dynamic. Rather than creative, positive-sum policies, the country is left in a stasis where “we’re just arguing about shit we saw on Twitter that is designed to make us mad.” [52:13]
  • He cites Cory Booker’s “baby bonds” as a race-conscious but color-blind policy that would address the root wealth gap without fostering white resentment.

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6. Political System Dysfunction & Solutions

[53:17 - 56:42]

• What Would Healthier Politics Look Like?:
  • Klein calls for a system where electoral majorities are allowed to govern—without the filibuster, gerrymandering, or other minority roadblocks:

    “You have parties...they fight it out in the election. Then you give one party a shot...and you decide if the other party should get the next shot. And we just can’t do that.” [54:31]

  • He decries endless cycles of symbolic conflict and policy stasis.

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7. Advice for Aspiring Writers and Policy Thinkers

[56:42 - 59:35]

• Advice for Aspiring Ezra Kleins:
  • Klein doesn’t believe much in advice (“The hard part is always execution”).
  • Suggests deep specialization as the route to impact—“just really knowing things cold.”

    “What you need to be able to show to an employer, to your audience...is that there is something you are going to be able to offer that others cannot offer. And that tends to come from some kind of specialization.” [57:55]

  • He notes the paradox: online platforms incentivize generalism, but the way to stand out is to know something deeply and uniquely.

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• On Adderall and neoliberalism:

  “[Adderall] manages to merge productivity and pleasure. It’s like the perfect drug for neoliberalism.” – Ezra Klein [12:11]

• On social media’s effect on human interaction:

  “I know people…I’ve watched them become more like Twitter in their normal human interactions because they spend all the time on the platform. It changes your brain.” – Klein [31:28]

• On cultural vs. political power:

  “Cultural power leans ten years or twenty years into the future…Our politics works the opposite way and is a time machine backwards fifteen, twenty years.” – Klein [41:53]

• On the scarcity mindset in policy:

  “We’re just not having the big policy conversations that we could use to make a lot of people better off simultaneously.” – Klein [52:38]

• On specialization for writers:

  “Very, very few people are a good enough writer to stand out on writing alone…The more that everybody is in a cacophonous conversation...the harder it is to stand out.” – Klein [58:16]

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Timestamps for Important Segments

• 02:08 – Klein on educational challenges and attention issues
• 07:36 – On over-prescription of Adderall to children
• 12:28 – Introduction to cancel culture and Klein’s economic/technological framing
• 18:58 – Why current cancel culture is more prevalent on the left
• 21:53 – Cancel culture vs. cancel behavior distinction
• 31:28 – Impact of social media and Marshall McLuhan’s theory on human behavior
• 39:26 – Discussion of double standards in hate speech and application of power
• 41:53 – Mismatch of political vs. cultural power
• 48:10 – Zero-sum mindset and policy scarcity
• 52:13 – Lack of positive-sum policy progress and the impact of Twitter
• 54:31 – Klein’s vision for political system reform
• 57:55 – Advice for the next generation of policy writers

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The conversation provides a rich, nuanced, and reflective exploration of today’s intersection of technology, culture, and political dysfunction, offering grounded insights and practical takeaways for anyone interested in contemporary debates on speech, power, and policy.

Transcript

[A]

SA.

[B]

Welcome to another episode of Conversations with Coleman. If you're hearing this, then you're on the public feed, which means you'll get episodes a week after they come out and you'll hear advertisements. You can gain access to the subscriber feed by going to ColemanHughes.org and becoming a supporter. This means you'll have access to episodes a week early, you'll never hear ads, and you'll get access to bonus Q and A episodes. You can also support me by liking and subscribing on YouTube and sharing the show with friends and family. As always, thank you so much for your support. Welcome to another episode of Conversations with Coleman. My guest today, who probably needs no introduction, is Ezra Klein. Ezra Klein is a journalist and political writer. He co founded Vox before leaving for the New York Times, where he's now a columnist and he also hosts the podcast the Ezra Klein show, which I've been listening to for many years. Ezra and I talk about a wide range of subjects here. We talk about his background as a smart kid who got horrible grades. We talk about the over prescription of Adderall to children. We talk about cancel culture, we talk about race conscious public policy, and we talk about how the American political system could become healthier. So without further ado, Ezra Klein. All right, Ezra Klein, thanks so much for coming on my show.

[A]

Thank you for having me.

[B]

So I've been a longtime listener of the Ezra Klein show for many years and I've been reading your recent articles at the New York Times. So it's a pleasure to finally get to meet you virtually and have you on my show.

[A]

Yeah, I'm glad we get a chance to do it.

[B]

Yeah. So a lot of places we could start. But before we get into the topics, actually there's one question I want to ask you about your biography. In preparation for this podcast, I learned that you had a 2.2 GPA in high school. And a couple months ago I had Scott Kaufman, the psychologist, on my show. And he's another one of these very smart people that did not do well in school. In fact, in his case, he at a younger age was categorized as learning disabled. So I'm always interested in these people. That would not have seemed promising at a glance, at least by looking at the results or your grades at an early age and then end up being really smart and successful. So can you talk at all a little bit about resolve that tension, what was going on at that point and what about you nevertheless made you so successful?

[A]

I don't know if I can fully resolve the tension because I think about it a lot myself. The central surprise of my life is I turned out to be someone with a high level of discipline and focus and work ethic. If you knew anything about me growing up, it's that those were the things I didn't have. And so when I look back on my schooling career, the basic understanding I have of it now is I have what might get called an attentional issue, but I think it's just like a kind of. I believe in the argument that a lot of learning disabilities, attention questions exist on a spectrum. And it's been said to me later that I have a kind of classic presentation in this way that I am hyper focused in some ways and I have a lot of trouble learning in others. In school specifically, I just never could listen to a teacher at the front of a room. I just still can't. And one thing that was weird about it at the time, looking back, is I didn't understand that not everyone was like this. Because think about what cultural representations of school are like. It's always the kid is in the desk and he or she is daydreaming and then the cartoon goes and Zack Morris and presses a pause button. And the idea that everyone is sitting there in school not being able to listen, like completely lost in a mental fantasy land, if you are absorbing it that way, that seems like what's really going on. So if you are actually like that, I don't think you realize, or I didn't realize how weird it was how other people were not struggling in the same way to listen the way I was. Conversely, I'm incredibly, incredibly good at absorbing information by reading it. And I'm very fast at absorbing information in conversation. So when my context changed later in life, out of rote memorization, out of listening to somebody lecture at the front of a room for eight, nine hours a day, which it was just hellish for me. And then it moved into something where the skills it got rewarded were can you deep dive into books? Can you write about and process what you've learned in conversation and in text? Then the kind of attention I had that was really maladaptive for that period became adaptive. So to the extent I resolve it, the way I resolve it is that context is really important to the success people do or don't have. It's actually an important part of my politics too. I am extremely viscerally emotionally acquainted with the fact that there are contexts you can put me in in which I am simply a failure. It just doesn't go well for me. And you will look at me and be like, that guy sucks. That guy just can't get it together. And then there are others where I look like a success, but it's the catalytic interaction between my set of strengths and weaknesses. And then the context more than it is anything innate about me. I don't feel to me like a hugely different person today, but I do have a very different context, and that context has allowed different parts of me to be emphasized.

[B]

Yeah, I think of another one of my best friends who is dyslexic and is the type of kid that teachers just would have given up on and turns out to be one of the great piano players on the jazz scene and in the pop production scene as well, and is now the kind of kid that people say, really he's making music with that guy, that other famous guy, and he's doing that well. And he's also an intelligent person to talk to, but totally the kind of kid that just could not possibly thrive in those settings. Do you think you would have been categorized as an ADHD kid if you grew up more in today's era where we're sort of quicker to slap that label on people?

[A]

I've wondered about that. I don't know is the answer, but I think that my mom is a little on the hippie side of things and so certainly was back then. And so I don't think would have been friendly to anybody trying to medicate me for any reason. That said, in other contexts, I'm pretty sure today I would have gotten medicated. I think that I would have been a pretty classic use case of this kid is smart and can't pay attention and put him on Adderall. I'll say that later in life. I never took an Adderall until into my 30s. I never did that in college and I don't really do it now, but I've tried it now. But I really needed to focus on something, so I was like, you should give this a shot. And I took 5 or 10 milligrams. The fact that we give kids 25 or 30 milligrams of that stuff is wild to me. Totally wild. I'm not saying it doesn't help some people. I'm not saying it's not good for them. I'm not questioning exactly the medical advice, but just the idea of a nine year old being on a higher dose of that stuff than I've taken. I've never taken 25 or anything like that. It blows my mind a bit. But I do think that would have been true for me. Now I struggle with what to make of my own educational experience sometimes. I've been in interviews like this on podcasts where people really want to jam me into. And so doesn't that prove learning is broken? And I don't think there's any doubt that I went to public school pretty much all my life. I don't think there's any doubt that school does not sufficiently adapt or is not really able to adapt to the ranges of learning that children have within it. Now I wouldn't say my problem is the one to start with, but I think that's true. And on the other hand. So I'd like to see that more possible. I don't think it would have been crazy to put me in a room where I did more independent study or something. But on the other hand, school has to optimize for some set of kids, particularly public school and kids who are smart but have trouble paying attention probably is not the group to optimize optimize towards. So I don't know. I have trouble knowing what to make of it. And then I had friends who went to fancier private schools and had more interesting learning experiences. And I'm not sure. It was also terrible for me to have to struggle. I mean I was lucky. I was in a context where I had lots of books at home. I could be obsessed about my own interests. The Internet was coming. The Internet was a thing. As I got into college and then perfectly into. Sorry. As I got into high school and then particularly into college. I don't know what my life would have been like without the Internet. So I had opportunities other people don't. But I think it's hard to know. I think about my own son, I have a two year old and what I will do or what I will think or how I will approach it if he has my struggles with learning and I'm very unresolved on it.

[B]

Yeah, I just want to echo that. Your bewilderment that we give Adderall to children. And I'm. I started doing Adderall probably when I was 22 or so in college. And I remember the very first time I did it, I did 10 milligrams. I was probably studying for some test and I remember thinking to myself at the peak of the experience, this is pretty much as intense as Molly, as mdma, close chemical cousin. Yeah. Without the sort of love based feelings. Just the intensity of this is absolutely insane. And obviously that you get a tolerance very quickly so people Taking it every day. Aren't feeling that every day. But it really is something that I want to have some expert to come on this podcast to just talk about this, because it's like a topic I've tried to raise with, like five different guests now, and I kind of think it's crazier than people give it credit for. On the other hand, I could be ignorant about this and it could be just for a certain person with a certain kind of brain chemistry. Exactly. The kind of daily thing that you need.

[A]

Well, I have heard that people I know who know more about this than me do say that for people with true adhd, it just acts on them somewhat differently. Like, the feeling of it is different. But I will say, given the pervasiveness of it, I had a bit of the same experience you did. Where I. I took is like, oh, this is a drug experience. It's not like taking an antibiotic. This is a drug experience. And it feels good. And as somebody who most of the time, if I do drugs that other people say feel good, I get very, very nauseous. I mean, I also feel good, but nausea is a big part of the experience for me. Usually. It was one of the few things I've taken. I'm like, I could see wanting to feel more like this all the time. And like, that feeling always scares me a bit. I'm not saying I've never done it, since it actually has some utility for me. I don't really have a. I don't have a current prescription for it or anything, but it really does help me partly back when my job involved constant meetings. And so I had to do a lot of attentional work that was difficult for me. It does have utility. I do see it. And on the other hand, it does scare me because, as you say, it is an intensely druggy. It manages to merge productivity and pleasure. It's like the perfect drug for neoliberalism.

[B]

Right. Nice. Yeah. No, that's exactly how I always felt about.

[A]

About it.

[B]

All right, so not so smooth transition. I've been reading your article since you joined the New York Times. Something like, what, six months ago or sooner or.

[A]

Sounds about right.

[B]

Yeah. So I want to start out with this interesting article you wrote about Cancel Culture. This is a topic I've also heard you talk about on your podcast, and it's something I think about a lot. And I think we have a lot of ways in common about thinking of cancel culture and maybe some interesting differences. I just want to read this part of your article. You say Quote, you suggest a different way of thinking about the amorphous thing we call cancel culture, and a more useful one. Cancellations, defined here as actually losing your job or livelihood, occur when an employee speech infraction generates public attention that threatens an employer's profits, influence or reputation. This isn't an issue of wokeness, as anyone who has been on the business end of a right wing mob trying to get them or their employees fired, as you have multiple times, knows, it's driven by economics. And the key actors are social media giants and employers who really could change the decisions they make in ways that will lead to a better speech climate for us all. So I found that to be a really interesting nugget and I think I totally agree that the issue of cancellation is logically separate from the issue of a particular ideology. I would say at the moment there are more cancellations by woke people than of woke people. And I wonder if you agree with that. But even if you do agree with that, I'd acknowledge that's just a function of this particular moment in history. And as I think you acknowledged in the piece, imagine if the Internet existed right after 9 11, which directions the cancellations would be going.

[A]

Yeah, social media, but yeah, that's something I say in the piece. You shouldn't think about this kind of set of consequences for speech infractions as being. I think of it as more technological and economic, not located just in one ideology. Now it is the case and we can talk about the reasons why. I agree. Basically there's more cancellations probably coming from the woke side, but you're seeing them on both. And the worm can turn. So you want to have a theory of this and an approach to it that's a little outside just the literal year 2021 and will be robust to different turns in the intellectual and ideological culture.

[B]

Absolutely. Not only can the valence of cancellations turn, it will turn. I mean, it just will turn. I don't know which direction it will turn, but it's not gonna remain static forever. And I think this is one of those issues like free speech, where anyone who really tries to stick to a principle throughout their lifetime is gonna find themselves in the fullness of time on very different sides of the political spectrum. Because almost anyone, you know, the vast majority of people, certainly politicians, but even many people that claim to care about an issue like free speech or cancel culture are very likely to only claim that when it benefits them. It's just one of those issues that perennially tends to make people hypocrites and I remember reading the book so youo've Been Publicly Shamed By. Was it Jonah Goldberg? Is that not Jonah?

[A]

No, no, that's John Ronson. John Ronson.

[B]

John Ronson. It's a great book. Yeah. And some of the cases of cancellations by right wing people, which I think are less likely to show up in my Twitter feed because of who I follow, are just galling. You still can't pee on an American flag or burn an American flag and expect to expect to be given the kind of charity that many people on the right would ask for if they make an analogous infraction on some person's value on the left.

[A]

Well, forget peeing on the American flag. As Will Wilkinson's case showed, you can't make a joke about the January 6th insurrection. People wanting to hang Mike Pence and get that kind of generosity right. In some ways, it's more narrow even than that.

[B]

Why do you think there are more cancellations right now by wokeness than of wokeness?

[A]

Because if you take my model of it, which is cancellation as a sort of economic phenomenon, somebody losing their job or losing kind of consistent economic opportunity, what's going to happen there is you need a couple things to converge and you read this out. So you need a speech infraction, or what is considered to be a speech infraction, whether it's intentional or not, not also, by the way, whether it's current or not, which is important. Then you need that speech infraction to get attention, which has a lot to do with the draws of the social media lottery. So it's not like there is some cultural HR department somewhere that has to treat every incoming claim equally. Sometimes people make a mistake or said something 15 years ago that gets brought up, and sometimes it doesn't, or sometimes it doesn't catch fire, and we really don't know why. I see all the time somebody becomes a main character of Twitter for the day or for the week for saying something that seems no worse to me than shit people say all the time. But for whatever reason, the right people retweeted it, the algorithm picked it up. And so then when that happens, and there's a tension now, then it becomes a question for the employer. And the employer doesn't want problems. The employer's not that loyal to employees. And so the key thing that happens next is, is it something big enough that the social media team begins to say to the executives, hey, we got a problem brewing here. Let's get marketing together or whatever it is, and then they make a decision and the reason I think you're seeing somewhat more, although again, I don't have a number on this, but I think it's a reasonable supposition. The reason you're seeing somewhat more of this come from the quote unquote woke, I think just has to do with educational polarization. And so if you think this stuff is happening at a high level of corporate action, and you think that at those levels you're going to have a lot more college educated people coming out of urban centers, that kind of thing, which is sort of how our economy seems to be going, then you are going to have a set of concerns that line up more with the concerns of those demographics. And you also have just the cultural trends that we're in the sort of era of Black Lives Matter. And a lot of demographic change is something my book is about in part. We are seeing a shifting in where power resides in society and who has the power to get their political claims heard. And there is an effort to redraw boundaries about what is polite and even acceptable speech, which is something, by the way, that I'm supportive of. And so it's a convergence of all this that will end up getting people in actual occupational trouble. And for right now, the largest areas of convergence, I think happen when you make a racist comment. Corporations are much more comfortable saying they want to be anti racist, that they want to be pro universal health care, or that they have a particular view on foreign policy. Although it's interesting where you can imagine a lot of cancellations happening in the future. So one I think we're starting to see is China. And this, you can argue what its ideological valence is or isn't, but look at what is happening to athletes or actors who in some way cross China and then the way that corporate power is brought to bear on them. And I think that's another place where, because it is a little bit more ideologically mixed, you can see the dynamic in a pure way, like John Cena giving that groveling apology in Mandarin because he said during the promotional tour in Taiwan for Fast and Furious 9 that Taiwan is a country. You're beginning to see the way this power is going to execute in society. And so I think you see it now, but I think it'll potentially change in the future. I want to put in one pin here. I don't have to do it in this answer, but I want to talk a little bit about, I think a more important or not or at least a related distinction I make in that piece between cancel culture and cancel Behavior, because that's a distinction that I think is pretty important and is very underplayed in this conversation.

[B]

Can you explain that?

[A]

Yeah, so. Because in part, my view of. To the extent cancel culture explains something that is more than cancellation, it is an overall speech climate in which people are afraid of not just losing their job, but also just becoming publicly shamed. To use the John Ronson argument or the John Ronson framing. Because people are nervous about becoming the main character on Twitter. Because that kind of nervousness will constrain what you say. I think it's important to ask a question of simply, how do you get wildly disproportionate punishments for speech infractions in any direction? And that, to me, and this is a cut that I haven't seen too many people make, that to me, has a lot to do with the behavior of whoever it is you have offended. And one of the things that offends me in the cancel culture debate kind of quote unquote, is a lot of the people who are most ideologically anti cancel culture constantly engage in what I think of as canceled behavior. So the thing where you pull a tweet from somebody who is much less powerful than you, and you raise it up as something ridiculous or that should be mocked, and you dunk on it to all of your followers. So you begin hitting that algorithmic virality thing, and sometimes you have enough power that the person gets fired again. Will Wilkinson at the Niskanin center, after he tweeted about Mike Pence and the right is an example that's happening to somebody where it was generated by the right. But just in general, I see among some of the anti cancel culture folks a real tendency to take this random academic out here and they said something super woke that I would probably agree is a little bit nutty, but just they try to get them mobbed. And I don't think they think of themselves as doing it. One of the things that is big on my way of approaching this is that the incentives, particularly of Twitter, which is, I think, a locus of this, so obviously not the only one. The incentives of Twitter, you are often doing an individual act that you don't intend to lead to a collective conclusion. So everybody individually who's dunking on this person may think to themselves, I'm just participating in the conversation. I'm making an argument. I'm saying that something I think is bad is bad. But the place where it becomes a problem for a university, for a journalistic organization, for a corporation of some other kind, for a public institution is when enough people are doing it algorithmically now that it's become a kind of PR disaster. And so I have made the argument that I think particularly those of us with bigger follower counts need to basically abide by a kind of code of social media conduct and among other things, be unbelievably careful about jumping into an ongoing pile on of somebody. Look, if Donald Trump or Joe Biden or Kamala Harris or somebody, if somebody with real power is saying something dumb, I mean, yeah, go nuts. That's the point of being in politics. But if it's just some rando on the Internet, I don't buy it. And so that's like, I don't remember if I had this line in the piece, but something I kind of believe and have said before is that don't tell me what you believe about cancel Culture. Show me how you act when you have an opportunity to be part of one of these pylons, and I will tell you what you believe about cancel Culture. And I would like to see from the people who seem to say they want a more generous and decent discourse where people can make mistakes and not be overly punished for it. I would like to see a kind of generosity and restraint that models the behavior they want, not just asserts that other people should act that way even as they don't. And this is something I see on the left and the right of foes and proponents of cancel culture. I think a lot of what we're dealing with here is a bad speech climate and individual behavior that then becomes algorithmically amplified is a big part of that. And those of us who want to change it. I have my ideas for how Twitter can change the algorithm. But since we're not going to do that tomorrow, I also have my ideas for how I can be a good actor as opposed to a bad one.

[B]

Yeah, so a lot to agree with in there. The point about, I guess it's a mix of death by a thousand cuts and a firing squad. Basically, it's no individual person feels like they're doing anything that bad because in some very real way they're not. It's like you could remove that tweet from history and the person would still be canceled. But you're just. But the collective tweeting of thousands, it may not even have to be thousands, ends up truly potentially ruining someone's career. So no individual person feels guilty like in a firing squad, but the victim feels like a life changing event has just happened to them because it has.

[A]

I don't love some of the firing Squad. There's some really intense analogies here. And usually I think it's not like we're not killing people here. We still have a culture where you don't get executed for your speech, even if sometimes people do lose their jobs. So I just want to note that I sometimes want to take down the temperature of this conversation a little bit. People get, from those of us who write and talk on the Internet in public, there is a particular sensitivity to the idea that we could lose our jobs or lose our reputations unfairly. And that is totally proper. We should be an interest group too. But people lose their jobs unfairly in this country all of the time. And sometimes we do not treat what happens to them when they get fired for trying to unionize or fired because they overslept or couldn't get there on the bus. These aren't firing squads. This is also kind of a capitalism problem, an at will employment problem.

[B]

Yeah. So I also really feel this thing about modeling the right thing here being much harder than people suppose. For instance, I remember Naomi Wolf, the writer, published a book something like a year ago, it might even be more than a year ago, and immediately there was some central data point in the book that was just very embarrassingly for her, debunked. I don't know if you remember this.

[A]

I do. I remember this. Yeah, this was kind of. This was very.

[B]

This was. It was.

[A]

It was tough to watch somebody go through this.

[B]

Yeah, it was. It was. It's like every author's worst nightmare where you've constructed what is like a really interesting argument about some historical data point. And it turns out you just totally misinterpreted what a word meant and. And sort of a quote, unquote, random person that you're on their podcast points this out to you and you have to almost be honest and disavow your central argument in real time or else contort yourself. And I remember seeing a video of this and immediately I tweeted about it because it was. I don't have any perception of Naomi Wolf really, but she's definitely not of my ideology. And that probably had something to do with why I was more eager to tweet about it than I might have been. But it was also just the spectacle itself. And I noticed after I tweeted. And it's also just a very rare moment to see a big author. This is not something that happens every day or even every year. And I tweeted about it, feeling what one feels in that moment, this kind of excitement and kind of like schadenfreude, and immediately felt guilty afterwards. And I realized, why did I contribute to this? What is probably one of the most embarrassing moments in this woman's life? Like, how could I possibly feel good about myself for participating in this? And then I remember immediately tweeting right after that, actually, I feel bad about having just tweeted this. And I remember some of my followers on Twitter were trying to make me feel better. Like, no, no, she deserves it. I was like, wait a minute. No, you should not be trying to make me feel better right now. What I did was actually wrong. I'm participating in something that I think is toxic, and my motivations for doing it were also wrong. And it's precisely the cancellations that you. And again, I wasn't directly advocating for her to be fired from whatever job she might have, but most cancellations are not explicit calls for firing. It's just this kind of general schadenfreude, and you don't realize the role you play in it. And it's much more difficult to actually model that kind of charity than people suppose.

[A]

I think that's right. I mean, I'll say a couple quick things on this, just for people who didn't see this. I'm going to get the details a bit wrong, but I'm going to get this broadly right. So she wrote a historical book, and she was talking about a certain punishment, and the word used for this punishment implied an execution. The word was not beheadings, but it was something like that, and she took it literally. And the word was basically figurative. People did not get killed for whatever this was when this judgment was handed down on them. So it was a very embarrassing. But it's kind of an understandable error. I wouldn't also say she got canceled. She made a very, very big error in a book. This got publicly pointed out, and she got humiliated. So I do want to. In some ways, I very much take your point about participating in the culture here, but I want to at least cut this a little bit from the cancellation conversation. And then I'll say the final thing, which is on what you were saying. Look, man, I couldn't agree with you more. Look at my Twitter feed. I constantly feel and struggle with the fact that despite having a legitimately huge Twitter account, I have something like 2.7 million followers. I don't tweet in any way to maximize that platform, and I don't tweet most of the things I think. And the reason is not, like, I'm a great guy the reason is exactly what you're saying. My experience of being on Twitter more is at the cost of the engagement, is to feel like you're becoming a worse person. And I'm lucky, I'm very lucky that in my job I have a New York Times column and a podcast. I get to have the influence I want to have without having to be deeply in that platform. But that's true for a lot of people who I think are really bad offenders on that platform. I've been thinking about how to write a column about this, but trying to do it in a fair enough way that balances the good and the bad of Twitter. But I think Twitter is bad. I think it would be better if it didn't exist on net or I think I do. It has been an important platform for certainly groups that have not had power to get their voices heard, but only some of those groups have been good. And I don't think the kinds of conversations it fosters tend to be good ones. I don't know anybody, I don't know anybody who's a better version of themselves on that platform than they are off of it. Well, I think a lot of people are better versions of themselves in podcasting than they are out of it. I actually do think that's a key thing. When we talk about media theory, I'm a big Marshall McLuhan guy. If you've ever read him or if people do his book Understanding Media, it's still incredible, even though it's a pretty weird book in a bunch of ways. But his famous thing, medium is a message. He's got this argument, and I'm just paraphrasing this from memory, but it'll be close, where he says the content of a medium is the juicy bone thrown to a dog to distract them. And his argument is that we think about mediums in terms of the stories that come through them, the writing, the whatever. But his view is that the way mediums change society and change us is that they absorb us into the incentives of the medium. We become more like them. I know people, I've watched them become more like Twitter in their normal human interactions because they spend all the time on the platform. It changes your brain. It changes how quickly you want feedback. People who once wrote a couple articles, long form articles a year and investigations, and we're comfortable with that. You become twitchy and you need it. And I don't think it has. I think it has pushed towards a worse public sphere. Again. One of the differences I have with a lot of people in the cancel culture debate is not that I disagree with which instances of it are bad, because often I tend to agree. I tend to be somebody who wants a lot of grace and wants a lot of generosity in the way we treat each other politically. That said, I think there's a real question of whether or not people recognize that this is not just an ideological issue, it is a technological issue. And people often mistake the two. Let me give an example that's a little bit outside this conversation, but it is related to it. Have you followed the thing going on at Basecamp?

[B]

No.

[A]

So Basecamp is a enterprise software company, well known, they very famous for the or, I think. No, I'm sorry, their name is a company's 37 signals. But Basecamp, Basecamp is their central product. And Basecamp is a forerunner functionally of Slack. It's one of the early, very, very ubiquitous enterprise chat software things. And they end up having a bunch of internal political fights, like a fight over a racist names list or a funny names list that was racist. And then stuff about diversity, equity and inclusion and other things going on in the company. And eventually the founders, who have always, they've written a lot of books about their company culture, et cetera, they go and they say, that's it, no more talking about politics at work. They announce this publicly. It's a big, we're making our culture better. We're not going to have these discussions. The company melts down. More than a third of people take a buyout a couple weeks later. It's a total, it seems to me from the outset, not what you want when you're running a company. And something I thought was interesting about it, watching it was, it was very clear to me, the founders of Basecamp and then a lot of the very senior tech people who were cheering them on the moment they did this on Twitter, didn't understand that they had created this world, that it was in creating these enterprise chat systems where everybody's talking to each other and putting in little emojis and everything, that you had completely changed the dynamic of power and the way public conversations were going to go, and you hadn't reckoned with that at all. And now you're going to try to undo it by mandate. You seem to have so little self reflection over what your technologies and the modes of interaction and engagement and communication that they foster are actually doing that you think you'll just turn it back by saying, no, stop it. I think we need a much more technological sense of the ways in which the technologies we're on top of change, the way we act, treat each other and think. But that's something people don't like to talk about as much because they like to think that we are in control of our technologies as opposed to what is exactly as true, which is to some degree they are in control of us.

[B]

Yeah. I've also noticed the phenomenon of real life conversations resembling conversations online. I think part of how that happens is because of the incentives of social media, you are usually given the worst version of the argument you disagree with. Right. If you are a BLM person, you're gonna get Candace Owens version of the anti BLM argument. You're not gonna get John McWhorter or you're much less likely to get it and vice versa. And I think part of what that does is it gives people an increased sensitivity in the bad sense to hearing disagreement in real life. When you hear what might otherwise be a really interesting, rich disagreement with somebody, both of you sort of instantly get triggered because you've been fed so much low quality argumentation on social media and have developed instincts and tripwires based on that that wouldn't have existed had you not consumed so much low quality content that gets promoted in your newsfeed. This is something I really worry about. And I want to kind of loop back though to your point about the speech climate in general, that conversations about cancel culture are partly conversations about a wider speech climate that many people object to. And it's one I object to as well. And I think, I suspect we might have an interesting disagreement here. But in any event, I recently saw circulating on my Twitter Reddit's new hate speech policy, which explicitly protects marginalized groups, black people, Hispanics, LGBTQ and so forth, but says we do not. These same protections don't apply to certain groups, such as groups that are in the majority. So, you know, read white people. And I think that kind of double standard is embedded in the speech climate right now, at least in certain spaces, the kind of spaces I've operated in. And a lot of people are in corporate America, universities, Silicon Valley. And it seems to me the way you've described the speech climate in your article and as well in other contexts, is that it's adjusting. People are historically marginalized, group are slowly gaining power, our demographics are changing, and the speech climate reflects that. And that's no doubt true to an extent. But what worries me about what I see happening is that it seems as if there's no line even in principle. If you're talking about anti white racial insults, say and we're sort of negotiating and disagreeing about where the line is with people of color. It's like, can you say the N word in quotation marks? People have different opinions and reasonable people can disagree. But it seems like there may just be no line in principle. There's nothing bad enough to say about white people that's going to be over some line. And that seems to me an unsustainable double standard from the point of view of trying to live in a multiracial democracy with a kind of modicum of respect for people's attachments to their identity. Is that something you see as well, or do you see it differently?

[A]

I think it's more complicated than that. I mean, look, there's a kernel of truth certainly to what you're saying, which is, I haven't seen the Reddit hate speech policy, but I don't think policies like that make a lot of sense. And even beyond that, I don't think they're politically effective. Right. Let's say that what you care about is instrumental here. I think creating a policy structured that way is actually worse for what you want because you're creating that much more white radicalization and backlash. I don't agree that there is no, in principle, much less de facto lines that people can cross in terms of anti white speech. I don't know, again, the Reddit policies, but I think that in most places you wouldn't want to be running around yelling the wrong thing. I think a problem in our culture right now is that different groups have dramatically different levels of power in different spheres. And so you see advancement happening sometimes really fast and in some cases going too far in some spheres that are kind of easier to change and then nothing happening in others. And so a good example of this is, sure, the Reddit hate speech policy turns out to be easy to change, in part, by the way, for my friend Matt Iglesias, we call the Great Awokening Reasons. Reddit is not such an unbelievably diverse organization. It's also a lot of very liberal, college educated white people writing these rules, including the guy who runs it. So some of what you're seeing there is a kind of transformation of political thinking, political signaling, not just among marginalized groups, but among white liberals who have become, on average, even more to the left on a bunch of these issues than non white folks in their political coalition. If you look at polling, but at the same time, if you look at things like wealth gap, particularly environmental justice issues, voting rights issues, the movement there is not only slower, it's oftentimes in the wrong direction. Something I've argued before is that one of the things right now that is deranging our politics somewhat is a tremendous imbalance between political and cultural power. And cultural power leans 10 years or 20 years into the future. The country, corporations, advertisers, TV show makers, et cetera, are trying to appeal to young, diverse urban audiences. When I used to do cable news a lot, you get the ratings of 4pm and you get them for all the age groups, but they don't care about anything but the 18 to. I think it's the 45 age group. The fact that you have a million people who over 65 listening, it doesn't matter. This is years before some of this stuff is going on. Corporations care about getting young viewers. That's where the money is on the.

[B]

Flip is that just because they're playing the long game.

[A]

I think it's some of that, yeah, you catch somebody for when they're 19 as a loyal customer of your shoe company, you got 50 years out of them. I don't really, to be honest, understand other parts of it. I mean, some of it is cultural too. If you're in an urban center and you're somebody who lives there and that's your social community, there's also just social pressure and creating things other people like you are going to think are good. So geographic polarization matters in this as well. So I'd say it's probably a mixture of actual economic incentives, but then also just other kinds of polarization operating at the same time. Social polarization. That said, our politics works the opposite way and is a time machine backwards 15, 20 years back in our demography. So because of the way the Senate works and the way the state lines are drawn, because of the way the two parties have sorted geographically, because of gerrymandering, because of the electoral college, because of turnout patterns among the old versus the young, because in some states of voter ID and other kinds of voter suppression laws, you have an electorate that looks much less like the country and much more like it did 10, 15 years ago. And so on the one hand, the left doesn't feel like it's winning because it cares a lot about politics and economics. And there it's often not winning, certainly not winning to the extent that it's winning in votes. On the other hand, the right, which has done, given how it's been performing electorally, very, very, very well politically, has control on the margin of most states, has 50, 50 in the Senate, probably will take the house back in 2022, can now win the presidency repeatedly without winning the popular vote, has the Supreme Court with a 6, 3 split, et cetera, et cetera. They feel like they're losing because they care a lot about the culture, and they are losing in the culture part of the Christian right. And so there's a weird way in which nobody can quite decide who has power and where it's being wielded. And so people feel simultaneously like they're on the losing end of this. So you just gave a kind of version of, well, is there anything that can't be done to white people anymore? Well, okay, on Reddit, maybe. But on the other hand, if you're thinking about what's going to happen at the Supreme Court, it doesn't feel like that at all. There's, in fact, a tremendous amount of protection for the interests of white people on the Supreme Court in the Senate, where the states that are wildly overrepresented tend to be heavily white. David Leonhardt has run these numbers. And so one of the things I do think is interesting about this period is nobody can quite decide who's winning, and everybody kind of feels like they're losing, and that creates a desperation in the way they fight. So I would like to see somebody's weird speech, you know, structures dialed back a little bit, but the economic redistribution dialed up, but nobody gets those choices, so they end up really pressing the advantage in the place where they have it and then being really, really pissed about the places where they're not being able to move forward.

[B]

So I couldn't agree more. And in fact, the point you just made is one I was going to raise to you as a question. It seems like everyone feels like a victim and can plausibly point to certain areas of reality in which their side is losing to justify that. And I think there's another version of this, not on the topic of political parties, but on the topic of race. And so here it's kind of analogous to the point that you just made, where if you look at the legal structure of the country, if you look at just some recent examples, Joe Biden's restaurant relief plan, which included a provision to put white people at the front of the line, or white owned, sorry, restaurants owned 51% by a person of color at the front of the line, or the mayor of Oakland creating a program that gave, you know, $500 checks to poor people of color, but not poor white people, you can find examples of these kinds of policies. And if you look only at that as a white person, you can say, well, look how many laws there are that are putting me to the back of the line, and feel a very genuine sense of victimhood as a result, particularly if you're struggling. On the other hand, outside of the legal structure, outside of the realm of public policy, the everyday social interactions on the ground, it's still the case that you are far more likely to experience prejudice as a black person, right? Whether this is not getting the callback on your resume submission or just an interaction with a cop that goes, even if not disastrously, just more snippy than it would be if you were white, being followed in a store by a suspicious shopkeeper, having to deal with a partner's parents that don't like you because of your race. And if you look only at that, you can find very real reasons to feel a grievance against the nation in which you live. And to me, it creates an analogous situation in the sense that if you look only at part of the equation, you can feel like a victim. And then you get groups that feel like victims interacting with each other only in that mindset. And it makes it very difficult. People, again, as you put it, press their advantage at the side that they're right about. And it's very. I find it difficult. I find myself wanting to be aspiring to be the type of person that can recognize legitimate grievances wherever they exist. Of course, nobody is going to be perfect at that. But is that a dynamic that you also see going on in the country, or do you view it differently?

[A]

No, I think that's definitely a dynamic in the country. To widen this out a little bit, if you go to my book now out in paperback, everybody should go get it. Why we're polarized. The thing I say at the beginning of that book is that one of the things I'm trying to explain and model is the way that policy argumentation, which is a positive sum endeavor in a kind of open policy space, I can think of ways to make lots of different kinds of people better off all simultaneously. It's amazing. It's fucking magic. Become zero sum or negative sum by the end of political debates. And there are a lot of reasons for this. Most of them not having to do with our speech climate, having to do with partisanship and filibuster and others. But let me give you an example why I think it matters that you're seeing so little action in policymaking and so little ambition in policymaking. People can't get big things through very often anymore. So you're just saying, look, you might be watching Joe Biden's thing come around and there's some provision for minority owned restaurants and that makes you feel bad. I think that would be a little ridiculous. Ridiculous given the size of the bills and the long term structure of our economy. But fair enough, if you're a struggling restaurateur, I could see why I pissed you off. But we've had a lot of minority owned subcontracting provisions in federal law for a long time and they just don't do that much in some ways. My issue with them is that they're not that effective. But there has, particularly in liberal politics, been forever an answer to the thing you are bringing up, which is to say, if you simultaneously believe that the structure of our economy and the wealth distribution and the income distribution and economic opportunity reflect literal centuries of explicit and also systemic racism, but you also believe that there are lots of white people or whomever that have struggled in our economy and are certainly not by any true definition of the word privileged or in a good position, then great, let's do race blind redistribution. So Cory Booker has a plan for, I like to call it a universal wealth distribution, but he calls it baby bonds. And he will sell this plan to you if you talk to him as a plan to eliminate the racial wealth gap. So what would happen is when you're born, if your family's under a certain wealth level, you get an asset, you get a kind of wealth bearing asset going up all the way. I think in some cases, if I'm not misremembering details to $50,000. But I, who is the son of a university mathematician, do not get that. You get this blindly, whether you are white or black or Hispanic or whatever. And Booker will say this will close a lot of the wealth gap. And it will. He's right. I've looked at his numbers on that. And on the other hand, nothing about it is explicitly based on anybody's skin color. It's based on what level of the wealth strata you're born into. And so in a world where we were policymaking, that's a great trade. If you're worried that there are a lot of white people who are struggling, but you also recognize because of the history of housing discrimination and credit discrimination and educational discrimination and literal burning of black cities, there's going to be a particular hit on black wealth compounding into the present, great, let's do baby bonds and let's do them universally in a colorblind way. And we will be able to help the people who need to be helped. Part of the problem, though, is that when policymaking begins to constrict and you can't do big creative things anymore, and you are arguing out of a place of scarcity and also arguing at a place often of symbolism, like little symbolic policies, then everything becomes again, zero sum, or sometimes actually just negative sum. I want to be in a policy conversation where I can say to what you're saying, yes, you have a genuine problem, and so do you. And let's figure it out. Let's figure out a way we can make both of you better off at the same time. But what's often happening right now is we're not making really anybody better off and we're just arguing about shit we saw on Twitter that is designed to make us mad. Or, you know, like, I'm out in sf. I know about that Oakland program. It is tiny. The fact that you know about it in Queens at all. It just speaks to these dynamics, like it's just not an important piece of policy. It's one of these endless efforts to show on a piloted way that maybe a guaranteed income would be a good thing for the society, but it's a very, very small program. It has the mortgage interest deduction, which builds atop legacy housing. Discrimination does not strike people as a racialized policy, but of course in its effects very much is and is just so many orders of magnitude more expensive than that Oakland thing that you can't even believe it. But we're just not having the big policy conversations that we could use to make a lot of people better off simultaneously. So, I mean, if you do look at the bills, things like the American Jobs act, they're not perfectly constructed from my view, but they would do this. But things are so gummed up that it's very, very unclear whether or not they will pass. And so I tend to think some of the victimized, arguing from a position of scarcity and fear dimensions of our politics actually speak to a kind of inability to engage in ambitious positive sum policy negotiation that a different kind of political system would engender.

[B]

What would that different kind of political system look like practically?

[A]

I mean, at a very basic level, the way most countries work is that some party wins more votes or some coalition of parties win more votes, and the other party or coalition of parties, and then the literal thing that means is they have a governing majority, and then they govern until the people decide they're bad and they should go. And I would like to see that be the way our system works, although I don't think it's going to be. So even on the margin, I would make moves towards that, like getting rid of the filibuster or getting rid of gerrymandering. I would like to see majorities on both sides be able to govern. I would like to see them because again, for all the reasons that I lay out in my book, bipartisanship is not going to be a way we govern right now. Not with parties this ideologically polarized. That is not how parties are even supposed to work. This always drives me crazy, this American thing that you're supposed to have bipartisanship. It would look so weird in another country. You have parties, they disagree, they fight it out in the election. Then you give one party a shot, they try some stuff, and you decide if it worked, and then you decide if the other party should get the next shot. And we just can't do that. Instead, we have this system where people run for election, maybe get more votes if they get more votes, maybe win if they win, maybe don't have the power to do anything really at all. If they do have the power to do anything at all, can probably only do 20% of it. And then we go back to the public and we're like, hey, what do you think of that? Think of what? Why didn't anything happen? And you're supposed to have accountability in political systems, you campaign on promises, you try to pass some rough facsimile of the promises, and then you let the public judge. And I would like to see that. Joe Biden ran for office. He won 7 or 8 million more votes. He won the election also. I would like to see him implement his agenda for a couple years. And then the public can decide if they liked it better or not. And then if they don't, Marco Rubio or Mike Lee or whoever, it's gonna be Tim Scott a couple years ago, maybe Mitt Romney, they can come in and do the stuff they promised and the public can decide. That seems sensible to me. But in our system, even though, by the way, most states work like this, you say this to people in America, like, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa. Run politics the way states and also cities and also other countries do. And also the way we tell our kids it works. That would be crazy. And then we sit here arguing over, like, speech on Twitter endlessly. I know we're talking about some of my speech columns, but I've only written one speech column since being at the Times. I really care about what we pass and don't pass. I think that politics is not just a way of avoiding war. It's a way of making negotiation constructive. But if it can't find an endpoint to negotiation because you've set it up so it won't, you've set it up so it would be irrational for the minority party, the opposition party, to allow the majority party to govern, because then that might help the majority party in the next election. But you've also made it possible for the minority party to stop the majority party from governing. Then you get a politics that becomes dysfunctional and turns in on itself, because instead of the two parties being able to effectively differentiate through the outcomes of their policies, they end up differentiating through their public collisions and their branding. It's just bad. It's not a good way to run a railroad.

[B]

All right, so one last question before I let you go. What advice do you have for a person who's, say, 18 years old and wants to become the next Ezra Klein, the next policy wonk, blogger, writer, podcaster? What do you say to such a person?

[A]

So the first thing I'll say is I don't believe in advice. Literally, I have so much advice for myself now that I can't take. The hard part is always execution. What I do say and the moment in which I came into politics and into journalism, I came in this open window of blogging and I've had a very, very weird and very privileged career that some of the doors I walk through are not open in the same way, although others hopefully are. But I think we under emphasize the value of just really knowing things cold and for me, and some of the people came up at the same time as I did, there's a real value in I wasn't a journalist, nobody was going to call me back. So I really learned healthcare policy. I understood it. By the time I went into journalism at 21, I really understood how the American healthcare system worked. And I still believe I was basically right then after another 15 years of covering it or whatever. And specializing is important. Very, very few people are a good enough writer to stand out on writing alone. If you're a good enough reporter to do it, fantastic. But very few people are that either. What you need to be able to show to an employer, to your audience, whether that is even if you're just a substack entrepreneur, is that there is something you are going to be able to offer that others cannot offer. And that tends to come from some kind of specialization. I just understand innovation policy in a way no one else does. I want to read the people who can tell me in a really, really substantive way right now. What to think of the bill formerly known as the Endless Frontiers Act. It's like the Innovation and Competitiveness act or something. Now, over at Vox, for instance, Jerusalem Dempsis has come in and just kicking ass because she knows so much about housing policy. And so she's offering such a distinctive value in the marketplace. The more that everybody is in a cacophonous conversation with each other, the harder it is to stand out. And so, paradoxically, the incentives of things like Twitter, et cetera, feel like they are to become more general, to just participate in whatever the algorithmic conversation of the day is. But actually the incentive is to differentiate even more. Now, the difficult thing is actually differentiating, holding your focus, doing that learning, and then being able to communicate it. But I don't think that's really changed. I think that having done a lot of hiring in my time now, when somebody was able to come to me at wantblog or at Vox, or if they came to me now for advice somehow, or to work on my show, and they can show me that there's something they can offer that others can't, that's fantastic. But if not, then it's harder for people to stand out.

[B]

All right, well, on that note, thank you so much for coming on my show, and I hope to have you back again someday.

[A]

Awesome, man. I appreciate it.

[B]

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