Governor Spencer Cox (3:15)

Thanks for having me, Ezra.

Ezra Klein (3:16)

So I want to start in 2023. You said back then that you felt we were, quote, facing a toxic debate unlike anything we've seen since the Civil War. What were you seeing then that made you say that?

Governor Spencer Cox (3:30)

Well, I was taking over as chair of the National Governors association. And as chair, you get to do an initiative. Everybody gets to do something. And I was looking at healthcare cost escalation, I was looking at critical minerals and energy production. And we had this conversation with team and just decided that we couldn't solve any of the biggest problems facing our country if we all hated each other. And so one of my team members had this idea, what if we focused on kind of the toxic polarization as our initiative for the nga, Spend a year working with experts across the country, trying to figure out if there's real research around how we could de. Escalate what was happening. And in one of those first convenings, we were in New Hampshire, actually on a college campus, and we had an expert who. Who came in from the Carnegie foundation who had done some research around this type of political violence that we were seeing in our country. And the report came back that we were kind of blowing through all those checkpoints towards some very serious division, the potential for a catastrophic decline in kind of Western civilization and a serious increase in political violence, and just led us to believe that we were on the cusp of something pretty dark.

Ezra Klein (4:48)

When you did that research, when you spoke to those experts, what were the kinds of conditions that revealed themselves to you as dangerous? What were the sort of checkpoints that people worried about that you saw us preaching?

Governor Spencer Cox (5:03)

Yeah, so a lot of it has to do with the way we talk about each other in our politics. It's the inability to accomplish big things, the lack of civility that we're seeing, and I kind of don't like the term civility anymore because we think civility means kind of holding hands in Kumbaya. And it's something much deeper than that. It was the threats that we were seeing in our language, the rhetoric that we were seeing from elected officials. And then we found that there was a measurable increase in threats of political violence to members of Congress in less than a decade. So threats against judges had doubled, attempted assassinations that we had seen, the different types of shootings, the rise of illiberalism, I guess, for lack of a better term, but the rejection of. Of Western norms of free speech, for example, others, campus protests. And, of course, coming out of 2020, the January 6th and the George Floyd and all of those different issues, the riots that we had seen in the streets during 2020, all of those things combined for kind of a tinderbox when it comes to our body politic.

Ezra Klein (6:11)

So that was something you've begun to think about, I mean, at least as early as 2023. I want to move us into the present. Talk me through September 10th for you. The day Charlie Kirk was murdered in Utah. What was that day like? What happened?

Governor Spencer Cox (6:27)

Yeah, well, I mean, it started out like any other day. I had a couple events. I had driven to a small town in Utah called Mona, where we talked to telecommunications providers and then came back, and I was actually having lunch with my staff. We have a quarterly birthday lunch, and it was my quarter. I had a birthday in July, and we were really excited. Just got in my plate of food to sit down when my assistant came and grabbed me and said, I need you immediately. We had a captain and a lieutenant from my highway patrol who told me that Mr. Kirk had been shot. And I couldn't believe it. I knew he was in town. I knew he was on campus. And I thought. I said, are you sure? Because as a governor, you've learned pretty quickly that there's a fog of war when it comes to these types of events. And, you know, you really can't trust any information you get early on. And then 30 seconds later, I have the White House on the phone, they've called me, and they want information. Actually, it was Marco Rubio, Secretary Rubio, who was in the Situation Room for something else. I have a great relationship with him. He called, and from there, it was just, how do we get the right information? Were other people shot and injured? Which hospital is he at? What is his condition? The initial report I got that he was awake and responsive, that, of course, was not true. And so I said, look, I need one of our people at the hospital so we have the right information. And then I get, you know, condition Delta, which is. Is not great. And. And then a few minutes later, fatal. And, you know, that. That called to the White House to inform them what had happened. And. And then just trying to figure out, you know, who is this? We have a suspect in custody, but that's not the guy. And now we're, you know, we're. We're chasing. What. What do we know? Did anybody see anything? Is there any video? And everybody wants information, and no one has any information. And that's the Hardest part, because then people start to make up information and trying to figure out what's real, what's not. And then you're dealing with, well, who's in charge. You have. You have campus police department, you have the. The county sheriff, you have the state, you have the FBI and the feds who are coming in, who's taking lead, who's got what assignment. And just trying to organize all that is in real time is something. Look, I just said the governor before me, I was lieutenant governor. He did not leave me a handbook explaining how to deal with the political assassination. It's never happened here. We're just making it up as we go along.

Ezra Klein (8:52)

What were your first thoughts about what this meant when you knew Kirk had died? About what it meant for the country, about what it meant for our politics?

Governor Spencer Cox (9:02)

Well, my first thoughts were certainly for his wife and kids. And I just in that moment, in every moment, he's a dad and a husband, first and foremost. And that's the kind of the sickening pit in the stomach. The second one is. And by the way, every governor does this. You worry about your state, like, oh, my gosh, how could this happen here? Especially because we really pride ourselves on trying to be a little different and trying to be the type of people that are peacemakers, that we lead the nation in service every year, we lead the nation in charitable giving. It's kind of part of our brand and our DNA and who we are. And you're like this, please, just not here. How could this happen here? But I think the thing that really hit so quickly to me, and I don't think it hit for a lot of people that were dealing with this here in Utah, was what this actually meant in a bigger picture, that this wasn't a local shooting or something that impacts us, that this was much, much bigger, both because, you know, I now have the President of the United States on the phone with me within an hour. So that's different than anything else. Right. But. But two, what just what this means culturally and as somebody who has been working on this for many years, understanding that this is something different. This is, I guess if the president getting shot, President Trump, the attempted assassination would have been the same. But he sur. But this is a big one. I mean, you have to go back a long time in our nation's history for something of this magnitude, for a large segment of the population who held him in a very, very specific light.

Ezra Klein (10:40)

You know, in 2020, I published my first book, which is called why We're Polarized, and the Final paragraphs of that book are this argument that I make about realism, that as polarized, as divided as things feel, I mean, you can look back in our history and see it much worse. Not just the Civil War, but look back at the 60s, look at the political violence, look at the assassinations, look at the violence in the streets. We are in so much better of a place today than we were then. And I've been thinking in the last few days that when I was on the tour for that book, one of the things I kept saying, though, was that my nightmare scenario is something like the 60s, but with today's hyperpolarized parties, hyperpolarized media, hyperpolarized social media. And as I've watched the rise in political violence, the attempted kidnapping of Nancy Pelosi and then the assault on her husband, the attempted firebombing of Josh Shapiro's residence, the attempted assassination of President Trump, the assassination of the former speaker of the Minnesota House, now of Kirk, it's knowing it's coming into this context. And I just. When I saw Kirk had died, I just remember my stomach sinking and the future going foggy because we're not well equipped for this right now.

Governor Spencer Cox (12:04)

That dark pit in your stomach. I'm glad you said that, because that was one of the first feelings I had. Just this wave of nausea kind of washes over you. And if you didn't feel something like that again, regardless of your politics, then I do believe there's something broken inside of us when we. We don't feel that. And again, understanding, there are a lot of people out there that disagree vehemently with maybe everything that. That Charlie Kirk said, although I suspect if you heard everything he said, you would probably find some things that you agreed with. But that is part of the issue, Right? And you're right. I mentioned in one of my press conferences after a question, that the 60s are important, I think, to go back to. I think that, in fact, I've actually, in the last couple days, been trying to look for the definitive piece on how we got out 1969 into the 70s, what was the off ramp there? And I'm not sure I found that definitive piece yet. But you are also right, and I think this is so critical to understand the differences between then and now and the way we get our information and consume our information and share our innermost thoughts and feelings with each other in such rapid succession. And the way the algorithms, especially steal our agency and addict us to them and show us the worst of humanity to get us that dopamine. Hit from outrage. That is very different. You know, when, when John F. Kennedy is assassinated, you have to go turn on a television and some breaking news and other political assassinations were not caught on tape. So you, you don't have tape of that. Martin Luther King, you know, as Junior is an example of that.

Ezra Klein (13:45)

It's not being looped on social media in front of everybody over and over and over again in a way that.

Governor Spencer Cox (13:50)

Desensitizes us again in a way that we should not be capable of processing. So. So if you take that, that hate and divisiveness and polarization of the 60s and implanted into today's different culture and media culture and polarization, it's a recipe for something, I believe, far more worse than that. And that's exactly why you and I on very different ends of the political spectrum had that same hit in our.

Ezra Klein (14:18)

Stomachs over those next few days after the shooting. I think everyone was desperate to know who the killer was, why they did it. I had so many private conversations with people, and what she would say to me is, I'm like, I just hope he's not or she's not. But I think people assumed it was a man, X, right? Where X was their politics, right. Just let them be illegible. Let this be John Hinckley Jr. Trying to impress Jodie Foster, locked inside some kind of mania, not some kind of legible political actor. You were up there sort of getting that information as it came in. I guess I've had a question about our whole debate over politics and motive. What is knowing alone? Gunman's motive. Tell us and not tell us. What meaning does it permit us to make? Because I think we're looking for it as a way of making meaning and what doesn't it.

Governor Spencer Cox (15:21)

Yeah, it's fascinating. You know, I. I said in that initial press conference that or one of them that I had hoped it wasn't a Utah. It was that somebody had driven from another state or from another country. But by the way, just as an aside, in real time, watching some people of a different political ideology take that and accuse me of racism, that I wanted it to be an illegal immigrant or something. Just seeing that happen is just crazy to me. But there is no, no generosity. And it's happened to me on, on both sides of the political spectru firmly. And what I've tried to do is just to share what the facts are, because too often we have a tendency to hide those things. And when we do that, then we lose trust and we've lost so Much trust in our institutions, so much trust in our elected leaders. If there was clear evidence right up front that this guy had a MAGA hat and had been maga's hold, I would have said that, too. So I think it's important that we understand the facts of every single one of these cases, whatever it is. There are examples, and you've pointed out examples, and I pointed out examples of people all across the political spectrum who have committed these atrocities. And I think it's only helpful in that we do need to try to figure out if there is something we can do societally to prevent these things from happening. And the only way to do that is to find out why they happened and how they happened. And if there is a certain belief system or a way that people went from one fairly normally held belief to something else. Trying to understand the human condition in such a way that are there things we can do to try to prevent this from happening again? And I think those are worthy discussions. But if we're only trying to find out the political ideology of the person so that we can feel better about ourselves, or to hate a broad group of people who have no intention or no, I, you know, don't support this type of behavior in any way, then that's not healthy.

Ezra Klein (17:15)

Well, I worry that, I mean, I think we're trying to find it out because we want to know, but then the question is, what do we do with that knowledge? You said that the evidence suggests the shooter had a leftist ideology. I've watched the Trump administration in the days since saying that there is a crackdown on what they call the radical left without defining it, that is now necessary, that we shouldn't be thinking of this as the act of one man. We should be thinking of it as the outcome of some broader network, culture, ideology, that if this is to be a safe society, needs to be repressed, suppressed, destroyed. What have you thought about that?

Governor Spencer Cox (17:56)

Yeah, so I've, I've obviously, obviously heard that. I've tried to be careful in a couple ways. One, my political ideology and my faith teaches that every person is responsible for their own actions. So we have agency and that it's the greatest gift that we've been given as human beings. And this person made a very, very, very terrible decision. And as society, we need to hold that person accountable to, again, to the greatest of the law. And I always caution against removing agency from a person that this person didn't have a choice, that this person acted because he had been acted upon. I think that's a big mistake. I think that's an illiberal ideology, and it's something that I reject when the left does it and I reject when the right does it. As to the radicalization piece, and again, I know that wasn't defined as radical left or whatever that is. I think we do need a deeper dive to understand what is radicalization and how does radicalization happen and are there things we can do to prevent that from happening. And so that's a worthy discussion, but we have to do that within the bonds of our Constitution and within the bounds of the law. Look, I don't get to speak for Charlie. I don't, and I don't presume to. I didn't have a relationship like Vice President Vance or others, and so I just want to be clear about that. But one of the things I truly appreciated about Charlie was his defense of. Of persuasion, his defense of being willing to show up on campus and engage, his defense of the founder's vision for our country, his defense of free speech.

Guest Commentator (19:37)

I go around universities and have challenging conversations because that's what is so important to our country, is to find our disagreements respectfully. Because when people stop talking, that's when violence happens.

Governor Spencer Cox (19:51)

His words about if we stop talking to each other, that's when the violence starts.

Guest Commentator (19:56)

When people stop talking, that's when you get violence, that's when civil war happens because you start to think the other side is so evil and they lose their humanity.

Governor Spencer Cox (20:03)

I don't think that you can remove a radical ideology through just pure repression or government enforcement. I think it's going to take more speech and more sunlight and more disagreement, more words and less violence. Now, again, if there is a way to do that, I'm certainly open to understanding it. But I truly think that the answer to getting rid of what got us into this situation is not more of the type of thing that these anarchists or evil people have brewing in their souls.

Ezra Klein (20:42)

What do you think about the people on the right who say, look, this was a guy at his best, at least, who was trying to operate through persuasion, who is trying to do politics the way you all say it should be done, and this just shows you can't. Right. They tried to kill Donald Trump, they tried to kill Charlie Kirk, they'll come for all of us eventually. This has been a more common reaction in some ways than I would have expected. I do think it reflects people who, as I have spoken to them and tried to understand where they are coming from, get more death threats than I realized. Right. So I think they've, you Know, many of them have been quite radicalized by that. But the sense of this, you know, he tried to do it through persuasion. He was killed. The period of persuasion of normal politics is over. How do you respond to people who want to give up on politics in that way?

Governor Spencer Cox (21:28)

Well, I first respond with a great deal of compassion and sympathy. I actually think that's a very normal reaction, and it's one I've had to kind of question myself on many occasions. He's literally in the act of doing the thing that he said would help us prevent violence, and he's been killed for it. And so it makes it really easy. I just think that's a human response, and I think we should give a lot of grace for that response. And then I hope that we can elevate what he taught and the reasons behind it and understanding what the consequences of rejecting that actually mean. And this is where many people, some intentionally but most unintentionally, don't think through the consequences of rejecting what he was preaching and what he was standing for. And my question is, okay, and then what? What. Where does that take us? And how do we engage then in a way that doesn't lead to more of what just happened? I will tell you, when I started that Disagree Better initiative, I got attacked on the right and the left, and the attack on the right was. And again, I'm overgeneralizing here, but generally it was, oh, you just want us to get along. You want us to hold hands, you want a Kumbaya moment. You just want us to capitulate, Right? And that's not what I meant at all. I chose the term disagree first because I think disagreement is absolutely critical, that we should be fighting, as you do on your podcast, and as I do in other ways, for what I believe in, and doing everything possible to win elections and to convince people to join our side and our tent so that we can adopt policies that make a difference. I don't think unity means agreeing together, as Yuval Levin says. I think it means acting together. And acting together is very different. Acting together is acting within the constraints that the Constitution gives us. The disagreement that came from the left was actually different than that. It was. Why should I talk to those people? Why would I engage with those people? And as Charlie said, I actually do believe that is more dangerous. I do believe it is more dangerous when we're not talking to each other. Look, there's two ways this can go, and I've warned people before. If you don't like Charlie Kirk, what comes after Charlie Kirk is going to be far, far worse. Charlie had a vision for young men in this country. A vision of self worth, a vision of building a vision morality, getting out of the party culture and getting out of the darkest parts of the Internet and building a life, getting married, having kids, human flourishing, which I think is so important. Pushing back against the Andrew Tates and others on the more liberal side of things. And I've heard it said that by killing Charlie Kirk you've now created a million more Charlie Kirks and the best version of that can be very healthy for us. I don't know that I have a great answer, except that the only way we survive as a country, the only way that our ideals that created this grand experiment 250 years ago, only survives if we can find an off ramp and continue to engage with each other.

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Ezra Klein (25:57)

This podcast is supported by PMI US US Businesses of Philip Morris International what does it mean to be invested in America? For the US Businesses of Philip Morris International, it means we're invested in advancing science, giving adults who smoke better options. We're invested in American manufacturing, helping local economies thrive. We're invested in community, supporting military voice, veterans and their families, disaster relief and economic empowerment. Because we're proud to be invested in America. See how@USPMI.com There's a worse version of Kirk and Kirkism too. You're talking about criticism from the left. The criticism I've gotten quite a bit of from the left in the past week or so has been that you're sanitizing this guy. You're sanitizing this guy who bussed people to the January 6 protests, sanitizing this guy. So the Democratic Party, he hates America, said the Civil Rights act was a mistake.

Guest Commentator (26:57)

If we would have said that Joy Reid and Michelle Obama and Sheila Jackson Lee and Ketanji Brown Jackson were affirmative action picks, we would have been called the racist. But now they're coming out and they're saying it for us. They're coming out and they're saying, I'm only here because of affirmative action. Yeah, we know. You do not have the brain processing power to otherwise be taken really serious.

Ezra Klein (27:22)

Seriously.

Guest Commentator (27:23)

You had to go steal a white person's slot to go be taken somewhat.

Ezra Klein (27:27)

Seriously sanitizing this guy who said Spencer Cox should be expelled from the Republican Party after you vetoed a bill. There was a side of him that did dialogue, although some people feel he weaponized it. But there's a side of him that was also open to much more illiberal means. And they see that running through. And they say that in pretending that this was a kind of path that we could all be on together. Right. This is sort of related to the critique you got from the left. There's not a way to be in community with people who do not want to be in community with you, and that there's a kind of pretense being made here by people who want to be in some kind of center, have some kumbaya moment that is whitewashing how divided we are. Disagree. Better is fine when our disagreements are within a certain range. But I think something I have become more sensitized to even in the last week, although knowing it in a broader sense before that is how many people think our disagreements are already out of that range, that we have already gone through some kind of national divorce. And the question we are really in now is simply in what way it will be effectuated.

Governor Spencer Cox (28:38)

Sure. And I've heard those same complaints. I've heard them for a long time, far before the assassination of Charlie Kirk. And to a guy who a few years ago did want me out of the Republican Party. I've been told he didn't share that sentiment now, but I get that and I applaud it. And that's exactly what we're talking about here, is that we can have these type of disagreements, and the people that are talking to you can very much Use their platform to say that they don't think we should whitewash everything that he said and that they had real concerns with him. That is part of what we're trying to do. That's part of the grand experiment. I don't think they should give up those views. Their opposition to Charlie Kirk or their opposition to me. I think that is what. Well within bounds and what we should be doing. I do worry that you and I still are too trapped into a very deep political culture. This is where we spend our time. We talk to people who are deeply ingrained in political culture. We spend a lot of time with people who are very much online. I'm online too much. You probably are, too. And we start to think that this is the real world. All those people you're hearing from about whitewashing Charlie Kirk. The truth of the matter is, is a lot of people had never heard of Charlie Kirk before this happened. And I think we forget that. And they're learning about this in real time. As to that. That concept of. Of a national divorce. Look, and I know this conversation has been pretty dark and pretty pessimistic. We. We haven't heard a lot. A lot of hopefulness yet. But there are real things out there that are happening that can make a difference. First of all, more in common. The group has done some tremendous research about how we. We are divided and the different ways we're divided. And 70% of Americans hate where we are right now. They're desperate for something different, and neither party is offering them an opportunity for anything different. There is a market failure, as we traditionally understand market failures in both major parties. At some point, I hope there will be a market correction. We also have a history in our country of very dark things and tragic things happening that wake us up in a way that allows us to find our better angels. I mean, we've talked a little bit about the Civil War. We've talked about the 60s. I mean, I think you can go back to the Gilded Age and certainly the Great Depression and how we found ourselves out of that. This is not out of the realm of things that happen in our country. And so, yes, there are people who are angry and they're trying to figure out what this means. And there will be a battle of words about what he stood for, what he didn't stand for, and that is all very important, but we do have an opportunity for all of those people to just say, you know what? I am done with this. I'm tired of it. Want something better and somebody, hopefully lots of Somebodies will stand up and say, hey, I don't like this either. Maybe you should vote for me.

Ezra Klein (31:36)

Well, I've watched you up on that stage that week trying to practice politics in a different way than many people are right now. And I want to ask you about some of the things you said, in particular, a speech you gave or comments you gave, remarks you gave after the suspect was found. But I could feel you worrying about whether or not we were still. Are still gonna come apart. And you started by saying that of all the forms of violence, political violence is distinct. It is different than any other kind of violence. Why?

Governor Spencer Cox (32:13)

Well, if I could, and I'll encourage your listeners. As I was preparing for this, I listened to your last podcast in which you interviewed Ben Shapiro, by the way. Amazing. Incredible. I hope everyone listens to it. I think it's the perfect example of how to engage with someone you disagree with in a way that is respectful of both of you. I appreciated that. Thank you for that. But before that, you talked about political violence and why it was different. And what I said and what I feel about this is while it was an attack on an individual, it is broader than that. It is an attack on all of us. It is an attack on our ideals. It is attack on the founding principles of our country. I've had legislators whose kids have asked them to get out of politics because it's too dangerous. That is the biggest red flag. That's why political violence is so damning and so dangerous, because it takes us out of the public square and it makes us fearful of engaging. This was a conversation I had with President Trump. He talked very directly to me about the assassination attempt on his life and how dangerous the job of president is. And if someone out there just decided not to run for office because they're fearful for their safety, if someone out there decided not to give a speech because they're worried that they could be attacked, if they are fearful to express an idea, then we are truly broken. And that's why we have to treat this differently than everywhere else. That's why this is different than any other type of shooting or violence that we see in our country.

Ezra Klein (33:52)

One thing, and you brought this up a second ago, but I want to go deeper into it. You said that the path to building a better political culture isn't pretending our differences don't matter, but actually embracing our differences with each other. What do you mean by that? What does it mean to embrace differences with each other when the differences are so profound? Right. When they're over, you Know whether people who are living here should be deported when they're over, whether Medicaid should be cut when they're over, what you should be teaching children in school when they're. When the stakes of them have real consequences for ourselves, for each other. What does it mean to embrace difference?

Governor Spencer Cox (34:32)

This is where it gets so hard, because there are two things that are important here. We definitely need more kindness in our public interactions. We definitely need more peacemakers and bridge builders. We need more people with compassion and sympathy towards people who disagree with. We need more people breaking bread with each other and sitting down together and having those type of moments, those Kumbaya moments. That is not what I'm talking about now. I'm not talking about Kumbaya moments. I'm just trying to get people to stop shooting each other. That's it. And the way we do that. The founders were brilliant in understanding this and they gave us the roadmap to doing it. And again, I just can't emphasize this enough, that unity is not thinking the same things. It's acting together. And the way we act together is through the constitutional framework that has been set up. And the way we do that is by engaging in an electoral process. It's by running for city council and voting for someone in your local city council or your school board. It's when somebody's running for the President of the United States. We have a clash of ideas that are very different. Should we shut the border or should we have an open border? These are the battles that we should be having. And then your side either wins or your side loses. And if your side wins, then you go about trying to enact all of those things. And if your side loses, then you don't. And you get a chance now to go back, build a coalition, which is really important. And again, this is where I just feel like persuasion. We've forgotten the importance of persuasion so that you can win the next time. And this is the problem. We believe in just short term. If I could just this one. If I could win this election, then all of my wildest dreams will come true and my enemies will go away forever. If we win this presidential election, then I will never have to deal again. I'm sorry to keep quoting Yuval, but I'll never have to deal with those damn people ever again. And that's not what the Constitution envisioned. It envisioned that you will always have to deal with those damn people. That this is a lifetime of work. It is not a single event. And if I could just as an aside, because I think this is really important. One of the big mistakes that we have made over the last 250 years with our country is losing the concept of federalism so much. One of the brilliant things that they did that was very unique. You know, there had been checks and balances in government in other places, but having two sovereigns at the same time was really important. And here is why. Because they didn't want our national election, our presidential election, to be that important. They really didn't. That's why they gave the federal government a very distinct set of powers, and the rest of that was left to the states. They knew that Texas was going to be very different from New Hampshire, or, you know, I guess we're going back a little bit, so maybe I should say Virginia. Very different than New York. Right. They understood that those local differences were important. What we've done by giving the federal government so much power and taking that away from the states, we've upped the stakes of these presidents presidential elections to such a fever pitch that it feels like life or death. And in fact, those are the very terms that we kind of use in our politics, which is so dangerous. But California should be very different than Utah, and it shouldn't be. Gosh, you know, if Kamala Harris wins, then the whole country is going to be like California. And that's something that I just can't stomach. And we're going to have to go. We're going to have to do everything possible. And that leads to some very dark places. And so I do, do think getting back to truly understanding the Constitution and how we act within that will help us to disperse with some of the truly terrible feelings that we're having for each other and give us a framework for acting together.

Ezra Klein (38:13)

I think people often move to this federalism point, and I don't totally disagree with it, and there are many ways in which I think it's even true. But I think the way people experience politics as much at least as they experience it through politics policy, is they experience it through media and culture. And something that's very, very different than the way American politics worked at the founding, or the way it worked in 1927, or the way it worked in 1977, is that our media has nationalized, our local media has weakened terribly. So, you know, a lot less about what is happening right around you, a lot more about what is happening elsewhere. We have national cable news, we have national social and algorithm, algorithmic media. You know, something that I notice a lot of on the right is the grabbing of Something from wherever in the country, this thing happening in this random school district somewhere. And then all of a sudden, it's like a national cause celeb. A national story, a national. It's like you don't have that separation anymore. You know, if you lived in New York at the time of the founding, you didn't know that much about what was happening in rural Virginia. But now you can live in rural Virginia and know a lot about what is happening anywhere in New York. Zoran Mamdani is a national story in a way that is unusual in part because so much media is concentrated here. And that feels like a big piece of this to me, that we're all kind of like locked in this box where our local politics for a lot of people has dissolved into something they barely even know anything about. Right? How many people can name their state seat Senator, their assemblyman, if they, you know, their city council member? And yet so many people can tell you what is happening in a school district they now hate or what they think about how crime is policed in San Francisco. And these are local issues. But I don't think we've seen. We live in a world right now where local issues calm the debate. Instead, it's like people hunt for the local story that will show us the deepest difference from each other, then they blow that up. And in part because there is nothing to do about it nationally, it creates this incredible cultural pressure in our politics. The only way to win is to vanquish the other side, because otherwise they're just going to be there doing what they're doing, and eventually it's going to seep into you and your children.

Governor Spencer Cox (40:30)

I couldn't agree more. When I graduated from Utah State University in 1998, if you took political science with 101, which I did, the first thing you learn in there is that all politics is local. And so if the President of the United States was coming to visit your state, he would learn some issues, some local issues. There's a, you know, there's a, a water issue or an infrastructure issue.

Ezra Klein (40:54)

Ethanol subsidies in Iowa.

Governor Spencer Cox (40:56)

There you go.

Ezra Klein (40:56)

That's.

Governor Spencer Cox (40:56)

That's the perfect example. Right? And, and so he would show up and he would talk about these local issues, and you'd be like, oh, that guy gets me. I like that guy. He understands our issues. When it's, you know, it's, it's a couple staffers who are briefing him on the, the flight over that has completely changed. I now believe that the ethos of politics is that all politics is national so the exact opposite happens, right? You show up to a local school board meeting or a local city council meeting and they're talking about something that's happening in New York or a school district in Virginia. You are absolutely right. That is part of it. There are two things that I think are the focal point of this. And you hit on the first one that I think is very damaging. The rise of cable news first and foremost, and the need for content. And then the understanding by cable news, working with psychologists and psychiatrists of the, of the outrage effect and the addiction that happens through dopamine releases for outrage, which is a real thing. And so then you, you started to get, not just cable news that was covering what was happening in the country, but you would get to fill in the gaps when nothing was happening. You would get two people screaming at each other, and that's very addicting. And then social media takes that and puts it on steroids. There's no question the algorithms drive us. If I'm fed outrageous, especially if I can see the worst of the other side. So people always say that you, you get locked in this cocoon, right? You only see your side of the story. True. But, but it's not just you're hearing people telling you what you want to hear about you. It's that they're, they're cherry picking the worst of the other side so that you can get outraged and justify your feelings about that. And that is happening. It's well documented. But there's something else that I think is important and we, we have to go back to the early 2000s when Professor Putnam at Harvard writes a book called Bowling Alone. And this idea of loneliness is, I, I believe is, is at the core of all of our, our greatest problems in this country right now. If you look less of what we would call community. One of my favorite things to do when I'm in a crowd is to ask how many of you belong to the Rotary Club or something like that? You know, a Lions Club, whatever volunteer organization, an Elks Lodge, something like that. And you know, 50 years ago, almost every hand would have gone up, and now almost no hands go up. There may be a little bit of a reawakening happening, but same thing with religious affiliation. Do you go to church on Sunday? Do you have real people in your life outside of the virtual world where you can have dinner and have conversations and get to know, know each other better? And that loneliness epidemic? Now we're, we're trying. If I don't have any real friends in my town, at least I can hate the same people together on Facebook, right? That's where it starts. I do just want to say for the record, my wife and I are 12 years sober when it comes to cable news. We, we turned it off 12 years ago. We, we had a, a Fox News addiction in our family. And we've been happier, healthier, our marriage is better, our relationship with our, our children are better. All of that. And now, sadly, social media has taken up even more of that.

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Ezra Klein (45:46)

One of the things I always think when I hear this argument loneliness is I don't think we're online because we're lonely. I think we're lonely because we're online.

Governor Spencer Cox (45:53)

Yes, yes.

Ezra Klein (45:54)

And the loneliness is partially a product there. Sometimes you're lonely being online with people. You know, the sort of canonical kids texting their friends instead of hanging out in person. But I also think that even people not lonely online there is something really disastrous about the politics it produces. The perspective we're getting on other people right now in this moment of extreme emotion is so dangerous. Henry Farrell, the political scientist, he has this great piece about this where he talks about that one thing that politicians like you yourself are always doing is trying to get a sense of the public. I mean, what do you really have? How many people can you talk to in a day? Not many. So I guess there are polls, but that tells you one kind of thing, and it's a very, very coarse snapshot. And then people, whether they know it or not, they go looking for some other kind of shortcut, some other kind of way of conceptualizing the public. And for a while, the news did it one way. Right? How is the news responding to things? Then cable news, and if you're on the right, Fox News became the right. If you're on the Democratic Party, MSNBC became the voice of the Democratic Party. I have many of the same criticisms, I'm sure, of cable news that you do, and I don't watch much of it myself. But seeing how cable news has been treating the aftermath of Charlie Kirk's death and seeing what it is like when I log on and try to check the temperature on X on Blue sky, you know, on other platforms, it's night and day. And it is something about the algorithms that what they want in this hunger, angry, heedless, dumb fashion is just something that makes you emotional. They don't care how it grabs you, just that it grabs you. And so we're all acting with this sense of a malformed public. Right. We have this idea of who the other side is, particularly in our heads, and it's not who they are. Something that I think is interesting about your work going before this is. I think a lot of us have just treated this as an inevitable ability that I think we think the public square has become degraded. I think we think what social media is doing, not just politically, but in many cases, we think the way young men are getting addicted to porn, we think it's all bad. But what are you going to do? Right. Free market. And that's not really been your approach. Right. I think something that's interesting in your politics and your policy is a sense that we've sort of abdicated our responsibility, ability to choose and shape. I mean, we shape markets, but we don't really shape online life. And I get the sense it's actually a pretty big place. You diverge with a lot of other people where you think we should and need to, particularly for children. Can I Get you to talk a bit about not just what you've done, but actually the theory of it.

Governor Spencer Cox (48:50)

Yeah, look, I'm a tech optimist. I have been, I'm a huge believer. I come from the telecom world. I was giving speeches, was many years ago, 12 years ago, 13 years ago, whenever it was on the Arab Spring and how social media was going to bring us all together and allow us to see past cultural divisions and solve all of our greatest problems. And here we are. So we passed some of the most comprehensive social media legislation in the country a couple years ago here in Utah, and we've passed several bills since then that I think are really important to protecting our young people. But it is more than that and it is bigger than that and it is philosophical and it is deeper than that. And I think we've made a huge mistake. I think our response to technology and specifically to social media and what it's done to our young people has been abhorrent. You know, I know we both know Jonathan Haidt, who's written kind of the preeminent book, the Anxious Generation. I was talking to Jonathan well before Anxious Generation came out. When I saw some of his initial work, he was in front of Congress kind of sharing some of that which led to the passage of those bills here in Utah. But it is deeper than that. It's a decision we've made to allow these companies to hijack our kids in ways we would never allow in, in any other way. We do not allow historically contractual relationships between, between corporations and, and minors for their data. The algorithm runs on us. It is our agency. I'm, I, I believe there, there's a great book called our, Our Biggest fight by Frank McCourt that, that I would recommend, where they make a really interesting argument that they're taking our agency from us and that our identity, really, our, our personal freedom is bound up in that and we have to take that back from them. The social graph. Us that know us better than we know ourselves, that allow us, as you so eloquently stated, and, and better than, than I could, to understand what makes us emotional and what keeps our eyeballs on there. So that when a kid is somehow, even if they don't want to, they're on TikTok at 3:00am Just going from, you know, from video to video and they've given up their free will and that is unbelievably dangerous. When tobacco companies addicted us, we figured out a way out of that. When opioid companies did that to us, we were, you know, we're figuring our way out of that. And I'm just here to say that I believe these tech companies with trillion dollar market caps combined are doing the same thing, the same thing that tobacco companies did, the same thing that the opioid companies did. And I think we have a moral responsibility to stand up, to hold them accountable and to take back our free will.

Ezra Klein (51:26)

You went on in that speech to say something I quoted in the episode I released a few days ago now, which is that we don't know what kind of turning point this will be for the country. It could be one towards something better, it could be one towards something worse. It could not be one at all. But that we sort of can each choose our own reaction, that we at least have agency over ourselves and how we respond to politics Next. What are you hoping people?

Governor Spencer Cox (51:52)

Well, I hope that people had that dark feeling in the pit of their stomach like you and I had. And I hope they will remember that. And I hope that they will ask themselves, am I part of the problem or can I be part of the solution? I hope that people will build community. I think we make a mistake telling our young people that they need to go out and change the world. I've given those speeches at graduations. The truth is it's very unlikely that that's going to happen. Most people will not have a huge impact on the world as we understand. And sadly, I think many of these most evil people that we're talking about, including shooters, are trying to have some sort of impact on the world. What I think we should be telling our young people is that they shouldn't be trying to change the world. They should be trying to change their community, their neighborhood. And that's where I really want people to focus. The experts, again have said that service is one of the most important things that we can do for our own mental health, but also for building community. I would encourage them to join a faith, a congregation. Believe in something bigger than yourself. And if you're not, if you're not interested in faith, then find a group, a positive tribe that is doing good in this world that will give you a place to meet people who are different than you. I think all of those things are how we do this differently. I hope people will log off of social media, especially Discord and 4chan and the deepest and darkest places, and find human beings again. You said it best. It's not that we're lonely and seeking out social media. It's that social media is making us more lonely. I need people to get out of that and get back in the real world. The virtual world is not real life and we need the real world. I will just say that AI is going to make this a thousand times worse. And hopefully we have our eyes wide open as we head into this new whatever this next thing is.

Ezra Klein (53:42)

Absolutely we don't. But do you have views on what would de escalate our politics beyond individual action? We talked a little bit about federalism, but I think I'm thinking of something that's more about our politics, about politicians, about your sense that you described a few minutes ago, that there are a lot people who don't want politics to feel this way. There is an unmet market for something different. And yet we are getting a lot of this, however you might define this. And it feels like it's been getting worse, not better. Politics is structural. It's shaped by primaries, by money, by all kinds of things. You're a professional practitioner of the arts. What would make for a better politics and what we have.

Governor Spencer Cox (54:26)

So there is a lot of research about this. And again, I would point to Stanford, who's run some pretty interesting experiments with what they call interventions. And there are several of them. Unwittingly. A professor at the University of Utah sent a video that I filmed with my Democratic opponent in 2020 when we were trying to de escalate coming out of that terrible summer, George Floyd and the pandemic and everything else. And what they found was that one of the things that can deescalate and interestingly enough, people's thoughts towards political violence were having politicians on stage together or on camera together talking about how they disagreed without hating each other. And so that is powerful. They found that there was a measurable drop in that polarization again and thoughts of violence towards the other side when you were able to get political elites, as they call them, and that's a term of art for them, political elites are people of. Of high political office, in a room together, talking like human beings. And so that's something we've encouraged. We filmed lots of videos together. I've encouraged my fellow governors. Governors are a great way to do that. But I would also caution that no one person, no governor, no president is going to be able to get us out of this. It really is those individual decisions that you focused on earlier and always.

Ezra Klein (55:46)

Our final question, what are three books you'd recommend to the audience?

Governor Spencer Cox (55:49)

Well, I've probably already mentioned a couple of them. I'll go ahead and just mention our Biggest fight by Frank McCourt, since I already mentioned it. We passed some legislation around that this year in Utah, by the way. It's kind of like the 96 telecom act, what we passed for social media companies. It would allow you to take your data, make your data portable and take it to other companies, which we think will increase competition, but also allow you to have your data deleted from these companies, which is important. The second one, I would urge, is Yuval Levin, since I already mentioned him. I'm going to cheat and do two for one here. He's written two books that I think are the most important books. The first one is called A Time to Build.

Ezra Klein (56:27)

Build.

Governor Spencer Cox (56:28)

It's really a rehash of almost everything we've talked about today. And then American Covenant was his latest one, which is kind of the answer to A Time to Build. American Covenant is about the Constitution and how it can solve this polarization that we're in right now. The last one I will mention is one by Jeffrey Rosen and it's about the Declaration of Independence. It's called the Pursuit of Happiness. As we're celebrating 250 years, that phrase, that phrase in the Declaration. So life, we, we all understand what life is. Liberty, that's freedom. But the pursuit of happiness, we misunderstand. The pursuit of happiness was a term that actually dates back to the Stoics, back to Aristotle and Marcus Aurelius and, and the Stoics, they understood, the founders understood the pursuit of happiness was not the pursuit of pleasure. It's the pursuit of virtue, of personal enrichment and, and of taking care of the people around us. And getting back to those virtues, I think is critical for our country. It's the responsibility piece. You have freedom on one side, on the other piece, we've forgotten. The responsibility piece to be better people that will lead us to, to human flourishing. And I think that's something our, our country needs right now.

Ezra Klein (57:35)

Governor Spencer Cox, thank you very much.

Governor Spencer Cox (57:37)

Thank you. Ezra Foreign.

Ezra Klein (57:56)

This episode of the Israel Clancho is produced by Roland who Fact Checking by Michelle Harris with Kate Sinclair and Mary Marge Locker. Our senior audio engineer is Jeff Geld, with additional mixing by Aman Sahota. Our executive producer is Claire Gordon. The show's production team also includes Annie Galvin, Marie Cassione, Marina King, Jack McCordick, Kristin Lynn and Jan Cobel. Original music by Aman Sahota and Pat McCusker. Audience strategy by Christina Seymilwski and Shannon Busta. The director of New York Times Pinion Audio is Annie Rose Strasser.

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