Ezra Klein | Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard

welcome welcome welcome to armchair expert experts on Expert I'm Dan Shepard I'm joined by miniature Mouse hello there how you doing I'm doing good how are you doing really good you know one of our favorite episodes of Sam Harris ever right was him debating this man this this mysterious man Ezra clined we were introduced to him there yeah and we really just enjoyed him um sparring with our uh our favorite person he's quick e oh he good he real good so Ezra Klein is an American journalist a blogger and a political commentator he co-founded Vox where he is currently editor at large he also has a new book called why we're polarized please enjoy as recline and tomorrow everybody is the premere of Monica and Jess love boys I'm so excited I hope everyone will check that out and support our most maximum miniature Mouse Happy Valentine's Day lovers [Music] you live in Oakland I do and but you're from Irvine that accurate yes yeah are you there for work or do you love Oakland you know part of it honestly was it I like the Bay Area a lot I love California we wanted to be closer to my family after we had the baby uh but been in DC for 15 years and and it was important to establish in our lives the idea that we could change things uh right to not get SE into one particular Rhythm Irvine though if I'm correct and I'm just going to be using some broad-stroke stereotypes I'm from Detroit let's watercolor okay good my my understanding of Orange County in general is just kind of like a Bastion of of the right in Southern California so traditionally yeah although in 2018 it elected um Irvine elected that District its first Democratic member of Congress k who totally awesome yes this isn't the one that sent some distasteful photos that bummed me out cuz I sent money to her campaign and I just don't care about those distasteful photos ktie Hill Katie Hill yeah and I got a check in the mail refunding my money that I had donated and I didn't want it yeah that that whole thing struck me as in like a absolute shame like to get run out of Congress through revenge porn it it struck me as real bad there's a great profile of her in actually Playboy recently she sat for and talked about sort of what she's doing next and how she's thought about it and among other things made me feel like Congress lost a good person for no good reason yeah and I I guess the uh the bottom line that she maybe crossed right was that um they were employees or they were working in her campaign that was the was that the inexcusable offense just just being I want to be careful on this one because I I did not look super deeply into this particular Scandal but it was not clear though if the employee had an issue with it and what the dynamics of that was it seemed to almost entirely come from an ex-husband out for revenge and that's a pretty different situation than an HR complaint it definitely didn't come from the employee that I do know but then it was like this person works for her and that's bad well one of the only consequences that I disagree with for the cracking down on these egregious misuses of power and balance which I'm totally for the part of me is like you can still date and [ __ ] people at work if not where the hell are you meeting people I mean people you don't use Tinder I I I I am too old to have used Tinder thank goodness cuz I would have I the addict and me would have I would abused that I would have yeah I would have hated myself shortly but at any rate you know this notion that you can't date a boss there's so many great examples of couples that have made it and persevered they're our favorite couples and then one of them was one another's boss you know all right I'm I'm I'll wait topic it's a tricky space having I thought about a lot cuz I ran I was the editor-in-chief of Vox for the first four years and we thought a lot about those policies and those questions and I think it is something where you need to clear a high bar right if you want to go to HR and talk it through and figure it out but on the other hand there the good examples of people dated a boss and it worked out great and the bad examples of people got fired because the boss retaliated against them and so the question I feel like we're in this era of like norms renegotiation and it's very uncomfortable to be in the middle of it yeah sure right before you figure out the new version but but again just to that point so um I think we have this fear of just in general confrontation right so if an employee is later fired because of this affair now this is going to be a grueling process to fix this or amend this and so we'd rather just not deal with that by saying it can never happen so that we don't have to deal with it but my point is like if someone fires someone because they had an affair with them and they fired them wrongly then they should uh suffer for that yeah but who makes him suffer right Court are bad about this power is a lot of who wins those fights yeah I agree with you in some IDE world what we would do is have negotiations of equals sort of constantly what if the negotiation is never equal right and then what do you do like how do you plan for that inequality at the front end yeah well what this is circling in weird ways already and what I think we'll talk about at length here today is you know some often conflicting values that we have in this country so I think as people have made their political leanings their identity we forget that both sides are pursuing something kind of virtuous right so the the right in just in general is pursuing like protection of individual rights and the left is more generally pursuing the greater good of the masses I I got to see if you're in so far do you would you agree with that I'm I'm I'm holding I'm holding judgment okay okay and then I would argue too that we have two values in the Constitution Liberty and equality and those two are often opposing and uh the right seems to Value Liberty and the left seems to value equality I think they both value both but I think it is a spectrum and you know the the pendulums pointing to one specific area so quite often both things like fighting for the right for people to fall in love at work is good and then fighting to make sure there's no abusive power is also good right so it's like I I think quite often we want to just assume the other side is bad or evil or all this but it it's quite possible they're pursuing a virtue we do agree with you know your your book why we are polarized did I get it right it's got It's got contraction it's were oh well yeah why we are sounds very formal you're right you we're just rapping about politics here very relatable pull up a chair it's so funny you'd say that because I was reading reviews of the book this morning and I had typed in why we are polarized and it said do you mean why were polarized so I've already been corrected once and I've already for thank you Mr Google but anyways one of my my my armchair opinions on it is just that we really think the other side is like evil the two things I would say that that made me think about is one I often wish we had a more philosophically tethered debate in this country in some stylized way you're completely right the the right is supposed to be in protection of individual rights left in in protection of equality and a more balanced society and I think that if you begin picking through what is happening on both sides you find a lot of variation and violation of that for instance choice is a question where you could really imagine a right that believed in a woman's right to choose because that is an individual right but it went in another Direction and I'm not I understand why people AR on both sides of that issue but it's one that I think um flies a bit in the face of that uh the other thing that I do think is interesting there's a philosopher I I hope I'm not Mis attributing this named Danielle Allen who makes the argument that we have really aired in this country with this idea that Liberty and equality are somehow in tension with each other that to truly have any kind of Liberty you need a fair amount of equality because deeply imbalanced power relationships are an En of Liberty I mean there's a great old line that the law in its Majestic equality permits both the rich and the poor to sleep under a bridge which is to say the rich never end up homeless sleeping under the bridge and so the question with a lot of issues of Liberty is do we have the equality to exercise that Liberty do we have the equality to go to our boss and say something has gone wrong here or is there actually no liberty in that situation because there's not enough equality of power for the Liberty to be exercised or similarly you know if you want to quit your job start a business but you can't get health care or you want to stand up to your boss but your kid is sick and you would lose your health care that's a situation which you don't have Liberty so I think something that has happened going way way way back in the American conversation is this idea that there's liberty and equality and these are should somehow be understood as intention I I think uh we should be working towards much more of a synthesis of them and and some people to to be fair do yeah well I think there's you just gave some examples where they seem kind of symbiotic in a way but also there are some very obvious examples where they're just not they're kind of opposing there there's you know you could you're going to have some cognitive dissonance to to pursue both right I just I I kind I guess I wish everyone started recognizing yeah it's going to be a compromise in its best case we're we're we're aiming for a compromise yeah to me that just would be such a different framing for how we think about all these things I think this is a hard thing right now one of the arguments of the book is that my background is is a policy reporter so I covered things in Washington like the Affordable Car Act fight and the financial crisis and climate change that kind of thing and I had the same experience over and over again which is a issue with start up right Washington in its hydraulic mechanisms would decide we're going to take on Healthcare this year and so I'd sit in these rooms where members of Congress from both sides of the aisle or Think Tank experts from both sides of the aisle began talking about what could we do what could we do that would make this better for everybody for the left given its premises for the right given their premises and you'd sit there and there'd be a lot of compromise because policy in general Zero Sum a lot of things are kind of screwed up for everybody and there's a lot of ways you can make it better for everybody and then by the end it would collapse down into Total War right it would collapse down into a pure party line vote nobody could you know cross the lines that's because when the question that American politics collapses down to which is a reasonable question the way we set up the rules is who will win the next election there's actually no compromise in that um Michael Lind who is a kind of interesting center right unusual thinker he talks about politics in terms of settlements which I really like it's a little bit related to to what you're saying in compromise that we have this slightly lazy language of War right class Wars War on Drugs war on climate like the partisan War Etc and he says like politics is always and everywhere about settlements right you got to think about what is your settlement going to be and I think that's actually a good frame sometimes to come at it from yeah that yeah it's almost like you know any business negotiation any kind of negotiation you recognize that oh that the goal here will ultimately be you know you didn't give up the thing that would have killed you and they didn't either and then somehow you know it all it all works but I do Wonder back to your point about when they were talking on the floor basically private conversation and public conversation and what I often find just even moving throughout my liberal Silo is there are there's almost like the party line in the news and on Twitter and in headlines and then when I start talking to people in real life face to face I'm finding it's not it doesn't mirror it at all I mean particularly and I guess I'm probably uniquely in the middle of the met too stuff as it pertains to Hollywood right there'll be like these open statements we would all give on red carpet and then we will have these way more Nuance conversations in real life CU maybe one of us knows the person or whatever the case is and I'm just increasingly shocked by how different those private and public conversations are and I just wonder is it because now everything is public so like I I have to imagine in the 40s those Senators would chat or those Congress people would chat and then they might come up and then what they did wouldn't be a headline they could kind of move in somewhat of more secrecy yeah yep I think this is completely true so one I think is a public Dimension you're talking about I have the experience a lot on my podcast of I'll bring someone on who's been you know like attacking me on Twitter or what they write is really even if has nothing to do with me very sharp edged and then when they're in the room it's actually sometimes hard to even like I want agreement but the Dynamics of sitting here with someone yeah it it pushes you so much towards conciliation and one tricky thing though is and I think about this a lot because I think it's a hard question is which one of us is the real us and is any of it the real us right because sometimes I think there's an intuition that that thoughtful behind closed doors Etc like that's who we really are but then certainly in politics then we get down to the vote and it goes the other way right like well actually was I getting fooled by the kind of nice social dynamics that we were playing in and then it turned out that what you really want to do was exercise power so one I think and this is one of the things about the book the book is very much about how systems technological systems political systems economic systems and social ones shape the way we act right that there are a lot of different ident identities we can have it a lot of different versions of ourselves we can be and depending on which context you've created for people you get a very different version of them but the other specific point you make I really like want to emphasize because I think it's a tricky one it's a tricky one to talk about but I think it's true people who study Congress will tell you that one of the reasons it works so badly is that there's too much transparency it used to be possible to do a lot of behindth scenes deal making you didn't have cameras in every hearing and that meant there was less performative grandstanding there was more opportunity compromise but if everything everyone does is under the microscope of all partisan media at all times then that work you have to do to get to the point where you say hey we're going to jump together and also just the incentives in any given meeting right if you could go viral on Twitter that day versus there are no cameras in that room so actually the question of whether or not you've been influential and had a good day is did your colleagues think you are persuasive that is very different and people want more transparency We Believe transparency is a good thing sunlight is the best disinfectant but sometimes I mean if you think about if you would want I mean you're a more open person than most I about to say if you would want every discussion with your partner like out but when I was running a business um I I used to think about in Congress how the meetings we had to figure out what we had to do next at Vox if there are cameras in those it'd be very hard to run oh yeah yeah like it's not how we run other kinds of things yes I'd say it'd be nearly impossible well and I think part of the dynamic and you were just talking about with systems is I think when we're most honest we can admit that we as individuals are probably not as good as the systems we can create that's kind of the beauty of systems I I just as a someone who loves reading history books there's so much of these Monumental just say projects right like uh the Panama Canal the Hoover Dam the interstate system so many of those things literally could have never gotten done with the level of transparency that we have today cuz sometimes there's some ugly underbelly of some of these bigger things that just need doing and I there doesn't seem to be any either appetite for that underbelly or acceptance that it's part of it I think that's right and the other thing I would just say is that the tricky thing is we can have systems that make us much worse than ourselves too oh sure and one of the things I'm worried about like deeply worried about is that politics has become a system that brings out the worst in us not the best um and not that I mean that has been true at other times right we read the books and those were the Great projects we also had the not great projects and we also had the not great moments in our our social history you don't like Eugenics it's not in my top 10 I would say um it did it didn't make the cut but I I'll actually give a I think a hard example of this so there's a great piece actually that political published a couple months ago and is about do you guys ever go to pen to Penn Station in New York the train station yeah sure so when I was in DC I was up there all the time and the thing about Penn Station is it's terrible like it's just a terrible train station like there's not nice stuff in it like waiting in there is unpleasant it's very old technology the whole thing is crazy and this was like a very deep investigation to they've been trying to make that into a train station worthy of New York for 30 or 40 years now and what happened in this guy's argument is that so Robert MOS is a kind of great and also terrible power right now that's an amazing is it oh my God that's an amazing book people should read the power Brook oh I had no idea that one individual was so you changed the landscape of is that a post motherless Brooklyn read for you it is it is yeah yeah I was super excited when motherless Brooklyn became also a Robert Moses movie I love that book anyway that's another topic yeah yeah anyway but again that's a prime example of someone who's like self will run Riot yet the ending result was pretty positive for New York well so I want to be careful on that because Moses built amazing things in New York right he built the New York as we understand it but as part of doing that he destroyed communities of color he ran freeways through them he displaced huge numbers of people and I mean it was very clear who paid for that progress he created this and one of the reactions in progressivism was to say we can't allow like people of power to run rough shot over communities and so what we should create is structures within the decision-making process where communities have like a really intense uh level of input but the problem is that if you build that in too many play places and the people who come out are not representative right because the people who come out are really there in general to oppose new projects they don't want the communities to change eventually you can't get anything done and one of the reasons it's really hard for us to build infrastructure in this country the way we did in the midcentury American period when a lot of like our iconic Bridges freeways you know pieces of Public Works were built is because we have so many internal veto points which are built with all good intentions and are in many ways good but also at some point if you can't get around California right if you can't drive somewhere or have good public transportation or I'm up in the Bay Area now if it's not affordable to buy a home as a middle class person because they won't let you build anything because you have all these neighborhood councils which are only about people who live there right now saying I don't want anything to change at all forever yeah they just kind of proceed as the uh immigrants that made it and then wanted to slam the door it's like no no I'm here and now it's good and this should nism is one of the great failures of liberalism what's nimbyism not in my backyard ISM oh yeah like I want everything to be better and different and let's build but like not where I am like it's where somebody right like we'll make the bridge over there yeah yeah so now there's this like movement of yimes yes in my backyard it's like this is I think in particularly in California like this is like a big important fight yeah so I make it a point to um whenever I see something about the president that irritates me I forced myself to imagine the exact same thing happened under Obama's tenure just going to check my temperature if I'm really that convicted about how how bad it was so in this impeachment thing as I ran this little experiment I do I was like you know I bet my first reaction would be why is a transcript of Obama talking to another president even in the public sphere wh wh how is it that Obama can't have a private conversation with a world leader h and that we all know about it that would just be my first KNE that cript optionally they did it's a wild it's a wild part of this oh I have friends and yeah I was sitting there with one of my good friends Steve and he goes did you read the transcript I go yeah it's so obvious he goes it no and I I could see in that moment we both genuinely are reading two dramatically different things even though it's the same thing but all I was going to say is um uh you know obviously I'm on the left so I do think that he was definitely saying investigate my political rival but with that said I'm a little concerned that two presidents can't have a conversation I feel like those conversations need to happen and that they they're never going to hold up to the scrutiny of us four days later evaluating this conversation that's a good that I don't think I'm with you on this part I think I would buy into this principle but I'm not sure I think it applies here because in general he can have those conversations they're not they chose to make this call record which they also edited by the way public and I think the wasn't there a really quick wasn't there a whistleblower some someone said I was on that call and yeah so there was a whistleblower who went to Congress went to the Inspector General and then and then went to Congress and said I've heard from people on these calls that something is going wrong here that needs to be investigated and as there was political pressure building up to have investigation the White House said you know what we're going to nip this in the bud we're going to release a transcript you're all going to see as in Donald Trump's words the call was perfect then they released a transcript I was like oh my God are you kidding me but as you say not everybody and one of the things that has always been very striking to me about that whole um structure of that and and I I have an impeachment podcast I've been like thinking about this a lot is that Donald Trump and maybe some of the people around him although we don't actually know that too well looked at this and said this call was great exactly this was perfect right like I should have done exactly what I did one of the chapters of the book is all about how we process information through a political lens how people from different perspectives will look at the exact same thing there's a great um line that we we read or hear or watch things as we are not as they are um what we bring to something is very much what we take from it and so people you know on the right have looked at this and I think they are wrong in this particular case but as you say Donald Trump clearly looked at this and I think the way he understood it is Joe Biden and Hunter Biden are bad for the country Donald Trump whatever else he will say about him is a True Believer in these kinds of conspiracy theories that he ends up running down he's like a genuine Fox News viewer in this way and the right thing for me to do as president is to try to stop them to try to fet out this kind of internal American corruption yes now I think that thing where populist leaders decide that they're domestic opponents are enemies of the state and like they need to use a state to stop that we've seen that a lot in the world it doesn't go super well long term yeah but that is not to say it's not authentic right it's not in their head motivated by an actual even concern for the country yeah well so again this is just like a little bit of good faith I guess I extend to a lot of people I completely disagree with it's like I watch that Cheney documentary and I'm like just 180° different opinion on everything but do I believe that in his heart he truly was fighting hourly to make this country the best place it could be in his world viiew I do believe that I don't think he was an evil guy trying to harm the country I just happen to disagree with every single opinion he has on what would make the country better yeah I I think in a way that we for good and for bad rely much too uh heavily on moralistic interpretations of people and trying to understand their politics right like the question of is Dick Cheney under his own framework of how the world Works a good or bad person is actually like not an important question and it sets in a way the bar way too low I think sometimes I'll hear this argument people make which is they think they're doing their best and like that's good but the problem is people who think they're doing good for the world on the left and the right can often do terrible harm because they such True Believers and what they're doing they become totally heedless of the consequences and in this way to be a little good placey about it I'm I I lean much more towards utilitarianism which is to say that I have covered Washington for you know coming up on two decades now I know a lot of these folks on the left and the right I believe almost all of them are working to create a better world as they understand it yeah and the way to judge them is are they creating a better world against some framework right not their framework but some framework if you are in all sincerity trying to work day in and day out to take healthare away from poor people I do not question the sincerity of your belief that is maybe not the government's right to tax me to fund Medicaid so poor single mothers can have Healthcare but I think you're doing a bad thing in the world and I think it's important to be able to separate out the the nature of people's motivations from their effect on the world yeah I agree but I I would just also say though it's a little defeat to just go like oh they're evil I'm good virtuous they're evil cuz there's no solution to that what are you going to have exorcism or something so to me it's just a little lazy it's kind of like as well to just go like oh Hitler was evil granted he was but Hitler was evil done thinking about that no what led to all the evilness and how do we prevent it from reoccurring like it is relevant to understand you know beyond just someone's evil good or bad oh yeah but that's what I mean a bit that I think we overly personalize politics is maybe a different way of putting that and it's something it's something I argue at the beginning of the book so I'm a political journalist and the way we tend to tell the stories of politics are through individuals we write biographies we write profiles we take you inside the meeting and the person of the thing to the other person and then like they ran off and if they hadn't said that thing maybe everything would be different and if you read books like game change or I mean it all kind of works like this we we're human beings we think in terms of other human beings and their stories yeah we like Heroes we like Heroes we like villains too and it's why I think it's important to think in terms of systems because one of the things I've really come to deeply believe about politics is for the most part if you put different people in the same positions they would end up doing similar things because people are responding to their incentives um the range of free will we have is smaller than we like to think it is yeah well and I I think as someone who loved Obama and was confused by some of his his decisions at times I thought oh this system is bigger than I think it is they tell them something that they're not telling me which caused him to now do something that I wouldn't have predicted he would have done there's a lot of Curiosities when people take that job I think about this right now as some of the left critiques of Obama because I I spent a lot of time talking to people in the administration when I covered them and in retrospect I think people sometimes rightly and sometimes wrongly but in general in a overly simplifying way they underestimate how much caution presidents need to operate with right much sometimes when the Obama Administration did not make the other decision or the more ambitious decision or the decision people wish they had made now they didn't make it because they thought it had a good chance of going wrong and if it went wrong too many people would pay the price and I remember there's a very particular conversation I had with somebody who was a senior policy maker there and this was during I don't know if you guys remember the debt sealing fights um and this was during that and the way that ended there was a lot of controversy over it and I was you know making the argument in some ways for why didn't you do this other thing that people like me thought would have been better and the person said to me look maybe we should have done it maybe you're right but the thing that you should always like keep in mind is it's not like nobody in the room in this room of political and policy professionals thought of that right it's not like the reason things don't happen is almost never CU nobody raised their hand about this it's a this obvious idea we should do that instead it's that we looked at that and we thought that what would happen in the aftermath would be worse now maybe we were wrong yeah but we were thinking that through and I I always try to keep that as a caution on myself it's very easy to like lob my bombs from the yeah from the outside of well you even said you just said that you know you have a utilitarian view of it and I think like we interviewed mayor Garcetti and one of the things I loved he said is like you enter that job with all kinds of ideologies but then you're the person who has to make the S the the whole city run so you become a pragmatist really quick yeah stay tuned for more armchair expert if you [Music] dare okay now I really became aware of you because I listen to Sam Harris's podcast and I love Sam Harris uh we've had him on a couple times we've had him on a couple times but of course you you had this this this Feud with him which was spectacular from not it was a debate we talked about it for like two weeks after we did people have people have very strong feelings about this but we did one podcast together it wasn't like a clash of no it was handled beautifully but I thought I think both of you it wasn't a fight the leadup well the leadup was wonderful because prior to the debate though there was like emails that were read all I'm saying is as as a as a as a movie goer I was like so interested in this whole no the hype was very well constructed yes like it was like Mayweather and uh McGregor like the the pregame was really spectacular but I really only was made aware of You by that whole thing the thing that I related to Sam on was oh yeah what happens if we do get some data that no one's going to like do we have a system by which you can bring something that would be hugely unpopular and you know dangerous to to light now I don't think it turns out that that that man's work was that I think you should give a little context yeah yeah you could probably sum it up better than me so yeah let me give you the quick version but recognize you'll get a little bit of my version but I'll try to be as as clear as possible as I can on it so back in the '90s 80s this is an old B the bell curve um although Murray's coming out with a like a like the bell curve two basically. oh he's doubling down yeah two two Bell two curve um so back back then he wrote a book so the idea that different population scor IQ test is not controversial it's simply true right right there's no doubt about it right um and the bell curve is a book uh that is not only about that though is in part about that but the kind of Arc of Murray's work is he's a sort of right-wing think tank guy who we initially became famous for a book called losing ground which was about why the war on poverty failed which I think he's wrong and it didn't fail but that's a different argument yeah thing out with this book that is sort of part of this oov which is saying that the reason you are seeing such different outcomes among different groups is IQ differentials biological uh at least partially biological and thus immutable IQ differentials and very importantly something that Murray says is that no matter whether or not the IQ differences are biological or environmental they are basically immutable we don't have policy interventions that can change them I think at all levels the evidence proves him wrong on that but that's a different thing yeah this is super controversial at the time like it's like a huge blowup it's like but way before my time in journalism then things like settle way down after that fast forward decades yeah yeah um Murray gives a speech or is going to give a speech at Middleton Williams something like that and there's basically like a deplatforming riot like get somewhat physical Murray chaperon is roughed up he wasn't even giving a speech about the bell curve it was about his other work so like this is like a bad event yeah um Harris brings him on to his podcast which at that point I listen to occasionally I like stuff on meditation and whatever I think something Harris always misunderstood was that he thought I was like coming into this as his enemy and I just wasn't I trying to deescalate him from the beginning and I think he always like kind of like was wrong footed on where on where I was um but anyway he brings on Murray and he basically has a conversation of which the framing is we need to have this conversation because what happened at this one college shows that there is this terrible political correctness pandemic nation that won't allow us to talk about things and then he goes on and has like this two and a half hour conversation with us which I think is a very bad version of a conversation about the bell curve and does a very bad job dealing with the extremely persuasive counterarguments to the idea that one um racial IQ differences are genetic which I do not think we have the evidence to say that that is true at any level and two they're immutable which over the past I think it's something like 40 years the black white IQ um Gap has closed by more than it currently exists by now we've been moving towards equality in this country since what do you want to call it the' 70s basically like a little bit and we're still quite far um at every level and so the idea that we somehow know what the effect of like everything we have done in this country to enslave and oppress and lock people out of good jobs and so on anyway I thought it was a quite bad version of that conversation but that said I like listened to it when it happened didn't think that much of it I was on vacation and the organization I run Vox published a piece by three IQ scientists basically debunking it uhhuh I got back I tweeted out the piece Harris got very mad at me challenged me to aate so then we had this conversation this is way more than anybody needs to know about this so the thing that you had brought up at the beginning which is the the persuasive point to you that he made is what if we had information come out you actually don't want to believe right an example I would give now is that uh I I think we would both agree that Mo most universities are pretty left leaning they're pretty Lial yeah yeah so if some scientist some environmental scientist was to discover some data right now proved climate change was in fact not real I can't imagine how that person would get that data out there or I would be fearful that it it wouldn't be able to get out there I would not I mean it would be it's hard for me to imagine because it would have to overturn so much other data simultaneously imagining that we had something like that let me say the let me take the broad version of this um I know people have this fear and I think it is it is not unreasonable but I think it is functionally unfounded in some ways I wish I had responded to this part of his argument more yeah because because it is not something I am so concerned about I didn't like I didn't take it that seriously but obviously people have this fear I think the place I come from on this is I work in politics I have to believe Seven Things I Hate About the world before breakfast I wake up I have to remember who the president is I like look around I have to think about how politics Works everything in my book I basically hate writing let me give you an example this from my own life yeah my entire life like career so not my whole life but my career is based on the idea that if I do and the people who work in my field do good reporting we are going to get information out there and that information is going to improve the world yes and I think the evidence is overwhelming that persuasion if people have decided not to believe you is almost impossible there's a thing that I talk about in called identity protective cognition if I go in to the doctor and like my knee hurts and the doctor says you know you got to do surgery why don't want to believe that but I will yeah yeah I am open to being persuaded that something is wrong and I need to do something I don't even like but if your identity was I have magic knees yes now it's a problem exactly or my identity is that you know above all else I'm a liberal and yes very hard so cuz you're protecting your concept of who you are your social relationships all of it that said I don't think that within um fundamentally truth seeking institutions and given the very many identities people bring to the table and how many different spaces there are for people to be embraced to find a group to find a a collision that in fact I think a lot of people are very willing to be the bearer of hard and unpleasant and very difficult truths and I think that for me and for a lot of people I know and a lot of people who do this kind of work I don't think it is easy to change your mind but I think if you look around at our society the idea that you might have to believe things you don't like and that scare you and that make the world a worse place to you look at what we have to believe every day I just don't think it's true that we're all such snowflakes but the thing that the point you made in there which I loved which is you were urging Sam to recognize why that story even appealed to him which is just take a little inventory of your own battles in your life and he himself feels like someone who said provocative things and maybe wasn't allowed to or wasn't embraced for or was excluded because of so naturally anyone that he sees as another fisherman at Sea he's kind of going to have a connection to and I just I thought that was the best point of the whole thing which is like when you care so passionately about something it's it's worthwhile to take five minutes and go oh what in my own life do I think I've I've dealt with what challenges with struggles that maybe I'm seeing that in this other person and now I'm kind of supporting their cause when maybe it's not even the the cause I believe in but it's just this familiar miror neuron feeling I have I don't know if people are really kind of trying to take inventory of their own their own lens enough and and I have it tremendously and you have it and Monica has it we all have it specifically Monica I don't really have it she's an objective computer so I think that we have misdefined this idea this idea of identity and identity politics um I think the way it is used in some of these communities and oftentimes in politics more broadly is that identity is something traditionally marginalized groups have identity politics is something traditionally marginalized groups practice so if you are you know African-Americans um uh create a group like black lives matter to protest police violence well that's identity politics okay if Rural white gun owners come together for an expansive reading of the Second Amendment that's just politics if CEOs want their taxes that's just politics right if we're arguing about what to do with Iran that's just politics and identity is present at not just all levels of politics but the most powerful identities are majoritarian identities and what happens when they're very powerful is they become more invisible nobody mentions them you don't see that they're happening one of the examples I give in the book is that there is a reason uh every politician ends their speeches with and God bless America and it's not because they're all very God-fearing and that they go to church every weekend or even that they're theistic it's that that is part of the American identity American flags are part of the the American identity so identity is something we all have and we all have many of them I am Californian a father Jewish a journalist a liberal like ETA you can go on like when I was a kid I used to get so into arguments about Mac versus Microsoft I was like such a warrior I know where you were at you were a warrior yeah of course um such a warrior in the macis mic think about sports right I I talk in the book about this list that 538 put together of 50 some sports riots that had happened in the past I forget exactly how long actually a lot of them happened when teams won but we get so e these contests that at some level have no real Stakes to them I mean the people will go wherever they get the biggest contract and so on but we care so much our identity is so connected to sports teams that we will burn the cities we live in and sometimes our our brothers and sisters will perish yeah because of a game and we are as human beings Exquisite I mean you're an anthropologist we're super exquisitly tuned to sense group yes and the qu one of the questions in politics always is what group are we sensing and feeling ourselves connected to at that moment a huge amount of Elections is actually about which group identity is going to get activated are we going to go to the polls feeling like um workers who are oppressed or are we going to go to the polls feeling like Americans who are afraid of China right you know it's a lot about identity can I tell you that again I'm going to try to stay neutral political but uh I felt it I experienced it last week which was with all this solmani assassination stuff you know it starts with me just going a this is you know just but at a certain point I felt myself going well if it's us against Iran I'm with us I I felt myself sliding into I didn't I don't agree with this but if it's [ __ ] go time I know where I stand and I was like oh that's so fascinating cuz I'm critical of the whole thing yet I can feel these identity ingroup things being activated I think it's really important what you just said though one of the things I talked about at the end of the book is having identity mindfulness so the reason I think it's a really bad thing that we have narrowed our understanding of how identity Works in politics to only groups that have traditionally not been that politically powerful is it blinds it us to it in ourselves but also it blinds us to it as a layer on which politics is always operating and something that's really important is to have identity mindful right to like ask yourself what is happening in me right now what is being triggered and did I want that triggered or did somebody do it to me without me even noticing did somebody structure a headline or structure a choice such that now I'm acting as a besieged American as opposed to a voter I I'll just relate a conversation I think about a lot I remember reporting this was back in the Obama Administration with their National Security team and this was shortly after one of the terror related shootings in Europe and they were talking to me about how they put so much resources into trying to prevent these Lone Wolf attacks not because these Lone Wolf attacks were at a casualty level the biggest thing you could possibly imagine the number of people dying from traffic accidents with orders and Orders of magnitude or cigarette smoke yeah it's probably not even 1,000th on the list but that if you imagined something like five mass shooter incidents that could be tracked back to Islamic terrorism and kind of a reaction that would create in the American population for escalation which is exactly what terrorists always want by the way right they always trying to disproportionately get a reaction to what they've done but if that happened right that feeling that you had around Soloman would have been I mean so much bigger right oh yeah like we have to do something that's how we ended up in the Iraq War which had nothing really to do with 911 which is in some putative way its cause and so trying to keep that from happening that kind of uh identity activation that you can't stop once it gets out of control it's a real political Challenge and a lot of politics and this is something the book is very fundamentally about a lot of politics is a conspiracy now to activate and inflame and aggravate some of our most intense and Central identities and use them to basically shut down higher orders of cognition drilling a little bit to that that specific example talking to the Obama Administration about the Lone Wolf Shooters and trying uh specifically and mindfully to prevent this is being labeled as Islamic terrorism right yes there's always this fight over whether you call radical Islamic extreme that you would call the whole thing one because individual things were clearly coming from particular groups but yes you didn't want to attribute it to the religion they were mostly trying to keep Islam out of the title let's just say that and I remember you know talking with my wife but at the time I was just like I I can empathize with the right going how are we going to defeat an enemy that you're pretending isn't an enemy like you're not even to label it what it is which is radical jihadists like if you're not willing to even say that I don't feel safe now cuz you're not even labeling the enemy and that makes me feel scared and yet now when I see their goal that also makes perfect sense and it's just an unfortunate yeah situation some of these choices are just bad choices they're bad yes but with the Islamic extremism thing what they're trying to do even separately which I Al thought was a really important thing is that this same idea identity question it operates in the other direction too Islam is a very big religion billion people maybe more uh I don't know the number off hand but it's huge it's I think the second most popular region in in in the world you do not want every member of that religion to listen to the American president and feel that what is being said is that we are in a war against them right and by the way a lot of the we in America are Muslims let's just agree that most bad decisions start with fear so it's like bad decisions start with fear so you're trying to sever what the terrorists actually wanted to do which is make their brand of radical jihadism somehow conflate it with Islam right say that you need to stand behind us because we are fighting for you like what they always want to do is like cut those people off in the same way that um like there's shootings like all over this country all the time and we don't want to we don't want to blow it up into something where it's all of a certain kind of people yep yeah I just wonder is is there not room for them to come out and kind of explain in a presidential address which people seem to watch like what the goal of terrorism is that they're trying to bait us into some lopsided response where we're going to spend $3 trillion and that that's the plan and we can't if you want to defeat them that involves not playing into that plan I don't know why this is not detailed I want to answer but my that I just had this thing happen in my head where I'm like one of my rules is that whenever somebody says why don't they say this thing that believe in a speech they always have said it and we in the Press didn't cover it almost always nobody does watch presidential speeches oh they don't no they watch like the State of the Union sometimes and mainly the people who tune in are very polarized right it's like you tune in cuz you're into it and then but the rest of them right I remember one thing Donald Trump understands is how to get covered and you get covered by being outrageous but the problem is most presidents they don't want to be outrageous what they want to be is sober right they want to like keep the temperature down for all the reasons we're talking about but when they do that nobody covers it yeah it's boring yeah it's boring but we had this debate we had it on a fact check a long time ago you and I and and I was saying well you can't say Islamic extremists and then not say white guy School shooters uhuh I mean if you want to make everything about the very specific group then that's a choice but you can't pick it's sort of in keeping with the minority identity politics thing where you hear that so much louder but no one's taking into consideration all the other identities that are associated with these other things I think the challenge of it is and it's the limitation of humans empathy which is uh most of those white Shooters look ingroup to Americans like now if they all wore top hats you could really easily isolate it's like oh these top ha hat guys I don't know what the [ __ ] is going on you know it's got a baked in challenge I agree I agree um but again it's just it falls in line with all these what you're saying is is is some identity awareness which is it requires you to have some awareness of what your ingroup is what an outgroup is why we're you know we're drawn to members of our ingroup and whatnot and just some acknowledgement of that is is kind of a uh control um but I want to talk because it's in your book this is more of a new phenomena the demographics of the parties has changed drastically right yeah the big story The Big macro story of the book but I would argue of American politics is that over the past 50 years we've had this convergence of a bunch of of identities around our political identities so one of the things that is misleading about our politics is that we've had the same names for the political parties for a long time oh this is infuriates me they describe very different things so if you go back to the 50s and' 60s America's functionally a four-party political system we have Democrats as we think about them now say Hubert Humphrey we have dixie crats who operate in the Democratic party but they are a conservative Southern and function and racist block so Thurman was the second most conservative member of the US Senate he was a Democrat at that time though he later became a republican his whole thing was protecting white supremacy in the South but he was a Democrat right he voted as a Democrat he voted for the Democratic Majority Leader you had Liberal Republicans in the Northeast like actually Liberal Republicans George Romney Mitt Romney's father was a very liberal Governor much more liberal than a lot of actual liberals today yeah and Romney was quite liberal in in Massachusetts or at least very moderate and then you had conservative Republicans as well and the thing that that gets at in is that the parties also were not very split by ideology and I have a ton of quotes in the book of people like Richard Nixon RFK well Richard Nixon was EPA did he create he creates EPA he almost creates or at least proposes a universal healthare system he talks about doing a universal basic income at one point there's a lot of his domestic policy that is very very liberal even by today's standards and so in addition to that um you have a lot of African-American Republicans right the Republican party is the party of Lincoln that's part of all you have the dixie crats Republicans are the party that invaded the American South you have um there's actually not that big of a split along religion geography doesn't split the parties and then over the past 50 years and race is a thing that ends up changing this right the Civil Rights Act where the Democratic party becomes more the party of racial equality and the Republican Party becomes more of a party of white backlash to that as that changes so the dixy krats become Republicans now the Republican party is the conservative party the democra party is the liberal party everything else begins to shift too so now the Democratic party uh I think this is a a measure of voting in 2016 but I think it was 44% non-white the Republican parties more than 90% white really quick let's just I want to give people a second to digest that that's what it is now the Republican party's 90% white and more than and Democratic part is about half non-white yeah that's um that's profound and that is true on religion so the Republican part is overwhelmingly a Christian party the single largest group in the Democratic Party is religiously unaffiliated um but also it's like the Democratic party of liberal Christians Buddhists Muslims atheists agnostics but if you go back to say the 92 Democratic party platform and you look at the immigration plank it reads like Donald Trump today I mean things were very different yeah so density is another one um it used to be that how dense an area was City rural didn't tell you much about its politics there is no city in America that is denser than 900 people per square mile now that is Republican like once you get over a certain density level no place in America votes Republican do you have an armchair theory on why that is I mean yeah there's a actually a great piece on this if people want to look it up by a guy named will Wilkinson called the density divide and basically the argument is that people are attracted to cities for or rural areas for psychological reasons if you're a person who likes a lot of change a lot of tumult a lot of bustle you like a lot of diversity around you um what psychologists would call you had John hey on here um openness to experience which Ates with liberalism you go to cities um if you want more tradition things to move a bit slower to be connected to like big family networks you tend to be in rural areas and that connects to conservatism so that makes a ton of sense but I would also Imagine as well if you are living in a city of a million people you're overtly aware of that we are a big mass of people and that there is a collective and that you're going to deal with all these people as you walk down the street and everything it's just going to heighten your sense of community I have to imagine versus living on a 100 Acre Farm and you pretty much see your wife all day and then that's that I could see where you're more aware of the individuals rights at that point because you're just not immersed in I think that might be right all these things are very they connect to each other in very complicated ways right what comes first our psychologies or our politics is actually a super hard question that I don't have a good way of answering but what basically ends up happening is that all of these things are very powerful identities like where do I live what is my skin color what is my Rel religion how much money do I make what is my age like what culture do I consume there was this uh New York Times thing a couple years ago that showed how popular different television shows were among different political groups and Duck Dynasty was the one was unbelievably conservative sure where um you know a lot of the shows that like I like good place good place probably Mad Men was pretty you know that kind of thing it it connects among liberals and so all these things end up creating what the political scientist an Aon calls Mega identities and it's super interesting here so one of the arguments here is that we like to think politics is about policy and it's very heavily about identity and one of the ways she shows that is that there are a lot of people who are Democrats but if you ask them about policy they're closer to the Republicans a lot of people Republicans if you ask them about policy they're closer to Democrats now how much does being close to the other side on policy restrain your hatred of the other side it helps somewhat uhhuh but if you have a bunch of identities that connect to the other side if you're a Democrat but you are in a right a white rural area you're an Evangelical Christian that will do a lot more to restrain your enmity towards Republicans than simply agreeing with them on policy you can be a liberal and everything else but if your identities connect yeah then you're going to be calmer about what will happen if the other side wins power yeah and so as this has happened it's created this real feeling of threat from the other side they're more different than us because as you were saying earlier we are as a species a hell of a lot more finely attuned to ingroup outgroup then what do I think should happen with Healthcare polic country yeah who the [ __ ] really understand politics are happening in your higher order cognition you got to do some work there but when it's like they don't look like me or feel like me or talk like me and I don't think they even like me which is a big thing I don't feel they like me which is a problem that drives a lot of political conflict stay tuned for more armchair expert if you dare [Music] well let me let me hit you with this and you can weigh in because this is kind of a long-standing debate with Monica I I'm not sure I actually want to get in the middle of it though please do you'll be on my side I in general I a I don't love that people are using their political opinions as a Cornerstone of their identity I think I think people are what they do not what they what theories they subscribed to in general I just don't feel like it's the most substantive thing to hang your identity on but there was a 2-year period where every [ __ ] conversation at every single dinner was about politics and I was like guys what are you actually doing other than voting every two years you know even if you're super civically engaged you're still talking about maybe eight activities over the course of four years yet 90% of your thought and conversations are about this that's troubling to me and Monica points out which is good which is the stakes are quite High there's kids at the border and cages but that to me seems to always be the counterargument to me going we don't need to talk about this all the time yes the stakes are high but I don't think that requires all of us to to talk about it Non-Stop and fight about it Non-Stop and think about it it's like go vote for the person who wants to get rid of cages well yeah but in order to know who you're voting for you have to have conversations I mean I don't think we should be talking about it all the time but I don't think we should not be talking about it I mean these are things happening in the world and I mean generally I agree that we shouldn't be making our party our identity but currently it feels like we're at some extremes that make it important to talk about it and figure out who doesn't want kids in cages who does want kids in cages because if you do want kids in cages maybe I don't really want to be hanging out with you and like that I don't really like saying that out loud but that's the truth I don't know that want to be you know at coffee or choosing to spend my limited time with someone who's for that and also I'm I disagree with you that convincing is impossible right yeah I think conversation respectful conversation can lead to an opening of ideas and thoughts and I don't know I'm not as pessimistic in that way so Ezra those are the two sides uh what are your thoughts why choose so two things so one the most important fact about our identities is that they are plural we have a lot of them and they activate when threatened when intrigued when talked about when the fact that uh you and I could relate as dads and you and I could in another context argue um from different political perspectives potentially or you and I could argue as you know people who like different sports teams those facts aren't contradictory about each other it's about what is at the Forefront when so that's I think a genuinely important thing about identity that people don't give enough Credence to uh the other thing though you guys both actually made super interesting points about how politics actually works so one Monica what you were saying I think people underestimate the degree persuasion is not impossible but it happens in the context of people feeling that they're in the circle together it happens in the context of not just respectful exchange of ideas that gets you somewhere but it's pretty important that people feel they share identity so actually if you're trying to convince somebody of something if you're trying to convince them that they're shouldn't be kids in cages uh which there should not be kids in I just want to say my kids occasionally deserve to be in a cage but that's well I mean temporary but if you're talking to somebody who thinks well look immigration like we have these people who are streaming over the border and you know they're doing it illegally which is actually not true they're coming legally and asking for Refugee status but nevertheless if you say look that's just straight bigotry and you are dehumanizing these people and cruel to these children you're not going to get very far but if you're like look like think about this as a father like that's a so trying to choose and actually being conscious of which identity you're operating in and calling forth another people is I think important for persu step one would connect and go hey we have this shared identity and now we're in in group but now let's talk about this but then the other thing that you bring up is and this is like an argument against interest for me as somebody who is a political journalist and like we give way too much of our attention National politics against state and local and National politics is highly polarized the way the identities work is often very difficult for persuasion and sitting around like being on Twitter being pissed off is bad it's what the political scientist Aton HS has a new book out uh which I think is worth reading and thinking about very hard he calls it political hobbyism there's a very big difference between practicing politics in a way that's trying to make the world better and being engaged in politics as a hobby yeah and so it's really different being out in your community working on making housing more affordable or supporting a candidate or you know being part of even the local PTA which is in its way a very political act right you're part of the Civic structure of your community and being on Twitter tweeting things that are basically saying and I say this to somebody on Twitter saying like I'm good and the people I disagree with are bad and I'm not even saying you shouldn't do that fair enough fine but don't confuse what you're doing there with actually practicing politics or sit around talking with people who agree with you at a dinner party about how bad Trump is you're not doing anything political there I think most people are hobbyist and they think they're somehow holding a position one of the things I really argue that I think is an actionable thing for individuals I got all my systemic things and getting rid of the filibuster and multiparty democracy and we can talk about it all but at an individual level like I really urge people to try to consciously rebuild state and local political identities that try to make more of your consumption of news State and local political news try to know what is happening like how many people just listening to this can name can probably name your senator of your state but can you name your state senator can you name your state representative your city council person but they would meet with you I mean they would kill to meet with you and you you had Eric Garcetti here though which is a good thing and he's a really impressive guy I fell so in love with him it's crazy but he he's fantastic but the the point is that one of the things that is heavily polarized politics is one of the restraints on how polarized politics got at other points in American political history was how much of our politics tends to be rooted in place you represent States not just parties districts not just parties and so you would have situations where yeah like you're a republican from Oklahoma and that's a democratic bill but they're willing to give you like help to rebuild a bridge in your district and like being from Oklahoma matters more than being a republican totally but we got rid of earmarks we think of that kind of thing as dirty transactionalism and like that's made politics much more polarized made it much harder to to find compromise and part of it is because so much media has nationalized so many state and local uh media has folded and we've lost what used to be these very powerful state and local political identities yeah you're so right because if you talk to your average Angelino at this point whether they were on the left or right I think 100% of us are like oh we have a major uh homeless crisis that really transcends any party it's like there's no one on the left or right that's like oh this is working this is great let's figure out how to you know make this sustainable it's like you know and there's a great example it's like something that's in your backyard and that you're seeing regularly you can easily bond with someone and la so Garcetti and and la and to give full credit here and I'm so I'm from Orange County I grew up reading the LA Times like I care a lot about La politics um you know my family's involved in it La passed a proposition to create a lot more money to work on the homelessness problem and they can't get the shelters and housing built because people who in every other context will have these like Signs in their window that everybody is welcome here and like nobody is illegal do not want the shelter anywhere near their home like liberal nimbyism and so they've had a lot less action even having got in money for it than they should have um and I've I've interviewed Garcetti about this because I cover this issue a bit and that's a kind of thing we're making that better like that's really practicing politics Yeah well yeah Dan Savage um when we talked to him he made a great point that just the entire system here in California is to basically promote no expansion like there're so anti-b buildings Hy regulations all these different things to prevent the all these areas from getting built up when you know that's a huge aspect of the problem is that there's just an inventory issue if you if you are in a PO where people cannot afford a house like you and you think of yourself as Progressive you are failing yeah right progressivism cannot make it possible for people to AFF a place to live and be able to get from point A to point B in a reasonable fashion I think the failure of California's highs speed rail which came for at least some of the reasons we've been talking about how hard it was to build in a straight line Etc yeah like it's one of the great failures of progressive governance of our age just is like California you can't get around you can't get a house like that's not working yeah now again to bring it back to Robert Moses it's like C can this stuff get done I mean people are going to have to be displaced you can't build anything without displacing some people and then it becomes a simple Market answer right which is are you going to try to reimburse all the owners in Beverly Hills for their houses or are you going to you know reimburse the residents in South Central and then you have this insane Market Force that you know so I don't know there's no appetite for anyone to go like yeah it's going to get Gnarly for a minute and then and are you also displacing the people in Beverly Hills is an important question there right or is it all Bakers field uhhuh right that's part of the key like is is everybody sharing is there some like one of the great and beautiful ideals of the left which is not always put into practice but is this idea of solidarity right that we are in this together that we are all that we all have to share in both the the wins and the losses and I think one of the places where people like get their backs up about that kind of building is the idea that the way it plays out and some way just goes back to the conversation we were having right at the beginning about power is that it sounds like great we're all going to have to give a little bit but in fact it's a people who don't have the power to organize at the city council who end up giving yeah and so the question is how can you make that Equitable and that is something that requires those liberals who are around that dinner table with you like talking about Donald Trump to actually throw in on do you think if we were taking from Bakersfield and taking from Beverly Hills some equality really started getting put into place do you think we'd lose a bunch of Democrats like truly oh definitely like a bunch of people yeah politics is hard and one of the things that I always uh I think that there is hard problems do not always have good answers and I think it's like something to appreciate about the world that it's there's an old Max vber quote that politics is a slow boring of hard boards and that to be really involved in it in a deep way over long periods of time you have to be open to getting a bit at a time and it often feels bad I think all the time about about how bad the Affordable Care Act felt to people when it passed right this was the single largest expansion of health insurance since the Great Society since Lyon Johnson it was more than any other president had been able to do but it was grueling and grinding and the public option got traded away and the deductibles were too high and the premium sucked and there's a lot wrong I mean I covered it there's a lot you don't want you have to build on it but the problem in our system with the filibuster and divided government and all the rest of it is it even if you win it feels a bit like losing and you really have to be connected to the fact that you're making people's lives better and not be overly attached to the symbolic levels of politics to even just be able to remain attached to it through that but people want people want sort of Glorious victory in politics and you almost never get it also there seems to be like no tolerance for growing pains to your point like you need to start with that Affordable Health Care Act and then you got to improve it improve it improve it and it's going to [ __ ] who knows maybe have tooken 20 years but you know you got to you have to start somewhere and I just feel like everyone's now expecting things to start perfect I don't know if we've been rewired cuz by God when they do release a new product it is perfect for the most part you know more than products ever were perfect I just we have now an expectation of that or something I think social media probably has an impact on the level of immediacy that we are accustomed to having at all times you know our attention spans are so tiny there's a guy named uh William Davies he just wrot a book called nervous States I was reading an interview with him and I just I read this line I just loved it he says populace sees the opportunity to promise immediate action while liberalism only offers mediated action via law political Representatives editorial peer review and so on and all this comes to be experienced as intolerably slow and self-interested in the age of the platform I think there's something to that that a lot of how we've improved Society is slow and it's hard work and it's generational and we want it to happen now because like shouldn't we be a to download the app to make everything better right exactly yeah well when we were talking about private versus public it was just interesting that your your experience with journalist I felt like was journalist so I started out as a blogger that's how I got into all of this and one of the nice things about blogging at least at that time was you could throw bad ideas up against the wall and the idea was that blogging was the beginning of the conversation yeah that then people be in your comments and be like that's wrong or other people would write a blog post and teach you hopefully some good faith like oh that part's good but this part but now what will happen it it had context right people some context for you and but now what happens is people screenshot something somebody said rip it out of context send it to a group of people who are never going to know what the person originally meant or never hear the the afterthoughts or it's very hard to learn in public and I think it's one reason a lot of people across a bunch of professions I mean in yours and mine have moved to podcast casting because it's still I still feel some capacity to be wrong in public in podcasting as I often am on my podcast because I think people understand when they can hear me that I'm trying to work this out that I'm not just a symbol of a media that is supposed to be infallible but in fact isn't oh by the way yeah I've been wrong on here a thousand times I've had in the last two years of changed complete positions on things and yeah I I almost feel like uh I I don't feel any cause to this other than not many people are learning real time and that's what I want to be an example of like it's fine to learn real time yes and it's important to learn real time I mean this is a place where I do not like I really wish we had called cancel culture criticism culture because people very rarely actually get canceled if not has never happened but what we do have is a culture I think of vicious criticism and that's very hard for people to bear and I think that there is a pressure to say around some of these controversial topics it's all wrong or it's all right and there are a lot of ideas that are you know maybe 70% wrong and 30% right or 70% right and 30% wrong and I think about that a lot in that debate where I do think people are afraid certainly on social media to be a little bit wrong in public doesn't mean the fears that they will get canceled and driven out of society forever most people don't do that and plenty of the ones who probably should end up making great livings as provocators and controversy artists but for like normal decent people the fear of just being attacked which is something that human beings do not like is very real and I think that I I mentioned Danielle Allen earlier um this philosopher and I did a podcast with just stuck in my head forever she's a Harvard philosopher and political theorist and talks a lot about democracy and she talks about democracy she says always requires sacrifice if it's working we are often giving up a little bit for other people to get more and then they have to give something up for us to get more and on and on and she says the only way that that works over the long term is if we approach each other with an ethic of political friendship I think a lot about are you embodying or uh violating an ethic of political friendship well I think Ruth Bader Ginsburg is the ultimate example of this the fact that she was well I'm just going to say the fact that she was like best friends with Scalia now is says she likes kavanau I'm like oh here's a woman who can be all things she can be a warrior for the left and she can be a human likes people you know I just I find her as hugely inspirational and the antidote to a lot of what is going on oh but you said I I won't get the quote right but you were talking about having you know majored in polyi and then finding your way to journalism and saying that in your mind the fourth estate is as powerful as any branch of the government basically in shaping the world and I think that is incredibly true and I I have to imagine in the current climate there's at least a an attempt to erode the trust in that fourth estate and what what price we would pay if people stopped believing in its utility and to some degree I already have uh so I have a big media chapter in the book and I think about this question a lot and I do think to be self-critical in the media for a minute one of the great mistakes we made is to pretend both externally and internally that we are simply a mirror held up to the world particularly in choosing what to cover we change the world if we give Donald Trump round the-clock coverage as we did in 2016 way before the polls merited the amount he got we help Donald Trump get elected if we spend all our time on Hillary Clinton's emails we you know and you and you can take this in a lot of different directions right everybody's going to have their own view of what is newsworthy and and and what the media should cover but a real problem I think is that we do not want to admit that we are as powerful an actor as we are because to do so would violate the self-conception of us as an objective mirror the mirror isn't an actor the mirror just reflects what comes in front of it but as we were talking about earlier we don't cover most things the President says including Donald Trump by the way we cover the outrageous things Donald Trump says I remember back in the bush and Obama administrations how much they would beg coverage of they would have these careful speeches on manufacturing policy that they were staging in an Ohio steel mill that had been like taken back from China like they and nobody cared yeah well I think the thing we would all like you guys to acknowledge is that you're as susceptible to Market forces as anyone else you will like this chapter of the book okay yeah because and let me say like we are right it's all about click it's all about it's not all about clicks I think people get a little too I mean come on it's a lot about clicks it can be about C but I think that people can get a little too it's all One Thing versus another now to be fair if I lived with tabloid coverage of me I might feel differently about this question I'm looking up here at would you date Dax um and 72% said no it appears like Trump though like 7 it looked like 72% would say no but in practice really 50% only said the popular vote was in your favor yeah you but you won in the Electoral College that's what I'm saying so the in the media chapter of this book I tell the story of how the media's um among other things business structure has changed from being Reliant at the television and newspaper and even to some radio levels on monopolies right there are only three networks using public Airwaves um newspapers you know there was the LA Times or and you didn't have access to everything constantly one of the reasons headlines get so amped up now is you're in this war of attention of all against all you know you're competing with the New York Times and the LA Times And The Washington Post and like lond in France but also with everything it's worth illustrating for folks that were born in the 90s that in the 80s you walked outside and you might have had your choice between the Detroit Free Press and the Detroit News there was your compe I read the LA Times I listen to but I couldn't listen to pod save America and read the New York Times go on to Drudge Report go on to all these different things this is new it's crazy how new it is wer competing we are on the one hand trying to adjust to it but also it it it does force a kind of intentional one-upsmanship from us and so one of the or you'll go out of business there's like a fact no one wants to admit and so one of the things though that I do think that demands of us differently than it used to I don't think that what has changed is that we were just a true mirror of the world before and we're now I mean I have a lot of critiques about how media worked in that age but one thing that has changed is that the media then was based on having a captured audience that they had to not offend if you're a monopoly what you want is that everybody who might go to a department store in Detroit will read your newspaper because that is how the business works I think the media had a very hard time sometimes telling the truth because they're worried if the truth was offensive to somebody and so that had its own set of problems and the media could be very but but in practice that almost led to what a compromise would have been I think that I think there's something to that again for certain person's kind of compromise right that media could ignore I mean one of the things I say in the book is that a lot of depolarized America in the 20th century relied on suppressing conflict and sometimes that's good but like we permitted the South to remain like a segregated horror show for a very long time Southern Democrats blocked anti- lynching laws and the media often times bottled a lot of things up that needed to come out yeah now the flip side is that we do not have a system where we're good at resolving conflict other systems the way you win power then you can govern our system it doesn't work that way so that creates some other problems anyway but on the media point we have to admit and take responsibility for the role we play in the world and that means I think defining what newsworthiness means to us so that it can't be hijacked by people just being outrageous offensive whatever people who understand what we really cover in some ways better than we even do ourselves well my complaint and maybe I'm wrong but I have to imagine when there these monoliths these media companies what they were probably doing to not offend or get rid of customers was just lobbing off the the farthest left 5% of the spectrum and the farthest right 5% of the spectrum you know I think they were probably de amplifying the fringes of both parties I think that's not quite right so I think that some of the stuff you find in that period is one the media was way too friendly to power because one of the ways you can people from being offended and certainly keep anybody from turning on you is it well whoever's in power kind of like commands some amount of public Allegiance so the media was one too uh open to the narratives of people already in power and the other version of this is the narratives of already dominant majorities right and that's again A Way sort of this identity comes in yeah it's very status quo oriented it feels like it just completely 180 and now the furthest 5% on both parties are driving all the dial and to me that's my biggest sense of frustration is I have to believe that still the majority of the country is semi Centrist I really just believe that it's not that it's Centrist exactly but it's also not this and one of the problems here is the great hack in the media is it every everybody's already talking about something well then isn't it newsworthy by definition and so what's happened is that the way social media works is it it selects for communication that creates the most intense emotional resp response usually though not always a negative emotional response and so then the media is attaching itself to the stories that create the most intense negative response one of the examples I use in the book is do you guys remember the fur over the Covington Catholic High School Kids on the National Mall oh yeah yeah yeah yeah yes these kids came out they were in some sort of nonviolent but insulting confrontation with a Native American guy M America had then it came out that like maybe they had been harassed earlier anyway it was I I came back from an offline vacation and like this was the only thing anybody was talking about and it actively objectively didn't matter nobody was hurt nobody died every other story happening in the was more important but it had attached to people's identities very intensively right young kids that are religious High School in magah hats Native American Elder drumming a political protest it's like a Disney cartoon it's like so perfectly archetyp and that's bad right that we let Twitter become an assignment editor in that way is really bad the other thing we did was we would both Sid stories where sometimes there was truth right and so like the famous example that we used to do a lot is well climate change some people think it's real this weirdo does not and like well both sides who can who can debate and you know as people would point out it was like a 98% scientific consensus and so the other problem is that in trying to be in offensive we would sometimes be untrue now sometimes now in trying to get attention we be untrue it's not that we've like fixed all of our problems it's just that we have moved into a system with different problems that I don't think we've come up with good answers for yet yeah yeah okay first of all I just enjoy talking to you so much can I just throw that out there I'm around whenever I'm gonna wrap this up with a question um I bring it to you because I'm not sure where I'm at on it I'm still in the incubation phase but when I originally heard first let me start at the beginning I think everyone agrees that automation is going to increase dramatically over time and there's this great fear that you know ultimately I think uh yval Harari calls it the uh the 's some class I forget the name he gave it but uh that people will be largely unemployed right in that automation will be doing 80% of the jobs and this is all ahead for us and so Andrew Yang famously now has a a standard Universal income right basic Universal income and when I first heard that I was like well that's a great idea because I I see they're writing on the wall they're correct and then I start with that premise and then again I watch a lot of historical stuff so all of a sudden Chris and I are watching TV and I'm like they thought that with steam power they thought that when the steam shovel came around so many people were employed doing this manual labor it was going to get rid of the workforce it that did not come to pass then the assembly line got rid of a drastic amount of employees that didn't come to pass the computer revolution in the '90s that was going to happen we have a 3.9 unemployment rate or something around that that's the lowest since the 60s part of me thinks the universal uh basic income is just completely defe and something we kind of succumb to on the left in that we're a little bit just cowardly like it just assumes that like somehow we won't figure it out like we always have like now's the time we've decided Now's the Time to Say nope we're giving up and we should just start paying people so I'm laughing because my wife literally wrote the book on this it's called give people money Andrew Yang recommends it as his favorite book on universal basic income so I'm at the center of a lot of you or near a lot Universal basic income talk and let me uh agree with 75% of what you said and then diverge in one part okay so the question of AI is a really interesting really complicated one I think in the near term and I'm talking here 2550 years and I've done at least enough work on this to feel reasonably confident in this I do not think we are facing the automation apocalypse I just don't um you made the point about unemployment numbers but the other number I would bring in here is productivity so productivity is how canate with the same amount of people in the economy um and productivity is the driver of increases in human welfare and of what we were seeing even over this period we're talking about is a is a sharp rise in automation a sharp rise in robots doing jobs that Fus to take humans so we can do more stuff with fewer people what you would be seeing is a sharp rise in productivity numbers what we have seen is a fall in productivity growth and that's a huge problem in our economy but in some ways the problem in our economy is that we are not getting enough robots at least fast enough now Andrew or Sam or youv all or others will tell you well look it may not have happened yet but that doesn't mean it won't might be right I think the point you make is really well taken I and I agree with it I've actually had this debate with you all no Harari on my podcast which is human beings are good at nothing so much as they are inventing things to create value in so it used to be that I don't have this number off the top of my head but I I want to say it's something like 40% of Americans were employed in some way in agricultural labor now I think it's than 2% but we create more Agricultural Product than we ever did before in our history and certainly than we did then and I I just want I don't want to slow you down but I do want to add for people who don't know our manufacturing that's another illusion people aren't aware of it's actually we manufacture more stuff we just do it with far less people it's not a complete argument to say we've lost all of our manufacturing we absolutely have not and we've in fact manufact as you say we manufacture more we do not have a lower employment rate than we have at these other times in fact we've created other jobs that didn't exist in those times and Prim service sector jobs care jobs I mean we now I think the number is we have more yoga instructors than we have coal miners we don't talk about that but it's actually true and so you can actually have a job podcasting and so what you all says and a place I actually just disagree with him is that people will become sort of irrelevant you're going to have this useless class of people useless class that's what it is not I think untrue that for so that some people as has been true at many points in in history you will have people who are underemployed and don't feel like they have dignity in the study and that's a huge genuine real problem but I don't think we're at a world where it's going to be 20 or 50% yeah and so we have already attached a lot more value in our society to jobs that I think would look completely bizarre and useless to people from another age that like made real things with their hands if you told people how much uh societal cache management consultants and lawyers and um high frequency Traders have it would look strange but we did that we attach status to jobs by giving them money is functionally what we do in our for sometimes for better and often times for worse and I don't see any reason to think we're going to stop being able to invent jobs there's no reason we need on some level I'm super sorry yoga teachers I'm about to weigh in on your behalf but you could go on YouTube and watch yoga that way yeah people don't do that because they actually like being involved with human beings so I just don't think that's going away that said all that said I think the worst case for Ubi is the automation case in part because it's not true and then in part even if it is true right even if I'm wrong about everything I just said let's say let's use the near-term case that we are going to get self-driving trucks so all the teamsters who drive trucks which is one of the most common jobs in America will be out of work Andrew Yang is offering then and I and I say this somebody I've known Andrew a long time I think he's I think he's great actually he's offering them a th000 bucks a month when they had a $75,000 a year job with full benefits that's not going to do it right um my colleague Dylan Matthews is a great line on this where he says that Ubi as a solution to automation is simultaneously too much and too little it gives money to people who are getting automated away and gives too little money to people who are getting automated away that all said I have become more and more friendly to the idea of to the arguments for Ubi as a utopian policy which is to say if you think that maybe the way we have constructed our idea of society is just sort of wrong that maybe you shouldn't have to work a job you don't like to have enough money to buy bread um or you want to make sure among other things that a lot of the work that we do is uncompensated right people caring for children for their parents we don't pay you for that maybe on some least Ubi would create a floor I could very much imagine an argument and have people have made these like Rucker bregman but also my wife Annie Lowry's book has some of this in it um at least like limbs these arguments and looks at them that the reason to before or against Ubi is that you think that the ability to live above the poverty line should be untethered from whether or not you are working and I think that as we become a rich Society I I'm very friendly to that I think the big question for it is what is it due to immigration policy and like how do you think about that those two interacting because I care a lot about immigration right like when people arrive they start getting the yeah like how do you do that and does it you know so there there are hard questions in how you do that how you pay for it those are all real things but I think the worst case for Ubi is a fear based automation case and the best case for Ubi is that you know maybe we should just say that it's actually okay if you don't want to do paid labor if you want to um do art or care for your children or whatever it is and we should make that a more possible thing for people to do inste a societal floor in a society as rich as ours is so that's kind of where I come down on Ubi net out the money but you know in theory over time you could MH interesting well I appreciate getting your perspective on that and all your perspectives and it's been a damn pleasure to sit with you and why we're polarized comes out what January 28th jary 28th and I think it it must go without saying you you desire like I do a less polarized Society is that or a country that is more governable amidst conditions of polarization which is also a way to think about that okay I think it's going to be very hard to depolarize but we can make it possible for governance to work better even in these conditions and I think we should at least think about that as an interim measure yeah you're right okay well Ezra what a pleasure uh I hope you'll come back when the next time you write a book or whatever else you're pedaling I'll be happy to help sell with you thank you both so much thank you and now my favorite part of the show The fact check with my soulmate Monica padman I love your white slacks why thank you you know what I like about is it makes the brown skin pop it makes it real Poppy the calves are exposed and it's just a beautiful caramel that we're all envious you're very generous cuz they're very ashy right now you always think that no they are they really are and they're kind of blending into the white pants because of the ash you think that the white pants are making the ash pop but I think the opposite I think it's making the the the melanin pop wow well thank you yeah um I and then what color are those shoes would you say oh we'd call these a oh my god I've never even heard that word before I'd call this a pumpkin tan tan okay but with a bit of peach in them yeah you're right little pumpkin Little Peach peachy okay great well I just wanted to let everyone know since there's no photos from the fact check what they're missing I guess not a nice thing to do like oh wobby W's in a uh Speedo today well great now I don't get to see it and [ __ ] you well we'd make sure we took a picture of that I would love to take a picture of wobby wob and a speedo next fact check I guess oh all right well wouldn't that be great he said it and that means he has to do it he said it on air are you going to prep your dong at all wobby wob because when I've had to do those uh underwear scenes and shows and movies I uh you know I want to be I want to show up I want to put my best foot forward so what do you do you know you smack it around a little bit tug on it you know just try to wake it up basically like Hey we're on camera bud I see uhhuh add attention add attention I'll walk wobby wob through that before the pictures I feel like that's a sexual harassment suit what you having yeah yeah um Ezra Klein yeah what a smarty pants I'm so glad we got to have him on he has been on my list for quite a while I think since we hurt him on Sam Harris like Bo we'd like to talk to that guy he was a good adversary for Sam he was I'll I'll say what it What specifically I loved about it is that I'd say Ezra's as well as well as normally intelligent or analytically intelligent he's very emotionally intelligent so it was fun to hear because I think when most people argue with Sam and I certainly would do this too is you kind of just leave the emotional aspect out of the conversation and he was very much infusing the debate with emotional intelligence which I thought was interesting I liked that and I think it's because emotions are they're as important as the science in a lot of these conversations they're as important as the facts because it's what drives us it is more than the facts it is more more behavior on this planet is explained by the emotions the person was having prior to enacting the behavior than than the science behind it I think yeah I think so too so it's kind of hard to have debates that are only logic based because there's this whole sector of life that you're just muting but it's a factor yeah I agree so Ezra does a good job of weaving both you have a high EQ and IQ thank you so do you oh thank you I actually don't know what my IQ is we can only hope that it's high we can only assume it's high high it's high it's high it's it's north of 130 is what I'm going to say it's north of 130 okay I gu North I think it was fairly High when whenever I got tested when I was a tiny baby baby yeah just a one years old uhhuh they tested me when I was just a one years old well sometimes um so Monica and I have a tradition of we um will'll text each other emojis but they're in a pattern so you got to you got to be able to predict what the next one is so those are mini IQ tests well for a while we were just doing the same but then but then it turned into a guessing game and I really enjoyed that yeah I Incorporated one that had involved like some math I know but so I didn't get it right but I blame you a little bit for it oh great as you should well only because cuz yours involved negatives it went into negative numbers but there's no differentiation on the Emoji because you can't like change the color or something you got confused by the nomenclature by like me adding the negative signs like it wasn't obvious to you I was saying negative apples oh I didn't see any negative signs at all yeah I was adding um NE Dash you'll never find it that's what 11,000 text later um and I had pinned your text you can do that yeah on my phone you can pin a text to the top so it just stays there no matter how long ago you read it oh yeah Samsung girl oh boy okay I don't want to get into a fight Sam I didn't know oh I got you know me and my high horse I'll get on about Apple Samsung came out with cordless charging a long time before Apple did sure I will grant you that they also came out with um water resistant phones long before Apple did and they're camera was way better uh long before apples was great and Kristen now has a [ __ ] phone that folds in half the screen folds like a piece of paper and you can you a functional AB but it it is a Marvel it's a it's a scientific breakthrough it is quite an impressive piece of technology it is and you have to imagine if that was on a billboard with the little Apple sign it would be the Talk of the Town I guarantee you'd be on the news every time you saw it there'd be [ __ ] a billion commercials and I'm like you know it is the power of branding a little bit it is yeah so Eric and I were talking last night we were working out together and um he brought up the fact that this uh Corona virus is is really whether they contain the virus or not it is going to have some lasting impact on industry because there's all these regions of China that can't export so he was saying that there's potentially going to be some apple supply chain issues I don't know if that's the case don't suei Apple this is just what Eric told me yeah Eric doesn't know but I said boy they better not have the supply chain down so long that people have to look at some other phones because they're going to start realizing these other phones are pretty [ __ ] good you can pin a text okay well I am not being paid by Samsung I just want to say that it's been a almost a decade since I was well that's an exaggeration um pinning a text pretty cool I guess um but every time I try to use that phone of hers I'm paralyzed it is a confusing phone see and I feel like listen I have an an apple ipack AKA and iPad I love I not just love I'm like have an emotional relation remember that see I know I know I know oh my God you proved it immediately you had an Apple product for 5 minutes and you grew to actually have feelings towards I think it's my son and the screen broke um I sat on it in my chair at work and I [ __ ] cracked it and the feeling I had I can only compare to the time that Mac's little dog was was nearly drowning in the pool and I and I rescued it I felt like that feel oh my God I was like this good little boy is so good to me and every time I want to watch some TV or something at lunch it works it's just works great and I and under my [ __ ] tutelage I it broke a bad parent my God what are you going to are you going to accidentally like poop on our PE baby or something I'm a little nervous your track record with your sons and stuff I know well maybe just but R PBB is a girl so it's only Sons I have a good track record with girls I have a bad track record with sons because the ipax is my son and so is Mac is my son oh right but Aaron's your son and you treat him well um I do treat him well I do think Aaron's GNA be um swinging through here today no oh just soon oh great yeah there's been some life developments and I think it's going to bring him out here and I think it'll be um a really wonderful time to interview him great yeah I'd love that um um do you want to tell people that story cuz it's a sweet story so um right when Bri and I broke up she got this dog it's a Brussels graffan it's the cutest dog it looks just like the dog in As Good As a gits if anyone remembers that I think his name was trudell in that movie or something wow you're right oh my God what a interesting thing you kept in your memory I love he's maybe the first dog I loved he's just such a good boy he doesn't do one thing wrong he's only there to smile at you or sit on your lap never gets into trouble really cute the way you love back I really do love him and so I was sitting on the patio and it acrossed my mind like uh uh it's been a while since I saw Mac but then I didn't you know whatever I don't know what a dog's interested in anyways this was after you and Bri broke up yes and I live by myself in the house we currently live in I was laying in a hammock I had a hammock back then when I was a bachelor my life ruled I had a Ural in the house and I had a hammock in the backyard MH so um I thought I'm going to go look for him mind you it had been a minute or so and then I decided to like look for him and then I went in the backyard and I went down to the pool and he was in the deep end of the pool paddling his heart out and he was trying to get up on the edge and he couldn't he's just too tiny he's so small and he was very scared a I could see in his little face he was so scared and I pulled him out and he was soaking wet and he had the scared look in his face and I was holding him and petting him and um that was the moment I had my first two human tears fell out of my eyes and it had been a couple decades and I was just staring at his little face and he was so grateful that I got there but he should have been mad at me for like sleeping on the job no it's not your the last thing I think is this dog's going to go for a death yeah that's not your fault you didn't know well I felt terrible and then for the next like 2 hours I just stared at him and he was long he was like already recovered from it and I was still I still wasn't you're still shedding one or two tears per hour yeah and then what's fun is that Max still does vacation at our house um Kristen and all of her generosity and benevolence has always had a very open door policy with Mac whenever they've traveled we had them for a couple months once when they went yeah I think to Australia ah he's such a little guy and then he'll sleep under the covers by your feet and I'm so nervous he's going to suffocate down there but he's just fine he doesn't need a lot of oxygen I don't think turns out he you know what he probably got trained in that pool you probably learned to subsist off it was for the best you did him a favor all training I put him through basically Navy SEAL training oh man I can't believe you cried over that so cute God so cute broke my heart anyways I felt similarly with my ey packs CU ipex didn't do anything wrong a lot of my thing is about whether someone deserves some shitty or not wow when bad stuff happens to me I'm like yeah like my ship gets stolen I'm like you're damn right it should get stolen I I was a a a rascal for a long time and I deserve some Karma MH but MC doesn't deserve a lick of karma neither does my eye packs oh okay okay Ezra Ezra so we talked a little bit about we just touched on Katie Hill mhm we were we were a little unclear about how murky her sexual Escapade was right so let me read I'm leaving because of misogynistic culture that gleefully consumed my naked pictures capitalized on my sexuality and enabled my abusive ex to continue that abuse this time with the entire country watching M that was her quote Miss Hill's case is not clearcut she was accused of having an affair with her Congressional legislative director a violation of house rules put in place in the wake of me too which she has denied but she did admit to having a separate sexual relationship with a staffer on her election campaign which is not barred by house rules I know that even a consensual relationship with a subordinate is inappropriate but I still allowed it to happen despite my better judgment she wrote in a letter to her constituents but it wasn't illegal or anything most people would agree having a sexual relationship with the Stafford clearly puts Miss Hill 32 she's my age Jesus in the wrong though of course there are many male politicians who have done it and remained in office but the manner in which the affair was exposed the public the publication of sensitive photos and texts which she blamed on her arang husband arguably makes her a victim as well um so I have zero issue with what she did yeah that she hooked up with people she works with you know I'm not I don't really care about that yeah uh but if it were a let's just do it as an exercise it was a republican man who had some pictures come out of him [ __ ] one of his staff members a young girl but he was not married or anything I don't think it would go anywhere you don't I mean you don't I I'm asking you would you not be like he can't do that oh I see um there is a tiny bit of a double standard happening that's all I'm pointing out I mean yes and no like when you when it's a guy you go oh he's a predator but when it's a woman you don't do that I don't do that cuz I'm not bothered by it at all ktie Hill the ktie hill issue I mean she also got punished she left office oh yeah which I don't think she should have yeah so but if I'm going to make a case for why I don't think she should should have I think it's incumbent upon me to just run through the analysis of it what I say the same thing about um [ __ ] who's the Senate Majority Leader that I don't love Mitch McConnell Mitch McConnell's [ __ ] some staffer uh do I give him the same I mean I guess part of it is I don't know there's all these like tiny little factors like is the person of age like does that person want to be in the Rel relationship which in this case I think she did like the the person never said yeah I was taking advantage of yes this this and this and I guess if it's if it's a man and he's having sex with someone he works with and that person is like yeah I want to have sex with that person yeah then I don't think it'd be an issue and I don't think I personally if it's like a young man another person of age and they both want to be doing that I don't see a problem with that yeah well that's what's so tricky about it is that I don't a lot of the current reaction doesn't leave a lot of room for simply that both people want to [ __ ] and we live in America and if you want to [ __ ] there's no law against it why why is you know why are people going down well the ones we're talking but whenever it's a man it's an Abus of power well Katie definitely had power over her her staffers what you know she sort of says that she says I know even a consensual relationship with a subordinate is inappropriate she's owning that but she's just owning that cuz she has to hear but in these U me too moments they're not consensual the the girls are not saying yes no it was fine so it in that case it is an abuse of power it's not an Abus of power if the girls are yeah I wanted to and I like that person and I liked having sex with them that none of them are saying that in these cases I'm sure it's happening every day all the time and a lot of the circumstances everyone knows what they're getting into and they like it and it's fine yeah but yeah yes you're I agree with you 100% but there is currently this assumption that a young adult woman can't possibly be evaluating that if the their male boss has all this power there there seems to be a little bit of uh movement where it's like well she couldn't consent the power Dynamic is so lopsided that you can't actually believe her saying it's consensual which I I don't like yeah I I understand that I understand not liking that I don't think in any of these like cancelled cases that's been the case now the one thing I'll concede that the reason it should be avoided is so often when people are [ __ ] at work and then they stop [ __ ] at work now there's big problems and generally the person who's more valuable to the company is the one that's going to weather that storm so that that is an implicit issue I think that is very Troublesome like are they going to fire Matt Low's assistant or Matt low exactly yeah have you gotten to the part with the there is someone on that show two people having an affair uhhuh not an affair they're they're having a relationship but in secret oh I'm not there yet what episode are you on h four oh know the weatherman nope nope we're not there yet it's early on I think anyway there's an example on the on the morning show which is what we're referring to yeah an example of a weatherman who's having a relationship with a pa okay they're having it in secret oh yes yes yes yes and she got really offended when he brought up the notion that it was lopsided right yeah she's like I'm doing you're a fa yeah you're right she's like I'm doing you a favor she's like I want to do this and that and that is an example of something that's going on that's fine so that would be the yeah just weren sometimes when the headline comes out we're not privy to that scene and you're not going to read the head line of consensual stuff because why would anyone even write that well cuz people have political enemies or work enemies and they could expose an affair like um uh Monica Lewinsky and Clinton that was not brought out because Monica Lewinsky was saying I feel scorned was brought out by a republican Grand conspiracy to get him to lie under oath like in that situation neither person was complaining right yet he you know went down well not for that well he got impeached over it not for an abuse of power over her no for lying under oath I'm saying that was in the 90s when me too wasn't a thing and so it wasn't like the headline was Bill Clinton sexually harasses Monica Lewinsky that was not ever a headline and only now some people are looking back on that and saying like huh he was the president and she was an intern yeah but the reason he was in trouble had nothing to do with his abuse of power oh right right right right yes yes so in the 90s in the '90s that wasn't a thing yeah so yeah yeah hezus said that there was a philosopher who made an argument that we can have Liberty and equality at the same time and he wasn't exactly sure if he was getting the name right Daniela Allen and yes it was her of course he got it right I know when did the bell curve come out 1994 September of 1994 well that weirdly is more recent than I thought it was I know I thought it was like a 70s book yeah I thought it was 80s um but yeah me too ' 80s yeah ' 80s yeah I thought it was 80s too yeah we all thought it was 80s it doesn't seem like the kind of study that would even be done in the 90s like I could see that being done in the 70s but not the 9s I know I mean it could happen now a study like that could come out I mean we're not imper to racism uh where was Charles Murray giving the speech middleberry College how many people currently practice Islam he said he thinks it was second most popular religion in the world it is it says in 2018 more than 24.1% of the world's population is Muslim the current estimate concludes that the number of Muslims in the world is around 1.8 billion mhm mhm Christianity first sure sure well let me guess third okay o going be hard it is hard actually yeah I'm G to say uh Hinduism so okay so third is actually irreligious affiliation what aerolus affilation but fourth is Hinduism oh what's the third say it again irreligious affiliation that just means you're religious but you're not saying which one I think so okay or does it mean you're not religious I don't know I don't know but the third is strange Hindu Hindu and then I would go Buddhism okay and then after [Music] Buddhism I would go I'd go Jewish actually folk religions are no it is woring a deer 5.9% are folk religions what does that even mean they love Bob Dylan I don't know but Judaism is only. 2% sure that's extremely low consider too low we got to get those numbers up yeah the hard thing is you have to be the mom has to be Jewish yeah and also the the Jewish folks have never spread Judaism under the sword the way that the other two religions of the book have in the past spread by way of the sword so well they also um Judaism likes keeping it insular like they don't want you in their catchphrase should be we good yeah you know what I'm saying they're kind of like AA too AA not a program of promotion but rather of Attraction that's in the bylaws so you can't go up and [ __ ] promote AA even though you do I I tell you my experience with AA and then yeah and then if you think that sounds groovy then you drop your slacks Hindu book and your Judaism book and your all those books you're not allowed to be those things of course you can yeah everyone's welcome can you be an irreligious Affiliated religion yeah that's me we don't know what it is well okay so RBG you said she's best friends with Scalia and she likes Kavanaugh this is what she said about Kavanaugh okay Justice Kavanaugh made history by bringing on board an all female law clerk Ginsburg noted in reference to a prom Thomas Kavanaugh made during his tumultuous confirmation thanks to his selections the court has this term for the first time ever more women than men serving as law clerks Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg came to the defense of her more conservative colleagues on the bench I can say that my two newest colleagues Brett Kavanaugh and Neil Gorsuch are very decent and very smart individuals she said Wednesday at an event in Washington DC could you reread the whole thing and do an impersonation of her what does she sound like I don't know Justice Kavanaugh oh really good I think she has a high voice uhuh she's very tiny actually I have her she's strong and Tiny she's a miniature Mouse for sure she is okay you said we have a 3.9 unemployment rate unemployment rate is 3.5% 3.5 well you see like it was the difference between Kum LA and Suma Kum La I was Suma had a lesser school but yeah nope I wasuma I got all a except one 189 point oh two or something oh female teacher yeah yep she wouldn't do it I begged her yeah I knew it girls don't be giving girls breaks so rude I'm going to give girls breaks okay break their back whoa oh my goodness all right that's all that was it yeah all right well he was delightful and he was on Bill Mah last week and uh made a great showing oh I'll check it out check it out love you love you [Music]