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More than just money Thank you for joining us for what's the big idea?

With Ezra Klein moderated by Mark Baumgarten.

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Hello and welcome to the Crosscut Festival.

I'm Mark Baumgarten, the managing editor here at Crosscut and the person with the great fortune to interview Ezra Klein today.

Ezra Klein first started gaining attention for his journalism almost 20 years ago as one of the earliest political bloggers eventually, and we're rocketing ahead here.

He went on to co-found the explainer heavy news and opinion site Vox and developed the Ezra Klein show where his talents as an interviewer quickly became apparent.

In November, of 2020, he took his podcast over to the New York Times, where he also joined the paper's stable of opinion columnists.

Ezra's journalism is expansive.

He delves into topics as divergent as White Nationalism science fiction, abortion rights and crypto.

But he's no dilettante, and he is not your average curious journalist.

Ezra comes to each of these topics deeply researched and with well-developed ideas And when he really wants to understand something, whether that's crypto or the war in Ukraine, he goes all in and takes his listeners with him.

The world right now is filled with tremendous challenges, and it's filled with big ideas on how to meet these challenges, or at least better understand them as recovers it all through his journalism.

So we thought we would invite him to help us think through this moment and share how he navigates the world as it is while imagining what it could be.

Ezra Klein Welcome to Crosscut Festival.

Thank you all for having me.

That guy sounds great.

Yeah.

On 20 years.

How does it feel?

Do you feel I feel old anguish.

I feel, Yeah, yeah.

I mean, you can see the gray here.

I've had two kids in the past couple of years that's made me feel twice as old as I was three years ago or four years ago.

So, yeah, no.

The onrushing train of my mortality is completely unlike normal So, Ezra, I so I want to start the conversation today.

I wasn't planning on talking about abortion, but the news this week makes it impossible to ignore.

And you know, the reason why I bring it up is because I, as a listener of your podcast, I recall back in the fall you had very turned out to be personal episode following the when SB8, the Texas law that sidestepped the legal right to abortion by incentivizing vigilante enforcement When the Supreme Court declined to to do anything about that, creating kind of a shadow ban right on on abortion.

After six weeks So now the court looks poised to strip away any federal protection for abortion.

And I'm just curious how you've been thinking about what's happening with the court this week.

Oh, so I am pretty reluctant to say anything about it yet because I don't think we know what that leak is.

And I'd prefer to hold my tongue than speak loudly and be felt before that leak.

could be exactly what it presents itself, as this is what the court has decided that we could be.

The court is moving away from that.

And that was leaked to try to stop the move that was leaked by a conservative justice or clerk or staffer of some sort who is trying to lock in the majority that existed.

At one point but has since crumbled because somebody moved and joined A lighter opinion authored by Roberts And no matter what, I think that you are going to see Roe eviscerated or gutted.

I mean, it is testament to the role Roberts now place on the court and how hard right it's become that if you imagine a world where it turns out, this was not the final decision, that this was an unsuccessful attempt to freeze that final decision to freeze that interim decision in place, and it fails And Roberts comes out with a majority opinion that confine that makes abortion illegal after 15 weeks.

Let's call it many people on the left, I don't wanna say, would celebrate it, but would be the sigh of relief for something that just a little while ago would have been a tremendous, tremendous defeat.

So I think all the world's here are tough.

If you believe in choice and I do, but I don't think we know which will bring hmm.

So you've you definitely been thinking about it, and I mean, I know that your you know, your take on the Supreme Court is more of a realist take.

I mean, you you push back against the mythology of the court as being some, you know, grand.

You know, entity.

And it really is in your eyes , a political entity.

So that that is the the way that you're looking at this right now, which is which is different from a lot of the reaction that we're seeing out in in the world right now.

But as you said, you are pro-choice, which was very clear in the in the episode of your podcast, in the fall.

And I wonder, so if we can just kind of maybe move down the road a little bit to the point at which Roe is eviscerated or gutted And you have this belief and you are an opinion journalist What is your role as a journalist when when something is done right, when it is, when , when that decision is made, when the future that we're moving into is different from the past that we've been in?

What what do you do at that point?

Because I've never really thought of your work as being advocacy necessarily, but Well, yeah, I wonder how you approach that.

I mean, my work has different modes.

There are times when I have a strong view and I'm trying to persuade you of that view.

I think that's more often than not true.

In my column The podcast, though, and to some degree, the column is more explanatory.

I mean, that was the work I did at Vox to work.

I did a blog It's the work in some ways that I feel most comfortable doing, and that takes over when I don't feel I have the answer on something which is frankly, most of the time.

It's why I put out more podcasts this week that I put out columns and you know, so I'll use maybe Russia and Ukraine as an example for for a moment , which is that's a place where I think my, my team and I have been able to provide some value.

I hope to the audience not because we were the experts on Russian Ukraine, but because we were thoughtful about identifying angles that could bring frameworks that would help you understand what was going on in Russian Ukraine and then on the other side of that ledger, we could help the people who did understand these frameworks did understand to the extent anyone can help Vladimir Putin thought or what the various stories and mythologies are that are here or what the sanctions designed is or what the energy markets are.

We could help them make those frameworks clear, like we can translate between the people with the knowledge and and ourselves and the audience If Roe is overturned, as you know, I think that's probably the likeliest outcome.

I think that'll probably be my role.

I don't think I have some answer.

I don't think I have some great opinion on abortion that other people don't have I don't think people purred.

To some degree, the personal dimensions of my views on this, I don't think it's something I will lean into super hard.

I think at that point, there's a lot of exploratory work to be done, not just in terms of consequences and who this affects, but but the deep ethical and intellectual and political and philosophical substrate of this debate in this country of what it means for the court to be increasingly seen as what it is, which is nine people in robes who dress up that way.

to attain an aesthetic detachment from our world that they don't actually hold What does it mean to have an institution that powerful lifetime appointments with so little accountability that nobody anymore believes is somehow different from our political system?

It just has a kind of random annotation of our political system, right?

Donald Trump got it Four justices named in three year.

I'm sorry , three justices did four years that very easily could have turned out differently for him.

It has turned out differently than many others, so it's not as undemocratic or randomly so.

So that will be I will try to to give people lenses to look at the situation through.

But I don't I don't pretend that I don't believe I'm going to be central to anyone's way of understanding a post Roe landscape.

Hmm.

All right.

I'm going to slide over to science fiction right now because one of the things I've been thinking about this week.

An easy Segway Well, hang with me for a minute.

So you know, one of the memes that has been sort of traveling around in, you know, in the last couple of years actually is this is really The Handmaid's Tale, right That that that this is sort of, you know, a a nonfiction version of Margaret at Margaret Margaret Atwood's vision and you had Margaret Atwood on your your podcast just a couple of months ago.

I know that you're a fan and I been thinking about dystopia because I heard, you know, maybe there's a couple of weeks ago when you brought up that we are living in a dystopia like as sort of an aside.

And I'm kind of and it made me think , at what point?

Ezra, do you think we slid into dystopia?

That's it.

Little.

I don't know what I said because I don't think we're living in it.

I think it will now be unified.

But people, we a science fiction, become focused on dystopia and has as much lost the muscle of utopia , which is something I spoke about.

That would.

But but I wouldn't say we're living in the dystopia I will say just from from from that I had not read The Handmaid's Tale and I cannot.

I mean, it was one of those books that I'd seen representations of and seen in other formats, and I thought I knew it.

You know, like, there's certain cultural artifacts like that like, Yeah, yeah, I know, like , you know, Gilead and people are forced to bear children and so on.

God is good If you're listening to me and and mark blather on here, but you haven't read The Handmaid's Tale , what you should do instead of listening to me or is read the actual book because it is so fresh and so much of it , even apart from the Roe decision and other elements of our modernity, so much of what it asks of the reader and the way it tries to understand what it'd be like to lose the lives we lead.

We lead like it's ringing in my head all the time.

This one beautiful line.

We thought we had such problems.

How are we to know we were happy?

I just I cannot stop thinking about it.

So that's not the answer you're looking for, but everybody should read The Handmaid's Tale.

If you haven't, don't don't think you know it because it's such a potent and ubiquitous cultural artifact.

especially if you've only watched the TV show, which I think the TV show is good and the book is is far superior.

and I have a hard, soft spot for for dystopian science fiction.

So, OK, let's go.

Let's move back into the realm of of nonfiction.

You talked a little bit about the work that you and your team have been doing on the war in Ukraine.

This is a really big story for you.

You've committed 11 episodes of your podcast and then a good amount of writing to the conflict since late February.

That's that's a half a day of of programming alone.

And I mean, you had former national security adviser Fiona Hill on twice in the course of like a month , which which is, you know, which is a lot to have somebody on talking about this conflict.

What is it?

And I want to get a little deep into it because I really want to understand and kind of what you're doing there.

And I I hope that everybody who's watching this goes and takes in or has taken in the journalism that you've been doing.

But but to start with, what is it about this conflict that made you want to go that deep What was the conversation that you and your team had that made you decide to go that deep I had a college professor once a historian who this was a couple of years after nine 11, but we were talking about nine eleven , and I remember her saying that there are.

I've always loved the line.

There are moments when you can feel the best of history close around you.

And that is one of the things that I felt was true with Russia's invasion of Ukraine, that this is a moment that will dent the way the world works Hmm.

And we've done a lot of episodes on Russian Ukraine because we felt there were a lot of episodes to do.

And when I have run, I mean, one thing we're not doing and that I don't want people to think is, say here that we have not been doing weekly or twice weekly updates on how Russia's war in Ukraine is going.

We have not covered, for the most part, the news coming out of of Ukraine, which is not because it isn't important, but it's just because the others are much better situated to do it than we have been.

We have had on Masha Gessen to talk about what it has been like in Russia during this period and how Putin, who would have been a biographer of thanks.

Fiona Hill, who has also written a biography of Putin and has been partially in charge of US strategic positioning vis-a-vis Russia, was there for for that layer of the Timothy Snyder, who is a historian who specializes actually in Ukraine and the central role this play in so much of the bloody conflict over the past 100 years.

I mean, Robert Water is very heavily about Ukraine in a way we don't always tell He was there to talk about the way different histories play into it, not just background of this war, but also the kind of inevitability history that underlies a lot of American thinking.

And I think keep going down the line on this.

You know, Daniel Yergin on how energy markets work.

But the point is that each every one of these to me was an explosion ottery lens you could bring.

No one of them is sufficient, not 11 of them together are sufficient.

There is no way to understand a conflict like Russia's invasion of Ukraine.

It is not possible There is too much in it.

But every one of these is one more lens that helps you, you know, as if they're different light spectrums like you can see something with one of them and then something else with another and something else with another.

Now there are other things in life that deserve a lot of coverage.

This is not the first time I've done what I call a cluster and what is the biggest one I've ever done.

But we did a cluster of five or six episodes on Climate , you know, sort of bunched together back and Vox.

I'm working in a cluster right now about the populist right.

I do like doing group episodes, and I think we're able to add force and value to the exploratory work we do by a bunch of things together.

They let you sort of walk around the elephant and feel the different parts of it.

But Russia has been so central to the show in recent months.

Big cause it was so obvious that there was no one or two conversations that would even begin to outline why this had happened or what effects it was going to have and consequences.

And while I still don't think we put too much of a dent in that set of questions, I do think we were able to to play a role for for the audience.

It was , I think, valuable to them and to us right And I am I'm curious about both of those things because it does feel like the work that you do.

It serves, it serves you , it serves your curiosity and want to understand and the audience.

So let's start off with you.

Well, all of that work that you didn't like, you said it's the largest cluster that you've done What are your takeaways?

I know you said you can't distill this down into a couple of bullet points, but what did you learn through this first, that through this cluster that you that you didn't understand before?

What what assumptions were you disabused of I'm not sure I have a great answer on this.

I can tell you things.

It has gotten me thinking about I think it has been easy to ignore the geostrategic dimension of energy in recent years.

America has had a huge energy production boom.

It's very easy to miss how much of global politics is actually about energy, and if there was a disruption over how much energy would decide what its aftermath looked like, I've been thinking a lot after some of the episodes we've done on sanctions and the degree to which Europe and America have been able to influence Russia through that have been able to punish Russia for that have not been able to go as far on that as maybe they wanted to because of oil and gas dependence.

I mean, that should happen.

And if you think about China , Taiwan in a different way, we are so much more intertwined with China.

Is it really a credible threat that we would punish them economically?

I mean, would we even be able to survive that ourselves?

Would we be able to sustain that?

How much sacrifice of the American people willing to make on behalf of Taiwan being, I think, really the operative question there?

I've been thinking in, you know, about what are the models for understanding leaders like Putin, who behave in ways very contrary to the presumptions?

And I think somewhat taken for granted, like analytical models, we use you know, in America for how for how the head of a nation might act without falling into the view that he is somehow irrational It's not really what I think about him, but I think we have a very limited view of what political rationality looks like and and frankly, what human nature is on many of these issues.

I've been thinking a lot.

I mean, to go to a column I did about liberalism and its critics and the way people outside the liberal circle think about it.

So this is not really takeaways, because I wouldn't say that what I have is takeaways.

I mean, I wouldn't say that what I've come away with is , well, I thought it was a six on the dangerous scale Now he's a nine or I thought we had a one point two percent chance of nuclear war in next five years.

But now it's a two point seven.

But I do.

I think there should somewhat help the assumptions anyone brings to the world and the questions you're asking about it.

And so I think many of those things are are ringing in my head.

You know, I think I guess what I what I pulled from it kind of the way I try to think when I try to explain it to people about what the value really is and what I have gotten from it, I always come back to that.

There was this sense of inevitability like this, this you talk about this.

Western democracies have a sense of inevitable polity.

It is.

It is what followed.

You know, the end of history, right?

And sort of like the path that we've been on and this assumption that that there is sort of one lane of thought, one one way to exist and and the assumption that Putin sort of is within that universe of the way that sort of most Western thought exists.

And the idea that he is operating on a completely different level or in a completely different light , he's playing a different video game right than the rest of us are is really the my takeaway from it is just that the world is much more complex than than we have believed for the last 30 years.

I think , which is maybe simplistic, right?

But but that was that was a light bulb for me.

I don't think it's easy, I think, to have lived through I've been reflecting on this recently, so I grew up my I grew up in the nineties.

I mean, I'm born in the 80s, but you know, my childhood is mostly in the nineties, and that's sort of when I began paying attention to politics later in that period.

It forms a kind of baseline for me, and I've had this feeling since being in politics like, Wow, man, it's really like Congress passed You know, like, we never seem to get a break It keeps like an hour or an hour.

It's like, you know, not 11 And you know, then the Afghanistan war and Iraq War and the financial crisis and the recession and the first black president and a huge like spurt of policymaking almost without precedent, in the modern era.

You can name a bunch of other things during this period.

but you know, things calm a little bit in the 2012 2013 period.

But then the death of Antonin Antonio, a sorrow of Justice Scalia , which ends up being unbelievably pivotal and everything that comes next.

Ex Donald Trump.

The pandemic I cannot decide this goes to everything about dystopia.

I cannot decide if we live in an era of unusual like velocity of crises or if the Algren period was the relative stability of like the eighties and nineties And if you go back to journalism about the first half of the 20th century, I mean, you have multiple words of the Spanish flu.

You go back to the 50s and 60s and 70s, obviously a time of tremendous fracture, various civil rights and women's rights and indigenous rights movements.

The anti-war movement , like maybe it just always is like this, particularly in a globalized world where things that start in one place, I mean, you know about them here, what would it have felt like to be in America if Russia had invaded during a Russia Ukraine conflict in nineteen pick a relatively calm moment in history?

But when we didn't have this kind of constant access to it on social media, maybe that would feel really differently.

But but it's been a very, you know, it really, really feels like we live in a time of constant crisis.

But I also can't quite tell if that's in part because the technological like digital global nervous system that we all inhabit now means a crisis anywhere.

It's a crisis everywhere , which obviously isn't entirely true.

I mean, ask the people of Yemen, the people starving in Afghanistan, but it's much more true than it's been in the past.

Certainly the ability to make it true when we choose as a polity to care.

So, you know, one of the things I mean, I completely agree with you and I. I try to I try to stabilize myself by accepting what I cannot control.

And that's a lot.

And there is a lot happening.

And one of the things that is a challenge for journalists and I face this, you face this is this churn makes it so difficult to to to just keep your focus on one thing for long enough to really understand it.

And you know, and Crosscut is a nonprofit, but we still, you know, money is is still a thing in our journalism.

world, just like it is in yours and there are incentives to move on to the next big thing.

How do you decide?

And let's take the Ukraine war as an example , because you just focused a lot of energy on it and you've continued to sort of, you know, do journalism around it as it's become, you know, as it's been called for.

But if the American public is not interested in the Ukraine war, anymore, at what point do you stop talking to them about the Ukraine war?

And I'm just curious about how you do this calculation in your mind when you're trying to figure out what it is that you're going to be focusing your journalism on.

So I have a couple answers to this, and they've been different at different points in my career.

So, you know, one gift for me personally, of being in the position I'm in at the times compared to the position I held as co-founder and CEO Vox or or even as the lead of Wonkblog at the Post is , if I don't do something, I never have the fear that it won't get done.

I don't have to be on everything which is a privilege There's no if I never had done a Ukraine Russia episode, it's not like the New York Times would have had nobody on Ukraine Russia , and nor have I been pivotal to their coverage of it.

I think I've added value in my way in my corner, but I'm not there on the ground wearing a flak jacket.

Right?

The New York Times has people that are risking their lives While I get to sit here and, you know, put on a nice coat and talk to you.

And so the first thing is simply say about that is that I get to choose, which is like a great gift.

And so the second thing that to say about it is that I have to choose where I think I can value.

And that is some combination of what I think the audience wants to know about what I think.

I have a good episode to do about and what I think is important You know, I'm about I'm getting ready to tape an episode with some really great, but I'm on Hannah Arendt.

It's not like like the thirsty masses are out there, you know, with a fist in the air demanding a hunter end episode.

But I think it'll do well.

I think we have an angle on it.

That's interesting I think we've done really good preparation.

I think the person we're going to have on is excellent.

And so at this point, with the show particularly, but not only, I think with the column too, I built up the credibility that I can make an unexpected pitch to the audience and they'll say, OK, we'll see if you're right about this.

Like, Well, you know, at least enough of them will come along.

I did episode not long ago with City Nguyen about the philosophies of games and the way they apply to life.

and people really loved it.

So I'm in a really, really unusual position with the show, with the relationship the show has from its audience, with the trust, I can have that I don't need to be the frontline news coverage of just being able to do work that I think I can do really well and part of that is where I am at the same time, when I think back on my years as a as a media executive, I guess the best felt called as an editor, as a as an editorial director, I I think if I could do it all again, and I thought about this at the time, it's just really hard to resist this pressure But I I would have put a lot more of my capital intellectually, organizationally, just in terms of time in deciding our coverage agenda and trying to stick to it against the whims of the news.

And I would have from the beginning tried to build a business model, supported that better.

I think different models lend themselves to different approaches.

And when we launched Vox, it was really the era of big Facebook traffic.

You know, big social media Typekit.

This was back before the media turned on these models.

But back then, it's like the traffic was like nothing anybody had ever seen.

You really got it by, like gripping the live wire of the news.

I mean, we did.

I think a lot of great work about trying to figure out how to turn things.

And we built a lot of places where we could do other things So if you look at Vox say today explained, I think it's both on the news and off of it in a really wonderful way.

Explained on Netflix really isn't about news.

It's a place where we're able to do a whole other kind of journalism.

Our YouTube channel?

I say our still but you know, their YouTube channel now But I mean, that's something as well over 10 million subscribers.

So there are places we're able to carve that out.

But in the cortex journalism, I think in retrospect, I wish I had built more buffer from the news than I was able to do.

And it's something I think about now.

I think that we're social media and the amount we all know and the speed with which we all know it.

The pressure on journalists to all kind of be on the same things is too high, and differentiation is really, really important.

And business models that allow for differentiation like subscription are really, really important.

And, you know, I mean, hindsight's twenty twenty But but this is a place where I think I was a little bit too caught up in the trends of the media business as opposed to taking critically at the time about them, which is to say we failed or anything, but is to say that I think there are ways I could have contributed to building a stronger coverage, identity and base from the beginning if I had seen it all a little bit more clearly, Hmm.

All right.

I'm going to take a moment right now and speak to the audience.

So just a reminder that we are going to be doing a Q&A with your questions for Ezra here in about 10 minutes, So make sure to get your questions and chat and maybe Ezra will end up answering one of them.

So , so the ever shifting news cycle and you're I mean, you're absolutely right It just especially in during the pandemic, it just feels like any sort of notion of agenda setting by a newsroom is thrown out the window because we're all just chasing the same shiny things, right?

But the one thing that has been a constant has been polarization And of course, you wrote the book on polarization , which came out last year And so I kind of wanted to ask you, you know, the two things that we that we've really spoken about in depth here , the invasion of Ukraine and and the Roe draft decision, you know, when Russians invaded Ukraine , there was a moment where it felt that the country was more united than it had been in a long time.

I mean, not entirely, absolutely.

But there was sort of like a sense of sort of a unity of purpose or a feeling.

And I'm curious about whether you felt that was real and whether there's you feel like there's something to build on there , Roe.

I think it was real, and I don't think there's all that much to build on.

I mean, I don't think everything.

I don't think every event in every moment is completely polarized.

China is also a spot of relatively low partisan polarization in Russia.

Invading Ukraine is a spot of relatively low partisan polarization, not none, but relatively low and those are exceptions more than rules and I think foreign like foreign policy kinds of events have historically been less divisive in this country.

Practical one, we are not because of the main actor in them.

So us launching a war is different than there being a war.

And so I think this is kind of like an an exceptional case that doesn't change sort of theories of domestic polarization all that much.

So is is depolarization even possible?

I mean, you talk about these exceptions and you know, there's the idea that maybe, maybe there's something that could bring us all together, you know, alien invasion or, you know, contrary to don't look up, maybe an asteroid or whatever it is, but is it possible or will things like Roe always interrupt the news cycle and tear us apart again?

Things like Roe , in my view, don't interrupt the news cycle and tear us apart.

We are torn apart, which leads to things like Roe.

I don't want to say that it's not multi-directional because of course, it is like the whole point in my book.

We're polarized is these are feedback loops and dynamic systems.

It's a great book, and people should buy it at full price from your local retailer.

But I don't think that there is some near-term hope of depolarization It's always heard me talk about this because I was on They want to spend 40 minutes defining terms like, Well, what are we polarized over compared to where things were 10 years ago?

We are more polarized over the concept of democracy in elections and somewhat less polarized over economic policy.

So is that better or worse?

I think actually, in many ways, it's quite a bit worse.

But, but but nevertheless, I think it's true.

It doesn't only go in one direction, but now.

But in terms of, I think, what people mean by this, which is a political system where common feeling and coalition building and compromise are nearer to reach.

I think there's any near-term hope of that.

And my argument is always that I'm not even sure that would be good.

What I think we need is a political system like you have in most countries that can operate under conditions of polarization, a political system where one side or the other can win elections and govern Even if the other side has a very different view on how the country should be governed And I think this would be actively a good thing My endless argument on this is that our political system should work roughly the way we tell children it works like party should run in elections The party that wins the most votes should win the election.

Not always true.

The party that wins the election, it should be able to implement more or less the agenda they promised.

Definitely not.

Usually true, then, that agenda, like the public, can decide if they liked it and like how it went and then there could be another election and the public can decide if they want to give the incumbents power again or change it out, and that we should start the cycle over again.

Democracy should be at its core representative democracy, a way in which the public is able to make choices.

They're able to choose that option given to them from among competing options.

They should get what they chose and then they should get information from how that plays out that they can then use to vote in a way that pursues their interests more fully in the next cycle.

The fact that we instead have a system where people run for office, the people get the most votes, may or may not win In fact, both parties might win at the same time, and you might have Senator McConnell and Majority Leader McConnell and President Obama , then whoever did win, even if they have a government in check, backed up probably can only pass like 50 percent of their agenda.

And they have to go back to the voters who are not congressional porters and don't understand why their problems are not solved.

And then the voters go one direction or the other.

But even if they but who they vote for right now, like the whole thing is it's nuts and every at every point, the information that both voters should be getting from how parties govern and that party should be getting how voters choose is not flowing through the system in a clear way.

That's not polarization.

That's institutional design.

And while I do not have optimism that we will solve that , unlike polarization, I could give you an agenda to solve it.

I could write it down on a piece of paper.

And if you were king, you could make it happen.

But you know, you're not.

I mean, to my knowledge, you're not king.

I am not king.

But thank you for that very interesting.

OK. Ezra, this has been kind of a dark conversation.

You know, we've been at a lot.

I don't I don't do much for help people, you know, but I think that I actually think that kind of I think it's unfair to you because because one of the things that I do enjoy about, about your work is that is that you do you do a good job.

I think of balancing optimism and skepticism, light and dark I mean, there is I mean, there is a reason, you know, why I think that you are drawn to science fiction.

I mean, you you see you see possibility, right?

You.

And when I hear you talk about, you know, crypto, right?

And what the possibilities are, you can be skeptical about it.

But there's also you kind of try to understand what the hopeful side of it is.

I mean, even Elon Musk buying Twitter , you try to see the hopeful side of it.

And so for my last question, before we turn it over to the viewers I wanted to and with apologies to you, I'd like to I'd like to end this.

Can you briefly tell me three things that are giving you hope right now?

right, Rob?

I love to talk in terms of hope I'll tell you three things I like to talk in terms of I will say that whenever this whole question comes up, the thing I always say is that I don't think people take seriously enough how bad the past was.

Like even the recent past I just had Emily St. John Mandel, the novelist on the show, and I had to read this beautiful section from Station 11, this great novel.

She did five or six years ago that takes place in the aftermath of the pandemic that that kills off like 99 percent of human beings.

And she has this famous passage in it.

It's just called an incomplete list, and it's about all the things that are gone from baseball games played under floodlights to airplanes to fluorescent pools , to the knowledge that you wouldn't die because you've got like a scratch on your toe to preserve it, to refrigeration, to , you know.

And what?

I don't think about that section is that what she's describing is not like the apocalypse.

What she's describing is a hundred years ago, it's like within two or three generations of my own family The idea that you can recognize like what is wrong in the world today, but can't recognize how what humanity has for the most part, lived through like the whole time , like up until 20 minutes ago I think a pretty grim vision of today should nevertheless not somehow make you think we live in some dystopia.

I mean, even take something like Roe medicalised abortions, like safe medical abortions, which are not going to completely go away even under a post Roe world.

Like they're completely they're a very, very recent phenomenon as it is effective contraception, which is not take away from the horror of that decision.

If it comes out the way I fear it will come out.

But it shouldn't take away from the feeling that we are living through something unknown in human history.

You know, you can now and in most places, you could just order pills, dude.

I don't want to take away.

I don't even really want to use that as an example.

But but I don't.

But this is one thing that I feel like gives me a different view on this.

I really feel like people don't take seriously that the past was a complete like by any measure of modernity.

Like , even the recent past was a complete disaster And most people I know, even who are quite pessimistic, don't think we're going to go back, you know, more like 75 years on that.

I very rarely hear a genuine prediction that things will be as bad.

You know, in 25 years as they were in 1950, for most human beings.

And so that should give you some perspective, at the very least.

And then, you know, something I try to orient towards on the show that should orient towards my my politics more.

This is actually a Trump era feeling from me.

But but I think it's true.

It's just like recognizing me.

There's a tremendous amount of beauty in the world we live in, and it's a real mistake to take all of your cues about what this is from politics, what you're going to be missing the true stories.

Things don't turn out the way we thought the triumphalism Democrats had under Obama.

Obviously, catastrophe The feeling of upsurge Republicans have right now over the last couple of years.

I mean, these things go back and forth in very unpredictable ways.

But I mean, my God, there's so much beauty.

I mean, you know, we can in this very distinctive way.

Again, compare to anybody to a minute ago.

We can at all times be listening, reading , watching like the highest achievements in human arts literature and music, and all of us sitting around doomscrolling on Twitter I mean, not all of us, but too many of us.

So there's some lunacy to that and trying to hold trying to work on that quality of your attention and see that, you know, deeper story and recognize the freedoms we do have at the moment.

We have them something else from the Emily St. John Mandel conversation.

I've been thinking about for a longer answer than you're hoping for.

But I've been thinking about it is we're all born at a moment.

And before that, we can't remember anything and we all know we're going to die, which is a personal apocalypse, as she put it, I think.

And so I think the past doesn't feel real and the fact that everything could and always feels real I think it's a kind of cognitive distortion that is always with us.

But these were real before us and things will go on.

Hopefully after us.

And that's a give you some and try to take both sides of that equally.

seriously.

You know, I think should help you tailor like, you know, some things are not quite as I want to do right now, but but it's not about the worst moment in human history.

And if we're sitting here listening to this, you're probably, you know, in some conceptual way about your individual situation, you know, probably doing OK. All right.

That was that was heavier than I thought it was going to be, Ezra.

Well, you're the one who cares about a great way to end this portion of the conversation.

But but very interesting.

Thank you so much.

So so let's open it up.

to the viewers out there.

So I've got a few questions for you.

There's some good ones here, this one.

How can we avoid discouragement as things get worse instead of better How can progressives in particular affect change when conservatives catering to money evangelism guns?

Jerry Mandarin and so on generally played dirty?

And Democrats often play too nice.

So I'm going to answer the second question because I think the first question was my ending monologue there.

Right?

One I think that it is a mistake to think that Democrats are not effecting change and always play so nicely.

And here Republicans are scoring all the wins.

I mean, you should.

I hope you listen to my upcoming populist right series sort of the feeling among Republicans and conservatives is that recent decades have been an unending series of losses for them, like to some degree interrupted by Donald Trump, but not that much.

Obviously, getting Roe would be a huge victory , but they have been to that.

To that end, for decades under the feeling of a complete defeat, right, that the Supreme Court made abortion a constitutional right, at least up to a certain point.

And there's just nothing they could do about it.

So they played a very, very, very long game.

And now it looks like it may be on the verge of success, but they're not going to be on the verge of a proportional success, right?

They're not going to do nothing in Alito's decision would make them like abortion constitutionally illegal or on constitutional right.

They would just kick it back to the states, which is very bad But but again, I think it be a mistake to try to miss that context.

You know, in a similar vein, the change, the transformation in recent years, like just the last like 15 years, I mean, we have the Affordable Care Act, which we didn't have before gay marriage Same sex marriage is a constitutional right, which it wasn't very I mean, as recently four as eight Barack Obama ran saying he was against gay marriage.

And that is how fast that has changed It has its imperfections, and inflation is a huge problem.

for politics.

But if you look at the kind of stimulus that the Joe Biden was able to pass , I'm kind of gutted.

Personally, the child tax credit allowed to lapse , but that was a huge policy victory and its moment.

I don't know what the coming couple of years are going to bring.

I don't think they're going to be a huge spate of progressive injuries, but I'm not sure.

I believe they're going to be huge spate of conservative victories.

For the most part, either, you know, except maybe in the courts and politics just continues to be a war or war by other means, for that matter.

And a lot of things in it are really, really disquieting right now.

I mean, if you I mean, the simple fact that I don't think we are sure if this country can survive a genuinely contested election, like what would happen then and all of the machinery put in place to make an election genuinely contested.

I think should really chill you.

I mean, I think the tail risk right now is really , really real.

The pandemic could disappear, you know, and are still living through.

Is it a genuine calamity like something?

History books will not skip over like a like a moment you will tell children about that will be remembered.

But it's just not the case.

I think in American politics that Democrats keep fighting nicely on losing Republicans, keep fighting dirty and winning.

And like , we all live in the aftermath of that.

The other side always looks more ruthlessly effective and organized to you than they really are.

And I can say with like, perfect like perfect confidence that Republicans think Democrats are fighting dirty , constantly winning, organizing all the cultural and corporate machinery against them.

And that, like true conservatives, have become like a rubber group discriminated against in every corner of American life.

I think they're wrong to , but it's OK.

There's nothing to their view.

So So it may be worth if you really want to feel better.

Go read some genuine social conservative writing on both the last 30 years, it felt like, and possibly in their laments, you will feel some of your victory So we're going to do one more question, and I want to turn to media here and you know, I'm interested in this because I'm just sort of interested in how you view cable news This person asks, What do you wish cable news would do differently?

when they cover the big events and stories like wars or elections?

or climate?

You know, this is when we talk about setting agendas and newsrooms, setting agendas Cable news has incredible power to do this.

What do you think they should do with that power?

I'm not sure.

Have a good answer to this one.

I would say those three issues are super different Wars and elections tend to be round the clock, constant coverage, full agenda , everybody on board.

Every show, every hour.

Climate is the opposite problem.

It's slow moving.

Catastrophic Diffuse.

It's hard to get attention focused on it.

You don't have like round the clock climate coverage and then the different channels have different issues.

Fox News is a very distinctive set of problems.

It's not the same problems as CNN , which is different than MSNBC.

So I'm not sure I even would think about cable news as an entity I think Fox News is poisonous or reasons you cannot guess.

The Times had a great series on Tucker Carlson recently.

It was really mainstreaming a lot of white nationalist rhetoric to a show of its very chilling.

The issues there are very, very different things can happen, which has problems for my view.

But but they're very different problems, so I apologize because know on the last question I should have a more stirring answer.

But well, if you make it sure I'd be able to get another one.

Let's do it.

This is maybe a more appropriate one where we could end.

How do you think the US's role on the world stage will change in the future, especially in terms of peacekeeping and global leadership?

I think this is going to be a really unsettled period of this eye.

China is just getting bigger and richer in a way that we are not going to be able to stop.

So on the one hand, I think it's going to push a fairer amount of pressure onto American leadership because I think people a lot of the West Paducah is going to want China counterbalance.

I think what has happened in Ukraine is going to force Europe to cohere more into an entity that those real defense spending and tries to balance Russia.

And so you're kind of going to have like a Europe Russia dynamic and an America China dynamic But I also think that the kind of hegemonic American role that we play for a very long time, this is over.

I don't think Americans have the interest in it or the stomach for it.

I don't think the world sees us in that way anymore.

I think there are too many other potent players like very, very powerful players.

I think that it's really telling.

I mean, most countries voted to condemn Russia.

They voted for the UN security resolution , but most of the population did it.

If you if you measure up by countries , I mean the, you know, China and India and others there have a lot of people in them.

So I think that America, I mean, we are going to be much more of a balancing phase in a period of great power competition and counter maneuvering and I don't really think I know how it's going to play out.

I did an episode with Fareed Zakaria very much on this topic and I think how we how we approach it will really matter.

Only end by saying I think that how optimistic to some degree you should be about the world has a lot to do with how you think the US China relationship will evolve.

Because if we evolve into antagonists, if competition becomes conflict, that's going to be truly, truly catastrophic, not just in a direct meeting of the army's kind of way, but in terms of cooperation, need problems like climate change, pandemics, et cetera.

If you believe that that can be managed in a different way, and you know, maybe there's tension and pressure, but it can be fundamentally cooperative and positive something for everybody like that's a much more optimistic vision of the future.

And so how do you do that, given also that China has been evolving towards a more authoritarian system, posing a much more concerning set of ideological challenges and questions is like the central foreign policy problem of the coming decades.

Hmm.

All right.

That was a better place to stop and we are out of time.

Ezra, I want to thank you so much for your enlightening answers.

Your very honest answers and just spending some time with us to help us think through a lot of really big things that are happening right now.

I appreciate it.

Sorry to be so depressing.

But it is great to be here.

I really appreciate the comments.

That's a good zone for me.

I like that.

Thanks so much.

And to everyone out there on the other side of the screen, thank you as well.

There are three more days of festival programming , and I hope you plan to catch another session or two.

I suggest you check out tomorrow's 9:00 a.m. session.

Work isn't working You can find that session and all the rest of the sessions for the festival at Crosscut dot com slash festival.

Thanks and good night