Ross Douthat: The Exit Interview — The Ezra Klein Show

[0:00] I've known Ross Stouthit a long time. We were bloggers back when the earth was young. [0:06] Hey, Ross, how are you doing? [0:08] Good. I'm fine, Ezra. How are you? [0:10] And then I watched him become a columnist here at the New York Times Opinion in 2009, [0:14] the youngest ever New York Times Opinion columnist. About a year ago, [0:18] he launched Interesting Times, which has been a great fellow podcast here in the section. [0:22] What is the Antichrist? [0:24] How much time do we have? [0:25] We've got as long, as much time as you have to talk about the Antichrist. [0:30] And then breaking all of our hearts, he announced he's going to 60 Minutes, [0:34] where he's going to be a correspondent. So I wanted to talk to Ross on his way out here [0:38] about how he has seen media change, how he has seen politics change, [0:43] and how maybe he believes it is changing again. Ross Stouthit joins me now. [0:54] Ross Stouthit, welcome back to the show. [0:56] Thanks for having me, Ezra. It's a pleasure. [0:58] What the hell, man? [0:59] What do you mean? [1:00] Going to 60 Minutes? You're leaving us? [1:02] I mean, spiritually, you never leave any place that you love. And all things are gathered in [1:10] by God for his... But yeah, I'm going to 60 Minutes. [1:14] All right. We're going to get to going to 60 Minutes. We're going to start with where [1:18] you came from and get to where you're going. Where do you locate your own spiritual origins [1:22] as a journalist, as a commentator, a pundit? I was going back. I had always thought you were, [1:30] like me, like an original blogger who gets absorbed by a media borg. [1:35] Oh, yeah. No, it was the opposite. [1:36] Yeah, you're the opposite. You started The Atlantic and become a blogger. [1:39] I, you know, I was a junior, junior, junior editor. I edited the letters section [1:44] at The Atlantic for a while, and I did blogging on the side. I think of myself as someone who was [1:52] sort of present for both the end of an old dispensation and the beginning of a new one. [1:58] And so I had sort of parallel careers in my early 20s. I had the career inside The Atlantic, [2:04] where I was doing junior editor work and sort of trying to work my way up the masthead at an [2:11] institution where, you know, you were still doing fact checking and copy editing on these huge [2:17] sheets of paper that would be printed out and circulate around the office. And 17 people would [2:22] have red pen on them. And it was very much a pre-internet magazine and a pre-internet journalistic [2:28] experience. And then at the same time, sort of as a side hustle, I was blogging, doing freelance [2:37] writing, and sort of participating in, yeah, the kind of the world of the early 2000s internet. [2:46] Those two things sort of converged because what then happened, as you know, was that many, many [2:52] traditional publications looked at that landscape and said, ah, this is the future and we need to [2:58] co-opt it, right? So at The Atlantic, that meant basically creating a mini editorial page or opinion [3:05] page that consisted of prominent bloggers that The Atlantic had hired. So there was a period when [3:12] they brought in Andrew Sullivan, who was then the biggest deal in blogging, but they also had [3:17] Iglesias, Megan McArdle, Ta-Nehisi Coates, um, and, and then me because I was already on staff. [3:28] And I can tell you that my own traffic numbers were, were somewhat lower than, than the others. Um, [3:35] but that, that was sort of the, the path as you know, in that era, because you followed it too, [3:39] was to sort of be a kind of outsider blogger, critic of the establishment. And then [3:46] an establishment institution might hire you or buy your blog or, or bring you on board. And it was [3:52] just that in my case, I was sort of already on board when that happened. [3:56] So how would you describe to somebody who was not around for that, you know, a young [4:01] journalism student today, what blogging was, what made it different? What made places like [4:07] The Atlantic, eventually the, the New York Times think they needed part of it too? [4:11] Well, so there were a couple of phases, right? Where, um, there were a couple of cohorts of [4:18] bloggers who became a big deal. And the first wave was, uh, immediately after September 11th. [4:25] And then in the run up to the Iraq war, where you had a set of people who were, some of them were [4:30] former liberals to had moved, right? Uh, some of them were just right wingers, but they got called [4:35] the war bloggers, right? And these, these were people who were, I would say the simplest way to [4:42] put it is that something crazy had happened, something world altering had happened, right? [4:48] And we, at the exact time that the internet was emerging as a force. And so there was a huge [4:56] market suddenly of people who were, you know, on their web browsers, looking at a screen, [5:01] all day, um, and wanted to hear people talking about terrorism, September 11th, Islam in the [5:09] Middle East, and then, you know, Afghanistan and Iraq and so on. And it's not surprising that the [5:15] people who filled that niche were mostly people who were in favor of the war on terror and then [5:20] in favor of the war in Iraq. But I think it really was that the event and the demand or the event and [5:27] the technology sort of intersected to create this opening. Like I remember being an intern [5:32] at National Review in the summer before September 11th, so summer of 2001, right? And so I think [5:39] Sullivan was blogging. There were like two or three people who were, when did you start blogging? [5:44] Oh, three. [5:44] Oh, three. [5:45] I was a freshman at UC Santa Cruz. [5:46] Right. Um, so in 2001, you had the internet and you had a few bloggers. And I remember just sitting in, [5:56] you know, the offices of, again, this like 50, 60 year old magazine. I'm an intern. I have very [6:03] little to do. And you just sort of hit refresh, right? You hit refresh on Andrew Sullivan's blog. [6:09] And you see what, you know, you see, you see if he's posted something new. Mickey Kaus, [6:13] right? Kaus Files was also probably one of the initial blogs at that point. But then September 11th [6:20] happens and suddenly you just have a lot more people hitting refresh and having, having this kind of demand. [6:25] Well, I want to go before that. So one of the things that I find interesting about this period [6:30] is that this is one of these places where I think media has changed more than people really realize. [6:37] There just wasn't a lot of political opinion accessible to most people. So it's like, I grew [6:43] up in Orange County, California. My family subscribed to the LA Times. So we, you know, there's an op-ed page [6:50] in the LA Times, which I would read sometimes. Right. [6:52] We were not a family that got, you know, small circulation, DC political. [6:57] The in-flight magazine of Air Force One. [6:59] Yeah. The New Republic, the American Prospect, the National Review, which is a conservative [7:03] magazine that you've written a lot for, The Atlantic. There was talk radio by that time. [7:09] The Laura Ingraham Show. Glenn Beck. [7:13] America's most exciting radio talk show, The Savage Nation. [7:19] But even that had only been on the scene for so long. And it's sort of like post-Rush Limbaugh form. [7:25] Right. [7:26] You know, when I was growing up there, Fox News is beginning to roll out, but it wasn't what [7:32] it would eventually become. I remember MSNBC beginning. [7:35] You had Crossfire. [7:36] You had Crossfire. [7:36] Right. As sort of a, like, that was what you watch. [7:39] You had, MSNBC event, originally is Microsoft NBC. [7:43] Yeah. [7:44] And I remember there being a, it was about tech, primarily. And I remember watching [7:48] a show with Soledad O'Brien where she, like, had an animated co-host, like a clip art co-host. [7:54] Welcome back to the show, my friends, and the site with Soledad O'Brien. I'm her co-host. [8:01] Can I, may I call myself that? [8:03] Sure. [8:03] Damn no. [8:04] You can call yourself whatever you want. The reality is... [8:07] Hey, what the heck, you know? [8:09] And what I always saw blogging is doing is, like, there was an unmet demand for political [8:16] opinion. And particularly after 9-11, when people were really, really interested [8:20] in politics, really upset about what was happening, really uncertain about what was happening. [8:26] And all of a sudden, you can get a flood of it. Like, now there is so much more opinion between [8:35] X and Instagram and, you know, Substack and everything else. [8:39] Right. Right. It's opinion all the way down. [8:40] That has been somewhat drowned out. But then it was somewhat revolutionary that, [8:44] all of a sudden, you could be, you know, refreshing and getting, [8:47] just throughout the day, more and more and more commentary on what was going on. [8:52] But the other thing that was revolutionary was that it was opinion, but it was also [8:57] just a very different kind of argument from what you would get reading op-ed pages and even, [9:04] like, small circulation journals. Early blogging was all about this kind of [9:11] ongoing, rolling debate where you'd write 4,000 words and someone else would come along and block [9:17] quote, right? [9:18] Very few people would write 4,000 words on a blog. That might have been your thing. [9:21] I mean, yeah. All right. Someone would write... [9:25] 300 words. [9:27] No, I mean, but this was also, right, you had more length. I mean, there were people, [9:33] there were people early on. Maybe I'm thinking too much of the war bloggers and not... Like, [9:38] the war bloggers were all about like, let me give you 2,500 words on how, you know, this event in [9:45] ancient Greek history totally explains George W. Bush's brilliant plan to remake the Middle East. I mean, [9:50] there was a lot of prolix content, but maybe some of it was just created by this kind of, [9:55] you quote someone and you say why they're wrong. But people did this back and forth to each other [9:59] constantly. It was hostile, but it was also, I think at its best, sort of really interestingly [10:06] respectful because you were putting the other side's words on your site. Like, even if you were [10:13] doing it just to show what a total idiot they were and, you know, how terrible they were, you were [10:19] still, you were sort of like, all right, here's 200 words I'm quoting and I'm going to go line by line [10:23] and I'm going to respond to every single line. That was, I think, a really distinctive part of it, [10:28] at least for the first few years. [10:31] It was, I thought a lot about why I think the blogosphere was healthier than what came after it, [10:38] and whether or not that was just, I was in my 20s and people like what was happening when they [10:42] were in their 20s, right? The music was better. But I do think this was, to me, the reality of it, [10:48] it was fundamentally conversational. You wrote things in the expectation that the people you were [10:54] writing about would read them and they would answer you. And I don't think that is how a lot of [11:01] media works now. Instead of talking to the people you're talking about, you talk about them, right? [11:07] X or Twitter, you know, you quote, tweet and say, yeah, and you, you know, and, and dunk on them. [11:12] And then, you know, you look for the hearts and the retweets. It, it has really changed what the [11:18] currency was. I mean, I remember, so I began my blog in 2003 and the only way you could get readership, [11:24] I mean, there were not algorithms, you were not winning Google search results. [11:27] Right. [11:28] The way you got readership was through these links back and forth. And so, you know, if right [11:35] now what happens is the reward and the way that audience is secured is, you know, you get people [11:43] who agree with you to retweet it, to, you know, restack it, whatever it might be. Then, you know, [11:49] I actually wanted, I disagreed with Andrew Sullivan on all kinds of things. It was good for me if Andrew [11:55] Sullivan, like blog quoted me and then argued, and then, you know, I would block quote him and [11:59] argue back and we would go back and forth. And it wasn't that it can never be disrespectful. [12:04] It was often heated, but there was still a sense that you were in relationship. People talked about [12:09] the blogosphere. [12:10] Right. You had a blog, you had a blog role. [12:12] You had a blog role. [12:13] And the people you put on your blog role. [12:14] You had an ecosystem. [12:15] Yep. [12:15] Well, so we, we had a lot of arguments over the years and in our, in our days as bloggers, [12:22] but I thought it'd be fun to, to go back to, to one of them in particular on what I think [12:27] it's fair to say is a forerunner to podcasting, which is blogging heads. The, uh, Robert Wright. [12:32] I knew, I knew I was going to regret this. [12:33] Robert Wright project? [12:34] Yes. Robert Wright, who is older than us, a brilliant writer, and who basically invented [12:40] podcasting without getting credit for it because the world was not quite ready. [12:43] The story of the moment is, um, John McCain's, um, running the most disgraceful campaign [12:50] in American history, possibly, um, maybe in world history. [12:55] Global, planetary, universal, um, universal history, I think is, is where we're at basically. [13:01] Right. So it's, so it's been pretty disgraceful. So basically McCain has, um, there's been sort of [13:06] a flurry of ads, statements, um, sort of back and forths that have in different ways, you know, [13:14] from, from the McCain campaign sort of shaded the truth, um, or not shaded the truth, have, [13:20] you know, have been outright lies and so forth. [13:23] Right. Right. And so there's been, and so, you know, all of the, all the great and good observers, [13:31] the sort of Joe Clines and, um, E.J. Dion's and so on have, have weighed in with, um, with remarks on, [13:38] I think, I think Richard Cohen is the latest today. He has a column. I think it basically says, you know, [13:43] I used to be in the tank for McCain, um, but, uh, now he's sold his soul to Satan and, um, you know, [13:50] I'm no, I'm no longer in the tank and so on. So it's basically the final, the final divorce between [13:56] John McCain and the reporters who used to love him. So I want to, I want to, I want to say on behalf [14:02] of myself, right, that for those, for like, I'm being ironical in that commentary. It's a much [14:08] simpler time. And it is, it is a simpler time where you, Ezra Klein, were part of a vast liberal [14:14] conspiracy bent on portraying the war hero John McCain as the most dangerous politician in American [14:20] history. I think we're both being pretty skeptical. I champion. No, I, I don't, I don't remember [14:24] whether you were part of it or not, but yeah, but it, it, this is, it's kind of amazing how [14:28] different that moment is when you can imagine that there were like huge eruptions over the [14:34] level of negative campaigning from McCain to Obama. I always feel this way when people talk about the [14:38] Obama Romney campaigning, where it all just seems so right all compared to where we eventually went. [14:44] Right. But this is, you know, part of, part of the argument of many of Donald Trump's supporters is that [14:50] it was precisely because, um, liberals insisted that first McCain and then Mitt Romney were [14:56] history's greatest monsters that, you know, that's how you got Trump. But the right, it was so kind of [15:02] Barack Obama. We don't need to, we don't need to argue, we don't need to argue about this. This is, [15:05] this is, yeah, this is my office at the Atlantic. I think that is copy of Grand New Party back there. [15:12] But in, but again, with the sense that like the point was to, the point was that this was somewhat [15:18] extracurricular and it was sort of, uh, you know, to be Norman Mailer-esque, right? It's sort of an [15:24] advertisement for yourself, right? That then in theory is supposed to cash out in promotions and [15:31] new jobs at the existing institutions, which is what happened again to that cohort, which is why [15:37] I ended up here at the New York Times and you ended up at the Washington Post. [15:40] So you are hired as the youngest ever opinion columnist at the New York Times? [15:45] Deep breath, yes. I believe this is 2009. This is 2009, yes. [15:50] But, but you're also in a, in a funny part of this. So throughout your career, I think it'll [15:55] continue to be the case. You are the more conservative voice at institutions that are [16:00] understood as broadly more liberal, right? I think that's true for the Atlantic. I think it's true for [16:05] the New York Times opinion page. People would say- I wrote, I wrote the conservative column for [16:10] the Harvard Crimson. For the Harvard Crimson. It goes all the way back. I'm curious about that experience. [16:14] Tell me what doing that for as many years as writing for liberal audiences as a conservative, [16:20] you know, a pro-life Catholic conservative. Let's start here. What did it teach you about liberals? [16:28] So I like liberals. [16:29] That was a long pause after that. [16:31] No, I'm well, it's, I spend, I mean, the first thing to be said is that I always regarded [16:40] this kind of role as just an incredible opportunity, like as a baseline, right? Where you write, [16:51] you write opinions in order to argue and persuade. That, that's what opinion journalism, [16:56] as far as I can see, is supposed to do. And, you know, it's an illusion to imagine that [17:03] anyone has their whole worldview altered by an 800 word column or anything remotely like that. But, [17:08] but still on the margins at the very least, right? You're trying to pull readers closer to your [17:14] perspective, move people to some degree, expose people to ideas they wouldn't otherwise cover. [17:21] And in that sense, there's just no better way to do it than to be the person at a given publication [17:28] who has heterodox views relative to their audience. And look, obviously there's lots of conservatives [17:34] who read the Atlantic when I was there. There's lots and lots of conservatives who read the New [17:38] York Times. So if you're, if you're working for a big publication, you're never exclusively [17:43] speaking to people who disagree with you, but yeah, clearly, clearly I'm speaking to a lot of people [17:48] who do disagree with me and that's a gift. And then you have to remember that it's a gift [17:55] because it's also a very stressful situation, right? The claims you make are going to be [18:01] exactingly scrutinized in a way that is maybe less true of people who sort of assume that the [18:10] audience is going to be on their side. Well, what have you learned about writing persuasively? [18:16] I mean, this is banal advice, but it's still the fundamental thing. It is to argue effectively, [18:22] you need to understand why people you disagree with hold the views that they do. And you need to start [18:30] from a version of their argument that is high-minded rather than low-minded. And it is sort of the best [18:39] version of the perspective that they hold. And that doesn't mean that you can't think that like [18:44] secretly or subconsciously they hold their opinion for bad or wicked reasons or because they want to, [18:51] you know, just destroy their enemies and salt the earth. Like you can believe that that exists [18:55] somewhere in their mind. But to argue with them, you have to actually engage with the version of [19:04] the argument that they themselves would put forward as their own best defense, right? So like the obvious [19:10] examples, I'll pick one from the right and one from the left, right? So if you are pro-choice and you [19:15] want to argue with pro-lifers, like actually argue with them, you cannot start from a description of the [19:20] pro-life position that says the point of pro-life politics is to subjugate women and punish them for [19:27] sexual immorality. You're allowed to think that that's out there and like is part of, you know, [19:33] the socially conservative psyche. You're allowed to think whatever you want, but you're not going to [19:36] get anywhere arguing unless you start with the fact that like pro-life people think, uh, unborn human [19:43] lives are human and worthy of legal protection in terms of being human. That's just where you have to start, [19:49] right? And then to take, to take an issue from the other direction. If you are a, um, conservative [19:57] opponent of liberal views on immigration, you're allowed to think that liberals are politically [20:03] Machiavellian cynics who are, you know, bringing in lots of illegal immigrants to vote democratic. But [20:09] you're never going to get anywhere arguing unless you start with what liberals themselves would say, [20:15] which is that, you know, immigration is a humanitarian and economic benefit to immigrants [20:22] and to the country that receives them. That's the, you know, that's, that's like where you have to start. [20:26] That's it. That's the, the whole, the whole secret. And again, how effective the arguments are [20:32] that you end up making from that starting point? I don't know, but I, I do think generally that [20:39] the act of sort of sustained attempted good faith interaction does even in totally polarized environments [20:51] yield a kind of, you know, reasonably favorable response. Like it's not the case that it, [20:58] that you can't talk across partisan divides. It's, it's challenging and difficult and sometimes exhausting. [21:05] Um, but people are open to it. [21:07] I think relatively few opinion writers are actually engaged in ongoing efforts at persuasion. [21:16] I think typically people who think they're doing that are engaged in ongoing efforts at affirmation. [21:21] And there are things around the edges where they're sort of putting their spin on it, [21:25] but it starts from a, a kind of locus of major agreement. And then you're sort of like shifting [21:32] into one direction or another. What I think has been interesting to watch across your career [21:36] is that you actually have been engaged in a very, very long effort at persuasion. You are almost [21:41] always in relationship with an audience that mostly doesn't share your views. [21:45] A profoundly, a profoundly successful exercise in persuasion. [21:48] What would you say you've been most successful? What, what would you say [21:52] you feel you have been most persuasive about? [21:54] I, I don't honestly know exactly how to judge that. I mean, I, I think that the, [22:03] so on the one hand, there's a bunch of things that have happened since I took the times job [22:08] that sort of fulfilled my expectations to some degree about like what was going to happen [22:15] in American politics and where certain things would go, uh, above all the sort of populist [22:22] nationalist transformation of the Republican party. [22:24] It's worth noting here for people who don't know you and your former co-blogger, [22:27] Ryhan had written a book called Grand New Party. [22:29] We, we, we wrote a book, but beyond the book, we were just sort of involved. [22:35] So this, this wasn't persuasion directed at liberals, honestly, this was persuasion directed [22:40] more at our fellow conservatives and saying, look, the tectonic plates under the Republican [22:45] party are, are shifting. The party has to deal with the fact that it has a more working [22:50] class coalition. It has to adapt its policy and rhetoric, all of these kinds of things. [22:55] But in fact, that vision was fulfilled in a way that had absolutely nothing to do with us. [22:59] It was not the case that we wrote a bunch of columns, persuaded a bunch of Republicans [23:05] to become more populist. And lo and behold, you know, a populist version of Marco Rubio [23:10] was elected president in 2016. No, obviously our prophecies were fulfilled by Donald Trump. [23:16] And the whole Trump phenomenon was just, was, and for the most part remains pretty disconnected from [23:24] the work of, um, you know, opinion mongers and would be intellectuals. So there's that. I, that's, [23:34] that's sort of one, one area of, um, success of a kind, but not the success that, that I looked for. [23:45] I think that, well, stop there for a second. In what way was it not right? You put some [23:50] flesh on that. So you wrote this book, you're, you're sort of involved in an effort to say the [23:54] Republican party should not be as doctrinally libertarian. It shouldn't be all about cutting [23:59] Medicare and cutting social security, that it had this opportunity at a time when it did not win [24:06] majorities of working class voters to shift its policies in a way that would make it more appealing [24:12] to them. And the kinds of shifts that you and Raihan advocated had to do with things like [24:18] immigration, had to do with things like tax credits for kids, had to do with sort of shifting it to a [24:25] more pro family, um, more concerned with the problems of working class families from, I would [24:30] say, uh, a more traditionalist perspective maybe than the left is. So how would you describe what [24:38] happened to that? And then what happened that created the working class shift because Republicans [24:42] do now win majorities of working class voters or Trump at least does. Um, what drove that that maybe [24:49] was not in your prescription? Well, so one part of what drove it was just that Trump picked [24:57] or intuited a different set of issues to focus on than Raihan and I would have, would have favored. [25:06] But, but generally we were focused on sort of family policy, wage subsidies, these kinds of [25:13] things. And Trump was just focused on obviously like trade tariffs and re-industrialization, um, [25:22] in a way that I don't think we, we, I don't think we fully anticipated how much some of those [25:27] arguments would resonate in 2016. I don't know how much they resonate now, but in 2016, I think [25:33] big part of the country was still getting over the shock of the opening to China. And there was [25:37] just a real percentage for Trump in flying around the Midwest, going to places that had been hammered [25:43] and saying, I'm just going to bring back your jobs, right? We're going to stop businesses from [25:48] leaving our country. And we are, they are being, they are being drained out of our country, our jobs, [25:58] our money, our base, and our factories. We are, we're going to stop it. [26:02] And that was again, a different message from saying we need to use government policy to [26:09] help people form families. And I'm genuinely angry at the people who took it. [26:13] And I'm right. Well that too. Right. So then there's, there's a more substantial anger. There's [26:18] more substantial scapegoating. They're moving to other places. A lot of them are moving to [26:22] Mexico. Don't underestimate it. It's like the new China on a smaller level, but like the new China. [26:28] So our, our view wasn't that you should never cut Medicare and social security. It was more that [26:33] if you're going to cut Medicare or reform Medicare, you should be doing it not to just pass a new upper [26:39] bracket tax cut, but to free up more money to help working families. Right. Would be, would be how [26:44] the argument would go. And Trump just said, no, we're, you know, we're never cutting these things. [26:50] Right. And so he outflanked all of his Republican primary opponents by realizing that a big part [26:56] of the Republican base wasn't on board with Mitt Romney and Paul Ryan. But what that did was [27:01] basically create a kind of a more popular, but much more fiscally unsustainable. And in the end, [27:09] I think sort of unproductive policy mix on the right, where the right sort of defines itself as [27:16] defenders of old people's entitlements rather than people who are eager to cut it, and then has no [27:21] space left for, for a lot of the policy ideas that, that we would have favored. So that's part of, [27:28] part of what happened. The other thing that happens, right, is that we were trying to sort of craft, [27:34] you know, I think you use the word traditional, I would have said sort of like a kind of moderate social [27:39] conservatism that was compatible with the Republican Party's sort of religious, religious [27:47] base and pro-life commitments and so on, but tried to start from there and broaden into, you know, [27:53] broader support for two parent families and marriage and these, these kinds of things. [27:57] What actually happened was that for about 10 years, social conservatism was just routed in the U.S. [28:05] It lost, I mean, it lost the argument over same-sex marriage most prominently, [28:09] but it lost a lot of different arguments. Like if you just look at the trends in the 2010s on, [28:14] you know, all kinds of questions from, you know, drug use all the way to like polyamory, [28:21] you know, not that the country is universally pro-polyamory, but you can, you can see that [28:25] leftward shift all over. It ends up showing up on abortion too, right? Trump comes in on the one hand [28:31] as a kind of someone who speaks to that, who says to embattled social conservatives and religious [28:36] conservatives, you're losing the culture and you need to live with that and just have me as like [28:41] the tough guy who will defend you. But then the other thing that happens is that liberalism and [28:48] progressivism having won those victories then radicalize further and say, well, you know, [28:53] what happened on same-sex marriage where we sort of shift the country completely in our direction in [28:59] an incredible amount of time, and then declare that, you know, the other side are bigots and we don't [29:04] need to talk to them anymore. We can do that with a lot of other issues too. And that gets you the [29:10] woke era and then it gets you the backlash against the woke era. But like the backlash against the woke [29:17] era is very far removed from a kind of stable social conservatism, like sort of building, building [29:28] something. I mean, the backlash against the woke era is then, you know, everybody from Catholic [29:33] traditionalists to pot-smoking libertarians, right? Who don't, who don't like the woke, but it's not a, [29:39] I don't know. It's not sort of a coherent basis for governing the country in ways that I think have [29:46] become totally apparent in the second Trump term. Well, you have this famous 2016 tweet, you write, [29:52] a thought sent back in time to the theocracy panic of 2005. Right. You seem like you're enjoying [29:57] this interview. If you dislike the religious right, wait till you meet the post-religious right. [30:02] Mm-hmm. Unpack both sides of that. I mean, for people maybe who don't really remember [30:07] what you're calling the theocracy panic of 05, what was that? But then the religious right versus [30:13] the post-religious right, I think is actually a quite significant thing. I just did this big [30:16] Odyssey essay, which I would say is very much about that question in a way. So, you know. [30:21] So the theocracy panic was just that George W. Bush won reelection in 2004, [30:28] with the support of lots and lots of white evangelicals. Liberals were not expecting [30:32] Bush to win. A bunch of liberals became obsessed with the idea that evangelicalism was taking over [30:38] America and was going to build a kind of Gilead-esque evangelical theocracy. I thought that was ludicrous [30:45] at the time and wrote a bunch of essays about it. And then by the time you get to the mid-2010s, [30:53] and Trump is winning while being conspicuously non-evangelical, conspicuously non-Christian, [31:00] it seems like you're in a world where everything that liberals hated and feared about George W. Bush [31:06] becomes something they're nostalgic for. Mm-hmm. [31:08] Right. And that they see sort of, and that as you kind of de-Christianize conservatism, [31:15] you get more bigotry, xenophobia, these kind of things. You know, that was 10 years ago. There's [31:22] a lot of different forms, like a post-religious right could be, and you see versions of this, [31:28] not a kind of, you know, terrifying fascist formation, but just a kind of right-wing politics of, [31:35] you know, sort of liberty and indifference and sort of proud amoralism, right? And again, [31:44] this is part of Trump's coalition, right, is people who just hate moralistic arguments and [31:51] want to do whatever they want to do and ended up seeing Trump as an avatar for that, which is, [31:58] I think, quite different from the part of the post-religious right that is literally people trying [32:03] to revive kind of a pagan non-Christian fascist politics. But both of those things sort of exist [32:11] as phenomena in the last 10 years. Tell me what you think leads to the phenomena of [32:17] the more pagan formation. So the first time I heard this description of it was actually in an interview [32:22] that Louise Perry, the sort of British conservative kind of critic of modern feminism did with your new [32:30] boss, Barry Weiss, and she was making this distinction between Jordan Peterson and Andrew Tate. [32:35] So, you know, the really crucial difference between Jordan Peterson and Andrew Tate, there are [32:38] obviously lots of differences, but the one that I think is most salient to this issue is, um, [32:44] Jordan Peterson is basically, um, preaching a Christian message and Andrew Tate is not. I, the more I think [32:54] about it, the more I think that actually that's really the key dividing line if you're thinking [32:59] about, um, American culture in particular. And that a lot of the fights on the right, [33:05] she sort of made this argument, are going to begin to come down to this. You know, are you sort of [33:10] pushing towards a, you know, what can be called here at least in certain forms of Christian ethic, [33:15] or is it about strength, about dominance, about hierarchy? Obviously Christianity is a big [33:21] phenomenon. And, you know, all as is Islam and Judaism and all these religions have many, [33:25] many different... It's a complicated world. [33:27] ...political manifestations. So I don't want to, I don't want to overly probably pagans too, [33:31] but I do think there's something to that. Well, the issue there though, [33:35] is that Jordan Peterson is not a Christian. Andrew Tate is a, that is a right-wing politics that [33:44] formally rejects Christianity. Jordan Peterson is a post-Christian right-wing politics that is sort of [33:50] trying... I mean, he's been ill for a while and I don't want to like sort of characterize where he [33:55] is right now, but generally he's engaged in this sort of constant, like wrestling with [34:02] the texts of the Old Testament and the Christian story and so on and saying, you know, these are [34:07] incredibly important and we need to, you know, preserve them without ever actually committing to, [34:13] to Christian belief. And conservatism generally, I think, as Christianity has declined, has ended up [34:21] in this weird place where it's trying to find some kind of category that includes Christianity, [34:27] includes traditional religion, but isn't reducible to it. So it's like, well, we're defending Western [34:33] civilization, right? You'll hear that a lot from people on the right. And often like that language [34:39] is associated with people on the right who are not themselves formally committed to Christianity. [34:45] But so Tate is an extreme, but even Peterson himself is sort of navigating in the kind of [34:53] post-Christian landscape in his own way. So tell me a bit of how you understand [34:57] the story. How do we go from the front-facing Christianity of conservatism in the Bush era [35:02] to this much more post-Christian assemblage that includes Christians, as you're, as you're saying, [35:11] but I would, I would say it's fair to say Christian ethics and virtue are not demanded as a, um, [35:17] Right. So two, two things happen. One is, um, at the mass level, Christianity just declines. [35:24] It declines sharply between the late 1990s and 2020. And that means that just inevitably [35:33] the kinds of appeals and rhetoric and argument that are sort of normative on the right when lots [35:38] of people are going to church, uh, are less normative when fewer people are going to church. [35:43] And that's a very simple story, but I think it, you know, it does a lot of explanatory work [35:48] as a culture gets less formally Christian. It's not surprising that its leadership would get less [35:55] formally Christian. Trump is again, an extreme case. He takes, he takes a trend to an extreme, [36:01] right. Where he is just sort of nakedly transactional in his relationship to [36:05] Christianity and doesn't even sort of necessarily mouth the pieties, but then at the intellectual [36:12] level, right. So let's say you are a writer or thinker or would be elite on the right, looking at [36:20] this landscape, looking at not just the decline of Christianity, but this sort of sweeping victory [36:25] for social liberalism that I just described. Well, you're going to look at that and say, [36:30] okay, we had an evangelical president in George W. Bush. We had sort of a Catholic evangelical [36:35] alliance sort of defining Republican politics. And what did we get from it? We got secularization [36:41] and the triumph of social liberalism. So something went wrong here. And a lot of the sort of [36:49] controversy and argument and debate among younger conservatives, especially, but all over the place, [36:55] is this kind of wrestling with like, well, why did, why did we fail? Right. And there's just a lot of [37:02] different impulses at work there. You have, you know, you have people who sort of want to leave [37:08] Christianity behind entirely and say the problem, you know, the problem is just like, you know, this, [37:15] this religion is sort of weak and, and its leaders are hapless and defeat and soft, and you need, you [37:25] know, a harsh, a harsh masculine force and so on. That's, that's a pretty narrow group. I think what, [37:33] what's more common is a desire among people who are connected to Christianity, who are Christian and so on, [37:41] to like say, well, where can we find greater strength? Where can we find, you know, greater [37:47] toughness? How can we be more effective political actors? How can we defeat our enemies instead of [37:54] having them vanquish us? You could call it a reaching for pagan energy that doesn't go all the [37:59] way to actually becoming pagan, right? And look, the truth is that, you know, if you go back and look- [38:04] Stephen Miller's not a Wiccan. [38:06] Stephen Miller's not a Wiccan, right. But there, yeah, there's a, I mean, there it's like, [38:13] the desire is for strength and toughness and a politics of enmity. There's various versions of [38:22] this that, um, that show up and they're connected also to the reality that, you know, if you look, [38:29] obviously, historically at the expressions of political Christianity in the Western world, [38:35] they are, you know, I mean, very comfortable with fighting wars and, um, you know, conquering enemies [38:43] and, and all of these kinds of things. And people, Christians, conservative Christians today who are [38:48] like, you know, what happened to the crusading spirit or something like that are, are not wrong that, [38:53] like that, that has been part of Christian culture in the West for a long time. But, [39:00] you know, you see this in the debate about like the Odyssey, for instance, right? Where [39:09] Christopher Nolan takes the Odyssey and some people have said he Christianizes it, right? [39:16] This is sort of debatable, but he, he certainly makes the moral vision of the story more compatible [39:24] with Christianity where it's like, okay, you know, Odysseus has committed sins and feels guilt and he [39:31] doesn't glory in war. Um, he doesn't sleep with Calypso, uh, and Circe and so on. But then [39:40] there's clearly a group, not just of would be neo-pagans, but sort of conservative Christians [39:45] on the internet who don't like that. And they're like, where's the, you know, where's the war, [39:50] right? Where's the, you know, we, we, this is sort of, this is like losing, losing the, [39:58] the, the core, the core of the story. And that's an, that's, I think that that partially reflects [40:03] this desire to find something that doesn't seem present in like late 20th century, sort of public [40:11] Christianity, the compassionate conservatism of George W. Bush, find some kind of fighting [40:16] spirit in the theory that that's what you need to overcome liberalism. It's funny. It's an odd [40:23] take on George W. Bush in a way that what he lacked was a fighting spirit. Bush who won two elections in [40:30] a row against the Democrats, uh, but also launched a large number of wars. Yes. There were some wars. [40:37] Well, yes. And there is no part. There's also some of this is like a creative miss or a convenient [40:43] misremembering by the right where you have like young nationalists on the right, young would be [40:50] nationalists who will say, you know, the one thing we can't do is go back to, you know, the feckless [40:57] liberal internationalism of George W. Bush. Um, but if you look at the things written in the run up to [41:03] the Iraq war, and this is maybe where my war blogger reference at the start is actually relevant. [41:08] They had a lot in common with populist nationalist arguments today. There's this sort of recurring [41:15] they were like the West has gotten soft, right? Radical Islam has taken advantage of our liberal [41:22] weakness. We need to show strength and make a friend enemy distinction in the battle for the [41:30] Middle East, right? Um, the, the whole like national greatness conservatism and this runs history is [41:39] filled with these like fun ironies, right? So there were a bunch of people who were associated with [41:44] what got called national greatness conservatism, which was basically a kind of, you know, pretty hawkish, [41:51] um, form of Republican politics. Um, who then like Bill Kristol, right? Um, who then end up as like [42:01] the great critics of Trump is our former colleague, our former colleagues are right. Our former colleague, [42:06] David Brooks, he's a less, he's a less extreme example. It's just really striking. If you go back, [42:12] like nobody hates Bill Kristol more than Trumpists and Bill Kristol hates Trumpists. But if you go back [42:19] and read like the way Kristol wrote about politics and war and all these things in the late nineties [42:23] and early two thousands, he has a lot in common with the way sort of the young nationalists spoiling [42:29] for a fight, write about politics today. It's just the focus, the focus is, is different. [42:35] So why do you think that ended up being such a major split? Because I agree that that is one of [42:40] the places where you tend to see a lot of split between Trumpists and never Trumpers people associated [42:45] with national greatness conservatism. That was an aggressive, muscular conservatism. [42:50] Yep. [42:51] That was a, we need to defend Western civilization version of conservatism. And, you know, for all [42:58] the talk about not launching new wars, it does not turn out to be the case that that is so central to [43:03] Donald Trump's conception. [43:04] Apparently not. [43:05] Of how MAGA works. [43:06] Yep. [43:06] So why do you think that became such a cut in the Republican coalition? [43:11] I think it was, well, it was partially a cut because even though Trump has ended up starting [43:17] a new war in the Middle East, he really did pretty strongly repudiate elements of neoconservative and [43:24] hawkish foreign policy. And to the extent that like, if you were committed to the idea that the Iraq [43:30] war had been a good idea, then Trump in 2016 was not your guy, right? So there was that as a kind of [43:37] specific breaking point. And then there was all there also was, you know, to make the case for [43:43] the never Trump side, a kind of clear character logical argument where you could say, you know, [43:50] in, in the early 2000s, that a national politics of national greatness only made sense if it was [43:57] founded on character and virtue in your leaders. And I don't think George Bush was like a paragon of [44:05] every single virtue, but it's fair to say that he was a more personally virtuous guy in various ways [44:10] than Trump. Right? So there were people who had committed to that idea for good reasons, [44:16] for whom it was just like, okay, I don't care how muscular Trump is or how international greatness [44:22] he is. He is just a bad guy and I'm not, I'm not going to support him. And then for younger people, [44:28] like, especially after 2016, like once, you know, once Trump wins, then he just sort of resets the [44:36] landscape, right? And you sort of, it's, it's just like you sort of, I feel like with younger people [44:44] on both the left and the right, the world where we had arguments about the character of American [44:49] politicians, the world where, you know, Bill Clinton's adultery was something to be litigated, [44:55] all, all, all of these things is just kind of a lost world. And so it's sort of, [45:00] I think it might be rediscovered soon. It might be. [45:03] I think in the turning of the wheel. Oh yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Right. No, [45:05] the next cohort, I mean, yeah, we're old now. So, you know, you can, you can see that each cohort [45:11] will have a different perspective and there may be a renewed interest in character. [45:16] There's another fascinating, at least to me, shift that has taken place, which is, you know, [45:20] we've described a couple of times here, the centrality of evangelical Christianity to [45:25] politics in say 2005. And now Catholics seem much more central to politics, right? Catholic thinkers, [45:33] you have a lot of Catholic converts at the top of Republican party politics, including J.D. Vance, [45:38] who was just on your show, the vice president, who just released a book about his Catholic conversion. [45:42] Albeit one with a Protestant church on the cover. [45:46] It is an odd design choice. I agree. [45:48] Sort of. I mean, it actually is a design choice that makes a lot of sense, but we can, [45:53] we can get into that. Go on. [45:54] What have you made of that? What, what, what does that move from like the form of Christianity [46:01] that seems to be driving right-wing politics was evangelical Christianity to Catholic thinking? [46:07] What is that? [46:09] I don't know. So one, I don't know how much Catholic thinking can be said to be driving [46:14] Republican politics. I, I would not look at the second Trump administration, but yeah, I think it's, [46:19] I think it's, I think it's very important in sort of right-wing intellectual culture. [46:24] In the last five years, generally, after a long period of secularization, [46:29] there is a renewed interest in arguments about religion, religious ideas that extends beyond [46:36] conservatism, maybe even extends to you, right, Ezra? We've, we've talked about this on this show [46:41] before. And I think in my own, my own work has been in this period kind of well suited to that moment. [46:49] I felt sort of more in tune with the times than I usually do in that sense. But the way that's [46:55] manifested in kind of right-wing intellectual culture is that Catholicism, which has, [47:04] I think it's fair to say, a stronger and deeper intellectual tradition than evangelical Christianity [47:11] in the US has just become like a kind of natural attractor for a lot of people who are like looking [47:19] for, looking for a harbor, looking for a place to land, looking to convert or revert or anything else. [47:26] But then the other thing is that, you know, Catholicism is still struggling as a mass institutional [47:33] religion, right? And evangelicalism is still thriving relative to Catholicism. I mean, [47:40] one argument you could make is that under sort of digital conditions, under sort of internet [47:45] conditions, which are hard on, they're hard on things that don't have a clear definition that are [47:52] sort of just based on kind of loose ancestral loyalties. So they've been really hard on like [47:57] denominational Protestantism, on people who are like, well, I'm a Methodist because my parents were [48:01] a Methodist, or I'm a Presbyterian because I like the pastor and so on. And they've been good for, [48:08] in different ways, sort of stronger brands. And in a way, Christianity sort of polarizes into [48:14] the strong brand of like liturgical religion, of which Catholicism is the strongest expression, [48:20] and then kind of the strong brand of mass market seeker sensitive, you know, come for our amazing, [48:27] our amazing praise music concert. And those are the two strongest forms. But the Catholic form is [48:33] stronger at the elite level, and the evangelical form seems stronger at the mass level. That was a [48:38] very long comment. But it's something obviously that I think about a lot. But it's a very, [48:44] yeah, I don't know where it goes from there. Like, do we just have a world where, [48:50] like, it's sort of natural if you're in the elite to be Catholic, the way it would have once been [48:54] natural to be an Episcopalian? But that's somehow separate from like, what's happening in mass [49:00] trends in religion? Does an elite turn to Catholicism eventually sort of trickle down [49:06] and sort of revitalize the wider Catholic institutions? I have no idea. [49:11] Do you think the relationship between the left and religion has changed? [49:15] Yes. I think that, again, I'm not sure where this goes, but I feel like the kind of post-Christian [49:24] left is having its own kind of existential crisis of like pessimism. But I feel like there was a [49:33] period when it went on the left, it was like, we are leaving traditional, patriarchal, [49:39] cis-heteronormative Christianity behind, and we're going to be great. We're going to, you know, [49:45] we're going to enter the broad sunlit uplands of science. We're going to trust the science in [49:49] this house and so on. And then somewhere between COVID and Trump returning and, you know, the rise [49:57] of AI and various other unsettling things, I think the left started to feel like they were missing [50:05] something. You know, if you watch, did you watch the last Knives Out movie? [50:10] I did. [50:11] Right. So the prior Knives Out movie was a movie about how Elon Musk and billionaires are bad and [50:18] evil. And the latest Knives Out movie was a movie about how there are really awful forms of religion, [50:27] and there's also really good forms of religion. And we should want the really good forms to survive. [50:35] And, you know, it's just, it's just one movie, but I thought it was an interesting sort of sense of [50:40] like a kind of, a kind of like groping around in liberal culture for sort of some kind of religious [50:49] or spiritual point of connection that again, I think also shows up in just kind of post-Christian [50:55] spirituality interest in sort of new age, pagan stuff, all that stuff too. There's just a lot of, [51:01] there's a lot of groping. [51:02] Well, I think you can see a couple of things happening that are at least interesting. So [51:07] I agree, Knives Out is one of them. We were talking about the Odyssey, but you have James [51:11] Tallarico who became a kind of phenom candidate, sort of one of the only like mainstream liberal [51:19] candidates who's been like a big attentional phenom of the moment. And does it by wrapping a [51:25] pretty straightforward progressive politics in a very, very moralistically Christian framework. [51:32] What would Jesus do about a justice system that incarcerates more people than any other country [51:38] on the face of the earth? And what would Jesus do about an economic system that prioritizes profits [51:46] over the health of our planet? Would he stay in his room and pray? Or would he walk into the seat [51:54] of power and flip over the tables of injustice? [51:58] And I think people have found that exciting. It has given them a way to talk about the moment that I think [52:03] feels deeper. And it has tapped into something very real. I think if you're watching some of the other [52:13] people coming up, this would include not just Ralph L. Warnock, but John Ossoff in Georgia, [52:17] they're much more comfortable in that grammar as well. [52:19] They got together, the Speaker of the House, held hands with other legislators, prayed a prayer, [52:27] and then they went and cut a trillion dollars out of Medicaid. 15 million people off of their health [52:34] care. They kicked veterans and seniors and children off of SNAP. And I don't understand how you read the [52:44] book that I read. I'm a Matthew 25 Christian. [52:48] A government transformed into a tool of one man's vengeance and enrichment. A spiritually broken [52:58] president who digs the moral pit deeper and deeper. But Pastor Proverbs says, whoever digs a pit, [53:17] whoever digs a pit will fall into it. And scripture is full of kings brought low by their own arrogance. [53:28] Right. So in my view, something is happening. It's not necessarily the left is becoming [53:33] believers in a new way, but there is a desire to sort of reconnect, I think, to traditions. [53:42] Well, I mean, there was a way in which from my perspective as a skeptical outsider, [53:47] the whole great awokening was this fascinating attempt to do religious energy without metaphysical [53:54] commitment. Like it was, it really was the case that there was kind of the [53:59] energy that you associate with a moralistic revival at work in anti-racism and, you know, [54:07] everything associated with that. Like you have iconoclasm, you have, you know, people enforcing [54:12] new moral norms. Like these are things that we associate with periods of spiritual ferment. [54:18] But quite self-consciously, like the anti-racist cause was detached from the black church in various [54:24] ways. Right. And you had like our, again, my former Atlantic colleague, Ta-Nehisi Coates, [54:30] you know, as a kind of prophet who very explicitly rejected cosmic hope. Right. If anything sort of [54:36] carried a kind of cosmic despair around with him, I think that combination doesn't work well. Right. [54:45] You end up with a kind of, a kind of politics of guilt without the possibility of redemption is a pretty [54:51] dark perspective on the world. And I think sort of wokeness for all its revolutionary zeal ends up [54:57] itself just in some dark places, again, independent of what's happening with Trump or on the right or [55:01] anything else. So some of it might be just a reaction to that too. Right. A sense of like, [55:07] okay, we can't moralize at people if we're also telling them that the universe is sort of [55:14] empty and meaningless, except for like the meaning we impose on it through ideological categories or [55:19] something like you need, if you're going to have progressive moralism, you need to be able to claim [55:24] to that it corresponds to something like out there in the cosmos that's real. Right. I don't totally [55:29] agree with that. Um, maybe one, one way to, to, to ground that disagreement is Pope Leo's AI and [55:36] cyclical. One of the things that struck me reading it was without agreeing with his metaphysics, right? [55:43] I am not a Catholic. My vision of the world and its cosmology is not Catholic. I found it to be a really [55:51] beautiful and moving articulation of what I would otherwise describe as liberal values, [55:58] all the way down to ways of practicing politics, you know, approaches to pluralism, approaches to the [56:04] human being. So now you could say, and I think this would be true. I mean, I come out of Jewish [56:10] tradition and I probably have a lot of that in the way I look at the world, but I do think there is [56:16] something about the emphasis there on a certain kind of human dignity and a certain kind of treatment [56:24] between people that Trump has thrown into a kind of relief. So maybe it looks more explicitly connected [56:31] to a politics I am interested in and trying to create than it would have if he had written the [56:35] same thing, but Jeb, Jeb Bush was president. [56:38] Yes. Maybe at this point we have sort of moved through the Trump era to a point where [56:46] liberals are saying like, okay, Trump is so corrupt and such a rotten person in all these ways. And [56:53] so what if we counterpose a kind of beautiful politics of human dignity against him? But that's [57:00] after trying for many years to say, and again, not you personally, maybe, but some people, right, [57:08] saying Trump is rotten and corrupt and his rottenness and corruption reveals the dark racist heart of [57:13] America. And the fact that we're all still in thrall to Confederate patriarchal values and what we need [57:21] need is, you know, a sort of total moral reckoning with all the deep, profound evils of the United [57:27] States. Like those are different messages. And I think the left kind of ran with the second message [57:34] for a while. And again, I think ended up in some cul-de-sacs and dark places. And so now it's like, [57:40] okay, now maybe we'll, maybe we like that Pope Leo is linking his critique of AI to a vision of human [57:49] dignity rather than a dark, just a purely dark vision where you're like, AI is bad because it is [57:56] controlled by, you know, um, evil, evil, ruthless tech bros or something. I don't know. Or, you know, or [58:06] AI is bad because it's part of the horrifying structures of capitalism, which are a nightmare from [58:12] which we're struggling to await. [58:13] So I want to go back to a question I asked you a bit ago. I'd asked you what being the, the sort of [58:17] conservative and many liberal institutions had taught you about liberals sort of answered that. [58:22] But I think over time, I don't know. I don't know. Yeah. I don't know if I did answer that. [58:25] But what about the media, right? You, you've been, you know, inside the media for a long time. [58:31] What has it made you think about what the media does well, what it does poorly? [58:36] When I was coming up, right, the media had its kind of self-conception where it was like, [58:41] we're just telling you the truth about the world. That's it. We're just reporting the truth and we're not [58:46] partisan and we won't even tell you if we voted for Republicans and Democrats. We're just in the [58:51] truth business. And then people in our cohort came along and challenged that, right? And obviously the [58:57] right had been challenging it for a long time. Parts of the far left, Chomsky and so on, had always [59:02] had this critique, but the internet helped make those critiques much more powerful. And there was [59:07] just a sense that, okay, we, you know, are moving into a landscape that is more opinion driven, [59:13] as, as you said earlier, where we're going to acknowledge biases. We're going to accept [59:18] that the New York times seems to have a pretty liberal audience, right? And a lot of liberals [59:23] work for it. Like we're not, you know, it's not just a view from nowhere and Fox news is going to [59:27] make, you know, it's going to be explicitly conservative and that like a future where the [59:32] American media looks, you know, looks a bit more like the British newspaper business did where you [59:39] have like, you know, you know, that the Guardian is the liberal newspaper and, you know, the Telegraph [59:44] is a more conservative newspaper that like, that was sort of where America was going to go and it was [59:49] okay, right? It was, it was okay to have sort of competing media institutions that sort of own their [59:55] biases in various ways. Um, but you know, we've lived in that kind of world, I think for a while now, [1:00:04] I don't know the Trump era, the AI era, the COVID era and so on, they, I feel like they have really [1:00:11] undermined my, my own sense of sort of knowing who I think the good guys and bad guys are in any [1:00:22] particular circumstance. And the less you feel like, the less you feel certain about knowing who [1:00:29] the good guys and bad guys are, the more you feel the benefit of just like setting out every day to [1:00:38] just sort of try and describe the world, like, and maybe, maybe become less of a persuader. I feel like [1:00:43] I write maybe more columns like that these days. As the world gets weirder, journalism needs people and [1:00:53] institutions that sort of refocus on just saying, we're trying to, we're trying to figure out what's [1:01:01] happening here. Cause I'm struggling to figure out exactly what's happening in a way that I don't [1:01:06] think I was when Mitt Romney and Barack Obama were running against each other. Um, and maybe this leads [1:01:13] to like, you know, you wanted to ask me about you're going to 60 minutes, which is the first place you [1:01:20] have worked in media that the Atlantic is a, is a magazine that is opinionated at its, at its core. [1:01:26] It's launched initially as an abolitionist magazine. You worked on the times opinion page. [1:01:31] 60 minutes is different, although it's under now Barry Weiss's management. Um, your former colleague [1:01:35] here, I never overlapped with Weiss here, but is that, you know, I'll ask the question straight. [1:01:41] Is that part of why you're going to 60 minutes? I think that, so I have, you have been doing [1:01:45] interview podcasts for a long time. Uh, I've only been doing it for, you know, less, less than two [1:01:51] years, but presumably, presumably I'm going to be doing a lot of interviewing, right? That's my hope. [1:01:57] And I, I find interviewing, I don't know how you find interviewing. I find it very difficult relative [1:02:02] to writing. Um, writing just comes easier and more naturally to me than, than interviewing does. [1:02:08] Um, but I have found interviewing just very helpful at a moment when like, what is actually going on in [1:02:17] the world seems more opaque to me. And so, yeah, one, one reason to take a job at 60 minutes is just an [1:02:23] opportunity to sort of do more of that for, for a somewhat different audience than, than the times [1:02:29] has. Although of course there's overlap, but, um, yeah, this is sort of, and this is, yeah, this, this seems [1:02:36] like a good time, a good time to, to ask questions a little bit in an open-ended way. Um, and that's, [1:02:45] I guess, you know, that's what we've both been doing with our shows, but that's sort of what [1:02:49] I'm thinking I'll be doing there. Obviously you're talking here in the way you often do to an audience [1:02:53] that is more liberal than you. Um, and who is in spite of, in spite of reading my columns all these [1:02:58] years, Ezra, who is maybe concerned about what, uh, they, they think Barry Weiss wants to do with 60 [1:03:05] minutes, what it means that, that you're one of the, the first big name hires there. What did they [1:03:10] say they wanted? Like, what, what is your sense of what 60 minutes, um, is trying to become, you [1:03:15] know, with you launching with you as a, you would, you would, you would need to get Barry to come on [1:03:21] your podcast, right. To get sort of her answer to that question. I, again, I see what, what I want [1:03:28] to do at 60 minutes in the show itself, I think is in keeping with what the show has always done [1:03:35] incredibly well, which is, yeah, help, help people understand what's really happening in the world [1:03:41] and get sort of an accurate sense of reality itself through interviews, investigations and so on. [1:03:48] That, that's sort of, I think if you had Barry here, she would say that is her formal goal, [1:03:53] that lots and lots of media institutions have lost the trust of people, um, who aren't politically [1:04:00] liberal or progressive. And so there's a way to sort of try and have a more balanced view of the [1:04:05] world and try and get those people back. My own primary sense of what 60 minutes can do [1:04:12] is more just capture the full messy reality of the world in 2026. And if you get that right, [1:04:20] then exactly how many Republicans versus Democrats you're reaching is like, you know, that, that will [1:04:27] sort of follow from success at the basic project of describing the world. You mentioned a minute ago, [1:04:32] the other big change in this, which is you're moving from writing to on camera interviewing, [1:04:37] which you've already done a bit with interesting times, your podcast. This is another big shift from [1:04:43] when you and I started, which is there is a lot of movement now towards video. There's a lot of people [1:04:52] who talk about, uh, a return to more orality and culture, but, but is that part of it for you? I mean, do you, [1:05:00] do you have the sense that the center of what journalism is the way people are understanding [1:05:08] the world is moving away from the written word? Yes. I, I, I think there is some, there's clearly [1:05:14] some way in which internet conditions, digital conditions, and whatever the hell is going to [1:05:20] happen with AI are sort of weakening the hold of the written word. I've certainly kept writing while [1:05:27] doing my show, uh, at the times and I intend to find ways to keep writing, um, while I'm working [1:05:34] for CBS. So I, I, that's, that part of journalism is very important to me, but yeah, people like, [1:05:41] it's not only podcasts and audio, right? Like in, you know, if you look at like what people engage [1:05:47] with at the New York times, they also engage with written dialogues. Like they love the feature that [1:05:54] our colleagues, Brett Stevens and Gail Collins or David Brooks and Gail Collins did of sort of [1:05:59] a conversation back and forth. They really like the features, um, that my long time editor, [1:06:04] John Guida does where he'll sort of interview someone in a, a written form where you're writing [1:06:08] and people are writing, writing in response. Yeah. The transcripts of our shows. Yeah. And, [1:06:13] and some of it I think is that people want to see the person underneath the writing. And maybe this [1:06:19] becomes more the case in the age of AI, Tyler Cowen, who, uh, you know, you, you know, his work [1:06:25] well, one of his arguments about AI is that it basically is just going to increase the premium [1:06:31] for, for instance, live performance, right? For the, the ability to, to speak in public and engage [1:06:36] with questions and all these kinds of human things will go up as AI can generate more writing. And [1:06:42] I think dialogue and conversation are sort of versions of that places where sort of writers [1:06:51] and thinkers sort of show their own humanities, maybe a little bit more than you do in a kind [1:06:57] of voice from the mountaintop column. Um, and then again, maybe this is just me projecting my own [1:07:03] perspective onto the world. But I also think people like these things because like, like me, [1:07:09] they're a little uncertain about what's, what's happening in reality. And the kind of conversational [1:07:15] form is a way into the news and what's going on in the world that doesn't require you to sort of [1:07:22] accept a single authoritative take and leaves room for an uncertainty and ambiguity while also [1:07:29] introducing you to perspectives that you might not have considered. That's, that's the positive case [1:07:34] for it. I can also make the negative case and say that, you know, a world, yeah, where people [1:07:39] read less and are less literate, um, has various negative repercussions. I'm not, I'm not trying [1:07:46] to like sort of be too Pollyannish about this change. At the very least is a real shift, I think. [1:07:53] Do you think with the reporting resources of 60 minutes behind you, you'll finally be able to [1:07:58] crack what the UFOs are? Yeah. I mean, look, this is obviously the number one goal. And, um, you know, [1:08:05] I, I've said, if I, if I can't break the UFO story in, I, I don't want to make any promises, [1:08:13] but yes, the subject of UFOs has, has come up at once or twice, maybe only from my end in, [1:08:21] in conversations about stories that, that, uh, the media should be interested in going forward. [1:08:27] Yeah. You, you talked here about the, the sort of messy edges of reality and, and, and your sense [1:08:31] of not knowing quite, uh, of being less certain than you've been at other times. And I, you know, [1:08:37] I bring up the UFO thing, not totally in just, I think it actually has become an important part of, [1:08:42] of your work. And to me that, and sort of a, a deeper skepticism of knowing who to trust, [1:08:50] of knowing what kind of information to trust has begun to characterize your work. So when you think [1:08:56] about navigating the boundaries of a reality, whose boundaries seem less certain to you, like, [1:09:04] how do you think about? How do I think about journalism? How do I think I, so when I thought of [1:09:11] the UFO story as just a story about people who have weird experiences in the woods and come back [1:09:17] and claim to have been abducted by UFOs, right? Like that story is interesting, but it's, it's not, [1:09:24] it's not intensely interesting because it's so personalized. Like you're not going to get, [1:09:28] it's like sort of analyzing someone's religious experience. It's really interesting to do, [1:09:32] but you're not going to get a sort of final decisive answer. Like if someone describes their [1:09:36] religious experience, there's no journalistic trick that can tell you, was that really [1:09:41] God or not. But with UFOs, like there are concrete claims made about objects that operate in physical [1:09:49] reality that are observed by, let's say, Navy aviators. And there are other concrete claims [1:09:54] about supposed secret programs that the federal government has. And those are questions that [1:10:00] journalists should be able to answer. So I'm interested in the UFO story in particular, but also [1:10:07] other questions like, you know, the debates that we're already having about AI consciousness, these [1:10:14] kinds of things, not because I think they are unknowable, but because I think that they actually [1:10:22] do presumably have answers, right? Like maybe the AI consciousness debate will never be resolved or [1:10:29] something. But like the question of how dangerous AI is going to be, how transformative AI is going to be, [1:10:35] guess what? We're going to find out. Like I know people, smart people in Silicon Valley [1:10:40] who talk about all human timelines now in terms of like three years, right? They're like, oh, [1:10:46] if you don't do it in the next three years, you're not, you're not going to do it because [1:10:50] the singularity is coming. Now I'm skeptical of that argument, but we're going to find out, [1:10:55] right? Over the next three years, whether those kinds of singularity believers are right or not. So, [1:11:00] yes, I'm interested in zones of uncertainty and questions that sort of don't have immediate and [1:11:09] obvious answers and questions that touch on the supernatural or the metaphysical and so on. But [1:11:15] as a journalist, I'm only interested in them insofar as you can figure out what the hell is going on. [1:11:21] Well, I hope you do. Ross, it's been a pleasure working alongside you. [1:11:25] It's been a pleasure, Ezra. [1:11:26] And meeting you for many, many, many years. I'll continue to watch you. [1:11:28] I imagine we will encounter one another again after this conversation. [1:11:32] In the singularity. And then always our final question. [1:11:34] God, I hope not. [1:11:35] Even in this post-literate age, what are three books you'd recommend to the audience? [1:11:39] I forgot about the three books question. I have been reading Speak Memory by Vladimir Nabokov, [1:11:49] however you want to pronounce it, which is his sort of memoir, mostly of his boyhood as a Russian [1:11:56] aristocrat before the Russian Revolution. I would recommend that to people who don't want to be [1:12:03] post-literate, who want to be very, very literate indeed. I will recommend Julian Jackson's biography [1:12:12] of Charles de Gaulle on general principles. I haven't read it recently, but just strong, [1:12:18] strong recommend there. And I will finally recommend the most recent book that I read to my children, [1:12:30] which is Robert Louis Stevenson's Treasure Island. So those are three solid recommendations, [1:12:35] and I'm happy to leave you with them. [1:12:36] Ross Duffett, thank you very much. [1:12:38] Ezra Klein, thank you.