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Welcome to one of our Ask Me Anything episodes.

I am here joined by our fantastic executive producer, Claire Gordon, who has sharpened all

of your questions and darts she will throw at me for some answer.

We appreciate everything you all send in.

We have tried to look at the questions to see which ones were the most common, which

seemed to have the most interest, and we're going to get started.

Claire, welcome to the other side of the show.

Thank you.

Thank you for having me.

It's uncomfortable to be here.

We will be getting to the question everyone's mind, which is the secret society your member

of dialogue.

When have I spoken to Peter Tiel and what did we say?

Exactly.

But first, this from Scott Kay, who's noticed that you seem to have a very intense relationship

with electronic music as we all have.

Quote, is musicianship something you've ever been drawn to?

You are clearly not a passive listener.

What does music do to your craft?

Why do you think you feel so at home in such a specific genre of music?

Musicianship is not something I've been heavily drawn to, but I did for the first time

ever recently take a singing lesson.

Really?

And it was such a beautiful experience because I've never felt I can sing at all.

And the fact that I make my living a part now in my voice is surprising because it was

always the way I speak and how I sound has always been like a point of real insecurity

for me when I was growing up, particularly.

What about it?

A lot about it.

Not letting people into my private insecurities, but it's really amazing to take a singing

lesson.

And I'd always thought I could not ever find a tune or a note and to try not to I could.

I was just wrong about that about myself, which was a cool thing to learn.

I played the flute a bit when I was young, but you know, as a kid, I tried to learn the

guitar when I lived in DC as an adult and I loved doing that.

I loved it.

I should really pick it back up.

Like playing it out of parties?

Playing crash into me for women?

No, I did not play in front of other people.

But the guy who's teaching me just hung over too often to come.

And so it kind of like just filtered out.

I'd like to learn something.

I wouldn't try to learn how to do electronic music.

This show in particular can colonize like everything I love.

You know, I can read a great novel and then it's like, well, we should have the novelist

on the show.

And I think it's good to be an appreciator of some things and not try to make them another

thing you're learning how to do.

I have in my life like an excess of energy that is oriented towards productivity, accomplishment,

doing, being angry at myself for not doing things well enough or not doing enough of them.

And so having spaces where I am an experiencer and not a creator is important for me.

I don't really know how to answer why I feel at home in it.

It just is the music.

I mean, I've been listening to, oh my God, it's so good.

But it's such an even hard album to tell people how to find.

So Fortet, who's an amazing producer, has an alias that is entirely composed out of

wingedings.

Like, I recognize how this sounds.

So he's got this new album out.

But both the artist on the album and every song on the album cannot be pronounced or even

searched, but you can find it on platforms by searching for a tap.

But it means 9-11 wasn't inside of.

It means as a client at Peter Till and his secret society.

And I just love the album.

I've actually had two experiences like this on the show, one with Jeff Tweedie of Wilco

and other with Brian Eno, talking to them about individually a song they had done for

Tweedie impossible Germany, I think it's called.

And for Eno, come on with Fred again.

And learning that the incredibly intense experience I had with that music was totally different

than the way they understood that music.

And I find that really beautiful.

And so whatever my experience is with music I like here, it's just mine.

It's not, I think, legible.

Other people don't have the same one.

But why these songs do the set of things to me, the ones that I like, which is not all

of them.

I mean, there's a lot of, there's both a lot of bad electronic music, but also a lot of

electronic music that just doesn't do it for me.

And, but I think it is the thing best left illegible even to the self.

There's a lot of art that what you want to do is just allow yourself to feel differently

and not, not try to pin the different feeling like a butterfly to a board.

But yeah, I, I feel at home in this music because it makes me feel things I don't feel elsewhere.

Happy.

No, often not.

I don't actually go for that much music that primarily makes me feel happy.

And some ways I think I use the music to feel things I have more trouble feeling.

A lot of the music I like is a little bit discordant and difficult for me.

You know, other people can experience it.

How they experience it.

I noticed when you took out your headphones or I actually hear a blast from your laptop,

I'm like, that's a choice.

That's a choice of vibe for your Tuesday afternoon.

And I think the music holding very contrasting emotions actually is important for me because

the work I do often has to hold very contrasting emotions.

There can be beauty and fear and anxiety and hope and all these things at the same time.

And so a lot of the music I go for, I mean, some of it I just used to calm down my nervous

system.

I love all of our Arnold's work and most of it for me is very soothing.

There's a lot of music I do listen to that's soothing.

My wife is always like, that's really sad.

Really, but like I don't find it sad.

I find it like sometimes a little bit melancholy but in a way I enjoy and then often times

really, really calming and really beautiful.

But then a lot of the music is actually helping me hold things that are hard to feel at the

same time so that I can infuse the work I'm doing with the kind of contradictory emotions

that sometimes it needs to have.

Wow.

Let's talk about the feedback to the Chris Rufo episode, which of our recent episodes got

the most questions, the most comments.

Bifurcated feedback.

Bifurcated feedback.

So this question is from Jason and it requires a little bit of setup.

I listened to your recent episode with Chris Rufo.

When out of curiosity, I went and listened to a few episodes of his podcast, Rufo and

Lomas.

And one of the episodes, Rufo reflected on his conversation with you.

I found his interpretation of the conversation wildly different from mine.

So I'm going to play two clips here.

And so the first clip, this is from our episode of Chris Rufo.

And you described Tucker Carlson as a white nationalist.

Rufo then asked you to define white nationalism.

And this is what you said.

In some versions, Jews are included in that white race.

Sure.

In some versions, they're not included in that white race.

In some versions, we are talking about something I would describe primarily as a kind of nationalism,

right?

You know, if you have too much of a country, not sharing a common heritage, you lose solidarity.

In some cases, we're talking about something much darker than that.

Right?

The way their community is changing and there's the KKK, right?

Everything exists on a spectrum.

But would you say someone who is like, for example, hesitant about rapid large scale demographic

change is just a kind of one percent white nationalist?

No, I don't believe that.

Yeah, because that would be like the majority of the country.

Yes, I don't think it is a problem or unfair or even wrong to worry about large scale rapid

demographic change.

And then here's Rufo's response.

A couple of years ago, you would not hear a prominent New York Times voice saying that

it is totally legitimate, reasonable and understandable to be concerned about large scale rapid demographic

change.

I mean, you know, that was a right-wing talking point for many years.

And the left-wing criticism was that was the great replacement theory, that was white

nationalism, that was KKK style white supremacy.

And so is this a concession?

Is this going to be the left's kind of moderate left or the establishment left's new position

moving forward?

I'll also add that that episode of Rufo and Loma's was called Ezra Klein admits the New York

Times was wrong on woke.

And the first two chapters on YouTube were called Ezra Klein's great replacement moment.

And what Ezra now admits was once branded white nationalism.

So with all that set up, Jason's question is it seemed that Rufo and Loma has equated

your statement with a full endorsement of the great replacement theory.

To me, this is a ridiculous misinterpretation of your point.

When you have guests with broad platforms like Rufo, do you engage with them after an interview?

And if so, how at all do you respond if you feel that someone is misrepresenting your

position?

I don't, for the most part.

I'll say a couple of things here.

One is it a major thread of my interview with Chris Rufo is that Rufo is a propagandist.

We begin with his discussion of agit prop and then a lot of the conversation is me unspooling

with him the way he does that.

And the consequences I think it has in the way it often misrepresents and then worsens

reality and is worse in the political party that he's part of.

But I'm not going to sit here and be surprised to that a person who is a proud propagandist,

maybe the way he responds to that interview is by focusing on the parts he thinks he can

turn into propaganda.

I did find that particular take, which I actually saw from other people too, very surprising.

I have for many, many, many years.

And in fact, it's part of my first book, Why Repolarized.

I just believed but talked a lot about how the immigration issue gets sanitized as about

economics.

But it is actually about people's discomfort with demographic change.

I wrote a big piece for Vox called White Threat in a Browning America.

I think I've been very attentive for a long time to the fact that it is very politically

destabilizing for the nature of a place for who lives in it to change fairly rapidly.

And it has changed on a kind of generational level fairly rapidly.

So in the 1970s, 4% dish, 4.5% of America was foreign born.

Now it's around 15%.

So it's one from, you know, sort of a low to either it is or it is near a high.

I have written a lot over the years about how that is a major driver of what Donald Trump

is.

I do not believe.

And I just like I cannot say this more flatly that it is a normal, constant and legitimate

dimension of politics in a nation for people to have views on who lives in the community

and how it's changing.

I think replacement theory is a white national theory.

The thing that I'm critiquing Rufo for in that section is, foot seeing with Tucker Carlson

at the time when Tucker Carlson is offering all these theories and then later on being

shocked, the Tucker Carlson has gone as far as he has.

So I'm saying, this was all happening and you seem perfectly happy with the trend that

it was on.

And I like, oh my God, like how did we end up with this conspiratorial, racialist right?

And I'm saying it was right there in front of you to fall on that.

I disagreed with Jason and his question of saying that Rufo was suggesting that you were

fully endorsing the great replacement theory.

He's saying that what you said you believe is what people on the right like him have been

saying for years and they have been branded white nationalists for it.

It's hard for me to know like which position Rufo is trying to describe to me or even to

the broader left here.

But I guess like the only thing I can say is I think you can have normal concerns and

it's just a normal part of politics that people notice and have views on when their communities

change.

I think you can do that without it being understood as white nationalism.

I think you brand that white nationalism or any kind of racialist view.

Then you have basically taken a huge amount of contestation in every nation we know of

and tried to make it politically unseeable.

I have personally never done that and have never believed that's like a usable way to

think about politics.

Of course you can then take that and turn it into a white nationals version and the white

nationals version is there are white people.

They are the true builders and inheritors of our society.

The people coming in are genetically or culturally inferior and that it is a threat to the

fundamental success of our society to have it not dominated by a certain percentage of

ethnically, you know, you're northern European or something descendants.

That to me is white nationalism.

I think it is very important to be able to delineate these things.

I think it's important for the left.

I think it's important for the right.

If the right can't see the difference that I'm talking about, then of course it's not

able to please white nationalism because it wants to say there's no difference in anything

which means you cannot see the thing you're trying to look for.

The point that you said about it's reasonable to be worried about large scale rapid demographic

change and you've said that several times before in the past going back years.

Why do you think Rufo expressed surprise at you saying it?

I mean, I don't want to speculate on why Rufo is pretending to be surprised about.

I think on that one, he, again, I don't want to interpret him for him.

I really try not to argue with guests after they've left the room.

I actually don't even think my views and immigration is that different than they've

ever been.

The Democratic Party has definitely moved on immigration.

It's shot really far left in 2020, you know, with Julian Castro pushing the primary field

to raise our hands or the debate moderators pushing them to raise our hands around

Julio Castro's argument that illegal immigration should be decriminalized, that the movement

across the border should be decriminalized.

I think even many of the people on that stage would agree with the way I am talking about

immigration, but at that point they were not willing to stand up to parts of their party

that were one very, very appropriately angry at the cruelty Trump showed towards immigrants.

But also we're trying to make an argument that pretty normal views on immigration that

most Americans held were on some level racist.

I just think that happened before, right?

And I don't think it's about, I don't think that the concession there actually had to

do with whether or not it's legitimate to worry about or have feelings about change

inside of the community.

The concession there from the left, which in general was a mistake it was making in 2020.

And we certainly did episodes on this like, you know, going into the next election,

is that order is very, very important to people.

And if what they feel is that when you are in power, the world is disordered, that prices

are out of control, that all of a sudden they're migrants everywhere, you know, on the

subways in New York selling candy and like putting aside how much immigration there is,

it orderly is the border like controlled.

So Jason and that question, he was defending you against what he thought was Rufo twisting

what you said.

We did get some feedback that was critical of you on Rufo.

And specifically people feeling that you didn't push back enough.

This is Matthew W. How do you decide, especially in the moment, when to push back on a guest

versus let a claim go?

I come into episodes typically with a broad structure I want to be able to tease out.

And I try to let people talk.

I'm having people on so you can hear what they think and you can come to your own judgments.

Again, I push back on people when I think it serves the episode when I think you don't

know what they think yet, when I think what they think is not clear, when I think what

they think is not been tested.

But if it begins to fail some set of that tests, right?

And sometimes I can't test it in the moment because I'm trying to go somewhere else and

that's going to take us down a path for 25 minutes and we don't have that 25 minutes.

Yeah, I mean the episode was already two hours.

So I just don't, I think and if people like didn't listen to it or didn't make it to the

end, I would recommend making it to the end because it's very revealing.

We were saying at the beginning we got very bifurcated feedback on Rufo.

And from my perspective, there was feedback that really saw what the structure of that

episode was and the way things were playing against each other and people who their interpretation

of it was different from mine.

But that's also I think, okay, I try to keep the episodes from becoming so legible that

there is not room for independent thought.

I have a lot of faith and trust in the audience.

And even where I understand there's going to be like a contested interpretation of

something, I'm trying to create something here where you can have contested interpretations

of it because it's supposed to be a space for you to think in, not for me to tell you

what to think.

I write columns, I write books, I occasionally do like essays on the show.

When I want to tell you what to think or try to persuade you of what I think I do that,

I don't want this show to be that.

I think that there is a tremendous amount of very didactic work out there.

And I think Twitter and social media in general has made it much worse where it's like people,

they've gotten used to every time something is bad or somebody coming and telling them

and just to be clear what you just heard is bad and you should be a bit like, I don't

think that makes people smarter, richer.

And also one thing I try to leave room for is that people legitimately come to things

with different values and different interpretations and they should be able to see different things

in the same episode.

I think that episode is really good.

And I think that if you follow it through its entire arc around corruption, around what

is turning the right into this racialist, right that he seems concerned about on his own

show, I think there is both like an argument being made there and a thing being revealed

there, the to me worked really well.

But I'm not going to tell you if it worked for you, right?

If you don't like the episode, you don't like the episode.

You know Tyler Cowan has a line, I don't know if he still says it before his episodes,

but he often says before them, this is a conversation I want to have with this person, not

necessarily the conversation you want me to have with this person.

And I think there's a truth to that.

There are episodes that from my perspective go totally off the rails or they end up

as something totally different than what I thought they were going to be.

That's not the case for that one.

So again, I don't want to break my own rules here and go like point by point and tell you

what I think you should think of it, but I can tell you that.

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This is from Kevin T.

I'm a listener going back well into the Vox days.

I love your show because while you are definitely to the left of me on some things, I think you're

a solid guy, you operating good faith, you're not a bullshitter.

I'm wondering if over the years you've come to see any of your more woke positions as

mistaken, e.g. your infamous Vox article from the Me Too era where you suggested that it

might not be so ultimately bad if some men were falsely accused of things if it led to

progress.

Parentheses feel free to quibble with this interpretation if you like.

I'm sure you will.

Before your conflict with Sam Harris, who I'm closer to ideologically, in this space

in particular, identitarianism, wokeness or whatever you want to call it, are there any

positions you've changed your mind on in the last five to ten years?

I would quibble with that description.

That's a piece about affirmative consent rules and colleges.

And I would probably quibble with that.

If you have it, it's not that I think it's good for people to be falsely accused of things.

I guess to the broad question being asked here, I often see people ascribing a lot of

movement to me on all this.

And I actually, you know, this has become a thing that people are saying about you.

I get it, but my positions to me haven't changed that much.

I think probably what gets emphasized has a little bit.

But here's what I would say.

I think that if I could go back, there's probably two things that I was less alert to than

I am now.

One is that an argument you would often hear people make and that I probably made

someone had to do with, well, there's no first amendment right to amplification on Twitter

or Facebook or something like that, right?

That if it's not something that is affecting the actual legal system or government policy,

you don't need to worry about it all that much.

Like the mob yelling you at Twitter or being shadow banned because you said something

like that was like, hey, speech.

And I think cultural power like that is, I didn't think it was totally unmeaningful at

the time.

I mean, one thing you'll see in my tenure at Vox, we never fired anybody for speech.

Never happened, right?

I wrote pieces in that era about the difference between a my view, cancel culture, which

Alice, that was like a poorly defined thing and cancel behavior, which I thought was very

real, which is people acting in a way that was going to lead to people losing their jobs.

Now they only lost their jobs when it combined with power and something that I tried to

be alert to then, and I still believe now, is that a lot of things where people were

saying what they cared about was free speech, what they cared about was power and losing power.

And I think the Trump administration has proven me 100% right on that, 100% that Donald

Trump and all these people came in saying they were going to restore free speech and they

did nothing of the kind.

In fact, they've used state power more aggressively than Democrats ever did to chill speech, to

punish people for speech, to scare people, to deport people.

So one thing that I just got into a lot of fights about and it put me like in the way people

categorize my opinions like very much on the woke side.

So it's like there is a big fight over power here.

And there's a real threat to free speech here.

I do think that the people who are arguing that the way that power is being deployed on platforms

and in spaces like colleges, that it was fundamentally illiberal and that it wasn't going to be contained

there.

It actually was going to leak into society.

They had more of a point than I thought then, right?

This is a point John Heitmaid and we had a debate about it back in the box days.

And there's always debates about college campuses and a lot of my views like who cares?

I don't want to hear that much about what happens at Yale.

And the view of height and some other people was it's not going to stay at Yale.

You're training the next generation of staffers and leaders and this is going to come out

of there.

I think one that was basically true, right, that the spillover effect is very real.

And two, that it also the application of cultural power caused such backlash that it arguably

more than wiped out the gains.

The number of people who I've seen who I think were truly radicalized by just stuff that

happened to them on Twitter, on Facebook, on Instagram, on places like that.

And part because I always looked at those places as kind of cesspools to be blunt, I think

I was just less concerned about what was happening there.

But I always want to say this because I think this is out of his importance.

The reason I was sympathetic to what gets called wokeness, I actually still believe all

that.

I believe systemic racism is very real.

I believe that our society is fundamentally unequal in very, very, very deep ways.

I believe that we often have very difficult trade-offs between who gets justice and that

as those as the power moves, right?

I mean, the sort of piece about affirmative consent was trying to grapple with something

that I still find is very hard to grapple with, which is the equilibrium that existed, you

know, the people were trying to alter affirmative consent laws wasn't an equilibrium where there

were no harms.

It was one where there was rampant sexual assault that went unpunished and many, many, many

women I know have been sexually assaulted and traumatized by it and harmed by it in

spaces where there was not really a recourse.

Data-affirmative consent laws find like a great equilibrium they didn't.

So I think you could say like, it's a hard problem.

But I don't want to just say, no, this was all wrong.

One of the things happening when you begin to sort of unearth the way we have settled

into unjust structures and society is you don't always know how to change those structures

in a way that will work.

And I think a lot of things failed.

I think a lot of things failed.

But the things people were trying to change were very real.

I mean, the level of just overwhelming workplace and social harassment that primarily women

faced and face, right?

It's not gone.

Was real.

I think racism remains a problem.

We don't really know how to deal with.

I think that I actually have like mostly the same views on what it is we're trying to fix

in society.

But I think I take more seriously the people who said that using illiberalism to create

something more liberal, even if the illiberalism is not coming from the state is your, your

imparalling more than you realize you're imparalling.

I mean, I also think it's an emphasis thing that in 2014, as we're like ratcheting up into

this big moment, but it's also a moment of progressive tailwinds and you're weighing

in all the time on talking about the finer points of these issues.

The political moment right now is not that.

Yeah, although I guess maybe the one thing I would say is that as I understand my own

work over time, I understand myself as trying to figure out how to make progress

on things that have remained pretty consistent.

And if an approach fails, and I think a lot of those approaches failed and they particularly

failed politically, either could be crazy not to try to ask, well, why did this fail?

And what do we learn from it?

And the thing you maybe hear me saying a lot about how do Democrats win in Iowa and Ohio

and Nebraska and South Dakota and North Dakota and Arkansas and these places they used

to win and thinking, okay, like what kind of a tent do you need to do that?

What kind of a party brand do you need to do that?

And me, I'm trying to make progress on the same issues.

I think one of the very, very bad habits people pick up learning their politics in online

discourse, online, algorithmically structured, like discourse holes is they begin to

equate political change with political position taking and that your commitment to something

is defined by how stridently you express your opposition to the thing you don't like,

how effectively you build power to fix it.

And I understood like again, what we call wokeness as an effort to build power to fix something.

And it went in directions and even at the time, like I was not on board of, but I think

you can't look around without saying that you were trying to do persuasion and the persuasion

failed.

And now things are quite a bit worse than they were even, I think Ben.

And so you have to ask, okay, like what failed and what have you learned?

I think if you have a politics over an extended period of time that is not learning things

about the world, something is wrong with it.

You should be changing your emphasis.

You should, but you should also be changing your approach.

And I guess the only other thing I'll say and this is a very consistent theme for me

back then too.

I just think a lot of what went wrong then and what is going wrong now has to do with

these fights taking place in fundamentally deranging spaces.

Spaces that have only become more deranged after Elon Musk bought Twitter become more

deranged as they've all become much more algorithmic and less focused on your friends and the

people you follow.

And I think if you go back to my work then, if you go to it now, I have an extremely clear

through line of just somebody who has been very, very, very concerned that if that attention

is the fundamental capacity we bring to politics, what we pay attention to shapes

what we see, it shapes how we act, it shapes what we believe about other people.

And if the way we pay attention, like the space it mediates our attention, deranges it,

focuses it on the wrong things in the wrong ways, then our politics is not going to be

good.

And the reason I think both there were pretty bad accesses in a public movement I fundamentally

agreed with.

And now there are really bad accesses in a public movement I fundamentally disagree with.

I think the fact that both are sort of we're taking place primarily first and foremost

on then Twitter now X is inseparable from what has gone wrong.

Just so we don't end on an entirely down note about how woke went.

I went back and read your yes means yes, this is your front of consent article in

Vox.

Yes means yes, the terrible law and I completely support it as the article.

I thought there was an editing that jumped out of me, but you're what you said, false

accusations.

I have not read this piece.

I don't even know we were going to talk about this.

I'm not read this piece like in many, many, many, many, many years.

Also, I don't think affirmative consent law makes false accusations more likely and more

likely to lead to guys being like railroaded, but there was something that did jump out

of me as feeling actually quite radical and what you said in that article.

Well, can you say what I said?

Because I would like to know what I said.

What you said, which is the thrust of your argument, is for one in five women to report

an attempted or completed sexual assault means that every day sexual practices and college

campuses need to be upended and men need to feel a cold spike of fear when they begin

a sexual encounter.

I definitely don't remember myself as writing that false accusations are not a big deal.

I mean, that's what I remember people being mad about, that cold spike of fear line.

And I'm not sure, I think I phrase that a little bit more vividly than I would.

And it's not that I want anybody to feel fear when beginning a sex.

There has been a cultural shift to a lot of anxiety around consent.

I recently saw obsession, the blockbuster horror movie by this Gen Z director that is

all about, this is my interpretation, turning that anxiety into supernatural horror.

And there's also very little data about how sexual assault and college campuses has actually

shifted in the years since.

But there is one study of 10 universities like Harvard Yale that does show that self-reporting

sexual assault has gone down significantly.

But like what you argued for here, it kind of happened and it maybe worked.

Maybe.

I mean, I'm not sure the affirmative consent laws were a good idea.

I don't know what a different, different state.

Yeah, I don't know how much difference I made.

So I think like what you could say about this was that I'm not sure what to think about

what college is should do.

And I thought they were worth trying and, you know, amidst this debate, I made an argument

for it and that argument was very informed by things people near me had gone through

to just be very blunt about it.

And I still believe that the difficult thing here is that, I mean, sex itself is like a

very complicated interaction between human beings and a very vulnerable and a very intimate

one.

I think what I'd say after writing that piece in the years that followed, it's me

too and everything else is like it all became much more sort of widespread and seen is

that I do think the way this got seen and treated really changed.

I think a lot of those changes were for the better.

I also saw a lot of stories where ambiguous interactions, you know, got interpreted as

like the worst form of interaction.

And I don't like you need a way to protect against that too.

And like I'll just, I don't have an answer to all this, right?

I don't know how to fix the like constant reality of sexual assault and also the reality

that if you like, yeah, I don't know how to fix the mix of the constant reality of sexual

assault and like the ambiguous way in which two people might understand the same thing

happening.

I think it's really hard.

This is a question from Javan S with the Democratic Party now splitting into center

dimes and DSA is DSA just now becoming hip to anti establishment politics in a way that

maggot did a decade ago are both movements just different flavors of populism where populism

is the real current of politics dressed up in different outfits.

I wouldn't focus this question on the DSA because a lot of the candidates we are talking

about in this populist moment are not to my knowledge DSA candidates, grandplanners

out of the race, but he was not a DSA candidate.

I feel all say to my knowledge is not a DSA candidate.

I mean, there are some populist running who are DSA affiliated and some who aren't.

Populism classically is a political perspective that is more about seeing a small group of

elites hoarding power and believing that in order to have a better society, better politics,

you need to break the power they hoard.

And so you can have, you know, you're right wing variants, you're left wing variants.

I think it's sort of fairly widely believed that the most electable form of candidate you

can run right now is economically populist and culturally moderate, right?

That's sort of the Dan Osborne formula in Nebraska and Dan Osborne is a candidate who

really did wild the overperform in a red straight.

Now he also ran as independent, but that many wasn't dragged down by the Democratic Party's

baggage.

Grandplanner wasn't culturally moderate.

I'm not sure he was the most kind of electable form of candidate you could run.

So this is what I mean, right?

I think the problem with seeing all this as populism is that it's more than that too.

I don't think populism necessarily has a lot to say about Israel Gaza.

You can have, you know, populists who end up on both sides of that issue.

And in fact, you do in current American politics.

And I think at some deeper level, populism is about listening to whatever group you are

saying it is that is the mass, right?

Whatever group you believe represents like the real people for the right populism tends

to be a more native born phenomena, right?

They're like the real Americans and then the kind of fake elites on the left.

It's often more economic.

But a lot of these candidates have a bunch of other positions that are kind of linked

to and more elite set of ideas, right?

On climate on other things that put them pretty out of step with working class voters.

And it's why when you look at who they went over, a grand planter was not overperforming

with working class voters.

Abdul Al-Sahed is not overperforming with non-college voters in Michigan.

Like his electorate doesn't look like that.

There's been a lot of people noting that the DSA's sweet spot is down-worthy mobile, highly

educated voters.

So I think we're going to see a lot of people making the argument again like real populism

has not been tried because what the DSA is is leftism.

And that's something different.

Sarah V wrote in with the question, I'm a registered Democrat and have been doing a deep dive

into the DSA website and what Democratic Socialists believe.

I consider myself a progressive but more Bernie Sanders type.

What is your understanding of the clear disconnect between what is on that website?

No more jails, defund police, open borders, and what Mamdani and others actually do when

they are in office?

I've been really enjoying watching Mamdani governs at the Jocke office.

That feels a good path so far, but it definitely doesn't reflect the tenants of that organization

of which he's a member.

I find it hard to know how seriously to take the DSA website or platform without getting

into incredibly tedious detail that has become a constant topic in our slack.

Trying to say who speaks for the DSA and who is speaking when you look at what the national

DSA says or what a local chapter says, it's a very unusually structured organization.

I do think it is valuable to look at what somebody like Mamdani does in power.

We've had a number of members of Congress who are a DSA associated or people in state

senate and assembly.

And when you're in power, you are working co-alitionally to pass legislation or executive orders or

regulations, whatever it might be, through a system that does not have entire agreement.

I don't know what Zoran Mamdani or anybody else would do if they had king-like power,

but I would say Mamdani, in terms of if you knew nothing about what he has said or what

he believes if you just saw what he has done governing, this would not look very different

if another liberal candidate in a primary had won.

Yes, they have added attacks on pricey second homes.

And I think, and I know he would like that more taxes on the rich than that.

He's also being very, very, very careful and doing a lot of both private and the semi-public

outreach to people who run investment banks to the business elite of New York City because

he actually does not want to infuriate them and run them out of the city.

If you begin to dry up the tax revenues, the rest of his agenda falls apart immediately.

I don't see the Mamdani era as reflecting an incredibly sharp break from, say, DiBlasio.

And you can, I think, say that sometimes I've got Bernie Sanders too, and that's not a

hit on them.

I think one of the valuable things about more leftist figures getting into powers of, getting

into offices where they have executive authority or legislative authority is you actually see

the give and take between ideology and power.

The one thing that I, sometimes I'm frustrating, is that people on the left don't recognize

that that is happening everywhere else too.

So liberals, you know, often want more ambitious and sweeping changes than they are able to

get one in power too.

But there's a tendency to look at what, say, an Obama is able to get done dealing with

the Senate, driven by the filibuster and say that's all Obamaism was or intended to be.

Which it isn't.

There is a lot that if Barack Obama were king, he would have done that he was not able

to do.

And, you know, with Mamdani, it's very similar with Bernie Sanders.

We had Fashikir, Bernie's former campaign manager on the show and he said on the show,

look, we knew that if we got into power, we weren't going to be able to pass Medicare

for all.

There's a high degree of pragmatism there.

So while he's pushing, let's take Medicare for all.

Then he gets into Congress and can we at least lower the age from 65 to 60?

We talked about Medicare expansion so that it covers home care, dental, hearing, and vision,

even if you can't all move with me to Medicare for all that actually is how President Bernie

Sanders would have governed.

We would have expanded Medicare, expanded what it covers, dropped down the age range.

And so there is this constant compromise when you're governing.

I think it is healthy to watch that playing out how much to take the DSA as a signal of

where these candidates even want to go that I'm less surefooted on.

What do you think of the critique that just this platform on their website is really

politically damaging for other Democrats?

It's going to be weaponized by Republicans.

And if it's not actually meaningful for how DSA elected's govern, then what is the

point?

I think you would have to ask a member of the DSA that I don't know what degree Democrats

broadly are going to be forced to answer for what the DSA believes.

My suspicion is not that aggressively because I do think people understand the DSA is a distinctive

thing.

And so the idea that in North Carolina, they're going to run a bunch of ads against Roy Cooper,

saying he believes in what like the DSA website.

I don't think anybody buys that.

I don't think it really works.

Now, they will matter what DSA candidates do when they come into Congress.

So if you have some of these newer members of Congress who are DSA affiliated, putting

forward a lot of bills to abolish police or abolish prisons, then and demanding Democrats

vote on them, then you're going to start to see more effort to define the party by what

it's high attention left flank is doing.

Tom Donney coming out and giving that sort of direct to camera address on how he would

like to arrest Benjamin Netanyahu and calls on the federal government to do that.

It is clear that we do not have the independently goal authority to enforce this warrant.

The federal government, however, does.

And I call on them to join the ICC and execute this warrant.

And I want to be equally clear.

Benjamin Netanyahu is not welcome in New York City.

Nor is any other war criminal at large.

That is going to be an issue for that they're helping party will try to weaponize against

voters who are maybe cross pressured and are maybe even critical of Israel, but do not

want to go where mom Donney and the DSA want to go on Israel.

Mom Donney being essential figure in the Democratic Party and making that statement.

That is something other Democrats are going to have to deal with.

The DSA having stuff on its website.

I'm just skeptical that's going to become a major political issue.

I'm Wesley Morris.

I'm a critic for the New York Times and I'm the host of a podcast called Cannonball.

We're going to talk about that song you can't get out of your head, that TV show you

watched and can't stop thinking about, and the movie that you saw when you were a kid

that made you who you are, whether you like it or not.

I was so embarrassed the whole time because it's a bad film and I still love it.

You can find Cannonball on YouTube and wherever you get your podcasts.

We got a bunch of questions that were all the same question.

This one is A-M-E-T.

Is this true that you are part of the dialogue group sponsored by Peter Teal?

Okay, dialogue.

Let me start here.

What happens is that as best I understand it, some hacker goes on Blue Sky and is like,

I got the membership roles of Peter Teal's Secret Society and includes all these people.

Elon Musk and Peter Teal and Reid Hoffman and Joseph Gordon Levitt and Josh Brolin and

me and Julian Castro and Cory Bucker.

Just like tons of people with very, very different roles in the world, different politics.

Cool hang.

Cool hang, right?

Then this gets picked up pretty credulously by Wired.

This was surprising to live through.

Dialogue is a pretty but all conference.

It is not secret.

Just like flatly, it's not secret.

Nobody ever asked me to keep my presence of secret.

I went twice.

I think now I'd have to remember the dates, but I think it was 2018 and 2022 or something like

that.

It was like one pretty pandemic, one kind of post pandemic.

The why did you never speak about it?

Why would I have spoken about it?

I mean, I don't speak about most conferences I go to.

It is off the record in the way most conferences are.

You can hold somebody if they let you.

Dialogue, it's a conference, sort of like an unconference style.

I went because at that time I was trying to do more coverage of tech.

What is unconference style?

Unconference style.

There aren't panels.

People kind of self-organize.

You write up on a board.

I would like to have a session on being a working parent or better sleep hygiene or are there

any really uses of crypto or whatever it might be.

You don't go and sit there and listen to people talk at you.

This is a genre of conference.

You are deep in conference, roll my mind.

I have done a lot of conferences.

That is part of my job.

To go places and meet people and listen to them and see if they'd be one day good guests

on my show.

That is like, as you know, part of what I do.

But dialogue was a conference.

One I went to the first one was for people under 40, I think it was.

It was sort of like young, we're up and coming people.

My favorite person I met there was a kind of lefty anarchist.

It wasn't like any of those bold face names who I then was told I was in a secret society

with.

There was no Elon Musk.

I've never heard of him as involved with it or read Hoffman or any of those people.

I went again a couple years later and just found it like the second one I went to kind

of like lame and it was reflecting the curdling anger of the tech right in that era.

I just found the energy pretty unpleasant and I didn't go back.

By the time I went, my understanding is Peter Teele is not involved.

He was one of the multiple co-founders of dialogue.

I never saw him at it or heard from him in respect to it.

I do want to say because I think people could get the wrong idea.

I'm not saying I think there'd be a problem if Peter Teele was still involved.

I've invited Peter Teele on this show.

He has not come on.

I have had reporting meetings with Peter Teele.

That is my job.

I do not see Peter Teele or anybody in our society.

I cannot or should not talk to.

Dialogue, when I went, no Peter Teele, not a society.

It was like a conference you went to, also not a secret.

Then to continuously see this thing that is being believed by people that I'm in the

secret society with Peter Teele.

What would that, without even being clear of what that would mean?

What would it mean for Huleen Castro who again, he came up earlier in our conversation,

really pushed Democratic Party left on immigration.

Peter Teele was supporting Donald.

Why would you think those two people are doing the same thing?

Which is to say that there is a way of looking at the world that I was really surprised how

many people seemed to buy into this.

I was particularly surprised to have it be around this conference dialogue because what

I will say in dialogue's favor, actually, is that it was a conference that invited a

wide variety of people from a very wide variety of industries and ideologies to do what it

said on the tin to go to a place and be in dialogue with each other for the weekend

or for a couple of days or whatever it was held.

It did an okay job with that.

In conferences of God, it's not the best.

It's definitely not the worst.

Its fundamental nature was fractious.

In part, its fractiousness is why I don't really want to go back because I just found some

conversations very unpleasant.

There's a big focus in that second one I was at about your most unpopular opinion and

it just felt very performative to me.

I think the thing that bothers a lot of people about this or that it taps into on some level

is this feeling of elites who people understand as having radically different politics and being

from radically different worlds, just like all hanging out in a chummy way.

It feels like then they're on the receiving end of this performance when actually elites

are all hanging out and have a class solidarity with each other.

It was a thing that in the episode with an unguaradardous on Jeffrey Epstein and what

it revealed about elite networks, it was kind of saying this and that there was a kernel

of truth to it about how elite networks work.

Even if these people were on cable, you're sitting at home, you're watching cable at the

end of the day and you're seeing these two talking heads fight.

But that's for you, that's the spectacle for you at home to keep you entertained.

What they're actually doing is revealed in these files, which is hanging out, breaking

bread, colluding, sharing information, giving each other tips on deals, giving each other

PR advice, making introductions to each other.

That's the thing I think this is.

I don't really buy this, to be honest.

Or let me put it this way.

If somebody wants to make this critique of like, functionally all conferences that they

collect people from like within an industry or across industries and put them together

and you think that's bad, that's fine, right?

That's a totally legitimate view to hold about the world.

I don't think that is bad.

I do that work here in public.

I try to have conversations with many different kinds of people across industries, across ideologies

in a way that is simultaneously honest and like fundamentally gracious.

I believe that is not just not a bad thing.

I believe it is a democratic habit that should be cultivated.

I think civic friendship, even across real difference, is more than beautiful, it is necessary.

It's not that I think Dalai was doing something amazing for the world, but you are definitely

not going to get me to sit here and say that the problem is that there might be a space

where I don't know, Ted Cruz and Joseph Gordon love it.

Somebody who works on cybersecurity risk of Microsoft might have a conversation with each

other.

I think that's helpful.

I think that's good.

Seeing the problem was it was a transactional network built around protecting a pedophile.

The output of the network is the problem and my critique of people who are in the Epstein

files late by the time that they had to know what he was doing or at least had information

that they had to reject about what he had done is that they were protecting a pedophile.

It is not that there is some world in which Nome Chomsky and Steve Bannon might have dinner,

like that seems interesting on some of the Peter Teele and Nome Chomsky who have ever

might have been.

I think people should talk to people they don't agree with, but if your belief is that these

people should not get to know each other, then I just don't agree.

The reason dialogue became or this thing became what it is because it was called a secret

society.

Spin was put on the ball to suggest that in public, as recline in Peter Teele, are pursuing

different agendas.

In private, they are dressing up in robes and sacrificing a goat and trying to do the same

thing.

That is not true.

It is just not true.

Technocratic liberals, managerial professional class liberals, they can sometimes make the

world too complicated to understand.

Conspiratory populism makes it too simple to understand.

That is not how the world works.

People are mostly doing in private what they are doing in public.

There would not be safety among a bunch of people who disagree that much to like coordinators,

say what is really on their minds or anything.

I can even get Peter Teele to come on the show and I kind of understand why he doesn't

want to come on the show.

Say one thing that you disagree with Peter Teele about.

That democracy and freedom and capitalism are incompatible.

That Donald Trump should be president.

The talent here should exist in the way that it currently does.

I find Peter Teele's functionally his entire agenda.

That got her was a cool website.

That got her was cool website.

The Blake master should be a senator.

The JD Vance is a good political actor.

Greta Thunberg is a correct model to think about the anti-Christ.

I disagree with Peter Teele.

His whole agenda is functionally the opposite of mine.

But I will absolutely talk to Peter.

And so the dialogue thing, the main thing it did for me, I mean, there's also the reality

that I can't go and knock on the doors of everybody who believes something untrue now

and correct the belief.

Then a few days ago on the internet I was accused of being a Chinese Communist agent or

spy or something.

The kind of constant cycle now of bullshit that you have no real way to correct is a challenging

thing I find to deal with.

But I think it reflects something pretty negative.

I don't think it said anything good about the way people, a lot of people are absorbing

information about the world at the moment.

I think it would also violate the New York Times employee handbook.

Yeah, it would be, I think I'm not supposed to be in a secret society, in a secret society.

But what even is a secret society?

What makes it a society, what makes it a secret?

I find to be an intellectually interesting question.

I mean, there needs to be initiation ritual.

Sure.

You can't tell people you're in it.

And I think besides that, you can do whatever.

Anyway, I'm not in any of those.

I can say right now to my knowledge, I'm not in any secret societies.

And you just stay on an email distra for the rest of your life.

Yeah, sure.

Last question.

So what are three musicians or songs or albums that you would recommend to the audience?

So the four, the four-tet, winged-ing album you should go find.

And then maybe, I'll really into it.

And I find this a very hypnotic, this particular album, Mass Amable.

I think it's called Mass A Mob Life by DJ Python.

Really cool, very strange music.

And then maybe to offer a song rather than a whole album.

There's a John Hopkins Imogen Heap collaboration that just came out called Reckoning.

Both of them are amazing on their own.

Like Imogen Heap, long time one of my favorite artists, John Hopkins, like his stuff is really,

really cool.

But coming together was, I was very excited when I saw it.

And I have listened to it a lot since it came out.

Like you and Chris Rufo.

Claire Gordon, thank you very much.

Thank you, Ezra.