Transcript of Ezra Klein Returns (on political polarization) New

Welcome, welcome, welcome to Armchair Expert, Experts on Expert. I'm Dan Shepard. I'm joined by Lily Padman.

Hi.

And today we have a returning guest. Yes, he was last here weeks before shutdown.

Yeah, lots changed.

6 years ago. Ezra Klein. He is a political commentator and a journalist. He co-founded Vox and is currently a New York Times podcast host and op-ed columnist.

Ding, ding, ding.

That's why he's here. I read an op-ed he wrote that I really, really liked that we're going to discuss at length. His books include Abundance. which is gaining a lot of political attention.

Oh, it's also been on so many big lists. Bill Gates's list, Obama's list, just man, oh man.

And then Why We're Polarized, which was how we met him the first time. Uh, and of course, listen to his podcast. It is extremely well-informed and beautifully executed. The Ezra Klein Show. Please enjoy Ezra Klein. Okay, I do believe you're stronger than you were 6 years ago. Have you been exercising? Are you doing a weight training program?

So this has been coming up a lot. I'm probably stronger than 6 years ago when I had a 1-year-old.

Okay, okay.

Then 10 years ago, I mean, I've not gone through a Dax-like Hulk-out here.

Well, I'm much older than you. This phase could still be in your future.

Fair enough. I was in pretty good shape in my early 30s. You're 42 right now?

Yeah, I'm 42. Then I had kids. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

It brought the curve down for a while, and then I turned 40. I read Peter Attia's Outlive.

Yep, yep. Very persuasive.

He really persuaded me that having muscle mass in the long term is important for health. And so I started trying to turn things around. Okay, good. Thank you for noticing. Yeah. I've consumed a psychotic amount of protein powder, as far as I can tell.

Yeah.

So I'm glad people feel like it's doing something. I know SF culture. I don't live there anymore, but I know that world. Is the peptide thing here?

Yeah.

Are you all on peptides?

I'm on peptides, yeah.

Which peptides are you on? We're having the most podcast conversation ever here. Yeah, I'm just fascinated by people.

Bro, by the way, this is going to dovetail beautifully into the piece you wrote that I loved. Yeah, why can't a centrist liberal talk about peptides and lifting weights?

Listen, if you can't talk about peptides as a liberal, we're not going to win anything.

Yeah, we got it. We're not going forward.

I'll make a real political point here. I feel like a couple years ago, 8-ish, 10-ish years ago, there was a big move on the kind of— I never know how to describe this— the left progressive something against what I call like male self-improvement. Brené Brown and worlds like that were fine. But the way you see this operating in terms of young men, both bodily and emotionally, that became a little bit of a no-go zone. And I was saying to people then, I was like, aspiration, like self-improvement is such a fundamental human drive. If you make your politics hostile to that, You will lose. You cannot make aspiration something that you code as right-wing.

Yeah. You think they're against self-improvement physically, is that what you mean?

I think there are two things that happened here. One was that there's a tendency to associate the idea that you can pull yourself up by your bootstraps, that everything is personal responsibility and how hard you're working at it, with the right. Mm-hmm.

Yeah.

And the sense that that is a way of avoiding a confrontation with societal conditions that need to be changed in order for people to thrive. And I am sympathetic to that as far as it goes. We do have a lot of societal conditions that need to be changed in order for people to thrive.

And it'd be great if someone pulls them up by their bootstraps, and it does happen. And yes, not on the level that we've been sold, but also it doesn't make it bad.

Yes. I always think that as a society, you want society to be skeptical of how much falls on the individual, and individuals to be optimistic about how much they can do for themselves. So yeah, I'm actually I'm largely a believer that things are pretty socially determined for us in terms of who we're born to and where we're born and the luck we come into contact with in life. I believe that the people who are richest in our society have not done nearly as much as they think to deserve that, and a lot of people who have fallen through the cracks have just gotten a bad run of luck. And social policy, taxation, universal healthcare, universal childcare, all these things should really reflect that. And also, it is good for individuals to believe because it is also true, right? These things are true at the same time.

Absolutely.

That you can make changes for yourself.

Yeah. That you would be a better version of yourself in the future than you are today. That's a great—

we should always be growing—

modus operandi for a human, right? Is I want to be able to look back and go, yeah, I'm a better version of myself today. Okay, where were we though? We were talking about peptides. Peptides. I take— I have to go back and forth on these, right? So your body doesn't get used to them. But they do virtually the same thing, which is I'm on one version of the Morilans. There's ipamorilan or somorilan. They tell your pituitary gland to make more of its own HGH. So you're not taking exogenous HGH, which is problematic for many reasons, but it tells your body to make more of it. So that one I'm on. I've been on testosterone for 8 years, but I'm on a really conservative dose. Can you feel my, my muscle? I'm rutting right now too, so that might be part of it, but I'm on a very, very small kind of conservative dose of that. And then there's another one I'm on. I feel ashamed to admit this one because it's very expensive, but SS31 repairs your mitochondria. And that one, I got to say, is the one I think is most impactful.

Do you do this?

No, I'm scared. Well, I am on a GLP-1.

Uh-huh.

So it's a peptide.

We'll count that as a peptide. And all of the friends are on all of these different ones, and I'm very scared of it, so I don't do it.

This is on my mind because I just did an episode about this. It'll— I don't know when this will come out and when that will come out. I am a little surprised by how confident people are with these things that we don't really understand. Yeah, I mean, the GLP-1s are very well studied. Not all of them, right? Some of them are new. But Ozempic, at least, is a diabetes drug for a long time. My wife is a type 1 diabetic, right? These things are known.

Yeah.

These other things where we're like, we think it does this. I read an interview with some doctor in the Bay Area, and he was talking to people who were into peptides, and he was saying, look, I'm also a startup founder, and I feel like people are reversing the value proposition. The thing about doing a startup is your downside is quite limited and your upside is unlimited. Worst case, your startup fails. Best case, you're, you know, a billionaire and you've changed the world. And these, he was saying he worries that it's the reverse. Like, best case, you feel a little bit better, right? The upside is somewhat limited, and downside, it's a little— who knows?

Yeah.

Well, let me be really clear for anyone in the audience, especially if you're a young dude. I have a doctor. I have a hormone doctor.

Got it.

And I get my pills legally from a pharmacy. I'm not buying them on the black market from China. There's a million things you could point at. So the efficacy of Tesamorlin, very well studied. It was developed for HIV patients in the '80s. It's been around for 40 years. Yes. And they, they noticed as a side effect of it, it was like, wow, they lost a lot of abdominal fat in addition to doing what they wanted it to do. So this off-label use for it is just very well documented, very well studied. It's been being prescribed to people for 40 years. So it's not crazy. But yes, if you're buying it from Joe's Pep Shack on the internet. Now we're not discussing peptides, we're discussing quality control issues and anything you would shove into your body.

Which, by the way, that is how most people are getting them because most people can't afford to have a peptide. And we live in LA, there are hormone doctors. That's not that common other places. And if you go to your GP, they're probably going to say like, no, just don't do it.

So it's tricky. These things all get mired in a lot of different issues. Attila, he's been vocal against peptides, which is interesting because I definitely think he does prescribe some certain patients he has.

I think he's probably getting a lot of emails from the Joe's Peptide Shack cohort.

Yeah. I mean, he doesn't want young dudes who have no knowledge of it firing all this shit into their body without a dosage by a doctor and a supply that's trusted and vetted. I think that's more the concern than what this peptide that's been studied for a long time, actually.

What about NADs? Are you on an NAD? People are really on NAD.

I don't know what this is.

I guess it's like good for your brain, but then that scares me because like anything that has an impact on your brain feels scary. Are you on that?

I'm not. I have tried that and I didn't notice any cognitive advantage from it, so I just skipped it. I'm already on too much stuff and it's all done with a shot. I'm not taking any of this oral.

I feel like it's easier, actually.

Yeah, I've gotten over it, but I'm not looking to add more needles to my life. Sure. Yeah, that's not like, got my— no, when I made my resolutions for 2026, it feels very substancey.

Even when I'm taking the GLP-1, I'm like, oh my God, I'm in that movie where you're just injecting yourself with this thing to make yourself stuff, look better, feel better.

Also, it's a turnkey for addicts. So all the dudes I know in recovery, it's like, oh great, we have something we can obsess about like this, but actually the outcome is beneficial.

So it scratches that place, a certain kind of energy.

Yeah.

And you're talking about which one you're in, then you're doing how much. Like, I miss that part of drug abuse.

Look, I think so much of life is figuring out whether you can harness your most intense internal energies to something constructive or destructive.

Yeah.

There's a line I love. I read it in an Oliver Burkeman book, but I don't think it's his line. I think he quotes somebody, but it's that behind most successful people is anxiety harnessed to productivity.

Mm.

Yeah, that's right.

I think so much of life, it's like so many people who are addicted and go into recovery and then become ultra marathoners.

Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah.

I always feel inside of me there is a constant thrumming energy, and if it doesn't have somewhere to go, it will go into just ruminating, worrying, hypochondria. And then I found political blogging.

Yeah. Thank God for you. It's just an endless river. It'll never dry up.

An endless river of things that are pro-social to be worried about.

Okay, so you were here 6 years ago and it was right before you were one of the last interviews in person.

That's right.

Yeah.

Our tour was bisected on that first book by the pandemic.

And you were promoting at the time Why We're Polarized.

Yeah.

Which again, and I may have said it in our first interview, but it's like I've had a very interesting personal social observation of you over the years, and it's evolved, which is there was moments— I think I was probably introduced to you in your wonderful arguments with Sam Harris, and I think maybe at that time I had diagnosed you as left of me, and I do consider myself liberal. And then I was like, he might be too liberal for me. But then you made some points against Sam that I was like, oh, he's incredibly empathetic. You were in a debate about who Sam would come to the rescue of and how obvious it was to you that these people he seemed to think that they had been persecuted unfairly, which makes so much sense because he himself felt like he was persecuted unfairly, and just how transparent the motivation was. And I was like, that's such an intuitive and empathic thing to bring into this debate that could just be about policies or this or that. So then I was like, I really appreciate this guy. And then I think I'm right to think that over the years we seem to have some similar concerns, which is just kind of a non-functional two camps that ruin everything and a lack of maybe pragmatism and a lack of results from both sides.

And just for me, kind of a little bit of disgust with the whole proposition, not one side or the other more than the other. Just my goodness, this can't be the way forward.

I would probably describe myself a little differently than that.

Yeah, please do.

I take more seriously than that that the two sides have different value-based views about how the world should be. And I'm probably more comfortable saying I'm on one of the sides than you are, but precisely because of that, I think it's very important to be self-critical of my side.

That's where we totally agree. Like, Monica and I often— and she's right— she'll be like, you have a lot of shit to say about the left. I don't hear you saying much about the right. And to me, I'm like, A, it's kind of self-evident what I hate about the right. B, the right's not listening to me, so I have no chance at changing them. But I have a chance to better our side.

People won't listen unless they believe you're really on their side. I do think Ezra is very— maybe I'm wrong— clearly left of center.

I think that's true. I'll cop to that.

Yes. And you are consistently saying, I'm centrist.

Yeah.

You don't like the idea of being put in the center.

But I would argue, though, that it has evolved to a degree where my liberal leanings, which would have been very left 10 years ago or 12 years ago, have actually got shoved into the center. Like, I don't think I've wavered as much as the polls have gotten so dramatic.

But there's no doubt the Democratic Party has moved left in that period of time.

Yeah. As the right has moved right.

I think a lot more people feel politically homeless and cynical right now than did, and not even always because they don't have a political home. But I think there's another thing layered on to what you're talking about, which is, one, the institutions of American life and government have become corroded, corrupted, sclerotic in a way that they're just not delivering well. And then two, the layer of social and algorithmic media means that who you hear from and what comes to define the debates on both sides and what comes to define both sides is a more extreme part of them than would have been before. I mean, you both work in attention, right, on some fundamental level. And so I'd be curious if this resonates for you. I think a lot about attention in politics. I think you have to. We're here in, in LA. I don't think it's a crazy thing to imagine Spencer Pratt winning the election. I don't think he will, the mayoral election, but getting attention, right? We saw it in New York where Zoran Momdani went from 1% to the mayor. We're seeing it in Maine where a guy nobody had heard of a year ago just pushed the sitting governor out of the Democratic primary for Senate, Nick Graham Platner.

If you can dominate attentionally— Donald Trump did this to the entire Republican Party all at once.

Yeah.

If you can win attention, you can kind of win everything. So the ability to cohere and dominate attentionally is, I think, one of the fundamental political skills of the age. And I was trying to think about, okay, what is the theory of attention beneath that? Like, how would I describe how attention works? And so I want to see if this resonates for you, because I was literally just thinking about it this morning. The way I would describe attention is that it is feeling plus curiosity equals attention, at least online.

Give me like a hard example.

Yeah. So if you have something that people are really curious about, it's the day after America bombs Iran, then The New York Times can put up a very dry, straightforward news story about bombing Iran and it's going to get a ton of readers. But if we did that same story about, I don't know, high food prices in Chile right now, unless that story was extremely emotionally laid in for some reason, nobody would read it.

Yes.

And algorithmically, I think you really see this for things to create a pop on social media where everything is so crowded and algorithmic media, you know, on TikTok and Instagram now, either people have to really want to hear about it. Peptides, right? There's a reason we started talking about that right at the beginning. It's a magnetic topic for people, or it has to give you a punch of inspiration, anger, outrage, humor, interest, something. And the way that's different than what that was before, because it's not like we never had people who worked on attention in this way before, is that it used to be gatekeepers plus feelings plus curiosity. It used to be that the New York Times or ABC News or the LA Times or whomever had a lot of power over what got coverage.

Yeah.

And that was being decided by editors and programmers and so forth. And so you could be a politician who's maybe not that interesting, but the people in the political community think you're good at your job and the LA Times editorial board endorses you.

John Carroll.

That's a really big deal. John Kerry is a good example of this kind of thing.

Like, John Kerry couldn't have even made a primary at this point.

I think that is totally right. And so I think there is a real shift, and that means, well, what kind of person is good at eliciting curiosity and feeling? Well, it's usually people who are more controversial, who say more outrageous things. And so it is like a subtle but I think quite important shift in the individuals through whom we see politics. Way, way, way more people know Marjorie Taylor Greene's name than can tell me who the chair of the House Ways and Means Committee is, even though the latter is like, in theory, much more politically powerful than the former.

Yeah. And I guess I left out probably my primary concern or passion about politics is just in general, the average person thinks way too much about it. Like, you should. This is your beat. You are dedicated to politics, you have a poli sci degree, you're a journalist, you're never going to take your foot off the gas, and you shouldn't. But the fact that it has infiltrated every aspect of life, where protein is now conservative, plant-based is a little bit like— diet is politicized, where you buy a car is politicized, where you shop— that to me is a big, big problem. I don't think the average American needs to be spending that much of their free thought concerned with ultimately something they'll do every 4 years, or maybe if they're very civilly minded, they will do it every 2 years. And yet they're occupying so much of their time and thought about it. That I think is problematic in general. I think everyone's way too into politics.

I would go further than that. I think one, being really into— what's the line people use on social media? I'm monitoring the situation, right? Isn't that the joke? Like, I work in the news. We are bringing you the thing that is going to unnerve you most from anywhere in the world at any time of day. I'm not sure human beings were built for this kind of socialization.

No, you're not. Not sure.

We were not.

We were designed to live with 100 people.

But then the other thing that I think you're getting at, which I feel very strongly, is we've become more and more sensitized at picking up signals for, are you my kind of person?

I know.

And that's really bad.

Yeah.

Because one, it flattens people to things that they're not. I've got Trump voters in my family. I've got people people I love whose politics are really, really, really distant from mine, and they are good, complex, highly textured people. And two, it's just bad small-d democratic habits. I think we have lost the sense— when people talk about what the American experiment is, of what that ever meant. There were not a lot of democracies when we started.

Yeah, yeah.

And we, when we started, I think it's fair to say, we're a particularly—

Democratic democracy.

Democracy, yes. We had, like, a tremendous amount of the country that could not vote, and some of which was in bondage.

Yeah, more than half the people here couldn't vote.

And they were still like, "What a remarkable experiment we're trying here." The idea that you would live in a society of more than 300 million people with as many differences as we have under rules that are largely democratic, doing that is actually a tremendously complex moral project. That early in our country, we talked a lot about what were the habits of thought and practice and generosity that we needed to bring to being citizens to make this work. We understood it was hard.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. If you're just born into it, we're at 250 years this year, you know. Yeah, it just is. It's a given.

It's a given. And we take it for granted.

Yeah, yeah.

And we take the habits beneath it for granted. And I think that's something that worries me a lot about the current moment. And I mean, yeah, we're at the year 250, and not to get too political on this, but We've got the president of the United States putting his signature on the currency for the first time and putting out passports with his face on them. And I think a lot of people who started this country would find that a little bit ironic. Sure.

Lady Liberty fainting.

And like a bad sign.

Yeah, it's not a great sign.

And so this idea that we are at this tremendous landmark of this country at the same time when some of the habits of both leaders and citizenry that sustained it even through very hard times seem to me to be in deterioration. It's something that has begun to occupy more and more of my mind.

Okay. But now let's go back to what you just said, which I totally agree with, which is no one can really rise to any kind of prominence without attention, massive amounts of attention. And the other thing I get critical of is just— so reverse engineer that. You hate this guy so much, it's all you talk about and think about for 10 years now. This person has occupied people's brains. And so the reward is to give them a lot of attention. To secure the fact that you'll have him. So it's also just a terrible game plan. I mean, I think you could really make a persuasive argument that if everyone fucking ignored him from the jump, we wouldn't even be in this situation. You think you're combating it, but I would argue you're fueling it.

What Trump understood, his most fundamental political insight, was that it does not matter if the attention you are getting is positive or negative, that attention is a volume game, at least in the modern scenario. And you could, as long as you were unlocking the energy of attention, you were winning. And so he is comfortable in a way that a lot of politicians aren't with negative attention.

Also, like, I remember those first debates with him for the primaries. The right hated him too, but the right gave him all the attention. You know, it's like there wasn't anybody who wasn't dying to talk about him.

He was driving that again, as you say, on purpose. He knew that. It wasn't like it just happened to him. He was a mastermind at that.

We cooperated, though. I mean, you have to take some kind of personal responsibility. And that game plan worked and we cooperated.

I think for a while though, we didn't. I think for a long time it was like, oh, this is funny, this is happening. And then at some point it was like, oh my God, I think this is happening. I think we need to start paying attention to it. I don't know what the right—

it's a very hard—

I know what the outcome is. So whatever game plan everyone thought was working, this is the outcome.

I think there's like a new generation of politicians you're beginning to see emerge. And they understand this moment in tension much more natively. Trump had a very specific early taste of it from reality TV and his own kind of relationship to marketing and his own quite unusual use of Twitter when most people in politics use Twitter in a very careful way.

Yeah.

Or were even too good for it.

Yeah. Barack Obama's Twitter account is not an interesting Twitter account. Like, I'm a big, big Obama fan.

Sure, sure.

But Twitter X now is not a space for deliberate, highly nuanced, on the one side, on the other side kind of communication.

A 61% opinion.

Exactly. So Trump got that. And now, one, you're seeing another shift into vertical video, algorithmic video, and you're seeing a different group of politicians. Zohran Mamdani, James Talarico in Texas, Graham Plattner, others who have a touch for it, and they're touching it in different ways. I'm interested to see where that goes because I think we are in another generational I'm not sure it'll be this election cycle that the generational turnover happens. Like, I think we're going to go to Gen X in the next election. Yeah, but I am a lot more confident in like the younger group right now than in the kind of middle.

Yeah, my hope comes from the well-documented pattern of young people hating whatever the people before them did. And what we did was so loud and obvious that I can only hope they're just going to reject that. That's where my hope lies. Okay, so I read This is Why There's No Liberal Joe Rogan in the New York Times. You did an op-ed on this and I just loved it. And I want to go through the points you made in it a bit. So let's just talk about Joe Rogan for a minute, because I'll just tell you historically where we come from. Like, A, I don't agree with him on much stuff, right? It's not my brand of masculinity. I respect the work ethic. I respect the thing he's built. I respect that he doesn't seem beholden to binary options. His politics seem to be all over the map. I respect his authenticity. I think he's very fucking true to who he is, pretty unwavering. So I've never joined on the bandwagon of hating him or loving him. So that's just where I stand on him.

I was keying off of this debate that happened among Democrats like right after the 2024 election where they felt like they had, like, lost the podcasters. Trump was going on Rogan and Rogan endorsed him. You know, he's going on Theo Von, Flagrant with Andrew Schultz. Was he on with Lex Fridman? I don't remember. But whatever it was, there was a real sense that the right had figured out podcasting and the left was now hopelessly behind.

And the left was really giving that a lot of credit. I mean, I was hearing people saying that's why he won.

I don't think it's totally off, by the way. I think there was something very real that was significant there, though I don't think, as we will talk about, the left has taken the right lesson. So right after the election, there was this big thing about the left needs a Joe Rogan. There needs to be a liberal Joe Rogan.

As you might guess, people called me personally and like, you need to be the opposite of Joe Rogan.

I think every in any way left of center male podcaster with any kind of audience— this happened to me, you— like, everybody I know of was like, are you the Joe Rogan? Yeah. Are you gonna be Joe Rogan?

Yeah.

A couple things are worth saying about Rogan. One is he has a first mover advantage that nobody can now replicate. Part of what makes Rogan Rogan is that he's been Rogan for so long. He's an institution. He's the Walter Cronkite of American podcasting.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. He's the king by such a margin, it's laughable.

And you can't get that kind of baseline audience and algorithmic power just like starting up right now. The second is that he's not fundamentally political.

Right.

I think at this point over the last couple of years, Rogan's politics have become more personally right than he quite lets on in terms of who he has on. I think he was very offended by fights he had with the left. But for most of his career, I don't think that was true. But what makes him interesting in politics— and this is true for Theovan, it's true for you guys— is that the great problem for politicians, the great problem for political movements, is that they know how to reach the people who are interested. And in fact, they know how to reach the people who like them and the people who hate them. What they do not know how to reach is people who don't care. And the people who, to what you were saying earlier about the news, are actually checked out of the news, do not want to hear about the worst thing in the world every morning when they pick up their phone. And these are the people who swing elections. Yeah, right. These are the people who can turn out and in many cases here turn out for Trump in 2024 because they were mad about prices, not because they were hardcore MAGA.

And what makes someone like Rogan or in a different way, a Theo Von or others politically important is precisely that they are not mainly political. And so there are all these people who trust them or love them or like them or tune into them because they find what they do interesting and appealing. And so then if a politician comes on, which only happens once in a blue moon, they get access to an audience they could never otherwise touch. Yeah, if you can't make a liberal Joe Rogan, because the whole point is that he's not a liberal, a conservative, a MAGA, an anything, and he wouldn't have had an audience had he been political from the jump.

He has an audience because MMA's got a huge audience, you know, he's very well-versed in that. Like, he has a lot of interest that was the bulk of his— bow hunting, Yeah, I guess hunting, conspiracy theories, you know, all kinds of stuff. The politics was like a tiny sliver. Yeah, but he was open to having anyone on.

But now he is considered that, whether he is or he isn't.

Well, here's a line in the article that's so good. He says, "The simplest way to tell people which side they're on is to tell them how much your side hates them." Yeah.

So years ago, Bernie Sanders went on Joe Rogan. And Rogan in the 2020 election, he's later said he was high and just screwing around. But, you know, whatever. It's the only endorsement he made in that election, to my knowledge, said he would probably vote for Bernie Sanders. There was then this big backlash to Bernie Sanders on the left online because in their view, Rogan is transphobic and is problematic. And I came in, I was like, what's wrong with you? Like, the whole case for Bernie Sanders is that somebody like Joe Rogan would like him. Like, the whole case for the Bernie Sanders electability theory is that there's something about his—

Schultz loved him too.

Schultz, like a lot of people love Bernie Sanders.

Yeah.

And it's that the way Bernie Sanders talks about politics and cuts through a certain level of bullshit and voices a certain deep cynicism that I think you all share to some degree makes him someone that someone like Rogan would like. So of course you want Bernie Sanders going into the places where he would reach people who don't normally vote for, or like Democrats who aren't going to a DSA meeting. And I became a Twitter trending topic because people were yelling at me so much for defending Bernie Sanders for that. And I remember thinking at that time that if you do this, you are going to push these people away from you, not Bernie, who's a professional politician, but people like Rogan. And look, I'm sympathetic to some of this. COVID hits. There is a huge fight around Rogan and vaccine misinformation.

Yes.

Yes.

There's a lot I disagreed with in both directions on that. My critique of Joe Rogan, by the way, who I've liked many episodes he's done, is that for the amount of power he has, I don't think he takes his job seriously enough.

That's Malcolm Gladwell's take.

I think that he wants to pretend he's a guy who can still just fuck around and spout off and nod. And you can. But when you have that kind of an audience, I do think there's a burden of responsibility on knowing what you're talking about, on knowing what they're talking about. I have this job too, and I'm not as big as Rogan, but The bigger I've gotten, the more seriously I take the preparation I do for every single episode because people are listening.

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We just had someone who we were supposed to have on, and once Dax did research, it was like, we can't. It would be irresponsible.

Yeah, we can't do this.

And you do have to think about that.

Yeah, but I do think it's worth saying, just for people who probably don't know and hadn't read the article, like, so Rogan's pro-choice. He was a Bernie Sanders supporter, pro-universal healthcare. You can't really put him in this box left or right prior to COVID in a very concerted effort to cancel him. I mean, Brené Brown quit her show on Spotify in protest.

I didn't remember that. So there is then a very organized effort. Spotify's done this huge deal with Rogan. He has people on who are questioning vaccines and their efficacy.

Well, let's just be fair, questioning a lot of stuff— masking, distancing. Unfortunately for everyone, both sides were wrong and right about a lot of stuff.

So that's what I was saying earlier too, that I kind of have sympathy in both directions here. I think a lot of broken stuff on vaccines did not hold up that well. The vaccines were really very safe and very effective. And there was a lot of going too far in terms of distancing measures, in terms of school closures. And I would say— and this maybe gets to one of the larger points I'm trying to make in this piece and in some other things I've been doing— I think there was a bad political practice happening, which is even if you are very, very, very pro-vaccine, you have to be very careful with, one, tools of compulsion and coercion. And I was somebody who believed in vaccine mandates, at least in some cases. But more than that, I think you have to be really, really, really careful with considering certain ideas out of bounds, because you don't get to tell people what they're allowed to believe, to have questions about, to feel uncertain about.

Because as I recall, the thing that set the firestorm off, he didn't say, "I don't believe in the vaccine." He said, "If I was a young man, I probably wouldn't take the vaccine." I remember it as having to do with guests, but the truth is it's been a long time.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

But just that thought could not be heard, tolerated, debated. Pressure tested.

But then he was having, like, RFK Jr. on and then not really questioning him about any of the things he was saying.

I think it went more like that. But I think the broad thing that happened is that there was a sense that Rogan was on the other side. He was a very, very powerful voice and a powerful platforming voice on the other side, and he had to be stopped. There was a huge kind of mobilization around that. It didn't end up working, but you could imagine it have gone a different way. That, I think, is a very, very high-profile example of a thing that was happening in a broader way back then during that sort of period in American life, which is an effort to win political arguments by sharply drawing the boundaries of allowable debate. And I think that is a very, very dangerous thing to do, particularly when you have not done the work of actually persuading people of your side of the debate. There's a tendency to move into deciding who is allowable, who should be platformed, etc., as opposed to actually doing the work of not just persuasion, but listening. And to the line you just quoted in the piece, what that often does for some people, they get cowed and they're willing to not speak the opinion that you're kind of pushing out of the public sphere.

And to some people, they really, really, really turn against you and they come to see you as a threat to them. One of my most deeply held views in politics, and I always say this to politicians, is that the most fundamental question in politics that people ask about a politician or movement is not whether they like the movement, not whether they like the politician. It's whether the politician likes them. The first thing people intuit is not if they like you, it's if you like them. And when you're talking about entrusting people with power, governmental power, institutional power, the question of whether you are safe and you will be seen by these people who want to wield power over you is a very, very, very fundamental question. And so part of, I think, a healthy politics is making people feel that if you win, even if you all don't agree on everything, you're not enemies.

Taken care of.

And if a political candidate declares, "I will not go on that show because I disagree with him," what that person is is saying is that whole audience, I don't like you. Exactly the point you're making. It's a bizarre way to declare to that listener, oh, that person doesn't like me. They won't even come talk to the person.

So I have not been on Rogan. I have pitched my books to him a few times, but he's not had me on. But I've been on some of these other shows. Right. And one of the things I actually mentioned in this piece is that I was surprised when I go on shows like Andrew Schultz's Flagrant or Lex Friedman's show. This is on my Abundance book tour. So this was a year ago, basically March of 2025. April 2025, maybe. And they would spend time on air, on the show, talking to me and complaining about how they were being called like this right-wing broosphere. But they had tried to get Kamala Harris, they had tried to get major Democrats on, and none of them would come on. Yeah, the thing was not that this collection of podcasts or this part of the culture had decided like they wouldn't talk to Democrats. It is that to a first approximation, the Democrats had decided they wouldn't talk to Yeah.

Anyone. I'll be fair. We almost had Kamala on, and then we were talking to her people and I was like, well, if she comes on, we have to talk about this and we have to talk about this and we have to talk about that. We have to talk about her life. And people who are running the show are afraid and they weren't on the right. They were like, yeah, you say whatever you wanna say. No one cares. Like, it's just get out there. But they're so hypervigilant on the left about protecting persona.

Well, this goes back to what I was saying a little bit earlier when I was saying that what the right came to understand under Trump Trump is that attention is a volume game.

Yeah.

And just being in front of people is the single most valuable thing you can do. Whereas on the left, at least up till now— you see someone like Gavin Newsom beginning to shift their positioning on this, but Kamala Harris very much— she would much rather not get attention than get negative attention.

Yeah.

She did not want to take risks.

But you're right, part of that is because the left will be like, oh, she said this bad thing, now we hate her.

Can't wait to eat themselves.

But that happens on the the right to— to who? How much do they care? All the time. Like, look at this stuff going on with Ted Cruz and Tucker Carlson and J.D. Vance and Vivek Ramaswamy, right? I mean, there was a mob of people at the Capitol who were chanting, "Hang Mike Pence" at a certain point. The idea that the right will not come for you— Marjorie Taylor Greene broke with Donald Trump, the death threats she got for that. The right will come for you. But the right has begun selecting for personality type. I mean, on the one hand, it offers a lot of fealty to Donald Trump himself, or at least until recently when some people have begun breaking. But beyond that, is sort of like, yeah, come on. And JD Vance and Ted Cruz and these other people who weren't always like this, but they've created these political personas that are much more edgelord-oriented and want controversy because they want to be in front of you. You know, the left is much more institutional, and people who rise up through institutions, they don't want to be talked to by HR. Yeah, the left had like a kind of personality type of, I don't want to be called in the principal's office, and the right is like cutting school.

Yeah, yeah.

Doing donuts in the parking lot. Exactly.

Yeah.

Tell me about Hasan Piker. I was unaware of him until I read this article.

This is what this piece was actually about. And I'm just going to say this for the record because it annoys me so much that this keeps happening. So there are two headlines on this piece that people saw. One was Hasan Piker is not the enemy. The other is there is no liberal Joe Rogan. And by the end of the day, it was there is no liberal Joe Rogan, or this is why there's no liberal Joe Rogan or whatever. He changed it because, you know, the backlash. No, we write a bunch of headlines. There's an automatic popularity testing tool and the winner wins out. And Joe Rogan is a better-known name than Hasan Piker.

Yeah, yeah. Okay.

Hasan Piker is a streamer. He is kind of like a leftist, more kind of Marxist politics, very sort of anti-colonialist, very anti-Zionist. And as he's gotten somewhat bigger, a fight had emerged in the Democratic Party about talking to Hasan Piker. The particular fight I got involved in here was at Third Way, which is a centrist Democratic group. They want the Democratic Party to be more moderate. They had written a piece about how Hasan Piker is an anti-Semite and we need to draw a line against the anti-Semites. And that had sort of not gone anywhere. Then there was a Michigan Senate race where the more progressive candidate in the race, Abdul El-Sayed, did a rally with Hasan Piker, and then he got denounced by the other candidates in the race for doing that. And there was this big blowup about Piker and whether people like him should be platformed. And this is sort of why I wrote this piece. Look, I got a lot of disagreements with Piker politically. I think he's wrong on a bunch of things. There are other things I think he's right on.

He made a crazy statement statement that the Nazis and the current Israeli administration are the same thing.

To some extent, he once said being a liberal Zionist is like being a liberal Nazi, which, as I write in the piece, I think is a pretty repugnant thing to say. He's defended that statement as saying he's just against ethnonationalism. But what made the Nazis the Nazis was not that they were an ethnonational state. There are a lot of ethnonational states. It's the industrialized extermination of the Jews across Europe. Europe. So I don't love that comment, but I don't think we should focus on the worst or most crude things people say. Piker is a streamer. He sits on air for 6 to 10 hours a day. You're going to find things that people shouldn't have said in that. And he's also somebody who's called out antisemitism in a lot of different formats. He's a Bernie Sanders supporter. You know, he's talked about Jon Ossoff as a good presidential candidate for 2028. So I think somebody who's repeatedly promoting Jewish Americans for the presidency, that's going to be a weird kind of Jew hatred.

Yeah.

And there are two points I wanted to make about this. One was simply that I think that there is an organized effort— and I'm Jewish, and I have a lot of very now conflicted feelings about Israel, but deep feelings about Israel. I wanted to be on a different path, and it's on very, very deeply. But so long as Israel is on this path, anti-Zionism is going to be a very, very, very potent political force. And the effort among some Jewish groups to conflate it with antisemitism is going to be very dangerous. Because if you keep telling people that if they oppose the Jewish state, they oppose Jewish people, eventually they're going to believe you, and you're making the antisemite's job a lot easier. So that's one dimension. And by the way, I know a lot of Jewish anti-Zionists, particularly young ones. Like, this has been a big thing in New York. Reza Ramadani's been running, and a lot of conflicts in the Jewish community have emerged, and I've done a lot of writing about this, so it's not my first time coming to this issue. I've done a lot of reporting about Israel and Palestine, and particularly since October 7th, and I've gone there.

The other thing that I want to say about this is that talking to people is not a reward for their agreement. I'm not saying you cannot draw lines, but in the way attention actually works now, when people have earned it— Piker has attention that is not like up to Third Way to grant him or not grant him. The decision of whether or not you will talk to him— I mean, you can decide who you think you'll have a productive conversation with.

Yeah.

But the idea that people should be off limits for conversation—

because I get criticized of this, like, your platform— yeah, your platform is the great— cuts through all other arguments.

I don't think it is a good way to think about politics in a diverse society, and I think you should be very, very careful with it. You can come up with a list of shitty things a lot of people have said, and you also need to open up space in your own mind that them being in conversation with you and with others is how they will change, and also maybe how you will change and how you will understand them better. And I do believe, like, going back to the moral imagination of what it means to live in a democracy, that part of it is being open to these complex and difficult conversations with each other. I talk to a lot of people on the right, and it's an ongoing thing on my show that I really try to have people on the right on who I truly disagree with, right? Not like never-Trumpers, but people who are foundational theorists of Trumpism, and they do want an ethno-national state, and they want things that I find genuinely appalling.

Yeah.

And I still want to understand them.

Yeah.

And I want to make myself more understood to them, or at least try, when I think we can have a productive conversation. I think that there is a genuine challenge we are all going to face if we want the country to work, which is how do we live here with each other? You know, I've been thinking a lot about about Obama recently and Obama in 2008 and Obama before that in '04 when he rises up with his famous speech about there not being a red and blue America and all of the hope that he pulled forward in people to be in this country and to be in politics in this country could feel profoundly different than it did then. And now it all looks quaint, right? You know, the divisions of 2004 versus the divisions of 2022 are gentle. But it didn't feel that way then. And I think one of the difficult things is that Obama won and his win had a lot of dimensions to it. But two things that I think many people felt it promised was, one, a kind of political reconciliation, and two, a kind of racial reconciliation. And instead, both things got worse.

And I don't think it's his fault. I think he tried very, very, very hard, but the politics became more divided. The Republican Party under Mitch McConnell opposed him relentlessly and eventually went to Donald Trump as their answer to him and a much more kind of ethno-nationalist form of politics. And in terms of racial reconciliation, people got very, very frustrated on the left at the lack of progress and went further into a much more aggressive posture. And that kind of became wokeness. And on the right, you had a sort of counter-response of birtherism and more white identity politics. And the reason I bring all this up is that I think a genuinely unsolved question after Obama that nobody has really taken up in a serious way is if we have stopped believing in that, then we have walled ourselves off from one, something a lot of people really want. You look at polling even now, there's a New York Times poll, political division is people's second biggest problem in the country.

Yeah.

Right. People don't like this.

Yeah.

No.

But nobody really believes they have an answer to it. Politics can become very choked up when there is something people want but they no longer believe it is possible to get. It turns into apathy, cynicism, radicalism. When I've been talking on here about the moral imagination and the habits of what it takes to live in a complex, multiethnic, highly polarized, highly disagreeable democracy with each other, a democracy where not even everybody really agrees on the fundamentals of democracy, agrees on, like, the legitimacy of elections. We are facing a challenge. It is really, really hard. We have come up up with answers to it or even a willingness to entertain answers to it, because I actually think that the experience of watching the hope of Obamaism turn into the kind of exhaustion of the Democratic Party by 2016 and the rise of Trump after that, it created— for anybody to talk like that, it sounds almost naive now. And yet we actually still do need to figure that out. I mean, we need to figure out issues of material plenty and the economy and the cost of living and economic power and a million other things that we all do know how to talk about and that, you know, Bernie Sanders or an AOC or an Elise Slotkin talk about all the time in their own different ways.

But we actually do have to have some vision for how you make this country work at a time when people can feel that it is at the risk of rupture.

Yeah. How effective is cancelation as a tactic?

That's a complicated question. It is effective if you can do it. And you can hold to it. But for a lot of people, particularly people who wield attention to their own political bases, it can actually be the opposite. I mean, I would say Tucker Carlson is more influential today than when he was pushed off of Fox News. Donald Trump was banned from every social media platform and in tremendous legal jeopardy, and now he's president again. Nick Fuentes was pushed off of everything and remains blocked from many things but has risen in influence in the shadows. I think that one thing that happened, and this was, I think, a stronger reality on the left, although the right has its versions of it too, is that the left had more power prior to Trump winning a second term over a lot of the institutions of American life. And so it wanted to wield power inside those institutions to push people out of them. We get you out of here, we get you banned on X or Instagram or whatever, you're gone. And it turned out you weren't gone. It turned out you created a shadow network. Naomi Klein, the leftist writer and theorist, has a great book on this called Doppelganger.

It created a sort of shadow world of Steve Bannons and Fuentes and things happening outside the sightline of mainstream politics. And now that shadow politics has become mainstream politics.

Yeah.

Mm-hmm.

I think just recognizing that you can agree or disagree with particular instances of it, and I have different feelings on different efforts here and on different people here, but as a politics, it failed. Like, Donald Trump is president.

Yeah. Yeah. The results are in.

Tucker Carlson is, I think, the number one podcast on Spotify, like, many weeks. I get failed.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

All right.

And I want to talk about— you give an example of this in the article, which is William F. Buckley and Eldridge Cleaver. Tell us about William F. Buckley.

Oh, it's so great. So William F. Buckley is the founder of a conservative magazine called National Review. And Buckley is, I think, considered the most important conservative coalition builder intellectual of the back half of the 20th century.

He's also highly entertaining.

Highly entertaining.

Watching him debate somebody—

it is worth going back. He's got this very patrician and unusual accent.

Yeah.

And he had a show that I believe was on PBS called Firing Line. And you might think that on Firing Line, like, William F. Buckley just had on other conservatives or mainstream liberals. But no, you can go and it's on YouTube and it is amazing to watch. He has on Eldridge Cleaver, among others from the Black Panthers. And I learned about this reading his biography of Buckley that is great by Sam Tannenhaus. It's such a wonderful episode of Firing Line to watch because basically Buckley sits down introduces Cleaver and is like, "So under the way you see the world, would you support somebody assassinating Richard Nixon?" And Cleaver, a Black Panther, basically says, "Well, you kill Nixon, then you just have another pig behind him.

So I'm not sure it would accomplish anything." "That you would also have to assassinate," he says.

"But I wouldn't try to stop him." And then, you know, I know from the biography that Cleaver came over to William F. Buckley's home a couple of times for drinks. And Buckley is not endorsing Cleaver, who could not possibly be further from Buckley's arch-conservative politics. But there is this willingness to have the engagement.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

And without the engagement being some kind of stamp of approval. And I think we have gotten into a position where we almost like don't believe that's true. You were talking earlier, Dax, about platforming and the concept of platforming. And I'm not saying it's not a real concept. I actually do believe the question of who I choose to have on my show, who you choose to have on your show, is meaningful. But I think we have taken the logic of that, which is one insight about programming a show among many, and made it into something bigger than it should be. Because one, we don't decide— we of any political movement— who is in the public discourse. And two, there can be tremendous things learned by moving outside of that. I mean, that Buckley Cleaver show has hundreds of thousands of views and gets watched today because it is kind of an amazing document. The logic of platforming, which is a very social media logic— it's the logic of blocking, of muting, right? I think a lot of our politics is now formed by our experience on social and algorithmic media and the way people treat each other there and what it means to win or lose there.

And it has overwhelmed other logics of communication, of conversation, One thing I like about the Buckley-Cleaver thing is that sometimes people can treat conversation as purely instrumental, right? How am I going to change X's politics if I won't talk to X? As if everybody is simply an object of intellectual charity upon which you should act. But one thing I like about that is that the Buckley-Cleaver thing is not about persuasion at all, right? It is literally just a conversation to see what will happen when two very, very different perspectives come into a room together.

You're writing here, to write the those people out of acceptable political discourse is to back yourself into a shrinking, sanitized corner of the public sphere. We had Adam Mosser on recently, who's the CEO of Instagram.

Instagram.

Yeah, you know, he was just saying that what the internet did, 1.0, was it made everyone a publisher. So there's no gatekeepers. Everyone has the ability to be a publisher. And that's one huge, crazy revolution that we're feeling the effects of, and that AI will be a new paradigm where everyone can be a producer. So like right now to make a movie, to make a show, to make— I mean, you know, there's a lot of capital required for that, but that soon will be gone as well. So it's like we've had these really fascinating moments that on the surface are very democratizing and maybe good in some ways. And then what you were seeing now, and yeah, you call it the algorithmic media, is it's a marketplace now. No, there's no gatekeepers. There's no one deciding. It is a full-blown market and anyone can rise to the top.

But let me complicate that in one way. And I know Adam and I— I like Adam, although I have my issues with Instagram. But one thing it isn't is a pure marketplace, a flat marketplace, because the decisions that the people who run these marketplaces make really matter. And I'll give an example. We're in this moment, and you guys do a great job of this, where the view is that every podcast has to be video and every video podcast has to be cut up into all these clips. Yeah. Clips economy where the atomic unit of algorithmic media is vertical video clips, horizontal in some places. And Instagram has an internal structure that they will not recommend a reel of over 3 minutes to a new audience. So what they have done is create a marketplace for things that are short. If you have a thought or a conversation or an exchange, and I'm not the world's most concise speaker, so I have a lot of those, that takes more than 3 minutes to play itself out, you are algorithmically punished for that.

Yeah, but you just slide over to YouTube or you slide over to the shadow thing. We can't say that Instagram is a gatekeeper because we just pointed out all these people that got kicked off.

Oh yeah, I'm making a different point. I'm not quite making a point about gatekeepers. I am making a point about that different periods of attention, different platforms, they reward different things and they still do have power operating in certain ways. And I think one thing that genuinely worries me about The direction I see us going is towards less and less and less and less context.

Oh, for sure. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Or complexity or nuance.

Yeah, we started this as sort of an antidote to the late-night talk show. Not that there's any problems with that, but it's a 5-minute thing. You go, you do your thing, you leave. This was supposed to be the opposite of that, and we're sort of circling back around to that being what it is. 2-minute clips, 5-minute clips, and I hate it.

She hates it. I have a different opinion. Point of view.

Tell me about your point of view. I mean, I'm struggling with it myself because I have this show, The Ezra Klein Show, which hopefully you all—

yeah, yeah, it's doing fantastic.

I'm grateful people are tuning in, but it is such a project of context. I think it's so beautiful about these conversations is the unfolding and the slight and nuanced energetic movements between people.

Yeah.

And first you're making kind of one point about gatekeepers, and then you're kind of like, well, no, that's a good point. Then you're back a little bit. And I'm not saying that the clips we put up as we're doing more of these, and other people do many more than we do, are bad. They're not. We just had a clip from that Abundance one with my co-author Derek Thompson talking about what Texas gets right about building housing that California and other places don't, and it's gone viral on Instagram and it's doing great. But it always feels to me like doing a kind of violence to this project where it's a project built on the belief that listening to people in complex conversation over an extended period of time gives you this sense of them, this sort of energetic experience of them, an intellectual experience of them, an emotional experience of them. And now we're gonna like chop, chop, chop, chop, chop, chop, chop into the things that gave you like an instant sensation.

Yeah, you have enough time to establish character and intention and motive in the long form, and that's great. But here's the way I look at it, is I feel like it weirdly parallels the whole point of your article, which is reverse engineer. So I was on a panel this year for the Golden Globes about podcasts, and the person kind of asked the, "Why is there no Rogan?" Everyone's like, "Oh yeah, I don't know why they're so big." And I'm like, "Guys, it's so obvious. We're not addressing the reality of this," which is you have a huge group of men who in 2020, when we talked, the first third of our conversation was about Me Too when we interviewed you 6 years ago. And so you have a whole legion of young men that at that moment in time were being told by some pundits and some shows that somehow young boys were, like, inherently defective. "We have a boy problem." These were headlines. "We have a boy problem. We have a male problem." So you have this whole group of kids who have just assumed the sins of the boss who was a pig and the powerful man who exploited people.

They haven't entered the workplace. They haven't even been on a date. They haven't sexually assaulted anyone. And they're hearing from a lot of the popular media outlets that there's something defective about them. And then lo and behold, some guys show up and they're like, we're not terrible. We're not ashamed of who we are. And you're shocked that they migrated over there? This is not a huge mystery.

You tell people you don't like them and they will believe you.

Yes.

So there's no fucking big question about why they're huge. It's quite obvious. So I go— let me just say, I didn't want to do video. But I would love for young men to hear me. I think I'm a good example for young men. Where are young men at? They're on YouTube. I can't pretend they're on audio only. That's not a reality. So if I want to reach young men, I gotta go where they listen. So I have to be on YouTube if I care about talking to young men. And guess what? A lot of people are only going to consume clips. We have not lost our audio-only listeners. It's the exact same since we went to video. It's like we already had our audio. They like it. They're getting it that way. And then now hopefully we'll have a whole group of people that I got to go to where they're going to consume it. And guess what? Yes. If you see a clip of our show on Instagram, it's not as good as the whole show, but it is better than nothing if that gets to the young boy scrolling. So I just think people are being completely unrealistic, naive, and not pragmatic about this whole approach.

It's like another version of, well, we want it our way. No. How were they doing it? How do you reach them?

No one's saying you don't have to. It's just annoying. It changed the game. Changes the fundamental point of what this was originally, which is we used to say you can't talk to someone for an hour and a half, 2 hours, and leave and not respect them in some way, understand them in some way, like them.

It's hard not to like someone.

You like people when you talk to them. Going back to the conversation you were just talking about with the Black Panthers, like, the reason they hung out is because they spend time together and you start liking each other. And that is what we need. We need people to start liking people who don't agree with us. And clips do not do They do not give you that. You have 1 or 2 minutes and you're not gonna start liking someone because of it, especially because we pick clips that are supposed to get people emotional in some way.

There's like 4 things in all this.

Yeah. Though I feel like we can— Weave them together. Yeah.

I'm sort of where both of you are on this. I've been in media a long time. I started a political blog when I was a freshman at UC Santa Cruz in 2002, was it? 2003? 2003, I think. So I've, like, seen many iterations of this now. And you don't get to choose where the media goes. Look, I think the movement towards short, algorithmically pushed vertical video is bad for people's minds. I think that we are fracturing and weakening our capacities for attention in a way that is bad for us. I worry about my kids. I worry about myself. I worry about my friends. Friends. I'm like a big believer in more of the Jon Haidt kinds of ways of thinking about all this.

Are you guys personal friends? Because I always say Jonathan Haidt, but you went Jon Haidt.

J Haidt. JJ. My man J. I wouldn't tell you what I really call him. I've known Jon a long time.

Brodog68, I mean, that's his email.

You wouldn't believe what his name on Fortnite is. Look, I don't like where it's going, and I think that the literal experience of being on these platforms and flicking, flicking, flicking, having your mind trained to want to be hit with an attentional shock so fast. Like, I genuinely believe it's bad for us, and I don't get to fucking decide if TikTok is a thing.

Nobody asked me.

I agree. I mean, we're doing it.

Nobody came and asked my permission.

Yeah.

And so I'm a little bit on that where you are. But the other thing that I do want to say, like, I really, really agree that the way the toxic masculinity discussion went ended up being itself quite toxic and pushing people away. And one of the things that I always thought was really interesting in some of the figures on the right, or who later got coded as right, who rose in that period— you're sort of Jordan Petersons and some of them— before you got to the real noxious stuff of Andrew Tate, was that there was a lot of talk about virtue and a lot of talk about myth and religion. And what brought people to at least some of these figures— and I mean, Peterson got big on Rogan in part, was again going back to this thing we were talking about at the very beginning. The human desire for self-improvement and self-cultivation is a very, very, very powerful drive. And I think people feel, of all genders and types right now, relatively adrift in a society that is, aside from wanting you to make money, pretty neutral about how you live your life. And by the way, this is not how politics used to be, not how liberalism used to be.

Liberalism used to be very much built on ideas about self-cultivation and freedom, not as the ability to do whatever you want, but as an output of self-mastery, right? Freedom came— you look at how the founders talked about it— freedom was something you had as you began to master the self and its drives and its passions. So you have all these young men, and just men in general, who are looking for some guidance on how to live. Even before we get into the question of feeling rejected by some part, the people who are offering that guidance and were doing so enthusiastically and in a way that was more yoked to the drives and culture of young men. I'm a middle-aged man now, but I was a young man once. Yeah, it's very bro-y, 'cause that's just a word you're using to describe men.

Boys. Yeah.

And boys. I think that one thing that I want to see come back into the politics I am nearer to and more associated with and believe in more but is actually just like a dialog about virtue, a belief that the way we cultivate ourselves, like particularly in this moment of AI and social adrift-ness, is really, really, really important, that the question of what it means to be a human being is more fundamental than what it means to have good politics even. And I think if you are talking to people's desire to be a good, not just a good, but be a kind of like a great human being, they are going to listen to you more when you begin to connect into other things like politics. But if you sort of push that away, or if they feel pushed away by you, they will never listen to you on anything else, in part because you are not listening to them.

Stay tuned for more Armchair Expert, if you dare. Well, look, there's hard and fast data on this. If there's any segment of our society that has declined the worst in the last 15 years, it's young men— educationally, employment-wise. And I think if it were any other group, there'd be an all-hands-on-deck situation. And so you have a guy like Jordan Peterson, who I personally can't stand— I mean, he is very entertaining to watch argue, he's an incredible debater— but what he really was offering was young men— he had a program for what it meant to be a man. And to have virtue. He was wowing them with his debate, but he had something to offer. Not one I agreed with, but that was a big component of his popularity. Because he was addressing young men. This is, "You should be a provider." All these calls to action to better yourself. He was there to do it, and no one else was.

Yeah, and so I think it's not just about— I mean, YouTube and all that is very, very important, and being in the places people actually are is very, very important. But seeing people as full people is very important. And being fundamentally oriented, being compassionate towards, like, their desires is very, very important. And I think that was just something that a different part of the political sphere, or what eventually became a different part of the political sphere, was offering more often to young men. And that's a political failure. It's a failure on a lot of levels, but it's a political failure too. I don't think people should be surprised by the results they got from that. And I always, like, want to say this to my friends on my side, Donald Trump is a genuinely remarkable historic figure. Oh, he is a figure who is himself a rupture in history.

Mm-hmm.

And also he is a very, very, very vulnerable political figure and always has been. We won again in 2024 because inflation had been really high the year before and because Joe Biden was in his 80s and not in his 60s.

And letting 250,000 immigrants in a month.

And by the way, that reflected some of this, like not being willing to listen to people who you thought had bad ideas. Bad politics. But part of Trump's weakness is that he is a virtuous person.

Yeah, he has no real ideas about anything.

I think he has ideas, but people know he's kind of a jerk. They know he says things that are untrue all the time. He's got a lot of personal force to him, but he's not at any level a good man. He's not been good to his wives. He's not been kind to the people he disagrees with. So one of the things—

real belief beliefs?

I think Trump has actually held a couple real beliefs, particularly on trade and immigration, for a very, very, very long time.

Yeah, since the '80s.

He has felt the way he feels about trade since it was Japan, not China. Like, one of my critiques of Trump, he doesn't update what he thinks about anything. He's got like the same views he had in 1987 today.

So true.

Which is a weird thing about him. But you can go back to a Playboy interview where he's talking about what he wants to do to Carg Island in the '80s or '90s. I mean, I talked about it on my show. A lot of I think understanding him and Iran has to do with the fact that he has views formed about Iran during the hostage crisis.

Right. The '79s.

Yeah. But the thing that— it's interesting because on the right, if you look at its culture, there's a lot of talk about virtues. There's J.D. Vance converting to Catholicism and now writing a book on it. But at the very top of it, the people are very corrupt. They're often very cruel. Trump doesn't read. There is not a deep push for personal cultivation or high standard behavior. And to me, both that is a shame because you want more character in your leaders, but it's also a kind of political opportunity because I think we know this hunger exists out there, and people are looking for leaders and media figures and other places that help them think through it and answer it. One of the things that helped the right was that it had found this language and it found this audience. And one of the things that is hurting the right right now is that its actual leader does not embody this way of living. Trump is a successful man, but not a good one. And that creates a lot of opportunity for people who are willing to take some of what the left has done well and then integrate some of what it has not.

But again, what you or a lot of people would see as an Achilles for him, weirdly, if you're among a group that has been told you're a piece of shit, or at least you perceive that you're being told you're toxic and a piece of shit, and you see a man who is actually toxic and a piece of shit, win and dominate despite that and get rich and have his family and have all that. Guess what? That's pretty fucking appealing because you're being told you're a piece of shit. Well, okay, this guy represents I could have a lot despite how you feel about me. Of course that's appealing.

Oh, I'm not arguing, but I think that's why you really want to create an answer, not a mirror. One of my biggest worries is that when I look at the Democratic field right now, I think there's a lot of desire for somebody who is able to mirror parts of Democrats want a fighter. I don't see many people offering an answer to the question Trump has posed, the question you're asking, which is like, if he can get this far doing this, this rich being that way, this powerful being that way, why shouldn't I be that way too? And calling people to their higher selves is tough work.

Yeah.

But I think work worth doing.

Again, that's also framing it as it provokes an entitlement, and I'm maybe arguing it's a salve. It's like, I'm a toxic piece of shit. No one wants me in this world. Well, this guy's going, fuck you. I don't give a shit if you think that way about me. I'm still going to win. It's comforting. It's not even necessarily that he induces some entitlement.

I think, and you really saw this, I think, after the assassination attempt in 2024, I think there's a sense that Trump, for a moment at least, embodied a form of aggressive, ambitious hyper-masculinity masculinity. And that watching him rise from the ashes of his own career, and then in that moment of danger, put up his bloodied fist, it was a moment when I saw a lot of people think, "Oh, there's something different about this figure." And what I'm saying is that the weakness of him is that he can't actually fulfill that promise. I mean, Trump is a very unpopular president. They're probably gonna lose the midterms quite badly. He's gotten us in a very unpopular war with Iran. There's a lot going wrong.

Oh, yeah, yeah.

You see a show like shortcomings. The answer to, I think, what is being looked for there— and by the way, not just for, for men, we've been talking about young men here, but I think it's a more societal thing. We could talk about this. I think AI is going to supercharge this question of what it means to be human. I think the desire for a politics that will answer this not by mirroring it on the other side, but by offering some different vision of like how it might feel to be in this country and what it might mean to a human being worthy of respect and esteem. I just think that's on the table.

A new role model, a new version of masculinity. It can still be someone masculine.

I'll do it. I'll do it. Okay. This is a unique opportunity for me to pressure test this kind of theory I've been mulling over on hikes. I'm embarrassed that I can't remember the author of the book. You're so good at that. Everyone you talk about, you reference, they deserve the credit. I can't think of his name, but I read a book about kind of a different framing of the political parties. You'll know what I bet. And it was basically saying instead of thinking about Democrats and Republicans and Libertarians as issues-driven parties, it's better to think of them as their worldview, which is the conservative worldview is life is a battle between law and order and barbarism. And on the left, the worldview is life is a battle between the oppressed and the oppressors. And the Libertarians, I can't even sum up right now. I've forgotten. But I love that framing. Every time I see one of these dust-ups, it seems quite evident to me that that's what's going on. You even look at the fissure on the left right now over Israel and Palestine, which you cover in this piece. The left's like, what the fuck do we do?

Which oppressed person do we decide is the oppressor? There's this huge tension on the left. Here's my current thought on this. I accept that. I think that's a really good breakdown of the political parties. What I think is they form those identities when those worldviews were very, very pertinent. I think they're vestigial at this point. I think that in the '70s, law and order was a big fucking issue. I mean, the homicide rate, what was happening in New York, every newspaper, like, you had a huge crime epidemic that has just steadily fallen and fallen and fallen. This place has gotten safer and safer and safer, and the logic behind the worldview is kind of eroding. And I would argue on the left as well. In 1960, there were a ton of oppressed people. Gay people could not get married. There was redlining. There were real issues, and we've made great progress. It's not done. I understand there's still racism, but you'd be insane to pretend it hasn't improved dramatically. So I'm wondering, as I see the driving force erode from the identity of both of these parties that were formed in different times that don't feel as relevant anymore, I'm noticing more and more our battles are becoming more and more hypothetical.

When I see what the fights that are raging right now, it's not even something that's happened, it's something that could happen. Because we don't really even have those issues in the same way we did when these parties were formed and the ideology was cemented. What do you think of that as a theory?

I think it probably explains more about social media than it does about politics. So when I think about the fights that are live in politics right now, which is more the world I'm in, Trump's immigration policy, which is a very real policy which is affecting real people's lives, the deportations, ICE, and Customs and Border Patrol in the streets. That has led people to risk their lives. I mean, it's led to American citizens being shot. There's a real fight over something that is not just kind of oppressed and oppressor, that has more to do with national character. Actually, I think to something you're saying about law and order, I think the thing that is very salient about that on both sides right now is feelings of disorder. And people began to associate Democrats, even though crime was not that high, with the feeling of disorder. Disorder in LA with like tent encampments and SF with like people in the streets. And then Trump beginning to create domestic disturbances by sending in armed troops and people in masks created a new kind of disorder, and that became unpopular quickly.

He's cracking down with this hypothetical notion that these illegal immigrants are creating lots of crimes. There's no data for that. In fact, there's data in the opposite direction. So it's a hypothetical fear of what these people are going to do.

That might be fair. I take that as an explanation.

And my frustration with that whole thing is like, and I could be wrong, I didn't poll everyone, but what feels very obvious was everyone kind of wanted them to stop letting 250,000 people a month in, and everyone didn't want them to kick everyone out that's already here. And there's no option for us.

Could have stopped at sealing the border.

Yes.

And he would have been a hero. He's got a lot of things where he could have just not gone as far as he did, and his issues at least would be at 60% in the polls. I think the big thing I was going to say, although I actually think you're correct on the immigration side of that, is right, is that if you look at a lot of the leaders, I just don't think the left and the right break down so much on those lines. So, you know, you just think about George W. Bush, Barack Obama, Joe Biden. I mean, these people are in our lifetime. It's not a million years ago. And their politics are just more complicated. And one of the things that I believe about good politicians is that they are able to contain a thing and then a certain amount of the thing's opposite at the same time. So Obama is a particular master of this. It's almost like a verbal tick where he would start telling you the right-wing position of a thing and what its good points were before he would then tell you his version of the thing. Like, go read The Audacity of Hope.

It all has that structure. Or you think about his famous speech on race. Obama, in his own background, in his own person, is somebody who has the racial contradictions of America inside of himself and is holding both of them and both narratives at the same time. And the left is not just about oppressed and oppressor. One of the good critiques of— maybe not the left, but the Democratic Party— is that it sure has a lot of people who are the winners in this society. The Democratic Party is another party of college-educated Americans. It overwhelmingly wins people with postgrad degrees. So saying you're the party of the oppressed when you don't win working-class Americans—

I don't think it's a party of the oppressed. I think it's a party dedicated to protecting the oppressed.

But see, I think that the contradiction of it is that oftentimes it's not. And one of the critiques of it is that it perpetuates itself. I mean, Abundance, the book I wrote last year, one of the big arguments of that book is that one reason liberal governance often fails is it has become so wrapped around its own dominance of institutions, and it listens so much to its own procedures and its own lawyers that it can't get anything done because it's ineffective. It is the party of the institutions, and the institutions don't work. So it then has to explain away all the institutional failures. And it is very hard to have both moral imagination and be the party who is like, well, you know, we just can't get any of this done. And so that's a dynamic on the left. And on the right, the question of is the right conservative or revolutionary or counter-revolutionary— the right is in a lot of flux. Donald Trump himself was such a disruptive figure in it. Now there's this Trump-Tucker Carlson break that is happening. You know, Ben Shapiro and Tucker Carlson are very different figures now. I think that the parties are very, very, very unsettled.

Yeah, yeah, there's no cohesion. That's why I don't think you can look at issues because they keep flopping.

I had Ben Shapiro he was here on my show, and I was wondering if his book Lions and Scavengers is part of what's in your mind there, though I don't know if that's the one.

You know, I haven't read that.

One of the arguments he's making in that book— I remember having him on the show, and I found that book really weird because I was reading and thinking, he's not naming who he's talking about. Who are the lions? Who are the scavengers? I remember at some point in our interview reading him these J.D. Vance quotes. He's like, yeah, Vance is a scavenger. And it became clear as I was talking to Shapiro that at least a big part of why he was writing that book was this feeling that the right that was emerging was not his right. It wasn't the right that was trying to conserve Reaganism, that it was something else, and it was a white identity politics, and that Tucker Carlson in a way was his, like, mental foil. So there is just, like, a very unsettled dimension. What great politicians do, and I think that we don't always credit them for this, is they are able to balance forces inside of themselves that don't seem reconcilable. Not by necessarily even compromising, but just by kind of absorbing parts of both points. You know, Bill Clinton and welfare reform. I'm not a fan of welfare reform the way it was actually done, but Clinton's recognition that people were angry at the Democratic Party because they felt that it was not asking for enough responsibility from the people that it wanted to help, that was a very potent part of his politics and is part of why he won voters that Democrats no longer win.

And I think selected against on a lot of social and algorithmic media to be able to do what some of these people are able to do, which is to have a view, and at the same time there is space in that view for the vision of the other side, and particularly the moral structure of the other side. So I recognize that sounds abstract, but I think if you go through a lot of different issues that have been a lot of the big fights of our era, the people who do it well are the people who are able to kind of hold hold both things at the same time. Okay.

On Abundance, which has been out for a year now, I loved— I was reading something out of there. This was a year ago, probably when it came out. You made this really kind of elegant and efficient argument that, in my opinion, is really necessary, which is this kind of move to just clinch down, scale back, and consumerism, and just again, the lack of reality of that position and why we need to— I'm probably— I can see by your—

I'm trying to— I'm thinking through Yeah, you're trying to remember.

Maybe I've fucked it all up, but I just thought you were very frank about how we need to get ourselves out of these issues. And I think abundance is weirdly a bad word for some group inside of certain leanings. That's why I loved Bill Gates's book on the environment. He's like, look, we have to develop. It's the fastest way to education and low infant mortality rate. Like, we just have to do that, and we got to figure out how How to Do It. You took kind of a radical view of how to help us handle housing, a lot of different issues, and it's kind of gotten some steam. So just what's the kind of main theme?

You can't have curiosity without some conflict.

Yes.

Abundance, among the reasons that it has both done well and been controversial, is that it is fundamentally a critique of why liberals often fail when they govern. And I'm a Californian. I was in California for much of the writing of the book. You know, the fundamental problem with California is that it doesn't build. It is too hard to build things here. It is too hard to build homes. One of the reasons I'm in California right now and talking to you all is I'm hosting a governor's forum in a couple of days, and it'll probably be out by the time this comes out. But, you know, it's about housing, and I have the top 5 Democrats in the race talking about— look, Governor Newsom and the California legislature passed dozens of housing bills over the past couple of years, and the rate of housing production hasn't gone up. And as a result, in LA, in San Francisco, in San Jose, in many places in this state, it is extremely hard to, say, be a firefighter and be able to afford a home in the city that you protect from burning down.

Yeah.

There is a simple reason that is true, and is that we don't build enough homes. And when you look into why, it is that within the innards of liberal governance, we have made it too hard to do things and too easy to stop things. And this affects clean energy. It is very, very hard to site and build enough clean energy to meet either the decarbonization goals we have on the left.

We can't build public transportation in this state.

Yeah, can you ride the high-speed rail in California yet? Like, no.

It's laughable.

And so how do you create a liberalism that actually builds, a liberalism that delivers what it promises, that is able to solve problems not just through redistribution— the redistribution is important— but also through the creation of more things in the real world? It's really important. Now, there is, as you say, steam and heat around that. And one of the places where it is like attracted a lot of internal argument in the Democratic coalition is this argument that, well, the real problem is corporations and corporate power. And corporations and corporate power often are a huge problem. PAC money, the AI PACs that are now trying to nuke any candidate who wants to regulate AI in any serious way. Corporate money is a real problem in politics. It was a big part of my first book, actually. And also the reality is, if you're building things, because things get built by corporations.

Yeah. And the money gets lent by corporations. Yeah.

And so you need a way to be aligning all these different institutions in society, from the government to the corporations to the unions to the interest groups to all these different things. The question is like, what are you trying to create more of and how do you get there? As opposed to sort of categorizing yourself as I'm pro-corporation or anti-corporation or pro-union or anti-union. I've been a member of unions. I want to make it much easier to use unionize. I want there to be higher union density in this country. I am pretty far on the position of we need more union power, and that doesn't mean unions never make decisions I disagree with. And also unions often have very different views. The building trades in California have been really bad actors on housing. The carpenters unions have been really good actors on housing. So the unions are not one thing, the corporations are not one thing. But I do think there can be a tendency in politics to want say like, these are my allies and I'm on their side, and these are my enemies and I'm against them. But particularly when you're talking about giant groups of institutions or people, you know, what we talk about is NIMBYs, not in my backyard.

I don't want to see us build mixed-use apartment buildings in Big Sur. Right. There are places we should not build over.

Yeah.

And also near mass transit in LA and San Francisco, it should be easy as shit to put up a tall building that people can live in.

Yeah.

And so even there, there are times when it is a very valuable thing to try to block things, but we need to be able to act. And the fact of the matter is that the reality that Texas is more able to build clean energy, even though its politics are pretty anti-clean energy—

Or that they've got the best housing story in America.

Yeah.

Dallas. That should be problematic.

That should be a thing we worry about, right? And try to learn some lessons from.

Okay, so the last thing I want to ask you about is something that's burbling up right now. And this will be my complaint of this state. They have gotten enough votes, it seems, that they're going to put this billionaire net worth tax on the ballot. So this will tax all billionaires 5% of all their assets. We just ran this experiment. This to me is so shortsighted and so lacks pragmatism, which is we did a millionaire's tax on housing, right? We defined a certain echelon of houses that you'd pay an extra amount of tax on in hopes of getting more tax revenue. And all it succeeded in doing was killing velocity of those home sales. We're never resetting the tax base. We've lost way more money by trying to get that extra bit of money. And I just cannot foresee how on earth you're going to tell everyone that owns a company here, because again, if you're not thinking it through, you're like, oh yeah, that guy has $1 billion of cash. Give me 5% of it. That billionaire owns stock in a company. So are you saying sell 5% of your holdings of your company?

Do you think that's what's going to happen? That's not going to happen. That person's going to bounce. Everyone's going to fucking bounce. The amount of money that's going to get lost by this extra grab, to me, is a little emblematic of the lack of pragmatism or reverse engineering reality that we are virtuous and we have great thoughts, but it doesn't feel realistic.

So I've done some reporting on this. I've talked to the union that has put this on the ballot. I've talked to some of the tax experts about it. I have complicated feelings about it for some of the reasons that you described. So let me Let me frame the issue in a slightly broader way. Trump and the Republicans passed a bill that across the country, but in California also, completely guts Medicaid. So there is, I believe it's a multi-billion dollar hole in the Medicaid budget coming up in California. This is true for a lot of states. You're gonna see millions of people kicked off of the rolls of health insurance and nobody really has an answer to it. So one of the big healthcare unions in California has pushed this one-time 5% wealth tax on the richest Californians Californians as a kind of way of plugging this hole. You tax them this money and you plug the hole. Wealth taxes have some big problems. I'm a believer, and I want to say this super clearly, I just had an episode on my show that was great with this tax expert Ray Madoff on how do you bring more of the assets of the rich into the taxable world.

Because basically you're Elon Musk, you're Jeff Bezos, your wealth is tied up in unrealized company stock.

Yes.

And what you can do is borrow against it to fund your life, which is not that expensive compared to how much money you have. And then one day you die and the rules under which it gets passed down are incredibly advantageous. And so it actually really never gets taxed in the way that, like, my income or a normal person's income gets taxed because it's never really treated as income. This is insanely unfair. Like, the very, very rich, not the surgeons, but the startup founders, are They're just evading taxes. We had this leak of tax documents a couple of years ago. The guy went to jail for it. But we saw that Jeff Bezos takes the child tax credit because his taxable income was like $80,000 or under $80,000. A lot of these people are making like a couple dollars a year because all of this compensation is not being treated as income.

Okay.

Yeah.

So we really, really, really need to fix that.

I want to say publicly, I agree with that.

The question of the wealth tax in California is, I think, two big things. One is, can you administer it effectively?

No way.

People disagree, but it's hard. And how much are the paintings worth? And to what degree do you then drive people who start things out of California? Now, the union is doing this— will say, hey, it's a one-time tax to do a one-time thing. It's not that much of their money. The thing is, and I think this is legitimate, these billionaires are like, if people begin to realize you could just put a ballot measure on to tax our wealth— and by the way, the way the thing is constructed, it would be a tax on anybody who's living here now. Moving after the thing passes would not hide your assets from the tax.

That would end up in court.

I looked into this a bit and we have done taxation this way before and it has held up. I don't know what would happen this time. I'm not a tax law expert. You could have Ray Madoff or somebody like that on to do that.

I don't think you can retroactively tax somebody.

We have done it before and it's worked. I was surprised to find that we had done that before and it worked. But I will say that the answer they will give you is that is a tried and tested approach to doing this. I can't adjudicate that particular question.

Okay.

But even if you could, the question of would you push those people now to Texas, to New York, to Colorado, to Miami, to somewhere else where they are not under this threat of ballot-based taxation every time there's a budget hole to plug is a very real one. The thing I would like to see is national-level tax reform that does this in a much fairer and more coherent way.

Yeah.

Yes.

And then does not have the issue of like pushing, you know, billionaires around to different states.

Does anyone think it's going to be a net gain?

I mean, the people pushing it think that, and they have tax experts on that. I mean, you could ask somebody like Emmanuel Saez or Gabe Zuckerman on here and they would give you the case for it. I have also, however, talked to very progressive tax experts who think it won't work and it's a bad idea. And so what I will say is even among people who are values-aligned with this tax and spend all of their time thinking about how to tax rich people more, there is a lot of debate over whether or not this tax is well-structured and doing it in one state is a good idea.

Yeah, I guess time will tell if it passes, but I think there'll be a lot less tax revenue if that passes.

If you begin to push— if you really do push billionaires out of the state, then you will over time get like a Laffer curve phenomenon where you have reduced the total taxable revenue. So the question of whether or not people will leave because of the tax— and again, there's disagreement on this question— it's not that much of their money. It's over 5 years. You could do 1% of your wealth over 5 years. I mean, if these people are doing investments in any reasonable way. They're making more of that on interest or on returns. But if you feel that in California you're going to get a very specific bad deal you will not get in Florida, or even that you will not get in New York— we're not doing this in New York, right?

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Or that you will not get in Connecticut or whatever.

Anywhere but California.

And that's why you don't see Gavin Newsom behind this. Yeah, I've had Gavin Newsom on my show. We talked about wealth taxes. He is pro them nationally but does not want this one in California because as a the guy responsible for making sure California has enough revenue, he does not feel in the long run this would be good for California.

I mean, it's the first biggest economy in the world.

It's hard to leave the country. It is not hard.

No.

To move to Austin.

No.

Yeah, exactly.

I have a house in Tennessee. I choose to be a resident here, and I'm happy to pay the taxes to a point. If you tell me that after I've already paid half of it, which I was happy to give away, that I now need to give the shit I saved, another half of that. I like Tennessee. I'll be there. I think everyone has a limit.

I think there are limits. The thing the union behind this will say is like, hey, it's a one-time thing. It's a one-time thing. The thing is, people don't believe it's a one-time thing. Once you show that the move works, the feeling is the move will be repeated.

Yeah. Yeah. And it probably will.

And so like, if their tax theory is right and you could do it in this retroactive way, well, that actually increases the incentive to move before somebody does that to you again. I don't know how many would move. On some level, I think the point of being being rich is to not have to live in places you don't want to live as much as the place you do want to live.

But money's a sickness. You don't think rationally.

I've met people who have a counter on their phone to make sure they are spending enough days in Florida.

Yes.

So they're taxed in Florida as opposed to in New York.

That's right.

And so they're all—

I wouldn't do that. Oh, and then I just want to say out loud as well, I don't mind that this place already has the highest taxes across the board, because you have to acknowledge that you cannot start Google elsewhere. I can't ever make the amount of money I ended up making in Michigan, and I should have to pay for that if I could have stayed in Michigan and made that amount of money. I can't, and all of these companies cannot. So you do have to pay for that. You have to pay for what is creating—

ethically give back to the place that gave you—

it's a place that creates great wealth, and that should come with a price tag. So I am in favor of that, but This to me just seems insanely shortsighted. And I do think you'll see a massive migration out of here. I mean, there's already been a pretty significant migration and it wasn't even that bad.

I have met people with the kinds of wealth that would be targeted under this tax. And one of the things that I think even many of them understand is that the tax code as it exists is really, really, really unfair in in their favor.

This is the Warren Buffett speech, the Warren Buffett kind of thing.

The key thing I think to understand is that income is taxed at a very high level and assets are not. And by the way, what's even more unfair about it is that the wealth most people have, which is a home, does get taxed, right? There is a straightforward tax on a home that is paid year on year. I mean, California's property tax.

Yeah, but if you sell it, your capital gains, 20%.

There's cap gains. What you you can do with shares of a company, you are able to do so many weird tricks and then eventually pass things on that it just kind of forever can protect too much from being seen as what it is, which is income. And so it creates this push for people to move all their compensation out of salary and into stock. And even many of the people who benefited from it said to me, like, this isn't fair. The estate tax, it's not even a thing anymore.

More.

We've gone from having a couple hundred thousand filings on it every year to in the low thousands because we have just made it so full of holes. And we really, really, really need, like, a comprehensive national restructuring of the tax code. Not because billionaires are bad. Yeah, not because rich people are immoral, but just because we should have fundamental fairness across society in the way different forms of income are treated. And this to me is part of where I think like being able to balance a couple of things, you know, in politics at once are important. There is a tremendous engine that benefits America in the amount of corporate ingenuity we have. It is good for America that we are as innovative as we are and want to keep that going. You know, if you want to imagine universal childcare in New York, it is only possible because so many people have made so much money in New York. Those two things are actually quite linked. But the fact that it is not bad to have enterprise does not mean that it is good to have the kinds of dynastic wealth we're now seeing. Does not mean that any way you hide your money from the government is actually a moral thing to do.

I think the right way to think about the politics here is both to be certainly on the left. I wish there was more appreciation for how much benefit can come from corporate ingenuity. There's also corporate malfeasance, but there is real benefit from corporations doing doing great work. Like, if we're gonna layer this whole country in solar panels, it's going to be corporations doing that. But at the same time, not to have let the fucking tax code become blind to the primary ways wealth, particularly mass wealth, is now being made, and how rich the very richest people have gotten— again, not the Beverly Hills surgeon, but the Bezos, Musk, who's closing in on a trillion dollars. Like, yeah, I don't even think we know how to conceive of that.

No.

Of wealth.

No.

Right? And now they're using that money very aggressively politically to buy things like Twitter and then use it more politically to move into elections because Citizens United created these huge loopholes for money. We really, really need to do a rebalancing where we're just trying to make a more stable and fair playing field for everybody, not to punish people, but just to create a fundamental sense that society works in a transparent and fair fashion. I think the side that can crack that code, we'll actually have cracked something pretty big.

Mhm.

Yeah. Well, Ezra, you're so smart. I love that you are a terrible student. I just love it.

What does that mean?

What, what? 2.2 grade point graduating high school.

Just didn't care.

Just hair iron.

I cared. I was not good at— it's a long story, but I really had a lot of trouble in school. If I could have made it better by caring, I would have made it better. I did not enjoy it.

Okay, well, that's hopeful for people who—

and then his fucking dad's a math professor.

It was not a thrilling period in the household for me.

So I love when poor students— that was the David Letterman scholarship. I don't know if you know that. Yeah, I think he had a scholarship standing in like Muncie, Indiana, and it was for average students because he was a shitty student. So it was not—

it's great. It's like, let's let this person— yeah, let's help this person.

Yeah, so as a fellow 2.2 grade point average high school graduate, I see you. I appreciate you. I love when And I can't wait for you to come back.

It's great to see you both.

Oh, and by abundance.

Stay tuned for the Fact Check. It's where the party's at. It feels like it's Friday.

It does. I have Friday energy. Yes. Bring in my stuff.

Yeah, me too. We had a busy work week.

We did.

And we're ending it now with this Fact Check.

We had a busy week.

Yeah.

And what I am reminded of is we used to do much harder weeks. I'm feeling my age. We did 8 in a week at times.

Yeah, we've done 8 plus some Armchair Anonymous.

We might have even gotten to 10 in a week.

Yeah, I'm sure we have. But it was still— this was a pretty hefty week.

Yeah, but do you think you're getting weaker? I'm getting a little weaker.

Yeah, probably. But—

You're also much younger than me. 20 years. Thank you, Robert.

Well, age is just a number, as we know.

To some extent.

Speaking of aging, you had a cough attack in the middle of an episode we just recorded. And then I started to have a cough attack. I don't know if you noticed.

I heard you do like a sneeze.

No, there was two sneezes and coughing and cough attack. And then I really got in my head. Head. Well, I did cough earlier this morning, but I did get in my head that, oh, this is so psychosomatic.

Oh sure, contagious, like yawns.

Exactly, like yawns. Like yawns. A yawn, Y-A-W-N, the motion you make with your mouth. Not yawn.

Not yawn.

Is that how it's spelled?

Yawn.

Oh, because they were saying urine.

Yeah, urine is yawn.

Oh, I've You say that?

Yeah, you never put together that was urine?

No, I thought that was just something you said.

We— Josh and I— Josh Nathan, my favorite person to write with when I was at the Groundlings. Yeah, he and I had a sketch we tried to get on stage for a whole year, to the point where we would have a showcase, uh, at the end of the year for like whatever executives would come. Yeah.

Oh, fine.

Yeah, yeah, kind of like a professional showcase. Yeah. And you got to pick your own phone. So Josh and I were like, fuck it, let's do it, because she's not gonna put it in the show. And it was two old men in the South sitting by a creek, and they were obsessed with nuts. Oh sure, like peanuts, cashews, walnuts. You know, that is a jacketed nut, right? And then it somehow evolved to they were opening up, and one guy had to admit to the other guy that he was using your bathroom. And I don't know what came over me, but I saw your wife's pantyhose.

Oh my God.

I decided in that moment to filter my yawn.

Oh, wow.

It was this whole coming clean about having filtered his yawn.

It's about secrets being revealed.

Yeah.

Through a pantyhose that he found in his friend's house. But they were also eating a tremendous amount of different nuts and they kept going, "That is a decadent nut." Oh, wow. And we had dumb hats on and a bunch of mustaches. Mustaches and stuff. And guess what? It worked.

It worked. You got an agent?

No, I mean, like, it, it was, uh, people laughed. Yeah, it was a very successful sketch.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

And it was fun because I did love our director. It's not like I didn't love her, but she was like, she's a— I need to admit it, it kind of worked. She just gives a kind of work.

Good for her.

We got to do it once.

Well, that's really fun.

Um, yes. So for years I used to say that as a decadent nut out of nowhere, and no one really know where that came from. And yawn is also an outgrowth of that. It's really funny how these tiny little things end up being your personality and no one's like, where'd that come from? What is he doing?

I thought it was a word for it. I am learning all this. Oh, wow. You think I don't listen to you, but I do. And then I—

It's just upside down a little bit.

It's upside down. Do you ever talk to him still?

Not enough. Not enough. For the amount of love and respect and admiration I have for him. Yeah, not enough. He moved away. He became a professor.

Oh yeah. Where?

He just like regrouped, I think somewhere in Orange County.

Oh cool. A professor of nuts.

Of decadent nuts. Only decadent nuts, which you'll find that we thought most nuts were pretty decadent. They are decadent.

They are actually. They are.

They're rich.

What's your favorite nut?

It would be a toss-up.

Uh-huh.

Um, the Marcona almond.

You do love a Marcona almond.

Mostly. And we just had a chef on, ding, ding, ding.

Yeah.

Uh, previous interview where I coughed.

Yeah, coughed.

Talk about texture. What I love about a Marcona almond is you can put it between your molars and crack it perfectly in half, and then the inside is the most decadent—

You love the smoothness.

Felties.

Suede.

Just so soft.

It's very smooth.

It's almost pornographic. What the tenderness of the inside of that nut feels when you rub your tongue on it.

I've done it. I agree. I agree, it's very soft.

It's—

well, it's not soft.

Do you think it's sexual?

It's smooth.

It's so smooth and tender.

But it's not really tender because you have to crunch into it.

No, the inside, when it pops open in half, that freshly revealed inner nut is—

It's very smooth. But I still don't think I'd classify it as tender because like, it's still hard.

Of course it's hard. Just this— it's so soft on the inside. I do love that. I do love that nut. Uh, what's your favorite nut?

Um, go on.

But truly, yeah, if calories weren't a thing, which they're not on your birthday—

see, that's another one of these things.

Yeah, callback that no one knows about. Yeah. Um, uh, uh, uh, a macadamia nut.

Oh, that's your fave?

Fuck yeah. I mean, it's like eating a stick of butter and crunch and sweet Sweet. They're so good. Do you like a macadamia?

Um, I don't dislike it, but I don't think about them. They don't pop up for me, right?

Unless you're in Hawaii. That was mine. Macadamia. Yeah, what a nut, right? Yep. Yeah. You ever filter your yawn through a pantyhose?

Okay, well, mine is pretty basic.

Uh, I'll throw up if you say one. There's one nut I'll throw up if Is that a peanut? No, but I can't eat peanuts.

It's not a peanut.

I know, but if you said walnut—

I love walnuts. That's not what I was gonna pick, but I do love walnuts.

They're great. But if that was your favorite nut—

I would say I eat those the most because I cook. I have some dishes that require walnuts. So if I'm being honest with myself and you, I probably consume walnuts the most of any nut.

Okay.

Okay.

Okay.

Like, a walnut is so good in a salad.

It's great in a salad.

It is so good.

But it's got the opposite thing that a Marcona almond has in that it's like a— it's like an atrophied testicle. I mean, scrotum. It's just so convoluted and nubby and gross. Like, the texture is gnarly. No, you'd agree? It looks like a brain. That's why they thought they were good for your brain.

Well, they are good for your brain because they look like a brain. No, because they They have good stuff in there.

Okay.

I don't think to me it looks or feels like a testicle because it's still, unless your testicles are like extremely hard.

Freeze-dried testicles is what I would say that they are.

Stop.

Okay, stop. Right? Now you understand.

No, I don't want to do this. I love walnuts. Okay. Pistachios are probably my fave.

You don't mind the work.

It takes eating. Exactly. I don't love that part, but I love the taste.

You'll buy a bag of pre-shelled?

I will, but they're much better shelled. They taste better with the shell. Yeah. So pistachios, or I also like a raw cashew. I don't like it when they're like smoked or salted or the way you— it's hard to find a raw cashew.

I do like a cashew. In fact, that was one of the nuts in the sketch that got a lot of attention.

Cashew nut. Yeah.

The only thing I'll complain about a cashew is when you get going on a bunch of them. It can become a cud.

What do you mean?

Oh, like, you know, like cows chew a bazillion pounds of grass in their mouth and they form it into a cud. It's like a— it's like a big blob of paste.

Ew, you're ruining so many.

Yes. And I think cashews in particular have that tendency to— like, you've had a bunch of them and you're just like, oh, I gotta wash— I gotta brush my teeth or swallow a lot of water or something.

You don't get that experience.

That— okay, you're probably eating them at the velocity.

No, I don't. I eat them one by one.

Sure, that's healthy. Yeah, I'll grab a handful and just pop them.

Yeah, people do that. That's very, um, indulgent. No, it's arrogant. No, it's, it's kind of a sign of something like older men do. Yeah, they like, you know, have like a handful of nuts.

That's what the sketch was about. Oh yeah, yeah, men, older men love their nuts. They'll carry around— you'll see older men with Little sack of nuts.

They always have nuts.

I can't wait for that phase in my life where I'm like, you know, kids, where are my— where's my nuts?

Yeah, yeah, it's coming. So pivot.

Yeah.

Um, yesterday I played mahjong.

Oh yeah, with who?

Neighborhood.

Oh, the neighborhood one.

Yeah, neighborhood gals.

And did you get neighborhood gossip?

I do get really good gossip, but not about the neighborhood.

Not about the neighborhood.

No.

I don't know.

But I do get really good gossip.

Really?

Yeah.

In our industry?

Yeah. Well, in our industry and some other industries. It's interesting. Oh. It's fun. You know, they're new friends.

Yeah.

And new friends are interesting when you're older.

How so?

Well, it's also fun because, so Rachel was there, one of my oldest friends. Rachel is fantastic.

Okay, this is Good Time Charlie to the max.

Oh yeah. And this is a shout out: if you live in LA and you want to learn mahjong, you really should reach out to Rachel. Rachel Field.

Oh, um, you really put her on blast.

No, she is now teaching. Yeah, she should. She's been playing since she was 7.

Oh wow.

Her mom is a big mahjong player. Her mom plays tournaments and stuff. Like, she's very, very very skilled and good and a great teacher.

Okay.

So, um, if— and mahjong's really hot right now, so if you're wanting to learn—

we've noticed it's a bit gendered. We were just having a conversation about mahjong. Yeah, a lot— I know a lot of women that are super into mahjong. I don't know any dudes that are into it.

I know a couple, and I think you would actually really like it.

Really?

Yeah, because there's— there's strategies, but there's also like— yeah, you would like it, and you feel really really good when you win. Um, but winning is fun. Winning is so fun. Yeah, it just is. I wonder—

earmark that.

Okay, but, um, anyway, so reach out to Rachel if you want to learn mahjong. I highly recommend her. But she was there, and she's an old friend, one of my oldest LA friends. And, um, then I have these new friends.

You're presenting the new you, right?

But then there's this old lady there.

Yeah, who knows everything.

Yeah, she knows everything.

The bitches and the dumb.

Yeah. So it's good. It kind of keeps you in your place. You can't like really put on a full personality because like I was telling— God, I probably shouldn't. Well, yeah, I was telling—

can I just point out, I love how many times you decide I shouldn't say this, and then I watch and the time gets shorter and shorter. By the way, it's just gonna be— then I'm gonna, I'm gonna be able to detect it in an eyebrow raise, and then you're gonna motor on. But it just, it does get shorter and shorter. Well, no, how am I gonna— and then you just go, yeah, I'm just gonna—

yeah, sometimes I do it, sometimes I don't.

Oh, so it seems like most times you do.

Well, you don't know.

Okay.

And sometimes it's to protect others, sometimes it's to protect myself.

That's right.

Normally if it's to protect others, I nix it. Well, not always.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, I know. It's really tricky.

It's hard. It's hard. Probably hard to be my friend. You don't know.

And exciting.

You just never— some friends like it and then some friends I don't think like Well, you know, we spent like a whole Fact Check basically talking about Ana the other day, and I almost texted her like, hey, like, we talked about you a lot on the Fact Check, but I didn't tell her.

You didn't?

I know it will get back to her because she has family members listen. She doesn't herself listen. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Rude.

Yeah.

And, but I'm just gonna let her find out on her own.

Okay.

Yeah. Anywho, so So I was telling them about something I did that I was proud of.

Okay.

And it felt kind of weird to say in front of Rachel for some reason.

Like you were bragging or—

No, no, no. I, I put myself out there.

Okay. Okay.

In a way that I don't normally do sexually.

Like romantically.

Romantically. Yes.

Okay. Oh, I wanna know.

I'll tell you.

Okay. I don't wanna tell everyone.

I'll just leave it at I put myself out there sort of romantically.

Okay. Okay.

Um, and I was proud of myself, but when I was telling them, it was, it's like with a different voice than if I was just telling Rachel.

Right. Yeah.

And so I felt kind of like caught in between.

Fraud.

Who am I?

Oh.

Uh-huh. Am I the old me or the new me?

Yeah. Uh, crisis of, uh, identity.

Yeah. And, I think, did she—

did you then discuss it with Rachel? Like, hey, did that seem—

I mean, more like the new girlfriends are like, oh my God, I love this, it's so exciting.

Like, I love this look for you.

Yeah, basically. And Rachel's like, I'm so proud of you. Like, you know, right?

She understands the weight of it. Yes, the journey.

But she also probably doesn't want to be like, Monica, yeah, yeah, this is great, you know, in front of my new friends.

She doesn't want to, yeah, put you on blast.

Yeah, she's trying to be a good friend with your new friends. Exactly.

Is there a specific friend in the group that you most want the approval of?

No, no, they're both pretty— they're both just cool.

Okay.

And, and smart and successful ladies. They're successful ladies. And I love a successful lady.

Stay tuned for more Armchair Expert. If you dare. Okay, on games.

Yes.

So we went last night up to Mess Hall.

Fun.

And you know what's interesting about Mess Hall? First of all, I love it. Yeah, let's just start there. I love Mess Hall. Um, but it is a really hard restaurant to gage how many people are going to be there because of— and I didn't think of this until we arrived— they get Greek Theater traffic.

No, same with Little Dom's.

Okay, so people come to see a show at the Greek Theater and they're there early because parking's a nightmare and driving somewhere, and they just said, let's have dinner. So we pulled up and like the parking lot was full where they were having to move 10 cars to get one car out. What is going on? Yeah, get in there, notice a lot of people are in cowboy gear. I'm like, oh, this is great. So I immediately— oh, there's a show at the Greek and it's, uh, country western, country and western, sit down next to a group of people. So I kind of brought this on myself.

Okay.

And I say, are you guys going to the Greek? And they're like, yeah. And it's like 4 30-somethings, mixed gender, probably couples, and then an older lady.

Oh, okay.

And I'm like, you guys going to the Greek? And they're like, oh, yeah. And I go, yeah. And you seem to have a bit of a country and western theme, is it? And they're like, oh, yeah, it's so-and-so. I didn't recognize the name. You got to listen to him. Russell Dickerson. Yes, Russell Dickerson. Do you know Russell Dickerson?

I do not.

Me neither. But these— everyone there was fun. I bet, I bet he's great. They're also playing country on the, on the hi-fi.

They're keeping it.

Yeah, I like that. I was like, oh, the manager's paying attention.

I love that.

It was all great. We were sitting outside, so we're playing spades as a family, and we've had a couple nice interactions with this table right next to us. And, uh, Lincoln's my partner. She has gone nil. L, and I have probably 6 cards left, and I have Joker low, 2 high, 2 L, Queen, oh, 9, 8, 6 left.

Spades.

All spades.

Oh shit. And pretty.

Yes. And I'm in the middle of like playing, and then the old lady leans over and she goes, your dad has all spades.

Oh no. And, um, oh, oh no, they don't know how you get—

well, no, this is great, you're already where my family is, which makes me think maybe I am worse than I know. But so I just laugh, and then the younger guy goes, oh, so-and-so— they make a joke about her drinking. Oh. And then I look at her in the eyes.

She's the older one, you said?

Yeah, the older one.

Okay.

And then I look her in the eyes, and I just am immediately muscle memory. I know this woman so well.

You've been there.

I've been there a million times. I'm in Michigan. Yeah, one of the ladies is too hammered and they can't control her. So all I literally did was just clock, oh right, that's that person, that's who we're dealing with.

Okay.

And then we continue on, and then someone says, oh, I hope that didn't ruin anything. What are you guys playing? And I go, spades. Reads, and then they know what Spade is. So, well, the younger people— but two of the people that were younger knew. So they knew that she basically just completely blew the whole— yeah, we should just throw it in.

Yeah.

And now they're kind of apologizing more. And then, and then our, our older friend is like— now she's kind of getting more involved, whatever.

Oh no.

I was super— I thought it was super nice. Again, this is back to the last fact check.

It is.

But we're leaving. We, we were done. We were playing after the meal, and we had paid the bill and that hand was over and then we packed it up and left.

Okay.

And then we got in the car and there was this little moment between the ladies and they were like, I don't know if one of the girls said it first or Kristen said it first, was like, were you a little mad back there, Dad? And I go, no, I wasn't mad. I just kind of clocked who I was dealing with.

Yeah.

And then one of them said, are you sure? I didn't see a nostril flare.

Yeah, yeah. You can't really help it. It's okay.

And I'm like, I'm so sincere in my heart. I know when I'm mad at somebody.

Yeah.

Or I know when I feel aggressive and defensive. Like, I was just really nice. Or if I'm mad at someone, I let them know. I generally don't hide it.

Well, you weren't being mean to her.

No, I was totally nice to her.

Yeah, but—

and if I really was angry at her, I would have made a kind of cutting joke, right?

Right.

I'd have been like, oh, you might want to stop at the other table, and I would have listed a high-stakes thing that she could have ruined, right? Like, I would have found a way to burn her in in a joking way if I was angry.

Right.

Because that's kind of what I'll do, right? If a guy is getting a little aggressive, I'll make a joke that's more aggressive. But I didn't do any of that. I didn't participate, and nor did I feel— and I was like, guys, I know you saw what you saw, and I don't want to gaslight anybody, but I know in my chest when I'm angry.

Yeah.

And I wasn't. It was more just acknowledgment. But do you think there was, like, maybe, like, 3 seconds before you did the right thing that you, like, like, well, that's what they're claiming, that they saw the nostrils flare up when I— when she outed my dad.

Like, I can— like, I know what laugh you did. It's a specific laugh. So anyways, whatever, that sucks. That is annoying.

I wasn't even— I thought it was fun because again, I had what I had. It wasn't going to impact anything. I was gonna win the next like 7 anyways. It's just like, it's more the— you were clearly playing a game. Yeah, no one ever wants to know what someone has. And then on top of it, the game was spades, which is hilarious.

It's also just like, mind your own business. I mean, there's a lot here that is annoying, objectively.

Yeah. And I was just more like, oh right, this person's in the state of mind. Yeah, intoxication-wise, where they thought that was going to land really big.

I get it.

She saw cute little girls. She said your dad. Yeah, she thought not. These girls are gonna love this. She doesn't even know who— that there's partners. She probably thinks it's me. We're all against each other.

I know.

And so, good, pick on the big guy. That's what you should do. So I wasn't— I understood it all. I just was like, what, what come— what does this lady do next?

Yeah, that's, you know, what's coming next. That's a lot. That's exhausting. That's, um, that's frustrating. I would be frustrated, and, and I would probably—

I knew immediately how embarrassed the 30-year-old were. Yeah, I could see them panic, and my heart went straight to them. So I was just like, oh, there's no big deal, you know? Like, I was laughing off for their benefit.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

It's so fun to play games at restaurants. This is kind of like the family hack.

Yeah, you guys play a lot.

We'll bring— not mahjong, we bring Rummy Cube.

Yeah.

Oh, fun.

Or spades.

Yeah.

And I think the best thing we've— best parenting decision we ever made in our lives was forcing them to learn how to play spades.

And you need 4. Like, this is the issue with spades. This is always the issue. You need 4 people who know how.

I know. I God, I wish there was a 2-person Spades that was just as invigorating.

I know, same. There's not that many good 2-person games.

You haven't really been playing much, huh?

I played when my parents were here. Jess taught my parents, remember?

Oh yeah, I do.

That was really fun. That's probably the last time I played. I don't get to play that often again because we need 4. 2-person games, there aren't as any good ones. There just aren't. Sometimes Jess and I play solitaire together as a team.

Two-man euchre is pretty fun. Okay, it's pretty fun. Aaron and I have played a couple million hands of two-hand euchre, but it's a little bit— it ends up being back and forth, right? Like, if you deal, you kind of have a bigger advantage, right? And then there's a lot of just, it's your turn, you're going to get points, and my turn, with exceptions.

But yeah, yeah, well, um, yeah, I haven't played in a while. I would love to play soon.

Um, summer's upon us. Are you so excited? I'm starting to think a lot about summer.

Me too. It's starting to feel summery here. I went on a night walk last night with Rachel, and after—

see any coyotes?

No. I did tell her though, I was like, be prepared for some coyotes. I said, this is what you have to do. You just keep walking and you act confident and you don't run away like I did. Yeah, but we didn't see any.

Oh, okay.

And, uh, and it was the— it was was like the sun was going down, but it was like 8. Oh, it was so nice. And I've grilled twice now.

Oh, you did it again.

I'm becoming a grill master.

Two times it only took you. Yeah, it takes some people years.

No, I'm not. It's gonna take me a long time, but I'm becoming— like, I, I have a, um, an oath to myself to get really good at it. So far I'm just doing chicken.

You don't love steak, right?

I love steak.

You do?

I do love steak.

You haven't wanted to cook a steak yet?

I do want to, but I'm not ready.

Okay.

Okay.

They just smell so good when they're cooking, even if you don't even eat it. If you just get to cook it, I know, it smells so good.

But I want to cook— I want to make a steak salad.

Okay.

Max makes steak salads in the summer, and now I want to make summertime steak salad. Yeah. Yeah. And so I'm going to do that, but I'm not ready yet. I'm going to do chicken a couple more times.

Okay.

I don't think I have a good— Do you ever do chicken?

I thought you were about to say, do you ever microwave your chicken?

Hey, do you ever—

I used to cook chicken. I used to cook a lot of wings.

Yeah, without a skin.

I haven't cooked chicken in a long time. Not to bore everyone with my steak journey, but I hated steak all grown growing up.

Yeah, you did.

And you may remember about 8 years ago, I was like, what am I missing? Yeah, I went to the store and I got every cut, and then I ate all them, and then I discovered, oh, I do love steak if it's a ribeye.

Yeah, you like ribeyes.

I'm obsessed with the ribeye. Yeah, since I've been cooking those, that's all. Like, I cook hamburgers or I cook, uh, smash burgers.

I thought about it. I thought about it when I was grilling. I was like, what? Dax hasn't made smash burgers in a long time, or he has and he hasn't invited me over.

I have really fallen off I made them over Fourth of July in Nashville.

Mm-hmm.

But yeah, I've fallen off and that's unacceptable. I should. I love it. I should do a big smash burger.

So soon. I would love that. They're so good.

Yeah. Any burger that you eat 3 or 4 of is a good sign.

So good. Anyway, I think I'm doing too much marinade.

Okay.

And I'd like to figure out a better situation.

Back off a little bit.

Yeah.

Okay.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Because it's too flavorful, like the marinade?

No, no, it's just like, I think it's too wet.

Okay. Does it—

On the grill.

Yeah, and all that sugar burns.

Yeah, and it sticks.

It cakes it up really. Yeah, do you have a good device to clean it off?

Yeah, I bought a scraper thing.

Okay, great. Make sure you use that.

I don't think I have the right tools. I don't know. I have a lot to learn.

Yeah, yeah.

I'm going to be humble.

Even though you're a grill master.

I'm on my way to being a grill master. I have a lot to learn. I'm going to watch YouTube videos.

Oh, good, good, good. AI is your best friend when it comes to cooking now.

That is really true. Yeah, that is really, really true. Um, yeah, summer, it's upon us.

Yeah, because the kids are in the countdown phase of how many days left of school.

I wanted to ask you that. Okay, when do they get out?

Unfortunately, they get off two different times, which that all ends next year, which I'm so thrilled about. Same spring break, same Christmas break. Um, but Delty's like, I want to say the 13th of June, right? And Lincoln's a full week or maybe even more before.

Before.

Okay, Lincoln's down to 9 days, I think.

Oh, fine.

Yeah.

And then they go back like second— first or second week of August?

No, like third and fourth.

Oh, is it? Yeah. Oh, I thought it was like this.

Calvin's August 10th.

I thought it was around then.

All good for an LAUSD school.

Yeah, I think so.

I also thought it was—

that's criminal.

But that's— I was, I was like, LA kids get— they don't get enough summer.

No, no, no, no, no.

My friends in Georgia, their kids are out by Memorial Day.

Yeah. And then they come back on Labor Day, literally the right before Labor Day. And pretty sure that's how it was when I was a kid.

Yeah, I would start school right as my birthday was starting.

So, so end of August, August 24th, we get back to school.

I wonder if Jack McBrayer will text me on August 24th.

24th.

Oh shit, that hasn't come out yet.

Um, it'll be—

it will have just come out.

Okay, it'll be out by this.

I wonder if he's gonna text me on August 24th.

Let's see.

You know who used to text me on August 24th?

Dave Koechner. Yes, sweet Dave Koechner.

Yes, he's my birthday buddy and he used to text me. Sweet boy. He did stop.

We've—

I mean, I haven't seen him in a long time.

It's been a long time. Bless This Mess was a while ago.

I know, 6 years. But it was sweet. It was a nice pop-out. Yeah, yeah.

Maybe you should text him.

I should.

Again, this is back to your— you were proud of yourself. Like, you know, just do it. Two-way streets. It's a good practice just to instigate, right? Instigate, instigate, instigate. Um, wanna do some facts?

Yeah, let's do some facts.

Ezra.

Ezra, smart man. Very smart man.

I will say I have anxiety both times we've interviewed him. I get anxious. Oh, because I, I know we're probably gonna debate a little bit, and he's such a skilled debater.

He is.

But when I was doing my research of him, I don't know if— I don't think I said this in the episode, but I'm watching him on his own show with his own co-author.

Yeah.

In his nature, even with his good friend who's his co-author, the friend will say something, he'll go, well, not really. He is a highly disagreeable person.

Yeah.

Which is part of his charm, right? It's like what he is. So I was like, I'm watching it before we're about I'm like, oh yeah, no, almost whatever I say, he'll probably go, well, no, not really, because that's just his nature. I was watching it on his own podcast with his own friend.

That's what he gets joy out of. Yeah, that's what we used to get joy out of as a duo. It started to slip away a little bit because it got fighty.

Well, I think our context changed. Like, there became a political environment that made all these debates have an emotional weight that they previously didn't have. Like, If we're arguing about Adnan, yeah, we're very removed from it. It doesn't affect us ultimately.

Yep.

And so we can have opinions and that's fine. But like, once it got into all the political stuff, it just got really emotionally charged.

That's true. That's very true.

Yeah. I can imagine a simpler time in the future where we are free to argue.

I hope it comes back. It's fun to do.

Ezra.

Ezra. Tessa Morale. Tessa Morlan, you said, has been studied on HIV patients? Yes, Tessa Morlan is an FDA-approved synthetic peptide used specifically to treat HIV-associated lipodystrophy, or lipodystrophy maybe. It is a growth hormone releasing factor analog prescribed to reduce excess visceral adipose tissue.

Abdominal fat?

Deep belly fat in adults with HIV. Mm-hmm. Stimulates the pituitary gland to release growth hormone. Bone. Cool.

Really kill.

Kill. I also looked up what NADs do. People are on those. Uh, they deliver a vital cellular coenzyme directly into the body, bypassing the digestive tract for maximum absorption. These are the injections. They are commonly used to naturally elevate energy levels, promote anti-aging cellular repair, enhance mental clarity, and aid in addiction recovery. That's interesting.

Well, if your chemistry is fried from the addiction, maybe it's helping rejuvenate all of that?

Maybe.

Yeah, because you kind of fatigue your adrenal system and your hormonal system.

Yeah.

And so maybe it helps it repair and get back to its fighting weight.

NAD+ is a coenzyme found in all living cells that plays a major role in metabolism, DNA repair, and energy production. As you age, your natural NAD levels decline, which can lead to fatigue, brain fog, and a slower metabolism.

Maybe I should rethink NAD+. NAD. Yeah, I don't need another peptide.

If you want to.

Yeah, it's too— it's— I'm at maximum amount of— I, I— my routine is so goddamn long.

Yours are probably include— it's probably already doing this, the other shit I'm doing.

Yeah, well, I feel pretty damn good, I'll say that.

Then yeah. Okay, did Trump go on Lex Fridman's podcast? Yes, September 24th, he did do that. Okay. Um, did Brené Brown quit her Spotify podcast because of rogue She paused her podcast in 2022, but she resumed a few weeks later. Oh, is the book that you cited about liberals looking at the world as oppressed versus oppressor and Republicans or conservatives looking at it as barbarism versus law and order. Law and order. Is that called The Three Languages of Politics?

I think so. What's the author?

Arnold Kling.

Yeah, I think that's it.

Okay.

Yeah, yeah.

The Three Languages of Politics. The oppressor versus oppressed axis, associated with modern liberals, progressives. They view political struggles through the lens of protecting the underprivileged from systemic abuse. Civilization versus barbarism axis, associated with conservatives/Republicans. They frame their political goals around defending time-tested morals, order, and Western values against chaos, decay, and barbarism. Liberty versus coercion. Access associated with libertarians. They prioritize individual rights over government intrusion and coercion. Arnold King.

There we go. Great book. I really loved it. It's short too, as I recall.

Oh, that's nice. Well, what is short? What is time?

It was 6 pages.

Uh-oh.

I think you just read the whole book out loud.

Oh great. Oh, where was Letterman scholarship? Scholarship. It was at Ball University— Ball State University.

There we go. Is that in Muncie, um, Indiana?

It is.

Yeah.

Yes.

Okay, great.

According to Rob, um, according to their website, probably according to Rob's computer, created a scholarship for C students in telecom.

Oh good, C students.

Yeah, it's great.

What if you were tanking your GPA just to get the scholarship?

Scholarship.

Yeah.

Um, a self-described C student at Ball State created a scholarship for C students in telecommunications, awarding up to $10,000 based on creativity rather than grades. That's cool.

Yeah, that's very cool.

Um, all right, that's really it.

Well, I was scared, intimidated, and then it was great. Yeah. And we— and I enjoyed it. All right, love you.

Love you.