How do we survive the media apocalypse?

24:34Right. One of the things that you said about Pitchfork that I found really interesting is that you said that you saw this, it's not a story that should be understood as just about a bunch of individual editorial choices at one specific website. It's about sectoral change and that the trend you see happening, which feels right to me, both across media and weirdly, like across many forms of things that try to get attention, is that like the small things are surviving. You know, you can have a sub stack and the huge battleships like the New York Times are surviving. And then everything in the middle is getting crushed.

25:07Like why, what is it about all these factors that kills the middle? I don't totally understand that. Everything in the middle competes with everything at the top. Right. You got to look at it from both the business side and the audience side. So from the business side first, it's just really hard to make money advertising as a media organization. You're not, like there the issue is not that you're competing with the New York Times. It's you're competing with Facebook. You're competing with Google. You're competing with TikTok. Right? You're competing with Netflix. So that's really tough, right?

25:41So what is your differentiated proposal to the advertiser? So in the past it might be, I'm how you reach the people of Indianapolis. And you want to reach the people of Indianapolis. But you know who knows when people are in Indianapolis? meta. Google. They know when people are in Indianapolis, and they know how to follow them all around the internet. So that's one thing. Then the next thing is that you are, you know, if you're doing anything kind of general interest, you're competing with everybody, right? You're competing with the New York Times, with the Washington Post, with everyone. You're competing with everybody on YouTube.

26:19And this is one of the paradoxes of this era. The audience probably has more access to high quality journalism they have ever had in human history. Ever. Right? Compared to like what I grew up with, it's like I had the LA Times op-ed page if I wanted to read political opinion. That was it. Like that was all the political opinion I had access to. And it wasn't much. Now if I want political opinion, I drown in it. Right. I mean, I obviously created myself too, but I drown in it. Right? You know, I would be growing up now in Southern California and like listening to, you know, whatever, Pod Save America, and reading political sub stacks, and, you know, magazines, and the New York Times opinion page, you know, and like a million other things.

27:01Like, it's just endless, right, how much people can have. So, you're having to fight against all of that to get somebody's fundamentally their subscriber dollars. And how much money do people want to spend out of their pocket a month on media? Well, they're already probably like subscribing now to Netflix, or max or amazon prime or some hulu disney plus whatever some combo of those like that's in their kind of media budget maybe they're going to subscribe to like one real news thing maybe right that's probably going to be the new york times right unless they have a real reason to be subscribing to the journal or the financial times most of what people want is not local news yeah most of what they want is this kind of mix of just being an informed citizen and also having just stuff they enjoy reading.

27:43So they're going to go for one of the big players. You're competing for what's left after all that, right? So on Substack, like maybe they really like you. Like I really like PJ. That's the reason people subscribe, right? They're not actually subscribing because it is on a cost-benefit level, like the most content for their buck. They're subscribing because they actually want to support the person, right? That kind of individual personalized relationship is really important. But if you're trying to be something that is growing and so can't be quite that personalized, right? You want to have 100 or 200 journalists.

28:15That's like this really hard space because at that level, you really are competing with Time Magazine and The Washington Post, a couple of very, very big players. So once you put that kind of mid-sized publication in competition with all of the very big players, who also, if it begins doing something interesting, will begin immediately seeing that, possibly hiring away its talent and copying it. Right. It's very hard to thrive. It's not that nobody can, and some people do, but it is just an incredibly hard business to sustain in. And so then, okay, if I'm just like a media nihilist and I say, fine, we're just going to have like, like the New York Times is going to be the one newspaper in America.

28:54They'll have a great Philadelphia bureau and a great Cleveland bureau. And then people can subscribe to some smart subsects for analysis and takes and some very specialized reporting. Why is that bad? Why do we not want a journalism that has no middle? I think a couple things. One is that as much as I love the New York Times and work there myself, obviously, the New York Times is not capable of replacing your local paper. It just isn't. It doesn't have, even if it has a Philly bureau, it doesn't cover Philadelphia the way the Philadelphia Inquirer does. And nobody in the New York Times would say it does.

29:26That's like not part of our offering. Maybe one day it should be, right? I mean, I don't make that decision. But you can imagine actually trying to nationalize local news, right? You can imagine trying to have some kind of player that has almost like a franchise model for local news. But we don't really have that right now. Local news is important. It just is. And not just local news. I think one mistake, particularly on the philanthropic side, has been trying to make local news too much of eat your vegetables kind of thing. But that was never the thing people primarily wanted in local news. They kept coming back for sports, for restaurants, for just a connection to their community and what might be happening in it and what they might like in it.

30:03And the fact they were coming back then meant when you reported on corruption at City Hall, they also saw that. And that gave the corruption reporting power. But you can't just be trying to report on corruption at City Hall. That doesn't really have a huge audience. What has the audience is like the connection to the place. So, one, in this world where there's no middle, you've just lost too much local news. right? And it never got replaced. It turned out that that was one of the things being subsidized. Then I think there's this other issue, which is the middles where a lot of interesting experimentation happens, where a lot of great journalists are trained up, where things happen that you wouldn't expect.

30:41It's not going to be a healthy industry long-term content-wise. If you don't have a lot of different kinds of things happening in it, I mean, we were talking about Pitchfork, which is very specific. It's like, you want things that can be simultaneously tuned to a certain audience, but with the scale, like the modest but real scale of journalists and money and capital and time to do ambitious work. And if you don't have that, then a lot of the best work of journalism does not happen. And so, you're losing local news. You're losing interesting kinds of experiments. You just lose a lot.

31:24We're going to take a short break for some ads. When we come back, Ezra Klein believes we have to fundamentally change how we think about consuming information online. He also believes that one of the words I just said in the previous sentence is basically a bad word. His radical argument, and the dirty word, after the break.

31:51Thank you.

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34:10Assuming 100 years from now there are history bugs, I have this fear that we're going to look back and we're going to say, there was this first era of the internet where everybody could get information from many more places. All of a sudden had to be much better information consumers. Like, to use an analogy, instead of basically one grocery store you would go to and get your apples, now it's like you have to identify what a good apple is. And if you eat the wrong kind of apple, it can make you not trust vaccines, or it can make you kind of racist, or it can make you think like the election didn't happen, or whatever.

34:38And I think if you look at how we as news consumers navigated that new media environment, I don't think we did a great job. Like, I don't think people's literacy when it came to finding good information really met the task at hand very well. My fear is now, as more websites disappear, that job is getting harder and our ability to do the job is not getting better. And that's sort of what I feel afraid of right now. One of the things I think I object to in the analogy and that I think has been poisonous across media now for a long time is the idea that what you are online or as a person is a consumer.

35:20That it's this kind of passive consumption. You know, you got to figure out which apple is going to, you know, infect you with anti-vaccine sentiment or whatever. Yeah. I think that over time, one of the things that we are going to have to discover is an identity of ourselves as generators of the internet, not consumers of the internet. Meaning what? Meaning on a small level, every time you read one thing over another or watch or listen to or spend time on, you are creating more of that thing and less of other things. Right? There is still some money that comes from just, like, your attention.

36:02Then a level above that, when you pay for anything, when you become a member, a subscriber, then you're really sending a signal to generate more of that thing and not of the other thing. Like, what we pay attention to online, we're willing into existence. What we ignore online, we are asking to die. Yes. I think that we have come to see what we do online as sort of morally neutral with the only moral decisions being made by the providers of the content. So it matters, like, what decisions The Washington Post or Meta or whoever, it matters what decisions those companies make, right? They're giving us stuff we like or we don't like, and we can be mad at them or not mad at them.

36:45But what we are clicking on, reading, where we are spending our time, where we are spending our money, like, but we can't be blamed for that. It's clickbait. Right. If you want local news to exist, you have to subscribe to local news. Right. And read it. Right. And spend time there. Like, you have to make that vibrant by your presence and your decisions. Nobody else, I mean, maybe philanthropists will do it for you, but you definitely can't trust them to do it for you. If you want, like, Pitchfork to exist, you need to read it. If you decide that the way you are going to access the entirety of the Internet is by spending time on social media sites and occasionally clicking a link, then what you will get is an Internet composed of social media sites, which is more or less what we have now.

37:31I wish I had, like, a better answer. It would be better if the venture capital had just found a bunch of, like, fantastic business models. Yeah. But at some point, if we don't want this, if people don't want this, then they have to do something else. Choosing to listen to search engine means there is more search engine. Choosing to listen to the Ezra Klein show means there is more Ezra Klein show. Choosing not to listen on some level means there is less of it. And the point is not that you should be listening to everything or everything should be pure virtue. But it is worth asking, if you find what I am saying here bad, but you do not subscribe to any local news, you are not neutral in this.

38:07you are the problem in it. And I just don't think people absorb that. I actually think the left has become allergic to any sense that there's like individual responsibility and collective problems, that like the decisions you make individually relating to climate or animals or news or anything, it's like there's some view that everything should be solved by a policy. But particularly in things that are driven by capitalism, it's like what the people do is what decides what there is more and less of. Now, you can do different things. Like, you can do policies, and I have policies that I would like to see done, but it is not actually neutral in what we do.

38:43Like, we are generators of the internet. We are generators of the media. What we give our time, attention, and money to is what thrives, and what doesn't get it is what dies. So if you look around, you're like, I kind of like this mix of what is currently thriving and dying on the internet. Terrific. Like, you're doing a great job. If you don't, then, like, I don't have another answer. I mean, collectively, at some point, it has to be worth it to create and fund the kind of journalism people want to see in the world. So what you're saying is like, one of the things you'll see people say online is like, well, there's no ethical consumption under capitalism.

39:16And you're like, actually, there is ethical consumption under capitalism. There's more ethical consumption. There's less ethical consumption. And your attention is a kind of consumption. So for you, the most frustrating person in this paradigm is like, the person who's on Twitter complaining about Twitter. You're like, dude, it's like you're sending money to Elon Musk and complaining about Elon Musk as you, like, take your$20 and put it in the envelope. You know my fury. People complain about Twitter. They're still on Twitter, right? Yes. If you don't want there to be more Twitter, more Elon Musk's ex, but you are sitting there all day reading and then adding value to Elon Musk's ex, then actually what you want is to be more of Elon Musk's ex.

39:57Right. You're voting for it with your attention. You are voting for it with your attention. And yeah, there's no ethical consumption under capitalism, people. That's a kind of personal absolution so you don't have to think about anything. Like, I can tell you that there is more and less ethical consumption under capitalism. If you are buying a lot of factory farmed meat, super cheap chicken, where those chickens live unbelievably horrible, monstrous lives because the only thing that you see at the market is how cheap the chicken breast is, I can tell you it's an unethical decision, right? And you're creating more horrifying treatment for chickens, whereas, like, if you try to buy better things, you create more market for better things.

40:34And that ultimately might also help lead to policy change and whatever. I often say, like, within these questions of consumption, people should think of themselves as individual nodes for collective change. Meaning what? Meaning that your decisions don't matter so much because they're your decision. Any one of us is a small part of this very, very large whole. But the decisions you make influence the people around you. Human beings are social. What we do is contagious. You know, like, you should understand that there is a relationship between, like, individual decisions and collective outcomes.

41:03Again, I want to be very clear that I'm not saying at all that what happened in media is that, like, individual people made a bunch of bad decisions, and this is the fault of the consumer. Like, the business models got wrecked by platforms, by bad venture capital decisions, by a lot of forces that were out of our control, right? And we were, like, we were not prepared for it. We had no immune system. Like, we were being given, you know, curiosity bait headlines and serve things virally, and, like, we didn't see it all. But at some point, you have to stop if you think this is going badly and say, okay, now what?

41:45So you're saying it's not our fault, but solving it might still be our responsibility. Yeah, this is a position of retreat here, right? Like, this is like a last gasp. You were saying in your intro about, you know, is the media ready for an extinction-level event? This isn't where I was 10 years ago. I mean, like, I will say, like, I started a number of media organizations, right? I started WonkBlog. I was a co-founder of Vox. I was the first editor-in-chief of Vox, and Vox is still there and, like, doing great work. but I am looking around me and I am seeing things die I am seeing great things and great journalists get gutted and something like recoils in me from just seeing people complain about it on social media you know I was on this show last to talk about how to use the internet sanely and like one thing you're hearing from me here is I think a harder question is how to use the internet ethically right but I don't know what it means to use the internet ethically like I don't have a great answer to this I'll give you an example One of the things I've been trying to think about over the past year, year and a half, is like, how do I use kind of smaller products?

42:46They're just kind of interesting, doing something different. One of the things I tried to use in this period was a really interesting browser experiment called ARC, the ARC browser. And they had a bunch of cool ideas inside of it. You know, it was like a small group. And then recently they got a bunch of coverage for creating a kind of search product that was built on AI. And what the search project does is when you search for something, The AI basically reads a bunch of relevant webpages and then assembles an entirely new webpage for you, like pastiched out of the stuff it has read, giving you the answer to the thing you've searched on.

43:21Okay, so there's a similar product called Perplexity. Yes. It does the same thing. And I had a real moment of, like, as a person who, honestly, I'm not very doom and gloom about anything. I tend to think, like, I am a perhaps too lazy citizen where a lot of big problems, I'm like, smart people who care are going to figure this out. It's going to be fine. Like, I can, like, kind of stay on the sidelines. And I used perplexity for the first time, and I asked it some question. And I watched in front of me as an AI wrote essentially a Wikipedia article specifically for me, and it cited its sources.

43:54And it was like, you know, Citation 1, The New York Times, Citation 2, NPR. And it was giving me all this information that journalists had worked to provide, but it was not sending me to the underlying websites. And I thought, oh, my God, Google search has really, for me, sucked for the past few years. Perplexity is doing a great job. And if no one visits those websites and no one looks at that advertising and no one pays for those subscriptions, the underlying thing it is mining for this information, like, this could be the next comment. Services like this could wipe us out. And it really scared me.

44:28I had the same response. Casey Newton, I think, had the exact right word in his platformer newsletter. I know a past guest on the show. Where he said that he uses with revulsion. Yes. Like the level of irresponsibility in this. And this was a cool little company. And I know they're just trying things out, right? Casey interviewed the head of ARC. And he was like, yeah, we'd have to figure, you know, what. There's no, I think, ethical way to do this, actually. Absolutely. And so I really find the question of how to ethically use the internet right now, how to ethically be a person consuming media, difficult.

45:02And I really wish you would have me on sometime for something fun and like I could seem like a likable person. but you can't just retreat from it. This is what it is, right? I don't believe in turning away from what the world actually is. But even things that you think are going to be a good option, over time, I mean, you know, Cory Doctor calls this the unshittification cycle where something begins by giving a lot of value to you, the user. Like, think of early Google. And then eventually, it's trying to extract a lot of value from you, the user. So the other thing about things like perplexity is right now they're funded by venture capital.

45:40They don't need to make money when they do need to make money. Like, God knows what they're going to do to do that. And so, it is very hard. I find this really tough. Like, I look around and I see it getting worse and worse. And I see what's coming, like the kind of AI era. It feels rapacious to me. It feels like these companies, and I know people at these companies, and I like people at these companies, and I believe that they are there because they are trying to create a super intelligence that if it doesn't, you know, 7 % odds like destroy the entire world, it's going to really solve a lot of important problems ideally.

46:13So I get it. I know what they're doing. Like they're idealists. But in the meantime, what they're doing is they're taking like the sum total of human cognitive labor available to them. They are feeding it into a machine. They are training the machine on it. And then they're going to turn around and monetize the output of all that human labor for themselves and all the people who did the graphic design that led to Dolly and all the people who are doing like the news gathering that are informing, you know, GBD3 and Gemini, they have no fucking idea what's going to happen to these people. I don't want to say they don't care, but they don't think it is their responsibility.

46:55And maybe it's not, right? I mean, in some ways, it's easier to imagine ethical consumption under capitalism than it is to imagine ethical production under capitalism. Right. You are just trying to compete with the other guys over there. And if you don't, they're going to win. No, and like, I mean, right now it's like, there's two moods I see happening on the internet. And one is like, whoa, look at this. It's amazing. Like, OpenAI released their Sora demo where they do the image generation thing, but with video. And you're like, oh my God, six months from now, I'll probably be able to make a Pixar movie.

47:25I never thought I could do that. And that's really cool. And it's really hard not to be excited. And then I have friends, people I know on the internet, people I don't know on the internet, who are like, if you input a prompt into one of these services, you're essentially like inviting the devil into our home. And I get why they feel that way. And I also feel like asking people to not participate in a useful and exciting piece of technology feels like probably not how we're going to solve it. So this is where I do think at some point you get into this question of policy. I think for things that capitalism is not going to fund, if we think they are important, we are going to have to fund them some other way.

48:07Philanthropy is one way, and I think there's certain things philanthropists will fund. But I don't know. I mean, at some point, and you see this in other countries, like, do you want to have publicly supported media? Like, much more of it. What would it even mean to do that? Like, who gets it? Like, how do you think about that, the politicization of that? It raises very difficult questions. Yeah. But so does all the rest of this stuff, and we're just letting it barrel forward without thinking about the answers to any of them. And so, I think we're going to lose a lot very quickly, and not a lot of everything.

48:45Again, I think people have access to, say, better foreign news than they've ever had in the entire sum total of human existence, which is great. But, like, a healthy informational and communication ecosystem, like, requires a lot. I always try to get people to think in terms of the commons. Are we polluting the informational commons? Are we enriching the informational commons? Like we have to think about this in some broad-based way as something we all are part of. And we haven't had to think about it that way because just very weird things supported it. And that worked because we don't want to pay much and also like we're financially stressed.

49:22And so the fact that news seemed almost free was great. Like, why would you pay for news if it's free? Until it's not great. That was like a deal with the advertisers. But the advertisers weren't there to support the news. The advertisers were there to sell you stuff. Yeah. And when they can sell you stuff somewhere else, they will. And capitalism is great. Like, I am a capitalist. Not everybody likes that about me. But I am in the places where capitalism should work. But not everything should be capitalism. Not everything is a market. Not everything is a well-structured market. Right? Some things will not be supported by this.

49:56So, like, to me, like, all this is a little bit radicalizing, requires very different kinds of thoughts. Like, it's just, it's very, you got to do something as a collective, too. And in some ways, the reason I actually often focus on individual action is I think it's easier to act collectively when you're acting individually. What do you mean? I don't think people typically vote in ways that don't align to how they act. it is a lot easier to believe in strong protections for animals in slaughterhouses when you don't eat much meat. When you do eat a lot of meat, particularly cheap factory farmed meat, it's actually harder to believe that, like, you should have strong protections that could lead to that meat becoming costlier.

50:37Like, recognizing that you don't need that all the time helps you get to the point where you can imagine, like, something else because, like, you've already kind of made, like, the internal shift. people don't tend to vote for radical new worlds that are not the one that they are willing to live in if it's going to change their life. They tend to change their life and then vote for the radical new world. Right. It's like a friend of mine used to say about exercise. She was like, action precedes motivation. Yes. It's like habit change precedes like wanting a different world in which those habits would make sense.

51:10Yes. So I think this idea that policy will save us, we have to do nothing, It's just like not really how things ultimately work. Both things have to happen. Both things have to happen.

51:23We're going to take one more quick break. And then if we, the people who read things on the internet and listen to things on the internet, have to change some of our habits to preserve what we love, what exactly do we have to do? Let's after some ads.

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53:12Okay, so what my takeaway is, things are bad. That some of this is about as much as we don't want to and as much as it feels like being told to become like an internet vegan, we have responsibility here. Like what we consume matters, what we pay for matters, what we ignore maybe more than anything matters. I would just say like the identity, the personal identity of a consumer is the identity of a kind of cattle. Right. It's a passive identity. Like be whatever you want. Don't be an internet vegan. As a longtime vegan for like a lot of my life, nobody likes a vegan. It's very unfortunate. But don't be passive, right?

53:52Don't act like a lot of this is happening to us, but it's going to keep happening to us if everybody just keeps acting like it is happening to us. And like if you're willing to be treated as cattle, you will be treated as cattle. Yeah. Like that's the end result here. If you're not willing to do something else, then I hope everybody likes where it's going. So what does it look like for you in this world you're trying to model in which we don't think of ourselves as news consumers, we think of ourselves as kind of like attention generators, and we are somewhat ethical in what we pay attention to and what we ignore and what we pay for.

54:30Like, what do you subscribe to? Are you spending like$400 a month on local news subscriptions? Like, what are you doing? I mean, I subscribe to—now it's funny because I live in New York and I work for the New York Times, so I both get a subscription to the thing I work for, and it's a local news source. You don't pay for the New York Times that you work at. No. When I worked at WOMAC, there were people who were sustaining members of WOMAC, and I was, like, both impressed and confused. I was like, they're just—they're giving you money that you're giving back to them. You just take a slight pay cut, probably.

54:57I still subscribe, and my household still subscribes to a bunch of local California things and also some local New York things. But in some ways, I don't want to, like, I'm a media professional, and I'm just going to have a different information habit on this than other people do. I honestly think, like, one just good place to start is not, like, trying to mimic, like, anybody else's pattern. Just, like, in your mix, there should be local news. If you're a news consumer, local news should exist somewhere in that, right? Even if you're not subscribing to it, you're just actually just reading it.

55:27You get the email newsletter and open it of your local paper. That's at least something, right? Then you know a little bit more about it, and they can get the advertising off of that. I get a bunch of music newsletters that I love, like Futurism Restated, Dada Strange, Flow State. And I read these, and that takes up a bunch of my time, and it's great. I have a Kindle app. Like, I read a lot of books. I like books. I actually like carrying around magazines. I still kind of—magazines are my favorite single format for consuming media, and I feel healthier when I do it. So if we're losing the middle and we're entering a new era where like things are grim, but like different things might become possible, what do you think the next wave of experimental, successful, possible media organizations or even media individuals might look like?

56:14So, it's like really important to me to not make this sound too, like we will replace everything we've lost. I think we're in like a kind of decline, but that's going to have ups and downs. And I do think, I very strangely think this is a great time to start media organizations. Why? One, I think that one of the things that went wrong the last time is we just believed in a business model that wasn't real. Right. And so, we built for a business model that wasn't real. And then when the business model became not real, the things built on top of it began to collapse. I think people actually have a more realistic view right now.

56:50It's like there are a few real business models. You get people to pay for something, right? I mean, the great innovation of Substack is it turned out that you could get people to pay more for an individual writer than anybody thought. Right? People would pay$60,$80,$100 a year just for somebody they liked. And then you didn't need that many of those people, right? If you have 5 ,000 of them, 10 ,000 of them, that's not going to support a newsroom of 20, but it does support something real. One thing about the social media scale plays is that they pushed towards generality. You were trying to compete with everything in these viral waves, like watching what was popping online.

57:30I think this era of the media is going to push towards specificity. You want to create very specific things that 10 or 15 or 20 or 25 ,000 people will find of immense value to them and pay money for. And that's how a lot of media traditionally worked. I mean, there are a lot of really important magazines that always had like low tens of thousands of subscribers, the New Republic, the Washington Monthly, the American Prospect, the National Review, but were incredibly important in American life, in many cases still are. I think there's a lot of philanthropic interest right now in local news. And I think you could create a lot of really amazing local news products.

58:05I think that we now know how to do subscriptions much better than we did 10 years ago. I think we have more distribution possibilities. I think we've learned more about how to write for people online. Right. I think there's a lot of room for things that do not need to attain scale. Like, I think you're going to have a lot of things that are 5, 10, 20 people and are not trying to get bigger than that. And because they're not trying to get bigger than that, they can do what they're doing well at a reasonable cost. And people can get a tremendous amount of value from those products. 50 people, you can do a lot with that.

58:32Most of the new things I love look like that. Like 404 Media, which is doing really amazing tech coverage that's for people. There's also stuff I read right now. I really like Blackbird Spyplane, which is a sub stack that's about men's fashion. I don't know how to wear clothes or what clothes to wear. I've never bought an article of clothing because I read about it in Blackbird Spyplane. I picked it up because I was thinking one day I'll dress better. It hasn't happened, but like I just enjoy a voicey specific thing about a world that I'm enjoying being a voyeur in, you know? Yeah, the difficult thing that I think is unsolved for this period is distribution at the beginning.

59:08So the part of this that I think is going to be once we figure it out, the click that makes a lot of this flower is, okay, you started this specific thing. How do you get it out there? because that's what search engine optimization and social media were the answers to for a while. They told you how to go from nowhere to an audience. Like you were hooking on to these distribution platforms that already existed as they've all just gotten worse. Yeah. It's much harder to do that, right? I mean, many people made the point that Substack was very fundamental way for people to monetize Twitter audiences.

59:42Yeah. As Twitter breaks down, you can't do that as effectively. So right now, I think how you have a financial relationship with an audience is fairly solved. I think that the editorial opportunities are really there. I think there is going to be at least some money in terms of, like, subscription and philanthropic and to some degree advertising, which can support quite a lot more, at least, than it is supporting currently. And the hard question of this era is distribution. Like, how do you go from nobody reads this thing or knows about it to 50 ,000, which is, like, not very much for the internet, but, like, but is enough maybe to get 1 ,000 subscribers if you're doing a great job?

1:00:22How do you get there? Once we figure that out, I think you're going to see a lot of things build.

1:00:34Ezra Klein Media goth, internet vegan Host of the podcast The Ezra Klein Show Also a columnist at the New York Times Ezra, thank you Thank you, this was Troubling? Unpleasant

1:01:04Thank you.

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