AMA: Peter Thiel, Chris Rufo and the D.S.A.

27:22That the spillover effect was very real. and two that uh that it also the the application of cultural power caused such backlash that it arguably more than wiped out the gains the number of people who i've seen who i think were truly radicalized by just stuff that happened to them on twitter on facebook on instagram on places like that, in part because I always looked at those places as kind of cesspools, to just be blunt. I think I was just less concerned about what was happening there. But I always want to say this because I think this other side of it is important. The reason I was sympathetic to what gets called wokeness, I actually still believe all that.

28:11I believe systemic racism is very real. I believe that our society is fundamentally unequal in very, very, very deep ways. I believe that we often have very difficult trade-offs between who gets justice and that as the power moves, right? I mean, the sort of piece about affirmative consent was trying to grapple with something that I still find is very hard to grapple with, which is the equilibrium that existed. You know, that people were trying to alter in affirmative consent laws wasn't an equilibrium. where there were no harms. It was one where there was rampant sexual assault that went unpunished.

28:50And many, many, many women I know have been sexually assaulted and traumatized by it and harmed by it in spaces where there was not really a recourse. Did affirmative consent laws find a great equilibrium? They didn't. So I think you could say it's a hard problem. But I don't want to just say, no, this was all wrong. one of the things happening when you begin to sort of unearth the way we have settled into unjust structures in society is you don't always know how to change those structures in a way that will work. And I think a lot of things failed. I think a lot of things failed. But the things people were trying to change were very real.

29:33I mean, the level of just overwhelming workplace and social harassment that, you know, primarily women, faced and face, right? It's not gone, was real. I think racism remains a problem we don't really know how to deal with. I think that I actually have like mostly the same views on what it is we're trying to fix in society. But I think I take more seriously the people who said that using illiberalism to create something more liberal, even if the illiberalism is not coming from the state, is you're imperiling more than you realize you're imperiling. I mean, I also think it's an emphasis thing that in 2014, as we're like ratcheting up into this big moment, but it's also a moment of progressive tailwinds and you're weighing in all the time on talking about the finer points of these issues.

30:28The political moment right now is not that. Yeah, although I guess maybe the one thing I would say is that as I understand my own work over time, I understand myself as trying to figure out how to make progress on things that have remained pretty consistent. And if an approach fails, and I think a lot of those approaches failed, and they particularly failed politically, I think it'd be crazy not to try to ask, well, why did this fail and what do we learn from it? And the thing you maybe hear me saying a lot about how do Democrats win in Iowa and Ohio and Nebraska and South Dakota and North Dakota and Arkansas and these places they used to win, and thinking, okay, what kind of a tent do you need to do that?

31:07What kind of a party brand do you need to do that? To me, I'm trying to make progress on the same issues. I think one of the very, very bad habits people pick up learning their politics in online discourse, online algorithmically structured discourse holes is they begin to equate political change with political position taking and that your commitment to something is defined by how stridently you express your opposition to the thing you don't like, not how effectively you build power to fix it. And I understood, again, what we call wokeness as an effort to build power to fix something. And it went in directions that even at the time, like I was not on board of.

31:53But I think you can't look around without saying that you were trying to do persuasion and the persuasion failed. and now things are quite a bit worse than they were even, I think, then. And so you have to ask, okay, like, what failed and what have you learned? I think if you have a politics over an extended period of time that is not learning things about the world, something is wrong with it. You should be changing your emphasis. You should, but you should also be changing your approach. And I guess the only other thing I'll say, and this is a very consistent theme for me back then too, So I just think a lot of what went wrong then and what is going wrong now has to do with these fights taking place in fundamentally deranging spaces.

32:40Spaces that have only become more deranged after Elon Musk bought Twitter, become more deranged as they've all become much more algorithmic and less focused on your friends and the people you follow. So, and I think if you go back to my work then, if you go to it now, I have an extremely clear through line of just somebody who has been very, very, very concerned that if that attention is the fundamental capacity we bring to politics, what we pay attention to shapes what we see. It shapes how we act. It shapes what we believe about other people. And if the way we pay attention, like the space it mediates our attention, deranges it, focuses it on the wrong things in the wrong ways, then our politics is not going to be good.

33:19And the reason I think both there were pretty bad excesses in a political movement I fundamentally agreed with, and now there are really bad excesses in a political movement I fundamentally disagree with, I think the fact that both are sort of, were taking place primarily, first and foremost, on then Twitter, now X, is inseparable from what has gone wrong. Just so we don't end on an entirely down note about how woke went. I went back and read your yes means yes. This is your affirmative consent article in Vox. Yes means yes is a terrible law and I completely support it. It's the article. I thought there wasn't anything that jumped out at me, but you said false accusations.

34:01I have not read this piece. I didn't even know we were going to talk about this. I've not read this piece like in many, many, many, many, many years. Also, I don't think affirmative consent law makes false accusations more likely or more likely to lead to guys being like railroaded. But there was something that did jump out at me as feeling actually quite radical in what you said in that article. Well, can you say what I said? Because I would like to know what I said. What you said, which is the thrust of your argument, is for one in five women to report an attempted or completed sexual assault means that everyday sexual practices on college campuses need to be upended.

34:33And men need to feel a cold spike of fear when they begin a sexual encounter. I definitely don't remember myself as writing that false accusations are not a big deal. I mean, that's what I remember people being mad about, that cold spike of fear line. And I'm not sure. I think I phrase that a little bit more vividly than I would. And it's not that I want anybody to feel fear when beginning sex. There has been a cultural shift to a lot of anxiety around consent. I recently saw Obsession, the blockbuster horror movie by this Gen Z director that is all about, this is my interpretation, turning that anxiety into supernatural horror.

35:13And there's also very little data about how sexual assault on college campuses has actually shifted in the years since. But there is one study of 10 universities like Harvard, Yale, that does show that self-reporting sexual assault has gone down significantly. But like what you argued for here, it kind of happened and it maybe worked. Maybe. I mean, I'm not sure the affirmative consent laws were a good idea. I don't know how much difference they made. Yeah, I don't know how much difference they made. So I think like what you could say about this was that I'm not sure what to think about what colleges should do.

35:49and I thought they were worth trying and you know amidst this debate I made an argument for it and that argument was very informed by things people near me had gone through to just be very blunt about it and I still believe that the difficult thing here is that I mean sex itself is like a a very complicated interaction between human beings and a very vulnerable and a very intimate one I think what I'd say after writing that piece in the years that followed, amidst Me Too and everything else, is like it all became much more sort of widespread and seen, is that I do think the way this got seen and treated really changed.

36:28I think a lot of those changes were for the better. I also saw a lot of stories where ambiguous interactions, you know, got interpreted as like the worst form of interaction. And I don't, like, you need a way to protect against that too. And like, I'll just, I don't have an answer to all this, right? I don't know how to fix the, like, constant reality of sexual assault and also the reality that if you, like, yeah, I don't know how to fix the mix of the constant reality of sexual assault and, like, the ambiguous way in which two people might understand the same thing happening. I think it's really hard.

37:08This is a question from Javan S. With the Democratic Party now splitting into center Dems and DSA. Is DSA just now becoming hip to anti-establishment politics in a way that MAGA did a decade ago? Are both movements just different flavors of populism, where populism is the real current of politics dressed up in different outfits? I wouldn't focus this question on the DSA because a lot of the candidates we are talking about in this populist moment are not, to my knowledge, DSA candidates. Graham Plattner's out of the race, but he was not a DSA candidate. Abdul El-Sayed, to my knowledge, is not a DSA candidate.

37:42I mean, there are some populists running who are DSA-affiliated and some who aren't. Populism classically is a political perspective that is more about seeing a small group of elites hoarding power and believing that in order to have a better society, better politics, you need to break the power they hoard. And so you can have your right-wing variants, your left-wing variants. I think it's sort of fairly widely believed that the most electable form of candidate you can run right now is economically populist and culturally moderate, right? That's sort of the Dan Osborne formula in Nebraska. And Dan Osborne is a candidate who really did wildly overperform in a red straight.

38:24Now, he also ran as an independent, but that meant he wasn't dragged down by the Democratic Party's baggage. Graham Plattner wasn't culturally moderate. I'm not sure he was the most electable form of candidate you could run. So this is what I mean, right? I think the problem with seeing all this as populism is that it's more than that, too. I don't think populism necessarily has a lot to say about Israel-Gaza. You can have, you know, populists who end up on both sides of that issue. And in fact, you do in current American politics. And I think at some deeper level, populism is about listening to whatever group you are saying it is that is the mass, right?

39:03Whatever group you believe represents like the real people. For the right, populism tends to be a more native-born phenomena, right? They're like the real Americans and then the kind of fake elites. On the left, it's often more economic. But a lot of these candidates have a bunch of other positions that are a kind of linked and more elite set of ideas, right, on climate, on other things. They put them pretty out of step with working class voters. And it's why when you look at who they went over, Graham Plattner was not overperforming with working class voters. Abdullah Syed is not overperforming with non-college voters in Michigan.

39:39Like his electorate doesn't look like that. There's been a lot of people noting that the DSA sweet spot is downwardly mobile, highly educated voters. So I think we're going to see a lot of people making the argument again like real populism has not been tried because what the DSA is is leftism. And that's something different. Sarah V wrote in with the question, I'm a registered Democrat and I've been doing a deep dive into the DSA website and what democratic socialists believe. I consider myself a progressive, but more Bernie Sanders type. What is your understanding of the clear disconnect between what is on that website, no more jails, defund police, open borders, and what Mamdani and others actually do when they are in office?

40:21I've been really enjoying watching Mamdani govern since he took office. It feels like a good path so far, but it definitely doesn't reflect the tenets of that organization of which he's a member. I find it hard to know how seriously to take the DSA website or platform without getting into incredibly tedious detail that has become a constant topic in our Slack. Trying to say who speaks for the DSA and who is speaking when you look at what the national DSA says or what a local chapter says, it's a very unusually structured organization. I do think it is valuable to look at what somebody like Mamdani does in power.

40:58Right. We've had a number of members of Congress who are DSA associated or, you know, people in state senates and assembly. And when you're in power, you are working coalitionally to pass legislation or executive orders or regulations, whatever it might be, through a system that does not have entire agreement with you. I don't know what Zoran Mamdani or anybody else would do if they had king-like power. But I would say Mamdani, in terms of if you knew nothing about what he has said or what he believes, if you just saw what he has done governing, this would not look very different if another liberal candidate in that primary had won.

41:43Yes, they have added a tax on pricey second homes. And I think I know he would like to add more taxes on the rich than that. He's also being very, very, very careful and doing a lot of both private and semi-public outreach to people who run investment banks, to the business elite of New York City, because he actually does not want to infuriate them and run them out of the city. If you begin to dry up the tax revenues, the rest of his agenda falls apart immediately. I don't see the Mamdani era as reflecting an incredibly sharp break from, say, de Blasio. And you can, I think, say that sometimes of Bernie Sanders, too.

42:26And that's not a hit on them. I think one of the valuable things about more leftist figures getting into powers of getting into offices where they have executive authority or legislative authority is you actually see the give and take between ideology and power. The one thing that I sometimes find frustrating is that people on the left don't recognize that that is happening everywhere else, too. So liberals, you know, often want more ambitious and sweeping changes than they are able to get one in power, too. But there's a tendency to look at what, say, an Obama is able to get done dealing with a Senate riven by the filibuster and say that's all Obamaism was or intended to be, which it isn't.

43:10There is a lot that if Barack Obama were king, he would have done that he was not able to do. And, you know, with Mamdani, it's very similar. With Bernie Sanders, we had Faz Shakir, Bernie's former campaign manager on the show. And he said on the show, look, we knew that if we got into power, we weren't going to be able to pass Medicare for all. There's a high degree of pragmatism there. So while he's pushing, let's take Medicare for all. Then he gets into Congress and can we at least lower the age from 65 to 60? Can we talk about Medicare expansion so that it covers home care, dental, hearing and vision, even if you can't all move with me to Medicare for all?

43:41That actually is how President Bernie Sanders would have governed. We would have, you know, expanded Medicare, expanded what it covers, dropped down the age range. And so there is this constant compromise when you're governing. I think it is healthy to watch that playing out. how much to take the DSA as a signal of where these candidates even want to go that I'm less sure-footed on. What do you think of the critique that just this platform on their website is really politically damaging for other Democrats, is going to be weaponized by Republicans? And if it's not actually meaningful for how DSA electeds govern, then what is the point?

44:25I think you would have to ask a member of the DSA that. I don't know to what degree Democrats broadly are going to be forced to answer for what the DSA believes. My suspicion is not that aggressively because I do think people understand the DSA is a distinctive thing. And so the idea that in North Carolina, they're going to run a bunch of ads against Roy Cooper saying he believes in what like the DSA website, I don't think anybody buys that. I don't think it really works. Now, it will matter what DSA candidates do when they come into Congress. So if you have, you know, some of these newer members of Congress who are DSA-affiliated putting forward a lot of bills to abolish police or abolish prisons, then—and demanding Democrats vote on them—then you're going to start to see more effort to, you know, define the party by what its kind of high attention left flank is doing.

45:25Mamdani coming out and giving that sort of direct-to-camera address on how he would like to arrest Benjamin Netanyahu and calls on the federal government to do that. It is clear that we do not have the independent legal authority to enforce this warrant. The federal government, however, does. And I call on them to join the ICC and execute this warrant. And I want to be equally clear. Benjamin Netanyahu is not welcome in New York City, nor is any other war criminal at large. That is going to be an issue that the Republican Party will try to weaponize against voters who are maybe cross-pressured and are maybe even critical of Israel but do not want to go where Mamdani and the DSA want to go on Israel.

46:07Mamdani being a central figure in the Democratic Party and making that statement, that is something other Democrats are going to have to deal with. The DSA having stuff on its website, I'm just skeptical that's going to become a major political issue.

46:42I gave my brother a New York Times subscription. She sent me a year-long subscription so I have access to all the games. We'll do Wordle, Nanny, Spelling Bee. It has given us a personal connection. We exchange articles. And so having read the same article, we can discuss it. The coverage, the options, not just news. Such a diversified guest. I was really excited to give him a New York Times cooking subscription so that we could share recipes. And we even just shared a recipe the other day. The New York Times contributes to our quality time together. You have all of that information at your fingertips.

47:18It enriches our relationship, broadening our horizons. It was such a cool and thoughtful gift. We're reading the same stuff. We're making the same food. We're on the same page. Connect even more with someone you care about. Learn more about giving a New York Times subscription as a gift at nytimes.com slash gift.

47:43So we got a bunch of questions that were all the same question. So this one is Amy T. Is this true that you are part of the dialogue group sponsored by Peter Thiel? Okay, dialogue. Let me start here. What happens is that, as best I understand it, some hacker goes on Blue Sky and is like, I got the membership roles of Peter Thiel's secret society and includes all these people. Elon Musk and Peter Thiel and Reid Hoffman and Joseph Gordon-Levitt and Josh Brolin and me and Julian Castro and Cory Booker. And just tons of people with very, very different roles in the world, different politics. Cool hang.

48:25Cool hang, right? And then this gets picked up pretty credulously by Wired. This was surprising to live through. Dialogue is a pretty banal conference. It is not secret. Just like flatly, it's not secret. Nobody ever asked me to keep my presence there secret. I went twice, I think. Now I'd have to remember the dates, but I think it was 2018 and 2022 or something like that. It was like one pre-pandemic, one kind of post-pandemic. Then why did you never speak about it? Why would I have spoken about it? I mean, I don't speak about most conferences I go to. It is off the record in the way most conferences are.

49:03I mean, you can quote somebody if they let you. But so, OK, so dialogue, it's a conference, sort of like an unconference style. I went because at that time I was trying to do more coverage of tech. What is unconference? Oh, sorry, unconference style. There aren't panels like people kind of self-organize. You like write up on a board like I would like to have a session on being a working parent or better sleep hygiene or are there any real uses of crypto or whatever it might be. So you don't go and like sit there and like listen to people talk at you. This is like a genre. and you are deep in conference world, my friend.

49:36I have done a lot of conferences. That is part of my job, to go places and meet people and like listen to them and see if they'd be one day good guests on my show. And like that is like, as you know, like part of what I do. But Dialogue was a conference. The one I went to, the first one was for like people under 40, I think it was. And so it was sort of like young, more up and coming people. Like my favorite person I met there was a kind of lefty anarchist. It wasn't like any of those bold faced names who I then was told I was in a secret society with. Like, there was no Elon Musk. I've never heard of him as involved with it or Reid Hoffman or any of those people.

50:10I went again a couple years later and just found it, like the second one I went to, kind of like lame. And it was reflecting the curdling anger of the tech right in that era. And I just found the energy pretty unpleasant and I didn't go back. By the time I went, my understanding is Peter Thiel was not involved. He was one of the multiple co-founders of Dialogue. I never saw him at it or heard from him in respect to it. I do want to say, because I think people could get the wrong idea, I'm not saying I think there would be a problem if Peter Thiel was still involved. I've invited Peter Thiel on this show.

50:47He has not come on. I have had reporting meetings with Peter Thiel. That is my job. I do not see Peter Thiel or anybody in our society as somebody I cannot or should not talk to. So dialogue. When I went, no Peter Thiel, not a society. It was like a conference you went to. Also not a secret. And so then to like continuously see this thing that, you know, is being believed by people. That I'm in the secret society with Peter Thiel. And like what would that, without anybody even being clear of like what that would mean, like what would it mean for Julian Castro? Who again, he came up earlier in our conversation, like really pushed the Democratic Party left on immigration.

51:28And Peter Thiel was supporting Donald. Like, why would you think those two people are doing the same thing? Which is to say that there is a way of looking at the world that I was really surprised how many people seem to buy into this. And then I was particularly surprised to have it be around this conference dialogue because what I will say in dialogue's favor, actually, is that it was a conference that invited a wide variety of people from a very wide variety of industries and ideologies to do what it said on the tin to like go to a place and be in dialogue with each other for the weekend and or for a couple of days or whenever it was held.

52:11and it did an okay job at that. Like on conferences I've gone to, it's not the best. It's definitely not the worst. And its fundamental nature was fractious. In part, its fractiousness is why I didn't really want to go back because I just found some of the conversations very unpleasant. There's like a big focus in that second one I was at about like your most unpopular opinion and it just felt very performative to me. I think the thing that bothers a lot of people about this or that it taps into on some level is this feeling of elites who people understand as having radically different politics and being from radically different worlds, just like all hanging out in a chummy way.

52:52And it feeling like then they're on the receiving end of this performance when actually elites are all hanging out and have this kind of a class solidarity with each other. And it was a thing that like in the episode with Anand Giridharadas on Jeffrey Epstein and what it revealed about elite networks, he's kind of saying this and that there was a kernel of truth to it about how elite networks work. Even if these people were on cable, you're sitting at home, you're watching cable at the end of the day and you're seeing these two talking heads fight. But that's for you. That's the spectacle for you at home to keep you entertained.

53:32What they're actually doing is revealed in these files, which is hanging out, breaking bread, colluding, sharing information, giving each other tips on deals, giving each other PR advice, making introductions to each other. That's the thing I think this should happen. I don't really buy this, to be honest. I mean, or let me put it this way. If somebody wants to make this critique of, like, functionally all conferences, that they collect people from, like, within an industry or across industries and put them together and you think that's bad, that's fine, right? Like that's a totally legitimate view to hold about the world.

54:09I don't think that is bad. I do that work here in public. I try to have conversations with many different kinds of people across industries, across ideologies, in a way that is simultaneously honest and like fundamentally gracious. I believe that is not just not a bad thing. I believe it is a democratic habit that should be cultivated. I think civic friendship, even across real difference, is more than beautiful, it is necessary. And it's not that I think Dalai was doing something amazing for the world, but you are definitely not going to get me to sit here and say that the problem is that there might be a space where, I don't know, Ted Cruz and Joseph Gordon-Levitt and somebody who works on cybersecurity.

55:01risk at Microsoft might have a conversation with each other. I think that's helpful. Like, I think that's good. Epstein, the problem was it was a transactional network built around protecting a pedophile. The output of the network is the problem. And my critique of people who are in the Epstein files late, by the time that they had to know what he was doing, or at least had information that they had to reject about what he had done is that they were protecting a pedophile. It is not that there is some world in which Noam Chomsky and Steve Bannon might have dinner. Like, that seems interesting on some level to me, or Peter Thiel, Noam Chomsky, whoever it might have been.

55:43I think people should talk to people they don't agree with. But if your belief is that these people should not get to know each other, then I just don't agree. The reason dialogue became or this thing became what it is is because it was called like a secret society. And so like spin was put on the ball to suggest that, oh, in public, Ezra Klein and Peter Thiel are pursuing different agendas. In private, they're dressing up in robes and sacrificing a goat and trying to do the same thing. And that's not true. It's just not true. Technocratic liberals, managerial, professional class liberals, they can sometimes make the world too complicated to understand.

56:28Conspiratorial populism makes it too simple to understand. That is not how the world works. People are mostly doing in private what they're doing in public. There would not be safety among a bunch of people who disagree that much to coordinate or say what's really on their minds or anything. Like, I can't even get Peter Thiel to come on the show. And I kind of understand why he doesn't want to come on the show. Say one thing that you disagree with Peter Thiel about. That democracy and freedom and capitalism are incompatible. That Donald Trump should be president. That Palantir should exist in the way that it currently does.

57:08Like, I find Peter Thiel's, functionally, his entire agenda reprehensible. That Gawker was a cool website? Gawker was a cool website. that Blake Masters should be a senator, that J.D. Vance is a good political actor, like Greta Thunberg is like a correct model to think about the Antichrist. I disagree with Peter Thiel. Like his whole agenda is functionally like the opposite of mine. But I will absolutely talk to Peter. And so the dialogue thing, the main thing it did for me, I mean, there's also like the reality, like I can't go and like knock on the doors of everybody who believes something untrue now and like correct the belief.

57:44then like a few days ago on the internet, I was accused of being like a Chinese communist agent or spy or something. Like the kind of constant cycle now of bullshit that you have no real way to correct is a challenging thing I find to deal with. But I think it reflects something pretty negative. I don't think it said anything good about the way people, a lot of people are absorbing information about the world at the moment. I think it would also violate the New York Times employee handbook. Yeah, it would be. I think I'm not supposed to be in a secret society. But what even is a secret society?

58:26What makes it a society? What makes it a secret? I find to be an intellectually interesting question. I mean, there needs to be an initiation ritual. Sure. You can't tell people you're in it. And I think besides that, you can do whatever. Anyway, I'm not in any of those. I can say right now, to my knowledge, I'm not in any secret societies. And you have to stay on an email distro for the rest of your life. Yeah, sure. Last question. So what are three musicians or songs or albums that you would recommend to the audience? So the Fortet Wingding album you should go find. And then maybe, I'm really into it, and I find this very hypnotic, this particular album.

59:08Mass Amable, I think it's called. Mass Amable. by DJ Python. Really cool, very strange music. And then maybe to offer a song rather than a whole album. There's a John Hopkins Imogen Heap collaboration that just came out called Reckoning. Both of them are amazing on their own. Like Imogen Heap, long time, one of my favorite artists, John Hopkins. Like his stuff is really, really cool. But coming together was, I was very excited when I saw it and I have listened to it a lot since it came out. Like you and Chris Rufo. Claire Gordon, thank you very much. Thank you, Ezra.