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My Reading Habits, Explained, and Other Questions You Asked

Ezra Klein responds to what listeners want to know.

ezra klein

I’m Ezra Klein, and this is “The Ezra Klein Show.”

[MUSIC PLAYING]

Hello, and welcome to the “Ask Me Anything” episode. Thank you to all of you who sent in hundreds — thousands? — of fantastic questions. I’m going to be joined today by my great colleague Annie Galvin, who’s a producer on the show, who is going to be here for you, the listener representative, asking your questions, making sure I don’t squirm away from them too much. Annie, thank you for being here.

annie galvin

Yes, thank you for having me, and thank you for answering so many of these great questions that we got. So we’re going to start with some questions about Ezra’s opinions on politics and social issues, and then we’re going to get into some personal questions for Ezra. So definitely stick around till the end.

ezra klein

Or don’t, it’s fine.

[LAUGHTER]

annie galvin

Either way. All right, so let’s start with a question from Matt. And Matt asks a timely question: “does the infrastructure deal change your mind about to what extent bipartisanship is possible?”

ezra klein

It doesn’t really. So the first thing I’d say on this is that there have been a bunch of bipartisan deals in recent years. People are treating this like it is the first time anything has passed the Senate in a bipartisan way, but it isn’t.

If you look during Trump’s presidency, he didn’t try to do that much through legislation. But he did get the NAFTA deal passed in a bipartisan way, the NAFTA revisions. If you go back to Obama, as polarized as that period was in 2015, there is this very big overhaul of No Child Left Behind called the Every Student Succeeds Act. That was a very bipartisan bill. It was jointly negotiated by Lamar Alexander, a Senate Republican, and Patty Murray. Republicans held the Senate at that point.

If you go to 2013 after the presidential election, there’s a big comprehensive immigration reform bill that passes in a bipartisan way out of the Senate. Which is all to say that even in periods of high polarization and party division, you tend to have the Senate doing a couple things in a bipartisan way. This infrastructure bill is what I would call lowest common denominator bipartisanship.

So what they’ve done is they’ve taken out of the American Jobs Act and the Families Plan all of the things on which the two parties disagree. Child care, human infrastructure, health care, all of it. And they’ve basically left spending on hard infrastructure. Roads, bridges, water pipes, that kind of thing. And they’re just going to pass that, which is fine. It’s good. I will be happy to see that bill pass. But this is not an example of how bipartisanship can work. To me, it’s actually an example of how wan it is.

If you can’t use compromise to find a way to pass things that are priorities — controversial priorities — for the two sides, all you can do is the very narrow world of, we all agree that we should spend money on roads. You really can’t do that much through it. The only thing I will say in its defense as an interesting political moment is the pincer move that seems to have been agreed to is interesting. That Republicans are still going to vote for this bill. Did vote for it in the Senate, despite knowing that there will also be this partisan budget reconciliation bill coming.

That was striking to me. That suggested there’s a little bit more space to pass simultaneously bipartisan and partisan parts of bills, just using different processes. And it would be interesting if that became a normal political strategy. But I see that as a political innovation on the margins, not the dawning of a new era of good feeling.

annie galvin

So from bipartisanship to polarization, Ara asks a question about your book, “Why We’re Polarized,” out now in paperback.

ezra klein

Thank you for saying that.

[LAUGHTER]

I’ll slip you a 20 after.

annie galvin

[LAUGHS] Thank you. So Ara asks, “Has anything changed in how you view ‘Why We’re Polarized’ since its publication? Have events, observations and conversations you’ve had since then altered your thesis or conclusions at all? And if so, to what extent?”

ezra klein

So one fun thing about the paperback, a reason to run out and buy it, is there is an afterword in the paperback, a new afterword about what I think the book got right and what I wish I had done differently in it. But to give a shortened version of this: first, not that much in my thinking has changed. I say this in the afterword.

The single biggest mistake I made was not believing the book’s thesis enough. And I recognize how much that just sounds like me puffing up my own book, but that’s the truth of it. I would have told you, even having published a book about how polarization structures not just the way we look at politicians, but also the way we look at real things in the world — the economy, who to trust, what to believe in.

I still would have told you, if you would describe to me what would happen over the next year after I published a book — the pandemic, 500,000 to 600,000 American deaths in that period of time, the second impeachment, the January 6 insurrection — I would have told you that more would change within the structure of political opinion. But for everything that happened with the pandemic, all the death, for all that happened, the 2020 election looked extraordinarily like the 2016 election.

There was a small swing towards Joe Biden. There were some interesting compositional differences. But it was not either a mass move towards Joe Biden or a mass move towards Donald Trump. For all that happened in the Trump presidency, he had an incredibly narrow band of approval from the day he was inaugurated to the day of the 2020 election.

So one of the things I said in the book is that we are creating a political system through polarization that is almost immune to new evidence, where there is very little accountability because very little can change minds. And in order for accountability to work, you really do need people to change their minds. You need swings in the political system such that politicians begin responding to new incentives. I wrote a whole book about how locked in place we are, and I underestimated it.

Now, the thing that I did not focus on in the book that ends up being a pretty important omission is that I talk about a lot of different dimensions upon which we can be polarized. Race, geography, psychology, ideology, partisanship, et cetera. Something I did not talk about nearly enough is educational polarization, which has become a really central form of polarization.

It is a hard thing to talk about because educational polarization seems to me to be picking up some other factors. It’s not simply education. As a way of thinking about this, if it were simply education, the polls would not have been wrong again in 2020 because the pollsters had corrected by that point, or were trying very hard to correct for education. But whatever was polarizing, education was only one piece of this sort of low-trust voter who doesn’t like to talk to pollsters. But nevertheless, educational polarization is really, really important. It’s changing the Democratic Party in profound ways, the Republican Party in profound ways. It is part of why racial polarization unexpectedly went down a little bit in 2020, because you had people of all races getting pulled more in the educational polarization direction. Joe Biden did better particularly among college educated whites. Donald Trump did better particularly among non-college Black Americans and Latinos.

And so that’s a piece of the book that I think I didn’t get right. I didn’t see how central educational polarization was becoming.

annie galvin

Yeah, that’s interesting. I just have a kind of a follow-up question. Were you surprised by the extent to which the pandemic sort of polarized people, just in terms of masks and vaccines, but also just even in terms of how seriously to take it? Because I think there was a moment at the beginning of the pandemic where I thought, well, it’s a virus. I mean, it’s going to affect communities differently, but it’s sort of a great equalizer in a biological sense.

But I think we’ve just seen increased polarization in a lot of ways. Did that surprise you at all? Or was this just totally predictable based on what you’d written?

ezra klein

It was predictable based on what I had written. And it surprised me because I thought there was a limit. I would have told you that one of the reasons that polarization can shape so much of how we see the world is that so much in politics is an abstraction. It is happening far away. It’s complicated.

You’re not out there taking the measure of the precise amount of carbon in the atmosphere. You’re not out there studying what it means for China to be a currency manipulator. It’s easy for these questions of group affiliation and who you trust to become dominant when these are complicated, second-hand questions that their effect on your own life is diffuse.

The virus wasn’t — isn’t — like that. You could die. The people you know could die. You could get sick. You could get long Covid. And I was and am a little bit astonished that even that form of direct life and death stakes could polarize as sharply as it did.

One of the questions I continue to have is whether or not that was baked in, or whether or not that was a secondary mutation in the system based on Donald Trump’s bizarre, erratic reactions to Covid. The counterfactual I always offer here is, what if we were in the second term of Mitt Romney’s presidency? And he had been up there wearing a mask and pushing for very science-based interventions, which is what he would have been doing.

Would Republicans have taken that as their position? And would you actually have a certain amount more of woo-woo liberal worries about vaccinations and masks and breathing carbon dioxide? I genuinely don’t know the answer to that, but it’s an interesting counterfactual to think about.

annie galvin

Yeah. Well, a lot to write about for the second edition when it comes out. [LAUGHTER] All right, so now we’re going to move into some questions about climate and economics. So Simon has a really interesting question: “What does think of Jason Hickel’s argument that degrowth is humanity’s best hope for addressing climate change?” So maybe could you just quickly gloss what degrowth is, and then give your opinion on it?

ezra klein

Yeah. And maybe we should do an episode on this. I have very complicated feelings about degrowth. So one is that it is tricky to talk about, as you say, because I find its advocates will continue to say that you’re defining it wrong. So let me use a definition from Hickel, which is, and I’m quoting him here, “Degrowth is a planned reduction of energy and resource throughput designed to bring the economy back into balance with the living world in a way that reduces inequality and improves human well-being.”

And so I’d note two things here. One is “designed.” Degrowth is, as its advocates understand it, a act of global economic planning really without equal anywhere in human history. It is an act of extraordinary central planning. So that’s one thing that is going to become important in my answer.

I’d say there’s part of this vision I’m sympathetic to, and then part of it that I just don’t think holds together. I would distinguish a critique of want and a critique of growth. And the way I would do that is that, as you hear if you listen to the show, I’m pretty critical of a lot of the ways capitalism generates desire.

Desire is something we build through advertising, through social mimicry. This is a show that is supported by advertising. This is part of the desire- generation complex in its business model. And we are told and taught to want a lot of things, not only that we don’t need, but that don’t make us happier. And so not all growth as measured by G.D.P. is good growth.

But a lot of what people want is fine, or great, or whatever. It’s their desire, and it’s not for me to tell them the jeans they’re interested in are incorrect. And a lot of it I don’t think is under the power of policymakers to control. I don’t think it’s all advertising. I don’t know that if you cut down advertising, the amount people would spend on consumption would go way down. They might simply consume other things.

And so I want people to have rich, materially fulfilling lives. And I think it’ll be a very hard piece to change. So in terms of having a counterweight to the materialism, the ideology of materialism in modern society, that’s a part of degrowth that I’m very open to.

But now let me talk about degrowth more in the terms of it is a direct political project, which is as an answer to climate change. I would cut this into a few pieces. Is degrowth necessary for addressing climate change? Is it the fastest way to address climate change? And is it desirable? It has to be at least one of those things to be the strategy you’d want to take.

And I don’t think it is. Let’s start with necessary. Many countries in Europe, even the United States, are growing while reducing their carbon footprint. Now, you could say they’re not doing so fast enough depending on the country. But they could all do so much faster if there was enough political will to deploy more renewable technology, to tax carbon, to do a bunch of things that we have not been able to pass. So it is clearly true that we can decouple growth and energy usage.

Hickel, to be fair, will say that that may be true. But given the speed at which we need to act, we can’t just be deploying renewable energy technology. It would also help the situation if we stopped using as much through material consumption. That is, I think, conceptually true and politically false.

I mean, let’s just state that speed is, first and foremost, a political problem. There is a delta between where we are right now in terms of what we are doing on climate change and where we could be. That delta is big, and that delta gets bigger every year because it gets harder every year. And the time we have to act before we start getting some of the really truly catastrophic feedback loops in play is shortening. So you’re now talking here about the speed at which you can move politics.

So for something to be faster, it doesn’t just need to be faster if you implemented it. It needs to be something you can implement such it accelerates the politics of radical climate action. And that’s where I think degrowth completely falls apart. And I have tried to look for the answer people give on this, and I’ve never found one that is convincing.

So again, I’ll quote Hickel on this: “Degrowth has a discriminating approach to reducing economic activity. It seeks to scale down ecologically destructive and socially less necessary production, i.e., the production of S.U.V.s, arms, beef, private transportation, advertising and planned obsolescence” — by which he means there, the fact that expiration dates are built into a lot of our electronics — “while expanding socially important sectors like health care, education, care and conviviality.”

And I’d urge people to think about that for a minute. I mean, you can listen to that and you will assume correctly that I am sympathetic to the idea that a lot of those goods are not great. I’m a vegan. I don’t eat beef. I would like nobody else to eat beef.

I think that if the political demand of the climate movement becomes you don’t get to eat beef, you will set climate politics back so far, so fast, it would be disastrous. Same thing with S.U.V.s. I don’t like S.U.V.s. I don’t drive one. But if you are telling people in rich countries that the climate movement is for them not having the cars they want to have, you are just going to lose. You are going to lose fast.

We watched this happen for years before Elon Musk and some others began inventing cars that were both electrified and were actually cool cars. You weren’t going to get everybody in a Prius. You might, over time, get them into the post-Tesla generations of electronic vehicles.

This is where the politics of it for me fall apart. I’d at least like to see some empirical evidence for the claim that degrowthers are right, and that their appeal will speed the politics of doing hard things on climate change. Because I think it will do the opposite. And I don’t see politicians winning in the countries they would need to win on anything like this platform. Quite the contrary.

I watched the most effective attack against Joe Biden’s climate policies. It dominated the news for a day or two. It was Fox News just making up — just completely making up — a false claim that Biden was going to limit or restrict red meat.

annie galvin

Right. [LAUGHS]

ezra klein

So my worry with degrowth is that it is trying to take the politics out of politics. It is attacking the flaws of the current strategy as not moving fast enough when the impediments are political, but then not accepting the impediments to its own political path forward.

I will say, because I think it’ll be weird to people if I don’t mention this, that there is the big problem, of course, that the rising generation of emissions is coming from China, from India. I think it’s something like 2/3 of emissions are now from middle income countries. That is only going up.

Hickel and other degrowthers will say that, yes, the point of this is that the rich countries, which have already used more than their fair share of the carbon budget, should cut their carbon usage so poor countries can grow. I cannot imagine how you are going to enforce this as a political and economic planning regime. How you will get rich countries to agree to do less so poor countries can have more. I mean, look at what has happened with vaccine hoarding.

I don’t want to say that this isn’t a good moral weight on the conversation or, in the long term, a good push for people to think about different ways of having growth, different ways of human flourishing. But the entirety — as the degrowth people will agree — the entire question of the climate change conversation is speed. And I just don’t see the argument for degrowth as being anything but an extraordinarily slower way of approaching the politics, probably counterproductive compared to what we’re doing, which is I think you can make tremendous strides on climate change by deploying renewable energy technologies and giving people the opportunity to have a more materially fulfilling life atop those technologies.

And by the way, when that happens in rich countries, as we have seen, it ends up subsidizing these renewable energy technological advances for poorer countries. So it is a fact that Germany and other countries did so much to subsidize solar for themselves, it has also made it possible for countries like China and India to have such a rapid advance in solar technology that it’s affordable for them to do a lot of their growth on that platform.

So I also think there are cross-subsidies in rich countries trying to maintain growth renewable energy deployment that end up helping poor countries change what they’re doing in a useful way, too. So that’s my take on degrowth. But I understand its appeal. I just don’t understand its politics.

annie galvin

So Eric had a question that relates to this, as well. So Eric asks, “How responsible are individuals for decreasing their personal consumption, and what role should government policy play?”

ezra klein

The way I try to think about this is, don’t think about consumption — even your consumption — as individual. Think of yourself as a node for social, political and moral contagion. I don’t think my personal decision to not eat meat is that important. On the scale of the global animal trade, it’s meaningless.

But I caught my veganism from my wife. Other people have caught veganism or vegetarianism from me. And it’s in that way that individual attitudes ladder up to social attitudes, and then to social and political change. Sometimes I’ll see people cut what individuals do and what happens in politics. But I think that’s a cut that you need to be very careful making.

It is very hard to impose through politics outcomes and social mores that individuals do not already believe in their private lives. You can do it sometimes. I mean, we’ve had times like, say, Brown v. Board, where that has to happen. But it’s a very difficult way of going about it.

And oftentimes the way politics changes is that enough individuals have changed — and I think this is true also for civil rights and a lot of the examples of what sometimes get looked at as legislative or legal change. Oftentimes enough individuals have changed that they are now open to the idea that the policy regime will move into accordance with their values. But if you’re someone who, say, loves eating meat, the idea that the government is going to come tomorrow and tell you you can’t is just not going to fly.

So taking seriously the ideas and morals and views of individuals, that’s not a different sphere than what ends up happening in politics. And it’s not just individual. All of the stuff catches. And it is why I’m a fan of people not being quiet about the way they try to instantiate their political ideals in their individual lives. I think that a lot of the value of the choices we make is in our willingness to try to use those to change the choices other people see as normal for them to make.

annie galvin

Just to make sure that we answer Eric’s question, is there a role for government policy to play at all in reducing consumption?

ezra klein

Yes, there are many ways. I mean, one simple way government policy can help reduce consumption that is negative is to correctly — I’m going to sound very economic here — correctly price in negative externalities. [LAUGHTER] But correctly price what things cost. I am still somebody who believes it would be valuable, even though I don’t think it is politically possible, to tax carbon, or certainly to have put a tax on it years ago.

There are all kinds of ways we could tax things that are actually bad for the world, bad for the environment. I mean, we do this to cigarettes right now at a pretty high level. So the government can often nudge people to make different decisions than they otherwise would.

Occasionally, it can ban. I mean, it can ban the worst things, and it often should. But yeah, government can use taxes and other kinds of pricing mechanisms to make sure that the prices people see and somewhat reflect the social cost of what they are doing. And also in the other direction. I mean, the amount we have spent to subsidize oil and gas exploration or defense technology or all kinds of other things that are not my favorite parts of our economy compared to what we have spent subsidizing better choices, I think, should make us sit up and wonder about what our priorities truly are.

So it isn’t just you can price the bad things, but you can pump a lot of money into making sure there are good options for people to have. It is very difficult to live in a way your society is not set up for you to live in. And that’s asking a lot of people individually, maybe not more than should be asked of us, but nevertheless more than most are willing to pay. So the government can often create other, better options. And there are all kinds of ways to do that, including something I think we’re going to get to in the next question.

annie galvin

Yes, yes. Jack asks the good question that’s also about pricing and externalities. Jack asks, “In thinking about the hopefully coming rise of plant-based products, how are they supposed to outcompete animal products on cost when the latter [animal products] rely on so many externalities and so much suffering in order to save money?”

ezra klein

I really want to say, good on Jack for recognizing and saying that animal cruelty is a cost that we just don’t pay. The animals do. It’s been something that I have tried to bang on for years, and I think it is so important. Cheap meat is not cheap.

There was a great Nick Kristof column some months back about the very, very, very low- price rotisserie chickens at Costco and how horribly those chickens are treated. And so, yeah, you walk into Costco and you’re like, I can’t believe how cheap that chicken is. But that chicken isn’t cheap. It’s just that the cost was paid by the chicken.

And, to some degree within the broader world of meat, is being paid by deforestation and all that comes with that. Is being paid in climate costs. Is being paid in antibiotic resistance and the people who die from that. I mean, there are a lot of costs that are not paid when people purchase a steak or a burger or whatever it might be.

That said, I don’t think, even with all of that unpriced suffering and all those unpriced externalities, it is impossible to imagine plant-based or cultivated meat products undercutting the price of meat in the market, simply because the problem with raising animals for food is that it is incredibly inefficient.

I was looking at some numbers from an article from Yale. It’s about 25 calories of feed required to create just 1 calorie of beef. The ratio for pork is about 15 to 1. Even the most efficient meat chicken is about 9 to 1.

So the promise of these plant-based and cell-based meats is that you don’t have that crazy math behind them. That the amount of energy and calories and time you put in to make the food is much closer to the food you get out. The amount of land that you need for the food is much, much, much smaller. And if you can do that, then you can undercut them on price even if you’re not correctly, I would say, pricing the externalities of meat.

And then what I would say is that, as the options in the market get better — because we’re still pretty early in the current generation of plant-based food products, and we haven’t even seen the first truly cultivated meat products go on wide sale. Like, that’s still going to be a couple of years out. But imagine 10 years into the future when there really is a healthy market for these things. And then maybe you can do what we talked about in the previous question of beginning to equalize the pricing a little bit more. Removing some of the subsidies that the current meat industry gets, or that the feed for animals get.

Putting in place stronger protections for animal welfare, which might lead prices to rise on animal-based meat, but it wouldn’t lead prices to rise on plant-based or cultivated meat. So as people begin to have other options with which to eat the meat they want — and by the way, this is a very global issue going back to the degrowth conversation — the trend of countries getting richer and wanting much more meat just seems unstoppable. I don’t know what you do about that except to give them options for meat that are not as ecologically destructive.

But as people get options that can fulfill the desire they have for meat without it always having to come from animals, they might be more open to demanding better treatment for animals, which, in general, is a very popular position. People believe animals should be treated well. They just often don’t want to think about it or think about the trade-offs that are actually being made because they like stuff that’s cheap, as we all do.

annie galvin

What are your thoughts about things like the Impossible Burger, where people have criticized those kind of meat simulacrum products for relying on some of the same industrial processes that can be harmful in other food production? Do you have a take on products that are meant to simulate the taste of meat versus just trying to move to a diet where you eat a lot of beans and other legumes and that kind of thing?

ezra klein

Yes, I think these people are — I want to say this gently because I like some of these folks. I think they’re very wrong. Mark Bittman is a friend of mine. He’s a food writer. He’s been on this show. He wrote a response to a piece I did called “A Moonshot for Meat,” where I was arguing for the beginnings of government subsidies for plant-based and cell-based meat research.

And he wrote this whole piece, and he said, we already have a replacement for meat. It’s legumes! And it’s like, yeah, man. [LAUGHTER] But there’s a reason that, at Burger King, you can now get an Impossible Whopper, and they never let you get a lentil Whopper.

annie galvin

Right.

ezra klein

I like legumes, too. I like beans. I am very skeptical of the part of the food movement that wants to impose its culinary preferences on other people. I don’t see that as, in general, successful. I am not somebody who is naturally down on the industrial production of food. We are supporting billions and billions of people, and I want us to be able to support more. I know we get questions about this that maybe I’ll deal with another day. I’m somebody who believes in human population growth. I want to see it done in a more sustainable way. But I believe human life is a good thing.

Just the animals who are getting killed right now and tortured, they don’t have time for us to convince the entire world that meat is gross. And since nobody has been even a little bit successful at doing that at all, except for certain religious movements, and even those are losing their potency — a lot more meat is eaten in India now than it used to be — I am extraordinarily skeptical of that as a strategy going forward.

The people I know in the animal rights movement who’ve been doing this for decades and decades and have only watched the horrors of the industrial animal production process get worse, there’s a reason they’ve moved in these directions. And I think they are right to. So yes, you have to be careful with your industrial processes. But there’s no version of modern life with 9 billion people on Earth that does not have a lot of industrial processes. You can have good ones. You can have bad ones. But I am not — I think this is going to come clearly through in this Ask Me Anything — I’m not anti-technology. I recognize that we are going to create more problems, but we’re going to create more problems in all kinds of ways. And we would also create more problems by trying to run a quick turnaround on this stuff.

And so the idea that Impossible and whatever is a simulacrum, I just — yeah, it’s a simulacrum. So are the animals who eat pumped full of antibiotics and bred to grow to sizes we would have never seen in nature. And meanwhile, you have the rise of cultivated meats, which are really, really very interesting.

I went to Upside Foods, which used to be Memphis Meats, and tried some of their chicken. And it’s just chicken.

annie galvin

It’s just chicken, yeah.

ezra klein

I just ate a piece of chicken for the first time in however many years. And I said that. I said, yeah, it tastes like chicken. And they’re like, because it is chicken. And I realize they do that bit with everybody who comes in the door.

annie galvin

Yes, for sure.

ezra klein

But it is a remarkably unremarkable eating experience. And so if we can grow chicken breasts on scaffolding using clean ingredients without pumping them full of antibiotics, without killing a chicken, I am all for it. And I do not see a way — I will say this flatly. Again, it’s related to my thinking on degrowth. I am very skeptical of our ability to change people’s long-time, deeply embedded preferences at high speed.

annie galvin

So one more question that relates to the environment. Alyssa asks, “How do you reconcile the need to build more housing for people with catastrophic biodiversity loss” that might come along with that effort to build?

ezra klein

So I don’t think those are in tension, really. A lot of the pressure to build more housing comes from people who want to see dense places zoned so you can build up. And I don’t think it’s the case that if we just made it easier to add stories to buildings in San Francisco, you would have any more biodiversity loss. The biodiversity in San Francisco proper is — it’s already pretty lost.

What’s happening right now is what’s creating a lot of biodiversity loss. So in California, because zoning is so terrible and it is so hard to build a house in the places people want to live, you’ve had tremendous outflow into what gets called now the urban wildland interface, which is to say building more homes in these more wooded exurban or rural or even, until now, relatively empty areas of wilderness. And that does have a lot of biodiversity loss.

But it’s also bad for the climate because people are driving more. It’s bad for fires for a bunch of different reasons. It’s just bad. But it is happening because we won’t build up in the cities where they actually want to live. And so we are pushing poorer people out to these more vulnerable, more ecologically difficult places.

So as a first approximation on housing, I would like to see more dense housing in areas people are already living in and want to live in. I would add, by the way, that in terms of biodiversity loss, the amount of land we give to animals, to grazing animals, it is beyond comprehension. It is so much of the land that is habitable on planet Earth. People have no idea how much this is picking up.

And so one of the best things we can do is to move to foods that don’t require so much land. If it’s legumes, great. But also, if it’s plant- and cell-based meats, great. But either way, I don’t think there’s really a tension between housing and biodiversity. But I think there are a lot of places where our current policy is creating terrible, terrible biodiversity outcomes. And denser housing, and a move away from industrial animal agriculture would be to things that could really help.

annie galvin

How many stories high do you think buildings in San Francisco should be allowed to be?

ezra klein

A lot higher than now.

annie galvin

[LAUGHS]

ezra klein

I don’t care.

annie galvin

Higher than three?

ezra klein

I don’t care. Again, I’d start with higher. I have been to cities like New York, where buildings get pretty high, and it’s fine. I don’t love everything about the architecture, but people do enjoy New York.

annie galvin

That’s true.

ezra klein

I don’t know, make it easy to build 10-story apartment buildings. Let’s start there before we get to skyscrapers. I understand the ways in which people like the aesthetic and even population-level characteristics of the places they live. But when you have places that are as economically central in some of these cities, like San Francisco, where so many people work, and so the reality is you have an entire service class in the city that is made to commute in so you can have your view — I don’t like it, and I think it’s unjust.

[MUSIC PLAYING]

annie galvin

All right, so shifting gears a little bit, Eric asks a really great question that I think builds on some of our recent episodes, like the ones with Ross Douthat and Ta-Nehisi Coates and Nikole Hannah-Jones. So Eric asks, “Does the United States need a shared sense of purpose, history, and patriotism in order to thrive?”

ezra klein

Absolutely. I say full-throatedly, absolutely.

annie galvin

Oh, OK.

ezra klein

And I just don’t agree with what a lot of people seem to think that means. I do not believe that the only way to have a shared sense of purpose, history, and patriotism is to have a gauzy, nostalgic, idealistic view of your own country’s past. I think a lot of countries have a sense of themselves as flawed. I mean, the most at-hand example is Germany, but by no means is Germany the only one. I don’t think there’s a view that Germany lacks the ability to have a unified national identity.

I would say that this is why Barack Obama scared the right so much. And I think this is an under-noticed fact about his presidency. His particular political genius was for fashioning a narrative of American history — and politically weaponizing that narrative, I should say. But fashioning a narrative of American history in which he cast as the true American identity the people who are working to overcome the sins of our past, and then the injustices of the status quo.

Whatever you think of his policies, that was his political genius. He actually took back the American story and a sense of patriotism for a more liberal or left view of America, and built inside that view is that we are an imperfect country that has much to atone for and much to live up to. And that those of us in this moment have a great purpose to do together. We have a great mission: to build the world’s first true multiethnic democracy. To achieve a level of economic flourishing and political equality we have never seen before.

When I had this conversation, Nikole Hannah-Jones pushed back on the idea that this sucks. Nobody should look at this as a celebration, that we still have not achieved a true multiethnic democracy. And she’s, of course, right about that. But given that America is what it is, the idea that there cannot be purpose and patriotism in living up to our ideals is absurd.

And not only is it absurd, but we have seen — not just in living memory, but a couple of years ago, his vice president is currently the president — we have seen the crafting of that narrative. And we have seen its extraordinary political potency. Barack Hussein Obama, seven years after 9/11, won the presidency, the first Black man to ever do it in this country, based on that narrative.

The right understood what an extraordinary threat that was to them, and they were correct about that. And I do think it’s something the left misses in Obama’s political legacy and in the lessons he taught. There are many things he wasn’t able to or didn’t achieve, and there are all kinds of reasons to be disappointed with how fast you can move in American politics, or how fast American politics did move in that period, and then what happened with Donald Trump afterwards.

But just as a simple question of, can you craft a politically powerful national identity around a view of America that says, first and foremost, we are a country that has been deeply unjust, and the people who are most American are those who have fought in every single age to make it more just? You absolutely can, and we just saw it done a couple of years ago.

annie galvin

OK, so let’s turn now to electoral politics. And this is a great question. I’m actually kind of curious for your thoughts on this, too. So Allison asks, “What happened to the Green Party in the U.S.?” And Alison says, “I mean, I know it’s still around. But where did it go so wrong as to become pretty irrelevant?”

ezra klein

So there is a political science maxim called — I think I’m going to get the pronunciation here right — Duverger’s Law. He was a French political scientist. And in its technical form, it is something like: single ballot plurality rule elections, such as first-past-the-post, structured within single member districts, tend to favor a two-party system. But to put this more simply, when you have a system where you have winner-take-all outcomes, third parties are destined to be spoilers. Which means the better they do, the more backlash they end up facing.

So imagine a world where Democrats in a given election win 40 percent. And Greens, due to unbelievably charismatic leadership and political strategy, win 15 percent. And Republicans win 45 percent. Now, in a proportional representation system like you have in many places in Europe, what would end up happening there is the Democrats and the Greens would govern and coalition with each other. In our system, the Republicans win.

annie galvin

Yeah, right.

ezra klein

And then the Democrats and many of the people who voted for the Greens are furious because — we saw this in 2000. George W. Bush did a lot of things people on the left didn’t like. Correctly so. And the promise is made, never again. We’re never again going to let that happen.

So if you want to have multiparty systems, you need proportional representation. The reason we don’t have stronger third parties is not a bunch of just tactical errors. It is because, paradoxically, the more effective a third party is in this country, the more backlash it will face and the weaker it will become. Outside of a complete level of party schism that ends up destroying one to the main two parties.

If you want to be a very good book on this, I recommend Lee Drutman’s “Breaking the Two-Party Doom Loop,” which is about arguing that much of America’s polarization problem is coming from our inability to have a strong multiparty democracy. He gets into a lot of the research here. It’s very readable. I don’t fully agree with him on the polarization side of it, but I do agree with him on the broader analysis. And I think his solutions are completely correct, and I think people should check that out.

annie galvin

So Brian asks a series of questions, and I’m just going to read them all. “What is holding blue states back from implementing many liberal policy wish list items, or even Biden’s platform, at the state level? For example, in California, why don’t we have universal health care or childcare? Is it a good idea for states to implement such large and expensive policies when they themselves generally can’t take on the kind of debt that the federal government can?”

ezra klein

I don’t think you could chalk it all up to money and the debt issue. So what Brian is getting at there is that the federal government can issue debt, and state governments, in almost all cases, need to balance their budget every single year. So their ability to put things on the credit card is much diminished.

If you wanted to, say, have a single payer health care system in the states where, in a state, unlike the federal government, the state would probably have to pay for all of it while the federal government might say, eh, we’re going to pay for it over 15 years, or not pay for all of it, or whatever it might be. But I think that’s a bit of a dodge.

There have been a lot of states that have attempted to pass some kind of single payer system. California is one of them. There was recently a very big push in Vermont. And they have failed in every single case. Whereas, say, Obamacare started in Massachusetts with the Romneycare reforms. Single payer in Canada began in a single province.

And this is an argument I have with a lot of people who, in terms of the system they would like to see, we agree. And in terms of how health care politics work, we disagree. But these policies are often not popular once you try to pass and implement them. They might become popular if they were implemented and in the rearview mirror. I actually believe that to be true.

But when you ask people to pay the full cost of single payer as they did in Vermont, they blanch. I highly recommend Sarah Kliff’s two big articles on the Vermont single payer effort that she wrote in Vox a couple of years ago. It’s a very, very good and telling look at why that failed in Bernie Sanders’s home state. In Bernie Sanders’s home state.

In California, there have been years of trying to pass single payer. And Gavin Newsom ran on single payer, and it is not happening. And it’s not not happening because imagining the financing is completely impossible. As California politicians never cease to point out, California, if it were its own economy, would be something like the fifth largest economy in the world. The fifth largest economy in the world can afford a national health care system. And arguably, as single payer people like to point out, it would be cheaper because you could negotiate down pricing.

But actually going all the way there is very, very, very politically difficult. A lot of the cost in the current system is hidden right now. It’s hidden in tax deductions. It’s hidden in employer payments. People who have employer-based health care pay roughly 30 percent of the full cost of their health insurance. That changes a bit year to year, but that’s in the ballpark.

So then, all of a sudden, when they’re presented with a price tag that would be 100 percent, even if that is being split also to business taxation, it’s really shocking because people don’t know how much the system currently costs. And it’s hard to get over that. That makes it very easy to demonize.

People don’t like the idea they’re not going to be able to have the health insurance they might currently like, even if it is unstable. They worry about doctor choice. So it is both the case that I would like to see blue states being much more aggressive on governance, and also that there are lessons in the fact that these efforts keep failing that I think people don’t want to take seriously or learn. Now, that doesn’t mean you don’t want to try something just because it has failed a bunch of times before. That isn’t how I see things. But there is information in the fact that this has happened repeatedly.

I would also just say, I think blue states are unduly cautious and fragmented in their policy making. Like for instance, people don’t know this, but in order to raise taxes in California, you need a 2/3 vote in the legislature. So it’s just really hard to raise taxes in California, which means that there are certain policies you could do if you could raise taxes that you can’t. Now, you can get around that by doing propositions. But it’s all a tough road to hoe when you’re doing complex legislating that requires a fair amount of horse trading and interest groups and so on. And then one advantage that the federal government’s debt capacities give it is that being able to put at least some of it on the credit card allows you to give out more benefits while asking for less in taxes or other kinds of costs. And so that’s one reason that you end up seeing a lot of these things happen federally first.

annie galvin

Yes. And we can link Sarah Kliff’s pieces in the show notes because I think that would be really great for people to look at.

[MUSIC PLAYING]

OK, so let’s move into some questions about you, Ezra.

ezra klein

Oh, good.

annie galvin

[LAUGHTER] Yes, now is the exciting part. So we’ll start with one actually more about the show. So Josh is asking about the shift that the shift has gone through since it was at Vox, and now it’s at the New York Times. So Josh asks, “It seems to me that your show has shifted away from what I always felt was your emphasis on political theory and political philosophy. Am I reading too much into that? Or has there been a conscientious shift in your approach to your podcast upon starting at the New York Times?”

ezra klein

I think there’s been a shift and certainly an ability to make good on ambitions I’ve had for a long time. I don’t think of the show as, first and foremost, a political podcast. I think of it as a show about ideas. And the ideas that matter — by the way, including ideas that matter for politics — are much broader than just what is happening in Congress, or what frames itself as explicitly political.

As an example this, if you think back to the episode we did with Sy Montgomery about octos, octopi, octopuses — I was so sure you couldn’t do octopi. And then a lot of people made the good point that, you know, it’s in the dictionary. Words are all made up. We do a lot of stuff where we mix different kinds of cognates. So maybe I can say octopi.

Anyway, if you look at that show, I think that’s a good example of one that looks like a move away from politics. Except I consider that show very political. If we took seriously the remarkable mental capacities and lives of octopuses, doesn’t that have profound implications for how we treat the sea, for how we treat them, for how we treat the climate that they live in? So I’m not always sure that the shows that don’t appear political truly are not.

If I think back to, say, the George Saunders episode, which I love, and Saunders is a novelist, that’s a very political show even as most of it is not specifically about politics. It’s about novels and empathy. So I see these worlds is more connected.

But if I’m being really honest, I started my political blog when I was 18 and in college. And starting right then, I wrote about politics every single day, every day, with the exception of a couple weeks a year of vacation, which I don’t even always take fully without writing about politics for 18 years by the time I left Vox. So now I’m 37. So I have spent more than half my life covering politics really every weekday, and frankly, more than that.

And I want to think about more things. It’s kind of a surprise that. And I also think, in certain ways, that the focus on politics also led me to miss things that ended up becoming very important in politics.

So I want the show to be broader because I think the world is broader. And sometimes I wanted to do this at Vox, but between my management roles there and just other responsibilities I had, it’s very difficult for me to prep. As you know — because Annie often has to work with me on these more cultural shows — it’s easy for me to prep a fellow political pundit and talk about what’s going on in Congress.

We’re about to prepare for a series of novelists. I’m terrified. Like, I am terrified.

annie galvin

[LAUGHS] Don’t worry.

ezra klein

But I think that leads to good shows. I think that leads to growth for me and for the show and new vistas for the audience. And so that is time I didn’t have before. But now that I have it, I want to use it.

annie galvin

Yeah, I think you’ve said before that one thing you try to do on the show is help create these maps for understanding the world and how to live. And I really love the idea that politics can be more than just policy. And that even an episode like the Jeff Tweedy one — I mean that’s not a political episode, but it’s about how to relate to the world around you and how to relate to other people and your own autobiography. And I think it’s not totally unrelated.

So the next question is from Ashley. And Ashley asks, “What is a critique of your work that you took to heart? How did you react to it, or how did you change?”

ezra klein

So a critique I’ve taken to heart in the past — let’s call it decade — is that sometimes in focusing coverage on what is politically possible, you also enforce the boundaries of what is possible. And I want to say that I don’t agree with the very strong version of this critique, which imagines that there are almost no boundaries on what you can get done except what pundits in the media are saying. That’s not really where I am. And we’ve talked about this. I think there’s a lot in public opinion that is not easy to change. And I think there’s a lot in our political institutions that make change hard. But I think at other times, like particularly when I ran Wonkblog at the Washington Post — and to be fair, my job there was to cover policymaking in Washington. But I think I took the boundaries too much for granted.

And so something I have tried to do is hold in tension that, on the one hand, a lot of good ideas are basically politically nonstarters, or even politically counterproductive. And you can’t seriously be somebody who wants to improve the world and not worry about that kind of consequentialist analysis. If you go back to my show with Ibram X. Kendi, there’s a lot of that in there. If you want to take a consequentialist approach to anti-racism, then you have to take seriously electoral politics. I remember somebody who I like — Perry Bacon Jr. said it on Twitter; he’s at the Washington Post — that he liked that show. But he felt the focus on electoral outcomes was misguided because Kendi isn’t a politician. But I don’t. I think that if you are saying that the only thing that matters is whether something raises or lowers racial inequality, then you cannot — you cannot — write political consequences out of your analysis because that’s where all this policymaking that we’re supposed to be focusing on comes from.

So I try to hold pressure on that idea. At the same time, I don’t want that to be an excuse for me to not write about or podcast about or think about ideas that are not currently politically possible. So I try to do shows that are well outside what is going to pass in Congress. And I think particularly nowadays we do, and increasingly columns like that. A few months ago, I wrote a column about a negative income tax, which is a form of universal basic income that is means tested. That’s not going to pass anytime soon, but it’s a good thing to inject into the conversation.

So I’ve tried to do a better job than I think I have at some other points in my career at balancing my focus on institutions and constraints and a pragmatic view of how to make change without letting that wall off large areas of needed discourse or ideas that might become very important in the future, or just a good thing to think about even if they’re not going to happen. But that’s a balance I try and probably only sometimes am able to strike.

annie galvin

So this is actually sort of related, but we did get a lot of questions about your reading habits, Ezra, which are quite impressive. And so we just picked one of those many questions from Ashley. And Ashley asks, “How much of your day do you spend reading? Every episode you talk about the things you read, and I’m constantly amazed. How do you find the time in your day? Are you a really speedy reader?” So questions along those lines.

ezra klein

I want to bring down how impressed people seem to be with me on this score.

annie galvin

[LAUGHS] Make us all feel better, yeah.

ezra klein

Well, you do a lot of reading, Annie. You’re being modest.

annie galvin

I like TV too, though. That’s the problem. [LAUGHTER]

ezra klein

So one thing is, part of my job is to read books. That is a great blessing for me, and it’s one most people don’t have. My reading is not confined to 25 minutes before I go to bed.

Now, I’m a weirdo. I will often wake up early to read, things like that. But part of my job is to spend time during the day reading, and that’s part of why I get a lot of reading done. I’m clearly a reasonably quick reader, but I know truly, crazily fast readers. I’m not that fast. But I just spend a lot of time at it. And so that’s kind of everything.

But I was reflecting on this question, and I realize that that’s probably also a bit of a dodge, which is, the biggest thing for me on reading is that I love it in a way I cannot express, in a way that’s probably not always healthy, and that is the bedrock of everything else for me. There’s an old joke in my family. I was probably nine, 10. I went on a vacation, or a trip — an international trip — with my older brother and my grandparents. And everybody joked that I didn’t go to any of the places we went.

I only went to Pern because, at that time, I was obsessed with Anne McCaffrey’s “The Dragonriders of Pern” trilogy. And I just would not take my nose out of the book. And that’s kind of been how I’ve been my whole life. And that doesn’t come from somewhere. I didn’t create that. I don’t get credit for that.

The fact that I find it incredibly calming to read, that I like to spend, in non-Covid times, my free time in bookstores. I feel comfortable there, in libraries. I didn’t get that, and it’s a gift to me that I have it. But that’s kind of the key thing. It’s easy to say, well, you should spend a lot of time reading. But it’s hard to spend a lot of time reading if you don’t like to read.

But for whatever reason, I love to read. I don’t like to do other things. And I’ve wondered too if it has to do with a weird information processing thing. I mean, you joked about watching TV, because I don’t watch — I watch almost no TV. And it’s hard for TV to hold my interest. And I’ve always had trouble just listening to people lecture. And I have a weird attention thing where I’m really good at taking in information while reading, and just not good at watching things happen. I just do not process well that way. I get bored really easily. This is why I did badly, or a big part of the reason I did so badly, in school.

But again, I don’t get moral credit for the fact that I have an attentional quirk that has worked out for me later in life. That just is how it is for me. And so I spend a lot of time reading. I like reading. I would like to spend more time reading than I do. But the great gift for me is I have a job that gives me time to do it, and that I have an innate drive to do it.

So even when I’m just resting, what I want to be doing is reading. And that makes me, in many ways, an annoying person to be around. But it’s a good habit for a podcast host.

annie galvin

Do you have any guilty pleasure activities that we can all feel better about? Do you play video games?

ezra klein

I used to play a lot of video games. I’ve tried to get back into them a bunch of different times during the pandemic. A podcast listener sent me a recommendation for “Kentucky Route Zero,” and I picked that up. And I’m trying to play it. I’m having a little bit of trouble holding on because it’s a bit slow moving and I’m not used to that kind of game, but I’m sure I’ll get there.

So I play video games. I listen to a lot of music. I go to a lot of — I mean, again, back when I could. I’ve really missed this. I go to a lot of shows.

I have a lot of friends. My life is not — I go out drinking. I don’t like the view of me that I’m some kind of reading automaton. I like to read. And then, other than that, if you watched me for a week, things would look very, very, very normal. And in some cases a little silly.

annie galvin

[LAUGHS]

ezra klein

I spend a lot of time with my kid. I mean, I just read a lot. People should be — I don’t want so much credit for that.

annie galvin

Yeah. No, that makes sense. And it is a huge blessing to have a job where you, to some extent, get paid to read. So that is part of it. OK, so another question about some of your practices.

So Rob asks, “I’d like to hear more about your journey with meditation. How did you get started meditating? What does your daily practice consist of? And what resources have you found helpful?”

ezra klein

So I’m always a little cautious about how much of my own spirituality I like to expose on the show, because it’s not something I really want to expose to critique. But I obviously mention my meditation a fair amount, so I feel like I should do it. So I got started, at least in the period of practice I think of myself as still in, which has now been going on pretty seriously for more than a decade. I got started because I was just going nuts. I was just super anxious.

This was a period of time around starting Vox. And that just took a lot out of me. And I began meditating, and I began meditating as a stress management technique. Which it worked somewhat for, although it’s by no means a silver bullet on that.

But the practice caught for me. And over time, it’s become many other things. I mean, more than — it manages my stress. It often helps me identify what is actually happening in my psyche so I can work with that, which is more important in my view.

More recently, the question of, what does your daily practice consist of? It’s a bit of an intense moment at which to ask me that, but I’ll give an honest answer. I’ve been thinking recently and feeling that my practice was a little stagnant. Or maybe a lot stagnant. And also, it felt like I was using meditation to anesthetize myself. That the point was to feel calm and stabilized and focus on your breath, and that I wasn’t getting out of it a deeper sense of the world or clarity about the world that I thought was there and have occasionally glimpsed on retreat.

I just actually recently went to a hermitage for a few days where I just sat in a room on my own for three nights. It was great. And among the things I did there, taking something out of Stephen Batchelor’s book, “Buddhism Without Beliefs,” which I highly recommend, is I spent a lot of time just meditating on death. Which is a pretty core practice in a lot of Buddhist traditions, and, of course, it is core in a lot of other traditions. A lot of death in Christianity. A lot of death and suffering in Judaism. A lot going on with death if you dig into almost any spiritual tradition that you’re familiar with.

But most of the ways traditions have been recast for modernity, they go away from that. There is an effort to push it away. And I found it really potent to spend time in that place and to really try to talk myself into the idea that all of this will go away. That my body will betray me. That I will lose people I love. That I will die. That I will just go back to the earth.

And then to ask the question of, well, what does that imply for how I should be living now? And I am not here to tell — I’m not enlightened. I don’t know. But it’s a hell of a practice, I’ll tell you that. And so I’ve been spending all that time in meditation using questions like that to try to think more about suffering. To try to feel into other people’s suffering more fully. And that’s meant a lot to me recently.

In terms of resources, when I was starting out meditating, I used a lot of the apps. I liked guided meditations. Over time, I don’t really do them anymore. I use the Insight Timer and I just set the bell. But I do recommend the apps. I always thought 10 Percent Happier was a particularly good one, if you want to check that out. It’s very friendly, and it has just some very, very good guided meditations. If you’re a real nerd about stuff and you want a very intense meditative program, I found The Mind Illuminated was really helpful for a while. At a certain point, it wasn’t for me anymore, but it really did supercharge — or put my practice on a track where it felt like it was making progress for a while, and I found that really valuable.

I like the book “Seeing That Frees,” I think it’s called, by Rob Burbea. There are a bunch out there. But I like reading sort of more scholastic forms of Buddhism that are — I wouldn’t call myself a Buddhist, but I spend a lot of time thinking about some of its ideas.

annie galvin

So another question about the show from Colten — and I think this is a really interesting question that I’m kind of interested in as well. So Colten observes, “While the podcast is part of your work life, personal anecdotes and simply listening to your thoughts on topics over a long period of time provide a good illusion of knowing you as a host.” And Colton asks, “I’m wondering what the quality of that relationship feels like on your end. Do you have any thoughts on that?”

ezra klein

Yeah it feels really weird.

[LAUGHTER]

Compared to everything I’ve done in journalism, the podcast has the highest quality of people feeling like they know me when they don’t. I am an awkward person if you meet me for a little while and I don’t know you. And so yeah, that part of it is a strange interaction. I will say the strangest part of it is actually for people who do know me, which is to say that there are people in my life who are actual friends of mine. They feel like we talk a lot because they listen to the podcast. But I feel like we don’t talk at all because we don’t, and I’m right about this. But they don’t feel as much the need to check in. And so then we will, and —

annie galvin

They’re all caught up, yeah.

ezra klein

Yeah, they’re all caught up on what I’m thinking about, and I don’t know anything about them. So it can cause — the funnier thing is the asymmetry it can cause in actual relationships I have.

annie galvin

Yeah. And it’s kind of a cliché to say that podcasts are such an intimate medium, but it is really weird. I mean, as a listener, I definitely feel like I know all these people that I definitely don’t know.

ezra klein

Yeah, and you just heard about that I’m meditating on death. I mean, it’s —

annie galvin

Yeah. You went there, yeah.

ezra klein

It encourages a confessionality that, of course, it does create intimacy. And that’s purposeful. I mean, I do want it to be an honest expression of who I am. But it is then hard to hold up the other side of the bargain well.

annie galvin

Yeah, that makes sense. All right. So one more before we get to our final question. Nathan asks, “Can you describe your comic book fandom? What are your favorite characters, writers, artists, et cetera? How much do you read, and how do you read? Do you read floppies, trades or digitally?”

ezra klein

So I’ve been a comic book fan going way back. When I was a little kid, I made a deal with my parents where instead of getting an allowance, they were willing to give me a higher real value of comic books for that allowance because they wanted to encourage reading, which is a good trick. So I mean, I remember getting the “Infinity Gauntlet” trade paperback when I sick one time. I mean, you never you never forget your first brush with the gauntlet.

So nowadays, I don’t read actual comics. I have subscriptions to the Marvel Unlimited and DC Infinity apps where you can pay a yearly rate, and then you can read basically everything they have ever published. But it’s, like, three months behind where things currently are, which I don’t care about. And so I just drill through comics like that.

In terms of favorite characters and writers and artists, I’m not as deep a comics nerd that I have all of that, to be honest with you. I think that probably my reputation overstates me on that because I’m a Jewish guy who wears glasses and talks about comic books sometimes. But if I were going to recommend a couple, I love Peter David’s “X-Factor” run from a number of years back. You can get that all on Marvel Unlimited, which is where I found it.

All the Neil Gaiman Sandman stuff is great. But I recently read “Sandman Overture,” and it blew my mind. And that’s a trade paperback, too. So if you want to just get that all in one, I really can’t recommend that one enough. I completely loved it.

In terms of things that have been going on more recently, I really loved the Jon Hickman X-Men universe that happened from — I think it’s called “Dawn of the Age of X,” or “Dawn of X,” and then into “Reign of X,” and so on. And that’s just been a cool — very, I would say, fantasy world-inflected take on the X-Men. It has a whole economic structure to it. It’s very much about relationships between nations and power and superpower.

If you want to listen to extraordinary levels of deep, nerdy but pretty entertaining analysis of X-Men, by the way, one of my guilty pleasures — not that guilty. Just one of my pleasures is the “Cerebro” podcast. A good way to get into that, if you liked the Spencer Ackerman episode from a couple of weeks ago, is go listen to Spencer do that show on either Magneto, which is a great one, or the Beast. But you really get a sense for how deep the rabbit hole on this stuff can go.

annie galvin

That’s such a good concept for a podcast, to just do these studies of one character. I love that.

ezra klein

Oh, it’s so good. I’ll also say, just while I’m talking about comics, that I recently read — actually, just while I was on vacation — Grant Morrison’s book “Supergods,” which is both a wonderful memoir of their development as a comic writer and a person, and their dabbling in magic, and all kinds of wild, fascinating stuff. And also just a great history of comics and the different ages, and what they have meant, and what they mean in our culture, and why they’ve attained the centrality they have.

And it’s a real fun book. I’d like to try to get them on the show sometime. But Grant Morrison’s “Supergods.” I highly recommend.

annie galvin

All right, Ezra. So now, always our final question. What are three books you’d recommend to the audience? And Jacob requests that you do children’s books.

ezra klein

I would love to do children’s books. And some of these will reflect what age my kid is at, but “Here We Are: Notes for Living on Planet Earth” by Oliver Jeffers, which is just a wonderful little book of awe and manages to look at living on planet Earth at both child scale somehow, but with the appropriate level of wonder. I really think that’s just a lovely piece of work.

My son, he loves trucks. My whole life is trucks. Heavy machinery. I can now identify skid-steers and backhoe loaders and all kinds of heavy machinery that I didn’t really understand before. “Cars and Trucks and Things That Go” by Richard Scarry is a classic. But man, the world building of that is wonderful.

The mixture in those books — the Scarry books, but particularly that one — of realism and magic, right? It is magical realism. It’s just a real delight. That guy was a genius. And then, speaking of geniuses, “Happy Birthday to You” by Dr. Seuss is one of the truly great accomplishments of the English language.

My poor son. It’s always book time, and he’s always like, truck book? And I’m like, “Happy Birthday to You,” maybe? Because I enjoy reading it. It’s such a fun, playful thing to read. One thing I just love about children’s books is the sense of delight in language. Just the delight in turning around language and playing with it. And Dr. Seuss, of course, being the unbelievable master of that.

So if you’ve never read “Happy Birthday to You,” you should be “Happy Birthday to You.” And just know that I wish we could do for you what they do in Katroo.

annie galvin

[LAUGHS] The real fans will know. Ezra Klein, your podcast is “The Ezra Klein Show.” Thank you for doing this.

ezra klein

Thank you, Annie. And for all you, and Roge, and Jeff, and Michelle do. People don’t always get to see the work behind the show, but it’s remarkable. And it’s good to have you in front of the mic.

annie galvin

Oh, thank you, thank you.

[MUSIC PLAYING]

ezra klein

The Ezra Klein Show is a production of New York Times Opinion. It is produced by Jeff Geld, Roge Karma and Annie Galvin. It is fact checked by Michelle Harris. Original music by Isaac Jones. And mixing by, once again, the great Jeff Geld.

[MUSIC PLAYING]

We asked for your questions, and you answered. Hundreds and hundreds of fantastic questions poured in, and our producer Annie Galvin joined me to ask some of the best of them. Does the infrastructure bill mean there’s more hope for bipartisanship than we thought? What’s my view on the degrowth movement? What do I think my book, “Why We’re Polarized,” got right, and what did it get wrong? Will plant- and cell-based meats ever be cheaper than eating animals, given the subsidies the meat industry gets? Why hasn’t any blue state created a single-payer health care system? Can you really build more housing without creating a biodiversity crisis?

[You can listen to this episode of “The Ezra Klein Show” on Apple, Spotify, Google or wherever you get your podcasts.]

We also get into reading habits, comic books, meditation, children’s books, why I spend a lot of time thinking about death and much more. So here it is: the “Ask Me Anything” episode.

(A full transcript of the episode is available here.)

Image
Credit...Photograph by Lucas Foglia

“The Ezra Klein Show” is produced by Annie Galvin, Jeff Geld and Rogé Karma; fact-checking by Michelle Harris; original music by Isaac Jones; mixing by Jeff Geld; audience strategy by Shannon Busta. Special thanks to Kristin Lin.

A correction was made on 
Sept. 13, 2021

An earlier version of this podcast described Canada's parliamentary electoral system incorrectly. It is a “winner take all” system, not a proportional representation system.

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