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

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

We're going to talk about that song you can't get out of your head, that TV show you watched and can't stop thinking about, and the movie that you saw when you were a kid that made you who you are, whether you like it or not. I was so embarrassed the whole time because it's a bad film, and I still love it. You can find Cannonball on YouTube, and wherever you get your podcasts.

Welcome to one of our Ask Me Anything Episodes. I am here, joined by our fantastic executive producer, Claire Gordon, who has sharpened all of your questions and like, "Darts, she will throw up me." Of course, my answer. But we appreciate everything y'all sent in.

We have tried to look at the questions to see which ones were the most common, which seemed to have the most interest, and we're going to get started. Claire, welcome to the other side of the show. Thank you. Thank you for having me.

It's uncomfortable to be here. We will be getting to the question of everyone's mind, which is the secret society your member of dialogue.

“When have I spoken to Peter T. Ellen, but did we say?”

Exactly. But first, this is from Scott Kay, who's noticed that you seem to have a very intense relationship with electronic music as we all have, quote, "is musician ship something you've ever been drawn to. You are clearly not a passive listener.

What does music do to your craft? Why do you think you feel so at home in such a specific genre of music?" Musician ship is not something I've been heavily drawn to, but I did for the first time ever recently take a singing lesson. Really?

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

And the fact that I make my living apart now in my voice is surprising 'cause there's always the way I speak and how I sound, there's always been like a point of real insecurity for me when I was growing up, particularly. What about it? A lot about it, without letting people into my private securities, but it's really amazing

to take a sing lesson. And I'd always thought I could not ever find a like a tune or a note, and it's turned out I could. I was just wrong about that about myself, which was a cool thing to learn. I played the flute a bit when I was young, but you know, it's a kid.

I tried to learn the guitar when I lived in D.C. as an adult and I loved doing that. I loved it. I should really pick it back up. I played it out of parties. Playing crash into me for women?

No, I did not play in front of other people. But the guy who's teaching me just hung over too often to come, and so it kind of just felt it out. I'd like to learn something. I wouldn't try to learn how to do electronic music.

This show in particular can colonize like everything I love, you know, I can really great novel and then it's like, well, we should have the novelist on the show.

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

thing you're learning how to do. I have in my life like an excess of energy that is oriented towards productivity, accomplishment doing, being angry at myself for not doing things well enough or not doing enough of them. So having spaces where I am an experience or not a creator is important for me. I don't really know how to answer why I feel at home in it.

It just is the music. I mean, I've been listening to, oh my god, it's so good, but it's so it's such an even hard album to tell people how to find.

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

wingedings, like I recognize how this sounds. So he's got this new album out, but both the artist on the album and every song on the album cannot be pronounced or even searched, but you can find it on platforms by searching Fortet. But it means 9/11, it was an incest song.

“It means as a client of Peter, Teo, and a secret society, and I just love the album.”

I've actually two experiences like this on the show, one with Jeff Tweede of Volko, another with Brian Eno, talking to them about individually a song they had done for Tweede impossible Germany. I think it's called. And for Eno, come on with Fred again, and learning that the incredibly intense experience

I had with that music was totally different than the way they understood that music.

it's just mine.

“It's not, I think, legible, other people don't have the same one, but why these songs”

do this set of things to me, the ones that I like, which is not all of them. I mean, there's a lot of, there's both a lot of battle electronic music, but also a lot of electronic music that just doesn't do it for me. I think it is a thing best left, illegible, even to the self. There's a lot of art that what you want to do is just allow yourself to feel differently

and not try to pin the different feeling like a butterfly to a board. But yeah, I feel at home in this music because it makes me feel things I don't feel elsewhere. Happy. No, often not, I don't actually go for that much music that primarily makes me feel

happy. In some ways, I think I use the music to feel things I have more trouble feeling. A lot of the music I like is a little bit discordant and difficult for me. Other people can experience it how they experience it. I noticed when you took out your headphones or I actually hear a blast from your laptop,

I'm like, that's a choice.

“That's a choice of vibe for your Tuesday, and I think the music holding very contrasting”

emotions actually is important for me because the work I do often has to hold very contrasting emotions. There can be beauty and fear and anxiety and hope and all these things at the same time. And so a lot of the music I go for, I mean, some of it I just used to calm down my nervous system.

I love all of our Arnold's work and most of it for me is very soothing. There's a lot of music I do listen to that soothing.

My wife is always like, that's a really sad, really like, I don't find it sad.

I find it like, sometimes a little bit melancholy but in a way I enjoy and then often times really really calming and really beautiful. But then a lot of the music is actually helping me hold things that are hard to feel the same time so that I can infuse a work I'm doing with the kind of contradictory emotions that it sometimes needs to have.

Well, let's talk about the feedback to the Kris Rufel episode, which are our recent episodes.

“Got the most questions, the most comments.”

By for Kated feedback. By for Kated feedback. So this question is from Jason and it requires a little bit of setup. I listen to your recent episode with Kris Rufel. And out of curiosity, I went and listened to a few episodes of his podcast, Rufel and

Lomes. And one of the episodes, Rufel reflected on his conversation with you. I found his interpretation of the conversation wildly different from mine, so I'm going to play two clips here.

And so the first clip, this is from our episode of the Kris Rufel.

And you described Tucker Carlson as a white nationalist. And this is what you said. In some versions, Jews are included in that white race. Sure. In some versions, they are not included in that white race.

In some versions, we are talking about something I would describe primarily as a kind in nationalism, right? The, you know, if you have too much of a country, not sharing a common heritage, you lose solidarity. In some cases, we're talking about something much darker than that.

Like, there are people who just don't like the way their community is changing. And there's the KKK, right? Everything exists on a spectrum. But would you say someone who is, like, for example, hesitant about rapid, large scale, demographic change is just a kind of one person, a white nationalist, yeah, because that

would be like the majority of the country. Yes, I don't think it is a problem or unfair or even wrong to worry about large scale, rapid demographic change. And then here's Rufel's response. A couple of years ago, you would not hear a prominent New York Times voice saying that

it is totally legitimate, reasonable and understandable to be concerned about large scale, rapid demographic change. I mean, you know, that was a right wing talking point for many years. And the left wing criticism was that was the great replacement theory, that was white nationalism, that was KKK style, white supremacy.

And so is this a concession, is this going to be the left, kind of moderate left or the establishment left's new position moving forward? I'll also add that that episode of Rufel and Loma as was called as recline amidst the New York Times was wrong on woke.

And the first two chapters on YouTube were called as recline's great replacement moment.

And what as are now admits was once branded white nationalism.

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

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

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

And if so, how at all do you respond, if you feel that someone is misrepresenting your position? I don't, for the most part, I'll say a couple of things here. What is it, a major threat of my interview of Chris Rufel is that Rufel is a propagandist. We begin with his discussion of adjutant prop. And then a lot of the conversation is me unspooling with him the way he does that.

And the consequences, I think it has in the way it often misrepresent and then worsen's reality and is worsen the political party that he's part of. But I'm not thinking to sit here and be surprised to that a person who is like a proud propagandist. Maybe the way he responds to that interviews by focusing on the parts he thinks he can turn into propaganda. I did find that particular take, which I actually saw from other people too, very surprising.

I have for many, many, many years.

And in fact, it's part of my first book, why we're polarized.

And I just believed, but talked a lot about how the immigration issue gets sanitized as about economics, but it is actually about people's discomfort, but demographic change. I wrote a big piece of a box called White Threat in a Browning America. I think I've been very attentive for a long time to the fact that it is very politically destabilizing for the nature of a place for who lives in it to change really rapidly.

And it has changed on a kind of generational level fairly rapidly. So in the 1970s, 4%-disch, 4.5% of America was foreign-born, now it's around 15%. So it's going from sort of a low to either it is or it is near a high. I have written a lot over the years about how that is a major driver of what Donald Trump is. I do not believe, and I just like, I cannot say this more flatly, that it is a normal,

constant and legitimate dimension of politics in a nation for people to have views on who lives in the community and how it's changing. I think where replacement theory is a white national theory. The thing that I'm critiquing Rufo for in that section is, if we're seeing with Tucker Carlson, at the time when Tucker Carlson is offering all these

theories and then later on being shocked, the Tucker Carlson has gone as far as he has. So I'm saying, this was all happening and you seem perfectly happy with the trend that it was on. And now you're like, oh my god, like how did we end up with this conspiratorial racialist right?

And I'm saying, it was right there in front of you. To follow up on that, I disagreed with Jason and his question of saying that Rufo was suggesting that you were fully endorsing the Great Replacement Theory. He's saying that what you said you believe is what people on the right like him have been saying for years and they have been branded, white nationalists for it.

It's hard for me to know which position Rufo is trying to describe to me or even to the broader left here.

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

it's just normal part of politics that people notice and have views on when their communities change. I think you can do that without it being understood as white nationalism. I think if you bring that white nationalism or any kind of racialist view, then you have basically taken a huge amount of contestation in every nation we know of and tried

to make it politically unstable.

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

about politics. Of course, you can then take that and turn it into a white nationalist version. And the white nationalist version is there are white people. They are the true builders and inheritors of our society. The people coming in are genetically or culturally inferior and that it is a threat to the fundamental

success of our society to have it not dominated by a certain percentage of ethnically, you know, you're Northern European or something, descendants. That to me is white nationalism.

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

I think it's important for the left. I think it's important for the right. If the right can't see the difference that I'm talking about, then of course it's not able to please white nationalism because it wants to see if there's no difference in anything which means you cannot like see the thing you're trying to look for.

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

“Why do you think Rufo express surprise that you're saying it?”

I mean, I don't want to speculate on why Rufo is pretending to be surprised. But I think on that one, he, again, I don't want to interpret him for him. I really try not to argue with guests after they've left the room. I actually don't even think my views on immigration that different than they've ever been. The democratic party has definitely moved on immigration.

It's shot really far left in 2020, you know, with who the encastro pushing the primary field to raise their hands or the debate moderators pushing them to raise their hands around

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

across the border should be decriminalized. I think even many of the people on that stage would agree with the way I am talking about immigration, but at that point they were not willing to stand up to parts of their party that were one very, very appropriately angry at the cruelty Trump showed towards immigrants. But also we're trying to make an argument that pretty normal views on immigration that most

Americans held were on some of our racist. I just think that happened before, right? And I don't think it's about, I don't think that the concession there actually had to do with whether or not it's legit a bit to worry about or have feelings about change inside

“of community. I think the concession there from the left, which in general was a mistake”

it was making in 2020. And we certainly did episodes on this like, you know, going into the next election, is that order is very, very important to people. And if what they feel is that when you are in power, the world is disordered, that prices are out of control, that all of a sudden they're migrants everywhere, you know, on the subways in New York, selling candy. And like putting aside how much immigration there is, is it orderly? Is

the border like controlled? So Jason and that question, he was defending you against what he thought was Rufo twisting

what you said. We did get some feedback that was critical of you and Rufo. And specifically

people feeling that you didn't push back enough. This is Matthew W. How do you decide, especially in the moment, when to push back on a guest versus let a claim go? I come into episodes typically with a broad structure. I want to be able to tease out. And I try to let people talk. I'm having people on so you can hear what they think and you can come to your own judgments. Again, I push back on people when I think it serves the episode.

When I think you don't know what they think yet, when I think what they think is not clear, when I think what they think is not been tested. But if it begins to fail, some said of that tests, right? And sometimes I can't test it in the moment because I'm trying to go somewhere else and that's going to take us down a path for 25 minutes and we don't have that 25 minutes? Yeah, I mean, the episode was already two hours. So I think and if people like didn't listen

to it or didn't make it to the end, I would recommend making it to the end because it's very revealing. We were saying at the beginning, we got very bifurcated feedback on Rufo. And from my perspective, there was feedback that really saw what the structure of that episode was and the way things were playing against each other and people who they're interpretation of it was different from mine. But that's also, I think, okay, I try to keep the episodes from becoming

so legible that there is not room for independent thought. I have a lot of faith and trust in the audience. And even where I understand, there's going to be a contested interpretation of something. I'm trying to create something here where you can have contested interpretations of it because it's supposed to be a space for you to think in, not for me to tell you what to think. I write columns, I write books, I occasionally do essays on the show. When I want to tell you what

to think or try to persuade you of what I think I do that, I don't want this show to be that. Like, I think that there is a tremendous amount of very didactic work out there. And I think Twitter and social media in general has made it much worse where it's like people, they've gotten used to every time something is bad or somebody coming and telling them

“and just to be clear what you just heard is bad and you should be able to, I don't think that”

makes people smarter, richer and also one thing I try to leave room for is that people legitimately come to things with different values, different interpretations and they should be able to see

And I think that if you follow it through it's entire arc around corruption, around what is turning the right into this racialist, right that he seems concerned about on his own show, I think there is, both are going to argument being made there and a thing being revealed there that to me worked really well. But I'm not going to tell you if it worked for you, right, if you don't like the episode you don't like the episode, you know Tyler Cowen has a line,

I don't know if he still says it before his episodes, but he often says before them, this is a conversation I want to have with this person, not necessarily the conversation you want me to have with this person. And I think there's a truth to that. There are episodes that for my perspective go totally off the rails or they end up as something totally different than what I thought they were going to be. That's not the case for that one. So again, I don't

“want to break my own rules here and go like point by point and tell you what I think you should”

think of it, but I can tell you that. If you're not a subscriber to the New York Times, we have some news for you. You can out

explore the Times for free without any paywalls at all during your first month in the New York

Times app. It's not just news. That should diversified yes. 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. It enriches our relationship, broadening our horizons. It was such a

cool 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/gift. This is from Kevin T. I'm a listener going back well into the Vox days. I love your show because

“while you were definitely to the left of me on some things, I think you're a solid guy,”

you operating good faith, you're not a bullshitter. I'm wondering if over the years you've come to see any of your more woke positions as mistaken. EG, you're infamous Vox article from the Me2 era where you suggested that it might not be so ultimately bad if some men were falsely accused of things if it led to progress. parentheses feel free to quibble with this interpretation if you like. I'm sure you will. Or your conflict with Sam Harris, who I'm closer to

ideologically. In this space in particular, identitarianism, wokeness or whatever you want to call it, are there any positions you've changed your mind on in the last five to ten years? I would quibble with that description. That's a piece about affirmative consent rules and

“colleges. And I would probably quibble with that view of it. It's not that I think it's good for”

people to be falsely accused of things. I guess like to the broad question being asked here. I often see people describing a lot of movement to me on all this and I actually know that. This has become a thing that people are being at. I get it but my positions to me haven't

changed that much. I think probably what gets emphasized has a little bit. But here's what I'd say.

I think that if I could go back, there's probably two things that I was less alert to. Then I am now. One is that an argument you would often hear people make and that I probably made this somewhat had to do with, well, there's no first amendment right to amplification on Twitter or Facebook or something like that. If it's not something that is affecting the actual legal system or government policy, you don't need to worry about it all that much. The mob yelling you

a Twitter or being shadowed ban because you said something like that. And I think cultural power like that is, I didn't think it was totally unmeaningful at the time. I mean, one thing you'll see

in my tenure at Vox, we never fired anybody for speech. Never happened. I wrote pieces in that

era about the difference between a my view cancel culture, which I was like a poorly defined thing and cancel behavior, which I thought was very real, which is people acting in a way

combined with power. And something that I tried to be alert to then, and I still believe now, is that a lot of things are people were saying what they cared about was free speech,

“what they cared about was power and losing power. And I think the Trump administration has proven me”

100% right on that. 100%. That Donald Trump and all these people came in saying they were going to restore free speech and they did nothing of the kind. In fact, they've used state power more aggressively, and Democrats ever did, to chill speech, to punish people for speech, to scare people, to deport people. So one thing that I just got in a lot of fights about, and it put me in the way people categorize my opinions, like very much on the website, so there is a big fight

over power here. And there's a real threat to free speech here. But I do think that the people who are arguing that the way that power is being deployed on platforms and in spaces like colleges, that it was fundamentally illiberal, and that it wasn't going to be contained. There it actually was going to leak into society. They had a more of a point than I thought then. This is a point

John Height made and read a debate about it back in the box days. And there's always debates about

college campuses. And a lot of my views are like, who cares? I just don't want to hear that much about what happens at Yale. And the view of height and some other people was it's not going to stay at Yale. Like you're training the next generation of, you know, staffers and leaders and like this is going to come out of there. I think one that was basically true, right, that the spillover effect is very real. And two that did it also the application of cultural power caused such backlash

that it arguably more than wiped out the gains. The number of people who I've seen, who I think were truly radicalized by just stuff that happened to them on Twitter, on Facebook, on Instagram,

on places like that. In part because I always looked at those places as kind of cesspools,

there must 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 episode is important. The reason I was sympathetic”

to what gets called wokeness, I actually still believe all that. I believe systemic racism is very real. I believe that our society is fundamentally unequal in very, very, very deep ways. I believe that we often have very difficult trade-offs between who gets justice and that as those as of 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 affirmative consent laws wasn't an equilibrium where there were no harms. It was one where there was rampant sexual assault that went unpunished and many, many, many women I know have been sexually assaulted and traumatized by it and harmed by it in spaces where there was not really a recourse. Did affirmative consent laws find a great

“equilibrium they didn't. So I think you could say like it's a hard problem. But I don't want to just”

say, no, this was all wrong. One of the things happening when you begin to sort of unearth the way

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

structures in a way that will work. And I think a lot of things failed. I think a lot of things failed. But the things people were trying to change were very real. I mean the level of just overwhelming workplace and social harassment that, 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 you're imparaling more than you realize you're imparaling. I mean, I also think it's an emphasis thing that in 2014 as we're like rationing up into this big movement. But it's also a moment of progressive tailwinds and you're weighing in all the time on talking about the finer points

of these issues, the political moment right now is not that. Yeah, although I guess maybe the one thing I would say is as I understand my own work over time, I understand myself as trying to

fails and I think a lot of those approaches failed and they practically failed politically,

“I think it'd be crazy not to try to ask, well, why did this fail on what we learned from it?”

And the thing you maybe hear me saying a lot about how do Democrats win in Iowa and Ohio and Nebraska and South Dakota and North Dakota and Arkansas and these places they used to win. And thinking, okay, like, what kind of a tent do you need to do that? What kind of a party brand do you need to do that? 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 like discourse holes is they begin to equate political change with political position taking and that your commitment to something is defined by how

rightantly you express your opposition to the thing you don't like, not how effectively you build

power to fix it. And I understood, like, again, what we call walkness as an effort to build power to fix something. And it went in directions and even at the time, like, I was not on board of, but I think you can't look around without saying that you were trying to do persuasion in the persuasion failed. And now things are quite a bit worse than they were even,

“I think then. And see, you have to ask, okay, like, what failed and what have you learned?”

I think if you have a politics over an extended period of time that is not learning things about the world, something is wrong with it. You should be changing your emphasis. You should but you should also be changing your approach. And I guess the only other thing I'll say, and this is a very consistent theme for me back then too, I just think a lot of what went wrong then and what is going wrong now has to do with these fights taking place in fundamentally deranging spaces, spaces that

have only become more deranged after Elon Musk bought Twitter, become more deranged as they have all become much more algorithmic and less focused on your friends and the people you follow. And I think if you go back to my work then, if you go to it now, I would 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 to shapes what we believe out 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 that our politics is not going to be good. And the reason I think both there were pretty bad accesses in a public movement I fundamentally agreed with. And now there are really bad accesses in a public movement I fundamentally disagree with. I think the fact that both are sort of

we're taking place primarily first and foremost on then Twitter now X is inseparable from what

has gone wrong. Just so we don't end on an entirely downnote about how work went. I went back and read your yes means yes this is your friend of consent article in Vox. Yes means yes the terrible law and I completely support it is the article. I thought there wasn't anything that I'm doubting about your ways to have false accusations. What did I have not read this piece? I didn't even know we were going to talk about this. I'm not read this piece like in many, 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 railroadage. But there was a man that did jump out of me as feeling I actually quite radical on what you said in that article. Well, can you say what I said instead? Because I would like to know what I said. What you said, which is the thrust of your argument, is for one in five women to report an attempted or completed sexual assault means that every

day sexual practices and college campuses need to be upended and men need to feel a cold spike of fear when they begin a sexual encounter. I definitely don't remember myself as writing that false

“accusations are not a big deal. I mean that's what I remember people being mad about that cold”

spike of fear line and I'm not sure I think I phrase out a little bit more vividly than I would and it's not that I want anybody to feel fear when beginning a sex. There has been a cultural shift to a lot of anxiety around consent. I recently saw a obsession the blockbuster horror movie by this Gen Z director that is all about this my interpretation turning that anxiety into supernatural horror. And there's also very little data about how sexual assault and college campuses has actually

shifted in the years since. But there is one study of 10 universities like Harvard Yale that does show that self-reporting sexual assault has gone down significantly but like what you argued for here it kind of happened and it may be worked. Maybe I mean I'm not sure the affirmative consent laws were good idea. I don't know what a different difference thing. Yeah I don't know how

think about what college it should do and I thought they were worth trying and you know amidst

this debate I made an argument for it and that argument is very informed by things people near me had gone through to just be very blunt about it. And I still believe that the difficult thing here is that I mean sex itself is like a very complicated interaction between human beings and a very

“vulnerable and a very intimate one. I think what I'd say after writing a piece in the years that”

followed it's me too and everything else is like it all became much more sort of widespread and seen is that I do think the way this got seen and treated really changed I think a lot of those changes were for the better. Also a lot of stories were 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

tattoo and look I'll just I don't have an answer to all this right I don't know how to fix the like constant reality of sexual assault and also the reality that if you like yeah I don't know how to fix the mix of the constant reality of sexual assault and like the ambiguous way in which two people might understand the same thing happening I think it's really hard. This is a question from Javan S with the Democratic Party now splitting into center dams 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 for 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 Platon is out at the race but he was not a DSA candidate. I do all say it to my knowledge is not a DSA candidate. I mean there are some populist running who are DSA affiliated and some who aren't. Populous and classically is a political perspective that is more about seeing a small group of elites hoarding power and believing that in order

“to have a better society better politics you need to break the power they hoard and so you”

can have you know you're right wing variants you're left wing variants. I think it's sort of fairly widely believed that the most electable form of candidate you can run right now is economically populist and culturally moderate. That's sort of the Dan Osborne formula in Nebraska and Dan Osborne is a candidate who really did wild the overperform in a red straight now. He also ran as independent but that many wasn't dragged down by the Democratic Party's baggage. Graham Platon

or wasn't culturally moderate. I'm not sure he was the most kind of electable form of candidate you could run. So this is what I mean right. I think the problem with seeing all this is populism is that it's more than that too. I don't think populism necessarily has a lot to say about Israel Gaza. You can have you know populists who end up on both sides of that issue and in fact

“you do in current American politics. And I think at some deeper level populism is about listening to”

whatever group you are saying it is that is the mass right. Whatever group you believe represents like the real people for the right populism tends to be a more native born phenomena right they're like the real Americans and then the kind of fake elites on the left it's often more economic. But a lot of these candidates have a bunch of other positions that are kind of linked and more elite set of ideas right on climate on other things that put them pretty out of step

with working class voters and it's why when you look at who they went over. A Graham Platon or was not overperforming with working class voters. Abdullah Zeyad is not overperforming with non college voters in Michigan. Like his elector doesn't look like that. There's been a lot of people noting that the DSA sweet spot is downworldly 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 and with the question, I'm a registered Democrat and have been doing a deep dive into the DSA website and what democratic socialist 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 Mombani and others actually do when they are in office.

I've been really enjoying watching Mombani governance at Zeyad's office. It feels good good path so far but it definitely doesn't reflect the tenants of that organization of which he's a member. I find it hard to know how seriously to take the DSA website or platform without getting a incredibly tedious detail that has become a constant topic in our Slack.

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 Mombani does in power. We've had a number of members of Congress who are DSA associated or 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. If you I don't know what Zeyad Mombani or anybody else would do if they had Kinglike power. But I would say

Mombani in terms of if you knew nothing about what he has said or what he believes if you just saw what he has done governing, this would not look very different if another liberal candidate

“in a primary head one. Yes, they have added attacks on pricey second homes and I think I know”

he would like that or taxes on the rich of the net. He's also being very, very, very careful

and doing a lot of both private and assembly 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 them on Gani era as reflecting an incredibly sharp break from say the Blasio. And you can, I think, say that sometimes I've Bernie Sanders too and that's

not a hit on them. I think one of the valuable things about more leftist figures getting in the powers of getting into offices or 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 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 driven by the filibuster and say that's all Obama isn't was or intended to be. Which isn't. There is a lot that if Barack Obama were king he would have done that he was not able to do. And with Maldonni it's very similar with Bernie Sanders, we had Fashiki or 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 you get 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 that

actually is how President Bernie Sanders would have governed? We would have, you know, expanded Medicare, expanded what a cover has dropped down the age range. And so there is this constant compromise

“when you're governing. I think it is healthy to watch that playing out. How much to take the”

DSA as a signal of where these candidates even want to go that I'm less surefooted on? What do you think of the critique that just this platform on their website is really politically damaging for other Democrats? It's going to be weaponized by Republicans. And if it's not actually meaningful for how DSA electives govern, then what is the point? I think you would have to ask a member of the DSA that. I don't know what degree Democrats

broadly are going to be forced to answer for what the DSA believes. My suspicion is not that aggressively because I do think people understand that 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 the DSA website. I don't think anybody buys that. I don't think it really works. Now, they will matter what DSA candidates do when they come into Congress. So if you have, 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 in demanding Democrats vote on them, then you're going to start to see more effort to, you know, define the party by what it's kind of high-attention left flank is doing. Mom Donny coming out and giving that sort of direct camera address on how he would like to arrest Benjamin Netanyahu and call us on the federal government to do that.

It is clear that we do not have the independent legal authority to enforce this one. The federal government, however, does. And I call on them to join the ICC and execute this

Nor is any other work criminal at large. That is going to be an issue for that they're helping

“party. We'll try to weaponize against voters who are maybe cross-pressured and are maybe even critical”

of Israel but do not want to go where Mom Donny and the DSA want to go on Israel. Mom Donny 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. The New York Times app unlocked. Everyone knows the times is behind a paywall. Only subscribers

have access to all the reporting. But what if you could explore the times for a month for free

without putting in a credit card? Now you can. When you download the New York Times app for the first

time, your first month in the app is free. A month to go behind the paywall. To see what time subscribers get every single day. All the investigations, the reviews, the recipes, the deeply reported fact-based journalism. If you don't already subscribe to the New York Times, download the times app today and get free access for 30 days. So we got a bunch of questions that were all the same question. So this one is A-Me-T.

Is this true that you are part of the dialogue group sponsored by Peter Teele? What happens is that as best I understand it, some hacker goes on blue sky and is like, I got the membership rolls of Peter Teele secret society and includes all these people. Elon Musk and Peter Teele and Reed Hoffman and Joseph Gordon Levitt and Josh Brolin and me and Julian Castro and Cory Booker and like just like tons of people with very, very different rolls in the world,

different politics. Cool hang. Cool hang, right? And then like this gets picked up like pretty credulously by wired. This was so surprising to live through. Dialogue is a pretty been all conference. It is not secret. Just like flatly, it's not secret. Nobody ever asked me to keep my presence

“or secret. I went twice. I think now I'd have to remember the dates. But I think it was 2018 and 2022 or”

something like that. It was like one pretty pandemic, one kind of post pandemic. The why did you never

speak about it? Because 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. I mean, you can code somebody if they let you. But so okay. So dialogue, it's a conference. So like an unconference style. I went because at that time I was trying to do more coverage of tech. And what is unconference style? I'm sorry, unconference style. There aren't panels. Like people kind of self-organize. You like right

up on a board. Like I would like to have a session on being a working parent or a better sleep hygiene or are there any really 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 I've 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 be one day could guess on my show and like that is like as you know,

like part of what I do. But dialogue was a conference and when I went to the first one was for like

“people under 40 I think it was and so it was sort of like young were upcoming people like my”

fair person I met there was in kind of lefty anarchist. It wasn't like any of those bold face

names who I then was told I was in a secret society with like there was no Elon Musk. I've never

heard of him as involved with it or read Hoffman or any of those people. I went again a couple years later and just found it like the second one I went to kind of like lame and it was reflecting the curdling anger of the tech right in that era and I just found the energy pretty unpleasant and I didn't go back. By the time I went, my understanding is Peter Kill is not involved. He was one of the multiple co-founders of dialogue. I never saw him at it or heard from him in respect to it.

I do want to say because I think people could get the wrong idea. I'm not saying I think there would be a problem if Peter Kill was still involved. I've invited Peter Kill on the show. He has not come on. I have had reporting meetings with Peter Kill. That is my job. I do not see Peter Kill or anybody in our society. Somebody I cannot or should not talk to. So dialogue, what I went, no Peter Kill, not a society. It was like a conference you went to. Also not a secret. And so

society with Peter Kill and like what would that, without a but even being clear of like what

that would mean like what it mean for Julien Castro who again we came up earlier in our conversation like really push a democratic party left on immigration and Peter Kill 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 and it did an okay job at that like on conferences have gone to it's not the best it's definitely not the worst and it's fundamental nature was fractious. In part it's fractious

and this 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 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 and 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 an unungerada us on

Jeffrey Epstein I would have revealed about elite networks it'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 what they're actually doing is revealed in these files which is hanging out breaking bread colluding

sharing information giving each other tips on deals giving each other PR advice making introductions

“to each other that's the thing I think this isn't really by 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 I don't think that is bad I do that work here in public I try to have conversations with many different kinds of people across industries across ideologies in a way that is simultaneously

honest and like fundamentally gracious I believe that is not just not a bad thing I believe it is a democratic habit that should be cultivated I think civic friendship even across real difference is more than beautiful it is necessary and it's not that I think dial I was doing something like amazing for the world but you are definitely not going to get me to sit here and say

that the problem is that there might be a space where I don't know

Ted Cruz and Joseph Gordon love it and somebody who works on cybersecurity risk of 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 nomchomsky and Steve van and might have dinner like that seems

interesting on some old mayor Peter Kiel and nomchomsky whoever might have been I think people should talk to people they don't agree with but if your belief is that these people should not get to know each other then I just don't agree the reason dialogue became or this thing became uh 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 as recline and Peter Kiel are pursuing different agendas in private

not true it's just not true technocratic liberals managerial professional class liberals they

“can sometimes make the world too complicated to understand conspiratorial 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 too like coordinator like say what's really on their minds or or anything like I can even get Peter Kiel 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 Kiel about that democracy and freedom and capitalism

are incompatible that Donald Trump should be president that um the talent here should exist

“in the way that it currently does like I find Peter Kiel's functionally his entire agenda”

rocker was the cool website uh rocker was cool website the Blake master should be a senator the JD vans is a good political actor like Greta Thunberg is like a correct model to think about the antichrist I disagree with Peter 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 the reality like I can't go on like knock on the doors very buddy who believe

something untrue now I'm like correct the belief then like a few days ago on the internet as excuse being like a Chinese communist agent or spy or something like the kind of constant cycle now of bullshit that you've 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

they could also violate the New York Times like 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 like what”

makes it a society what makes it a secret that I find to be an intellectual interesting question but I mean there needs to be initiation ritual sure you can't tell people you're in it and I think besides that you can do whatever anyway not in anything I can say right now to my knowledge I'm not in any secret societies and you just stay on an email district for the rest of your life yeah sure last question sort of three musicians or songs or albums that you would

recommend to the audience who so the four the four-tet winging album you should go find and then maybe I really into it and I find this like very hypnotic this particular album mass amable I think it's called mass amobly by DJ Python really cool very strange music and then maybe it offer a song rather than a whole album there's a John Hopkins image and heep collaboration just

came out called reckoning both of them are amazing on their own like image and heep 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 Ruffham Craig Gordon thank you very much thank you Ezra [BLANK_AUDIO]