Opinion | How They Failed: California Republicans, Media Critics and Facebook – The New York Times

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Today on The Argument, do Kara Swisher, Ezra Klein and I agree on anything?

This week, Im doing something a little different. Instead of a typical debate, today Im doing a special roundtable discussion on the stuff in the news that I and my colleagues cant stop thinking and arguing about. Im joined by my fellow hosts from New York Times Opinion. Kara Swisher is the host of Sway, and Ezra Klein hosts The Ezra Klein Show. And as youll hear, we agree on some things, but definitely not everything. Well be back next week with a regular Argument episode. And its going to be a barn burner. First, heres Ezra kicking off our conversation.

Jane, Kara, hello.

Hello.

Hey, how are you doing?

How are you feeling, Kara? I hear youre a little froggy over there.

Im a little froggy. Its really bad because Ive got 103 interviews to do in the next two days. So itll be fine. Too much screaming at the kids.

Yeah, well, and probably theyre bringing all the germs. Ive been getting sick now that people are doing stuff. My son keeps coming home with a snotty nose.

Yes.

We got a lot to cover today. Were going to talk about the media. Were going to talk about Facebook. Were going to talk about all kinds of different things. But I want to begin where I live in California, where the recall effort just got stomped into the ground. Gavin Newsom won by about 27 points. And he won by that much in part because the Republicans, to the extent they unite around anybody, united around the most terrifying possible candidate to most Californians. Jane, when we worked at Vox, you did a great piece about the California Republican Party and what it had become. And I thought about that piece a lot over the past couple of weeks. So Im curious how you read the Republicans in this election and what California Republicans are.

So, as I wrote back in 2018 in this piece, the California Republican Party is largely an entity that exists to produce conservative/anti-liberal thought in other places. Like, the degree to which California conservatives have largely given up on California as evidenced by, I think, running a conservative radio host who has said many conservative radio host things, instead of someone who is purely going to be aimed at Gavin Newsom, I think is evidence of that. One of the things I found interesting about this is that this election or this recall potentially could have been successful if Democrats were caught napping and Republicans could coalesce around someone who was like, Im not Gavin Newsom. I will never go to French Laundry while you cant go to things. I will never do these things that appear to annoy you. Instead, they went with a conservative radio host in Larry Elder, who very much started out by saying that Joe Biden won the election and then backtracked, because thats what you have to do in a conservative media ecosystem right now not in California in conservative radio. Its interesting how this was where the nationalization of politics really bit back for Republicans, because this became a race about how Larry Elder was going to get rid of all Covid-related mandates, and he was going to discourage vaccination. Whether or not he would have, it just became this nationalized race. And it became about him, not about Gavin Newsom. And it was very easy to say, Larry Elder is basically Trump. He invited Trump into this race. And if Californians arent that thrilled about Gavin Newsom, they are especially not that thrilled about Donald Trump.

You know what surprised me, Kara, was that none of the super rich, super cranky, super I can do anything better than anybody else billionaires out in Silicon Valley put themselves on the ballot. There had been talk of that. They are filled with criticisms of how Democrats run California. And I thought that was a kind of from the side, a little bit independent candidacy that could have been pretty dangerous to Newsom.

Sure.

Im curious how you read the absence of any of them

Well

in the final options.

Well, they dont like to be inconvenienced, right? [LAUGHTER] Thats the whole thing. But I thought Chamath Palihapitiya hes a big investor, former Facebook executive might have run. He sort of teased it, but then said no. And I did a Q&A with him in The Times about what happened. But you know, they just like to get on Twitter and be huffy. And then they were leaving California. Im like, just leave. Just leave. Goodbye, see you later. Whats interesting is there are a couple of things, what Jane was talking about is, look, Californias not in the worst shape, right? Theres a budget surplus. Covid rates right now are declining rather precipitously. Obviously, it has huge problems with homelessness, et cetera. But that was way before Covid and will continue for a long, long time. And I think in general, people are not necessarily French Laundry aside, which I thought was a real mistake on Newsoms part, since hes been so tough on Covid stuff I think people are pretty OK with him. They dont necessarily love him, you know? But they dont dislike him. And thats what I think is interesting.

Yeah, there is this glut in conservative media of why Im leaving California stories

Yeah, whatever. See ya.

and why everyones moving to Miami or Austin or something. But I think that theres an idea that is going to turn into a political movement of sorts.

Its like dont let the door hit you. Dont let the excellent produce hit you on the way out. Just go. [LAUGHTER] You made all your money here. California gave you all kinds of opportunity. Kick it in the teeth and leave. I think whats interesting about Newsom, that speech he gave I dont know, Ezra, what you thought of it. I thought it was quite graceful, given he could have kicked them back in the teeth. And hes been a big supporter of tech and has not, like a lot of California politicians, has kind of let them roll all over everybody, essentially. So Im just curious what you imagine that speech was about?

I think Newsom understands that even being threatened with a serious recall campaign does not mean youre in the strongest position. And so hes not trying to be a factional governor. Hes trying to re-establish himself with a pretty stunning victory here as a governor who can credibly represent California. You dont want to be the guy who squeaked through. And to his credit, he, in the end, wasnt. But I did a piece right before the recall actually happened, where I chatted with him for it. But before I chatted with him, what Id been doing was running through the Democrats record in California. And particularly in the last 18 months, the amount of actual legislating they have done is astonishing. I mean, they passed a universal transitionary kindergarten program, so basically an entire new grade of school for four-year-olds. They put $12 billion into homelessness. Well see what comes of it, but we dont see an investment like that anywhere else in the country. They just signed right after the recall they passed before through the legislature, but Newsom signed right after a series of bills on housing that, among other things, end single-family zoning in California. Theres this huge list. And this goes, I think, to your point, Kara Newsom wants to be seen and wants to be understood as one of the great governors, one of the transformational governors of California. And what he somehow needs to do is get himself out of the way so the record can actually speak and also be implemented because getting all this policy done, particularly during the period of Covid, is going to be very, very, very difficult. But I think on some level, he gets that. And so the question that hes sort of asking is, can he just get Californians to hold on long enough, such that the easing of Covid can really be felt at the same time that the spending down of the surplus that they are tossing around like Oprah money now begins to reverberate in the lives of everyday Californians? If he can get to the other side of that without overly polarizing himself, he has a possibility to look in the long run like a great governor.

Im curious how does the elitism I think that is his real problem. He looks elite. He sounds elite. Everything about him is like elite liberal, although I dont think hes quite as liberal as people make him out to be, right? So thats his big, scary weakness, I would say.

I wrote this in the beginning of the piece. I think that Newsom is fascinating because the reality of his politics is an inversion of his reputation. Newsom looks to people like a guy whos all style and no substance. Hes got this super coiffed hair. He looks like the guy you would cast to play a slippery politician in a movie. He had this very tabloidy personal life, particularly back when he was in San Francisco. He makes these terrible mistakes, like French Laundry.

And Kimberly Guilfoyle, but go ahead. [LAUGHTER]

Yes, and Guilfoyle. But the truth of Newsom is that its like perfectly the inverse. Hes a stylistically very weak politician whos constantly misjudging situations, and substantively, a pretty good one, whos passed a lot of good policy and really does understand a lot of the issues California is facing, can give you chapter and verse on a lot of the things that theyre working through the legislature. Not a perfect governor by any means, but I think this is the essential paradox of Newsom. I think I wrote it this way, that hes like an earnest nerd who presents as a slick jock. And hes never found a way to out-communicate that.

I once told him his skin was just too nice. I know it sounds terrible and completely lookist. He was like, why do you think people dont believe me? Im like, youre too handsome.

Let me ask Jane one thing before we move off of Newsom, which is one of the things youre hearing from Newsoms team, from Democrats, is that running on tough Covid regulations was actually a huge winner for them. Even if you look nationally right now, vaccine mandates poll really well. Most people are vaccinated, and they want other people to be vaccinated. And so the one thing Im hearing Democrats consider extracting out of the recall campaign is really seeing possibly tough Covid regulations as something that could help them politically over the next year, even into the midterms when that happens. Do you think theres something to that?

I mean, I think it goes to maybe Im just going to have to do a giant the nationalization of politics is generally bad because I do think its on a state by state basis. Like, for instance, theres a race going on right now in Virginia. Im in Washington, D.C. So Virginia its over there somewhere. Right now, Youngkin, whos the Republican candidate, is getting hit really hard on being close to Trump. The Virginia Democrats are going really hard on Covid related stuff. But I also think if you are trying to win down ballot races or youre trying to win in more purple states because increasingly, Virginia is a blue state until proven otherwise, I think that that wont work. I do agree, though, that one of the challenges weve had is that we have heard a lot about extremely loud people coming to school board meetings and screaming about masks. But the vast majority of people are not like that. The challenge will be, can you build a winning coalition on being tougher on Covid? I mean, its not a very satisfying answer, but I think itll depend on where you are.

So speaking of nationalizing everything, Jane, I think you want to talk a bit about the media.

I do, and Im annoyed. Im incredibly annoyed, and I need to be told whether or not my annoyance is justified, because I want to talk about how the media reports on and criticizes other media. This is one of those moments in which I recognize that I am a part of the media. I am a part of the problem.

Its media all the way down.

It really is. Now, you may have seen Fox News posted a story about media frets over too many white Emmy winners. And then there was a dust-up between Politico and a Washington Post columnist that then Fox News reported on ad nauseum. Theres a lot of reporting on people writing on Substack and just a lot of people going back and forth and back and forth about the media. And it is driving me absolutely insane.

You mean the people on Substack. The hot take hacks thats what I call them.

Some of them are, and some of them are just on Substack.

Yeah, good. Yeah.

But even the conversation about Substack is one of those moments where Im like, OK, why is it seeming to overtake talking about the news that is actually happening?

Because it scares the media. Because Substack scares media companies, it scares media people. Theres also a bunch of FOMO. Like, should I be on Substack earning a million dollars? Which you wont.

Right.

I think thats totally normal, dont you think? Its like Hollywood right now obsessing over streaming, but that counts, actually.

I want to cut to different kinds of media takes here aside, because I dont think anybodys having Substack conversation, except, like, 50 people on Twitter and Substack. That does not strike me as something that has erupted into wider consciousness.

Exactly! So we should stop doing it.

Well, Im not talking about it. I said

Good!

that specifically so I wouldnt have to talk about it for the rest of this episode.

Amazing. Perfect.

Im not going to be part of the problem. Im going to be the change I seek to see in the world. I like a lot of Substack, so I think its all fine. This is a place where Im going to speak up for the right wing critique of things. Not that the media is all liberal and fake news and everything, but something the right has understood for a very long time is that the media as an institution is really important in a way that media as an institution does not want to admit. The media as an institution is a super important political actor, who we choose to cover how we cover what stories, to the point you were just making, Jane, we choose. Those are incredibly important. And because the media wants to pretend that it is some kind of unbiased mirror to the world, not those of us who are in the opinion section, but elsewhere in the world

Right.

the media has a lot of trouble explaining the role it is playing and the frameworks through which it is trying to play that role well. And so it falls to people outside of it who feel ill served by it to make a big issue out of it. But then the problem is there is no one media anymore I mean, if there ever was. But there really is not now. And then social media is not a media in the way that a network news channel is. And so I would like to say, I think media criticism is very worth doing. I just think we need way better media criticism because these little gossipy flare-ups, they are trading on deep feelings people have that the media is important and it doesnt represent them. But its not able to get at that real conversation that is a worthwhile one and might have.

But they do. But people do not trust the media. I dont know how many relatives you have, depending on where, but I often get relatives saying I dont trust the media, and Im in the media. Ive even had my mom I did an interview with Hillary Clinton, and she called me up and she said, you cant believe what Hillary Clinton just said. And she then repeated back to me via the Fox filter. And I was like, no, no, thats not what she said. And she goes, oh, thats your opinion. And I was like, no, she talked to me. Like, I was the one who did the interview and it was like astonishing. And then the media, which is so manifestly insecure, then seizes upon it and gets into a big cycle of being defensive, when you should just, like every other industry, some of us suck, some of us dont. When we make mistakes, we try to admit it. The media also gets so insecure that they cant help but feel bad that people dont like them.

I also do think when people are like, oh, I dont trust the media, that implicitly says to me like, I trust some media. I just dont trust you. Its just like youve got your media, and Ive got my media, and our mediums hate each other. And then they fight. And I get concerned sometimes that the overemphasis on the media turns into a moment in which Im like, I would also be distrustful of institutions that seem to mostly discuss themselves and people like them.

See, unlike Ezra, I think social media has ruined the media because everybody can say something. You dont know where the sourcing is sometimes. Its taken apart the already tenuous relationship media had with its users and has blown it wide open. And so everybody has a voice. Everyones screaming past each other. And so the power of media, especially institutions, like The New York Times and other places, has just going to be diminished, even if a lot of important people do pay attention to it.

Do you think, though, that this is something because what are we thinking about social media the entity that I think about is Twitter, but most people, most journalists are on Twitter, most people in general are not.

Facebook is where they are.

Yes.

Yeah.

But Twitter drives the entire media because all the journalists are there. I mean, were going to talk about Facebook in a minute I have said this forever, I think the biggest problem in the direct media is the medias intense reliance and presence in Twitter. We are all talking to each other and its not just to the point Kara was making. Yes, everybody has a voice. And some people a voice are terrible, and theyve got big followings, but also the media tweets like nobody is watching.

That is a good line Ezra.

And look Im very sympathetic to the idea that people were too constrained in the media for a long time. But I logged on to Twitter and I always think to myself, you know everybody can read this, right? People act on Twitter in a way that is not well designed to increase trust in them or their institutions, and then they turn like why does nobody like or trust me anymore? [LAUGHTER]

I am often texting media people at night saying, get off, put it down. [LAUGHTER] But if youre not a professional, youre crashing your care into the wall.

Youre like the Twitter guardian Angel?

I do it all the time, Im like put it down. Im a professional, put it down.

Ezra Klein: So Kara The Wall Street Journal has been publishing the series called The Facebook Files, and to sum up a few of the major findings, Facebook lied about equal application of standards, they have whats basically a V.I.P. pass exempting celebrities and notable people from some rules. Maybe not all. They withheld research about the negative mental health impact of Instagram especially on teen girls, and despite promises to the contrary, Facebook was a major source of misinformation about the pandemic and the vaccine. So Im curious what you think of all this. Oh, it goes on. Doesnt it? The beat goes on. Nick Clegg who is the head of global affairs had a reaction to it, which was sort of a non-reaction, reaction or one of those non-denial, denial kind of things. Where he said, its complex

Its all true, but how dare you?

Well, no. I dont know what he said. He just got on there he said, its complex and were not evil. And I was like, OK, we didnt think either of these things were not true. I think what was powerful about the Journal pieces and the times its done great pieces doing a lot of people have. Casey Newton and many others, is that its just more proof of what we already thought. As it builds, it sort of gives us a picture of something we already know about them but adds more data and more documentation to whats happening in there. Which is, I think more of a hot mess than other people do. I dont think its calculated I think its sloppy. I think the architecture is rotten. And Im not sure its fixable the way its set up. Especially the constant shifting of priorities. And lastly, that everything rises and falls with Mark Zuckerberg. And he is completely incapable of doing this. The wisest person in the world couldnt do this job, and he, I am sorry to say, is not the wisest person in the world.

If youve got that kind of ehh feeling about Facebook two months ago, what has been learned that should change that in any way?

I think some of this data about girls, young girls, and the toxicity of Instagram for it, and you know Facebooks working on, Oh my God, Instagram for kids. Like no stop, right now. It was a lot of data around it and some of the research that Facebook did about itself, which is good. Thats great to look at yourself, but that didnt act upon as some people in the company thought. And thats why youre getting all these documents because people inside the company are just tossing documents over the wall, because theyre tired of it I suspect. I think it just continued to show in a wide range of areas, whether it was how celebrities and famous people are treated, the impact on kids, the difficulty of managing misinformation on the platform, and the fact that one person makes all the decisions. Its the same through line, though, is that this place is impossible to manage because its so big and so powerful.

And like, the challenge we have is that, every single time Facebook has gone before congressional hearings, all that has been displayed is that members of Congress have no idea what Facebook page or how it works.

Thats not true. The recent David Cicilline ones in his report was excellent, was fantastic actually. One of the things thats interesting about this, is that Facebook continues to fend off this stuff because were so disorganized. Look over whats going on in China, theyre taking over tech right now. Theyve decided its too powerful and theyre just taking over the place. I think one of the problems politically is that Facebook knows our political system is chaotic in normal times. And now its really chaotic, theyve hired a mess of lobbyists and PR people and everyone else to stave off whats inevitable. And so it just goes on. And by the way shareholders are rewarding them quite a lot still no matter what.

One of the problems with them it always seems to me, is that theyre running something that is on the scale now of a global governance system or a religion maybe. I mean, things dont operate on that multibillion person scale and one of the repeated revelations of the Journal reporting, but also all reporting and also if you just look at what is happening on Facebook for 20 minutes, is that they dont have policies that are equally and fairly applied. And of course, they dont. For the most part, things of that scale very rarely do, but what things at that scale tend to have, is some reason to believe in the legitimacy of the outcome. So if you are the U.S. government, in theory there are elections and the whole system of government, and theres representation, right? Theres representation. And if youre the Catholic Church like in theory the Pope is the Gods representative on Earth, so theres at least divine authority. And the problem I see with what Facebook has been trying to do, one place I would give them a little bit of credit is that for years in a way, you dont see in that many companies, theyre trying to be creative with how to constrain themselves at least a little bit. They tried to create this Facebook Supreme Court-style situation. They do try to create policies, and try to create boards, and so on. Theyre trying to create within it a kind of thing that looks almost like a government, but my critique of them is always they are doing so without representation. Like its all a bit of a show game because in the end, its only Mark Zuckerberg there with his super shares who has true power over this situation. Theyre not trying to create a situation where the Facebook users can vote on what the policy should be and how they should be applied, nothing. And so in the end its just them running something that is too big for any just them to be legitimate doing.

I think what theyre doing is hand waving and with all that stuff. They dont mean it. They dont, they meant it Mark Zuckerberg could be fired like most other C.E.O.s in this country or anywhere else. Secondly, if they have this much power and refuse to be transparent, all this stuff around research, that just says to you, theyre just hand waving at everybody and until Mark Zuckerberg can be fired or until they can be sued, nothings going to happen here. And their shares go up, are you kidding? Nobody is going to change this situation even if it has a deleterious effect on people. And then they can say, Oh you know what, we didnt cause Jan 6. Well, thats not what were saying. Were saying your tools in the hands of malevolent players are super dangerous, but we have no power over them whatsoever, and thats going to be the problem. Even if theyre the nicest people in the world, which they try, were not a terrible people. Stop impugning No one is saying theyre Thanos. Some people are, thats not true. But what were saying is you are imperfect people, with an imperfect platform, and youre making decisions that affect people rather significantly on very serious issues like vaccinations, and getting people into a state of rage almost constantly. Thats the real problem is this addiction rage, self-esteem circle that affects the psyche of people.

Especially because the algorithms are encouraging this, I really recommend well link it in our show notes, but the research that Instagram is well aware of the mental health impact that Instagram can have on teen girls and on teen boys, and its well aware of this. Facebook has publicly played down the apps negative impacts. They havent make the research available. And I think that thats something where you have a company that is being duplicitous. It is being duplicitous because it can be. Because it assumes that you will eventually move on. There is a memo that was by Facebook Vice President Andrew Bosworth, who said that maybe it costs a life by exposing someone to bullies. Maybe when someone dies in a terrorist attack coordinated on our tools, and still we connect people.

Guns dont kill people, people kill people, its the same thing. Its the same thing. But Im curious Ezra as to your thoughts on this as someone whos been thinking about the intersection of this industry with politics, the political solutions, and what this means for our polarization problem. A thing I hear you wrote a book about.

I did, I did. This is just hard. Let me just Ill quickly make the argument from Facebooks perspective, so somebody has, which is: They are running a multi-billion person platform. And you will have all the good and the bad of humanity on it. You will have all of the bullying, and also people getting together to raise money for kidneys. And youll have also just a lot of banal stuff where people are saying, did you did you see the thing that happened on TV last night. I think a lot of this is a dodge, because they are amplifying peoples emotions to highly engaging material. And so its like you take human interactions and you run them through an emotion amplification machine, and I dont think thats healthy. But thats their view of it, and to the point about political solutions to the extent there are any, these are hard. I mean, I see in politics people often trying to fit the problem of social media into a box that I dont think is quite the right one. So we have recognized approaches to things like antitrust, Facebook should not have been allowed to buy Instagram. I think now, that is like looked back on as a pretty clear mistake. But that doesnt mean that if they didnt buy Instagram you would not have the problem of the company Instagram, which is now a gigantic company, and is running itself in a way that is bad for many teens. Because of course having young people live their lives on a platform that is seeing curated photos of their friends, and how much more fun everybody else is having and how they look and so on is going to be bad for you. Like of course its going to be bad for you. So there is a broad problem here of what if society is just choosing to spend a lot of time on technologies, that for some value of we, some of we dont think are good. And the thing I will sometimes hear from Facebook people and Kara Im sure you hear this more than I do, is you know what, candy bars arent good for you either. And white bread isnt good for you either. And the tricky thing here, is you are making value judgments on what is OK for people. There are things in society we dont allow people to do certain kinds of drugs and by scorpion missile launchers, but mostly we say, if you want to buy things that are bad for you to eat or you want to buy alcohol and youre over 21 even though you might be an alcoholic, we let you do it. And Facebook has a lot of those, and Instagram has a lot of those dimensions in addition to, of course other dimensions that are fine. Politics doesnt have a good language for that.

Theres no laws. This is as if you built a city and everybody pays you rent by way of their data, right? So you live in the city, you dont get police, you dont get water, you dont get stopped signs, you dont get fire people, you dont get regular food, youre just on your own and its the purge. And then they write, they have the audacity to write you: Well, its a free country. And so at some point, theyve got to put in speed limits. Theyve got to put in warning labels. If they want to play like this, then lets have some real teeth behind it and then people can make their decision. But they wont do that, because they know that our country unlike China or some other places are not going to crack down on them. Now in other countries India, and just now in Russia you just saw that just happen. They cracked down. They understand the power of this thing. Even if theyre authoritarians, they get it. And so they rely on us being the most dysfunctional democracy so that they can continue to do what they want, and then try to say that theyre virtuous. Theyre not virtuous, theyre just not.

I do not feel good about the terms crack down and comparisons like, I think thats the complicated thing here is that the Russian government could care less about the impact that these outlets are having on young women and on bullying. That was for political purposes. And I think that thats something when you hear from some on the right who are very much about like, oh, we need to crack down those platforms. Their issue is that sometimes if you say something mean about Donald Trump or a lie about vaccines, you might get your post removed, and theyre mad about that. So I think that thats the thing that concerns me here is that the incentives behind how we would think about a regulatory environment are so different depending on the politics of the people. Like theres a lot of talk about antitrust with relation to other I think there was a house committee that essentially ruled that Facebook needs to be broken up, and that these entities are too big. But again like, I dont know, Im concerned.

Its very hard to break them up. The way theyve constructed it, is the thing. What do you break up, precisely?

Well even if you do break it up do you do the things youve broken up now just have more incentiveto compete in even more destructive ways for market share, because they cant cross-subsidize from the thing. This is my only point on regulating these things which I think everybody knows Im pretty for, is that you have to define which problem youre trying to deal with at any given time, very tightly. And you might need to do a lot of different things. The issue for anti-competitive practices by Facebook or by Amazon might be very different. The solutions for that issue might be very different than solutions for we think Instagram is bad for kids. Like those are two separate problems and you could solve one without solving the other, but currently we are solving neither. I think that is a good place to come to a close here. So were going to do what recommendations around a book, a movie, a TV show, some good you like. I see youre doing constant monitoring, glucose monitoring in your newsletter now Kara.

Yeah.

So weird gadget, whatever you want. Jane

Im downing honey right now, Im sure my glucose is off the charts right this second. [LAUGHTER]

I want to recommend two books that Im reading simultaneously because one is an upper and one is a downer. The downer is Anthony Beevors The Fall of Berlin 1945, which is fantastic. Absolutely fantastic. It is also devastating. About the Eastern Front of the Second World War which is something I knew a lot about, I wrote my undergraduate thesis on that subject and yet somehow there are things that I read here and then I need to take a long soothing walk to get over having read. But Im also reading Fuzz: When Nature Breaks the Law by the great science writer Mary Roach, which deals with things like what do you do when elephants kill people, and how do you deal with killer trees, or bears, or cougars. Which I assume are issues that you have in California. I dont know. Its wild out there, but both books are great. Read them simultaneously because it really helps balance it out. Its like having kale and ice cream but good together.

Kara.

I think you just talked about continuous glucose monitoring, Im super interested in stuff like that. This sort of quantified self is it selfie? I guess you call it. I would recommend Michael Pollans latest book, This is Your Mind On Plants. I think anything he writes is really interesting. This is about opium, coffee, and mescaline essentially. And I think its really interesting because Ive been interviewing a lot of people lately about these trials around the use of psychotropic drugs in PTSD and depression, and you can all laugh, ha ha Im on a trip. But some of this stuff is incredible promise, and is moving through including up to and including LSD and things like that.

And I recommend actually just some straight-up fiction, nothing too heavy, Ive been into a fantasy series. Its called silk punk, so its very Asian-inflected, by Ken Liu called The Dandelion Dynasty. Ken Liu is super interesting. Hes won a bunch of awards for short fiction. Hes the translator of two of the Three Body Problem series books. But these books are just really cool if youre into a good story that is both like highly about science and gods but also just about how governance would work in a somewhat feudal society, and how a revolution would work. I loved it. The first one is called The Grace of Kings, the second one, is also great and the third one has just come out. But you should begin with The Grace of Kings, and the whole series is called The Dandelion Dynasty by Ken Liu. Well, Jane, Kara, thank you all so much. This was a lot of fun.

Thank you.

Thank you.

Thanks so much to Kara and Ezra for chatting with me. You can subscribe to their shows Sway, and The Ezra Klein Show in your favorite listening app, and next week Ill be back with an argument you wont want to miss.

This episode was produced by Phoebe Lett, Annie Galvin, and Roge Kama. It was edited by Stephanie Joyce, Alison Bruzek and Nayeema Raza. Engineering, music and sound design by Isaac Jones and Sonia Herrero. Fact checking by Kate Sinclair, Michelle Harris and Kristin Lin. Audience strategy by Shannon Busta. Special Thanks to Matt Kwong, Daphne Chen and Blakeney Schick. 438 00:34:07,060 > 00:34:16,000

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Opinion | How They Failed: California Republicans, Media Critics and Facebook - The New York Times