The Exchanges

Q He's setting up his game too. Okay, so one last question then to wrap up. Speaking of media and your role now as editor-in-chief of Vox, and we started talking about this in the beginning, coming full circle, like what do you think is happening next, not just for you personally, but in this space?

A So I'm pretty optimistic about the business, but it is changing. One thing I did not expect was actually how fast some parts of it would change. I think the thing that's going to be very, it might be great, but it's going to be, I think, difficult. Is how much we are going off platform. When we started Vox, a lot of the theories about Vox were about, you know, Vox.com, frankly. When we talked about card stacks and created card stacks, card stacks are something, and those are a product we have to attach contextual information to our news story. So if you're reading something about, say, um, the, the Trans-Pacific Partnership trade deal, we can cover the new news in that, and then also let you see this Set of cards you can swipe through that give you all the background information. So if you've not been following that, you can catch up very quickly, but card stacks cannot be imported to our Snapchat discover product. They can't be put on at the moment, Facebook instant articles. Uh, they're not relevant for a lot of the places people are now discovering our content. And as that happens, as we have less control over the platforms on which we publish, I actually do worry about the way it will choke off innovation. Because all of a sudden, I mean, let's say we create a great data interactive, which is something we do a lot at Vox, and that interactive, it can't be in a Facebook Inst…

AI assessment note: “how much we are going off platform”

Q But I will say that when I first saw what was happening, everyone was kind of mocking as if it was a joke, and I was like, why is anyone not taking this more seriously?

A What I think you're seeing with Trump, so one, the faction of the Republican Party Trump represents is by no means new. It is the faction that was voting for Pat Buchanan, It's very similar to the pro coalition, which drew not exclusively, but quite heavily from the Republican party. And I think many of the Democrats who were attracted to pro are now Republicans or part of that shift over in the South. Uh, so this is not new. What is interesting about what Trump is doing is that he is able to completely divorce himself from the party apparatus while running within the party. Usually the party would, the party has traditionally suppressed this part of itself, right? The fact that you had a lot of Downscale white voters in the Republican Party who like Medicare, who like Social Security, who are happy to tax rich people, who are skeptical of trade, but who are also socially conservative, heavily nationalistic, and very, very upset about immigration. Trump didn't discover that. We knew that. The Republican Party suppressed those kinds of candidates by its control of money, its control of information, its control of who gets taken seriously, of who gets good jobs, of who gets good positions. Trump For unusual reasons, his media celebrity, his money, et cetera, has been able to subvert all of that. He has both been able to be, uh, a candidate on the stage in Republican debates, and …

AI assessment note: “the faction of the Republican Party Trump represents is by no means new”

Q He's setting up his game too. Okay, so one last question then to wrap up. Speaking of media and your role now as editor-in-chief of Vox, and we started talking about this in the beginning, coming full circle, like what do you think is happening next, not just for you personally, but in this space?

A So I'm pretty optimistic about the business, but it is changing. One thing I did not expect was actually how fast some parts of it would change. I think the thing that's going to be very, it might be great, but it's going to be, I think, difficult. Is how much we are going off platform. When we started Vox, a lot of the theories about Vox were about, you know, Vox.com, frankly. When we talked about card stacks and created card stacks, card stacks are something, and those are a product we have to attach contextual information to our news story. So if you're reading something about, say, um, the, the Trans-Pacific Partnership trade deal, we can cover the new news in that, and then also let you see this Set of cards you can swipe through that give you all the background information. So if you've not been following that, you can catch up very quickly, but card stacks cannot be imported to our Snapchat discover product. They can't be put on at the moment, Facebook instant articles. Uh, they're not relevant for a lot of the places people are now discovering our content. And as that happens, as we have less control over the platforms on which we publish, I actually do worry about the way it will choke off innovation. Because all of a sudden, I mean, let's say we create a great data interactive, which is something we do a lot at Vox, and that interactive, it can't be in a Facebook Inst…

AI assessment note: “I think the thing that's going to be... difficult. Is how much we are going off platform.”

Q Why couldn't people have gone to a Wikipedia article to get a summary like that? Like, what itch were you scratching?

A So one, at that point, Wikipedia is not as comprehensive as it is now. So it wasn't that they were good, or at least I didn't find good summaries of these systems there and just not, not know to, not use them. They, they just weren't there. I, I was, I I was creating a resource I couldn't find. And I think something that has been consistent in the way I approach policy writing is that I actually like to take the reader on my own journey of learning. So what I find fun about it is actually not the writing. Um, I'm not somebody who got into, into writing because it makes me feel super alive or something. I don't think I'm a very good writer actually on a sentence level. A lot of my friends, um, Certainly my wife are a lot better than I am. What I am, I think, good at doing and interested in doing is structuring questions and finding the answers to them. Kind of figuring out where is the core bit of uncertainty. I'm often looking for what is the question on which a debate turns. What is the question that if you come to this answer versus that answer, you get a different total policy recommendation. And so, you know, as I tried to figure out an area like healthcare, One great thing about blogging, and particularly blogging at that time, was it could be very provisional. I could just learn about things. I could, in a way that did not bespeak or try to, uh, assume any kind of authori…

AI assessment note: “Wikipedia is not as comprehensive as it is now... creating a resource I couldn't find.”

Q the dematerialization of the goods, which is that a car, there's two ways to look at the car. Like, there's a car that was this mechanical object. There's a car today that is more soft, that is increasingly becoming more software than hardware. And then you actually have just pure software that is not in any kind of physical form. Like, do you not buy the dematerialization of good arguments?

A I don't think that, I, I definitely buy that we are dematerializing our goods. I don't buy that it's all that important. And I don't think there's a reason to think it would be that important. But, but think about this another way in terms of what we are Cause one thing that I think is problematic and, and my friend, my colleague, Matt Iglesias has made this point. I think it's a really important point for this debate. There is a technical economic concept called productivity. That technical economic concept is really important for a lot of other things in the economy, but it's not the only thing that matters. And in a bit of linguistic imprecision, we often let it stand in for technology. You can have technology advancing and it doesn't do anything for productivity. And clearly to some degree we have that. I'm not sure we have it more than we have at other times, but, but we clearly have it to some degree. But the thing about, the thing about productivity mismeasurement, the argument to me that I can't get away from, is if what we were seeing was really a problem in productivity numbers, I would want to see the effects of increasing productivity showing up in other indicators. So maybe we're not measuring productivity well, but we're measuring wages perfectly well, and they're not going up. Maybe we're not measuring productivity well, but we're definitely measuring the number …

AI assessment note: “I definitely buy that we are dematerializing our goods. I don't buy that it's all that important.”

Q Why would that be any more valid than anything else?

A So what I'm saying is that You can imagine a world where we're having tremendous productivity increases that are not being tracked. What you would imagine to see in that world, though, is the reason we care about productivity increases is that they grow the economy. They lead to higher wages. They lead to more jobs. They lead to people feeling like things are getting better. We are not seeing any of that either, and that makes productivity mismeasurement, in addition to all the technical arguments against it, very unlikely to me. So you're now talking about, you're now talking about a kind of productivity that is not leading to any of the things that We care about productivity for.

AI assessment note: “We are not seeing any of that either, and that makes productivity mismeasurement... very unlikely”

Q So Ezra, speaking of some of those unusual factors that you were talking about, what do you think of all these confessionals that the media is writing about their own role, its own role in the Trump phenomenon? I mean, you're saying that the phenomenon existed regardless, but Trump being Trump What's your take on that?

A So to some degree, I'm a little unsympathetic to all this, or at least unsurprised. One is that the media has a major role in all elections, and we don't like to talk about it. It has always been the case that the media and who the media covers and how they cover them are a really important contributor, and who wins and who doesn't. Who we take seriously from the beginning really matters. The media's coverage of Al Gore, I think, really contributed to him losing the election in The media not giving a damn about all kinds of candidates has strangled all sorts of insurgencies in the crib. Because we in the media, and I use we a little bit loosely here, because this side I run, and the way I've done my work is a little bit more opinionated. But, um, but, but broadly speaking, the media has in general wanted to portray itself as a completely neutral observer, as simply a reflection of events. But we are obviously a powerful factor, and Trump is forcing, I think, us to, to reckon with that in ways normally we don't, because normally the candidates we give a lot of attention to, nobody's upset about that, right? That we have found ways to give attention to candidates who are endorsed by their party structures, who are leading in the polls.

AI assessment note: “I'm a little unsympathetic to all this, or at least unsurprised.”

Q Tell us a little bit about how you have made this transition. I mean, you've gone from being like totally independent to being essentially an entrepreneur, a media entrepreneur. How has that been for you?

A Um, accidental at almost all levels. So I am, I did not ever intend to become a journalist. This is a, a Slew of surprises for me in my life. When I started a blog, it wasn't something you did because it was a career path. Um, I began a blog in my freshman year of college at UC Santa Cruz. It was 2003. I had been rejected from my, from an internship on my school newspaper. So it's not like my journalism skills were in high demand. Uh, but I caught blogging at a really good moment when there was a big first mover advantage. I did an internship at the Washington monthly, uh, which is a DC magazine. But also had blogs and, you know, was, was part of that world.

AI assessment note: “accidental at almost all levels. So I am, I did not ever intend”

Q Why would that be any more valid than anything else?

A So what I'm saying is that You can imagine a world where we're having tremendous productivity increases that are not being tracked. What you would imagine to see in that world, though, is the reason we care about productivity increases is that they grow the economy. They lead to higher wages. They lead to more jobs. They lead to people feeling like things are getting better. We are not seeing any of that either, and that makes productivity mismeasurement, in addition to all the technical arguments against it, very unlikely to me. So you're now talking about, you're now talking about a kind of productivity that is not leading to any of the things that We care about productivity for.

AI assessment note: “makes productivity mismeasurement, in addition to all the technical arguments against it, very unlikely”

Q Why couldn't people have gone to a Wikipedia article to get a summary like that? Like, what itch were you scratching?

A So one, at that point, Wikipedia is not as comprehensive as it is now. So it wasn't that they were good, or at least I didn't find good summaries of these systems there and just not, not know to, not use them. They, they just weren't there. I, I was, I I was creating a resource I couldn't find. And I think something that has been consistent in the way I approach policy writing is that I actually like to take the reader on my own journey of learning. So what I find fun about it is actually not the writing. Um, I'm not somebody who got into, into writing because it makes me feel super alive or something. I don't think I'm a very good writer actually on a sentence level. A lot of my friends, um, Certainly my wife are a lot better than I am. What I am, I think, good at doing and interested in doing is structuring questions and finding the answers to them. Kind of figuring out where is the core bit of uncertainty. I'm often looking for what is the question on which a debate turns. What is the question that if you come to this answer versus that answer, you get a different total policy recommendation. And so, you know, as I tried to figure out an area like healthcare, One great thing about blogging, and particularly blogging at that time, was it could be very provisional. I could just learn about things. I could, in a way that did not bespeak or try to, uh, assume any kind of authori…

AI assessment note: “I was creating a resource I couldn't find.”

Q But I will say that when I first saw what was happening, everyone was kind of mocking as if it was a joke, and I was like, why is anyone not taking this more seriously?

A What I think you're seeing with Trump, so one, the faction of the Republican Party Trump represents is by no means new. It is the faction that was voting for Pat Buchanan, It's very similar to the pro coalition, which drew not exclusively, but quite heavily from the Republican party. And I think many of the Democrats who were attracted to pro are now Republicans or part of that shift over in the South. Uh, so this is not new. What is interesting about what Trump is doing is that he is able to completely divorce himself from the party apparatus while running within the party. Usually the party would, the party has traditionally suppressed this part of itself, right? The fact that you had a lot of Downscale white voters in the Republican Party who like Medicare, who like Social Security, who are happy to tax rich people, who are skeptical of trade, but who are also socially conservative, heavily nationalistic, and very, very upset about immigration. Trump didn't discover that. We knew that. The Republican Party suppressed those kinds of candidates by its control of money, its control of information, its control of who gets taken seriously, of who gets good jobs, of who gets good positions. Trump For unusual reasons, his media celebrity, his money, et cetera, has been able to subvert all of that. He has both been able to be, uh, a candidate on the stage in Republican debates, and …

AI assessment note: “The Republican Party suppressed those kinds of candidates by its control of money”

Q the dematerialization of the goods, which is that a car, there's two ways to look at the car. Like, there's a car that was this mechanical object. There's a car today that is more soft, that is increasingly becoming more software than hardware. And then you actually have just pure software that is not in any kind of physical form. Like, do you not buy the dematerialization of good arguments?

A I don't think that, I, I definitely buy that we are dematerializing our goods. I don't buy that it's all that important. And I don't think there's a reason to think it would be that important. But, but think about this another way in terms of what we are Cause one thing that I think is problematic and, and my friend, my colleague, Matt Iglesias has made this point. I think it's a really important point for this debate. There is a technical economic concept called productivity. That technical economic concept is really important for a lot of other things in the economy, but it's not the only thing that matters. And in a bit of linguistic imprecision, we often let it stand in for technology. You can have technology advancing and it doesn't do anything for productivity. And clearly to some degree we have that. I'm not sure we have it more than we have at other times, but, but we clearly have it to some degree. But the thing about, the thing about productivity mismeasurement, the argument to me that I can't get away from, is if what we were seeing was really a problem in productivity numbers, I would want to see the effects of increasing productivity showing up in other indicators. So maybe we're not measuring productivity well, but we're measuring wages perfectly well, and they're not going up. Maybe we're not measuring productivity well, but we're definitely measuring the number …

AI assessment note: “I definitely buy that we are dematerializing our goods. I don't buy that it's all that important.”