![\"ezra](\"https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5f30c4dca7d02836d6114d79/1610509514229-NACGI0C1DCLWXQQX2CSI/ke17ZwdGBToddI8pDm48kDG7l3FN_Rfmzlz15VRQpdAUqsxRUqqbr1mOJYKfIPR7LoDQ9mXPOjoJoqy81S2I8N_N4V1vUb5AoIIIbLZhVYxCRW4BPu10St3TBAUQYVKcePDP5txbcf_JnaUTT55ADhwgPhgYOHER0oL_Di--fcAjuKjH-4PxuN7H9USXGo6j/ezra+klein.jpg?format=1000w\")
\n \n \n \n \n\n \n \n \n \n \n \n \n\n \n \n Ezra Klein created the concept of The Green Pill—the namesake of this podcast. He is a world-renowned political journalist, founder of Vox Media, former columnist at the Washington Post, and host of The Ezra Klein Show. In this first episode, Wayne Hsiung and Ezra Klein discuss what happened to Ezra after he first took the green pill and how his life was forever altered.
“I want to normalize the idea that if you care about suffering, one of the categories of suffering you should care about is animal suffering.”
\"The solution is not individual action, but there is no solution without individual action.”
Ezra's work at Vox
Ezra's book - Why We're Polarized
Ezra interviews Wayne Hsiung - Ezra Klein Show | When Doing the Right Thing Makes You a Criminal
Melanie Joy's book - Why We Love Dogs, Eat Pigs, and Wear Cows
Music by Moby: Everything That Rises
\n\n\n\nWayne Hsiung 0:06 \nHi everyone, this is Wayne Hsiung, welcome to The Green Pill. This is a podcast about change, and especially about how huge personal changes can lead to huge social changes. But to understand change, we have to understand ourselves right? And in trying to understand myself, I think the key thing I learned is this. I am a living, walking contradiction. I've been a corporate lawyer, but I've been arrested a dozen plus times for protesting corporations. I'm a vegan and an animal rights activist. But I also consider a factory farmer, a good friend. I abhor mainstream establishment politics. Yet I'm running for political office. I am contradiction. But here's the key thing. So are you and this show is going to explore those contradictions and tensions in all of us, and how they often lead to growth and change. That's why as recline is maybe the best first guest for us as we came up with this concept, The Green Pill that illustrates the importance of contradiction and change. And the idea behind The Green Pill is simple: That when you realize the suffering of animals matters, everything around you suddenly changes the world around you turns into a living contradiction, the coal mine becomes a warzone. As you see all the animals who are burned alive are displaced, the zoo starts to feel like a prison. As you see the animals pacing back and forth in a cage and that chicken on your plate starts to look like a corpse. Now, Ezra cares deeply about what has happened in animals. He calls it the moral horror of our age. But the transformations and contradictions and tensions he went through when he took the green pill is a much bigger concept than just animal rights. The Green Pill is about these key moments in our life that change us through inspiration, enlightenment or suffering. It's about those moments when you start looking at the world through a different set of eyes. And suddenly, everything changes. So let's get to the first episode. Ezra needs almost no introduction, he's one of the most important journalists of our age, founder of Vox, and a former columnist at the Washington Post. Let's listen to how Ezra took the green pill. And what's happened to him since he did that. \n\nWell, thanks for joining the podcast and for kind of honoring me with being the first guest as well. And we're going to talk about this concept of The Green Pill, which is the title of the podcast and just a bit. But before I even get into that, why don't you just tell me for a second, how did you come to care about animals? I mean, there aren't too many political journalists who spent a lot of time thinking about animals and animal rights.\n\nEzra Klein 2:32 \nIt's it's one of these things where I'm not sure the story is all that good. The thing that is always striking me about this issue is that I think I always did, right. I think in some ways that everybody, not everybody, but but almost everybody always has to maybe offer a somewhat elliptical answer here. So my son, his first word is doggy, which is true for a lot of kids, he just wanders around being like doggy, doggy, doggy. And like any parent, I've got a lot of books for him. And we've been given a ton of books for him. And if you open up any of them, any of them, it's all animal protagonists, like up and down like every Sandra Boynton book, the protagonists are animals like every book for kids, it's like, either the main characters are animals, or they're literally letters. They're just almost never human beings. And I say all that because it's made me reflect on this question a bit, which is like, how did I come to care about animals? I think most people care about animals. I think there is an extraordinary amount of work that goes into severing that intuitive sense that these are sentient creatures that we shouldn't hurt needlessly, from a world that is doing a ton of that. And obviously, we don't do it on everything, right, the same people. I mean, people sit around eating a burger talking about how terrible it is in other countries that you dogs, right, we have tremendously powerful animal rights laws around the treatment of dogs and cats. It is well understood both like an actual thing in psychology and a trope of fiction, that if you want to spot a sociopath, look for the person torturing animals. And so I don't think there's anything at all unusual about the amount of care about animals, I don't actually think I like animals more than other people possibly even a little bit less. I'm definitely annoyed at my dogs currently. But what happened for me is that slowly over time, I was bouncing back and forth between vegetarianism. And then eventually my partner, Annie went vegan, and I followed her into that. And the thing that has, that I think is was true for me about that experience is that once I found a way to hold more or less to that approach to eating, it allowed me to fully experience the things I already believed. That when faced with a cognitive dissonance between what I did to animals and how I felt about them. The way I handled it, which I think is why a lot of people handle it is I didn't think about it. And it was once I was not experiencing that kind of cognitive dissonance because my trip, my approach was more aligned with my values, that I could sort of sit and think about those values and look at them. And so now I guess, have a reputation as somebody who genuinely cares about animals, but I don't think I do, I just think that I'm in a position a little bit by happenstance, due to people around me caring about this a lot. I'd also give some credit on this to my colleague, Bill Matthews, who sort of pushed me in this direction. And that gave me a little bit of space to allow the values to be at the forefront, as opposed to the cognitive dissonance to be turning them down.\n\nWayne Hsiung 5:46 \nI want to push you on this a little bit, though, because you say I don't care about animals more than most people, but you've taken real professional risks and writing about things that most political journalists don't write about. I mean, you've interviewed Hillary Clinton and Elizabeth Warren, and yet you also write about chickens, and how mean we are to chickens. And I think you said in a podcast once that the scariest podcast you've ever done was one about animals because you're worried about the impact that had on your audience, maybe on your reputation, too. And I know a lot of other folks in the animal rights movement, including myself, feel the same way that there's this almost mockery we face for talking about chickens at a time when, for example, millions of people are sick with a Coronavirus. So, I mean, how did you assess those costs and benefits personally? And how did you decide? No, I'm going to make this part of not just my personal ethical beliefs, my my journalism, my career.\n\nEzra Klein 6:34 \nI want to I want to come back, by the way to how can you talk about chickens, and its Coronavirus? Because I would love to talk about that. Let's do thinking a lot about that. Because it's fucking crazy that we're not actually talking more about chickens, and it's Coronavirus, because there's a real reason. Anyway, we'll come back to that. Yeah, it's true. So this podcast in a way that it does me a great honor takes away the term the green pill, which comes from a podcast I did with Melanie Joy, the author of the book, why we love dogs, where cows and pigs might have the order of that wrong, but that's the book title roughly. And that was a scary podcast, it is in a weird way was scary to kind of out myself as somebody who is a vegan, you know, believes that the way we treat animals is a signal moral horror of our age. You know, and and if you go back and listen to that show, and I hope people do if they're interested, I do think it I do think it holds up. I am very tentative. And I still certainly in some contexts hold that. But I become less. So I've been thinking about this a lot over the past couple of years. And like what what role I want this to play, like I wrote this book, why we're polarized available wherever you get your books. And I mentioned a couple of times in that book, I mentioned a number of times in that book, I just sort of do drive by little moments of veganism, or at least like animal suffering issues. And the reason I do that is that look, I'm as you know that I'm a political journalist, a political commentator. And I think I play a number of roles in that. And there, there are a number of dimensions of that job that are important. Some of them are explaining what's going on, but but some of them also are pushing things into the conversation that I think need to be there. And so the thing that I think of myself as doing is as somebody who, you know, occupies a certain role in quote, unquote, the discourse. Um, I want to normalize the idea that if you care about suffering, one of the categories of suffering you should care about is animal suffering. And And not only that, I want to normalize the idea that that is that those things are integrated, that it is easier to care about all kinds of suffering, if you are open to it, not that these things are at some kind of zero sum attack on each other. I actually did a piece not long ago. I don't know time is very strange. Now it's all liquid. But I did a piece like maybe six months ago about this study that basically did, corre looked into correlations between people cared about animal rights issues and cared about other issues. And far from this idea that it's somehow difficult to care about chickens, and also racism or chickens and also, class exploitation. If you care about animals, you're much more likely to register a high level of concern about those other issues. And not only that, but if you live in a state with strong animal protection laws, it is likely to be a state with much stronger human rights laws. There is a way in which developing compassion to me is it's like developing a muscle developing a sensitivity and the work you do walling yourself off from what you know to be true about the way we are treating animals practically in factory farms. That is learning how to cut yourself off from an awareness of suffering that you will experience in other areas to the homeless people you pass on the street, the tremendous amounts of suffering experienced by the poor in developing nations, right? The same mental models. I really believe this the same mental pathways and process sources that allow us to love a dog, eat a burger and nothing about the chickens are also the same ones allow us to care about the poor in our own country, and dehumanize the people who were born somewhere else, but are having no less rich and miserable, or even worse, a much more miserable experience, because of the economic circumstances they were built into. So So to me, actually, this is all very much part of the same project. And, you know, whatever risk I take on it, I mean, as you say, it's like a risk of some mockery. If I'm not willing to risk a little bit of mockery in my job, I really shouldn't have my job.\n\nWayne Hsiung 10:39 \nYeah, I think you're right, that there is just a common strand to all these movements and causes that we're just trying to build systems with more empathy, that treat individual sentient beings as sentient beings that deserve some modicum of respect. But I think the difference between advocating for global poverty or homelessness or against homelessness, I should say is that, especially on the left, people will hear that and they might ignore it. But they don't actively oppose it. They don't get angry about it and say, You're stupid, or you're silly, or why don't you care about, you know, low income folks in the United States rather than worrying about homeless people. So what is it? Do you think and actually, Vox has written some good articles about this? What do you think it is about veganism animal rights that creates this intense antipathy? Not just with right wingers, but even on the left? You know, and I think the article you all did show that people actually dislike vegans more than the dislike Muslims and atheists, and like them slightly more than they like drug addicts nationwide. So why do you think it is that that animal rights is in the orphan child, not just of American politics, but even of the American left?\n\nEzra Klein 11:44 \nSo there's a bunch of things here, and I think they're really, I don't know, I think this is a really interesting and rich space. Number one, people do not like anything, any political message that makes them feel bad, nothing that implicates them is going to be popular. And if you want to see another version of it, and I'm always and I want to be very careful, before I say this, I don't try to compare these as things I just want to note. But I think the psychological defense mechanisms are very similar. This is a country built atop a huge structure racist policies, I mean, from its very founding, and the amount of defensiveness that goes into any conversation about that, the amount of that and it comes and I don't think this is unclear, it comes from the feeling of how dare you tell me I don't deserve this. How dare you tell me this isn't mine? How dare you tell me that I am culpable? How dare you tell me that I am wrong. Right. And there's this ongoing conversation about the ways in which people act as if being called racist is a bigger problems than actually racism itself, on and so that is just going to be true in anything. I mean, in anything when it comes up to that, like, there's this ongoing conversation during the Democratic primary, where all these billionaires who will say on the one hand, I'm very happy to pay higher taxes, and in many cases, I think they were, but they were furious at Elizabeth Warren or others on the left, who implied or said explicitly that the existence of their billions was a problem, right? They're willing to pay the taxes or up to some level maybe, but the idea they would lose social status along the way that was intolerable. Right. And so veganism has this dimension or plant based people and and we should talk about this too because I think there's some real problems in the way veganism presents itself and plays into this but nevertheless like the issue is is that that you cannot get away from no matter how gently you frame what it is saying is it if you believe what it is saying then to the people who don't believe it or trying to resist believing of it they are participating in are culpable in something atrocious and the cognitive dissonance of that of like, I think I'm a good person I treat the people in my life while I treat my pets well, and you're telling me that by having this dinner, which is what I grew up on is what my parents eat is what my friends eat is what eight out of 10 things on this menu are I'm a bad person or participating in something that feels to me like to participate in it would be about but like people are just going to hate that and the immune system to it is mockery. The immune system to it is Anthony Bourdain, God rest his soul saying that, you know, vegans are the Hezbollah like splinter sect of vegetarians, because if you can laugh at it, then of course it's not true. Um, one thing that I think is a real mistake in the animal rights world is the way in which which this got defined as about individual diets, and a commitment to like individual diets, as opposed to the the structural world people live in. And I think this was a real mistake, because it is understood in other areas that you can care about climate change, even though you live a life that is contributing to climate change, that you can care about poverty, even though you do not in a kind of Peter Singer way, donate nearly as much to global poverty or even domestic poverty as kind of simple thought experiments would say you should, there's a kind of capacity we have in a lot of places to sever individual action from social structure. And something in the animal rights world, I think, is quite unusual, is it that is it that is tied much closer together. I mean, even in the thing itself, veganism doesn't describe just a philosophy, it literally describes a way of eating, right. And so we have ratcheted up both the level of commitment, you need to feel that way. And as such, the cognitive dissonance because it's very then hard to say, I am somebody who cares about animals, but I don't do the thing you're supposed to do if you care about animals, which is cut my consumption of them. I mean, the number of people I know who tell me like they want to be a vegetarian, but just can't. And so like, what they end up doing is not thinking about any of this stuff at all. Because like, that's just too difficult and hard to have a place. And by the way, it's a place I have been in myself, like it isn't something I say with any judgment. Like that's a real mistake. So I think those are the two things like people are resistant to anything, any political idea that implicates them in something unjust, or that frames them and what they've done as part of the problem, but then Aside from that, like this particular one has been framed in such a stringent way that it's very hard for people to find a spot for their own inclusion, if they're not willing to go all the way and we do not live in a world where it is easy to go all the way on that. We do not live in a world setup to be vegan. \n\nWayne Hsiung 17:00 \nSo two just end interesting anecdotes on that. I think most folks know me is a pretty committed animal rights activists have faced felony charges for rescuing animals in slaughterhouses I've got beaten up by dog meat traders. I've gone through a lot. But one interesting thing is that when I first read Animal Liberation by Peter Singer, the first sentence of the book is this is a book about the tyranny of human over non human animals. And even as someone back when I first started reading this book, I was already a huge animal. I, unlike you, I was obsessed with animals when I was a kid, I do love animals more than ordinary human beings. But reading that sentence, it didn't make me think it didn't make me curious. It actually made me angry. You know, the idea that Peterson would allege that I was part of a tyrant class that was dominating the rest of the earth because I saw myself as a victim in many ways. I was I was a, you know, poor immigrant kid who'd suffered from racism in Central Indiana, and I loved animals. And he's telling me that I'm part of a tyrant class. But But I read the book, and it influenced me in a lot of really important ways. One way it didn't actually influence me originally, though, was changing my dietary habits. I was kind of a lazy vegan for years. Even though I accepted kind of all the arguments and singers book, I thought that it was atrocious what was happening to animals, it took me a long time to become a real vegan even to this day, I think you're right, that the focus on kind of personal dietary purity is an obstacle to the movement, because it prevents us from cultivating a larger mass of people have the identity of animal rights supporter, and maybe this is a good time for us to segue. And I think the central concept that I want to discuss today, which is the green pill, I mean, what what is the green pill and maybe even backup for those who haven't seen The Matrix? Could you even explain the metaphor? Because I think there are enough people now, what 20 years later who haven't seen the movie that it's useful for us to talk about? What the green pill again, metaphorically stands for.\n\nEzra Klein 18:43 \nYeah, so I've gotten so old. It's such a disaster. Yes, so people probably are familiar now with the red pill as a metaphor, which comes of course from the matrix, which is, you know, Neo is offered this choice to take the red pill Neo here being this much sainted Keanu Reeves. And he's offered this choice to take the red pill, and wake up to an unbelievably grotesque and horrifying reality in which human beings are kept No, sorry for the spoilers here of this two decade old movie. But human beings are kept in these pods. And the robots are sucking life force out of us. And it's a bad situation. So you can you can take, I think it was a blue pill and remaining your comfortable dream. Or you could take the red pill and wake up to a horrifying reality. And so red pill has remained as a concept in our culture. And it now tends to refer to a kind of alt light or even the alt right strain of conservatism. You take the red pill and it's like you become a men's rights activist or Yeah, I think Elon Musk was just tweeting in a somewhat unclear way about taking the red pill but it's confusing because he had a red rose next to it which was like, usually mean socialist Twitter says very so people are using red pill all over for this idea as stepping through the looking glass of an ideology, or realization that makes the entire world look different to you. That makes it so the world you saw beforehand is no longer the world you see after. And when I began going into this and thinking about this, and it took me a long time to work up to bringing it into my work. So I've done a lot of reading and, and one of the things I wanted to do, as I talked about this was to what we were just talking about, separate the idea of diet, from the idea of accepting the reality of it and the importance of animal suffering. And so the green pill is sort of my metaphor for that, which is that almost nothing has been as radicalizing in my life as simply taking the scale and reality of animal suffering seriously, once you accept it, and it doesn't take much to accept it, it only takes believing what I already believe, right? believing what most people already believe, just taking it seriously. Then I would sit at dinner with people I love people I admire as good people as people like who spend their whole days and lives working to make the world a better place. And they'd be eating something that like would fill me with a kind of horror, right? I mean, I feel this way, particularly for any kind of like commodity chicken product. And the world just begins to look cruel. I talk all the time and eventually I'm gonna write this piece about this but when you drive up and down California you see these ads for, what is the name of the Christian chicken place?\n\nWayne Hsiung 21:43 \nChick-fil-A \n\nEzra Klein 21:43 \nChick-fil-A Chick-fil-A. Oh, sorry. So Chick-fil-A is a very famous advertising campaign. It's been going on for decades. If you actually look at the founder of Chick-fil-A , it's on the front of his book. And it is on billboards all over. And it is these paper mache Shea cows? Who are spray painting on a white background. Eat more chickens. Yeah, and the words are like, like a kid had written them. Right? symbol letters are backwards, it's misspelled. And it's funny, right? The idea is that it's funny. And the joke to say it literally is that the cows are vandalizing billboards telling you to eat more chickens, because they don't want to be killed for your food. So they like are trying to get you to like, kill the chickens instead. And the amount of just numbing that has to be done in society for that to be a joke. And for it to like be going on for decades now. And that's like the green pill to me that on the other side, it just begins to look different. And to me what I care about, like what my political project in this is, is not making people vegan, I actually think that's a distraction and even a problem. It is just getting people to accept in the way they accept it with climate change in the way that they accept it with poverty, that this is a problem. That is a problem that we should make continuous political effort to change, right? That is a problem where incremental solutions would be good were also transformative ones would be great. But that is just something we should be working on that we should just see it. And so like in my work, when I think of myself as doing on this issue is not turning people vegan is trying to get people to take the green pill trying to get people to simply awaken to the idea that we already know that what you'll know the numbers on this, and I'm going to forget them from from memory, but it's some insane number, like 70-80 billion animals a year are processed, mostly under the industrial agriculture system. And the amount of suffering that they go through for their whole lives up until their death is unimaginable. I mean, if you just just literally explained what the life of a chicken is, like in these farms, people will leave the podcast because like nobody wants to hear that. And to just say like, that is exactly what you think it is. That is exactly as bad as it sounds. And it deserves a place in our politics proportionate to that reality. All of a sudden, the world the people you love the restaurants you went to, like everything just looks different, and it looks a little grotesque. And then how you handle that new kind of cognitive dissonance, that new sense of alienation. I think that's also a really difficult project, right? And something that people come up with in different ways. And we should and we can talk about but it's also like a really, a really emotionally and politically complex question that I think there's a lot of growth and learning in.\n\nWayne Hsiung 24:57 \nSo how do you handle it personally when you're sitting here Someone's eating a commodity chicken right in front of you. And you're thinking about what this poor living creature had to go through? I mean, what do you say to them? How do you respond? How do you react emotionally in your face? I mean,\n\nEzra Klein 25:11 \nno, no, my view on this is that I am very public about my views here. And if anybody wants to ask me about them, I will tell you about them without apology. And people always seem to want to ask you about them. It's a it's a funny inversion of the stereotype or people like vegans can't stop talking about how vegan they are. And in my experience, what happens is you're sitting at dinner with people, and they're all they all order something and you don't and then they immediately ask you about it, not that you bring it up. Well, and then you're all talking about veganism for a while or you know, the green pill or whatever it might be. So to me, my view on this is that I will if you ask me, this one, I'm very public about what I think on this like, like extraordinarily. So just given the level of public megaphone I happen to have, so people know what I think if you if you if you know me, you know what I think. And so then people, if you want to have a conversation with me, I do not hide what I think about this, I think it's actually a really important thing that social contagion is crucial here. And a lot of people around me, as by the way I did from one of my colleagues who I respect the most, and my wife going, taking this very seriously, before I did that changed me. And I want to be able to have that effect on other people. But you will not do it. I don't believe you can do it by by making people defensive. And so my view on this is simply like, this is a totally reasonable thing conversation to have. I'm happy to have it if anybody would like to have it. But No, I don't. When I sit down at dinner, like the food comes out at the dinner party. And I'm like, Listen, everybody. I don't like hit the hit the hit the glass with the spoon and begin ranting. I don't think I don't think that's a viable a viable approach.\n\nWayne Hsiung 27:01 \nSo I think you're right, that folks are not persuaded when they feel defensive. But you also said early in the podcast, and I agree with this, that people feel defensive, just by virtue of the fact that you are adopting posture taking. So I'm just wondering, have you had any intense negative experience of friends, family members, colleagues? And how do you respond when someone does get defensive or even angry about the fact that you're pushing your diet on them? Or you're advocating for position that seems to implicitly or frankly, maybe even explicitly judge them for their moral behavior?\n\nEzra Klein 27:30 \nI I don't know. One thing that I think is probably makes my life a little bit easier in this regard is I'm very practiced at managing political conflict in real time. And so the idea that we might have a controversial political conversation is just not something I am particularly turned off by. Nor and I'm nor something that I feel like unable to keep it on on reasonably safe ground. I, oddly enough, do not find it to be the hardest of the conversations I have with people. In part, because there's more shared ground there than people realize, yeah. Look, I have family members and friends who are Trump supporters. And there is not that much shared ground on that. That's a very polarizing conversation. When you scratch that there's a very foundational differences usually in what people want, in their ideal world. That's actually not typically true on this issue. If you paint a picture of a world where it's like, imagine that all the meat could be lab grown, and so no animal ever had to suffer. Almost everybody wants that. Now look, you'll you'll always have the thing. It is the thing you learn talking about animal issues, is it everybody's uncle is either a farmer who raises the happiest cows in the world, on their gigantic many acre ranch, where they get daily massages, and so on. Or is like a hunter who goes into the back country of Kentucky and shoots their own whatever, whatever. And you know what, that is just not something like if you are hunting your own food, or you really are able to source up the chain in a humane way. Like we don't really have a conversation to have, like, that's I we can go back and forth on what you think about that. And I respect everybody's views on this, and I don't do it. I'm not a hunter. But it would not be on my list of the Top 50 political issues I would worry about. It is the scale of industrial agriculture. Like full stop Alpha and Omega that motivates me in the space. And most people don't like it either. I mean, you know the the polling here as well as I do that. I think it's something like two thirds of people say we should ban slaughterhouses.\n\nWayne Hsiung 30:00 \nYeah, shocking, yeah,\n\nEzra Klein 30:02 \nyeah, you can chuckle about that because obviously two thirds of people are eating the food or more than that from from slaughterhouses. But it speaks to what the reality is, which is, by the way, the reality on a lot of political issues, which is people are conflicted. And what you're trying to do in a conversation about this stuff is speak to the conflict. This brings up something else that I think is increasingly important in this and I am trying to figure out right now how to write about it, and it goes to Coronavirus and chickens. But there is a tremendous, a tremendous and tremendously sad amount of human suffering embedded in the animal suffering. There is a very deep way in which we are connected to each other. And I don't just mean on the psychic or psychological level of there's a kind of violence we do unto ourselves when we teach ourselves not to care about something we know we should care about, when we tell a child who asks why we eat the chicken, like, Oh, you know, because their protein and you know, like, when we do that there's a there's something but that's not what I mean here. I mean that animal agriculture is a tremendous contributor to climate change, which billions of human beings arguably all human beings are going to suffer from. I mean that the entirety of the coronavirus pandemic came from as far as we know, the meat trade came from the wet market where people were buying animals for food. I mean that if you go to the CDC and look at the strains of disease, they are tracking as pandemic risk. Most of them are avian flus where the transmission mechanism would be that slaughterhouse workers and by the way, there are lots of papers about this slaughterhouse workers get infected in these kind of disease, hothouse atmospheres and then bring it back into the community. I mean, that if you look at the real shit we should be afraid of because Coronavirus is not the worst thing that can happen. You look at the the h5n1 disease that is an avian flu, it kills 60% of the human beings it infects currently, it cannot do human to human transmission. So it has not become a pandemic. But we know because a scientist actually did it in a lab, which was fucking crazy, by the way, he does hast it through 10 ferrets. And at the end, it could spread Farah to ferret, which is considered because of the way ferrets reaction to virus works considered to be an analogue to human to human. So we know it can mutate the spread human to human 60% fatality rate. And that's not by any means the only one and you have the antibiotic resistance issue, where 70% of all antibiotics in America are used on factory farms leading to these levels of resistance that just like all these experts were warning about a pandemic flu, they've all been warning about a post antibiotic world. And the unbelievable danger of that. This is like To me, this is one of these places where it isn't even just that we are successfully exploiting all these animals and it's making us healthier, happier, stronger. I don't tend to get into the nutrition thing because honestly, I think it's complicated and I don't trust a bunch of the argue people arguing about it. It seems to me on net, it's a little bit healthier to be vegetarian, but it can be perfectly healthy eating fish and some other things. But in terms of climate change in terms of disease risk in terms of the psychological trauma to meatpacking workers, and for that matter, oftentimes physical trauma and in terms of the danger they then pose to their communities through disease risk. Like we are doing something here that is unbelievably dangerous to ourselves. And we are living through that right now. And it is wild, given everything that we are talking about Coronavirus, and again, I'm trying to figure out how to write this in a way people can hear it. Yeah, that that is not one of the things we are talking about. It's like the thing that actually caused it you can't even say or I shouldn't say that you can say it just people don't will talk about anything else. And it's just crazy. We have ended up in not only like an immoral but a deeply for our own future as a species counterproductive and injurious relationship with the natural world. And the scale of it is just astonishing. And to me, the practice here is not being perfect, or it's very much not me telling people even really what they eat. It's just just look right like that's my job as a reporter. Just look, bear witness, like, let's try to understand these problems we face and you can understand them without this one. Now, if a problem we face is the amount of suffering it Sorry, I don't mean to rant, but it's so big, and the amount of attention we give to so much smaller things. It's just kind of wild to me.\n\nWayne Hsiung 34:49 \nYeah, I think this relates to kind of the flip side of the green pill concept. For me. You talked a lot about the experience of the person who's taking the green pill. But part of the point of the entire concept is that there's a broader system around all of us that is inducing us to not think about the things the green pill allows us to see. And I think that's one of the reasons people don't see these six, because they're all these structures and cultural norms that prevent us from just engaging with the facts of the matter. And I was actually really struck, you did a podcast of Bill Gates recently, and you just straight up asked bill directly, you know, what do you think about pandemics in animal agriculture, the exploitation of animal What do you think about the linkage and, you know, Bill is someone who's a very innovative, bold person, very courageous, he's made a lot of big bets in his life, he makes lots of bold predictions. And I can tell he just kind of shied away from the question entirely and deflect and said, Oh, you know, I don't know if there's anything we can do about that. Because humans just eat animals, and we can't remove the risk entirely. And I wonder when you were talking to Bill about this, do you think do you get the sense that he was deflecting? Because he genuinely doesn't think it's something that could be done to avoid pandemic risk? Or do you think it was kind of a political thing he was doing, recognizing this is kind of moving me into dangerous territory where a lot of people are going to be mad about the fact that I'm advocating for veganism and animal rights. What do you think the thought process is for Bill? And what do you think that says about our broader culture and, and the pressure people feel to not be kind of an animal rights radical?\n\nEzra Klein 36:10 \ni? There's a lot in that. So I don't want to characterize bog it's a solid process, because the truth is, I don't know it. I'm sure my impression of him from interviewing him a number of times over the years, is that he is an enormously practical and pragmatic thinker. And when you ask him a question, you get, like a, like a, like a very direct answer about what you can actually do about the thing, right? He's a problem solver, and a problem solver in the, the adjacency. So if you even listen to how he talks about starting his foundation, what he saw was that we had these problems that we had the technology to solve, and the capacity to solve at scale, and just nobody was putting the money. And so who's gonna put the money in? So I think when I asked him about animal suffering and the risk issues, I know he's somebody who is funding some of the plant based meats innovation, but I don't think to him that is, I think he would see that as a non productive line of inquiry. Yeah, that's my impression. It does what you're saying more broadly. Yeah. Like, look, one of the immune like, the kind of behavioral or societal immune system responses here is to make this hard to talk about by mocking the people who talk about it. And by the way, this is true in a lot of social justice movements. I mean, there's a lot of making fun of woke left and, you know, dumb college students and, you know, if you're not a communist, when you're young, you have no brain or you'd have no hard if you're not a conservative, when you're older, you have no brain, right? There's I mean, this stuff has been going on forever. It's not unique. Sometimes I think that animal rights people can feel like, like, the dynamics around this issue are unique, and they just aren't, in my view, they're just very normal. Every hippie who tells you that there should be no war, or there should be no nukes, people like, Ah, ha, ha, you and your patchouli. But there actually, it would be good if there was no war, and it would be good if there are no nuclear weapons, or at least I think those things are true. I buy those arguments. And, you know, I've recommended Melanie Joy's books many times, and I've written a what will be a blurb for a reissue of it. And the reason I recommend it so highly is it to me, it's a way of thinking not just about this issue, but about the way that dominant ideologies protect themselves, they protect themselves through invisibility, right? It becomes not just an ideology, but just the way things are. They protect themselves through being so consensus oriented, that it becomes socially uncomfortable and unacceptable to question them. And it's a good framework, because it's not the only one, right? I mean, there's plenty of this stuff lurking around in all areas of our lives. And it's one way I think that people who maybe are more woke on the animal issues need to remain pretty humble. Very few of us are pure, like truly pure. Most people are contributing to climate change. If you're listening to this podcast, we add a proportion to what the average human being is. Very few of us are truly in the effective altruism sense of the word. You know, donating excess income to save, save the real lives of children who are dying from malaria or being stunted by malnutrition elsewhere. And instead, we're buying knickknacks and espressos and the whole thing so, you know, I'm not out here I don't think anybody's pure on this by the way, including on the animal stuff and we can talk about my own views on this. It's a it's an important point for me to always make that I am not and do not claim to be like a perfect follower of a vegan diet. I don't eat meat and I don't eat eggs, but I have my my, my moments of softness on other things. And I think it's really important to build structures that people can live in. Because if they can't, if they're just in a constant space of failing, then they're going to leave because people don't like to feel like they're failing. And so, to me, it's about having a worldview that people can adopt, and that it doesn't demand that much of you to adopt it. But that in adopting it, it allows you to advocate for the things that make it easier to live that way, without having a lot of cognitive dissonance about yourself right now. \n\nLook like I drive places, I like we have a car. And what I want is for that car to be able to run on renewable electricity. But if you made it so that I couldn't be somebody who cared about climate that my my care about, it would be suspicious by virtue of having a car, because cars are bad for the climate, even we have a you know, we have one that's like partially electric, but a lot of electricity is not renewable around here. So I am making it worse. And I don't feel any real. I mean, I feel some sadness about that. But I feel dissidence about it like I want to, I am trying to advocate so that my car can run on renewable electricity. And like, that's how I feel about veganism to about animal issues. Like I, I'm somebody who believes these issues are important. And I want it to be easy and natural and normal to eat a plant based diet like and to and to not cause unnecessary suffering to animals or human beings. And like that is a long political project of changing the structures and the social dynamics around all of us. It is not a thing where we're supposed to recede from modern life tomorrow.\n\nWayne Hsiung 41:36 \nYeah, and this, this framing the non systemic individualistic framing, the sense that you're to blame if you're eating animals, or if you're driving a Hummer or even just driving a car that's not fully electric. I think a lot of folks see that as is accurate, but don't realize that there's actually a pretty strong corporate movement to actually shift the way social events are construed by society at large so that they are construed as attacking individuals. And Andrew Jacobs in New York Times has done some good work on this. And I've actually worked at them a little bit about how a lot of the large nonprofits that are funded by corporations, when legislators and policymakers come to them and ask them Well, what do you think about factory farming? What do you think about climate change and fossil fuels? They'll come back to them and say, well, it's ultimately consumer responsibility. And we'd love to do something about this. And our clients would love to do something about this. But what can we do people want to eat meat, they want to drive their Hummer. So really, your problem is you need to go talk to the consumers, and we just need to educate as many people as we can. And then eventually, the world will change in the direction of addressing climate change in a reasonable fashion or reducing the suffering of animals. And I think what what's important for me to convey to folks and why I like the Green Pill concept so much, because in the matrix, it wasn't that the, you know, this, this mythical world that had been created was it was an accident. It was just this happenstance that all of us believe in this collective delusion. It wasn't actually an intentional, intentional matrix, there was an active effort to try and deceive us about what was actually happening in the world around us. And when you take the green pill, you're part of the resistance, in a sense. So but, you know, I guess my question for you then is if it is the case, that there's this broader system around us that's shaping our behavior, and in ways that are insidious or accidental? And, and are the solution isn't just for us individually to come out of it? And you know, decide we're not going to provide our economic support. What do you see as a solution? I mean, how do we change the system?\n\nEzra Klein 43:29 \nSo this is a really complicated space, I think, and it's a place where I've begun to have a real problem with some of left discourse, but but let me try to let me try to not just throw clear about it. But but but talk you through the solution is not individual action, but there is no solution without individual action. So Jonathan Safran Foer, his new book, We Are The Weather. I have some issues with that book, to be honest, but I think it's trying to get at this question in an interesting way. And I saw them this review of it in the nation. And for his book, for those who haven't read it, it's basically arguing that eating animals, animal agriculture, a huge contributor to climate change, probably the easiest, most impactful thing people can do to climate change is to eat fewer animals. And so people should not eat meat before dinner. It's a pretty straightforward argument. And he says a million times in that book, a million like constantly like every third sentence, collective action is necessary here. Social Change will have to happen, there is no replacement for it, but also individual changes necessary and there's this nation review. It's like a long piece on this, but it basically comes down to this argument that you can individualize this. It has to be policy change, it has to be structural change. And I see this all the time. It's a particular tech, in my view now of climate discourse, where if you ever say anybody should do anything different, like it will just fill with people like scolding you that This is a structural problem. It's built into capitalism. It's built into neoliberalism. It's like something gigantic, and like no person bears responsibility, like that's what they want you to think. Instead, what we need to do is change the system. And obviously, there's truth to that. But, but but but we know a lot about how social change happens, we know a lot about how political change happens. And we know a lot about how people end up voting and choosing to be part of political change. And for most people, there has to be some level of alignment between their values, their behavior and how they vote. People do not vote for things which indict them personally, they just don't, they do not vote for things that make them feel like a bad person, they just don't. And so what you need is to have enough kind of consciousness raising on the individual level enough things happening in people's social networks, that they come to think of themselves as somebody who cares about animal rights, as somebody who's already doing a lot of work in their life to try to be better about this. And then when they see prop 12, on the ballot in California, or right now, Cory Booker and Elizabeth Warren, among others, have a bill to try to reduce factory farms face him out over time, even I need to dig into the details of it. So I want to be careful in how I describe it. But if you're already kind of there in your personal life, you're going to love voting for that bill. If you're not, of course, you're not going to touch that. And so there is this way in which there is like a duet between our individual existences and our decisions as members of a collective as members of society. And somehow we have to get people to move individually, even as we don't put all of the responsibility on them individually. But it is a huge, huge, and I think irrecoverable mistake, to somehow take personal responsibility, and personal action entirely out of this, because people's political decision makings and definitely societal decisions are an emergent phenomenon of individuals. And individuals don't feel like this is on them, they don't feel like this is they've not moved on this. It's somebody else's problem. They are not going to vote for something that makes it their problem. They're just not. And so yeah, so that's one thing that's on the political side. And then in truth, I think there is going to be an answer to this, it is going to be technological, I do not think we will policy change our way out of this, my hope is that we live in the age of animal cruelty right now. And I mean that in a very specific way. It is a new development in human existence, that we have the technology to conduct animal agriculture, at this level of cruelty at this scale, if you had tried to do it, 100 years ago, disease would have ripped through your flock in two seconds. And that would have been the end of that. It is only advances in antibiotics, in breeding in ventilation, in transportation in storage, that has made this kind of industrial animal agriculture possible, like it just wasn't. And my hope is that we are on the cusp of technology, making it unnecessary and even overly expensive and dangerous, right, because we're gonna get so good at either the plant based or the lab based meat replacements, that to be doing this animal stuff where you got to like kill these animals and take on this pandemic risk and use antibiotics and fuck up the environment, it'll become ridiculous. And the advances made in terms of things like impossible foods and beyond meats and the just team with their mayo and so on. Like, they're really big, just in the past five or 10 years. So if you expand that over the next 10, or 20, I think where we could be on that is really, really profound. So if you want to ask me like where the hope for me is that as technology makes it easier to adopt a different way of living here, morality follows. The simpler it is to make this choice that a lot of people already want to make the more people who will make this choice. Look, I'm somebody I'm I live in like an urban area. Nowadays, I live in the Bay Area. It's like frickin vegetarian Mecca out here. And so it's pretty easy for me to not eat meat. If I lived in a place where it was really truly hard, you know, like the Midwest 25 years ago or something? Would I be a veggie, I don't know, the easier it gets, the more people who will do it. So it is like all these things are connected, right individual action, policy action and the technologies and alternatives that make it simple to make these choices in your life.\n\nWayne Hsiung 49:41 \nI think what you're what you're saying now is kind of one of the central arguments of your book, why we're polarized that politics is based on identity more than issues as much as we like to think that we're these rational philosopher kings. we're examining the pros and cons of various, you know, policies. Instead, what we're doing is asking, does our tribe like this or not? And we have to give people a sense that they're part of our tribe if they're going to buy into the policies we want. My main question to you might challenge you on this is, why is dietary habits the relevant identifier for our tribe in the first place? Why don't we just try and make democrats for example, the identity that's most salient when we think about animals, or make Buddhists or Hindus or even people who are just leftist and spiritually inclined to care about animals as part of their identity? Why does it have to be this this dietary trigger that that invokes these primal and tribal instincts in our psychology that makes us think, okay, I'm supportive, the animal rights movement?\n\nEzra Klein 50:33 \nI didn't know Weren't you the one who did this, though you have control over the whole vegan agenda.\n\nWayne Hsiung 50:39 \nI wrote an article A long time ago called boycott veganism, which got me an enormous amount of trouble, and got me tossed out of the vegan tribe. Because I, I, I agree with you that ultimately, this is about identity and non issues. And I think that the vegan identity, partly because of some of the stuff that Vox is written about is just a bad identity for us to mobilize around, that we should not even think it's him to make dietary changes.\n\nEzra Klein 51:00 \nI think it's a huge problem. I think it's weird. look like I'm Jewish. I'm not observant, and I'm definitely not kosher. But if the identity of Jewish was actually just kosher, right, if that's what you called it, and, like, I think a lot fewer people who don't keep to those rules would would feel it. And so, yeah, like, I'm not saying I know what the term is, I mean, maybe the term should just be veganism and somehow it gets redefined. But I don't really think that you can do that. And it's funny because the people who are trying to do this, they don't use the term vegan, right. I mean, the meat people, they use the term meat. Nobody wants to plaster the word vegan, on anything they sell. Right? That is not a good strategy. And we know like, we've looked at branding data that says, there are a few words consumers have worse associations with and vegan, plant based isn't that bad, right? There's other stuff going, you know, there are other words people can come up with, but vegan is terrible. You don't want it? And so yeah, yes. Like, I think this identity should be broader. I think it should be much more big pant. And I think it should be connected to other identities. I mean, the other thing My book is about is identity stacking identity alignment, right? How many identities you have that pull in different directions? And then how many do you have to pull in the same direction and, and a long term trend right now is identities that pull in the same direction, identities lining up on top of each other? And I agree, I think that is not that I want to confine this issue to the left, I really don't. But given that I think it functionally already is there. Given like what that I've seen in general, I think it should be a real issue that, you know, if you want to call yourself a progressive, you should at least care about these things. And I thought it was a real positive thing and the Democratic primary this year, you had to the, to my knowledge of the first time ever, multiple vegans running for president in Cory Booker and Tulsi Gabbard, and I know that at least Booker and Castro both had animal suffering policy platforms, and then Booker has continued working on this afterwards with his his factory farm initiative. And so like, that struck me is like, actually a step forward. I had a great conversation with hooli and Castro on my podcast about this, because Castro is not vegetarian. And I was asking him about this because he had this very forward looking agenda on animals. And he said, Yeah, like, I just think this is important. I'm not vegetarian, maybe I should be. But I've worked on these issues as a mayor, like we made San Antonio and no kill place and shelters and, and other issues like that. And I just think we should be pushing on this. And like, I thought that was great, right? Like, that is what we need. And so I \n\nWayne Hsiung 53:42 \nhonestly, he was a lot braver on the issue than Cory Booker was even though he wasn't vegan. I listened to those podcasts and and it was striking that the nonvegetarian was saying more powerful things about it. \n\nEzra Klein 53:52 \nBut you know, I really, I think that's I think there's an obvious reason for that. I mean, and I think Booker is is getting a little bit bolder on some of these issues. But I think that for Booker being vegan, forced him a little bit to downplay the issues that he has, because being vegan was going to turn off some of the electorate for him to push into that would have like made his candidacy. I think it is non viable. Whereas Castro, who's not vegan, like will sit down and have a burger with you did not kind of face that friction, and so he could he could be a little bit more Nixon goes to China on this one. I'm not saying that's fair. Like that's not how things should be. And I think that that Booker is pushing harder on this in a way that's actually very positive right now. But this is a book that was a step forward. And by the way, if you look at this in Britain, the Labour Party has like an animal rights Manifesto. So I think over time, this is the direction of things I look I think this is a role that I am trying to play a little bit right i think that i you know, my sort of my audience leans progressive and like my, my politics, lean liberal, and I like want to show that like this is part of my politics. And frankly, it's a lot more important to my politics than a lot of things that are more traditional in those ideologies, I would trade a lot of things out to put this one in, if it if the if the choice your mind, because and this goes to, I think what you're saying something I argue in the book is that identities can be based on values. And to me, the central identity for, for liberals or for us and a lot of progressives is built around a kind of compassion for the suffering a belief that we should reduce unnecessary suffering that it should not be on individuals, preferably individuals trapped in bad systems to do this on their own. And I think if that is your like, if that is a value, if that is an identity, you hold your somebody's concerned in this world about suffering, then this is a politics you should hold you should be concerned about human suffering, animal suffering, and crucially, the intersection of the two.\n\nWayne Hsiung 55:49 \nYeah, I think that makes a lot of sense. So one, one question I have for you is I mean, you said that most of your hope comes from technological solutions to this problem. And you most of the work you actually do is political, right? You're trying to advocate you're trying to persuade you're trying to elevate voices, including mine, which I'm appreciative of that are talking about animal rights from political perspective. And I guess my question is, why don't you have more hope that policy can change when you have two vegans running for president in the Democratic primary when you have bold moves like Julian Castro, who's not even a vegetarian himself, saying, we just have to ban ag gag laws across the country, we have to start addressing the cruelty to farm animals when you have Cory Booker and Elizabeth Warren now proposing a ban on k foes and it might not pass and almost certainly won't get to the publican Senate in the short term. In the long term, the fact that it's being proposed is is very promising. And then the latest thing is I don't know if you heard this, but there's a farm county in Utah, South Utah, that became from what I understand the first county in the nation to propose an outright ban on CAFOs at the local level. And this is a county that's adjacent to a factory farm. They're doing analysis for animal rights reasons, because they just hate the environmental consequences effective fine. But this is a deeply conservative, Southern rural Utah County saying we're done with factory farming. So what why is it that you don't see the signs as a signs that we should be investing more into that, rather than just relying on the technological solutions? \n\nEzra Klein 57:08 \nOh, well, I wish I wouldn't, I wouldn't say that, right? I would not say we shouldn't be investing more in it. I mean, and as you know, like, I literally am, like, I'm a politics person investing a lot more of my own personal time and energy into this. So it is, please do not get me wrong. \n\nWayne Hsiung 57:24 \nWell why don't you have more hope, I guess.\n\nEzra Klein 57:25 \nBecause I don't have a lot of hope about politics right now, for a lot of reasons. I mean, my book, Why We're Polarized, it's fundamentally about how polarization merges with American political institutions to make almost any large scale political change in policy change impossible in normal circumstances. So one is that you're coming? I'm coming from a baseline of it's very hard to do anything. And to be honest, no, I don't believe that if Julian Castro had become president or Cory Booker become president, they would have prioritized us on their agenda. I just don't, I think that that would have been too hard. And I think they wouldn't have seen a pathway to passage. And then I care on this, because of the global situation makes it even harder. You know, let's say there was some kind of earthquake ideological change in America over the next 10 years that made it. I mean, it would be a big deal, right? It would be a big damn deal. If we got rid of the Ag Gag laws and passed Prop 12, all across the country, which is like the the very strong, or the stronger than in most places, California. restrictions, and I can treat animals. And I think you and I both agree that Prop 12 doesn't go anywhere near the world, we would like to see nowhere near it. Like it's unbelievably far it is still unbelievably cruel. It is just better. And in my view, at least and what came before it. That would be huge. And I think that's probably unlikely. And so, and then the question of like, what is going to happen in China, in Indonesia, and Bangladesh, as these countries hopefully continue to get richer? I mean, we know that a couple years ago, China actually asked people to cut their meat and dairy consumption. And China as a government is a pretty good record of getting its people to do what it wants them to do. And they didn't do it. It just kept going up. Yeah. So you know, when I talk to the people who work on this, and we're working on it their whole lives. You're in a you're in a different place, and some of them but but for most of them, they will sit and look me in the eyes and tell me the signal failure for them the thing they wake up with every single day. They've been working on this issue for 25 years, they feel it's become more culturally accepted to have these views about animal agriculture. And the number of animals that have that suffer and die to be on our plates every year goes up and up and up, that the situation has only gotten worse and couldn't get better. Maybe. Maybe something will happen but I mean, I would like to see Coronavirus in some ways change people's view on this but I don't see much evidence that it is but so my view is that policy change at the level of what we're talking about for something as deeply rooted as dietary habits, it is going to come through the technology making the change, almost imperceptible, then some kind of deep spiritual awakening, or political awakening lead driven by some kind of like quasi spiritual awakening, there just aren't many examples of that. It's not that there are none. But there aren't many on record, it's a really hard thing to do. And I don't, I don't pretend to think we should get there. So or I don't pretend to think we're going to get there quickly. But that isn't to say, really importantly, and this is why I kind of framed this as a three legged stool earlier that politics doesn't have a role to play. Like, for instance, it is obvious to me that a huge way the political system could be helpful here is to shunt five or 10 or $15 billion a year, given concerns about pandemic risk, given concerns about climate change risk into innovation, around plant based and lab based meat replacement, that is an obvious whip, right? And it would be like a, like a pimple on the ass of the federal budget, it'd be nothing. They're not doing it right now. There's no money really going to that federal aid. Not really, in any country, Bruce Friedrich is very eloquent on this point. I'm the head of the Good Food Institute. So like, one thing I very much think could happen is that you begin seeing funding at the national level for work in this area. And one other good thing about that is that if that funding were happening, a lot more of the research in this era, be open source, open source, like I give full credit to everything Impossible Foods is doing full credit to be on me. But these are for profit businesses with capitalizations of billions of dollars. And most of what they're doing, they keep to themselves. Yep,\n\nwhat I'd like to see is tremendous amounts of basic research happening here, that could be used by any company, and, frankly, by any government, so everybody can build on it. So do I think there's going to be a law passed in the next couple of years that, like changes how we meet or bands, factory farms? No, like, I think that if you really saw a political process spin up around that, and you began to get the kind of fear mongering about your meats gonna get more expensive, like that stuff would die in a second, at least in the current political situation, and it wouldn't do anything for the international scene. But I think that the, I hope we will make advances on on those fronts. And I hope that as it becomes a priority, people begin to look for Okay, like, what could we do politically? Well, you know, what a lot of money goes into climate change research really a lot does. What if a little bit more was spent, and in the Green New Deal, there was $15 billion for this kind of research. I think that could be unbelievably high leverage. And so that's the kind of thing that I spend a lot of my time thinking about, and it feels really achievable to me. I think that I think that is a totally plausible five year win.\n\nWayne Hsiung 1:02:53 \nYeah, that makes a lot of sense. I mean, I think you're making a very reasonable case, I think I'm more pessimistic about the prospect of the political system, allowing these innovators to actually innovate if we don't rest back political control of our food system, okay, from big corporations. And I'm also more optimistic probably about the prospect of ordinary people just mobilizing about this cause, because I think you're right, most people do really care about this issue. And, you know, I'm very influenced by this word Cass Sunstein has done recently, really, showing that a lot of what's happened with Me Too and Black Lives Matter is that there are these existing causes a lot of people cared about for years, sometimes decades or hundreds of years. And the cases of civil rights that when there was a political opportunity or opening, there was a sudden wave of sentiment coming forward. And the analogy to animal rights to me is so clear that there are so many people are sort of quietly looking around them starting to take the green pill, realizing something is really awful about our relationship nonhuman animals, and they're just waiting for that opportunity, that feeling that it's safe to come out and openly say, this is wrong. And I want to be a part of the change. But we'll see. And I think you're right, that these two things do work in conjunction, but we've taken a lot of your time. So I want to end with just you've talked a lot about various solutions to this problem. But if you could distill your personal perspective to folks who are listening to this podcast, what is one thing that you think people should try to change in their own lives to help in this area, frankly, and some other if they could?\n\nEzra Klein 1:04:10 \nI think they should be vocal. I think in general, the single best thing people can do is not run around being confrontational and challenging, but also and I know a lot of people who are vegan, do this is not hide what it is they think, is be open and honest, in an open hearted way, right in a way that is embedded in relationships. But yeah, like, you think this is wrong, and when people ask you why you did not order the meat you tell them and I think that has an effect over time. I think people do not want to be thought of as doing the wrong thing by their friends by their family members. I think it makes him think twice. I know a lot of people who they eat meat but they don't eat it around me. And you know what? Great, that's a couple meat meals a day. not get ordered. And you know, I'll be at a dinner party and you know, the host will be very kind and have made a vegetarian dinner for everybody because I was there. Something I used to do at Vox when I was editor in chief was if there was an event that was being thrown, that I was like, the main person at that, like I was going to be the speaker at like, it was not there was not going to be catered with me. Like that was something that I could do. So I just, I think people should be, again, not a jerk, but vocal, you can, in the same way that you would be if somebody was sitting at the dinner table with you and took a cigarette out and let it I don't really like the analogy to Black Lives Matter and Me Too. I think that movements built on the pain people are experiencing that human beings are experiencing in their own lives, the oppression they're experiencing, they just have a fundamentally different character. But I think this is actually very similar in some ways to public health movements. You know, in his eye, he's got a new book Jesus brought his name's Robert Frank, the economist have thrown in front of me under the influence, which he doesn't take this step, but it's all about the economics of contagion, and of social behavior. And he uses smoking a lot. And you know, the reality of smoking is that it's something that over time, it just became socially unacceptable. And it became socially unacceptable, because you're just like, No, no, don't smoke on my kid, I don't want them to see that. I don't want them to smell that smoke around me. And overtime, like it's not that nobody smokes, but fewer people do. And I think that's sort of where you want to go on this. Then the other thing I would say is that, if you are listening to this, or you you are in this is to not be too tough on yourself. We have even talked about it, although I've certainly implied it a bunch. But I think it's really important that if you are going to make dietary changes, if you're going to make behavioral changes, you make ones you can stick to. And that means that you do not create something where you're constantly failing, where you either have to be 100% good, or you're like, well, I'm just fit, I'm just bad at this, I suck and then it's like you're all the way back on the other side. You know, for me going like I still when I'm traveling, I eat dairy, I just find it too hard to remain fully vegan, what I don't have control over what I'm cooking. And I don't like you know, can't choose a restaurant and so on. So like all eat some dairy and like I am totally comfortable with that. I'm like whatever, 90 or 95% vegan and that's great. Bruce Friedrich told me a story of somebody saying to him like that, they told him they go vegan, but they just couldn't live without having some cream in their coffee in the morning. He was like, great, go vegan and have cream in your coffee in the morning. Like, don't let that stop you. This is about like, this is not about your purity, it is about your sustainability. And if you can be if you can eat 60% less meat, that's great. That's plenty. Like don't eat before dinner, it's all fine. Like you're trying to be better not perfect. None of us are perfect. So like, be vocal about what you believe is right in the world. Because that influences the people around you even if it's difficult. And also be gentle with yourself. If you're trying to do better in a world that is not set up for it. Don't get into a situation where you can't follow your own values. And so you have to change your values because it is too hard to change your behavior. Ease up on changing your behavior so you can hold to the values.\n\nWayne Hsiung 1:08:17 \nYeah, that makes sense. How do you respond when people call you out for cheating on veganism? When you're eating out on traveling?\n\nEzra Klein 1:08:25 \nI honestly couldn't care less. There are some Oh, not at all. There are being honest. I am. Yes, there are many things I worry about when people throw it at me. And this is just not one of them. I mean, as you can hear, it's actually part of my politics of is to try to get people to not be purist. So if you call me out for not being purist, yes, that is fine. Like when I did the green pill episode I saw later there's this Reddit thread about whether or not as a as a vegan, because at that point, I said that like twice a year, I had this old tradition with my best friend and his mother would go out and get sushi. And I was like, like, I still do that. Right? And I don't do that anymore. But I did at that point people like well, I can't really and it's like, it's totally like, you don't call me whatever, like I really don't care. And I really think the parody stuff is a problem. So that the idea that somebody would say like, I'm cheating, like, I'm not like I have constructed my view of how to do this, such that I am really succeeding by my own lights on it. And the question is for me is am I helping make this persuasive to people? am I helping create space where people can see themselves in it? Even if they can't go all the way to veganism? Like ideally I would stop using the word I just actually don't like the green pill is a good I hope it's a good concept. I'm glad you like it. But it's not like a word I do. It's not a you know, it's not I don't think carnism works exactly, which is Melanie Joy and I don't have quite the language yet, but there are a lot of criticisms get that get thrown at me any day and some of them make me feel bad but I am very upfront about what my like, framework is you And I totally respect people who disagree with it, that is completely fine. But I've done a lot of searching on this one and i don't disagree with it. So I'm gonna, I'm gonna feel okay about it. \n\nWayne Hsiung 1:10:10 \nYeah, that makes a lot of sense. And I think that the evidence is pretty clear that purity politics is a problem. Okay, well, any other final things you want to share? Like anything you didn't get to that you'd like to talk about on this issue on something else to know?\n\nEzra Klein 1:10:23 \nI guess one last thing I'll just say, because I think that's a good point. That's a point that Matt ball who's over good food Institute kind of really turned me on to but a very, I do think a thing people do wrong here is that they, it's weird, the way vegetarianism got defined versus veganism. And I'm a total believer that you're better off eating beef occasionally, but not eating eggs than eating eggs and not eating beef. Like a lot of people become vegetarian eat a ton of eggs. So they don't eat meat, which is just like, cows are big, you know, your family can maybe eat a cow in a year and probably not. Whereas egg laying chickens, like have really bad lives. So I kind of wish things would get, like, sorted in different ways. But yeah, um, eggs, I think are actually an almost uniquely problematic space here that doesn't get enough attention. And I wish I could get separated out from the veganism conversation that like, I sort of care a lot less about how people feel about dairy than about eggs, like eggs are one of the things I really won't eat. And, and I don't know, I don't want to get preachy about what is right and wrong here. Exactly. But I think it is worth doing some. Like, it's a good like, Matt Ball had this organization called called first step. And like the idea first step was like, just don't eat chicken and don't eat eggs. If you're just eating bigger animals and stuff, it's a lot less suffering. And it has some bad climate implications, which, you know, is a good reason to just go further and go, you know, vegan or something close to it. But, but in terms of animal suffering, I think people underestimate eggs. And it's worth, it's worth that getting some attention.\n\nWayne Hsiung 1:11:57 \nYeah, his proposals, very controversial in the animal rights movement, got a lot of people extremely angry, for better for worse. And I think I mean, I will say, I think some of the anger is not justified. But if you look in the literature on injunctive norms, and the social norms, literature, I'm a much greater believer in the social movement theory of the animal rights movement than you are. And to the extent we're actually trying to create injunctive norms. You know, creating some clarity as to what we are trying to ask society is really important. And the confusing aspect of his ask is, you're saying, on the one hand, animals are suffering, and we shouldn't hurt them. On the other hand, you're saying, well, let's hurt some of them, but not others. And while you make a good point that, you know, you're gonna reduce more suffering by going to the cow over the chicken, the simplicity of the message is lost when you say it's okay to eat cows, or forgive them that permissive?\n\nEzra Klein 1:12:44 \nYeah, but I think, not that not to speak for him. But I think the thing that he would say, right, I know this is kind of in his presentation is over the past however many decades, the number of vegetarians and vegans has remained steady. So at some point, you have to say the effort to create the injunctive norm is what's gonna work like it is not succeeding. Yeah. And you have to try different things that but my point is not that like first step is actually my approach, like, as you've heard, it actually isn't. But yet, but I mostly brought this up, because I wanted to make sure sort of like in my language, what people heard is not, you know, don't worry about eggs, because I worry a lot about eggs.\n\nWayne Hsiung 1:13:23 \nUnderstandably, well, thanks so much for chatting with us as well. That was that was a fascinating conversation. And, and I hope a lot of people hear this and, and take that open minded attitude and that and frankly, I think you're right, the attitude that I have to take care of myself, too, and not see this as so hard that it's impossible for me to even engage in this material. So I think it's a great lesson to take home.\n\nEzra Klein 1:13:45 \nWell, thank you for having me.\n\nWayne Hsiung 1:13:48 \nBig shout out to Ezra Klein for joining us on this podcast. He's one of the busiest people I know, in addition, just out of kid in the middle of a pandemic, so really grateful to him for joining and sharing with us this concept of the green pill. I hope you found his words as insightful and thoughtful as I did. He's one of the smartest people I know and I know I found this conversation really insightful myself. The episode was produced by Ronnie Rose with audio systems from Leighton Woodhouse, Julie Waldroup and Crystal Heath also provided great assistance. The music on the show has been given to me by my friend, Moby and if you liked the podcast, share it with a friend and hit that subscribe button wherever you downloaded the podcast. Finally, if you have something you want to share with me, email us at Wayne@thegreenpillpodcast.com thanks for joining.\n","author_name":"Wayne Hsiung"}