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

**SPEAKER_1** (0:01)
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**Ezra Klein** (0:56)
Welcome to one of our Ask Me Anything episodes. I am here joined by our fantastic executive producer, Claire Gordon, who has sharpened all of your questions into like darts. She will throw at me, force me to answer.
But we appreciate everything you all sent in. We have tried to look at the questions to see which ones were the most common, which seemed to have the most interest, and we're going to get started. Claire, welcome to the other side of the show.

**Claire Gordon** (1:19)
Thank you. Thank you for having me. It's uncomfortable to be here.
We will be getting to the question in everyone's mind, which is the secret society you're a member of, and what is the secret of your dialogue?

**Ezra Klein** (1:30)
When have I spoken to Peter Thiel and what did we say?

**Claire Gordon** (1:32)
Exactly. But first, this is from Scott Kay, who's noticed that you seem to have a very intense relationship with electronic music as we all have. Quote, is musicianship something you've ever been drawn to? You are clearly not a passive listener.
What does music do to your craft? And why do you think you feel so at home in such a specific genre of music?

**Ezra Klein** (1:56)
Musicianship is not something I've been heavily drawn to, but I did for the first time ever recently take a singing lesson.

**Claire Gordon** (2:02)
Really?

**Ezra Klein** (2:02)
And it was such a beautiful experience because I've never felt like I can sing at all. And the fact that I make my living apart now in my voice is surprising because it was always the way I speak and how I sound has always been like a point of real insecurity for me when I was growing up, particularly.

**Claire Gordon** (2:17)
What about it?

**Ezra Klein** (2:18)
A lot about it without letting people into my private insecurities. But it's really amazing to take a singing lesson. And I'd always thought I could not ever find like a tune or a note. And it turned out I could. I was just wrong about that, about myself, which was a cool thing to learn.
I played the flute a bit when I was young, but as a kid. I tried to learn the guitar when I lived in DC as an adult, and I loved doing that. I loved it. I should really pick it back up.

**Claire Gordon** (2:46)
Like playing it out of parties.

**Ezra Klein** (2:48)
Playing Crash Into Me for women. No, I did not play in front of other people. But the guy who's teaching me just hung over too often to come, and so it just filtered out. I'd like to learn something. I wouldn't try to learn how to do electronic music. This show in particular can colonize everything I love. I can read a great novel and then it's like, well, we should have the novelist on the show. I think it's good to be an appreciator of some things and not try to make them another thing. I think we're learning how to do. I have in my life like an excess of energy that is oriented towards productivity, accomplishment, doing, being angry at myself for not doing things well enough or not doing enough of them. And so having spaces where I am an experiencer, not a creator is important for me.
I don't really know how to answer why I feel at home in it.
It just is the music. I mean, I've been listening to, oh my god, it's so good, but it's such an even hard album to tell people how to find. So Four Tet, who's an amazing producer, has an alias that is entirely composed out of wingdings. I recognize how this sounds. So he's got this new album out, but both the artist on the album and every song on the album cannot be pronounced or even searched. But you can find it on platforms by searching Four Tet.

**Claire Gordon** (4:15)
But it means 9-Eleven was an inside joke.

**Ezra Klein** (4:18)
It means Ezra Klein and Peter Thiel are in a secret society. I just love the album. I've actually had two experiences like this on the show, one with Jeff Tweedy of Wilco, another with Brian Eno, talking to them about individually a song they had done for Tweedy Impossible Germany, I think it's called.