Ross Douthat: The Exit Interview

**Ezra Klein** (0:00)
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**Ezra Klein** (0:55)
I've known Ross Douthat a long time. We were bloggers back when the Earth was young.
Hey, Ross, how are you doing?

**SPEAKER_2** (1:03)
Good.

**Ross Douthat** (1:03)
I'm fine, Ezra.

**Ezra Klein** (1:04)
How are you? And then I watched him become a columnist here at the New York Times Opinion in 2009, the youngest ever New York Times Opinion columnist. About a year ago, he launched Interesting Times, which has been a great fellow podcast here in the section.

**Ross Douthat** (1:17)
What is the Antichrist?

**SPEAKER_3** (1:18)
How much time do we have?

**Ross Douthat** (1:20)
We've got as much time as you have to talk about the Antichrist.

**Ezra Klein** (1:25)
And then breaking all of our hearts, he announced he's going to 60 Minutes, where he's going to be a correspondent. So I want to talk to Ross on his way out here, about how he has seen media change, how he has seen politics change, and how maybe he believes it is changing again. Ross Douthat joins me now.
Ross Douthat, welcome back to the show.

**Ross Douthat** (1:51)
Thanks for having me, Ezra. It's a pleasure.

**Ezra Klein** (1:53)
What the hell, man?

**Ross Douthat** (1:54)
What do you mean?

**Ezra Klein** (1:55)
You're going to 60 Minutes? You're leaving us?

**Ross Douthat** (1:57)
I mean, spiritually, you never leave any place that you love, and all things are gathered in by God for his, but yeah, I'm going to 60 Minutes.

**SPEAKER_6** (2:08)
All right.

**Ezra Klein** (2:09)
We're going to get to go into 60 Minutes. We're going to start with where you came from and get to where you're going.
Where do you locate your own spiritual origins as a journalist, as a commentator, a pundit? I was going back. I had always thought you were like me, like an original blogger who gets absorbed by a media borg.

**Ross Douthat** (2:30)
Oh, yeah. No, it was the opposite.

**Ezra Klein** (2:31)
Yeah, you're the opposite. You started The Atlantic and become a blogger.

**Ross Douthat** (2:35)
I was a junior, junior, junior editor. I edited the letter section at The Atlantic for a while, and I did blogging on the side. I think of myself as someone who was present for both the end of an old dispensation and the beginning of a new one. I had parallel careers in my early 20s. I had the career inside The Atlantic where I was doing junior editor work and trying to work my way up the masthead at an institution where you were still doing fact checking and copy editing on these huge sheets of paper that would be printed out and circulate around the office, and 17 people would have read pen on them. It was very much a pre-internet magazine and pre-internet journalistic experience. And then at the same time, sort of as a side hustle, I was blogging, doing freelance writing, and sort of participating in, yeah, the kind of the world of the early 2000s internet. Those two things sort of converged because what then happened, as you know, was that many, many traditional publications looked at that landscape and said, ah, this is the future and we need to co-opt it, right? So at the Atlantic, that meant basically creating a mini editorial page or opinion page that consisted of prominent bloggers that the Atlantic had hired. So there was a period when they brought in Andrew Sullivan, who was then the biggest deal in blogging, but they also had Iglesias, Megan McCardell, Ta-Nehisi Coates, and then me, because I was already on staff, and I can tell you that my own traffic numbers were somewhat lower than the others.
But that was the path, as you know, in that era because you followed it too, was to be a outsider blogger critic of the establishment, and then an establishment institution might hire you or buy your blog or bring you on board. And it was just that in my case, I was sort of already on board when that happened.

**Ezra Klein** (4:50)