Ezra Klein: belief

Transcript context

…Sure. I have a lot more sensitivity to that kind of thing. I have a lot more sensitivity to the ways in which firms have trouble turning themselves around. Things that often seem mysterious to me about why a firm didn’t just swoop in and take this market opportunity seem a lot less mysterious to me now that I’ve been in a big one and been able to see that from a lot of different vantage points at the Washington Post, and that was a firm that I think has been very successful in changing and evolving and transforming. But I also saw how hard and wrenching that was and how many ways it could have gone wrong and didn’t, I think in that case, due to some really strong and good leadership. Then at Vox this is a young firm, and Vox Media itself is more than 600 employees now, though, so it isn’t that small. Vox.com is more like 70. Even there I have a sense of, my God, just the difficulty of growth, the organizational cost of growth, the dangers it puts you into, the overstretchedness, the lack of slack in any of the systems so that you can deal with things that are longer-range while you’re trying to deal with what’s going on today. My sense of how the economy works on a micro level has changed a lot from just being inside larger firms. That I think has influenced me quite a bit. I’d say the other thing is I am probably much more — and, again, I’m not sure this is a policy idea — I am much more skeptical of anything anybody says about how a firm or a government organization, or anything else, works. One of my big takeaways from now having sat through a lot of meetings with consultants, a lot of meetings with people trying to sell ideas or companies to me, a lot of meetings where I was trying to sell an idea to someone else, is that there is just a lot of bullshit in the economy. There is a lot of bullshit in organizations, and there is in a way I don’t totally understand an accepted level of bullshit between everybody. I seem to be at meetings all the time where everybody seems to know that only half of whatever idea is being pitched as a savior to everything is really being implemented or really going to work. I constantly see in media now people touting some kind of great pilot project or some little innovation they came up with that is covered as if it will save media, but I can look at it and know there’s no way that will be spread through the workflow of even the host organization much less than any other organization. I’ve become much more cynical about — I think of this a lot, by the way, with Snowden and the NSA. On the one hand a lot of those revelations are really, really, really important. On the other hand, it’s a lot of consultant documents about what they were doing on behalf of the government, and I often think about how much of that is really getting effectively done, which in some ways makes it scarier. One way of reading those documents is the government has become this omniscient, all-seeing surveillance state. ow much of that is really getting effectively done, which in some ways makes it scarier. One way of reading those documents is the government has become this omniscient, all-seeing surveillance state. My guess is that their ability to use that data —…

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