michelle goldberg

I’m Michelle Goldberg.

charlie warzel

I’m Charlie Warzel.

david leonhardt

I’m David Leonhardt. And this is “The Argument.” [RHYTHMIC DRUMMING] First up, we’re talking about the Democratic candidate of the moment, Michael Bloomberg.

michelle goldberg

I am maddened by this argument that Bloomberg and Trump — that Bloomberg isn’t necessarily better than Trump.

david leonhardt

Then, digital privacy. Is it even possible in 2020? And what should each of us be doing?

charlie warzel

I’ve really become very, very aware of the fact that my phone is spying on me at all times.

david leonhardt

And finally, a recommendation. This was just a great example of something that I return to just everyday. [MUSIC PLAYING] Michael Bloomberg initially decided not to run for president. He didn’t think Joe Biden could be beat, at least not by a fellow moderate. But as Biden began to struggle, Bloomberg entered the race. He has since spent hundreds of millions of dollars on television ads, social media memes, and a large campaign staff. In one recent national poll, he was in second place behind Bernie Sanders. Bloomberg will begin appearing on ballots in the Super Tuesday primaries two weeks from now in California, Texas, and a dozen other states. Ross Douthat is off this week, and we’re joined by Charlie Warzel, a Times Opinion writer. Welcome, Charlie.

charlie warzel

Thanks for having me.

david leonhardt

Absolutely. So you recently wrote a piece arguing that a key part of Bloomberg’s strategy is his shamelessness. What did you mean by that?

charlie warzel

What I meant by that is not necessarily always a bad thing, although we equate shamelessness with a lot of current political tactics that we don’t like. But what I really mean is that he and his campaign are willing to sort of do whatever it takes. They’re not worried about looking like they’re potentially buying this election as some people might claim. They’re not worried about fighting with Trump or the Trump campaign, or any surrogates of Donald Trump online. There’s no sort of they go low, we go high combination or thought process here. What it is is we’re willing to get in the mud and wrestle, do whatever it takes. There’s just, really, he’s kind of laying all the cards out there and saying I’m going to use everything in my power to try to defeat Donald Trump.

david leonhardt

Yeah, can you talk about a couple of the tweets? Because I guess I hadn’t even seen them all until reading your piece. I mean, they’re kind of remarkable. I mean, they’re just — Bloomberg is sort of trading schoolyard insults with Trump.

charlie warzel

That’s right. Last week, I think he responded to a Donald Trump tweet calling him, like, a clown or something like that. His spokesperson, Julie Wood, right after Trump’s interview with Sean Hannity at the Super Bowl, called him obese and made fun of his spray tan. I mean, these are like real sort of — they’re going all out for it and really sort of stooping to, like, the Trump level of diminutive nicknames and sort of crass remarks. And it’s working. If you look at some of those tweets, they’re actually performing better than the Trump tweet that came from it. And you know, maybe that doesn’t really matter all that much. But it’s something that doesn’t usually happen. Anyone who tries to sort of contests Trump on his ground never does as well in terms of visibility and engagement.

david leonhardt

Michelle, how are you thinking about all this? I mean, I’m sure on many levels, you’re kind of horrified that this candidate who’s a billionaire is trying to buy the nomination. And yet, is there any small part of you that feels like, wait a second. Bloomberg might actually be able to beat Trump and be a stronger candidate against him than any of the other Democrats right now at the top of the polls?

michelle goldberg

What I don’t quite understand is why so many people have convinced themselves that Bloomberg is more electable than Bernie Sanders. I understand why a lot of people in the party are panicked about Bernie Sanders. And I think that Sanders supporters tend to think that the party is panicked because they think that Bernie Sanders will win the general election. I believe quite strongly that the party is panicked because they think that Bernie Sanders will lose the general election. But I also think that Bloomberg is not really positioned to do any better. I mean, David, you and I have talked on this show a lot about how— about this myth that the kind of average centrist voter is socially liberal but economically conservative, and how that’s actually a fairly niche political position kind of confined to the coasts. And so his kind of issue profile is not that popular. He said a million things that are kind of guaranteed to turn off almost every sector of the electorate, except for other billionaires. If you look at what happened to Hillary, I mean, look at what she said about the ‘94 crime bill and how that was weaponized to depress African-American turnout. Here, you have someone who actually operationalized a campaign of years-long terror against young black and brown boys. And so I just — I mean, I don’t see how he does well with white people without a college education, with people of color, or with young people. And all of those groups are just central to Democrats’ chances of beating Trump.

david leonhardt

So you and I absolutely agree about that part, which is Michael Bloomberg is basically a rich person’s idea of what a centrist American voter is, right? Which is, he’s economically conservative, or at least economically moderate, historically economically conservative and socially liberal. Whereas the real median American voter is closer to Ross, which is socially conservative and economically to the left. But that’s where the median American voter is. But I guess I would say there’s a second myth about politics. So the first myth is that Michael Bloomberg looks like the median voter. The second myth is that swing voters make decisions based on policies. And Michael Bloomberg certainly isn’t the candidate that I would design for any number of reasons. But when I look at the field right now, I get the case that Bloomberg would be the strongest candidate against Trump, not because of issue by issue, but because of this shamelessness and this willing to kind of fight hard and dirty, Charlie, that you were talking about. And also, he just kind of has this moderate vibe even if, when you kind of line up the issues, he doesn’t look the way most Americans do. And so with a better candidate out there, I would say no way. But right now, I’m not so sure.

michelle goldberg

Yeah, but you’re not worried about sort of mass disillusion of young people or kind of people of color— particularly, young people of color— staying home, or you know, kind of a ‘68 style shit show at the Democratic Convention if it’s Bloomberg?

david leonhardt

Yes, I’m worried about all that and more. Absolutely. Like, for the state of American democracy, I’m worried about all those things. And I think that’s a really good list of the enormous downsides of a Bloomberg nomination. I’m not saying he’s clearly the best nominee. I’m just saying, looking at the alternatives, I’m open to the idea that he’s the strongest nominee. I mean, Charlie, how do you think about this?

charlie warzel

So when I wrote my column on Thursday, the influx of emails I got from older boomers was just unbelievable. And sort of the anger and frustration at my writing that he was — Bloomberg — is shameless. And I was just so surprised by this notion that people were saying outright, using the term, the phrase, “buy the election,” saying we need Bloomberg to use his war chest to buy the election, sort of bypass democracy in the democratic process. And then after Trump is defeated, we can sort of return to normalcy and let the political process go as it is. And I found that to be really disorienting. And I think Michelle’s point is really well-taken. Like, the way that a younger already disillusioned group of voters — people who graduated out of college into the financial crisis — who are really looking towards a Bernie or a Warren because of that appeal, to see a billionaire come in and just spend that kind of money to sort of flood the zone so much that we all sort of forget what game we’re playing, I think that could be just devastating.

michelle goldberg

To me, the interesting thing there is he has an organic base, right? That there are sort of, like, Bloomberg bros out there willing to send people angry emails. And I do wonder what that means. Because there’s this interesting thing going on right now with Bloomberg having really picked this fight with Bernie over Bernie’s obnoxious online fans. Anyone who’s had run into certain parts of the Bernie internet knows that it can be really unpleasant. At the same time, there’s something really creepy about one of the richest men in the world singling out sort of fairly random Twitter accounts for attack and acting like they’re the aggressor, right? It’s a very weird dynamic. And it also, I think, goes back to what Charlie was saying at the beginning about how extremely online the Bloomberg campaign is, which you sort of wouldn’t necessarily guess for a Bloomberg campaign. And it’s not clear to me how that translates to the outside world, right? I mean, I’ve sort of seen people online saying, you know, nobody out in the real world who’s not on Twitter kind of cares about quote unquote, “Bernie bros“. That’s actually not my experience. You know, I sort of talk to normal people who aren’t on Twitter all the time who have an extremely bad — I think, unfairly bad— impression of Bernie Sanders.

charlie warzel

You’re totally right. That’s a insular, it’s a small fight. It’s sort of designed for, like, the nexus of media Twitter and politics Twitter, that these are things that people who need to log off care about. But I think it actually really works. And this is something that I think the Trump campaign did really well in 2015 and 2016, which is basically creating arguments optimized for people on the internet, and especially, like, media professionals. Because media professionals cover those. And then those arguments blow up into cable news chyrons and headlines. And you know, I went on TV last week to talk about Bloomberg hacking attention. It works. Like, the fact, even, that we’re sitting here talking about it now, like, this is a guy who didn’t enter the first couple primary contests, and yet, has this recognition, is polling pretty high, is a sort of a front issue runner in this race. So I mean, I think that these fights are really strategically picked to sort of piss off the right group of people. Because that controversy generates attention, and generated attention keeps you in the mix.

david leonhardt

And that’s a little bit what you’re talking about Charlie, right, which is he picks the fights that he knows are going to get people talking. But I actually want to flip that just for one minute. And I’d be interested in what you each think of this. I also think his candidacy is a sign that individual candidates matter less than many voters, and certainly, many journalists sometimes think they do. I’ve been really struck by how progressive parts of Bloomberg’s agenda are. I think on many things, it’s to the left of Barack Obama. He calls for a surtax on income above $5 million. He’s come out with a new Wall Street plan that calls for a financial transactions tax. This is a guy who made his billions on Wall Street. And it clearly matters who the nominee is. And if there’s a Democratic president, it will matter who the president is. But as I look at his agenda, and I guess I would say this in particular to people on the left who are worried about a moderate— whether it’s Bloomberg or Buttigieg or Klobuchar being the nominee— it is really possible to force a president to come along with a movement of public opinion and a movement of activists, rather than just reacting to that.

michelle goldberg

Most progressive I know say I’ll vote blue no matter who. And a lot of people draw the line at Bloomberg because of his record in New York. But I would say this. I think that it’s kind of incumbent on progressives to do everything possible to make sure that Bloomberg doesn’t get the nomination. And if he does get the nomination, to do everything possible to make sure he wins, because I am maddened by this argument that Bloomberg isn’t necessarily better than Trump.

david leonhardt

You know, I actually want to build on that for one quick minute, which is you said you think progressives shouldn’t compare Bloomberg to Trump. And I agree with that. I would also flip it and say Democratic moderates should not compare Bernie Sanders to Trump. And you now see this on both sides, right? You see Bloomberg supporters saying that Bernie is the Trump of the left, and you see Bernie supporters saying that Bloomberg is Trumpesque because of his money. I mean, come on. Just look at the facts here. Neither Sanders nor Bloomberg is anything like Trump, or would govern anything like Trump.

michelle goldberg

A matter of personal suspense for me is whether I’m going to be spending the election writing columns yelling at leftists to be practical and vote for Bloomberg, or whether I’m going to be spending the election yelling at moderates to be practical and vote for Bernie Sanders.

david leonhardt

Charlie, we’re taping this on Tuesday before the debate in Nevada. What are you expecting over the next week or so? How serious a candidate do you view him for the nomination versus this being a little bit of kind of media boomlet?

charlie warzel

I mean, I hate to make predictions on anything, right? But I feel that— I truly feel that one of the lessons I learned from 2016 is that for her better or worse— and I think often, for worse— that the media attention and, like, that relish and that spotlight they can throw on a candidate really is important and really does affect the way that people view them. And I do think that that makes him a viable candidate come Super Tuesday. And I mean, it’s sort of dispiriting to think that the process can be sort of hacked like this and come at from like a business school case study perspective. But I think we’re seeing that it kind of works. And I don’t think we’ve yet reached a place where we know how to counter somebody who can hack our attention like that.

david leonhardt

You disagree with any of that, Michelle?

michelle goldberg

No. I would say that like, to me, the two big unknowns are, first of all, all the — I don’t want to call it oppo, but just like all the sort of negative things about Bloomberg’s record, the things that might make him toxic to a Democratic party electorate, are coming out really this week. And so I don’t think we know yet what the effects of those are going to be or whether this massive ad blitz and this massive campaign of informational warfare can overcome all of that. He’s a perfect target for all of these other candidates. They haven’t really had that much incentive so far to go after each other. They all, in different ways, have incentives to go after Bloomberg. And you know, it’s not like he’s such a charismatic figure on his own. So it will be interesting to me to see if this kind of boomlet survives people’s encounter with the actual guy.

david leonhardt

Let’s end this discussion by my saying thank you to the many listeners who called in to correct my pronunciation last week of Nevada. I said “Nevada” multiple times. And I hope you heard that I took your comments to heart and have tried to do better this time— Nevada, Nevada, Nevada. We’re going to take a quick break and be right back. [MUSIC PLAYING] I’ve got Twitter, Spotify, Waze, and Lyft on my phone. I have multiple email addresses and countless online accounts. All of them are gathering some kind of data on me. It makes me wonder, what’s even private anymore? Not where I go or whom I talk to, what I spend my money on, or what I had for breakfast, without much government regulation, many of us feel helpless. Privacy can seem dead. Charlie, The Times has done a big series on this topic over the past year, the privacy project. And Michelle and I want to start by asking you a couple of down-to-Earth questions about the topic. The first one is, how do you try to protect your digital privacy? And the second one is, what do you recommend to people who are a lot less savvy about this than you are, like me and Michelle?

charlie warzel

I would say that the first thing to remember — and I always say this when people ask for recommendations, which is tha t — it’s kind of a downer to say at the beginning, but there’s really no way to — no foolproof way to protect your privacy here in 2020. And I say that just simply to always stress that this is a real problem without a great solution for people, and that this is incumbent on lawmakers to address and companies to start really taking up the mantle on. So that’s sort of the preface. I have become — over the course of this yearlong project that we’ve been doing, I’ve become sort of radical about my online privacy in a way. I now browse the internet using a VPN, which is a virtual private network. And you can purchase a subscription to that. And it’s just this program that runs and basically masks where all of your data and traffic are coming from so that your internet service provider doesn’t necessarily know every site you’re going to. And it sort of is a way to kind of throw some noise into the system of big data. I turn off location tracking. Personally, I have apps just request anytime they need it. So like, obviously, Waze or Google Maps is a great way to get around the city. It’s kind of become essential. So I have that turn on only when I need to get somewhere. So it’s not running in the background. It’s not showing me something like that. And that’s the same for most of my apps. And then I’ve turned off location data being sent to advertisers, because there is a massive industry that is collecting, aggregating, and reselling location data. And that is basically a map to your entire life and every movement. So we actually have a handy guide in thenewyorktimes.com, which I hope people can check out. But basically, you go into the settings on your phone. For an iPhone, there’s a privacy setting a little bit down the page. You can go to location services, and you can turn that off. But this is something that most people just don’t know. And most of these services are opt out. So you are opted in automatically. And that’s a process that is slowly changing. But I’ve really become very, very aware of the fact that my phone is spying on me at all times.

david leonhardt

And what are the downsides of turning it all off, meaning, you mentioned Waze. So that’s the one exception you make. When you’re trying to get around, you turn it on. But I guess, I realize I’m getting really specific here, but if you turn it off for your airline apps or your restaurant apps, does that mean that you don’t get notices that your plane’s about to board? The trade-offs may be worth it, but I’m just interested in what are the trade-offs?

charlie warzel

I think that the trade-offs are that things become a little less useful. I mean, that is just simply what you have to sacrifice. And I think what we’ve learned is that many people don’t want to sacrifice that convenience. I mean, these tools are sometimes really great. I’ll give you an example from our reporting of our location tracking series. We interviewed a woman whose location information we obtained in part of this very large trove. And it was six months’ worth of every movement of her life— bringing her kids to school, going on first dates, really personal stuff— medical visits, things like that. And though we weren’t able to, with 100 percent certainty, track which app it was, we believe that it probably was a coupon app or something very similar to that that was used maybe one time in two years. So this person had sacrificed their entire life down to the millimeter, down to the foot, down to which room in their house they preferred to save $0.50 on some soup or something like that. There’s this idea that the trade that we’re making is we’re giving away everything for this very minuscule bit of convenience. And I don’t think people realize that that is the trade they’re making.

michelle goldberg

Well, part of the problem, right, is that to me, it’s not even about the kind of convenience of these apps as much as the tax on your time to figuring out how to circumvent these privacy invasions, right? I mean, if you’re sort of not super technologically agile, to go in and opt out of all of these things, or even to remember different passwords for a bunch of different apps. If you’re just like an ordinary person who is kind of constantly overwhelmed and has more balls in the air than they can keep up, I mean, just personally, I hate Facebook with the power of 1,000 suns, and could easily delete Facebook, the app, from my life. What I don’t think I could do without, unless I really spent a couple of days getting my life together, is Facebook is an alternative login to a million sites whose passwords I have long forgotten. And so it’s almost like what we have right now are sort of neoliberal solutions to privacy problems in the same way that tax advantaged savings accounts and all of the sort of policy fixes so often just require the individual to take on an unsustainable amount of personal accounting work.

charlie warzel

I really like that comparison too, because there’s also sort of like a — there’s a bit of like a market influence there too. Along with privacy, there’s this idea of the privacy paradox, which is that we feel like our privacy is invaded, but we don’t do anything about it because of a lot of the things you listed. We’re just too busy. Our lives are so hard as it is, so stressful. There’s a million things we have to do. But the fact that we don’t do anything about it sends these signals to these companies into the market. And they get to say, well, you know, we have this user satisfaction. We gave them the ability to opt out. And look, they don’t. I think that that’s really true. And there is this sort of this idea that, oh, if you look at the most popular password, it’s 123456. So clearly, people don’t care about their privacy that much. And it’s not the case. It’s what you said. It’s that people don’t know that they can get a password manager that organizes all their passwords and refreshes them. But even that’s really complicated.

david leonhardt

Well, that raises an obvious question, Charlie, which is what should the policy solution here be?

charlie warzel

It’s obviously very nuanced. But I mean, I think we’re talking around multiple things here. This is different areas of a larger privacy discussion. And there is sort of this idea that companies should make everything opt in, right? You basically start with downloading an app. And they have no permissions at all. And you slowly give them those permissions as it becomes available, all the while, understanding and knowing what you’re giving up. And I think that that’s obviously a good place for us to want to get to. But I think there’s so much in this space. Like, my understanding of the privacy world when I started this a year ago, and where I am now, I mean, it’s crazy. I honestly had no idea all of the nefarious things that are sort of hidden below the surface that we don’t have probably time to get into here. But what I would say is that a federal privacy law, let’s say, or even really stringent state-based laws, need to rein in these companies in terms of what they can collect at the outset, and then what they can do with that data. Because that’s really what we’re talking about. I don’t mind if a company with great privacy protections that’s offering me a great service is collecting pertinent information and using that to make the product better. That’s just — that’s a good trade-off, I would say. What I don’t like is when they’re reselling that data to Equifax or shady third party brokers if that information gets polluted or messed up, and then I’m denied a loan down the line or something like that. Those things are the problem. So I think what we need to do is lawmakers need to really study up on this stuff, really try to understand this, work with the experts and try to find ways to head off these tech companies of the past.

david leonhardt

You know, it reminds me— to come back to the presidential campaign — of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, which Elizabeth Warren largely set up during the Obama administration. And a big part of the idea behind that bureau is you can’t really write a regulation that is going to keep banks and other financial companies from having a huge advantage over consumers and taking advantage of them. And it feels the same with a lot of this technology stuff. I mean, it feels to me like we need something like a consumer privacy protection bureau. Is that a crazy idea?

charlie warzel

No, I think that’s a phenomenal idea. And I actually think, you know, of all the candidates that I was able to speak with on this issue, Elizabeth Warren sort of approached it in the most accessible way. I do think it has to come from that place of protecting consumers. I think it does have to sort of look into ideas like corruption and monopoly, to some degree. I think that’s a smart way to approach it because I don’t think there is one rule to rein everyone in the same way that the financial industry is so complex. If you look at digital advertising, which is really the heart of all of this, it is a 7,000 headed hydra, just waiting to sort of prey on our data.

david leonhardt

Well, OK. On that grim note, let’s leave it here. But for any of our listeners who want to learn much more, check out The Great Explainer that The Times opinion section has done on the topic of privacy. It’s called “One Nation Tracked“. You can find it at nytimes.com/tracked, that’s T-R-A-C-K-E-D. Now it’s time for our weekly recommendation when we suggest something to take your mind off of the news the day. Charlie, since you are our guest, and since Michelle and I have already made many recommendations, we thought we would ask you to come up with one this week. So what do you have for us?

charlie warzel

Yeah, so mine is something I was introduced to this fall, which is a subscription newsletter. It’s called Flow State. And it comes Monday through Fridays into my inbox. And it offers up a playlist of music on Spotify, on SoundCloud, on anywhere where you get your music. It’s all free. And it gives you — it’s music that you can work by. It’s music that’s supposed to sort of stimulate your brain a little bit. It’s a lot of classical sort of, there’s jazz influences. It’s really varied. It’s all by people you’ve almost never heard of, a lot of, like, ambient music, things like that, that sort of helps stimulate and promote concentration and focus. And it was recommended to me by a friend who is very productive. And I tried it. And it’s really wonderful. I’m someone who I can’t — if I’m reading or writing, which I do most of the day, I have a really hard time listening to music and not getting distracted by vocals and things like that. This is just— it’s great. It makes me broaden my horizon. It’s totally changed up all my, like, Spotify recommendations for the better. And I just love that every single day, it shows up around 3 AM or 4 AM in my inbox. So it’s one of the first things that I see when I eventually wake up.

david leonhardt

So what’s the recommendation?

charlie warzel

It’s called Flow State. It’s a substack newsletter. And it’s delivered five times a week.

david leonhardt

For free?

charlie warzel

For free. You can also subscribe and get some exclusive playlists. But you can get it for free too.

david leonhardt

Charlie, thanks for joining us.

michelle goldberg

Yeah, thank you so much.

charlie warzel

Thanks for having me.

david leonhardt