Read past the paywall for a highly scientific “sentiment analysis” of Ezra Klein vs. Theo Von.

Last week, I wrote about how frustrated I am with the myopia of the media class. Too many people in my cohort blithely assume that the internet things they’re into are also the things that the people who live in the reality that exists outside of their home offices are also into, especially when something is “viral” or simply has millions of views. This is not how the world works. Yet this is the class of people we entrust to fly to some random town in Idaho, where they’ll hunt for undecided voters as if they’re a species of cryptid. 

Most people, even those who spend lots of time on the internet, are just trying to live their lives. They have not read the latest discourse-shaping blog post, they don’t have opinions about the new episode of Industry, and they don’t know who or what the hell Bar Italia is. It’s not because they’re dumb or unsophisticated, they’ve just got other shit going on. There is a very small number of people who need to be reminded of this, but unfortunately, most of those people work in internet media. 

In an ideal world, I would not feel compelled to write some variation of the above in successive weeks. I had a big thing planned for this week’s post where I was going to revisit a bunch of rap albums from 2011 and not do media criticism at all. That will have to wait for next week, because I went on the internet and got mad. More accurately, I saw an article — pretend you can’t see the screenshot below — reflecting on the publicity bump that Ezra Klein has gotten ever since he flexed his Influence Muscles a few months ago by being the first mainstream political commentator to call for Joe Biden to not run again. That’s a real phenomenon, but the knock-on effect that this piece’s headline focuses on, which is that people are now sexually horny for Ezra Klein, has made me so mad that I decided to write a 2300-word blog post about it. Okay, now have a look at the screenshot.

While I am mad, I should clarify that I am not mad at Maggie Bullock, the piece’s author. Her tone throughout the piece is jokey and self-aware, and the folks she consults for the article are the exact sort of resistance MSNBC Tim Walz-is-brat style people you might expect to be “horny” for “Ezra Klein.” As far as articles centered around the phenomenon of someone, somewhere out there expressing a desire to engage in sexual congress with New York Times columnist and podcast host Ezra Klein go, it’s fine. And even if the piece sucked, it would still be fine: Bullock is a freelancer, and I would never begrudge a fellow writer getting money to write a thing. Lord knows I have written worse pieces about dumber topics for money. 

Instead, I am Mad at the headline — which, given that editors and not freelancers write headlines, Bullock probably did not write — and the worldview that it implies. If you look at the dek, aka the subheader below the headline, we can see some hedging and/or setting of the argument’s terms: “How the New York Times podcaster became the thinking lady’s new heartthrob and the internet’s ‘intellectual daddy.’”

🚨🚨ALERT, ALERT, THE MEDIA EVENTS PAYWALL IS ABOUT TO HIT, I WILL BE ASKING YOU FOR A ONE-TIME PAYMENT OF $1 TO CONTINUE READING THE POST 🚨🚨

Presumably, this is a “have your cake and eat it too” moment. The editor is trying to satisfy their boss by hooking in readers with an intriguing, counterintuitive headline, but still laying down the landing gear to get to the actual, more accurate thrust of Bullock’s piece, which is that a set of individuals who have progressive-but-not-leftist politics have unexpectedly started to find Ezra Klein attractive. Also, and this is quibbling, but at no point in the piece itself is the phrase “intellectual daddy” written by Bullock or stated by any of her sources, despite the fact that “intellectual daddy” is in the fucking dek in quotation marks as if someone says it! AAAAAAAAAGHHHH!!!

Nonetheless, those are shockingly myopic definitions of “everybody,” “the internet,” and “the thinking lady!” 

The internet is vast, and the number of horny people on it is so, so high. They’re, like, the main people on the internet. The number of people on the internet who consider themselves “thinkers of thoughts” (i.e., smart) is very high as well. There’s a shitload of people who go online for various reasons pertaining to their intellectual curiosity, though it’s important to acknowledge a person’s intellectual interests don’t always dovetail with their romantic preferences. To wit, I humbly submit to the court this article documenting a different micro-trend from a few years ago where women started semi-ironically joking that they wanted to date men who couldn’t read. My friend Crissy is quoted in the piece. Via text, she told me that she finds Ezra Klein “repulsive.” When I asked her to suggest an alternative “intellectual daddy” to Klein, she responded, “jordan peterson (jk),” before rejecting the concept wholesale.

To be clear: Ezra Klein occupies a rare status in culture. It’s basically his job to be the house intellectual for the liberal establishment, keeping an ear to the ground for what topics are bubbling among both Washington insiders as well as cool academics and influential/smart bloggers, and translating it all for a mass audience (occasionally in a way that can leave folks feeling like he jacked their shit). 

As a result, there is a certain hesitancy to take shots at Klein and other writers of his ilk, because there’s always a possibility that he might end up subscribing to your Substack and ultimately inviting you on his podcast. This is not unlike how rappers used to go easy on Drake because he might randomly hop on their buzzy song and elevate their platform. Much like Drake, Klein’s tactics are leech-like — except that when it comes to his podcast, it’s the host who sucks.

I am not denying Ezra Klein’s fame, and I am not denying that people out there probably think he’s hot. What I’m saying, instead, is that the number of people out there who think he’s hot is very small, and certainly not generalizable to “everybody.” 

Let’s assume that for any celebrity who has qualities that a person can appreciate as “attractive” — as in, even if an individual is not attracted to the celebrity, they can see why someone else would be attracted to them, especially if that someone else in question were into a specific thing that the individual in question could be said to embody — there is a certain subset of people who could envision a world in which they would fuck the celebrity if the celebrity appeared in front of them and was like, “Yo let’s have sex.” For the purposes of this thought experiment, let’s discount celebrities who are specifically marketed as “sex symbols” (Jeremy Allen White, Sydney Sweeney, etc.) and focus only on the ones who are famous because they do a thing that is unrelated to their physical attractiveness. 

In other words, the number of people who feel this way about Ezra Klein is probably about the same as the number of people who feel this way about Theo Von, the mulleted comedian and podcaster whose vibe is kind of “Joe Dirt in real life.” 

No one in the mainstream media would ever say that people are “horny for Theo Von,” because Theo Von’s public persona is that of a fool, and his curation of guests on his podcast does not advance a worldview as much as it signifies a post-Joe Rogan openness to any idea he is unfamiliar with. However, Theo Von has interviewed Donald Trump, and most of the mainstream media has decidedly not interviewed Donald Trump.

Beyond that, Theo Von is a great control for an experiment such as this, because, like Klein, Theo Von is a new media kingpin. Klein has 2.5 million followers on Twitter; Von has 3 million YouTube subscribers. Each is not a conventional sex symbol, and each has transcended the platform from which they got their start (Klein via The Washington Post, then Vox, then The New York Times; Von via the MTV reality show The Challenge). Each has had Bernie Sanders on his podcast. Klein is 40 and Von is 44, which puts them in the same late-Millennial cohort. Von’s father was a minor Polish noble; Klein’s father was a professor at UC Irvine (aka a minor American noble). Though the audiences and the approaches are different, they are basically the same guy. 

I spent some time trying to convince ChatGPT to scrape twitter for some sort of “sentiment analysis” related to Ezra Klein’s attractiveness vs. Theo Von’s, but ChatGPT was adamant that it could do nothing of the sort for me. However, I then remembered I could just do it myself by searching Klein’s name plus words like “attractive,” “hot,” and “sexy,” mentally filtering out any irrelevant uses of the terms (“Ezra Klein was into Biden dropping out before it was sexy”).

The results were genuinely surprising — there were like three people over the past decade who’d tweeted about finding Ezra Klein “attractive,” but many more who’d done the same re: Theo Von, often adding that they were embarrassed by their being attracted to him. 

Prior to the Bustle piece dropping, people who tweeted “hot” in reference to Klein were either talking about his takes or wanting him to go on the chicken wing show Hot Ones. Once the article declaring him attractive came out, however, some people claimed to have been riding with Klein all along. Searching “theo von” and “hot” yielded a lot of noise too, both because people were also telling him to go on Hot Ones (why is this show so popular?) and because there exists a small group of users who’ve named themselves things like “Theo Von’s Dumb Cousin” and spend a lot of time responding to thirst traps.

The term “handsome” is where Ezra Klein shines. And by that, I mean I was able to find a stretch of seven posts from the early-to-mid-2010s that all mentioned him being handsome. Theo Von, meanwhile, has a similar amount of people calling him handsome, and they have mostly happened more recently than the mentions of Klein.

However, Theo Von really wins in the “[NAME] can get it” department. Ezra Klein… not so much.

Given the constraints of my research, I was unsurprised to find a slight edge tilting things in Theo Von’s favor. He’s probably overall a bit more famous than Klein is, and I’d guess that his audience tends to conduct itself online with less decorum than Ezra Klein’s audience, as evidenced by the “[Ezra Klein/Theo Von] handsome” results vs. the “[Ezra Klein/Theo Von] can get it” results. Meanwhile, to the extent that the gist of Maggie Bullock’s piece can be extrapolated beyond the small sample of people she spoke to, it’s highly possible that a lot of the people who find Klein attractive are expressing this sentiment within the walled garden of a group chat. 

Some further caveats: My research into this matter was by no means comprehensive. My survey definitely could have included more search terms, and I could have surveyed platforms other than Twitter — I just did Twitter because it’s the easiest place to search text. If I were doing this “for real” I would have looked into what was being said in the comments sections of YouTube videos and Instagram posts, as well as reddit threads and other online forums, and probably run some sort of web scraper program written in R. I did not, because this is mainly “media criticism” and not “data journalism,” and also I don’t know how to do data journalism shit. 

Additionally, we cannot discount the possibility that my results were skewed by the post-Elon Twitter landscape, because it’s safe to assume that Elon Musk personally probably likes Theo Von way more than he likes Ezra Klein, and as a result might be boosting Von-related chatter, while inadvertently burying historical Klein thirst on the platform as part of a larger attempt to make Klein seem less popular than he actually is. 

In conclusion, despite Bullock’s claim that Klein’s ascent to Millennial David Brooks means he’s now a certified stud, the level to which people are attracted to him appears to have remained static and small over the years. The number of people who have found themselves attracted to Theo Von, yet are repulsed by their attraction to him, has grown over the past decade. This is likely not because he got “more hot,” but instead because he’s gotten more famous outside of comedy circles. Von is still getting more famous, which means the number of people who find him handsome will likely grow, reaching its peak around the time the 44-year-old Von hits the age of 46/47 and then decline, first slowly for a couple of years, then dropping precipitously. Perhaps this hotness fall-off can be forestalled by various age-defying medical procedures and semi-legal supplements, but it will happen. 

And when it does, Ezra Klein — whose peak, terrifyingly, might not come until actual David Brooks retires and he enjoys absolute hegemony over center-left thought — may finally be able to extract his revenge.