YouSaid · the spoken record

Ezra Klein

lines on the record: 128
first: 2018-12-12
most recent: 2018-12-12
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“He loves it. He loves it. It's amazing. So I have great, my kids watch substantive stuff, even if they're doing it. I have to say one son in the morning watches. So you see them watching substantive stuff, which I think is really interesting. So I do think there's a tiredness of the twitchy and the tiredness of the thing. And we'll see. We'll see how it goes. But anyway, Ezra Klein, welcome to San Francisco and the Bay Area.”
2018-12-12 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Ezra Klein and Kara Swisher on the future of journalism · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“But it's true. And what's really interesting is I think about my kids too because my son, he literally was like, do you know Ezra Klein? I'm like, yes. And he goes, can I meet him? And I'm like, okay, like, I'm kind of famous. But he doesn't, but he wanted to go in and meet Ezra. And there's his picture of him. But now he likes Carlo. He loves Carl's machine. I was like, don't you want to see as your client? He's like, no, I want to see Karl Smaza.”
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“What's my favorite I'll say this. One of my favorite things that we're doing, the thing that we're doing that we weren't doing a couple years ago that's been really good for us, I think like our souls, is we've become a production house. So with midrole, we're making Today Explain, which is our daily podcast, and with Netflix, we're making explained. And we have another one coming with YouTube. And I think those things have expressed like the soul of what we want to be as well as anything we've ever done. And they're slower and they have a very different kind of incentive structure around them. And it's felt healthy. It's felt healthier than a lot of the other things we've tried. And so that's been really encouraging. And to what you were just saying, to what you're making money on being your best work, those are places where we're making money on our best work. And that too has felt healthy. So that maybe is my, if I had to pick a favorite, but I love anything that allows us to actually fund our journalism.”
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“I think people are really leaning. People seem to be the stuff we're making money on is all smart and long and not short and twitchy. It seems like it. And so that's a positive thing. So I'm going to end this by asking, as a question, what's your favorite journalism business model these days?”
2018-12-12 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Ezra Klein and Kara Swisher on the future of journalism · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I did. Of course I did. I watched it 50 times, along with broadcast news and some others. But I did watch the apprentice. And you did get by the end the formulaicness, the tiredness, it got exhausting, and you turned it off. Like, I know it sounds crazy, but you did. And I think that's, I feel, that interview with Chunk Chao and Andrea and Holly, you felt it. You feel it when you talk to journalists. You feel it. Everyone's tired of the show. So it would be interesting to see what happens. And what's really interesting right now, there's a show on Broadway right now Network. I urge you all to watch the movie and read the book Network. It's a Broadway show right now. It's really fascinating to understand how all that was so outrageous and every bit of it is now existing, which is except for the murder on television so far. But it's just a really interesting time. So I have some hopes too.”
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“You get tired of the show after a while. And I think a lot of journalists are tired of this show. I get a sense that people are tired of the show. Do you know what I mean? Like the show gets, oh, like it's sort of like the Truman show. It's like this blow hard. Fuck him. Like, you know what I mean? At the end of the day, you've seen the truth.”
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“I think he's an unusual case. That's why I'm covered by people, like, I think, I believe I am the only person who watched every episode of the apprentice. I did watch it. I'm sorry, people. I did. I get why he's popular completely. I watched every episode.”
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“Another, like they're going to take actions on your behalf. I do think, and I hope that that's going to push for a certain amount of quality journalism. I don't think you can ever really just be on Trump's tweets. I think that you need more than that. But I think by the same token that if we don't learn how to stop letting, let me put it this way. The problem is not that we report on Trump's tweets, it's which ones we report on. We have decided that the president saying something offensive. I don't want to say crazy because genuinely crazy is a new”
2018-12-12 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Ezra Klein and Kara Swisher on the future of journalism · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So, a few things. I'm so sympathetic to the direction of this question, but I want to stand up a bit for my colleagues and say, even now, even at its worst, there is so much other great work going on. Part of the problem is that some of what gets lifted up through the algorithms, and I think this is even more true actually on cable news, there can be a focus on some of the work we do and other parts of it get lost, but there's just remarkable journalism happening, not just on Trump and politics, but out on foreign policy. I mean, a million great things are happening in any given moment. And so there's a lot of bad stuff, but a lot of good. I do think that the future of journalism, particularly as people are moving more to subscription models, particularly as you can't just rely on the algorithm to have a business model, particularly as you actually have to build enough of a relationship with the audience that they're going to fund you in some way.”
2018-12-12 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Ezra Klein and Kara Swisher on the future of journalism · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So I've been frustrated with Twitter as all the reporters are reporting on Donald Trump's tweets and part of me always wish that everybody would just boycott it for a while, but I now know that's not going to happen because, as you said earlier, How, I guess, important Twitter can be with what people have to say. It's a platform. But what is the future of journalism if all we do is report on Donald Trump's crazy tweets?”
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“I once saw you get attacked on Twitter, or even what you perceived as an attack on Twitter, and you responded with such overwhelming force that I don't.”
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“You know something? Fascinatingly, nobody calls me that. People don't attack me that much on Twitter. It's fascinating. Someone was just pointing out to me. I don't get that strafed on. I get less strafed on Twitter than you might imagine. And I'm not clear why that is. I guess, yeah”
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“I was always comfortable. I was comfortable from the day one. I mean, you know, I don't know. It was interesting. I was just at this lunch called The Old Grumpy Girls of the New York Times Network. They had a lunch there. For women at the New York Times, it was great. It was this lunch. It's something like old girls network. I don't know. Anyway, someone asked me that, and I was like, I don't know. I just voice, but obnoxious. It's just since the beginning. And so I don't know. I don't know. I just don't care what people think of me. I wish I did. I know I don't. I don't know that. I don't know. I don't know”
2018-12-12 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Ezra Klein and Kara Swisher on the future of journalism · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“But you know what I mean? I have done the reporting. I've talked to hundreds of people. I'm going to tell you this is a mess or I'm going to tell you this is going on at Uber and stuff like that. And so what I do with my report is tell me what you found out and then tell them, tell the readers that. And don't be scared to say this is the determination you made because you're not wrong because you spent the time doing, but you can make a determination of something. And so we've been doing that forever. We did that from the beginning and I want them to really do that a lot, but they can't do it without, they can't be just a pontificating person who doesn't know, who just has an opinion about something. They've got to go in there and find out and talk to everybody. And then give people a chance to respond too. That's the other thing, is letting these companies or people you cover respond so you're fair to them. And so I think it's over the old kind of way you do journalism is over because it's useless and it's not true.”
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“I had this whole screaming monologue in my head that I decided to create a website of my screaming monologue. And so it was, I think what we do is you have to do the reporting to say, for example, a story I worked on, Yahoo is a goat rodeo people. Let me just tell you, I've been inside and it's a goat rodeo in there, you know what I mean?”
2018-12-12 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Ezra Klein and Kara Swisher on the future of journalism · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, I'm way down the other road for a long time now. I've always thought that I look at it as reported analysis. You can't do analysis without doing the reporting, and we've been doing that at Reco since all things D and before. I was so tired of that to be sure statement, those really, I just was exhausted by it, and I actually had a fit at the Wall Street Journal when it was, there was a story about web ban. I don't remember one of them. And they were like, you need carry, you need to get an analyst to say what you already know from your smarts and doing the reporting and having analysis to say what you want to say. I'm like, why can't I say what I want to say? I already know. Like, I'm going to tell you this is a disaster. It's going to go up and smoke. And they wouldn't let me do it. And they had to put the to be sure statement, which is to be sure comma, you know, some people think. And then you quote someone. And it just was ridiculous. And I was.”
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“I do think Twitchy people are tired of Twitch. I get the sense that people, I'm working on another podcast idea, and it's so non-Twitchy. It's like the opposite. The podcast, when we started the podcast, one of the things was I was told you can't do anything an hour. And I'm like, I'm doing an hour. You know what I mean? Like people, I think, really want substantive discussions. I think in the next era, leaning into smart is probably a really good idea pushing towards smart.”
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“I do think it pushes you towards taking a position. I think one reason that the organizations where I've done this, it's done pretty well is because we've been willing to take positions and that relates to like what people actually want out of that coverage and if you can't do that the coverage tends to fail. But I don't think people don't want to know about things that are important. I think sometimes it's harder.”
2018-12-12 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Ezra Klein and Kara Swisher on the future of journalism · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I don't agree that we feel this pressure. I don't agree that the pressure is as real as we think it is. The thing that I do think is true is that it's quite hard. I think it's harder to do a lot of these policy stories well, to find the angles on them, to understand how to make them sellable to an audience than some of the big scandal or the big conflict. Now, some places do do it well, right? I think if you name most of the really big outlets, they're excellent at this. Like the New York Times, Washington Post. But I think that we have been trained to think people don't like this stuff. And we often don't do it well. I think, by the way, policy journalism is particularly hamstrung by false equivalence. Policy journalism, generally speaking, the question people have is like, how does this work and is it good? Like, will it be good for me? And if the answer is I can't tell you, they're going to leave. Now, if you can go and say, this is going to be terrible for you or great for you. This is a great bill or a bad bill, right?”
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“Quick to you, Ezra, on this particular point. Vox is kind of known for being a place that doesn't take the bait and has substantive policy coverage that's also interesting. Oh, I thank you. I'm not saying this to Brown knows you, but there are probably a lot of publications that don't want to cover these things in such a sensational way, but they feel like if they do it, they won't make the money. The business won't survive.”
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“I don't hugely agree, to be honest. I think that we have a lot of received wisdom about this. It isn't quite true. So every place I've been, it's like, oh yeah, the policy, that's going to do way worse than the other stuff. And I'm not saying that Trump-Russia doesn't do well. Like some of it does. And certainly if you get, if there's a huge story. But a lot of our top coverage and everywhere I've been has been the policy coverage. I think that often it's harder to do well. But I thought about this another way because I was actually going to go make an opposite version of this point. So I went back and I looked at Donald Trump's tweets. I was like, I wanted to make the point looking at this that when Trump tweets like media's the enemy of the people and blah, blah, blah, blah, that it gets way more pickup on Twitter than when he tweets about jobs numbers or something else like that. And then it turned out I was wrong. So I couldn't make that point, which is terrible. But it was kind of encouraging in a way.”
2018-12-12 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Ezra Klein and Kara Swisher on the future of journalism · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Right, because that stuff does work. I mean, we've talked, Nicole, again, I urge you to listen to Nicole Wong thing, but when you focus on speed, virality, and engagement, you're going to get those kind of stories and they're going to rise to the top. And then people are going to do them. And it takes very certain kind of person to resist it. It certainly does. It takes an editor that's like, eh, I'm not interested.”
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“And what we don't. Because, you know, right now I think we kind of tell the public newsworthiness is important, but it's actually kind of like outrageous, scandal, secret. It's like a weird cocktail of things. And I don't think we've got that cocktail right.”
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“There you go. And so that's going to be the tricky order for them to navigate. I don't advise political figures, so how they navigate it is up to them. But I do think it's something that we in the media need to think a little bit about, about whether or not we, I think that another way to think about this is a Clinton email coverage during the campaign. Clinton's emails got more coverage than all policy issues in the campaign put together. Trump and Clinton. And by the way, it wasn't close. They got way more coverage. And journalists often say, well, look, there was a story. And sure, it was a story, but how big of one, right? Were we ordering things correctly? Because people are taking their cues on what's important from, among other things, how often we're covering it and how often we're covering what else is going on. And was email security really the issue that that election was turning on? I kind of don't think so. So I think that we need to do some soul searching in our own profession. This is what I was saying a little bit earlier with Newsworthiness about what we believe to be newsworthy.”
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“Spent a lot of money on ads about healthcare. Now they're going to be in office and nobody's going to listen to their healthcare talk and everybody's going to cover their scandals. And if any Democrat anywhere in the House mentions the word impeachment, it will be headline news everywhere all the time.”
2018-12-12 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Ezra Klein and Kara Swisher on the future of journalism · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So, one, I'm not sure there is kind of a system wide solution. I mean, one thing I've tried to do at the places I've been, I ran Wonk Blog at the Post, which was a policy-focused vertical, and then Vox is something that I, along with Metaglacius and Melissa Bell launched. And everywhere that I have run political coverage, I have made it part of the culture that we take policy seriously, democratic, Republican. If somebody is introducing a big new policy, if Trump is, if anybody is. We see that as headline news. And by the way, I think the audience does. We've always done really well on traffic. We've actually usually out-competed more horse-raced oriented publications. So the way kind of I try to handle it is by orienting my values of the organizations I'm in towards the things that I believe that we believe are important. To the broader point, one thing I was saying in that piece is that if you looked at how the Democrats ran the election, they didn't spend their time on Trump scandals.”
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“Completely dominate the coverage was something that wasn't that big of a story. And so that's another thing. And it goes to Andrew Mitchell's issue. And so I think a lot of the problem is also deciding really what is news. And when to, I'm actually right now, I'm less worried about false equivalence, which I think the news in general has gotten better at, though certainly there are bad examples than I am about amplification. People are manipulating us to amplify them. And I don't think we are nearly sophisticated about how to handle that, nor the answer is nearly as obvious as they were in like somebody's done something terrible. Like maybe say it's bad.”
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“We try to do black. I mean, we'll react to something that we think is really important, but to what you're saying there, there's the issue of Trump tweeted something, and it was reported in a straightforward, dumb fashion. Then there's the issue of Trump tweeted something and everybody's falling all over themselves to call it a lie, but they're also falling all over themselves to cover it. I would say the caravan is really...”
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“Because I just tweeted something like this because he says something false and they write a headline of what he said versus it was really today. It was the same thing. I agree. I had a story, I think reporters type things down. I've said this many, many times. There was a Peter Thiel was giving a speech at the National Press Club and everyone wrote a news story in what he said. And I was like, what are you doing? Half the things he says are just codswallop. It's bullshit. And so I just did a blog like, oh, he says this, but let me just tell you what actually is happening. And I just did that. And I was like, I was sort of irritated by how we were just sort of saying what they, that wasn't, that was an experience I had. But I am irritated by we just say what they said. I just did a podcast with Andrea Mitchell, Chuck Todd, and Hallie Jackson, they were talking about this very thing. It's like, what do you, like, she said, what do you do when he says something?”
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“And so, I do think it's like the loss of those institutions and the big city metropolitan mid-sized daily business model that has destroyed statehouse coverage. There have been cool efforts to bring it back on its own, like the American Independent Network, but they've died because people don't just want the statehouse coverage. It's got to be bundled with the city they care about and the region they live in and the national news they care about or else you end up having statehouse coverage that is either only philanthropic or it's for lobbyists which is not the best kind of state.”
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“I would say State House Journalism was always cross subsidized by big city journalism and national journalism. So who did great coverage of the California State House? Well, to a large extent the LA Times, which also did national and international for that matter, but was also rooted in LA, which is a huge city, one of the biggest cities in the world. And you had that in smaller ways, in lawsuits. Now, in some states, obviously, the state house is easy in the biggest city, but in a lot, it's not. And it's been the weakening of those major metropolitan papers that has really gutted good statehouse coverage because excellent journalists wanted to be at the LA Times and being at the State House for the LA Times was a really good way to do it. Or similarly like the New York Times is based in New York City. And like every journalist wants to be at the New York Times, or most of them do. But they also send people to Albany. And it's like, that is how you become a national reporter at the New York Times. As Kara is saying, that's an important thing.”
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“It's hard because those were always young journalists that were at Statehouse. It wasn't always the most experienced, you know, you started off at City Hall. It was one of the early ones that you would do. So I think what's fallen apart is that mentorship system of moving up. And that really is, I think, a problem. I think that's always been a problem right now in journalism is that people at the lower levels don't train upwards. They move very quickly from thing to thing versus getting training. And so I think that's one of the issues that just doing those stories every single day, like doing whatever the city council meeting. I mean, I did them. I don't know if Ezra did, but I did. I did a lot of those just endless stories that you just get good at and get smart at and stuff. So I think that's one of the problems. And then when they just don't have people there anymore, there's just physically no people covering these things. And so I don't know what the answer to that is. I just, I mean, every, it seems to me every state in our...”
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“Basic, excellent new generation local. I do too, but I'm not sure you can everywhere and everywhere deserves great local journalism. Yeah.”
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“I don't know, and this is hard. I don't know that the market will furnish a business model for as much news as we ideally need to have. I think there's going to have to be if we're going to get the things particularly at the local level that we need, there's a real role for philanthropy, and there might even be a role as there is in a lot of other countries for the state for subsidies of different kinds. We do this with arts here. It's not crazy that you might see local journalism as a public good. But I see a lot of money going to local investigative, and I wish I saw more go into actually just building good local journalism institutions. You need a platform for investigative to stand on. People need to be coming every day to read something they care about. And that's what gives the investigative force. I see a lot of people want to invest in or fund local investigative, but I'm not seeing as much of what Kara's saying, which is trying to build...”
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“So, I think that's one thing that's happening. I think it's been pretty hard. I think a lot of groups didn't go into this with a business strategy. I actually think one good thing for Vox Media is that our CEO, Jim Bankoff, had been around the block in media and tech a bunch of times, and I think always was a little bit more sober.”
2018-12-12 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Ezra Klein and Kara Swisher on the future of journalism · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“You interviewed So, a couple just quick thoughts on local news and tech businesses. So, one, on how product is affected and technology has affected all of our business models. This answer may get me, this may be off message, and if so, Jim Bankoff, I'm sorry. But I think for a long time, not a long time, there was a period of time in the media where the idea was that digital media companies were going to be tech companies with tech-like scale and tech-like returns. And there was all this venture going into it. And there was this idea that it would be more akin to something like a Facebook, not at that scale, but like that, than actually a media business. And what seems to me to be happening now is it's turned out that's not really true. You are building media businesses online and they're going to get media business-like returns if things go well, and you need a mix of different revenue strategies. And you're building a new Cond ⁇ Nas, things like that. And it's a pretty straightforward business model, but it isn't like this exciting, like maybe you become a 10, 50, 100 billion dollar company and you just figure out the business model later.”
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“Like, look what's happened in Miami around Jeffrey Epstein. Like, there's just like if you put money into local news across the country, and I'm talking about a multimedia effort, like a newspaper, but with all kinds of effort, I think it would be, if I was a billionaire, that's what I would do. That was exactly what I'd find that kind of thing and do something with it.”
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“I'm not doing that. You know what I mean? And so I think that's one of the things. And to the local, go ahead, the local news question, I think it's a really important one because I just was discussing this the other day. I interviewed A.G. Salzberger, who's the new, what is he, publisher? The publisher. You interviewed him. Yeah, I know. I forget. I think he's the, I get it wrong. He's the publisher of the New York Times now. He's the son of the other Salzberger. There's lots of them. And he's very smart, smart young man. And one of the things I said, what if you do if you got a billion dollars from Lorraine Jobs, who has several many of them? And would be kind of cool. And he's like, well, we want to make our own billion. I'm like, I don't care. What would you do with a billion dollars? He wouldn't answer my question, which was irritating to me. But my idea, I was like, if I was, if I was the New York Times, I was given a billion dollars, I would buy up local newspapers all over the country and do a New York Times job on them, like make them really good across, like, that's what I would do with a billion, like bring back local news.”
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“We pub Yeah, I'm just saying, you do. If you do the product because some advertiser wants it, it's like doing a conferences. We do our conferences because we went to our conferences and then we find the sponsors. We don't do them because whenever the sponsor comes to you, we'd like to do something on the future, innovation and AI and the ethics. I'm like, I'm going to go over here.”
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“Fox, we publish videos before we publish text. And video was an important part of our journals and we didn't go into it as a business case. And so like today we have more than 5 million subscribers on YouTube. It's our biggest platform. We have a Netflix show. It really made me angry when a bunch of publishers went into video and I'm not calling this out of anybody in particular, but a lot did. Whereas what they were trying to do was flood the zone with volume because video had higher CPMs. So it's like people would accidentally click on a bad video on an article that was getting heavy traffic. Or, you know, there was this move to Facebook and everybody's doing this short, silent, autoplay, silent newsreel. And it's like, it wasn't good work. There's a lot of, I think, business in video, but there's not good business in video. It's just as a business strategy. You need an audience strategy. So that's one piece of it. Yeah.”
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“Opinion's gotten so easy and thick out there that we don't do enough of the stuff that was behind a lot of that news. It was like good process even if there wasn't always good product. And I think I don't want the old even-handed news product, but I do want to bring more of that process into it.”
2018-12-12 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Ezra Klein and Kara Swisher on the future of journalism · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Let me just say one last thing before we move to QA, which is something that was really interesting to me to see when I was at the post was that you could write the same story as news, news analysis, and opinion. It was just like you were just saying that there's some people think this is a shitty deal, right? Like critics say Comcast deal is terrible. And then there's like... Comcast deal has problems. And then there's opinion like Comcast sucks, right? And you could write the same thing in different places like who you quoted and what order it went in. That was always really interesting to me. And I always thought that in the traditional way we did it, we made it too hard for the news side to tell the truth and too easy for the opinion side to lie. But now I think we also sometimes”
2018-12-12 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Ezra Klein and Kara Swisher on the future of journalism · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I think it's hard, honestly, to make a bad avocado. That's like the genius of that. But the one thing I don't want to say, and I can tell that we're supposed to move the Q&A in a second.”
2018-12-12 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Ezra Klein and Kara Swisher on the future of journalism · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“All opinion, yes. Some of it And Twitter and Facebook, they're also people's. It's not that opinions are bad. It's just that one thing I think is so weird is how rapidly we moved from, I think like a well-informed person going about the world would have liked a lot more thoughtful opinion about things to it's like hard to get away from all the opinion there is about that.”
2018-12-12 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Ezra Klein and Kara Swisher on the future of journalism · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Places did. And then, like, everything is online, everything's easily accessible, and everybody explodes looking at blogs and also looking what's cheap to produce, the amount of available political opinion. And now we're drowning in political opinion. There's so much.”
2018-12-12 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Ezra Klein and Kara Swisher on the future of journalism · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It's something I think about is that when I started blogging, like in 2003, that was early blogging. 2001 is sort of the beginning of it, a little bit earlier with Dave Wiener. And there was so little political opinion available. Like if you wanted political opinion, I grew up in Irvine, as I mentioned. So we got the LA Times. And not that when I was 10, I was looking for political opinion, but if I had been, if at 10, I'd wanted more political opinion. It's like we got the LA Times op-ed page, and that was it. I mean, we didn't subscribe in my house to any political magazines. There was no cable news. There was no, it's so weird to think about this. There was no political opinion. And then, I mean, one reason blogs took off was that all of a sudden there was more political opinion and more voices and perspectives could be recognized. And there were weird political opinions and normal ones and hot ones and people cursed and they used different. It was great, but it still wasn't that much. It wasn't what most...”
2018-12-12 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Ezra Klein and Kara Swisher on the future of journalism · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“The brakes are rough, but I think hot takes have taken over a lot of even really good journalistic institutions, and they've hired a lot of people that do hot takes, and I hate them. I think it brings it down.”
2018-12-12 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Ezra Klein and Kara Swisher on the future of journalism · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Do you know what? Here's the thing I was at one this week and I was like, and I can't, you know, I'm so tomorrow I turn 56 and I just can't take it anymore. And it's like, and I thank you. So I was like literally at this dinner party and someone said to him, I'm like, that's really stupid. They're like, what? I'm like, I just, I wish I could be polite, but that's the stupidest thing I've ever heard. And they're like, what? I go, I don't, you don't even have any intellectual underpinnings to anything you just said. And I just can't take it. I'm going to finish my dinner over here. And I just, that's what a hot taste is. That's a high take.”
2018-12-12 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Ezra Klein and Kara Swisher on the future of journalism · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I didn't see that drive by Brooklyn coming at all. Like, I was just sitting here, we talked DCSF. I'm glad we hit New York. Do you know what?”
2018-12-12 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Ezra Klein and Kara Swisher on the future of journalism · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Really stupid, shallow idea that is just like, I'm gonna say something real controversial and then have nothing to back it up with, and I'm just gonna say it over and over again. You know what I mean? It's just like the dumb person sitting next to you at a Brooklyn dinner party. I don't know what else to put it. You know what I mean? Do you know what I mean?”
2018-12-12 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Ezra Klein and Kara Swisher on the future of journalism · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT