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

“As you say, I've spent most of my career in DC, so maybe it's true everywhere. Yeah, it's true. But I find that there's a lot of yearning for the, you know, they fight all day and then they go to the same dinners and parties at night, culture of D.C. It's still there a little bit, but I think it's lesser. But I've always found it very odd.”
2018-12-12 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Ezra Klein and Kara Swisher on the future of journalism · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That is by far the part of DC that, I mean, maybe it's what makes it work, but is the weirdest, the kind of it's all in the game mentality. One of the really common things to have happen to this report, and you see, I'm sure you have this, is that you'll write something really searing about someone, and then their staffer will call you and fight with you all day, like all day. They will not stop screaming at you, and you're like, yeah, but your boss actually is an asshole, or he was lying, or like whatever it might have been. And then at the end, like, well, okay, like let's get a drink sometime soon. And it's just very weird you build relationships through conflict. And it's, I mean, it's fine. It's a good way for things to do.”
2018-12-12 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Ezra Klein and Kara Swisher on the future of journalism · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“What's really interesting is they vomit up information there. I mean, it's not that hard here to get you all to talk, but there it's like, Kara, did you know that we're about to invade France? I'm like, whoa, okay, thank you. Okay, thank you for that. It's an incredibly, and the other part is that you go, like, I literally write Trump is a goblin or something like that on Twitter, like, or, you know, whatever that particular morning I'm feeling like. And then they'll call me for the White House, like, hey, come over and visit. And I'm like, okay.”
2018-12-12 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Ezra Klein and Kara Swisher on the future of journalism · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“He slips on. He tells you something. And I'm not saying there's none of that. It's just that the value of it has gone down so much. To change the culture”
2018-12-12 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Ezra Klein and Kara Swisher on the future of journalism · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And two, they're mostly just, I'd never reported on a White House. It was not trying to make arguments for what it was doing. They're just like backbiting each other. I was like, there's no information here. There's a drama. And you can maybe uncover some things, but it's not the institutions themselves are less valuable to have access to. The people themselves are out tweeting up a storm. They're on cable news all the time. And so, you know, that whole Georgetown cocktail circuit, like the idea was you'd be near Teddy Kennedy. Right.”
2018-12-12 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Ezra Klein and Kara Swisher on the future of journalism · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“You might have, there's value to knowing the people who went into the Trump administration if you're doing Trump administration reporting, but it isn't a cohesive thing like previous administrations have been stepped down as editor-in-chief. I'm like, well, maybe I should do more White House reporting again. I used to do a lot of that under Obama and a bit under Bush. I began sitting down and talking to these folks. And I really quickly realized that one, most of them don't know what's going on.”
2018-12-12 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Ezra Klein and Kara Swisher on the future of journalism · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, there's definitely a lot of that. The other thing, though, that I think you're getting at there, which I do think is part of this whole story, is that, look, DC, why was it useful to be in DC? In part because access can be useful. And there's a lot of access journals in Washington, D.C. One reason I think that the culture there is breaking down, though, is that the access is becoming less and less useful, right? So one, the institutions themselves are weakening. We were talking about parties reporting, but like political party reporting, the political parties are weakening. A lot of their functionaries are in DC, but they're on Twitter and they're not that interesting and they're a lot less powerful than they used to be.”
2018-12-12 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Ezra Klein and Kara Swisher on the future of journalism · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“To say, and the guy named Lockheed's like laughing, and then Dylan's over here saying, Oh, Kara, stop it. And I'm like, no, but he's wrong. Everything he's saying is completely stupid. And the rest of the reporters don't say a word. It was an astonishing display of lack. And then what happened is like, as Kara said, like, you know what I mean? And it was fascinating to watch the sort of weird, there was no journalism going on. I don't know what was happening.”
2018-12-12 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Ezra Klein and Kara Swisher on the future of journalism · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“You go to dinners, essentially they bring famous CEOs in, and then you sit and have dinner with a boardroom table. It's really awkward. It's really like not a nice. And they put me in a good spot. There's like the status spot. I pay a lot of attention to status in Washington. It's sort of like being the hunger games, the city, those capital. You know what I mean? Like where you're sitting. And I was sitting on one side was Doug, the guy who's the CEO of Walmart. On the other the CEO of Lockheed Martin across from me is Jamie Diamond. So I was like, oh, I got the good seat. I'm in the good seat. This is real good. And as it started, they were pontificating on, I think it was China and the China tariffs and this and that. And what was really interesting, this was off the record, oh well, too bad. And they were talking about different things. And Jamie, who I know pretty well, said something about China, about tech. And I was like that. I said it loudly. And he was like, excuse me, Karen. I'm like, well, I don't know. And he's like, what do you have to say? I said, well, everything you're saying out of your mouth is wrong. And I don't know what to say.”
2018-12-12 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Ezra Klein and Kara Swisher on the future of journalism · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“A number of parties recently. I went to one at David Gregory's house. His wife is Beth Wilkins, who's a very well-known litigator. So I've been to a lot and I've been to a business roundtable thing with Jamie Diamond. And it's a really interesting culture. I find the political journalism culture in DC to be incredibly docile. I find them very, very docile. I find myself extraordinarily rude in the culture, you know, which I find myself here.”
2018-12-12 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Ezra Klein and Kara Swisher on the future of journalism · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“You'd be terrible. You'd be like sitting in the corner. You'd be sitting in the corner. My job is essentially to get Teddy Kennedy to say something stupid. That was my job, which was not very hard because he drank a lot. But it was, so what would happen is there would be something that happened that day, whether it was a big piece of legislation or whatever the news of the day was. And then the style section of the Washington Post would send out young party reporters to go to whatever the agriculture association's party or John McLaughlin had a party or whatever. Someone had a party and you went there and then you made a story of the day from the party, which actually there was a party culture, a cocktail party culture. And then a lot of that was formed. A lot of policy was formed that way. A lot of the way the city worked was that way. And that doesn't exist. You're right. It's all everyone's sort of looking down at their phones and reacting, doing reacting and reacting to reacting and reacting. I have been to...”
2018-12-12 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Ezra Klein and Kara Swisher on the future of journalism · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, it's much more unsure of itself. I think a lot of the driving parts of it are outside of it now. And again, not everybody, a lot of people doing important driving worker in DC and just a lot of the work is there. You can't get away from the fact that DC has a culture of its own. But I don't think it's as powerful in politics as it used to be. Like people used to talk about the Georgetown cocktail circuit. To my knowledge, nobody's ever been to Georgetown at this point. People just stopped going 10 years ago.”
2018-12-12 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Ezra Klein and Kara Swisher on the future of journalism · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And I don't think it exists as a kind of cohesive force in the way certainly I felt it to under the Bush or Obama president.”
2018-12-12 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Ezra Klein and Kara Swisher on the future of journalism · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And I think that's a pretty powerful culture, particularly in this era. I actually think DC journalism culture is probably more powerful under Obama than it is under Trump. Cable is more important under Trump than it was under Obama. Podcast culture is important, I think, increasingly. You have sort of like on the left, the crooked media folks, like on the right, people like Ben Shapiro, you have the intellectual dark web people, a lot of them were out here. A lot of that is in California, oddly enough, right? Both on the left and the right. I don't want to take away from your point that there's a DC political culture. I do think the DC political culture got cracked and traumatized by Trump.”
2018-12-12 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Ezra Klein and Kara Swisher on the future of journalism · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I do. I have a whole chin stroking setup. It doesn't work. It's not good work. It's never good work unless I'm actually doing the research to find things, to build models, to like find evidence, to read appendices that other people aren't doing. And so that work where you're generating something new and then applying it as a lens onto the world, it can often be really good. But if what's happening is somebody said something and you're reacting to it, or you read something and you're reacting to it, which is the culture of Twitter. Twitter is a functionally reactive culture. It's a reactive product. Hey, somebody said X, like, you know, come back at it, clap back. I think it's created a more reactive take economy, right? I think part of the rise in takes is economic and digital, but part of it is part of his Twitter. But the other thing I do think it creates is more reactive coverage. We're all reacting to the same information and so covering things more reactively.”
2018-12-12 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Ezra Klein and Kara Swisher on the future of journalism · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Different kinds of stimuli create different kinds of product. If you are out reporting something, my wife, Annie Laura at the Atlantic, a former decode guest, she's a really remarkable reporter. I mean, she goes out into very unusual places and sees things other people don't see. I have tremendous admiration for what she does. I'm much more, as Kara put it, a little bit of like a Michael Kinsey-like character. I like sit and stroke my chin.”
2018-12-12 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Ezra Klein and Kara Swisher on the future of journalism · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Reload the thing. It's like, oh, did it get? Is it at 100? And then it's going to go to 1,000. You can run all this out. There's this intense incestuous herd-like political journals and Twitter culture. And one of the things that it's doing a bunch of different things simultaneously, but one, I think it's making everybody talk about and think the same things all at the same time. The best journalists are the people who are finding things out or seeing things or hearing things that the other journalists aren't, right? You got to be pretty damn smart to look at what everybody else is looking at and see something they're not going to see. And most of us are not that smart. And Twitter is making us all dumber because we're seeing the same shit all the time. And I think it displays us often at our worst. I don't think it's been good for our audiences' trust in us. Three, there is...”
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 think in the way that you're talking about that the journalism culture is a DC culture, I think it's now Twitter culture. And I believe this is a real problem. I'm much more hair on fire about this than a lot of my colleagues who know that when you hear this, this is an opinion of mine that a lot of people disagree with. But I think the fundamental force shaping political journalism now is Twitter. I think every political journalist that I know with a couple of exceptions is on Twitter all the time. All their friends are on Twitter. The feedback loop is incredibly fast. I mean, what is a journalist, right? Like on some of like, what do these people, what do we do? And we find things out or think things up, then we publish whatever we came up with somewhere. Then we get some kind of feedback, and then we do it again. And all that used to be pretty slow. And what Twitter did was it made it really fast. I mean, you can look at Twitter within two minutes and know if your tweet is taking off.”
2018-12-12 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Ezra Klein and Kara Swisher on the future of journalism · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Models of what's going on, sometimes many at once, to try to be able to kind of understand how the pieces fit together. And I never feel like I can do that very well from before”
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 true. I always say that one thing I think that is interesting about the two places is that DC is this place where the culture is defined, is shaped by people watching solvable problems prove impossible to solve. And Silicon Valley is shaped by people watching impossible problems prove possible to solve. And that second one sounds better and for a long time when I said it really sounded better, but it also can create a kind of optimism and a heedlessness that can be a problem. Sometimes the caution you get in DC is not the worst thing in the world when you're making decisions that have literal life and death consequences. But so trying to understand the culture and the way people think and the way they're making their decisions, trying to be able to inhabit the minds of the people creating this stuff that we're all living amidst, that's part of it. I do think a lot of my work is about building”
2018-12-12 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Ezra Klein and Kara Swisher on the future of journalism · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Strange culture. I mean, it is a different intellectual culture. I mean, the people here are peculiar. They're peculiar people.”
2018-12-12 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Ezra Klein and Kara Swisher on the future of journalism · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Models. And so that story of governance, particularly as I began to feel that everything in politics was increasingly downstream of changes that had particularly been wrought in our communications by tech. Coming out to spend more time thinking about and trying to understand that governance problem and where it was going was really appealing to me.”
2018-12-12 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Ezra Klein and Kara Swisher on the future of journalism · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I mean, everybody wants big picture, but the weather, we left Halfoon Bay and we got back into a DC heat wave and like two weeks later, we're like, eh, what if the weather could just be nice all the time? The other thing, though, and this is what Kara's alluding to with the tech bug, this story here to me has become really interesting. I mean, my work as a journalist is I cover problems of governance. I cover the way governance fails. I cover the way governance succeeds. I'm interested in the way institutions are governed and the policy that comes out of that governance. Silicon Valley for a long time was a story of innovation. And of course, in some ways still is. But I think for a lot of us now who have to live in the world that you all have created, it's now a story of governance. How do you govern these platforms? How do you govern these companies? How do you govern organizations and products and tools and institutions that have more power than they ever anticipated, that don't fit into a lot of our traditional”
2018-12-12 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Ezra Klein and Kara Swisher on the future of journalism · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So, like any move, a bunch of it was personal. I'm from California, I'm from Irvine, California, I've been in DC for 15 years. I actually love DC, but that is also a long time to be in DC. And I took a book leave out in Half Boon Bay earlier this year, and I just felt like I could think. There was just space from the news cycle, which I've lived in a kind of news response mode for 15 years. I've been there for a long time doing that. And I don't think I had realized just like how loud the buzzing in my own mind was. And so part of it was just being out there having a little bit more room, having a little bit more elevation, what is a political conversation that's gotten more and more bizarre. And more and more, and we can talk about this in our future of journalism talk, I think more and more distorted by the actual journalistic conversation itself. Part of it is, you guys have such nice weather out here.”
2018-12-12 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Ezra Klein and Kara Swisher on the future of journalism · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, okay, okay. Come on this week. Come on. I'd like to line up her and Preet Barrow and just hit them until they tell me everything. Anyway, so we're going to talk about the future of Jerusalem. Ezra Klein is my friend and he is my colleague at Vox Media. We are now, what are we? Partners. Partners. We are now partners. We're doing a lot more stuff together. Ezra just moved to the Bay Area. And so let's give him a round of applause for being here. I have just moved halftime, not halftime, a third of the time to DC because my kids are there. So we sort of have traded places a little bit, but I'm here a lot also. And I want to sort of get started. I wanted you to talk a little bit about why you moved here. What was the thinking? You've gotten sort of infected by the tech bug in a lot of ways. Not the bad one. But talk a little bit why you're here and what you're thinking about. And then we're going to get into talking about journalism and other topics.”
2018-12-12 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Ezra Klein and Kara Swisher on the future of journalism · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Oh, goodness sake, the future of journalism. That is true about Sally Gates. I have a huge man crush on her. And then she texts me and I'm like, oh, Sally Gates, every time it happens. And I have to say, no, I can't have dinner with you, Sally, next week. Next time I'm in DC. Anyway, it was such a good week, too. Think about it. I mean, I get the whole lowdown on Michael Cohen. I was going to get taken.”
2018-12-12 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Ezra Klein and Kara Swisher on the future of journalism · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So tonight's conversation is about the future of journalism. A lot has changed in the field of journalism over the last 10 to 15 years, and they're going to talk a little bit about what has changed, what's happening now, and their perspective on the future. And these are two people who are so qualified to talk about this very topic, probably two of the most qualified people in the country. So we're honored to have them here at the corner of 16th and fucking Valencia in San Francisco at my small business. Real quick, the goal of Manny's is to create a central place for people to become better informed and more involved citizens. That's what this is about. We have events every night this week, next week, and the week before ours. And without further ado, Kara Swisher and Ezra Klein.”
2018-12-12 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Ezra Klein and Kara Swisher on the future of journalism · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Hi, I'm Kara Swisher, editor at large of Recode. You may know me as a professional goat herder, but in my spare time I talk tech and you're listening to Recode Decode from the Vox Media Podcast Network. Today we're going to share a really fun conversation I had with Ezra Klein, the founder and editor at large of Vox.com. And you'll understand the goat reference soon enough. We spoke in front of a live audience at Manny's in San Francisco about a wide range of things, including the future of journalism, which is we'll see where that's going. It was a really great conversation and a little preview of what it would be like to work with Ezra when Recode partners with Vox in the near future. Take a listen.”
2018-12-12 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Ezra Klein and Kara Swisher on the future of journalism · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT