#208: Ezra Klein -- From College Blogger to Political Powerhouse

50 years from now, 100 years from now, when it's really easy to not eat factory farm meat because there's all this lab-grown meat and really tasty synthetic meat, people will look back on the way we treated animals in this era and judge us very, very harshly ... I think we are going to look very bad because, you know, we're torturing a lot of sentient beings constantly.

If I could change anything [about] the way people engage with politics... I wish people thought less about the president and more about Congress and less about national politics and more about state & local politics.

There are different ways you can frame the story of your life. One of them is through the things you achieved. It often feels to me that the truer one for me, or at least an as true one, is through the things that I wanted and didn't get that turned out to be extreme blessings.

The thing people really underestimate and really underinvest in is city and state politics. Tremendous amounts of change can happen there. Tremendously important things can begin there. And there is a lot less polarization, a lot less opportunity to access your legislators or the other relevant decision makers, and a lot of opportunity then for things to spread.

If everybody just ate beef—cut out eggs, cut out poultry, cut out fish, cut out all the rest of it—if everybody just ate beef, you would reduce the number of animals killed for human consumption by something in the order of 95-98%.

One of the criticisms I have of journalism is that we are too focused... on journalism as a universally applicable skillset/toolset. Now it is that, but because we have so much confidence in it, we do not demand enough subject-issue knowledge out of journalists.

People over-invest in the headline issues. They are unlikely to change minds on issues where everybody already has a very intense position. Where there is a lot of room in politics to change things is to raise the salience of issues that people do not currently care a lot about.

Going back to this idea of how do you absorb information, I'm good at absorbing it by reading, but the real way I come up with ideas is by talking about or writing about... the inputs.

A core idea of Vox and a core idea of mine in how I approach journalism is that the product is the reporter's body of knowledge, not primarily the new piece of information.

We have an internal document at Vox called 'The Vox Voice' about who are we supposed to be to the audience. And one of the premises here is that if we have taken something important and made it uninteresting, it is always our fault, and it is never there's.

You know what? Writing half-informed comments about politics on Facebook, that is a legitimate form of engagement in a way that you learn about political life.

Money in politics is toxic and it is poisonous ... It erodes trust in the system ... It is not impossible to bribe your way into some kind of political outcome, but it is quite difficult.