Ezra Klein is a journalist, blogger, and political commentator, he works as editor-at-large of Vox.
Democrats made a strong case against Donald Trump. Republicans are being punished for supporting it. Vox’s Zack Beauchamp explains.
Transcript at vox.com/todayexplained.
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Vox’s Andrew Prokop previews the historic second impeachment trial of former President Donald Trump. Law professor Alan Rozenshtein explains what the Justice Department can and cannot do to prosecute insurrectionists.
Transcript at vox.com/todayexplained.
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Impeachment won’t stop the United States’ slide towards authoritarianism. Voter reform might.
Transcript at vox.com/todayexplained.
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You often hear that eating animals is natural. And it is. But not the way we do it.
The industrial animal agriculture system is a technological marvel. It relies on engineering broiler chickens that grow almost seven times as quickly as they would naturally, and that could never survive in the wild. It relies on pumping a majority of all the antibiotics used in the United States into farm animals to stop the die-offs that overcrowding would otherwise cause. A list like this could go on endlessly, but the point is simple: Industrial animal agriculture is not a natural food system. It is a triumph of engineering.
But though we live in a moment when technology has made animal cruelty possible on a scale never imagined in human history, we also live in a moment when technology may be about to make animal cruelty unnecessary. And nothing changes a society’s values as quickly as innovations that make a new moral system easy and cheap to adopt. And that’s what this podcast is about.
Bruce Friedrich is the head of the Good Food Institute, which invests, connects, advises, and advocates for the plant and cell-based meat industries. That work puts him at the hot center of one of the most exciting and important technological stories of our age: the possible replacement of a cruel, environmentally unsustainable form of food production with a system that’s better for the planet, better for animals, and better for our health.
I talk a lot about animal suffering issues on this podcast, and I do so because they’re important. We’re causing a lot of suffering right now. But I don’t believe that it’ll be a change in morality or ideology that transforms our system. I think it’ll be a change in technology, and Friedrich knows better than just about anyone else alive how fast that technology is becoming a reality. In a rare change of pace for the Ezra Klein Show, this conversation will leave you, dare I say it, optimistic.
Book Recommendations:
Why We Love Dogs, Eat Pigs, and Wear Cows: An Introduction to Carnism by Melanie Joy
Clean Meat: How Growing Meat Without Animals Will Revolutionize Dinner and the World by Paul Shapiro
Eating Animals by Jonathan Safran Foer
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Creator Details
Birthdate
May 9th, 1984
Location
DC, USA
Episode Count
475
Podcast Count
36
Total Airtime
3 weeks, 4 days
PCID
039889