The Ezra Klein Show

From 2012 to 2015, Evelyn Farkas served as Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for Russia, Ukraine, and Eurasia, where she was responsible for policy toward Russia, the Black Sea, the Balkans, and Caucasus regions and conventional arms control.Farkas is now a senior fellow at the Atlantic Council, and I asked her on the show to explain two of the issues that worry me most right now: the horror that has befallen Syria, and the risky belligerence that has overtaken Russia. If this sounds like a tough episode to you, give it a chance. This conversation doesn’t presuppose deep — or really any — knowledge of either conflict. Farkas is clear, thoughtful, and insightful, and at a moment when Syria is destabilizing Europe and Russia is destabilizing the United States, it’s more than worth taking the time to dig into both.Along the way, we talk about Farkas’s time in Bosnia, her frustrations with President Obama’s hands-off approach to the Syria conflict, why she’s sick of “slippery slope” arguments in foreign polic

Columbia law professor Tim Wu makes me feel boring and underaccomplished. He’s been a Supreme Court clerk, a Silicon Valley startup employee, a bestselling author, and a star academic. He coined the term "network neutrality," wrote the superb book The Master Switch, and was dubbed "Genius Wu" by Richard Posner — a man many consider to be our smartest living judge. And this is to say nothing of Wu's award-winning side-gig as a — yes — travel writer.Anyway, screw that guy. Wu's new book is The Attention Merchants, and it's a history of how the advertising business has shaped the information we consume, the products we crave, and the way we think. We talk about that book, but we also talk about Wu's approach to life. He explains why his great strength is his ability to ignore inconsistency, how Larry Lessig shaped his career and his marriage, why working in Silicon Valley left him skeptical of markets, and Marshall McLuhan and Timothy Leary’s advertising jingle for acid (really).We also go deep into antitrust la

Ta-Nehisi Coates is an author at the Atlantic. His book, Between the World and Me, won the National Book Award, and was spoofed on SNL. He's writing the (awesome) Black Panther series for Marvel. He's a certified MacArthur Genius. And he just released a blockbuster story based on hours of interviews with President Obama about the role race played in Obama's upbringing, his presidency, and the 2016 campaign.Coates is also one of my favorite people to talk to, and I think this conversation shows why.The first half of our conversation is political: it's about Coates's conversations with Obama, his impressions of the president, his perspective on American politics, the way his atheism informs his worldview, why he thinks a tragic outlook is important for finding the truth but — at least for nonwhite politicians — a hindrance for winning political power. The second half is much more personal: it's about his frustrations as a writer, his discomfort with the way "Between the World and Me" was adopted by white audien

Patrick Collison is the 28-year-old CEO of Stripe, the online payments company that was just valued at $9 billion.Haven't heard of Stripe? You've probably used it. Last year, 40 percent of people who bought something online used Stripe's payment systems. The company has become an integral part of the internet's financial plumbing. And Collison has become one of Silicon Valley's leading lights — he made the cover of Forbes last year, where one venture capitalist described him as "the LeBron James of entrepreneurs."Collison is also one of the few people I've met who is a genuine polymath. He seems to know everything about everything, and his recall — particularly his ability to live-footnote his own comments — is something to behold. We talk about how he and his brother conceived of, and launched, Stripe, and then we go much deeper. Among the topics we discussed: -Why there was a market opportunity for Stripe in a world that had PayPal-Why people are often wrong when they look at a market and think an incumbent

José Andrés isn't just a chef. He's a force. All that talk of how DC is now a hot dining scene? Andrés deserves more than a bit of the credit. He's popularized Spanish tapas through Jaleo, brought El Bulli-style molecular gastronomy to America through MiniBar, and racked up some Michelin stars and James Beard awards along the way.Andrés has hosted television shows, taught courses on the science of cooking at Harvard, extended his restaurant empire to Las Vegas and South Beach, set up a nonprofit in Haiti, and launched a fast-casual chain focused on vegetables. He's been named "Man of the Year" by GQ and one of the world's 100 most influential people by Time. I've known Andrés for a couple of years, and I've never met a better storyteller, or seen anyone who thinks harder about the component parts of creativity.  We talk about that, as well as:-What Andrés learned from his father-Why the most important job when making paella is tending the fire-Why cooking at home is important but not essential-What he makes o

There are few episodes of this show that people loved as much as my conversation with Heather McGhee, president of the think tank Demos. Our first discussion focused on race, class, populism, and the sometimes toxic ways the three interact. It's a topic I wanted to revisit in the aftermath of Trump's election, and so I asked Heather back to the show. After this conversation, I'm very, very glad I did. Among other things, we discussed:-The three factors that explain the election results-Why race is a more complex force in politics than either liberals or conservatives assume-The dangers of Democrats convincing themselves that populism and racial justice are either/or-Her experience talking with a white man who realized he was prejudiced, and asked her help in changing-Why Clinton lost states Obama won-Why Clinton didn't outperform Obama among nonwhite voters-Why the core of modern racism is seeing some races as made of individuals and others as collectives-Whether the very language around race and racism makes

Why did Hillary Clinton lose the election? Why did Donald Trump win it? And why was the polling so completely wrong?No one digs deeper into the demographics, polls, and trends of modern American politics than the Atlantic's Ron Brownstein. Though he didn't predict Trump's win, his pre-election writing explained exactly how it could — and eventually did — happen. And it's a more complicated story than you've heard.In the week since the election, much has been made of Trump's strength among white working class voters — and properly so, as they were core to his victory. But the white working class wasn't the primary cause of Clinton's loss. Her real problem were groups that didn't turn out for her in the numbers her campaign expected — college-educated whites, African-Americans, and millennials. And that suggests a very different future for the Democrats. In this conversation, Brownstein goes through the math of the election in detail. We also talk about:-What Clinton’s campaign assumed, wrongly, about winning t

We’re bringing the Ezra Klein Show to you a little early this week because, well, there's an election coming in a few days. And we wanted to talk about it. The 2016 election is the product of profound failures on the part of different institutions in American life: the Republican Party, the media, the financial system. And few have tracked those failures as clearly, or closely, as David Frum.Frum is Canadian by birth — a perspective, he says, that helps him see American politics as the product of institutions, rather than just personalities. Since moving to the US in the 80s and finding himself inspired by Ronald Reagan, he's chronicled and commentated on conservatism in America. His book, Dead Right, is one of the key documents for understanding the Republican Party of the 1990s. He then did a stint as speechwriter in George W. Bush's White House, where he wrote the famous "Axis of Evil" line in Bush's 2002 State of the Union. More recently, he's written for the Atlantic, where he's been unsparing — and larg

To understand the 2012 election, you had to ask a political scientist. To understand the 2016 election, you need to call a linguist.At least, I did. Deborah Tannen is a Georgetown University linguist who's done pioneering work in how men and women's communication styles differ. Her book You Just Don't Understand: Women and Men in Conversation, was on the New York Times best seller list for nearly four years, including eight months as number one. But I got to know her earlier this year, as part of a reporting project to understand Hillary Clinton's leadership style, and the ways in which it's lost — and even a liability — on the campaign trail.Tannen's work has helped me understand not just Clinton and Trump's communication styles, but my own — her analysis of how men and women communication at home, and in the workplace, is useful no matter who you are. This episode, more than any other I've done, is full of practical insight into situations we all face daily. Among our topics:-How she became a linguist-Why e

This week’s guest is a Nobel Prize winner. We like to sprinkle those in every so often. Joseph Stiglitz revolutionized how economists understood market failures (hence that prize), served as chief economist at The World Bank, led the Council of Economic Advisers under Bill Clinton, has written more great books and articles than I can count, and now leads The Roosevelt Institute. He's a pretty smart guy. Markets, Stiglitz argues, are man-made, and we need to make them a lot better. We often treat markets as natural phenomena, but they have rules, their rules create some winners and some losers, and, crucially, those rules can be changed. How to change those rules, and which rules to change, is where Stiglitz's recent work has focused — work that is known to have caught the eye of Hillary Clinton — and we talk about it at length, as well as:-Why he became an economist-The nature of the work that won him the Nobel prize-His basic explanation of “information asymmetry,” the term for which he’s probably most famou

The overwhelming focus of this election has been Donald Trump — the things he does, says, tweets. But the next president is likely to be Hillary Clinton. And we've put a lot less effort into understanding her lengthy, detailed agenda for the country.So I sat down with one of my favorite journalists, The Huffington Post’s Jonathan Cohn, who has been doing that work, to talk through what Clinton's platform actually says, and what it all adds up to. We also discussed:-How the stereotype of her has gone from "radical liberal feminist" to "sell-out conservative Democrat," and what both miss-How childcare, work-life balance issues, and parental leave define Clinton's platform-How racial dynamics have changed since Clinton’s emergence as a national public figure in the 90s-The people who surround Clinton and shape her policy platforms-Jon’s evaluation of how Obamacare’s doing and what about it still needs work-The way geography’s complicating the way Obamacare works by creating so many healthcare marketplaces-Why Ob

Francis Fukuyama is a political scientist, a public intellectual, and progenitor of the famed "End of History" thesis. But his recent work is his most important yet. Over two volumes, he's been studying how societies become safe, pluralistic liberal democracies — and then how those advanced democracies descend, and decay, into chaos.Sound familiar?This is a scary conversation that comes at just the right time. We discussed:-How American became a “vetocracy”-Why the representative democracy we have has calcified-Why the internet may be overwhelming our ability for government agencies to deal efficiently with public comment-What he thinks is stoking Trump supporters in the way we talk about diversity and pluralism-Why conversations about class are important-What he thinks about different models of government around the world, especially Denmark’s-How we overcompensate for what we’ve learned through past wars-How polarization is disrupting the way the public views government agencies like the Fed and NOAA-What h

A number of you have asked that we turn the tables and have someone interview me for the show. So when Tyler Cowen — economist at George Mason University, blogger at Marginal Revolution, and generalized genius — invited me on his podcast Conversations with Tyler, I said yes, and asked if we could post the discussion here, too. Tyler — whose podcast you should listen to — asks some of the hardest, strangest, most provocative questions of anyone I know, and so this was a lot of fun. Among the topics we discussed:-What we do now that we will reflect on as kind of crazy or unethical in the next few decades-How my video team at Vox has taught me to think about visual stories-The value of making content that’s made to be re-discovered-Why identity as a driver of virality is important to the current online media landscape-The ethics of eating meat, and why I think those attitudes will change fast in the coming decades-My thoughts on how CEOs work and how the job of being a CEO has become its own profession-What I th

This election season has left pretty much everything I thought I knew about politics in doubt. Both parties nominated unpopular candidates, even when they had popular alternatives. One party's nominee isn't really running any ads, and has barely bothered to build a field operation. The same party's nominee says things on a regular basis that would've been — or would've been thought to be — disqualifying in any other year. So it's been weird.One of the best chroniclers of that weirdness has been the Atlantic's Molly Ball. In the latest edition of the magazine, she has a fantastic piece looking at whether Trump's candidacy is proving that most of what's done by campaigns — the ads, the microtargeting, the message-crafting, etc — is just a waste of money. We talk about that, as well as:-Whether there's actually a floor in American politics — if even Trump is remaining competitive, does that mean basically anyone can get 45 percent of the vote?-How Hillary Clinton’s experience within the political system has come

This week, I've turned over the mic to The Weeds' Sarah Kliff. She went to Capitol Hill to interview HHS Secretary Sylvia Burwell about all things healthcare. They talked about how to pay doctors to provide better care, the current state of the Obamacare marketplaces, and what she's learned about management running the federal government's largest agency. I hope you enjoy this, and I'll be back next week! Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

There are a couple of ideas that drive how I see policy and politics. One of them is that most of what drives health outcomes has nothing to do with what happens in doctor's offices. Another is that we overestimate the importance of the president national politics and underestimate the important of city officials and local politics.Dr. Leana Wen — and this episode — stands at the intersection of those two ideas.Wen is the Baltimore City Health Commissioner — a job she got when she was only 31, after a stint as an ER doctor, and a background as a Rhodes Scholar and medical activist. Her work in Baltimore coincided with the aftermath of Freddy Gray's killing, a brutal opioid epidemic, and a renewed focus on urban health disparities (there are counties in Baltimore that have higher infant mortality than the West Bank).In this conversation, we talk about all that and more. Here's some of the more:-Why her family moved to Utah after leaving China after the Tiananmen Square protests-Whether America's culture of sha

I’ve been reading sociologist Arlie Hochschild’s writing for about a decade now. Her immersive projects have revolutionized how we understand labor, gender equity, and work-life balance. But her latest book, Strangers In Their Own Land: Anger and Mourning on the American Right, is something new: she spent five years among tea party supporters in Louisiana, trying to bridge the deepest divide in American politics. It was, she says, an effort to scale the "empathy wall," to create an understanding of how politics feels to people whose experiences felt alien to her. In this conversation, we discuss:-How she approaches immersive sociology-The kinds of questions she asks people in order to get them to open up about their political feelings-What it takes to “turn off your alarm system” when you encounter oppositional ideas-What she describes as the “deep story” that explains how conservative Americans, particularly older white men, feel increasingly looked down on-Why she feels empathy on the part of people who dis

If you came by the Vox office, you would find it oddly quiet. That's not because we don't like each other, or because we're not social, or because we don't have anything to say. It's because almost all our communication happens silently, digitally, in Slack.Slack is Stewart Butterfield's creation, and it's the fastest-growing piece on enterprise software in history. But here's the kicker: he didn't mean to create it, just like he didn't mean to create Flickr before it. In both cases, Butterfield was trying to create a new kind of game: immersive, endless, and focused on experiences rather than victories. The story of Butterfield's pivots from the game to Flickr and Slack have become Silicon Valley lore. But in this conversation, we go deep into the part that's always fascinated me: the game Butterfield wanted to create, the reasons he thinks gaming is so important, and the ways in which his philosophy background informs his current work. We also talk a lot about the nature of status, identity, and communicati

W. Kamau Bell is a comedian and a writer. But you probably know him from one of his podcasts(Denzel Washington Is The Greatest Actor Of All Time Period and Politically Re-Active) or his CNN show The United Shades of America.In this conversation, Bell and I go wide. We begin with an inquiry into the nature of health food, transition into a discussion of how future historians will view our present (and, particularly, a discussion of which stories we're ignoring that they'll see as central), move into the lessons Bell has learned from parenthood and fame, dig into his decision to move to Northern California from New York, examine his path to comedy, talk through the opportunities presented by podcasting, and more. There's also a damn good Eddie Murphy story in here.Here's how good this conversation is: I spoke with Bell just a few days after getting my wisdom teeth out, and I still had a great time. You will too. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Malcolm Gladwell needs no introduction (though if you didn't know the famed author has launched a podcast, you should — it's called Revisionist History, and it's great.).Gladwell's work has become so iconic, so known, that it's become easy to take it for granted. But Gladwell is perhaps the greatest contrarian journalist of his generation — he looks at things you've seen before, comes to conclusions that are often the opposite of the conventional wisdom, and then leaves you wondering how you could ever have missed what he saw. To see something new in something old is a talent, it's a process, and it's what we discuss, in a dozen different ways, in this episode. Among the topics we tackle:-How Gladwell got started at the Washington Post after being fired from another job for waking up late-Gladwell’s high school zine based on personal attacks and Bill Buckley-How Canadians are disinclined to escalate conflicts-The value and nature of boredom in childhood-How people reflexively pile on to convenient narratives