Mixed Signals: Ezra Klein on Trump, Sanity, and Podcasting

Ben Smith
I listen to your podcast so much that it’s weird to have you in my podcast. It’s disorienting.

Ezra Klein:
It’s a blurring of the lines.

Max Tani:
Welcome to Mixed Signals from Semafor Media where we are tracking the wild changes in this media age. I’m Max Tani, media editor at Semafor. With me as always is our editor-in-chief Ben Smith.

Ben Smith:
Good to be here, Max.

Max Tani:
This week on the show we are sitting down with another podcaster, and that podcaster is New York Times columnist and host, Ezra Klein, who has emerged as one of the great stars of this era of media. We’ll talk to him about making space for intelligent conversation in a kind of dumb era, his role in democratic politics today, and we’ll see if we can get him to spill about his post-election meeting with Kamala Harris.

Ben Smith:
Yeah, I think Ezra, he’s probably the biggest star of the New York Times right now. Pretty extraordinary moment he’s having.

Max Tani:
He’s eclipsed what used to be you, Ben. You were the biggest star of New York Times.

Ben Smith:
I think I had to leave because I was not going to win that competition.

Max Tani:
Well, we’ll dig into all of that right after the break. Ben, one of the really exciting things and also, conversely, one of the challenges of being someone who writes about the media and reports on the media is that it’s kind of a lot harder to know who is important these days. If you had my job 20 years ago, you would have been like, well, the most important person in media is whoever owns Paramount or-

Ben Smith:
The anchor of the Evening News.

Max Tani:
The anchor of the Evening News, exactly, or the owner of Conde Nast. Those jobs are obviously still very important, but are those media outlets or are those places reaching as many people as some random podcaster that nobody has ever heard of, except 20 million people? It’s actually kind of hard to say. That’s one of the things to me has made Ezra Klein, particularly in the last year, a really interesting and fascinating figure. It really seems like, Ezra, who obviously was quite notable beforehand, has really emerged to the point that my mom is sending me his podcast, asking me if we listened to him. There’s articles online about people who think he’s really attractive, which is strange when you think that this guy is a guy who mostly writes about housing policy. It is a very interesting phenomenon.

Ben Smith:
Yeah, I know it’s true. I mean, I think in a moment when there are sort of a more dispersed media, fewer really big media stars, I mean, I think a lot of our friends and family will be very excited that we’re talking to Ezra today. It’s been really kind of amazing to watch his rise, because he’s a little younger than me, but he’s also precocious. We started blogging around the same time, he started in ’03, I started in ’04, and I’d always been eyeing him, I suppose, with some amount of jealousy.
He was an independent progressive blogger, and then at The American Prospect when blogs were hot and everybody needed a blogger, the Washington Post hired him, I think not even fully understanding what he was doing, but he built this thing, Wonk Blog there. That was the most interesting thing happening in the Washington Post and was a real pillar of the progressive side of the internet.
He then jumped to found Vox in 2014, built a media company there, but also started his own show and I think made his way out of management and back into being just a thoughtful, influential voice on the left side of the spectrum, but also a really deep internal critic of the Democratic Party who I suppose maybe the peak of his influence was he was probably the most important early voice to say that the Democrats had to ditch Joe Biden. It was this very memorable thing in the spring of last year saying, think about what it’s going to look like when Trump is elected and we all look at the leaked WhatsApp messages from Biden’s staff saying they knew. I think we’re actually probably likely to see some of that stuff.

Max Tani:
We’re about to see some of those, it seems like.

Ben Smith:
In Jake Tapper and Alex Thompson’s book, but it really was pretty prescient. Anyway, now he’s got a huge book out. I was on the Acela the other day, I saw two copies of Abundance by Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson.

Max Tani:
That’s the target audience.

Ben Smith:
Very target audience. It was a book about how the Democratic Party needs to totally change the way it thinks about the world. I think one of the things that I’m most interested in talking about is whether there really is space for that kind of thoughtful, kind of elite policy discussion in good faith across party lines in this moment that is dominated by insane memes and profound polarization.

Max Tani:
Well, Ezra is actually waiting for us, why don’t we bring him in?

Ben Smith:
Thank you for joining us, Ezra.

Ezra Klein:
Of course.

Ben Smith:
I’ve been hearing a lot of you because along with being a super fan of your podcast, I have been hearing you on all my other favorite podcasts, like The Rest is Politics the other day, so your voice is very much in my head, and it occurred to me that, because I had this experience that when you’re on a media tour and you’re talking to all these different outlets, you sort of learn more about media being subject of it than almost in any other setting. I’m curious what you’ve learned on your book tour actually and just being in the middle of this very strange media moment?

Ezra Klein:
I guess the big thing that I have come to realize is that podcasts are not that good at selling books, and the reason I think it is, compared to TV where I think you see a much stronger bump when you do it, which surprised me, but is it podcasts act much more as a substitute for the book? If you’re sitting there and you’re chatting with Lex Fridman for four hours, or The Rest is Politics guys for over an hour, do people leave that and think, I need to spend another 300 pages with you, or do they leave it and think, yeah, I got it, I see what you’re about?

Ben Smith:
I have great news for you, Ezra, because I feel like the substance and the meat of Abundance have been very widely explored, and also it’s a great read and people should purchase it, so we will not bother you with burning through the substance of your book here, and in fact would like to talk to you about other things.

Ezra Klein:
Wonderful, although I’m always happy to talk about Abundance.

Ben Smith:
Please go prove us we’re wrong here. We’re not going to talk about Abundance, the only way to find out about it is to purchase it.

Ezra Klein:
Thank you for your service, Ben.

Max Tani:
That is interesting though, I mean, do you think that that’s going to be more of a challenge in the future as TV viewership continues to decline and more people are engaging with podcasts? That it will be actually harder to sell non-fiction books in this way? That’s actually interesting.

Ezra Klein:
Well, I’d first say I’m not a hundred percent sure I’m right about it, it’s my perception of it, and maybe it’s just that when TV airs, people either see it at that moment or they don’t, so the effect on your sales is immediately visible, whereas the podcast is an ambient field of sales that are higher for a period of time.

Ben Smith:
I had a very similar experience in my book tour, and someone, well, okay, it was Michael Wolfe, afterward I said basically that, “Wow, I did all this selling of books on podcasts, I’m not sure it really moved the needle.” He said, “Oh, you’re judging it by the wrong metric. The metric isn’t book sales, it’s attention.”

Ezra Klein:
Yes, that I agree with, and my co-author Derek Thompson says, in some ways the product of the book is the conversation, and what you’re trying to do in podcast world is create conversation and create movement in conversation.

Ben Smith:
One of the things that I have sort of admired about you through the years was how intentional you’ve been about different forms of media, and I definitely went down with the Good Ship Twitter, but you had sort of gotten off it as it got, I don’t know, worse at doing what we used to like, that it did, which was have really open conversations. I think I also liked that it was a distribution mechanism for scoops. You wrote at one point that Twitter made you dislike people who you like, and that podcasts made you like people who you had previously disliked. I’m curious about how you think these different forms of mediums have shaped the way we argue and think about ideas?

Ezra Klein:
Oh, that’s a good and a big question. I think that Twitter and the form of compressed text-based engagement oriented commentary that Twitter and all of its clones, Bluesky, Threads do is somehow bad, to just be really blunt about it.

Ben Smith:
Yeah.

Ezra Klein:
I think one way you know it is, does anybody think politics is better now than before it? I hear, and you know this Ben, I hear people all the time say, well, I couldn’t do my job without Twitter. I’m like, well, somebody did your exact job before Twitter, and nor can we say that people are macro level more informed than they were before Twitter. This is kind of why I haven’t made the jump to Bluesky either or Threads or anything. It’s not that there isn’t good to them, it’s that somehow the net effect seems negative. The Bluesky problem I think is an echo chamber problem. It’s a factional Twitter, which I think that can be really, really bad for the way you think. X is run by Elon Musk, which I really think liberals in general need to think pretty hard about what it means to be there.
America has this idea about TikTok, which I think is more or less a reasonable idea, which is, do you want to give such unbelievably critical attentional infrastructure to a foreign power, to have it under, roughly we believe, the control of a foreign power who you could end up in a highly antagonistic relationship with, or they just might want to shape what you’re doing in ways that are bad for you quietly along the way. The question that China poses for TikTok for America, Elon Musk poses in a much worse way, I think, for liberals. I mean, this is a guy who has made himself the biggest voice on it, who shapes its policies and who is a hundred percent all in on the future of civilization being about how many elections Republicans win, including those being special Supreme Court elections in the state of Wisconsin.
Whenever you’re adding value to that platform, the question is, at what point does Musk weaponize that value against you? I understand why people are there, and every so often I’ll come back for two or three weeks, but I think it’s a big problem in vulnerability that seems completely obviously likely to blow up in love’s space and possibly also in the rights space because I don’t think that getting a dominance of a platform like that is going to be good for them, either it’s going to end up with them believing a lot of things that are not good for them to believe and are not true. I don’t know, as you know, my feelings about this whole area are tricky.

Ben Smith:
It’s not just liberals, it’s people interested in honest fact-based arguments.

Ezra Klein:
Yeah, people who believe in liberal democracy, is the way I would actually put it.

Ben Smith:
Small L. Small L liberalism in a way.

Max Tani:
When you’ve come back to Twitter though for a few weeks at a time, I’m curious why you’ve made that decision, and also I’m curious what the impact of that has been? Have you found that it’s shaped the conversation in ways that you were hoping to shape it, or did you just kind of leave afterwards because it wasn’t doing that?

Ezra Klein:
When I’ve come back, I’ve come back for compressed periods where I was trying to do a very particular thing or trying to be part of a very particular conversation that I felt was moving faster than I could move in podcasts and columns. The period of time where the kind of clay around whether or not Joe Biden was going to run again, got really soft, but that was moving faster than I could move at column speed.
There was a period sort of right after the election where part of this was just emotional on my part. I had a lot to say, I was upset about how that had gone, and some of the factional fighting about what lessons should be taken. I sort of went there to do, but I left and stopped doing that pretty quickly. I have a view for myself and I’m only going to speak for myself, that you should choose which platforms you’re going to put the time in to be really good at.
I don’t really do television anymore, not because I don’t think it’s good to do television, it’s just that I do not have the time to invest in doing television well in the way I did at another point in my career. I don’t think it’s good for me personally to be on Twitter, Bluesky all the time, I think it makes me more irritable, I think it makes me more consensus oriented, I think it kind of messes with the way I think, but I put a lot of time into podcasting my own and doing other people’s. Right? I have a much lower bar for doing another podcast than I do for doing television.

Ben Smith:
Has it occurred to you that these things we call podcasts, particularly the New York Times ones, which are so beautifully filmed, are going to stealthily actually become television again?

Ezra Klein:
It has occurred to me, yes, as I’ve been moving into the YouTube world, it has definitely occurred to me, as we are doing this one on video.

Ben Smith:
I mean, maybe they’ll fix TV or bring back the Bill Buckley debates, Gore Vidal era of TV.

Ezra Klein:
Everything starts good and ends bad, so at some point it’s going to... Look, I think cable news, as you know Ben, I’m a big Marshall McLuhan and an Neil Postman fan, so I try to be very attentive to the structures of the mediums, and podcasting both the good and the bad of it is it’s very loose and free flowing. The problem for me with cable news is the segment structure of cable news. I was a guest host for Rachel Maddow, for Lawrence O’Donnell, for all these folks for a period of time, and it always really frustrated me that I couldn’t just say, well, today the whole show is going to be on X.

Ben Smith:
Right.

Ezra Klein:
I just think X is so important, we’re going to do one conversation across the entire thing. It’s very hard to do much in the four to eight minute interview format, I think. There are people who are really good at it. I think my friend Chris Hayes does really great work on television, but I think the good thing about podcasting is, it’s a little bit formless, it encompasses everything from the four-hour Lex Fridman show to the kind of riotous multi hour five person all in panel, to my more structured interviews, to The Daily’s much more highly produced project, to search engines, kind od inquiries. It doesn’t have nearly as much form imposed on it because it doesn’t have length requirements the way it is able to do, ad breaks is different.
I mean, so much of the form of television is imposed by the scarcity of air wave or cable space, and from the business structure and the way that ads are sold and packaged and so on. There’s still more space for that to be weird in podcasts. I do worry that going to video is going to homogenize that every time we professionalize anything and make it a bigger and better business. I also worry the ability to do viral clips, which are so great for getting things seen and getting them known, it allows podcasting to go viral in a way it couldn’t, but it also makes podcasting a lot less safe for people to be open in than it was before.

Ben Smith:
To do a very podcasty thing, because this is really half-baked, somewhere in what you just said, I sort of see a kind of scarcity abundance thing happening. Abundance isn’t about media and it doesn’t apply in totally obvious ways to media, but there is something about media. It’s actually gotten incredibly cheap, essentially, which it does apply, it’s become incredibly cheap to produce media. You don’t need a broadcast tower or printing press, and so it has changed the nature of the thing, and that’s what you’re talking about with podcasts, because the cost of production have gotten so low. I can’t take that any further, but I am curious if you’ve thought how the scarcity sort of abundance framework applies to media?

Ezra Klein:
I’ll say two things. One, abundance of the book itself is not about the idea that things can be limitless, it’s the idea that there are trade-offs, right? You want to make some things very abundant, and that means making trade-offs in how you design the things. I think the canonical way of saying this about media is that what has become abundant is media and information, and what becomes scarce is attention. What I think is strange about that, which is obviously true on some level, is that people will clearly pay attention to these three, four-hour podcasts. My show is routinely an hour and a half and people pay it very close attention. I think closer attention they pay to anything else that I do.
At this exact time that I think we’ve all bought into an argument about the media that the attentional pipe has narrowed very, very sharply because now there’s so much coming at you. There’s also been this flight to forms of media that require or reward extremely long periods of attention. I mean, I was listening this morning to a Dwarkesh Patel podcast with two guys trying to mechanize all jobs, it’s over three hours. I do think there’s something interesting about that. There is a kind of, podcasting is a counter-reaction, clearly to me, to how packaged and tight and professionalized and efficient everything else became in the era of viral contextless social media content.

Ben Smith:
It gives a bit of a lie to the kids these days, stuff about attention spans too.

Ezra Klein:
Maybe. Maybe, maybe.

Ben Smith:
We’ll see.

Ezra Klein:
I mean, it’s a different form of attention though, because I do think podcasting is typically the second thing people are doing.

Ben Smith:
Right.

Max Tani:
Yeah.

Ben Smith:
A lot of laundry to fold.

Ezra Klein:
Yeah, there’s a lot of laundry to fold, you’re at work. There’s something about the ability to dip in and out attentionally. I think that something like Rogan is not working in the same way that something like The Daily is working. The Daily, the expectation I think is you’re listening the whole time. Rogan, it’s more like old drive-time radio where you’re sort of tuning in and out of something. I think those are different. I am very worried about people’s attention.

Ben Smith:
Well, we hope you’re listening closely. Just to ask a final media question, I suppose, the editor of your old publication, The American Prospect just wrote a piece, Robert Kuttner just wrote a piece titled, Is the Press Next? Trump went after law firms, went after universities, in both cases really in a fairly thoughtful way, I think, going after their income, going after their businesses. I would say I’ve been surprised by how, as Kuttner writes, by how little he’s gone after the press. It’s been kind of trivial nonsense, sparring. Do you expect that to change?

Ezra Klein:
I wouldn’t be surprised if it changed. The question with Trump is always, if he’s able to find the point of leverage, and so what he’s able to figure out with the universities is that the federal money was huge point of leverage. The law firms, again, somewhat similar. Tariffs are a point of leverage he has over every country in the world. Doge was identifying funding flows and other things, or points of leverage over the federal bureaucracy and then being able to use, I would say, extra legal firing, but nevertheless to execute that leverage.
I think the way to think about them going after the press, at least in the ways that they would do so that are legal, we’re not even a hundred days into this administration, things could get much darker than they currently are, but in terms of the kinds of things we’ve seen before, that would be analogous to a lot of what he’s done, it would require him to identify the point of leverage he has on the press, and I think there could be a couple there. Early, there were defamation lawsuits, that was more during the end of the campaign, but bizarrely like a defamation lawsuit against the Des Moines Register because they didn’t like Ann Selzer’s poll, right? Didn’t they do that?

Max Tani:
Yeah.

Ezra Klein:
I don’t think defamation lawsuits are that good of an angle for them because they just probably can’t win that many, but they could tie a lot of media organizations, particularly smaller ones up in lawsuits that they don’t really have the money to fight, so I wouldn’t be shocked to see something like that happen. Access is obviously a point of leverage they have over the press. They could squeeze out your reporters, our reporters, et cetera, and access is something you only get if they could control it. The question there, of course, is partially, if you can control it. I mean, Jeffrey Goldberg was in Waltz’s phone. That’s how that happened.

Max Tani:
Yeah. Also, Trump is his own worst enemy when it comes to access stuff because obviously he hates the access, but also loves to give access.

Ezra Klein:
I think the press for them has always been. If you think about what he does from the sort of WWE perspective, which many people do, and I’ve always said it’s actually a useful perspective on him, you need your foil. What Steve Bannon once said, the Democrats don’t matter, the media is the opposition party. I think they more or less believe that. The fact that they’ll so often go into unfriendly media environments, JD Vance will go on the Sunday shows, et cetera, they understand that there’s an energy being unlocked by that fight.
If they stop doing it, then they lose the foil, and I don’t think they want to do that. My worries about the way they’ll go after the press, honestly have more to do with things like FBI surveillance and things that are darker and more illegal but are very common around the world. Things like going after leaks and trying to throw people in jail. If they keep ratcheting up the sort of authoritarianism, I mean, then you just want to look at other countries and see how that looks. We know how that looks in other countries and it’s pretty grim.

Max Tani:
Yeah, and obviously, of course it hasn’t been lost on a lot of people in media that the deputy director of the FBI is a guy who is formerly obsessed with media to an insane kind of degree. He’s tweeted about me. If he’s tweeted about me, I’m pretty far down the food chain, but he is aware of who many of the reporters are and has obviously grudges against them, which is slightly alarming if you’re a journalist. Well, Ezra, you know how this works, we need to take a short break right now, but we’ll be right back with Ezra Klein. Another thing we wanted to talk about in one way that people perceive the narrative of this administration is obviously through your podcast, which is been really successful and been a real breakout hit for The Times, and it’s really played a central role in the way that a lot of Democrats, a lot of liberals think. I know this just from the amount of times that my mom has sent it to me.

Ezra Klein:
My core audience is Max’s mom.

Max Tani:
My mom is actually a good person for you to go after, she pays extra. It’s really interesting to me the ways in which this looks very different from 2017 when you saw, you mentioned that you used to fill in for Rachel Maddow, her show’s ratings during the first Trump Administration were kind of insane by cable news standards. Obviously, a lot of that audience it seems like has shifted to podcasts. How do you feel that this media moment is different, and what do you think is the end result of more people who are searching for, liberals in particular, who are searching for some way to understand what’s going on, that many of them are turning to something like your podcast instead of cable news?

Ezra Klein:
I don’t know about the cable news side of it, I’m not tracking cable news ratings. You would know all that much better than me.

Max Tani:
Yeah, the ratings are significantly lower than they were the first time around. They’re decent, but it’s not six million viewers a night.

Ezra Klein:
It is hard for me to feel that I have my arms around the moment, because I think I’m so overwhelmed by it myself and I’m on book tour and running around. I think the need for some kind of sense-making is high. I mean, I think that was true in Trump won. I think it’s even truer in Trump two, there’s so much coming at you. I noticed when I was on book tour, the thing that people said endlessly to me about my show in signing lines was, you’re making me feel sane. I thought, oh, maybe that’s bad. I think this time is pretty insane, I’m not sure I should be making you feel sane. I guess that’s one intuition about it, but honestly, I programmed the show pretty intuitively, I don’t have a giant theory on this moment yet. I don’t think this moment is cohered into a thing. I think that it’s very, very, very unstable.

Max Tani:
Do you think that it had in 2017, had it cohered into a thing? Was that, maybe we look back and we remember it as the resistance, if there was a kind of coherent ideology, maybe?

Ezra Klein:
No, I don’t think it had cohered. I mean, I always think of John Mulaney’s great segment from that era. His great bit about having a horse loose in a hospital, and I thought it’s one of the best riffs ever done on Donald Trump. It’s worth going back and watching that. The whole point of that riff, which was the way people experienced that time was, it was so chaotic. I think a difference now, a substantive difference, even though maybe it’s experienced fairly similarly is, at that time the chaos was very much inside the Trump Administration and its real world consequences were much more modest in mid 2017 than they have been by mid 2025. He did not really know how to run his administration, there were significant parts of the administration that were opposed to much of what he wanted to do. He wasn’t doing anything particularly significant on the economy.
They were trying to repeal the Affordable Care Act, which they ultimately were not able to do. If they had succeeded, maybe we would remember that time somewhat differently, but there was nothing in Trump one that was as consequential in people’s day-to-day lives or in the structure of the government itself as Doge, as the tariffs. I don’t think that there were efforts that were as dangerous to civil liberties as the deportations to El Salvador. I don’t think that the administration was as coherent an object, even though I don’t want to overstate how coherent this administration is. It is much more dedicated to serving Donald Trump than his first one was.

Ben Smith:
There also just weren’t successes like slowing immigration the way they have, I suppose. Back on the horse in the hospital years, I mean, it was also a media environment, which at least I felt, I was running BuzzFeed then, that a lot of our readers felt, and a lot of Democrats felt like there’s no way this guy was legitimately elected. There are two theories. One, it was Facebook, two, it was Russia, and lots of media energy went into chasing those two things. The White House felt totally under siege from that set of questions. I think I have some regrets about that in retrospect. Do you?

Ezra Klein:
Do you regret publishing the dossier? Is that what you’re saying? Is that the admission here, Ben?

Ben Smith:
Is that the headline? I would say I’m more ambivalent about it than I used to be.

Max Tani:
Oh shit, we made news on our own podcast. You’re not supposed to make news, Ezra is supposed to make news.

Ezra Klein:
Listen, man, once a podcast host, you think I’m not going to see that coming?

Ben Smith:
I hear Ezra’s voice and I think I’m on his podcast.

Ezra Klein:
I’m a professional here.

Max Tani:
Yeah.

Ben Smith:
You know what I mean?

Ezra Klein:
Look, I have maybe different views on this. I was always very hostile to the Facebook did it, through disinformation theory. I mean, you go back to what I said then. I never thought there was evidence that Russian disinformation or ads or something on Facebook had turned the election. I thought James Comey had turned the election, which I still think is true. The Russia stuff, I always thought that was worth investigating. I mean, I guess people can debate whether or not it got too much. It definitely became a deus ex machina for liberals.

Ben Smith:
Yeah, I mean, there’s a broader sense that there had to be some kind of trick.

Ezra Klein:
Yeah, the idea that he was illegitimate was, I think widespread. I never believed that Russia had won the election for him, and I don’t think I ever said anything that would’ve suggested I did believe that. I definitely didn’t believe Facebook had. The idea that he was possibly compromised or that people around him were, I don’t think was or is by the way crazy that there were linkages there that should have been worrying. I think that the network of corruption around Donald Trump is vast and much worse than we actually know, including now, by the way, where I think crypto has created whole new vistas of potential corruption.

Ben Smith:
Incredible.

Ezra Klein:
Yeah, I think that liberals had gotten themselves into a weird place where they wanted some explanation for how it had happened, but they also, I think, the more damaging thing was the view that Mueller was going to come out with some report, and that would be the end of this. I think something very different in the liberal mind is a recognition that there is something very authentic in Trump’s appeal, and there’s going to be no, and nobody comes in and saves you on a horse. I think that’s really important. I also think the fact that Trump lost a popular vote, and that the election was so incredibly close in the battleground states in 2016 contributed to this feeling that this guy was a fluke and should be treated as kind of an aberration, and his dominance of politics in the era since, at least intentionally, and his reelection of course in 2024 has very, very firmly ended that.

Max Tani:
It does seem like your book has gotten a lot of attention from pretty notable members of the Democratic Party. Gavin Newsom had you on his show, Tim Walz went on his show and mostly talked about your book or talked about your book quite a bit, New York Times, your employer also reported that you had met with Kamala Harris recently. I’m curious what she wanted to discuss and has she read the book? Did you give her a copy?

Ezra Klein:
I can. That was not a meeting I can talk about on the record unfortunately.

Max Tani:
All right, fair enough.

Ben Smith:
Does that mean she hasn’t read the book?

Ezra Klein:
I do not know to what degree she has read the book.

Max Tani:
How about this? Let me ask that a different way. What did you want to tell her?

Ezra Klein:
I’m not going to talk about the meeting with Harris, including in the sort of one abstracted out. I go to these wanting to hear from them, right? Like this for me is a reporting opportunity to sort of better understand where people are thinking. Yeah, look, it’s a weird moment of engagement for me with the political system. There is a lot I am trying to say about what I have come to view is our problems in liberal governance and problems in governance broadly.
I’m trying to say it to people who are the people who govern, and so then what they think about what actually happened is very useful for me. Gavin’s podcast was a really interesting moment for me because, look, this book is very heavily about failures of governance in California specifically, which is where I’m from. There’s a world where I go on his show and he’s like, what the hell is wrong with you? This book is entirely wrong. This is going great, your complete misreading situation. It’s very interesting to go on the show and have them say, basically, the book is right.
I’ve just not really been able to fix it. I was saying to somebody after, that I think you should actually take that as a much more pessimistic sign for these ideas and the opposite, right? If I were going around and the Biden Administration people, the Democratic governors were saying to me, you’re completely wrong about all this, we’re doing a good job, it should take this long, these are the outcomes we were looking for. Well then the sort of theory of change is pretty straightforward. It’s like, conceptually well if people agreed with the book we’re in power as opposed to people disagree with the book, then maybe this would all happen. The world in which everybody is saying no, it’s a disaster... I mean, Jake Sullivan gave me this amazing quote where he said everything we tried to do around building in the real world was getting sucked into quicksand, and the more we fought it, the further we got sucked in.
I, on the one hand, don’t think any of these figures like the Biden Administration, Newsom, et cetera, have made trying to repair the functioning of government central to their agenda. It’s not like I think they have really fought this fight and failed, but on the other hand, I think they all know it’s a problem and don’t actually find it to be something at least easily solvable. That should really give you an appreciation, it gives me an appreciation for probably how hard the things I would like to see fixed are to fix.

Ben Smith:
You and Derek finished the book before Doge, but there is a sense now among liberal leaders, I heard this from somebody near Starmer that, wait, why can’t we do that? We have different goals, we want to smash different parts of the state, but that there’s a sense of action that Trump has brought and maybe that it’s a bit easier to wreck than it is to build, but that there’s some, you do hear sometimes, oh, can we impose a sort of Ezra-like essentially better functioning government by storm, the way Trump has tried?

Ezra Klein:
I think there’s a recognition that Democrats took, process more seriously and as more binding than it really was. I think the way Doge has shocked Democrats is there’s been a lot of things that they wanted to do in government too, and then the lawyers would say, I’m not sure about that, and they’d say, well, okay. The lived recognition that you don’t have to listen to everything the lawyers say, the lived recognition that they can fire all these people and the civil service protections are actually norms, they’re not highly enforceable laws.
The range of action, if you choose to take it, is wider. Now, I don’t think it’s Doge wide. I mean, a lot of this is going to prove to be illegal or already has proven arguably to be illegal, but it’s not Biden narrow either. Again, I’ve had a really interesting experience recently where I’ve been talking to a lot of members of the Biden Administration, people who, for one reason or another, struck me as kind of hostile to what I was arguing or upset about the way I argued something, and I’ll go talk to them and they’ll say, yeah, I disagreed with this piece, but actually the situation is so much worse than you even knew.
There’s a really interesting quote in this piece I did for The Times a couple of weeks ago, again, this part from Jake Sullivan where he says, look, we listened to the bureaucracy too much, we gave in too much to being institutionalist, to being too respectful of what every agency said. I think there’s a real moment now where you can look at sort of Biden as thesis, very pro-institution, Trump is antithesis, very, very anti-institution, and now there’s a groping around for what would synthesis look like. What would it look like if you actually did have a Doge-

Ben Smith:
Cory Booker is Hegelian synthesis.

Ezra Klein:
Exactly. Cory Booker has always been. He is the one Hegel was waiting for. Yes, but you’re hearing it from him. I mean, I am not hearing from people inside the system. I have heard basically nobody say we are getting the outcomes we want, you should back off because you’re wrong.

Max Tani:
I had a question. I actually kind of wanted to ask this to both of you because both of you guys have been, Ezra, you currently are, and Ben, you were an employee of the New York Times, which has managed to do incredibly well while many other publications, new media organizations have really struggled. I’m really curious, first to you, Ezra, and then Ben I’ll get your opinion as well. Are you worried about the New York Times having a monopoly in the media business?

Ezra Klein:
I don’t think we have a monopoly. I’m going to be, for all the obvious reasons, careful about what I say about The Times. I am very depressed, I will say, about what happened with the era of new media optimism and growth, and I’m not privy to Semafor’s internals, but there was a view, we had it at Vox, I know Ben had it at BuzzFeed, I know Vice had it, that we could build the next era of really big media businesses that could fund really expansive, ambitious reporting, alongside things like the New York Times and the Washington Post and The Atlantic, there would be these other completely first class, like, Vox Media would be the next Conde Nast, et cetera.
It’s not that nothing like that can possibly happen. I mean, Vox Media is still there and it’s doing great work, but the business model didn’t work out. The thing we thought we could do, where we could turn the huge audiences of the viral traffic era into money and use that money to fund reporting and thereby build in a digitally native way, institutions that were capable of doing what Conde Nast does, what The Times does, that fell apart.
There is a possibility to do much smaller things and be more differentiated. I think there’s actually a lot of room to build cool publications on Substack, and I hope you all at Semafor are doing great, but the way this is shaken out is not good. I mean, I’m glad The Times is doing well, I love being at The Times, but the middle of the industry has kind of been decimated. You don’t want things to have winner take all dynamics, and particularly not winner take all dynamics in terms of business models capable of funding ambitious reporting because ambitious reporting is not narrowly cost-effective and it is very, very high value. That’s where, to me, there’s a lot of loss. I wish we had a couple of things that came out of that digital era that we could look around and say that made it to the winner’s circle.

Max Tani:
Yeah.

Ezra Klein:
Again, Vox Media is still there, but I don’t think anything, the business model did not work out. That’s the thing I will say, that the platforms, the theory was, you could work through the platforms, get more audience, turn that audience into money, turn that money and audience into bigger brand advertising, keep climbing up the quality ladder and build things of the size, I mean, that you would have foreign bureaus. That is not how it’s worked out.

Max Tani:
Ben, I’m curious, same question to you. Obviously, you’re in the midst of doing this. I’m curious both for your perspective as a professional and also my employer.

Ben Smith:
Yeah, I think everything Ezra said is right, just the basic notion we’re going to build the New York Times of the internet, or alternately other companies than the New York Times, like the Washington Post or the Boston Globe will really fundamentally succeed at being major rivals to the New York Times also in doubt. There is a tendency in all these internet businesses to centralize and for the winner to keep getting stronger and stronger and squeeze out the losers. That’s sort of the curse of the Los Angeles Times. Why would you subscribe when the New York Times is the competition? Now, I mean, I think the lesson that we all learned of that era is to be so focused, so careful, to build slowly. I think we are probably as insanely ambitious at Semafor as we were on BuzzFeed, but the timeline to global dominance is probably not a year and a half, which was perhaps the kind of hubris and also of the zero interest rate era.
There was a sort of economic environment that also made no sense that we lived in and enjoyed. Yeah, I don’t know. I mean I guess it also, I was just on the final note, I guess, and back to something we talked about earlier. I mean, The Times is an obvious target, for it is by far the strongest independent journalistic outlet in the United States, in the world, and thus an obvious target for a foreign administration. That, I think, [inaudible 00:39:10] has written about that. I think it’s very well fortified, but I think that’s a scary place to be.

Ezra Klein:
I think that this is one reason across a lot of domains of the administration. I think they tend to go after weak targets first, and it’s why it’s been really bad that there has been, initially at least, is belief that if you could just cut the deal, they’ll leave you alone. One, they won’t leave you alone. That’s what Columbia is realizing, what the law firms are realizing. Two, it’s like everyone you roll over on, then it makes it harder for the next one to resist. God bless Harvard for actually fighting, and it’s why I think it’s going to be important if that begins happening in the media, the media acts with some kind of solidarity, not like, well, that’s a Des Moines Register’s problem.

Ben Smith:
Not our reflex-

Ezra Klein:
Not our reflex.

Ben Smith:
I know exactly what you mean.
Well, Ezra, thank you so much for taking the time today. This is super, super interesting, and hopefully our podcast can buck the trend in terms of helping you move books.

Ezra Klein:
Yeah. Think about how little you learned about Abundance on this podcast. I mean, the only way to hear about it is to get the book.

Ben Smith:
We delivered, we delivered on never talking about the book. Your publicist should be thrilled.

Max Tani:
Ezra, thank you so much, it’s been really great.

Ezra Klein:
Thanks y’all, I enjoyed it.

Ben Smith:
Thanks, Ezra. That was, I mean, incredibly interesting. Ezra is an incredibly articulate guy, and actually, in some ways I think he says exactly what he thinks, and I don’t want to waste too much time sort of reinterpreting it. What do you make of just Ezra and his place in the culture right now? I do think he’s pretty extraordinary.

Max Tani:
It’s really interesting. He’s obviously, to a certain degree enjoying having a moment where he can steer the conversation towards his ideas. I did think that obviously his prescriptions for our media future are, like many of his episodes of his own show these days, quite bleak and a little scary.

Ben Smith:
Yeah, I’m not sure I share... I mean, I do think the most obvious thing that is happening is that Ezra becomes Charlie Rose in the sense of long-form conversations, only to be clear. I’m not sure I agree with him that sort of podcast becoming TV requires they’re becoming dumber. I think there is some happy medium of, you spend a little more money, you edit it, you have a great producer like Sheena who takes out the worst parts, but I don’t think it is inevitable that you converge on kind of hollowed out, reflexive, hyper-partisan conversation. I think you’re going to see the current wave of television replaced by... I mean, not just by things like the Ezra Klein show. There’ll be a bidding war for the Ezra Klein show, but it’ll probably have to be an hour. I think you’ll see, essentially, I hope, maybe smarter television, possible.

Max Tani:
What did you think about his view of himself and his own position in the media landscape because it seemed like he obviously didn’t want to talk about his meeting with Kamala Harris, but this idea of both putting out a policy book that he clearly wants to use to kind of shape housing policy and reducing income inequality or just inequality in general, at the same time that he’s also trying to perform his kind of duties as a journalist?

Ben Smith:
Yeah, something I like about Ezra is that I think there’s an honesty too, if you’re a journalist who is politically engaged, I mean advocacy journalism, so isn’t used as a bad word, but I mean it neutrally, that you should just embrace that. I heard Alistair Campbell asked him about, why don’t you go into politics? He said, I am in politics. I think that’s true, and there’s sort of a valuable honesty to it, that either breaks some of these categories and it maybe brings it closer to something like Britain where people like Ezra kind of wander in and out of government and into editing newspapers and magazines.

Max Tani:
You see that actually on the right too, right? You see, like, Tucker Carlson is obviously incredibly, even in his kind of reduced non-Fox news state, still remains pretty influential and important.

Ben Smith:
I suppose, look at the Trump cabinet.

Max Tani:
Right, exactly. Maybe what you’re seeing is more of that happening on the left. Right?

Ben Smith:
I guess a final question, Max, are we at peak Ezra right now, or do you think peak Ezra is still to come?

Max Tani:
I actually do really think that people are clearly interested in the show, and it’s no coincidence that it started to rise along with his advocacy for Biden to drop out. People are interested in the show because they see their own perspectives reflected there, or they see a path forward at a moment where they are frustrated with members of the Democratic Party who they believe have failed them in losing to Trump.

Ben Smith:
Yeah, I also think he treats his audience like they’re intelligent, which is, and I think that that line that he makes people feel sane, I think that’s a rare commodity, and I do think respecting your audience’s intelligence is a pretty rare thing in this media environment, whether you’re looking at Democratic Party or Republican Party fundraising emails and texts, or a lot of what’s put out on television, it really, really assumes you’re an idiot, and I think a lot of the media that’s succeeding now treats its audience with a level of respect, hopefully, including this show whose audience contains very few idiots.

Max Tani:
Well, that is it for us this week. Thank you for listening to Mixed Signals from Semafor Media. Our show is produced expertly by Sheena Ozaki, with special thanks to Max Toomey, Britta Galanis, Chad Lewis, Rachel Oppenheim, Anna Pezzino, Garrett Wiley, Jules Zern, and Tory Core. Our engineer is Rick Kwan, and our theme music is by Billy Libby. Our public editor is you, our intelligent listeners who would never lead us astray or make us any dumber.

Ben Smith:
Yeah, tell us what you think. Email ben.smith@semafor.com.

Max Tani:
It’s bsmith@semafor.com.

Ben Smith:
I’m trying to give my fake email so they don’t spam me, Max. I can’t be mixing with the whole ploy. Yes, either one of those two email addresses works, tell me what you think about Max, and if you like Mixed Signals, please follow us wherever you get your podcasts, and feel free to review us.

Max Tani:
If you want more, you can always sign up for Semafor’s Media newsletter, which is out every Sunday night.

Ben Smith:
I can’t believe you blew up up by old email.

Max Tani:
I thought you actually meant it.