Ezra Klein: evaluation

Transcript context

…At the end of your podcasts, you ask your guests to recommend three books maybe they’ve been reading lately. I’ll ask you to recommend three travel spots. It doesn’t have to have been recent, and it could be around the block in Brooklyn. It could be anywhere. Tell us just three spots where people ought to go or think about, and why they’re interesting or important to you. My father’s Brazilian, and I’ve been to Brazil many times. I think of Rio de Janeiro as one of the most beautiful and vibrant and dynamic and exciting cities in the world. Brazil itself is just tremendous. It is one of those countries you could spend a lifetime exploring and never reach the terminal point of it. There’s so much I have not done there. Brazil just itself to me — you could pick all kinds of places. Start with Rio, but try to travel out of Rio. Go to some of the spots where Brazilians vacation in the summer. There’s a place that I went with my father to a conference when I was young called Barra Do Sahy. It’s an island. You can see your feet in the water. I was young, so I’m not sure how accurate my impressions of it are. It sits in my head like a Shangri-la. I love it. I’ve had a lot of experiences in Brazil like that. That’s one. I love Berlin as a city. Now, partially this is because I’m into electronic music, and it’s a city that takes electronic music incredibly seriously. You have just this remarkable mixture of nightlife that I find really, really exciting, and really vibrant. It’s just a fun city to walk around. It has great museums. It has great food. People are friendly. There are a lot of immigrants. There’s a lot to see, and there’s a thing to experience there that I just like. I’m not sure it’d be exactly true for everybody, although I think probably even people with radically different tastes in mind would find a lot to love in Berlin, but if you have my specific tastes, [laughs] Berlin is just an extraordinary place to go. I spent a week there last year, and if I could, I think I would spend a couple weeks there every year. It’s one of the places — Mexico City being the other — where I’ve landed and spent some time and just immediately had the view, “I could live here. I could just do this. It would be wonderful.” I am just a huge fan of American second cities, and I travel a lot around music. I go to a lot of music festivals in small places, not all electronic. One of my favorites is one called Big Ears in Knoxville, and it’s a lot of folk music. It’s a lot of experimental music. Knoxville is just a great place and a great city. Again, the food is great. I think in general, at this point, the food in places like Knoxville — all smaller cities — are just better than in the really big cities because so many people have been costed out. San Francisco’s food just isn’t good anymore. It’s not a good food city, hasn’t been for some time. It was one of the most disappointing things to me about living there. California cuisine used to be so vibrant, but I think now it isn’t, and it’s just because we’ve pushed out the people who could make it. The labor costs are too high, et cetera. I think, actually, just traveling around America itself is, as you would say, underrated. As somebody who tends to like urban travel, that’s part of it. I guess I did three there, so I shouldn’t keep going. Even four, if you count Mexico City.…

Stored transcript either side of the excerpt. The highlighted words are the published quote; the surrounding text is unedited source, never generated.