Statecraft

The full transcript for this conversation is at www.statecraft.pub.

When I started this podcast a couple years ago, the idea was more constrained than it is today. We wanted to do exit interviews wit…

Today I'm talking to Dan Wang. He has a great new book, Breakneck: China's Quest to Engineer the Future. Dan spent the better part of the last decade in China and published a yearly letter summarizin…

Today we're joined by Dr. Rob Johnston. He's an anthropologist, an intelligence community veteran, and author of the cult classic Analytic Culture in the US Intelligence Community, a book so influent…

At the end of April, the Transit Costs Project released a report: it’s called How to Build High-Speed Rail on the Northeast Corridor. As the name suggests, the authors of the report had a simple goal…

Happy Fourth of July! I’m attending a wedding today, so this episode is from the vault, in a way, although it’s its first time on Statecraft. I originally published this essay in January of 2022 on M…

The decisions that humans make can be extraordinarily costly. The wars in Iraq and Afghanistan were multi-trillion-dollar decisions. If you can improve the accuracy of forecasting individual strategi…

 There are many forces in policymaking (and in our lives generally) that push us towards the short term. Many of the most important measurements in political life are on extremely tight timelines: el…

What can we learn from Estonia? It’s not a question you hear often — the nation of under two million residents doesn’t mean much to many. But for good governance advocates, it’s long been a touchpoin…

Today we talked to Randy Clarke, the head of DC’s Metro system, WMATA. If you’re a transit nerd, you probably know about Clarke — he’s become something of a celebrity for his public presence and disc…

 Today, we’re taking a look at a predecessor to DOGE: The Reinventing Government project (officially known as the NPR, for National Partnership for Reinventing Government). The NPR ran for almost the…

Last week, we talked to Stephanie Pollack about salvaging a transit project in danger of failure — it was the first in a set of interviews we’re running on transit. Today, we’re zooming out further, …

This conversation, with transit guru Stephanie Pollack, is one of my favorite conversations we’ve recorded on here. For one, I had a blast recording — Stephanie’s funny, and she’s got a killer Boston…

 At the end of January, the Trump administration pushed out a top Treasury department official after he refused to give DOGE access to the government's vast payment system. We're talking to him today…

Today we talked to Alex Jutca; he leads analytics and technology at the Allegheny County Department of Human Services, where his team’s mission is to build the country’s leading R&D lab for local gov…

Today’s guest is Narayan Subramanian. Under the Biden administration, he was a legal advisor, and then an advisor to the Secretary at the Department of Energy (DOE). Later, he was the Director for En…

DOGE is the most interesting story in state capacity right now. Yet although we’ve talked around it on Statecraft, I haven’t covered it directly since the beginning of the administration. In part, th…