The Ezra Klein Show

Over the past month, there have been two dominant stories in American foreign policy. One, of course, is the war with Iran. The other is the much-anticipated summit between President Trump and Xi Jinping of China. And I think if you look closely at both of these stories, you see that our foreign policy has entered into a period of absolute incoherence. I’m not even sure what the status of the Iran war is at this point. What is Trump trying to achieve? What is he willing to accept? Taking a more hawkish approach to China has been a core and consistent principle of Trump’s since his first term. He’s been insistent that China has taken advantage of the United States and that America needed to change that dynamic and flex more power. But is that happening? Is that even Trump’s position anymore? So I wanted to do an episode looking at China and Iran and trying to assess Trump’s foreign policy in general and the ways he’s remaking what America means on the world stage. Ian Bremmer is the president and founder of Eurasia Group, a political risk research and consultancy firm, and the global affairs publication GZero. He’s also the author of, among other books, “Every Nation for Itself: What Happens When No One Leads the World.” Mentioned: Bowling Alone by Robert D. Putnam The J Curve by Ian Bremmer “The ‘Vibecession’ Is Over. The ‘Permacession’ Is Here.” by Annie Lowrey “Disney and the Decline of America’s Middle Class” by Daniel Currell Eurasia Group’s Top Risks for 2026 Book Recommendations: The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams A World Appears by Michael Pollan <a href="https://us.macmillan.com/books/9780765325280/thechronoliths/" target="_blank" rel="noopener norefer

President Trump doesn’t seem to care that much about winning the midterms. He’s more unpopular at this point in his second term than basically any of his modern predecessors. Democrats seem poised to retake the House and have a real chance of retaking the Senate. You might expect a president in that position to pivot to the center, to focus on voters’ top concerns and try to boost the strongest Republicans in key races. Trump isn’t doing any of that. Instead, he announced a $1.8 billion slush fund to pay out “victims of lawfare,” he threatened to re-escalate the Iran war, and he intervened in Republican primaries in ways that are gifts to Democrats, like endorsing the scandal-plagued Ken Paxton over the incumbent, John Cornyn, in Texas’ Senate race. Why doesn’t Trump seem to care more about winning? Liam Donovan is a Republican strategist and a president at Targeted Victory, a Washington public affairs and digital marketing firm. He has worked on the National Republican Senatorial Committee and for Cornyn. In this conversation, we discuss the moves Trump is making, the rough political environment for Republicans and what the paths to Democratic victories look like. Mentioned: “Graham Platner Thinks a Political Revolution Is Coming” by The Interview Thomas Massie interview in The Washington Examiner Book Recommendations: The Right by Matthew Continetti Apple in China by Patrick McGee The Frackers by Gregory Zuckerman Thoughts? Guest suggestions? Email us at [email protected]. You can find transcripts (posted midday) and more episodes of “The Ezra Klein Show” at nytimes.com/ezra-klein-podcast, and you can find Ezra on Twitter @ezraklein. Book recommendations from all our guests are listed at <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/article/ezra-klein-show-book-recs.html" target="_blank

What are the conditions that enable a country to become great — or great again? The Trump administration — and other right-wing movements in other countries — offers a vision of greatness based on power and domination abroad, and a mix of shared national and religious stories at home. And that vision is clearly appealing to a lot of people. Liberals in the U.S. and elsewhere have been struggling to tell a story that can compete. What story would Yuval Noah Harari tell? One of the through lines of Harari’s best-selling books — “Sapiens,” “Homo Deus,” “Nexus” — is the huge role that stories play in shaping the arc of history, driving humans to cooperate on a grand scale to achieve great things, or divide violently against one another. So I wanted to ask him about the stories that the U.S. and Israel, in particular, seem to have embraced right now. What does history tell us about the power of this story? And why does the liberal story seem so weak right now? Mentioned: Sapiens by Yuval Noah Harari Homo Deus by Yuval Noah Harari Unstoppable Us, Volume 3 by Yuval Noah Harari “Understanding AI” by Timothy B. Lee Book Recommendations: The MANIAC by Benjamin Labatut Chimpanzee Politics by Frans de Waal Brave New World by Aldous Huxley Thoughts? Guest suggestions? Email us at [email protected]. You can find transcripts (posted midday) and more episodes of “The Ezra Klein Show” at nytimes.com/ezra-klein-podcast, a

We have entered a world of maximum gerrymandering warfare. Any guardrails that once existed, from the Constitution or the courts, have been bulldozed over the last decade – most recently in the Supreme Court decision that gutted the Voting Rights Act and made it harder for minorities to challenge racially discriminatory voting maps. Red and blue states alike have been aggressively trying to redraw their congressional maps in response to all these developments. And there is no sign that will end in 2028; legislatures will just continue trying to tweak their lines to squeeze out advantage for whatever party is in power. And competitive districts in this country – already an endangered species – now teeter on extinction. That is, unless something dramatic changes. Lee Drutman is a senior fellow in the political reform program at New America. He’s one of the most persistent and thoughtful advocates of selecting House members through proportional representation – a system used in many other countries that would make gerrymandering much more difficult. He’s the author of the 2020 book “Breaking the Two-Party Doom Loop: The Case for Multiparty Democracy in America” and writes the newsletter Undercurrent Events. Mentioned: Breaking the Two-Party Doom Loop by Lee Drutman “Undercurrent Events” by Lee Drutman Why We’re Polarized by Ezra Klein “How one country stopped a Trump-style authoritarian in his tracks” by Zack Beauchamp Book Recommendations: Tyranny of the Majority by Lani Guinier American Politics by Samuel P. Huntington <a href="https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/645938/the-recognitions-by-william-gaddis-introduction-by-tom-mccarthy-afterword-by-william-h-gass/" target="_blank" rel="noopene

What do you do when you feel anxious or insecure? Many of us try to push the feeling away, or we ruminate on it, or try to solve it, or avoid the thought altogether. But what would happen if we did the exact opposite? The Buddhist nun and teacher Pema Chödrön is the author of many beloved books, including “When Things Fall Apart,” “Welcoming the Unwelcome” and — my personal favorite — “Comfortable With Uncertainty.” And she has a way of inviting people to befriend the parts of life that typically induce dread — from uncertainty and suffering to loss and discomfort. And she argues that the process of sitting with these experiences and emotions actually releases their power over us. In a time as chaotic and tumultuous as ours, she has so much practical wisdom to share. In this conversation, she shares what it looks like to actually let go of difficult emotions, the art of “collaborating with reality” when things don’t go as expected, and how to awaken yourself to the “nowness” of life. Mentioned: Comfortable with Uncertainty by Pema Chödrön When Things Fall Apart by Pema Chödrön Welcoming the Unwelcome by Pema Chödrön Another Kind of Freedom by Pema Chödrön Book Recommendations: Shambhala: The Sacred Path of the Warrior by Chögyam Trungpa Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind by Shunryu Suzuki Enlightened Vagabond by Matthieu Ricard Thoughts? Guest suggestions? Email us at ezrakleinshow@nyt

On Friday, I moderated a forum with the top Democratic candidates for California governor, focusing on the state’s housing crisis. California’s current governor, Gavin Newsom, came into office in 2019 promising to build millions of homes. And in the years since, dozens of pro-housing laws have passed, designed to cut red tape and spur more construction. And yet the number of homes being built in California is basically the same as when he took office, and the state’s housing crisis remains, arguably, the worst in the country. So I wanted to know what the next governor would do about it. We taped this at the Calvin Simmons Theater in Oakland, Calif. The candidates on the stage were Xavier Becerra, a former attorney general of California and health and human services secretary under President Joe Biden; Matt Mahan, the mayor of San Jose and a tech entrepreneur; Katie Porter, a former U.S. representative; Tom Steyer, a former San Francisco hedge fund manager, a climate activist and a philanthropist; and Antonio Villaraigosa, a former mayor of Los Angeles and speaker of the California State Assembly. This panel was recorded live. The Times did not fact-check candidates’ remarks. Mentioned: “Cost to Build Multifamily Housing in California More Than Twice as High as in Texas” by RAND “What Worries Me Most About ‘Abundance’” with Derek Thompson and Marc Dunkelman, The Ezra Klein Show Book Recommendations: The Hour of the Predator by Giuliano da Empoli Rain of Gold by Victor Villaseñor Yesteryear by Caro Claire Burke Why Nothing Works by Marc J. Dunkelman Ours Was the Shining Future by David Leonhardt Thoughts

Here’s a shocking number: One out of eight American adults is taking a GLP-1, like Ozempic or Zepbound, according to a KFF poll. GLP-1s are the biggest pharmaceutical story since antidepressants. But there’s still so much we don’t know. “We’re only at the beginning of what’s been called this Ozempic era,” the journalist Julia Belluz told me. “I think we’re really just at the beginning of discovering the benefits and the harms of these drugs.” These discoveries begin in the research but are also expanding into how we think about our punishing beauty standards and the blurry lines between illness and wellness. Belluz is a contributing Opinion writer and the author, with Kevin Hall, of “Food Intelligence.” She’s one of the best health and science reporters I know and has been reporting on GLP-1s for years. In this conversation, Belluz takes me through what we know — and don’t know — about GLP-1s, their unexpected uses, how they are clashing with a culture obsessed with thinness and looksmaxxing, and whether everyone should be on them. Mentioned: “The obesity pay gap is worse than previously thought” by The Economist “The Great Ozempic Experiment” by Julia Belluz Book Recommendations: Behave by Robert M. Sapolsky The Poison Squad by Deborah Blum Ultra-Processed People by Chris van Tulleken Thoughts? Guest suggestions? Email us at [email protected]. You can find transcripts (posted midday) and more episodes of “The Ezra Klein Show” at nytimes.com/ezra-klein-podcast, and you can find Ezra on Twitter @ezraklein. Book recommendations from all our guests are listed at <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/article/ezra-klein-show-book-recs.html" target="_bl

In the U.S., illiberalism is in power. I don’t think anybody really argues against that. But I’ve been surprised by how weak liberalism has felt in response. Donald Trump isn’t a popular president; he isn’t making people want more of what he is. But if the forces of illiberalism are really going to be turned back in this country, I think more people need to be excited and inspired by liberalism itself. We need a liberalism that stands for more than “not Trump.” So I’ve been on my own esoteric journey, reading a lot of books on the history of liberalism, trying to understand what excited and inspired people in the past, and how liberals overcame crises like the one we’re in. And reading one of those books, “The Lost History of Liberalism” by Helena Rosenblatt, it felt like an epiphany — that this was a piece of the puzzle. So I wanted to have Rosenblatt on the show to talk about it. Rosenblatt is a professor of history, political science and French at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York, and in this conversation, she walks me through the history of liberalism that she uncovered, and the values that once lived at its heart. Mentioned: Democracy in America by Alexis de Tocqueville Liberalism by Edmund Fawcett Book Recommendations: Liberalism against Itself by Samuel Moyn Liberalism as a Way of Life by Alexandre Lefebvre Thinking With Machines by Vasant Dhar Thoughts? Guest suggestions? Email us at [email protected]. You can find transcripts (posted midday) and more episodes of “The Ezra Klein Show” at nytimes.com/ezra-klein-podcast, and you can find Ezra on Twitter @ezrakle

“Abundance” came out a little over a year ago. It’s been exciting — and a little disorienting — seeing how it’s rippled out into the world, and the ways it’s been embraced and debated and critiqued. So I wanted to take a moment to talk through what’s really happened in the last year – with Derek Thompson, my “Abundance” co-author, and Marc Dunkelman, whose book “Why Nothing Works” came out around the same time, and circles the same ideas. What has the abundance movement actually achieved in the last year? Where has it fallen short? And what have the three of us learned from our critics? Mentioned: Ezra is moderating a forum on housing and affordability with some of the top California gubernatorial candidates. The event is on Friday, May 8, in Oakland, CA. You can buy tickets here. Use the code EKSHOW for 20 percent off your order. Abundance by Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson Why Nothing Works by Marc J. Dunkelman Derek Thompson’s Substack The Power Elite by C. Wright Mills The Power Broker by Robert A. Caro “The Most Expensive Mile of Subway Track on Earth” by Brian M. Rosenthal “Why Are Palantir and OpenAI Scared of Alex Bores?” by The Ezra Klein Show “The Anti-Social Century” by Derek Thompson <a href="ht

Stewart Brand might be the most influential philosopher of the internet – at least in its more idealistic era. In the 1960s, Brand was the central bridge figure between the San Francisco counterculture and the emerging technology scene. He created the legendary Trips Festival with Ken Kesey in 1966, and was there at “the mother of all demos” in 1968. And he created and edited the Whole Earth Catalog, which Steve Jobs called “one of the bibles of my generation” and “Google in paperback form, 35 years before Google came along.”  Brand has seen Silicon Valley evolve in the decades since. And along the way, he has written many brilliant books about our relationship to technology, the built environment and the natural world. His latest book is “Maintenance: Of Everything, Part One.”  In this conversation, we discuss everything from dropping acid to the genesis of the Whole Earth Catalog, what he thinks A.I. will reveal about humanity, the 40 years he’s spent living on a tugboat and the importance of maintenance in a culture that prizes novelty and disposability. Mentioned: Ezra is moderating a forum on housing and affordability with some of the top California gubernatorial candidates. The event is on Friday, May 8, in Oakland, CA. You can buy tickets here. Use the code EKSHOW for 20 percent off your order. Maintenance: Of Everything, Part One by Stewart Brand “We Didn’t Ask for This Internet” with Cory Doctorow and Tim Wu, The Ezra Klein Show I And Thou by Martin Buber Book Recommendations: The Beginning of Infinity by David Deutsch The Perfectionists by Simon Winchester The Scottish Enlightenment by Arthur Herman Thoughts? Guest suggestions? Email us at ezrakleins

Leading the Future, a super PAC whose funders include the founders of companies like Palantir and OpenAI, is spending millions of dollars this election cycle, and a considerable amount of that money is going toward attack ads against Alex Bores – even though Bores himself used to work for Palantir. Bores is a New York state assemblyman who is running for Congress to represent New York’s 12th District. His campaign includes an extensive A.I. policy platform, including demands for A.I. companies to be more transparent about safety, and an idea for an “A.I. dividend” that would redistribute some of the profits of A.I. companies to the public. So his race has turned into a central battleground over the future of the A.I. industry and who has the power to shape it. In this conversation, we discuss how Bores went from working for Palantir to running a campaign that would regulate the A.I. industry, the major issues he thinks A.I. policy needs to address, and his response to the attacks against him. Mentioned: Give People Money by Annie Lowrey “Alex Bores’ AI Policy Framework For Congress” “NY Congressional Candidate Faced Palantir Sexual Comments Claim” by Laura Nahmias “AI populism’s warning shots” by Jasmine Sun Book Recommendations: A Theory of Justice by John Rawls World Eaters by Catherine Bracy Bird by Bird by Anne Lamott Thoughts? Guest suggestions? Email us at [email protected]. You can find transcripts (posted midday) and more episodes of “The Ezra Klein Show” at nytimes.com/ezra-klein-podcast, and you can find Ezra on Twitter @ezraklein. Book recom

Jeff Bezos, Michael Bloomberg and Warren Buffett are three of the richest people in the world, but they pay little in income tax relative to their wealth. In 2021, ProPublica published an investigation built on leaked tax documents that reveal what some of the richest Americans really pay — or don’t. Warren Buffett had a true tax rate of 0.1 percent. Jeff Bezos: 0.98 percent. Michael Bloomberg: 1.3 percent. Ultra-wealthy Americans have essentially been written out of the tax system. “It’s wrong as a matter of principle. It’s wrong because we need their money. It’s wrong as a matter of fairness. It is wrong for so many reasons,” the law professor Ray Madoff told me. She’s the author of the new book “The Second Estate: How the Tax Code Made an American Aristocracy,” and she’s interested in helping people understand how broken the American tax system is and how to fix it. In this conversation, we discuss the techniques the ultra-wealthy use to evade the tax system, why they think “salaries are for suckers” and what tax reform could look like. Mentioned: “The Secret IRS Files: Trove of Never-Before-Seen Records Reveal How the Wealthiest Avoid Income Tax” by Jesse Eisinger, Jeff Ernsthausen and Paul Kiel The Second Estate by Ray D. Madoff Taxation: The People’s Business by Andrew W. Mellon Philanthrocapitalism by Matthew Bishop and Michael Green Book Recommendations: The Age of Extraction by Tim Wu The Rise and Fall of the Neoliberal Order by Gary Gerstle Crossroads by Jonathan Franzen Thoughts? Guest suggestions? Email us at [email protected]. You can find transcripts (posted mid

For decades, most discussions of Israel and Palestine were framed around the eventual creation of a two-state solution. That effort has been dead for years. What has emerged in its place is what the political scientists Marc Lynch and Shibley Telhami call the “one-state reality.” Their book on this — edited with Michael Barnett and Nathan Brown — came out before Oct. 7, 2023. Since Oct. 7, that reality has become further entrenched: There’s been a record pace of settlement construction in the West Bank. Israel now occupies more than half the territory of Gaza. And Israel’s push into Lebanon has displaced more than a million people. So what does it mean to reckon with Israel’s one-state reality — to see the facts on the ground rather than the frames of the past? Shibley Telhami is the Anwar Sadat professor for peace and development at the University of Maryland, College Park. Marc Lynch is the director of the Project on Middle East Political Science at George Washington University. Lynch is the author, most recently, of “America’s Middle East: The Ruination of a Region.” Mentioned: “Israel’s One-State Reality” by Michael Barnett, Nathan Brown, Marc Lynch, and Shibley Telhami The One State Reality by Michael Barnett, Nathan J. Brown, Marc Lynch and Shibley Telhami Israel’s Religiously Divided Society, Pew Research Center Summary of a Year of Terror, Expulsion, and Annexation — 2025 in the Settlements, Peace Now Book Recommendations: Justice for Some by Noura Erakat Wars of Ambition by Afshon Ostovar The Second Emancipation by Howard W. French Mayors in the Middle by Diana B. Greenwald <p

When President Trump didn’t annihilate “a whole civilization” on Tuesday, as he had threatened to do, much of the world exhaled. But the damage of his statements — a U.S. president, the commander in chief of the world’s most powerful military, threatening to commit war crimes — continues to linger in the shadow of an uncertain cease-fire. Fareed Zakaria is the host of CNN’s “Fareed Zakaria GPS” and the author of “Age of Revolutions” and other books. In this conversation, we discuss whether Trump’s threats on Truth Social worked as a negotiating tactic, the significance of crossing this kind of moral line and how the decline of American leadership is already reshaping the world. This episode contains strong language. Mentioned: Age of Revolutions by Fareed Zakaria “The Predatory Hegemon” by Stephen M. Walt “Iran is an imperial trap. America walked right in.” by Fareed Zakaria Book Recommendations: A World Safe for Democracy by G. John Ikenberry The Irony of American History by Reinhold Niebuhr The Quiet American by Graham Greene Thoughts? Guest suggestions? Email us at [email protected]. You can find transcripts (posted midday) and more episodes of “The Ezra Klein Show” at nytimes.com/ezra-klein-podcast, and you can find Ezra on Twitter @ezraklein. Book recommendations from all our guests are listed at https://www.nytimes.com/article/ezra-klein-show-book-recs. This episode of “The Ezra Klein Show” was produced by Annie Galvin. Fact-checking by Michelle Harris with Kate Sinclair and Mary Marge Locker. Our senior engineer is Jeff Geld, with additional mixing by Aman Sahota. Our recording engineer

In a prime time address on Wednesday, President Trump proclaimed that America was “on the cusp of ending Iran’s sinister threat.” But he also kept open the option of boots on the ground. The effective closure of the Strait of Hormuz is also about to start really biting – as countries get hit with shortages, which would spike prices across the globe. So what are Trump’s options? What would happen if he just declared victory and walked away from the fight? What kinds of military operations are on the table? If Trump ended the war without achieving his strategic goals, what would that mean for the United States, for Iran and for the world? “I don’t see a victory in real terms at the end of this crisis…,” Suzanne Maloney told me. “And that is a very dangerous outcome for the long term.” Maloney is one of Washington’s leading Iran experts. She has advised several presidential administrations and has written or edited a number of books on Iran. She is the vice president and director of the Brookings Institution’s foreign policy program. Note: This conversation was recorded on Wednesday morning, before Trump’s speech on the war. But the speech reflected Maloney’s analysis almost perfectly. Mentioned: The Iranian Revolution at Forty by Suzanne Maloney President Trump Addresses Nation on War with Iran “Trump tells Post war against Iran won’t last ‘much longer’ —Strait of Hormuz will reopen ‘automatically’ after US exit” by Steven Nelson Book Recommendations: The Twilight War by David Crist American Hostages in Iran by Warren Christopher and Paul H. Kreisberg Democracy in Iran by Misagh Parsa Thoughts? Guest suggestions? Email us at [email protected]. You can find transcripts (posted midday) and more episodes of “The Ezra Klein Show” at nytimes.com/ezra-klein-podcast, and you can find Ezra on Twitter @ezraklein. Book re

Consciousness is this amazing, mind-bending riddle. It’s the only thing any of us truly knows. We experience everything else in life through it. And yet we barely understand it. We don’t know what it’s made of or how it works or why it exists. But scientists and theorists have been trying to answer those questions, and have made some startling discoveries. The science writer Michael Pollan, known for books like “The Omnivore’s Dilemma” and “How to Change Your Mind,” spent five years on the vanguard of this research. And his new book, “A World Appears: A Journey Into Consciousness,” shows that the closer you look at consciousness, the weirder it gets. I asked Pollan to walk through some of the places his mind wandered on this journey — including the role of the body and feelings in consciousness, fascinating studies that provide evidence for plant sentience, the researchers who have abandoned their old theories after trying psychedelic drugs, and the possibility that consciousness may not emerge from inside us at all. “I’ve entered this ‘never say never’ realm with this research,” Pollan told me. Mentioned: “The Descriptive Experience Sampling method” by Russell T. Hurlburt and Sarah A. Akhter “What Is It Like to Be a Bat?” by Thomas Nagel The Hidden Spring by Mark Solms Descartes’ Error by Antonio Damasio “The Oxford Handbook of Spontaneous Thought” by Kalina Christoff and Kieran C. R. Fox Book Recommendations: The Blind Spot by Adam Frank, Marcelo Gleiser and Evan Thompson Ducks, Newburyport by Lucy Ellmann Being

Is Trumpism crashing on the shoals of the Iran war? That is what Christopher Caldwell thinks. Caldwell is a prominent thinker on the right. He’s a contributing editor at the conservative publication the Claremont Review of Books,and he’s one of the people who’ve been trying to define, and even craft, a coherent Trumpism. So his recent article in The Spectator, “The End of Trumpism,” sparked a lot of debate on the right. At the core of this debate are some fundamental questions that I think remain unresolved, despite Trump’s decade-long dominance of the Republican Party: What is Trumpism? Is there Trumpism, or is there just Donald Trump? Caldwell is a contributing writer for Times Opinion and the author of “The Age of Entitlement: America Since the Sixties.” In this conversation, he explains how he understood Trumpism as a movement of “democratic restoration” — and why he believes the Iran war betrays that. And I ask him why he sees the seams of Trump’s base fraying, despite polling that suggests otherwise. Mentioned: “The end of Trumpism” by Christopher Caldwell The Age of Entitlement by Christopher Caldwell “Is the West Becoming Pagan Again?” by Christopher Caldwell Self-Rule by Robert H. Wiebe “Trump as Alexander the Great” by John B. Judis Book Recommendations: The Gulag Archipelago by Aleksandr I. Solzhenitsyn Common Ground by J. Anthony Lukas Ball Four

Iran has currently shut off more than 10 percent of the world’s oil supply. If that goes on for a lot longer — or if the war escalates to include more strikes on energy infrastructure in the region — the price of oil could go through the roof, and the damage to the global economy could be catastrophic. So what would that look like? What tools does the United States have to avert it? And how is this crisis already reverberating in countries around the world? Jason Bordoff is the founding director of the Center on Global Energy Policy at Columbia University and a founding dean of the Columbia Climate School. He served as a special assistant to President Barack Obama and senior director for energy and climate change on the National Security Council. In this conversation, Bordoff answers all my questions about the crisis so far and how things could spin out from here, the strategic positioning of the United States, Europe, Iran, Russia and China, the developing countries likely to suffer the most and the lessons the world might take from this. Mentioned: “Making the U.S. More Resilient to Oil Price Shocks” by Jason Bordoff and Spencer Dale “The Return of the Energy Weapon” by Jason Bordoff and Meghan L. O’Sullivan Book Recommendations: Material World by Ed Conway More and More and More by Jean-Baptiste Fressoz Deliver Me from Nowhere by Warren Zanes Thoughts? Guest suggestions? Email us at [email protected]. You can find transcripts (posted midday) and more episodes of “The Ezra Klein Show” at nytimes.com/ezra-klein-podcast, and you can find Ezra on Twitter @ezraklein. Book recommendations from all our guests are listed at https://www.nytimes.com/article/ezra-klein-show-book-recs. Subscribe today at nytimes.com/podcasts or on Apple Podcasts and Spotify. You can also subscribe via your favorite podcast app here https://www.nytimes.com/activate-access/audio?source=podcatcher. For more podcasts and narrated articles, download The New York Times app at nytimes.com/app. Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz com

Naomi Klein saw where our politics was headed before most people on the left. Her 2023 book “Doppelganger: A Trip Into the Mirror World” is hard to describe. But among other things, it traces the new coalitions Klein saw forming on the right, the ways they were co-opting issues long associated with the left, and finding huge audiences and influence outside existing institutions. The people and coalitions that Klein wrote about run our world now. We are all living in the mirror world. As she put it, it’s “doppelgangers at the wheel.” So I wanted to have Klein on the show to help understand how that happened, what the left failed to see at the time and the lessons the left should take from it now. As Klein told me: “The thing about doppelgangers is, in literature, they’re always a message telling you a warning: You have to look at yourself. There’s something about yourself that you’re not seeing.” Note: We recorded this episode before the war in Iran. Mentioned: Doppelganger by Naomi Klein No Logo by Naomi Klein “Minnesota Proved MAGA Wrong” by Adam Serwer End Times Fascism by Naomi Klein and Astra Taylor Book Recommendations: Empire of AI by Karen Hao Here Where We Live Is Our Country by Molly Crabapple Fire Alarm by Michael Löwy Thoughts? Guest suggestions? Email us at [email protected]. You can find transcripts (posted midday) and more episodes of “The Ezra Klein Show” at nytimes.com/ezra-klein-podcast, and you can find Ezra on Twitter @ezraklein. Book recommendations from all our guests are listed at <a href="https://www.nytimes.com

The Trump administration miscalculated how Iran would respond to this war. And the United States, Iran and Israel were brought to the brink of war in the first place because of a whole series of misjudgments and miscalculations going back decades. Ali Vaez is the Iran project director at the International Crisis Group. He was involved in the negotiations that led to the 2015 nuclear deal, and is in fact himself a nuclear scientist. He’s also an author of “How Sanctions Work: Iran and the Impact of Economic Warfare.” In this conversation, Vaez explains how over 47 years the United States, Israel and Iran came to one another as threats, and why so many efforts to thaw relations failed. It’s the briefing on Iran that Trump should have received before he decided to go to war. Mentioned: How Sanctions Work by Narges Bajoghli, Vali Nasr, Djavad Salehi-Isfahani, and Ali Vaez Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action Book Recommendations: Persians by Lloyd Llewellyn-Jones The Mantle of the Prophet by Roy P. Mottahedeh Tomorrow Is Yesterday by Hussein Agha and Robert Malley Thoughts? Guest suggestions? Email us at [email protected]. You can find transcripts (posted midday) and more episodes of “The Ezra Klein Show” at nytimes.com/ezra-klein-podcast, and you can find Ezra on Twitter @ezraklein. Book recommendations from all our guests are listed at https://www.nytimes.com/article/ezra-klein-show-book-recs. This episode of “The Ezra Klein Show” was produced by Jack McCordick. Fact-checking by Michelle Harris with Kate Sinclair. Our senior engineer is Jeff Geld, with additional mixing by Isaac Jones and Aman Sahota. Our executive producer is Claire Gordon. The show’s production team also includes Marie Cascione, Annie Galvin, Rollin Hu, Kristin Lin, Emma Kehlbeck, Marina King and Jan Kobal. Original music by Aman Sahota and Pat McCusker. Audience strategy by Kristina Samul

I’m opposed to this war. The Trump administration did not consult the American public or try to persuade Congress before authorizing the strikes on Iran. I don’t think the administration is prepared for what the strikes might unleash. But I wanted to try to understand President Trump’s decisions from the perspective of somebody much friendlier to his foreign policy. Nadia Schadlow is a senior fellow at the Hudson Institute and served as a deputy national security adviser during Trump’s first term. She led the drafting and publication of the 2017 National Security Strategy of the United States. In this conversation, Schadlow gives the conservative case for war with Iran, and for attacking without first building support in Congress or with the public. And I ask her how she squares Trump the candidate, who ran on a promise of not starting new wars, with the Trump of today, who’s deposed two heads of state since the start of 2026, and now says he won’t rule out boots on the ground in Iran. Is there a consistent worldview here? Or did Trump change? Mentioned: “National Security Strategy of the United States of America” War and the Art of Governance by Nadia Schadlow “The Globalist Delusion” by Nadia Schadlow “The Great Lie of War” with Ben Rhodes on “The Ezra Klein Show” Book Recommendations: America in the World by Robert B. Zoellick The Mystery of Capital by Hernando De Soto The Peacemaker by William Inboden Demon Copperhead<s

Last Friday, Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth announced that he was breaking the Pentagon’s contract with the A.I. company Anthropic and would declare the company a supply chain risk — a designation for companies so dangerous, they can’t exist anywhere in the U.S. military supply chain. What makes this so wild is the military is still using Anthropic’s A.I. system right now. They reportedly used it during the raid to capture Maduro in Venezuela, and are now using it in the war in Iran. This story raises so many questions: Why does the government think Anthropic is so dangerous? How exactly is the government using A.I. right now? How do they want to use A.I.? And who should ultimately control this powerful and uncertain technology? Dean Ball is a senior fellow at the Foundation for American Innovation and the author of the newsletter Hyperdimensional. He served as a senior policy adviser on A.I. for the Trump White House and was the primary staff writer of their A.I. action plan. But he’s been furious at the Trump administration for how it has been handling the conflict with Anthropic. So I wanted to have him on the show to explain why. Mentioned: “Hyperdimensional" by Dean Ball “What if Dario Amodei Is Right About A.I.?” The Ezra Klein Show “Stratechery” by Ben Thompson Book Recommendations: Rationalism in Politics and Other Essays by Michael Oakeshott Empire Of Liberty by Gordon S. Wood Roll, Jordan, Roll by Eugene D. Genovese Thoughts? Guest suggestions? Email us at [email protected]. You can find transcripts (posted midday) and more episodes of “The Ezra Klein Show” at nytimes.com/ezra-klein-podcast, and you can find Ezra on Twitter @ezraklein. Book recommendations from all our guests are listed at <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/article/ezra-klein-show-book-recs.htm

Two sitting heads of state, eight weeks apart. On Saturday, February 28, the United States and Israel launched a massive military assault on Iran that resulted in the death of Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, along with much of his senior command. This came less than two months after the United States military captured Nicolás Maduro, the president of Venezuela, in an overnight raid. The president seems to believe that he can decapitate these regimes and control their successors without events spinning out of his control. Is he right? Ben Rhodes is a New York Times Opinion contributing writer and a co-host of “Pod Save the World.” He served as a senior adviser to President Barack Obama and worked on the Iran nuclear deal. In this conversation, we discuss the ongoing conflict in Iran, how Democrats should respond, and whether Trump’s “head on a pike” approach to foreign policy underestimates the chaos of war. Mentioned: “Push from Saudis, Israel helped move Trump to attack Iran” by Michael Birnbaum, John Hudson, Karen DeYoung, Natalie Allison and Souad Mekhennet “Trump’s Best Foreign Policy? Not Starting Any Wars” by J.D. Vance Book Recommendations: From the Ruins of Empire by Pankaj Mishra The World of Yesterday by Stefan Zweig Travelers in the Third Reich by Julia Boyd Thoughts? Guest suggestions? Email us at [email protected]. You can find transcripts (posted midday) and more episodes of “The Ezra Klein Show” at nytimes.com/ezra-klein-podcast, and you can find Ezra on Twitter @ezraklein. Book recommendations from all our guests are listed at <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/ar

President Trump’s approval ratings on the economy, immigration and trade are deep in the red. But in Tuesday night’s State of the Union address, he decided to tell the American people: You don’t know what you’re talking about. “Today our border is secure, our spirit is restored, inflation is plummeting, incomes are rising fast. The roaring economy is roaring like never before,” he said. I’m not going to fact-check the president in this episode. But I do want to ask: Even if he can’t be honest with the American people, is he at least being honest with himself? My editor Aaron Retica joins me to discuss. Mentioned: “I Am Part of the Resistance Inside the Trump Administration” by Miles Taylor “Has Trump Achieved a Lot Less Than It Seems?” with Yuval Levin on “The Ezra Klein Show” Thoughts? Guest suggestions? Email us at [email protected]. You can find transcripts (posted midday) and more episodes of “The Ezra Klein Show” at nytimes.com/ezra-klein-podcast, and you can find Ezra on Twitter @ezraklein. Book recommendations from all our guests are listed at https://www.nytimes.com/article/ezra-klein-show-book-recs. This episode of “The Ezra Klein Show” was produced by Claire Gordon and Marie Cascione. Fact-checking by Michelle Harris, with Kate Sinclair and Mary Marge Locker. Our senior engineer is Jeff Geld, with additional mixing by Isaac Jones & Aman Sahota. Our executive producer is Claire Gordon. The show’s production team also includes Annie Galvin, Rollin Hu, Kristin Lin, Emma Kehlbeck, Jack McCordick, Marina King and Jan Kobal. Original music by Pat McCusker. Audience strategy by Kristina Samulewski and Shannon Busta. The director of New York Times Opinion Audio is Annie-Rose Strasser. Subscribe today at nytimes.com/podcasts or on Apple Podcasts and Spotify. You can also subscribe via your favorite podcast app here https://www.nytimes.com/activate-access/audio?source=podcatcher. For more podcasts and narrated articles, download The New York Times app at nytimes.com/app. Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

A.I. agents are here. Have they changed your life yet? The release of agents like Claude Code marked a new pivot point in the history of A.I. We are leaving the chatbot era and entering the agentic era — where A.I. is capable of completing all kinds of tasks on its own, and even collaborating and communicating with other A.I. It isn’t clear yet whether these models actually make their users meaningfully more productive. But the technology is continuing to improve; there are few signs that it is close to plateauing. So what might this new era mean for our economy, our labor market and our kids? Clark is a co-founder of Anthropic, the company behind Claude and Claude Code. His newsletter, Import AI, has been one of my go-to reads to track the capabilities of different models over the years. In this conversation, I ask him to share how he sees this moment — how the technology is changing, whether it is leading to meaningful changes in how we work and think, and how policy needs to or can change in response to any job displacement on the horizon. Mentioned: “Import AI” by Jack Clark “2026: This is AGI” by Pat Grady and Sonya Huang “Why and How Governments Should Monitor AI Development” by Jess Whittlestone and Jack Clark “Anthropic’s Chief on A.I.: ‘We Don’t Know if the Models Are Conscious’", Interesting Times with Ross Douthat Book Recommendations: A Wizard of Earthsea by Ursula K. Le Guin The True Believer by Eric Hoffer There Is No Antimemetics Division by qntm Thoughts? Guest suggestions? Email us at [email protected]. You can find transcripts (posted midday) and more episodes of “The Ezra Klein Show

It has been harder to get insight into the dynamics of President Trump’s White House this term compared with the first one, partly because there have been fewer leaks. But after the attack on Venezuela and the administration’s actions in Minneapolis, I’ve found myself wondering: How exactly is Trump making decisions? Who is he listening to? How does this White House work? Ashley Parker and Michael Scherer cover the Trump administration for The Atlantic and have written a series of big profiles on key figures in this administration. Parker previously won three Pulitzer Prizes for her reporting at The Washington Post. Mentioned: “The Wrath of Stephen Miller” by Ashley Parker and Michael Scherer “‘I Run the Country and the World’” by Ashley Parker and Michael Scherer “This Is the Real Reason Susie Wiles Talked to Me 11 Times” by Chris Whipple “Susie Wiles, JD Vance, and the “Junkyard Dogs”: The White House Chief of Staff on Trump’s Second Term (Part 1 of 2)” by Chris Whipple Book Recommendations: The Secret History by Donna Tartt Bel Canto by Ann Patchett Frankly, We Did Win This Election by Michael C. Bender An Image of My Name Enters America by Lucy Ives Palimpsest by Gore Vidal <a href="https

At the end of January, Trump’s Justice Department released what it said was the last tranche of the Epstein files: millions of pages of emails and texts, F.B.I. documents and court records. Much was redacted and millions more pages have been withheld. There is a lot we want to know that remains unclear.But what has come into clear view is the role Epstein played as a broker of information, connections, wealth and women and girls for a slice of the global elite. This was the infrastructure of Epstein’s power — and it reveals much about the infrastructure of elite networks more generally.Anand Giridharadas is something of a sociologist of American elites. He’s the author of, among other books, “Winners Take All: The Elite Charade of Changing the World” and the forthcoming “Man in the Mirror: Hope, Struggle and Belonging in an American City.” He also publishes the great newsletter The.Ink.Back in November, after the release of an earlier batch of Epstein files, Giridharadas wrote a great Times Opinion guest essay, taking a sociologist’s lens to the messages Epstein exchanged with his elite friends. So after the government released this latest, enormous tranche of materials, I wanted to talk to Giridharadas to help make sense of it. What do they reveal — about how Epstein operated in the world, the vulnerabilities he exploited and what that says about how power works in America today?Note: This conversation was recorded on Tuesday, Feb. 10. On Thursday, Feb. 12, Kathryn Ruemmler announced she would be resigning from her role as chief legal officer and general counsel at Goldman Sachs.This episode contains strong language.Mentioned:“How the Elite Behave When No One Is Watching: Inside the Epstein Emails” by Anand Giridharadas“How JPMorgan Enabled the Crimes of Jeffrey Epstein” by David Enrich, Matthew Goldstein and Jessica Silver-Greenberg“Scams, Schemes, Ruthless Cons: The Untold Story of How Jeffrey Epstein Got Rich” by David Enrich, Steve Eder, Jessica Silver-Greenberg and Matthew GoldsteinNobody's Girl by Virginia Roberts Giuffre<p

George Saunders is tired of being the “kindness guy.”Saunders is one of my favorite fiction writers, and a friend of the pod; I talked to him back in 2021 and 2022. He also has a reputation as a kind of guru of kindness, thanks to a viral commencement speech he gave back in 2013. We talked about kindness on the show before.But with the publication of his new novel, “Vigil,” I noticed that something about Saunders seemed to have shifted. He was pushing back against that public persona, and wrestling with darker themes.“Vigil” follows an oil tycoon who, on his deathbed, is visited by angels and people from his past asking him to reassess his life. And you can feel a tension in that book that is also very alive in Saunders himself — between recognizing how much of our lives are conditioned by our circumstances and the need to pass judgment to reckon with the truth.In this conversation, I discuss that tension with Saunders. I ask him about his relationship not just to kindness but also to anger; how he defines sin; whether he believes in free will; and what he thinks lies beyond kindness.This episode contains strong language.Mentioned:Vigil by George Saunders“What It Means to Be Kind in a Cruel World” by The Ezra Klein Show“George Saunders Convocation Speech 2013”“A Tough Question Indeed” by George SaundersEast West Street by Philippe Sands“When Is It Genocide?” by The Ezra Klein ShowBook Recommendations:I Will Bear Witness, Volume 1 by Victor KlempererRed Cavalry and Other Stories by Isaac BabelThe Place

Ragebait, sponcon, A.I. slop — the internet of 2026 makes a lot of us nostalgic for the internet of 10 or 15 years ago.What exactly went wrong here? How did the early promise of the internet get so twisted? And what exactly is wrong here? What kinds of policies could actually make our digital lives meaningfully better?Cory Doctorow and Tim Wu have two different theories of the case, which I thought would be interesting to put in conversation together. Doctorow is a science fiction writer, an activist with the Electronic Frontier Foundation and the author of “Enshittification: Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It.” Wu is a law professor who worked on technology policy in the Biden White House; his latest book is “The Age of Extraction: How Tech Platforms Conquered the Economy and Threaten Our Future Prosperity.”In this conversation, we discuss their different frameworks, and how they connect to all kinds of issues that plague the modern internet: the feeling that we’re being manipulated; the deranging of our politics; the squeezing of small businesses and creators; the deluge of spam and fraud; the constant surveillance and privacy risks; the quiet rise of algorithmic pricing; and the dehumanization of work. And they lay out the policies that they think would go furthest in making all these different aspects of our digital lives better.Mentioned:Enshittification by Cory DoctorowThe Age of Extraction by Tim Wu“Fighting Enshittification” by Josh RichmanBook Recommendations:Small Is Beautiful by E. F. SchumacherManipulation by Cass R. SunsteinThe Rise and Fall of the Great Powers by Paul KennedyCareless People by Sarah Wynn-WilliamsLittle Bosses Everywhere by Bridget Read</stro

My motivation for this episode is personal. One of my resolutions this year is to spend more time hosting and to make those gatherings more meaningful.I think a lot of us wish we had better social lives and a stronger feeling of community around us. But it’s hard. We’re busy, we’re tired, and social planning and hosting can feel like just more work. So I asked Priya Parker on the show to help.Parker is the author of “The Art of Gathering: How We Meet and Why It Matters” and a wonderful Substack, Group Life. She’s also a conflict resolution facilitator. And she just thinks about gathering and hosting in a different way from anyone else I’ve ever met. For her, it’s about more than just throwing a great dinner party; it’s about how we build community across differences, all the way up to how gathering can help create a better politics. The way Zohran Mamdani’s mayoral campaign thought about community and built community among its volunteers was partly based on her work and advice.This episode is a bit of a break from politics — but also not. Because pulling the people we love closer and spending more time together rather than alone are as essential as any political or civic discipline could be right now.This conversation contains strong language.Mentioned:In Defense of Politics by Bernard CrickI And Thou by Martin BuberThe Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny by Kiran Desai“Adorable Little Detonators” by Allison P. Davis“The Accused” by Katie J.M. Baker“The Black Thought Project” by Alicia Walters“Zohran’s Smile” by Anand GiridharadasBook Recommendations:The Politics of Ritual by Molly FarnethOn Repentance and Repair by Danya Ruttenberg<a href="https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/705378/boymom-by-ruth-wh

The old world order is dying. What new world order — if any — is struggling to be born?I can’t think of a week when it felt clearer that an era was coming to an end. Whatever people thought America was, at least for a couple of decades, it’s something else now. The killing of Alex Pretti and the fact that it was recorded on video that plainly contradicted the Trump administration’s initial narrative made that clear. Mark Carney, the prime minister of Canada, also drove home that point when he declared at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, that the world was in the midst of a “rupture.”What do people think of America now in Europe? In China? And if American hegemony is coming to an end, what comes after that?Adam Tooze is a historian at Columbia University and a chronicler of crises. The Guardian recently called him “the crisis whisperer.” He’s written a number of books about the times when systems fall apart and new orders emerge, including “Crashed: How a Decade of Financial Crises Changed the World.” And on his Substack, Chartbook, he tracks the unfolding crises and power shifts, in particular the rise of China. He also had a front-row seat to the chaos of Davos last week, moderating a panel that included Howard Lutnick, the commerce secretary.I wanted to talk to Tooze about what he saw at the World Economic Forum, how the world’s understanding of the U.S. is changing and how he’s making sense of this moment.Mentioned:Crashed by Adam Tooze“Chartbook” Substack by Adam Tooze“The Empty Chamber” by George Packer“The growing challenges for monetary policy in the current international monetary and financial system", speech by Mark CarneyBook Recommendations:Diary of a Madman and Other Stories by Lu XunThe Southern Tour by Jonathan ChatwinContext Collapse by Ryan RubyThoughts? Guest suggestions? Email us at [email protected].</p

“We are in the midst of a rupture, not a transition,” Prime Minister Mark Carney of Canada announced last week at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland.It was one of the most significant foreign policy speeches in years, sending shockwaves through the international community. He was describing a dynamic that’s been building for decades — what the scholars Henry Farrell and Abraham Newman call “weaponized interdependence” — that has now reached a tipping point.I asked Farrell on the show to explain this dynamic, why this is a “rupture” moment and how other countries are responding. He is an international-affairs professor at Johns Hopkins University, is an author of the book “Underground Empire: How America Weaponized the World Economy” and writes an excellent Substack, Programmable Mutter.Note: This episode touches on the clashes over immigration enforcement in Minneapolis and the killing of Renee Good, but it was recorded on Friday, before the killing of Alex Pretti.Mentioned:“Davos 2026: Special address by Mark Carney, Prime Minister of Canada”Underground Empire by Henry Farrell and Abraham Newman“Programmable Mutter” by Henry Farrell“The nature and sources of liberal international order” by Daniel Deudney and G. John Ikenberry“The Enshittification of American Power” by Henry Farrell and Abraham L. Newman“Too big to care” by Cory DoctorowWeapons of the Weak by James C. ScottPrivate Truths, Public Lies by Timur Kuran“<a href="https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/international-organization/article/further-back-to-the-future-neoroyalism-the-trump-administration-and-the-emerging-international-syst

There’s so much more happening than what you see in online video clips.Congress gave Trump a staggering, military-size budget for immigration enforcement. And it’s hard to keep the scale of what the administration is building in your mind all at once. There are all the additional boots on the ground, as well as a lot of things that are less visible.I wanted to talk to someone who has followed closely how the whole immigration system is changing under President Trump. Caitlin Dickerson is a journalist at The Atlantic. She’s been covering immigration closely since Trump’s first term, and she won a Pulitzer Prize in 2023 for reporting on his family separation policy. In this conversation, we discuss what the country’s new immigration enforcement infrastructure looks like, what it is being used to do now and what it might mean for the future.This episode contains strong language.Mentioned:“We need to take away children.” by Caitlin Dickerson“ICE’s Mind-Bogglingly Massive Blank Check" by Caitlin Dickerson“Hundreds of Thousands of Anonymous Deportees” by Caitlin Dickerson“How ICE Lost Its Guardrails” by Caitlin Dickerson“Countering Domestic Terrorism and Organized Political Violence,” The White HouseBook Recommendations:Impossible Subjects by Mae M. NgaiSolito by Javier ZamoraMeditations for Mortals by Oliver BurkemanThoughts? Guest suggestions? Email us at [email protected] can find transcripts (posted midday) and more episodes of “The Ezra Klein Show” at <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/co

We are one year into Trump’s second term. And it feels like so much has happened – more than the human mind, or the country, can absorb. But how much has Trump really accomplished? What policies have changed the country in a way that will last?My guest Yuval Levin is one of the smartest thinkers on the right, and his verdict is: not that much. “There’s an important story to tell about the absence of action in the past year, too,” he tells me.Levin is the director of social, cultural and constitutional studies at the American Enterprise Institute, the founder and editor of National Affairs and the author of several books on policy and political theory, including “American Covenant: How the Constitution Unified Our Nation – and Could Again.”Mentioned:ChartsBuckley by Sam TanenhausBook Recommendations:Insecure Majorities by Frances E. LeeMaking the Presidency by Lindsay M. ChervinskyLast Branch Standing by Sarah IsgurThoughts? Guest suggestions? Email us at [email protected] can find transcripts (posted midday) and more episodes of “The Ezra Klein Show” at nytimes.com/ezra-klein-podcast, and you can find Ezra on Twitter @ezraklein. Book recommendations from all our guests are listed at https://www.nytimes.com/article/ezra-klein-show-book-recs.This episode of “The Ezra Klein Show” was produced by Rollin Hu. Fact-checking by Michelle Harris, with Kate Sinclair. Our senior engineer is Jeff Geld, with additional mixing by Aman Sahota. Our executive producer is Claire Gordon. The show’s production team also includes Marie Cascione, Annie Galvin, Kristin Lin, Emma Kehlbeck, Jack McCordick, Marina King and Jan Kobal. Original music by Pat McCusker. Audience strategy by Kristina Samulewski and Shannon Busta. The director of New York Times Opinion Audio is Annie-Rose Strasser. Subscribe today at nytimes.com/podcasts or on Apple Podcasts and Spotify. You can also subscribe via your favorite podcast app here <a href="https://www.nytimes.

State Representative James Talarico of Texas might have been our most requested guest last year. And he seemed to come out of nowhere.Talarico started breaking through with viral videos on TikTok and Instagram. And in those videos, he didn’t sound like your typical Democrat. He’s forthrightly Christian, quoting Scripture to defend progressive positions and challenging Christian nationalism on Christian grounds. And he is now running for Senate in Texas — in a primary field that includes U.S. Representative Jasmine Crockett — in what will be one of the most important Senate races this year.So I wanted to have Talarico on the show to talk about his faith, his politics and the way those two have come together in this attentional moment. Because he’s clearly saying things that people are hungry to hear.Mentioned:The Sabbath by Rabbi Heschel“#2352 James Talarico”, The Joe Rogan ExperienceCommon Sense by Thomas PaineBook Recommendations:Lonesome Dove by Larry McMurtryJesus and the Disinherited by Howard ThurmanThe Upswing by Robert D. Putnam and Shaylyn Romney GarrettThoughts? Guest suggestions? Email us at [email protected] can find transcripts (posted midday) and more episodes of “The Ezra Klein Show” at nytimes.com/ezra-klein-podcast, and you can find Ezra on Twitter @ezraklein. Book recommendations from all our guests are listed at https://www.nytimes.com/article/ezra-klein-show-book-recs.This episode of “The Ezra Klein Show” was produced by Marie Cascione. Fact-checking by Kate Sinclair and Mary Marge Locker. Our senior engineer is Jeff Geld, with additional mixing by Aman Sahota. Our executive producer is Claire Gordon. The show’s production team also includes Annie Galvin, Rollin Hu, Kristin Lin, Emma Kehlbeck, Michelle Harris, Jack McCordick, Marina King and Jan Kobal. Original music by Pat McCusker. Audience strategy by Kristina Samulewski and Shannon Busta. The director of New York Times Opinion Audio is Annie-Rose Strasser.

The shocking events of January have sent a message: America works differently now. M. Gessen is a Times Opinion columnist and the author of books about living under autocracy, including the National Book Award-winning “The Future Is History.” They have been a clear, relentless and perceptive voice on what it means and what it is like to live in a country that is turning into a different kind of regime. And they wrote an essay on the seizure of the president of Venezuela, calling it “a blow — quite likely fatal — to the new world order of law, justice and human rights that was heralded in the wake of World War II.” Mentioned:“329 Days of Trump” by Michael M. Grynbaum and Stuart A. Thompson“Two Middle East Negotiators Assess Trump’s Israel-Hamas Deal” by Ezra KleinThe Future Is History by M. GessenBook Recommendations:Tomorrow Is Yesterday by Hussein Agha and Robert MalleyOne Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This by Omar El AkkadThe Hill by Harriet ClarkThoughts? Guest suggestions? Email us at [email protected] can find transcripts (posted midday) and more episodes of “The Ezra Klein Show” at nytimes.com/ezra-klein-podcast, and you can find Ezra on Twitter @ezraklein. Book recommendations from all our guests are listed at https://www.nytimes.com/article/ezra-klein-show-book-recs.This episode of “The Ezra Klein Show” was produced by Annie Galvin and Marie Cascione. Fact-checking by Michelle Harris. Our senior engineer is Jeff Geld, with additional mixing by Aman Sahota and Isaac Jones. Our executive producer is Claire Gordon. The show’s production team also includes Rollin Hu, Kristin Lin, Emma Kehlbeck, Jack McCordick, Marina King and Jan Kobal. Original music by Pat McCusker. Audience s

What is America doing in Venezuela?On Jan. 3, the Trump administration launched an operation that ended with the capture of President Nicolás Maduro, who is now in New York City on narcoterrorism and weapons charges. “We’re going to run it, essentially, until such time as a proper transition can take place,” Trump said.Mr. Trump’s policy here is strange for a number of reasons: The U.S. is suffering from a fentanyl crisis, but Venezuela is not known as a fentanyl producer. Venezuela’s oil reserves are not the path to geopolitical power that they might have been in the 1970s. Mr. Maduro was a brutal and corrupt dictator, but Mr. Trump has left his No. 2 in charge. And Mr. Trump ran for office promising fewer foreign entanglements — not more.So why Venezuela, and why now? That’s the question we look at in this conversation.Jonathan Blitzer is a staff writer at The New Yorker. He has profiled Stephen Miller and has been following the U.S. military’s drug boat strikes in the Caribbean, as well as the Trump administration’s evolving agenda in Latin America. He’s also the author of the book “Everyone Who Is Gone Is Here: The United States, Central America, and the Making of a Crisis.Mentioned:Everyone Who Is Gone Is Here by Jonathan BlitzerAlien Enemies Act1979/1980 Refugee ActMonroe Doctrine“How Stephen Miller Manipulates Donald Trump to Further His Immigration Obsession” by Jonathan Blitzer“Who’s Running Venezuela After the Fall of Maduro?” by Jonathan BlitzerBook Recommendations:The Known World by Edward P. JonesWhat You Have Heard Is True by Carolyn Forché<a href="https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/253399/the-spy-and-the-traitor-by-ben-macintyre/" target="_blank

I like to start the year with a few episodes on things I’m personally working on. Not resolutions, exactly. More like intentions. Or, even better, practices.One of those practices, strange as it sounds, is repeatedly asking the question: “What is this?” It’s a question I got from a book of the same name, by Stephen and Martine Batchelor. In that book, they are describing an approach to Buddhist meditation built on the cultivation of doubt and wonder. You can see that as a spiritual practice, but it’s also an intellectual and ethical one. It is, for me, a practice that has a lot of bearing on politics and journalism.Stephen Batchelor’s latest book, “Buddha, Socrates, and Us: Ethical Living in Uncertain Times,” explores those dimensions of doubt more fully. And so I wanted to have him on the show to discuss the virtues of both certainty and uncertainty, the difficulty of living both ethically and openly. You can see this as a conversation about our inner lives or our outer lives, but of course they are one. And Batchelor, as you’ll hear, is just lovely to listen to.Mentioned:Buddha, Socrates, and Us by Stephen BatchelorWhat Is This? by Martine Batchelor and Stephen BatchelorEthics of Care by Carol GilliganBook Recommendations:Children of a Modest Star by Jonathan S. Blake and Nils GilmanWork Like a Monk by Shoukei MatsumotoThe Second Body by Daisy HildyardThoughts? Guest suggestions? Email us at [email protected] can find transcripts (posted midday) and more episodes of “The Ezra Klein Show” at nytimes.com/ezra-klein-podcast, and you can find Ezra on Twitter @ezraklein. Book recommendations from all our guests are listed at https://www.nytimes.com/article/ezra-klein-show-book-recs.This episode of “The Ezra Klein Show” was produced by Kristin Lin. Fact-checking by Michelle Harris. Our senior engineer is Jeff Geld, with additional mixing by Isaac Jones. Our executive producer is Claire Gordo

This is the strangest economy I’ve seen in my lifetime. If you just looked at the macro data — the jobs numbers, G.D.P., the stock market — things look pretty normal. But they clearly aren’t normal. The Trump administration spent the year upending the global trade system while tech companies spent hundreds of billions of dollars on A.I., a technology that could potentially displace many of our jobs. And people don’t feel normal, either. Survey data shows that the vibecession rages on.Tracy Alloway and Joe Weisenthal are the co-hosts of the excellent economics podcast “Odd Lots” and have closely followed all the chaos this year. So I wanted to have them on the show to explain what the hell is going on.Mentioned:ChartsOdd LotsThe Three-Body Problem by Cixin Liu“The Vibecession: The Self-Fulfilling Prophecy” by Kyla Scanlon“Everyone is Gambling and No One is Happy” by Kyla ScanlonBook Recommendations:Breakneck by Dan WangNorth Woods by Daniel MasonA Marriage at Sea by Sophie ElmhirstThe Digital Reversal by Andrey MirOrality and Literacy by Walter J. OngNo Sense of Place by Joshua MeyrowitzThoughts? Guest suggestions? Email us at [email protected] can find transcripts (posted midday) and more episodes of “The Ezra Klein Show” at <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/co

What will America’s story be after President Trump? My colleague David Leonhardt did a great series on that question this year, talking to a number of leading politicians. I thought two of those episodes, with Senator Bernie Sanders and with Senator Ruben Gallego, would be of particular interest to you.And they’re great to listen to as a pair. Sanders and Gallego have strong views about where the Democratic Party went wrong and how it can win back working-class voters in particular — views that have a lot of overlap but also some interesting shades of difference. So I wanted to share both conversations.You can learn more about our sister show “The Opinions” here — and subscribe wherever you find your podcasts. Subscribe today at nytimes.com/podcasts or on Apple Podcasts and Spotify. You can also subscribe via your favorite podcast app here https://www.nytimes.com/activate-access/audio?source=podcatcher. For more podcasts and narrated articles, download The New York Times app at nytimes.com/app. Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

“This lightbulb went off that almost no one was asking these questions.”In 2006, Elie Hassenfeld and a few of his friends pooled some money they wanted to donate to charity. And they wanted to find charities where their money would go the farthest in improving lives. That information, it turned out, was incredibly hard to find.That was the seed of GiveWell. For almost a decade, GiveWell has dedicated itself to rigorously researching the impact of charities around the world and channeling donations to the ones that are the most effective at saving lives. It might sound simple, but this was a radically new approach in the world of charitable giving, and the work itself isn’t simple at all.I’ve supported GiveWell through the years. So as the year winds down and other people might be thinking about giving to a charity, I wanted to invite Hassenfeld, GiveWell’s chief executive, on the show to talk through this work. How does it measure impact? Are there limits to what you can measure? As an organization, has it made mistakes? What does it really mean to give well?If you like what you hear, I hope you’ll also consider donating to GiveWell. Learn more at givewell.org.Mentioned:GiveWell“Trust in Radical Truth and Radical Transparency” by Ray DalioHarlem Children’s ZoneAgainst Malaria FoundationHelen Keller IntlNew IncentivesNo Lean SeasonClinton Health Access Initiative (CHAI)PATHGiveDirectlyALIMABook Recommendations:Factfulness by Hans Rosling with Ola Rosling and Anna Rosling Rönnlund<a href="https://www.hachettebookgroup.com/titles/abhijit-v-banerjee/poor-eco

This is one of my favorite conversations in recent memory — with the writer Zadie Smith. Smith is the author of novels, including “White Teeth,” “On Beauty” and “NW,” as well as many essays and short stories. Her ability to give language to the kinds of quiet battles that live inside of ourselves is part of why she’s been one of my favorite writers for years.“We absolutely need to gather in our identity groups sometimes for our freedoms, for our civil rights. There’s absolutely no doubt about that. But for that role to be the thing that is you existentially all the way down — that is something that I personally believe all human beings revolt from at some level,” she told me when we spoke last September, shortly before  Trump’s re-election.It’s ideas like these that I found interesting to revisit now, in a starkly different political climate. In this conversation, we discuss Smith’s novel, “The Fraud,” which Smith wrote with Trump and populism front of mind; what populism is really channeling; why Smith refuses the “bait” of wokeness; how people have been “modified” by smartphones and social media; and more.This episode contains strong language.Mentioned:Feel Free by Zadie Smith“Fascinated to Presume: In Defense of Fiction” by Zadie SmithAmusing Ourselves to Death by Neil Postman“Generation Why?” by Zadie SmithBook Recommendations:The Director by Daniel KehlmannThe Rebel’s Clinic by Adam ShatzThe Diaries of Virginia WoolfThoughts? Guest suggestions? Email us at [email protected] can find transcripts (posted midday) and more episodes of “The Ezra Klein Show” at nytimes.com/ezra-klein-podcast. Book recommendations from all our guests are listed at https://www.nytimes.com/article/ezra-klein-show-book-recs.This episode of “The Ezra Klein Show” was produced by Annie Galvin. Fact-checking by Michelle Harris, with Kate Sinclair. Our senior engineer is Jeff Geld, with additional mixing by Aman Sahota and Efim Shapiro. Our senior editor is Claire

Gavin Newsom is the 2028 Democratic front-runner. That’s what many of the polls and the Polymarket betting odds say.It’s been widely believed that Newsom wants to run for president someday. But belief that he could be a front-runner was less common. A liberal white guy from a state that much of the country considers badly governed just didn’t seem like the profile the Democratic Party was looking for.But as a Californian who has watched Newsom for a long time, I was surprised by him this year. After President Trump returned to the White House, Newsom started a podcast, interviewing people like Charlie Kirk, Steve Bannon and Michael Savage, which made a lot of Democrats mad. At the same time, Newsom turned himself into the leader of the resistance — trolling Trump on social media and pushing a ballot initiative to end California’s independent redistricting to counter the partisan redistricting effort in Texas.Newsom has been willing to try things and take risks. He has shown a feel for this moment — in politics and in the way attention works now.But it’s still true that he runs a state that the country considers badly governed. California tops the rankings of unaffordable states, at a time when affordability has become a central electoral issue.In this conversation, I ask Newsom about all of this — what he learned this year from talking to figures on the right, how he thinks the Democratic Party can win back voters it lost, why California is so unaffordable and what he’s doing about it.Mentioned:Applebee’s America by Ron Fournier, Douglas B. Sosnik and Matthew J. Dowd“And, This Is Charlie Kirk”“And, This Is Gaming Culture & Gen-Z Nihilism With Content Creator Brandon “Atrioc” Ewing”“And, This Is Michael Savage”“And, This Is Steve Bannon”“Newsom Says Trump’s Attacks Are ‘Not Normal’”“<a href="https://www.c-span.org/program/american-history-tv/barack-obama-2004-democratic-national-convention-key

I answer your questions on the year’s political lessons, the struggles of young men and handling heat on the show.The end-of-year Ask Me Anything episode has become a tradition on the show. So as 2025 comes to a close, I’m joined by Claire Gordon, the show’s executive producer, to answer your questions about an eventful year — how my thinking on the Trump administration has evolved, how well the Democratic Party has played its chips, what I think it means to be a Democrat right now, whether “Abundance” is centrist, how politicians might address adriftness of young people, how I’ve handled the criticism the show has received and how many packets of Splenda I consume in a day.Note: This conversation was recorded on Tuesday, Dec. 2, and does not reflect more recent developments in Congress’s review of the Sept. 2 boat attack.Mentioned:“Don’t Believe Him” by Ezra Klein“The Supreme Court Is Backing Trump’s Power Grab” by Ezra Klein“What if Trump Just Ignores the Courts?” by Ezra Klein“The Republican Party’s NPC Problem — and Ours” by Ezra Klein“Abundance and the Left" by Ezra Klein“The Emergency Is Here” by Ezra Klein“Stop Acting Like This Is Normal” by Ezra Klein“What Were Democrats Thinking?” by Ezra Klein“The Goon Squad” by Daniel KolitzDragonriders of Pe

My colleague Ross Douthat talks to the journalist who exposed Jeffrey Epstein. This episode of “Interesting Times,” with the Miami Herald investigative journalist Julie K. Brown, came out back in July. But since Epstein has very much stayed in the news, I wanted to share it now. The conversation is such a fascinating and helpful explainer of the whole case, and the questions that remain unanswered — with the woman whose reporting led to Epstein’s re-arrest.  If you haven’t had a chance to check out “Interesting Times” this year, you really should. The team has produced so many great episodes, especially with leading thinkers and activists on the right. You can find them on the NYT Audio app, Apple, Spotify, Amazon Music, YouTube, iHeartRadio or wherever you get your podcasts. Subscribe today at nytimes.com/podcasts or on Apple Podcasts and Spotify. You can also subscribe via your favorite podcast app here https://www.nytimes.com/activate-access/audio?source=podcatcher. For more podcasts and narrated articles, download The New York Times app at nytimes.com/app. Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

The holidays are an unusually social time, filled with parties and family get-togethers. But for most of the year, we feel isolated and unsatisfied with our social lives. Our society isn’t structured to support connection year-round. So it’s an apt time to re-air this episode — a conversation with the writer Sheila Liming about rediscovering the lost art of hanging out.Liming is an associate professor of professional writing at Champlain College and the author of “Hanging Out: The Radical Power of Killing Time.” In the book, Liming investigates the troubling fact that we’ve grown much less likely to simply spend time together outside our partnerships, workplaces and family units. What would it look like to reconfigure our world to make social connection easier for all of us?I spoke to Liming in April 2023. But I find that this conversation provides a clearer sense of what’s gone wrong in our social lives — and how to make “hanging out” with others more fulfilling.Note: We're still gathering questions for an upcoming "Ask Me Anything" episode we'd like to record. If you have any questions for Ezra, please email [email protected] using the subject line "AMA."Mentioned:“You’d Be Happier Living Closer to Friends. Why Don’t You?” by Anne Helen Petersen“The Nuclear Family Was a Mistake” by David BrooksFull Surrogacy Now by Sophie LewisRegarding the Pain of Others by Susan SontagLetters from Tove by Tove JanssonBook Recommendations:Black Paper by Teju ColeOn the Inconvenience of Other People by Lauren BerlantThe Hare by Melanie FinnThoughts? Guest suggestions? Email us at [email protected] can find transcripts (posted midday) and more episodes of “The Ezra Klein Show” at nytimes.com/ezra-klein-podcast, and you can find Ezra on Twitter @ezraklein. Book recommendations from all our guests are listed at https://www.nytimes.com/article/ezra-klein-show-book-recs.This episode of “The Ezra Klein Show” is produced by Annie Galvin, with Jeff Geld, Rogé Karm

On Monday night, in front of a live audience, I talked to Fareed Zakaria about the different political age he believes we’ve entered. Zakaria is the host of “Fareed Zakaria GPS” on CNN and the author of the 2024 book “Age of Revolutions: Progress and Backlash From 1600 to the Present.” To mark the release of the book in paperback, Zakaria invited me to have this conversation at Symphony Space in New York City. We discuss the “revolution” we may be living through, the forces driving it,  and how the Democratic Party can adapt.Mentioned:The Tea Party and the Remaking of Republican Conservatism by Theda Skocpol and Vanessa Williamson"The Time Tax" by Annie Lowrey"Behind Trump and Vance Is This Man’s Movement" by Ezra Klein"The end of progress against extreme poverty?" by Max Roser"What Does the ‘Post-Liberal Right’ Actually Want?" by The Ezra Klein ShowEscape from Freedom by Erich FrommBook Recommendations:A Preface to Morals by Walter LippmannThe Coming Of Post-Industrial Society by Daniel BellThe Lost City by Alan EhrenhaltThoughts? Guest suggestions? Email us at [email protected] can find transcripts (posted midday) and more episodes of “The Ezra Klein Show” at nytimes.com/ezra-klein-podcast, and you can find Ezra on Twitter @ezraklein. Book recommendations from all our guests are listed at https://www.nytimes.com/article/ezra-klein-show-book-recs.This episode of “The Ezra Klein Show” was produced by Jack McCordick. Fact-checking by Michelle Harris, with Kate Sinclair and Mary Marge Locker.  Our senior engineer is Jeff Geld. Mixing by Isaac Jones. Our executive producer is Claire Gordon.  The show’s production team also includes Marie Cascio

Patti Smith, “the Godmother of Punk,” has lived a wild life and accumulated so much wisdom in the process. In the 1960s and ’70s, Smith was a fixture of the New York City creative scene — hanging out with the likes of Bob Dylan, Janis Joplin, Allen Ginsberg and Robert Mapplethorpe. Merging her own poetry with an ace backing band, she became a global rock star. Then she gave it up, moved to Michigan, raised a family, and remade herself into a best-selling author. Her stunning memoir “Just Kids” won the National Book Award and is one of the books that I’ve kept returning to, again and again.There is clearly something unusual about Smith. People who know her have described her as “shamanistic.” But even for those of us who will never become rock stars, there’s something inspiring — and oddly relatable — in how she thinks about life. So I was excited to have the opportunity to sit down with her and learn more.Smith is out with a new memoir, “Bread of Angels,” and is on tour for the 50th anniversary of her breakthrough album, “Horses.” We talk about that book and that album and so much more: the boundless curiosity that drives her; the books that shaped her; her childhood communion with a snapping turtle; what Andy Warhol was like; what color she thinks the soul is; and a lot more that’s hard even to describe.This episode contains strong language.Mentioned:“Pan’s Labyrinth” by Guillermo del ToroGrimm’s Complete Fairy Tales by Jacob Grimm and Wilhelm GrimmBread of Angels by Patti SmithJust Kids by Patti Smith“The Dark Blot” by Gérard de Nerval“Genie” by Arthur Rimbaud“Guernica” by Pablo Picasso“The Last Supper” by Andy WarholBook Recommendations:<a href="https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/653027/the-adventures-of-pinocchio-by-carlo-collodi-translated-with-an-introduction-and-notes-by-john-hooper-and-annakraczyna/"

Is this the future of MAGA?Tucker Carlson’s interview with the white nationalist influencer Nick Fuentes has caused a firestorm on the right. Carlson and Fuentes’s friendly chat about American Jews — whether they fit into this country or were loyal to Israel above all — was the kind of conversation that for decades would have been unimaginable among mainstream figures in politics. And by crossing that line, Carlson was making a statement — about the power of Fuentes’s movement and the future of MAGA.To help me think through this, I wanted to talk to the political writer John Ganz. He’s studied the roots of antisemitism on the right and has followed the evolution of MAGA closely. He’s behind the newsletter Unpopular Front and the author of “When the Clock Broke: Con Men, Conspiracists, and How America Cracked Up in the Early 1990s.”This episode contains strong language.Mentioned:“Unpopular Front” by John Ganz“Finding Neverland” by John Ganz“Groyperfication” by John GanzBook Recommendations:Taking America Back by David Austin WalshFurious Minds by Laura K. FieldProphets of Deceit by Norbert Guterman & Leo LowenthalThoughts? Guest suggestions? Email us at [email protected] can find transcripts (posted midday) and more episodes of “The Ezra Klein Show” at nytimes.com/ezra-klein-podcast, and you can find Ezra on Twitter @ezraklein. Book recommendations from all our guests are listed at https://www.nytimes.com/article/ezra-klein-show-book-recs.This episode of “The Ezra Klein Show” was produced by Jack McCordick. Fact-checking by Ashley Braun. Our senior engineer is Jeff Geld, with additional mixing by Isaac Jones. Our executive producer is Claire Gordon. The show’s p

Democrats’ case for the government shutdown was just starting to break through to voters. Why fold now?Thoughts? Guest suggestions? Email us at [email protected] can find the transcript and more episodes of “The Ezra Klein Show” at nytimes.com/ezra-klein-podcast. Book recommendations from all our guests are listed at https://www.nytimes.com/article/ezra-klein-show-book-recs.html This column read was produced by Kristin Lin. Fact-checking by Jack McCordick. Our senior engineer is Jeff Geld, with mixing by Isaac Jones. Our executive producer is Claire Gordon. The show’s production team also includes Marie Cascione, Annie Galvin, Michelle Harris, Rollin Hu, Marina King, Emma Kehlbeck and Jan Kobal. Original music by Aman Sahota and Pat McCusker. Audience strategy by Kristina Samulewski and Shannon Busta. The director of New York Times Opinion Audio is Annie-Rose Strasser.Subscribe today at nytimes.com/podcasts or on Apple Podcasts and Spotify. You can also subscribe via your favorite podcast app here https://www.nytimes.com/activate-access/audio?source=podcatcher. For more podcasts and narrated articles, download The New York Times app at nytimes.com/app. Subscribe today at nytimes.com/podcasts or on Apple Podcasts and Spotify. You can also subscribe via your favorite podcast app here https://www.nytimes.com/activate-access/audio?source=podcatcher. For more podcasts and narrated articles, download The New York Times app at nytimes.com/app. Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.