As strange as it is to write, this is my last podcast here at Vox.

In January, I'll be starting at the New York Times as a columnist on the opinion page, doing a reported column on policy and launching an interview podcast. Meanwhile, Vox will be building something new and better atop this show's DNA in this feed.

In this episode, I wanted to reflect on the almost five years I’ve spent doing this show. This project has changed my work, and my life, in unexpected ways. So here are the four lessons this show has taught me and, of course, the three books that have influenced me, and that I'd recommend to the audience. 

Thank you for everything, and you can reach me at ezrakleinshow@gmail.com. See you on the other side. 

Book recommendations: 
Why We Love Dogs, Eat Pigs, and Wear Cows by Melanie Joy
The Inheritance Trilogy by N.K. Jemisin
Working by Studs Terkel

Credits:
Producer/Audio engineer - Jeff Geld
Researcher - Roge Karma

Please consider making a contribution to Vox to support this show: bit.ly/givepodcasts Your support will help us keep having ambitious conversations about big ideas.

New to the show? Want to check out Ezra’s favorite episodes? Check out the Ezra Klein Show beginner’s guide (http://bit.ly/EKSbeginhere)
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

How do you feel right now? Excited to listen to your favorite podcast? Anxious about the state of American politics? Annoyed by my use of rhetorical questions?
These questions seem pretty straightforward. But as my guest today, psychologist Lisa Feldman Barrett, points out there is a lot more to emotion than meets the mind.
Barrett is a superstar in her field. She’s a professor of psychology at Northeastern University, holds appointments at Harvard Medical School and Massachusetts General Hospital, and has received various prestigious awards for her pioneering research on emotion. Her most recent book How Emotions Are Made: The Secret Life of the Brain argues that emotions are not biologically hardwired into our brains but constructed by our minds. In other words, we don’t merely feel emotions — we actively create them.
Barrett’s work has potentially radical implications. If we take her theory seriously, it follows that the ways we think about our daily emotional states, diagnose illnesses, interact with friends, raise our children, and experience reality all need some serious adjusting, if not complete rethinking.
If you enjoyed this episode, you should check out:
A mind-expanding conversation with Michael Pollan
The cognitive cost of poverty (with Sendhil Mullainathan)
Will Storr on why you are not yourself 
A mind-bending, reality-warping conversation with John Higgs
Book recommendations: 
Naming the Mind by Kurt Danzinger 
The Island of Knowledge by Marcelo Gleiser 
The Accidental Species  by Henry Gee
Sense and Nonsense by Kevin L. Laland
Credits:
Producer and Editor - Jeff Geld
Researcher - Roge Karma
Recording engineer - Cynthia Gil
Field engineer - Joseph Fridman
The Ezra Klein Show is a production of the Vox Media Podcast Network
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Best of: We don’t just feel emotions. We make them.

You often hear that eating animals is natural. And it is. But not the way we do it.
The industrial animal agriculture system is a technological marvel. It relies on engineering broiler chickens that grow almost seven times as quickly as they would naturally, and that could never survive in the wild. It relies on pumping a majority of all the antibiotics used in the United States into farm animals to stop the die-offs that overcrowding would otherwise cause. A list like this could go on endlessly, but the point is simple: Industrial animal agriculture is not a natural food system. It is a triumph of engineering.
But though we live in a moment when technology has made animal cruelty possible on a scale never imagined in human history, we also live in a moment when technology may be about to make animal cruelty unnecessary. And nothing changes a society’s values as quickly as innovations that make a new moral system easy and cheap to adopt. And that’s what this podcast is about.
Bruce Friedrich is the head of the Good Food Institute, which invests, connects, advises, and advocates for the plant and cell-based meat industries. That work puts him at the hot center of one of the most exciting and important technological stories of our age: the possible replacement of a cruel, environmentally unsustainable form of food production with a system that’s better for the planet, better for animals, and better for our health.
I talk a lot about animal suffering issues on this podcast, and I do so because they’re important. We’re causing a lot of suffering right now. But I don’t believe that it’ll be a change in morality or ideology that transforms our system. I think it’ll be a change in technology, and Friedrich knows better than just about anyone else alive how fast that technology is becoming a reality. In a rare change of pace for the Ezra Klein Show, this conversation will leave you, dare I say it, optimistic.
Book Recommendations:
Why We Love Dogs, Eat Pigs, and Wear Cows: An Introduction to Carnism by Melanie Joy
Clean Meat: How Growing Meat Without Animals Will Revolutionize Dinner and the World by Paul Shapiro
Eating Animals by Jonathan Safran Foer
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Best of: Ending the age of animal cruelty, with Bruce Friedrich

After creating and running Parks and Recreation and writing for The Office, Michael Schur decided he wanted to create a sitcom about one of the most fundamental questions of human existence: What does it mean to be a good person? That’s how NBC's The Good Place was born.

Soon into the show’s writing, Schur realized he was in way over his head. The question of human morality is one of the most complicated and hotly contested subjects of all time. He needed someone to help him out. So, he recruited Pamela Hieronymi, a professor at UCLA specializing in the subjects of moral responsibility, psychology, and free will, to join the show as a “consulting philosopher” — surely a first in sitcom history.

I wanted to bring Shur and Hieronymi onto the show because The Good Place should not exist. Moral philosophy is traditionally the stuff of obscure academic journals and undergraduate seminars, not popular television. Yet, three-and-a-half seasons on, The Good Place is not only one of the funniest sitcoms on TV, it has popularized academic philosophy in an unprecedented fashion and put forward its own highly sophisticated moral vision.

This is a conversation about how and why The Good Place exists and what it reflects about The Odd Place in which we actually live. Unlike a lot of conversations about moral philosophy, this one is a lot of fun.
 
References:
Dylan Matthews' brilliant profile on The Good Place
Dylan Matthews on why he donated his kidney


Book recommendations:
Michael Schur:
Ordinary Vices by Judith N. Shklar
The Spy Who Came in from the Cold by John le Carré 
Beloved by Toni Morrison
Pamela Hieronymi:
What We Owe to Each Other by T.M. Scanlon
Being and Nothingness by Jean-Paul Sartre
Mortal Questions by Thomas Nagel


Credits:
Producer/Audio engineer - Jeff Geld
Researcher - Roge Karma

Please consider making a contribution to Vox to support this show: bit.ly/givepodcasts Your support will help us keep having ambitious conversations about big ideas.

New to the show? Want to check out Ezra’s favorite episodes? Check out the Ezra Klein Show beginner’s guide (http://bit.ly/EKSbeginhere)

Want to contact the show? Reach out at ezrakleinshow@vox.com
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Best of: The moral philosophy of The Good Place

Michael Lewis needs little introduction. He’s the author of Liar’s Poker, Moneyball, The Big Short, The Blind Side, The Fifth Risk. He’s the host of the new podcast “Against the Rules.” He’s a master at making seemingly boring topics — baseball statistics, government bureaucrats, collateralized debt obligations — riveting. So how does he do it?

What I wanted to do in this conversation was understand Lewis’s process. How does he choose his topics? How does he find his characters? How does he get them to trust him? What is he looking for when he’s with them? What allows him to see the gleam in subjects that would strike others, on their face, as dull?

Lewis more than delivered. There’s a master class in reporting — or just in getting to know people — tucked inside this conversation. As in the NK Jemisin episode, Lewis shows how he does his work in real time, using me and something I revealed as the example. Sometimes the conversations on this show are a delight. Sometimes they’re actually useful. This one is both.

Book recommendations:
Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain
A Collection of Essays by George Orwell
The Right Stuff by Tom Wolfe

Credits:
Producer/Audio engineer - Jeff Geld
Researcher - Roge Karma

Please consider making a contribution to Vox to support this show: bit.ly/givepodcasts Your support will help us keep having ambitious conversations about big ideas.

New to the show? Want to check out Ezra’s favorite episodes? Check out the Ezra Klein Show beginner’s guide (http://bit.ly/EKSbeginhere)

Want to contact the show? Reach out at ezrakleinshow@vox.com
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Best of: Michael Lewis reads my mind

It’s the rare podcast conversation where, as it’s happening, I’m making notes to go back and listen again so I can fully absorb what I heard. But this conversation with Tracy K. Smith was that kind of episode.

Smith is the chair of the Lewis Center for the Arts at Princeton University, a Pulitzer-Prize winning poet, and a two-time poet laureate of the United States (2017-19). But I’ll be honest: She was an intimidating interview for me. I often find myself frustrated by poetry, yearning for it to simply tell me what it wants to say and feeling aggravated that I can’t seem to crack its code.

Preparing for this conversation and (even more so) talking to Smith was a revelation. Poetry, she argues, is about expressing “the feelings that defy language.” The struggle is part of the point: You’re going where language stumbles, where literalism fails. Developing a comfort and ease in those spaces isn’t something we’re taught to do, but it’s something we need to do. And so, on one level, this conversation is simply about poetry: what it is, what it does, how to read it.

But on another level, this conversation is also about the ideas and tensions that Smith uses poetry to capture: what it means to be a descendent of slaves, a human in love, a nation divided. Laced throughout our conversation are readings of poems from her most recent book, Wade in the Water, and discussions of some of the hardest questions in the American, and even human, canon. Hearing Smith read her erasure poem, “Declaration,” is, without a doubt, one of the most powerful moments I’ve had on the podcast.

There is more to this conversation than I can capture here, but simply put: This isn’t one to miss. And that’s particularly true if, like me, you’re intimidated by poetry.

References: 
Smith’s lecture before the Library of Congress 
Smith’s commencement speech at Wellesley College 
Book recommendations: 
Notes from the Field by Anna Deavere Smith 
Quilting by Lucille Clifton 
Bodega by Su Hwang 


Credits:
Producer/Audio engineer - Jeff Geld
Researcher - Roge Karma

Please consider making a contribution to Vox to support this show: bit.ly/givepodcasts Your support will help us keep having ambitious conversations about big ideas.

New to the show? Want to check out Ezra’s favorite episodes? Check out the Ezra Klein Show beginner’s guide (http://bit.ly/EKSbeginhere)

Want to contact the show? Reach out at ezrakleinshow@vox.com
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Best of: Tracy K. Smith changed how I read poetry

What I’ve learned, and what comes next.

This conversation with Harvard political theorist Danielle Allen in fall 2019 is one of my all-time favorites. 
 
Allen directs Harvard’s Edmond J. Safra Center for Ethics. She’s a political theorist, a philosopher, the principal investigator of the Democratic Knowledge Project, and the co-chair of a two-year bipartisan commission of the American Academy of Arts &amp; Sciences, which just this year released “Our Common Purpose,” a report with more than 30 recommendations on how to reform American democracy. Her 2006 book Talking to Strangers: Anxieties of Citizenship since Brown v. Board of Education, which forms the basis for this conversation, is the most important exploration of what democracy demands from its citizens that I've ever read. I talk about democracy a lot on this show, but it’s her life’s work
 
I tried a bunch of different descriptions the first time this episode was released and they all failed the conversation. I had no better luck this time. I loved this one, and, at a moment when the future of democracy looks even darker than it did a year ago, I think you will too. Don’t make me cheapen it by describing it. Just download it.

References:
"Building a Good Jobs Economy" by Dani Rodrik and Charles Sabel
Book recommendations:
"Politics and the English Language" by George Orwell
"What America Would Be Like Without Blacks" by Ralph Ellison
Men in Dark Times by Hannah Arendt


Credits:
Producer/Audio engineer - Jeff Geld
Researcher - Roge Karma

Please consider making a contribution to Vox to support this show: bit.ly/givepodcasts Your support will help us keep having ambitious conversations about big ideas.

New to the show? Want to check out Ezra’s favorite episodes? Check out the Ezra Klein Show beginner’s guide (http://bit.ly/EKSbeginhere)

Want to contact the show? Reach out at ezrakleinshow@vox.com
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Best of: An inspiring conversation about democracy with Danielle Allen 

On November 3, as the country fixated on the incoming presidential election results, voters in Oregon approved a seemingly innocuous ballot measure with revolutionary potential. Proposition 109, which passed with 56 percent of the vote (the same margin by which Joe Biden defeated Donald Trump in the state), legalizes the use of psilocybin, the main psychoactive compound found in magic mushrooms, in supervised therapeutic settings. 
 
Multiple studies have found that use of psilocybin in a medical context has the power to cure depression, addiction, and anxiety at rates that no existing drug or therapy can boast (although these results still need to be replicated with larger sample sizes before drawing definitive conclusions). Scores of renowned scholars, artists, and entrepreneurs talk about their use of psychedelic drugs as one of the most important experiences of their entire lives. The details of how the Oregon initiative will be implemented still need to be worked out, but the prospect of making these drugs widely available in a therapeutic context could have transformative impacts on American mental health care and, perhaps, on our culture writ large. 
 
There isn’t anyone I’d rather discuss this new law and its implications with than Michael Pollan. Pollan is the author of dozens of landmark books, but his most recent, How To Change Your Mind: What the New Science of Psychedelics Teaches Us About Consciousness, Dying, Addiction, Depression, and Transcendence, is the best exploration of the transformative therapeutic potential of psychedelics to date.
 
My first conversation with Pollan in 2018 was one of my favorites of all time on the show, and this one didn’t disappoint either. We discuss how Pollan’s work inspired the Oregon ballot initiative, what Proposition 109 actually does and the challenges it will face, the lost history of psychedelics being used as a therapeutic tool in the 1950s, why the mental health profession in America is so excited about the revolutionary possibilities of psychedelic treatment, why the “noetic experience” induced by psychedelics has such incredible healing potential, whether widespread psychedelic use would create massive population-level changes in society, and much more.


References: 
My first conversation with Pollan
Recent Johns Hopkins study on psychedelics and depression 
"What the psychedelic drug ayahuasca showed me about my life" by Sean Illing

Book recommendations: 
The Overstory by Richard Powers 
The Invention of Nature by Andrea Wulf
Entangled Life by Merlin Sheldrake

Credits:
Producer/Audio engineer - Jeff Geld
Researcher - Roge Karma

Please consider making a contribution to Vox to support this show: bit.ly/givepodcasts Your support will help us keep having ambitious conversations about big ideas.

New to the show? Want to check out Ezra’s favorite episodes? Check out the Ezra Klein Show beginner’s guide (http://bit.ly/EKSbeginhere)

Want to contact the show? Reach out at ezrakleinshow@vox.com
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Michael Pollan on the psychedelic society

Robert Sapolsky is a Stanford neuroscientist and primatologist. He’s the author of a slew of important books on human biology and behavior, including most recently Behave: The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst. But it’s an older book he wrote that forms the basis for this conversation. In Why Zebras Don’t Get Ulcers, Sapolsky works through how a stress response that evolved for fast, fight-or-flight situations on the savannah continuously wears on our bodies and brains in modern life.
But stress isn’t just an individual phenomenon. It’s also a social force, applied brutally and unequally across our society. “If you want to see an example of chronic stress, study poverty,” Sapolsky says.
I often say on the show that politics and policy need to begin with a realistic model of human nature. This is a show about that level of the policy conversation: It’s about how poverty and stress exist in a doom loop together, each amplifying the other’s effects on the brain and body, deepening their harms.
And this is a conversation of intense relevance to how we make social policy. Much of the fight in Washington, and in the states, is about whether the best way to get people out of poverty is to make it harder to access help, to make sure the government doesn’t become, in Paul Ryan’s memorable phrase, “a hammock.” Understanding how the stress of poverty acts on people’s minds, how it saps their will and harms their cognitive function and hurts their children, exposes how cruel and wrongheaded that view really is.
Sapolsky and I also discuss whether free will is a myth, why he believes the prison system is incompatible with modern neuroscience, how studying monkeys in times of social change helps makes sense of the current moment in American politics, and much more. It’s worth your time.

Book Recommendations:
The 21 Balloons by William Pene Dubois
Chaos: Making a New Science by James Gleick
The Tangled Wing: Biological Constraints on the Human Spirit by Melvin Konner


Credits:
Producer/Audio engineer - Jeff Geld
Researcher - Roge Karma

Please consider making a contribution to Vox to support this show: bit.ly/givepodcasts Your support will help us keep having ambitious conversations about big ideas.

New to the show? Want to check out Ezra’s favorite episodes? Check out the Ezra Klein Show beginner’s guide (http://bit.ly/EKSbeginhere)

Want to contact the show? Reach out at ezrakleinshow@vox.com
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Best of: Robert Sapolsky on the toxic intersection of poverty and stress

It’s often said that Joe Biden has an instinct for finding the political center — that of his party, and that of the country. To understand how Biden has changed, and how he might govern, we need to understand how the ideological context of American politics is changing, and why.  

Felicia Wong is the President and CEO of the Roosevelt Institute, a progressive think tank that has done some of the best work on the way the ideological firmament of politics is shifting. Wong believes that the set of governing assumptions behind both conservative and progressive policymaking, what broadly gets called “neoliberalism,” is devolving. And she, and Roosevelt more broadly, have done some of the best work mapping the different worldviews and factions competing to take its place. 

We discuss what neoliberalism was and wasn’t, how a focus on markets is giving way to a focus on power, the four main groups that make up “the new progressivism,” where Biden himself has affinities with the changing worldview, what he can (and can’t) do without congress, the case for and against student debt cancellation, how the new administration could wield its antitrust power, why Elizabeth Warren’s brand of economic thinking holds particular promise for a Biden administration, and more. 

References:
"What Is the Current Student Debt Situation?" by Matt Bruenig
"The Emerging Worldview: How New Progressivism Is Moving Beyond Neoliberalism" by Felicia Wong

Book recommendations: 
Suburban Warriors by Lisa McGirr
From Counterculture to Cyberculture by Fred Turner 
State of Resistance by Manuel Pastor



Credits:
Producer/Audio engineer - Jeff Geld
Researcher - Roge Karma

Please consider making a contribution to Vox to support this show: bit.ly/givepodcasts Your support will help us keep having ambitious conversations about big ideas.

New to the show? Want to check out Ezra’s favorite episodes? Check out the Ezra Klein Show beginner’s guide (http://bit.ly/EKSbeginhere)

Want to contact the show? Reach out at ezrakleinshow@vox.com
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Joe Biden and "the new progressivism"

There are few conversations I’ve had on this show that are quite as relevant to our current political moment as this one with Princeton political scientist Frances Lee.
Joe Biden will occupy the White House come January, but pending the results of two runoff Senate elections in Georgia, Democrats either won’t control the Senate at all or will face a 50-50 split. In either case, an important question looms large over the incoming administration: Will Republican senators negotiate with Biden in good faith? Lee’s work is an indispensable framework for thinking about that inquiry.
In her most recent book, Insecure Majorities: Congress and the Perpetual Campaign, Lee makes a point that sounds strange when you hear it but changes everything once you understand it. For most of American history, American politics has been under one-party rule. For decades, that party was the Republican Party. Then, for decades more, it was the Democratic Party. It’s only in the past few decades that control of Congress began flipping back and forth every few years, that presidential elections became routinely decided by a few percentage points, that both parties are always this close to gaining or losing the majority.
That kind of close competition, Lee writes, makes the daily compromises of bipartisan governance literally irrational. "Confrontation fits our strategy,” Dick Cheney once said. "Polarization often has very beneficial results. If everything is handled through compromise and conciliation, if there are no real issues dividing us from the Democrats, why should the country change and make us the majority?”
Why indeed? This is a conversation about that question, about how the system we have incentivizes a politics of confrontation we don’t seem to want and makes steady, stable governance a thing of the past.
.

Book Recommendations:
The Imprint of Congress by David R. Mayhew
Fear Itself: The New Deal and the Origins of Our Time by Ira Katznelson
Congress's Constitution: Legislative Authority and the Separation of Powers by Josh Chafetz


Credits:
Producer/Audio engineer - Jeff Geld
Researcher - Roge Karma

Please consider making a contribution to Vox to support this show: bit.ly/givepodcasts Your support will help us keep having ambitious conversations about big ideas.

New to the show? Want to check out Ezra’s favorite episodes? Check out the Ezra Klein Show beginner’s guide (http://bit.ly/EKSbeginhere)

Want to contact the show? Reach out at ezrakleinshow@vox.com
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Best of: Frances Lee on why bipartisanship is irrational 

If I could get policymakers, and citizens, everywhere to read just one book this year, it would be Kim Stanley Robinson’s The Ministry for the Future. 
Best known for the Mars trilogy, Robinson is one of the greatest living science fiction writers. And in recent years, he's become the greatest writers of what people now call cli-fi — climate fiction. The name is a bit of a misnomer: Climate fiction is less fictitious speculation than an attempt to envision a near future that we are likely to inhabit. It’s an attempt to take our present — and thus the future we’re ensuring — more seriously than we currently do. Robinson’s new book does exactly that. 
In The Ministry for the Future, Robinson imagines a world wracked by climate catastrophe. Some nations begin unilateral geoengineering. Eco-violence arises, as people begin to begin experience unchecked climate change as an act of war against them, and they respond in kind, using new technologies to hunt those they blame. Capitalism ruptures, changes, and is remade. Nations, and the relations between them, transform. Ultimately, humanity is successful, but it is a terrifying success — a success that involves making the kinds of choices that none of us want to even think about making. 
This conversation with Robinson was fantastic. We discuss why the end of the world is easier to imagine than the end of capitalism; how changes to the biosphere will force humanity to rethink capitalism, borders, terrorism, and currency; the influence of eco-Marxism on Robinson’s thinking; how existing power relationships define the boundaries of what is considered violence; why science-fiction as a discipline is particularly suited to grapple with climate change; what a complete rethinking of the entire global economic system could look like; why Robinson thinks geoengineering needs to be on the table; the vastly underrated importance of the Paris Climate Agreement; and much more.

References: 
"'There is no planet B': the best books to help us navigate the next 50 years" by Kim Stanley Robinson
My conversation on geoengineering with Jane Flegal 
The Ezra Klein Show climate change series 

Book recommendations: 
Unsheltered by Barbara Kingsolver 
The Arrest by Jonathan Lethem 
Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead by Olga Tokarczuk

Credits:
Producer/Audio engineer - Jeff Geld
Researcher - Roge Karma

Please consider making a contribution to Vox to support this show: bit.ly/givepodcasts Your support will help us keep having ambitious conversations about big ideas.

New to the show? Want to check out Ezra’s favorite episodes? Check out the Ezra Klein Show beginner’s guide (http://bit.ly/EKSbeginhere)

Want to contact the show? Reach out at ezrakleinshow@vox.com
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

The most important book I've read this year 

Happy Thanksgiving! We will be back next week with brand new episodes, but on a day when so many of us are thinking about love and relationships I wanted to share an episode that has changed the way I think about those topics in a profound way. 

Alison Gopnik is a professor of psychology and philosophy at the University of California Berkeley. She’s published more than 100 journal articles and half a dozen books, including most recently The Gardener and the Carpenter: What the New Science of Child Development Tells Us About the Relationship Between Parents and Children. She runs a cognitive development and learning lab where she studies how young children come to understand the world around them, and she’s built on that research to do work in AI, to understand how adults form bonds with both children and each other, and to examine what creativity is and how we can nurture it in ourselves and — more importantly — each other.

But this conversation isn’t just about kids -- it's about what it means to be human. What makes us feel love for each other. How we can best care for each other. How our minds really work in the formative, earliest days, and what we lose as we get older. The role community is meant to play in our lives.

This episode has done more than just change the way I think. It’s changed how I live my life. I hope it can do the same for you.
Book recommendations:
A Treatise of Human Natureby David Hume
Alice's Adventures in Wonderland by Lewis Carroll
The works of Jean Piaget


Credits:
Producer/Audio engineer - Jeff Geld
Researcher - Roge Karma

Please consider making a contribution to Vox to support this show: bit.ly/givepodcasts Your support will help us keep having ambitious conversations about big ideas.

New to the show? Want to check out Ezra’s favorite episodes? Check out the Ezra Klein Show beginner’s guide (http://bit.ly/EKSbeginhere)

Want to contact the show? Reach out at ezrakleinshow@vox.com
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Best of: Alison Gopnik changed how I think about love 

At the holidays, I wanted to share some of my favorite episodes of the show with you (we’ll be back next week with brand new episodes). My conversation with Vivek Murthy tops that list, and it has particular force this Thanksgiving, when so many are alone on a day when connection means so much.
As US surgeon general from 2014 to 2017, Murthy visited communities across the United States to talk about issues like addiction, obesity, and mental illness. But he found that what Americans wanted to talk to him about the most was loneliness. In a 2018 report by the Kaiser Family Foundation, 22 percent of all adults in the US — almost 60 million Americans — said they often or always felt lonely or socially isolated.
Murthy went on to write Together: The Healing Power of Human Connection in a Sometimes Lonely World, and was recently named one of the co-chairs of Joe Biden’s coronavirus task force. Those projects may sound different, but they connect: Coronavirus has made America’s loneliness crisis far worse. Social distancing, while necessary from a public health standpoint, has caused a collapse in social contact among family, friends, and entire communities. And the people most vulnerable to the virus — the elderly, the disabled, the ill — are also unusually likely to suffer from loneliness. 
Murthy’s explanation of how loneliness acts on the body is worth the time, all on its own — it’ll change how you see the relationship between social experience and physical health. But the broader message here is deeper: You are not alone in your loneliness. None of us are. And the best thing we can do for our own feeling of isolation is often to help someone else out of the very pit we’re in.

Book recommendations:
Tuesdays with Morrie by Mitch Albom
Conversations with God by Neale Donald Walsch
Dear Madam President by Jennifer Palmieri


Credits:
Producer/Audio engineer - Jeff Geld
Researcher - Roge Karma

Please consider making a contribution to Vox to support this show: bit.ly/givepodcasts Your support will help us keep having ambitious conversations about big ideas.

New to the show? Want to check out Ezra’s favorite episodes? Check out the Ezra Klein Show beginner’s guide (http://bit.ly/EKSbeginhere)

Want to contact the show? Reach out at ezrakleinshow@vox.com
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Best of: Vivek Murthy on America’s loneliness epidemic 

Donald Trump has built his presidency on top of racial dog whistles, xenophobic rhetoric, and anti-immigrant policies. A core belief among liberals was that this strategy would help Trump with whites but almost certainly hurt him with Latinos, and people of color more broadly. Then the opposite happened: In 2020, Trump gained considerable support among voters of color, particularly Latinos, relative to the 2016 election.
What happened?
Ian Haney López is a legal scholar at UC Berkeley and the author of Dog Whistle Politics: How Coded Racial Appeals Have Reinvented Racism and Wrecked the Middle Class. In 2017, he partnered with the leftist think tank Demos and various polling groups to better understand the effectiveness of racial dog whistles and how Democrats could combat them. The results were sobering, even to the experts who commissioned the polls. As Haney López documented in his 2019 book Merge Left: Fusing Race and Class, Winning Elections, and Saving America, 60 percent of Latinos and 54 percent of African Americans have found Trumpian dog-whistle messages convincing, right in step with the 61 percent of whites who did.
This conversation is about the complicated reality of racial politics in America. It’s about the fact that the electorate isn’t divided into racists and non-racists — most voters, including Trump supporters, toggle back and forth between racially reactionary and racially egalitarian views — and a more robust theory of how race operates in American politics that follows. And it’s about the kinds of race- and class-conscious messages that Haney López’s research suggests work best with voters of all backgrounds.

Book recommendations:
Racial Realignment:The Transformation of American Liberalism, 1932–1965 by Eric Schickler
The Line Becomes a River by Francisco Cantú
Born a Crime by Trevor Noah 


Credits:
Producer/Audio engineer - Jeff Geld
Researcher - Roge Karma

Please consider making a contribution to Vox to support this show: bit.ly/givepodcasts Your support will help us keep having ambitious conversations about big ideas.

New to the show? Want to check out Ezra’s favorite episodes? Check out the Ezra Klein Show beginner’s guide (http://bit.ly/EKSbeginhere)

Want to contact the show? Reach out at ezrakleinshow@vox.com
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

What Democrats got wrong about Hispanic voters

I’ve been fascinated by the sharp change in how the tech platforms — particularly the big social media companies like Facebook, Twitter, and to some degree, YouTube — are acting since the 2020 election. It’s become routine to see President Donald Trump’s posts tagged as misinformation or worse. Facebook is limiting the reach of hyper-viral stories it can’t verify, Twitter is trying to guard against becoming a dumping ground for foreign actors trying to launder stolen secrets, and conservatives are abandoning both platforms en masse, hoping to find more congenial terrain on newcomers like Parler. 

So is Big Tech finally doing its job, and taking some responsibility for its role in our democracy? Are they overreaching, and becoming the biased censors so many feared? Are they simply so big that anything they do is in some way the wrong choice, and antitrust is the only solution?

Casey Newton has spent the past decade covering Silicon Valley for The Verge, CNET, and the San Francisco Chronicle. Today, he writes Platformer, a daily blog and newsletter focused primarily on the relationship between the big tech platforms and democracy. He’s my go-to for questions like these, and so I went to him. We discuss: 


The lessons the platforms learned the hard way in 2016 

What Facebook and Twitter got right -- and wrong -- this election cycle

The dissonance between Facebook and Twitter’s progressive employees and broader user base 

The problem of trying to be neutral when both sides really aren’t the same

Whether Facebook and Twitter handled the Hunter Biden New York Post story correctly

Whether major tech platforms are biased against conservatives

Why YouTube has been so much less aggressive than Facebook and Twitter on moderation

The recent rise of Parler, the Twitter alternative that conservatives are flocking to by the hundreds of thousands 

What Biden administration’s tech agenda could look like 

The Section 230 provision at the heart of the debate over content moderation 

How the big tech CEOs differ from each other ideologically 

The problems that antitrust enforcement against tech platforms will solve -- and the problems it won’t solve 


And much more

Book recommendations: 
Facebook: The Inside Story by Steven Levy
No Filter: The Inside Story of Instagram by Sarah Frier
Caste by Isabel Wilkerson 

Credits:
Producer/Audio engineer - Jeff Geld
Researcher - Roge Karma

Please consider making a contribution to Vox to support this show: bit.ly/givepodcasts Your support will help us keep having ambitious conversations about big ideas.

New to the show? Want to check out Ezra’s favorite episodes? Check out the Ezra Klein Show beginner’s guide (http://bit.ly/EKSbeginhere)

Want to contact the show? Reach out at ezrakleinshow@vox.com
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Antitrust, censorship, misinformation, and the 2020 election

If the past week — and past four years — have proven anything, it’s that we are not as different as we believed. No longer is the question, "Can it happen here?" It’s happening already. As this podcast goes to air, the current president of the United States is attempting what — if it occurred in any other country — we would call an anti-democratic coup.
This coup attempt will probably not work. But the fact that it is being carried out farcically, erratically, ineffectively does not mean it is not happening, or that it will not have consequences.
The most alarming aspect of all this is not Donald Trump’s anti-democratic antics; it’s the speed at which Republican elites have consolidated support around him. Some politicians, like Lindsey Graham, have wholeheartedly endorsed Trump's claims. On Monday, Graham said that Trump should not concede the election and that "Republicans win because of our ideas and we lose elections because [Democrats] cheat." Others — including Mike Pence, Marco Rubio, and Josh Hawley — have signaled solidarity with the president, while not quite endorsing his conspiracies. The message is clear: When faced with the choice of loyalty to Trump and the legitimacy of the democratic process, Republicans are more than willing to throw democracy under the bus.
Anne Applebaum is a staff writer for the Atlantic, a senior fellow of international affairs at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies, and most recently the author of Twilight of Democracy: The Seductive Lure of Authoritarianism. In it, Applebaum, once comfortable in center-right elite circles, grapples with why so many of her contemporaries across the globe — including right here in America — have abandoned liberal democracy in favor of strongman cults and autocratic regimes. We discuss: 

How the media would be covering Trump’s actions — and the GOP’s enabling of him — if this were taking place in a foreign country 

How the last four years have shattered the belief in the idea that America is uniquely resistant to the lure of authoritarianism

Why most politicians under increasingly autocratic regimes choose to collaborate with the regime, and why a select few choose to dissent 

The “apocalyptic pessimism” and “cultural despair” that undergirds the worldview of Trump’s most enthusiastic supporters 

How Lindsey Graham went from outspoken Trump critic to one of Trump’s most vocal supporters in the US Senate 

Why the Republican Party ultimately took the path of Sarah Palin and Donald Trump, not John McCain and Mitt Romney

Why what ultimately separates Never Trumpers from Trump enablers is a steadfast commitment to American democracy

What we can expect to happen if and when a much more competent, capable demagogue emerges in Trump’s place

Whether the Biden administration can lower the temperature of American politics from its fever pitch 

The one thing that gives me a glimmer of hope about the Biden presidency 

 
References: 
"Trump is attempting a coup in plain sight" by Ezra Klein, Vox
"History Will Judge the Complicit" by Anne Applebaum, The Atlantic
“Laura Ingraham’s Descent Into Despair” by Anne Applebaum, The Atlantic
My EK Show conversation with Marilynne Robinson

Book recommendations: 
Absalom, Absalom! by William Faulkner 
All the King’s Men by Robert Penn Warren 
Gilead by Marilynne Robinson 



Credits:
Producer/Audio engineer - Jeff Geld
Researcher - Roge Karma

Please consider making a contribution to Vox to support this show: bit.ly/givepodcasts Your support will help us keep having ambitious conversations about big ideas.

New to the show? Want to check out Ezra’s favorite episodes? Check out the Ezra Klein Show beginner’s guide (http://bit.ly/EKSbeginhere)

Want to contact the show? Reach out at ezrakleinshow@vox.com
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

The crisis isn’t Trump. It’s the Republican Party.

Joe Biden will be the 46th president of the United States. And — counting the votes of people, not just land — it won’t be close. If current trends hold, Biden will see a larger popular vote margin than Hillary Clinton in 2016, Barack Obama in 2012, or George W. Bush in 2004. 

Commentary over the past few days has focused on the man he beat, and the incompetent coup being attempted in plain sight. But I want to focus on Biden, who is one of the more misunderstood figures in American politics — including, at times, by me. 

Biden has been in national politics for almost five decades. And so, people tend to understand the era of Joe Biden they encountered first — the centrist Senate dealmaker, or the overconfident foreign policy hand, or the meme-able vice president, or the grieving, grave father. But Biden, more so than most politicians, changes. And it’s how he changes, and why, that’s key to understanding his campaign, and his likely presidency. 

Evan Osnos is a staff writer at the New Yorker and the author of Joe Biden: The Life, the Run, and What Matters Now, a sharp biography of the next president. Osnos and I discuss: 


The mystery of Joe Biden’s first political campaign

Why the Joe Biden who entered the Senate in 1980 is such a radically different person than the Joe Biden who ran for president in 2020 

What the Senate taught Biden

Biden’s ideological flexibility, and the theory of politics that drives it

The differences between Biden’s three presidential campaigns -- and what they reveal about how he’s grown

The way Biden views disagreement, and why that’s so central to his understanding of politics 

How Biden’s relationship with Barack Obama changed his approach to governance

The similarities — and differences — between how Obama and Biden think about politics 

Why Biden is “the perfect weathervane for where the center of the Democratic party is.” 

Biden’s relationship with Mitch McConnell

How Biden thinks about foreign policy

Why Biden has become more skeptical about the use of American military might in the last decade 


And much more.

Book recommendations: 
Amusing Ourselves to Death by Neil Postman
The Field of Blood by Joanne B. Freeman
The Ideas That Made America by Jennifer Ratner-Rosenhagen 

Credits:
Producer/Audio engineer - Jeff Geld
Researcher - Roge Karma

Please consider making a contribution to Vox to support this show: bit.ly/givepodcasts Your support will help us keep having ambitious conversations about big ideas.

New to the show? Want to check out Ezra’s favorite episodes? Check out the Ezra Klein Show beginner’s guide (http://bit.ly/EKSbeginhere)

Want to contact the show? Reach out at ezrakleinshow@vox.com
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

The Joe Biden experience 

This is not the post-election breakdown I expected to have today, but it's definitely the one that I needed.
Chris Hayes is the host of the MSNBC primetime show, “All In," and the podcast "Why is this Happening? With Chris Hayes." He's also one of the most insightful political analysts I know. We discuss the purpose of polling, the problems of polling-driven coverage, the epistemic fog of the results, the strategy behind Trump's inroads with Latino voters, how Democrats might have won the presidency but lost democracy, what happens if Trump refuses to accept the election results, and much more.
More than anything else, this conversation has helped me make sense of everything that's happened in the last 24 hours. I think it will do the same for you.

References: 
"How Democrats Lost the Cuban Vote and Jeopardized Their Future in Florida." by Noah Lanard, Mother Jones
Chris's podcast on "Understanding the 'Latino Vote' with Chuck Rocha" 

Credits:
Producer/Audio engineer - Jeff Geld
Researcher - Roge Karma

Please consider making a contribution to Vox to support this show: bit.ly/givepodcasts Your support will help us keep having ambitious conversations about big ideas.

New to the show? Want to check out Ezra’s favorite episodes? Check out the Ezra Klein Show beginner’s guide (http://bit.ly/EKSbeginhere)

Want to contact the show? Reach out at ezrakleinshow@vox.com
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Chris Hayes and I process this wild election

We’re one day away from the election, though who-knows-how-many days from finding out who won it. But there’s more at stake than whether Donald Trump or Joe Biden will be our next president. 

There is a fight behind the fight, a battle that will decide all the others. America is not a democracy, and Republicans want to keep it that way. America is not a democracy, and Democrats — at least some Democrats — want to make it more of one. 

Democracy has, in particular, become Stacey Abrams’ animating mission. In 2018, Abrams lost the George gubernatorial race by a razor-thin margin amidst rampant voter suppression. Since then, as the founder of Fair Fight, she’s turned her attention to the deeper fight, the one that sets the rules under which elections like her plays out. In her recent book, Our Time Is Now: Power, Purpose, and the Fight for a Fair America, Abrams makes the case that the fight over democracy is the central question of our politics right now with more power and clarity than any other politician I’ve heard. 

In my view, Abrams is right. And so she’s exactly the person to hear from on the eve of the election. We discuss the GOP’s turn against “rank democracy,” the role of demographic change, how Republicans have cemented minority rule across America political institutions, why we potentially face a “doom loop of democracy,” the changing face of voter suppression in the 21st century, what a system that actually wanted people to vote would look like, why democracy and economic equality are inextricably linked, and much more.

One thing to note in this conversation: You won't hear Trump's name all that much. It's the Republican Party, not just Trump, that has turned against democracy, and that is implementing the turn against democracy. And it's the Democratic Party, not just Joe Biden, that will have to decide whether democracy is worth protecting, and achieving. Democracy is on the ballot in 2020 and beyond, but it's not just on the presidential voting line.

References: 
"The fight is for democracy." Ezra Klein, Vox
The Dictator's Learning Curve by William Dobson
My previous EK Show conversation with Abrams 

Book recommendations: 
Ida by Paula Giddings 
Charged by Emily Bazelon 
The Intuitionist by Colson Whitehead 
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Stacey Abrams on minority rule, voting rights, and the future of democracy

As you may have heard, there's a pretty important election coming up. That means it's time to bring back the one and only Nate Silver. 

Silver, the founder and editor-in-chief of FiveThirtyEight, boasts one of the best election forecasting records of any analyst in the last 15 years. His forecasting models successfully predicted the outcomes in 49 of the 50 states in the 2008 US presidential election and all 50 states in 2012. And in 2016, Silver’s FiveThirtyEight gave Donald Trump a 28 percent chance of victory — a significantly higher percentage than virtually any other prominent analyst at the time. He knows what he’s talking about, and it shows in this conversation. We discuss: 


What went wrong with the polls in 2016 — and whether pollsters today have corrected for those mistakes 

Why a 2016-sized polling error in 2020 would still hand Joe Biden the election

Why the 2020 race has been so incredibly steady despite a global pandemic, an economic crisis, and the biggest national protest movement in US history 

The possibility of a Biden landslide  

The not-so-small chance that Biden could win Texas and Georgia 

The massive Republican advantage in the Senate, House, and Electoral College — and how that affects our national politics 

Why the Senate would still advantage Republicans, even if Democrats added five blue states. 

Whether the Bernie Sanders left took the wrong lessons from 2016 

Why Biden’s unorthodox 2020 campaign strategy has been so successful 

Whether Sanders would be doing just as well against Trump as Biden is doing 

How a more generic, non-Trump Republican would be faring against Biden 

Why Silver is generally optimistic that we will avoid an electoral crisis on November 3 


And much more.

References: 
“How FiveThirtyEight’s 2020 Presidential Forecast Works — And What’s Different Because Of COVID-19." Nate Silver, FiveThirtyEight
"The Senate’s Rural Skew Makes It Very Hard For Democrats To Win The Supreme Court." Nate Silver, FiveThirtyEight
Let the People Pick the President: The Case for Abolishing the Electoral College by Jesse Wegman
"Toby Ord on existential risk, Donald Trump, and thinking in probabilities." The Ezra Klein Show
"The Real Story of 2016" by Nate Silver


Book recommendations: 
The Biggest Bluff by Maria Konnikova
Superintelligence by Nick Bostrom
The Precipice by Toby Ord  



Credits:
Producer/Audio engineer - Jeff Geld
Researcher - Roge Karma

Please consider making a contribution to Vox to support this show: bit.ly/givepodcasts Your support will help us keep having ambitious conversations about big ideas.

New to the show? Want to check out Ezra’s favorite episodes? Check out the Ezra Klein Show beginner’s guide (http://bit.ly/EKSbeginhere)

Want to contact the show? Reach out at ezrakleinshow@vox.com
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Nate Silver on why 2020 isn't 2016

There are few issues on which the stakes in this election are quite as stark as on health care. Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden plans to pass (and Democrats largely support) a massive health care expansion that could result in 25 million additional individuals gaining health insurance. The Trump administration, as we speak, is pushing to get the Supreme Court to kill the Affordable Care Act, which would strip at least 20 million Americans of health care coverage. 
 
There's no one I'd rather have on to discuss these issues than Sarah Kliff. Kliff is an investigative reporter for the New York Times focusing on health care policy, and my former colleague at the Washington Post and Vox where we co-hosted The Weeds alongside Matt Yglesias. She's one of the most clear, incisive health care policy analysts in media today and a longtime friend, which made this conversation a pleasure. We discuss: 


The legacy of Obamacare 10 years later

Why the fiercely fought over “individual mandate” isn’t all it’s cracked up to be 

What Biden’s health care plan would actually do — and where it falls short 

Whether a Biden administration would be able to pass massive health care reform — and why it might still have a chance even if the filibuster remains intact 

The ongoing Supreme Court case to dismantle Obamacare 

Whether Donald Trump has a secret health care plan to protect those with preexisting conditions (spoiler: he doesn’t) 

The hollow state of Republican health care policy 

The academic literature showing that health insurance is literally a matter of life and death 

Which social investments would have the largest impact on people’s health (hint: it’s probably not expanding insurance) 

 
And much more


References: 
"If Trump wins, 20 million people could lose health insurance. If Biden wins, 25 million could gain it." by Dylan Scott, Vox
“Obamacare Turns 10. Here’s a Look at What Works and Doesn’t.” by Sarah Kliff, et al. New York Times
"The I.R.S. Sent a Letter to 3.9 Million People. It Saved Some of Their Lives." by Sarah Kliff, New York Times
"Republicans Killed the Obamacare Mandate. New Data Shows It Didn’t Really Matter." by Sarah Kliff, New York Times
"Without Ginsburg, Supreme Court Could Rule Three Ways on Obamacare" by Sarah Kliff and Margot Sanger-Katz, New York Times

Book recommendations: 
The Healing of America by TR Reid 
And the Band Played On by Randy Shilts 
Dreamland by Sam Quinones 
I Want My Hat Back by Jon Klassen



Credits:
Producer/Audio wizard - Jeff Geld
Researcher - Roge Karma

Please consider making a contribution to Vox to support this show: bit.ly/givepodcasts Your support will help us keep having ambitious conversations about big ideas.

New to the show? Want to check out Ezra’s favorite episodes? Check out the Ezra Klein Show beginner’s guide (http://bit.ly/EKSbeginhere)

Want to contact the show? Reach out at ezrakleinshow@vox.com
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Sarah Kliff grades Biden and Trump's health care plans

In 2016, Julius Krein was one of Donald Trump’s most ardent supporters. In Trump’s critiques of the existing Republican and Democratic establishments, Krein saw the contours of a heterodox ideology he believed could reshape American politics for the better. So he established a pro-Trump blog and, later, a policy journal called American Affairs, which his critics claimed was an attempt to “understand Trump better than he understands himself.”

Today Krein finds himself in an unusual position. Upon realizing Trump was not committed to any governing vision at all (but was as racist as his critics suggested), Krein disavowed the president in 2017. But as the editor of American Affairs, he’s still committed to building an intellectual superstructure around the ideas that were threaded through Trump’s 2016 campaign.

This conversation is about the distance between Trump and the ideology so many tried to brand as Trumpism. We also discuss Krein’s view that the US has always functionally been a one-party system, the disconnect between Republican elites and voters, what a new bipartisan economic consensus could look like, whether Joe Biden and the Democrats take Trump’s ideas more seriously than Trump does, which direction the GOP will go if Trump loses in a landslide in November, why Republicans lost interest in governance, whether media coverage is the true aim of right-wing populists, why Krein thinks the true power lies with the technocrats, and more.

References: 
“I Voted for Trump. And I Sorely Regret It." by Julius Krein
"The Three Fusions" by Julius Krein

Book recommendations: 
Innovation in Real Places by Dan Breznitz 
History has Begun by Bruno Maçães
The Hall of Uselessness by Simon Leys 


Credits:
Producer/Audio wizard - Jeff Geld
Researcher - Roge Karma

Please consider making a contribution to Vox to support this show: bit.ly/givepodcasts Your support will help us keep having ambitious conversations about big ideas.

New to the show? Want to check out Ezra’s favorite episodes? Check out the Ezra Klein Show beginner’s guide (http://bit.ly/EKSbeginhere)

Want to contact the show? Reach out at ezrakleinshow@vox.com
 
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Trumpism never existed. It was always just Trump.

If Democrats win back power this November, they will be faced with a choice: Leave the existing Supreme Court intact, and watch their legislative agenda — and perhaps democracy itself — be gradually gutted by 5-4 and 6-3 judicial rulings; or use their power to reform the nation’s highest court over fierce opposition by the Republican party.
Ganesh Sitaraman is a former senior advisor to Elizabeth Warren and a law professor at Vanderbilt. He’s also the author of one of the most hotly debated proposals for Supreme Court reform, as well as the fairest and clearest analyst I’ve read regarding the benefits and drawbacks of every other plausible proposal for Supreme Court reform. So in this conversation, we discuss the range of options, from well-known ideas like court packing and term limits to more obscure proposals like the 5-5-5 balanced bench and a judicial lottery system.
But there’s another reason I wanted Sitaraman on the show right now. Supreme Court reform matters — for good or for ill — because democracy matters. In his recent book, The Great Democracy, Sitaraman makes an argument that's come to sit at the core of my thinking, too: The fundamental fight in American politics right now is about whether we will become a true democracy. And not just a democracy in the thin, political definition we normally use — holding elections, and ensuring access to the franchise. The fight is for a thicker form of a democracy, one that takes economic power seriously, that makes the construction of a certain kind of civic and political culture central to its aims. 
So this is a conversation about what that kind of democracy would look like, and what it would take to get there – up to and including Supreme Court reform.

References: 
Jump-Starting America by Jonathan Gruber and Simon Johnson 
"How to save the Supreme Court" by Daniel Epps and Ganesh Sitaraman
Sitaraman's tweet threads about expanding the court , term limits , the 5-5-5 Balanced bench, lottery approach, supermajority voting requirements, jurisdiction stripping, legislative overrides, and what the best approach is.


Book recommendations: 
The Structure of Scientific Revolutions by Thomas Kuhn
The Public and Its Problems by John Dewey
The Anarchy by William Dalrymple 


Credits:
Producer/Audio wizard - Jeff Geld
Researcher - Roge Karma

Please consider making a contribution to Vox to support this show: bit.ly/givepodcasts Your support will help us keep having ambitious conversations about big ideas.

New to the show? Want to check out Ezra’s favorite episodes? Check out the Ezra Klein Show beginner’s guide (http://bit.ly/EKSbeginhere)

Want to contact the show? Reach out at ezrakleinshow@vox.com
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

What should Democrats do about the Supreme Court?

Marilynne Robinson is one of the greatest American novelists alive today. She’s the author of the Pulitzer-prize winning Gilead — one of my favorite books, ever — as well as Housekeeping, Home, Lila, and her latest, Jack. She’s also produced four brilliant collections of nonfiction essays. 
But Robinson is not simply a beautiful writer; her work is inextricably bound up with the most important issues of our times: race, religion, education, geography, and democracy — so much so that in 2015, Barack Obama chose to interview her on the state of the country while he was still the sitting president. This was a joy of a conversation to have right now, and it covers vast amounts of ground, including:
• Robinson’s obsession with the doctrine of predestination 
• What we know -- and all we don’t know -- about the nature of reality 
• The power of loneliness
• How, for all the talk of polarization, there are certain ideas that Americans widely, quietly share
• How the logic of efficiency and growth has come to invade every aspect of our lives
• The differences between writing fiction and nonfiction 
• How to train yourself to notice the world around you
• The sobering purpose of studying history
• What it will take to keep American democracy alive and well  
• The particular problem that Donald Trump poses
• The baseline assumptions and practices a democracy demands we share
And much more. I found this conversation a tonic to have in this moment. I hope it’s the same for you.

Book recommendations: 
Birdman of Alcatraz by Thomas E. Gaddis


Credits:
Producer - Jeff Geld
Audio engineer - Jackson Bierfeldt
Researcher - Roge Karma

Please consider making a contribution to Vox to support this show: bit.ly/givepodcasts Your support will help us keep having ambitious conversations about big ideas.

New to the show? Want to check out Ezra’s favorite episodes? Check out the Ezra Klein Show beginner’s guide (http://bit.ly/EKSbeginhere)

Want to contact the show? Reach out at ezrakleinshow@vox.com
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Marilynne Robinson on writing, metaphysics, and the Donald Trump dilemma

As we approach the 2020 election, I want to make sure the conversation on this show reflects the actual choice the country is facing. So we are going to be doing a few episodes, including this one, with guests who believe Donald Trump is the better candidate this November. 

I wanted to start with foreign policy because that’s where Trump has been most influential. Trump has successfully broken the previous bipartisan consensus on key foreign policy issues. The way Republicans — and now even Democrats — talk about trade, alliances, Russia, and China has changed dramatically over the last four years. That’s an important shift, whether or not you agree with it. 

Rebeccah Heinrichs is a senior fellow at the Hudson Institute where she specializes in nuclear deterrence and missile defense, a former adviser to congressional Republicans, and one of the sharpest defenders of Donald Trump’s foreign policy. Heinrichs sees a clear foreign policy worldview animating the Trump administration — one with more successes to its name than critics are willing to admit. I see a worldview that is inconsistently applied, and whose goals are often undermined, by the President’s impulsive, anti-strategic behavior on the world stage. So I asked Heinrichs to come on the show and persuade me that I’m wrong. 

In this conversation Heinrichs and I discuss how Trump shattered the foreign policy consensus that preceded him, why he sees China as such a central threat to American interests, the trade-offs that come with engaging in multilateral agreements and institutions, whether the threats America faces require global cooperation to address, the importance (or lack thereof) of how other countries view America, the ways that Trump undermines his own purported foreign policy aims, Trump’s ally-bashing, the US-Saudi Arabia alliance, the Trump administration's stance on human rights, what we can expect from Trump in his second term, and much more.

Book recommendations: 
The World America Made by Robert Kagan 
The False Promise of Liberal Order by Patrick Porter 
Exercise of Power by Robert Gates 


Credits:
Producer - Jeff Geld
Audio engineer - Jackson Bierfeldt
Researcher - Roge Karma

Please consider making a contribution to Vox to support this show: bit.ly/givepodcasts Your support will help us keep having ambitious conversations about big ideas.

New to the show? Want to check out Ezra’s favorite episodes? Check out the Ezra Klein Show beginner’s guide (http://bit.ly/EKSbeginhere)

Want to contact the show? Reach out at ezrakleinshow@vox.com
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

The case for Trump’s foreign policy

Fareed Zakaria is the host of CNN’s Fareed Zakaria GPS, a columnist for the Washington Post, and one of the most astute foreign policy thinkers of our time. So much of this conversation is focused on just that: How Biden and Trump respectively see the world and want to shape it. In particular, the ways Biden’s foreign policy differs from Obama’s and has changed over the years, whether Trump has a coherent foreign policy at all, and why the most important US foreign policy question is “What is an acceptable level of influence for China to have?”

But I also wanted to talk to Zakaria about some broader trends — trends he’s been tracking for some time. Zakaria’s 2003 book The Future of Freedom anticipated the rise of illiberal democracies across the globe long before anyone paid it much attention. His 2008 book The Post-American World described the multipolar international order that, in many ways, we now inhabit. And just recently he authoredTen Lessons for a Post-Pandemic World which forecasts how Covid-19 will change the trajectory of our world. 

So in this conversation we also discuss the state of journalism, the dangers of great power war in the 21st century, why Zakaria believes rise of China is far less of a threat than either Republicans or Democrats seem to believe, why a global spike of economic inequality in an already unequal world is perhaps the most important pandemic trend, whether Zakaria has lost faith in America, whether anything short of violent catastrophe can upend concentrations of wealth, how the world’s views of China and America are changing, and much more.

References: 
"The definitive case for ending the filibuster" by Ezra Klein
The Great Leveler: Violence and the History of Inequality from the Stone Age to the Twenty-First Century by Walter Scheidel
﻿Book recommendations:
Cultural Evolution by Ronald F. Inglehart 
American Politics: The Promise of Disharmony by Samuel P. Huntington
The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier &amp; Clay by Michael Chabon


Credits:
Producer - Jeff Geld
Audio engineer - Jackson Bierfeldt
Researcher - Roge Karma

Please consider making a contribution to Vox to support this show: bit.ly/givepodcasts Your support will help us keep having ambitious conversations about big ideas.

New to the show? Want to check out Ezra’s favorite episodes? Check out the Ezra Klein Show beginner’s guide (http://bit.ly/EKSbeginhere)

Want to contact the show? Reach out at ezrakleinshow@vox.com
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Fareed Zakaria on how Biden and Trump see the world

Helluva week in politics, huh? And yet, in the background, the world is still warming, the fires still burning, the future still dimming. There will be plenty of episodes to come on the election. But I wanted to take a step back and talk about a part of policymaking that is often ignored, but which our world may, literally, depend on.

In campaign season, candidates make extravagant promises about all the bills they will pass. The implicit promise is the passage of those bills will solve the problems they’re meant to address. But that’s often not how it works. Between passage and reality lies what Leah Stokes calls “the fog of enactment”: a long, quiet process in which the language of bills is converted into the specificity of laws, and where interest groups and other actors can organize to gut even the strongest legislation. This is where wins can become losses; where historic legislative achievements can be turned into desultory, embarrassing failures.

Stokes is a political scientist at UC Santa Barbara, and author of Short Circuiting Policy: Interest Groups and the Battle Over Clean Energy and Climate Policy in the American States. Her book tracks the fate of a series of clean energy standards passed in the states in recent decades, investigating why some of them failed so miserably, and how others succeeded. But her book is more than that, too: It’s a theory of how policymaking actually works, where it gets hijacked, how power is actually wielded, and how to do policymaking better.

So this is a conversation that’s about policymaking broadly — we talk about far more than climate, and the principles here apply to virtually everything — but is also about the key question of the next few years narrowly: How do we write a climate bill that actually works?

Book recommendations: 
Rising by Elizabeth Rush
The Education of Idealist by Samantha Power
War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy

Credits:
Producer - Jeff Geld
Audio engineer- Jackson Bierfeldt
Researcher - Roge Karma

Please consider making a contribution to Vox to support this show: bit.ly/givepodcasts Your support will help us keep having ambitious conversations about big ideas.

New to the show? Want to check out Ezra’s favorite episodes? Check out the Ezra Klein Show beginner’s guide (http://bit.ly/EKSbeginhere)

Want to contact the show? Reach out at ezrakleinshow@vox.com
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

How a climate bill becomes a reality

In this special episode of the Future Perfect podcast, neuroscientist Lori Marino helps us understand how arbitrarily we draw the lines between animals as pets and animals as food, and how we might redraw those lines.
Subscribe to Future Perfect on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or your favorite podcast app to automatically get new episodes of the latest season each week.

Further listening and reading: 


Lori Marino has done in-depth round-ups of all the research on chicken cognition and pig cognition.


You might also enjoy this study, where students who worked with chickens were surprised by their intelligence

In the piece, we used clips from this BBC Earth segment on how pig intelligence compares to toddler intelligence, and a Compassion in World Farming piece on pigs and video games


Dylan Matthews has written in depth about unnecessarily painful pig castration. He’s also written about the practice of mass-culling male chicks. 


For more on what labels like “wild caught,” “organic,” and “grass-fed” actually mean for the food you eat, Rachel Krantz wrote a comprehensive guide. We also have more information on what it means for eggs to be “cage-free.” 


We always want to hear from you! Please send comments and questions to futureperfect@vox.com. 
This podcast is made possible thanks to support from Animal Charity Evaluators. They research and promote the most effective ways to help animals.

Featuring:
Lori Marino, Kimmela Center for Animal Advocacy
Sigal Samuel (@SigalSamuel), staff writer, Vox 

More to explore:

Follow all of Future Perfect’s reporting on the Future of Meat.

Subscribe to Vox’s Future Perfect newsletter, which breaks down big, complicated problems the world faces and the most efficient ways to solve them.

Follow Us:
Vox.com
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

The meat we eat affects us all

In a special, post-debate episode, I'm joined by Matt Yglesias to discuss the most unnerving presidential debate I've ever seen.

Hosts:
Matthew Yglesias (@mattyglesias), Senior correspondent, Vox
Ezra Klein (@ezraklein), Editor-at-large, Vox

Credits:
Producer/Editor - Jeff Geld
Researcher - Roge Karma

Please consider making a contribution to Vox to support this show: bit.ly/givepodcasts Your support will help us keep having ambitious conversations about big ideas.

New to the show? Want to check out Ezra’s favorite episodes? Check out the Ezra Klein Show beginner’s guide (http://bit.ly/EKSbeginhere)

Want to contact the show? Reach out at ezrakleinshow@vox.com
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

A dark, dangerous debate

We talk a lot on this show about the problems with American political institutions. But what if all those problems are actually just one problem: the two-party system.

Lee Drutman is a political scientist, senior fellow in the Political Reform program at New America, co-host of the podcast Politics in Question, and most recently the author of Breaking the Two-Party Doom Loop: The Case for Multiparty Democracy in America, which makes the best case against America’s two-party system that I’ve ever read. 

In Drutman’s telling, the reason our politics have gotten so toxic is simple: Toxicity is the core incentive of any two-party system. American democracy was only stable at mid-century because we functionally had a four-party system that kept the temperature of political combat from overheating, and the only way to achieve a similar homeostasis is by recreating that kind of system (which Drutman has a four-part plan to do).

I'm convinced by a lot of Drutman’s analysis, but I tend toward skepticism that the two-party system is the source of our political ills, which makes this a really fun, dynamic conversation.

Book recommendations: 
The Semi-Sovereign People by E.E. Schattschneider
Uncivil Agreement by Liliana Mason 
A Different Democracy by Steven L. Taylor, Matthew Soberg Shugart, Arend Lijphart, Bernard Grofman 



We are conducting an audience survey to better serve you. It takes no more than five minutes, and it really helps out the show. Please take our survey here: voxmedia.com/podsurvey. 

Please consider making a contribution to Vox to support this show: bit.ly/givepodcasts Your support will help us keep having ambitious conversations about big ideas.

New to the show? Want to check out Ezra’s favorite episodes? Check out the Ezra Klein Show beginner’s guide (http://bit.ly/EKSbeginhere)

Credits:
Producer/Editor - Jeff Geld
Researcher - Roge Karma

Want to contact the show? Reach out at ezrakleinshow@vox.com
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

A radical — or obvious? — plan to save American democracy

The death of Ruth Bader Ginsburg, just weeks before a presidential election, leaves us in dangerous waters. It’s easy to imagine a scenario in which the election outcome is contested by one side and is ultimately determined by a Supreme Court with the deciding vote cast by Trump's recent appointee. Indeed, both Sen. Ted Cruz and President Donald Trump have named this scenario as driving their urgency to replace Ginsburg. At that point, a legitimacy crisis looms.

Suzanne Mettler is the John L. Senior Professor of American Institutions at Cornell University. Her work has focused on trust between citizens and their governments, but recently, she’s co-written, with Robert Lieberman, a book that is tailor-made for this moment: Four Threats: The Recurring Crisis of American Democracy. Its thesis is a dark one: America’s most dangerous political crises have been driven by four kinds of threat -- political polarization, democratic exclusion, economic inequality, and executive power. But this is the first time all four threats are present simultaneously.  

“It may be tempting to think that we have weathered severe threats before and that the Constitution protected us,” they write. “But that would be a misreading of history, which instead reveals that democracy is indeed fragile, and that surviving threats to it is by no means guaranteed.” 

We discuss where Ginsburg's passing leaves us, what 2020 election scenarios we should be most worried about, what the tumultuous election of 1800 can teach us about today, how this moment could foster exactly the democratic reckoning this country needs, whether court packing and filibuster elimination will save American democracy or destroy it, when people know they’re benefiting from government programs and when they don’t, and more.

Book recommendations: 
Good Enough for Government Work by Amy Lerman 
Fragmented Democracy by Jamila Michener
With Ballots and Bullets by Nathan Kalmoe 

We are conducting an audience survey to better serve you. It takes no more than five minutes, and it really helps out the show. Please take our survey here: voxmedia.com/podsurvey. 

Please consider making a contribution to Vox to support this show: bit.ly/givepodcasts Your support will help us keep having ambitious conversations about big ideas.

New to the show? Want to check out Ezra’s favorite episodes? Check out the Ezra Klein Show beginner’s guide (http://bit.ly/EKSbeginhere)

Credits:
Producer/Editor - Jeff Geld
Researcher - Roge Karma

Want to contact the show? Reach out at ezrakleinshow@vox.com
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

RBG, minority rule, and our looming legitimacy crisis

David French is a senior editor at the Dispatch, a columnist at Time, and one of the conservative commentators I read most closely. French and I have rather different politics — he's a Christian conservative from Tennessee and I’m a secular liberal from California — but his upcoming book, Divided We Fall: America’s Secession Threat and How to Restore Our Nation, tracks some of the same problems that I’ve been obsessing over for years: political polarization and the way it's cracking America apart.
 
But French goes further than I do: He fears not just governmental dysfunction and paralysis, but full-on secession and even civil war. He constructs two in-depth scenarios — one quite violent — by which America fractures into two separate red and blue nations following secession, and argues the only viable solution is a supercharged form of federalism in which both sides accept that in a nation this polarized, America can only hang together if it permits different regions to govern apart. But is that an answer to our problems, or simply a form of submission to them?
 
In important ways, French's solution is the opposite of the path I tend to favor, and the result is a constructive debate about the nature of group polarization, the possibility of secession, the importance of the filibuster, what we can learn from James Madison, the virtues and vices of democracy, and the feedback loops of governance. There are, of course, no perfect answers here. But perhaps we can discover the least-terrible solution on offer. 

(One note: This conversation was recorded shortly before Ruth Bader Ginsburg's death. But as you'll hear, much of what we talk about is unnervingly relevant to the kind of political crisis, and particularly the questions of minoritarian vs. majoritarian rule, that we're now facing.)

Book recommendations: 
The Splendid and the Vile by Erik Larson
The Federalist Papers by Alexander Hamilton, James Madison, and John Jay
Dune by Frank Herbert 


We are conducting an audience survey to better serve you. It takes no more than five minutes, and it really helps out the show. Please take our survey here: voxmedia.com/podsurvey. 

Please consider making a contribution to Vox to support this show: bit.ly/givepodcasts Your support will help us keep having ambitious conversations about big ideas.

New to the show? Want to check out Ezra’s favorite episodes? Check out the Ezra Klein Show beginner’s guide (http://bit.ly/EKSbeginhere)

Credits:
Producer/Editor - Jeff Geld
Researcher - Roge Karma

Want to contact the show? Reach out at ezrakleinshow@vox.com
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

David French and I debate polarization, secession, and the filibuster 

Matt Yglesias is a co-founder and senior correspondent at Vox, my co-host on The Weeds podcast, and my oldest friend in journalism. Matt’s college blog was an inspiration for my own, and since then we’ve worked together, podcasted together, and even started Vox together. I've learned an enormous amount from him, both when we agree and when we disagree.

A lot has changed since Matt and I started blogging in the early 2000s — and we’ve changed, too. So we start this conversation by discussing how social media has altered American politics, why Matt went from a war hawk to near-pacifist on US foreign policy, what it’s like to go from attacking the establishment to being seen as part of the establishment, and the way the Obama administration disillusioned him. 

But Matt has also recently written a new book, One Billion Americans: The Case for Thinking Bigger. In it, he argues that the path to ensure American greatness and preeminence on the world stage is a combination of mass immigration, pro-family policy, and overhauling America’s housing and transportation systems. We discuss how to reconcile that vision with the reality of climate change, what a genuinely progressive pro-family agenda would look like, Donald Trump’s housing policy dog-whistling, why we should be allowing a lot more legal immigration, and much more.

Book recommendations:
Justice, Gender and the Family  by Susan M. Okin
Political Order and Political Decay by Francis Fukuyama
A Farewell to Alms by Gregory Clark


We are conducting an audience survey to better serve you. It takes no more than five minutes, and it really helps out the show. Please take our survey here: voxmedia.com/podsurvey. 

Please consider making a contribution to Vox to support this show: bit.ly/givepodcasts Your support will help us keep having ambitious conversations about big ideas.

New to the show? Want to check out Ezra’s favorite episodes? Check out the Ezra Klein Show beginner’s guide (http://bit.ly/EKSbeginhere)

Credits:
Producer/Editor - Jeff Geld
Researcher - Roge Karma

Want to contact the show? Reach out at ezrakleinshow@vox.com
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

The Matt Yglesias Show 

Our conversation over race and policing — like our conversations over virtually everything in America — is shot through with a crude individualism. Talking in terms of systems and contexts comes less naturally to us, but that means we often miss the true story.
Phillip Atiba Goff is the co-founder and CEO of the Center for Policing Equity, as well as a professor of African-American studies and psychology at Yale University. At CPE, Goff sits atop the world’s largest collection of police behavioral data. So he has the evidence, and he knows what it tells us — and, just as importantly, what it doesn’t even attempt to measure. He knows what we can say with confidence about race and policing, and what we wish we knew, but simply don’t. He thinks in systems, in contexts, in uncertainty — in the bigger, harder picture. 
That’s what this conversation is about. What do we know about racial bias in policing? At what levels does it operate? Where has it been measured, and what haven’t we even tried to measure? How much of policing is driven by crime rates? How do we think about the conditions that create crime in this analysis, and what do we miss when we ignore them? What do we know about the investments that actually make people safe? How do we balance the reality that police do reduce violent crime with the fury communities have at being over-policed, or victimized by police? How do we experiment with other models of safety carefully and systematically?
There’s a lot in this one. This conversation could’ve gone for hours longer. But these are tough issues, and they deserve someone who understands both the micro-level data and the macro-level context. Goff does, and he shares that knowledge generously and clearly here.

Book recommendations: 
Wounded in the House of a Friend by Sonia Sanchez
Evicted by Matthew Desmond 
Uneasy Peace by Patrick Sharkey
No Matter the Wreckage by Sarah Kay


We are conducting an audience survey to better serve you. It takes no more than five minutes, and it really helps out the show. Please take our survey here: voxmedia.com/podsurvey. 

Please consider making a contribution to Vox to support this show: bit.ly/givepodcasts Your support will help us keep having ambitious conversations about big ideas.

New to the show? Want to check out Ezra’s favorite episodes? Check out the Ezra Klein Show beginner’s guide (http://bit.ly/EKSbeginhere)

Credits:
Producer/Editor - Jeff Geld
Researcher - Roge Karma

Want to contact the show? Reach out at ezrakleinshow@vox.com
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Race, policing, and the universal yearning for safety

Coronavirus has turned life into an endless series of risk calculations. Can I take my child to see his grandparents, even if it means getting on a plane? Is it okay to begin seeing friends or dating? Should I attend religious services even if they are held inside? Do I have to wear a mask around my roommates? The profusion of these questions reflects public health failures, but we live in the wreckage of those failures. So how are we best to live?

Julia Marcus is an epidemiologist at Harvard Medical School and a contributing writer for The Atlantic who has penned a brilliant series of essays about how to think about risk amidst this pandemic. Marcus’s starting point, which emerges from her previous work on HIV prevention, is that an all-or-nothing approach is blindly unrealistic: Everything is a trade-off. Shaming is a terrible public health strategy. And we can’t have a conversation about risks that ignores the reality of benefits, too. 

In this conversation, Marcus offers a framework for making key life decisions while also managing coronavirus risk at the same time. We also discuss what the risk calculation for someone living in Germany or South Korea looks like, how the US government’s abdication of responsibility has shifted the burden of risk management onto individuals, the kinds of activities we tend to underestimate and overestimate the riskiness of, the principles that should guide us in the age of coronavirus, how long we can expect this pandemic to last, and much more.
References: 
“Quarantine Fatigue Is Real”, Julia Marcus, The Atlantic
“Americans Aren’t Getting the Advice They Need”, Julia Marcus, The Atlantic
“Colleges Are Getting Ready to Blame Their Students”, Julia Marcus, The Atlantic
Book recommendations: 
Momo by Michael Ende
Tiny Beautiful Things by Cheryl Strayed 
The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down by Anne Fadiman

We are conducting an audience survey to better serve you. It takes no more than five minutes, and it really helps out the show. Please take our survey here: voxmedia.com/podsurvey. 

Please consider making a contribution to Vox to support this show: bit.ly/givepodcasts Your support will help us keep having ambitious conversations about big ideas.

New to the show? Want to check out Ezra’s favorite episodes? Check out the Ezra Klein Show beginner’s guide (http://bit.ly/EKSbeginhere)

Credits:
Producer/Editor/Audio Wizard - Jeff Geld
Researcher - Roge Karma

Want to contact the show? Reach out at ezrakleinshow@vox.com
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

How to think about coronavirus risk in your life 

The Republican Party began losing the Black vote around 1936. Since then, Republicans have commissioned reports, hired consultants, and spent huge sums of campaign dollars trying to win back Black voters. The project continues today: This year’s Republican National Convention presented a lineup of speakers far more diverse than the Republican Party itself, making the case for the “Party of Lincoln.” A third of African Americans, after all, self-identify as “conservative.” And yet, no Republican presidential candidate has won more than 15 percent of the Black vote since 1964 (many have received well under 10).
 
Leah Wright Rigueur is a historian and public policy scholar at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government and the author of The Loneliness of the Black Republican, a remarkable study of the distinct ideologies woven through the Black conservative and Black Republican traditions. The book traces the history of why Black voters left the GOP and what the Republican Party has tried to do — and what it has refused to do — to win them back.
 
Rigueur has also spent the past decade teaching classes on racial protests, riots, and how they shaped American politics in the 20th century. We discuss the historical analogues for today’s protest movement, what’s different now than in 1968, the complex relationship between protesters and electoral politics, how these movements can lead to both lasting change and white backlash, and more.

Book recommendations: 
Civil Rights and the Making of the Modern American State by Megan Ming Francis
Don't Blame Us by Lily Geismer
One Person, No Vote by Carol Anderson



We are conducting an audience survey to better serve you. It takes no more than five minutes, and it really helps out the show. Please take our survey here: voxmedia.com/podsurvey. 

Please consider making a contribution to Vox to support this show: bit.ly/givepodcasts Your support will help us keep having ambitious conversations about big ideas.

New to the show? Want to check out Ezra’s favorite episodes? Check out the Ezra Klein Show beginner’s guide (http://bit.ly/EKSbeginhere)

Credits:
Producer/Editor/Audio Wizard - Jeff Geld
Researcher - Roge Karma

Want to contact the show? Reach out at ezrakleinshow@vox.com
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Black Republicans, Donald Trump, and America's "George Floyd moment"

The last time Andrew Yang was on the podcast, he was just beginning his long shot campaign for the presidency. Now, he’s fresh off a speaking slot at the Democratic convention, and, as he reveals here, talking to Joe Biden about a very specific role in a Biden administration. 
Which is all to say: A lot has changed for Andrew Yang in the past few years. And even more has changed in the world. So I asked Yang back on the show to talk through this new world, and his possible role in it. Among our topics:
- Could a universal basic income be the way we rebuild a fairer economy post-coronavirus? 
- What’s changed in AI, and its likely effect on the economy, over the past five years? 
- What’s the one mistake Yang wishes the Democratic Party would stop making? 
- What did he learn from the surprising success of his own campaign? 
- What job is he talking to Joe Biden about taking if Democrats win in November? 
- Democrats think of themselves as the party of government. So why don’t they care more about making government work? 
- How can Democrats get away with endlessly claiming to support ideas they have no actual intention of passing?
- Do progressives have an overly dystopic view of technology?
- Is there a way to pull presidential campaigns out of value statements, and into real plans for governing?
- The unusual power Joe Biden holds in American politics
And much more.
References: 
Vox's Kelsey Piper's piece on GPT-3 
My previous podcast with Andrew Yang 
Ezra's piece on "Why we can't build" 
Book recommendations:
Zucked: Waking Up to the Facebook Catastrophe by Roger McNamee
They Don't Represent Us by Lawrence Lessig 
Humankind by Rutger Bregman

This podcast is part of a larger Vox project called The Great Rebuild, which is made possible thanks to support from Omidyar Network, a social impact venture that works to reimagine critical systems and the ideas that govern them, and to build more inclusive and equitable societies. You can find out more at vox.com/the-great-rebuild

We are conducting an audience survey to better serve you. It takes no more than five minutes, and it really helps out the show. Please take our survey here: voxmedia.com/podsurvey. 

Please consider making a contribution to Vox to support this show: bit.ly/givepodcasts Your support will help us keep having ambitious conversations about big ideas.
New to the show? Want to check out Ezra’s favorite episodes? Check out the Ezra Klein Show beginner’s guide (http://bit.ly/EKSbeginhere)

Credits:
Producer/Editor/Audio Wizard - Jeff Geld
Researcher - Roge Karma
Want to contact the show? Reach out at ezrakleinshow@vox.com
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Andrew Yang on UBI, coronavirus, and his next job in politics

In 2003, America invaded Iraq. The war cost trillions of dollars, thousands of American lives, hundreds of thousands of Iraqi lives, and destabilized the both the US and the Middle East. And for what? Iraq had no WMDs. Even if they had, they posed no threat to us. Why did we do it? What do we need to learn from it?

That’s the question Robert Draper has spent years trying to answer. In 2007, Draper wrote Dead Certain, a study of the Bush administration with access to the President himself. But there was a hole at the center of that book, and Draper knew it: He still didn't quite understand what had led Bush to invade Iraq. And so he set out to fill the hole. Draper’s To Start a War: How the Bush Administration Took America into Iraq is based on interviews with more than 300 people involved in the run-up to the Iraq War, and the stories they tell offer the clearest, most damning, most useful account of that decision to date. 

There’s a reason I wanted to have this conversation right now. The Iraq War isn’t just past. It’s present. It’s part of how George W. Bush’s Republican Party fell to Donald Trump. It’s a study in the ways a president led by conviction and dismissive of expertise can warp the federal government (sound familiar?). It’s a reminder that belief can be as dangerous as cynicism. It's a lesson in the way that, when information is uncertain, assumptions rule all. And for all the differences between Bush and Trump personally, closely studying the Iraq War reveals a key continuity between them, and a reason Republican administrations keep leading to catastrophe. 

References: 
Ezra's piece on why Republican administrations keep leading to catastrophe 

Book recommendations: 
The Flamethrowers by Rachel Kushner
The False Cause by Adam H. Domby
Young Heroes of the Soviet Union by Alex Halberstadt



Please consider making a contribution to Vox to support this show: bit.ly/givepodcasts Your support will help us keep having ambitious conversations about big ideas.
New to the show? Want to check out Ezra’s favorite episodes? Check out the Ezra Klein Show beginner’s guide (http://bit.ly/EKSbeginhere)

Credits:
Producer/Editor/Audio Wizard - Jeff Geld
Searcher and Researcher - Roge Karma
Want to contact the show? Reach out at ezrakleinshow@vox.com
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Why the hell did America invade Iraq?

Saul Griffith knows the US energy system better than just about anyone on this planet. He’s an inventor, a MacArthur genius fellow, and the founder and CEO of Otherlab where his team was contracted by the Department of Energy to track and visualize the entirety of America’s energy flows. I had Griffith on the show last year for our climate series to lay out what it would look like for America to decarbonize. It was an awesome episode, but it was just a start. 
 
Last month, Griffith formed an organization called Rewiring America and released an e-book of the same name that details the path to effectively decarbonize the US economy by 2035 without forcing Americans to sacrifice their current lifestyles and without having to invent any new technology. Just as importantly — and this is why it fits our mobilization series — Griffith worked with economists to come up with an estimate of how many new jobs this kind of mobilization could create: 25 million over the next five years, they found. More than that: They looked at what kinds of jobs these would be and where they’d be created. 
 
Griffith’s plan is just about the boldest I’ve seen — and there are real questions about whether our political system is up for the task. But those are, crucially, political questions; part of answering them is showing that they can be answered and that they can be answered in ways that make working Americans better off rather than worse. We are in the midst of an unprecedented triple crisis: A public health crisis, an economic crisis, and a climate crisis each unlike anything we’ve ever faced. If there is a time to be bold, this is it.

References: 
Rewiring America's Jobs Report 
Study on animal agriculture and emissions 
Dave Robert's Vox explainer on the "Rewiring America" plan 
My previous conversation with Saul Griffith 
You can check the Ezra Klein Show's climate change series here.

Book recommendations 
Debt: A 5,000 Year History by David Graeber

This podcast is part of a larger Vox project called The Great Rebuild, which is made possible thanks to support from Omidyar Network, a social impact venture that works to reimagine critical systems and the ideas that govern them, and to build more inclusive and equitable societies. You can find out more at vox.com/the-great-rebuild



Please consider making a contribution to Vox to support this show: bit.ly/givepodcasts Your support will help us keep having ambitious conversations about big ideas.
New to the show? Want to check out Ezra’s favorite episodes? Check out the Ezra Klein Show beginner’s guide (http://bit.ly/EKSbeginhere)

Credits:
Producer/Editor/Audio Wizard - Jeff Geld
Searcher and Researcher - Roge Karma
Want to contact the show? Reach out at ezrakleinshow@vox.com
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

How to decarbonize America — and create 25 million jobs

Isabel Wilkerson is an intimidating guest. She’s a former New York Times reporter, Pulitzer Prize recipient, Guggenheim fellow, and hands-down one of the best writers of our time. Her 2010 book The Warmth of Other Suns, a beautiful narrative history of the Great Migration, was a landmark achievement, and remains one of the all-time most recommended books on this show. 
 
Wilkerson worked for years on her new book, Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents, which grapples with a question that has become all the more relevant in recent months: What does America look like when the myths we tell ourselves about who we are, who we’ve been, and what we’ve created fall away? How should we understand the way the racial hierarchies of our past still shape our present?
 
Caste is a book built around a big theory: that America is a caste system and that, to understand it, we need to drop our sense of exceptionalism and analyze ourselves the way we analyze caste systems in other countries. But it is also a book built around dozens — hundreds — of smaller stories. Wilkerson’s genius as a writer is her ability to connect the macro and the micro, to tell you the big story of what happened but to make that story matter by linking it to the lives of those who survived it. That is, to me, her unique contribution: What in the hands of another writer would feel like an abstraction attains, in her work, the vividness and emotional power of lived experience. 
 
This is a big conversation, and it’s not always an easy one. But it is one you will not forget.

References: 
My conversation with David Williams on why Covid-19 is so deadly for Black America 
Book recommendations: 
Annihilation of Caste by B.R. Ambedkar
Deep South by Allison Davis and Burleigh Gardner 
The Heart of Man by Eric Fromm


Please consider making a contribution to Vox to support this show: bit.ly/givepodcasts Your support will help us keep having ambitious conversations about big ideas.
New to the show? Want to check out Ezra’s favorite episodes? Check out the Ezra Klein Show beginner’s guide (http://bit.ly/EKSbeginhere)

Credits:
Producer/Editor/Audio Wizard - Jeff Geld
Searcher and Researcher - Roge Karma
Want to contact the show? Reach out at ezrakleinshow@vox.com
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Isabel Wilkerson wants to change how we understand race in America

In 2019, about one in six children in America — 12 million kids nationwide — lived in poverty. That’s a rate about two or three times higher than in peer countries. And that was before the worst economic and public health crisis in modern history. 
 
The scale of child poverty in America is a disgrace, not only because of the suffering it creates and the potential it drains from our society, but because it’s easily avoidable. Child poverty is not an inevitability; it’s a policy choice. And we’ve been making the wrong choice for far too long. 
 
So for the second episode of our economic remobilization series, I wanted to focus on a simple set of questions: What if we started taking our moral responsibility to America’s kids seriously? What would that world look like? How would we get there? 
 
Congress member Barbara Lee is the chair of the Majority Leader Task Force on Poverty and Opportunity — and she’s someone who raised two kids, as a single mom on public assistance. In 2015, Lee and her colleague Lucille Roybal-Allard commissioned a landmark report from the National Academy of Sciences to better understand child poverty in America and what we could do to reduce it. Released last year, the report lays out a series of concrete policy proposals that would cut child poverty in half while paying for themselves 10 times over in social benefits.
 
In this conversation, Lee and I discuss the psychological impact that poverty has on kids, why investing in children is one of the best investments a society can make, what other countries do right on this front that we can learn from, what it would take to end child poverty as we know it, and much more — including why Lee, a hero to many progressives, was an early backer of now-VP nominee Kamala Harris.

This podcast is part of a larger Vox project called The Great Rebuild, which is made possible thanks to support from Omidyar Network, a social impact venture that works to reimagine critical systems and the ideas that govern them, and to build more inclusive and equitable societies. You can find out more at vox.com/the-great-rebuild

References: 
"A Roadmap to Reducing Child Poverty" by the National Academies of Sciences
A great Vox explainer on the child poverty report 

Book recommendations: 
The End of White Politics by Zerlina Maxwell
Say It Louder! by Tiffany Cross 
Just Mercy by Bryan Stevenson 



Please consider making a contribution to Vox to support this show: bit.ly/givepodcasts Your support will help us keep having ambitious conversations about big ideas.
New to the show? Want to check out Ezra’s favorite episodes? Check out the Ezra Klein Show beginner’s guide (http://bit.ly/EKSbeginhere)

Credits:
Producer/Editor/Jack-of-all-audio-trades - Jeff Geld
Searcher and Researcher - Roge Karma
Want to contact the show? Reach out at ezrakleinshow@vox.com
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

What it would take to end child poverty in America

Australian comedian Hannah Gadsby became a global star with her Netflix special Nanette. It’s a remarkable piece of work, and it does what great art is supposed to do: Give you a sense, however fleeting, of what it is like to live inside another human’s experience. Gadsby’s new special, Douglas, takes that a step further: It explores her autism diagnosis and gives you a sense of what it is like to experience the world through another person’s mind. 

The first half of my episode with Gadsby is about her experience moving through the world as a neurodiverse person. Gadsby didn't receive her autism diagnosis until she was almost 40 years old, after decades of struggling to navigate systems, institutions, and norms that weren't built for people like her. Her story of how she got to comedy — and how close she was to simply falling off the map — is searing, and it helped me see some of the capabilities and social conventions I take for granted in a new light. As in her shows, Gadsby, here, renders an experience few of us have had emotionally legible. It’s a powerful conversation.

Then, we turn to the topics of free speech, safety, and cancel culture. For years, comedy has been undergoing many of the very same debates that have recently become front and center in the journalism world, and Gadsby has done some of the most powerful thinking I've heard on these issues. We discuss what it means for people in power to take responsibility for their speech, how to navigate the complex relationship between creator and audience members, why Twitter is a “bullying pulpit,” the role of recording technology, and the new skills those of us privileged with a platform are going to need to develop.

This is one of those conversations I’ve been thinking about since I had it. Don’t miss it.


Book (and painting) recommendations: 
Saint Sebastian as a Woman by Louise Bourgeois
The Hidden Life of Trees by Peter Wohlleben 
The New Tsar by Steven Lee Myers


Please consider making a contribution to Vox to support this show: bit.ly/givepodcasts Your support will help us keep having ambitious conversations about big ideas.
New to the show? Want to check out Ezra’s favorite episodes? Check out the Ezra Klein Show beginner’s guide (http://bit.ly/EKSbeginhere)

Credits:
Producer/Editor/Jack-of-all-audio-trades - Jeff Geld
Researcher/Learner of all things - Roge Karma
Want to contact the show? Reach out at ezrakleinshow@vox.com
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Hannah Gadsby on comedy, free speech, and living with autism

The novel coronavirus — and America’s disastrously inept response — has shuttered the economy, leaving factories quiet, businesses closed, workers unable to do their jobs. Pulling out of this hole will require an economic effort unlike anything in recent history. We don’t just need a bit of stimulus. We will need a remobilization. But towards what end?

This is the first episode in a four-part series exploring how to rebuild the economy after COVID. Future episodes will look at a Green New Deal, a children-centric economy, and a universal basic income. But I wanted to start at the beginning. What can the government do? What is the economy for? Why should we trust politicians, rather than markets, to allocate resources on this scale?

Zach Carter is a senior reporter at HuffPost and the author of a new book, The Price of Peace: Money, Democracy, and the Life of John Maynard Keynes. The book, which has widely been hailed as one of the year’s best, is a remarkable biography animated by a question many of us have forgotten Keynes asked: What values should guide an economy? What are the higher purposes economic policy should serve? Carter and I discuss:

What Keynes would advise the US government to do if he were alive today

How good domestic economic management can reduce the risk of global war

Whether economics should be about maximizing consumer preferences or pursuing a social purpose

The limits of democracy

The role advertising plays in economic preferences

Why the gold standard was — and is — a terrible idea

Why Democratic politicians are stuck in the 1990s when it comes to their thinking on budget deficits

Modern Monetary Theory (and its discontents)


And much more.

Book recommendations:
The Globaists by Quinn Slobodian
The Deluge by Adam Tooze 
Nova by Samuel R. Delany
John Kenneth Galbraith: His Life, His Politics, His Economics by Richard Parker 


This podcast is part of a larger Vox project called The Great Rebuild, which is made possible thanks to support from Omidyar Network, a social impact venture that works to reimagine critical systems and the ideas that govern them, and to build more inclusive and equitable societies. You can find out more at vox.com/the-great-rebuild
Please consider making a contribution to Vox to support this show: bit.ly/givepodcasts Your support will help us keep having ambitious conversations about big ideas.
New to the show? Want to check out Ezra’s favorite episodes? Check out the Ezra Klein Show beginner’s guide (http://bit.ly/EKSbeginhere)

Credits:
Producer/Editor/Audio fanatic - Jeff Geld
Researcher- Roge Karma
Want to contact the show? Reach out at ezrakleinshow@vox.com
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

What would Keynes do? 

For 30 years, Stuart Stevens was one of the most influential operatives in Republican politics. He was Mitt Romney’s top strategist in 2012, served in key roles on both of George W. Bush’s presidential campaigns, and worked on dozens of congressional and gubernatorial campaigns — building one of the best winning records in politics. Then Stevens watched his party throw its support behind a man who stood against everything he believed in, or thought he believed in. 

Most dissidents from Trumpism take a familiar line: They didn’t leave the Republican Party; the Republican Party left them. But for Stevens, Trump forced a more fundamental rethinking: The problem, he believes, is not that the GOP became something it wasn’t; it’s that many of those within it — including him — failed to see what it actually was. In his new book, It Was All a Lie, he delivers a searing indictment of the party he helped build and his role in it. 

This is a conversation about the Republican Party’s past, present, and future. We discuss the differences between the Democratic and Republican coalitions, whether party elites could have prevented Trump’s rise, the power the GOP base holds, the relationship between tax cuts for the rich and white identity politics for the poor, where the party can and can’t go after Trump, the GOP operatives trying to put Kanye West on the 2020 ballot, how Stevens played the race card in his first campaigns, why Romney lost while Trump won, and much more.

Book recommendations:
The memoirs of Franz von Papen
Black Cross by Greg Iles 


Please consider making a contribution to Vox to support this show: bit.ly/givepodcasts Your support will help us keep having ambitious conversations about big ideas.
New to the show? Want to check out Ezra’s favorite episodes? Check out the Ezra Klein Show beginner’s guide (http://bit.ly/EKSbeginhere)

Credits:
Producer/Editor/Audio fanatic - Jeff Geld
Researcher- Roge Karma
Want to contact the show? Reach out at ezrakleinshow@vox.com
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

A devastating indictment of the Republican Party

Conservative parties operating in modern democracies face a dilemma: How does a party that represents the interests of moneyed elites win mass support? The dilemma sharpens as inequality widens — the more the haves have, the more have-nots there are who want to tax them.

In their new book, Let Them Eat Tweets: How the Right Rules in an Age of Extreme Inequality, political scientists Jacob Hacker and Paul Pierson argue that three paths are possible: Moderate on economics, activate social divisions, or undermine democracy itself. The Republican Party, they hold, has chosen a mix of two and three. “To advance an unpopular plutocratic agenda, Republicans have escalated white backlash — and, increasingly, undermined democracy,” they write.

On some level, it’s obvious that the GOP is a coalition between wealthy donors who want tax cuts and regulatory favors, and downscale whites who fear demographic change and want Trump to build that wall. But how does that coalition work? What happens when one side gains too much power? If the donor class was somehow raptured out of politics, would the result be a Republican Party that trafficked less in social division, or more? And has the threat of strongman rule distracted us from the growing reality of minoritarian rule?

In this conversation, we discuss how inequality has remade the Republican Party, the complex relationship between white identity politics and plutocratic economics, what to make of the growing crop of GOP leaders who want to abandon tax cuts for the rich and recenter the party around ethnonationalism, how much power Republican voters have over their party, and much more.

Paul Pierson's book recommendations: 
Behind the Beautiful Forevers by Katherine Boo
Evicted by Matthew Desmond
The Social Limits to Growth by Fred Hirsch

Jacob Hacker's book recommendations: 
Tocqueville's Discovery of America by Leo Damrosch
The Buried Giant by Kazuo Ishiguro
The Internationalists by Oona A. Hathaway and Scott J. Shapiro


Please consider making a contribution to Vox to support this show: bit.ly/givepodcasts Your support will help us keep having ambitious conversations about big ideas.
New to the show? Want to check out Ezra’s favorite episodes? Check out the Ezra Klein Show beginner’s guide (http://bit.ly/EKSbeginhere)

Credits:
Producer/Editor - Jeff Geld
Researcher in chief - Roge Karma
Want to contact the show? Reach out at ezrakleinshow@vox.com
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

How inequality and white identity politics feed each other

The introduction to Jia Tolentino’s Trick Mirror: Reflections on Self-Delusion, hit me hard. In her investigation of how American politics and culture had collapsed into “an unbearable supernova of perpetually escalating conflict,” she became obsessed with five intersecting problems: “First, how the internet is built to distend our sense of identity; second, how it encourages us to overvalue our opinions; third, how it maximizes our sense of opposition; fourth, how it cheapens our understanding of solidarity; and, finally, how it destroys our sense of scale."

Yeah, me too.

My conversation with Tolentino was one of my favorites of last year -- and it has become all the more relevant in the midst of a pandemic that has collapsed most human communication into Zoom calls, Twitter feeds, and Instagram stories. This is a conversation about what happens when technology combines with the most powerful forces of human psychology to transform the nature of human interaction itself. It’s about how we construct and express our core sense of self, and what that’s doing to who we really are.

References:
The art of attention (with Jenny Odell)
Book Recommendations:
On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous by Ocean Vuong
Random Family: Love, Drugs, Trouble, and Coming of Age in the Bronx by Adrian Nicole LeBlanc
Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City by Matthew Desmond



Please consider making a contribution to Vox to support this show: bit.ly/givepodcasts Your support will help us keep having ambitious conversations about big ideas.
New to the show? Want to check out Ezra’s favorite episodes? Check out the Ezra Klein Show beginner’s guide (http://bit.ly/EKSbeginhere)

Credits:
Producer/Editor - Jeff Geld
Researcher in chief - Roge Karma
Want to contact the show? Reach out at ezrakleinshow@vox.com
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Best of: Jia Tolentino on what happens when life is an endless performance

Mike Birbiglia is one of my favorite comedians. He’s behind the specials. “Thank God for Jokes” and “My Girlfriend’s Boyfriend,” the movies “Sleepwalk With Me” and “Don’t Think Twice,” and now the book The New One.

The New One is on a subject close to my heart: Fatherhood. Birbiglia didn’t intend to be a father. He didn’t want to be a father. But he became one. And it was hard — on him, on his wife, on his marriage. The New One is a memoir of that time — funny, but brutally honest, and touching on some of the hardest truths of parenthood. It’s the kind of book that you can’t quite believes anyone would write. I mean, who would admit that? Or that? And did you read the part where…?

So this is a conversation with a very funny person about some very tender subjects. Something Birbiglia and I both found becoming fathers is that there’s a lot less discussion of the emotional and relational dimensions of fatherhood than you might think. Our experiences were different. But these are topics that should be discussed more, whether you’re a parent or not.

Book recommendations: 
Nobody Will Tell You This But Me by Bess Kalb
Feel Free by Zadie Smith



Want to contact the show? Reach out at ezrakleinshow@vox.com
Please consider making a contribution to Vox to support this show: bit.ly/givepodcasts Your support will help us keep having ambitious conversations about big ideas.
New to the show? Want to check out Ezra’s favorite episodes? Check out the Ezra Klein Show beginner’s guide (http://bit.ly/EKSbeginhere)

Credits:
Producer/Editor - Jeff Geld
Researcher in chief - Roge Karma
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Dadding out with Mike Birbiglia

In this special crossover episode of Vox's Future Perfect series, The Way Through, Co-host Sean Illing talks to David Wolpe, senior rabbi at Sinai Temple in Los Angeles, about God and how to make sense of suffering in human life.

Relevant resources: 
Making Loss Matter : Creating Meaning in Difficult Times by Rabbi David Wolpe
Religion without God: Alain de Botton on "atheism 2.0." by Sean Iling

Featuring:
David Wolpe (@RabbiWolpe), senior rabbi at Sinai Temple in Los Angeles

Host:
Sean Illing (@Seanilling), senior interviews writer, Vox

More to explore:
Subscribe to Vox’s Future Perfect newsletter, which breaks down the big, complicated problems the world faces and the most efficient ways to solve them.

About Vox:
Vox is a news network that helps you cut through the noise and understand what's really driving the events in the headlines.
Please consider making a contribution to Vox to support this show: bit.ly/givepodcasts. Your support will help us keep having ambitious conversations about big ideas.
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

A rabbi explains how to make sense of suffering

There’s been a lot of discussion lately — including on this show — of the problems facing national news. Cries of fake news, illiberalism in the administration, fractured audiences, the cancel culture debate, shaky business models, and more. But the truest crisis in news isn’t in national news. It’s in local news. 

American newspapers cut 45 percent of newsroom staff between 2008 and 2017. From 2004 to 2015, the U.S. newspaper industry lost over 1,800 print outlets to closures and mergers. And it’s only gotten worse since then. This is truest crisis in American news media: That so many places are losing the institutions that gather the news, that bind the community together, that hold public officials accountable ands bring public concerns visibility. Vast swaths of the country are now news deserts — and it’s happening at the same time that the average news consumer feels like they’re drowning in more information than ever before.

Margaret Sullivan was the award-winning chief editor of the Buffalo News, then the public editor of the New York Times, and now the media columnist for the Washington Post. She’s also the author of Ghosting The News: Local Journalism and the Crisis of Democracy. This is a conversation about the economic, technological, and political forces that led to the devastation of local news; what happens to communities in the absence of health local news institutions; and, just as importantly, what we can do to save and revitalize local journalism.

Book recommendations:
Democracy’s Detectives by James T. Hamilton
Still Here by Alexandra Jacobs 
Minor Characters: A Beat Memoir by Joyce Johnson

Want to contact the show? Reach out at ezrakleinshow@vox.com
Please consider making a contribution to Vox to support this show: bit.ly/givepodcasts Your support will help us keep having ambitious conversations about big ideas.
New to the show? Want to check out Ezra’s favorite episodes? Check out the Ezra Klein Show beginner’s guide (http://bit.ly/EKSbeginhere)

Credits:
Producer/Editor - Jeff Geld
Researcher in chief - Roge Karma
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

The crisis in the news

What would it take for America to heal? To be the country it claims to be?

This is the question that animates Bryan Stevenson’s career. Stevenson is the founder and executive director of the Equal Justice Initiative, a clinical professor at the New York University School of Law, a MacArthur genius, and the author of the remarkable book Just Mercy — which was recently turned into a feature film, where Stevenson was played by Michael B. Jordan. 

I admire Stevenson tremendously. He has lived a life dedicated to justice. Justice for individuals — some of whom he has rescued from death row — and justice for the society he lives in. He’s one of the fairly few people I’ve found with vision for how America could find justice on the far shore of our own history. That vision is particularly needed now and so I asked him to return to the show to share it. To my delight, he agreed.

This conversation is about truth and reconciliation in America — and about whether truth would actually lead to reconciliation in America. It’s about what the process of reckoning with our past sins and present wounds would look and feel and sound like. It’s about what we can learn from countries like Germany and South Africa, that have walked further down this path than we have. And it’s about the country and community that could lie on the other side of that confrontation. 

Book recommendations: 
The Souls of Black Folks by W.E.B Du Bois 
The Warmth of Other Suns by Isabel Wilkerson 
From Slavery to Freedom by John Hope Franklin Evelyn Higginbotham 
The Brothers Karamazov by Fyodor Dostoevsky
Gilead by Marilyne Robinson 

Want to contact the show? Reach out at ezrakleinshow@vox.com
Please consider making a contribution to Vox to support this show: bit.ly/givepodcasts Your support will help us keep having ambitious conversations about big ideas.
New to the show? Want to check out Ezra’s favorite episodes? Check out the Ezra Klein Show beginner’s guide (http://bit.ly/EKSbeginhere)

Credits:
Producer/Editer - Jeff Geld
Researcher - Roge Karma
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Bryan Stevenson on how America can heal

Five years ago, Oren Cass sat at the center of the Republican Party. Cass is a former management consultant who served as the domestic policy director for the Mitt Romney campaign and then as a senior fellow at the conservative Manhattan Institute. But then he launched an insurgency. 

Today, Cass is the founder and executive director of American Compass, a new think tank created to challenge the right-wing economic orthodoxy. Cass thinks conservatism has lost its way, becoming obsessed with low tax rates and a quasi-religious veneration of markets. What conservatives need, he thinks, are clear social goals that can structure a radically new economic agenda: a vision that puts families first, eschews economic growth as the be-all-end-all of policymaking, and recognizes the inescapability of government intervention in the economy. Trump is likely — though not certain — to lose in 2020. And then, Cass thinks, Republicans will face a choice: to return to a “pre-Trump” consensus, or to build a “post-Trump future” — one that, he hopes, will prevent more Trump-like politicians from rising. 

In this conversation, Cass and I discuss how current economic indicators fail, the relationship between economics and culture, why Cass believes production — not consumption — should be the central focus of public policy, the problems with how our society assigns status to different professions, the role that power plays in determining market outcomes, the conservative case against market fundamentalism, why Cass supports labor unions and industrial policy but not a job guarantee or publicly funded childcare, what the future of the Republican Party after Donald Trump looks like, whether Cass’s policies are big enough to solve the problems he identifies, and more.

References: 
The Once and Future Worker by Oren Cass 
"Removing the Blinders from Economic Policy" by Oren Cass
Book recommendations: 
The Closing of the American Mind by Allan Bloom 
The Value of Everything by Mariana Mazzucato 
Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy 


Want to contact the show? Reach out at ezrakleinshow@vox.com
Please consider making a contribution to Vox to support this show: bit.ly/givepodcasts Your support will help us keep having ambitious conversations about big ideas.
New to the show? Want to check out Ezra’s favorite episodes? Check out the Ezra Klein Show beginner’s guide (http://bit.ly/EKSbeginhere)

Credits:
Producer/Editer - Jeff Geld
Researcher - Roge Karma
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

What a post-Trump Republican Party might look like

Last week, Harper’s published an open letter arguing that “the free exchange of information and ideas, the lifeblood of a liberal society, is daily becoming more constricted.” The letter had a long list of signatories, and triggered an instant controversy, not so much for what it said as a text as for how it was being used as a political document. This is a hot debate on both sides because it traces the issue most central not just to journalists’ hearts, but to our jobs: Can we speak the truth, as best we understand it? And who, even, is “we”?

I believe in the free exchange of information and ideas. I’ve committed my life to it. But I also worry those values are sometimes deployed as political positioning rather than democratic practice. The term "free speech" is often used here, but we're not dealing with laws regulating speech. We're dealing with media platforms that make editorial decisions as a matter of course. No one has the right to a New York Times op-ed column, or a warm reception on social media. But fear of losing your job, or your status, can chill speech — as, of course, can fear of physical or legislative harm. As such, I've come to think the core of this debate isn't freedom, but safety. The word has become polarizing, but the yearning for it is ubiquitous. To speak freely, you must feel safe, or at least safe enough. That’s what the letter’s signatories are asking for. That’s also what its critics are asking for.

Yascha Mounk is a political scientist at Johns Hopkins University, a columnist at the Atlantic, the host of the Good Fight podcast, and now the founder of a new journal, Persuasion, dedicated to pushing back on the illiberalism he sees infecting the discourse. Yascha and I agree on most issues, and I think hold similar values, but often find ourselves arguing over this topic. So I asked him on the show to see if we could figure out why. We discuss liberalism and illiberalism, what to do with speech that restricts others from speaking, the component parts of what gets called “cancel culture,” whether the zone of debate has widened or narrowed over the past 20 years, the differing cultures of Twitter and Reddit, The NYT's Tom Cotton controversy, whether safety and free speech are truly in tension, what the word “unsafe” means to people who have daily reason to fear for their freedom and futures, and much more. 


Want to contact the show? Reach out at ezrakleinshow@vox.com
Please consider making a contribution to Vox to support this show: bit.ly/givepodcasts Your support will help us keep having ambitious conversations about big ideas.
New to the show? Want to check out Ezra’s favorite episodes? Check out the Ezra Klein Show beginner’s guide (http://bit.ly/EKSbeginhere)

Credits:
Producer/Editer - Jeff Geld
Researcher - Roge Karma
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Free speech, safety, and ‘the letter’ 

Masha Gessen grew up in the Soviet Union and spent two decades covering the resurgence of totalitarianism in Russia, before being driven from the country by policies targeting LGBT people. Watching Donald Trump win in 2016, Gessen felt like they had seen this movie before. Within forty-eight hours of Trump’s victory, Gessen’s essay “Autocracy: Rules for Survival” had gone viral, including lessons that in hindsight read as prophetic: Believe the autocrat. Do not be taken in by small signs of normality. Institutions will not save you.

Now, Gessen is back with a new book, Surviving Autocracy, that is a collection of ideas they have been building over the course of the Trump presidency. We discuss the inherent fragility of American political institutions, Donald Trump’s autocratic aesthetic, how the language of liberal democracy paradoxically undermines genuine liberal democracy, what lessons Gessen learned from covering the rise of Vladamir Putin, why Gessen believes the US is currently in the first stage of the three part descent to autocracy, whether George W. Bush was a more damaging president than Donald Trump, the counterintuitive roots of Trumpian post-truthism, and much more.

Book recommendation: 
The Post-Communist Mafia State by Balint Magyar


Want to contact the show? Reach out at ezrakleinshow@vox.com
Please consider making a contribution to Vox to support this show: bit.ly/givepodcasts Your support will help us keep having ambitious conversations about big ideas.
New to the show? Want to check out Ezra’s favorite episodes? Check out the Ezra Klein Show beginner’s guide (http://bit.ly/EKSbeginhere)

Credits:
Producer/Editer/ Audio Master Jeff Geld
Researcher - Roge Karma
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

The frightening fragility of America's political institutions

When we talk about AI, we’re often talking about a very particular, narrow form of intelligence — the sort of analytical competence that can win you games of GO or solve complex math equations. That type of intelligence is important, but it’s incomplete. Human affairs don’t operate on reason and logic alone. They sometimes don't operate on reason and logic at all.

In 1995, computer scientist Rosalind Picard wrote a paper and subsequent book making the case that the fields of computer science and AI should take emotion seriously, and providing a framework for how machines could come to understand, express and monitor emotion. That project launched the field of “Affective Computing” and today Picard is the founder and director of the Affective Computing Research Group at MIT, and a leading inventor and entrepreneur in affective computing. 

In this conversation, Picard and I discuss the importance of emotional cognition to human decision-making, how emotion-tracking technology is being used to help disadvantaged populations (but could also be used to bring about dystopian results), how affective computing deals with the subjective expressions of human emotions, what studying affective computing taught her about interacting with other humans, why Picard believes the goal of AI technology should be to “empower the weak”and “reduce inequality,” and much more.

Book recommendations: 
The Bible (stick around for the reasoning behind this one)


Want to contact the show? Reach out at ezrakleinshow@vox.com
Please consider making a contribution to Vox to support this show: bit.ly/givepodcasts Your support will help us keep having ambitious conversations about big ideas.
New to the show? Want to check out Ezra’s favorite episodes? Check out the Ezra Klein Show beginner’s guide (http://bit.ly/EKSbeginhere)

Credits:
Producer/Editer/ Jack-of-all-audio-trades Jeff Geld
Researcher - Roge Karma
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Can artificial intelligence be emotionally intelligent? 

My first conversation with Harvard political theorist Danielle Allen in fall 2019 was one of my all-time favorites. I didn’t expect to have Allen on again so soon, but her work is unusually relevant to our current moment.

She’s written an entire book about the deeper argument of the Declaration of Independence and the way our superficial reading and folk history of the document obscures its radicalism. (It’ll make you look at July Fourth in a whole new way). Her most recent book, Cuz, is a searing indictment of the American criminal justice system, driven by watching her cousin go through it and motivated by the murder that ended his life. Harvard’s Edmond J. Safra Center for Ethics, which Allen directs, has released the most comprehensive, operational road map for mobilizing and reopening the US economy amidst the Covid-19 crisis. And to top it all off, a two-year bipartisan commission of the American Academy of Arts &amp; Sciences, which Allen co-chaired, recently released a report with more than 30 recommendations on how to reform American democracy — and they’re very, very good.

This is a wide-ranging conversation for a wide-ranging moment. Allen and I discuss what “all men are created equal” really means, why the myth of Thomas Jefferson’s sole authorship of the Declaration of Independence muddies its message, the role of police brutality in the American revolution, democracy reforms such as ranked-choice voting, DC statehood, mandatory voting, how to deal with a Republican Party that opposes expanding democracy, the case for prison abolition, the various pandemic response paths before us, the failure of political leadership in this moment, and much more.

References: 
My first conversation with Danielle Allen 
Harvard’s Edmond J. Safra Center's Covid-19 work 
"Our Common Purpose" report on reinventing democracy for the 21st century 

Book recommendations: 
To Shape a New World by Brandon Terry and Tommie Shelby 
Solitary by Alfred Woodfox 
The Torture Letters by Laurence Ralph


Want to contact the show? Reach out at ezrakleinshow@vox.com
Please consider making a contribution to Vox to support this show: bit.ly/givepodcasts Your support will help us keep having ambitious conversations about big ideas.
New to the show? Want to check out Ezra’s favorite episodes? Check out the Ezra Klein Show beginner’s guide (http://bit.ly/EKSbeginhere)

Credits:
Producer/Editer/ Jack-of-all-audio-trades Jeff Geld
Researcher - Roge Karma
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Danielle Allen on the radicalism of the American revolution — and its lessons for today

Land of the Giants is a podcast from our friends at Recode and the Vox Media Podcast Network that examines the most powerful tech companies of our time.
 
The second season is called The Netflix Effect, and it’s hosted by Recode editors Rani Molla and Peter Kafka.
 
The Netflix Effect explores how a company that began as a small DVD-by-mail service ultimately upended Hollywood and completely changed the way we watch TV.
 
It’s a fascinating look at what really goes on behind the scenes at Netflix, one of the few companies that’s actually growing during the pandemic, and how they’re continuing to transform entertainment for you and me.  
 
New episodes are released every Tuesday morning. 
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Land of the Giants: The Netflix Effect

In 1964, the Canadian philosopher Marshall McLuhan wrote his opus Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man. In it, he writes, “In the long run, a medium's content matters less than the medium itself in influencing how we think and act." Or, put more simply: "Media work their magic, or their mischief, on the nervous system itself."

This idea — that the media technologies we rely on reshape us on a fundamental, cognitive level — sits at the center of Nicholas Carr's 2010 book The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains. A world defined by oral traditions is more social, unstructured, and multi-sensory; a world defined by the written written word is more individualistic, disciplined, and hyper-visual. A world defined by texting, scrolling and social feedback is addicted to stimulus, constantly forming and affirming expressions of identity, accustomed to waves of information.

Back in 2010, Carr argued that the internet was changing how we thought, and not necessarily for the better. “"My brain, I realized, wasn't just drifting,” he wrote. “It was hungry. It was demanding to be fed the same way the net fed it — and the more it was fed, the hungrier it became.” His book was a finalist for the Pulitzer that year, but dismissed by many, including me. Ten years on, I regret that dismissal. Reading it now, it is outrageously prescient, offering a framework and language for ideas and experiences I’ve been struggling to define for a decade. 

Carr saw where we were going, and now I wanted to ask him where we are. In this conversation, Carr and I discuss how speaking, reading, and now the Internet have each changed our brains in different ways, why "paying attention" doesn't come naturally to us, why we’re still reading Marshall McLuhan, how human memory actually works, why having your phone in sight makes you less creative, what separates "deep reading” from simply reading, why deep reading is getting harder, why building connections is more important than absorbing information, the benefits to collapsing the world into a connected digital community, and much more.

The point of this conversation is not that the internet is bad, nor that it is good. It’s that it is changing us, just as every medium before it has. We need to see those changes clearly in order to take control of them ourselves. 

Book recommendations: 
The Control Revolution by James R. Beniger
The Four-Dimensional Human by Laurence Scott
A Visit from the Goon Squad by Jennifer Egan

Want to contact the show? Reach out at ezrakleinshow@vox.com
Please consider making a contribution to Vox to support this show: bit.ly/givepodcasts Your support will help us keep having ambitious conversations about big ideas.
New to the show? Want to check out Ezra’s favorite episodes? Check out the Ezra Klein Show beginner’s guide (http://bit.ly/EKSbeginhere)

Credits:
Producer/Editer - Jeff Geld
Research Czar - Roge Karma
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Nicholas Carr on deep reading and digital thinking

Believe it or not, we’re already halfway through 2020. What a great year so far, huh? Just a delight. That means it’s time for an AMA. Among the questions you asked:

If Joe Biden is elected president, what should his administration's first legislative priority be? 

What were the best critiques of Why We’re Polarized? 

How much of today's political conflict comes down to the Boomer/Millennial divide?

What’s your reading process?

What does preparation for EK Show episodes look like?

If you were only intellectually accountable to beauty and not truth, what religion would you choose? 

What’s your favorite non-Vox podcast?

What’s your biggest takeaway from year 1 of being a dad?

East coast or west coast? 

What are the episodes that you have the most fun doing? 

What’s an important identity of yours that doesn’t usually come out on the show? 

Roge Karma joins me for this one.

References: 
"In praise of polarization" by Ezra Klein
"Imagining the nonviolent state" by Ezra Klein

Ezra's book recommendations: 
The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck
Beyond Ideology by Francis Lee
What It Takes by Richard Ben Cramer 

Most fun EK Shows: 
I build a world with fantasy master N.K. Jemisin
The art of attention, with Jenny Odell
Tracy K. Smith changed how I read poetry
How Hasan Minhaj is reinventing political comedy

Want to contact the show? Reach out at ezrakleinshow@vox.com
Please consider making a contribution to Vox to support this show: bit.ly/givepodcasts Your support will help us keep having ambitious conversations about big ideas.
New to the show? Want to check out Ezra’s favorite episodes? Check out the Ezra Klein Show beginner’s guide (http://bit.ly/EKSbeginhere)

Credits:
Producer/Editer/Audio Wizard - Jeff Geld
Researcher/Guest host - Roge Karma
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Your questions, answered

I got my start as a blogger. But more specifically, I got my start as a health policy blogger. My first piece of writing I remember people really caring about was a series called “The Health of Nations,” in which I checked out books from college library, downloaded international reports, and profiled the world’s leading health systems. It was crude stuff, but it taught me a lot. The way we do health care isn’t the only way to do health care.  It’s not the best way, or the second best, or the third.

Ezekiel Emanuel is a bioethicist, oncologist, and co-director of the University of Pennsylvania’s Health Transformation Institute. He was a top health policy advisor in the Obama administration, he’s a senior fellow at the Center for American progress, he makes his own artisanal chocolate, and he’s got a new book — Which Country Has the World’s Best Healthcare? — where he goes into more detail than I ever did, or could, to profile other health systems and rank them against our own.

So, yes, this is a conversation about which country has the world’s best health system. But it’s also about how innovation in health care actually works, whether there’s any evidence private insurers add actual value, whether health care is the best investment to make in improving health (spoiler: no), how do you improve a health system when half of the political system will fight like hell against those improvements, and much more. Emanuel has also been doing a lot of work on coronavirus policy, and so we spend some time there, discussing the question that’ tormenting me now: Are we simply giving up that fight? And is there even a politically viable option to giving up, given how much time the government has wasted and how exhausted the public is?

Book recommendations: 
Master of the Senate by Robert Caro
The Last Place on Earth by Roland Huntford
On His Own Terms: A Life of Nelson Rockefeller by Richard Norton Smith


Want to contact the show? Reach out at ezrakleinshow@vox.com
Please consider making a contribution to Vox to support this show: bit.ly/givepodcasts Your support will help us keep having ambitious conversations about big ideas.
New to the show? Want to check out Ezra’s favorite episodes? Check out the Ezra Klein Show beginner’s guide (http://bit.ly/EKSbeginhere)

Credits:
Producer/Editer/Audio Wizard - Jeff Geld
Researcher - Roge Karma
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Which country has the world's best healthcare system? 

The criminal justice system asks three questions: What law was broken? Who broke it? And what should the punishment be? Upon that edifice — and channeled through old bigotries and fears — we have built the largest system of human incarceration on earth. America accounts for 5 percent of the world’s population and 25 percent of its imprisoned population. 

Restorative justice asks different questions: Who was harmed? What do they need? And whose obligation is it to meet those needs? It is a radically different model, with profoundly different results both for victims and perpetrators. Studies show restorative justice programs leave survivors more satisfied, cut recidivism rates, and cost less. If we’re thinking about rebuilding the criminal justice program, restorative justice should be central to that conversation. 

sujatha baliga is the director of the Restorative Justice Project at Impact Justice. She won a MacArthur “genius” grant in 2019. She’s a survivor of abuse herself. Her work points toward a new paradigm for criminal justice: one focused on repairing breaches, not exacting retribution. And it carries lessons for how our politics might function, how our society could heal some of its oldest wounds, and how we live our own precious lives. 

References: 
"Imagining the nonviolent state" by Ezra Klein
Healing Resistance: A Radically Different Response to Harm by Kazu Haga
Book recommendations: 
For the Benefit of All Beings by the Dalai Lama 
The Structure of Scientific Revolutions by Thomas Kuhn
The Sunflower: On the Possibilities and Limits of Forgiveness by Simon Wiesenthal

Want to contact the show? Reach out at ezrakleinshow@vox.com
Please consider making a contribution to Vox to support this show: bit.ly/givepodcasts Your support will help us keep having ambitious conversations about big ideas.
New to the show? Want to check out Ezra’s favorite episodes? Check out the Ezra Klein Show beginner’s guide (http://bit.ly/EKSbeginhere)

Credits:
Producer/Editor - Jeff Geld
Researcher extraordinaire - Roge Karma
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

The transformative power of restorative justice 

In his new book, The Decadent Society, New York Times columnist Ross Douthat diagnoses America’s core problems as decadence: “a situation in which repetition is more the norm than innovation; in which sclerosis afflicts public institution and private enterprises alike; in which intellectual life seems to go in circles; in which new developments in science, new exploratory projects, underdeliver compared with what people recently expected.”

Douthat argues that there is a kind of ideological exhaustion, a spiritual malaise, at the center of the American project. We are a victim of our own successes, undone by our own achievements, and unable to break free from our oldest debates. But is he right?

Ross and I cover a lot of ground in this conversation. We discuss why conservative Catholics talk so much more about sex than poverty, the dangers of the expansionary impulse, whether psychedelic culture is an antidote to decadence, the importance of utopian ambition, the moral foundations of effective altruism, the problem with contemporary science fiction, whether political liberalism is dependent on Christian metaphysics, why America can’t build, whether war is necessary for existential meaning, how the New York Times op-ed page has changed over the past decade, and much more.

Book recommendations: 
From Dawn to Decadence by Jacques Barzun
The Illusion of the End by Jean Baudrillard
The End of History and the Last Man by Francis Fukuyama
The Handmaid's Tale by Margaret Atwood
The Children of Men by PD James



Want to contact the show? Reach out at ezrakleinshow@vox.com
Please consider making a contribution to Vox to support this show: bit.ly/givepodcasts Your support will help us keep having ambitious conversations about big ideas.
New to the show? Want to check out Ezra’s favorite episodes? Check out the Ezra Klein Show beginner’s guide (http://bit.ly/EKSbeginhere)

Credits:
Producer/Editor - Jeff Geld
Researcher - Roge Karma
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Ross Douthat and I debate American decadence

You may have been following — I hope you are following — the New York Times's recent UFO reporting. Videos that the Navy confirms are real show pilots seeing and marveling over craft they can't explain. And as former Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid put it, those videos “only scratch the surface” of the Pentagon's UFO research.

UFOs are one of those topics that it’s hard to take seriously because they’re covered in kitsch and conspiracy. But there are those who take them seriously, which means approaching the question with humility. The history, frequency, and consistency of these events point toward something that merits study. But the explanations we force onto them — from religious visitations to aliens — confuse us further. We’re working backward from beliefs we already have, not forward from phenomena we don’t understand. 

Diana Walsh Pasulka is a professor of religious studies at the University of North Carolina Wilmington and chair of the Department of Philosophy and Religion. In 2019, she published a fascinating book called American Cosmic: UFOs, Religion, Technology, in which she embeds in the world of UFO research and tries to understand it using the tools of religious scholarship. The results are revelatory in terms of theory but also in terms of the things she sees, learns, and is forced to confront.

Sometimes it's healthy — and, to be honest, fun — to train our attention on what we can't explain, not just what we can. In this episode, we do just that.

Book recommendations:
Passport to Magonia by Jacques Vallee
Authors of the Impossible by Jeffrey J. Kripal
UFOs: Generals, Pilots, and Government Officials Go on the Record by Leslie Kean


Want to contact the show? Reach out at ezrakleinshow@vox.com
Please consider making a contribution to Vox to support this show: bit.ly/givepodcasts Your support will help us keep having ambitious conversations about big ideas.
New to the show? Want to check out Ezra’s favorite episodes? Check out the Ezra Klein Show beginner’s guide (http://bit.ly/EKSbeginhere)

Credits:
Producer/Editor - Jeff Geld
Researcher - Roge Karma
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

A serious conversation about UFOs

In 2017, Paul Butler published the book Chokehold: Policing Black Men. For Butler the chokehold is much more than a barbaric police tactic; it is also a powerful powerful metaphor for understanding how racial oppression functions in the US criminal justice system. 

Butler describes a chokehold as “a process of coercing submission that is self-reinforcing. A chokehold justifies additional pressure on the body because a body does not come into compliance, but a body cannot come into compliance because of the vice grip that is on it.” That, he says, is the black experience in the United States. 

Butler knows that experience all too well. He began his legal career as a criminal prosecutor, a job that he describes in this conversation as “basically just locking up black men.” Then, the tables turned and Butler found himself falsely accused of a misdemeanor assault. "After that experience I didn’t want to be a prosecutor any more," he writes. "I don’t think every cop lies in court but I know for sure that one did." 

That experience put Butler on a journey very different than the one he began. Butler, now a Georgetown Law professor, has come to believe that the criminal justice system is not merely broken and in need of repair; rather, it is working exactly as it was designed, and thus needs to be completely reimagined.

Book recommendations:
Song of Solomon by Toni Morrison
Sula by Toni Morrison

Want to contact the show? Reach out at ezrakleinshow@vox.com
Please consider making a contribution to Vox to support this show: bit.ly/givepodcasts Your support will help us keep having ambitious conversations about big ideas.
New to the show? Want to check out Ezra’s favorite episodes? Check out the Ezra Klein Show beginner’s guide (http://bit.ly/EKSbeginhere)
Credits:
Editor - Jackson Bierfeldt
Researcher - Roge Karma
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

A former prosecutor's case for prison abolition

The first question I asked Ta-Nehisi Coates, in this episode, was broad: What does he see right now, as he looks out at the country? “I can't believe I'm gonna say this,” he replied, “but I see hope. I see progress right now.”

Coates is the author of the National Book Award-winner Between the World and Me and The Water Dancer, among others. We discuss how this moment differs from 1968, the tension between “law” and “order,” the contested legacy of MLK, Trump's view of the presidency, police abolition, why we need to renegotiate the idea of “the public,” how the consensus on criminal justice has shifted, what Joe Biden represents, the proper role of the state, the poetry Coates recommends, and much more. 

But there’s one thread of this conversation, in particular, that I haven’t been able to put down: There is now, as there always is amidst protests, a loud call for the protesters to follow the principles of nonviolence. And that call, as Coates says, comes from people who neither practice nor heed nonviolence in their own lives. But what if we turned that conversation around: What would it mean to build the state around principles of nonviolence, rather than reserving that exacting standard for those harmed by the state?

Book recommendations: 
Punishment and Inequality in America by Bruce Western
Marked: Race, Crime, and Finding Work in an Era of Mass Incarceration by Devah Pager
The Country Between Us by Carolyn Forche

Want to contact the show? Reach out at ezrakleinshow@vox.com
Please consider making a contribution to Vox to support this show: bit.ly/givepodcasts Your support will help us keep having ambitious conversations about big ideas.
New to the show? Want to check out Ezra’s favorite episodes? Check out the Ezra Klein Show beginner’s guide (http://bit.ly/EKSbeginhere)
Credits:
Editor - Jackson Bierfeldt
Researcher - Roge Karma
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Why Ta-Nehisi Coates is hopeful 

Dutch historian and De Correspondent writer Rutger Bregman got famous for the lashings he gave Tucker Carlson and the assembled plutocrats of Davos. But his work is far more utopian than polemical. The conversation we had on this show almost a year ago on his previous book Utopia for Realists is still one of my favorites.

Bregman's new book, Humankind: A Hopeful History, is even more ambitious: it's an effort to establish that human beings, human nature, is kinder, friendlier, more decent, than we are given credit for. And that a new world could be built atop that understanding.

I'm not convinced by everything in this book, to be honest. But that tension makes this conversation unusually generative. We discuss the deeply social, egalitarian lives of hunter-gatherers, whether the advent of human civilization was a huge mistake, and how our views toward religious faith have changed radically since our early 20s; and we debate whether humans have a nature at all, the implications of the Holocaust, whether we can build a society without CEOs, politicians, and bureaucrats, and more

By the end, I'm still not sure I believe there is one human nature. But, I do think that if we believed Bregman's view of our nature, rather than, say, Donald Trump's view of our nature, maybe we could build something much more beautiful.

Book recommendations:
Affluence without Abundance by James Suzman
Behind the Shock Machine by Gina Perry
The Lost Boys by Gina Perry
How to Tame a Fox (and Build a Dog) by Lee Alan Dugatkin and Lyudmila Trut

Want to contact the show? Reach out at ezrakleinshow@vox.com
Please consider making a contribution to Vox to support this show: bit.ly/givepodcasts Your support will help us keep having ambitious conversations about big ideas.
New to the show? Want to check out Ezra’s favorite episodes? Check out the Ezra Klein Show beginner’s guide (http://bit.ly/EKSbeginhere)
Credits:
Producer/Editor - Jeff Geld
Researcher - Roge Karma
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Are humans fundamentally good? (with Rutger Bregman) 

I first met Cyrus Habib at a conference a few years ago. You don't forget him. He's a Rhodes scholar. Iranian-America. As lieutenant governor of Washington state, he was the youngest Democrat elected to statewide office in the country. And he's blind.

Then, a couple of weeks ago, I read a piece in the New York Times that I didn't expect: Habib, who had a clear shot to be the next governor of Washington, is leaving politics to become a Jesuit. He is going to take a vow of obedience, of poverty, of chastity. He is going to give up his phone for years. And most fascinating of all, he doesn’t think of it as an act of sacrifice. “I don’t see it as a shrinking of my world,” he told the Times. "I see it as a shrinking of my self.”

That is not something you read every day. So I asked Habib if he would come on the podcast and talk to me about this decision. The result is a remarkable conversation about Habib’s intertwining faith and political journeys, what you can and can’t achieve through political service, whether religion is the modern counterculture, how the forces of meritocracy and achievement ensnare even their winners, what it means to lead a life of joy, whether freedom comes through choice or constraint, the Jesuit theory of social change, whether a decision like this is selfish or selfless, and so much more.

This conversation takes a bit of a winding path. But where it goes is really, really worth it.

Book recommendations: 
The Jesuit Guide to (Almost) Everything by James Martin
Tattoos on the Heart by Greg Boyle
Far from the Tree by Andrew Solomon
Laudato Si' by Pope Francis


Want to contact the show? Reach out at ezrakleinshow@vox.com
Please consider making a contribution to Vox to support this show: bit.ly/givepodcasts Your support will help us keep having ambitious conversations about big ideas.
New to the show? Want to check out Ezra’s favorite episodes? Check out the Ezra Klein Show beginner’s guide (http://bit.ly/EKSbeginhere)
Credits:
Producer/Editor - Jeff Geld
Researcher - Roge Karma
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

From politician to priest

I’ve known Cornell economist Robert Frank for almost 15 years. And for as long as I’ve known him, Frank has been trying to convince his fellow economists of an idea that’s simple to state, but radical in its implications: social pressure is a fundamental economic force. We are not rational, individual economic agents; we are social animals trying to mimic, and best each other — oftentimes without even knowing it. The failure of the economics profession to see this is, in Frank's view, a crime against public policy.

Frank’s new book, Under the Influence: Putting Peer Pressure to Work, came out shortly before coronavirus reshaped daily life. But it is, for that very reason, extraordinarily timed: it’s an effort to show that the economics of social contagion could reshape the world, solving our hardest problems — from climate change to income inequality — and offering new ways to think about the power we have as individuals. Absent coronavirus, its argument might’ve seemed abstract, optimistic. But now we've seen it happen.

We are watching a version of Frank’s thesis play out right now, in real time. In the wake of coronavirus, social pressure has driven perhaps the single fastest behavioral transformation in human history. It is the example and pressure we face from each other that has made social distancing so effective, so fast. And if social pressure can do that — what else can it do?

What Frank offers here is a theory of how public policy can shape peer pressure for good and for bad. Some of the ideas in this podcast — "expenditure cascades," "positional goods" — are hard to unsee once you see them. Others — like his proposal to rebuild the tax system around a progressive consumption tax meant to curb the intra-wealthy competitions that drive inequality — would radically reshape vast swaths of the tax code.

Book recommendations: 
The Uninhabitable Earth by David Wallace-Wells
Micromotives and Macrobehavior by Thomas Schelling
"How to solve climate change and make life more awesome" with Saul Griffith (podcast)

Want to contact the show? Reach out at ezrakleinshow@vox.com
Please consider making a contribution to Vox to support this show: bit.ly/givepodcasts Your support will help us keep having ambitious conversations about big ideas.
New to the show? Want to check out Ezra’s favorite episodes? Check out the Ezra Klein Show beginner’s guide (http://bit.ly/EKSbeginhere)
Credits:
Producer/Editor - Jeff Geld
Researcher - Roge Karma
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Robert Frank's radical idea

Grocery store clerks. Fast food cashiers. Hospice care workers. Bus drivers. Farm workers. Along with doctors and nurses, these are the people who are putting their own lives at risk to keep our society functioning day in and out amid the worst crisis of our lifetimes. We call them heroes, we label them “essential,” and we clap for their brave efforts -- even though none of them signed up for this monumental task, and many of them lack basic healthcare, paid sick leave, a living wage, cultural respect and dignified working conditions. 

How did things get this way? Why did we end up with an economy that treats our most essential workers as disposable? And what does an alternative future of work look like? 

Mary Kay Henry is the president of the Service Employees International Union, a 2 million person organization that represents a huge segment of America’s essential workers. If you ask a traditional economist why essential workers are paid so little, they’ll talk about marginal productivity and returns to education; ask Kay Henry and she’ll talk about something very different: power.

Book recommendations: 
White Fragility by Robin DiAngelo
Lead from the Outside by Stacey Abrams
The Dowry by Lorraine Paolucci Macchello

Want to contact the show? Reach out at ezrakleinshow@vox.com
Please consider making a contribution to Vox to support this show: bit.ly/givepodcasts Your support will help us keep having ambitious conversations about big ideas.
New to the show? Want to check out Ezra’s favorite episodes? Check out the Ezra Klein Show beginner’s guide (http://bit.ly/EKSbeginhere)
Credits:
Producer/Editor - Jeff Geld
Researcher - Roge Karma
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Why “essential” workers are treated as disposable

The Times of London called Mariana Mazzucato “the world’s scariest economist.” Quartz describes her as “on a mission to save capitalism from itself.” Wired says she has “a plan to fix capitalism,” and warns that “it’s time we all listened.

”Mazuccato is an economist at University College London and Founder and Director of UCL's Institute for Innovation and Public Purpose. She’s the author of The Entrepreneurial State and The Value of Everything — two books that, together, critique some of the most fundamental economic assumptions of our time, and try and chart a different path forward.

This is a moment that demands critique. The workers who are being called “essential” now were treated as disposable before — paid low wages, offered little respect. The difference between states with innovative, capable public sectors and states where government agencies have been dismissed and defunded is on terrible display. 

The debates Mazzucato has been trying to open for years are now unavoidable. So let’s have them.

Book recommendations: 
Memoirs of Hadrian by Marguerite Yourcenar 
The Deficit Myth by Stephanie Kelton
War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy

Want to contact the show? Reach out at ezrakleinshow@vox.com
Please consider making a contribution to Vox to support this show: bit.ly/givepodcasts Your support will help us keep having ambitious conversations about big ideas.
New to the show? Want to check out Ezra’s favorite episodes? Check out the Ezra Klein Show beginner’s guide (http://bit.ly/EKSbeginhere)
Credits:
Producer/Editor - Jeff Geld
Researcher - Roge Karma
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

"The world’s scariest economist” on coronavirus, innovation, and purpose

While you read these words, the universe is splitting into countless copies. New realities, all with a version of you, exactly like you are now, but journeying off into their own branch of the multiverse.
Maybe.
Sean Carroll is a theoretical physicist at CalTech, the host of the Mindscape podcast, and author of, among other books, Something Deeply Hidden, which blew my mind a bit. He is also a believer in, and defender of, the “many-worlds” interpretation of quantum mechanics, which has to be one of the five most fun things in the world to think about. Science!
This is a conversation where I get to do something I’ve always wanted to do: Ask a real quantum physicist all of my questions about quantum physics. And then ask again, when I don’t understand the answer, which I usually don’t. And then again, when I sort of understand, but there’s still a part tripping me up. Carroll is wonderfully patient and beautifully clear, and the result is a conversation I haven’t stopped telling friends about since I had it. This world sucks right now. Let’s think about some other ones.


References: 
The Biggest Ideas in the Universe! YouTube series
Book recommendations: 
How Physics Makes Us Free by J. T. Ismael
How the Universe Got Its Spots by Janna Levin
The Calculus Diaries by Jennifer Ouellette

Want to contact the show? Reach out at ezrakleinshow@vox.com
Please consider making a contribution to Vox to support this show: bit.ly/givepodcasts Your support will help us keep having ambitious conversations about big ideas.
New to the show? Want to check out Ezra’s favorite episodes? Check out the Ezra Klein Show beginner’s guide (http://bit.ly/EKSbeginhere)
Credits:
Producer/Editor - Jeff Geld
Researcher - Roge Karma
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

A mind-bending conversation about quantum mechanics and parallel worlds

In Michigan, African Americans represent 14 percent of the population, 33 percent of infections, and 40 percent of deaths. In Mississippi they represent 38 percent of the population, 56 percent of infections, and 66 percent of deaths. In Georgia they represent 16 percent of the population, 31 percent of infections, and just over 50 percent of deaths. The list goes on and on: Across the board, African Americans are more likely to be infected by Covid-19 and far more likely to die from it.
This doesn’t reflect a property of the virus. It reflects a property of our society. Understanding why the coronavirus is brutalizing black America means understanding the health inequalities that predate it.
For the last 25 years, David R. Williams, a professor of public health and chair of the Department of Social and Behavioral Sciences at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, has been studying those inequalities. He was named one of the top 10 most-cited social scientists in the world from 1995 to 2005, and Reuters ranked him as one of the “World’s Most Influential Scientific Minds” in 2014.
At the center of Williams’s work is an attempt to grapple with some of the most difficult and sensitive questions in public: Why do black Americans have higher rates of chronic illness, disease, and mortality than white Americans? Why do those disparities remain even when you control for variables like income and education?
Consider this: The life expectancy gap between a white high school dropout and a black high school dropout? 3½ years. Between a white college graduate and a black college graduate? 4.2 years.
In this conversation, Williams doesn’t just give the clearest account I’ve heard of the coronavirus’s unequal toll. He also gives the clearest account of how America’s institutional and social structures have led to the most profound and consequential inequality of all.
References: 
"Are Ghettos Good or Bad" by David Cutler and Edward Glaeser
David Williams's Ted Talk on racism and health 
Book recommendations: 
American Apartheid by Douglas S. Massey and Nancy A. Denton
The Highest Stage of White Supremacy by John Whitson Cell
The Color of Law by Richard Rothstein
Between the World and Me by Ta-Nehisi Coates


Want to contact the show? Reach out at ezrakleinshow@vox.com
Please consider making a contribution to Vox to support this show: bit.ly/givepodcasts Your support will help us keep having ambitious conversations about big ideas.
New to the show? Want to check out Ezra’s favorite episodes? Check out the Ezra Klein Show beginner’s guide (http://bit.ly/EKSbeginhere)
Credits:
Producer/Editor - Jeff Geld
Researcher - Roge Karma
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Why the coronavirus is so deadly for black America

One of my favorite episodes of this show was my conversation with Jenny Odell, just under a year ago. Odell, a visual artist, writer, and Stanford lecturer, had just released her book How to Do Nothing: Resisting the Attention Economy and we had a fascinating conversation about the importance of maintenance work, the problem with ceaseless productivity, the forces vying for our attention, the comforts of nature, and so much more. 
A lot has changed since then. Odell’s book became a sensation: it captured a cultural moment, made it onto Barack Obama’s favorite books of 2019 list and became, for many, a touchstone. And then, a global pandemic hit, radically altering the world in ways that made the core themes of Odell’s work more prescient, and more difficult. What happens when, instead of choosing to “do nothing,” doing nothing is forced upon you? What happens when all you have access to is nature? What happens when the work of maintenance becomes not just essential, but also dangerous?
So I asked Odell back, for a very different conversation in a very different time. This isn’t a conversation, really, about fixing the world right now. It’s about living in it, and what that feels like. It’s about the role of art in this moment, why we undervalue the most important work in our society, how to have collective sympathy in a moment of fractured suffering, where to find beauty right now, the tensions of productivity, the melting of time, our reckoning with interdependence, and much more. 
And, at the end, Odell offers literally my favorite book recommendation ever on this show. And no, it’s not for my book. 
References: 
My previous conversation with Jenny Odell on the art of attention 
"The Myth of Self-Reliance" by Jenny Odell, The Paris Review
"I tried to write an essay about productivity in quarantine. It took me a month to do it." by Constance Grady, Vox
The Genius of Birds by Jennifer Ackerman
Book recommendations: 
Give People Money by Annie Lowrey
Lurking: How a Person Became a User by Joanne McNeil
What It's Like to Be a Bird by David Allen Sibley


Want to contact the show? Reach out at ezrakleinshow@vox.com
Please consider making a contribution to Vox to support this show: bit.ly/givepodcasts Your support will help us keep having ambitious conversations about big ideas.
The Ezra Klein Show is a finalist for a Webby! Make sure to vote at https://bit.ly/TEKS-webby
New to the show? Want to check out Ezra’s favorite episodes? Check out the Ezra Klein Show beginner’s guide (http://bit.ly/EKSbeginhere)
Credits:
Producer/Editor - Jeff Geld
Researcher - Roge Karma
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Jenny Odell on nature, art, and burnout in quarantine

Rep. Pramila Jayapal (D-WA) is the co-chair of the 95-member House Progressive Caucus. That means, in the aftermath of Sen. Bernie Sanders’s presidential campaign, she leads the most influential bloc of progressive power in the federal government. And one thing that separates Jayapal from other elected officials: She’s actually willing to talk about it.
I know some of you skip over episodes with politicians because they’re interviews, not conversations. This one is a conversation, and it’s broadly about two things.
First, how do we prevent a Great Depression? In particular, Jayapal has a bill — the Paycheck Guarantee Act — that would replace payroll up to incomes of $100,000 for businesses slammed by Covid-19. And if it sounds wishful to you, recalibrate: It’s been endorsed by Nobel prize-winning economists, a former Federal Reserve chair, and more. And there’s even Republican support for the broad idea. 
Second, how does the left wield power? Are Democrats getting rolled by Republicans on stimulus? Why doesn’t the House Progressive Caucus act more like the Freedom Caucus? What leverage do Democrats or progressives have, and why don’t they seem willing to use it in the way Republicans do? I wasn’t sure if Jayapal would actually answer my questions here — most politicians don’t — but she did, and the result is an unusually frank discussion about how the left does, and doesn’t, wield power in Congress.
Book recommendations: 
The Book of Joy by Desmond Tutu, the Dalai Lama and Douglas Carlton Abrams
The Sympathizer by Viet Thanh Nguyen 
The Rumi Collection by Kabir Helminski

Want to contact the show? Reach out at ezrakleinshow@vox.com
Please consider making a contribution to Vox to support this show: bit.ly/givepodcasts Your support will help us keep having ambitious conversations about big ideas.
The Ezra Klein Show is a finalist for a Webby! Make sure to vote at https://bit.ly/TEKS-webby
New to the show? Want to check out Ezra’s favorite episodes? Check out the Ezra Klein Show beginner’s guide (http://bit.ly/EKSbeginhere)
Credits:
Producer/Editor - Jeff Geld
Researcher - Roge Karma
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

An unusually honest conversation about wielding political power

The coronavirus is “a nightmare scenario” for media, wrote New York Times columnist Charlie Warzel. “It is stealthy, resilient and confounding to experts. It moves far faster than scientists can study it. What seems to be true today may be wrong tomorrow.”
Warzel is right. We’ve talked a lot in recent years about fake news. But combatting information we know is false is a straightforward problem compared to covering a story where we don’t know what’s true, and where yesterday’s expert consensus becomes tomorrow’s derided falsehoods. In these cases, the normal tools of journalism begin to fail, and trust is easily lost.
There’s been a lot of criticism of what the media missed in the run-up to coronavirus. Some of it has been unfair. But some of it demands attention, reflection, and change. There’s also a lot the media got right, and those successes need to be celebrated and learned from. The questions raised here are hard, and go to one of the trickiest issues in journalism: how does a profession that prides itself on reporting truth cover the world probabilistically? What do we do when we simply can't know what's true, and when some of what we think we know might become untrue?
Warzel covers the way technology, information, and media interact with and change each other. He’s one of the people I turn to first when I’m churning over these questions, which is…not infrequent. And so what you’re going to hear in this podcast is a bit different than the normal fare: this is less an interview-with-an-expert, and more the kind of conversation that I — and others in the media — am having a lot of right now, and that I think we at least need to try and have in public. 
References: 
What went wrong with the media’s coronavirus coverage? by Peter Kafka, Recode
What we pretend to know about the coronavirus could kill us, by Charlie Warzel, NYT
Book recommendations: 
The Uninhabitable Earth by David Wallace-Wells
Nothing to See Here by Kevin Wilson
Uncanny Valley by Anna Wiener
If you enjoyed this episode, check out: 
Is the media amplifying Trump's racism? (with Whitney Phillips)

Want to contact the show? Reach out at ezrakleinshow@vox.com
Please consider making a contribution to Vox to support this show: bit.ly/givepodcasts Your support will help us keep having ambitious conversations about big ideas.
The Ezra Klein Show is a finalist for a Webby! Make sure to vote at https://bit.ly/TEKS-webby
New to the show? Want to check out Ezra’s favorite episodes? Check out the Ezra Klein Show beginner’s guide (http://bit.ly/EKSbeginhere)
Credits:
Producer/Editor - Jeff Geld
Researcher - Roge Karma
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

What should the media learn from coronavirus? 

In 2015, I asked Bill Gates a simple question: What are you most afraid of? 
He replied by telling me about the death chart of the 20th century. There’s the spike for World War I. The spike for World War II. But between them sat a spike as big as World War II. That, he said, was the Spanish Flu, which killed an estimated 65 million people. Gates’s greatest fear was a flu like that, ripping through our hyperglobalized world. 
Gates saw this coming, and he tried to warn the world. But the virus came, and we weren’t ready. Now, we all live in his nightmare. 
Gates has reoriented his foundation and committed hundreds of millions of dollars to the world’s fight against coronavirus. He recently published a long essay detailing what we know and don’t know about the disease, and what we need to invent and deploy to safely return to normalcy.
I spoke with Gates to explore those questions, plus a few more. What does it feel like to be at the center of so many coronavirus conspiracy theories? What happens if we reopen too soon? Why are different cities seeing such different outcomes? Do rich and poor countries need different responses? What are the true chances of a vaccine in 18 months?
But above all, I wanted to ask him the inverse of the question I asked him in 2015: what does he hope for? What is his vision for life after coronavirus?

Want to contact the show? Reach out at ezrakleinshow@vox.com
Please consider making a contribution to Vox to support this show: bit.ly/givepodcasts Your support will help us keep having ambitious conversations about big ideas.
The Ezra Klein Show is a finalist for a Webby! Make sure to vote at https://bit.ly/TEKS-webby
New to the show? Want to check out Ezra’s favorite episodes? Check out the Ezra Klein Show beginner’s guide (http://bit.ly/EKSbeginhere)
Credits:
Producer/Editor - Jeff Geld
Researcher - Roge Karma
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Bill Gates’s vision for life beyond coronavirus 

It’s been a while since I’ve been able to introduce a conversation on this show as fun. But this one was. I needed it. Maybe you do, too.
Madeline Miller has written some of my favorite novels of the past few years. Her books — the Orange Prize-winning The Song of Achilles and the New York Times No. 1 bestseller Circe, soon to be an HBO series — are brilliant reimaginings of some of the most revered texts in the Western canon. Miller’s also a trained classicist, a Shakespeare director, a Latin teacher, and a Greek mythology obsessive. 
This is a conversation about story and myth, about how our conceptions of godliness and human nature have changed, about the difficulty of translation and the resonance of superheroes. We debate whether Achilles is the worst and agree that anyone who loves language should read Sandra Boynton. Miller reveals how to train yourself to write a beautiful sentence and how to steel yourself to tell the stories you burn to see but that the canon has wiped out. And we discuss what character from the Greek canon most resembles President Donald Trump.
This one was a tonic for me. Hopefully, it will be for you, too.
Book recommendations: 
The Odyssey by Homer (translated by Emily Wilson)
Mythos by Stephen Fry
Heroes by Stephen Fry 
If Not, Winter: Fragments of Sappho by Anne Carson
Autobiography of Red by Anne Carson
Mythology by Edith Hamilton 

Want to contact the show? Reach out at ezrakleinshow@vox.com
Please consider making a contribution to Vox to support this show: bit.ly/givepodcasts Your support will help us keep having ambitious conversations about big ideas.
The Ezra Klein Show is a finalist for a Webby! Make sure to vote at https://bit.ly/TEKS-webby
New to the show? Want to check out Ezra’s favorite episodes? Check out the Ezra Klein Show beginner’s guide (http://bit.ly/EKSbeginhere)
Credits:
Producer/Editor - Jeff Geld
Researcher - Roge Karma
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

An epic conversation with Madeline Miller 

We have something a bit different today. Two episodes from our extraordinary colleagues at Today, Explained, both of them close to my heart. 
The first is an episode that I worked with them on, and appear in: The Loneliness Pandemic. It’s about the social consequences of social distancing, and the toll that isolation and loneliness takes on our health. It's about how the people most vulnerable to isolation are being told to quarantine, and what that will do to their lives. And it's about what the rest of us can do to help.
The second is simply one of the best, most important podcast episodes I’ve heard in ages: It’s about how we’re treating the same workers we call “essential” as disposable, endangering them and their families, and calling them heroes even as we refuse to give them raises. And it's about the possibility — and historical precedent — for labor action in this moment, to make sure essential workers are treated as essential. Do not miss it. And if you’re lucky enough to be working from home, think about what you can do to stand in solidarity with those making your safety possible. 
You can, and should, subscribe to "Today, Explained," wherever you get your podcasts. 

Want to contact the show? Reach out at ezrakleinshow@vox.com
Please consider making a contribution to Vox to support this show: bit.ly/givepodcasts Your support will help us keep having ambitious conversations about big ideas.
The Ezra Klein Show is a finalist for a Webby! Make sure to vote at https://bit.ly/TEKS-webby
New to the show? Want to check out Ezra’s favorite episodes? Check out the Ezra Klein Show beginner’s guide (http://bit.ly/EKSbeginhere)
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

The loneliness pandemic/Betraying “essential workers”

The Democratic presidential primary is over. Joe Biden is the presumptive nominee heading into the fall. And this week, Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren endorsed their former competitor.
On the left, the question is: What went wrong? How did Sanders lose to Biden? Why didn’t Warren catch fire? But too few of these postmortems have had sufficient data to build out their theories. And too many of them explain away strategic and tactical failures as media or establishment conspiracies.
Sean McElwee has a different perspective. McElwee is the co-founder and executive director of Data for Progress, an organization that utilizes cutting-edge polling and data-analysis techniques to support progressive causes. His aim is to fashion an agenda that is both progressive and popular. But he also sits atop mountains of data that let him test hypotheses with a lot more rigor than most armchair pundits.
As a result, McElwee has a fascinating, heterodox view of the 2020 primary, the Sanders and Warren campaigns, and what it will take for progressives to build power. We discuss the critical mistakes both major progressive candidates made, which progressive ideas are most popular with the American people, how the left’s theory of class politics interferes with its most obvious path to electoral victory, why maximalist policy agendas fail even when they look like they’re succeeding, what good (and bad) Overton Window politics look like, how progressives can shape Biden’s presidency, and much, much more.
References: 
How Joe Biden won over Bernie Sanders — and the Democratic Party by Ezra Klein
Book Recommendations: 
Deep Roots: How Slavery Still Shapes Southern Politics by Maya Sen


Want to contact the show? Reach out at ezrakleinshow@vox.com
Please consider making a contribution to Vox to support this show: bit.ly/givepodcasts Your support will help us keep having ambitious conversations about big ideas.
The Ezra Klein Show is a finalist for a Webby! Make sure to vote at https://bit.ly/TEKS-webby
New to the show? Want to check out Ezra’s favorite episodes? Check out the Ezra Klein Show beginner’s guide (http://bit.ly/EKSbeginhere)
Credits:
Producer/Editor - Jeff Geld
Researcher - Roge Karma
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Why Bernie Sanders lost and how progressives can still win

When will social distancing end? When will life return to “normal”? And what will it take to get there? 
Scott Gottlieb is a physician and public health expert who served as Donald Trump’s first FDA commissioner, where he was the rare Trump appointee to win plaudits from both the left and the right. Now he’s a resident fellow at the American Enterprise Institute where he’s emerged as a leading voice on the coronavirus response. 
Gottlieb is one of the lead authors of a comprehensive roadmap for what it would take to end social distancing and reopen the American economy. The report divides coronavirus response into four distinct phases (we are currently in phase one, which requires the strictest social distancing measures) and documents key “triggers” that states need to meet if they want to advance to a phase with less intense social distancing and a somewhat normal economy. It’s exactly what we need right now: a specific proposal for what comes next that we can actually analyze and debate. 
Two themes drive this conversation. First, what are the challenges to simply getting out of lockdown? Why don’t we have enough tests yet? What’s stopping us from making more? And second, what does the world look like out of lockdown but before we get to a vaccine? What’s being imagined here isn’t a return to normal, either socially or economically, but a kind of limbo that it’s not clear we have the political will to sustain and that has few answers for the most vulnerable among us. 
For more on this topic, I looked at not just the AEI plan but three others for this piece. I thought immersing myself in the plans to reopen the economy would be some comfort. Boy, was I wrong. 

Resources:
"A road map to re-opening" by Scott Gottlieb, Caitlin Rivers, Mark McClellan, Lauren Silvis, and Crystal Watson, AEI
"I’ve read the plans to reopen the economy. They’re scary." by Ezra Klein, Vox
The Weeds - How does this end?

Want to contact the show? Reach out at ezrakleinshow@vox.com
Please consider making a contribution to Vox to support this show: bit.ly/givepodcasts Your support will help us keep having ambitious conversations about big ideas.
The Ezra Klein Show is a finalist for a Webby! Make sure to vote at https://bit.ly/TEKS-webby
New to the show? Want to check out Ezra’s favorite episodes? Check out the Ezra Klein Show beginner’s guide (http://bit.ly/EKSbeginhere)
Credits:
Producer/Editor - Jeff Geld
Researcher - Roge Karma
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Scott Gottlieb on how, and when, to end social distancing

Oxford philosopher Toby Ord spent the early part of his career spearheading the effective altruism movement, founding Giving What We Can, and focusing his attention primarily on issue areas like global public health and extreme poverty. Ord’s new book The Precipice is about something entirely different: the biggest existential risks to the future of humanity. In it, he predicts that humanity has approximately a 1 in 6 chance of going completely extinct by the end of the 21st century.
Wait! Stay with me!
The coronavirus pandemic is a reminder that tail risk is real. We always knew a zoological respiratory virus could become a global pandemic. But, collectively, we didn’t want to think about it, and so we didn’t. The result is the reality we live in now. 
But for all the current moment’s horror, there are worse risks than coronavirus out there. One silver lining of the current crisis might be that it gets us to take them seriously, and avert them before they become unstoppable. That’s what Ord’s book is about, and it is, in a strange way, a comfort. 
This, then, is a conversation about the risks that threaten humanity’s future, and what we can do about them. It’s a conversation about thinking in probabilities, about the ethics of taking future human lives seriously, about how we weigh the risks we don’t yet understand. And it’s a conversation, too, about something I’ve been dwelling on watching President Trump choose to ratchet up tensions with China amidst a pandemic: Is Trump himself an existential risk, or at least an existential risk factor?
Book recommendations: 
Reasons and Persons by Derek Parfit 
Doing Good Better by William MacAskill 
Maps of Time by David Christian and William H. McNeill 
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Toby Ord on existential risk, Donald Trump, and thinking in probabilities

In January, Sen. Elizabeth Warren was the first presidential candidate to release a plan for combatting coronavirus. In March, she released a second plan. Days later, with the scale of economic damage increasing, she released a third. Warren’s proposals track the spread of the virus: from a problem happening elsewhere and demanding a surge in global health resources to a pandemic happening here, demanding not just a public health response, but an all-out effort to save the US economy.
Warren’s penchant for planning stands in particular stark contrast to this administration, which still has not released a clear coronavirus plan. There is no document you can download, no web site you can visit, that details our national strategy to slow the disease and rebuild the economy. 
So I asked Warren to return to the show to explain what the plan should be, given the cold reality we face. We discussed what, specifically, the federal government should do; the roots of the testing debacle; her idea for mobilizing the economy around building affordable housing; why she thinks that this is exactly the right time to cancel student loan debt; why America spends so much money preparing for war and so little defending itself against pandemics and climate change; whether she thinks the Democratic primary focused on the wrong issues; and how this crisis is making a grim mockery of Ronald Reagan’s old saw about “the scariest words in the English language.”

Want to contact the show? Reach out at ezrakleinshow@vox.com
Please consider making a contribution to Vox to support this show: bit.ly/givepodcasts Your support will help us keep having ambitious conversations about big ideas.
The Ezra Klein Show is a finalist for a Webby! Make sure to vote at https://bit.ly/TEKS-webby
New to the show? Want to check out Ezra’s favorite episodes? Check out the Ezra Klein Show beginner’s guide (http://bit.ly/EKSbeginhere)
Credits:
Producer/Editor - Jeff Geld
Researcher - Roge Karma
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Elizabeth Warren has a plan for this, too

There is no doubt that social distancing is the best way to slow the spread of the coronavirus. But the efficacy of social distancing (or really any other public health measure) relies on something much deeper and harder to measure: social solidarity.
 “Solidarity,” writes Eric Klinenberg, “motivates us to promote public health, not just our own personal security. It keeps us from hoarding medicine, toughing out a cold in the workplace or sending a sick child to school. It compels us to let a ship of stranded people dock in our safe harbors, to knock on our older neighbor’s door.”
Klinenberg, a sociologist by trade, is the director of the Institute for Public Knowledge at New York University. His first book, Heat Wave, found that social connection was, at times, literally the difference between life and death during Chicago's 1995 heat wave. Since then, he’s spent his career studying trends in American social life, from the rise of adults living alone to the importance of “social infrastructure” in holding together our civic bonds.
 This conversation is about what happens when a country mired in a mythos of individualism collides with a pandemic that demands social solidarity and collective sacrifice. It’s about preventing an epidemic of loneliness and social isolation from overwhelming the most vulnerable among us. We discuss the underlying social trends that predated coronavirus, what kind of leadership it takes to actually bring people together, the irony of asking young people and essential workers to sacrifice for the rest of us, whether there’s an opportunity to build a different kind of society in the aftermath of Covid-19, and much more.

References 
Going Solo: The Extraordinary Rise and Surprising Appeal of Living Alone by Eric Klinenberg 
Palaces for the People: How Social Infrastructure Can Help Fight Inequality, Polarization, and the Decline of Civic Life by Eric Klinenberg 
“We Need Social Solidarity, Not Just Social Distancing” by Eric Klinenberg
“Marriage has become a trophy” by Andrew Cherlin 

Book recommendations: 
Infections and Inequalities by Paul Farmer 
Strangers in Their Own Land by Arlie Hochschild 
A Paradise Built in Hell by Rebecca Solnit 
The Division of Labor in Society by Emile Dukheim 

Confused about coronavirus? Here’s a list of the articles, papers, and podcasts we’ve found most useful.
New to the show? Want to check out Ezra’s favorite episodes? Check out the Ezra Klein Show beginner’s guide (http://bit.ly/EKSbeginhere)
Credits:
Producer/Editor - Jeff Geld
Researcher - Roge Karma
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

What social solidarity demands of us in a pandemic

The COVID-19 pandemic is a grim reminder that the worst really can happen. Tail risk is real risk. Political leaders fumble, miscalculate, and bluster into avoidable disaster. And even as we try to deal with this catastrophe, the seeds of another are sprouting.
The US-China relationship will define geopolitics in the 21st century. If we collapse into rivalry, conflict, and politically opportunistic nationalism, the results could be hellish. And we are, right now, collapsing into rivalry, conflict, and politically opportunistic nationalism. 
The Trump administration, and key congressional Republicans, are calling COVID-19 “the Chinese virus,” and trying to gin up tensions to distract from their domestic failures. Chinese government officials, beset by their own domestic problems, are claiming the US military brought the virus to China. The US-China relationship was in a bad way six months ago, but this is a new level of threat.
Evan Osnos covers the US-China relationship for the New Yorker, and is author of the National Book Award winner, The Age of Ambition: Chasing Fortune, Truth and Faith in the New China. In this conversation, we discuss the past, present and future of the US-China relationship. What are the chances of armed conflict? What might deescalation look like? And we know what the US wants — what, in truth, does China want?

Book recommendations: 
Wish Lanterns: Young Lives in New China by Alec Ash
The Beautiful Country and the Middle Kingdom by John Pomfret

Confused about coronavirus? Here’s a list of the articles, papers, and podcasts we’ve found most useful.
New to the show? Want to check out Ezra’s favorite episodes? Check out the Ezra Klein Show beginner’s guide (http://bit.ly/EKSbeginhere)
Credits:
Producer/Editor - Jeff Geld
Researcher - Roge Karma
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Coronavirus has pushed US-China relations to their worst point since Mao

"We cannot let the cure be worse than the problem itself!"
That was President Donald Trump, this week, explaining why he was thinking about lifting coronavirus guidelines earlier than public-health experts recommended. The "cure," in this case, is social distancing, and the mass economic stoppage it forces. The problem, of course, is COVID-19, and the millions of deaths it could cause. 
This is a debate that needs to be taken seriously. Slowing coronavirus will impose real costs, and immense suffering, on society. Are those costs worth it? This is the most important public policy question right now. And if the discussion isn't had well, then it will be had, as we're already seeing, poorly, and dangerously. 
I wanted to take up this question from two different angles. The first dimension is economic: Are we actually facing a choice between lives and economic growth? If we ceased social distancing, could we sustain a normal economy amidst a raging virus? Jason Furman, professor of the practice of economic policy at Harvard’s Kennedy School and President Obama's former chief economist, joins me for that discussion. 
But the economy isn't everything. What is a moral framework we can us when faced with this kind of question? So, in the second half of this show, I talk to Dr. Ruth Faden, the founder of the Berman Institute for Bioethics at Johns Hopkins. 
And then, at the end, I offer some thoughts on my own on the frightening moment we're living through, and the kind of political and social leadership it demands.  
Confused about coronavirus? Here’s a list of the articles, papers, and podcasts we’ve found most useful.
New to the show? Want to check out Ezra’s favorite episodes? Check out the Ezra Klein Show beginner’s guide (http://bit.ly/EKSbeginhere)
Credits:
Producer/Editor - Jeff Geld
Researcher - Roge Karma
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Is the cure worse than the disease? 

“What is happening,” writes Annie Lowrey, “is a shock to the American economy more sudden and severe than anyone alive has ever experienced.”  
It’s also different from what anyone alive has ever experienced. For many of us, the Great Recession is the closest analogue — but it’s not analogous at all. There, the economy’s potential was unchanged, but financial markets were in crisis. Here, we are purposefully freezing economic activity in order to slow a public health crisis. Early data suggests the economic crisis is going to far exceed any single week or quarter of the financial crisis. Multiple economists have told me that the nearest analogy to what we’re going through is the economy during World War II.
I have a secret advantage when trying to understand moments of economic upheaval. I’m married to Annie Lowrey. I can give you the bio — staff writer at the Atlantic, author of Give People Money (which is proving particularly prophetic and influential right now) — but suffice to say she’s one of the clearest and most brilliant economic thinkers I know. Her viral piece on the affordability crisis is crucial for understanding what the economy really looked like before Covid-19, and she’s been doing some of the best work on the way Covid-19 will worsen the economic problems we had and create a slew of new ones.
But this isn’t just a conversation about crisis. It’s also a conversation about how to respond. I wouldn’t call it hopeful — we’re not there yet. But constructive. 
References: 
"The Great Affordability Crisis Breaking America" by Annie Lowrey
If you enjoyed this episode, check out: 
"Fix recessions by giving people money," The Weeds
Book recommendations: 
Severance by Ling Ma
Midnight in Chernobyl by Adam Higginbotham
Crashed by Adam Tooze
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

An economic crisis like we’ve never seen 

Ron Klain served as the chief of staff to vice presidents Al Gore and Joe Biden. In 2014, President Barack Obama tapped him to lead the administration’s response to the Ebola outbreak in West Africa. He successfully oversaw a hellishly complex effort preparing domestically for an outbreak and surging health resources onto another continent to contain the disease.
 But Klain is quick to say that the coronavirus is a harder challenge even than Ebola. The economy is in free fall. Entire cities have been told to shelter in place. And there’s no telling how long any of this will last. In this conversation, Klain answers my questions about the disease and how to respond to it, as well as questions many of you submitted. We discuss:

How to change the virus’s reproduction and fatality rates

Why you need to work backward from health system capacity

What it means to “flatten the curve”

Why social distancing will be with us for a long time to come

The difference between “social distancing” and “self-quarantine”

What the Trump administration needed to do earlier, and what they still can do now

The testing debacle

The economic policy necessary to make social distancing possible

Why we need to remember not everyone can work at home

What it would take to surge health care capacity in the US — and how fast we could potentially do it 

The strengths and weaknesses of America’s particular health care system in responding to a pandemic like this one

Whether the coronavirus is showing authoritarian systems perform better than liberal(ish) democracies

What Joe Biden is like in a crisis 


And much more. I’ve been covering the coronavirus nonstop, and this is one of the clearest, most useful conversations I’ve had. If you’re feeling overwhelmed, the clarity of Klain’s analysis will help.
 Also: We want to know what kinds of coronavirus conversations you want to hear right now. Email us at ezrakleinshow@vox.com with suggestions for guests, or just angles. This is going to be a hard time, and we want this podcast to be as much a help as possible.
Book recommendations: 
Deadliest Enemy: Our War Against Killer Germs by Michael Osterholm 
The Great Influenza by John Barry 

Confused about coronavirus? Here’s a list of the articles, papers, and podcasts we’ve found most useful.
New to the show? Want to check out Ezra’s favorite episodes? Check out the Ezra Klein Show beginner’s guide (http://bit.ly/EKSbeginhere)
Credits:
Producer/Editor - Jeff Geld
Researcher - Roge Karma
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

"The virus is more patient than people are" 

The Bernie Sanders campaign is an organizing tour-de-force relative to the Joe Biden campaign; yet the latter has won primary after primary — with even higher turnouts than 2016. So does organizing even work? And, if so, what went wrong?
Jane McAlevey has organized hundreds of thousands of workers on the frontlines of America’s labor movement. She is also a Senior Policy Fellow at UC Berkeley’s Labor Center and the author of three books on organizing, including, most recently, A Collective Bargain: Unions, Organizing, and the Fight for Democracy.
McAlevey doesn’t pull her punches. She thinks the left builds political power all wrong. She thinks people are constantly mistaking “mobilizing” for “organizing,” and that social media has taught a generation of young activists the worst possible lessons. She thinks organized labor’s push for “card check” was a mistake, but that there really is a viable path back to a strong labor movement. And since McAlevey is, above all, a teacher and an organizer, she offers what amounts to a master class in organizing — one relevant not just to building political power, but to building anything.
To McAlevey, organizing, at its core, is about something very simple, and very close to the heart of this show: how do you talk to people who may not agree with you such that you can truly hear them, and they can truly hear you? This conversation ran long, but it ran long because it was damn good.
References: 
No Shortcuts by Jane McAlevey
Raising Expectations and Raising Hell by Jane McAlevey
Book recommendations: 
Democracy May Not Exist But We'll Miss it When its Gone by Astra Taylor
I've Got the Light of Freedom Charles M. Payne
On Tyranny by Timothy Snyder
New to the show? Want to check out Ezra's favorite episodes? Check out the Ezra Klein Show beginner's guide (http://bit.ly/EKSbeginhere)
Want to contact the show? Reach out at ezrakleinshow@vox.com
Credits:
Engineer - Cynthia Gil
Producer/Editor - Jeff Geld
Researcher - Roge Karma
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

A master class in organizing

Before becoming the co-host of Pod Save America, Dan Pfeiffer spent most of his adult life in Democratic Party politics, which included serving as White House communications director for President Barack Obama. But in his new book Un-Trumping America, the former operative levels some sharp criticism toward the party he came of political age in. 
Contrary to the rhetoric of the leading Democratic presidential candidate, Pfeiffer doesn’t think of Donald Trump as the source of our current social and political ills, and he doesn’t believe that beating Trump will bring about a return to “normalcy.” For Pfeiffer, Trump is a symptom of much deeper forces in our politics — forces that will continue to proliferate unless Democrats get serious about, among other things, genuine structural reform. Among the things we discuss: 
- Pfeiffer’s view that Donald Trump is the favorite in 2020
- Why the core divide in the Democratic Party isn’t progressive vs. moderate
- The flaws in both Sanders and Biden’s theories of institutional change 
- The way Obama looms over the Democratic primary — perhaps even more than Trump does 
- The case for, and against, filibuster reform
- Pfeiffer’s biggest regret from inside the Obama administration
- What working with Joe Biden is like
- Why the Obama White House didn’t rally around Biden in 2016
- The damage the political consultant class does to Democrats
- What the left got wrong about the Democratic Party
- Why Democrats need to prioritize democracy itself
References: 
Ezra's profile of Joe Biden
Book recommendations: 
Nixonland by Rick Perlstein
The Known World by Edward P. Jones
No Ordinary Time by Doris Kearns Goodwin


New to the show? Want to check out Ezra's favorite episodes? Check out the Ezra Klein Show beginner's guide (http://bit.ly/EKSbeginhere)
The “Why We’re Polarized” tour continues, with events in Austin, Nashville, Chicago, and Greenville. Go to WhyWerePolarized.com for the full schedule!
Want to contact the show? Reach out at ezrakleinshow@vox.com
Credits:
Engineer - Cynthia Gil
Producer/Editor - Jeff Geld
Researcher - Roge Karma
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Dan Pfeiffer on Joe Biden, beating Trump, and saving democracy 

Obsessively following the daily political news feels like an act of politics, or at least an act of civics. But what if, for many of us, it’s a replacement for politics — and one that’s actually hurting the country?
That is the argument made by Tufts University political scientist Eitan Hersh. In his incisive new book Politics is for Power, Hersh draws a sharp distinction between what he calls “political hobbyism” — following politics as a kind of entertainment and expression of self-identity — and the actual work of politics. His data shows that a lot of people who believe they are doing politics are passively following it, and the way they’re following it has played a key role in making the political system worse.
But this isn’t just a critique. Hersh’s argument builds to an alternative way of engaging in politics: as a form of service to our institutions and communities. And that alternative approach leads to some dramatically different ideas about how to marry an interest in politics with a commitment to building a better world. It also speaks to some of what we lost in rejecting the political machines and transactional politics of yesteryear — a personal obsession of mine, and a more important hinge point in American political history than I think we realize.
We are, as you may have noticed, deep into election season, and that’s when it’s easiest to mistake the drama of national politics for the doing of actual politics. So there’s no better time for this conversation.
Book recommendations: 
Hobbies by Steven Gelber
Concrete Demands Rhonda E. WIlliams
Here All Along by Sarah Hurwitz

New to the show? Want to check out Ezra's favorite episodes? Check out the Ezra Klein Show beginner's guide (http://bit.ly/EKSbeginhere)
The “Why We’re Polarized” tour continues, with events in Austin, Nashville, Chicago, and Greenville. Go to WhyWerePolarized.com for the full schedule!
Want to contact the show? Reach out at ezrakleinshow@vox.com
Credits:
Engineer - Cynthia Gil
Producer/Editor - Jeff Geld
Researcher - Roge Karma
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Are you a "political hobbyist?" If so, you're the problem.

Super Tuesday winnowed the 2020 Democratic primary race down to two candidates: Joe Biden and Bernie Sanders. So how would their presidencies actually differ? Who would staff their administrations? How would they handle Congress? How would they handle key foreign policy decisions? What are their likely points of failure? How would they change the Democratic Party?
I asked my friend, colleague, and Weeds co-host Matt Yglesias to join me for this conversation, and it was a good one. We’ve both covered Biden and Sanders for a long time, but come away with somewhat different impressions of each. The points where we differ here were, for me, even more helpful than the points where we agreed.
I'll be interested, as always, to hear your thoughts: ezrakleinshow@vox.com.
References:
Matt Yglesias' case for Bernie Sanders 
Ezra's piece on what Bernie needs to learn from Biden

New to the show? Want to check out Ezra's favorite episodes? Check out the Ezra Klein Show beginner's guide (http://bit.ly/EKSbeginhere)
The “Why We’re Polarized” tour continues, with events in Austin, Nashville, Chicago, and Greenville. Go to WhyWerePolarized.com for the full schedule!
Want to contact the show? Reach out at ezrakleinshow@vox.com
Credits:
Engineer - Cynthia Gil
Producer/Editor - Jeff Geld
Researcher - Roge Karma
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

What would a Sanders or Biden presidency look like?

Rebecca Solnit is one of the great activist-essayists of our age. Her books and writing cover a vast amount of human existence, but a common thread in her work — and a focus of her upcoming memoir, Recollections of My Nonexistence — is what it means to be voiceless, ignored, and treated as a unreliable witness to the events of your own life. 
“We always say nobody knows, and that means that everyone who knows was nobody,” Solnit says. “Everyone who was nobody knew about Harvey Weinstein.”
This conversation is, in part, about what it means to be a nobody and what we’d learn if we listened to the voices on the margins of society. But it goes wide from there, covering the psychic toll of sexual violence, the Weinstein ruling, how visual art infuses Solnit’s journalism, the changing cultural role of San Francisco, what climate change will do to social relations, the different narratives of violence that men and women grow up with, and much more.
A quick warning: We spoke just after the Weinstein ruling, and we discuss sexual violence both in terms of specific cases and larger cultural questions. It’s an important conversation, and Solnit’s thinking here is essential and humane, but listeners should be prepared for it.
Book recommendations: 
On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous by Ocean Vuong
In the Dream House by Carmen Maria Machado
There There by Tommy Orange

New to the show? Want to check out Ezra's favorite episodes? Check out the Ezra Klein Show beginner's guide (http://bit.ly/EKSbeginhere)
The “Why We’re Polarized” tour continues, with events in Austin, Nashville, Chicago, and Greenville. Go to WhyWerePolarized.com for the full schedule!
Want to contact the show? Reach out at ezrakleinshow@vox.com
Credits:
Engineer - Cynthia Gil
Producer/Editor - Jeff Geld
Researcher - Roge Karma
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Rebecca Solnit on Harvey Weinstein, feminism, and social change 

Welcome to Weeds 2020! Every other Saturday Ezra and Matt will be exploring a wide range of topics related to the 2020 race. 
Since the Nevada caucuses, Bernie Sanders has become the clear frontrunner in the 2020 Democratic primary, spurring lots of debate over whether he could win in the general election. We discuss where the electability conversation often goes off-the-rails, why discussing electability in 2020 is so different than 1964 or 1972, the case for and against Bernie’s electability prospects, and the strongest attacks that Trump could make against Sanders and Joe Biden. 
Then, we discuss Ezra’s favorite topic of all time: the filibuster. Ezra gives a brief history of this weird procedural tool, and we discuss why so many current Senators are against eliminating it.

Resources:
"Bernie Sanders can unify Democrats and beat Trump in 2020" by Matthew Yglesias, Vox
"The case for Elizabeth Warren" by Ezra Klein, Vox
"How the filibuster broke the US Senate" by Alvin Chang, Vox
"Running Bernie Sanders Against Trump Would Be an Act of Insanity" by Jonathan Chait, Intelligencer
"The Sixty Trillion Dollar Man" by Ronald brownstein, Atlantic
"The Day One Agenda" by David Dayen, American Prospect
"Bernie Sanders looks electable in surveys — but it could be a mirage" by David Broockman and Joshua Kalla, Vox
Hosts:
Matthew Yglesias (@mattyglesias), Senior correspondent, Vox
Ezra Klein (@ezraklein), Editor-at-large, Vox
New to the show? Want to check out Ezra's favorite episodes? Check out the Ezra Klein Show beginner's guide (http://bit.ly/EKSbeginhere)
The “Why We’re Polarized” tour continues, with events in Austin, Nashville, Chicago, and Greenville. Go to WhyWerePolarized.com for the full schedule!
Want to contact the show? Reach out at ezrakleinshow@vox.com

About Vox
Vox is a news network that helps you cut through the noise and understand what's really driving the events in the headlines.
Follow Us: Vox.com
Facebook group: The Weeds

New to the show? Check out the Ezra Klein Show beginner's guide 


Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Weeds 2020: The Bernie electability debate

It’s the rare podcast conversation where, as it’s happening, I’m making notes to go back and listen again so I can fully absorb what I heard. But this is that kind of episode.
Tracy K. Smith is the chair of the Lewis Center for the Arts at Princeton University, a Pulitzer-Prize winning poet, and a two-time poet laureate of the United States (2017-19). But I’ll be honest: She was an intimidating interview for me. I often find myself frustrated by poetry, yearning for it to simply tell me what it wants to say and feeling aggravated that I can’t seem to crack its code.
Preparing for this conversation and (even more so) talking to Smith was a revelation. Poetry, she argues, is about expressing “the feelings that defy language.” The struggle is part of the point: You’re going where language stumbles, where literalism fails. Developing a comfort and ease in those spaces isn’t something we’re taught to do, but it’s something we need to do. And so, on one level, this conversation is simply about poetry: what it is, what it does, how to read it.
But on another level, this conversation is also about the ideas and tensions that Smith uses poetry to capture: what it means to be a descendent of slaves, a human in love, a nation divided. Laced throughout our conversation are readings of poems from her most recent book, Wade in the Water, and discussions of some of the hardest questions in the American, and even human, canon. Hearing Smith read her erasure poem, “Declaration,” is, without a doubt, one of the most powerful moments I’ve had on the podcast.
There is more to this conversation than I can capture here, but simply put: This isn’t one to miss. And that’s particularly true if, like me, you’re intimidated by poetry.
References: 
Smith’s lecture before the Library of Congress 
Smith’s commencement speech at Wellesley College 
Book recommendations: 
Notes from the Field by Anna Deavere Smith 
Quilting by Lucille Clifton 
Bodega by Su Hwang 


New to the show? Want to check out Ezra's favorite episodes? Check out the Ezra Klein Show beginner's guide (http://bit.ly/EKSbeginhere)
The “Why We’re Polarized” tour continues, with events in Austin, Nashville, Chicago, and Greenville. Go to WhyWerePolarized.com for the full schedule!
Want to contact the show? Reach out at ezrakleinshow@vox.comCredits:
Engineer - Cynthia Gil
Producer/Editor - Jeff Geld
Researcher - Roge Karma
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Tracy K. Smith changed how I read poetry

In the late 90s Barbara Ehrenreich went undercover as a waitress to discover how people with minimum wage full-time jobs were making ends meet. It turned out, they weren’t. Ehrenreich’s book Nickled and Dimed revealed just how dire the economic conditions of everyday working people were at a time when the economy was supposedly booming. It was a wake up call for many Americans at the time, including me who picked up the book as a curious college student. 
Since then Ehrenreich, a journalist by trade, has written on a vast range of topics from the precarity of middle-class existence to the psychological and sociological roots of collective joy to human mortality to her own attempt, as an atheist, to grapple with mystical experiences. Needless to say, this is a widely ranging conversation. 
References: 
Living with a Wild God by Barbara Ehrenreich
Natural Causes by Barbara Ehrenreich
Dancing in the Streets by Barbara Ehrenreich
Nicked and Dimed by Barbara Ehrenreich
Fear of Falling by Barbara Ehrenreich
Had I Known by Barbara Ehrenreich


New to the show? Want to listen to Ezra's favorite episodes? Check out The Ezra Klein Show beginner's guide.
The “Why We’re Polarized” tour continues, with events in Austin, Nashville, Chicago, and Greenville. Go to WhyWerePolarized.com for the full schedule!
Want to contact the show? Reach out at ezrakleinshow@vox.com
Credits:
Engineer - Cynthia Gil
Producer/Editor - Jeff Geld
Researcher - Roge Karma
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Barbara Ehrenreich on UBI, class conflict, and collective joy

Hello! I’m Jane Coaston, filling in for Ezra. My guest today is Tim Carney, a commentary editor at the Washington Examiner and a visiting fellow at the American Enterprise Institute. 
In the wake of the 2016 election, Carney began traveling across the country and poring through county-level data in an attempt to understand the forces that led to Donald Trump’s victory. The culprit, he argues, is not racism or economic anxiety, it's the breakdown of social institutions.
In his new book Alienated America: Why Some Places Thrive While Others Collapse, Carney posits that for centuries religious (and other private) institutions formed a much-needed social glue that kept communities together. That social glue, however, has decayed in recent decades, creating a void of despair, alienation, and frustration in so-called “Middle America." Donald Trump did not offer a compelling way to solve these problems, but he was the only candidate willing to name them — and in 2016 that was enough.
In this conversation, we discuss Carney's thesis at length, but we also talk about why white evangelicals love Trump so much, how communities of color have responded differently to institutional loss than white communities, the appeal of Bernie Sanders, how Trump's reelection strategy will differ from his 2016 campaign, and much more. I hope this conversation is as interesting for you to listen to as it was for me to have.
Book recommendations: 
Dignity: Seeking Respect in Back Row America by Chris Arnade
My Father Left Me Ireland by Michael Brendan Dougherty 
The Bible 

New to the show? Want to check out Ezra's favorite episodes? Check out the Ezra Klein Show beginner's guide (http://bit.ly/EKSbeginhere)
The “Why We’re Polarized” tour continues, with events in Austin, Nashville, Chicago, and Greenville. Go to WhyWerePolarized.com for the full schedule!
Want to contact the show? Reach out at ezrakleinshow@vox.com
Credits:
Producer/Editor - Jeff Geld
Researcher - Roge Karma
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

What Donald Trump got right about white America

This one was a pleasure. Ta-Nehisi Coates joined me in Brooklyn for part of the “Why We’re Polarized” tour. His description of the book may be my favorite yet. It is, he says, “a cold, atheist book.” We talk about what that means, and from there, go into some of the harder questions raised not so much by the book, but by American history itself. Then Coates asked me a question I never expected to hear from him: Is there anything I could say to leave him with some hope? Don’t miss this one.

New to the show? Want to check out Ezra's favorite episodes? Check out the Ezra Klein Show beginner's guide (http://bit.ly/EKSbeginhere)
The “Why We’re Polarized” tour continues, with events in Austin, Nashville, Chicago, and Greenville. Go to WhyWerePolarized.com for the full schedule!
Want to contact the show? Reach out at ezrakleinshow@vox.com
Credits:
Producer/Editor - Jeff Geld
Researcher - Roge Karma
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Ta-Nehisi Coates on my “cold, atheist book”

Hello! I’m Sean Illing, Vox’s interviews writer filling in for Ezra while he’s on book tour. My guest today is Martin Hägglund, a philosopher at Yale and the author of This Life: Secular Faith and Spiritual Freedom, which I consider to be one of the most ambitious and important books in the last several years.
We begin by discussing what it means to live a free and purposeful life without regret or illusion. For Hägglund, this life is all we have. There is no heaven, no afterlife, no eternal beyond. We live and we die and that means that the most important question any of us can possibly ask is, “What should we do with our time?” 
We end by talking about the limits of capitalism, namely why it doesn’t really allow us to own our time in the way we ought to. And thus why, for Hägglund, democratic socialism is the only political project that takes the human condition seriously. 
This is an unusual conversation, but, I have to say, I loved it. I appreciate and admire Hägglund’s willingness to tackle the biggest questions any us can ever ask, and I think by the end of it you will, too.
Book recommendations:
Fellow Creatures: Our Obligations to the other animals by Christine Korsgaard
On the Soul (De Anima) by Aristotle 
Phenomenology of Spirit by G.W.F Hegel 

Follow Sean Illing at Vox or on Twitter @seanilling
New to the show? Want to listen to Ezra's favorite episodes? Check out The Ezra Klein Show beginner's guide.
Ezra's book is available at www.EzraKlein.com.
The “Why We’re Polarized” tour continues, with events in Austin, Nashville, Chicago, and Greenville. Go to WhyWerePolarized.com for the full schedule!
Want to contact the show? Reach out at ezrakleinshow@vox.com
Credits:
Guest host - Sean Illing 
Producer - Jeff Geld
Researcher - Roge Karma
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

If God is dead, then … socialism? 

 I’ve been a fan of Tim Urban and his site Wait But Why for a long time. Urban uses whimsical illustrations, infographics, and friendly, nontechnical language to explain everything from AI to space exploration to the Fermi Paradox. 
Urban's most recent project is an explainer series called “The Story of Us." It began as an attempt to understand what is going on in American politics today, and quickly turned into a deep exploration into humanity's past: how we evolved, the history of civilization, and the way our psychologies have come to interact with the world around us. 
My initial theory of this conversation was that Urban’s work has interesting points of convergence and divergence with my book. But once we got to talking, something more interesting emerged: Based on his reading of human history, psychology, and technological advancement, Urban has come to believe we are at an existential fork-in-the-road as a species. A hundred years from now, Urban thinks, our species will either advance so significantly that we will no longer be recognizable as human beings, or we will so lose control of our progress that the human story will end in a destructive apocalypse. I’m less convinced, but open to the idea that I’m wrong.
So this, then, isn’t just a conversation about politics and polarization in the present. It’s more fully a conversation about whether the politics of the present are distracting us from the forces that are, even as we speak, deciding our future.
References: 
Dave Robert’s piece on Tim Urban’s aversion to politics 
My conversation with Andrew Yang 
Book recommendations: 
A Little History of the World by E.H. Gombrich 
The Three-Body Problem by Cixin Liu 
Atomic Habits by James Clear

New to the show? Want to listen to Ezra's favorite episodes? Check out The Ezra Klein Show beginner's guide.
My book is available at www.EzraKlein.com.
The “Why We’re Polarized” tour continues, with events in Portland, Seattle, Austin, Nashville, Chicago, and Greenville. Go to WhyWerePolarized.com for the full schedule!
Want to contact the show? Reach out at ezrakleinshow@vox.com
Credits:
Producer - Jeff Geld
Researcher - Roge Karma
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Tim Urban on humanity’s wild future 

Jill Lepore is a Harvard historian, a New Yorker contributor, the author of These Truths, and one of my favorite past guests on this show. But in this episode, the tables are turned: I’m in the hot seat, and Lepore has some questions. Hard ones.
This is, easily, the toughest interview on my book so far. Lepore isn’t quibbling over my solutions or pointing out a contrary study — what she challenges are the premises, epistemology, and meta-structure that form the foundation of my book, and much of my work. Her question, in short, is: What if social science itself is too crude to be a useful way of understanding the political world?
But that’s what makes this conversation great. We discuss whether all political science research on polarization might be completely wrong, why (and whether) my book is devoid of individual or institutional “villains,” and whether I am morally obliged to delete my Twitter account, in addition to the missing party in American politics, why I mistrust historical narratives, media polarization, and much more.
This is, on one level, a conversation about Why We’re Polarized. But on a deeper level, it’s about different modes of knowledge and whether we can trust them.

New to the show? Want to listen to Ezra's favorite episodes? Check out The Ezra Klein Show beginner's guide.
My book is available at www.EzraKlein.com.
The “Why We’re Polarized” tour continues, with events in Portland, Seattle, Austin, Nashville, Chicago, and Greenville. Go to WhyWerePolarized.com for the full schedule!
Want to contact the show? Reach out at ezrakleinshow@vox.com
Credits:
Producer - Jeff Geld
Researcher - Roge Karma
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Home

Discover

Sign up for free to listen for longer

Home

Discover

Sign up for free to listen for longer

What I’ve learned, and what comes next.

Mark as played

Share

About the episode

View all episodes