The Ezra Klein Show

The Ezra Klein Show

The moral philosophy of The Good Place (with Mike Schur and Pamela Hieronymi)

Dec 9 • 104 min

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 The Good Place…

When doing the right thing makes you a criminal

Dec 5 • 105 min

For most of his life, Wayne Hsiung was a typical overachiever. He attended the University of Chicago, started his PhD in Economics, became a law professor at Northwestern, was mentored by Cass Sunstein. But then, something snapped. In the midst of a deep,…

Peter Singer on the lives you can save

Dec 2 • 79 min

Imagine you’re walking to work. You see a child drowning in a lake. You’re about to jump in and save her when you realize you’re wearing your best suit, and the rescue will end up costing hundreds in dry cleaning bills. Should you still save the child? Of…

Best of: The age of “mega-identity” politics

Nov 28 • 76 min

Happy Thanksgiving! Please enjoy a re-air episode from April 2018 with Lilliana Mason. Yes, identity politics is breaking our country. But it’s not identity politics as we’re used to thinking about it. In Uncivil Agreement: How Politics Became Our…

Because podcast

Nov 25 • 82 min

Gretchen McCulloch is a self-described “internet linguist,” host of the podcast Lingthusiasm, and author of the recent book Because Internet: Understanding the New Rules of Language. In it, she demonstrates that the way we’ve come to speak on the internet…

There’s more to life than profit

Nov 21 • 94 min

Yancey Strickler is the co-founder and former CEO of Kickstarter, and he’s just released a new book, This Could Be Our Future: A Manifesto for a More Generous World. In Strickler’s telling, our society has been so thoroughly captured by the value-system…

Having a bad day? Dave Eggers can help.

Nov 18 • 85 min

I’ve wanted to have Dave Eggers on the show for a while now. Eggers has not only written a vast range of books (a deeply ironic personal memoir, a heartwarming novel about a Sudanese refugee, a futuristic story about a tech dystopia) but he’s also founded…

How Whole Foods, yoga, and NPR became the hallmarks of the elite

Nov 14 • 73 min

If you’re anything like me, this episode will make you think about the way you shop, learn, eat, parent, and exercise in a whole new way. My guest today is Elizabeth Currid-Halkett, a professor of public policy at the University of Southern California…

How social media makes us antisocial

Nov 11 • 95 min

Andrew Marantz is a writer at the New Yorker who, for years, has been deeply immersed in the world of conservative trolls, alt-right social media personalities, and online conspiracy theorists. His most recent book Antisocial has been viewed as a…

ICYMI: Edward Norton’s theory of mind, movies, and power

Nov 8 • 113 min

Due to a technical glitch this interview with Edward Norton did not find it’s way into most people’s feeds. If you were able to download the first one this is indeed the exact same interview, but if you missed it please give a listen and enjoy - we had a…

Introducing Reset

Nov 8 • 42 min

Thanks for listening to Reset from Recode and the Vox Media Podcast Network. Today’s episodes were Can A.I. Tech You To Write Better and Quantum Supremacy, WTF. If you enjoyed these episodes, subscribe to Reset for free on Apple Podcasts, Spotify,…

What a smarter Trumpism would sound like

Nov 7 • 87 min

Michael Lind is a visiting professor at the University of Texas at Austin, the co-founder of the New America Foundation, and an important contributor to American Affairs, a journal originally created to imagine a more Trumpist conservatism. Lind is by no…

The climate crisis is an oceans crisis

Nov 4 • 74 min

Welcome to episode 2 of our climate cluster. The more I prepared for this series, the more I realize there was a big blue gap in my understanding of climate change. Oceans cover 70% of the earth, absorb 93% of the heat from the sun, and capture 30% of the…

We live in The Good Place. And we’re screwing it up.

Oct 28 • 87 min

Welcome to the first episode of our climate cluster. This isn’t a series about whether “the science is real” on climate change. This is a series about what the science says — and what it means for our lives, our politics, and our future. I suspect I’m…

Neoliberalism and its discontents

Oct 24 • 94 min

“Neoliberalism” is one of the most confusing phrases in political discourse today. The term is often used to describe the market fundamentalism of thinkers like Milton Friedman and Frederich Hayek or politicians like Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher.…

The four words that will decide impeachment

Oct 21 • 55 min

Hey EK Show listeners! Something different today. The first episode of my new podcast: Impeachment, Explained. This was the week of confessions. Acting White House Chief of Staff Mick Mulvaney admitted to a Trump administration quid quo pro with Ukraine,…

We don’t just feel emotions. We make them.

Oct 17 • 95 min

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…

How politics became a war against reality

Oct 14 • 89 min

In his brilliant 2014 book Nothing is True and Everything is Possible, Soviet-born TV producer turned journalist Peter Pomerantsev described 21st-century Russia as a political anomaly. He wrote about “a new type of authoritarianism” that waged war on…

The loneliness epidemic

Oct 10 • 81 min

As US surgeon general from 2014 to 2017, Vivek 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.…

Ibram X. Kendi wants to redefine racism

Oct 7 • 91 min

Racism is one of the most morally charged words in the English language. It is typically understood as a form of deep inner prejudice — something that people actively feel and consciously express. My guest today, Ibram X. Kendi, wants to redefine racism.…

Malcolm Gladwell’s Stranger Things

Oct 3 • 97 min

Malcolm Gladwell’s work is nothing short of an intellectual adventure. Sometimes, as in his podcast Revisionist History, he takes something small and mundane — a hockey statistic, a semicolon, a verbal tic — and draws a broad, sweeping conclusion that…

An inspiring conversation about democracy

Sep 30 • 92 min

Danielle Allen directs Harvard’s Edmond J. Safra Center for Ethics. She’s a political theorist, and a philosopher, and the principal investigator of the Democratic Knowledge Project. I talk about democracy a lot on this show, but it’s her life’s work.…

Samantha Power’s journey from foreign policy critic to UN ambassador

Sep 26 • 93 min

Samantha Power reported from the killing fields of Bosnia. She watched a genocide that could’ve been stopped years earlier grind on amidst international indifference. What she saw there led to A Problem From Hell, her Pulitzer-prize winning exploration of…

When meritocracy wins, everybody loses

Sep 23 • 91 min

In The Meritocracy Trap, Daniel Markovits argues that meritocracy — a system set-up to expand opportunity, reduce inequality and end aristocracy — has become exactly what it was set up to combat: a mechanism for intergenerational wealth transfer that…

Nikole Hannah-Jones on the 1619 project, choosing schools, and Cuba

Sep 19 • 104 min

“The truth is that as much democracy as this nation has today” writes Nikole Hannah-Jones “it has been borne on the backs of black resistance.” Hannah-Jones is an investigative journalist at the New York Times Magazine, the winner of MacArthur Genius…

Randall Munroe, the genius behind XKCD

Sep 16 • 87 min

I’m not usually a fanboy on this podcast, but this episode is the exception. I love the web-comic XKCD. I’ve had prints of it hanging in my house for years. It’s nerdy and humane, curious and kind. And every so often, it’s explosively, crazily creative,…

Julián Castro’s quiet moral radicalism

Sep 12 • 67 min

I’m careful about inviting politicians onto this podcast. Too often, questions go unanswered, and frustrated emails flood my inbox. So I only bring on candidates now if there’s a conversation directly related to themes of this show. In this case, there…

Political animals (with Leah Garcés)

Sep 9 • 92 min

Imagine, for a moment, what it’s like to be an animal rights activist. Tens of billions of animals are being tortured and slaughtered every year. It is, to you, a rolling horror. But to the people you love, the world you live in — it’s normal. You’re the…

John McWhorter thinks we’re getting racism wrong

Sep 5 • 69 min

Hello everyone. I’m Jane Coaston, senior politics reporter at Vox with a focus on conservatism (Ezra will be back from vacation next week). “Antiracism… is now a new and increasingly dominant religion” writes John McWhorter, “it is what we worship, as…

The rocky marriage between libertarians and conservatives

Sep 2 • 88 min

Hello, everybody! I’m Jane Coaston, senior politics reporter at Vox with a focus on conservatism. Today, I’m speaking with Conor Friedersdorf, a staff writer for the Atlantic, who has been navigating the fractious divides within the conservative movement…

A mind-bending, reality-warping conversation with John Higgs

Aug 29 • 91 min

I don’t usually begin interviews with the question “who the hell are you?” But, then again, not every guest is John Higgs. I fell into Higgs’s work by accident. An offhand recommendation of his book on the KLF, a British band that burnt a million pounds…

Jia Tolentino on what happens when life is an endless performance

Aug 26 • 104 min

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…

The original meaning of “identity politics” (with Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor)

Aug 22 • 84 min

Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor is an associate professor of African-American Studies at Princeton University and the author of multiple books, including most recently How We Get Free: Black Feminism and the Combahee River Collective, which traces the origins of…

Are bosses dictators? (with Elizabeth Anderson)

Aug 19 • 90 min

Imagine a society whose rulers suppress free speech, free association, even bathroom breaks. Where the government owns the means of production. Where the leader is self-appointed or hand-selected by a group of wealthy oligarchs. Where exile or emigration…

The Constitution is a progressive document

Aug 15 • 62 min

“The Constitution must be adapted to the problems of each generation,” writes Erwin Chemerisnky, “we are not living in the world of 1787 and should not pretend that the choices for that time can guide ours today.” Does that sentence read to you as obvious…

Matt Bruenig’s case for single-payer health care

Aug 12 • 124 min

The Democratic primary has been unexpectedly dominated by a single question: Will you abolish private health insurance? Wrapped in that question are dozens more. Why, if private health insurance is such a mess, do polls show most Americans want to keep…

Can Raj Chetty save the American dream?

Aug 8 • 82 min

I don’t ordinarily find myself scrambling to write down article ideas during these conversations, but almost everything Raj Chetty says is worth a feature unto itself. For instance: - Great Kindergarten teachers generate hundreds of thousands of dollars…

Astra Taylor will change how you think about democracy

Aug 5 • 81 min

Astra Taylor’s new book has the best title I’ve seen in a long time: Democracy May Not Exist, But We’ll Miss It When It’s Gone. I talk a lot about democracy on this show, but not in the way Taylor talks about it. The democracy I discuss is bounded by the…

Is big tech addictive? Nir Eyal and I debate.

Aug 1 • 79 min

“How do successful companies create products people can’t put down?” That’s the opening line of the description for Nir Eyal’s bestselling 2014 book Hooked: How to Build Habit-Forming Products. Hooked became a staple in Silicon Valley circles — it was…

Generation Climate Change

Jul 29 • 97 min

This is one of those episodes I want to put the hard sell on. It’s one of the most important conversations I’ve had on the show. The fact that it left me feeling better about the world rather than worse — that was shocking. Varshini Prakash is co-founder…

Is the media amplifying Trump’s racism? (with Whitney Phillips)

Jul 25 • 87 min

Some podcasts I do are easy. There’s a problem and, hey look, here’s a great answer! Some are hard. There’s a problem and, well, there may not be a good answer. This is one of those. When Donald Trump tweeted that four new Democratic members of Congress…

Rutger Bregman’s utopias, and mine

Jul 22 • 92 min

Universal basic income. A 15-hour work week. Open borders. These ideas may strike you as crazy, fantastical, maybe even utopian… but that’s exactly the point. My guest today is Dutch historian Rutger Bregman, whose book Utopia for Realists is not only…

How white identity politics won the Republican civil war

Jul 18 • 88 min

Tim Alberta’s new book American Carnage documents “the Republican Civil War”: a decade-plus struggle over whether the Republican Party would build itself around white identity politics or try to reach out to a changing America. Trump’s election settled…

George Will makes the conservative case against democracy

Jul 15 • 76 min

It’s a good time to be a Republican. But it’s a bad time, George Will argues, to be a conservative. Hence his new, 700-page manifesto, The Conservative Sensibility, which tries to rescue conservatism from the perversions of the Trumpist GOP. Will’s…

What deliberative democracy can, and can’t, do (with Jane Mansbridge)

Jul 11 • 56 min

Every time I do an episode on polarization, I get a few emails asking: What about deliberative democracy? Couldn’t that be an answer? Deliberative democracy, if you’re not familiar, refers to a broad set of approaches in which citizens get together, with…

Rod Dreher on America’s post-Christian culture war [CORRECTED]

Jul 8 • 115 min

[A quick note about this episode - we have fixed an error that caused some listeners to hear overlapping audio in the first portion of the show. Thank you for your understanding, and we’re sorry for the issue] In 2017, Rod Dreher published The Benedict…

White threat in a browning America (Jennifer Richeson re-air)

Jul 4 • 78 min

This conversation with Yale psychologist and MacArthur genius Jennifer Richeson first appeared a year ago, and it’s one of my favorites. But I wanted to repost it now for two reasons. First, it’s as a necessary companion to Monday’s conversation with…

Behind the panic in white, Christian America

Jul 1 • 96 min

About seven in 10 American seniors are white Christians. Among young adults, fewer than three in 10 are. During the span of the Obama administration, America went from a majority white Christian nation to one where white Christians are a minority. That’s…

An enlightening, frustrating conversation on liberalism (with Adam Gopnik)

Jun 27 • 111 min

“Liberalism is as distinct a tradition as exists in political history, but it suffers from being a practice before it is an ideology, a temperament and a tone and a way of managing the world more than a fixed set of beliefs.” That’s from Adam Gopnik’s new…

The cognitive cost of poverty (with Sendhil Mullainathan)

Jun 24 • 99 min

If you’re a Parks and Rec fan, you’ll remember Ron Swanson’s Pyramid of Greatness. Right there at the base sits “Capitalism: God’s way of determining who is smart and who is poor.” It’s a joke, but not really. Few want to justify the existence of poverty,…

Failing towards Utopia

Jun 21 • 20 min

Nice Try! is a new podcast from Curbed and the Vox Media Podcast Network that explores stories of people who have tried to design a better world, and what happens when those designs don’t go according to plan. Season one, Utopian, follows Avery Trufelman…

Why liberals and conservatives create such different media (with Danna Young)

Jun 20 • 96 min

The debate over polarized media can make the two ecosystems sound equivalent. One is left, the other right, but otherwise they’re the same. That couldn’t be more wrong. They’re structured differently, they work differently, they value different things,…

Stacey Abrams and Lauren Groh-Wargo (Live!)

Jun 17 • 64 min

“The phrase ‘identity politics’ is a weaponization of the Democrats’ structural advantage in elections from now until eternity,” says Stacey Abrams. In this live interview from 2019’s Code conference, Kara Swisher and I sat down with Abrams and her…

This changed how I think about love (with Alison Gopnik)

Jun 13 • 94 min

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. She runs a cognitive development and learning lab where she studies how young…

The plan behind Elizabeth Warren’s plans

Jun 10 • 54 min

Oligarchic capitalism? Elizabeth Warren has a plan for that. Opioid deaths? She’s got a plan for that too. Same is true for high housing costs, offshoring, child care, breaking up Big Tech, curbing congressional corruption, indicting presidents,…

Michael Lewis reads my mind

Jun 5 • 103 min

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…

How Mitch McConnell convinced Michael Bennet to run for president

Jun 3 • 78 min

I’m not sure what I expected Sen. Michael Bennet’s answer to be when I asked him why he was running for president. I didn’t expect it to be “Mitch McConnell.” Since arriving in the Senate in 2009, Bennet has built a reputation as a senator’s senator. He’s…

How the brains of master meditators change

May 30 • 70 min

Richie Davidson has spent a lifetime studying meditation. He’s studied it as a practitioner, sitting daily, going on retreats, and learning under masters. And he’s pioneered the study of it as a scientist, working with the Dalai Lama to bring master…

Why good people are easily corrupted (with Lawrence Lessig)

May 27 • 84 min

I’ve been learning from, and arguing with, Harvard law professor Lawrence Lessig for a decade now. We have a long-running debate over whether money or polarization is the root cause of our political ills. But our debate works because we share a crucial…

The art of attention (with Jenny Odell)

May 23 • 86 min

“For some, there may be a kind of engineer’s satisfaction in the streamlining and networking of our entire lived experience,” writes Jenny Odell. “And yet a certain nervous feeling, of being overstimulated and unable to sustain a train of thought,…

Matt Yglesias and Jenny Schuetz solve the housing crisis

May 20 • 65 min

In this special crossover episode, Brookings Institution’s Jenny Schuetz joins The Weeds’ Matt Yglesias to discuss subsidies, zoning reform, and much more. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

What kind of news is cable news? (With Brian Stelter)

May 16 • 87 min

Brian Stelter is the host of CNN’s Reliable Sources, as well as the network’s chief media correspondent. But before he was the host of Reliable Sources, he was just a kid with a blog — a blog that obsessed over the coverage decisions, business models, and…

Contrapoints on taking the trolls seriously

May 13 • 81 min

YouTube is where tomorrow’s politics are happening today. If you’re over 30, and you don’t spend much time on the platform, it’s almost impossible to explain how central it is to young people’s media consumption. YouTube far outranks television in terms…

The purpose of political violence

May 9 • 81 min

“Between 1830 and 1860, there were more than seventy violent incidents between congressmen in the House and Senate chambers or on nearby streets and dueling grounds.” Here’s the wild thing about that statistic, which comes from Yale historian Joanne…

Ask Ezra Anything 3: Endgame

May 6 • 96 min

Time for another AMA! You all hit the big stuff in this one. What’s the purpose of this show? How do I prep for it? What did I think of the Whiteshift conversation? What has fatherhood changed in my worldview? What weird work habits do I recommend? How…

The disillusionment of David Brooks

May 2 • 98 min

2013 was David Brooks’s worst year. “The realities that used to define my life fell away,” he says. His marriage ended. His children moved out. The conservative movement was undergoing the crack-up that would lead to Donald Trump, and to Brooks’s…

Emily Oster schools me on parenthood

Apr 29 • 57 min

I’ve read a lot of Emily Oster over the past year. Her first book, Expecting Better, has become the data-minded parent’s bible on pregnancy. Her new book, Cribsheet, extends that analysis to the first years of life. Oster is an economist at Brown…

Lessons from Vox’s first 5 years

Apr 25 • 95 min

This is a special episode for me. Vox turns 5 this week! So I sat down with my co-founders, Melissa Bell and Matt Yglesias, to discuss what went right, what went wrong, what changed in the media environment, and what we learned along the way. Matt’s…

Work as identity, burnout as lifestyle

Apr 22 • 84 min

In the past few months, two essays on America’s changing relationship to work caught my eye. The first was Anne Helen Petersen’s viral BuzzFeed piece defining, and describing, “millennial burnout.” The second was Derek Thompson’s Atlantic article on…

How social democrats won Europe — then lost it

Apr 18 • 69 min

Democratic socialism is on the rise in the United States, but it’s been a dominant force for far longer in Europe. Ask Bernie Sanders to define his ideology and he doesn’t start naming political theorists; he points across the Atlantic. “Go to countries…

In defense of white-backlash politics

Apr 15 • 101 min

“The big question of our time is less, ‘What does it mean to be American?’ than, ‘What does it mean to be white American in an age of ethnic change?’” writes Eric Kaufmann in his new book Whiteshift: Populism, Immigration, and the Future of White…

Identity, nationalism, and fatherhood

Apr 11 • 108 min

Michael Brendan Dougherty is a senior writer at National Review and the author of My Father Left Me Ireland, a moving, lyrical memoir about fatherhood and identity. It’s also a stirring defense of nationalism, an attack on wonks, and a critique of some of…

An ex-libertarian’s quest to rebuild the center right

Apr 8 • 86 min

Nothing would do more to repair American politics than for the center right to regain power in the Republican coalition. But before that can happen, the center right needs to exist — it needs a theory of both policy and politics, one that would allow it…

How whiteness distorts our democracy, with Eddie Glaude Jr.

Apr 4 • 91 min

“Race isn’t about black people, necessarily,” says Eddie Glaude Jr. “It’s about the way whiteness works to disfigure and distort our democracy, and the ideals that animate our democracy.” Glaude is the chair of Princeton University’s department of African…

Pete Buttigieg’s theory of political change

Apr 1 • 62 min

First off. Hello! I’m back from paternity leave. And this is a helluva podcast to restart with. Pete Buttigieg is a Rhodes scholar, a Navy veteran, and the mayor of South Bend, Indiana. He’s a married gay man, a churchgoing Episcopalian, and a proud…

Meet the policy architect behind the Green New Deal

Mar 28 • 85 min

Last month, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Sen. Ed Markey introduced a Green New Deal resolution, outlining a bold effort to decarbonize the US economy and forestall the worst effects of climate change. Ever since, it has been the talk of the town in…

The somewhat fractured state of American conservatism

Mar 25 • 63 min

Matthew Continetti, editor-in-chief of the Washington Free Beacon, sits down with Vox senior politics reporter Jane Coaston to discuss intellectual conservatism, the legacy of William F. Buckley and Ronald Reagan, neoconservatism, and the role Donald…

American politics after Christianity, with Ross Douthat

Mar 21 • 79 min

I’m Vox’s interviews writer, Sean Illing. Lately, I’ve been interested in the following question: Is the decline of institutionalized Christianity making our politics worse? The answer may be yes, but I’m not convinced it’s for the reasons many people…

Why Gov. Jay Inslee is running for president on climate change

Mar 18 • 68 min

Vox senior politics reporter, Jane Coaston speaks to Washington Gov. Jay Inslee at South by Southwest about climate change, his 2020 candidacy, why it’s time to eliminate the filibuster, and the Green New Deal. We are conducting an audience survey to…

ICYMI: Julia Galef

Mar 14 • 94 min

For this episode of The Ezra Klein Show, we’re digging into the archives to share another of our favorites with you! * At least in politics, this is an era of awful arguments. Arguments made in bad faith. Arguments in which no one, on either side, is…

The roots of extremism, with Deeyah Khan

Mar 11 • 85 min

What draws someone into an extremist movement? Is it about ideology? Race? Politics? So many of our discussions about extremism try to explain away the problem by reducing its complexity, but that brings us further and further away from actually solving…

ICYMI: Paul Krugman

Mar 7 • 99 min

For this episode of the Ezra Klein show we’re digging back into the archives to share another of our favorite episodes with you! *** On October 24, 2016, in the final days of the presidential election, Paul Krugman, the Nobel-prize winning economist and…

Pop music can make you smarter

Mar 6 • 21 min

Vox takes culture seriously. Our coverage of movies, TV, books, and music delves deep into what our cultural touchstones reveal about who we are and what we care about — and how what we consume influences our world in turn. That’s why I’m so excited to…

Life after climate change, with David Wallace-Wells

Mar 4 • 74 min

After years of hovering on the periphery of American politics, never quite the star of the show, it seems that climate change is having a moment. An ambitious Green New Deal, backed by a large and active youth movement, identifies global warming as a…

Pramila Jayapal thinks we can get to Medicare-for-All fast

Feb 28 • 60 min

The Democratic Party is quickly coalescing around an ambitious Medicare-for-All platform — and Rep. Pramila Jayapal (D-WA) is shaping up to be a major voice in that debate. Jayapal co-chairs the Congressional Progressive Caucus and, earlier this week,…

Noah Rothman on the “unjustice” of social justice politics

Feb 25 • 72 min

I’m Jane Coaston, senior politics reporter at Vox with a focus on conservatism and the GOP. For the last three years or so, there has been an ongoing discussion among conservatives about identity politics and what many view as the corrosive use of…

Why should we care about deficits?

Feb 21 • 68 min

Stony Brook University’s Stephanie Kelton is the most influential proponent of Modern Monetary Theory, a heterodox take on government budgets that urges a focus on inflation, rather than deficits. Jason Furman was President Barack Obama’s chief economist,…

Anniversary special: Rachel Maddow

Feb 18 • 103 min

To celebrate The Ezra Klein Show’s third anniversary, I’m listening back to the very first episode: a conversation with Rachel Maddow. Rachel is, of course, the host of MSNBC’s primetime news show and a best-selling author. But she took a winding path to…

Andrew Sullivan and I work out our differences

Feb 14 • 127 min

I’ve been arguing with Andrew Sullivan online for almost 15 years now. It’s one of my oldest and most rewarding hobbies. In the past, I’ve always felt we understood each other, even in periods of sharp disagreement. Lately, that’s changed. Sullivan and I…

The core contradiction of American politics

Feb 11 • 69 min

The Republican and Democratic parties are not the same. I’ll say it again: The Republican and Democratic parties are not the same. I don’t just mean they believe different things. I mean they’re composed in different ways, they argue from different…

Leftists vs. liberals, with Elizabeth Bruenig

Feb 7 • 81 min

What separates Obama-era liberalism from Sanders-style democratic socialism? What are the fights splitting and transforming the Democratic Party actually about? This is a conversation I’ve wanted to have for a while, in part because I often find myself…

The world according to Ralph Nader

Feb 4 • 86 min

Ralph Nader needs no introduction. But if your knowledge of Nader mostly consists of his 2000 campaign for the presidency, his career does demand some context. Nader is one of America’s truly great policy entrepreneurs, and arguably one of its great…

This conversation will change how you understand misogyny

Jan 31 • 136 min

Misogyny has long been understood as something men feel, not something women experience. That, says philosopher Kate Manne, is a mistake. In her book Down Girl: The Logic of Misogyny, Manne defines misogyny as “as primarily a property of social…

Ending the age of animal cruelty, with Bruce Friedrich

Jan 28 • 81 min

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…

Robert Sapolsky on the toxic intersection of poverty and stress

Jan 24 • 81 min

Robert Sapolsky is a Stanford neuroscientist and primatologist. He’s the author of a slew of important books on human biology and behavior. But it’s an older book he wrote that forms the basis for this conversation. In Why Zebras Don’t Get Ulcers,…

Frances Lee on why bipartisanship is irrational

Jan 21 • 63 min

There aren’t too many people with an idea that will actually change how you think about American politics. But Frances Lee is one of them. In her new book, Insecure Majorities, Lee makes a point that sounds strange when you hear it, but changes everything…

Sean Decatur doesn’t see a free speech crisis on campus

Jan 17 • 80 min

Sean Decatur is the president of Kenyon College and the first African-American to hold that job. He’s also one of the most thoughtful voices in the debate over free speech and political correctness on campus. “Colleges and universities have been charged…

Cal Newport has an answer for digital burnout

Jan 14 • 71 min

Cal Newport suspects you’re a digital maximalist — someone who believes that any potential for benefit is reason enough to start using a new technology. Don’t feel bad. That’s how most of us are. That’s how society teaches us to be. Newport wants us to…

Eric Holder’s plan to save democracy

Jan 10 • 66 min

Eric Holder was attorney general during the first six years of Barack Obama’s presidency, and there are days when it feels like he’s the attorney general of Obama’s post-presidency, too. Holder chairs the National Democratic Redistricting Committee, a…

Anil Dash on the biases of tech

Jan 7 • 82 min

“Marc Andreessen famously said that ‘software is eating the world,’ but it’s far more accurate to say that the neoliberal values of software tycoons are eating the world,” wrote Anil Dash. Dash’s argument caught my eye. But then, a lot of Dash’s arguments…

Jill Lepore on America’s two revolutions

Jan 3 • 95 min

Jill Lepore is a Harvard historian, a New Yorker contributor, and the author of These Truths, a dazzling one-volume synthesis of American history. She’s the kind of history teacher everyone wishes they’d had, able to effortlessly connect the events and…

Best of: N.K. Jemisin

Dec 31, 2018 • 85 min

This is the most fun I’ve ever had on a podcast. Nora Jemisin — better known by her pen name, N.K. Jemisin — won the Hugo Award for best novel this year for the third year in a row. No one had ever done that before. Jemisin is also the first author to…

Best-of: Bryan Stevenson

Dec 27, 2018 • 94 min

Here, at the holidays, I wanted to share some of my favorite episodes of the show with you. Bryan Stevenson tops the list. He’s the founder of the Equal Justice Initiative, the author of the remarkable book Just Mercy: A Story of Justice and Redemption, a…

Kara Swisher interviews me on the Future of Journalism (Live!)

Dec 24, 2018 • 95 min

When I decided to start an interview podcast, the first person I went to for advice was Kara Swisher — founder of Recode, host of the Code Conference and the Recode/Decode podcast, and one of the most legendary interviewers in the business. Since then,…

TED’s Chris Anderson on the lessons of listening

Dec 20, 2018 • 71 min

You know TED. Black stage, red accents, wireless mic, one speaker. Billions of views each year. TED is more than a conference now; it’s a meme: “Thanks for coming to my TED talk” closes Tumblr and Twitter posts. Chris Anderson is the guy that took TED…

Rep. Katie Porter on how capitalism is failing

Dec 17, 2018 • 81 min

Katie Porter is the Rep.-elect from California’s 45th District, which happens to be the district I grew up in. She’s part of the brigade of Democrats who turned Orange County blue for the first time since the Great Depression. But that’s not why I asked…

How Hasan Minhaj is reinventing political comedy

Dec 13, 2018 • 104 min

In Patriot Act, Hasan Minhaj’s new Netflix show, he does three things political comedians often don’t do. First, he makes political comedy personal. Second, he makes it visual. And third, he makes it last. Minhaj was the last correspondent hired by Jon…

Adam Serwer on white political correctness

Dec 10, 2018 • 52 min

“What a society finds offensive is not a function of fact or truth,” writes Adam Serwer, “but of power.” Serwer is a writer at the Atlantic, and he’s been looking at the identity politics and political correctness debates from a direction that’s too often…

Will Storr on why you are not yourself

Dec 6, 2018 • 88 min

“To have a self is to feel as if we are, in the words of neuroscientist Professor Chris Frith, the ‘invisible actor at the centre of the world’.” That’s Will Storr, writing in his fantastic book Selfie. Ignore the very of-the-moment title. Storr dives…

How to be a better carnivore

Dec 3, 2018 • 32 min

Here are two things I believe. First, the way we treat the animals we kill for food is shameful. Second, only a tiny percentage of the population will go vegetarian or vegan and stay that way, at least until lab-grown meat gets a lot better. The middle…

Peter Beinart on anti-Semitism in America and illiberalism in Israel

Nov 29, 2018 • 88 min

This is a conversation I’ve been putting off, if I’m being honest. I can’t hold it from the safe space of journalistic distance. It’s about the strange, vulnerable space that many Jews, myself included, find themselves in today. The first part of this…

Where Jonathan Haidt thinks the American mind went wrong

Nov 26, 2018 • 113 min

Jonathan Haidt is a psychologist at New York University and the co-founder of Heterodox University. His book The Righteous Mind, which describes the different moral frameworks that animate the left and the right, was a key influence on my work. But these…

The Impact: Deportation without representation

Nov 22, 2018 • 33 min

For Thanksgiving listening, I have an episode of The Impact, from my Weeds co-host Sarah Kliff. The Impact is a show about how policy shapes our lives. This season, Sarah and her team are focusing on the most exciting, innovative ideas at the state and…

Molly Ball on Nancy Pelosi’s future and Paul Ryan’s failure

Nov 19, 2018 • 65 min

The midterm elections are being interpreted almost entirely as a referendum on President Donald Trump. But it was also a referendum on Paul Ryan’s speakership, which drove Trump’s domestic policy agenda, and Nancy Pelosi’s opposition strategy. In its…

Whitney Phillips explains how Trump controls the media

Nov 15, 2018 • 112 min

Here’s a fun fact: The best training for understanding the president’s media strategy is to have studied internet trolls for years and years. Okay, maybe that fact wasn’t so fun. Maybe it’s incredibly depressing. At any rate, Whitney Phillips did exactly…

Ask Ezra Anything

Nov 12, 2018 • 98 min

You had questions. Smart, interesting questions. Questions about the zero-sum logic of markets, about whether compromise is possible or even desirable in today’s politics, about where the left goes too far, about local vs. national politics, about how to…

Presidents in crisis with Slow Burn’s Leon Neyfakh

Nov 8, 2018 • 86 min

Slow Burn is one of my favorite podcasts of the past few years. Its first season, on Watergate, relived the confusion, chaos, and strangeness of the Richard Nixon presidency’s collapse. Its second season, on Bill Clinton’s affair with Monica Lewinsky and…

Sandy Darity has a plan to close the wealth gap

Nov 5, 2018 • 52 min

Here’s something to consider: For families in which the lead earner has a college degree, the average white family has $180,500 in wealth. The average black family? $23,400. That’s a difference of almost $160,000 — $160,000 that could be used to send a…

How identity politics elected Donald Trump

Nov 1, 2018 • 99 min

Identity Crisis is the most important book written on the 2016 election. Based on reams of data covering virtually every controversy, theory, and explanation for the outcome, it settles many of the debates that have raged over the past two years. More…

Rep. Mark Sanford on losing the Republican Party to Donald Trump

Oct 29, 2018 • 66 min

Mark Sanford was elected to Congress in 1994, where he quickly established himself as one of the most conservative members of the chamber. In 2002, he was elected governor of South Carolina. He was, again, one of the most conservative elected officials in…

Doris Kearns Goodwin (live!) on how great presidents are made

Oct 25, 2018 • 84 min

If you’ve got a question, Doris Kearns Goodwin has a charming, insightful, well-told presidential anecdote for you. Actually, a couple of them. I interviewed the Pulitzer Prize-winning presidential historian live onstage for the release of her new book,…

What Nate Silver’s learned about forecasting elections

Oct 22, 2018 • 81 min

This close to an election, who do I want to hear from? Nate Silver, of course. I sat down with the FiveThirtyEight founder and math wizard to talk about how he builds his forecasting models, what they’re saying about 2018, how big the Democrats’…

Jay Rosen is pessimistic about the media. So am I.

Oct 18, 2018 • 84 min

This is a tough conversation. It was a tough one to hold, and it’s a tough one to publish. I’m a journalist. I’ve been a journalist for 15 years. I believe in journalism. But right now, I’m worried we’re failing. I’m worried we’re making American politics…

Why Bill Gates is worried

Oct 15, 2018 • 61 min

“To put it bluntly,” wrote Bill and Melinda Gates in their foundation’s annual Goalkeepers Report, “decades of stunning progress in the fight against poverty and disease may be on the verge of stalling. This is because the poorest parts of the world are…

Reihan Salam makes the case against open borders

Oct 11, 2018 • 92 min

In his new book, Melting Pot or Civil War: A Son of Immigrants Makes the Case Against Open Borders, Reihan Salam tries to do something difficult: build a pro-immigrant case for a more restrictive immigration system. This is an argument, interestingly,…

Jose Antonio Vargas on living undocumented in Trump’s America

Oct 8, 2018 • 89 min

Jose Antonio Vargas was born in the Philippines in 1981. When he was 12, his mother sent him to America, to live with family. When he was 16, he went to the DMV to get a driver’s license and found out his green card was forged; he was an undocumented…

Rebecca Traister: Women’s rage is transforming America

Oct 4, 2018 • 72 min

Why did Christine Blasey Ford have to smile and politely ask for breaks while Brett Kavanaugh could rage at the cameras and dismiss the hearings as a farce? The answer is in Rebecca Traister’s essential, perfectly timed new book, Good and Mad: The…

Patrick Deneen says liberalism has failed. Is he right?

Oct 1, 2018 • 62 min

Liberalism, write Patrick Deneen, “has been for modern Americans like water for a fish, an encompassing political ecosystem in which we have swum, unaware of its existence.” Deneen, a political theorist at Notre Dame, isn’t talking about the liberalism of…

Francis Fukuyama’s case against identity politics

Sep 27, 2018 • 94 min

Is all politics identity politics? And if so, then what does it mean to condemn identity politics in the first place? That’s the subject of my discussion with Stanford political scientist Francis Fukuyama. In his new book, Identity: The Demand for Dignity…

Carol Anderson on the myth of American democracy

Sep 24, 2018 • 57 min

The president of the United States was the runner-up in the popular vote. The majority in the US Senate got fewer votes than the minority. And even if Democrats win a hefty majority of the vote in 2018’s House elections, Republicans, due to gerrymandering…

Martha C. Nussbaum on how fear deforms our politics

Sep 17, 2018 • 57 min

In her new book Monarchy of Fear, famed philosopher Martha C. Nussbaum identifies fear as the oldest and deepest of our emotions. Fear takes hold in our earliest infancy, when we can experience need but we can’t act. And it lurks underneath our psyches,…

David French on “The Great White Culture War”

Sep 10, 2018 • 95 min

David French is a senior writer for National Review and one of the conservatives I read most closely. About a month ago, he published an interesting column responding to some things I had said, and to the broader currents cutting through our politics.…

Your attention is being hijacked. Chris Bailey can help.

Sep 4, 2018 • 67 min

Life is the sum focus of what you pay attention to. You hear that a lot. But look at the verb there: “pay” attention to. As if attention is something we consciously spend out. As if it’s something we control. But do we? Not these days. There’s a war on…

Anand Giridharadas on the elite charade of changing the world

Aug 30, 2018 • 95 min

“How can there be anything wrong with trying to do good?” asks Anand Giridharadas in his new book, Winners Take All. “The answer may be: when the good is an accomplice to even greater, if more invisible, harm.” Giridharadas has done his time in elite…

I build a world with fantasy master N.K. Jemisin

Aug 27, 2018 • 85 min

I’m just going to say it. This may be the most fun I’ve ever had on a podcast. Nora Jemisin — better known by her pen name, N.K. Jemisin — just won the Hugo Award for best novel for the third year in a row. No one had ever done that before. Jemisin is…

Reup: Zephyr Teachout vs. Corruption

Aug 24, 2018 • 94 min

Zephyr Teachout is a law professor at Fordham University and one of the nation’s foremost experts on political corruption. She’s also, after a glowing New York Times endorsement this week, arguably the frontrunner in the race to replace Eric Schneiderman…

Is our economy totally screwed? Andrew Yang and I debate.

Aug 20, 2018 • 74 min

“The future without jobs will come to resemble either the cultivated benevolence of Star Trek or the desperate scramble for resources of Mad Max,” writes Andrew Yang. Well then. Yang is the founder of Venture for America, the author of The War on Normal…

Chef Marcus Samuelsson on immigration, creativity, and Anthony Bourdain

Aug 13, 2018 • 74 min

Marcus Samuelsson is the Michelin-starred chef behind Harlem’s The Red Rooster an award-winning cookbook author,the winner of the first season of Top Chef: Masters, ;nd the host of No Passport Required, a new food and travel show from Eater and PBS.…

Why online politics gets so extreme so fast

Aug 6, 2018 • 68 min

During the 2016 campaign, Zeynep Tufekci was watching videos of Donald Trump rallies on YouTube. But then, she writes, she “noticed something peculiar. YouTube started to recommend and ‘autoplay’ videos for me that featured white supremacist rants,…

Taking Trump’s corruption seriously

Aug 2, 2018 • 67 min

The question of whether President Trump colluded with Russia during the 2016 election has consumed Washington since the Justice Department appointed Robert Mueller special counsel in March 2017. But there’s another question worth considering: the…

The surprising story of how American politics polarized

Jul 30, 2018 • 67 min

We talk a lot on this podcast about the epic levels of political polarization and how much of our ongoing breakdown they explain. But what was American politics like before it was polarized? And what got us from there to here? Sam Rosenfeld is a political…

The most important idea for understanding American politics in 2018

Jul 23, 2018 • 79 min

America is changing. A majority of infants are, for the first time in US history, nonwhite — and the rest of the population is expected to follow suit in the coming decades. The number of religiously affiliated Americans is at a record low, and the share…

What economists and politicians get wrong about trade

Jul 19, 2018 • 60 min

For decades, Harvard’s Dani Rodrik has been a lonely voice in the economics profession warning that the academics were getting this one wrong. Trade is not an unalloyed good; “globalization would deepen societal divisions, exacerbate distributional…

How to disagree better

Jul 16, 2018 • 100 min

Arthur Brooks is the president of the American Enterprise Institute, one of Washington’s most respected and powerful conservative think tanks. He’s also launching a new podcast, The Arthur Brooks Show, with Vox Media on the art and practice of…

Jaron Lanier’s case for deleting social media right now

Jul 9, 2018 • 82 min

During my book leave, I took a social media sabbatical. No reading Facebook. No reading Twitter. And you know what? It was great. I felt able to think more clearly, and listen more closely, than had been true in years. I’m not sure that was all because of…

The most clarifying conversation I’ve had about Trump and Russia (part 2)

Jul 5, 2018 • 71 min

What have we actually learned about Donald Trump’s ties to Russia, and his administration’s efforts to cover those ties up? What role did Russia really play in the 2016 election? And what are special counsel Robert Mueller’s possible endgames — what can…

The Supreme Court vs. Democracy

Jul 2, 2018 • 69 min

If 75,000 votes in Michigan, Wisconsin, and Pennsylvania had tipped the other way, President Hillary Clinton would’ve named both Antonin Scalia and Anthony Kennedy’s replacements. But they didn’t. And now Donald Trump, in less than two years, will fill as…

Eric Garcetti on the lessons of Los Angeles

Jun 25, 2018 • 66 min

There’s been a lot of talk about the coming of majority-minority America — the point, projected for roughly 2045, when there will no longer be any racial or ethnic group that makes up a majority of the United States. But there are plenty of places in…

What Ellen Pao saw coming

Jun 18, 2018 • 57 min

Ellen Pao had a rough 2015. She lost her high-profile gender discrimination lawsuit against Kleiner Perkins, one of Silicon Valley’s biggest and most powerful venture capital firms. She also stepped down as CEO of Reddit after a tumultuous tenure in which…

The Green Pill

Jun 11, 2018 • 63 min

What accounts for the way most of us eat? What’s the ideology, the theory, behind our diets? And what happens when you stop believing in it? Over the past decade, I’ve been on a fitful journey toward veganism. At least, that’s the way I normally say it.…

How Jane Mayer exposed Eric Schneiderman, Bush’s torture program, and the Kochs

Jun 4, 2018 • 76 min

On May 7, Jane Mayer and Ronan Farrow published a story in the New Yorker detailing New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman’s alleged history of sexually and psychologically terrorizing the women he dated. Hours later, Schneiderman stepped down.…

Political power and the racial wealth gap

May 28, 2018 • 82 min

The racial wealth gap is where past injustice compounds into present inequality. When I asked Ta-Nehisi Coates, on this show, what would prove to him that white supremacy was over in this country, he pointed to the closing of the racial wealth gap. The…

Tyler Cowen on the painful end of American complacency

May 21, 2018 • 89 min

Headlining any conversation with Tyler Cowen is difficult. This one, for instance, covers how to write a book, single-payer health care, political correctness, loneliness, the expanding Overton window, the tech backlash, technological innovation, the case…

A mind-expanding conversation with Michael Pollan

May 14, 2018 • 85 min

This is perhaps the most literal title I’ve given a conversation on this podcast. This is a discussion about how to expand your mind — how to expand the connections it makes, the experiences it’s open to, the sensory information it absorbs. And, more than…

Optimism about America

May 7, 2018 • 83 min

In a February 2017 column, David Brooks wrote about “the Fallows Question, which I unfurl at dinner parties: If you could move to the place on earth where history is most importantly being made right now, where would you go?” The Fallows question is based…

The New York Times’s lead Clinton reporter reflects on her coverage

May 3, 2018 • 60 min

It’s time to talk about the damn emails — and the way the media covered them. Amy Chozick reported on Hillary Clinton for a decade. She was there as Clinton’s campaign fell short in the 2008 Democratic primaries. And as the New York Times’s lead reporter…

The age of “mega-identity” politics

Apr 30, 2018 • 79 min

Yes, identity politics is breaking our country. But it’s not identity politics as we’re used to thinking about it. In Uncivil Agreement: How Politics Became Our Identity, Lilliana Mason traces the construction of our partisan “mega-identities”: identities…

Is American democracy really in decline? A debate.

Apr 23, 2018 • 115 min

Yascha Mounk’s new book, The People vs. Democracy: Why Our Freedom Is in Danger and How to Save It, is perhaps the year’s scariest read. In it, Mounk argues that “liberal democracy, the unique mix of individual rights and popular rule that has long…

Special episode: The Syrian conflict, explained by a UN diplomat who saw it start

Apr 20, 2018 • 57 min

Many of you will remember the interview I did with Grant Gordon, who works on humanitarian policy innovation at the International Rescue Committee. That conversation received a huge response — some of you even wrote in to say it had changed your career…

Is modern society making us depressed?

Apr 16, 2018 • 93 min

“What if depression is, in fact, a form of grief — for our own lives not being as they should?” asks Johann Hari. “What if it is a form of grief for the connections we have lost yet still need?” In his new book, Lost Connections, Hari advances an argument…

Carol Anderson on White Rage and Donald Trump

Apr 12, 2018 • 96 min

Carol Anderson is a professor of African-American studies at Emory University and the author of White Rage: The Unspoken Truth of Our Racial Divide. Anderson’s book emerged from a viral op-ed she wrote for the Washington Post in 2014, amid the backlash to…

The Sam Harris Debate

Apr 9, 2018 • 134 min

There’s a lot of backstory to this podcast, most of which is covered in this piece. The short version is that Sam Harris, the host of the Waking Up podcast, and I have been going back and forth over an interview Harris did with The Bell Curve author…

Mark Zuckerberg on Facebook’s hardest year, and what comes next

Apr 2, 2018 • 51 min

It’s been a tough year for Facebook. The social networking juggernaut found itself engulfed by controversies over fake news, electoral interference, privacy violations, and a broad backlash to smartphone addiction. Wall Street has noticed: the company has…

Is Mitch Landrieu the “White, Southern Anti-Trump”?

Mar 26, 2018 • 85 min

Mitch Landrieu is the white mayor of New Orleans, and he wants America to talk about race. Landrieu is the author of the new book, In The Shadow of Statues: A White Southerner Confronts History. The statues he refers to are Confederate war memorials, four…

Melinda Gates (live!) on stopping climate change, ending malaria, and the problems money can’t solve

Mar 19, 2018 • 55 min

Melinda Gates is the co-founder and co-chair of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, the largest private foundation in the United States. With more than $40 billion in assets, the Gates Foundation works on a dizzying array of issues, from eradicating…

A better conversation on guns

Mar 12, 2018 • 54 min

Want to know why we can’t make any progress on the guns debate? Because this isn’t a debate over policy. It’s a debate over identity. After last month’s shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School, I remembered a book Evan Osnos recommended on this…

This isn’t Joe Kennedy’s grandfather’s Democratic Party, and he knows it

Mar 5, 2018 • 67 min

When you’re sitting in front of Rep. Joe Kennedy, it’s clear that you’re sitting in front of a Kennedy. The face, the jawline — it’s all uncannily familiar. But Kennedy, the grandson of Robert F. Kennedy, is rising in a changed Democratic Party. In the…

Amy Chua on how tribalism is tearing America apart

Feb 26, 2018 • 64 min

Human beings are tribal creatures, particularly when they feel threatened. And the reality of living in America in 2018, at a time of massive demographic change and social upheaval, is that we all feel threatened, and so we are all becoming more tribal.…

How technology brings out the worst in us, with Tristan Harris

Feb 19, 2018 • 74 min

In 2011, Tristan Harris’s company, Apture, was acquired by Google. Inside Google, he became unnerved by how the company worked. There was all this energy going into making the products better, more addicting, more delightful. But what if all that made the…

Steven Pinker: enlightenment values made this the best moment in human history

Feb 12, 2018 • 71 min

Does the daily news feel depressing? Does the world feel grim? It’s not, says Harvard professor Steven Pinker. This is, in fact, the best moment in human history — there’s less war, less violence, less famine, less poverty, than there ever has been.…

Why my politics are bad with Bhaskar Sunkara

Feb 5, 2018 • 76 min

Bhaskar Sunkara is the founder and publisher of Jacobin, a journal of “socialist perspectives on politics, economics, and culture.” He launched the publication in 2011 when he was an undergraduate at George Washington University. Today, its print edition…

How Democracies Die

Jan 29, 2018 • 77 min

The year is young, but Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt’s How Democracies Die is going to be one of its most important books. It will be read as a commentary on Donald Trump, which is fair enough, because the book is, in part, a commentary on Donald…

How to oppose Trump without becoming more like him

Jan 22, 2018 • 75 min

Krista Tippett is the host of the award-winning radio show and podcast On Being. In 2014, she was awarded the National Humanities Medal by President Barack Obama. For good reason. She’s created, over decades, something rare in American life: spaces where…

You will love this conversation with Jaron Lanier, but I can’t describe it

Jan 15, 2018 • 101 min

Oftentimes it’s easy for me to describe these conversations. This one is on Trump and Russia. That one is on health care. But not this time. I want you to listen to this conversation, because Jaron Lanier is brilliant and his mind is unusual and spending…

The most clarifying conversation I’ve had on Trump and Russia

Jan 8, 2018 • 78 min

What really happened between the Trump campaign and the Russian government? The investigation into that question has rocked American politics. The FBI director was fired over it. The attorney general might get fired over it. The president’s former…

Pod Save America’s Jon Favreau on Trump’s first year, the GOP’s “rot,” and the left’s failures

Jan 2, 2018 • 64 min

Jon Favreau was President Obama’s chief speechwriter. In those days, he was a frequent critic of the political media, frustrated, as many in the Obama administration were, with its focus on conflict, on ephemera, on appearing even-handed even when reality…

The inside story of Doug Jones’s win in Alabama

Dec 25, 2017 • 65 min

“The day before the Washington Post story came out, we were behind by one point, 46 to 45,” says Joe Trippi. “And the day before the election, we were ahead in our own survey by two points. We ended up winning by 1.8.” This, Trippi says, was the reality…

What life is like in North Korea

Dec 18, 2017 • 52 min

The most important story in the world right now is how real the chance of war with North Korea is — and how cataclysmic such a war would be. Part of the reason the risk of war is so real is that our understanding of North Korea is so sparse. “The Hermit…

“An orgy of serious policy discussion” with Paul Krugman

Dec 11, 2017 • 98 min

On October 24, 2016, in the final days of the presidential election, Paul Krugman, the Nobel-prize winning economist and New York Times columnist, tweeted, “When this election is finally over, I’m planning to celebrate with an orgy of…serious policy…

The case for impeachment

Dec 4, 2017 • 72 min

I have grown obsessed with a seemingly simple question: Does the American political system have a remedy if we elect the wrong person to be president? There are clear answers if we elect a criminal or if the president falls into a coma. But what if we…

What Buddhism got right about the human brain

Nov 27, 2017 • 80 min

I wanted to take a post-Thanksgiving break from politics and current events this week to talk to Robert Wright. He’s written some of the best books on religion and evolutionary psychology, including Non-Zero and The Evolution of God. His latest book is…

Rebecca Traister on #MeToo, female rage, and Anita Hill’s legacy

Nov 20, 2017 • 91 min

We’re living through an upheaval. The #MeToo moment has engulfed some of the most powerful men in politics, entertainment, and media. It has also forced a national reckoning with the reality of America’s sexual and workplace cultures — how often they…

Ai-jen Poo: the future of work isn’t robots. It’s caring humans.

Nov 13, 2017 • 67 min

When we talk about the future of work, we usually focus on artificial intelligence, robotics, driverless cars. The future of work, we’re told, is a future where humans cease to be necessary. Ai-jen Poo wants to refocus that conversation. When we think…

Evan Osnos on the North Korea crisis, Trump’s mental health, and China’s rise

Nov 6, 2017 • 87 min

Evan Osnos is the author of the National Book Award-winning The Age of Ambition: Chasing Fortune, Truth, and Faith in the New China, as well as a staff writer at the New Yorker. And he’s recently back from a trip to North Korea, where he learned how…

Why politics needs more conflict, not less

Oct 30, 2017 • 78 min

Here’s a counterintuitive thought: maybe Congress in particular, and politics in general, has too little conflict, not too much. That’s James Wallner’s argument, and it’s more persuasive than you might think. Wallner is a political scientist who became a…

Why the Weinstein scandal gives Tig Notaro hope about Hollywood

Oct 23, 2017 • 46 min

Tig Notaro dropped out of high school. She drifted between odd jobs for a long time and eventually found her way to Colorado, where she discovered open mic nights and a talent for stand-up comedy. Stand-up brought discipline to her life. But fame eluded…

What happens when human beings take control of their own evolution?

Oct 16, 2017 • 67 min

Over the past decade, scientists have developed what was once just the subject of dystopian fiction: gene editing technology. It’s known as CRISPR. Jennifer Doudna, a professor of molecular and cell biology and chemistry at the University of California…

Ta-Nehisi Coates is not here to comfort you

Oct 9, 2017 • 73 min

“It’s important to remember the inconsequence of one’s talent and hard work and the incredible and unmatched sway of luck and fate,” writes Ta-Nehisi Coates in his new book, We Were Eight Years in Power. Coates’s view of his career flows from his view of…

How the Republican Party created Donald Trump

Oct 2, 2017 • 111 min

Thomas Mann and Norman Ornstein have studied American politics for more than three decades. They are the town’s go-to experts on the workings of Congress. In 2012, they rocked Washington when they published It’s Even Worse Than It Looks, a book that…

Reihan Salam wants to remake the Republican Party — again

Sep 25, 2017 • 81 min

In 2008, Reihan Salam co-wrote Grand New Party: How Republicans Can Win the Working Class and Save the American Dream with his frequent collaborator Ross Douthat. After nearly eight years of President Bush, Salam wanted to remake the Republican Party to…

David Remnick on journalism in the Trump era and why he hires obsessives

Sep 19, 2017 • 88 min

For the past 19 years, David Remnick has been the editor of the New Yorker, perhaps the greatest magazine in the English language. Under his leadership, the New Yorker has received 149 nominations for National Magazine Awards and won 37. It’s also,…

What Hillary Clinton really thinks

Sep 12, 2017 • 60 min

On page 239 of What Happened, Hillary Clinton reveals that she almost ran a very different campaign in 2016. Before announcing for president, she read Peter Barnes’s book With Liberty and Dividends for All, and became fascinated by the idea of using…

Dan Rather thought he’d seen it all. But then came President Trump.

Sep 5, 2017 • 71 min

Dan Rather has covered the most momentous events of the modern era. He was in Dallas, Texas, during President Kennedy’s assassination. He was in Vietnam, embedded with US troops, in 1965 and 1966. He reported on Watergate, stood at the Berlin Wall as it…

From 4Chan to Charlottesville: where the alt-right came from, and where it’s going

Aug 29, 2017 • 89 min

Angela Nagle spent the better part of the past decade in the darkest corners of the internet, learning how online subcultures emerge and thrive on forums like 4chan and Tumblr. The result is her fantastic new book, Kill All the Normies: Online Culture…

Why prosecutors, not cops, are the keys to criminal justice reform

Aug 22, 2017 • 79 min

Angela J. Davis is the former director of the DC public defender service, a professor of law at American University, and editor of a remarkable new book titled Policing the Black Man, which pulls together deeply researched essays on virtually every aspect…

Chris Hayes on whether Trump should be removed from office

Aug 15, 2017 • 69 min

In the aftermath of Trump’s bizarre, dangerous North Korea tweets, I’ve been fixated on a question: Should Trump be removed from office? The mechanisms we have for curbing a dangerous presidency are limited, at least as we normally think about them.…

Sen. Michael Bennet on why this is a dismal, sociopathic era in Congress

Aug 8, 2017 • 81 min

Michael Bennet is an accidental senator. He was unexpectedly appointed to fill an open seat after Ken Salazar joined the Obama administration. He had never run for elected office before, or served in a legislative body. Perhaps that’s why he’s always, in…

What’s scary isn’t Trump’s illiberalism but America’s acceptance of it

Aug 1, 2017 • 67 min

Yascha Mounk is a lecturer at Harvard, a columnist at Slate, and the host of The Good Fight podcast. He’s also an expert on how democracies backslide into illiberalism — which was the topic of our first conversation on this podcast. But when Mounk and I…

Julia Galef on how to argue better and change your mind more

Jul 25, 2017 • 94 min

At least in politics, this is an era of awful arguments. Arguments made in bad faith. Arguments in which no one, on either side, is willing to change their mind. Arguments where the points being made do not describe, or influence, the positions being…

Dr. Nneka Jones Tapia, the first psychologist to run a jail

Jul 18, 2017 • 71 min

Cook County Sheriff Thomas Dart calls the 8,000-person Cook County Jail the largest mental health institution in the country. Thirty percent of its inmates have diagnosed mental health issues, and the number with undiagnosed conditions is thought to push…

Eddie Izzard on World War I, cake or death, and marathoning

Jul 11, 2017 • 71 min

Now that I’ve gotten Eddie Izzard to re-derive his famed “cake or death?” routine in real time, I’m ending this podcast. Always good to go out on top. Okay, maybe I won’t actually end it. But this episode was a thrill to do. Eddie Izzard has long been one…

Avik Roy and Ezra debate the Senate GOP’s health bill

Jul 3, 2017 • 89 min

According to the Congressional Budget Office, the Senate GOP’s health care bill — officially known as the Better Care Reconciliation Act — will lead to 22 million fewer people with health insurance and plans with such high deductibles that low-income…

danah boyd on why fake news is so easy to believe

Jun 27, 2017 • 90 min

danah boyd is an anthropologist and computer scientist who studies the way people actually use technology. Not the way we wish we used technology, or the way we hope we will use technology, but the way we actually use it.“Technology,” she says, “is made…

Al Franken on learning to be a politician

Jun 20, 2017 • 58 min

Sen. Al Franken’s new book, Al Franken, Giant of the Senate, is the rare politician memoir that’s actually interesting. And note that I said interesting, not funny (though it is also funny).Most books by politicians are about how they’re not really…

Zephyr Teachout on suing Trump, fighting corruption, and breaking monopolies

Jun 13, 2017 • 94 min

Zephyr Teachout is a law professor at Fordham University, the author of Corruption in America, one of the lead lawyers in the emoluments case that’s been brought against Donald Trump, and a former gubernatorial and congressional candidate. Which is all to…

Masha Gessen offers a plausible Trump-Russia theory

Jun 6, 2017 • 68 min

Masha Gessen is a Russian-American journalist and the author of, among other books, The Man Without a Face: The Unlikely Rise of Vladimir Putin. Since the election, she has been analyzing Donald Trump through the lens of Russian politics and personalities…

Kwame Anthony Appiah on cosmopolitanism

May 30, 2017 • 69 min

Few words are as reviled in American politics as “cosmopolitan.” The term invokes sneering, urban, elite condescension. It’s those smug cosmopolitans who led to Donald Trump’s election. It’s those rootless cosmopolitans who’re shipping jobs overseas with…

Yascha Mounk: Is Trump’s incompetence saving us from his illiberalism?

May 23, 2017 • 96 min

Yascha Mounk is a Lecturer on Government at Harvard University, a Fellow in the Political Reform Program at New America, and host of the podcast, The Good Fight. He’s also the author of some of the scariest political science research I’ve seen in a long…

Bryan Stevenson on why the opposite of poverty isn’t wealth, but justice

May 16, 2017 • 95 min

Bryan Stevenson is the founder and executive director of the Equal Justice Initiative. He and his staff have won reversals, relief, or release for more than 115 wrongly convicted prisoners on death row. He’s the author of the power book Just Mercy, and a…

Death, Sex, and Money’s Anna Sale on bringing empathy to politics

May 9, 2017 • 55 min

There’s much talk of “empathy” in today’s politics, but it’s a cramped, weaponized form of empathy — an empathy designed to force us to grudgingly tolerate each other, or an empathy used to explain away the reasons we hurt each other.You can glimpse…

Cory Booker returns, live, to talk trust, Trump, and basic incomes

May 4, 2017 • 73 min

Senator Cory Booker is back! In this special live episode of The Ezra Klein Show — taped at Vox Conversations — Booker and I dig into America’s crisis of trust. Faith in both political figures and political institutions has plummeted in recent decades,…

VC Bill Gurley on transforming health care

May 2, 2017 • 75 min

Washington has been gripped of late by the world’s most depressing, least imaginative, debate over health care. The question, as it stands, is whether Obamacare will survive (while being mildly, but persistently, sabotaged by the Trump administration), or…

Elizabeth Warren on what Barack Obama got wrong

Apr 25, 2017 • 49 min

Elizabeth Warren is the founder of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, the senior senator from Massachusetts, and the author of the new book, “This Fight Is Our Fight: The Battle to Save America’s Middle Class.”You might have heard of her.Warren is…

Cal Newport on doing Deep Work and escaping social media

Apr 18, 2017 • 85 min

I was asked recently to name a book that changed my life. The book I chose was Cal Newport’s “Deep Work,” and for the most literal of reasons: it’s changed how I lived my life. Particularly, it’s led me to stop scheduling morning meetings, and to preserve…

G. Willow Wilson on religion, comics, and modern myths

Apr 11, 2017 • 78 min

This is a podcast about topics we don’t always cover on this show. Religion. Spirituality. Gender roles. Traditionalist societies. Comic books.G. Willow Wilson is the author of The Butterfly Mosque, Alif the Unseen, and the Hugo award winning comic book,…

Chris Hayes on the crisis of elites and the politics of order

Apr 4, 2017 • 105 min

I could describe this podcast, and I will. But the tl;dr is this is one of my favorite conversations so far, and you’re going to enjoy it. So just go listen. Chris Hayes is, of course, the host of the MSNBC primetime show, “All In.” He’s also the author…

Tyler Cowen explains it all

Mar 28, 2017 • 96 min

I have never come across a mind quite like Tyler Cowen’s. The George Mason economist, and Marginal Revolution blogger, has an interesting opinion on, well, everything. He’s a genuine polymath who can talk knowledgeably about more subjects than I even know…

Molly Ball on whether facts matter in politics

Mar 21, 2017 • 79 min

You may remember the Atlantic’s Molly Ball from the fantastic pre-election conversation we had on this podcast. She’s back this week to talk about an issue I’ve become more and more obsessed with — does factual argument matter in American politics? Or is…

Denis McDonough on how to run the White House

Mar 14, 2017 • 84 min

How do you actually run a White House? What is the president’s actual job? What is the chief of staff’s role? What happens if you screw up? These are questions I’ve been reflecting on rather a lot lately, for obvious reasons. And so I asked Denis…

Cecile Richards on Planned Parenthood, labor organizing, and the Supreme Court

Mar 7, 2017 • 77 min

Before Cecile Richards was president of Planned Parenthood, she was a labor organizer working with garment workers in El Paso, Texas. The experience taught her a key principle of political change: people do things for their reasons, not your reasons.In…

Tim Ferriss on suffering, psychedelics, and spirituality

Mar 2, 2017 • 114 min

Tim Ferriss is the author of the 4-Hour Workweek, as well as the new book, Tools of Titans. He’s also the host of The Tim Ferriss Show, which is one of my favorite podcasts, and an inspiration for this show. Tim is a relentless optimizer, and on his…

Yuval Harari, author of “Sapiens,” on AI, religion, and 60-day meditation retreats

Feb 28, 2017 • 72 min

Yuval Noah Harari’s first book, “Sapiens,” was an international sensation. The Israeli historian’s mind-bending tour through the trump of Homo sapiens is a favorite of, among others, Bill Gates, Mark Zuckerberg, and Barack Obama. His new book, Homo Deus,…

Elizabeth Drew covered Watergate. Here’s what she thinks of Trump.

Feb 21, 2017 • 74 min

Elizabeth Drew is the author of Washington Journal, one of my favorite books about Watergate. Drew covered the story as a reporter for the New Yorker, and the book emerges from the real-time, journalistic diary she kept amidst the chaos. As such, it does…

Avik Roy on why conservatives need to embrace diversity

Feb 14, 2017 • 94 min

Avik Roy advised Mitt Romney’s 2012 campaign on health care, ran the policy shop on Rick Perry’s 2016 campaign, and then worked for Marco Rubio after Perry dropped out. So Roy’s Republican credentials are pretty solid. But he’s aghast at the direction his…

Kara Swisher gives a master class on reporting and interviewing

Feb 7, 2017 • 100 min

Before I launched this podcast, I asked Kara Swisher to coffee. Swisher founded the technology news site Recode, hosts the excellent Recode Decode podcast, and runs a legendary conference series. She is among the best interviewers working today. Some of…

David Miliband explains the global refugee crisis

Feb 2, 2017 • 52 min

Donald Trump’s executive order temporarily banning Muslim refugees from Iraq, Iran, Libya, Somalia, Sudan, and Yemen, and indefinitely banning them from Syria, doesn’t come in a vacuum. The world is currently experience the worst refugee crisis since…

Jennifer Lawless on why you — yes, you — should run for office

Jan 31, 2017 • 66 min

There are 500,000 elected positions in the United States. I’ll say that again: 500,000. And that’s no accident. “Our political system is built on the premise that running for office is something that a broad group of citizens should want to do,” writes…

JD Vance: the reluctant interpreter of Trumpism

Jan 24, 2017 • 105 min

J.D. Vance’s Hillbilly Elegy has been adopted as the book that explains Trumpism. It’s the book that both Senator Mitch McConnell and Senator Rob Portman recommended as their favorite of 2016. It’s a book Keith Ellison, the frontrunner to lead the DNC,…

Keith Ellison: The Democratic National Committee has become the Democratic Presidential Committee, and that needs to end

Jan 17, 2017 • 66 min

Congressman Keith Ellison is the frontrunner to lead the Democratic National Committee in the Trump era. Ellison has a fascinating backstory: he’s the first Muslim elected to the US Congress, and he was the second member of Congress to endorse Bernie…

Elizabeth Kolbert: We have locked in centuries of climate change

Jan 10, 2017 • 84 min

Elizabeth Kolbert covers climate change for the New Yorker. She’s the Pulitzer prize-winning author of The Sixth Extinction. And she recently wrote a paragraph I can’t stop thinking about. “The problem with global warming—and the reason it continues to…

Sarah Kliff and Ezra Interview Obama About Obamacare

Jan 6, 2017 • 78 min

Two weeks before he leaves office, President Obama sits down for a lengthy conversation about the lessons of the Affordable Care Act and the law’s uncertain future. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

You Ask, Ezra Answers

Jan 3, 2017 • 98 min

At long last, here’s the Ask Ezra Anything episode. You sent in great questions, and I answered as many as I could. To keep me honest — and to make sure I didn’t just talk to myself for two hours — I invited friend-of-the-show Grant Gordon back to the…

Evelyn Farkas explains the crisis in Syria and the threat of Russia

Dec 27, 2016 • 83 min

From 2012 to 2015, Evelyn Farkas served as Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for Russia, Ukraine, and Eurasia, where she was responsible for policy toward Russia, the Black Sea, the Balkans, and Caucasus regions and conventional arms control.Farkas is…

Tim Wu’s interesting, unusual, fascinating life

Dec 20, 2016 • 94 min

Columbia law professor Tim Wu makes me feel boring and underaccomplished. He’s been a Supreme Court clerk, a Silicon Valley startup employee, a bestselling author, and a star academic. He coined the term “network neutrality,” wrote the superb book The…

Ta-Nehisi Coates: “There’s not gonna be a happy ending to this story”

Dec 14, 2016 • 106 min

Ta-Nehisi Coates is an author at the Atlantic. His book, Between the World and Me, won the National Book Award, and was spoofed on SNL. He’s writing the (awesome) Black Panther series for Marvel. He’s a certified MacArthur Genius. And he just released a…

Stripe CEO Patrick Collison on management, rationalism, and the enlightenment

Dec 6, 2016 • 92 min

Patrick Collison is the 28-year-old CEO of Stripe, the online payments company that was just valued at $9 billion.Haven’t heard of Stripe? You’ve probably used it. Last year, 40 percent of people who bought something online used Stripe’s payment systems.…

Award-winning chef José Andrés on cooking, creativity, and learning from the best

Nov 29, 2016 • 92 min

José Andrés isn’t just a chef. He’s a force. All that talk of how DC is now a hot dining scene? Andrés deserves more than a bit of the credit. He’s popularized Spanish tapas through Jaleo, brought El Bulli-style molecular gastronomy to America through…

Heather McGhee returns to talk Trump, race, and empathy

Nov 22, 2016 • 65 min

There are few episodes of this show that people loved as much as my conversation with Heather McGhee, president of the think tank Demos. Our first discussion focused on race, class, populism, and the sometimes toxic ways the three interact. It’s a topic I…

Ron Brownstein: Clinton didn’t lose because of the white working class

Nov 15, 2016 • 69 min

Why did Hillary Clinton lose the election? Why did Donald Trump win it? And why was the polling so completely wrong?No one digs deeper into the demographics, polls, and trends of modern American politics than the Atlantic’s Ron Brownstein. Though he…

David Frum on the 2016 election, and the long decline of the GOP

Nov 6, 2016 • 97 min

We’re bringing the Ezra Klein Show to you a little early this week because, well, there’s an election coming in a few days. And we wanted to talk about it. The 2016 election is the product of profound failures on the part of different institutions in…

Deborah Tannen on gendered speech, Hillary Clinton, Donald Trump, and you

Nov 1, 2016 • 95 min

To understand the 2012 election, you had to ask a political scientist. To understand the 2016 election, you need to call a linguist.At least, I did. Deborah Tannen is a Georgetown University linguist who’s done pioneering work in how men and women’s…

Joseph Stiglitz on broken markets, bad trade deals, and basic incomes

Oct 25, 2016 • 71 min

This week’s guest is a Nobel Prize winner. We like to sprinkle those in every so often. Joseph Stiglitz revolutionized how economists understood market failures (hence that prize), served as chief economist at The World Bank, led the Council of Economic…

Let’s talk about Hillary Clinton’s policy ideas, with Jonathan Cohn

Oct 18, 2016 • 75 min

The overwhelming focus of this election has been Donald Trump — the things he does, says, tweets. But the next president is likely to be Hillary Clinton. And we’ve put a lot less effort into understanding her lengthy, detailed agenda for the country.So I…

Francis Fukuyama on whether America’s democracy is decaying

Oct 11, 2016 • 73 min

Francis Fukuyama is a political scientist, a public intellectual, and progenitor of the famed “End of History” thesis. But his recent work is his most important yet. Over two volumes, he’s been studying how societies become safe, pluralistic liberal…

Tyler Cowen interviews Ezra Klein about politics, media, and more

Oct 6, 2016 • 78 min

A number of you have asked that we turn the tables and have someone interview me for the show. So when Tyler Cowen — economist at George Mason University, blogger at Marginal Revolution, and generalized genius — invited me on his podcast Conversations…

The best conversation I’ve had about the election, with Molly Ball

Oct 4, 2016 • 74 min

This election season has left pretty much everything I thought I knew about politics in doubt. Both parties nominated unpopular candidates, even when they had popular alternatives. One party’s nominee isn’t really running any ads, and has barely bothered…

HHS Secretary Sylvia Matthews Burwell on running Obamacare, Medicare, and Medicaid

Sep 27, 2016 • 47 min

This week, I’ve turned over the mic to The Weeds’ Sarah Kliff. She went to Capitol Hill to interview HHS Secretary Sylvia Burwell about all things healthcare. They talked about how to pay doctors to provide better care, the current state of the Obamacare…

Dr. Leana Wen on why the opposite of poverty is health

Sep 20, 2016 • 102 min

There are a couple of ideas that drive how I see policy and politics. One of them is that most of what drives health outcomes has nothing to do with what happens in doctor’s offices. Another is that we overestimate the importance of the president national…

Arlie Hochschild on how America feels to Trump supporters

Sep 13, 2016 • 61 min

I’ve been reading sociologist Arlie Hochschild’s writing for about a decade now. Her immersive projects have revolutionized how we understand labor, gender equity, and work-life balance. But her latest book, Strangers In Their Own Land: Anger and Mourning…

Stewart Butterfield on creating Slack, learning from games, and finding your online identity

Sep 6, 2016 • 96 min

If you came by the Vox office, you would find it oddly quiet. That’s not because we don’t like each other, or because we’re not social, or because we don’t have anything to say. It’s because almost all our communication happens silently, digitally, in…

W. Kamau Bell on the lessons of parenthood, Twitter, and fame

Aug 30, 2016 • 93 min

W. Kamau Bell is a comedian and a writer. But you probably know him from one of his podcasts(Denzel Washington Is The Greatest Actor Of All Time Period and Politically Re-Active) or his CNN show The United Shades of America.In this conversation, Bell and…

Malcolm Gladwell on the danger of joining consensus opinions

Aug 23, 2016 • 95 min

Malcolm Gladwell needs no introduction (though if you didn’t know the famed author has launched a podcast, you should — it’s called Revisionist History, and it’s great.).Gladwell’s work has become so iconic, so known, that it’s become easy to take it for…

Grant Gordon on studying the world’s worst conflicts

Aug 16, 2016 • 91 min

Grant Gordon is a political scientist and policymaker who specializes in humanitarian intervention. He’s a fellow at the Stanford Center on International Conflict and Negotiation, and has worked on humanitarian and development policy for the United…

Melissa Bell on starting Vox, managing media, and connecting newsrooms

Aug 9, 2016 • 85 min

I first started working with Melissa Bell at the Washington Post. I was trying to launch a new product — Wonkblog — and I needed some design work done. Melissa wasn’t a designer. She wasn’t a coder. She didn’t manage designers or coders. She was, rather,…

Atul Gawande on surgery, writing, Obamacare, and indie music

Aug 2, 2016 • 99 min

I’ve wanted to do this interview for a long, long time.Atul Gawande is a surgeon at Brigham and Women’s Hospital. He’s a professor in the Department of Health Policy and Management at the Harvard School of Public Health. He is executive director of…

Trevor Noah, host of The Daily Show

Jul 26, 2016 • 78 min

This is a serious conversation with a very funny man.Trevor Noah is the host of Comedy Central’s the Daily Show. He’s also a stand-up comic who grew up in apartheid South Africa, the son of a black mother and a white father. That was illegal in…

Conservative intellectual Yuval Levin on how the Republican Party lost its way

Jul 19, 2016 • 79 min

Yuval Levin has been called “the most influential conservative intellectual of the Obama era,” and the moniker fits. As editor of National Affairs — in my opinion, the best policy journal going on the right — he’s been at the head of the “reformicon”…

Hillary Clinton. Yes, that Hillary Clinton.

Jul 12, 2016 • 48 min

My interview this week is with Hillary Clinton. You may have heard of her.I won’t bore you with Clinton’s bio. Instead, I want to say a few words about what this interview is, as it’s a bit different than the EK Show’s normal fare (though I do ask her for…

Patrick Brown on plant-meat that bleeds and the science of flavor

Jul 5, 2016 • 46 min

Not long ago, I had the chance to eat a burger from a company called Impossible Foods. The burger was delicious. It was juicy, savory, and bloody. Oh, and it was made from plants.Yes, they’ve created a veggie burger that bleeds. Patrick Brown is the CEO…

Heather McGhee on what Democrats get wrong about racism

Jun 28, 2016 • 79 min

Heather McGhee is the president of the think tank Demos, and one of the most interesting thinkers today on the intersection of racism and economic inequality.Among Heather’s most interesting arguments is her belief that “the left will have to challenge…

Jesse Eisenberg on Jewish humor, writing lessons, and interrogating strangers

Jun 21, 2016 • 63 min

My guest on this episode is Jesse Eisenberg — who you may know as Lex Luthor in Batman V. Superman, Mark Zuckerberg in The Social Network, or Daniel Atlas in the just-released Now You See Me 2.I was apprehensive about this interview. I haven’t interviewed…

Jessica Valenti on honesty, internet trolls, and modern feminism

Jun 14, 2016 • 73 min

Jessica Valenti is the founder of Feministing, a columnist at the Guardian, and the author of the new book “Sex Object.” She’s also a friend from the early days of blogging. In this podcast, we talk about the early days of blogging, as well as how the…

Moby on how cheap rent leads to great art

Jun 7, 2016 • 60 min

Moby’s new memoir, Porcelain, is a great read for policy wonks. Really.It’s less a history of music than a history of New York in the 80s and 90s, and a reflection on how density, crime, racial and sexual marginalization, and lax zoning policy created the…

Secretary of Labor (and maybe VP?) Tom Perez

May 31, 2016 • 69 min

Tom Perez is President Obama’s Secretary of Labor. He is also, according to the New York Times, on Hillary Clinton’s shortlist for the vice presidency.I spoke with Perez about his path to the Labor Department, the powers of the Secretary of Labor, the…

Andrew Sullivan on quitting blogging, fearing political correctness, and Donald Trump

May 24, 2016 • 116 min

Last year, Andrew Sullivan quit blogging — the medium he had done so much to create. And you know what? He was pretty damn happy about it. He was taking walks, meditating, exercising, reading, and generally living the good life. Of course, then Donald…

Alice Rivlin, queen of Washington’s budget wonks

May 17, 2016 • 60 min

There is no budget wonk in Washington with a resume as thick as Alice Rivlin’s. She was the founding director of the Congressional Budget Office. She was the director of President Bill Clinton’s Office of Management and Budget. She was vice chair of the…

Arianna Huffington on sleep, death, and social media

May 10, 2016 • 86 min

Arianna Huffington is, of course, the editor and namesake of the Huffington Post, one of the true juggernauts of the new media world. But her path to that position has been a winding one. She was a prominent conservative — and a confidante of Newt…

Robert Reich on supporting Bernie Sanders, dating Hillary Clinton, and fighting inequality

May 3, 2016 • 104 min

You could fill a podcast just reciting Robert Reich’s biography. Rhodes Scholar. Assistant to U.S. Solicitor General Robert Bork. Director of policy planning at the Federal Trade Commission under Carter. Secretary of Labor for Bill Clinton. Candidate for…

Bruce Friedrich on how technology will reduce animal suffering

Apr 26, 2016 • 79 min

When I first met Bruce Friedrich, he was running PETA’s awareness campaigns. Yeah, those campaigns — the ones where naked people stuffed themselves in saran wrap and cages, and where wounded chickens limped outside KFCs.He was also one of the smartest,…

Ben Thompson on how to make it in media in 2016

Apr 19, 2016 • 97 min

Note: If you saw this twice, this is a reissue of a previous episode, with corrected audio.Since starting his site Stratechery in 2013, Ben Thompson has established himself as one of the smartest and most thoughtful analysts at the intersection of media,…

Ben Thompson on how the media business is changing

Apr 19, 2016 • 97 min

Note: There was a technical issue with the first upload of this show, please re-download if you got to it early.Since starting his site Stratechery in 2013, Ben Thompson has established himself as one of the smartest and most thoughtful analysts at the…

Grover Norquist explains what it takes to change American politics

Apr 12, 2016 • 90 min

This is an interview you all have been asking for since day one. Grover Norquist is the head of Americans for Tax Reform, the creator of the no-new-taxes pledge that virtually every Republican officeholder has signed, and the founder of the Wednesday…

Neera Tanden on what it’s like to work for Hillary Clinton

Apr 5, 2016 • 71 min

Neera Tanden is CEO of the Center for American Progress — perhaps the most influential left-leaning think tank in Washington. Before that, though, she was the policy director for both Hillary Clinton’s Senate office and 2008 campaign, as well as a senior…

David Chang, head of the Momofuku empire

Mar 29, 2016 • 88 min

David Chang has driven many of the most important food trends of the last decade. His Momofuku empire has put pork belly on your plate, ramen on your corner, and bagel bombs in your local coffee shop. He’s received four James Beard awards, been named a GQ…

Cory Booker on the spiritual dimension of politics

Mar 22, 2016 • 110 min

Cory Booker is a United States senator from New Jersey, the only vegan in Congress, and the author of the new book “United: Thoughts on Finding Common Ground and Advancing the Common Good”. In this conversation, Ezra and Booker go deep on Booker’s history…

Michael Needham on the Republican Party’s crack-up

Mar 15, 2016 • 73 min

Want to understand what’s happened to the Republican Party? Then listen to this discussion.Michael Needham is the CEO of Heritage Action for America, where he’s been one of the activists at the center of the fight between the Republican establishment and…

Jim Yong Kim on revolutionizing how we treat the world’s poor

Mar 8, 2016 • 77 min

This was an amazing interview.Jim Yong Kim is the president of the World Bank — the massive, multilateral institution dedicated to eradicating poverty. But Kim is also a public-health legend: he was a co-founder of Partners in Health, which revolutionized…

Theda Skocpol on how political scientists think differently about politics

Mar 1, 2016 • 63 min

Political science is a misunderstood discipline. It’s often laughed off by people who think it’s ridiculous that something as human and contingent and unpredictable as politics can be called a science. Chemistry is a science. Politics is a hobby. Politics…

Bill Gates on stopping climate change, building robots, and the best books he’s read

Feb 23, 2016 • 44 min

Bill Gates is one of those people for whom “needs no introduction” is actually true. The polymathic Microsoft founder now leads the world’s largest and most important private foundation, and he’s predicting that we’re on the cusp of the energy…

How lobbying works, with super-lobbyist Tony Podesta

Feb 16, 2016 • 59 min

When the New York Times profiled Tony Podesta, the headline was simply: “Tony Podesta, superlobbyist.” Podesta is head of the Podesta group, and considered by many to be the most powerful, or at least one of the most powerful, lobbyists in Washington.…

Rachel Maddow on skinhead rallies, AIDS activism, and why she doesn’t read op-eds

Feb 9, 2016 • 106 min

Rachel Maddow is, of course, the host of MSNBC’s top-rated, Emmy-award winning primetime news show and the bestselling author of “Drift: The Unmooring of American Military Power.” But Maddow took a winding path to cable news — a path that included…

Coming Soon — The Ezra Klein Show

Feb 4, 2016 • 1 min

Subscribe to this feed to get all of the episodes of Ezra Klein’s new podcast as soon as they appear. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices