The Ezra Klein Show

The Ezra Klein Show

Martha C. Nussbaum on how fear deforms our politics

Sep 17 • 58 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 • 97 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 • 68 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 • 90 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 • 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 • 89 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 • 73 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 • 77 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 • 67 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 • 62 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 • 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 • 75 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 • 54 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 • 98 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 • 83 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 • 65 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 • 66 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 • 63 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 • 70 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 • 61 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 • 75 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 • 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 • 90 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 • 83 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 • 82 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 • 55 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 • 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 • 113 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 • 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 • 91 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 • 91 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 • 129 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 • 49 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 • 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 • 54 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 • 52 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 • 61 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 • 59 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.…

My favorite new podcast

Feb 23 • 22 min

This is one I’m excited to share. For months, we’ve been working on a daily explainer podcast called — wait for it — Today, Explained. The idea is, every weekday afternoon, to take something important in the news, slow it down, and dig into what’s really…

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

Feb 19 • 70 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 • 72 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 • 72 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 • 75 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 • 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 • 96 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 • 75 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 • 58 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 • 64 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 • 50 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 • 95 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 • 71 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 • 78 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 • 65 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 • 84 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 • 77 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 • 44 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…

Introducing: The Impact, with the curious case of the $629 Band-Aid

Oct 19, 2017 • 26 min

This is a bonus episode that I’m really excited about. It’s Vox’s new show, The Impact, hosted by Sarah Kliff. So often in Washington, the story stops when Congress passes a law. Reporters move on to the next legislative or political battle. But on The…

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

Oct 16, 2017 • 65 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 • 71 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 • 80 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 • 89 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 • 69 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 • 87 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 • 77 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 • 67 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 • 79 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 • 66 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 • 93 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 • 68 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 • 73 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 • 86 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 • 87 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 • 56 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 • 93 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 • 66 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 • 67 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 • 94 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 • 93 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 • 73 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 • 68 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 • 73 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 • 47 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 • 80 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 • 72 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 • 100 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 • 91 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 • 73 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 • 79 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 • 72 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 • 108 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 • 67 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 • 68 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 • 88 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 • 95 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 • 46 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 • 61 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 • 100 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 • 60 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 • 78 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 • 72 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.

You Ask, Ezra Answers

Jan 3, 2017 • 93 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 • 77 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 • 89 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 • 100 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 • 87 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 • 86 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 • 59 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 • 63 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 • 92 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 • 89 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 • 66 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 • 70 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 • 67 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 • 73 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 • 68 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 • 43 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 • 96 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 • 55 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 • 91 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 • 88 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 • 90 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 • 86 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 • 79 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 • 94 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 • 73 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 • 74 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 • 44 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 • 42 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 • 74 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 • 58 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 • 68 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 • 55 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 • 63 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 • 111 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 • 54 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 • 85 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 • 101 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 • 76 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 • 92 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 • 92 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 • 86 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 • 67 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 • 84 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 • 105 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 • 68 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 • 72 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 • 57 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 • 40 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 • 56 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 • 100 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.