The Ezra Klein Show

President Trump doesn’t seem to care that much about winning the midterms. He’s more unpopular at this point in his second term than basically any of his modern predecessors. Democrats seem poised to retake the House and have a real chance of retaking the Senate. You might expect a president in that position to pivot to the center, to focus on voters’ top concerns and try to boost the strongest Republicans in key races. Trump isn’t doing any of that. Instead, he announced a $1.8 billion slush fund to pay out “victims of lawfare,” he threatened to re-escalate the Iran war, and he intervened in

What are the conditions that enable a country to become great — or great again? The Trump administration — and other right-wing movements in other countries — offers a vision of greatness based on power and domination abroad, and a mix of shared national and religious stories at home. And that vision is clearly appealing to a lot of people. Liberals in the U.S. and elsewhere have been struggling to tell a story that can compete. What story would Yuval Noah Harari tell? One of the through lines of Harari’s best-selling books — “Sapiens,” “Homo Deus,” “Nexus” — is the huge role that stories play

We have entered a world of maximum gerrymandering warfare. Any guardrails that once existed, from the Constitution or the courts, have been bulldozed over the last decade – most recently in the Supreme Court decision that gutted the Voting Rights Act and made it harder for minorities to challenge racially discriminatory voting maps. Red and blue states alike have been aggressively trying to redraw their congressional maps in response to all these developments. And there is no sign that will end in 2028; legislatures will just continue trying to tweak their lines to squeeze out advantage for wh

What do you do when you feel anxious or insecure? Many of us try to push the feeling away, or we ruminate on it, or try to solve it, or avoid the thought altogether. But what would happen if we did the exact opposite? The Buddhist nun and teacher Pema Chödrön is the author of many beloved books, including “When Things Fall Apart,” “Welcoming the Unwelcome” and — my personal favorite — “Comfortable With Uncertainty.” And she has a way of inviting people to befriend the parts of life that typically induce dread — from uncertainty and suffering to loss and discomfort. And she argues that the proc

On Friday, I moderated a forum with the top Democratic candidates for California governor, focusing on the state’s housing crisis. California’s current governor, Gavin Newsom, came into office in 2019 promising to build millions of homes. And in the years since, dozens of pro-housing laws have passed, designed to cut red tape and spur more construction. And yet the number of homes being built in California is basically the same as when he took office, and the state’s housing crisis remains, arguably, the worst in the country. So I wanted to know what the next governor would do about it. We tap

Here’s a shocking number: One out of eight American adults is taking a GLP-1, like Ozempic or Zepbound, according to a KFF poll. GLP-1s are the biggest pharmaceutical story since antidepressants. But there’s still so much we don’t know. “We’re only at the beginning of what’s been called this Ozempic era,” the journalist Julia Belluz told me. “I think we’re really just at the beginning of discovering the benefits and the harms of these drugs.” These discoveries begin in the research but are also expanding into how we think about our punishing beauty standards and the blurry lines between illnes

In the U.S., illiberalism is in power. I don’t think anybody really argues against that. But I’ve been surprised by how weak liberalism has felt in response. Donald Trump isn’t a popular president; he isn’t making people want more of what he is. But if the forces of illiberalism are really going to be turned back in this country, I think more people need to be excited and inspired by liberalism itself. We need a liberalism that stands for more than “not Trump.” So I’ve been on my own esoteric journey, reading a lot of books on the history of liberalism, trying to understand what excited and in

“Abundance” came out a little over a year ago. It’s been exciting — and a little disorienting — seeing how it’s rippled out into the world, and the ways it’s been embraced and debated and critiqued. So I wanted to take a moment to talk through what’s really happened in the last year – with Derek Thompson, my “Abundance” co-author, and Marc Dunkelman, whose book “Why Nothing Works” came out around the same time, and circles the same ideas. What has the abundance movement actually achieved in the last year? Where has it fallen short? And what have the three of us learned from our critics? Mentio

Stewart Brand might be the most influential philosopher of the internet – at least in its more idealistic era. In the 1960s, Brand was the central bridge figure between the San Francisco counterculture and the emerging technology scene. He created the legendary Trips Festival with Ken Kesey in 1966, and was there at “the mother of all demos” in 1968. And he created and edited the Whole Earth Catalog, which Steve Jobs called “one of the bibles of my generation” and “Google in paperback form, 35 years before Google came along.”  Brand has seen Silicon Valley evolve in the decades since. And alon

Leading the Future, a super PAC whose funders include the founders of companies like Palantir and OpenAI, is spending millions of dollars this election cycle, and a considerable amount of that money is going toward attack ads against Alex Bores – even though Bores himself used to work for Palantir. Bores is a New York state assemblyman who is running for Congress to represent New York’s 12th District. His campaign includes an extensive A.I. policy platform, including demands for A.I. companies to be more transparent about safety, and an idea for an “A.I. dividend” that would redistribute some

Jeff Bezos, Michael Bloomberg and Warren Buffett are three of the richest people in the world, but they pay little in income tax relative to their wealth. In 2021, ProPublica published an investigation built on leaked tax documents that reveal what some of the richest Americans really pay — or don’t. Warren Buffett had a true tax rate of 0.1 percent. Jeff Bezos: 0.98 percent. Michael Bloomberg: 1.3 percent. Ultra-wealthy Americans have essentially been written out of the tax system. “It’s wrong as a matter of principle. It’s wrong because we need their money. It’s wrong as a matter of fairness

For decades, most discussions of Israel and Palestine were framed around the eventual creation of a two-state solution. That effort has been dead for years. What has emerged in its place is what the political scientists Marc Lynch and Shibley Telhami call the “one-state reality.” Their book on this — edited with Michael Barnett and Nathan Brown — came out before Oct. 7, 2023. Since Oct. 7, that reality has become further entrenched: There’s been a record pace of settlement construction in the West Bank. Israel now occupies more than half the territory of Gaza. And Israel’s push into Lebanon ha

When President Trump didn’t annihilate “a whole civilization” on Tuesday, as he had threatened to do, much of the world exhaled. But the damage of his statements — a U.S. president, the commander in chief of the world’s most powerful military, threatening to commit war crimes — continues to linger in the shadow of an uncertain cease-fire. Trump did not destroy Iran, but he may be destroying another civilization: ours. Fareed Zakaria is the host of CNN’s “Fareed Zakaria GPS” and the author of “Age of Revolutions” and other books. In this conversation, we discuss whether Trump’s threats on Truth

In a prime time address on Wednesday, President Trump proclaimed that America was “on the cusp of ending Iran’s sinister threat.” But he also kept open the option of boots on the ground. The effective closure of the Strait of Hormuz is also about to start really biting – as countries get hit with shortages, which would spike prices across the globe. So what are Trump’s options? What would happen if he just declared victory and walked away from the fight? What kinds of military operations are on the table? If Trump ended the war without achieving his strategic goals, what would that mean for th

Consciousness is this amazing, mind-bending riddle. It’s the only thing any of us truly knows. We experience everything else in life through it. And yet we barely understand it. We don’t know what it’s made of or how it works or why it exists. But scientists and theorists have been trying to answer those questions, and have made some startling discoveries. The science writer Michael Pollan, known for books like “The Omnivore’s Dilemma” and “How to Change Your Mind,” spent five years on the vanguard of this research. And his new book, “A World Appears: A Journey Into Consciousness,” shows that

Is Trumpism crashing on the shoals of the Iran war? That is what Christopher Caldwell thinks. Caldwell is a prominent thinker on the right. He’s a contributing editor at the conservative publication the Claremont Review of Books,and he’s one of the people who’ve been trying to define, and even craft, a coherent Trumpism. So his recent article in The Spectator, “The End of Trumpism,” sparked a lot of debate on the right. At the core of this debate are some fundamental questions that I think remain unresolved, despite Trump’s decade-long dominance of the Republican Party: What is Trumpism? Is th

Iran has currently shut off more than 10 percent of the world’s oil supply. If that goes on for a lot longer — or if the war escalates to include more strikes on energy infrastructure in the region — the price of oil could go through the roof, and the damage to the global economy could be catastrophic. So what would that look like? What tools does the United States have to avert it? And how is this crisis already reverberating in countries around the world? Jason Bordoff is the founding director of the Center on Global Energy Policy at Columbia University and a founding dean of the Columbia Cl

Naomi Klein saw where our politics was headed before most people on the left. Her 2023 book “Doppelganger: A Trip Into the Mirror World” is hard to describe. But among other things, it traces the new coalitions Klein saw forming on the right, the ways they were co-opting issues long associated with the left, and finding huge audiences and influence outside existing institutions. The people and coalitions that Klein wrote about run our world now. We are all living in the mirror world. As she put it, it’s “doppelgangers at the wheel.” So I wanted to have Klein on the show to help understand how

The Trump administration miscalculated how Iran would respond to this war. And the United States, Iran and Israel were brought to the brink of war in the first place because of a whole series of misjudgments and miscalculations going back decades. Ali Vaez is the Iran project director at the International Crisis Group. He was involved in the negotiations that led to the 2015 nuclear deal, and is in fact himself a nuclear scientist. He’s also an author of “How Sanctions Work: Iran and the Impact of Economic Warfare.” In this conversation, Vaez explains how over 47 years the United States, Israe

I’m opposed to this war. The Trump administration did not consult the American public or try to persuade Congress before authorizing the strikes on Iran. I don’t think the administration is prepared for what the strikes might unleash. But I wanted to try to understand President Trump’s decisions from the perspective of somebody much friendlier to his foreign policy. Nadia Schadlow is a senior fellow at the Hudson Institute and served as a deputy national security adviser during Trump’s first term. She led the drafting and publication of the 2017 National Security Strategy of the United States.

Last Friday, Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth announced that he was breaking the Pentagon’s contract with the A.I. company Anthropic and would declare the company a supply chain risk — a designation for companies so dangerous, they can’t exist anywhere in the U.S. military supply chain. What makes this so wild is the military is still using Anthropic’s A.I. system right now. They reportedly used it during the raid to capture Maduro in Venezuela, and are now using it in the war in Iran. This story raises so many questions: Why does the government think Anthropic is so dangerous? How exactly is

Two sitting heads of state, eight weeks apart. On Saturday, February 28, the United States and Israel launched a massive military assault on Iran that resulted in the death of Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, along with much of his senior command. This came less than two months after the United States military captured Nicolás Maduro, the president of Venezuela, in an overnight raid. The president seems to believe that he can decapitate these regimes and control their successors without events spinning out of his control. Is he right? Ben Rhodes is a New York Times Opinion contributing writer and a co-

President Trump’s approval ratings on the economy, immigration and trade are deep in the red. But in Tuesday night’s State of the Union address, he decided to tell the American people: You don’t know what you’re talking about. “Today our border is secure, our spirit is restored, inflation is plummeting, incomes are rising fast. The roaring economy is roaring like never before,” he said. I’m not going to fact-check the president in this episode. But I do want to ask: Even if he can’t be honest with the American people, is he at least being honest with himself? My editor Aaron Retica joins me to

A.I. agents are here. Have they changed your life yet? The release of agents like Claude Code marked a new pivot point in the history of A.I. We are leaving the chatbot era and entering the agentic era — where A.I. is capable of completing all kinds of tasks on its own, and even collaborating and communicating with other A.I. It isn’t clear yet whether these models actually make their users meaningfully more productive. But the technology is continuing to improve; there are few signs that it is close to plateauing. So what might this new era mean for our economy, our labor market and our kids?

It has been harder to get insight into the dynamics of President Trump’s White House this term compared with the first one, partly because there have been fewer leaks. But after the attack on Venezuela and the administration’s actions in Minneapolis, I’ve found myself wondering: How exactly is Trump making decisions? Who is he listening to? How does this White House work? Ashley Parker and Michael Scherer cover the Trump administration for The Atlantic and have written a series of big profiles on key figures in this administration. Parker previously won three Pulitzer Prizes for her reporting

At the end of January, Trump’s Justice Department released what it said was the last tranche of the Epstein files: millions of pages of emails and texts, F.B.I. documents and court records. Much was redacted and millions more pages have been withheld. There is a lot we want to know that remains unclear. But what has come into clear view is the role Epstein played as a broker of information, connections, wealth and women and girls for a slice of the global elite. This was the infrastructure of Epstein’s power — and it reveals much about the infrastructure of elite networks more generally. Anand

George Saunders is tired of being the “kindness guy.” Saunders is one of my favorite fiction writers, and a friend of the pod; I talked to him back in 2021 and 2022. He also has a reputation as a kind of guru of kindness, thanks to a viral commencement speech he gave back in 2013. We talked about kindness on the show before. But with the publication of his new novel, “Vigil,” I noticed that something about Saunders seemed to have shifted. He was pushing back against that public persona, and wrestling with darker themes. “Vigil” follows an oil tycoon who, on his deathbed, is visited by angels a

Ragebait, sponcon, A.I. slop — the internet of 2026 makes a lot of us nostalgic for the internet of 10 or 15 years ago. What exactly went wrong here? How did the early promise of the internet get so twisted? And what exactly is wrong here? What kinds of policies could actually make our digital lives meaningfully better? Cory Doctorow and Tim Wu have two different theories of the case, which I thought would be interesting to put in conversation together. Doctorow is a science fiction writer, an activist with the Electronic Frontier Foundation and the author of “Enshittification: Why Everything

My motivation for this episode is personal. One of my resolutions this year is to spend more time hosting and to make those gatherings more meaningful. I think a lot of us wish we had better social lives and a stronger feeling of community around us. But it’s hard. We’re busy, we’re tired, and social planning and hosting can feel like just more work. So I asked Priya Parker on the show to help. Parker is the author of “The Art of Gathering: How We Meet and Why It Matters” and a wonderful Substack, Group Life. She’s also a conflict resolution facilitator. And she just thinks about gathering and

The old world order is dying. What new world order — if any — is struggling to be born? I can’t think of a week when it felt clearer that an era was coming to an end. Whatever people thought America was, at least for a couple of decades, it’s something else now. The killing of Alex Pretti and the fact that it was recorded on video that plainly contradicted the Trump administration’s initial narrative made that clear. Mark Carney, the prime minister of Canada, also drove home that point when he declared at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, that the world was in the midst of a “rup

“We are in the midst of a rupture, not a transition,” Prime Minister Mark Carney of Canada announced last week at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland. It was one of the most significant foreign policy speeches in years, sending shockwaves through the international community. He was describing a dynamic that’s been building for decades — what the scholars Henry Farrell and Abraham Newman call “weaponized interdependence” — that has now reached a tipping point. I asked Farrell on the show to explain this dynamic, why this is a “rupture” moment and how other countries are responding. H

There’s so much more happening than what you see in online video clips. Congress gave Trump a staggering, military-size budget for immigration enforcement. And it’s hard to keep the scale of what the administration is building in your mind all at once. There are all the additional boots on the ground, as well as a lot of things that are less visible. I wanted to talk to someone who has followed closely how the whole immigration system is changing under President Trump. Caitlin Dickerson is a journalist at The Atlantic. She’s been covering immigration closely since Trump’s first term, and she w

We are one year into Trump’s second term. And it feels like so much has happened – more than the human mind, or the country, can absorb. But how much has Trump really accomplished? What policies have changed the country in a way that will last? My guest Yuval Levin is one of the smartest thinkers on the right, and his verdict is: not that much. “There’s an important story to tell about the absence of action in the past year, too,” he tells me. Levin is the director of social, cultural and constitutional studies at the American Enterprise Institute, the founder and editor of National Affairs an

State Representative James Talarico of Texas might have been our most requested guest last year. And he seemed to come out of nowhere. Talarico started breaking through with viral videos on TikTok and Instagram. And in those videos, he didn’t sound like your typical Democrat. He’s forthrightly Christian, quoting Scripture to defend progressive positions and challenging Christian nationalism on Christian grounds. And he is now running for Senate in Texas — in a primary field that includes U.S. Representative Jasmine Crockett — in what will be one of the most important Senate races this year. So

The shocking events of January have sent a message: America works differently now.  M. Gessen is a Times Opinion columnist and the author of books about living under autocracy, including the National Book Award-winning “The Future Is History.” They have been a clear, relentless and perceptive voice on what it means and what it is like to live in a country that is turning into a different kind of regime. And they wrote an essay on the seizure of the president of Venezuela, calling it “a blow — quite likely fatal — to the new world order of law, justice and human rights that was heralded in the

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Every Tuesday and Friday, Ezra Klein invites you into a conversation about something that matters. How do we address climate change if the political system fails to act? Has the logic of markets infiltrated too many aspects of our lives? What is the future of the Republican Party? What do psychedelics teach us about consciousness? What does sci-fi understand about our present that we miss? Can our food system be just to humans and animals alike? Subscribe wherever you listen to podcasts. You can find transcripts (posted midday) and more episodes of "The Ezra Klein Show" at nytimes.com/ezra-kle