The Ezra Klein Show podcast.

December 28, 2019

Ezra Klein brings you far-reaching conversations about hard problems, big ideas, illuminating theories, and cutting-edge research. Want to know how Mark Zuckerberg intends to govern Facebook? What Barack Obama regrets in Obamacare? The dangers Yuval Harari sees in our future? What Michael Pollan learned on psychedelics? The lessons Bryan Stevenson learned freeing the wrongly convicted on death row? The way N.K. Jemisin imagines new worlds? This is the podcast for you. Produced by Vox and the Vox Media Podcast Network.

🌐 The Ezra Klein Show website

Key points in this episode

What is the origin of Comic Sans?

What was it like to build an encyclopedia from ground up?

What is the best way to have an argument at work?

How do you create a culture where employees do not fear to speak up?

Why do you think startups might be ill-positioned to create "elder tech"?

Why is diversity in workplace so important?

Why are women more likely to join a team that already has women on it?

How can we encourage more women to study Computer Science and Math?

Does the overt political correctness and focus on diversity threaten our country's growth?

Are globalism and technology threatening our way of life?

What world is possible in 2030?

What does Warren Buffet think of climate change?

From politician to priest

The Ezra Klein Show

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

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

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

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

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

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

Key points in this episode

Robert Frank's radical idea

The Ezra Klein Show

I’ve known Cornell economist Robert Frank for almost 15 years. And for as long as I’ve known him, Frank has been trying to convince his fellow economists of an idea that’s simple to state, but radical in its implications: social pressure is a fundamental economic force. We are not rational, individual economic agents; we are social animals trying to mimic, and best each other — oftentimes without even knowing it. The failure of the economics profession to see this is, in Frank's view, a crime against public policy.
Frank’s new book, Under the Influence: Putting Peer Pressure to Work, came out shortly before coronavirus reshaped daily life. But it is, for that very reason, extraordinarily timed: it’s an effort to show that the economics of social contagion could reshape the world, solving our hardest problems — from climate change to income inequality — and offering new ways to think about the power we have as individuals. Absent coronavirus, its argument might’ve seemed abstract, optimistic. But now we've seen it happen.
We are watching a version of Frank’s thesis play out right now, in real time. In the wake of coronavirus, social pressure has driven perhaps the single fastest behavioral transformation in human history. It is the example and pressure we face from each other that has made social distancing so effective, so fast. And if social pressure can do that — what else can it do?
What Frank offers here is a theory of how public policy can shape peer pressure for good and for bad. Some of the ideas in this podcast — "expenditure cascades," "positional goods" — are hard to unsee once you see them. Others — like his proposal to rebuild the tax system around a progressive consumption tax meant to curb the intra-wealthy competitions that drive inequality — would radically reshape vast swaths of the tax code.
Book recommendations:
The Uninhabitable Earth by David Wallace-Wells
Micromotives and Macrobehavior by Thomas Schelling
"How to solve climate change and make life more awesome" with Saul Griffith (podcast)

Why the coronavirus is so deadly for black America

The Ezra Klein Show

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

Key points in this episode

Jenny Odell on nature, art, and burnout in quarantine

The Ezra Klein Show

One of my favorite episodes of this show was my conversation with Jenny Odell, just under a year ago. Odell, a visual artist, writer, and Stanford lecturer, had just released her book How to Do Nothing: Resisting the Attention Economy and we had a fascinating conversation about the importance of maintenance work, the problem with ceaseless productivity, the forces vying for our attention, the comforts of nature, and so much more.

A lot has changed since then. Odell’s book became a sensation: it captured a cultural moment, made it onto Barack Obama’s favorite books of 2019 list and became, for many, a touchstone. And then, a global pandemic hit, radically altering the world in ways that made the core themes of Odell’s work more prescient, and more difficult. What happens when, instead of choosing to “do nothing,” doing nothing is forced upon you? What happens when all you have access to is nature? What happens when the work of maintenance becomes not just essential, but also dangerous?

So I asked Odell back, for a very different conversation in a very different time. This isn’t a conversation, really, about fixing the world right now. It’s about living in it, and what that feels like. It’s about the role of art in this moment, why we undervalue the most important work in our society, how to have collective sympathy in a moment of fractured suffering, where to find beauty right now, the tensions of productivity, the melting of time, our reckoning with interdependence, and much more.

And, at the end, Odell offers literally my favorite book recommendation ever on this show. And no, it’s not for my book.

Book recommendations:
Give People Money by Annie Lowrey
Lurking: How a Person Became a User by Joanne McNeil
What It's Like to Be a Bird by David Allen Sibley

References:
My previous conversation with Jenny Odell on the art of attention
"The Myth of Self-Reliance" by Jenny Odell, The Paris Review
"I tried to write an essay about productivity in quarantine. It took me a month to do it." by Constance Grady, Vox
The Genius of Birds by Jennifer Ackerman

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

Key points in this episode

An unusually honest conversation about wielding political power

The Ezra Klein Show

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

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

Key points in this episode

What should the media learn from coronavirus?

The Ezra Klein Show

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

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

Key points in this episode

Bill Gates’s vision for life beyond coronavirus

The Ezra Klein Show

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

An epic conversation with Madeline Miller

The Ezra Klein Show

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

New to the show? Want to check out Ezra’s favorite episodes? Check out the Ezra Klein Show beginner’s guide (http://bit.ly/EKSbeginhere)
Credits:
Producer/Editor - Jeff Geld
Researcher - Roge Karma
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

"The virus is more patient than people are"

The Ezra Klein Show

Ron Klain served as the chief of staff to vice-presidents Al Gore and Joe Biden. In 2014, he was tapped by President Barack Obama to lead the administration’s response to the Ebola outbreak in West Africa. He successfully oversaw a hellishly complex effort preparing domestically for an outbreak and surging health resources onto another continent to contain the disease.

But Klain — who co-hosts the podcast "Epidemic" — is quick to say that coronavirus is a harder challenge even than Ebola. And it’s not just the disease. The economy is in freefall. Entire cities have been told to shelter in place. There’s no telling how long any of this will last. In this conversation, Klain answers my questions about the disease and how both governments and individuals should respond to it, as well as questions many of you submitted. We discuss:

How to change the virus’s reproduction and fatality rates

Why public health experts plan backwards from health system capacity, not forward from infections

What it means to “flatten the curve,” and why it’s a mistake to think of the curve as singular

What we miss when we shame people into social distancing

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

Why the "patience" of the virus means we're going to be social distancing for a long time to come

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

The testing debacle

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

The economic policy necessary to make social distancing possible

What kind of economic rescue package Klain, who helped manage the 2009 stimulus, thinks is needed now

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

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

What Joe Biden is like in a crisis

The difference between how Obama and Biden run meetings

What Klain thinks Bernie Sanders has gotten right in his response

And much more. I’ve been covering coronavirus nonstop and this is one of the clearest, most useful conversations I’ve had. If you’re feeling overwhelmed, the clarity of Klain’s analysis will help.

New to the show? Want to check out Ezra’s favorite episodes? Check out the Ezra Klein Show beginner’s guide (http://bit.ly/EKSbeginhere)
Want to contact the show? Reach out at ezrakleinshow@vox.com
Credits:
Producer/Editor - Jeff Geld
Researcher - Roge Karma
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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

The Ezra Klein Show

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

Key points in this episode

What would a Sanders or Biden presidency look like?

The Ezra Klein Show

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

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

Key points in this episode

Rebecca Solnit on Harvey Weinstein, feminism, and social change

The Ezra Klein Show

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

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

Key points in this episode

Weeds 2020: The Bernie electability debate

The Ezra Klein Show

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

Resources:
"Bernie Sanders can unify Democrats and beat Trump in 2020" by Matthew Yglesias, Vox
"The case for Elizabeth Warren" by Ezra Klein, Vox
"How the filibuster broke the US Senate" by Alvin Chang, Vox
"Running Bernie Sanders Against Trump Would Be an Act of Insanity" by Jonathan Chait, Intelligencer
"The Sixty Trillion Dollar Man" by Ronald brownstein, Atlantic
"The Day One Agenda" by David Dayen, American Prospect

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

Key points in this episode

Tracy K. Smith changed how I read poetry

The Ezra Klein Show

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

Key points in this episode

Barbara Ehrenreich on UBI, class conflict, and collective joy

The Ezra Klein Show

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

Key points in this episode

What Donald Trump got right about white America

The Ezra Klein Show

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

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

Jill Lepore on what I get wrong

The Ezra Klein Show

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

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Is Tom Steyer the solution to our dysfunctional politics?

The Ezra Klein Show

Tom Steyer has worked for Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley. He made his billions running a hedge fund for decades before moving into progressive activism on causes like democratization, climate change, and impeaching Donald Trump. Now, he is running for president of the United States.
Steyer’s primary message on the campaign trial is that we need to get money, lobbyists and corporate influence out of politics. At the same time, he is the living embodiment of much of what he thinks is broken about our system. He used his wealth as a shortcut onto the presidential debate stage and, in doing so, essentially wrote the playbook for any future billionaire who decides they want a shot at winning the highest office in the land.
So, is Steyer the solution to our dysfunctional politics -- or is he himself part of the problem? That question is a lot bigger than Steyer himself. It is about the kinds of people we think will best represent the interests of non-billionaires. It is about the sort of influence we think wealth should have in our society. It is about whether, in our current political moment, we want to trust the arsonists to put out the fires they helped create.
I’ll let you decide the answer.
Book recommendations:
The Holy Bible
War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy
Their Eyes Were Watching God by Zora Neale Hurston
The Good Assassin by Paul Vidich

New to the show? Want to listen to Ezra's favorite episodes? Check out The Ezra Klein Show beginner's guide.
My book is available at www.EzraKlein.com.
Also, we’ve announced more tour dates! Go to WhyWerePolarized.com for all the details.
Want to contact the show? Reach out at ezrakleinshow@vox.com
Credits:
Engineer - Cynthia Gil
Producer - Jeff Geld
Researcher - Roge Karma
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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Why We're Polarized, with Jamelle Bouie (live!)

The Ezra Klein Show

The Why We’re Polarized book tour kicked off this week with a wonderful event at Sixth and I in Washington, DC. My conversation partner for this one was New York Times columnist Jamelle Bouie. Our interview was great, and then the audience questions were so good we had to keep them in as well. We discuss:
• Why things were far worse in the “golden age” of the 1950s and ’60s than they are today
• Why the key question isn’t so much “why are we polarized?” as “why weren’t we polarized?”
• Why “moderate” Republicans end up losing to conservatives
• Why demographic change is the core cleavage of American politics today
• How polarization makes bipartisanship irrational and political dysfunction the norm
• Why Donald Trump and Mitch McConnell are not the causes of polarization but rather the most clear manifestations of it
• That more information doesn’t rescue politics
• Why America today is not functionally a democracy (and why I hate when people claim it is a “republic” to justify our current system)
• Why the most underrated divide in American politics is not that between left and right but between the informed and the uninformed
• Why we can’t reverse polarization and instead need to reform our political system so that it can function amid polarization

Also, we’ve announced more tour dates! Go to WhyWerePolarized.com for all the details.
My book is available at www.EzraKlein.com.
Want to contact the show? Reach out at ezrakleinshow@vox.com
You can subscribe to Ezra's new podcast Impeachment, explained on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Stitcher, Overcast, Pocket Casts, or your favorite podcast app.
Credits:
Editor - Jeff Geld
Researcher - Roge Karma
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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Antisemitism now, antisemitism then

The Ezra Klein Show

“The bad days are back” wrote Batya Ungar-Sargon in the Forward in December, “Orthodox Jews are living through a new age of pogroms. This week, as we celebrated the Festival of Lights, there were no fewer than 10 anti-Semitic attacks in the New York area alone.”
Antisemitism is occasionally called “the oldest hatred.” It thrums across continents and eras, finding new targets for old prejudices. But where, exactly, does it come from? Why is it such a hardy weed? And why does this era feel so thick with it?
Deborah Lipstadt, a professor of Modern Jewish History and Holocaust Studies at Emory University, is the author of Antisemitism: Here and Now. We discuss the earliest forms, tropes, and rationales for antisemitism, and the cultural reasons for their persistence. Lipstadt explains the way right- and left-wing antisemitism differ, and examines the charges of antisemitism levied against some modern politicians, like Donald Trump and Jeremy Corbyn. We talk about antisemitism in the age of social media and rising party polarization. And we talk about the convergence and divergence of antisemitism and anti-Zionism: what distinguishes a legitimate critique of Israel from an antisemitic slur towards it?
This episode airs on National Holocaust Remembrance Day. It’s a reminder that the very worst days lie in living memory, in an age more similar our own than we like to admit.
References:
“Why No One Can Talk About The Attacks Against Orthodox Jews” by Batya Ungar-Sargon
Book recommendations:
If This is Man by Primo Levi
Still Alive by Ruth Kluger
The Unwanted by Michael Dobbs

My book is available for pre-order! You can find it at www.EzraKlein.com.
Want to contact the show? Reach out at ezrakleinshow@vox.com
You can subscribe to Ezra's new podcast Impeachment, explained on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Stitcher, Overcast, Pocket Casts, or your favorite podcast app.
Credits:
Producer and Editor - Jeff Geld
Engineer- Cynthia Gil
Researcher - Roge Karma
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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Book excerpt: A better theory of identity politics

The Ezra Klein Show

This is a podcast episode literally years in the making. It’s an excerpt — the first anywhere — from my book Why We’re Polarized.
A core argument of the book is that identity is the central driver of political polarization. But to see how it works, we need a better theory of how identities form, what happens when they activate, and where they fit into our conflicts. We’ve been taught to only see identity politics in others. We need to see it in ourselves.
If you’re a longtime listener, this excerpt — like the broader book — will tie a lot of threads on this show together. If you’re a new listener, it’ll give you, I hope, a clearer way to understand a powerful driver of our politics and our lives.
Why We’re Polarized comes out on January 28. You can order it, both in text and audiobook forms, at WhyWerePolarized.com.
Find the audio book on Audible.com
Want to contact the show? Reach out at ezrakleinshow@vox.com
You can subscribe to Ezra's podcast Impeachment, explained on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Stitcher, Overcast, Pocket Casts, or your favorite podcast app.
Credits:
Producer and Editor - Jeff Geld
Researcher - Roge Karma
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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The war on Muslims (with Mehdi Hasan)

The Ezra Klein Show

With “reeducation" camps in China, religious disenfranchisement in India, ethnic cleansing in Myanmar, street violence in Sri Lanka, mass shootings in New Zealand, the flourishing of far-right parties across Europe, and the mainstreaming of Islamophobia in America, there’s been a global surge in anti-Muslim bigotry — often supported by the full power and might of the state. It’s one of the most frightening and undercovered political stories of our time.
Mehdi Hasan is a senior writer for the Intercept, the host of the Deconstructed podcast, and the anchor of Al Jazeera’s Up Front. He’s done some of the best reporting on anti-Muslim prejudice and persecutions worldwide, covering everything from Narendra Modi’s rise in India to the treatment of Uighurs in China to the role that social media plays in amplifying anti-Muslim sentiment. We discuss all of that in this conversation, but we also try to answer some deeper questions: Why Muslims? Why now? What is the ideology that drives and justifies anti-Muslim bigotry? What are the political incentives that foster it?
Not everything in this conversation is easy to hear. But understanding the scope and scale of the war on Muslims is central to understanding the world we live in, the Orwellian nature of the Islamophobic narrative, and the resentments and traumas we’re inflicting on the future.
Book recommendations:
The Fear of Islam by Todd H. Green
The Enemy Within by Sayeeda Warsi
The Autobiography of Malcolm X by Alex Haley

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Post-debate special!

The Ezra Klein Show

Vox's Matt Yglesias and I unpack the debate that did, and didn't, happen.
Related reading:
"Joe Biden will never give up on the system" by Ezra Klein
"4 winners and 3 losers from the January Democratic debate" Vox Staff
"The case for Elizabeth Warren" by Ezra Klein
"Bernie Sanders can unify Democrats and beat Trump in 2020" by Matthew Yglesias
"Joe Biden skates by again" by Matt Yglesias
"Elizabeth Warren’s new plan to reform bankruptcy law, explained" by Matt Yglesias
"The Third Rail of Calling ‘Sexism’ Warren tried not to talk about it." by Rebecca Traister

My book is available for pre-order! You can find it at www.EzraKlein.com.
Want to contact the show? Reach out at ezrakleinshow@vox.com
You can subscribe to Ezra's new podcast Impeachment, explained on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Stitcher, Overcast, Pocket Casts, or your favorite podcast app.
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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An “uncomfortable” conversation with Cory Booker

The Ezra Klein Show

When the Democrats meet for their next debate, Booker won’t be on the stage. That’s despite a bevy of endorsements, killer debate performances, innovative policy proposals, and a resume that runs circles around many of the other candidates in the field.
That’s a shame. There is a moral radicalism to the way Cory Booker lives out his politics. He lived for years in a housing project. He leads hunger strikes. He challenges political machines. He’s a vegan. He has a more ambitious policy vision than is often discussed, but beneath that is a far more radical ethical vision than he get credit for.
I think there’s a reason for that. When Booker turns his politics turn outward, they lose clarity. He shies away from drawing bright lines, his answers double back to blur out potential offense. As a result, his arguments for a politics of radical love end up emphasizing his love in ways that obscure his radicalism. As admiring as I am of what Booker demands of himself, I often can’t tell what he’s asking of me.
In this conversation, I wanted Booker to risk my discomfort, not just his own. And in his answers, I think you can hear both the remarkable promise and power of Booker’s politics, and some of the challenges that have held back his campaign.
References/Book recommendations:
Tightrope by Nicholas Kristof
“Who Killed the Knapp Family” by Nicholas Kristof
The Violence Inside Us by Chris Murphy

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The conservative mind of Yuval Levin

The Ezra Klein Show

Something I’ve been thinking a lot about recently is the way we often conflate two very distinct things when we assign political labels. The first is ideology, which describes our vision of a just society. The second is something less discussed but equally important: temperament. It describes how we approach social problems, how fast we think society can change, and how we understand the constraints upon us.
Yuval Levin is the director of Social, Cultural, and Constitutional Studies at the American Enterprise Institute, the editor-in-chief of the public policy journal National Affairs, and the author of the upcoming book A Time to Build. Levin is one of the most thoughtful articulators of both conservative temperament and ideology. And, perhaps for that reason, his is one of the most important criticisms of what the conservative movement has become today.
There’s a lot in this conversation, in part because Levin’s book speaks to mine in interesting ways, but among the topics we discuss are:

The conservative view of human nature

Why the conservative temperament is increasingly diverging from the conservative movement

What theories of American politics get wrong about the reality of American life

The case Levin makes to socialists

How economic debates are often moral debates in disguise

Levin’s rebuttal to my book

The crucial difference between “formative” and “performative” social institutions

Why the most fundamental problems in American life are cultural, not economic

Why Levin thinks the New York Times should not allow its journalists to be on Twitter

Whether we can restore trust in our institutions without changing the incentives and systems that surround them

There’s a lot Levin and I disagree on, but there are few people I learn as much from in disagreement as I learn from him.
Book recommendations;
Democracy in America by Alexis De Tocqueville
The Quest for Community by Robert Nisbet
Statecraft as Soulcraft by George Will
If you enjoyed this episode, you may also like:
David French on “The Great White Culture War"
George Will makes the conservative case against democracy

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How an epidemic begins and ends

The Ezra Klein Show

Introducing season 3 of The Impact!
The 2020 candidates have some bold ideas to tackle some of our country's biggest problems, like climate change, the opioid crisis, and unaffordable health care. A lot of their proposals have been tried before, so, in a sense, the results are in.

This season, The Impact has those stories: how the big ideas from 2020 candidates succeeded — or failed — in other places, or at other times. What can Sen. Elizabeth Warren's proposal to fight the opioid crisis learn from what the US did to fight the AIDS epidemic? How did Germany — an industrial powerhouse that invented the automobile — manage to implement a Green New Deal? How did public health insurance change Taiwan?

Subscribe to The Impact on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or your favorite podcast app to automatically get new episodes of the latest season each week.

On this special preview:

Sen. Elizabeth Warren is running for president with a plan to fight the opioid epidemic. Her legislation would dramatically expand access to addiction treatment and overdose prevention, and it would cost $100 billion over 10 years. Addiction experts agree that this is the kind of money the United States needs to fight the opioid crisis. But it’s a really expensive idea, to help a deeply stigmatized population. How would a President Warren get this through Congress?

It’s been done before, with the legislation Warren is using as a blueprint for her proposal. In 1990, Congress passed the Ryan White Care Act, the first national coordinated response to the AIDS crisis. In the decades since, the federal government has dedicated billions of dollars to the fight against AIDS, and it’s revolutionized care for people with this once-deadly disease.

But by the time President George H.W. Bush signed the bill into law, hundreds of thousands of people in the US already had HIV/AIDS, and tens of thousands had died.

In this episode, Vox's Jillian Weinberger explores how an epidemic begins, and how it ends. We look at what it took to get the federal government to finally act on AIDS, and what that means for Warren’s plan to fight the opioid crisis, today.
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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Nathan Robinson’s case for socialism

The Ezra Klein Show

“Socialism” is simultaneously one of the most commonly used and most confusing terms in American politics. Does being a socialist mean advocating for the complete abolition of capitalism, markets, and private property? Does it mean supporting a higher tax rate, Medicare-for-all, and Sen. Bernie Sanders? Or does it simply mean a deep hatred of systemic injustice and the institutions that perpetuate it?
In his new book Why You Should be a Socialist Nathan J Robinson, the founder and editor-in-chief of the Current Affairs magazine, attempts to shed light on these questions. In his writing, Robinson distinguishes between a “socialist economy” (think collective ownership, worker cooperatives, single-payer health care) and what he calls a “socialist ethic": a deep sense of moral outrage that animates agents of radical change. This distinction may sound like a dodge, but I think Robinson gets at something here that — while hard to understand from the outside — is crucial to understanding today's left politics. We also discuss:
- The central role of democracy to the socialist worldview
- What it means to be a “libertarian socialist”
- What Robinson's socialist utopia would look like
- Why so many socialists have turned on Sen. Elizabeth Warren in favor of Sen. Bernie Sanders
- Robinson’s special loathing for South Bend, Indiana, Mayor Pete Buttigieg
- What he believes Sanders’s “political revolution” would look like
- The lessons of Jeremy Corbyn
- Whether the deep difference between liberals and socialists is temperament
- Why “public vs. private” is often a false choice
- The challenge of economic growth
And much more.
Book recommendations:
Understanding Power by Noam Chomsky
The Anarchist FAQ by Ian McKay
The Dispossessed by Ursula K. Le Guin
If you enjoyed this episode, you may also like:
Leftists vs. Liberals with Elizabeth Bruenig
Matt Bruenig’s case for single-payer health care
Why my politics are bad with Bhaskar Sunkara

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How to topple a dictator (with Erica Chenoweth)

The Ezra Klein Show

The 2010s witnessed a sharp uptick in nonviolent resistance movements all across the globe. Over the course of the last decade we’ve seen record numbers of popular protests, grassroots campaigns, and civic demonstrations advancing causes that range from toppling dictatorial regimes to ending factory farming to advancing a Green New Deal.
So, I thought it would be fitting to kick off 2020 by bringing on Erica Chenoweth, a a political scientist at Harvard specializing in nonviolent resistance. At the beginning of this decade, co-authored Why Civil Resistance Works, a landmark study showing that nonviolent movements are twice as effective as violent ones. Since then, she has written dozens of papers on what factors make successful movements successful, why global protests are becoming more and more common, how social media has affected resistance movements and much more.
But Chenoweth doesn’t only study nonviolent movements from an academic perspective; she also advises nonviolent movement leaders around the world (including former EK Show guests Varshini Prakash of the Sunrise Movement and Wayne Hsiung of Direct Action Everywhere) to help them be as effective and strategic as possible in carrying out their goals. This on-the-ground experience combined with a big-picture, academic view of nonviolent resistance makes her perspective essential for understanding one of the most important trends of the last decade -- and, in all likelihood, the next one.
References:
"How social media helps dictators" by Erica Chenoweth
"Drop Your Weapons: When and Why Civil Resistance Works" by Erica Chenoweth
Book recommendations:
These Truths by Jill Lepore
Nonviolence: The History of a Dangerous Idea by Mark Kurlansky
From #BlackLivesMatter to Black Liberation by Keenga-Yamahtta Taylor

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Ask Ezra Anything

The Ezra Klein Show

It’s here. The final AMA of 2019. Among the questions you asked:
- If you believe that changing someone's mind about a topic, any topic is difficult, how do you function as a journalist?
- What’s your opinion on capitalism?
- What have you learned about yourself since being a dad that has surprised you the most?
- You talk a lot about polarization. But it seems your audience leans liberal. So how do you reconcile that?
- Do you believe in free will?
- What’s your take on the left/liberal divide?
- Red wine or white wine?
- We know 2020 will come down to a small collection of swing states. Shouldn’t the Democrats just run whichever candidate will be strongest in those states?
- What’s with Vox and NBER papers?
- What would get journalists to leave Twitter?
- What happens if Trump loses the election but refuses to leave office?

All this, plus you get to hear from the mysterious Jeff Geld…

My book is available for pre-order! You can find it at www.EzraKlein.com.
Want to contact the show? Reach out at ezrakleinshow@vox.com
You can subscribe to Ezra's new podcast Impeachment, explained on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Stitcher, Overcast, Pocket Casts, or your favorite podcast app.
Credits:
Producer, Editor, Guest Interviewer - Jeff Geld
Researcher - Roge Karma
Engineer - Cynthia Gil
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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Best of: Work as identity, burnout as lifestyle

The Ezra Klein Show

Here, at the end of the year, I wanted to share one of my favorite episodes of 2019 with you.
Earlier this year, 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 “workism.”
The two pieces speak to each other in interesting ways, and to some questions I had been reflecting on as my own relationship to work changes. So I asked the authors to join me for a conversation about what happens when work becomes an identity, capitalism becomes a religion, and productivity becomes the way we measure human value. The conversation exceeded even the high hopes I had for it. Enjoy this one.
Book recommendations:
Kids These Days: Human Capital and the Making of Millennials by Malcolm Harris
White: Essays on Race and Culture by Richard Dyer
The Vertigo Years: Europe, 1900-1914 by Philipp Blom
A Visit from the Goon Squad by Jennifer Egan

My book is available for pre-order! You can find it at www.EzraKlein.com.
Want to contact the show? Reach out at ezrakleinshow@vox.com
You can subscribe to Ezra's new podcast Impeachment, explained on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Stitcher, Overcast, Pocket Casts, or your favorite podcast app.
Credits:
Producer and Editor - Jeff Geld
Engineers - Cynthia Gil
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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Republicans vs. the planet

The Ezra Klein Show

Dave Roberts is an energy and climate writer at Vox, and a senior fellow at the Kleinman Center for Energy Policy at the University of Pennsylvania. He started as his career covering climate science and clean energy technology, but -- for reasons we discuss here -- he now writes just as much about political psychology, media ecosystems, political institutions, and how they intersect with climate change. We cover a lot in this conversation, including:

“Tribal epistemology,” and why it’s crucial to climate paralysis

How the GOP went from the party of cap-and-trade to the party of climate denial

Why the right and left-wing media ecosystem’s diverged so dramatically

What today’s climate activists get right about our politics that their predecessors got wrong

The carbon tax dead-end

How nuclear energy became so divisive

The conflicting moral and social visions at the heart of the climate movement

Why it is impossible to separate technological innovation from the policy ecosystem that shapes it

Whether climate change really is an “existential” threat

What climate change will mean for the world’s poor

References:
Dave Roberts on America's "epistemic crisis."
Book recommendations:
Caught Stealing by Charlie Huston
"State of the Species" by Charles C. Mann

My book is available for pre-order! You can find it at www.EzraKlein.com.
Submit questions for our upcoming "Ask Me Anything" at ezrakleinshow@vox.com
You can subscribe to Ezra's new podcast Impeachment, explained on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Stitcher, Overcast, Pocket Casts, or your favorite podcast app.
Credits:
Producer and Editor - Jeff Geld
Researcher - Roge Karma
Engineers - Cynthia Gil
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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The geoengineering question

The Ezra Klein Show

Most analyses of how to “solve” climate change start from a single, crucial assumption: that carbon emissions and global warming are inextricably linked. Geoengineering is a set of technologies and ideas with the potential to shatter that link.
Can we use them? Should we? Could they be used in concert with other solutions, or would simply opening the door drain support from those ideas? Even if we did want to deploy geoengineering, who would govern its use? And is mucking with the earth at this level more dangerous than climate change itself — which may, ultimately, be the choice we face?
Jane Flegal is a geoengineering expert at Arizona State University and a program officer at the Bernard and Anne Spitzer Charitable Trust. She’s able to parse this debate with an unusual level of clarity, fairness, and rigor. This isn’t an argument for or against geoengineering. It’s a way to think about it, and that turns out to be a way to think about the climate change problem as a whole.
Book recommendations:
The Planet Remade by Oliver Morton
Experiment Earth by Jack Stilgoe
Frontiers of Illusion by Daniel Sarewitz

My book is available for pre-order! You can find it at www.EzraKlein.com.
Submit questions for our upcoming "Ask Me Anything" at ezrakleinshow@vox.com
You can subscribe to Ezra's new podcast Impeachment, explained on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Stitcher, Overcast, Pocket Casts, or your favorite podcast app.
Credits:
Producer and Editor - Jeff Geld
Researcher - Roge Karma
Engineer - Cynthia Gil
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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How to solve climate change and make life more awesome

The Ezra Klein Show

The climate series is back! The reason for the delay is that I wanted to make sure that this episode was next up in the series. Once you start listening, you’ll understand why.
So far, we’ve spent the series talking about the problem we're facing and what the world will ultimately look like if we fail. Today’s conversation is different: It is about what it will take to solve climate change and what kind of world we can build if we succeed.
Saul Griffith is an inventor, a MacArthur genius fellow, and the founder and CEO of Otherlab, a high-tech research and development company on the frontlines of trying to imagine our clean energy future. Griffith and his team were contracted by the Department of Energy to track and visualize the entirety of America’s energy flows — and as a result, he knows the US energy system better than just about anyone on this planet. As a result, Griffith is clearer than anyone else I’ve found on the paths to decarbonization, and how to navigate them.
Most conversations about climate change are pretty depressing. This conversation is not. We have the tools we need to decarbonize. What’s more, decarbonizing doesn’t mean accepting a future of less — it can mean a more awesome, humane, technologically rich, and socially inspiring future for us all. This conversation is about a vision of decarbonization that is genuinely awesome, and how we can actually get there.
References:
Otherlab's diagram of US energy flows
Griffith's piece on paths to decarbonization
Book recommendations:
Debt: The First 5,000 Years by David Graeber
Freedom's Forge by Arthur Herman
The Extinction Rebellion Handbook
Silent Spring by Rachel Carson

My book is available for pre-order! You can find it at www.EzraKlein.com.
The first batch of stops for my book tour is up! Get tickets at http://www.whywerepolarized.com
Submit questions for our upcoming "Ask Me Anything" at ezrakleinshow@vox.com
You can subscribe to Ezra's new podcast Impeachment, explained on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Stitcher, Overcast, Pocket Casts, or your favorite podcast app.
Credits:
Producer and Editor - Jeff Geld
Researcher - Roge Karma
Engineer - Cynthia Gil
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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Paul Krugman on climate, robots, single-payer, and so much more

The Ezra Klein Show

It’s cliché to call podcasts wide-ranging. But this conversation, with Nobel-prize winning economist and NY Times columnist Paul Krugman, really is. A sample of what we discuss:
- How economists mucked up the climate debate
- What a Democratic president should pass first
- The politics and policy of Medicare-for-all
- Krugman’s three-part test to determine whether a program needs to be paid for (don’t miss this!)
- Why Pete Buttigieg is wrong on tuition-free college
- Why Andrew Yang is wrong on automation
- What the Obama administration got wrong, and right, in the financial crisis
- The means-testing vs. universal program debate is a false dichotomy
- What it would take to revitalize the economies of middle and rural America
- The productivity puzzle
- The antitrust problem
- Geographic inequality
- Whether elite or mass opinion is the key constraint on policy ambition
- Path dependence in social welfare states
- Whether private insurers should exist
And much more. Don’t miss this one.
References:
Krugman's upcoming book, Arguing with Zombies
Book recommendations:
An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding by David Hume
Plagues and Peoples by William McNeil
Collected essays of George Orwell

My book is available for pre-order! You can find it at www.EzraKlein.com.
Submit questions for our upcoming "Ask Me Anything" at ezrakleinshow@vox.com
You can subscribe to Ezra's new podcast Impeachment, explained on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Stitcher, Overcast, Pocket Casts, or your favorite podcast app.
Credits:
Producer and Editor - Jeff Geld
Researcher - Roge Karma
Engineer - Cynthia Gil
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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

The Ezra Klein Show

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 was born.
Soon into the show’s writing, Schur realized he was in way over his head. The question of human morality is one of the most complicated and hotly contested subjects of all time. He needed someone to help him out. So, he recruited Pamela Hieronymi, a professor at UCLA specializing in the subjects of moral responsibility, psychology, and free will, to join the show as a “consulting philosopher” — surely a first in sitcom history.=
I wanted to bring Shur and Hieronymi onto the show because The Good Place should not exist. Moral philosophy is traditionally the stuff of obscure academic journals and undergraduate seminars, not popular television. Yet, three-and-a-half seasons on, The Good Place is not only one of the funniest sitcoms on TV, it has popularized academic philosophy in an unprecedented fashion and put forward its own highly sophisticated moral vision.
This is a conversation about how and why The Good Place exists and what it reflects about The Odd Place in which we actually live. Unlike a lot of conversations about moral philosophy, this one is a lot of fun.

References:
Dylan Matthews' brilliant profile on The Good Place
Dylan Matthews on why he donated his kidney
Book recommendations:
Michael Schur:
Ordinary Vices by Judith N. Shklar
The Spy Who Came in from the Cold by John le Carré
Beloved by Toni Morrison
Pamela Hieronymi:
What We Owe to Each Other by T.M. Scanlon
Being and Nothingness by Jean-Paul Sartre
Mortal Questions by Thomas Nagel

My book is available for pre-order! You can find it at www.EzraKlein.com.
Submit questions for our upcoming "Ask Me Anything" at ezrakleinshow@vox.com
You can subscribe to Ezra's new podcast Impeachment, explained on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Stitcher, Overcast, Pocket Casts, or your favorite podcast app.
Credits:
Producer and Editor - Jeff Geld
Researcher - Roge Karma
Engineer - Cynthia Gil
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When doing the right thing makes you a criminal

The Ezra Klein Show

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, overwhelming depression, Hsiung visited a slaughterhouse and was radicalized by the immense suffering he saw. He now faces decades in prison for rescuing sick, injured animals from slaughterhouses.
Hsiung is the founder of Direct Action Everywhere, an organization best known for conducting public, open rescues of animals too sick for slaughter. These rescues are, in many cases, illegal, and Hsiung and his fellow activists are risking years of imprisonment. But the sacrifice is the point: Hsiung and his colleagues are trying to highlight the sickness of a society that criminalizes doing what any child would recognize as the right thing to do.
In our conversation, I wanted to understand a simple question: How did he get here? What leads someone with a safe, comfortable life to risk everything for a cause? What does society look like to him now, knowing what he faces? And the big question: Is Hsiung the weird one? Or is it all of us — who see so much suffering and injustice and simply go about our lives — who have lost our way?
References:
New York Times story on a DxE rescue mission
Video of the mission to save Lily the piglet
Book recommendations:
Everything is Obvious by Duncan J. Watts
The Brothers Karamazov by Fyodor Dostoevsky
Grit by Angela Duckworth

My book is available for pre-order! You can find it at www.EzraKlein.com.
Want to contact the show? Reach out at ezrakleinshow@vox.com
You can subscribe to Ezra's new podcast Impeachment, explained on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Stitcher, Overcast, Pocket Casts, or your favorite podcast app.
Credits:
Producer and Editor - Jeff Geld
Researcher - Roge Karma
Engineer - Jeremy Dalmas
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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Peter Singer on the lives you can save

The Ezra Klein Show

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 course you should. But this simple thought experiment, taken seriously, has radical implications for how you live your life.
It comes from Peter Singer’s “The Life You Can Save,” one of the most influential modern works of ethical philosophy. Singer is perhaps the most influential public intellectual of my lifetime. His book “Animal Liberation” helped build America’s animal rights movement. His work helped create the effective altruism movement.
In Singer’s hands, the questions that motivate a moral life are startlingly simple. But if you take them seriously, living morally is very, very hard. And the way most of us are living, right now — well, we’re letting a lot of children drown. What happens if we force ourselves to recognize that fact? What does it demand of us?
That’s the topic of my conversation with Singer. We also discuss the differences between ethical philosophy and religion, why moral reasoning is a social act, the ethics of caring most about those closest to you, The Good Place, AI risk, open borders, where our obligations to others end, why Singer wouldn’t have become a philosopher if he’d been an effective altruist in his youth, and much more.

Book recommendations:
On Liberty by John Stuart Mill
The Better Angels of Our Nature by Steven Pinker
On What Matters by Derek Parfit
Reasons and Persons by Derek Parfit

To read Peter SInger's book please visit www.thelifeyoucansave.org

My book is available for pre-order! You can find it at www.EzraKlein.com.
Want to contact the show? Reach out at ezrakleinshow@vox.com
You can subscribe to Ezra's new podcast Impeachment, explained on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Stitcher, Overcast, Pocket Casts, or your favorite podcast app.
Credits:
Producer and Editor - Jeff Geld
Researcher - Roge Karma
Engineers - Cynthia Gil
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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ICYMI: The age of "mega-identity" politics

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

The Ezra Klein Show

My book is available for pre-order! You can find it at www.EzraKlein.com.
Want to contact the show? Reach out at ezrakleinshow@vox.com
You can subscribe to Ezra's new podcast Impeachment, explained on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Stitcher, Overcast, Pocket Casts, or your favorite podcast app.
Credits:
Producer and Editor - Jeff Geld
Researcher - Roge Karma
Engineer - Jeff Geld
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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

The Ezra Klein Show

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 like a lot of people in that I accept that climate change is bad. What I struggle with is how bad. Is it an existential threat that eclipses all else? One of many serious problems politics must somehow address?
I wanted to kick off the series with someone who knows the science cold. Kate Marvel is a research scientist at NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies and a professor at Columbia University’s Department of Applied Physics and Mathematics. But Marvel isn’t just a leading climate scientist. She’s also unique in her focus on the stories we tell each other, and ourselves, about climate change, and how they end up structuring our decisions. We discuss:
- How a climate model actually works
- Why this is the good place
- Why there is so much variation in climate scientists’ predictions about global temperature increases
- Why global warming is only one piece of the much larger problem of climate change
- Why a hotter planet is more conducive to natural disasters
- The frightening differences between a world that experiences a 2°C temperature increase as opposed to a 5°C temperature increase
- Whether the threat of climate change requires solutions that break the boundaries of conventional politics
- The underlying stories that animate much of the climate debate
- Whether the planet can sustain continued economic growth
- What it means to “live morally” amid climate change
And much more...
Book recommendations:
Parable of the Sower by Octavia Butler
Parable of the Talents by Octavia Butler
Annihilation by Jeff Vendermeer
My book is available for pre-order! You can find it at www.EzraKlein.com.
Want to contact the show? Reach out at ezrakleinshow@vox.com
You can subscribe to Ezra's new podcast Impeachment, explained on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Stitcher, Overcast, Pocket Casts, or your favorite podcast app.

Credits:
Producer and Editor - Jeff Geld
Researcher - Roge Karma
Engineer - Ernie Erdat
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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Neoliberalism and its discontents

The Ezra Klein Show

“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. At the same time, critics often place more progressive figures like Bill Clinton, Barack Obama, and even Elizabeth Warren under the neoliberal banner. This raises an important question: what the hell is neoliberalism?
I decided to bring on two guests today to help us answer that question. Wendy Brown is a professor of political theory at UC Berkeley, author of Undoing the Demos and In the Ruins of Neoliberalism, and one of the foremost critics of neoliberalism, not only as a set of economic policies but a “governing rationality” that infects almost all aspects of our existence. Noah Smith is an economist, a columnist at Bloomberg, and is known for his robust defenses of some (though not all) neoliberal positions, which earned him the prestigious title of Chief Neoliberal Shill of 2018. We discuss:
- The differences between neoliberal theory and “actually existing neoliberalism”
- Neoliberalism as not only a set of economic policies but a form of “public reason” that influences our very conception of what it means to be human
- How neoliberal thought came to dominate almost every aspect of our lives
- Whether neoliberalism is an inherently anti-democratic project
- The relationship between neoliberal economic policies and traditional morality
- The differences between New Deal liberalism and Obama-era neoliberalism
- Whether a growth-driven economic model is compatible with our planet's ecological limits

Book recommendations:
How Asia Works by Joe Studwell
Law Without Future by Jack Jackson
Democracy in Chains by Nancy McLean

Credits:
Producer and Editor - Jeff Geld
Researcher - Roge Karma
Engineer - Topher Routh
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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Eric Holder’s plan to save democracy

The Ezra Klein Show

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 cause close enough to Obama’s heart that the ex-president recently folded his Organizing for America operation into it.

Holder calls the project “a partisan effort for good government,” a line rich with both the promise and problems of Obamaism. The NDRC doesn’t want to build a redistricting operation to match the GOP’s machine, they want to take redistricting out of the hands of politicians altogether. But critics worry that their organizing will work in blue states, fail in red states, and lead to Democrats unilaterally disarming in the redistricting wars.

In this conversation, Holder lays out his strategy to end redistricting and answers his critics. We discuss whether there’s still the possibility of a Supreme Court ruling on the subject, and what tools Democrats have in red states. We also revisit Holder’s famous “nation of cowards” speech on race, and discuss whether more bankers should’ve been sent to jail during the financial crisis. Enjoy!

Book Recommendations:

An Unfinished Life: John F. Kennedy, 1917 - 1963 by Robert Dallek

The Collected Poems of Langston Hughes by Langston Hughes

1944: FDR and the Year That Changed History by Jay Winik

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Anil Dash on the biases of tech

The Ezra Klein Show

“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 catch my eye. He’s one of the most perceptive interpreters and critics of the tech industry around these days. That’s in part because Dash is part of the world he’s describing: He’s the CEO of Glitch, the host of the excellent tech podcast Function, and a longtime developer and blogger.

In this conversation, Dash and I discuss his excellent list of the 12 things everyone should know about technology. This episode left me with an idea I didn’t have going in: What if the problem with a lot of the social technologies we use — and, lately, lament — isn’t the ethics of their creators or the revenue models they’re built on, but the sheer scale they’ve achieved? What if products like Facebook and Twitter and Google have just gotten too big and too powerful for anyone to truly understand, much less manage?

You know the topics that obsess me on this podcast. Polarization. Identity. Attention. I’ve come to believe that all of them are downstream from the technologies on which they rest. If you feel like society has gone a bit wrong, it’s likely because the internet has gone a bit wrong. And Dash’s arguments help explain why.

Book Recommendations:

Respect: The Life of Aretha Franklin by David Ritz

Prince and the Purple Rain Era Studio Sessions: 1983 and 1984 by Duane Tudahl

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Jill Lepore on America’s two revolutions

The Ezra Klein Show

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 themes of American history to make sense of our past and clarify our present.

“The American Revolution did not begin in 1775 and it didn’t end when the war was over,” Lepore writes. This is a conversation about those revolutions. But more than that, it’s a conversation about who we are as a country, and how that self-definition is always contested and constantly in flux.

And beyond all that, Lepore is just damn fun to talk to. Every answer she gives has something worth chewing over for weeks. You’ll enjoy this one.

Recommended books:

Only some of the conversations I have on this show really change how I think about politics, but this was one of them. Don’t miss it.

Recommended books:

Strangers in Their Own Land: Anger and Mourning on the American Right by Arlie Russell Hochschild

Divided by Color by Donald Kinder

The American Voter by Angus Campbell, Philip E. Converse, Warren E. Miller, and Donald E. Stokes

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

The Ezra Klein Show

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 the country. Many expected him to be the GOP’s nominee against Obama in 2012. Then it all happened. The disappearance. “Hiking the Appalachian trail.” Sanford left public life. He was done, it seemed. And then he wasn’t. He won a House seat in South Carolina. He overcame the kind of scandal that usually destroys a politician. But he couldn’t overcome Trump. Sanford was a rock-ribbed conservative, a Republican, but he was no Trumpist. He accused the president of fanning the flames of intolerance, of being reckless with the truth. He wrote a New York Times op-ed calling on Trump to release his tax returns. Sanford got a primary opponent for his troubles, Trump endorsed her, and Sanford lost. Weeks after Sanford's defeat, Trump appeared before House Republicans and mocked Sanford in front of his colleagues. The president, unusually, was booed. I sat down with Sanford in his final weeks in Congress to talk about what he’s learned about the Republican Party, about Donald Trump, about America, and about himself. Recommended books: Destined for War: Can America and China Escape Thucydides’s Trap? by Graham Allison Fascism: A Warning by Madeleine Albright The Square and the Tower: Networks and Power, from the Freemasons to Facebook by Niall Ferguson

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

The Ezra Klein Show

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, Leadership: In Turbulent Times, and left the building slightly in awe: Some people are truly masterful storytellers, and Goodwin is one of them.

In the book, Goodwin examines how Abraham Lincoln, Teddy Roosevelt, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, and Lyndon Johnson became the men we remember. She focuses, in particular, on the periods of suffering that softened them, eras that preceded the soaring leadership etched into history.

Threaded through the book’s pages, then, is a lot of pain, a lot of mental illness, a lot of uncertainty. That opened space for a conversation about the recurrent link between the presidency and mental illness, about how Goodwin researches the personal lives of presidents, about who the best analogues to our current president may be, about how history will have to be researched and written differently in an age when few write letters but text constantly.

Goodwin makes the humanity of our past vivid enough that it is able to provide ballast, just for a moment, to the inhumanity of our present. Enjoy!

Recommended books:

The Guns of August by Barbara Tuchman

War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy

Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy

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What Nate Silver's learned about forecasting elections

The Ezra Klein Show

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’ structural disadvantage in the House and Senate really is, whether there's a purpose to predicting election outcomes, which campaign reporters he reads, and whether Trump is the favorite for 2020.

Silver and I also share the experience of building journalism outlets trying to do things a bit differently over the past five years, so we discuss what he’s learned along the way, what he wishes he knew at the beginning, and how he hires.

Silver brings unusual clarity and rigor to the topics he focuses on, and right now, given the speed and intensity of the elections news cycle, a bit of rigor is a welcome thing. Enjoy!

Thinking Fast and Slow by Daniel Kahneman

Bad Blood by John Carreyrou

Superintelligence by Nick Bostrom

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

The Ezra Klein Show

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 worse, not better.

That’s not because we're not doing remarkable, courageous, heroic work. It’s not because we’re fake news or biased hacks. Look at the #MeToo movement, the investigations of Donald Trump's finances, the remarkable reporting that journalists do every day from war zones and Ebola outbreaks and authoritarian regimes.

It's because everything around us has changed — our business models, the way people read us, the way we compete with each other, the way we’re manipulated — and we’re getting played, particularly in political reporting and commentary, by the outrage merchants and con artists and trolls and polarizers who understand this new world better.

President Trump is the most successful media hacker out there, but he’s not the only one. They’re using us as tools to fracture American democracy, and I don’t think we know how to stop them.

Jay Rosen is a professor of journalism at New York University and the founder of PressThink. He’s one of our sharpest, clearest critics and interpreters. I asked him on the show to help me think through what’s wrong in the press, and what I’m doing wrong in my own work.

Recommended books:

Deciding What's News by Herbert Gans

Democracy in America by Alexis de Tocqueville

Exit, Voice, and Loyalty by Albert O. Hirschman

Making Democracy Work by Robert Putnam

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Why Bill Gates is worried

The Ezra Klein Show

“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 growing faster than everywhere else; more babies are being born in the places where it’s hardest to lead a healthy and productive life.”

There is no topic in the philanthropic world more fraught than population growth. The history of efforts to analyze and address it is filled with bad predictions and cruel solutions. The Gateses, though, are trying to take a different approach to the issue. Rather than seeing a population problem in the demographic projections, they’re framing it as a poverty problem — and, for that matter, an opportunity.

In this conversation, I talk with Bill Gates about the report and about much more: the geographic and political forces that have held African development back, whether economic growth brings political freedom, the risks posed by artificial intelligence, and how we should weigh future human lives and current animal suffering.

This conversation also marks the launch of a new Vox podcast and section, Future Perfect, which focuses on evidence-based ways to make the world a better place. You can find the section at Vox.com, and you can find the podcast, which is hosted by my colleague and friend Dylan Matthews, wherever you get your podcasts. Enjoy!

Recommended books:

The Headspace Guide to Meditation and Mindfulness by Andy Puddicombe

Educated by Tara Westover

Big Debt Crises by Ray Dalio

Find the Future Perfect podcast on Apple Podcasts | Spotify | ART19

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Reihan Salam makes the case against open borders

The Ezra Klein Show

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, that’s as much about inequality as it is about immigration. “Diversity is not the problem,” Salam writes. “What’s uniquely pernicious is extreme between-group inequality.”

Salam, the executive editor of the National Review, thus makes a two-sided case: He argues that a socially sustainable immigration system is one where America is more deeply committed to equality, which means both focusing on higher-skilled immigrants who need less support and radically raising the amount of support we’re willing to give immigrants who do need it. And that compromise, he argues, should be paired with a more serious American effort to improve the economic conditions of the places immigrants travel here from.

Is this a synthesis that makes sense? Does it really address the cleavages preventing us from moving forward on immigration? And what are the fundamental values that we should base our immigration system on anyway? That’s what Reihan and I discuss in this episode.

Recommended books:

The Other Side of Assimilation: How Immigrants Are Changing American Life by Tomas Jimenez

Replenished Ethnicity: Mexican Americans, Immigration, and Identity by Tomas Jimenez

Who Are We?: The Challenges to America's National Identity by Samuel Huntington

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Jose Antonio Vargas on living undocumented in Trump’s America

The Ezra Klein Show

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 immigrant.

Vargas went on to be a decorated journalist, winning a Pulitzer as part of the Washington Post team covering the Virginia Tech shootings. He profiled Mark Zuckerberg for the New Yorker and led a technology vertical at the Huffington Post. But he lived in fear of his secret, of the fragile foundation upon which he'd built his life. So he did something few would have the courage to do: He told the world himself.

In his new book, Dear America: Notes of an Undocumented Citizen, Vargas details what happened both before and after his confession. "This book is about constantly hiding from the government and, in the process, hiding from ourselves," he writes. "This book is about what it means to not have a home.”

Vargas has spent the better part of the last decade doing something no one should have to do: asking people to see him as a human, not a category; asking the country he lives in to decide what it wants to do with him, or what it wants from him. It is a testament to how strange and broken our system is, how uncertain our values are, that it has refused to give him an answer.

Immigration politics is at the core of Trumpism, which means it’s at the core of our politics right now. But the stories of actual immigrants aren’t. In this raw conversation, Vargas and I discuss his life, how being undocumented changes not just your path but your psyche, and what Vargas wants to say to those who see him as the problem they elected this president to fix.

Recommended books:

The Fire Next Time by James Baldwin

There There by Tommy Orange

America Is Not the Heart by Elaine Castillo

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Rebecca Traister: Women's rage is transforming America

The Ezra Klein Show

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 Revolutionary Power of Women's Anger. It’s a book, Traister writes, about how anger works for men in ways it doesn’t for women. I happened to read it the weekend before the Kavanaugh/Ford hearings, and it was eerily prescient: The book was essential to understanding not only what I was seeing at the hearings but, as importantly, what I wasn’t seeing.

My conversation with Traister is about those hearings, but about much more too: When is anger constructive and important? Can it tie us together, rather than just pulling us apart? How is the #MeToo movement navigating the fact that sometimes the people it’s angry about are also the people it loves — that our bad guys are also our good guys, as Traister puts it? And what does it mean to see each other in our full humanity, including in our angry humanity?

Recommended books and essays:

Intercourse by Andrea Dworkin

The Uses of Anger by Audre Lorde

The Power by Naomi Alderman

Key points in this episode

Patrick Deneen says liberalism has failed. Is he right?

The Ezra Klein Show

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 the left, the liberalism of Elizabeth Warren or Nancy Pelosi. He’s talking about the liberalism that drives both the left and the right, the one that elevates individual flourishing over groups, families, places, nature. That’s the liberalism that is wrecking our societies and our happiness, Deneen says, and while the left and the right often disagree on how to achieve it, they're both disastrously bought into its core ideas.

Deneen’s book, Why Liberalism Failed, has become a quiet sensation, gaining plaudits from conservative pundits and even showing up on Barack Obama’s reading list. His is a radical critique, and while I disagree with much of it, the things it gets right are important.

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Francis Fukuyama’s case against identity politics

The Ezra Klein Show

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 and the Politics of Resentment, he builds a theory of what identity means in modern societies and how spiraling demands for recognition are tearing at the fabric of our politics.

"The retreat on both sides into ever narrower identities threatens the possibility of deliberation and collective action by the society as a whole," he writes. "Down this road lies, ultimately, state breakdown and failure.” Yikes.

Fukuyama’s book revolves around a question I’ve become a bit obsessed by: When do we see political claims as identity politics, and when do we see them as just politics? What’s obscured in the passage from one boundary to another? Whose agendas are served by it? And in a country whose narrative of progress and perfection is inextricably bound up in the success of past moments of identity politics, how did this come to be such a vilified term today?

So I asked Fukuyama on the show to discuss it. This is a great conversation with one of the foremost political thinkers of our age.

Recommended books:

Democracy for Realists: Why Elections Do Not Produce Responsive Government by Christopher Achen and Larry Bartels

The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion by Jonathan Haidt

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Carol Anderson on the myth of American democracy

The Ezra Klein Show

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 and geography, may retain control of the chamber.

But it’s not just the structure of our system that eats at America’s democratic claims. It’s the rules being layered on top of it. In 2017, 99 bills to limit voting have been introduced in 31 states. Recent years have seen an explosion of laws meant to make it harder for Americans — particularly nonwhite, young, and poorer Americans — to vote. America calls itself a democracy, but it's elected officials are actively working to make democratic participation harder.

This is nothing new, says Carol Anderson, chair of Emory’s African-American studies department, and author of the new book One Person, No Vote. Efforts to limit the franchise, to ensure power remained where it was even as the trappings of democracy gave it legitimacy, are as old as the country itself.

“Right now, our democracy is in crisis,” she says. This is a conversation about the distance between what America claims to be, what it is, and how much worse it can get. It's about the continuity between past violations of our democracy that we all understand and condemn and present violations that cloak their true nature.

With the 2018 election around the corner, this is a conversation we all need to be having.

Recommended books:

Give Us the Ballot: The Modern Struggle for Voting Rights in America by Ari Berman

One Nation Under God: How Corporate America Invented Christian America by Kevin Kruse

White Flight: Atlanta and the Making of Modern Conservatism by Kevin Kruse

It's Even Worse Than It Looks: How the American Constitutional System Collided with the New Politics of Extremism by Thomas E. Mann and Norman J. Ornstein

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Martha C. Nussbaum on how fear deforms our politics

The Ezra Klein Show

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, communities, and polities forever after that.

This is a conversation about what fear is and how it shapes our worldviews and our politics. It’s also a conversation about what hope is, and whether embracing it is a choice we can, and should, make. Nussbaum is one of our greatest living philosophers. The way she thinks about politics, and her effort to recenter emotions at the core of both political and philosophical inquiry, is worth hearing.

The Prison Letters of Nelson Mandela by Sahm Venter

To Shape a New World: Essays on the Political Philosophy of Martin Luther King, Jr. edited by Tommie Shelby and Brandon M. Terry

The Opposite of Woe: My Life in Beer and Politics by John Hickenlooper

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David French on “The Great White Culture War"

The Ezra Klein Show

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.

“Conservative white Americans look at urban multicultural liberalism and notice an important fact,” he wrote. "Its white elite remains, and continues to enjoy staggering amounts of power and privilege. So when that same white elite applauds the decline of 'white America,' what conservatives often hear isn’t a cheer for racial justice but another salvo in our ongoing cultural grudge match, with the victors seeking to elevate black and brown voices while remaining on top themselves."

I asked French to come on the podcast to discuss this idea — and the controversies that motivated it — more deeply, and he quickly accepted. The result is a tricky conversation about very sensitive territory in our politics. It’s about how we talk about race and class and status and gender and sexuality and religion, how we understand and misunderstand each other, how our political identities turn conflicts about one thing into conflicts about all things, why groups that are objectively powerful feel so powerless, and much more.

I always appreciate the grace, openness, and intelligence French brings to his writing, and all of that is on full display here too.

Recommended books:

The Coddling of the American Mind by Greg Lukianoff and Jonathan Haidt

Coming Apart by Charles Murray

The Expanse series by James S.A. Corey

Key points in this episode

Your attention is being hijacked. Chris Bailey can help.

The Ezra Klein Show

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 for our attention, and we’re often losing it. Chris Bailey’s Hyperfocus looks, from the outside, like a book about productivity. But it’s really one of the best books I’ve read about attention: what it is, how much it can hold, how we lose track of it, and how to get it back.

This is a conversation about paying attention to your attention, making sure you’re controlling it rather than accidentally letting it — and all the multibillion-dollar companies working to hijack it — control you. This is one of those conversations that, if you can apply it, will actually make your life a bit better, a bit more your own.

Recommended books:

Getting Things Done by David Allen

Mindfulness in Plain English by Bhante Henepola Gunaratana

How Not to Die by Michael Greger

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Anand Giridharadas on the elite charade of changing the world

The Ezra Klein Show

“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 circles. His education took him through Oxford and Harvard, he spent years as a New York Times columnist, he's a regular on Morning Joe, he’s a TED talker. And so when he mounted the stage at the Aspen Institute and told his fellow fellows that their pretensions of doing good were just that — pretensions — and that they were more the problem than the solution, it caused some controversy.

Giridharadas’s new book will make a lot of people angry. It’s about the difference between generosity and justice, the problems with only looking for win-win solutions, the ways the corporate world has come to dominate the discourse of change, and the fact that elite networks change the people who are part of them.

But for all the power of Giridharadas’s critique of elite do-goodery, does he have better answers to the problems they’re trying to solve? And what of the very real problems that have left so many disillusioned with government, or the very real accomplishments that exist in the systems we’ve built? If we are pursuing change wrong, then what needs to be changed to pursue it better?

Recommended books:

There Will Be No Miracles Here by Casey Gerald (forthcoming)

The Argonauts by Maggie Nelson

Identity: The Demand for Dignity and the Politics of Resentment by Francis Fukuyama

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

The Ezra Klein Show

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 also the first author to have every book in a single series win the Hugo for best novel, and the first black author to win a Hugo for best novel. She’s a badass.

What makes Jemisin’s work so remarkable is the power and detail of the worlds she builds for her characters, and her readers, to inhabit. In this podcast, she shows us how she does it: Jemisin teaches a world-building seminar for sci-fi and fantasy authors, and here, she leads me through that exercise live. It’s a master class not only in building a new world but in understanding our own. You don’t want to miss this.

Recommended books:

The Murderbot Diaries series from Martha Wells

Unexpected Stories by Octavia Butler

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Reup: Zephyr Teachout vs. Corruption

The Ezra Klein Show

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 as New York’s attorney general. The Democratic primary, which will likely decide the race, is on September 13.

The NY AG position is unusually important right now. President Trump’s businesses are in New York, his family works in New York, his associates worked in New York. When special counsel Robert Mueller referred Michael Cohen for prosecution, it was to New York prosecutors. And for all the talk of Trump’s pardon power, he can pardon against federal prosecution, not state prosecution. All that means that the New York attorney general is uniquely situated to investigate, and prosecute, the corruption swirling around Trumpworld.

I had Teachout on this podcast in June 2017. We talked about how political corruption was defined by the Founding Fathers, and why, during the Constitutional Convention, they discussed the threat posed by corruption more than they discussed the threat posed by foreign invasion. And we talked about the way today’s Supreme Court — in the Citizens United and related decisions — has narrowed the definition to be almost meaningless. We also discussed an emoluments lawsuit Teachout was involved in against Trump, as well as the power of corporate monopolies in American life.

It was a great conversation then, and it’s all the more relevant now. Enjoy!

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

The Ezra Klein Show

"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 People, and an outsider candidate for the Democratic nomination in 2020. His campaign is based on a grim view of the economy he sees coming: AI, automation, and globalization leading to mass joblessness. The only things that can save us, he says, are a universal basic income (UBI), a redefinition of what work is and how it’s compensated, and a redefinition of how we measure economic and social progress.

I’ll be honest. I’m skeptical of the robots-will-take-all-the-jobs thesis that’s took Silicon Valley, and much of the punditariat, by storm. Yang and I debate those doubts, as well as the different arguments for a UBI (and the various ways to finance it).

You want big ideas? Here they are.

Recommended Books:

Give People Money by Annie Lowrey (I promise I did not push Andrew to recommend this!)

AI Superpowers: China, Silicon Valley, and the New World Order by Kai-Fu Lee

Squeezed by Alissa Quart

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Chef Marcus Samuelsson on immigration, creativity, and Anthony Bourdain

The Ezra Klein Show

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.

Samuelsson’s story is remarkable. He was born in Ethiopia to a mother who carried him and his sister 75 miles on foot to a hospital when all three of them were suffering from tuberculosis. Samuelsson’s mother died, but he and his sister survived and were adopted by a Swedish family, which is where he grew up.

He’s lived and cooked all over the world — Japan, France, Austria, Switzerland — and has a pile of Michelin stars as a testament to his ability to see how the culinary traditions of one place can be informed by another, or introduced to another.

This is a conversation about creativity and how diversity powers it. It’s a conversation about what immigration adds to communities, rather than just the role it plays in politics. And it’s a conversation — an emotional one — about what Samuelsson learned from his friend Anthony Bourdain, whose show No Reservations set the template in this space, and whose loss continues to be

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Why online politics gets so extreme so fast

The Ezra Klein Show

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, Holocaust denials and other disturbing content.”

And it wasn’t just Trump videos. Watching Hillary Clinton rallies got her "arguments about the existence of secret government agencies and allegations that the United States government was behind the attacks of Sept. 11.” Nor was it just politics. "Videos about vegetarianism led to videos about veganism. Videos about jogging led to videos about running ultramarathons."

Tufekci is a New York Times columnist and a professor at the University of North Carolina. She’s also one of the clearest thinkers around on how digital platforms work, how their algorithms understand and shape our preferences, and what the consequences are for society. So as we learn that Facebook is detecting new efforts at electoral manipulation and as we watch online politics become ever more bitter and divisive, I wanted to talk with Tufekci about how digital platforms have become engines of radicalization, and what we can do about it.

Recommended books:

The Control Revolution by James Beniger

Ruling the Waves by Debora Spar

Orality and Literacy by Walter Ong

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Taking Trump’s corruption seriously

The Ezra Klein Show

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 financial corruption swirling around Trump’s businesses, and now his administration. In any other White House, this would be the ongoing, constant story — the site of endless investigations and inquiries. And it still might be. We know Mueller is looking into the web of financial ties between Trump’s businesses and the post-Soviet bloc, and we know that part of the Mueller investigation gets Trump particularly outraged. Plus, we still don’t know what’s on Trump’s tax returns, or what could be discovered if Democrats take back a chamber of Congress and get subpoena power.

Here’s my bet: If there is some scandal lurking that’s going to derail the Trump administration, I think it’s going to be found by following the money, not by following the Russian bots.

Adam Davidson has been investigating this since Trump's election. If you're an avid podcast listener, you probably know Adam from his days at Planet Money. He's now at the New Yorker, doing some of the best investigative work on the Trump Organization. You’ll want to hear what he’s found.

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The surprising story of how American politics polarized

The Ezra Klein Show

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 scientist at Colgate University and author of the book The Polarizers: Postwar Architects of Our Partisan Era. I’ve read a lot of books on polarization, and Rosenfeld’s is the best I’ve seen at painting a picture of what American politics looked like before Republican meant conservative and Democrat meant liberal, and why polarization seemed like a good, necessary thing to many of the people who drove it.

While you listen to this history, try to think about it not from the perspective of someone sitting in 2018, looking at a political system in crisis, but someone in 1955, observing a system that offered nothing but false and confusing choices. Would you have been on the side of the polarizers?

Recommended books:

On Capitol Hill by Julian Zelizer

Making Minnesota Liberal by Jennifer Delton

Social Policy in the United States by Theda Skocpol

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The most important idea for understanding American politics in 2018

The Ezra Klein Show

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 of foreign-born residents is at a historically high level.

What happens to a country amid this kind of demographic change and strain? What does it do to our politics, to our identities, to our worldview?

I’ve come to believe that you can’t understand politics in America right now without understanding these changes and how they act on us psychologically. And to understand these changes, you need to talk to Yale psychologist Jennifer Richeson, who has done pioneering work on the way perceptions of demographic threat and change affect people’s political opinions, voting behavior, and ideas about themselves.

I believe this is one of the most important conversations I’ve had on this podcast for understanding America today — and I also know it’s just the start of trying to understand these questions. Enjoy.

Recommended books:

White Rage: The Unspoken Truth of Our Racial Divide by Carol Anderson (who was also on EKS)

Change They Can't Believe In: The Tea Party and Reactionary Politics in America by Christopher S. Parker and Matt A. Barreto

The Space Between Us: Social Geography and Politics by Ryan Enos

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What economists and politicians get wrong about trade

The Ezra Klein Show

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 problems, and undermine domestic social bargains,” Rodrik warned. But few listened. The tendency to emphasize trade’s benefits while ignoring its costs created a massive political backlash.

“Economists would have had a greater—and much more positive—impact on the public debate had they stuck closer to their discipline’s teaching, instead of siding with globalization’s cheerleaders,” Rodrik wrote in his excellent book, Straight Talk on Trade: Ideas for a Sane World Economy.

Rodrik isn’t just a rock thrower. He’s a professor of international political economy at Harvard's John F. Kennedy School of Government and the president-elect of the International Economic Association. And so, as Trump’s trade war begins, I asked him on the show to explain what politicians and economists have gotten so wrong about trade, and what it would mean to get it right.

Recommended books (and an article):

Economism: Bad Economics and the Rise of Inequality by James Kwak

Power and Plenty: Trade, War, and the World Economy in the Second Millennium by Ronald Findlay and Kevin O'Rourke

“International Regimes, Transactions, and Change: Embedded Liberalism in the Postwar Economic Order” by John Ruggie

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How to disagree better

The Ezra Klein Show

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 disagreement.

I’ve known Brooks for a while. And I disagree with him on, well, a lot — at least when it comes to American politics. And yet, those disagreements haven’t ended a years-long conversation between us on everything from management to spirituality to policy. I can say from experience: Brooks really is good at disagreeing.

In this podcast, Brooks — a Seattle native with a liberal family and a background as a traveling musician — reveals what he’s learned on how to disagree better, why civility shouldn’t be the goal in conversation, and why it’s healthy to have a lot of arguments. We talk about why he’s stepping down from his position at AEI, why I stepped down from management at Vox, and why anger is a healthy emotion and contempt isn’t.

This is one of those conversations I’ve thought about daily since having it. The anger versus contempt rubric has been particularly useful for me, and I think it will be for you. Enjoy!

Recommended books:

Zen and the Art of Archery by Eugen Herrigel

The Unpersuadables by Will Storr

The Consolations of Mortality by Andrew Stark

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Jaron Lanier’s case for deleting social media right now

The Ezra Klein Show

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 social media — I was also hanging back from much of the news — but I’m certain the blackout helped.

The experience of coming back, and reopening myself to the feeds and the tweets and the algorithms, has been profound. It feels like, suddenly, someone is following me around and shouting in my ear. Sometimes what they’re shouting is important, or funny, or incisive. Sometimes it’s angry, insulting, or just irrelevant. Sometimes it’s just a cry for attention — Look at me! Post to me! Don’t let your competitors get all the likes and retweets!

I’ve been thinking, a lot, about how I want to engage with social media going forward. And so I called Jaron Lanier. Lanier’s been on this podcast before. Our previous conversation — about virtual reality and the ways the internet went awry from its early utopian ideals — is one of my favorites. But his new book is particularly relevant to me. It’s called Ten Arguments For Deleting Your Social Media Accounts Right Now, and so I asked him on the show to make the case that I should, in fact, delete all my social media accounts right now, and that you should, too.

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

The Ezra Klein Show

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 he really do, and when might he do it?

In January, I had Lawfare’s Susan Hennessey on the podcast to guide me through the Trump-Russia case, and it’s one of the most helpful — and popular — episodes we’ve done. Now she’s back, and given how much more we know now than we did eight months ago, it’s an even crazier, more necessary, conversation. Enjoy!

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The Supreme Court vs. Democracy

The Ezra Klein Show

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 many Supreme Court seats as Barack Obama did in eight.

When news of Kennedy’s retirement came down, I knew exactly who I wanted to talk to: Dahlia Lithwick, Slate’s exceptional legal analyst, and host of the podcast Amicus. I can’t say our conversation made me feel better about the Supreme Court. If someone as knowledgeable and humane as Lithwick is this alarmed, then, well, it’s alarming. But it at least left me feeling like I understood the stakes.

Lithwick is brilliant in tracing the ideological and political trends that have led us to this moment: We talk about how the Court has moved steadily right for a generation, such that John Roberts — John Roberts! — is now the closest thing to a swing vote; how lifetime appointments have collided with deep politicization; what it means that voting rights are under attack from judges who wouldn’t hold their jobs if America was more of a democracy, and much more.

The right has won the fight for the Supreme Court for the next few decades, and they have done so because they were more focused, more committed, and better organized. This is how they did it, and what comes next.

Recommended book:

One Person, No Vote: How Voter Suppression Is Destroying Our Democracy by Carol Anderson

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

The Ezra Klein Show

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.

Schneiderman was only Mayer’s most recent investigation. Over the course of her career, she’s exposed America’s torture programs, the Koch brothers’ takeover of Republican Party politics, the role the reclusive Mercer family had in funding Donald Trump’s rise, the real story of what happened between Clarence Thomas and Anita Hill, and more. She’s among the greatest investigative reporters of her generation, and I’ve always wondered how she breaks so many huge stories on such a vast range of topics. And so, in this podcast, I asked her.

The result is a conversation that not only helps make sense of the moment we’re living in — from #MeToo to how the Kochs tamed the Trump administration to why Gina Haspel is our CIA director — but also acts as a primer on the art and practice of investigative reporting. Enjoy!

Recommended books:

Winner-Take-All Politics by Jacob S. Hacker and Paul Pierson

The Diamond as Big as the Ritz by F. Scott Fitzgerald

Invisible Hands: The Businessmen's Crusade Against the New Deal by Kim Phillips-Fein

Optimism about America

The Ezra Klein Show

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 on the life and work of Jim and Deborah Fallows. Jim is a national correspondent at the Atlantic; Deborah is a writer and linguist. When Japan looked like the future, they moved there to watch it happen; when software was eating the world, they moved to Seattle and Jim dove inside Microsoft; when China was on the rise, that was where they made their home. It’s a reason, when asked, that I’ve always named Jim Fallows as one of my few must-read writers: His journalism is thick with a wisdom that only comes from having immersed himself in many, many different lives.

Over the past few years, however, the Fallows have believed the story is happening, well, here. They came to believe that the story America is telling about itself to itself — a story of national decline, of bitter political polarization, of rural resentment and coastal elitism and tribal identity and spiritual malaise — is wrong. And so they got in their plane (yes, Jim is a pilot too), and they spent years traveling the country, trying to see it more clearly by seeing its places more precisely. It has left them with a sense of hope that feels almost alien in this age.

Their new book, Our Towns, is a travelogue of this journey and what it revealed to them about America. In this conversation, we talk about the optimism it left them with, as well as what they’ve learned designing their lives around adventure and travel, why they spent their honeymoon in a work camp in Ghana, how to make life feel longer, whether our political identities are our true identities, why Americans hate the media, and the reason libraries are more important than ever.

I’ve always admired the Fallowses’ for both their work and their wisdom, and it was a pleasure, in this interview, to get to explore both.

Deborah's recommended books:

Democracy in America by Alexis de Tocqueville

Journals of Lewis and Clark edited by Bernard DeVoto

James's recommended books:

Grant by Ron Chernow

Sister Carrie by Theodore Dreiser

An American Tragedy by Theodore Dreiser

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

The Ezra Klein Show

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 on the Clinton campaign in 2016, she was there as Clinton seemed certain to win in 2016 — and there on that night in November when she lost.

Her new book, Chasing Hillary, is a memoir of these years and that reporting. In it, Chozick reflects on her coverage of Clinton, her relationship with the candidate, the incentives of her newsroom, and how all of it intertwined with her own life. It’s an unusually honest book, exposing much more of the psychodrama that exists between politicians, campaign staff, editors, and reporters than is normally shown, and Chozick is frank about both her discomfort with some of the stories she wrote and the ways her subjects tried to manipulate her.

In this conversation, we talk about the emails, as well the media’s deep and pervasive biases, what Trump could do that Clinton couldn’t, the ways campaign coverage distorts campaign reporting, our gendered expectations for politicians, Chozick's clashes with Bernie Sanders supporters, Chelsea Clinton’s criticisms of Chozick’s book, and much more.

Books:

What It Takes: The Way to the White House by Richard Ben Cramer

Nixon Agonistes: The Crisis of the Self-Made Man by Gary Willis

A Woman in Charge: The Life of Hillary Rodham Clinton by Carl Bernstein

The Boys on the Bus by Timothy Crouse

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The age of "mega-identity" politics

The Ezra Klein Show

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 that fuse party affiliation to ideology, race, religion, gender, sexuality, geography, and more. These mega-identities didn’t exist 50 or even 30 years ago, but now that they’re here, they change the way we see each other, the way we engage in politics, and the way politics absorbs other — previously non-political —spheres of our culture.

In making her case, Mason offers one of the best primers I’ve read on how little it takes to activate a sense of group identity in human beings, and how far-reaching the cognitive and social implications are once that group identity takes hold. I don’t want to spoil our discussion here, but suffice to say that her recounting of the “minimal group paradigm” experiments is not to be missed. This is the kind of research that will change not just how you think about the world, but how you think about yourself.

Mason’s book is, I think, one of the most important published this year, and this conversation gave me a lens on our political discord that I haven’t stopped thinking about since. If you want to understand the kind of identity politics that’s driving America in 2018, you should listen in.

Books:

Ideology in America by Christopher Ellis and James Stimson

Homegoing by Yaa Gyasi

The Power by Naomi Alderman

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Is American democracy really in decline? A debate.

The Ezra Klein Show

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 characterized most governments in North America and Western Europe, is coming apart at its seams. In its stead, we are seeing the rise of illiberal democracy, or democracy without rights, and undemocratic liberalism, or rights without democracy.”

It’s an excellent book. But reading it left me wondering: Was America really such a textbook liberal democracy before? I have no qualms with Mounk’s concerns about our present, but as I've dived deeper into the declinist literature on American democracy, I have come to wonder whether it relies on an overly nostalgic view of our past.

The Sam Harris Debate

The Ezra Klein Show

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 Charles Murray about a year ago. In that interview, the two argued that African-Americans are, for a combination of genetic and environmental reasons, intrinsically and immutably less intelligent than white Americans, and Murray argued that the implications of this “forbidden knowledge” should shape social policy.

In response, Vox published a piece by three respected academic specialists on genes and IQ who argued Murray and Harris got both the science and its implications very wrong. Harris felt slandered by the piece we published and publicly demanded I debate him.

After failing to get Harris to debate the authors of the Vox piece instead, I agreed. Over email, he then revoked his invitation to debate me. Harris’s defenders published a few pieces, our authors published a second piece, and everyone moved on. That’s where things sat for months. Then, a few weeks ago, Harris reopened the discussion with me on Twitter, I published a piece on the subject in response, and he published all the private emails we’d sent each other along the way. As you’ll hear him say, that backfired, so he decided, at last, to debate me.

Whew. So here we are.

For all that, I think this discussion — which is also being released on Harris’ podcast — is worth listening to. Harris’s view is that the criticism he and Murray have received is a moral panic driven by identity politics and political correctness. My view is that these IQ tests are inseparable from both the past and present of racism in America, and to conduct this conversation without voices who are expert on that subject and who hail from the affected communities is to miss the point from the outset.

So that’s where we begin. Where we go, I think, is worthwhile: these hypotheses about biological racial difference are now, and have alway been, used to advance clear political agendas — in Murray’s case, an end to programs meant to redress racial inequality, and in Harris’s case, a counterstrike against identitarian concerns he sees as a threat to his own career. Yes, identity politics are at play in this conversation, but that includes white identity politics.

To Harris, and you’ll hear this explicitly, identity politics is something others do. To me, it’s something we all do, and that he and many others simply refuse to admit they’re doing. This is one of the advantages of being the majority group: your concerns get coded as concerns, it’s everyone else who is playing identity politics.

Even if you’re not interested in the specifics of our debate, I think this discussion goes to some important questions in American life — questions that drive our culture and politics today. I hope you enjoy it.

A few links mentioned in the discussion:

My piece on this whole debate, which links all the relevant articles.

Harris and Murray's original podcast

Vox's original response piece

The Haier piece Harris wanted us to publish defending him

Our authors' response to various criticisms

The emails between me and Harris

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

The Ezra Klein Show

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 lost almost $100 billion in market cap in recent weeks.

Behind Facebook’s hard year is a collision between the company’s values, ambitions, business model, and mindboggling scale. Mark Zuckerberg, the site’s founder, has long held that the company’s mission is to make the world more open and connected — with the assumption being that a more open and connected world is a better world. But a more open world can make it easier for governments to undermine each other’s elections from afar; a more connected world can make it easier to spread hatred and incite violence.

So has Facebook become too big to manage, and too dangerous when it fails? Should the social infrastructure of the global community be managed by a corporation headquartered in Northern California? What’s Zuckerberg’s reply to Apple CEO Tim Cook, who says the social media giant’s business model is at odds with its users’ interests? And how has all this changed Zuckerberg’s ambitions for Facebook’s future, and confidence in its mission?

Zuckerberg and I talk about all of this and more in this conversation.

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Is Mitch Landrieu the "White, Southern Anti-Trump"?

The Ezra Klein Show

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 of which he controversially took down in May of 2017.

"These monuments purposefully celebrate a fictional, sanitized Confederacy; ignoring the death, ignoring the enslavement, and the terror that it actually stood for,” Landrieu said, in a speech that went viral nationally. "After the Civil War, these statues were a part of that terrorism as much as a burning cross on someone’s lawn; they were erected purposefully to send a strong message to all who walked in their shadows about who was still in charge in this city.”

Since then, Landrieu's profile has skyrocketed. He is often talked about as a Democratic candidate for 2020. In the New York Times, Michelle Goldberg called him "the white, Southern anti-Trump."

In this conversation, Landrieu and I discuss how he came to believe it necessary to remove the statues, and what happened in the aftermath. We also talk about his experience serving in the Louisiana legislature with David Duke ("a dress rehearsal for the rise of Donald Trump,” he says), the power of dog whistle politics, why you can’t run a government like a business, whether Democrats can still talk to the whole country, what makes a “ radical centrist," why leaders need to get comfortable with uncomfortable conversations, and whether confronting America’s divisions opens a path towards healing or just deepens our divides.

Recommended books:

Where Do We Go From Here: Chaos or Community, by Martin Luther King Jr.

Lies My Teacher Told Me by James Loewen

The Warmth of Other Suns by Isabel Wilkerson

Sing, Unburied, Sing by Jesmyn Ward

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A better conversation on guns

The Ezra Klein Show

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 show, called Citizen-Protectors: The Everyday Politics of Guns in an Age of Decline by Jennifer Carlson.

Carlson, a sociologist, realized that her discipline had missed a major social transformation: that Americans weren’t just buying guns for hunting or home protection. Guns had become part of their everyday lives, structuring how they saw the world, their country, and their role in it. And so she dove deep into the experiences of gun carriers in Michigan, becoming a gun carrier and even certified instructor herself, examining how the NRA’s training programs construct new models of citizenship, and digging into how gun ownership interacts with race, gender, and class.

I don’t believe that empathy alone offers a way forward in the guns debate. But I do believe that understanding the identities at play here — both among those who own guns and those who want to see gun ownership restricted — is the only way to have a debate that makes sense. This conversation helped me, at least, see those identities much more clearly.

Books

Columbine by Dave Cullen

Chokehold by Paul Butler

The Limits of Whiteness by Neda Maghbouleh

Key points in this episode

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

The Ezra Klein Show

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 1950s, the nonwhite share of the Democratic vote was about 7 percent. In 2012, it was about 44 percent — and that number is ticking upward.

Kennedy is navigating it smoothly. Tapped to give the Democratic response to the State of the Union — and you’ll want to listen to him tell the story of how that came about — he delivered a powerful performance in a speaking slot that usually buries ambitious young politicians. And he did it by reminding Democrats that their rhetoric can be bigger than their divisions, that a party built on difference can still see its way to a national identity.

In this conversation, Kennedy and I talk about the vision and the policies that lie behind that speech. Where should Democrats go on health care, on economics, on drugs? Is the divide over identity politics and economic populism really a “false choice,” as Kennedy argues? And how do Democrats talk about unity when Trump keeps driving the national conversation into divisive issues?

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Amy Chua on how tribalism is tearing America apart

The Ezra Klein Show

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.

In her new book, Political Tribes, Amy Chua argues that America’s foreign policy has long been undermined by our underestimation of tribalism abroad, and that our domestic stability is now being hollowed out by our inability to see it clearly at home. Donald Trump, she argues, is a product of tribal threat — of a country where “race has split America’s poor and class has split America’s whites.” And progressives, she argues, are a big part of the problem — they have become judgmental, exclusionary, and smug.

The question that animates much of my conversation with Chua is: What can be done to calm American tribalism? Is it a product of overheated rhetoric and political choices? Or is it the inevitable result of a country teetering on demographic instability, a moment when no group can truly consolidate power so all groups are left fighting for it?

Mentioned:

The book about sports rivalry that Ezra mentions as an example of the power of divisive sports identities

Amy Chua mentioned Better Angels, a group working to depolarize America

She also mentioned Sarah Silverman's new show, I Love You, America, which aims to bridge our political divide with comedy

Anne Jones' "whitelash" idea is articulated here

Ezra mentioned that the Soviet Union exploited American racial tensions. Here’s an explanation of that history.

Books:

The Possessed by Elif Batuman

Educated: A Memoir by Tara Westover

Ethnic Groups in Conflict by Donald L. Horowitz

Amy Chua also did a By the Book with the New York Times recently, so here's a full breakdown of her reading recommendations.

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

The Ezra Klein Show

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 users’ lives worse, more busy, more distracted?

Harris wrote up his worries in a slide deck manifesto. “A Call to Minimize Distraction & Respect Users’ Attention” went viral within the company and led to Harris being named Google’s “design ethicist.” But he soon realized that he couldn’t change enough from the inside. The business model wasn’t built to give users back their time. It was built to take ever more of it.

Harris, who co-founded the Center for Humane Technology, has become the most influential critic of how Silicon Valley designs products to addict us. His terms, like the need to focus on “Time Well Spent,” have been adopted (or perhaps coopted) by, among others, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg.

I interviewed Harris recently for my podcast. We talked about how the 2016 election threw Silicon Valley into crisis, why negative emotions dominate online, where Silicon Valley’s model of human decisionmaking went wrong, whether he buys Zuckerberg's change of heart, what happened when meditation master Thich Nhat Hahn came to Google, what it means to control your own time, and what can be done about it.

Key points in this episode

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

The Ezra Klein Show

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. There’s more opportunities for human flourishing, more personal freedom, more democracy, more education, more equality, more technological wonder, than the world has ever seen.

In Pinker’s new book, Enlightenment Now, he mounts both his case that the world that this moment is astonishingly great from a historical perspective, and argues that there’s a reason for that: enlightenment values of science, reason, humanism, and faith in progress. Values that he says are under attack from a right that is retreating into zero-sum nationalism, a left that has lost faith in progress, and a public that doesn't always appreciate just how much progress has been made.

In this conversation, we talk about Pinker’s new book, as well as his views on political correctness on campus, how politics drives us to irrationality, and what future generations will look back on us with horror for doing. There are things Pinker says in here that I’m skeptical of, as you’ll hear, but I agree with his big point: if all you’re following is the daily news cycle, with our deep bias towards what’s going wrong right now, it’s easy to miss how much has gone right to get us to this moment.

Books and articles mentioned in this episode:

Pinker's piece for the New Repulibic, Science Is Not Your Enemy

Leon Wieseltier's reponse to that piece

Yuval Noah Harari's, Sapiens

Paul Shapiro's Clean Meat

Philip Tetlock's Superforecasting

Peter Singer's The Expanding Circle

Richard Herrnstein's controversial Atlantic piece on IQ

E.O. Wilson's book, Sociobiology

German Lopez's reporting on "The Ferguson Effect"

Books Recommended:

Factfulness by Hans Rosling

The Beginning of Infinity by David Deutsch

Whole Earth Discipline by Stewart Brandt

Atrocities by Matthew White

Enlightenment Now by Steven Pinker

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Why my politics are bad with Bhaskar Sunkara

The Ezra Klein Show

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 has 40,000 subscribers and a million readers monthly online.

Jacobin is at the vanguard of a resurgent American left that judges traditional liberalism as too weak and feckless for the times we live in and sees politics as fundamentally about class struggle. And Sunkara has been an able and interesting articulator of that view, as well as a longtime critic of mine.

I wanted to have Sunkara on the podcast to talk through what his form of socialism means in America and elsewhere today, what’s wrong with my politics, and what separates traditional forms of liberalism from democratic socialism. If you want to understand what the new American left is thinking, where it’s going, and what challenges it’s facing, his answers are worth listening to. Enjoy!

Books:

The Prophet: The Life of Leon Trotsky by Isaac Deutscher

The Other America by Michael Harrington

The Age of Extremes: The Short Twentieth Century by Eric Hobsbawm

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How Democracies Die

The Ezra Klein Show

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 Trump. But it deserves more than that. It is more than that.

How Democracies Die is three books woven together. One summarizes acres of research on how democracies tumble into autocracy. The second is an analysis of the troubling conditions under which American democracy thrived and the reasons it has entered into decline. The third book is a fretful tour of Trump’s first year in office, and the ways in which his instincts and actions mirror those of would-be autocrats before him.

Of these, the book about Donald Trump is the least interesting, and so in this interview, I didn’t focus on it. Instead, this is a discussion about how modern democracies fall, and the ways in which American democracy has been creeping towards crisis for decades now.

Viewed this way, Trump is much more a symptom of our democratic decline than its cause. So let's talk about the cause.

Books and Articles Mentioned

The Oppermanns by Lion Feuchtwanger

The Shaping of Southern Politics: Suffrage Restriction and the Establishment of the One-Party South, 1880-1910 by J. Morgan. Kousser

The Path to Power (The Years of Lyndon Johnson, Volume 1) by Robert Caro

Political Order in Changing Societies by Samuel P. Huntington (edited)

Donald Matthews' book about the Senate in the 1950s

Julia Azari's piece, Weak parties and strong partisanship are a bad combination:

Rosenthal political polarization

The webcomic Ezra mentioned, "Different"

James Carse's book, Finite and Infinite Games

Key points in this episode

How to oppose Trump without becoming more like him

The Ezra Klein Show

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 people of different faiths, disciplines, and ideologies discuss divisive questions without becoming more divided, without losing sight of each other's humanity.

Tippett comes from a political family, and spent her early adulthood working on Cold War policy in the shadow of the Berlin Wall. She was a wonk who talked SALT treaties and nuclear policy for a living. But she left that life, believing that there were harder, deeper questions that language wasn’t allowing her to explore, much less answer.

I've been wanting to talk with Tippett because I think this is a moment that challenges our humanity as we engage in the daily thrum of politics. Trump makes everything he touches a bit Trumpier, he calls on our worst selves, he makes it seem more acceptable — even more necessary — to act more like him. And he degrades all of us in the process.

It has never, to me, felt harder to keep hold of decency in public life than it is now. This is something Tippett has rare skill at. Here, she both offers and models an approach all of us can learn from.

Walking the Pastures of Wonder by John O’Donahue

Rilke’s Book of Hours: Love Poems to God, translated by Joanna Macy and Anita Barrows

Let Your Life Speak, by Parker Palmer

Key points in this episode

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

The Ezra Klein Show

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 some time within it is a privilege. But I don’t know how to describe it to you. It begins with the story of Lanier tripsitting Richard Feynman, the famed physicist, when he was dying from cancer and decided to try LSD, and it goes from there.

Lanier is a VR pioneer and a digital philosopher. He coined the term "virtual reality,” founded one of the first companies in the space, and has been involved in both the practice and theory of creating and living in virtual worlds for decades now. He's one of the most trenchant critics of Silicon Valley's business model, and the way it's screwed up both the internet and the world. And somehow, all this has made him a much more humanistic, insightful analyst of what it’s like to live in this world, too.

His latest book, “Dawn of the New Everything,” is one of my favorites of the last year — it’s thrilling to read a memoir that smart, and that strange, in an era that is so focused on making us dumber and angrier. And in person, Lanier is just as exciting — every answer has an insight worth hearing in it.

This is one of my favorite conversations I've had on the pod. Give it 15 minutes. If you don’t love it, I’ll give you your money back.

Books:

What life is like in North Korea

The Ezra Klein Show

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 Kingdom" is a world unto itself; a land of deprivation, of lunacy, of tyranny, of delusion. We have no diplomatic relations, no trade, no cross-cultural exchanges. We don't understand Kim Jong Un, we don't understand his people, and they don't understand us. And so, ignorant, we lurch towards the possibility of nuclear war built atop mutual miscomprehension.

The best view we have into life in North Korea is Barbara Demick's Nothing to Envy: The Ordinary Lives of North Koreans. Demick was the Los Angeles Times bureau chief in Seoul and Beijing, and she found herself obsessed with this country she couldn't cover and couldn't understand. So she began talking to the people who had left it, the refugees who escaped across the DMZ. She began asking them to reconstruct their lives, to tell her what it was like, to make everyday life in North Korea intelligible. And they did. They told her what it was like to grow up, and to fall in love, and to go to school, and to have dinner, and to flee. They told her what it was like to build new lives, to remember past friends, to know their family was in a place they could never visit again, to hear the rest of the world fear and pity the place they had once called home.

This conversation is about North Korea, but it's also about North Koreans — about what it's like to live in the most closed society on earth, about what they know and don't know of the outside world, about how their existence can be both ordinary and extraordinary, about what would happen to them if there was a war. And this is a conversation about what we need to know about North Korea, about how the country's past informs its present, about what Demick would tell Trump if he would just listen.

Key points in this episode

"An orgy of serious policy discussion" with Paul Krugman

The Ezra Klein Show

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 discussion.”

Then, of course, Donald Trump won the election, and serious policy discussion took a backseat to alternative facts, at least for awhile. But now it’s time!

In this podcast, Krugman and I cover a lot of ground. We talk taxes, net neutrality, universal basic incomes, job guarantees, antitrust, automation, productivity growth, health care, climate change, college costs, and more. Krugman explains why more information doesn’t make people better thinkers, the “kitchen test” for assessing how much technological progress a society is really making, and what the role of policy analysis is when the policymakers don’t care about evidence.

Enjoy!

Books:

The Foundation novels by Isaac Asimov

An Inquiry Concerning Human Understanding by David Hume

Plagues and Peoples by William McNeil

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The case for impeachment

The Ezra Klein Show

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 just make a hiring mistake, as companies do all the time? What if we elect someone who proves himself or herself unfit for office — impulsive, conspiratorial, undisciplined, destructive, cruel?

I’ve spent the past few months reporting out a story on that question — a story that is about Donald Trump, sure, but also about the American political system more broadly — and so today, on the podcast, the tables are turned: Sean Rameswaram, the host of Vox's new, soon-to-be daily explainer podcast, interviewed me about “The case for normalizing impeachment.”

The big question here is one that I've been weighing on the podcast in recent months (listen to my second episode with Chris Hayes and you'll hear an early version of it): Are the civic and political consequences of impeachment worse than the consequences of leaving a dangerously unfit president in office? I think I've come to an answer — but it's not the answer I started with. Enjoy!

Suggested books on impeachment:

Impeachment: A Handbook by Charles Black Jr.

Impeachment: A Citizen's Guide by Cass Sunstein

Young Radicals: In the War for American Ideals by Jeremy McCarter

Constitutional Law Stories edited by Michael C. Dorf

Key points in this episode

What Buddhism got right about the human brain

The Ezra Klein Show

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 Why Buddhism is True, and it’s fantastic. I’m interested in mindfulness, and so have read a lot of books on the subject. This isn’t like those. It’s a not a how-to guide, or an argument for meditation’s health benefits. It’s a deep dive into theories of the mind, informed both by Wright’s scientific background and his study and practice of Buddhism. It’s about how our minds evolved to keep us alive, not to keep us happy or satisfied — and what can be done about it.

There is practical advice in this podcast, too. Wright beautifully describes what happens when he reaches what he calls "meditative depths,” what it’s like to go on a 10-day silent meditation retreat, and why a mindful outlook doesn’t lead to complacency or neutrality. But whether you’re interested in meditation or not, you should be interested in how your mind works, and on that, Wright has a lot to say that’s worth hearing.

Books:

What is Life? / Mind and Matter by Erwin Schrödinger

Mindfulness in Plain English by Bhante Gunaratan

What the Buddha Taught by Walpola Rahula

Why politics needs more conflict, not less

The Ezra Klein Show

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 top Republican Senate aide, working as legislative director for Senators Jeff Sessions and Pat Toomey, as well as executive director of the Senate Steering Committee under Toomey and Lee. He’s now a senior fellow at the R Street Institute, and the author of “The Death of Deliberation: Partisanship and Polarization in the United States Senate.”

Wallner is immersed in congressional history and procedure, and one of his conclusions after years of both study and experience is that the leadership in both parties are using the rules to stymie disagreement and suppress chaos — and well-intentioned though this might be, it’s making everything worse. Congress, Wallner believes, is an institution designed to surface conflict so that positions can be made clear, compromises can be tested, and a way forward can be found. That’s not happening now, and the results are disastrous.

The Republican Party is particularly bad on this score, he says. “They pretend like they all agree on everything...But if you never deal with your problems, what do you think happens? A break-up! And that's literally what you're seeing right now.”

The first few times I hard Wallner’s arguments, I was skeptical. In some ways, I’m still skeptical, as you’ll hear in this conversation. But I’m also convinced he’s onto something important.

Books:

The Professor's House by Willa Cather

Democracy and Leadership by Irving Babbitt

Notes of Debates in the Federal Convention of 1787 by James Madison

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Why the Weinstein scandal gives Tig Notaro hope about Hollywood

The Ezra Klein Show

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 her until 2012, when she released "Live," the comedy album of the stand-up set she performed just four days after she was diagnosed with breast cancer, and soon after her mother suddenly passed away.

Now, Notaro has her own show, "One Mississippi," on Amazon Prime. The show is semi-autobiographical, and she plays a version of herself, a radio host who recently lost her mother and struggles after a double mastectomy.

As we discuss here, "One Mississippi" brilliantly tackles workplace sexual harassment, in terms all too familiar in the wake of the Harvey Weinstein allegations. And it doesn’t stop within the boundaries of the show: Notaro has said that Louis CK, one of her executive producers, needs to “handle” the sexual harassment allegations that have swirled around him.

Key points in this episode

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

The Ezra Klein Show

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 Berkeley, was a key member of the research group that developed the technology. She's also the co-author of the recent book A Crack in Creation: Gene Editing and the Unthinkable Power to Control Evolution.

A straightforward description of CRISPR is mind-boggling in what it suggests. As Doudna writes, “the genome — an organism’s entire DNA content, including all its genes — has become almost as editable as a simple piece of text.” It is possible that when the history of this era is written, most of our obsessions — Trump, tax rates, cybersecurity, Obamacare, NFL protests — will be forgotten, and CRISPR will be where historians focus.

With great power comes great responsibility — and genuine terror. Doudna had a nightmare as her lab and others started to use CRISPR to make heritable changes in genes. She dreamed that her colleague wanted her to meet someone interested in her research — and it was Adolf Hitler with a pig face, waiting to take notes on the technology she developed. She awoke from that dream in a cold sweat. And the concerns that dream represent pushed her to discuss the implications of CRISPR technology publicly.

CRISPR could do enormous good or tremendous harm — or both. In this conversation, Doudna and I discuss its possibilities, its dangers, its technical obstacles, the regulatory questions it raises, and much more.

Books:

The Double Helix by Jim Watson

Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind by Yuval Noah Harari

The Making of the Atomic Bomb by Richard Rhodes

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Ta-Nehisi Coates is not here to comfort you

The Ezra Klein Show

“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 human events: contingent, unguided, and devoid of higher morality or cosmic justice. He is not here to comfort you. He is not here to comfort himself. "Nothing in the record of human history argues for a divine morality, and a great deal argues against it," he writes. "What we know is that good people very often suffer terribly, while the perpetrators of horrific evil backstroke through all the pleasures of the world."

It’s this worldview that makes conversations with Coates so bracing. His philosophy leaves room for chaos, for disorder, for things to go terribly wrong and stay that way. In this discussion, I asked him what would make him hopeful, what it would mean for America to live up to its ideals. Closing the 20-to-1 white-black wealth gap, he replied. But what would that take, he asked? “Maybe something so large that you find yourself in a country that's not even America anymore.”

Maybe, he mused, it’s something that he couldn’t even support. "It's very easy for me to see myself being contemporary with processes that might make for an equal world, more equality, and maybe the complete abolition of race as a construct, and being horrified by the process, maybe even attacking the process. I think these things don't tend to happen peacefully."

This is a discussion about race, about luck, about history, about politics, but above all, about how the stories we tell ourselves are often designed to carry comfort rather than truth.

"For me, my part in this struggle, my part to make a better world, is not simply to have people pick up my work and say, 'Well, all the facts seem correct. I think this is right,' and, then move on with their lives," says Coates. "My job is to bring across the emotion, to make them feel a certain way, to haunt them, to make it hard to sleep."

Key points in this episode

How the Republican Party created Donald Trump

The Ezra Klein Show

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 marshaled their considerable authority to argue that the dysfunction poisoning American government was the result of “asymmetric polarization,” notably a Republican Party that “has become an insurgent outlier in American politics — ideologically extreme; contemptuous of the inherited social and economic policy regime; scornful of compromise; unmoved by conventional understanding of facts, evidence and science; and dismissive of the legitimacy of its political opposition.”

This was a controversial diagnosis then. After Trump, it’s closer to the conventional wisdom.

E.J. Dionne is a columnist at the Washington Post, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, and the author of the classic book Why Americans Hate Politics. He’s one of the sharpest political observers alive.

And now, like a Canadian indie-rock supergroup, the three of them have come together to write One Nation After Trump, a dive into how the Republican Party created Trump, how Trump won, and what comes next.

As Dionne says in this interview, the American system was "not supposed to produce a president like this,” and so a lot of our conversation is about how the guardrails failed and whether they can be rebuilt. Mann, Ornstein, and Dionne may be political sages, but they're also a lot of fun, and they have a lot of fun together. You'll hear that in this conversation.

Books:

Franklin D. Roosevelt and the New Deal by William Leuchtenburg

Strength to Love by Martin Luther King, Jr.

The First Congress by Fergus Bordewich

Thinking, Fast and Slow by Daniel Kahneman

Democracy for Realists by Christopher Achen and Larry Bartels

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Reihan Salam wants to remake the Republican Party -- again

The Ezra Klein Show

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 appeal to the working-class voters it needed. The vision was idea-driven: tax policy that helped the middle class, healthcare ideas that would mean more insurance for more people, and a generalized effort to remake the safety net to support modern families.

In 2016, Donald Trump managed to make the Republican Party more popular among working class whites. But he didn’t do it the way Salam hoped.

Today, Salam is executive editor at the National Review, and he’s trying to puzzle his way towards a new synthesis on the questions fracturing American politics. In this episode, we talk about the future of the Republican Party, the healthcare debate, and how he would reform our immigration system (and upend the whole way we talk about it). Salam is a fast, original thinker, and he packs a lot into this conversation. Enjoy!

Books:

Greater Than Ever: New York's Big Comeback by Dan Doctoroff

How Change Happens -- Or Doesn't: The Politics of US Public Policy by Elaine Kamarck

The British Dream: Successes and Failures of Post-war Immigration by David Goodhart

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

The Ezra Klein Show

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, perhaps more impressively, been consistently profitable in an era where many august journalism organizations have seen their business models collapse.

And Remnick keeps writing. He’s the author of six books, including Lenin’s Tomb, which won a Pulitzer Prize, and The Bridge, a fascinating biography of Barack Obama, and he churns out a steady stream of deeply reported profiles of musicians, athletes, and politicians. Oh, and he hosts the New Yorker Radio Hour.

He’s a busy guy.

Remnick started his career as a beat reporter at the Washington Post. In 1988, the Post sent him to Moscow, an auspicious time for a young reporter to land in what was then the Soviet Union. There, he witnessed the fall of the USSR and the creation of modern Russia — a journalistic background that has become startlingly relevant in recent years.

In this wide-ranging discussion, the New Yorker editor discusses Russia’s meddling in the US election, Russia’s transformation from communist rule to Boris Yeltsin and Vladimir Putin, his magazine’s coverage of President Donald Trump, how he chooses his reporters and editors, and how to build a real business around great journalism. Whether you care about politics or journalism or just the role of truth in society today, there's a lot of wisdom here.

Books:

Homage to Catalonia by George Orwell

Middlemarch by George Eliot

The novels of Vladimir Nabokov

Key points in this episode

What Hillary Clinton really thinks

The Ezra Klein Show

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 revenue from shared natural resources, like fossil fuel extraction and public airwaves, alongside revenue from taxing public harms, like carbon emissions and risky financial practices, to give every American “a modest basic income.”

Her ambitions for this idea were expansive, touching on not just the country’s economic ills but its political and spiritual ones. “Besides cash in people’s pockets,” she writes, “it would be also be a way of making every American feel more connected to our country and to each other.”

This is the kind of transformative vision that Clinton was often criticized for not having. It’s an idea bigger than a wall, perhaps bigger even than single-payer health care or free college. But she couldn’t make the numbers work. Every version of the plan she tried either raised taxes too high or slashed essential programs. So she scrapped it. “That was the responsible decision,” she writes. But after the 2016 election, Clinton is no longer sure that “responsible” is the right litmus test for campaign rhetoric. “I wonder now whether we should’ve thrown caution to the wind, embraced [it] as a long-term goal and figured out the details later,” she writes.

What Happened has been sold as Clinton’s apologia for her 2016 campaign, and it is that. But it’s more remarkable for Clinton’s extended defense of a political style that has become unfashionable in both the Republican and Democratic parties. Clinton is not a radical or a revolutionary, a disruptor or a socialist, and she’s proud of that fact. She’s a pragmatist who believes in working within the system, in promising roughly what you believe you can deliver, in saying how you’ll pay for your plans. She is frustrated by a polity that doesn’t share her “thrill” over incremental policies that help real people or her skepticism of sweeping plans that will never come to fruition. She believes in politics the way it is actually practiced, and she holds to that belief at a moment when it’s never been less popular.

This makes Clinton a more unusual figure than she gets credit for being: Not only does she refuse to paint an inspiring vision of a political process rid of corruption, partisanship, and rancor, but she’s also actively dismissive of those promises and the politicians who make them.

On Tuesday morning, I sat down with Clinton for an hour on the first official day of her book tour. It is a cliché that stiff candidates become freer, easier, and more confident after they lose — see Gore, Al — but it is true for Clinton. Jon Stewart used to talk of the “buffering” you could see happening in the milliseconds between when Clinton was asked a question and when she answered; the moments when she played out the angles, envisioned the ways her words could be twisted, and came up with a response devoid of danger but suffused with caution. That buffering is gone.

In our conversation, she was as quick and confident as I’ve seen her, making the case for her politics without worrying too much about the coalitional angles or the possible lines of offense. And she says plenty that can, and will, offend. In our discussion, she lit into Bernie Sanders’s single-payer plan, warned that Donald Trump is dragging us down an authoritarian path, spoke openly of the role racism and white resentment played in the campaign, and argued that the outcome of the 2016 election represented a failure of the media above all. This was Clinton unleashed, and while she talked about what happened, it was much more interesting when she talked about what she believed should have happened.

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

The Ezra Klein Show

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 fell, and interviewed young Chinese dissidents as tanks rolled into Tiananmen Square.

Rather has seen it all. So when I sat down with him a few weeks back, I wanted to know how he compared our current political climate to all of the contentious moments he's covered.

"I am an optimist by experience and by nature," he told me. And yet, he continued, "this is a very difficult period. This is a test of our whole democratic system."

Rather and I discuss the Trump presidency and what it means for the Republican Party's future, our fractured media landscape, and Rather's own evolving career in media.

Books:

Man's Search for Meaning by Viktor Frankl

All the Pretty Horses by Cormac McCarthy

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

The Ezra Klein Show

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 Wars From 4Chan And Tumblr to Trump and the Alt-Right, a comprehensive exploration of the origins of our current political moment.

We talk about the origins of the alt-right, and how the movement morphed from transgressive aesthetics on the internet to the violence in Charlottesville, but we also discuss PC culture on the left, demographic change in America, and the toxicity of online politics in general. Nagle is particularly interested in how the left's policing of language radicalizes its victims and creates space for alt-right groups to find eager recruits, and so we dive deep into that.

Books:

Civilization and Its Discontents by Sigmund Freud

This Is Why We Can't Have Nice Things: Mapping the Relationship between Online Trolling and Mainstream Culture by Whitney Phillips

The Net Delusion: The Dark Side of Internet Freedom by Evgeny Morozov

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

The Ezra Klein Show

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 of how black men and black boys interact with the criminal justice system.

It is a revelatory, comprehensive tour of the subject that’s often in the news but rarely treated in a thorough way.

We cover a lot of ground in this podcast, looking at everything from disparities in crime rates to sentencing to policing. But perhaps the most important point we cover — which is also the subject of Davis’s chapter in the book — is that the conversation around criminal justice reform often misses the key actors.

The debate tends to focus on police, but as Davis writes, "prosecutors are the most powerful officials in the criminal justice system, bar none. Police officers have the power to arrest and bring individuals to the courthouse door. But prosecutors decide whether they enter the door and what happens to them if and when they do.”

Books:

Just Mercy by Bryan Stevenson

The Short and Tragic Life of Robert Peace by Jeff Hobbs

My Beloved World by Justice Sonia Sotomayor

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Chris Hayes on whether Trump should be removed from office

The Ezra Klein Show

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. Though legal scholars argue over the founders’ intent, impeachment is thought to be a remedy for executive criminality, while the 25th Amendment is only meant to be used amid physical and mental incapacitation.

But what if neither condition is present? What if the United States of America — a nuclear hyperpower — just puts the wrong person in the job? What if we make a mistake — now or in the future — that is not clearly driven by breaches of law or catastrophic changes in health? What remedies does our system offer? What would the cost of invoking those remedies be?

Chris Hayes is the host of MSNBC’s All In, and he’s also an unusually thoughtful analyst of political institutions and systems. So I asked him back to the podcast to talk about this question, and a few more. We cover the infighting between different factions of the Democratic Party, the signs that congressional Republicans are growing some backbone, and the reports that Trump’s closest aides are conspiring to keep him from doing too much damage to the country.

This is a great conversation about some topics you’re going to hear a lot more from me on soon. Enjoy!

(One note: This conversation was recorded a few days before the white supremacist rally in Charlottesville, which is why you don’t hear us cover it. But Trump’s reaction to the rally only underscores many of the points we make in this podcast.)

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

The Ezra Klein Show

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 my experience, been appropriately shocked by how the US Congress actually works.

Since joining the Senate (and winning reelection in 2010 and 2016), Bennet has become one of its more effective members. He was part of the Gang of Eight that authored the immigration reform plan that passed the body, and he’s known for working well with both Republicans and Democrats. And yet, he is despairing over the state of the institution in which he serves.

This is a conversation about why Congress is broken, and what broke it. We discuss money, partisanship, the media, the rules, the leadership, and much more. We talk about what Bennet thinks House of Cards gets right (hint: it’s the sociopathy) and whether President Trump’s antics are creating some hope of institutional renewal.

There’s a lot of good stuff in this conversation, and I don’t want to spoil it. Suffice to say, if you care about the US Congress in this age — and you should — this is a discussion worth hearing.

Books:

Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City by Matthew Desmond

Behind the Beautiful Forevers: Life, Death, and Hope in a Mumbai Undercity by Katherine Boo

The Retreat of Western Liberalism by Edward Luce

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

The Ezra Klein Show

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 last spoke, fears of Trump’s illiberal instincts seemed to have been overblown. This was an administration too incompetent to be authoritarian.

But Mounk made a prediction then that has, I think, been borne out: Trump’s illiberal instincts would be catalyzed by his failures, not his successes. As Trump finds himself frustrated by Congress, and by the FBI investigation, and by Robert Mueller’s inquiry, and by White House leakers, he lashes out at the system he thinks is unfairly, even dangerously, constraining him.

Of late, Trump’s illiberalism has made a comeback — he’s giving speeches calling for more police brutality, he fired an FBI director who threatened him, he’s attacking his own attorney general for doing too little to shield him from investigation, he’s demanding vast changes to congressional rules, he’s calling for administration lawyers to begin exploring the reach of his pardon powers, and he's running a White House where the clear guiding principle is loyalty to Trump rather than loyalty to country. But as Mounk and I discuss in this podcast, that’s not the scary part.

The scary part isn’t Trump’s illiberalism but the political system’s acceptance of it. If you had read off Trump’s list of offenses as a hypothetical 12 months ago, you would’ve been told that neither Congress nor the public would allow any of this to go unpunished. But Trump remains around 40 percent in the polls and his support among congressional Republicans has barely wavered.

This is a lesson that goes far beyond Trump: We’re learning that American politics is much more vulnerable to, and much less offended by, leaders who want to subvert the rule of law than we thought. It may be that Trump is too impulsive and short-tempered to take advantage of that fact. But will that be true of his successors, too?

As you’ll hear in this podcast, as Mounk and I were discussing that question, we got news that Trump had fired his chief of staff, Reince Priebus, and replaced him with Gen. John Kelly. You’ll get to hear us react to that in real time. Enjoy!

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

The Ezra Klein Show

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 held. Arguments that leave everyone dumber, angrier, sadder.

Which is why I wanted to talk to Julia Galef this week. Julia is the host of the Rationally Speaking podcast, a co-founder of the Center for Applied Rationality, and the creator of the Update Project, which maps out arguments to make it easier for people to disagree clearly and productively. Her work focuses on how we think and argue, as well as the cognitive biases and traps that keep us from hearing what we're really saying, hearing what others are really saying, and preferring answers that make us feel good to answers that are true. I first met her at a Vox Conversation conference, where she ran a session helping people learn to change their minds, and it's struck me since then that more of us could probably use that training.

In this episode, Julia and I talk about what she's learned about thinking more clearly and arguing better, as well as my concerns that the traditional paths toward a better discourse open up new traps of their own. (As you'll hear, I find it very easy to get lost in all the ways debate and cognition can go awry.) We talk about signaling, about motivated reasoning, about probabilistic debating, about which identities help us find truth, and about how to make online arguments less terrible.

Enjoy!

Books:

Language, Truth, and Logic by A.J. Ayer

Seeing Like a State by James Scott

The Robot's Rebellion by Keith Stanovich

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

The Ezra Klein Show

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 the true percentage much higher. So perhaps it’s not surprising that Dart chose Dr. Nneka Jones Tapia, a psychologist, to run it.

What is surprising is that Jones Tapia is the first mental health profession to run a jail. In this conversation, we talk about how the justice system looks when you begin with a mental health lens — how you balance punishment and treatment, how you think about personal responsibility versus mental instability, and how you manage the tension between what we use jail for and what we should use jail for.

Enjoy!

Books:

The Bible

The New Jim Crow by Michelle Alexander

The Road Less Traveled: A New Psychology of Love, Traditional Values and Spiritual Growth by M. Scott Peck, M.D.

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

The Ezra Klein Show

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 of my favorite comics. I've watched his specials more times than I can count. And this conversation was a real pleasure. Izzard — whose new memoir, Believe Me, is now on shelves — thinks fast, and not always linearly, so we covered a lot of ground.

Among our topics:

- How he ran 27 marathons in 27 days, and why he did it

- His process for writing jokes

- Why he wants to run for parliament, and how he's taken inspiration from Al Franken's career

- His techniques for borrowing confidence from his future self

- What he learned as a street performer

- Why so many of his routines are based on history and anthropology

- His off-the-cuff and hilarious explanation of World War I

- The thought process that led to his famous "cake or death?" routine

- His gender identity, and how he integrated it into his act early on

- How he managed being the first transgender person many Americans ever saw

- Who excites him in comedy now

- His thoughts on the recent British election

And much more. Enjoy this conversation. I certainly did.

Books!

Through the Looking-Glass, and What Alice Found There by Lewis Carroll

Great Expectations by Charles Dickens

Al Franken, Giant of the Senate by Al Franken

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

The Ezra Klein Show

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 people won’t be able to afford them. On the bright side? Massive tax cuts for the rich.

It’s not a widely popular vision — the bill is struggling to attract Republican support, and is polling between 12 and 17 percent. But it does have defenders. Chief among them is Avik Roy, a past guest on this podcast and the co-founder of the Foundation for Research on Equal Opportunity. The bill’s passage, Roy said, would be "the greatest policy achievement by a GOP Congress in my lifetime.”

I am, to say the least, not a fan of this legislation. So I asked Roy to return to the podcast to discuss it. I wanted to hear the best possible case for the bill.

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

The Ezra Klein Show

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 time.What Mounk found is that the consensus we thought existed on behalf of democracy and democratic norms is weakening. The percentage of Americans who think it’s important to live in a democracy has been plummeting in recent decades. The percentage of Americans who say they would support a military coup is worrying high. This is the context in which Donald Trump — a politician with clearly illiberal instincts — won the presidency. And this may help explain why he won the presidency: the political consensus elites thought he violated may not actually be a consensus anymore. The good news, which Mounk and I talk about in this podcast, is that Trump may have authoritarian instincts, but he doesn’t appear to have plans, and he definitely doesn’t appear to have the discipline to stick to his plans. We also discuss Trump’s bizarre first few months in office, as well as the challenges democracies face across the western world, and whether diverse societies make pluralist liberal democracies harder to sustain. Mounk is scary smart, he’s got an international perspective most commentators on American politics lack, and his story about becoming an American citizen after growing up Jewish in Germany is worth the price of admission on its own (that would be true even if this podcast wasn’t free). Enjoy!Books:“The Subjection of Women," by John Stuart Mill"A House for Mr. Biswas," by V. S. Naipaul“The Leopard," by Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa

The Ezra Klein Show podcast.

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