The Ezra Klein Show

There’s good reason to worry about the future of democracy, and little reason to believe Democrats have a viable plan for protecting it. They built their strategy around passing a major suite of voting reforms and protections through Congress, and a few weeks back, their whole agenda collapsed in the face of the filibuster. So what now? Is there a Plan B for protecting democracy?Yes. But it begins with realizing that there is no national solution in a country that administers elections at the state and local levels. Which means it begins with realizing that many Democrats have made a mistake: They’ve focused so much on national conflicts that they’ve ceded state and local power to the right, with dangerous results. Trumpists can’t pass some big national bill putting Trump back in office, so they are organizing to win the state and local offices that will hold power over the process next time. Democracy’s defenders need to do the same. And that means you.Amanda Litman is a co-founder of Run for Something, which recruits and supports young, progressive candidates who want to run for office. And so this is a conversation about the mechanics of American democracy, the confusions and myths that keep so many of us from participating in them and the practical question of what it means to step off the sidelines and, well, run for something. We talk about why Democrats tend to chase “shiny objects” over real political power, what right-leaning organizations have been up to that liberals should envy, how you probably have more control over issues like abortion and climate change than you think, what it actually takes to run a local campaign, the three questions prospective candidates should be able to answer, and more.This isn’t a conversation raging against the decaying of American democracy. This is a conversation about saving that democracy by participating at its most fundamental level: the local level. The one where you can have the most impact. And so it’s the rare conversation about democracy that left me feeling better, rather than worse, about what’s possible. I think it’ll do the same for you.This episode contains strong language.Mentioned:The Ezra Klein Show is hiring a managing producer. Learn more here.From ProPublica: “Heeding Steve Bannon’s Call, Election Deniers Organize to Seize Control of the GOP — and Reshape America’s Elections” by Isaac Arnsdorf, Doug Bock Clark, Alexandra Berzon and Anjeanette DamonWhat It Takes by Richard Ben CramerFind out what elected offices you can run forBook recommendations:The Heart Principle by Helen HoangOlga Dies Dreaming by Xochitl GonzalezLet’s Get Physical by Danielle FriedmanThoughts? Guest suggestions? Email us at ezrakleinshow@nytimes.com.You can find transcripts (posted midday) and more episodes of “The Ezra Klein Show” at nytimes.com/ezra-klein-podcast, and you can find Ezra on Twitter @ezraklein. Book recommendations from all our guests are listed at https://www.nytimes.com/article/ezra-klein-show-book-recs.“The Ezra Klein Show” is produced by Annie Galvin, Jeff Geld and Rogé Karma; fact-checking by Michelle Harris; original music by Isaac Jones; mixing by Jeff Geld; audience strategy by Shannon Busta. Our executive producer is Irene Noguchi. Special thanks to Kristin Lin. Unlock full access to New York Times podcasts and explore everything from politics to pop culture. Subscribe today at nytimes.com/podcasts or on Apple Podcasts and Spotify.

1 Feb 20221h 5min

The world has gotten louder, even when we’re alone. A day spent in isolation can still mean a day buffeted by the voices on social media and the news, on podcasts, in emails and text messages. Objects have also gotten louder: through the advertisements that follow us around the web, the endless scroll of merchandise available on internet shopping sites and in the plentiful aisles of superstores. What happens when you really start listening to all these voices? What happens when you can’t stop hearing them?Ruth Ozeki is a Zen Buddhist priest and the author of novels including “A Tale for the Time Being,” which was shortlisted for the Booker Prize, and “The Book of Form and Emptiness,” which I read over paternity leave and loved. “The Book of Form and Emptiness” is about Benny, a teenager who starts hearing objects speak to him right after his father’s death, and it’s about his mother, Annabelle, who can’t let go of anything she owns, and can’t seem to help her son or herself. And then it’s about so much more than that: mental illnesses and materialism and consumerism and creative inspiration and information overload and the power of stories and the role of libraries and unshared mental experiences and on and on. It’s a book thick with ideas but written with a deceptively light, gentle pen.Our conversation begins by exploring what it means to hear voices in our minds, and whether it’s really so rare. We talk about how Ozeki’s novels begin she hears a character speaking in her mind, how meditation can teach you to detach from own internal monologue, why Marie Kondo’s almost animist philosophy of tidying became so popular across the globe, whether objects want things, whether practicing Zen has helped her want less and, my personal favorite part, the dilemmas posed by an empty box with the words “empty box” written on it.Mentioned:The Ezra Klein Show is hiring a managing producer. Learn more here.The Great Shift by James L. KugelBook recommendations:When You Greet Me I Bow by Norman FischerThe Aleph and Other Stories by Jorge Luis BorgesVibrant Matter by Jane BennettThis episode contains a brief mention of suicidal ideation. If you are having thoughts of suicide, call the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline at 1-800-273-8255 (TALK). A list of additional resources is available at SpeakingOfSuicide.com/resources.Thoughts? Guest suggestions? Email us at ezrakleinshow@nytimes.com.You can find transcripts (posted midday) and more episodes of “The Ezra Klein Show” at nytimes.com/ezra-klein-podcast, and you can find Ezra on Twitter @ezraklein. Book recommendations from all our guests are listed at https://www.nytimes.com/article/ezra-klein-show-book-recs.“The Ezra Klein Show” is produced by Annie Galvin, Jeff Geld and Rogé Karma; fact-checking by Michelle Harris; original music by Isaac Jones; mixing by Jeff Geld; audience strategy by Shannon Busta. Our executive producer is Irene Noguchi. Special thanks to Kristin Lin and Kristina Samulewski. Unlock full access to New York Times podcasts and explore everything from politics to pop culture. Subscribe today at nytimes.com/podcasts or on Apple Podcasts and Spotify.

25 Jan 202259min

It’s been a year since Joe Biden was sworn in as the 46th president of the United States. And what a roller coaster of a year it’s been.The Biden administration blew past its Covid vaccination goal of 100 million shots in 100 days, only to run into the realities of vaccine skepticism, the Delta wave and now Omicron. The president oversaw an unprecedented economic recovery — including the sharpest one-year drop in unemployment in American history — but now faces the highest inflation in decades, supply chain crises and souring approval ratings. Congress passed the $1.9 trillion American Rescue Plan and the $1 trillion bipartisan infrastructure law, but negotiations collapsed over the administration’s signature Build Back Better bill, and on Thursday the Senate failed to pass any voting rights legislation.Ron Klain is President Biden’s chief of staff and one of the most influential members of the current administration. We discuss what the United States can learn from Asian countries’ pandemic strategies, what went wrong with America’s testing regime, the administration’s plan for tackling inflation, what it will take to be prepared for the next variant, what Klain has learned about what private sector can — and can’t — accomplish on its own, the fate of Build Back Better, what can excite Democrats for the 2022 midterms, the status of relations between the White House and Joe Manchin, how the administration is thinking about the 6-to-3 conservative Supreme Court majority and more.Mentioned:The Ezra Klein Show is looking for a managing producer. Learn more.Book Recommendation:The Gatekeepers by Chris WhippleThoughts? Guest suggestions? Email us at ezrakleinshow@nytimes.com.You can find transcripts (posted midday) and more episodes of “The Ezra Klein Show” at nytimes.com/ezra-klein-podcast, and you can find Ezra on Twitter @ezraklein. Book recommendations from all our guests are listed at https://www.nytimes.com/article/ezra-klein-show-book-recs.“The Ezra Klein Show” is produced by Annie Galvin, Jeff Geld and Rogé Karma; fact-checking by Michelle Harris, Mary Marge Locker and Kate Sinclair; original music by Isaac Jones; mixing by Jeff Geld; audience strategy by Shannon Busta. Our executive producer is Irene Noguchi. Special thanks to Kristin Lin. Unlock full access to New York Times podcasts and explore everything from politics to pop culture. Subscribe today at nytimes.com/podcasts or on Apple Podcasts and Spotify.

21 Jan 202245min

I remember thinking, as Covid ravaged the country in December 2020, that at least the holidays the next year would be better. There would be more vaccines, more treatments, more immunity. Instead, we got Omicron and a confusing new phase of the pandemic. What do you do with a variant that is both monstrously more infectious and somewhat milder? What do you say about another year when we didn’t have enough tests, enough ventilation or the best guidance on masks? And how do you handle the fracturing politics of a changing pandemic in an exhausted country?Zeynep Tufekci is a sociologist and New York Times Opinion columnist who does a better job than almost anyone at assessing the pandemic at a systems level. To solve a public-health crisis, it’s not enough to get the science right. There are also challenges with supply chains, infrastructure, research production, mass communication, political trust and institutional inertia. I’ve found Tufekci’s ability to balance the epidemiological data and the sociological realities uniquely helpful across the pandemic, and you can hear why in this conversation.We discuss how the Covid crisis has changed, as well as Tufekci’s sobering conclusion: that the virus, at this point, is feeding on our dysfunction. We look at what Omicron is and isn’t, where the Biden administration has succeeded and failed, the debate over closing schools, why so many Asian countries have so powerfully outperformed the West, how the role of vaccines has changed, what a pandemic-prepared society would actually look like, and what should be true of our pandemic policy in a year that isn’t now.Book recommendations:The Theory and Practice of Group Psychotherapy by Irvin D. Yalom and Molyn LeszczChaos by James GleickThe Dead Hand by David HoffmanThoughts? Guest suggestions? Email us at ezrakleinshow@nytimes.com.You can find transcripts (posted midday) and more episodes of “The Ezra Klein Show” at nytimes.com/ezra-klein-podcast, and you can find Ezra on Twitter @ezraklein. Book recommendations from all our guests are listed at https://www.nytimes.com/article/ezra-klein-show-book-recs.“The Ezra Klein Show” is produced by Annie Galvin, Jeff Geld and Rogé Karma; fact-checking by Michelle Harris, Mary Marge Locker and Kate Sinclair; original music by Isaac Jones; mixing by Jeff Geld; audience strategy by Shannon Busta. Our executive producer is Irene Noguchi. Special thanks to Kristin Lin. Unlock full access to New York Times podcasts and explore everything from politics to pop culture. Subscribe today at nytimes.com/podcasts or on Apple Podcasts and Spotify.

18 Jan 20221h 15min

Nothing like a newborn and paternity leave to leave you feeling a bit out of the loop. So for my first podcast back since October, I wanted to wander through the thickets of where we are politically and how we got here.Because where we are is strange: the Omicron wave and the breakdown of the liberal Covid consensus that preceded it; a hot economy with low unemployment, rising wages and high inflation; a Build Back Better bill for which the eventual compromise seems obvious even as the legislation is stalled; the anniversary of Jan. 6, which comes as both of the Democrats’ major democracy bills are languishing; and a Biden administration that has passed big, popular policies, only to watch its poll numbers fall.Chris Hayes is the host of MSNBC’s “All In” and the podcast “Why Is This Happening?” He’s also one of my favorite people to process politics with, so I asked him to help me track back through the past few months of the news and look into how 2022 could be better.Mentioned:“The Ronald Reagan Guide to Joe Biden’s Political Future” by Jamelle Bouie“How Michel Foucault Lost the Left and Won the Right” by Ross Douthat“Ten Million a Year” by David Wallace-Wells“On the Internet, We’re Always Famous” by Chris HayesBook recommendations:The Braindead Megaphone by George SaundersThe Three-Body Problem Series by Cixin LiuThe Racial Contract by Charles W. MillsThoughts? Guest suggestions? Email us at ezrakleinshow@nytimes.com.You can find transcripts (posted midday) and more episodes of “The Ezra Klein Show” at nytimes.com/ezra-klein-podcast, and you can find Ezra on Twitter @ezraklein. Book recommendations from all our guests are listed at https://www.nytimes.com/article/ezra-klein-show-book-recs.“The Ezra Klein Show” is produced by Annie Galvin, Jeff Geld and Rogé Karma; fact-checking by Michelle Harris; original music by Isaac Jones; mixing by Jeff Geld; audience strategy by Shannon Busta. Our executive producer is Irene Noguchi. Special thanks to Kristin Lin. Unlock full access to New York Times podcasts and explore everything from politics to pop culture. Subscribe today at nytimes.com/podcasts or on Apple Podcasts and Spotify.

11 Jan 20221h 3min

For decades, our society’s dominant metaphor for the mind has been a computer. A machine that operates the exact same way whether it’s in a dark room or next to a sunny window, whether it’s been working for 30 seconds or three hours, whether it’s near other computers or completely alone.But that’s wrong. Annie Murphy Paul’s “The Extended Mind” argues, convincingly, that the human mind is contextual. It works differently in different environments, with different tools, amid different bodily states, among other minds.Here’s the problem: Our schools, our workplaces, our society are built atop that bad metaphor. Activities and habits that we’ve been taught to associate with creativity and efficiency often stunt our thinking, and so much that we’ve been taught to dismiss — activities that look like leisure, play or rest — are crucial to thinking (and living!) well.Paul’s book, read correctly, is a radical critique of not just how we think about thinking, but how we’ve constructed much of our society. In this conversation, originally released in July 2021, we discuss how the body can pick up on patterns before the conscious mind knows what it’s seen, why forcing kids (and adults) to “sit still” makes it harder for them to think clearly, the connection between physical movement and creativity, why efficiency is often the enemy of productivity, the restorative power of exposure to the natural world, the dystopian implications of massive cognitive inequality, why open-plan offices were a terrible idea and much more.Mentioned: "The extended mind" by Andy Clark and David J. ChalmersBook recommendations: Supersizing the Mind by Andy ClarkMind in Motion by Barbara TverskyThoughts Without a Thinker by Mark EpsteinYou can find transcripts (posted midday) and more episodes of "The Ezra Klein Show" at nytimes.com/ezra-klein-podcast, and you can find Ezra on Twitter @ezraklein.Thoughts? Guest suggestions? Email us at ezrakleinshow@nytimes.com.“The Ezra Klein Show” is produced by Annie Galvin, Jeff Geld and Rogé Karma; fact-checking by Michelle Harris; original music by Isaac Jones; mixing by Jeff Geld; audience strategy by Shannon Busta. Special thanks to Kristin Lin and Alison Bruzek. Unlock full access to New York Times podcasts and explore everything from politics to pop culture. Subscribe today at nytimes.com/podcasts or on Apple Podcasts and Spotify.

4 Jan 20221h 8min

For years, I’ve kept a list of dream guests for this show. And as long as that list has existed, Ted Chiang has been atop it.Chiang is a science fiction writer. But that undersells him. He has released two short story collections over 20 years — 2002’s “Stories of Your Life and Others” and 2019’s “Exhalation.” Those stories have won more awards than I can list, and one of them was turned into the film “Arrival.” They are remarkable pieces of work: Each is built around a profound scientific, philosophical or religious idea, and then the story or the story structure is shaped to represent that idea. They are wonders of precision and craft. But unlike a lot of science fiction, they are never cold. Chiang’s work is deeply, irrepressibly humane.I’ve always wondered about the mind that would create Chiang’s stories. And in this conversation, originally released in March 2021, I got to watch it in action. Chiang doesn’t like to talk about himself. But he does like to talk about ideas. And so we do: We discuss the difference between magic and technology, why superheroes fight crime but ignore injustice, what it would do to the human psyche if we knew the future is fixed, whether free will exists, whether we’d want to know the exact date of our deaths, why Chiang fears what humans will do to artificial intelligence more than what A.I. will do to humans, the way capitalism turns people against technology, and much more.The ideas Chiang offered in this conversation are still ringing in my head months later, and changing the way I see the world. It’s worth taking your time with this one.Recommendations: "Creation" by Steve Grand"On the Measure of Intelligence" by Francois Chollet"CivilWarLand in Bad Decline" by George Saunders"A Visit from the Goon Squad" by Jennifer Egan"Royal Space Force: The Wings of Honnêamise" (movie)"On Fragile Waves" by Lily Yu"Pilgrim at Tinker Creek" by Annie DillardControl (video game)Return of the Obra Dinn (video game)You can find transcripts (posted midday) and more episodes of "The Ezra Klein Show" at nytimes.com/ezra-klein-podcast, and you can find Ezra on Twitter @ezraklein.Thoughts? Guest suggestions? Email us at ezrakleinshow@nytimes.com.“The Ezra Klein Show” is produced by Annie Galvin, Jeff Geld and Rogé Karma; fact-checking by Michelle Harris; original music by Isaac Jones; mixing by Jeff Geld; audience strategy by Shannon Busta. Special thanks to Kristin Lin and Alison Bruzek. Unlock full access to New York Times podcasts and explore everything from politics to pop culture. Subscribe today at nytimes.com/podcasts or on Apple Podcasts and Spotify.

28 Des 202150min

How do you introduce Noam Chomsky? Perhaps you start here: In 1979, The New York Times called him “arguably the most important intellectual alive today.” More than 40 years later, Chomsky, at 92, is still putting his dent in the world — writing books, giving interviews, changing minds.There are different sides to Chomsky. He’s a world-renowned linguist who revolutionized his field. He’s a political theorist who’s been a sharp critic of American foreign policy for decades. He’s an anarchist who believes in a radically different way of ordering society. He’s a pragmatist who pushed leftists to vote for Joe Biden in 2020 and has described himself as having a “rather conservative attitude towards social change.” He is, very much, himself.The problem in planning a conversation with Chomsky is how to get at all these different sides. So this one, from April 2021, covers a lot of ground. We discuss:— Why Chomsky is an anarchist, and how he defines anarchism— How his work on language informs his idea of what human beings want— The role of advertising in capitalism— Whether we should understand job contracts as the free market at work or a form of constant coercion— How Chomsky’s ideal vision of society differs from Nordic social democracy— How Chomsky’s class-based theory of politics holds up in an era where college-educated suburbanites are moving left on economics— Chomsky’s view of the climate crisis and why he thinks the “degrowth” movement is misguided— Whether job automation could actually be a good thing for human flourishing— Chomsky’s views on US-China policy, and why he doesn’t think China is a major geopolitical threat— The likelihood of nuclear war in the next decadeAnd much more. Mentioned in this episode: On Anarchism by Noam Chomsky Climate Crisis and the Global Green New Deal by Noam Chomsky and Robert Pollin “Why the Amazon Workers Never Stood a Chance” by Erik Loomis “Trends in Income From 1975 to 2018” by Carter C. Price and Kathryn A. Edwards “This is What Minimum Wage Would Be If It Kept Pace with Productivity” by Dean Baker“There is no Plan B for dealing with the climate crisis” by Raymond PierrehumbertRecommendations: "The Last of the Just" by Andre Schwarz-Bart"All God's Dangers: The Life of Nate Shaw" by Theodore RosengartenSelected essays by Ahad Ha'amYou can find transcripts (posted midday) and more episodes of "The Ezra Klein Show" at nytimes.com/ezra-klein-podcast, and you can find Ezra on Twitter @ezraklein.Thoughts? Guest suggestions? Email us at ezrakleinshow@nytimes.com.  Unlock full access to New York Times podcasts and explore everything from politics to pop culture. Subscribe today at nytimes.com/podcasts or on Apple Podcasts and Spotify.

21 Des 20211h 12min