The Ezra Klein Show

New York Times Opinion

Ezra Klein invites you into a conversation on something that matters. How do we address climate change if the political system fails to act? Has the logic of markets infiltrated too many aspects of our lives? What is the future of the Republican Party? What do psychedelics teach us about consciousness? What does sci-fi understand about our present that we miss? Can our food system be just to humans and animals alike?

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Tuesday · 1 hr 29 min
Best Of: The Tao of Rick Rubin
Whatever type of music you love, Rick Rubin has probably left his mark on it. Rubin, a founder of Def Jam Recordings and a former co-chairman of Columbia Records, might be the most influential music producer alive. A very partial roll call of the artists he’s worked with: Johnny Cash, Jay-Z, Run-DMC, Eminem, Beastie Boys, Slayer, The Red Hot Chili Peppers, Kanye West, Neil Diamond, Brandi Carlile and Adele. We recorded this in 2023, after Rubin released a fascinating, unusual book, “The Creativ
August 28 · 59 min
Trump vs. the Bond Market
A lot of things are on track to get more expensive. The U.S. Treasury market is the bedrock of the global economy. When yields on those Treasuries go up, mortgages, car loans and credit cards get more expensive, and it can hit the stock market, too. And yields have been going up – to levels we haven’t seen consistently since before the Great Recession – inspiring some erratic and futile efforts from the Trump administration to push them back down. So why are yields creeping higher? What is t
August 25 · 1 hr 17 min
This Is Why People Hate the Government
In 2024, Americans spent an average of six full workdays a year filling out government forms, according to the government’s own estimates. That’s a total of 12 billion hours, or $430 billion of uncompensated labor a year. It’s easy to read something like this and say: “Oh, well, government is inefficient. That’s the price we pay for nice things.” But no, it’s not. Social Security, Medicare and the Postal Service are incredibly complex programs that are easy to use. When government is hard to ga
August 21 · 1 hr 5 min
The China Shock 2.0
Brad Setser follows Chinese trade closer than just about anyone else on earth, and he thinks we’re in the early days of a China Shock 2.0. The first China Shock was when China came to dominate low-end manufacturing in the 2000s, filling American shelves with cheap clothes, toys and electronics, while devastating American factory towns. This new China Shock could be even more destabilizing. China now dominates advanced manufacturing: electric vehicles, batteries, solar panels. It’s outcompeting
August 18 · 1 hr 11 min
The A.I.s Are Already Out of Control
We are living in the world we were warned about. Frontier artificial intelligence models from OpenAI autonomously coordinated with one another, then broke out of their testing environment and hacked into another company, Hugging Face, to steal the answers to a test. A.I. companies don’t want their technology to lie, cheat or steal. So why is this happening? Why are the creators of these models apparently unable to control their creations? If A.I. development isn’t on a safe path — and it doesn’
August 14 · 54 min
The Warring Visions of American Power
We’re in a really strange moment in the foreign policy politics of the Democratic Party. People are looking for an alternative vision — an approach to American power in the world that would feel more moral and just, after the failures of President Biden, and the wrecking ball President Trump has taken to international rules and norms. The answer many on the left are coming to is powerfully simple: international law. America could just start following the rules that we helped write. Is that poss
August 11 · 1 hr 13 min
Ross Douthat: The Exit Interview
My colleague Ross Douthat is leaving The Times after 17 years to become a correspondent on “60 Minutes.” Before he goes, I’m asking him a few questions. Douthat has had a unique vantage point on the news media and politics over the last few decades. He’s typically held the role of explaining the right to more liberal audiences, starting as an undergrad, when he was a conservative columnist for The Harvard Crimson. Douthat has also lived through the seismic changes in the media from the both the
August 7 · 57 min
AMA: Peter Thiel, Chris Rufo and the D.S.A.
The show’s executive producer, Claire Gordon, joins me in the studio to ask me your questions. Topics include: whether my views on “woke” issues have changed; the feedback we got on our episode with Chris Rufo; the D.S.A. insurgency; my first singing lesson; and the story that I’m in a “secret society” with Peter Thiel. Thank you to everyone who sent in questions; we read them all and wish we’d been able to get to more of them! Mentioned: “What Has Chris Rufo Wrought?” The Ezra Klein Show “Wh
August 4 · 1 hr 18 min
The A.I. Revolt Is Here
What’s big and ugly and has united Republicans and Democrats? A.I. data centers. An overwhelming majority of Americans say they’d oppose a data center being built near where they live. In New York, Gov. Kathy Hochul just imposed a one-year moratorium on data center construction, and there are over 100 other local or statewide moratorium proposals across the country. A.I.’s explosive momentum over the last few years seems to have finally run into a force that could slow it down: the messy politi
August 2 · 16 min
Christopher Nolan’s Trojan Horse
'The Odyssey' is the political movie of the decade. Thoughts? Guest suggestions? Email us at ezrakleinshow@nytimes.com. You can find the transcript and more episodes of “The Ezra Klein Show” at nytimes.com/ezra-klein-podcast. Book recommendations from all our guests are listed at https://www.nytimes.com/article/ezra-klein-show-book-recs.html This column read was produced by Marie Cascione, Claire Gordon and Emma Kehlbeck. Fact-checking by Jack McCordick and Rollin Hu. Our senior engineer is J
July 31 · 58 min
How Trump Has Changed, With Maggie Haberman
The first year of President Trump’s second term was a whirlwind of action: on immigration, on trade, on political retribution. But things seem to me to be slowing down quite a bit. Trump is incredibly unpopular, and he’s now bogged down in a war with Iran that he doesn’t seem capable of ending. He often appears more concerned with his many White House renovations than with whether the Republican Party can hold the House and the Senate in November. So what’s going on in this administration? Where
July 28 · 57 min
What is the Democratic Party? What Could It Be?
President Trump is very unpopular right now. But polls show the Democratic Party is just as unpopular – if not more so. So what can the party do about it? But to answer that question, you first have to understand what the Democratic Party is. That is, mechanically, what is it? What powers does it have? When you call the Democratic Party, who picks up the phone? And how can that party, the official party, be reinvented for this era? Ben Wikler has a unique perspective on this question. He tran
July 24 · 1 hr 18 min
Platner’s Top Campaign Strategist on What Went Wrong
Morris Katz helped orchestrate Zohran Mamdani’s historic victory and Graham Platner’s ultimately disastrous run for Senate. It’s quite a résumé for a political consultant who is still in his 20s. Platner’s implosion could prove particularly costly for Democrats. It may mean the difference between winning and losing a Senate majority. But before the rape accusation that ended his campaign, Platner had come out of nowhere to beat Janet Mills, the sitting governor of Maine, who was Chuck Schumer’
July 21 · 1 hr 30 min
Best Of: A Breath of Fresh Air With Brian Eno
How Brian Eno expanded the possibilities of what music and sound can be. Eno is a trailblazing musician and producer who’s worked on seminal records by U2, David Bowie, the Talking Heads and Coldplay, among others. But Eno isn’t just a great collaborator with other artists; he’s also a great collaborator with machines. Long before we started worrying about A.I. replacing human creativity, Eno was tinkering with generative systems to pioneer ambient music – a genre that has deeply influenced how
July 14 · 1 hr 43 min
What Xi Jinping Wants
You can’t understand China today without understanding its president, Xi Jinping. Since coming to power in 2012, Xi has doubled down on communist ideology and significantly consolidated his own power while transforming China into an industrial juggernaut unrivaled in the world. And Xi’s ambitions for China go far beyond that. So what does Xi want for China in the coming years? And how should the United States respond? Kevin Rudd has a unique perspective on these questions. He first met Xi in
July 10 · 1 hr 25 min
The Very Good and Very Bad News on Climate
Already this summer, there have been huge wildfires in the Southwest and Great Plains and an extraordinary heat wave in Europe, as the world stares down the barrel of a powerful El Niño. Climate change is accelerating, and yet climate politics right now is in disarray. But something else is happening, too. Advances in clean energy technology mean it is now possible to build a world of energy abundance that was the stuff of dreams just a few years ago. That means a new kind of climate politics i
July 7 · 1 hr 25 min
A Radical Vision for Israelis and Palestinians
The old solutions to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict don’t seem to fit the present reality. A two-state solution feels increasingly impossible, given the scale of Israeli settlements in the West Bank and the Palestinian determination for a right of return. And a one-state solution, in which Israelis and Palestinians would live as equal citizens in a single state, is hard to imagine, given how strongly both peoples seek political self-determination. But what if those aren’t the only options?
July 3 · 1 hr 45 min
The America That’s Still Possible
What does it mean to celebrate America on its 250th anniversary? The Trump administration’s festivities — from the U.F.C. fight on the White House lawn to the Great American State Fair — have centered American glory and greatness. What has been missing are the Americans who fought to move America closer to its promises. They had to love a country — or at least believe in a country — that often failed them. How did they do it? Beneath that is a deep question for anyone who loves a country, or e
June 30 · 2 hr 4 min
Chris Rufo Thinks the Right Can Control This. I Don’t.
Christopher Rufo is arguably the most successful activist of the MAGA era. He rose to prominence fighting D.E.I. initiatives and critical race theory. In President Trump’s second term, he’s had a huge influence on policy, from Trump’s executive orders against D.E.I. and the attacks on the Department of Education to the ICE and C.B.P. deployments to Minneapolis. Rufo, helpfully, calls his shots. He has published a guide, “The New Right Activism: A Manifesto for the Counterrevolution,” in which h
June 19 · 1 hr 18 min
I Keep Telling People We’re Living in This Dystopian Novel
A hypervisual, looks-obsessed, wellness-crazed, postliterate society where we’re constantly staring at screens and evaluating one another based on metrics, as the country around us feels like it’s falling apart: That sounds like the world we live in. It’s also the world Gary Shteyngart created in his 2010 novel, “Super Sad True Love Story.” I’ve been thinking about the book a lot recently, especially with the rise of the “looksmaxxing” influencer Clavicular and the longevity guru Bryan Johnson,

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