The Ezra Klein Show

Consciousness is this amazing, mind-bending riddle. It’s the only thing any of us truly knows. We experience everything else in life through it. And yet we barely understand it. We don’t know what it’s made of or how it works or why it exists. But scientists and theorists have been trying to answer those questions, and have made some startling discoveries. The science writer Michael Pollan, known for books like “The Omnivore’s Dilemma” and “How to Change Your Mind,” spent five years on the vanguard of this research. And his new book, “A World Appears: A Journey Into Consciousness,” shows that the closer you look at consciousness, the weirder it gets. I asked Pollan to walk through some of the places his mind wandered on this journey — including the role of the body and feelings in consciousness, fascinating studies that provide evidence for plant sentience, the researchers who have abandoned their old theories after trying psychedelic drugs, and the possibility that consciousness may not emerge from inside us at all. “I’ve entered this ‘never say never’ realm with this research,” Pollan told me. Mentioned: A World Appears by Michael Pollan “The Descriptive Experience Sampling method” by Russell T. Hurlburt and Sarah A. Akhter “What Is It Like to Be a Bat?” by Thomas Nagel The Hidden Spring by Mark Solms Descartes’ Error by Antonio Damasio “The Oxford Handbook of Spontaneous Thought” by Kalina Christoff and Kieran C. R. Fox Book Recommendations: The Blind Spot by Adam Frank, Marcelo Gleiser and Evan Thompson Ducks, Newburyport by Lucy Ellmann Being You by Anil Seth 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. This episode of “The Ezra Klein Show” was produced by Kristin Lin. Fact-checking by Kim Freda. Our senior engineer is Jeff Geld, with additional mixing by Aman Sahota and Isaac Jones. Our executive producer is Claire Gordon. The show’s production team also includes Marie Cascione, Annie Galvin, Michelle Harris, Rollin Hu, Emma Kehlbeck, Jack McCordick, Marina King and Jan Kobal. Original music by Pat McCusker. Audience strategy by Kristina Samulewski and Shannon Busta. The director of New York Times Opinion Audio is Annie-Rose Strasser.

Is Trumpism crashing on the shoals of the Iran war? That is what Christopher Caldwell thinks. Caldwell is a prominent thinker on the right. He’s a contributing editor at the conservative publication the Claremont Review of Books,and he’s one of the people who’ve been trying to define, and even craft, a coherent Trumpism. So his recent article in The Spectator, “The End of Trumpism,” sparked a lot of debate on the right. At the core of this debate are some fundamental questions that I think remain unresolved, despite Trump’s decade-long dominance of the Republican Party: What is Trumpism? Is there Trumpism, or is there just Donald Trump? Caldwell is a contributing writer for Times Opinion and the author of “The Age of Entitlement: America Since the Sixties.” In this conversation, he explains how he understood Trumpism as a movement of “democratic restoration” — and why he believes the Iran war betrays that. And I ask him why he sees the seams of Trump’s base fraying, despite polling that suggests otherwise. Mentioned: “The end of Trumpism” by Christopher Caldwell The Age of Entitlement by Christopher Caldwell “Is the West Becoming Pagan Again?” by Christopher Caldwell Self-Rule by Robert H. Wiebe “Trump as Alexander the Great” by John B. Judis Book Recommendations: The Gulag Archipelago by Aleksandr I. Solzhenitsyn Common Ground by J. Anthony Lukas Ball Four by Jim Bouton 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. This episode of “The Ezra Klein Show” was produced by Jack McCordick. Fact-checking by Michelle Harris with Kate Sinclair and Mary Marge Locker. Our senior engineer is Jeff Geld, with additional mixing by Aman Sahota. Our executive producer is Claire Gordon. The show’s production team also includes Marie Cascione, Annie Galvin, Rollin Hu, Kristin Lin, Emma Kehlbeck, Marina King and Jan Kobal. Original music by Pat McCusker. Audience strategy by Kristina Samulewski and Shannon Busta. The director of New York Times Opinion Audio is Annie-Rose Strasser.

Iran has currently shut off more than 10 percent of the world’s oil supply. If that goes on for a lot longer — or if the war escalates to include more strikes on energy infrastructure in the region — the price of oil could go through the roof, and the damage to the global economy could be catastrophic. So what would that look like? What tools does the United States have to avert it? And how is this crisis already reverberating in countries around the world? Jason Bordoff is the founding director of the Center on Global Energy Policy at Columbia University and a founding dean of the Columbia Climate School. He served as a special assistant to President Barack Obama and senior director for energy and climate change on the National Security Council. In this conversation, Bordoff answers all my questions about the crisis so far and how things could spin out from here, the strategic positioning of the United States, Europe, Iran, Russia and China, the developing countries likely to suffer the most and the lessons the world might take from this. Mentioned: “Making the U.S. More Resilient to Oil Price Shocks” by Jason Bordoff and Spencer Dale “The Return of the Energy Weapon” by Jason Bordoff and Meghan L. O’Sullivan Book Recommendations: Material World by Ed Conway More and More and More by Jean-Baptiste Fressoz Deliver Me from Nowhere by Warren Zanes 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.

Naomi Klein saw where our politics was headed before most people on the left. Her 2023 book “Doppelganger: A Trip Into the Mirror World” is hard to describe. But among other things, it traces the new coalitions Klein saw forming on the right, the ways they were co-opting issues long associated with the left, and finding huge audiences and influence outside existing institutions. The people and coalitions that Klein wrote about run our world now. We are all living in the mirror world. As she put it, it’s “doppelgangers at the wheel.” So I wanted to have Klein on the show to help understand how that happened, what the left failed to see at the time and the lessons the left should take from it now. As Klein told me: “The thing about doppelgangers is, in literature, they’re always a message telling you a warning: You have to look at yourself. There’s something about yourself that you’re not seeing.” Note: We recorded this episode before the war in Iran. Mentioned: Doppelganger by Naomi Klein No Logo by Naomi Klein “Minnesota Proved MAGA Wrong” by Adam Serwer End Times Fascism by Naomi Klein and Astra Taylor Book Recommendations: Empire of AI by Karen Hao Here Where We Live Is Our Country by Molly Crabapple Fire Alarm by Michael Löwy 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 Trump administration miscalculated how Iran would respond to this war. And the United States, Iran and Israel were brought to the brink of war in the first place because of a whole series of misjudgments and miscalculations going back decades. Ali Vaez is the Iran project director at the International Crisis Group. He was involved in the negotiations that led to the 2015 nuclear deal, and is in fact himself a nuclear scientist. He’s also an author of “How Sanctions Work: Iran and the Impact of Economic Warfare.” In this conversation, Vaez explains how over 47 years the United States, Israel and Iran came to one another as threats, and why so many efforts to thaw relations failed. It’s the briefing on Iran that Trump should have received before he decided to go to war. Mentioned: How Sanctions Work by Narges Bajoghli, Vali Nasr, Djavad Salehi-Isfahani, and Ali Vaez Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action Book Recommendations: Persians by Lloyd Llewellyn-Jones The Mantle of the Prophet by Roy P. Mottahedeh 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. This episode of “The Ezra Klein Show” was produced by Jack McCordick. Fact-checking by Michelle Harris with Kate Sinclair. Our senior engineer is Jeff Geld, with additional mixing by Isaac Jones and Aman Sahota. Our executive producer is Claire Gordon. The show’s production team also includes Marie Cascione, Annie Galvin, Rollin Hu, Kristin Lin, Emma Kehlbeck, Marina King and Jan Kobal. Original music by Aman Sahota and Pat McCusker. Audience strategy by Kristina Samulewski and Shannon Busta. The director of New York Times Opinion Audio is Annie-Rose Strasser.

I’m opposed to this war. The Trump administration did not consult the American public or try to persuade Congress before authorizing the strikes on Iran. I don’t think the administration is prepared for what the strikes might unleash. But I wanted to try to understand President Trump’s decisions from the perspective of somebody much friendlier to his foreign policy. Nadia Schadlow is a senior fellow at the Hudson Institute and served as a deputy national security adviser during Trump’s first term. She led the drafting and publication of the 2017 National Security Strategy of the United States. In this conversation, Schadlow gives the conservative case for war with Iran, and for attacking without first building support in Congress or with the public. And I ask her how she squares Trump the candidate, who ran on a promise of not starting new wars, with the Trump of today, who’s deposed two heads of state since the start of 2026, and now says he won’t rule out boots on the ground in Iran. Is there a consistent worldview here? Or did Trump change? Mentioned: “National Security Strategy of the United States of America” War and the Art of Governance by Nadia Schadlow “The Globalist Delusion” by Nadia Schadlow “The Great Lie of War” with Ben Rhodes on “The Ezra Klein Show” Book Recommendations: America in the World by Robert B. Zoellick The Mystery of Capital by Hernando De Soto The Peacemaker by William Inboden Demon Copperhead by Barbara Kingsolver 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. This episode of “The Ezra Klein Show” was produced by Annie Galvin. Fact-checking by Michelle Harris with Mary Marge Locker and Kate Sinclair. Our senior engineer is Jeff Geld, with additional mixing by Aman Sahota. Our executive producer is Claire Gordon. The show’s production team also includes Marie Cascione, Rollin Hu, Kristin Lin, Emma Kehlbeck, Jack McCordick, Marina King and Jan Kobal. Original music by Pat McCusker. Audience strategy by Kristina Samulewski and Shannon Busta. The director of New York Times Opinion Audio is Annie-Rose Strasser.

Last Friday, Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth announced that he was breaking the Pentagon’s contract with the A.I. company Anthropic and would declare the company a supply chain risk — a designation for companies so dangerous, they can’t exist anywhere in the U.S. military supply chain. What makes this so wild is the military is still using Anthropic’s A.I. system right now. They reportedly used it during the raid to capture Maduro in Venezuela, and are now using it in the war in Iran. This story raises so many questions: Why does the government think Anthropic is so dangerous? How exactly is the government using A.I. right now? How do they want to use A.I.? And who should ultimately control this powerful and uncertain technology? Dean Ball is a senior fellow at the Foundation for American Innovation and the author of the newsletter Hyperdimensional. He served as a senior policy adviser on A.I. for the Trump White House and was the primary staff writer of their A.I. action plan. But he’s been furious at the Trump administration for how it has been handling the conflict with Anthropic. So I wanted to have him on the show to explain why. Mentioned: “Hyperdimensional" by Dean Ball “What if Dario Amodei Is Right About A.I.?” The Ezra Klein Show “Stratechery” by Ben Thompson Book Recommendations: Rationalism in Politics and Other Essays by Michael Oakeshott Empire Of Liberty by Gordon S. Wood Roll, Jordan, Roll by Eugene D. Genovese 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. This episode of “The Ezra Klein Show” was produced by Rollin Hu. Fact-checking by Michelle Harris with Kate Sinclair and Mary Marge Locker. Our senior engineer is Jeff Geld, with additional mixing by Aman Sahota. Our executive producer is Claire Gordon. The show’s production team also includes Marie Cascione, Annie Galvin, Kristin Lin, Emma Kehlbeck, Jack McCordick, Marina King and Jan Kobal. Original music by Pat McCusker. Audience strategy by Kristina Samulewski and Shannon Busta. The director of New York Times Opinion Audio is Annie-Rose Strasser.

Two sitting heads of state, eight weeks apart. On Saturday, February 28, the United States and Israel launched a massive military assault on Iran that resulted in the death of Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, along with much of his senior command. This came less than two months after the United States military captured Nicolás Maduro, the president of Venezuela, in an overnight raid. The president seems to believe that he can decapitate these regimes and control their successors without events spinning out of his control. Is he right? Ben Rhodes is a New York Times Opinion contributing writer and a co-host of “Pod Save the World.” He served as a senior adviser to President Barack Obama and worked on the Iran nuclear deal. In this conversation, we discuss the ongoing conflict in Iran, how Democrats should respond, and whether Trump’s “head on a pike” approach to foreign policy underestimates the chaos of war. Mentioned: “Push from Saudis, Israel helped move Trump to attack Iran” by Michael Birnbaum, John Hudson, Karen DeYoung, Natalie Allison and Souad Mekhennet “Trump’s Best Foreign Policy? Not Starting Any Wars” by J.D. Vance Book Recommendations: From the Ruins of Empire by Pankaj Mishra The World of Yesterday by Stefan Zweig Travelers in the Third Reich by Julia Boyd 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. This episode of “The Ezra Klein Show” was produced by Jack McCordick. Fact-checking by Michelle Harris with Mary Marge Locker, and Kate Sinclair. Our senior engineer is Jeff Geld, with additional mixing by Aman Sahota and Isaac Jones. Our executive producer is Claire Gordon. The show’s production team also includes Marie Cascione, Annie Galvin, Rollin Hu, Kristin Lin, Emma Kehlbeck, Marina King and Jan Kobal. Original music by Pat McCusker. Audience strategy by Kristina Samulewski and Shannon Busta. The director of New York Times Opinion Audio is Annie-Rose Strasser.

President Trump’s approval ratings on the economy, immigration and trade are deep in the red. But in Tuesday night’s State of the Union address, he decided to tell the American people: You don’t know what you’re talking about. “Today our border is secure, our spirit is restored, inflation is plummeting, incomes are rising fast. The roaring economy is roaring like never before,” he said. I’m not going to fact-check the president in this episode. But I do want to ask: Even if he can’t be honest with the American people, is he at least being honest with himself? My editor Aaron Retica joins me to discuss. Mentioned: “I Am Part of the Resistance Inside the Trump Administration” by Miles Taylor “Has Trump Achieved a Lot Less Than It Seems?” with Yuval Levin on “The Ezra Klein Show” 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. This episode of “The Ezra Klein Show” was produced by Claire Gordon and Marie Cascione. Fact-checking by Michelle Harris, with Kate Sinclair and Mary Marge Locker. Our senior engineer is Jeff Geld, with additional mixing by Isaac Jones & Aman Sahota. Our executive producer is Claire Gordon. The show’s production team also includes Annie Galvin, Rollin Hu, Kristin Lin, Emma Kehlbeck, Jack McCordick, Marina King and Jan Kobal. Original music by Pat McCusker. Audience strategy by Kristina Samulewski and Shannon Busta. The director of New York Times Opinion Audio is Annie-Rose Strasser.

A.I. agents are here. Have they changed your life yet? The release of agents like Claude Code marked a new pivot point in the history of A.I. We are leaving the chatbot era and entering the agentic era — where A.I. is capable of completing all kinds of tasks on its own, and even collaborating and communicating with other A.I. It isn’t clear yet whether these models actually make their users meaningfully more productive. But the technology is continuing to improve; there are few signs that it is close to plateauing. So what might this new era mean for our economy, our labor market and our kids? Clark is a co-founder of Anthropic, the company behind Claude and Claude Code. His newsletter, Import AI, has been one of my go-to reads to track the capabilities of different models over the years. In this conversation, I ask him to share how he sees this moment — how the technology is changing, whether it is leading to meaningful changes in how we work and think, and how policy needs to or can change in response to any job displacement on the horizon. Mentioned: “Import AI” by Jack Clark “2026: This is AGI” by Pat Grady and Sonya Huang “Why and How Governments Should Monitor AI Development” by Jess Whittlestone and Jack Clark “Anthropic’s Chief on A.I.: ‘We Don’t Know if the Models Are Conscious’", Interesting Times with Ross Douthat Book Recommendations: A Wizard of Earthsea by Ursula K. Le Guin The True Believer by Eric Hoffer There Is No Antimemetics Division by qntm 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. This episode of “The Ezra Klein Show” was produced by Rollin Hu. Fact-checking by Michelle Harris with Mary Marge Locker and Kate Sinclair. Our senior engineer is Jeff Geld, with additional mixing by Isaac Jones and Aman Sahota. Our executive producer is Claire Gordon. The show’s production team also includes Marie Cascione, Annie Galvin, Kristin Lin, Emma Kehlbeck, Jack McCordick, Marina King and Jan Kobal. Original music by Pat McCusker. Audience strategy by Kristina Samulewski and Shannon Busta. The director of New York Times Opinion Audio is Annie-Rose Strasser.

It has been harder to get insight into the dynamics of President Trump’s White House this term compared with the first one, partly because there have been fewer leaks. But after the attack on Venezuela and the administration’s actions in Minneapolis, I’ve found myself wondering: How exactly is Trump making decisions? Who is he listening to? How does this White House work? Ashley Parker and Michael Scherer cover the Trump administration for The Atlantic and have written a series of big profiles on key figures in this administration. Parker previously won three Pulitzer Prizes for her reporting at The Washington Post. Mentioned: “The Wrath of Stephen Miller” by Ashley Parker and Michael Scherer “‘I Run the Country and the World’” by Ashley Parker and Michael Scherer “This Is the Real Reason Susie Wiles Talked to Me 11 Times” by Chris Whipple “Susie Wiles, JD Vance, and the “Junkyard Dogs”: The White House Chief of Staff on Trump’s Second Term (Part 1 of 2)” by Chris Whipple Book Recommendations: The Secret History by Donna Tartt Bel Canto by Ann Patchett Frankly, We Did Win This Election by Michael C. Bender An Image of My Name Enters America by Lucy Ives Palimpsest by Gore Vidal Blood by Douglas Starr 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. This episode of “The Ezra Klein Show” was produced by Jack McCordick. Fact-checking by Michelle Harris. Our senior engineer is Jeff Geld, with additional mixing by Aman Sahota. Our executive producer is Claire Gordon. The show’s production team also includes Marie Cascione, Annie Galvin, Rollin Hu, Kristin Lin, Emma Kehlbeck, Marina King and Jan Kobal. Original music by Aman Sahota and Pat McCusker. Audience strategy by Kristina Samulewski and Shannon Busta. The director of New York Times Opinion Audio is Annie-Rose Strasser.

At the end of January, Trump’s Justice Department released what it said was the last tranche of the Epstein files: millions of pages of emails and texts, F.B.I. documents and court records. Much was redacted and millions more pages have been withheld. There is a lot we want to know that remains unclear. But what has come into clear view is the role Epstein played as a broker of information, connections, wealth and women and girls for a slice of the global elite. This was the infrastructure of Epstein’s power — and it reveals much about the infrastructure of elite networks more generally. Anand Giridharadas is something of a sociologist of American elites. He’s the author of, among other books, “Winners Take All: The Elite Charade of Changing the World” and the forthcoming “Man in the Mirror: Hope, Struggle and Belonging in an American City.” He also publishes the great newsletter The.Ink. Back in November, after the release of an earlier batch of Epstein files, Giridharadas wrote a great Times Opinion guest essay, taking a sociologist’s lens to the messages Epstein exchanged with his elite friends. So after the government released this latest, enormous tranche of materials, I wanted to talk to Giridharadas to help make sense of it. What do they reveal — about how Epstein operated in the world, the vulnerabilities he exploited and what that says about how power works in America today? Note: This conversation was recorded on Tuesday, Feb. 10. On Thursday, Feb. 12, Kathryn Ruemmler announced she would be resigning from her role as chief legal officer and general counsel at Goldman Sachs. This episode contains strong language. Mentioned: “How the Elite Behave When No One Is Watching: Inside the Epstein Emails” by Anand Giridharadas “How JPMorgan Enabled the Crimes of Jeffrey Epstein” by David Enrich, Matthew Goldstein and Jessica Silver-Greenberg “Scams, Schemes, Ruthless Cons: The Untold Story of How Jeffrey Epstein Got Rich” by David Enrich, Steve Eder, Jessica Silver-Greenberg and Matthew Goldstein Book Recommendations: Random Family by Adrian Nicole LeBlanc Behind the Beautiful Forevers by Katherine Boo Unpublished Work by Conchita Sarnoff 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. This episode of “The Ezra Klein Show” was produced by Jack McCordick. Fact-checking by Michelle Harris, with Kate Sinclair and Mary Marge Locker. Our senior engineer is Jeff Geld, mixing by Aman Sahota and Isaac Jones. Our executive producer is Claire Gordon. The show’s production team also includes Marie Cascione, Annie Galvin, Rollin Hu, Kristin Lin, Emma Kehlbeck, Marina King and Jan Kobal. Original music by Pat McCusker and Aman Sahota. Audience strategy by Kristina Samulewski and Shannon Busta. The director of New York Times Opinion Audio is Annie-Rose Strasser.

George Saunders is tired of being the “kindness guy.” Saunders is one of my favorite fiction writers, and a friend of the pod; I talked to him back in 2021 and 2022. He also has a reputation as a kind of guru of kindness, thanks to a viral commencement speech he gave back in 2013. We talked about kindness on the show before. But with the publication of his new novel, “Vigil,” I noticed that something about Saunders seemed to have shifted. He was pushing back against that public persona, and wrestling with darker themes. “Vigil” follows an oil tycoon who, on his deathbed, is visited by angels and people from his past asking him to reassess his life. And you can feel a tension in that book that is also very alive in Saunders himself — between recognizing how much of our lives are conditioned by our circumstances and the need to pass judgment to reckon with the truth. In this conversation, I discuss that tension with Saunders. I ask him about his relationship not just to kindness but also to anger; how he defines sin; whether he believes in free will; and what he thinks lies beyond kindness. This episode contains strong language. Mentioned: Vigil by George Saunders “What It Means to Be Kind in a Cruel World” by The Ezra Klein Show “George Saunders Convocation Speech 2013” “A Tough Question Indeed” by George Saunders East West Street by Philippe Sands “When Is It Genocide?” by The Ezra Klein Show Book Recommendations: I Will Bear Witness, Volume 1 by Victor Klemperer Red Cavalry and Other Stories by Isaac Babel The Place of Tides by James Rebanks 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. This episode of “The Ezra Klein Show” was produced by Annie Galvin. Fact-checking by Michelle Harris. Our senior engineer is Jeff Geld, with additional mixing by Aman Sahota, Efim Shapiro and Isaac Jones. Our executive producer is Claire Gordon. The show’s production team also includes Marie Cascione, Rollin Hu, Kristin Lin, Emma Kehlbeck, Jack McCordick, Marina King and Jan Kobal. Original music by Aman Sahota and Pat McCusker. Audience strategy by Kristina Samulewski and Shannon Busta. The director of New York Times Opinion Audio is Annie-Rose Strasser.

Ragebait, sponcon, A.I. slop — the internet of 2026 makes a lot of us nostalgic for the internet of 10 or 15 years ago. What exactly went wrong here? How did the early promise of the internet get so twisted? And what exactly is wrong here? What kinds of policies could actually make our digital lives meaningfully better? Cory Doctorow and Tim Wu have two different theories of the case, which I thought would be interesting to put in conversation together. Doctorow is a science fiction writer, an activist with the Electronic Frontier Foundation and the author of “Enshittification: Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It.” Wu is a law professor who worked on technology policy in the Biden White House; his latest book is “The Age of Extraction: How Tech Platforms Conquered the Economy and Threaten Our Future Prosperity.” In this conversation, we discuss their different frameworks, and how they connect to all kinds of issues that plague the modern internet: the feeling that we’re being manipulated; the deranging of our politics; the squeezing of small businesses and creators; the deluge of spam and fraud; the constant surveillance and privacy risks; the quiet rise of algorithmic pricing; and the dehumanization of work. And they lay out the policies that they think would go furthest in making all these different aspects of our digital lives better. Mentioned: Enshittification by Cory Doctorow The Age of Extraction by Tim Wu “Fighting Enshittification” by Josh Richman Book Recommendations: Small Is Beautiful by E. F. Schumacher Manipulation by Cass R. Sunstein The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers by Paul Kennedy Careless People by Sarah Wynn-Williams Little Bosses Everywhere by Bridget Read Jules, Penny & the Rooster by Daniel Pinkwater 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. This episode of “The Ezra Klein Show” was produced by Annie Galvin. Fact-checking by Will Peischel. Our senior engineer is Jeff Geld, with additional mixing by Isaac Jones and Aman Sahota. Our executive producer is Claire Gordon. The show’s production team also includes Marie Cascione, Rollin Hu, Kristin Lin, Emma Kehlbeck, Jack McCordick, Michelle Harris, Marina King and Jan Kobal. Original music by Pat McCusker. Audience strategy by Kristina Samulewski and Shannon Busta. The director of New York Times Opinion Audio is Annie-Rose Strasser. And special thanks to Natasha Scott.

My motivation for this episode is personal. One of my resolutions this year is to spend more time hosting and to make those gatherings more meaningful. I think a lot of us wish we had better social lives and a stronger feeling of community around us. But it’s hard. We’re busy, we’re tired, and social planning and hosting can feel like just more work. So I asked Priya Parker on the show to help. Parker is the author of “The Art of Gathering: How We Meet and Why It Matters” and a wonderful Substack, Group Life. She’s also a conflict resolution facilitator. And she just thinks about gathering and hosting in a different way from anyone else I’ve ever met. For her, it’s about more than just throwing a great dinner party; it’s about how we build community across differences, all the way up to how gathering can help create a better politics. The way Zohran Mamdani’s mayoral campaign thought about community and built community among its volunteers was partly based on her work and advice. This episode is a bit of a break from politics — but also not. Because pulling the people we love closer and spending more time together rather than alone are as essential as any political or civic discipline could be right now. This conversation contains strong language. Mentioned: In Defense of Politics by Bernard Crick I And Thou by Martin Buber The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny by Kiran Desai “Adorable Little Detonators” by Allison P. Davis “The Accused” by Katie J.M. Baker “The Black Thought Project” by Alicia Walters “Zohran’s Smile” by Anand Giridharadas Book Recommendations: The Politics of Ritual by Molly Farneth On Repentance and Repair by Danya Ruttenberg BoyMom by Ruth Whippman Talk to Your Boys by Christopher Pepper and Joanna Schroeder 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. This episode of “The Ezra Klein Show” was produced by Annie Galvin. Fact-checking by Michelle Harris with Mary Marge Locker and Kate Sinclair. Our senior engineer is Jeff Geld, with additional mixing by Aman Sahota. Our executive producer is Claire Gordon. The show’s production team also includes Marie Cascione, Rollin Hu, Kristin Lin, Emma Kehlbeck, Jack McCordick, Marina King and Jan Kobal. Original music by Pat McCusker. Audience strategy by Kristina Samulewski and Shannon Busta. The director of New York Times Opinion Audio is Annie-Rose Strasser.

The old world order is dying. What new world order — if any — is struggling to be born? I can’t think of a week when it felt clearer that an era was coming to an end. Whatever people thought America was, at least for a couple of decades, it’s something else now. The killing of Alex Pretti and the fact that it was recorded on video that plainly contradicted the Trump administration’s initial narrative made that clear. Mark Carney, the prime minister of Canada, also drove home that point when he declared at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, that the world was in the midst of a “rupture.” What do people think of America now in Europe? In China? And if American hegemony is coming to an end, what comes after that? Adam Tooze is a historian at Columbia University and a chronicler of crises. The Guardian recently called him “the crisis whisperer.” He’s written a number of books about the times when systems fall apart and new orders emerge, including “Crashed: How a Decade of Financial Crises Changed the World.” And on his Substack, Chartbook, he tracks the unfolding crises and power shifts, in particular the rise of China. He also had a front-row seat to the chaos of Davos last week, moderating a panel that included Howard Lutnick, the commerce secretary. I wanted to talk to Tooze about what he saw at the World Economic Forum, how the world’s understanding of the U.S. is changing and how he’s making sense of this moment. Mentioned: Crashed by Adam Tooze “Chartbook” Substack by Adam Tooze “The Empty Chamber” by George Packer “The growing challenges for monetary policy in the current international monetary and financial system", speech by Mark Carney Book Recommendations: Diary of a Madman and Other Stories by Lu Xun The Southern Tour by Jonathan Chatwin Context Collapse by Ryan Ruby 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. This episode of “The Ezra Klein Show” was produced by Rollin Hu. Fact-checking by Michelle Harris, with Kate Sinclair. Our senior engineer is Jeff Geld, with additional mixing by Aman Sahota. Our executive producer is Claire Gordon. The show’s production team also includes Marie Cascione, Annie Galvin, Kristin Lin, Emma Kehlbeck, Jack McCordick, Marina King and Jan Kobal. Original music by Pat McCusker. Audience strategy by Kristina Samulewski and Shannon Busta. The director of New York Times Opinion Audio is Annie-Rose Strasser.

“We are in the midst of a rupture, not a transition,” Prime Minister Mark Carney of Canada announced last week at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland. It was one of the most significant foreign policy speeches in years, sending shockwaves through the international community. He was describing a dynamic that’s been building for decades — what the scholars Henry Farrell and Abraham Newman call “weaponized interdependence” — that has now reached a tipping point. I asked Farrell on the show to explain this dynamic, why this is a “rupture” moment and how other countries are responding. He is an international-affairs professor at Johns Hopkins University, is an author of the book “Underground Empire: How America Weaponized the World Economy” and writes an excellent Substack, Programmable Mutter. Note: This episode touches on the clashes over immigration enforcement in Minneapolis and the killing of Renee Good, but it was recorded on Friday, before the killing of Alex Pretti. Mentioned: “Davos 2026: Special address by Mark Carney, Prime Minister of Canada” Underground Empire by Henry Farrell and Abraham Newman “Programmable Mutter” by Henry Farrell “The nature and sources of liberal international order” by Daniel Deudney and G. John Ikenberry “The Enshittification of American Power” by Henry Farrell and Abraham L. Newman “Too big to care” by Cory Doctorow Weapons of the Weak by James C. Scott Private Truths, Public Lies by Timur Kuran “Further Back to the Future: Neo-Royalism, the Trump Administration, and the Emerging International System” by Stacie E. Goddard and Abraham Newman “The Dynamics of Informational Cascades: The Monday Demonstrations in Leipzig, East Germany, 1989–91” by Susanne Lohmann Book Recommendations: Dollars and Dominion by Mary Bridges Nonesuch by Francis Spufford The Score by C. Thi Nguyen 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. This episode of “The Ezra Klein Show” was produced by Jack McCordick. Fact-checking by Michelle Harris, with Mary Marge Locker, Kate Sinclair Our senior engineer is Jeff Geld, with additional mixing by Aman Sahota and Isaac Jones. Our executive producer is Claire Gordon. The show’s production team also includes Marie Cascione, Annie Galvin, Rollin Hu, Kristin Lin, Emma Kehlbeck, Marina King and Jan Kobal. Original music by Pat McCusker and Carole Sabouraud. Audience strategy by Kristina Samulewski and Shannon Busta. The director of New York Times Opinion Audio is Annie-Rose Strasser.

There’s so much more happening than what you see in online video clips. Congress gave Trump a staggering, military-size budget for immigration enforcement. And it’s hard to keep the scale of what the administration is building in your mind all at once. There are all the additional boots on the ground, as well as a lot of things that are less visible. I wanted to talk to someone who has followed closely how the whole immigration system is changing under President Trump. Caitlin Dickerson is a journalist at The Atlantic. She’s been covering immigration closely since Trump’s first term, and she won a Pulitzer Prize in 2023 for reporting on his family separation policy. In this conversation, we discuss what the country’s new immigration enforcement infrastructure looks like, what it is being used to do now and what it might mean for the future. This episode contains strong language. Mentioned: “We need to take away children.” by Caitlin Dickerson “ICE’s Mind-Bogglingly Massive Blank Check" by Caitlin Dickerson “Hundreds of Thousands of Anonymous Deportees” by Caitlin Dickerson “How ICE Lost Its Guardrails” by Caitlin Dickerson “Countering Domestic Terrorism and Organized Political Violence,” The White House Book Recommendations: Impossible Subjects by Mae M. Ngai Solito by Javier Zamora Meditations for Mortals by Oliver Burkeman 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. This episode of “The Ezra Klein Show” was produced by Jack McCordick. Fact-checking by Michelle Harris. Our senior engineer is Jeff Geld, with additional mixing by Aman Sahota. Our executive producer is Claire Gordon. The show’s production team also includes Marie Cascione, Annie Galvin, Rollin Hu, Kristin Lin, Emma Kehlbeck, Marina King and Jan Kobal. Original music by Pat McCusker. Audience strategy by Kristina Samulewski and Shannon Busta. The director of New York Times Opinion Audio is Annie-Rose Strasser. Special thanks to Sarah Stillman and Aaron Reichlin-Melnick.

We are one year into Trump’s second term. And it feels like so much has happened – more than the human mind, or the country, can absorb. But how much has Trump really accomplished? What policies have changed the country in a way that will last? My guest Yuval Levin is one of the smartest thinkers on the right, and his verdict is: not that much. “There’s an important story to tell about the absence of action in the past year, too,” he tells me. Levin is the director of social, cultural and constitutional studies at the American Enterprise Institute, the founder and editor of National Affairs and the author of several books on policy and political theory, including “American Covenant: How the Constitution Unified Our Nation – and Could Again.” Mentioned: Charts Buckley by Sam Tanenhaus Book Recommendations: Insecure Majorities by Frances E. Lee Making the Presidency by Lindsay M. Chervinsky Last Branch Standing by Sarah Isgur 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. This episode of “The Ezra Klein Show” was produced by Rollin Hu. Fact-checking by Michelle Harris, with Kate Sinclair. Our senior engineer is Jeff Geld, with additional mixing by Aman Sahota. Our executive producer is Claire Gordon. The show’s production team also includes Marie Cascione, Annie Galvin, Kristin Lin, Emma Kehlbeck, Jack McCordick, Marina King and Jan Kobal. Original music by Pat McCusker. Audience strategy by Kristina Samulewski and Shannon Busta. The director of New York Times Opinion Audio is Annie-Rose Strasser.

I answer your questions on the year’s political lessons, the struggles of young men and handling heat on the show. The end-of-year Ask Me Anything episode has become a tradition on the show. So as 2025 comes to a close, I’m joined by Claire Gordon, the show’s executive producer, to answer your questions about an eventful year — how my thinking on the Trump administration has evolved, how well the Democratic Party has played its chips, what I think it means to be a Democrat right now, whether “Abundance” is centrist, how politicians might address adriftness of young people, how I’ve handled the criticism the show has received and how many packets of Splenda I consume in a day. Note: This conversation was recorded on Tuesday, Dec. 2, and does not reflect more recent developments in Congress’s review of the Sept. 2 boat attack. Mentioned: “Don’t Believe Him” by Ezra Klein “The Supreme Court Is Backing Trump’s Power Grab” by Ezra Klein “What if Trump Just Ignores the Courts?” by Ezra Klein “The Republican Party’s NPC Problem — and Ours” by Ezra Klein “Abundance and the Left" by Ezra Klein “The Emergency Is Here” by Ezra Klein “Stop Acting Like This Is Normal” by Ezra Klein “What Were Democrats Thinking?” by Ezra Klein “The Goon Squad” by Daniel Kolitz Dragonriders of Pern Series by Anne McCaffrey and Todd J. McCaffrey 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. This episode of “The Ezra Klein Show” was produced by Claire Gordon, Kristin Lin and Marie Cascione. Fact-checking by Michelle Harris. Our senior engineer is Jeff Geld, with additional mixing by Isaac Jones. Our executive producer is Claire Gordon. The show’s production team also includes Annie Galvin, Rollin Hu, Emma Kehlbeck, Jack McCordick, Marina King and Jan Kobal. Original music by Carole Sabouraud and Pat McCusker. Audience strategy by Kristina Samulewski and Shannon Busta. The director of New York Times Opinion Audio is Annie-Rose Strasser. Transcript editing by Andrea Gutierrez, Sarah Murphy and Marlaine Glicksman.