The Ezra Klein Show

Stewart Brand might be the most influential philosopher of the internet – at least in its more idealistic era. In the 1960s, Brand was the central bridge figure between the San Francisco counterculture and the emerging technology scene. He created the legendary Trips Festival with Ken Kesey in 1966, and was there at “the mother of all demos” in 1968. And he created and edited the Whole Earth Catalog, which Steve Jobs called “one of...

Leading the Future, a super PAC whose funders include the founders of companies like Palantir and OpenAI, is spending millions of dollars this election cycle, and a considerable amount of that money is going toward attack ads against Alex Bores – even though Bores himself used to work for Palantir.

Bores is a New York state assemblyman who is running for Congress to represent New York’s 12th District. His campaign includes an exten...

Jeff Bezos, Michael Bloomberg and Warren Buffett are three of the richest people in the world, but they pay little in income tax relative to their wealth.

In 2021, ProPublica published an investigation built on leaked tax documents that reveal what some of the richest Americans really pay — or don’t. Warren Buffett had a true tax rate of 0.1 percent. Jeff Bezos: 0.98 percent. Michael Bloomberg: 1.3 percent.

Ultra-wealthy Americans ...

For decades, most discussions of Israel and Palestine were framed around the eventual creation of a two-state solution. That effort has been dead for years. What has emerged in its place is what the political scientists Marc Lynch and Shibley Telhami call the “one-state reality.” Their book on this — edited with Michael Barnett and Nathan Brown — came out before Oct. 7, 2023.

Since Oct. 7, that reality has become further entrenched...

When President Trump didn’t annihilate “a whole civilization” on Tuesday, as he had threatened to do, much of the world exhaled. But the damage of his statements — a U.S. president, the commander in chief of the world’s most powerful military, threatening to commit war crimes — continues to linger in the shadow of an uncertain cease-fire.

Fareed Zakaria is the host of CNN’s “Fareed Zakaria GPS” and the author of “Age of Revolutions...

In a prime time address on Wednesday, President Trump proclaimed that America was “on the cusp of ending Iran’s sinister threat.” But he also kept open the option of boots on the ground. The effective closure of the Strait of Hormuz is also about to start really biting – as countries get hit with shortages, which would spike prices across the globe.

So what are Trump’s options? What would happen if he just declared victory and walk...

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 Dile...

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...

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 c...

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 ...

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....

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 serv...

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 Madur...

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 the...

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 ...

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 tec...

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 administra...

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 fo...

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 shi...