The Ezra Klein Show

→ WHAT IT COVERS Ezra Klein and Matt Duss, executive vice president of the Center for International Policy and former Bernie Sanders foreign policy adviser, examine how Gaza is fracturing Democratic foreign policy consensus, what a left-oriented foreign policy would look like in practice, and how the next Democratic administration should break from Biden-era approaches on Israel, China, trade, and military intervention.

→ WHAT IT COVERS Ezra Klein and Atlantic staff writer Helen Lewis map the ideological movement Lewis terms "masculinism" — a coordinated New Right project involving figures like Bronze Age Pervert, Doug Wilson, and Scott Yenor that seeks to restructure American law, economics, and culture around pre-feminist gender hierarchies, and examine why it resonates despite its intellectual contradictions.

→ WHAT IT COVERS Ezra Klein and Ian Bremmer analyze Donald Trump as both symptom and cause of American political dysfunction, examining the failed Iran war strategy, the US-China summit climb-down, America's petro-state identity versus China's electrostate dominance, and how algorithmic media and housing scarcity have combined to hollow out social mobility and destabilize the global order the US built after World War II.

→ WHAT IT COVERS Ezra Klein and Republican strategist Liam Donovan analyze why Trump, polling at 58% disapproval and more unpopular than any modern second-term predecessor, appears to prioritize controlling the Republican Party over winning the 2026 midterms — and map the competitive Senate races in North Carolina, Maine, Texas, Ohio, Alaska, Iowa, and Michigan.

→ WHAT IT COVERS Yuval Noah Harari joins Ezra Klein to examine whether human civilization runs on cooperation or power, tracing this tension through Trumpism, Israeli-Palestinian conflict, the collapse of liberal international order, and AI's emerging capacity to reshape human psychology, language, financial systems, and political identity at a scale no previous technology has approached. → KEY INSIGHTS - **Cooperation vs.

→ WHAT IT COVERS Ezra Klein and political scientist Lee Drutman examine how the 2024 Callais Supreme Court ruling gutted the Voting Rights Act, triggering an all-out gerrymandering war costing Democrats 7-10 House seats, and why proportional representation with multi-member districts offers the only structural solution to permanently end partisan map manipulation.

→ WHAT IT COVERS Ezra Klein interviews Buddhist teacher Pema Chödrön about her new book *Another Kind of Freedom*, exploring how to relate to discomfort, uncertainty, and suffering rather than avoid them. They cover meditation practice, the difference between pain and suffering, patience, presence, and how tolerating discomfort directly correlates with personal growth capacity.

→ WHAT IT COVERS Ezra Klein moderates a 92-minute forum with five leading California Democratic gubernatorial candidates — Tom Steyer, Javier Becerra, Katie Porter, Matt Mahan, and Antonio Villaraigosa — focused exclusively on California's housing crisis, examining construction costs, city-state conflicts, homelessness policy, and why thousands of permitted homes remain unbuilt despite years of pro-housing legislation.

→ WHAT IT COVERS Ezra Klein and journalist Julia Belluz examine GLP-1 drugs like Ozempic and tirzepatide, now used by 1 in 8 Americans. They cover weight loss mechanisms, weight-independent cardiovascular and anti-inflammatory benefits, side effects, the addiction-reward system connection, risks for children, and how algorithmic social media has created a dangerous peptide experimentation culture.

→ WHAT IT COVERS Ezra Klein interviews historian Helena Rosenblatt about her book *The Lost History of Liberalism*, tracing how "liberality" — a Roman civic virtue centered on generosity and communal obligation — predates liberalism by two millennia, and how recovering that moral tradition could address liberalism's current political exhaustion and identity crisis. → KEY INSIGHTS - **Liberality vs.

→ WHAT IT COVERS One year after publishing *Abundance*, Ezra Klein reunites with co-author Derek Thompson and historian Marc Dunkelman to assess the book's real-world impact. They evaluate housing construction outcomes in California, Texas, and New York, debate corporate power critiques from Elizabeth Warren, examine AI's political complications, and discuss what a future Democratic governing agenda must look like beyond cutting red tape. → KEY INSIGHTS - **Vibes vs.

→ WHAT IT COVERS Stewart Brand, creator of the Whole Earth Catalog and foundational thinker behind Silicon Valley's early ethos, speaks with Ezra Klein about his new book on maintenance as a philosophical practice, examining how caring for objects, bodies, and systems connects to ownership, agency, and civilizational survival. → KEY INSIGHTS - **Maintenance as true ownership:** Owning something legally differs from owning it meaningfully.

→ WHAT IT COVERS New York State Assembly member Alex Bores, author of the RAISE Act — one of the first AI safety laws passed by any U.S. state — discusses AI regulation, job displacement, an AI dividend proposal, and the $2.5 million super PAC funded by Palantir, OpenAI, and Andreessen Horowitz cofounders actively working to end his congressional campaign.

→ WHAT IT COVERS Boston College Law professor Ray Madoff explains how America's wealthiest — Bezos, Musk, Buffett — legally pay near-zero taxes by avoiding taxable income through stock appreciation, borrowing against assets, and dynasty trusts, while wage earners pay up to 52% combined income and payroll taxes, and why the estate tax collects almost nothing despite a 40% rate.

→ WHAT IT COVERS Political scientists Michael Barnett, Nathan Brown, Mark Lynch, and Shibley Telhami's 2023 framework — the "one state reality" — argues Israel already functions as a single sovereign controlling all territory from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean Sea, governing Palestinians under a permanently inferior legal regime, a condition accelerated dramatically by post-October 7 policy choices.

→ WHAT IT COVERS Ezra Klein and Fareed Zakaria analyze Trump's Easter Sunday threats to annihilate Iranian civilization, the subsequent ceasefire deal that left Iran stronger than before the war, and what this episode reveals about America's transformation from enlightened hegemon into what foreign policy scholar Stephen Walt calls a "predatory hegemon" extracting short-term rents at the cost of long-term global standing.

→ WHAT IT COVERS Ezra Klein interviews Brookings Institution Iran expert Suzanne Maloney about the U.S.-Iran war, examining why Iran believes it holds strategic leverage despite absorbing over 10,000 strikes, how Strait of Hormuz closure threatens the global economy, and why neither regime collapse nor a negotiated victory appears achievable for the Trump administration.

→ WHAT IT COVERS Michael Pollan joins Ezra Klein to discuss Pollan's new book on consciousness, covering experiments in inner experience sampling, plant sentience, lantern versus spotlight consciousness in children versus adults, the body's role in thought, mind wandering as creative fuel, and how psychedelics are reshaping neuroscientists' theories about whether brains generate or merely receive consciousness.

→ WHAT IT COVERS Christopher Caldwell, contributing editor at the Claremont Review of Books, argues on The Ezra Klein Show that Trump's Iran military strike may signal the end of Trumpism as a governing project. Ezra Klein and Caldwell examine what Trumpism actually was, whether it had coherent ideology beyond Trump himself, and how Gulf State financial entanglements complicate the war's origins. → KEY INSIGHTS - **Defining Trumpism vs.

→ WHAT IT COVERS Energy policy expert Jason Bordoff from Columbia University's Center on Global Energy Policy analyzes the Iran-Strait of Hormuz crisis with Ezra Klein. The Strait carries 20 million barrels daily — 20% of global supply — and its closure represents the largest energy supply disruption ever recorded, exceeding the 1973 Arab oil embargo's 6-7% disruption by a significant margin.