Coming Soon: The Ezra Klein Show

Every Tuesday and Friday, Ezra Klein invites you into a conversation about 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? Subscribe wherever you listen to podcasts. 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 [email protected]. “The Ezra Klein Show” is produced by Rogé Karma and Jeff Geld; fact-checking by Michelle Harris; original music by Isaac Jones; mixing by Jeff Geld.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Ezra Klein?

  I'm Ezra Klein, host of The Ezra Klein Show, which is now at The New York Times.

• 0:08Ezra Klein?

  This is a conversation show. I get to talk with brilliant people about the questions that obsess me. So I figured the best way to preview the show is to simply tell you some of those questions. We often cover American politics as if the presidency is all that matters, but Joe Biden's agenda, it will live or it will die in the Senate. So what would it mean for Democrats to remake the Senate into an actual legislating deliberative body again, a seat of effective governance, as opposed to the central national impediment to effective governance?

• 0:38Ezra Klein?

  There are so many shows right now to do on coronavirus, but I want to call this one out. Did the FDA and the regulatory structure more broadly fail? Were we, are we right now too slow, too risk averse, too unwilling to move forward on imperfect information, even when lives are on the line? And so what do we need to learn from that?

• 0:58Ezra Klein?

  I'm a liberal. I live in California, and so I can't help noticing that liberalism, it isn't governing very well here, or for that matter, in New York. The failures and cruelties of Trumpism are obvious, but why are progressives having so much trouble wielding power well in the places where they do have it? And then there's this, and I'm obsessed with this. We are not going to legislate enough quickly enough to stop climate change. That cannot be the only path. So then, what options are left? What options do we have if politics fails? And on that note, we often take the point of politics for granted, as if we all share a vision of the good society, but we don't. And one reason we don't, I fear, is that we don't talk about that question very much. We don't argue about it much. But politics

• 1:43Ezra Klein?

  is bigger than any one policy, building out that dream of what we are trying to build, that idea of the good society and of the virtuous life. That's worth talking about and exploring too, and we will. The Ezra Klein Show will launch on January 26 at The New York Times. New episodes will drop Tuesdays and Fridays from then on. Subscribe here or wherever you get your podcasts.