The Gray Area with Sean Illing

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Best of: Robert Sapolsky on the toxic intersection of poverty and stress Dec 10, 2020

Show notes

Robert Sapolsky is a Stanford neuroscientist and primatologist. He’s the author of a slew of important books on human biology and behavior, including most recently Behave: The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst. But it’s an older book he wrote that forms the basis for this conversation. In Why Zebras Don’t Get Ulcers, Sapolsky works through how a stress response that evolved for fast, fight-or-flight situations on the savannah continuously wears on our bodies and brains in modern life.

But stress isn’t just an individual phenomenon. It’s also a social force, applied brutally and unequally across our society. “If you want to see an example of chronic stress, study poverty,” Sapolsky says.

I often say on the show that politics and policy need to begin with a realistic model of human nature. This is a show about that level of the policy conversation: It’s about how poverty and stress exist in a doom loop together, each amplifying the other’s effects on the brain and body, deepening their harms.

And this is a conversation of intense relevance to how we make social policy. Much of the fight in Washington, and in the states, is about whether the best way to get people out of poverty is to make it harder to access help, to make sure the government doesn’t become, in Paul Ryan’s memorable phrase, “a hammock.” Understanding how the stress of poverty acts on people’s minds, how it saps their will and harms their cognitive function and hurts their children, exposes how cruel and wrongheaded that view really is.

Sapolsky and I also discuss whether free will is a myth, why he believes the prison system is incompatible with modern neuroscience, how studying monkeys in times of social change helps makes sense of the current moment in American politics, and much more. It’s worth your time.

Book Recommendations:

The 21 Balloons by William Pene Dubois

Chaos: Making a New Science by James Gleick

The Tangled Wing: Biological Constraints on the Human Spirit by Melvin Konner

Credits:

Producer/Audio engineer - Jeff Geld

Researcher - Roge Karma

Please consider making a contribution to Vox to support this show: bit.ly/givepodcasts Your support will help us keep having ambitious conversations about big ideas.

New to the show? Want to check out Ezra’s favorite episodes? Check out the Ezra Klein Show beginner’s guide (http://bit.ly/EKSbeginhere)

Want to contact the show? Reach out at ezrakleinshow@vox.com

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Joe Biden and "the new progressivism" Dec 07, 2020

Show notes

It’s often said that Joe Biden has an instinct for finding the political center — that of his party, and that of the country. To understand how Biden has changed, and how he might govern, we need to understand how the ideological context of American politics is changing, and why.

Felicia Wong is the President and CEO of the Roosevelt Institute, a progressive think tank that has done some of the best work on the way the ideological firmament of politics is shifting. Wong believes that the set of governing assumptions behind both conservative and progressive policymaking, what broadly gets called “neoliberalism,” is devolving. And she, and Roosevelt more broadly, have done some of the best work mapping the different worldviews and factions competing to take its place.

We discuss what neoliberalism was and wasn’t, how a focus on markets is giving way to a focus on power, the four main groups that make up “the new progressivism,” where Biden himself has affinities with the changing worldview, what he can (and can’t) do without congress, the case for and against student debt cancellation, how the new administration could wield its antitrust power, why Elizabeth Warren’s brand of economic thinking holds particular promise for a Biden administration, and more.

References:

"What Is the Current Student Debt Situation?" by Matt Bruenig

"The Emerging Worldview: How New Progressivism Is Moving Beyond Neoliberalism" by Felicia Wong

Book recommendations:

Suburban Warriors by Lisa McGirr

From Counterculture to Cyberculture by Fred Turner

State of Resistance by Manuel Pastor

Credits:

Producer/Audio engineer - Jeff Geld

Researcher - Roge Karma

Please consider making a contribution to Vox to support this show: bit.ly/givepodcasts Your support will help us keep having ambitious conversations about big ideas.

New to the show? Want to check out Ezra’s favorite episodes? Check out the Ezra Klein Show beginner’s guide (http://bit.ly/EKSbeginhere)

Want to contact the show? Reach out at ezrakleinshow@vox.com

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Best of: Frances Lee on why bipartisanship is irrational Dec 03, 2020

Show notes

There are few conversations I’ve had on this show that are quite as relevant to our current political moment as this one with Princeton political scientist Frances Lee.

Joe Biden will occupy the White House come January, but pending the results of two runoff Senate elections in Georgia, Democrats either won’t control the Senate at all or will face a 50-50 split. In either case, an important question looms large over the incoming administration: Will Republican senators negotiate with Biden in good faith? Lee’s work is an indispensable framework for thinking about that inquiry.

In her most recent book, Insecure Majorities: Congress and the Perpetual Campaign, Lee makes a point that sounds strange when you hear it but changes everything once you understand it. For most of American history, American politics has been under one-party rule. For decades, that party was the Republican Party. Then, for decades more, it was the Democratic Party. It’s only in the past few decades that control of Congress began flipping back and forth every few years, that presidential elections became routinely decided by a few percentage points, that both parties are always this close to gaining or losing the majority.

That kind of close competition, Lee writes, makes the daily compromises of bipartisan governance literally irrational. "Confrontation fits our strategy,” Dick Cheney once said. "Polarization often has very beneficial results. If everything is handled through compromise and conciliation, if there are no real issues dividing us from the Democrats, why should the country change and make us the majority?”

Why indeed? This is a conversation about that question, about how the system we have incentivizes a politics of confrontation we don’t seem to want and makes steady, stable governance a thing of the past.

Book Recommendations:

The Imprint of Congress by David R. Mayhew

Fear Itself: The New Deal and the Origins of Our Time by Ira Katznelson

Congress's Constitution: Legislative Authority and the Separation of Powers by Josh Chafetz

Credits:

Producer/Audio engineer - Jeff Geld

Researcher - Roge Karma

Please consider making a contribution to Vox to support this show: bit.ly/givepodcasts Your support will help us keep having ambitious conversations about big ideas.

New to the show? Want to check out Ezra’s favorite episodes? Check out the Ezra Klein Show beginner’s guide (http://bit.ly/EKSbeginhere)

Want to contact the show? Reach out at ezrakleinshow@vox.com

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

The most important book I've read this year Nov 30, 2020

Show notes

If I could get policymakers, and citizens, everywhere to read just one book this year, it would be Kim Stanley Robinson’s The Ministry for the Future.

Best known for the Mars trilogy, Robinson is one of the greatest living science fiction writers. And in recent years, he's become the greatest writers of what people now call cli-fi — climate fiction. The name is a bit of a misnomer: Climate fiction is less fictitious speculation than an attempt to envision a near future that we are likely to inhabit. It’s an attempt to take our present — and thus the future we’re ensuring — more seriously than we currently do. Robinson’s new book does exactly that.

In The Ministry for the Future, Robinson imagines a world wracked by climate catastrophe. Some nations begin unilateral geoengineering. Eco-violence arises, as people begin to begin experience unchecked climate change as an act of war against them, and they respond in kind, using new technologies to hunt those they blame. Capitalism ruptures, changes, and is remade. Nations, and the relations between them, transform. Ultimately, humanity is successful, but it is a terrifying success — a success that involves making the kinds of choices that none of us want to even think about making.

This conversation with Robinson was fantastic. We discuss why the end of the world is easier to imagine than the end of capitalism; how changes to the biosphere will force humanity to rethink capitalism, borders, terrorism, and currency; the influence of eco-Marxism on Robinson’s thinking; how existing power relationships define the boundaries of what is considered violence; why science-fiction as a discipline is particularly suited to grapple with climate change; what a complete rethinking of the entire global economic system could look like; why Robinson thinks geoengineering needs to be on the table; the vastly underrated importance of the Paris Climate Agreement; and much more.

References:

"'There is no planet B': the best books to help us navigate the next 50 years" by Kim Stanley Robinson

My conversation on geoengineering with Jane Flegal

The Ezra Klein Show climate change series

Book recommendations:

Unsheltered by Barbara Kingsolver

The Arrest by Jonathan Lethem

Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead by Olga Tokarczuk

Credits:

Producer/Audio engineer - Jeff Geld

Researcher - Roge Karma

Please consider making a contribution to Vox to support this show: bit.ly/givepodcasts Your support will help us keep having ambitious conversations about big ideas.

New to the show? Want to check out Ezra’s favorite episodes? Check out the Ezra Klein Show beginner’s guide (http://bit.ly/EKSbeginhere)

Want to contact the show? Reach out at ezrakleinshow@vox.com

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Best of: Alison Gopnik changed how I think about love Nov 26, 2020

Show notes

Happy Thanksgiving! We will be back next week with brand new episodes, but on a day when so many of us are thinking about love and relationships I wanted to share an episode that has changed the way I think about those topics in a profound way.

Alison Gopnik is a professor of psychology and philosophy at the University of California Berkeley. She’s published more than 100 journal articles and half a dozen books, including most recently The Gardener and the Carpenter: What the New Science of Child Development Tells Us About the Relationship Between Parents and Children. She runs a cognitive development and learning lab where she studies how young children come to understand the world around them, and she’s built on that research to do work in AI, to understand how adults form bonds with both children and each other, and to examine what creativity is and how we can nurture it in ourselves and — more importantly — each other.

But this conversation isn’t just about kids -- it's about what it means to be human. What makes us feel love for each other. How we can best care for each other. How our minds really work in the formative, earliest days, and what we lose as we get older. The role community is meant to play in our lives.

This episode has done more than just change the way I think. It’s changed how I live my life. I hope it can do the same for you.

Book recommendations:

A Treatise of Human Natureby David Hume

Alice's Adventures in Wonderland by Lewis Carroll

The works of Jean Piaget

Credits:

Producer/Audio engineer - Jeff Geld

Researcher - Roge Karma

Please consider making a contribution to Vox to support this show: bit.ly/givepodcasts Your support will help us keep having ambitious conversations about big ideas.

New to the show? Want to check out Ezra’s favorite episodes? Check out the Ezra Klein Show beginner’s guide (http://bit.ly/EKSbeginhere)

Want to contact the show? Reach out at ezrakleinshow@vox.com

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Best of: Vivek Murthy on America’s loneliness epidemic Nov 23, 2020

Show notes

At the holidays, I wanted to share some of my favorite episodes of the show with you (we’ll be back next week with brand new episodes). My conversation with Vivek Murthy tops that list, and it has particular force this Thanksgiving, when so many are alone on a day when connection means so much.

As US surgeon general from 2014 to 2017, Murthy visited communities across the United States to talk about issues like addiction, obesity, and mental illness. But he found that what Americans wanted to talk to him about the most was loneliness. In a 2018 report by the Kaiser Family Foundation, 22 percent of all adults in the US — almost 60 million Americans — said they often or always felt lonely or socially isolated.

Murthy went on to write Together: The Healing Power of Human Connection in a Sometimes Lonely World, and was recently named one of the co-chairs of Joe Biden’s coronavirus task force. Those projects may sound different, but they connect: Coronavirus has made America’s loneliness crisis far worse. Social distancing, while necessary from a public health standpoint, has caused a collapse in social contact among family, friends, and entire communities. And the people most vulnerable to the virus — the elderly, the disabled, the ill — are also unusually likely to suffer from loneliness.

Murthy’s explanation of how loneliness acts on the body is worth the time, all on its own — it’ll change how you see the relationship between social experience and physical health. But the broader message here is deeper: You are not alone in your loneliness. None of us are. And the best thing we can do for our own feeling of isolation is often to help someone else out of the very pit we’re in.

Book recommendations:

Tuesdays with Morrie by Mitch Albom

Conversations with God by Neale Donald Walsch

Dear Madam President by Jennifer Palmieri

Credits:

Producer/Audio engineer - Jeff Geld

Researcher - Roge Karma

Please consider making a contribution to Vox to support this show: bit.ly/givepodcasts Your support will help us keep having ambitious conversations about big ideas.

New to the show? Want to check out Ezra’s favorite episodes? Check out the Ezra Klein Show beginner’s guide (http://bit.ly/EKSbeginhere)

Want to contact the show? Reach out at ezrakleinshow@vox.com

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

What Democrats got wrong about Hispanic voters Nov 19, 2020

Show notes

Donald Trump has built his presidency on top of racial dog whistles, xenophobic rhetoric, and anti-immigrant policies. A core belief among liberals was that this strategy would help Trump with whites but almost certainly hurt him with Latinos, and people of color more broadly. Then the opposite happened: In 2020, Trump gained considerable support among voters of color, particularly Latinos, relative to the 2016 election.

What happened?

Ian Haney López is a legal scholar at UC Berkeley and the author of Dog Whistle Politics: How Coded Racial Appeals Have Reinvented Racism and Wrecked the Middle Class. In 2017, he partnered with the leftist think tank Demos and various polling groups to better understand the effectiveness of racial dog whistles and how Democrats could combat them. The results were sobering, even to the experts who commissioned the polls. As Haney López documented in his 2019 book Merge Left: Fusing Race and Class, Winning Elections, and Saving America, 60 percent of Latinos and 54 percent of African Americans have found Trumpian dog-whistle messages convincing, right in step with the 61 percent of whites who did.

This conversation is about the complicated reality of racial politics in America. It’s about the fact that the electorate isn’t divided into racists and non-racists — most voters, including Trump supporters, toggle back and forth between racially reactionary and racially egalitarian views — and a more robust theory of how race operates in American politics that follows. And it’s about the kinds of race- and class-conscious messages that Haney López’s research suggests work best with voters of all backgrounds.

Book recommendations:

Racial Realignment:The Transformation of American Liberalism, 1932–1965 by Eric Schickler

The Line Becomes a River by Francisco Cantú

Born a Crime by Trevor Noah

Credits:

Producer/Audio engineer - Jeff Geld

Researcher - Roge Karma

Please consider making a contribution to Vox to support this show: bit.ly/givepodcasts Your support will help us keep having ambitious conversations about big ideas.

New to the show? Want to check out Ezra’s favorite episodes? Check out the Ezra Klein Show beginner’s guide (http://bit.ly/EKSbeginhere)

Want to contact the show? Reach out at ezrakleinshow@vox.com

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Antitrust, censorship, misinformation, and the 2020 election Nov 16, 2020

Show notes

I’ve been fascinated by the sharp change in how the tech platforms — particularly the big social media companies like Facebook, Twitter, and to some degree, YouTube — are acting since the 2020 election. It’s become routine to see President Donald Trump’s posts tagged as misinformation or worse. Facebook is limiting the reach of hyper-viral stories it can’t verify, Twitter is trying to guard against becoming a dumping ground for foreign actors trying to launder stolen secrets, and conservatives are abandoning both platforms en masse, hoping to find more congenial terrain on newcomers like Parler.

So is Big Tech finally doing its job, and taking some responsibility for its role in our democracy? Are they overreaching, and becoming the biased censors so many feared? Are they simply so big that anything they do is in some way the wrong choice, and antitrust is the only solution?

Casey Newton has spent the past decade covering Silicon Valley for The Verge, CNET, and the San Francisco Chronicle. Today, he writes Platformer, a daily blog and newsletter focused primarily on the relationship between the big tech platforms and democracy. He’s my go-to for questions like these, and so I went to him. We discuss:

The lessons the platforms learned the hard way in 2016
What Facebook and Twitter got right -- and wrong -- this election cycle
The dissonance between Facebook and Twitter’s progressive employees and broader user base
The problem of trying to be neutral when both sides really aren’t the same
Whether Facebook and Twitter handled the Hunter Biden New York Post story correctly
Whether major tech platforms are biased against conservatives
Why YouTube has been so much less aggressive than Facebook and Twitter on moderation
The recent rise of Parler, the Twitter alternative that conservatives are flocking to by the hundreds of thousands
What Biden administration’s tech agenda could look like
The Section 230 provision at the heart of the debate over content moderation
How the big tech CEOs differ from each other ideologically
The problems that antitrust enforcement against tech platforms will solve -- and the problems it won’t solve

And much more

Book recommendations:

Facebook: The Inside Story by Steven Levy

No Filter: The Inside Story of Instagram by Sarah Frier

Caste by Isabel Wilkerson

Credits:

Producer/Audio engineer - Jeff Geld

Researcher - Roge Karma

Please consider making a contribution to Vox to support this show: bit.ly/givepodcasts Your support will help us keep having ambitious conversations about big ideas.

New to the show? Want to check out Ezra’s favorite episodes? Check out the Ezra Klein Show beginner’s guide (http://bit.ly/EKSbeginhere)

Want to contact the show? Reach out at ezrakleinshow@vox.com

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

The crisis isn’t Trump. It’s the Republican Party. Nov 12, 2020

Show notes

If the past week — and past four years — have proven anything, it’s that we are not as different as we believed. No longer is the question, "Can it happen here?" It’s happening already. As this podcast goes to air, the current president of the United States is attempting what — if it occurred in any other country — we would call an anti-democratic coup.

This coup attempt will probably not work. But the fact that it is being carried out farcically, erratically, ineffectively does not mean it is not happening, or that it will not have consequences.

The most alarming aspect of all this is not Donald Trump’s anti-democratic antics; it’s the speed at which Republican elites have consolidated support around him. Some politicians, like Lindsey Graham, have wholeheartedly endorsed Trump's claims. On Monday, Graham said that Trump should not concede the election and that "Republicans win because of our ideas and we lose elections because [Democrats] cheat." Others — including Mike Pence, Marco Rubio, and Josh Hawley — have signaled solidarity with the president, while not quite endorsing his conspiracies. The message is clear: When faced with the choice of loyalty to Trump and the legitimacy of the democratic process, Republicans are more than willing to throw democracy under the bus.

Anne Applebaum is a staff writer for the Atlantic, a senior fellow of international affairs at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies, and most recently the author of Twilight of Democracy: The Seductive Lure of Authoritarianism. In it, Applebaum, once comfortable in center-right elite circles, grapples with why so many of her contemporaries across the globe — including right here in America — have abandoned liberal democracy in favor of strongman cults and autocratic regimes. We discuss:

How the media would be covering Trump’s actions — and the GOP’s enabling of him — if this were taking place in a foreign country
How the last four years have shattered the belief in the idea that America is uniquely resistant to the lure of authoritarianism
Why most politicians under increasingly autocratic regimes choose to collaborate with the regime, and why a select few choose to dissent
The “apocalyptic pessimism” and “cultural despair” that undergirds the worldview of Trump’s most enthusiastic supporters
How Lindsey Graham went from outspoken Trump critic to one of Trump’s most vocal supporters in the US Senate
Why the Republican Party ultimately took the path of Sarah Palin and Donald Trump, not John McCain and Mitt Romney
Why what ultimately separates Never Trumpers from Trump enablers is a steadfast commitment to American democracy
What we can expect to happen if and when a much more competent, capable demagogue emerges in Trump’s place
Whether the Biden administration can lower the temperature of American politics from its fever pitch
The one thing that gives me a glimmer of hope about the Biden presidency

References:

"Trump is attempting a coup in plain sight" by Ezra Klein, Vox

"History Will Judge the Complicit" by Anne Applebaum, The Atlantic

“Laura Ingraham’s Descent Into Despair” by Anne Applebaum, The Atlantic

My EK Show conversation with Marilynne Robinson

Book recommendations:

Absalom, Absalom! by William Faulkner

All the King’s Men by Robert Penn Warren

Gilead by Marilynne Robinson

Credits:

Producer/Audio engineer - Jeff Geld

Researcher - Roge Karma

Please consider making a contribution to Vox to support this show: bit.ly/givepodcasts Your support will help us keep having ambitious conversations about big ideas.

New to the show? Want to check out Ezra’s favorite episodes? Check out the Ezra Klein Show beginner’s guide (http://bit.ly/EKSbeginhere)

Want to contact the show? Reach out at ezrakleinshow@vox.com

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

The Joe Biden experience Nov 07, 2020

Show notes

Joe Biden will be the 46th president of the United States. And — counting the votes of people, not just land — it won’t be close. If current trends hold, Biden will see a larger popular vote margin than Hillary Clinton in 2016, Barack Obama in 2012, or George W. Bush in 2004.

Commentary over the past few days has focused on the man he beat, and the incompetent coup being attempted in plain sight. But I want to focus on Biden, who is one of the more misunderstood figures in American politics — including, at times, by me.

Biden has been in national politics for almost five decades. And so, people tend to understand the era of Joe Biden they encountered first — the centrist Senate dealmaker, or the overconfident foreign policy hand, or the meme-able vice president, or the grieving, grave father. But Biden, more so than most politicians, changes. And it’s how he changes, and why, that’s key to understanding his campaign, and his likely presidency.

Evan Osnos is a staff writer at the New Yorker and the author of Joe Biden: The Life, the Run, and What Matters Now, a sharp biography of the next president. Osnos and I discuss:

The mystery of Joe Biden’s first political campaign
Why the Joe Biden who entered the Senate in 1980 is such a radically different person than the Joe Biden who ran for president in 2020
What the Senate taught Biden
Biden’s ideological flexibility, and the theory of politics that drives it
The differences between Biden’s three presidential campaigns -- and what they reveal about how he’s grown
The way Biden views disagreement, and why that’s so central to his understanding of politics
How Biden’s relationship with Barack Obama changed his approach to governance
The similarities — and differences — between how Obama and Biden think about politics
Why Biden is “the perfect weathervane for where the center of the Democratic party is.”
Biden’s relationship with Mitch McConnell
How Biden thinks about foreign policy
Why Biden has become more skeptical about the use of American military might in the last decade

And much more.

Book recommendations:

Amusing Ourselves to Death by Neil Postman

The Field of Blood by Joanne B. Freeman

The Ideas That Made America by Jennifer Ratner-Rosenhagen

Credits:

Producer/Audio engineer - Jeff Geld

Researcher - Roge Karma

Please consider making a contribution to Vox to support this show: bit.ly/givepodcasts Your support will help us keep having ambitious conversations about big ideas.

New to the show? Want to check out Ezra’s favorite episodes? Check out the Ezra Klein Show beginner’s guide (http://bit.ly/EKSbeginhere)

Want to contact the show? Reach out at ezrakleinshow@vox.com

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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