There’s a lot to process as 2024 draws to a close. In our end-of-year Ask Me Anything, the supervising editor of “The Ezra Klein Show,” Claire Gordon, joins Ezra in the studio to ask your questions – on politics, and lots of not-politics too. Ezra talks about the ways this year has affected him personally: how his views on government have changed; his efforts to stave off burnout; and his off-again, on-again relationship with social media. They also discuss the making of the show: the accusation that certain episodes have “normalized” Donald Trump; how we’re going to approach covering the next administration; the story behind our new theme music; and what’s going on with that arm tattoo.Thank you to the listeners who sent in questions, and to everyone who’s tuned in this year. Without you, this year would have been a lot lonelier. (We also wouldn’t have jobs.) We’ll be re-airing one of our favorite episodes this Friday (on the art of rest). And then we’ll be back here with new episodes in 2025. Wishing you a great end to 2024. Happy new year!This episode contains strong language.Mentioned:“Magical Tree Creatures” by Pat McCuskerThoughts? Guest suggestions? Email us at [email protected] can find transcripts (posted midday) and more episodes of “The Ezra Klein Show” at nytimes.com/ezra-klein-podcast. 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 fact-checked by Michelle Harris. Mixing by Isaac Jones, with Efim Shapiro and Aman Sahota. Our supervising editor is Claire Gordon. The show’s production team also includes Rollin Hu, Elias Isquith, Kristin Lin and Jack McCordick. Original music by Pat McCusker. Audience strategy by Kristina Samulewski and Shannon Busta. The executive producer of New York Times Opinion Audio is Annie-Rose Strasser. Unlock full access to New York Times podcasts and explore everything from politics to pop culture. Subscribe today at nytimes.com/podcasts or on Apple Podcasts and Spotify.
Chapter 1: What are Ezra's reflections on 2024?
From New York Times Opinion, this is The Ezra Klein Show. So happy holidays. Welcome to the near end of a year that has felt like many, many, many years. And we thought before it all ends, we would answer a couple more questions, hopefully slightly more fun ones than there are more election focused. Ask me anything.
And then we're going to be back with new episodes in the new year and have some stuff that I'm pretty excited about in the pipeline. But thank you to everybody who's been listening this year. It has been a ride. Thank you to Claire Gordon, who's here with me and has been an amazing partner in building the show this year and editing it and getting things out at the last minute.
To her and to the team, they've all been incredible. And getting the show out the door with as fast as news was moving was no small thing and took no small number of long nights. So thank you to you.
Oh, thank you, Ezra. It has been a year. I am not yet quite ready to process it all. And these aren't all fun questions. People are here for your political analysis.
I thought you told me this one was going to be lighter. Yeah.
Well, there will be some fun at the end when I'm going to continue the tradition from last year of a rapid-fire round.
Okay.
But to start with, short, simple, sweet, from Juna Elena Amia, why are you a liberal and not a democratic socialist?
Are all of my AMAs going to start with very complicated definitional questions?
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Chapter 2: Why does Ezra identify as a liberal instead of a democratic socialist?
Good Lord. Okay. I think it really depends what you mean by liberal and democratic socialist because those things mean different things in Europe where there are deeper traditions of both. And I think here the liberal, democratic socialist, and left dimensions overlap but are different and are referred to as different by different people. Let me try to do this in stages.
I'm a liberal because I believe life is fundamentally unfair. I believe both life is fundamentally unfair, and I believe we deserve partial credit at best for how we do in it, right? Not our fault that we were born to poorer parents, not our fault we were born with dyslexia or without the iron will somebody else might have had.
And also, on the other side of that, often not our fault that we were such hard workers and that our particular mix of intelligence and capacity was the right fit for the society we were in at the right time, and we had the resources or good luck to take advantage of it.
I am very well suited to a society that highly values abstract communication and not that well suited to a society that requires you to know where you're going or work a lot with your hands.
I'm just curious because I've heard you say that before. Is there like a particular moment or something you read or a life experience where you felt this like click for you as a sort of a philosophical worldview?
I did really badly in school. And then I did really well as an adult. And I don't think I was more or less responsible for either one. The things that have made me successful in some ways were the same things that made me unsuccessful before. My monomania around things I'm interested in and difficulty with things I'm uninterested in.
My desire to be in a quiet room reading and writing by myself all the time. I don't think when I was 14 and couldn't get it together, that was a moral failing. Some part of my mental software was different. So my own life, I just, I did not, in some level, deserve how badly I did when I was younger, and I don't deserve how well I've done as I've been older.
I mean, I do my best with what I have, but the what I have... And frankly, even the doing my best doesn't even feel like something I chose. It feels compulsive. There are many times when I'd frankly like to do a worse job and it's not in me. It's more anxiety producing in me not to work than to work. It won't have come out yet, but I'm about to tape with Oliver Berkman, the self-help author.
And in his book, he's quoting somebody saying, that most successful people are an anxiety disorder harnessed for productivity. I don't think that's entirely wrong. So that's a lot of why I'm a liberal. And then you get into this question of democratic socialists or liberal.
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Chapter 3: How does Ezra's personal experience shape his political views?
Can you abolish the private health insurance people currently have and like? Will people trust the American government enough to do that? Can you raise taxes to the extent you would need to fund that set of programs? Is that what people want? Is that possible? And I probably am just simply more... open to the idea that corporations do bad things, but also do great things.
I was hearing an interview Bernie gave on The Daily, and he talked about how nothing Elon Musk has done at Tesla did anything for working class people.
And I thought that was such a weird comment, because if you believe, as Bernie Sanders does and as I do, in the importance of the electric vehicle transition and how good cleaning up that air pollution and reducing those emissions would be for working communities, then Elon Musk has done a tremendous amount for those people, whatever else you think about his politics or his tendencies.
harnessing the genus of the private sector is probably more important to me. And I value it more highly than a lot of people who call themselves democratic socialists. So there's probably an affective dimension to that around capitalism. Affective, and it sounds like maybe more into capitalism. I'm probably more into capitalism, but I think a lot of them are too.
I think if you look at how a lot of my friends who are more on the outside live, the purchasing patterns don't look that different and what technology they're using doesn't look that different. So there's a bit of what you're willing to credit. the market with doing and being able to do.
And let's take nothing away from Bernie Sanders or, frankly, from democratic socialists, just why I feel like I tend to end up on this side of the debates. I think probably one place I'm different from a lot of liberals and democratic socialists is I would like to put invention and innovation and technology much more at the center of any kind of social justice agenda.
It is now seems like a million years ago in American politics and we are elevating or Trump is elevating to the various health agencies, people who opposed a lot of this. But I think Operation Warp Speed is one of the greatest public health achievements ever. And the work behind it, it's really amazing.
And it allowed something that no other policy could have done if we had not invented the mRNA technologies that could have gotten us to those vaccines so quickly. We couldn't have just kept lockdowns going. And I think a lot of things are like that. We're not going to be able to hit our decarbonization goals without clean cement, without clean jet fuel.
We just don't have that yet, at least not in anything that we can afford at scale. And so... There are all kinds of problems we just cannot solve effectively or affordably with the technology we have today. But we could with technology we see right over the horizon. And I would put that much more at the center. So I am maybe not just a liberal, but I am an abundance liberal.
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Chapter 4: What are Ezra's thoughts on social media's impact on mental health?
Blue Sky, I think, has a possible problem of... It has a selection problem. It's pulling liberals who are upset about the state of Twitter into one place. And so I'm a little more worried about it being a generator of groupthink and in-group policing and dynamics that I think make it harder to think independently. I'm not sure I should be on any of them. I'm not sure it's good for the way I think.
I'm not sure it's good for the books I want to read. I'm not sure it doesn't have a tendency to pull me... into stupid controversies, not even my own, just whatever is obsessing the platforms at the moment. And on the other hand, it feels like a moment of factional conversation among people on the left, which has been interesting to me
I'm certainly trying to make some arguments around abundance and where the Democratic Party should go and what has gone wrong in blue state governance that do not all feel like podcasts and columns. So some of it is coming out in those places. But I try to make sure I am using these things and not being used by them. And pretty quickly, I tend to feel I'm being used by them.
right, as they colonize my mind more and more. And so if that happens in the next few weeks, you probably won't see me there anymore. And that I'm making no claims about personal virtue. I don't like clink my glass when I leave and make an announcement. You know, I'm there when it feels like it's a useful thing for what I'm trying to do.
And I try to leave when it feels like it harms what I'm trying to do. And I'm right now in the bubble between those conditions. And I'm not 100% sure which side I'm going to fall on.
Is there a sign that any of us outside who care about your mental well-being should know to stage an intervention?
If you see me getting on fights, in like real fights on X or Blue Sky, you should pull me out. Or being in a bad mood because something happened. Yeah, that kind of thing. Yeah, that's when I tend to leave, right? If one of these platforms is harming your day-to-day quality of life... So you can micropost at other digital avatars. I mean, then you're making a mistake.
I have made that mistake many times. I did an interview for the Wall Street Journal piece with some podcasters after the election. And I said a line there that I think I might have said here in the past, but that the thing that I always notice is that Twitter makes me dislike people I like and podcasts make me like people I dislike. And it's still kind of true.
But I'm not sure I want to be in a place where I feel like it makes my view of other people less sympathetic. and makes them more simplistic to me because the constraints of the place make everybody, including me, more simplified.
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Chapter 5: How does Ezra approach the normalization of political figures like Trump?
And there are going to be other things, you know, maybe the Department of Governmental Efficiency or things that happened to Marco Rubio, Secretary of State Tenure or tariffs that are not like that and that need to be simply reported on as normal politics. And so this is another dimension that I think the effort to make normal a binary, things are or are not normal, makes hard.
It's an administration. It's going to govern the country for the next four years. And parts of it are just going to be politics and policy. And parts of it might be something else entirely, an effort to change or corrupt the system itself. And, you know, I intend to try to take everything at its level.
And the fact that one thing is happening doesn't mean you have to cover the other thing in either direction. I think this is going to be really hard to balance. I did less of this in the first Trump administration, to be honest. And I think liberals in general treated more of the first Trump administration as illegitimate. He didn't win the popular vote. There was this whole Russia investigation.
It was all crazy. His administration was full of normal Republicans leaking about what a maniac he was. It was much easier even for the people reporting on it to sort of treat him as aberrant because in some ways his own administration treated him as aberrant. And it seemed possible this was just a one-time fluke in American politics. You know, the butterfly flapped its wings and we got this.
And that's not what it is anymore. It wasn't in a way what it was then. And, you know, my first job on this show is to be a good reporter. I understand the show is an act of continuous reporting. And I'm not being a good reporter and not doing a good job if I'm not actively reporting on this administration. So we'll see what shape that takes. Many of them don't want to talk to me.
But it is not going to be a closed-door policy because Trump goes over some line in one area and then, you know, there's no more talking about the tariffs or something. It's not the way I'm going to do my job.
Last question on politics from Matthew Davidoff. I've heard you argue very convincingly against the filibuster. Now we're set to have a Trump-controlled or Trump-friendly majority in all three branches. Has your opinion changed at all?
It hasn't changed. Obviously, my ideal world is not that the filibuster goes away at the exact moment that people who I think have the worst views on society are in power. I wish Democrats had gotten rid of the filibuster.
And maybe if they had, they, I mean, they had such a thin majority, they probably couldn't have done much with it because Joe Manchin would have stopped what they were going to do anyway. But there have been different moments over the past decade when I think Democrats could have delivered a lot better. if they didn't have the filibuster to worry about.
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Chapter 6: What parenting insights does Ezra share?
isn't, like, an interesting fact about the world. It is infuriating to me.
I mean, does any part of you... or hopeful that there could be a bulldozing of regulations in a Trump second term that could have positive effects?
I'm not, because what I'm interested in is outcomes. And I don't want to bulldoze regulations in order to make it possible to pump much more oil and pollute streams. Right. That's not my end goal. Regulations are a tool. Trump loves clean air. He does love clean air. The end goal, the end points matter.
In some ways, I do think that Republicans and Democrats have very similar pathologies on this, which is both become process obsessed and not outcome oriented. Right. I think the biggest problem around liberal governance is that it is obsessed by process and it mistakes process for outcomes.
It is not connected enough to what is actually happening once the money gets spent or the grant goes out or the contract is awarded. And among Republicans, too often, they treat government as an abstraction. And they are also not trying to achieve anything except the removal of regulations, except the shrinking of government, except the hampering of government agencies.
So liberals often hobble government. Conservatives try to weaken and starve it. Neither is connected to an outcome I want. The process I am interested in is one that says, how do we make it easy and fast to to site and build clean energy. How in places where we have a housing crunch do we make it easy to build housing? Work backwards from the goal you want to achieve to the rules you need.
You can't have a regulations good or regulations bad view. You have to ask, are you getting the outcomes you want and then work backwards.
I think that's a good place to end because that I think really captures where your mind has been most of the year. Rapid-fire round. Should we say 30 seconds? From Clark Hill, who are your top three favorite X-Men? Ooh, I don't know.
When I was a kid, I loved Gambit. I don't think that would be my answer now, but I think I have to say it given how much I loved Gambit. What a hard question to give me in a 30-second round. Yeah, Dark Phoenix era Jean Grey and Krakoa era White Queen.
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Chapter 7: What significant beliefs has Ezra changed in the past year?
Maybe I actually have 20 minutes. I should take a walk. I don't take enough vacations for rest to be just a thing that happens on vacation. It has to happen more times a day. And there's like bluntly, like I don't want to keep feeling the way I felt at the end of this year. So I am trying to change the way I look at the day to day.
I remember you saying a very similar thing to me around the end of last year.
Yeah, it's a consistent problem. I do have a tendency to burn myself out by the end of the year. Yeah. I would say that since October 7th a year ago, the show has been a lot harder. I'm sorry. We are not the ones suffering the most from that. I don't mean to, there's no stolen valor. It has just been a, you know, it has been a very intense period of news.
Do I?
You just staged a play.
Well, I wrote a play that my husband staged without telling me.
Yeah, you're like an interesting person with a well-rounded set of views. You belong to clubs. Everybody knows you have a fun and interesting life.
I'm glad I'm giving off that impression. That's important for my self-esteem. Last question of the year from Elizabeth Taylor.
The... The Elizabeth Taylor. I mean, I guess we don't know she's not.
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