The Ezra Klein Show

Ezra Klein might be the best interviewer working in podcasting right now. His show, now housed at the New York Times, publishes twice a week and features long, probing conversations that regularly stretch past the one-hour mark. Klein has this unusual ability to take genuinely complicated subjects -- climate policy, the mechanics of political polarization, theories of consciousness -- and make them feel urgent and accessible without dumbing them down. The guest list reads like a syllabus from the most interesting graduate seminar you never took. One week it is a leading climate scientist, the next it is a philosopher or a novelist or a sitting senator. Klein does his homework. You can tell he has actually read the book, studied the paper, thought through the counterarguments. His questions build on each other in ways that push conversations into territory the guest did not expect to visit. Klein comes from a center-left policy background, having founded Vox before moving to the Times, and his analytical instincts show. He is less interested in who said what outrageous thing today and more interested in the structural forces shaping American politics over decades. That can occasionally make the show feel more like a seminar than a podcast, but for listeners who want to actually understand why things are the way they are, there is nothing else quite like it. A 4.3 rating across nearly 14,000 reviews says plenty about the audience it has built.