Ask Ezra Anything: Degrowth, Third Parties, Reading and More

The Ezra Klein Show

New York Times Opinion

Society & Culture, Government, News

4.6 • 11K Ratings

🗓️ 31 August 2021

⏱️ 71 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

We asked for your questions, and you answered. Hundreds and hundreds of fantastic questions poured in, and our producer Annie Galvin joined me to ask some of the best of them. Does the infrastructure bill mean there’s more hope for bipartisanship than we thought? What’s my view on the degrowth movement? What do I think my book, “Why We’re Polarized,” got right, and what did it get wrong? Will plant- and cell-based meats ever be cheaper than eating animals, given the subsidies the meat industry gets? Why hasn’t any blue state created a single-payer health care system? Can you really build more housing without creating a biodiversity crisis? We also get into reading habits, comic books, meditation, children’s books, why I spend a lot of time thinking about death and much more. So here it is: the “Ask Me Anything” episode. Mentioned: "What Does Degrowth mean? A Few Points of Clarification" by Jason Hickel "The Ugly Secrets Behind the Costco Chicken" by Nicholas Kristof "The Number of Parties" by Maurice Duverger Breaking the Two-Party Doom Loop: The Case for Multiparty Democracy in America by Lee Drutman "Forget Obamacare: Vermont Wants to Bring Single-Payer to America" by Sarah Kliff "What the Rich Don't Want to Admit About the Poor" by Ezra Klein Buddhism Without Beliefs by Stephen Batchelor Seeing That Frees by Rob Burbea The Sandman: Overture by Neil Gaiman Supergods by Grant Morrison Book Recommendations: Here We Are by Oliver Jeffers Cars and Trucks and Things That Go by Richard Scarry Happy Birthday to You! by Dr. Seuss 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. Book recommendations from all our guests are listed at https://www.nytimes.com/article/ezra-klein-show-book-recs.html. Thoughts? Guest suggestions? Email us at [email protected]. “The Ezra Klein Show” is produced by Annie Galvin, Jeff Geld and Rogé Karma; fact-checking by Michelle Harris; original music by Isaac Jones; mixing by Jeff Geld, audience strategy by Shannon Busta. Special thanks to Kristin Lin.

Transcript

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0:00.0	I'm Mr. Clon and this is the Ezra Clancho.
0:20.5	Hello and welcome to the Ask Me Anything episode.
0:23.7	Thank you to all of you who sent in hundreds, thousands of fantastic questions.
0:28.4	I'm going to be joined today by my great colleague, Andy Galvin, who's a producer on the show,
0:32.7	who is going to be here for you, the listener representative, asking your questions,
0:36.7	making sure I don't squirm away from them too much.
0:39.7	Andy, thank you for being here.
0:41.6	Yes, thank you for having me and thank you for answering so many of these great questions that we got.
0:47.3	So we're going to start with some questions about Ezra's opinions on politics and social issues,
0:53.1	and then we're going to get into some personal questions for Ezra.
0:56.4	So definitely stick around till the end.
0:58.8	Or don't, it's fine.
1:00.4	Either way.
1:04.2	All right, so let's start with a question from Matt.
1:07.2	Matt asks a timely question, does the infrastructure deal change your mind about to what extent bipartisanship is possible?
1:16.4	It doesn't really.
1:18.0	So the first thing I'd say on this is that there have been a bunch of bipartisan deals in recent years.
1:24.5	People are treating this like it is the first time anything has passed ascended into bipartisan way, but it isn't.
1:29.7	If you look during Trump's presidency, he didn't try to do that much for legislation,
1:34.1	but he did get the NAFTA deal passed in a bipartisan way, the NAFTA revisions.
1:38.7	If you go back to Obama as polarized as that period was in 2015,
1:43.1	there is this very big overhaul of no child left behind called the Every Student Secze Act.
	...

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