Interesting Times

The Democrats are back in power with a new economic mandate. But is that how they will actually govern?

Our guest host Christine Rosen sits down with Catherine Liu, a left-wing cultural critic and the author of “Traumatized: The New Politics of Public Suffering.” Liu explains why Democratic elites are still invested in culture wars and are focusing on what she calls “trauma politics.”

Pornography gets the blame for a lot of societal problems, including the so-called “sex recession.” Can porn ever really be ethical? Erika Lust thinks so. The adult filmmaker sees porn as an art form. She’s a self-described feminist who centers women’s desires and fantasies in her work. But how different is the product she’s making?

Lust sits down with Julia Yost, senior editor at “First Things,” to make the case for porn. Together, they discuss the adult film industry, stigmas around sex and translating fantasy into reality.

Note: As we work on relaunching “I...

The Trump administration wants to accelerate the use of artificial intelligence for scientific discovery. But can its plan succeed without prioritizing universities?

Guest host Tyler Cowen speaks with Michael Kratsios, President Trump’s top science and technology adviser, about the White House’s new blueprint for American innovation and what it means for the next generation of scientists.

Dwarkesh Patel is one of the most important voices in the artificial intelligence world. Deeply embedded in San Francisco’s tech community, he has interviewed nearly every tech chief executive at length.

This week’s guest host, Tyler Cowen, a professor of economics at George Mason University, sits down with Mr. Patel to discuss why researchers are resigning, whether A.I. could become conscious and if he’ll ever get an A.I. girlfriend.

Note: As we work on relaunching “Interesting Times,” the show will feature a series of guest hosts in the coming months.

Literacy is declining sharply across the West. In the era of vertical video, who has the time or concentration to read a long article — let alone a whole book?

As we lose the ability to read long-form text, we might also be losing the capacity for democratic deliberation and self-governance. That’s the argument this week’s guest, the Times of London columnist James Marriott, makes in his recent book, “The New Dark Ages.” He sits down with guest host Mary Harrington to discuss our return to oral culture, the political consequences and what we can learn from the m...

Nick Bostrom rose to prominence for predicting artificial intelligence doom more than a decade ago — garnering support from figures like Elon Musk, Sam Altman and Bill Gates. But now he’s retreating from those warnings, focusing his attention on a more complex question: What if A.I. succeeds beyond humanity’s wildest imaginations? Will we be bored out of our minds? Are we too infantile to understand what’s coming?

Guest host Spencer Klavan, the associate editor at the Claremont Review of Books, presses Bostrom on the potential uses and abuses of superintelligence, rationalist ethics and what makes us...

Many Americans are losing faith in elections. Proposed solutions from across the political spectrum to restore faith in the process — early voting, mail-in ballot restrictions and voter ID laws — seem to have the opposite effect.

But lack of trust in elections is a symptom of a broader problem: America is living through an era of democratic dissatisfaction. That’s what the New York University law professor Richard Pildes argues on this episode of “Interesting Times.” He and the guest host, Sarah Isgur, the editor of SCOTUSblog, discuss why Americans are so worried about the midterms and how to fix our...

President Trump made more than $2 billion last year — far exceeding his presidential salary of $400,000. His growing fortunes are raising questions about his allegiance to investors, particularly foreign ones, as he makes policy decisions and shapes the direction of the country.

The contributing Opinion writer Christopher Caldwell and the Harvard law professor Jack Goldsmith discuss how the president has amassed this fortune, whether it’s legal and if the United States is becoming a kleptocracy.

Note: As we work on relaunching 'Interesting Times,' the show will feature a series of guest hosts in the coming mont...

“Interesting Times” is on a brief hiatus. Before we return next month, we’re bringing you an interview from “The Ezra Klein Show” with Ross Douthat about his 17 years as a conservative columnist at The New York Times. But Ross and Ezra go back even further, to the nascent days of political blogging. They talk about the seismic changes they’ve witnessed in the media industry over the years and the art of changing minds.

(A full transcript of this episode is available on the Times website here.)

Thoughts? Email us at [email protected]. Please subsc...

For my final episode as host of “Interesting Times,” I wanted a fitting finale — a conversation that encapsulates the ambition of this show: examining how seemingly radical ideas are steadily entering the mainstream of American politics, technology and culture. Few ideas are as radical as the hope of significant life extension and the quest to live forever.

My guest today thinks he can outrun death. After selling his tech company for hundreds of millions of dollars and experiencing a profound religious crisis, Bryan Johnson turned his own body into the ultimate science project, centered on an explicit missio...

What does a liberal solution to the masculinity crisis look like? As men fall behind in the American educational system and the economy, they’re looking for meaning — and often find it in the wrong places.

My guest today is Scott Galloway, a professor at N.Y.U.’s Stern School of Business. Galloway is an unlikely masculinity guru — he’s a liberal academic, a business founder and a married father.

He had a lot to say about the social and economic reasons young men seem to be struggling, but he’s still optimistic about the future.<...

American leaders are staying in office past their prime. Boomers are reluctant to relinquish control — from political offices to corner offices — to the detriment of their juniors. In a society where the elderly hold so much power, should younger generations revolt? 

My guest today is Samuel Moyn, a professor at Yale Law School, and he argues that American democracy is distorted by the power of the old. We discuss how seniors have hoarded wealth and influence and how Americans can renew an intergenerational compact.

Is President Trump’s grand strategy unraveling? The United States is at war with Iran, China is ascendant, Russia and Ukraine are stalemated and American allies are openly questioning our commitment to them.

Elbridge Colby, the under secretary of defense for policy, joins me to discuss the state of America’s foreign policy and he makes the case that Trump’s approach to our allies and adversaries is making us stronger.

Democratic socialists are having a moment. But can they actually remake the Democratic Party — and the American economy — in their image? My guest today, Bhaskar Sunkara, is longtime democratic socialist, and he makes the case that socialism has a universal appeal that transcends our current politics and will ultimately triumph against capitalism.

The work of Rod Dreher has a consistent theme: doom. He believes the collapse of Christianity has ushered civilizational decline in Europe, that we’ve traded our humanity for comfort, and he worries that totalitarianism is around the corner for the United States. “I’m worried about Weimar America,” he tells me. “It may not be Hitler 2.0, it may not be Stalin 2.0. It might be something all American, but it’s not going to be what we’re used to.” It’s best not to dismiss him; he’s been right before. We discuss how we got here and the dangers that sti...

My fellow Americans: On this 250th anniversary of our great republic, I think we’re unlikely to have a unifying address from any politician. So, I thought I’d get a little dressed up and offer one myself. Watch this video on YouTube Channel: Interesting Times with Ross Douthat.

(A full transcript of this episode is available on the Times website.)

Thoughts? Email us at [email protected]

Subscribe today at nytimes.com/podcasts or on Apple Podcasts, Spotify and Amazon Music. You can also subscribe via your favorite podcast app here http...

The growing alienation between men and women is, to my mind, one of the biggest stories of our time.

It’s warping our politics and culture through the rise of misogynistic influencers on the right and a growing sense of feminist despair on the left.

My guest this week believes that our problems today can be traced back to the sexual revolution. She argues that it reset relations between the sexes in a fundamentally negative way and ultimately benefited men. Louise Perry is a columnist for The Wall Street Journal’s Free Expression section and the...

“If you think this is a bad deal, what is your alternative?” Critics of JD Vance think that his key role in the Iran negotiations may end up being an albatross around his neck. (“If it doesn’t work out, I’m blaming JD,” President Trump said in France this week.)

But in our conversation, the vice president seemed buoyant and eager to play the salesman, insisting that the deal is better than the pact President Barack Obama sealed in 2015.

I asked him about his initial opposition to the war, his conflict with the pope and whether...

We can enhance athletic performance, lose weight with a pill and even take psychedelics to alter consciousness. At what point does all this self-optimization become self-obsession? When does it get in the way of our humanity itself? My guest this week is the German biotech entrepreneur Christian Angermayer, who believes scientific breakthroughs to extend our lives — and even put us in touch with the divine — are close at hand.

0:00 - Intro
01:40 - Investing in longevity, A.I. and psychedelics
6:06 - The vision for the Enhanced Games
13:45 - Normalizing enhancements for everyone
20:02 - Ozempic is t...

In an era defined by deep institutional distrust, a new trend within populist conservatism has emerged. It’s a sense that the federal government is keeping secrets and protecting the powerful at our expense. My guest this week is Representative Anna Paulina Luna, a conservative Republican from Florida who has quickly established herself as a political troublemaker. She’s challenging fellow lawmakers — Republicans and Democrats — on issues like sexual harassment and ethics, but she doesn’t see her campaign to clean up Congress as in tension with her allegiance to President Trump. Luna has focused her first years in Congress o...

The future of high-tech warfare has arrived. Just look to the conflicts in Ukraine and Iran to see how much drones and robots have remade the modern battlefield. Is the U.S. positioned to win wars in this new era? What are the ethical constraints of waging autonomous warfare? My guest this week is Christian Brose, the president and chief strategy officer of Anduril, a defense technology company building a slate of autonomous weapons and defense systems for the American military.

What’s really driving the humanities crisis in higher education? As enrollment and reading decline, I asked Jennifer Frey, a professor of philosophy, what it was like to run a liberal arts program that was gutted. I wanted to know whether she thinks the age of A.I. could bring back the kind of education she says is fundamental to human formation.

The United States and China are really the only two countries that matter right now in shaping the A.I. future. As President Trump and President Xi Jinping meet in Beijing, there’s a kind of Cold War atmosphere, with people talking about an A.I. arms race. But who is winning? Are we even in a race at all? Kyle Chan, a foreign policy fellow at the Brookings Institution, says it’s hard to call it a race because the U.S. and China have very different A.I. goals.

A stalemated war. Fractured alliances. A rival waiting in the wings. It feels to me that we’re having an “end of the American empire” moment. My guest this week, Ray Dalio, is an unlikely prophet of doom — the billionaire Bridgewater investor conquered Wall Street by studying history and mastering global trends. He foresaw the 2008 financial crisis,and these days he’s warning that the U.S. is repeating the patterns that ended great empires of the past.

Self-driving cars are here. But what kind of future will they bring: safe roads and extra time or dystopian traffic jams? My guest this week is Andrew Miller, who writes about self-driving cars and transportation policy. I love the open road, so I press him on what’s lost when we give away driving to the robots.

One question has haunted my investment strategy for years: What is cryptocurrency actually for? It feels as though the vibes are constantly shifting — one day it’s the dollar’s successor, and the next it’s little more than a meme. My guest this week is bitcoin evangelist Anthony Pompliano, the chief executive of ProCap Financial. We get into whether crypto is a bet against the American empire and whether its volatility is actually a strength.

President Trump has tested the limits of presidential power since he returned to office — from his assertion of total control over federal agencies to his war in Iran. But so far, many of Trump’s most aggressive moves have been stopped by the Supreme Court. 

My guest this week is Sarah Isgur, a conservative court watcher, who argues that the Supreme Court isn’t just a firewall against Donald Trump, but the real power center in American politics today.

How would you live if you knew when you were going to die? I sat down with the former Republican senator Ben Sasse to hear how he is facing his own mortality after receiving a terminal cancer diagnosis. For Sasse, cancer brings pain, but also clarity, sharpening his focus on the state of our politics, his wife and three children, and the God he expects to shortly meet.

Even if you don’t believe he walked on water, the teachings of Jesus still have a certain power. My guest this week, the New Testament scholar Bart Ehrman, calls himself a “Christian atheist.” I asked Ehrman to come on the show to explore Jesus’ message, discuss how the Bible has shaped the morality of the Western world and explain what even the biggest skeptic can learn from one of mankind’s oldest texts.

Is the U.S. winning the war with Iran? Even though President Trump claims success, it doesn’t quite feel like it — oil and gas prices are high, the Strait of Hormuz is effectively closed, and the Iranian regime is still in place. Mark Dubowitz, the chief executive of the Foundation for Defense of Democracies and a prominent Iran hawk, explains why “total victory” is within reach in spite of the cost. I pressed him on the gap between Trump’s desire for a quick deal and his desire to end the Islamic Republic.

The idea that white people — and white men in particular — face discrimination has become something of an obsession on the American right.

It’s a view that my guest this week shares. Jeremy Carl was nominated to a State Department post by the Trump administration, which sparked a lot of controversy. Carl is the author of “The Unprotected Class,” in which he makes the case that white Americans are in danger of becoming “second-class citizens.” 

I wanted to know what he thinks constitutes anti-white discrimination and whether focusing on it inevitably leads to white nationalism. After we taped...

Can the Democrats finally seize on President Trump’s increasing unpopularity and end their slump? It seems to me as though 2026 is providing them ample opportunity. But I wanted to know what they actually stand for. Have they learned anything about immigration? Are they ready for the new politics of artificial intelligence? To find out, I asked someone I consider a true man of the left, Chris Hayes, the host of “All In With Chris Hayes” on MS NOW.

I don’t think a war with Iran is what Trump — or his voters — had in mind when he campaigned on “America first.” My guest this week is Curt Mills, the executive director of The American Conservative, a magazine that champions foreign policy restraint. Mills thinks the war with Iran is a major betrayal of the voters who put Trump in the White House and has the potential to shatter Trump’s domestic coalition. 

We’re going back to the moon for the first time in more than 50 years. That is, if Artemis II can get off the ground. I sat down with Jared Isaacman, the billionaire leading NASA, to hear his perspective on everything from extraterrestrial life to the timeline for sending humans to Mars. 

This interview was recorded before NASA announced the delay of Artemis II’s launch.

The next global leader is waiting in the wings — and no, I don’t mean China. India is the major power with the fastest-growing economy and the world’s largest population, and on the heels of trade deals with the United States and the European Union, it’s poised to become even more influential. I wanted to speak with Amitav Acharya, a prominent international relations scholar, about whether a new Indian century is about to be born.

A.I. is evolving fast, and humanity is falling behind. Dario Amodei, the chief executive of Anthropic, has warned about the potential benefits — and real dangers — linked to the speed of that progress. As one of the lords of this technology, is he on the side of the human race?

(A full transcript of this episode is available on the Times website.)

Thoughts? Email us a...

Nearly four years after Roe v. Wade was overturned, where is the pro-life movement setting its sights? That’s what I wanted to know from the activist Lila Rose. We spoke last month in front of a live audience at the Catholic University of America. We debated whether her cause was prepared for the fall of Roe and whether abortion still matters at all to the right. 

I want to say something that few conservatives will admit right now: Donald Trump has lost the country. The coalition he assembled to defeat Kamala Harris has evaporated, and his aggressive agenda — never mind his legacy — won’t survive if Republicans can’t win the next election.

Thoughts? Email us at [email protected]. Please subscribe to our YouTube Channel, Interesting Times with Ross Douthat.

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If you want to understand how Robert F. Kennedy Jr. became the face of American public health, you have to go back to the Covid era. Medical authorities spoke with certainty: Trust the science. Don’t listen to skeptics. But a lot of people stopped trusting experts entirely when outsiders got some things right and the establishment got some things wrong. Now those outsiders are in charge, like my guest this week. Dr. Jay Bhattacharya is the director of the National Institutes of Health. I wanted to know: Can an outsider restore trust in public health institutions without undermining tr...

President Trump’s aggressive return to the White House has been disruptive in ways that will continue to reshape American — and global — governance and politics for decades. At a live event with the Library Foundation of Los Angeles, I joined my colleague Jamelle Bouie and our boss, the Opinion editor, Kathleen Kingsbury, to break down the first year of Trump 2.0. This conversation originally aired as an episode of “The Opinions.”

(A full transcript of this episode is available on the Times website.)

Thoughts? Email us at [email protected]. Please subscribe to our YouTube Channel, Interestin...