Does Trump know ball? Is he afraid of Bad Bunny—or did MAGA just fumble the halftime show? This Super Bowl Sunday, Tommy sits down with journalist and sportswriter Pablo Torre to unpack how America’s once-sacred sports institutions have been overtaken by politics. The two dig into Trump’s long and messy relationship with the NFL, MAGA’s Bad Bunny boycott, and the rise of online sports gambling and prediction markets.
For a closed-captioned version of this episode, click here. For a transcript of this episode, please email transcripts@crooked.com and include the name of the podcast.
Chelsea striker Liam Delap has recently stunned fans on Instagram by apparently doing incredibly complicated calculations in his head, finding what’s known as the cube root of some very large numbers.
But is he really a human calculator? Or is there something else going on? Tim Harford speaks to Rob Eastaway, mathematician and author of ‘Maths on the Back of an Envelope’ to learn about the trick you can use to pull this off - and while he’s here we also ask him about the trend of more goals being scored in the Premier League.
Presenter: Tim Harford
Producers: Nathan Gower
Series Producer: Tom Colls
Editor: Richard Vadon
Programme Coordinator: Brenda Brown
Sound Engineer: James Beard
Credit: Video of Liam Delap from Chelsea’s Instagram account, chelseafc
Modern political economy is based upon a Machiavellian belief in might makes right. Yet, political power cannot accomplish what free markets and private property rights have done in lifting billions of people out of poverty.
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Music
Unseen Forces by Justin Walter
Peperomia Seedling by Green-House
Ebb Tide by Houston & Dorsey
Little Miss Echo by Raymond Scott
Stellify by Francesco Albanese
Chain Home by Rogerson and Eno
Luna by Digitonal
Caroline Shaw plays The Orangery from Plan & Elevation
Notes
The place to start with all of this is here. It'll lead you out to the Bishop Museum's work, the lovely documentary produced by Hawai'ian Public Television, everywhere where you'd want to go.
Recent reports on the advances of AI in computer coding could spell a major shift in the software sector and cause substantial shifts in society. Is the AI singularity upon us, and how do we handle this emerging future? Plus John and Eliana recommend the Mel Brooks documentary The 99 Year Old Man!
Ragebait, sponcon, A.I. slop — the internet of 2026 makes a lot of us nostalgic for the internet of 10 or 15 years ago.
What exactly went wrong here? How did the early promise of the internet get so twisted? And what exactly is wrong here? What kinds of policies could actually make our digital lives meaningfully better?
Cory Doctorow and Tim Wu have two different theories of the case, which I thought would be interesting to put in conversation together. Doctorow is a science fiction writer, an activist with the Electronic Frontier Foundation and the author of “Enshittification: Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It.” Wu is a law professor who worked on technology policy in the Biden White House; his latest book is “The Age of Extraction: How Tech Platforms Conquered the Economy and Threaten Our Future Prosperity.”
In this conversation, we discuss their different frameworks, and how they connect to all kinds of issues that plague the modern internet: the feeling that we’re being manipulated; the deranging of our politics; the squeezing of small businesses and creators; the deluge of spam and fraud; the constant surveillance and privacy risks; the quiet rise of algorithmic pricing; and the dehumanization of work. And they lay out the policies that they think would go furthest in making all these different aspects of our digital lives better.
This episode of “The Ezra Klein Show” was produced by Annie Galvin. Fact-checking by Will Peischel. Our senior engineer is Jeff Geld, with additional mixing by Isaac Jones and Aman Sahota. Our executive producer is Claire Gordon. The show’s production team also includes Marie Cascione, Rollin Hu, Kristin Lin, Emma Kehlbeck, Jack McCordick, Michelle Harris, Marina King and Jan Kobal. Original music by Pat McCusker. Audience strategy by Kristina Samulewski and Shannon Busta. The director of New York Times Opinion Audio is Annie-Rose Strasser. And special thanks to Natasha Scott.
From time to time, the American people need to be reminded who is the boss. The boss is the US government. The citizenry are the serfs, the servants, the subordinates.
