In episode 75 of Night Owls, John Ellis and Joe Klein pour a late-night double of geopolitics, economics, and technological dread. The conversation opens with President Trump’s latest press conference on Iran, where the rhetoric is hot, the implications hotter, and the margin for miscalculation somewhere between “razor-thin” and “catastrophic.” Ellis and Klein unpack the strange chessboard of Middle Eastern politics, where every move, whether military, rhetorical, or symbolic, reverberates through Israel’s strategic calculus, Iran’s internal factions, and America’s appetite for risk.

Back home, the mood doesn’t exactly lighten. Inflation continues its slow, grinding assault on American consumers, turning everyday purchases into small existential crises. Meanwhile, artificial intelligence looms over the labor market like an unpaid intern who just learned how to do your job better than you can. Ellis and Klein explore what happens when automation stops being theoretical and starts quietly rearranging reality.

Then comes the truly unnerving frontier: deepfakes. In a world where seeing is no longer believing, the hosts examine how synthetic media threatens to collapse the already fragile boundary between truth and fiction, and what that means for democracy, journalism, and basic sanity.

Finally, the episode closes with a reflection on Jesse Jackson’s political legacy and the shifting power dynamics inside a Democratic Party that seems, depending on the day, either on the brink of reinvention or total confusion.

Hosted by John Ellis and Joe Klein

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Produced by Dale Eisinger