Vox Launches 'The Weeds: The Next Four Years' with Host Matt Yglesias

Today, Vox debuted an eight-part interview podcast series—The Weeds: The Next Four Years—with Matt Yglesias, author of the “Slow Boring” newsletter and host of Vox’s The Weeds podcast. The series explores the challenges and opportunities facing the incoming Biden administration––covering everything from cabinet appointments to relationships with Congress to the points of tension and the limits imposed by political and procedural reality.

In the wake of an election that elevated a new Democratic president, Matt will talk with top experts from different points on the political spectrum to help listeners understand the real stakes for the economy, the pandemic, the environment, national security, and more all with an eye to understanding politics as the art of the possible.

The debut episode features Karl Smith, an economist and adjunct scholar at the right-of-center Tax Foundation, in a discussion about what went right with the Trump economy and where Biden might be able to do the painstaking work of forging compromises with congressional Republicans that boost the labor market and get America back to wage growth. Next week, Emma Ashford of the Atlantic Council and formerly the Cato Institute, will explore Biden’s approach to national security, and future episodes will cover the Covid transition, what’s left of the green agenda under divided government, and how the new administration will handle ongoing antitrust litigation.

ABOUT MATT:

Matthew Yglesias (@mattyglesias) is the author of the “Slow Boring” newsletter and host of Vox’s The Weeds podcast, part of the Vox Media Podcast Network. His latest book, One Billion Americans: The Case for Thinking Bigger argues that to compete in the global marketplace America needs more—more ideas, more ambition, more utilization of resources, more people.

ABOUT VOX:

Vox explains the news. In a world of too much information and too little context, too much noise and too little insight—Vox’s journalists candidly shepherd audiences through politics and policy, business and pop culture, science, and everything else that matters, empowering its audience with the context they need to answer questions they didn’t know they had. Vox is home to influential verticals including Recode, The Goods, and The Highlight; a robust podcast lineup featuring “Today, Explained,” “The Weeds,” “The Ezra Klein Show,” “Switched on Pop,” and more; and award-winning video production with popular series like “Explained” on Netflix, “Missing Chapter” and “Earworm” on YouTube, “Answered” on Quibi, and “Glad You Asked” for YouTube Originals.