The Jon Stewart Podcast

This week we’re talking to Rep. Katie Porter, the Democratic congresswoman from California’s 47th district, who wields her whiteboard like a weapon. She explains (in plain English!) what we’ve got wrong about inflation and why Congress isn’t jumping at the chance to fix it. She updates us on the midterm elections, breaks down the hypocrisy of Republican rhetoric on crime, and blows our minds about why political ads never show members of Congress doing actual work...

The midterms are two weeks out and chaos just keeps building. The UK is cycling through prime ministers faster than James Bonds as their economic crisis continues. Meanwhile, election deniers in the U.S. are whipping themselves into a frenzy. Jon is joined by British journalist Gabriel Gatehouse to break down what’s happening in the UK, plus what his QAnon and election-conspiracy reporting might tell us about our democracy’s post-election fate—if this election ever ends...

Jon is joined by Steve Hanke, a professor of applied economics at Johns Hopkins University, for a chat about why we find ourselves in this current inflation disaster and how we might get out of it. They get into whether the Fed is blowing it, the role of money supply, and whether anyone is looking out for the little guy in all of this monetary maneuvering...

SEC Chair Gary Gensler is back! Jon throws him some of the thousands of audience questions we got, and they dive into the issue of whether the SEC is doing enough to ensure market transparency, why there’s not more accountability for the market’s biggest players, and what the limits on SEC power mean in a practical sense. Plus, we set a record for most acronyms in a single episode–PFOF, DRS, PSA, UBS! You name it, we got it...

Rep. Elissa Slotkin (MI-08) joins Jon to describe the frustrating circumstances that led to her fiery speech on the House floor last week, when several Republicans tried blocking a bill for veterans before ultimately voting for it. Later, they explore why being from a competitive district like hers is different than a safe district—and the governing challenges of working with an opposing party that won’t compromise...

This week we’re talking about the #MahsaAmini protests in Iran with Rana Rahimpour, an Iranian-British journalist with BBC Persian. Jon is also joined by staff writer Alexa Loftus and our Iranian supervising producer Reza Riazi. It’s a fascinating discussion about why this uprising is different from anything that’s come before, what comes next for the people of Iran, and what the U.S. can do to help. (The bad news is it involves Elon Musk...

Jon is joined by Geoffrey Berman, a former US attorney from the Southern District of New York—and author of the new book Holding the Line: Inside the Nation’s Preeminent US Attorney’s Office and Its Battle with the Trump Justice Department. They dig into how Bill Barr tried to have Berman fired, why nailing down powerful guys like Trump is so hard, and whether better guardrails could protect our democracy...

One Jon is nice—but have you ever heard a podcast with three of them? (Plus, a Tommy for good measure.) The Pod Save America guys are here to discuss midterm elections, the problem with polling, and whether we should look to journalism to save us. They also take a stroll down memory lane to the Obama White House, reminiscing about the good old days of government website crashes and that time a gaping hole opened in the bottom of the ocean...

Jon talks to Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Sheri Fink, whose book Five Days at Memorial is the basis for the Apple TV+ series of the same name. They discuss why our healthcare system is always ill-equipped for disasters—and whether there’s something else coming our way that we should panic about...

Jon is joined by staff writers Kasaun Wilson and Rob Christensen to talk about his fight to get the PACT Act—which gives urgently needed healthcare to sick veterans—passed in the Senate. He discusses battling Republican misinformation and the behind-the-scenes work it took to achieve this victory. Plus, Kay and Rob chat about their struggle to behave in the Senate gallery, Jon’s Bernie Sanders impression, and what the Senate has in common with an assisted living facility...