Politics after the easy answers run out.
Time To Say Goodbye works through politics and culture as a running argument among people who know the terrain. Its interviews linger on labor, media institutions, foreign policy, radical history, and the uneasy professional class that keeps showing up inside those fights.
PRESS PLAY
Time To Say Goodbye is a politics and culture show built around long exchange rather than polished monologue. It moves like a serious conversation that has been allowed to keep its rough edges. Recent episodes return again and again to the people and institutions caught between status, work, ideology, and power. With Noam Scheiber, the show follows the anger of downwardly mobile college graduates into Apple support work, graduate student unions, UAW representation, and the wider leftward turn after Iraq and the financial crisis. With Sara Yasin, it uses newsroom careers at places such as the LA Times and BuzzFeed News to talk about identity, hiring, editorial lanes, and the strange incentives that shape who gets assigned which stories. It can be blunt. It can also be careful. The show often starts from banter, haircuts, bread, travel, or old workplace memories before narrowing toward a hard political question. Episodes on Iran bring Robert Malley, Stephen Wertheim, and Patrick Halkrin into conversations about Trump, Democratic incoherence, military leadership, enlisted morale, and the shadow of previous Middle East wars. The foreign policy discussions are grave without becoming tidy. The cultural episodes are just as interested in institutions as in personalities. Molly Crabapple's appearance opens onto the Jewish Bund, radical history, organizing, and the threat AI poses to artists and writers. Jonathan Shainin's visit uses Equator as a way to think about global media audiences, modernization, and the limits of American assumptions. The show is strongest when a guest's expertise meets the hosts' appetite for historical context and political pressure-testing. It does not chase a single neat thesis. It circles, revises, jokes, interrupts, and then keeps asking why the structure works the way it does. That looseness is part of the appeal. The result is a dense, often dryly funny political conversation for people who want argument, context, and institutional memory in the same room.
Made for: For listeners who follow left politics, media criticism, labor fights, and foreign policy closely enough to want the longer version. It suits people who prefer argument and context over packaged certainty.
What sets it apart: The show lets interviews sprawl without losing the political thread, moving from anecdote to theory and back again. Its edge comes from combining insider media fluency, labor and class analysis, and a willingness to sit with messy institutional contradictions.
A podcast about politics, culture, fishing, surfing and some other stuff with Jay Caspian Kang and Tyler Austin Harper goodbye.substack.com
Based on 6 episodes we listened to · September 2026
Jay and Tyler make political conviction legible through searching guest conversations about institutions, ideology, labor, media, and war.
Time To Say Goodbye turns political argument into a loose, questioning conversation, with Jay and Tyler moving from opening banter to sustained exchanges with guests.
A professional introduction barely survives before Jay and Tyler start testing every premise in the room.
Press play if you want
Short reviews from the PlayNext desk, based on the episodes we processed.
A grounded conversation on overqualified work, graduate organizing, and the politics of economic frustration.
The episode frames economic frustration first as a workplace story, then as a political one. The hosts speak with Noam Scheiber, a New York Times reporter and author of Mutiny, about college-educated workers whose credentials have not protected them from low pay, overwork, or…
A candid conversation about newsroom work, identity, and the careers old media makes possible.
Old media's habits get a close, personal reading as the host and Sarah Yassin examine how newsroom work can turn identity into an assignment. Yassin's background as a journalist and editor in US and UK newsrooms, including BuzzFeed News and the LA Times, gives the episode a…
A sharp conversation about global media, cultural power, and the assumptions built into modernization.
A conversation about Equator opens into a broader look at who gets to describe the world, and what assumptions come along with American ideas of modernization.
A conversation about the war with Iran presses Democrats on the clarity of their response.
Robert Malley and Stephen Wertheim join Time to Say Goodbye to discuss the war with Iran and the political response. The hosts date the recording at the start, aware that events may move before the episode reaches listeners.
A former Green Beret grounds a discussion of war language, regime change, and enlisted morale.
The episode works best as a close read of mixed signals around the Iran action, where Pete Hegseth and Marco Rubio reject the word war, Trump uses it, and regime change remains a moving question.
A sharp historical conversation on how far-right ideas have circulated around conservative politics.
Time To Say Goodbye follows the flirtation between young GOP staffers and far-right imagery by setting it inside a longer political record. With David, the episode moves from Ron Paul's newsletters in the late 1970s to Pat Buchanan's 1990 claim about Treblinka, then toward…
Nancy Frazier revisits progressive neoliberalism and Democratic candidates' political credibility after Trump's return.
Who gets to claim populism after Trump's return? Nancy Frazier joins the hosts to revisit her 2017 essay on progressive neoliberalism and consider what went wrong in the election.
A near-daily politics rundown from Dana Goldberg and Alison Gill on Trump-era legal fights.
Three Slate journalists debate the week's politics, plus live shows and author interviews.
Mike Pesca opens with a monologue, then digs into Supreme Court ethics and Iran policy.
Nancy Fraser says "progressive neoliberalism" fused feminism, anti-racism, multiculturalism, environmentalism, and LGBTQ rights with Wall Street, Silicon Valley, and Hollywood.
Hosts Jay Caspian Kang and Tyler Austin Harper interview historian David Austin Walsh about his new book on the conservative movement and the far right.
Noam Scheiber, a New York Times reporter, discusses his book Mutiny: the Rise and Revolt of the College-Educated Working Class with the hosts of Time to Say Goodbye on April 14.
Sarah Yasin, former managing editor of the LA Times and current editor of The Key, explains why she left legacy news after layoffs and a “dark” economic outlook in January 2024.
The hosts discuss missing an episode due to vacation in Hawaii and engage in a lighthearted conversation about tanning and racial perceptions.
Molly Crabapple discusses her new book on the Jewish Bund and the impact of AI on art and writing.
The hosts banter about personal updates before discussing Joe Kent's defection and its implications for Trump.
Jay and co-host Tyler interview Jonathan Shainin, a former New Yorker and Guardian editor who has launched Equator, a new global English-language magazine at equator.org.
Jay and Tyler interview Robert Malley (former US special envoy for Iran, 2021-2023) and Stephen Wertheim (Carnegie Endowment historian) about the political history that led to Trump's decision to attack Iran.
Time to Say Goodbye host Jay is joined by returning guest Patrick, a former U.S.
A discussion with Jonathan Berman about the history of anti-vaccine movements and recent CDC changes.
The hosts welcome returning guests Jessica Dai and Ben Recht to discuss Jessica's prescient 2023 article on AI alignment and whether its questions remain unresolved.
Jonathan Mahler discusses his book about New York City in the late 1980s, focusing on inequality, high-profile crimes, and influential figures like Trump and Giuliani.
Leigh Claire LaBerge discusses her new book 'Fake Work' and the recent Zohran primary win in New York City.
Alex Thompson discusses his new book 'Original Sin' about the Biden campaign and why Biden ran again.