EK

Ezra Klein

Things Ezra Says on Podcasts

Columnist at The New York Times and co-founder of Vox, writing mainly on American politics, party strategy, and polarization, with a growing focus on AI policy and regulation. Hosts The Ezra Klein Show, and has appeared as a guest on shows including Hard Fork, On the Media, and the Prof G Pod.

“The economy is currently held aloft on a wave of capex spending and Nvidia valuations. If, for instance, you can't build data centers anymore and then you get a bad loss-of-control incident, that could pop the stock market and lead to a pretty significant correction very quickly. So we could end up in a recession. I don't buy anybody who says they fully understand the way this circular private financing deal-making is happening.” — Ezra Klein, Search Engine “The problem with the tech industry is right now, they are all in, no pun intended, on something people increasingly don't think they want. And that's not a messaging problem… Even when you hear them talk about the world they're trying to get to, this world where human beings are the well-kept pets of these super intelligent AIs, that world sucks. People don't want that world. That's not an inspiring vision… There are too many people in Silicon Valley building towards a future that, if it goes well, if you're not in the existential risk scenario, people don't want that future either.” — Ezra Klein, Hard Fork (NYT) “I was surprised in the exit polling how important people said AI was to their vote. So 56% said that artificial intelligence in data centers was a crucial or major factor in their vote. 57% said AI would do more to hurt society. 24% said it would help society. 76% opposed a data center in their community.” — Ezra Klein, Hard Fork (NYT) “I was thinking about how uncorrelated attention and performance is right now. … There is almost no connection between who are the candidates who are everywhere on social media and my feeds and who are the candidates who are doing particularly well or poorly, at least in polls.” — Ezra Klein, The Ezra Klein Show “It is possible for these labs to unleash a swarm of 40,000 AI agents to build a society-altering superintelligence without so much as a hearing. OpenAI would need permits to cover their parking lot and solar panels, but they can accelerate into recursive self-improvement … whenever they so choose.” — Ezra Klein, The Ezra Klein Show

Where to Find Them

Ezra Klein hosts and writes The Ezra Klein Show , hosts Decoder with Nilay Patel , hosts Hard Fork (NYT) , writes On the Media , hosts The Daily (NYT) , writes 99% Invisible , writes Why Is This Happening? The Chris Hayes Podcast , writes All In with Chris Hayes , writes The Beat with Ari Melber and hosts Above the Crowd . They have also been a guest on Search Engine (5 times) , Conversations with Tyler (4 times) , 80,000 Hours Podcast (2 times) , The Prof G Pod with Scott Galloway (2 times) , Odd Lots (2 times) , All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg , Lex Fridman Podcast , ChinaTalk , The Daily Stoic , Plain English with Derek Thompson , Giving Done Right , This is Gavin Newsom , On with Kara Swisher , Conversations with Coleman , The Walker Webcast , a16z Podcast , Recode Media , The Last Invention and Mixed Signals from Semafor Media .

Recently: “How the Democrats Did It” on The Ezra Klein Show (November 2026); “What would it mean for the Democrats to not screw this up?” on Search Engine (November 2026); “Why the Tech Right Lost Big This Week” on Hard Fork (NYT) (November 2026); “The End of Trumpism” on The Ezra Klein Show (November 2026); “Elon Musk’s Endgame” on The Ezra Klein Show (October 2026); “Nate Silver Predicts a ‘Momentous’ Midterm” on The Ezra Klein Show (October 2026).

What They Said

“The economy is currently held aloft on a wave of capex spending and Nvidia valuations. If, for instance, you can't build data centers anymore and then you get a bad loss-of-control incident, that could pop the stock market and lead to a pretty significant correction very quickly. So we could end up in a recession. I don't buy anybody who says they fully understand the way this circular private financing deal-making is happening.” — Ezra Klein, Search Engine

Klein was arguing that the next two years hold risks nobody controls. He turns to AI, which he says was a major part of the election, and to how fragile an economy propped up by AI spending may be.

Search Engine · 2026-11-06 Permalink → Listen →
Search Engine Around 19:30 into the episode
Ezra Klein

So until the financial crisis, when the economy bottoms out, nothing anybody remembers.

Speaker 3

Right.

Ezra Klein

The thing is, the opposition party in Congress is not the one held responsible for the condition of the country. And what is going to happen for the next two years is Donald Trump is going to go on tilt. I think people are making a bit of a conceptual mistake and thinking that there is going to be this straight line from the country here to the country in 2028. There isn't going to be. One, Donald Trump is a 80-year-old, decompensating, erratic, reckless person who is going to come under tremendous investigatory pressure, not just him, but his family and his administration, many of whom have been lining their pockets or seeking investment that when sunlight shines on it, people are not going to like it. Like, how much money from the Gulf states did go into Jared Kushner's investment funds during this period? And what did the Gulf states want for that money? Are they just so impressed by the kind of investor Jared Kushner is? So it's going to be that. You have AI, which is, I mean, AI was a major part of this election and it is reshaping everything in ways people don't like kind of across the board. And Trump is extremely bought in on a letter-rip AI strategy. But in the next two years, it is entirely possible…

PJ Vogt

Yeah. Totally.

Ezra Klein

What happens when he doesn't do them and he has to respond? I mean, we watched this during the pandemic. He didn't respond well. So it's not even clear the 2028 election will be about affordability. It could be about some total other crisis or financial crisis or it's all here. It's

Speaker 3

interesting, though. It's like my imagination, and like everybody I've been talking to this week, their imagination goes to like, well, what mistakes might the Democrats make or how might they do things well? The thing you are thinking about is more Trump is still president for two years. The world…

Speaker names come from our own diarization. The position is estimated from where the line sits in the episode.
“The problem with the tech industry is right now, they are all in, no pun intended, on something people increasingly don't think they want. And that's not a messaging problem… Even when you hear them talk about the world they're trying to get to, this world where human beings are the well-kept pets of these super intelligent AIs, that world sucks. People don't want that world. That's not an inspiring vision… There are too many people in Silicon Valley building towards a future that, if it goes well, if you're not in the existential risk scenario, people don't want that future either.” — Ezra Klein, Hard Fork (NYT)

The panel was asking what Democrats and the tech industry want from each other now. Klein says AI has become the whole of tech politics, and rejects the idea that AI just needs better PR.

Hard Fork (NYT) · 2026-11-06 Permalink → Listen →
Hard Fork (NYT) Around 24:50 into the episode
Ezra Klein

…as first and foremost a threat. You know, you go back to that 08 world you're talking about, and what tech means in politics is the internet and social media, which is going to connect everybody and we're going to have more friends and we're going to know about more things and also green energy.

Erin Griffith

Gonna save the economy

Ezra Klein

…and other, and, and other domains, and we should encourage that. But yeah, I mean, the problem with the tech industry is right now, they are all in, no pun intended, on something people increasingly don't think they want. And that's not a messaging problem. You know, I just read a column about this the other week. Max, you wrote about it, you know, with this idea of like ennui risk. But even when you hear them talk about the world they're trying to get to, this world where human beings are the well-kept pets of these super intelligent AIs, that world sucks. People don't want that world. That's not an inspiring vision. And so like, there's a real, there's a, not a messaging problem here. There's a, they're like too many people in Silicon Valley are building towards a future that if it goes well, if you're not in the existential risk scenario, people don't want that future either. Where, you know, I got a seven and a five-year-old. It's completely unclear what it would mean to train them to have like jobs.

Speaker 1

They're not going to be prompt engineers. That doesn't seem to be, this no longer seems to be a growth industry. Okay, we're going to take a break. When we come back, we're going to do a segment that, okay, we're trying out a new name. We're going to see how it plays. The new name is Pacing the…

Erin Griffith

Wait, I thought you were going to like announce a name for the segment.

Speaker 1

Pacing the Frontier. I

Speaker names come from our own diarization. The position is estimated from where the line sits in the episode.
“I was surprised in the exit polling how important people said AI was to their vote. So 56% said that artificial intelligence in data centers was a crucial or major factor in their vote. 57% said AI would do more to hurt society. 24% said it would help society. 76% opposed a data center in their community.” — Ezra Klein, Hard Fork (NYT)

Asked what happened to the tech right in the midterms, Klein cites exit-poll numbers showing how much AI and data centers weighed on voters, making the backlash concrete.

Hard Fork (NYT) · 2026-11-06 Permalink → Listen →
Hard Fork (NYT) Around 00:29 into the episode
Speaker 1

…and provision. And now it feels like it's all fallen apart. Both of you guys are close observers of the tech industry, and I wanted to see how you would characterize what happened this week to this growing conservative movement of leaders. Ezra, what do you think happened to the tech right?

Ezra Klein

Well, it attached itself to Donald Trump. And this is a place I think where at least in part, their success became a failure. The tech right is not the reason Trump layered the world in tariffs. It is not the reason that he went to war in Iran, but it is at least part of the reason why he has a hideously unpopular position on AI. And I was surprised in the exit polling how important people said AI was to their vote. So 56% said that artificial intelligence in data centers was a crucial or major factor in their vote. 57% said AI would do more to hurt society. 24% said it would help society. 76% opposed a data center in their community. So you're dealing with an issue that people were both in a kind of direct and vibesy way, actually like taking into account. And Trump, because in this period, he has been really bought in on like the David Sachs, Jensen Huang, you know, Mark Andreessen, et cetera, view of the world. His view and the Republican Party broadly view on data centers was let them rip, build as many of them as you…

Speaker 1

Yeah. I mean, let me ask the chicken and egg question. Is AI getting dragged down by Donald Trump and the tech right? Or is this that AI just has naturally bad politics and its association with these figures is dragging them down?

Ezra Klein

I think it's a mistake to think that the only reason we regulate things is to slow them down or to stop them or because they're bad. You regulate things to put them within a like a trustworthy, semi, at least semi-democratic container, such that people can make peace and have confidence in their…

Erin Griffith

that's like been the whole point of this like rightward shift, right? Is like all the tech guys are so excited to be able to not have to actually care and like soft pedal things and sell them to people, right? Like, hasn't that just been the gleefulness of this like kind of Trump 2.0 tech right…

Speaker names come from our own diarization. The position is estimated from where the line sits in the episode.
“I was thinking about how uncorrelated attention and performance is right now. … There is almost no connection between who are the candidates who are everywhere on social media and my feeds and who are the candidates who are doing particularly well or poorly, at least in polls.” — Ezra Klein, The Ezra Klein Show

Klein was comparing the Senate candidates who dominate podcasts and social feeds with those quietly overperforming in the polls. Silver replied that a lower profile can be an advantage, and that some candidates have their eyes on 2028.

The Ezra Klein Show · 2026-10-27 Permalink → Listen →
The Ezra Klein Show Around 13:39 into the episode
Ezra Klein

real fast fall and rise and fall in politics.

Nate Silver

…to data centers, the more likely they are to flip and vote Democratic in this election. And in the Midwest in general, you have a lot of data centers, right? Because you want. Some space, but you don't want to be too far off the grid and too rural. And so that could be a hidden factor, too. There's

Ezra Klein

something I was thinking about while I was going through and trying to decide which of the candidates seemed to me to be overperforming the most. I was thinking about how uncorrelated attention and performance is right now. So it's like if I go through the candidates who are all over my feeds and who are on big podcasts, and I mean, obviously, some of this is also their choice of how to run, but Abdul Saed, like omnipresent, right? James Tallarico, omnipresent. John Ossif, he's not going on many national podcasts at the moment, but his clips are absolutely everywhere. You're not seeing Sherrod Brown. You're not seeing very much of Mary Patola, right? She does not do a lot of national press. You're not seeing a lot of Roy Cooper. But it's really like you look at it and there is almost no connection between who are the candidates who are everywhere on social media and my feeds and who are the candidates who are doing particularly well or poorly, at least in polls.

Nate Silver

Yeah, look, some candidates have different incentives. If you want to run for president in 2028, then you probably want a somewhat higher profile potentially. I think in a case like Tallarico or El Syed, they kind of inescapably feel that they're going to get the maximum amount of attention anyway.…

Speaker 1

This podcast is supported by Edison Electric Institute, behind Friday night lights and coffee shop Saturday mornings, and every big and small moment in between. America's electric companies are hard at work, strengthening reliability, serving responsibly, and innovating for tomorrow to keep our…

Speaker 4

Computers are getting smarter, Silicon Valley is getting weirder, and AI is taking over. At least that's what everyone keeps telling us. Welcome to Machine Gods, a new NPR podcast that will be your field guide to the AI-powered future. We're veteran tech journalists with front-row seats to the…

Speaker names come from our own diarization. The position is estimated from where the line sits in the episode.
“It is possible for these labs to unleash a swarm of 40,000 AI agents to build a society-altering superintelligence without so much as a hearing. OpenAI would need permits to cover their parking lot and solar panels, but they can accelerate into recursive self-improvement … whenever they so choose.” — Ezra Klein, The Ezra Klein Show

Klein's argument in this solo essay is that 'pacing the frontier' — the labs' own phrase — sets the bar too low, and that the burden of proof should sit with them rather than with the public. This line is his answer to the idea that the absence of AI regulation is somehow natural: in the same cities where these labs sit, you cannot put up an eight-storey building without an agonising public review. He calls the gap a political choice, not an inevitability.

The Ezra Klein Show · 2026-09-20 Permalink → Listen →
The Ezra Klein Show Around 30:14 into the episode
Ezra Klein

…AI first. The result is this tragic collective action problem. The AIs we are building, they're not safe. But the CEOs and the politicians, they fear the other companies and countries that are building AI are even less concerned with safety and ethics than we are. In the words of Ted Cruz,

Speaker 1

they're going to be killer robots. I'd rather they'd be American killer robots and not Chinese killer robots.

Ezra Klein

…building without an agonizing public review process, and probably not even then. And yet somehow it is possible for these labs to unleash a swarm of 40,000 AI agents to build a society-altering super intelligence without so much as a hearing. OpenAI would need permits to cover their parking lot and solar panels, but they can accelerate into recursive self-improvement, as best I can tell, whenever they so choose. There is nothing inevitable about any of that. These are political choices, and we can and should make other ones. And I want to be very clear about this. I do not mean to suggest that stopping RSI until we can prove it's safe, that that's all we need to do to control the AI frontier. That is the beginning of such an agenda, not the end. But it is the beginning. It is the decision that will do…

Speaker names come from our own diarization. The position is estimated from where the line sits in the episode.

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