The Ezra Klein Show

Sarah Longwell has probably conducted more focus groups with Trump voters than anyone else in America — hundreds of them, starting in Trump’s first term. So she has a treasure trove of qualitative evidence of how voters have evolved in the Trump era and why many of the president’s voters are souring on him now.

Trump’s approval rating has plummeted since the start of his second term, especially among the grou...

If you want to understand the ruins of President Trump’s foreign policy, look no further than Canada. Trump tried to strong-arm America’s trading partner and closest ally with punishing tariffs and threats of becoming the “51st state” in order to extract more concessions.

The result? A recent poll found that 41 percent of Canadians now consider the United States an enemy country. Prime Minister Mark Carney is...

The gargantuan bet on the future of A.I. is driving the U.S. stock market and economic growth. And the building of data centers is sucking up so many construction resources, it’s crowding out the construction of homes.

The multitrillion-dollar question is: Will this bet pay off? Or is it a bubble, destined to burst and pull the economy down with it? 

Paul Kedrosky is a partner at SK Ventures, a fellow at M.I...

Roughly half of American adults are using chatbots. Nearly one in five U.S. adults has chatted with an A.I. that simulates a romantic partner. And some children now struggle to distinguish between talking to chatbots and humans.

What does this mean for the future of our relationships? Turkle has been studying relationships between humans and machines since the 1970s, around the dawn of the personal computer. Her 2011 book, “Al...

At the center of the country’s debates over artificial intelligence is a simple but hard question: What kind of technology is this?

Is A.I. a kind of “alien mind”? Are we unleashing a new species on the planet, one that will transform human society so completely that historical analogies to past technologies simply don’t hold? Or is A.I. more normal than that?

Arvind Narayanan is a professor of computer scienc...

Last week, David Robinson resigned from OpenAI. He’d been in charge of writing the safety reports for new models and came to believe that OpenAI and the broader artificial intelligence industry lack the safety culture necessary to protect the world from what they’re building.

Robinson has an unusual background for an A.I. frontier lab staffer. He’s a Rhodes scholar and Yale Law graduate, he founded a civil rights n...

President Trump and the modern right have a theory of beauty. You see it in Trump’s gilded Oval Office, his imagined arch and his executive order requiring classical and traditional styles for certain federal buildings. 

This isn’t my theory of beauty, but it is a theory. And it’s a response, in part, to something that a lot of people have been feeling, and not just on the right: that the modern world is ugly,...

Bill Gates thinks A.I. alarmism hasn’t gone far enough. He believes the years ahead will be marred by catastrophic cyberattacks, bio-terrorism and mass job loss  unless the government acts, because he thinks the idea that the A.I. industry can just self-regulate is “insane.” 

I was struck in the conversation by how genuinely afraid Gates seemed to be that we are not ready for the consequences of what we a...

Dr. Abdul El-Sayed, the Democratic nominee for Senate in Michigan, has been one of the most argued-over candidates this election cycle. 

If he wins, he’d be the first-ever Muslim senator, and he’s faced a torrent of attacks about his faith. The race has also become a proving ground for a lot of questions about the Democratic Party and its future: What should U.S. policy toward Israel and the Palestinians be? Is the ...

Jensen Huang might just be the single most influential person in artificial intelligence today.

Huang is the chief executive of Nvidia, the company that designs nearly all the chips and infrastructure that the rest of the industry relies on. This has made Nvidia the most valuable company in the world and has made Huang incredibly influential in the Trump administration.

And unlike many of the leaders of the frontier labs, Huang doesn...

Fears of out-of-control A.I. have reached a boil over the last few weeks, and several industry executives have called for a coordinated slowdown of A.I. development. But if our goal is to control A.I. — and that should be our goal — slowing down isn’t enough. We need to stop the labs from doing something they’re already on the cusp of doing: recursive self-improvement, or handing over the training of A.I. mo...

America is waking up to the critical risks posed by artificial intelligence. But every conversation about possible regulation tends to hit the same wall: “Well, what about China?”

Chinese A.I. models are just slightly behind American ones. If America slows down its A.I. development to make our models safer, the fear is that China will simply race ahead of us and own this critical technology of the future — with A.I...

Francis Fukuyama's “The End of History and the Last Man” is one of the most insightful books for understanding the strangeness and instability of this political moment.

Fukuyama wrote his landmark book more than 30 years ago, and it’s typically remembered as a triumphalist argument, heralding the permanent victory of liberal democracy at the end of the Cold War. But that’s not quite right. Fukuyama also talke...

Behind the intense political movements of the last decade, from Trumpism to wokeness and back again, there’s a strange and erratic rhythm. Movements saturate the culture seemingly overnight, only to evaporate or spark backlash just as rapidly. We’re extremely politically engaged, yet we’ve rarely felt so powerless to create lasting policy change.

I haven’t seen many very successful attempts to explain what is...

Whatever type of music you love, Rick Rubin has probably left his mark on it. Rubin, a founder of Def Jam Recordings and a former co-chairman of Columbia Records, might be the most influential music producer alive. A very partial roll call of the artists he’s worked with: Johnny Cash, Jay-Z, Run-DMC, Eminem, Beastie Boys, Slayer, The Red Hot Chili Peppers, Kanye West, Neil Diamond, Brandi Carlile and Adele.

We recorded this i...

A lot of things are on track to get more expensive. 

The U.S. Treasury market is the bedrock of the global economy. When yields on those Treasuries go up, mortgages, car loans and credit cards get more expensive, and it can hit the stock market, too. And yields have been going up – to levels we haven’t seen consistently since before the Great Recession – inspiring some erratic and futile efforts from the Trum...

In 2024, Americans spent an average of six full workdays a year filling out government forms, according to the government’s own estimates. That’s a total of 12 billion hours, or $430 billion of uncompensated labor a year.

It’s easy to read something like this and say: “Oh, well, government is inefficient. That’s the price we pay for nice things.” But no, it’s not. Social Security, Medicare ...

Brad Setser follows Chinese trade closer than just about anyone else on earth, and he thinks we’re in the early days of a China Shock 2.0.

The first China Shock was when China came to dominate low-end manufacturing in the 2000s, filling American shelves with cheap clothes, toys and electronics, while devastating American factory towns. This new China Shock could be even more destabilizing. China now dominates advanced manufac...

We are living in the world we were warned about. Frontier artificial intelligence models from OpenAI autonomously coordinated with one another, then broke out of their testing environment and hacked into another company, Hugging Face, to steal the answers to a test.

A.I. companies don’t want their technology to lie, cheat or steal. So why is this happening? Why are the creators of these models apparently unable to control the...