Ezra Klein

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767 appearances 2 recordings 1 series first heard Mar 2026 last heard 11 Sep

Ezra Klein’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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recordings per month · last 12 months

Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 2 in all, peaking in Sep 2026 with 1.

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Hard Fork · The Ezra Klein Show: The A.I. Revolt Is Here · 11 Sep 2026 podcast

Yes. voice-verified

So at the most generous, the thing that I've heard repeatedly is sort of what you're describing, which is it would be better if this were going slower. voice-verified

But I can't control that because I whether I'm at, you know. voice-verified

anthropic or open AI or Google or meta, you know, if we slow down, it just is our less ethical competitors over there who speed up. voice-verified

And even if you put down legislation slowing down all of America, then it's China, you know, the CCP, which is going to win the race. voice-verified

I guess one question is, do you buy this central metaphor of a race that has a, like a ticker tape line where at some point somebody passes it and then they have the recursive super intelligence and like the race is over? voice-verified

Or do you see this more as like most technologies, like a kind of like a linear set of gains? voice-verified

I mean, can be fast, can be slow, but that doesn't have that somebody is going to win dynamic. voice-verified

who will build voice-verified

The reason I want to focus in on this race metaphor for a minute is I've come to think it is really one of the central dividing lines in how you think about different kinds of AI policy. voice-verified

Whether you think that we are in a race with China to get to the point where one side or the other is going to pull endlessly and decisively ahead because they hit that recursive, self-improving level. voice-verified

Well, then that means what you do in the next one to three years is incredibly, incredibly definitionally important. voice-verified

But if you don't believe that, if you believe something more like, yes, this is a powerful technology, it's a powerful technology that might have a lot of downsides, might come with a lot of social instability. voice-verified

Its effect on a society may not be good. voice-verified

Then voice-verified

let's run faster to the bad place is not nearly as compelling an argument. voice-verified

And all of a sudden, the idea that we should have policy in place that slows things down for more voice, for more consideration, voice-verified

It's not crazy. voice-verified

And I guess one place this goes is that I have begun to notice like a really interesting convergence between the SF AI safety people in a way and like the AI populace like a Bernie Sanders or in a different way an Abdul El-Sayed. voice-verified

who are getting to not that different places but through very very different mechanisms right they're like the ai safety people who actually believe we are in a race but they believe that winning that race might bring the end of humanity right and so like they don't they don't want to move that fast right if we began to slow down we'd have more credibility for negotiating with china and like trying to come up with like international treaties and all the rest of it voice-verified

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