Ezra Klein

speaker

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.

Appearances

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Hard Fork · The Ezra Klein Show: How Fast Will A.I. Agents Rip Through the Economy? · 27 Mar 2026 podcast

One of my biggest concerns about where we're going here is that people have a, I think, mistaken theory of the human mind that operates for many of us as if we, I always call it the matrix theory of the human mind. voice-verified

Everybody wants the little port in the back of your head that you just download information into. voice-verified

My experience being a reporter and doing the show for a long time is that human creativity and thinking and ideas is inextricably bound up in the labor of learning, the writing of first drafts. voice-verified

So when I hear, right, I have producers on the show, and I could say to my producers before an interview with Jack Clark or an interview with someone else, go read all the stuff, go read the books, give me a report, then I'll walk into the room having read the report. voice-verified

Right. voice-verified

I don't find that works. voice-verified

I need to do all that reading too, and then we talk about it and we're sort of passing it back and forth. voice-verified

I worry that what we're doing is a quite profound offloading of tasks that are laborious. voice-verified

It makes us feel very productive to be presented with eight research reports after our morning run. voice-verified

But actually, voice-verified

What would be productive is doing the research. voice-verified

There's obviously some balance, right? voice-verified

I do have producers and people in companies do have employees. voice-verified

But how do you know? voice-verified

People are getting more productive versus they've sent computers off on a huge amount of busy work and they are now the bottleneck. voice-verified

And what they're now going to spend all their time doing is absorbing B plus level reports from an AI system as opposed to the kind of shortcuts, the actual thinking and learning process that leads to real creativity. voice-verified

Yeah. voice-verified

All of us, I think, have the experience that our work is full of what you call schlep problems, our life is full of schlep problems. voice-verified

Give me examples of what you now don't do. voice-verified

To the extent you're living in an AI-enabled future that I'm not, what am I wasting time on that you're not? voice-verified

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