The Ezra Klein Show

Democrats are on track to have more power in the next Congress than they’ve had since 2009. How can they navigate the divides in a party that now stretches from Abdul El-Sayed in Michigan to Adam Hamilton in Kansas? How do they prevent all their new voters in this election from flipping back in the next one? Can they turn this victory into a springboard to an even bigger and more durable Democratic majority in 2028 and beyond? We will have two episodes that try to answer these questions from different angles, one from the center of the party and one from the left. First, representing the more center view, we have Adam Jentleson, the founder and president of the Searchlight Institute, a Washington think tank. Jentleson is a veteran of the Senate; he served as deputy chief of staff to the former Senate majority leader Harry Reid and chief of staff to Senator John Fetterman. He’s also the author of two books, “Kill Switch: The Rise of the Modern Senate and the Crippling of American Democracy,” and  “Supermajority: How Democrats Can Build Lasting Power,” which came out in September.

President Trump is primarily responsible for the Republican shellacking on Tuesday. But to get over the finish line in so many places — across the Midwest and deep into the South – Democrats had to run the right candidates, and those candidates ran very different campaigns. So how exactly did those Democrats do it? Michelle Goldberg, my colleague at New York Times Opinion, did amazing work this past year covering the biggest races — traveling to Texas, Michigan, Maine and other states, meeting with the candidates, and getting a sense of their campaigns on the ground. She joins me for a deep dive into the most exciting — and shocking — wins, and what they reveal about the new Democratic Party that will emerge out of this election.

Tuesday night, a blue tsunami crashed across the political map. Democrats won control of the House and the Senate with room to spare, flipping seats in states that once seemed unimaginable: South Carolina, Kansas, Texas. Ezra Klein sits down with his editor Aaron Retica to survey the wreckage of Trump’s 2024 coalition, and what Democrats can learn from their victories.

Ahead of the midterm elections, Elon Musk has become the single largest campaign donor in any election cycle, giving about $450 million to Republicans. It is just a fraction of a percent of his near-trillion-dollar net worth. Musk’s control over SpaceX, Starlink, X, Tesla and Neuralink, on top of his riches, has given him power over wealth, attention and critical infrastructure that few human beings have ever amassed before. What does he want to do with all this power? What is he trying to buy with his campaign spending? What is the world he wants to build? Quinn Slobodian is a professor of international history at Boston University. He’s the author of “Globalists,” “Hayek’s Bastards” and, most recently, “Muskism: A Guide for the Perplexed,” which he co-wrote with Ben Tarnoff.

“If the election goes roughly as the polls say it will go, then in some ways it would mark the end of the Trump era,” Nate Silver told me. The midterms are a week away, and it looks entirely possible that Democrats will win not just the House, but also the Senate. Democrats are polling competitively deep into red territory – Texas, Ohio, Alaska, Iowa, Kansas – states that Trump won in 2024 by double digits. But Democrats have been burned by big polling misses before. So can we really trust what the polls are telling us? And what stories have emerged in the data that we might see play out on election night? Silver is an internationally famous elections nerd, one of the people who made election forecasting a core part of American political discourse. He edits The Silver Bulletin on Substack, co-hosts the podcast “Still Counting” and is the author, most recently, of “On the Edge: The Art of Risking Everything.” Mentioned: “Data centres are turning Trump voters into Democrats” by The Economist “We Gave Four Good Pollsters the Same Raw Data. They Had Four Different Results.” by Nate Cohn “FINAL Silver Bulletin 2024 presidential election forecast” by Nate Silver and Eli McKown-Dawson Book Recommendations: The Rise and Fall of American Growth by Robert J. Gordon You Can Just Do Things by Cate Hall, with Sasha Chapin The Biggest Game in Town by Al Alvarez Thoughts? Guest suggestions? Email us at ezrakleinshow@nytimes.com. You can find transcripts (posted midday) and more episodes of “The Ezra Klein Show” at nytimes.com/ezra-klein-podcast, and you can find Ezra on Twitter @ezraklein. Book recommendations from all our guests are listed at https://www.nytimes.com/article/ezra-klein-show-book-recs. This episode of “The Ezra Klein Show” was produced by Jack McCordick. Fact-checking by Michelle Harris, Kate Sinclair, Julie Beer and Jordyn Flaherty. Our senior engineer is Jeff Geld, with additional mixing by Aman Sahota and Pat McCusker. Our recording engineer is Aman Sahota. Cinematography by Bets Wilkins. Video editing by Arpita Aneja, Mahdokht Mahmoudabadi and Brandon Belk-Yee. Our executive producer is Claire Gordon. The show’s production team also includes Annie Galvin, Marie Cascione, Kristin Lin, Emma Kehlbeck, Rollin Hu, Marina King and Jan Kobal. Original music by Pat McCusker. Audience strategy by Shannon Busta. The director of New York Times Opinion Shows is Annie-Rose Strasser.

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 groups that swung toward him in the last election — young, Black and Hispanic voters. But I wanted to have Longwell on the show to hear what these people are really saying. What exactly has disappointed them about Trump’s second term? And what opportunities could that open for Democrats? Longwell is a founder and the publisher of The Bulwark, the host of “The Focus Group Podcast” and the author of “How to Eat an Elephant: One Voter at a Time.”

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 pursuing closer trade ties with China and Europe in order to diversify away from the U.S. And in August, he walked away from trade talks with the Trump administration, barreling our two countries toward a Jan. 1 deadline when huge new tariffs will go into effect. Trump’s theory of power appears to have failed here because Canada — even though it’s the weaker party — simply refused to capitulate. There’s a broader lesson in that. Chrystia Freeland served in a number of senior roles in the Canadian government, including deputy prime minister, minister of finance, and minister of foreign affairs, where she was a lead negotiator for Canada in trade talks with the first Trump administration. She’s the author of a new book, “Unreliable Boyfriend: An Insider’s View of Dealing With a Chaotic Superpower, Plutocrats, and Other Complicated People.” Mentioned: “US business leaders are waking up to the perils of plutopopulism” by Chrystia Freeland “How Democrats Drove Silicon Valley Into Trump’s Arms" by Interesting Times “Jamie Dimon: A Plan for the Western World’s Revival” by Jamie Dimon Book Recommendations: “The Dispossessed: An Ambiguous Utopia” by Ursula K. Le Guin “The Player of Games” by Iain M. Banks “Book of Lives: A Memoir of Sorts” by Margaret Atwood Thoughts? Guest suggestions? Email us at ezrakleinshow@nytimes.com. You can find transcripts (posted midday) and more episodes of “The Ezra Klein Show” at nytimes.com/ezra-klein-podcast, and you can find Ezra on Twitter @ezraklein. Book recommendations from all our guests are listed at https://www.nytimes.com/article/ezra-klein-show-book-recs. This episode of “The Ezra Klein Show” was produced by Jack McCordick. Fact-checking by Kelsey Lannin and Kate Sinclair. Our senior engineer is Jeff Geld, with additional mixing by Aman Sahota and Isaac Jones. Our recording engineer is Aman Sahota. Cinematography by Bets Wilkins. Video editing by Kristen Williamson, Julian Hackney and Dani Dillon. Our executive producer is Claire Gordon. The show’s production team also includes Marie Cascione, Annie Galvin, Kristin Lin, Emma Kehlbeck, Rollin Hu, Marina King and Jan Kobal. Original music by Pat McCusker. Audience strategy by Shannon Busta. The director of New York Times Opinion Shows is Annie-Rose Strasser.

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.T., and the author of a newsletter about A.I.. He thinks we’re very obviously in a bubble. Azeem Azhar is a technology entrepreneur and the author of the newsletter Exponential View. He has a more optimistic take.

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, “Alone Together,” offered a prescient warning about how social media was atrophying in-person bonds. And in her latest book, “Artificial Intimacy: Who We Become When We Talk to Machines,” Turkle turns the lens on A.I., wrestling with what happens when technology comes after not only our attention but also our capacity for attachment.

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 science at Princeton University and the director of the Center for Information Technology Policy. And he’s an author, alongside his colleague Sayash Kapoor, of the extremely influential essay “A.I. as Normal Technology.” In that essay, and then in a Substack under that name, they lay out their case that A.I. is in fact something we’ve seen before — or at least, it’s close enough to past revolutionary technologies that we have a road map to deal with it. So I wanted to bring Narayanan on the show to hear that perspective.

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 nonprofit and he advised the Biden White House. He did not come up in the hothouse of Silicon Valley. And when he joined OpenAI in 2023, he says, he saw A.I. as a useful tool, not as a technology that could pose catastrophic risks. That’s changed. In Robinson’s first interview since leaving OpenAI, he tells me why. (The New York Times has sued OpenAI and Microsoft claiming copyright infringement. The companies have denied those claims.)

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, or getting uglier.  I’ve seen at least a dozen articles or videos over the last few years asking, “Is the world getting uglier?” They point to the drabness of new apartment blocks, the sameness of new cars and the reign of “greige” in homes and fashion.  So I’ve wanted to do an episode on this for a while. Why does the world seem to be getting uglier, or drabber? And at a moment when the right has a clear answer to this feeling, does the left have any answer at all?  Debbie Millman teaches at the School of Visual Arts in New York City and hosts the long-running podcast “Design Matters,” where she talks to creative people about design. In her long career as a brand designer, she revamped the logos for companies like Burger King, 7 Up and Häagen-Dazs. She’s also written a number of books on design, and recently wrote an article for Time magazine, “Is the World Getting Uglier?”

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 are building, and how emphatic he was that so many of the people in positions of authority are in complete denial about what he thinks is about to happen. Gates is a pioneering technologist, the co-founder of Microsoft and the chair of Gates Foundation, which is set to spend down around $200 billion over the next two decades. He recently announced that trying to make A.I. a force for equality in the world, as opposed to an impetus for inequality, is a new priority of his foundation’s work.

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 future of health care reform Medicare for all? Can a left-wing populist win in a state that twice voted for Donald Trump? There’s been so much more heat than light in this race, so I wanted to invite El-Sayed on the show for a longer conversation. We talked about his upbringing, his views on U.S. foreign policy, his work on health care reform and what he would actually do if elected in November.

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’t think A.I. could wipe out humanity. He thinks that the doomers are just scaring people, and that the industry doesn’t need new regulation at all. I wanted to hear how he saw it, so I flew out to Nvidia’s headquarters in Santa Clara, Calif., to talk to him.

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. models to A.I.

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. models that are less safe than our own.  So how should the United States respond to this prisoner’s dilemma? And is it possible that the two countries leading the A.I. race could actually strike a deal?  Matt Sheehan is a senior fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. He’s been closely following the A.I. debate in China, and how China’s been interpreting the A.I. debate here. And he’s working to try to lay a foundation for future coordination between the two countries. He’s the author of a newsletter under his name and the 2019 book “The Transpacific Experiment: How China and California Collaborate and Compete for Our Future.” This conversation was recorded on Sept. 10.

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 talked about the serious weaknesses he saw in liberal democracy — how it may not fully satisfy the human soul — and his warnings feel very prescient now.  So I wanted to have Fukuyama on the show to talk through the ideas in his book and how he sees them today, at a time when liberal democracy seems increasingly imperiled around the world. Fukuyama is a political scientist at Stanford University and the author of a number of other great books of political theory, as well as a new memoir, “In the Realm of the Last Man.”

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 driving this volatility. But one concept that has taken off recently, and captures what so many of us are feeling, is “hyperpolitics.” The idea comes from Anton Jäger, a historian and contributing writer to New York Times Opinion. In his book “Hyperpolitics: Extreme Politicization Without Political Consequences,” Jäger theorizes what it means to live in a moment marked by hyper-engagement — high voter turnout, mass protests, trends that flare up and fade with extreme rapidity — yet where institutional trust is low, institutional relationships are decayed and people are disconnected from the structures that make political efforts stick. I think Jäger’s theory cuts to the core of this political era. So I invited him on the show to break down what hyperpolitics is, how we got here and what it actually takes to build lasting change today.

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 in 2023, after Rubin released a fascinating, unusual book, “The Creative Act: A Way of Being.” I’d expected stories of late-night sessions with famous musicians, but instead it read like a spiritual tract. Rubin was offering a guide to how to cultivate the mind states that lead to real creativity. And that’s what this conversation was about, too: how to open yourself up more to the world, and learn to trust your own taste. Rubin’s advice feels more relevant with each passing year, as technology gets ever better at hacking our attention and the world fills with A.I. slop. So I wanted to share this episode again.