How the Israel-Gaza Conversations Have Shaped My Thinking

It’s become something of a tradition on “The Ezra Klein Show” to end the year with an “Ask Me Anything” episode. So as 2023 comes to a close, I sat down with our new senior editor, Claire Gordon, to answer listeners’ questions about everything from the Israel-Hamas war to my thoughts on parenting. We discuss whether the war in Gaza has affected my relationships with family members and friends; what I think about the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement; whether the Democrats should have voted to keep Kevin McCarthy as House speaker; how worried I am about a Trump victory in 2024; whether A. I. can really replace human friendships; how struggling in school as a kid shaped my politics as an adult; and much more. Mentioned: We’re looking for a researcher to join our team. Learn more and apply here. Thoughts? Guest suggestions? Email us at [email protected]. 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 Kristin Lin. Fact-checking by Michelle Harris, with Kate Sinclair and Mary Marge Locker. Our senior engineer is Jeff Geld. Our senior editor is Claire Gordon. The show’s production team also includes Emefa Agawu and Rollin Hu. Original music by Isaac Jones. Audience strategy by Kristina Samulewski and Shannon Busta. The executive producer of New York Times Opinion Audio is Annie-Rose Strasser. And special thanks to Sonia Herrero.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:03Ezra Klein?

  From New York Times Opinion, this is The Ezra Klein Show.

• 0:23Ezra Klein?

  So before we begin, one bit of housekeeping, which is, we are looking for a researcher on the show, somebody who's going to be central in prepping and creating the structure of these episodes alongside, obviously, me and the team. We are looking for somebody with a background here in politics and policy. It's an election year, and then it's going to be either the first year of a re-elected administration or a new administration. So that's going to be an important set of topics for us. If you're interested, we have the application linked in show notes, or you can find it at nyco.com under the Careers tab. But for today, you all sent in a lot of questions. I have seen a number of them, and they are

• 1:03Ezra Klein?

  very difficult, and I am nervous about answering them. But here to join me with it, which is also a great way of introducing her to all of you, we have a new senior editor on the show, the great Claire Gordon, who I used to work with back when we worked on Netflix's Explained! show together, which was great then. And I am so glad that she is on the show now, and she's agreed to come pepper me with all of your questions and not let me refuse to answer them. And so Claire, welcome.

• 1:32Claire Gordon?

  Thank you, Ezra. It's great to be here. Well, let's get started. The questions that came in overwhelmingly were in four buckets. And the first of those buckets is Israel-Palestine.

• 1:44Ezra Klein?

  Oh, good. The easy bucket first.

• 1:46Claire Gordon?

  Mm-hmm, just to warm you up. So...

• 1:48Ezra Klein?

  Damn it.

• 1:51Claire Gordon?

  And then the US politics, AI, and then personal questions, and then we'll end with a fun rapid fire round that I know you are not dreading.

• 2:02Ezra Klein?

  Great. All right, let's do it.

• 2:04Claire Gordon?

  So question one, in the first episode that you put out after October 7th, the very first thing that you said was that your mom had asked you to promise her that you wouldn't talk about this publicly. And then you proceeded to do that quite a bit. So the question from a listener, this is Marissa H., is how have your relationships with family and friends been impacted by your conversations? Or the positions that you've made publicly on Israel, Palestine? And then I would add to that, how does your mom feel?

• 2:36Ezra Klein?

  My mom feels proud of me, as she usually does. My mom is wonderful. I guess the thing I'd say about this is that I don't have the view in my personal life, and to some degree, I don't think other people should have the view in their personal lives, that it is my job to police and change the opinions of the people I love. And there are people I love with opinions on this issue that differ markedly from mine. And differ markedly from mine in ways that I sometimes find personally difficult. But I don't think the point of family or being in a relationship is getting everybody into alignment with you. And I think if you do, you're just going to harm a lot of relationships. And I also don't think you're going to be persuasive to the extent you

• 3:21Ezra Klein?

  are ever persuasive to somebody who is pretty far from where you are. It's because they feel safe with you and they feel heard by you such that they are open over long periods of time to the gentle pressure of your differing views. And you don't get that if over the holiday table, you start yelling at them about their terrible opinions. So no, no relationships have frankly been altered at all. But I've been watching people drive themselves mad on social media over this.

• 3:59Ezra Klein?

  And I think social media is about the worst possible place you can imagine to discuss something as complicated and emotional and difficult as Israel-Palestine. I mean, you're talking about one of the hardest things to discuss even in person. And I think that it's like this thing very far away, but that is so emotionally immediate, right? The images, the horrors, the fear. And so I think people get into this question of it has activated such emotional intensity in them, what part of it do they have any traction on? Most of us sitting here, we can't end the war there. We can't create peace. We can't do anything. So what can you do? You can maybe police the views and feelings of the people right next to you.

• 4:43Ezra Klein?

  You have no power over what's happening there, but maybe you have power over the people in your Instagram stories feed, or maybe over the people in your family. And I don't want to say you shouldn't talk about difficult things to people. You know you should, but it's not a place to try to exert control.

• 5:00Claire Gordon?

  So not trying to persuade your loved ones of your views feels like great advice, but I'm curious how that actually looks in practice. Say it's the holidays, you're at the holiday dinner table, a loved one expresses a view that you deeply disagree with, maybe you find it even upsetting. And then what do you do next? How do you engage in that conversation if you're not trying to persuade them?

• 5:28Ezra Klein?

  I'm not saying I never try to persuade a loved one of my views. And I'm not saying that I never get annoyed or angry even at the views of those around me. I do like, it's much easier for me to discuss this issue with the hundreds of thousands, millions of listeners of this show than it is with my own family oftentimes. It's so much harder when it's people you love. But if I have a view that's different than theirs, once that conversation is done, I'm not going back to it. That's not my project inside my own family. It just isn't. And it has been a sobering and humbling thing for me as a professional political communicator to realize that oftentimes I cannot convince the people closest to me of things I really believe.

• 6:13Ezra Klein?

  I saw somebody on social media on Threads who is saying that their rule on this is that before they try to persuade someone they know of something, they ask three questions. I'm not saying I do that, but that struck me as a very wise rule, that before you ever try to talk somebody else out of their position, you ask three questions about how they got to that position and what it means to them and what is behind it. And then you're going to learn something more about a position that feels very alien to you. And if you're trying to persuade them, you're going to know a little bit better what it is you're working with.

• 6:50Claire Gordon?

  Okay, well, let's see if you can persuade anyone with these next questions. So this one is from Mark C. About a month ago, we had Yossi Klein Halevi on the podcast and you'd asked a question about the BDS movement. That's the Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions movement in the context of talking about all the nonviolent efforts Palestinians had made to bring international attention to their cause and put pressure on Israel. And he had responded that BDS, quote, "has as their goal the destruction of Israel." So Mark, who's been a supporter of BDS and definitely did not have as his goal the destruction of Israel, his question was, did Halevi have a point there? And what are your feelings about BDS generally?

• 7:34Ezra Klein?

  So what Halevi is saying there, as I understand it, so if you go to the Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions website and you look at their three big planks, the third one is right of return, that Palestinians who were expelled during the Nakba or fled during the Nakba, who can trace their ancestry back, so this would also then include children and grandchildren, et cetera, have the right to return into Israel.

• 8:02Ezra Klein?

  I think Halevi and most Israelis understand that as a way of destroying the state of Israel. During my conversation to Tarek McConney, he mentions his estimate of, I think, 14 million Palestinians worldwide who can claim some ancestry here. Israel has 7 million Israeli Jews, 9 million in population. So to Israelis, like, that is a way of saying you're going to destroy the state of Israel. It isn't, you'll destroy it by, like, looting it and burning it to the ground. But, I mean, Halevi is very clear on this in the conversation. To him, that is a kind of destruction. I think right of return is a lie that has been told to people. I mean, that is a part of it that kind of breaks my heart. I have talked to people who work in refugee camps in Jordan, Egypt, et cetera, and they've

• 8:46Ezra Klein?

  met people who have the keys to their grandparents' house on a necklace around their neck because it shows, like, you're going to go back there someday. And you're not. That is not how these conflicts have ever worked. I think the idea that international law tells you it will work that way is a lie international law is telling you. There's no right of return for the Jews who are expelled from Iran. There's no right of return for the people expelled during partition in India and Pakistan. No right of return for the Germans expelled after World War II out of Eastern Europe. About 900,000 Jews is the number I've heard were expelled or left or fled different parts of the Middle East during this period. There's no right of return for them. It's not going to happen.

• 9:28Ezra Klein?

  So BDS, I have mixed feelings about it. I think for a long time, Israel was trying to be the thing that it says it is, right? Like, a Jewish state, but one trying to absorb across democratic principles and to work in a humane way. I think that had functionally ended. And so, using boycott and impeachment and sanction techniques to try to put pressure on them to go in a different direction makes a lot of sense to me.

• 9:56Ezra Klein?

  To do it with the idea that you're going to get right of return, if you take that seriously, and maybe you do, maybe you don't. I think a lot of people did not think about that as what they were really doing when they were involved in that movement. I don't think that makes sense. And I do think this is a real dividing line right now on the left in terms of different imaginations of ways this conflict ends. There are a lot of people who want to see a kind of humane outcome across the lines where Palestinians get a state and they actually have authority on the economy over that state. And that state is functionally the West Bank and Gaza. And that is a real thing that could not be achieved right this second, but could be achieved. And then there are people who think you need right of return, which is a kind of single state solution. And I don't see any world where you're getting that.

• 10:38Ezra Klein?

  And so I think it's actually then ensures the continuation of this world. And this world is very, very, very bad. So my thoughts on BDS are mixed, but I do think that in terms of the tactic, putting aside some of the goals, but in terms of the tactic, I think that if you believe what is happening to the Palestinians is and has been deeply unjust, and I do, and you want to see nonviolent resistance work, and I do, and you want there to be a reason to do nonviolent resistance as opposed to armed resistance, and I do, then I think you have to ask yourself, if you're not going to be open to that tactic, what is it you would be open to? What is it that would matter enough that it might actually be listened to?

• 11:22Ezra Klein?

  Because like the occasional op ed is not doing it.

• 11:26Claire Gordon?

  So we had a couple of questions from listeners who just struggled with the idea of Zionism and the idea that Israel needs to be a Jewish homeland and a Jewish majority state. And so I'll put the question this way. One of the driving forces behind the creation of Israel was the idea that the Jewish people needed a Jewish homeland to be safe, that that was a lesson from history that's been learned many times over, certainly a lesson from the Holocaust, that if Jews didn't have their own state dedicated to protecting them, it was very possible that the Jewish people long term wouldn't survive. Do you think that's true?

• 12:04Ezra Klein?

  I am not certain, and in fact somewhat doubt, that Israel makes Jewish people safer. It has not been obvious to me that that is true for a long time. Now, it is believed by many Jewish people, so you're hearing a view of mine that is not necessarily widely held. But if you think about where you have a lot of Jewish people collected in one place, where that place is dangerous, where a disaster could happen that could wipe out a lot of Jews again, I think you would say Israel. You know, you can have a very different view than me on that. I actually just don't think that view is relevant, really, to what comes next. The state of Israel is a state.

• 12:44Ezra Klein?

  If you could prove that it made it 10% likelier to have a mass disaster for Jews, it would not cease being a state. It has other reasons for existing. There are people who live there and have families there and businesses there and communities there and make art there right now. And so I think that that kind of sits on its own now. I don't think that what you believe about Israel's role in the security of worldwide Jewry actually tells you very much about what to think about Israel. In my view, we actually sort of overly particularize the situation, which I know is a weird thing for me to say, given all the shows we've just done on it about its very specific history and so on.

• 13:28Ezra Klein?

  But I do think we make it a little too special. Israel's a state formed, like many states, in violence. In my view, it was not formed by UN resolution, that the UN never had any intention or capability to enforce. Israel was a place where different peoples had settled on that land and had a claim on that land going far back. I really, really dislike the idea that... Jews had no relevance to that land, right? The kind of settler colonialism idea. When people read the book at the core of Judaism, it is an account of the Jewish people being expelled violently, repeatedly from Jerusalem, which was not located at that time in New Jersey.

• 14:13Ezra Klein?

  It was there in the same place it is now. There's a very ancient connection for the Jewish people to that land. When did the statute of limitations on Jewish expulsion run out? So the UN does try to partition, but the UN doesn't enforce that. They don't send a military to do it. So instead, what there is is a war. And the Arab countries try to wipe out this new state of Israel. Israel tries to not be wiped out, and Israel wins. And that is what creates a state of Israel, a war, just like many other states. And then the boundaries and borders change in other wars, like the 1967 war. So I sometimes think people make this into something weirder than it is. Israel is a state.

• 14:56Ezra Klein?

  It is a state formed partially in war, like many states have been. It is a state that will protect its borders. And it is a state that is for the people who it has defined itself as being for, which is true for most states. I think saying it's a Jewish state and that's so weird. I mean, America is a state for Americans. China is a state for the Chinese, Brazil, a state for Brazilians. States are imagined communities. Nationalities are imagined. Now, it doesn't mean that you won't get killed trying to cross a border. The fact that something is a story doesn't mean it can't kill you. But it does mean that it is not so unusual for a country to define who it is for. And then if you are not in that definition, you don't get to come there and have citizenship.

• 15:40Ezra Klein?

  Mexicans cannot just come to America and say, "Well, I live here now. I'm a citizen."

• 15:47Ezra Klein?

  Nor can Canadians, for that matter. And I think if you just look at it as a normal state that is going to try to act as many other states would in this scenario, a lot of things just come clearer. Israel's a state, it's going to try to defend itself and maintain its own internal sense of cohesion. And like, that is what most states do. Most states would not be open to immigration policies that made their current majorities minorities overnight. Like, that is not how most states operate. The people of France would not agree to that policy. The people of Chile would not agree to that policy. This isn't as weird, I think, as people try to make it out to be.

• 16:28Ezra Klein?

  The end goal for Israel is not exception, it's normalcy. And I think being kind of unable to see that about it, both kind of in terms of how it acts and in terms of where it needs to go, is often a big part of the problem here.

• 16:44Claire Gordon?

  Do you think that people's inability to see that, thinking that a Jewish state is somehow unique or strange compared to other states, is that mostly just because of how recent a political project Israel is? Or does antisemitism play a role in that?

• 17:01Ezra Klein?

  I mean, it might be a bit of both, but I don't think you need antisemitism as an explanatory factor here. What Israel is, is formed very much by the Holocaust. And so it is also a kind of international project in different ways, and it has a tension internationally in other ways. But part of it is simply the way the world, but particularly America, focuses there because of our relationships, because of who we are and who is there. And yeah, because it is recent. And so you can see the way the clay was shaped in a way that history and time has made other things look more settled. And then it connects, of course, to the stories of the three major Abrahamic religions. It creates a different sense of it.

• 17:44Ezra Klein?

  I mean, I also think the religious dimension here cannot be understated. But I think all that actually sometimes makes it hard to see how normal what is happening there is.

• 17:54Claire Gordon?

  So I wanted to go back to something you said earlier about how the idea that Israel makes Jews safer hasn't seemed obviously true to you for a long time. And I wonder if that's because of some specific recent forces. One, the memory of the Holocaust being a living memory, and that's becoming less true every year. I mean, for kids born today, the Holocaust is their great-grandparents' generation or their great-great-grandparents' generation. And so the protective power of that memory is fading. And then, secondly, the state of Israel, that maybe Israel has actually been a victim of its own success in a way, that it's given Jewish people such a sense of security in the world that more

• 18:35Claire Gordon?

  people no longer see it as necessary. I mean, are there other things that make you think that the very long and consistent history of Jewish pogroms and persecution is less likely to repeat itself in the future?

• 18:51Ezra Klein?

  I do not believe the age of pogroms is done. There's a line that antisemitism is a light sleeper, and I believe that. I think you see it right now. I think the question is, in that world, is it obvious that Israel is a point of safety rather than a point of vulnerability? And I would say it is not obvious. That's maybe the real thing I would say here. I don't know. I find that Israel, because of how complicated the place in which it is, is, because of what it takes for it to survive, what it took for it to be founded, is that a place Jews can run to, or is it a place in which they're vulnerable? I mean,

• 19:32Ezra Klein?

  people keep saying Hamas's attack was the single largest killing of Jews in one day since the Holocaust. What should that make you think? And I think in the 20th century, Israel's necessity was real. If only it had been formed earlier. How many could have been saved? I think people often don't realize that the world Jewish population still has not rebounded to the level it was before the Holocaust. I mean, that is the size of the decimation. How many families, how much art, how much literature, how much genius? How much was lost? I still think that is something we cannot get our arms around.

• 20:13Ezra Klein?

  But I don't know, I'm a Jewish person. Do I feel safer? Do I feel like there's less antisemitism in the world right now because of what is happening there? Or does it seem to me that there's a huge upsurge of antisemitism and that even Jews in places that are not Israel are vulnerable to what happens in Israel? And one reason I think Jews in the diaspora do and should have a voice as to what is happening there is we are vulnerable to it. It is both potentially, in some circumstances, a place it could protect us, but it is also in other circumstances, a place it could endanger us. But I don't know.

• 20:54Ezra Klein?

  And I will say that I was at a training because I want to go to Israel. So The Times makes you do this training called a Hefat training. And it's a training for journalists and NGO workers and humanitarian workers who might be operating in a conflict zone. And you do a lot in this training, including first aid and this and that. But one of the things that ended up happening is a march where you're kind of in the scenario of, in this case, it was, we were in Africa, in a particular state in Africa in this, and the terrorist group of al-Shabaab was going to be advancing and that they were killing foreigners. And it was meant to sort of test these skills they were teaching you about how to correctly

• 21:38Ezra Klein?

  dive away from grenades and how to run amidst live fire.

• 21:42Claire Gordon?

  So where are you? What's the scene?

• 21:44Ezra Klein?

  We're in a forest. Like, we're actually outside. And then at some point, there's a capture scenario. And it's like people with guns and they're firing blanks around and they're screaming at us and you're face down. And this was not a scenario about Jewish people. This is al-Shabaab is just advancing and they're going to kill foreigners. We're not in Israel here. This is not what's going on. And just one of the people, one of the actors doing the scenario just starts screaming, "Who's the Jew here? Who are the Jews here? Give up the Jews. Are you all willing to die to protect a Jew?" And there's something about the fact that when you're trying to make a realistic scenario of capture, that the thing people's mind goes to is, well, probably a terrorist group would hunt down all the Jews first.

• 22:27Ezra Klein?

  I don't know what makes Jewish people safer or less safe. It's not always obvious to me. I'm not telling anybody to take my judgment on this. But the sense of threat is real. And then, of course, like, there's a reality of who is really unsafe right now? Gazans. Like, people living in Gaza are the people dying in mass numbers right now. This is like a very hard set of things to hold. And so you're, yeah, it's just a very hard set of things to hold.

• 22:57Claire Gordon?

  Okay, so one final question on Israel-Palestine. A listener asked whether you would, using this platform, call for a ceasefire.

• 23:06Ezra Klein?

  I don't think that's my... Let me separate that into two things. Do I think there should be a ceasefire? I think Israel should stop doing what it's doing. I do not like the structure of this conversation where, like, the only two options on the board are all-out ground invasion and pummeling and destruction of Gaza and ceasefire. Going back to the Zach Beecham episode, you know, our kind of second interview on this, I believed then, I believe now, in a limited, targeted, continuous counterterrorism strategy. I don't think Hamas, the threat posed by Hamas, was ever really about Hamas's capabilities.

• 23:48Ezra Klein?

  I mean, even now, we know that Israel had all the intelligence it needed to stop what Hamas did. They had the actual plan as a document. They had analysts who saw Hamas doing training operations, and they dismissed it. And then what Hamas did was not technically complex. It's not because, oh, in one of the tunnels, they had such advanced weaponry. I mean, you had paragliders here. You had people, you know, just running through in normal vehicles, like it was guns. Some of this is simply about normal security and getting your intelligence right.

• 24:23Ezra Klein?

  Then the idea that you're going to drain Hamas of the danger it poses with a death toll in Gaza like this, that this is not going to lead to more radicals and more vengeance, I don't buy it. I have not seen a good argument made for it. Israel's not reporting in some public way where people can check the work, what they have achieved and why we should believe it is worth the toll it is taking on Gazans. So it is my view that degrading Hamas's capabilities is important. I have not been convinced in the reading and interviewing I've done, that the way they have done it was a targeted, or even necessarily wise way to do it. I believe to a large degree that what Yasser Klay and Halivi said was

• 25:05Ezra Klein?

  true, that Israel executed a massive overwhelming response to reestablish deterrence. I don't believe deterrence was the problem. I don't believe that if you had told the leaders of Hamas that their operation would succeed as easily as it did, and their fighters would go on to butcher as many Israeli civilians as they did, and to take as many Israeli hostages as they did, that the leaders of Hamas would have said, given that speculative world, "Oh, Israel's a paper tiger, they're not going to attack." And so I don't think

• 25:45Ezra Klein?

  deterrence actually had to be reestablished. Now, other people disagree with me on that, but I think there were other ways to do it that would have been wiser and more targeted and more limited. And the cost in the way the world sees Israel now, and the cost in how many people in Gaza want vengeance now, and how much radicalization there will be now, and how many children who no longer have their parents will grow up wanting to avenge those deaths, I think those have to be weighed somewhere.

• 26:16Ezra Klein?

  I don't think, I mean, people are calling for a ceasefire almost from day one here. I don't think any state could be attacked by Hamas or anything like Hamas the way Israel was and do nothing. But counterterrorism is possible, and it could have been done over a long, extended period. And it would have been, given Israel's capacities on surveillance, you know, pretty straightforward to be attentive to anything that looked like a training exercise and anything that looked like a massing of power. And the kind of counterterrorism I'm talking about and the counterterrorism experts talked about here, I mean, that could be very violent, and it could be very destructive.

• 26:56Ezra Klein?

  But it's not going to displace 80% of the entire population of Gaza and lead to this kind of death rate among children. I don't think this was about, at some core level, Hamas. I think it was about Israel showing that if anything like this was done to it, the cost would be staggering. And I don't think that was ever the question here in anybody's mind. But at this point, I, yeah, I mean, when is, when is the cost too high? I think we've passed that point long ago.

• 27:57Claire Gordon?

  All right, ready to move on?

• 27:59Ezra Klein?

  I am ready to move on.

• 28:01Claire Gordon?

  U.S. Politics, Chapter Two. So this question from Jonah P. about Kevin McCarthy's dramatic ouster from the speakership. And at the time, Democrats, you know, very quickly were like, we're not going to help him at all, don't like the guy, this is the Republicans' problem. Was that wrong? Should the Democrats have given him the votes? Given where we've ended up now?

• 28:27Ezra Klein?

  I think that's actually a bit of a myth. There were Democrats willing to save McCarthy. What they were not willing to do was save him for nothing. So there were last minute negotiations among centrist Democrats and Republicans to come up with some kind of a deal here where Democrats would give McCarthy the votes he needed and in exchange it would get things like potentially seats on the powerful Rules Committee. They would get some concessions for the quite big move of crossing the aisle to save a Republican speaker. And the person who did not want to make a deal like that is Kevin McCarthy. I think it's really important to say this. Kevin McCarthy, from the beginning of this whole shenanigan,

• 29:09Ezra Klein?

  he said he would not cut a deal with Democrats to save his speakership. And when you're not willing to play politics and you're not willing to make the trades to get votes, then you don't get to play politics and you don't get the votes. I don't think it is actually the Democratic Party's job. And more than its job, I don't think it is an appropriate thing for it to do to collapse its own interests as a negotiating partner and give Republicans something for nothing. Votes don't cost nothing. The idea that Democrats should have saved McCarthy for nothing? I don't buy it.

• 29:43Claire Gordon?

  Not for the good of the country?

• 29:44Ezra Klein?

  I don't think it necessarily would have been better for the country. I mean, at some point, the Republican Party has to get back to making deals. At some point, the Republican Party has to get back to acting like a governing coalition. And possibly, if they lose their majority over this, some of them would be more likely to do it next time. Look, I don't know, and nor does anybody know, what will bring the Republican Party back to some level of normalcy. Maybe it's simply not possible for the foreseeable future. I think that's more the camp I'm in. But it is not good for Republicans. It is not good for moderate Republicans. It is not good for Republicans as a whole to have a deeply inexperienced,

• 30:27Ezra Klein?

  deeply radical speaker. That is going to be a good issue for Democrats in the elections. Abortion in particular is probably Democrats' strongest issue right now, and Mike Johnson is a great foil for them on that. I don't think you should try to help bad Republicans get elected because it makes it easier possibly for Democrats to defeat them. I think that's a very high-risk strategy. But I also think that for Democrats themselves to have any negotiating leverage at all as a normal governing party themselves, they have to be able to take reasonable positions and stick to them. The idea that the Republican Party has become such a deranged institution that the cost of the other party saving their speaker

• 31:11Ezra Klein?

  is no longer a deal of some kind? Look, when McCarthy wanted the speakership in the first place, he made all these deals with the far right of his own party, including that any member of it could call a vote on his speakership. He made deals to become speaker. He had to make deals to stay speaker. He decided that not staying speaker was better than making any deal at all with the Democratic Party? And like, that was his choice, not the Democrats' choice.

• 31:38Claire Gordon?

  So for this next question, we had a bunch of folks write versions of this, and I would paraphrase them all this way. There is a non-trivial chance that Trump will be the next president. If he wins, he's promised to do a lot of stuff that sounds pretty scary. And people are writing and warning about this, but at the same time, it mostly feels business as usual. Liz Cheney's line that we're sleepwalking into dictatorship. So what do you make of that cognitive dissonance? How worried are you?

• 32:16Ezra Klein?

  I am quite worried. We're going to do a lot more coverage of this in 2024. I think, though, that the thing people underestimate is that, right now, people's attention still is not focused on Donald Trump, or frankly, on 2024. And as that changes, as you have primaries, and he wins primaries, and assuming he does become a Republican nominee, and then you do have the coverage of a kind of two candidate campaign, the things he's saying will get a lot of attention. Now, Donald Trump has won in the past, despite saying completely insane, crazy things. But in that election, he lost a popular vote and almost lost the election. To be fair, if you look at relevant electoral college states, 2020 was quite close, but

• 33:01Ezra Klein?

  Trump lost a lot of ground. I think when people are heavily exposed to the yet more extreme version of him, I don't think that's going to go well for him or for the Republican Party. Now, the danger of Biden having some kind of issue around his age, or, I don't know, some of the wars that he has the US backing in Ukraine or in Gaza, they go really badly, right? There are things that could happen that could then let Trump slip through, but this is going to get more real, and we're just not there yet. But I do think people should be worried. And the other thing is, to me, what's really dangerous here is not necessarily that Trump himself has become more extreme, though I do think the evidence that he has is convincing.

• 33:44Ezra Klein?

  It's that the Republican Party around him has become more extreme and more enabling. Like, that's true of the House Speaker, who we just mentioned, Mike Johnson, which is true of who are the members of the Republican House majority, it's true of the members of the Senate, it's true of the kinds of people who would work in a Trump White House, Trump would, and people around him would know better how to choose nominees from their own faction than Trump did in 2016, when there was a constant tension between, you know, the sort of traditional factions of the Republican Party, who are staffing a lot of key positions, and Donald Trump and kind of the direct people around him, and including some of like his family members and so on.

• 34:26Ezra Klein?

  So if you do have another Trump term, you're going to have a more extreme Trump, governing alongside a more extreme Republican Party, with a staff that is more dedicated to making Trump's whims and revenge fantasies come true. And that is an extraordinarily dangerous situation.

• 34:48Claire Gordon?

  All right, now on to AI. So in the recent, sort of catching up on the world of AI, episode that you did recently with Casey Newton and Kevin Roos, you all talked about the future boom that you expect in AI friends. And you were all pretty casual about it. You talked about how you think that your kids will grow up maybe not to have real friends.

• 35:10Ezra Klein?

  That they'd have both. I think my kids will have real friends, too.

• 35:15Claire Gordon?

  And then Casey joked about how there were going to be Fox News segments in the future, freaking out about this, how Silicon Valley had turned a generation into shut-ins who only hung out with their robot friends, and it would be this silly moral panic. And while I was listening to that, I was just thinking, that sounds like a pretty reasonable reason to be panicked. And a couple of listeners had the same reaction I did. Keith Kay called the idea of chatbot pals replacing human friends, quote, "one of the most insane and depressing things I've ever considered." And Hugh Kay asked, "Surely the evidence is pretty clear that we need human-to-human connection. The loneliness epidemic won't be met by human-to-machine, right?"

• 35:58Ezra Klein?

  I mean, I definitely believe humans need human-to-human connection. Now, it could be that it's complementary, right? Like, look, when you look at the world of Star Wars, there are AIs there, but also there are human relationships there, and there's simply a flow between them, right? You can be buddies with C-3PO, but still have a relationship with Han Solo. I don't know. So, I mean, that's one world, possibly, right? Our pets don't make it so we don't have human-to-human connection. And maybe AIs will be helpful in that, right? Maybe, you know, you can imagine a world where we wanted people to get out, you know, more and see people, and AIs are, in some ways, like helpful coaches, like, you know, hey, like, get out of the house. Like, if you have a therapist, like, the therapist often tries, like, get you out of the house, like, get you doing things.

• 36:43Ezra Klein?

  Maybe AIs would be like that. But I think you should be nervous about how weird the world might get on the rapidity of the timeframe. It could get really weird. I think the thing that's going to slow this down is not technology. I think the technology is functionally there, at least on the AIs as buddies question. I think it is going to be kind of generational discomfort. I think people my age are, you know, I'm going to turn 40 in a couple of months. I think people my age are going to have trouble having AI friends. I think kids won't. And so what's going to happen is like generational turnover. And I don't think we know how that's going to look or feel. I don't think we have any way of really thinking about that. I think

• 37:27Ezra Klein?

  we haven't done nearly as much thinking about that as we have about workplace disruption. And my gut is it in the next 20 years, there's actually more effect on society in terms of social disruption and upheaval than job disruption and upheaval. Now, I could be proven very wrong on this, but that has been my claim. And for now, I still feel it's true. And yeah, I don't know what to tell you. It's weird. I don't know what to do about it. I don't know how to feel sufficiently or insufficiently alarmed. I don't know how to prepare my kids for it. How do you think about a world that you've never lived in before? I mean, I think the best thing to say about it is at least sci fi has been

• 38:07Ezra Klein?

  thinking about this world for a long time. And so there are actually all manner of stories about it. And so in certain ways, humanity is very well prepared on one very important level, which is the level of story. But, you know, that's only one level. And that doesn't mean we're prepared enough.

• 38:27Claire Gordon?

  Yeah, some of those stories end pretty badly.

• 38:29Ezra Klein?

  Some of them do. I mean, I always say this, but if you've not watched her, the, I think it's a 2013 Spike Jones movie, in which Scarlett Johansson voices an AI that is a personal assistant, but that the lead character falls in love with. And I think it is such a prescient movie. So like, you should watch that movie. But the way the movie in some ways resolves like this key issue is at some point, the AIs get bored of us and leave, which is a recurrent trope, by the way, in sci fi. It didn't like just come from there. But what if they don't?

• 39:09Ezra Klein?

  Like, in some ways, I think what's scary about that movie is that it ends so neatly, and it's sort of needed to. But if you just go right up to the end and it doesn't end neatly, and you just have this world where the AIs are more interesting than the people to the people, then what? I don't really think that it will destroy the desire for human-to-human contact. I mean, the desire for touch is very profound. The desire to be chosen, I think a real problem with AI relationships, is going to be that they are unchosen in a way. It is important to my conception of myself, that my best friend, that my wife, that the people I love, most of them. I mean, my family has kind of stuck with me.

• 39:54Claire Gordon?

  And I'm paid to be here, but I chose to.

• 39:58Ezra Klein?

  But they can, they could choose at any time not to be, right? They keep choosing me. That's important for who I understand myself to be and my sense of self-worth. I think people want to be chosen. And so there's going to be a lot of subtle things that even a very interesting AI can't do. But that's not everything. And that might not be as important to three generations from now. So who knows?

• 40:47Claire Gordon?

  Well, you brought up your kids a moment ago, which is a nice segue to the personal bucket of questions. And this, I just thought, was a really beautiful question from Robert M. And he talked about when his kids were born, getting this, quote, "pure hit of universalism." I was so aware both of my child's individual profound importance to me, but also how that experience was repeated billions of times the world over. And then he went on to talk about how, over the years, his kids are now teenagers, that feeling faded and their world shrank to the size of the nuclear family. Quote, "The direction of travel is towards protecting this tiny bit of territory from the world."

• 41:32Claire Gordon?

  And so he wanted to know, have you felt pulled in that direction too?

• 41:36Ezra Klein?

  I think that's a really beautiful question. It reminds me of something George Saunders has said, which is that having children, I'm going to get this quote wrong from memory. So this is a kind of directionally, right? Reimbue the world with moral urgency because everybody in it deserved to be loved as he loved his daughters. And I feel that. It's one reason I've found covering things like Gaza emotionally unbelievably wrenching. I mean, to sit with the violence done to children by Hamas and then the violence done to Gazans in Israel's reprisals. It's a lot of children. It's a lot of children, children dying and children losing.

• 42:23Ezra Klein?

  But then that tension that he points out between the sort of universalism and the particularism, right? The recognition that every child is as important and is loved by somebody as much as your child is important and is loved by you, or hopefully is loved by somebody that much. And the way having children focuses you on your own family and on taking opportunity and giving it to them, right? Like, I know the advantages my children have being my children, right? Compared to being born in a much poorer place to a much poorer set of parents in a rural area. And I know the blessings I'm showering on them and, you know? And like, that's just a very, very hard thing to negotiate.

• 43:08Ezra Klein?

  I sometimes on these things don't think that there is much better answers than that you should have like a rule for yourself on charity. And like mine, which is, you know, you can hear this from, you know, various modern sources, but I actually took it from tithing, which is, you know, in my family, the floor for charity is 10% of pre-tax earnings. And it can be, and often is higher than that, but it can't be lower than that. And if it's lower than that, then, you know, we're just way too focused on our own family. And I mean, it's still like can be up to 90% focused on your own family. But I don't like have a way to answer this, but I really do think that universalism is something to try to hold on to.

• 43:53Ezra Klein?

  I think it is precious and I think it's important and I think it is true.

• 43:57Claire Gordon?

  Well, I think a good follow up question to that is Joan Kay's. What kind of school would you like your children to attend? And what do you hope their education will bring them?

• 44:11Ezra Klein?

  I want my children to attend public school. I overwhelmingly attended public school. There was like one year when I didn't, but I attended public school. I went to public university and that was important to me and it's important to my self conception. The only thing hard for me about this question is that I hated school and I suffered a lot in it. And the way my brain works, to sit at a desk, listening to somebody lecture is torture. I just had to do it again for a couple of days and it was torture again. I remembered how useless it is to me, like how hard it is for me to focus in that fashion. I mean, I just sat and fought with that like my whole childhood.

• 44:53Claire Gordon?

  You know, your job is people talking at you.

• 44:55Ezra Klein?

  But me talking with them.

• 44:59Ezra Klein?

  Me talking with them. I can learn very, very fast in conversation. Weirdly, I can listen to podcasts because it can be the second thing I'm doing. If I'm walking or washing the dishes or whatever, I can handle that. I don't call into teleconference calls as a reporter even now because I just can't absorb any of the information. Like it's just how my, I don't know, like it's why I graduated high school with a 2.2. I just can't learn that way. And I wonder if I would be willing to have my children hate school and like just kind of suffer in it day after day after day, the way I did. Would I be willing to bear that?

• 45:40Ezra Klein?

  And on the other hand, I think that the fact that I did was good for me. And it created a really deep desire after failing for so long in my own life to succeed. And my best friends today are my best friends from then. And the fact that I didn't do that well in school didn't stop me from having an amazing life. So I don't know.

• 46:01Claire Gordon?

  When you were younger and had a crummy grade point average, what was your story about that? Did you have that clarity of just?

• 46:09Ezra Klein?

  No, I didn't understand this until much later. I mean, you look at any media about school. And it's like the kid starts drawing and ends up in the world of their own imagination. I mean, that's what the show is about. And I thought that was really happening to everybody in the way it was happening to me. And I actually didn't understand. I mean, it sounds crazy now to me to say it. I didn't understand that other people were sitting there paying attention to and absorbing the material. Look, it was grueling for me and for my family. I don't know what to say about it. Eventually, everybody just settled in to the idea that I was some kind of weird underachiever.

• 46:47Claire Gordon?

  So that was your story, that you were like an underachiever?

• 46:49Ezra Klein?

  Terribly so, that I was smart but lazy. And I did a lot of reading on my own and definitely seemed interested in the world. And it was a continuing puzzle to my teachers and to my parents and to myself. And at a certain point, people got bored of yelling at me or it didn't work and they stopped. And I just kind of dragged myself through the rest of it. And I did really well in the SATs and that got me into UC Santa Cruz. But that was it. Like, I got saved by testing because I was a good test taker. Otherwise, I understood myself to be a fuck up.

• 47:31Ezra Klein?

  And that I actually turned out, when I found something that worked for my mind, which was blogging, to be not just like a hard worker, but an insanely hard worker, like functionally a kind of workaholic, was the single biggest surprise about myself to ever happen to me, or frankly, to the people around me, right? Like, the one thing that was obvious about me was that I wasn't a hard worker. It's the reason I care a lot about context, that I believe that people are different in different contexts. Like, I've had the experience of being the same person in one context, and I'm a total disaster for years, years and years and years. And then all of a sudden, the exact same set of traits, the ability to hyper-focus

• 48:12Ezra Klein?

  on a book, and hyper-focus on things I'm interested in, and write quickly, all of a sudden, like, that's like a path to success and fame.

• 48:22Ezra Klein?

  And I didn't change, like, the world changed, like, the context for me and the world changed. So, yeah, um, you know, you gotta recognize, like, the stories you tell are often not really about you, they're about the interaction between you and the place that you're in.

• 48:37Claire Gordon?

  I'm curious if that's left a mark on you in other ways, just through your formative years, having the story about yourself and being, like, told that you're a screw-up, in terms of a desire to prove yourself by working so hard, punishing yourself for something, or having a chip on your shoulder about it?

• 48:57Ezra Klein?

  I think it is certainly a plausible read of me

• 49:04Ezra Klein?

  for a time period. But at the same time, I was always very obsessive about the things I was into. And so it isn't like my, at least, subjective experience of finding political blogging was like, "I'm gonna show 'em."

• 49:20Ezra Klein?

  I found it, I loved it, I often can't stop. I mean, when you ask, like, "Does it leave other marks on me?", one of the marks it leaves on me is, I don't really believe people are that responsible for their success or their failure. A lot of things that we bracket into the "you deserve credit for this" bucket, like, "Are you a hard worker?", in many ways, I would work less hard if I could, I just can't. Like, it's compulsive. So, I don't know, I, like, it definitely affects my politics. I just attribute a lower percentage of people's life outcomes to things they are choosing to do. Than to things that are sort of innate,

• 50:03Ezra Klein?

  which is why I kind of believe that what you want as a society is for individuals to believe in individual responsibility and for society to not believe in individual responsibility all that much. And so, you know, obviously, we want to encourage people on the margin to make good decisions, but I just don't think people should be punished that hard for their failure. A lot of times, failure is like not really up to people and nor is success. And so even if we want to create the conditions that maximize success for any individual, I don't think morally, the reasons that people fall short are often up to them.

• 50:41Claire Gordon?

  Do you have any personal goals for yourself in 2024?

• 50:45Ezra Klein?

  Ooh, um, yeah, I do. I mean, I always have like a million. If I don't have a list in my head. So one is that I'm just spending a lot more time, and this is going to come out in episodes we're going to do like right at the beginning of the year, actually. I'm spending a lot more time thinking about aesthetics and how to have a personal sense of taste, how to actually know what you think is beautiful and what you are moved by and how to be more attuned to that in the world. And I feel actually very far down that path with music, which over the past five, six years, I think my taste has really shifted in. And now I really know what moves me and I can hear something and map it.

• 51:30Ezra Klein?

  I'm sort of just beginning to build that visually. And that's really important to me this year in terms of visual art, in terms of my own personal style. I would like, just like my life to be more beautiful and to appreciate beauty more deeply in it. I always just want to sleep more and sleep better. I'm a dad of kids, young kids, and it really shows me just how much of my life, how well it is going is about how well I am sleeping or not sleeping. And so that's something on my mind that I want to work with. And I gotta get my, I gotta get my book done this year. I ended my book leave early to come back and do the Israel Palestine.

• 52:10Claire Gordon?

  Yeah, how's that going?

• 52:11Ezra Klein?

  Not great at the moment. I don't want to say not great. Book leave was very productive until it ended, but, um, I mean, in 2024, somehow amidst everything else, like I have to get this book done or disaster will fall upon my head. So, you know, take that for what you will.

• 52:30Claire Gordon?

  Now for a new experiment for the show. The rapid fire round.

• 52:36Ezra Klein?

  Oh, fun. All right, so how long do I have on each of these?

• 52:39Claire Gordon?

  15 seconds.

• 52:42Ezra Klein?

  I don't think I've ever answered a question in 15 seconds.

• 52:46Claire Gordon?

  Me and the team, we were debating whether, really for you, rapid fire was more like two minutes.

• 52:51Ezra Klein?

  Yeah, sure.

• 52:52Claire Gordon?

  We whittled it down. All right.

• 52:54Ezra Klein?

  Okay.

• 52:55Claire Gordon?

  First question. What is the best and least cliched piece of parenting advice you've received or given?

• 53:03Ezra Klein?

  It is harder to parent yourself than to parent your children.

• 53:06Claire Gordon?

  I want to know what that means, but no follow ups.

• 53:09Ezra Klein?

  It's up to you, but and it is at least as important.

• 53:14Claire Gordon?

  You covered the UFO story earlier this year. Do you believe something genuinely anomalous happened? Is there a there there?

• 53:23Ezra Klein?

  I believe there is something unexplained in the multi-censored data captured across a bunch of these UFOs. I don't believe that has been explained away.

• 53:35Claire Gordon?

  Do you do anything to minimize your personal carbon footprint?

• 53:40Ezra Klein?

  Yes, among other things, I don't eat meat.

• 53:43Claire Gordon?

  So you're a human being.

• 53:46Ezra Klein?

  Thank you.

• 53:47Claire Gordon?

  Not a question. But you're also, as a public person and a person on the internet, a brand. How do you feel about your brand? And how accurate is it as a representation of Ezra Klein, the human?

• 54:01Ezra Klein?

  I don't know about my brand, which has been different at different times, and I don't like to think of it as a brand. I think the version of me on the podcast is like 65% accurate.

• 54:14Claire Gordon?

  What has been your favorite episode of the Ezra Klein Show during the past year? And why?

• 54:20Ezra Klein?

  I do not have an on the spot answer to that, but I've been proud of the Israel-Palestine series has been meaningful to me.

• 54:28Claire Gordon?

  It feels like change, technological, social, political change is happening faster and faster, that more has changed since 2003 than changed between 83 and 2003, for example. Do you think that's true?

• 54:42Ezra Klein?

  I didn't until AI, and now I do.

• 54:45Claire Gordon?

  If our current civilization survives for another few thousand years, what do you think kids in the year 5,000-something will learn about this current moment, or say, this century, in their history books, if anything?

• 54:58Ezra Klein?

  This is a 15-second answer question?

• 55:00Claire Gordon?

  Mm-hmm. And you've already used up five.

• 55:02Ezra Klein?

  I suspect it'll be technological changes, specifically AI and gene editing.

• 55:10Claire Gordon?

  And last question. Where do you see yourself in 10 years?

• 55:14Ezra Klein?

  10 years older.

• 55:17Claire Gordon?

  All right, that's a wrap. That was the last question. And I just wanted to quickly say thank you to all the listeners that took the time to send in questions. There were so many brilliant ones. And sorry if we didn't have the time to get to yours. And of course, thank you, Ezra Klein.

• 55:33Ezra Klein?

  Thank you.

• 55:44Ezra Klein?

  This episode of The Claire Gordon Show was produced by Kristin Lin. Fact checking by Michelle Harris with Kate Sinclair and Mary Marge Locker. Our senior engineer is Jeff Geld. Our senior editor is Claire Gordon. The show's production team also includes Roland Hu and Kristin Lin. Original music by Isaac Jones. Audience strategy by Christina C. Miluski and Shannon Busta. The executive producer of New York Times Opinion Audio is Andy Rose Strasser. And special thanks to Carol Sabaro.