What We Got Right — and Wrong — in ‘Abundance’ | The Ezra Klein Show

0:00 It has been a little over a year since Derek Thompson and I published Abundance.

0:05 And so I wanted here at the just over a year mark to have a check-in.

0:09 What has happened?

0:11 What hasn't happened?

0:13 Which of the arguments have changed our minds?

0:15 Which politicians actually seem to be doing something with the idea?

0:19 And where does it all go from here?

0:21 Derek Thompson is a contributing writer at The Atlantic.

0:24 is of course a co-author of abundance and the author

0:27 of a great Substack newsletter under his name.

0:30 Mark Dunkelman is a fellow at the Searchlight Institute and at Brown University

0:34 and the author of a book that came out around the same time,

0:37 Why Nothing Works, which is about some very

0:39 similar ideas but with a much more historical perspective.

0:42 So, I want to have them on together to sort

0:43 of talk through what we've seen and what we think is coming.

0:46 As always, my email esc.com.

0:55 Mark Dunkelman, Derek Thompson.

0:57 Welcome to the show.

0:58 It's good to be here.

0:59 Thrilled to be here.

0:59 Yeah.

1:00 So, our books came out a little more than a year ago.

1:03 Congratulations everybody.

1:05 But just at the high level, where's your pet at?

1:08 What are you feeling good about?

1:10 What are you feeling worried about a year?

1:11 And Derek, start with you.

1:14 So maybe one way to think about the reaction to the fallout

1:18 of abundance is to think about its impact at three different levels.

1:23 The level of vibes, the level of legislation, and the level of outcomes.

1:28 At the level of vibes,

1:29 this is a 0.1 percentile outcome given where I was March 1st of 2025.

1:35 Um the degree to which the concept of abundance

1:38 has reached something like full penetration of the political discourse.

1:42 Certainly the discourse of the Democratic party.

1:44 You look at the fact that, you know, governors Kathy Hokll,

1:47 JB Pritsker are talking about how their solutions to the energy

1:51 crisis or the housing crisis must begin with a supply side policy.

1:54 That tells me that this is not just a word that's being banded about.

1:57 It's a concept.

1:58 Look at problems, solve them on the supply side

2:01 that is being actively talked about at the level of governors,

2:04 at the level of Congress, at the level of the Senate.

2:06 Um, Zoran Mdani has called out the concept

2:09 of abundance and has paired his policy

2:11 of rent freezes with a policy of helping developers build in New York City.

2:15 So that's the level of vibes.

2:16 I think it it it's clearly entered this level of of mimetic

2:20 strength that is far beyond my wildest dreams of 13 months ago.

2:24 At the level of legislation, I'd say it's like a BB+.

2:27 Um, you know, one bill that Gavin Newsome signed

2:30 is literally called Abundant and Affordable Homes Near Transit Act.

2:34 you abundant is right there in the first word.

2:37 Um there's legislation that's been passed around

2:39 the country that also has tried um many times

2:42 explicitly citing abundance to make it easier

2:44 to build housing and easier to build clean energy.

2:46 But then I think where the strongest criticism of our movement

2:49 has to begin is at the level of outcomes.

2:51 You know, California should be commended for the law that it signed.

2:56 But if you have the misfortune of going to say Fred the St.

2:59 Louis data website and looking up housing

3:02 starts in California between say 2021 and 2026,

3:06 you do not see the publication of the book

3:09 Abundance by Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson in those statistics.

3:12 What's even more worrisome to me, you look at 2015 to 2026,

3:15 you don't even see the Yimi movement.

3:16 That is exactly right and that's pretty concerning.

3:20 Um, we said in our book, judge political movements by their outcomes.

3:26 The bright side is maybe you could say

3:28 it's too early to count our outcome successes.

3:30 But the very fair criticism of our movement right now is where are the outcomes

3:35 especially in states like California where

3:38 the volume of abundance has been the loudest.

3:42 Mark, so I think I have a slightly more optimistic perspective.

3:45 More optimistic than that.

3:47 That's pretty optimistic.

3:50 My view is that your book and the associated

3:56 effort to rethink progressive policy um uh is a sort

4:04 of a remarkable change in the sense that from the beginning

4:09 of the progressive movement in the late 1800s through the 1950s,

4:14 basically the progressive answer to most public policy questions was

4:20 put the government in charge and it will make enormous strides,

4:24 centralize power and we will bring power

4:27 to the Tennessee Valley through the Tennessee Valley Authority.

4:30 We will uh remake the banking system through the Federal Reserve.

4:34 We had a whole series of ideas that were grounded in this notion

4:38 that we were going to have strong centralized power do big things.

4:44 And then beginning in sort of the late 50s

4:47 and into the 60s a different idea which had been there

4:51 at the beginning but had really been uh sequestered

4:53 by this sort of idea that big government could do big things

4:57 uh emerges and there are books like Cight Mills's power

5:01 elite and then the the SDS puts out the portion statement

5:05 and the core notion that they are beginning to seed

5:09 inside the progressive movement is actually uh centralized power is bad

5:15 and we need to uh take on the core elite

5:19 that have been making all these decisions and uh the progressive

5:24 movement becomes about speaking truth to power in almost every

5:29 form and you see that uh in the reaction to uh

5:33 the civil rights movement that's that speaking truth to the the power

5:36 of Jim Crow you see it in uh secondwave

5:39 feminism you see it in the uh the objection to Uh

5:43 you you see that in the reaction to urban renewal,

5:46 to the highway program, Silent Spring, ultimately the power broker,

5:50 which is my book is sort of in conversation with the power broker.

5:54 But in all of these all all of these are

5:57 strikes against the old progressive way of governing.

6:03 It is to push power down to empower little people who have been

6:07 bulldozed in the proverbial sense and in the literal sense uh to be

6:11 able to stand up against centralized power and that by the mid1 1970s

6:16 is the speaking truth to power is the central idea of the progressive movement.

6:22 I think what abundance has done for the first time really since then is to open

6:27 up a conversation about whether we need to rethink

6:31 that core notion of what progressivism is about.

6:34 In the old notion, the sense was that we needed to in all

6:39 cases put more oversight on government rather than letting it cook.

6:43 And now I think we're beginning to say many of us on the far

6:48 left uh and in more moderate circles like we need government to function

6:53 uh just sort of generally and I think like that was not

6:57 a conversation we were having 18 months ago in in nearly the same way.

7:02 All right.

7:02 So so both of you are are speaking more

7:04 in the uh grand march to triumph uh register here.

7:09 So I'm gonna come in with things I'm more worried about.

7:12 So, I probably agree with a lot of what you said,

7:15 Derek, but at the level of vibes,

7:18 abundance has been more factionally controversial

7:23 in the Democratic party than I would

7:25 have expected and has cut into it in ways that I wouldn't expected.

7:30 Sort of setting off a big populist liberal fight.

7:34 And I think whether or not that fight is constructive and whether or not

7:40 the synthesis that come out of it are constructive is unknown as of yet.

7:45 My absolutely biggest worry though is not

7:48 the critiques of abundance outside the tent,

7:51 but a kind of small balness that I see emerging inside the tent.

7:58 When when I think about failure modes for what

8:00 this could be and what it could be becoming,

8:04 it's an abundance ends up as a synonym for efficiency that we've rebranded

8:11 an agenda for state capacity that it's just I always hear people like

8:15 I don't disagree with cutting red tape as if like all abundance is

8:18 is about cutting red tape as opposed to an actual radical vision of planitude.

8:24 And I think something that neither of our books ended up doing all

8:27 that well was really describing what that vision of the future would look like.

8:32 You know, you imagine a candidate, you know,

8:34 running for the Democratic nomination in 2028

8:37 or running for the presidency in 2028.

8:40 What are the ways that they describe what this abundant future is to look like?

8:47 Is it you're promising to build just 5 million houses?

8:49 Does that mean anything to anybody?

8:52 How do you make clean energy abundance a concept that people can actually feel?

8:57 How is that something people are excited about?

8:59 And then this this goes to another thing

9:01 that I think is going quite poorly actually.

9:04 The back half of abundance, as you know better than anyone,

9:08 is about trying to build a progressive politics of technology.

9:12 And I think the way particularly the AI conversation has gone and the often

9:17 quite merited um anger that is building at AI leaders and AI companies.

9:24 I see that as actually farther away than I did at the beginning of 2025.

9:28 So with all that on the table, uh our book begins with housing.

9:31 I think housing is the place where you see the most legislative action,

9:34 where you see the most um governors and and and politicians talking about it.

9:39 A lot of the examples in the book are from California,

9:41 where I'm from, where I was when we wrote much of the book.

9:44 The governor of California, Gavin Newsome,

9:46 has very much embraced the abundance critique.

9:47 And so I want to play this clip of Gavin Newsome on Jimmy Kimmel.

9:51 Is California overregulated?

9:53 Because it feels like there are a lot of well-meaning laws, rules, etc.

9:57 that get in the way of building your house, of opening a restaurant.

10:01 Uh, you know, I've experienced this myself.

10:04 What What do we do about that?

10:06 No, we I mean, we need a liberalism that builds and we have to own that.

10:10 And I'm very much part of this sort of new nomenclature.

10:13 We call this abundance agenda and we've got to reconcile that.

10:16 We've got to be more focused on time to delivery,

10:20 not just rhetoric, not just what we're for.

10:22 We got to actually deliver and manifest it.

10:24 That's why this year we did the most

10:26 significant housing reforms in our state's history.

10:28 We did something that hadn't been done in decades.

10:31 We've tried to address land use reforms, what we call secret reforms.

10:34 We weren't able to get it done.

10:36 We finally were able to get it done this year in a meaningful way.

10:39 But this is a meaningful topic for Democrats to recognize.

10:43 We have to deliver on big and bold things.

10:46 Trump breaks things.

10:49 Democrats need to build things.

10:51 But we have to actually deliver on that promise.

10:53 Speaking of Trump's reform, Derek, what do you think when you hear that?

10:57 I I definitely don't want to give the same answer to every question,

10:59 but I hear the governor of California describing

11:04 a legislative victory in terms that literally quote our book,

11:09 a liberalism that builds abundance.

11:11 He's being asked questions by a late night host

11:13 that are basically like LLM summaries of our book.

11:17 But then you look at the outcomes and California

11:20 still hasn't actually increased housing starts in the what is

11:24 it now six months to since that bill was signed

11:27 nine months after the debate over that bill really began.

11:30 That's not the fault of that legislation necessarily.

11:35 You could think of it a couple ways.

11:37 You could think one that there's a set of problems that have accumulated

11:40 in California over the last 50 years that have made it harder to build housing.

11:45 And this is one important step to ungunk that process.

11:49 That's maybe that's an optimistic way to frame it.

11:52 Another way to frame it is that, you know,

11:53 legislation is not the only ingredient when it comes to housing construction.

11:58 We're in an environment with an elevated interest rate

12:01 where Trump is waging war against legal and undocumented immigration,

12:05 which is complicating the fact that I think

12:07 40% of construction workers in California are foreign born.

12:11 So, the labor supply of construction work

12:12 in California is scarce and therefore very expensive,

12:15 also raising the cost of housing.

12:17 And you look around the country and there just aren't a lot

12:19 of housing construction uh triumphs at all

12:22 for a variety of macroeconomic reasons.

12:25 I care about outcomes.

12:27 We care about outcomes.

12:29 And if California, Illinois, New York,

12:32 if they're going to pass laws that hold up abundance

12:35 as the inspiration or motivation or philosophy of those laws,

12:39 and then 3 months, 6 months, 2 years later,

12:42 we still don't have the fruits of abundance,

12:45 whether it's building more housing, building more clean energy.

12:48 I I I am worried that that speaks to a gap

12:51 between what I call the legislation vibes and the outcomes.

12:54 Well, here is I think also another way

12:56 of thinking about this that I've become more

12:58 sensitized to in the year after publishing the book

13:01 that I'd like to hear your thoughts on.

13:03 So whether a housing project gets built can depend on a series of things,

13:07 but I think you can often break it

13:08 into into three things when there is demand for it.

13:11 So one is just legally, can you get the damn thing built?

13:15 Can you get the permits?

13:16 Can you get the agreements?

13:17 Can you, you know, get through if it's a big enough project,

13:20 the city council or the planning board or whatever?

13:22 And we focus a lot on that.

13:23 I would say when I look around that there's been

13:26 at least the intellectual victory where there is a something getting closer

13:31 to a broad consensus that you should be able to build

13:34 legally that should be possible in places where we need housing.

13:37 But then there's a question of can you finance the build

13:40 and then there's a question of how much does the build cost?

13:44 What is the cost of construction in terms

13:45 of materials in terms of labor in terms of how much you're paying labor in terms

13:50 of what kind of thing you need to build?

13:52 And I think a good critique of the book that I've heard um is one,

13:56 we don't talk very much about financing.

13:58 And one thing that's been hard is that even

14:00 as a lot of yes in my backyard bills are passing,

14:02 as you sort of mentioned quickly,

14:04 the financing environment has gotten much worse because interest

14:06 rates went way up after the um inflationary period.

14:09 And the second is that cost of construction in a place like California

14:14 is a very fraught topic because nobody wants to see um wages go down.

14:19 Um there's a big deportation agenda uh happening under Donald Trump,

14:23 which as you mentioned is making labor more expensive.

14:26 But even as there's been a lot of victories

14:28 on zoning and exempting things from, you know,

14:30 environmental reviews, the financing side has gotten harder.

14:34 I've definitely talked to mayors and others who say, "Look,

14:37 I've got all these projects I want to see go forward,

14:40 and we've made it possible for them to go forward,

14:42 but the financing the the projects are not penciling out,

14:46 and we don't have an answer to it."

14:47 Yeah.

14:47 The framework that I've developed for this, which I think

14:49 is a critique of that first chapter of that housing chapter,

14:53 is that to really understand housing in America,

14:55 you need to understand a 50-year story,

14:57 which is mostly about rules, a 20year story, which is about business cycles,

15:02 and a 5-year story, which is about the incredibly

15:04 weird business cycle that has followed the pandemic.

15:08 Chapter one of our book, The Housing Chapter, does, I think,

15:10 a very good job explaining the 50-year story

15:13 of how a set of zoning and permitting and environmental

15:17 legislation and rules that accumulated around the 1960s

15:20 and 1970s has slowed housing construction across the country,

15:23 but in particular in blue cities and blue

15:26 states where there is very, very hot demand.

15:28 I think it did a good job of explaining that 50-year accumulation of rules.

15:32 But there's also the 20-year story, which is that after the Great Recession,

15:35 the construction industry in this country was decimated.

15:39 And that led to the 2010s being the decade

15:41 with the fewest houses built per capita of any decade on record.

15:46 That's not just a rules story.

15:48 That's a story about macroeconomics.

15:50 It's a story about the fact that after the Great Recession,

15:52 there just wasn't demand or available labor or companies sufficient to build

15:57 the kind of housing that we would need in the 2020s.

15:59 And then what happened in the 2020s was

16:01 just like one piece of mayhem after another.

16:04 You had the pandemic.

16:04 You had inflation.

16:06 You have now I think a scarcity of construction labor

16:09 which makes it more expensive to build in many places.

16:11 And so I do think that to really understand the problems that states,

16:17 the governors and mayors face when it comes to housing,

16:20 you you do have to understand that there is

16:21 this kind of like Russia nesting doll of problems.

16:24 50 years of rules, 20 years of macroeconomic crisis,

16:28 and then five years of macroeconomic and financing crisis.

16:32 And and that's really put us where we are.

16:34 And so I I agree.

16:36 I think and like you,

16:38 I'm I'm I'm picking up the criticisms that I heard about financing,

16:42 about the fact that if you want to build this level of housing,

16:45 you need to be obsessed with the question

16:47 of how do we actually finance that construction?

16:50 how especially do we make loans to developers at a time of high interest rates

16:55 possible for them to keep up

16:56 with the level of housing construction that you want?

16:59 Those are really really strong critiques.

17:01 I think they click into the story that we were telling the 50-year story.

17:05 Um but I do think that that it is fair

17:07 to argue that our book missed that very important ingredient.

17:10 Mark, there's also a question of power here

17:12 that I know you've been very focused on.

17:14 So I I'm going to keep California in the front

17:16 of my mind here just because I know it very well.

17:18 But very recently we've seen huge

17:20 clashes between Governor Nuome and cities across

17:23 California because they are all these big bills are passing at the state

17:28 level and then the cities are using all kinds of often fairly

17:32 innovative uh approaches to just making them not work to dragging their feet.

17:37 Right?

17:37 This is a big conflict between Los Angeles and the state at the moment,

17:40 but not only Los Angeles.

17:42 And this is hard.

17:45 The question of who should have the right to say

17:48 yes and who should have the right to say no.

17:51 And I think even within conversations among, you know, people on the left,

17:56 they're very there's like a lot of contrasting intuitions here for good reasons.

18:01 How do you think about this?

18:03 Well, h housing to my mind is sort of an outlier

18:07 within the abundance agenda because uh unlike in linear infrastructure,

18:15 transit lines, train lines, uh electrical transmission lines,

18:21 um the challenge here is to empower someone who owns

18:26 a plot of land to build housing or more housing on it.

18:30 And I say that because in this circumstance, in the world of housing,

18:36 the challenge is that the state wants more housing and they're up here

18:42 and the person that has purchased a plot of land wants to build housing,

18:46 but the neighborhood doesn't.

18:49 Right?

18:49 So, you've got it's sort of a sandwich and it's the it's

18:52 the peanut butter and jelly that's that that's gumming up the works.

18:56 Uh to I think mix metaphors.

18:58 Um uh and in this case, in the case of housing,

19:02 like what Buffy Wixs and Scott Weiner have largely tried

19:05 to do is to push power down to the homeowner,

19:09 which feels good to us as progressives who want to speak truth to power, right?

19:13 We we we don't like it when some oppressive force sitting above

19:18 us uh tells us we can't do the thing that is good.

19:23 Um, and so empowering someone who lives near a transit stop,

19:27 who who has a a a an underutilized piece of land in a city

19:32 that they can build a bunch of housing on it feels good to us.

19:36 And that's largely what's passed.

19:38 It's pushing power down to the land owners that they can do more.

19:44 And then you you reach into these challenges of financing and whatnot.

19:47 I have to say in the scheme of things I you

19:50 guys are journalists and I have spent a long time in politics.

19:53 The idea that a year later you'd have a bunch of more

19:56 housing built because of a book is seems a little far-fetched to me.

19:59 I agree with that.

20:01 But but but you know uh I I like the standard you're holding yourself.

20:04 Well, let me I I will add one thing on that because

20:06 I think the way to think about why you should worry about

20:09 this is that it's not like the last year was the first time

20:12 California or any of these states passed a bunch of new housing bills.

20:15 They were they were bigger and they were cleaner.

20:18 But there has been a decade of housing bills being passed in California.

20:22 Dozens and dozens of bills including many

20:24 that were framed to me as transformative that just weren't.

20:28 And so to what you're saying and as somebody who's worked in politics,

20:31 you've seen this and as somebody who's covered legislation, I've seen it.

20:34 I think there is a tendency to assume when a bill has passed, it's done.

20:39 Right?

20:40 if you've been fighting for the bill and you know you're you know finally

20:43 we got the duplex bill or whatever it is well it's passed great great

20:48 news everybody we're going to get our duplexes

20:49 and often it doesn't work that way

20:51 a lot of things don't work in practice the way you think they would

20:54 and that implies to me particularly on housing um that when you don't have

21:00 enough consensus on the ground for something it can be very very very hard

21:05 to implement it because cities and neighborhoods

21:08 and planning commissions and so on use

21:10 a lot of different uh tools to you know block their projects in other ways.

21:17 I mean the the core question you're asking here and I think we're

21:20 all asking is who should decide what housing is built when and where?

21:24 How how should that decision-m process work?

21:28 And so when I wrote Why Nothing Works, the sort of the big aha moment I

21:32 realized was that for a lot of progressivism's history,

21:36 our view was centralize that power in the hands

21:40 of one person who will decide what is built.

21:43 And that's how Levittowns were built.

21:45 It's that that's how Robert Moses built housing all over New York City.

21:49 That's how uh you know s sort

21:51 of the the establishment built housing for a long time.

21:54 And then we switched horses, right?

21:58 We decided we didn't like that model because in many

22:00 cases it was abusive to people who lived in communities

22:03 that were bulldozed or uh they were discriminatory or they were

22:08 not sensitive to what was what was happening in the environment.

22:11 So, uh we created over the course of 50 years a whole series

22:15 of laws that put new checks um on on those who would build housing.

22:21 And uh we're now beginning to try to dial

22:25 back the number of veto points in the process.

22:30 And you're right, it's been 10 years uh of of small

22:35 bore changes and now I think more substantial changes.

22:38 Um but I do think that you're going to see, you know, I'm from Rhode Island.

22:42 we've got a bunch of more housing starts than we had and that like

22:46 I understand that it's not the immediate satisfaction of suddenly uh we have

22:50 five million more units across the country but it is like it's a different

22:54 discussion among progressives and that feels to me like a a sea change.

22:59 So so something that I wrote about in our housing chapter was

23:03 the anger in the 60s and the 70s that America was just getting uglier.

23:09 The term ticky tacky comes from, you know,

23:11 the song about the uh housing in Daily City,

23:14 like in, you know, not too far south from San Francisco.

23:18 You had the accurate view that a lot of forests

23:22 and rivers were being despoiled and the growth machine, government construction,

23:28 all of it that the public lost a kind of faith in it

23:31 because instead of this building making

23:34 their surroundings more livable and more beautiful,

23:38 it just became these soulless gray, you know,

23:42 mixeduse um anonymous uh you know, construction.

23:47 And and so actually one thing that has been very very badly underplayed

23:51 here is the centrality of aesthetics in whether or not people want to build.

23:56 I don't know that I buy this idea at all.

23:58 Um at least I think it's incredibly underpowered as an explanation.

24:02 So the claim on the table seems

24:03 to be that Americans 1950s and 1960s turned against

24:07 the growth machine as you described it primarily out

24:10 of an aversion to the ugliness of the world.

24:13 Ugliness is not the word that I would use.

24:15 Right.

24:15 The word that I would use is um uh environmental degradation.

24:21 I mean the environmentalist movement of the 1960s and 1970s was about

24:24 the fact that people were dying from the air and dying from the water.

24:29 That's not a question of aesthetics.

24:32 That's a question of health.

24:35 If you want to understand why it's easy to build in Texas

24:39 but difficult to build in California and all you have is a beauty explanation,

24:44 well then you're essentially saying that continued building in Texas

24:47 is made possible because Houston is so damn beautiful.

24:50 Houston is not so damn beautiful.

24:52 The reason that it's easy to build in Houston, I think,

24:54 has very little to do with like the aesthetic perfection of downtown Houston,

24:59 and much more to do with the fact that there's a system of customs and laws

25:04 and a lack of zoning regulation that simply makes

25:06 it easier to build up and to build out.

25:08 Same goes for Dallas.

25:09 Same goes for Austin.

25:11 Same goes for San Antonio.

25:12 I want us to build beautifully.

25:13 I want to build things that people love.

25:15 in part because I want the growth machine of the 21st

25:18 century to have democratic approval such that we build houses,

25:23 people love them, they want us to build more houses,

25:25 I think that's a fly flywheel we should hope for.

25:29 But if you really want to understand why pedaluma stopped building in the 1970s,

25:34 why you can't build in San Francisco,

25:36 why it's so much harder to build in blue cities and blue states than in Texas.

25:40 I don't think the beauty argument or the beauty paradigm gets you very far.

25:46 I think that is probably right.

25:48 I I in some ways want to put beauty closer to the center of politics

25:52 or at least say it is more important than we give it credit for in politics.

25:56 And also I don't think it explains why

25:57 Austin builds homes and you know Los Angeles doesn't.

26:01 But I actually want to hold then on Austin for a second because one fight

26:05 that still felt fairly live when we were

26:07 writing the book is does building housing lower rents?

26:11 Right?

26:11 There was an argument that because demand is always so high,

26:14 you can build homes, but it doesn't do anything.

26:16 It just allows more kind of wealthy people to move into them and you know,

26:19 maybe it's even like building freeways where

26:20 it increases so much demand that you know,

26:22 you don't get any uh faster travel time.

26:25 You've done some reporting on Austin.

26:27 That's been a kind of hell of a story over the past year or two.

26:30 What have we seen there?

26:32 What we've seen essentially is that Austin built

26:34 an enormous number of homes in the 2010s

26:36 and early 2020s and average rents have gone down

26:40 down down over the last 18 to 24 months.

26:43 Austin is like the canonical story here.

26:45 But the story that I find more impressive in a way is Dallas, Texas.

26:51 Dallas, Texas between 2019 and the early 2020s added

26:56 a population equivalent to the size of urban Boston.

27:01 Hundreds of thousands of people moved into the Dallas metro.

27:04 And if Dallas were like Los Angeles and San Francisco,

27:07 the average price of a home in Dallas,

27:10 Texas right now would be around $3 billion.

27:12 But that's not what happened.

27:14 No, I'm just joking.

27:15 It's like it would be so absurdly high you

27:17 wouldn't you have to calculate it in like Bitcoin.

27:19 But what happened instead is that housing prices in Dallas

27:22 have actually declined over the last three and a half years.

27:25 Dallas built so much that construction

27:29 increased per capita throughout this period.

27:32 Dallas builds more housing today than any other metro in the country.

27:35 That is a triumph of allowing the housing market to work.

27:40 And that's because housing is not a special kind of good.

27:44 It's a good that like so many other goods is responsive to supply and demand.

27:48 Given a steady level of demand, if you restrict supply, prices go up.

27:53 If you add supply, prices stabilize.

27:56 And if you add enough supply, prices can actually go down.

27:59 It's why you have in so many places where people want to live,

28:02 price is going through the roof because we've simply made it too hard to build.

28:05 It is really, really important to me

28:07 that whatever explanation that people have for this phenomenon,

28:10 some people say it's about billionaires or corporate interests.

28:13 I say look to Texas.

28:15 Texas has billionaires.

28:17 Texas has corporate interests,

28:19 but Texas also has an entirely different set of rules and customs

28:23 and permitting regulation that simply makes it

28:27 easier for supply to respond to demand.

28:30 And as a result, we have outcomes in Texas that are better than the rent freeze

28:36 that Mani has promised New York and other uh

28:40 left-wing politicians have promised their own cities and states.

28:42 We have something better than a rent freeze.

28:43 we have rents going down because we've made it easier to build.

28:47 So, you mentioned Mani and the rent freeze and uh of course

28:51 there's another side to his agenda which is to increase supply, right?

28:54 Mandani is attempting a synthesis I think you're seeing much more often

28:58 now on the Democratic side which is price controls paired with supply increases.

29:03 You'll sometimes even hear these argued as uh

29:07 one creating the support for the other, right?

29:09 Price controls creating political momentum for supply increases.

29:12 I want to play a a clip of Mam Donnie here speaking in March.

29:16 And we're all here together today for an announcement

29:20 where we launched the neighborhood builders fasttrack.

29:25 What does that mean?

29:26 Because I know it doesn't explain itself.

29:29 What this means is that we are creating

29:32 a pre-qualified roster of developers and in doing so

29:36 we are going to cut down on pre-development time

29:39 for new projects from 18 months to 10 months.

29:46 Now, when you couple that with the referendums

29:48 that were passed just late last year,

29:52 that means that we are cutting down on the time it takes

29:54 to build affordable housing in this city by up to 2 and 1/2 years.

29:59 And I say that to you in a city where we know that time is money.

30:03 Yes, sir.

30:03 Here here's what I like about that clip

30:06 and that I think reflects something bigger happening in across

30:10 democratic policym which is a recognition that speed matters

30:16 and in a way that was I think not admitted

30:20 a lot of policym actually took the view that delay

30:23 was good that delay was good because policy is

30:25 complicated its effects are complicated and what we need

30:29 is a lot of process and time to surface information,

30:34 surface objections, surface concerns.

30:35 You can really see this in the way environmental reviews are conducted.

30:38 You can see this in the way that, you know, housing is built.

30:41 And I don't think we often said like delay is good,

30:44 but in practice, we believed delay was good.

30:47 I mean, there you have a democratic socialist out

30:49 there saying as a applause line, time is money.

30:52 And I think the sense that uh like speed is progressive.

30:57 It's more affordable, but also it allows you to deliver at the time frame

31:00 of elections and show government making a difference in people's life.

31:04 That is a principle that I am seeing people take more seriously.

31:08 I'm not saying that's just our fault or anything of that nature,

31:11 but I think it's actually really important.

31:13 And recognizing that delay is corrosive to democracy because

31:17 you can't feel government in your life is a really,

31:20 really, really important shift for democratic side policym to make.

31:26 Mark, you've written about this explicitly.

31:28 Among liberals, input was considered a costless virtue.

31:33 It was considered costless to have long periods of input, to prize input,

31:38 to say that the ultimate expression of democracy

31:41 is people standing up and telling their city council,

31:44 don't build this thing anywhere close to me.

31:46 That was seen as more democratic in some places than the actual vote

31:49 for the mayor who promised for h who promised to deliver housing to that city.

31:53 and they're and actually like found that like

31:55 the people who showed up on Tuesday night at the city council meeting were

31:57 the veto point that prevented him from allowing housing.

32:01 People also use the term procedure fetish as if

32:04 progressives just sort of like procedure for procedure sake.

32:06 Nick Bagley's term.

32:07 That's Nick Bagley's term.

32:09 And um my general view here is that we're

32:13 not looking for procedure just because we like it.

32:16 We're not looking for delay because we like delay.

32:19 We have a fantasy and we've had it now for several decades

32:23 that if you get everybody in the room early enough in a planning process,

32:28 you can create a product or an outcome that has no tradeoffs.

32:34 And the truth is that we're facing and one

32:37 of the major barriers to abundance is we're facing real trade-offs here.

32:42 I I mean I do want to point out you

32:44 know the housing crisis in New York City there's always

32:46 been a housing crisis in New York City and we

32:49 put all sorts of restrictions on what government could do.

32:51 We are now trying to figure out I think Mdani Warren people in the moderate

32:57 wing of the party people who are further left how are we going to do

33:00 this in a fair and expeditious way and I I think the abundance discourse has

33:08 wanted in many cases to pit us or you guys against the left and that's not

33:17 an accurate portrayal of what's happening you're

33:20 seeing Mom Donnie Elizabeth Warren is author

33:24 of the maybe the most pro-abundant housing bill

33:28 introduced forever uh in the Senate and has passed

33:32 the Senate and I I think you know to the degree that uh there seems

33:36 to be tension about this here's an idea

33:39 where it seems to me that there's growing consensus.

33:41 The polling outfit Blue Rose um recently did this survey where

33:46 they asked people whether they liked abundance messaging or populist messaging.

33:50 And it turns out that the most popular

33:52 messaging was a synthesis of abundance and populism.

33:56 It was things like quote working Americans can't afford

33:59 the basics and it's because we stop building them.

34:01 Not enough housing, not enough energy, not enough child care.

34:04 And what little gets built goes to the wealthy first.

34:08 Democrats will build an America that works for everyone,

34:11 not just those at the top.

34:12 That was the message that pulled the best.

34:14 I don't think that that's dispositive.

34:16 I mean, testing messaging is not the beall endall of politics.

34:19 And look, there are philosophical differences between liberals

34:22 and populists that we shouldn't run away from.

34:24 Like, they exist.

34:26 But the fights often obscured the degree to which

34:31 individuals could hold simultaneously both populist and abundance principles.

34:38 And I've come to think of this somewhat cheesily as the abundance mullet,

34:42 which is to say economic populism in the front and abundance in the back.

34:45 So who's wearing the the abundance mullet,

34:47 as horrifying as that might be to imagine?

34:50 Zor Mamdani ran on freezing the rent,

34:54 but here he is talking about making it easier

34:56 and faster for developers to build in New York City.

34:59 To be fair, he ran on both.

35:00 He did.

35:01 Yes, you're right.

35:01 He ran on both.

35:02 But I think if you pulled people and asked them, "What did you hear more about?

35:06 Freezing the rent or accelerating the time with which developers could

35:10 start getting building in Manhattan and Brooklyn." I think most people associate

35:14 him with the mimemetic freeze the rent rather than the less

35:17 mimetic uh shortening the permitting time from 18 months to 10 months.

35:22 So he's one example.

35:22 Another example I think is um is New

35:24 Jersey Governor Mikey Cheryl who ran on uh freezing

35:29 uh utility increases um making it easier for people

35:32 to afford electricity by talking about price caps.

35:35 But her second executive order was all about

35:38 supply side uh renovations uh to encourage the construction

35:42 of solar and storage in particular by making

35:44 it easier to build energy in New Jersey.

35:47 So there again you have the promise of freeze the utility increase

35:51 in the front with the promise of expanding supply in the back.

35:55 So, uh, I was going to do this later,

35:57 but I I think I'm going to do it now because I think one

36:00 of the dangers of this conversation is

36:01 that the three of us largely are are proabundance.

36:04 And I have done previous episodes where I've

36:06 had critics sitting at, in fact, this very table.

36:09 But I want to try to offer up the critique so it is represented

36:13 in the strongest way I can which is that yes of course there can be a synthesis

36:17 of populism and abundance and you can see

36:18 it in somebody like you know maybe a mom

36:20 Donnie but that in fact in practice abundance

36:25 has two huge problems from the populist perspective.

36:29 One is that a lot of rich people and billionaires

36:32 really like it and are funding things with abundance

36:35 in the name and that they are going to use abundance

36:39 as a mask or a vehicle to push the Democratic party,

36:44 you know, back in their direction.

36:47 Um, and the other which is like the big

36:48 critique that gets made of certainly our book,

36:50 I don't know if it is as true in the critique that gets

36:53 made of yours is that abundance just isn't focused on the right enemies.

36:58 that what politics should be about is

37:01 a confrontation with corporate power and what abundance

37:05 is at least perceived as trying to make politics about is a more positive sum.

37:11 We can all build, we can all get along.

37:13 It's a sort of more liberal uh approach to things.

37:17 That I think is like the strongest version I can give.

37:19 But you can hear um Elizabeth Warren make a version

37:22 of this argument in a a speech he gave not too long ago.

37:26 So yes, we need more government efficiency, a lot more.

37:31 But many in the abundance movement are doing little to call out

37:36 corporate culpability and billionaire influence

37:39 in creating and defending those very inefficiencies.

37:45 Instead, abundance has become a rallying cry,

37:50 not just for a few policy nerds worried about zoning,

37:53 but for wealthy donors and other corporate aligned Democrats who are

37:58 putting big time muscle behind making

38:01 Democrats more favorable to big businesses.

38:06 It looks like the corporate tycoons have found one more way to stop

38:10 the Democratic party from tackling a rigged system with too much energy.

38:16 She goes on to kind of note that Reed Hoffman, who's a, you know,

38:20 tech billionaire and and influential tech figure,

38:23 has been sending the book around to to people he knows.

38:26 I want to ask this of of both of you.

38:28 What do you understand to be the relationship between abundance

38:33 and corporations and abundance and concentrations

38:37 of wealth and income and power?

38:41 Mark, look, I think there are certain

38:44 cases where concentrated corporate power is a problem.

38:50 Uh we're we're coming off a week where there

38:53 were a bunch of victories for the anti- monopouist movement,

38:58 uh Live Nation and Ticket Master.

39:01 Like I'm not sure that any of the three of us would voice any

39:05 objection to taking a a strong stance

39:09 on abuses of corporate power in that realm.

39:13 As someone who goes to a lot of uh music shows,

39:16 I really really hate ticket fees.

39:18 I really don't like them.

39:19 So, so, so there you go.

39:20 I But my concern about that critique is that if you look at the stories,

39:26 at least in my book and several of the stories in your book,

39:28 like the problem in many cases is not created by corporate power.

39:33 Like, you know, the the last chapter of my book is about

39:36 an effort to build a clean energy transmission line through the state of Maine,

39:40 which is really just a like a a string through a bunch of forests in Maine.

39:46 It's proposed in 2016 and it's constructed in 2026.

39:53 Like not because there was some corporate behemoth that was uh

39:58 standing in the way or trying to drive up its own.

40:02 Like the the the fight there was about whether it was worth it

40:06 to imperil some portion of a pristine forest in northern Maine with a wire.

40:13 And the way that people used the levers available within

40:17 the government uh made it so that we could not replace

40:23 something like 700,000 cars worth of carbon into the atmosphere through

40:29 old fossil fuel generation with clean hydro power coming from Canada.

40:35 Like that's not a problem about corporate power.

40:39 That's a problem with can government make an expeditious decision.

40:44 Durk, I want to say something really clearly.

40:45 I think the people who focus on corporate power being

40:49 the most significant problem in America have some very good ideas.

40:52 I also think frankly that we just heard from Elizabeth Warren,

40:55 the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau in a way

40:57 is like kind of a very abundancy agency.

40:59 I mean it consolidated what used to be

41:03 she says earlier in that speech

41:04 that the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau which

41:06 she helped found and and and ideulate is like an abundance before abundance.

41:10 Oh great then maybe maybe I'm just totally ripping off her point

41:13 here because I I read it months ago but I think she's right.

41:16 I mean it consolidated what used to be

41:18 entirely disperse regulatory authority in the government

41:21 in order to bring it to bear to help consumers against corporate power.

41:25 That strikes me as exactly what we were talking about when it comes to state

41:29 capacity and your line which you repeated so

41:31 much on our book tour about deregulating government,

41:34 getting government out of its own way,

41:36 getting government to work faster and better for the public.

41:39 CFPB seems like an absolute unaloyed triumph in that respect.

41:44 At the same time, I think people who fixate on corporate power,

41:47 while they have some very good ideas, have some not very good ideas.

41:49 I mean, last year, not going to open up this can of worms all the way,

41:52 but I was engaged in a very protracted debate against anti-

41:55 monopoly folks about the degree to which Dallas was a housing oligopoly.

42:01 I don't think it is.

42:02 I don't think we should be fixated

42:03 on punishing builders who are successfully adding housing

42:07 that seems like taking this one lens

42:09 and applying it where it shouldn't be applied.

42:12 And that tells me that if the lens of corporate power leads

42:16 to both some very good ideas and some not very good ideas,

42:19 then it might not be the single

42:21 best lens through which to see improving America.

42:24 I am not a populist.

42:26 I am a liberal.

42:27 I am concerned not about corporate power specifically but about

42:32 power but about how power can manifest in strange places.

42:37 It can manifest absolutely at the level of corporations and monopoly.

42:41 It can also manifest at the level of the neighborhood.

42:44 As Mark was just explaining, when a group of neighbors stop a new

42:49 apartment from going up by lobbying the city

42:52 council and mayor to not build housing where it is where it should be added,

42:57 what is that if not the application of power?

43:00 In 2017, the New York Times, where we are sitting,

43:03 published this incredible piece that I think

43:05 went back and forth between us and notion,

43:07 even if the final didn't make it in the book.

43:09 And it was about the incredibly expensive per mile

43:11 cost of connecting Grand Central to the Long Island Railroad.

43:16 Why was it so expensive to build a train, a tunnel in New York?

43:22 Partly it was about consulting fees.

43:24 Partly it was about construction.

43:26 Partly it was about the fact that public union staffing levels in New York City

43:31 are like four times higher than they are in the typical city or state in Europe,

43:36 France, Spain, the UK.

43:38 And that's why our construction costs are so much higher.

43:40 So if I'm a if I'm a populist sitting here, I'm going to interrupt you.

43:43 Sure.

43:43 If I'm a populist sitting here,

43:44 I'm somebody who more believes with this in this critique.

43:48 Here's my answer to what you just said.

43:51 Yes, it's all true.

43:52 Yes.

43:52 Uh if I'm a if I'm I think making the best argument I can make at least.

43:56 Yes, that's all true.

43:58 But you sure seem more excited when you start talking about

44:02 the power being misused by the neighborhood group or by the public

44:06 sector union or by the poorly run government and you

44:11 sort of yada yada yada your way past the corporate power.

44:14 I think that some of the critique comes from a a feeling

44:18 and I have my own answer to this but I'm curious for for yours.

44:21 a feeling that yes, you could certainly have an abundance,

44:25 a version of abundance that understood corporate power as one of the many

44:30 blockages and you know and and often a very central blockage.

44:34 But in practice, the way abundance is written,

44:37 the way many of the people arguing for it seem to argue for it,

44:40 there's like a yeah, the anti-corporate folks are right sometimes.

44:45 Let's go back to talking about how government doesn't work, right?

44:47 Let's go back to talking about where public sector unions

44:50 increase costs and that it's in that where the real message,

44:55 the real priority set is revealed.

44:58 There's a way in which I'm not exactly sure how to answer that question.

45:02 Um, it's a really good question.

45:06 Why am I more excited to make the point that I seem more excited to make?

45:11 Um, you know that feeling when like when

45:15 you're in a room and everyone around you is

45:18 like freaking out about something and in a weird

45:20 way that like calms you down because you're like,

45:23 "Oh, everyone's freaked out about this thing,

45:25 so I don't need to add my anxiety to like

45:28 the median level of anxiety in this room." That's kind

45:32 of how I feel about certain aspects of fearing

45:36 the influence of corporate power in monopolies and energy and entertainment.

45:44 I see it's being covered.

45:47 I see people writing about it.

45:48 I see people getting agitated about it.

45:50 I think it's good that the government is winning lawsuits against

45:53 entertainment companies that are abusing their own power to raise ticket prices.

45:57 I think it's good.

45:59 But that's not where the debate is.

46:01 I'm excited about adding an impression that I

46:05 think we introduced you and I to the conversation,

46:08 which is that we are so used to seeing

46:12 this version of power exist at the level of corporations.

46:17 And we're so used to seeing the way that that can

46:20 have pernitious impacts on consumers that we miss other instantiations of power.

46:27 And a neighborhood can in a strange way be an instantiation of power.

46:31 It doesn't seem like some nefarious thing when a nicel

46:36 lookinging woman stands up at a city council meeting and says,

46:38 "I would prefer to not build an apartment building behind

46:41 my farm because I'm afraid of my horses being freaked out

46:44 by the construction noise." But I want us to see

46:47 that that that is power if it stops an apartment building from being built.

46:51 So, it's always difficult to but but but important

46:54 maybe to respond to a question about like affect.

46:57 Um maybe the first thing I should have

46:58 said was I encourage people to read the transcript

47:00 where my affect isn't visible rather than watch

47:02 this on YouTube where my affect is visible.

47:05 But I really do think it's like that if if I'm

47:07 really reaching down into understanding like why am I passionate about getting

47:12 people to see these these other ways that you know surprising

47:17 accumulations of power can stop things from happening in the public good.

47:20 It's because that's where I think we're missing the story.

47:24 This is a conversation,

47:26 this conversation among progressives between the populace

47:29 and the abundance nicks or whatever we're called,

47:32 uh, that is more than a century old, right?

47:36 At the turn of the 20th century, and I go through this in my book,

47:38 the turn of the 20th century,

47:40 the railroads have completely remade the American economy.

47:43 power is accumulating and the people who are concerned about these monopolies

47:48 have two wildly different ideas about what to do about it.

47:51 One idea is anti- monopoly.

47:53 It's brandian.

47:54 It's uh big is bad, small is beautiful.

47:57 How do we carve these things up so that the old sort of 19th century kind

48:02 of capitalism that Louis Brandeise had seen

48:04 on the on the on the streets of Louisville,

48:07 Kentucky as being grown up could be reestablished.

48:10 But there was a second idea which was we should build up what was then like just

48:14 a shadow of a government that so that it

48:16 could accurately and and powerfully regulate uh with centralized power.

48:22 The Roosevelt proposed a bureau of corporations.

48:25 We eventually get the federal trade commission.

48:27 Before that we have the interstate commerce uh commission which

48:30 is a big bureaucracy designed to to regulate the railroads.

48:34 Um that's a different idea that is taking power

48:36 as it is and pushing it up into some

48:38 big powerful competent government bureaucracy that will do

48:42 the things that ordinary people can't do for themselves.

48:47 And uh I I I think sort of the misunderstanding here

48:51 is that those who say you know we need to attack corporate

48:55 power are just taking the Brendesian notion of it and that the abundance

49:01 ethos hearkens back to the old ideas that existed you know

49:06 from the turn of the 20th century through the 1960s that we

49:09 should be building up government power so that government is capable

49:12 of taking on these corporations that we have people in government who

49:16 can make discretionary decisions about where

49:18 we're going to build transmission lines,

49:20 how we're going to improve transit, where we're going to build housing,

49:23 how we're going to regulate this and that.

49:24 We want bureaucracies to be able to move speedily.

49:28 Um, and we we want them to be able to make decisions in the public interest.

49:32 And strangely enough, it is the reforms that we've seen since the 60s and 70s

49:37 that have slowed government down so they

49:39 cannot be responsive to the corporate challenge.

49:42 And so to my mind like there's a some confusion here

49:45 and that the the the idea that we should abandon abundance in the name of just

49:52 sort of attacking corporations misses the point

49:55 that government should be a competent

49:58 institution that can accurately and thoroughly review

50:03 and challenge corporations when they're doing wrong.

50:07 Can I throw the baseball back to you?

50:08 like h how do you how do you situate the corporate power critique

50:12 in your current conception of abundance slash

50:15 maybe alternative way to ask that question?

50:17 Um a time machine materializes right next to us

50:20 over here takes us back to December 2023

50:24 allowing us just enough time to add a chapter

50:28 7 to the book called abundance and corporate power.

50:32 Do you write that chapter and what do you put in it?

50:36 So I have a couple answers to this.

50:38 Um, one which is more to the way we wrote

50:41 the book and the question I asked you about affect is

50:43 that I think we wrote the book with a couple

50:48 of thoughts but one was it was a book about blind spots

50:53 of liberal and leftist governance and and interesting this is

50:58 actually an argument right the populists often do think

51:00 this to be a blind spot of liberal governance

51:04 but to me corporate power is actually something that the left,

51:08 broadly speaking, understands and is relatively attentive to.

51:12 I mean, we were writing this book when Lena Khan was the chair of the FTC.

51:18 So, one thing that it just wasn't that much

51:20 about was things where I thought, you know,

51:22 progressives kind of had the right idea,

51:26 but that created the impression that it isn't concerned with that.

51:29 And so, I think then you get into two things that are more substantive.

51:33 One is that I think when you are talking about

51:37 building things and this is a book about building things,

51:40 this is a movement about building things

51:42 and typically building them in the real world.

51:45 You are necessarily forced into a complex relationship with corporations

51:50 and functionally everything else because first things are built by corporations.

51:57 Most things will continue to be built by corporations.

52:00 Whether you're talking about drug development where there is a mix

52:03 of obviously public research but then the pharmaceutical industry actually

52:07 does do a huge amount of drug development and you're not

52:09 there's no nobody has a theory of getting away from that.

52:12 Um to when you're talking about you know building

52:15 commercial buildings often building housing

52:17 decarbonizing almost anything you can think of that needs to be built at a large

52:23 scale is going to be built in part by corporations.

52:26 So, you need to find a way to align corporate energy with your program.

52:33 Just sort of being anti-corporate as an orientation isn't going to work.

52:38 Um, and so I think that's one other

52:39 reason why I I've always said that the theory

52:42 of power in abundance is liberal in the sense

52:44 that it believes power can concentrate poorly anywhere.

52:47 It can concentrate poorly among corporations,

52:50 in government, among unions, in neighborhoods.

52:53 that there is no safe uh concentration of power.

52:57 But here's where I think if I could add your chapter seven um I probably would.

53:03 Yeah, Mark, I take your point that a lot of the things we focus

53:06 on in the book uh or frankly that you focus on in your book

53:10 um corporate concentration isn't the reason

53:14 the transmission lines aren't getting built and it's

53:17 not the reason that housing isn't getting built in, you know, this or that city.

53:23 But one thing that we are at a principles

53:26 level arguing for is that government should be stronger,

53:31 more capable of being decisive and then more capable of uh turning

53:37 those decisions into actual concrete and steel and law and so on.

53:42 and the way money affects politics at its

53:46 highest levels from state houses to the federal government.

53:51 I wouldn't have really thought of a campaign finance

53:53 reform chapter in the book the way we initially conceived

53:56 of it and also because I have a bunch on campaign

53:59 finance reform in my first book in my own head.

54:01 I'm like I've covered this.

54:03 But I think the place where I think you could have put in a a chapter 7

54:09 I think the place where on the one hand

54:11 I think progressivism already has like the right view

54:13 on this but it has not been able

54:15 to instantiate this view into policy is the more powerful

54:19 government is the more worried you have to be

54:22 about the distorting influence of money inside of it.

54:26 And so a political system as porous to money

54:30 as the one we have currently is becomes very dangerous.

54:34 So, I I just put out a a podcast about um or with this congressional candidate,

54:39 Alex Boris, who is running uh for Congress in um in New York, and you know,

54:45 this kind of super PAC that is funded

54:48 by co-founders Palunteer and Open AI and Andre

54:51 Horowitz is like dumping money to destroy him

54:55 and and Boris is a former employee of Palunteer,

54:57 but what's going on there is he wants to regulate AI

55:01 and these companies uh and investment firms

55:04 firms that are making functionally unimaginable amounts

55:07 of money from AI are kind of trying to build like a death

55:11 star to destroy anybody who might regulate AI in a way they don't like.

55:15 And so a system where you cannot trust there

55:19 to be like a good structure of who has voice

55:23 and who has influence because it is so dependent

55:25 on donors is not a system where just saying let's

55:29 make government more powerful and trust that the people

55:31 running it are going to do the right thing really

55:34 works because you have a like a fundamental corruption

55:39 of the central decision-making apparatus and I think it's a sense

55:44 of that being true and the cynicism coming

55:46 from that that well I'm not try I I buy

55:49 a bunch of the critiques I think that the feeling

55:52 that if the billionaires who have all this influence like

55:55 this book and implemented it you know or got really

55:58 behind it in the system as it exists that it

56:00 would just give them a really big voice because it's

56:03 not specifically oriented towards taking some of their voice away.

56:07 I think there's validity to that.

56:08 That's that that's the version of it I would uh give credibility to.

56:12 Yeah, I think I agree.

56:14 I I don't consider myself anti-billionaire TM,

56:22 but I don't think you can look at what's

56:23 happening with money and government right now and the increasing

56:26 role that billionaires have over campaign finance and not

56:29 be a little bit concerned about the last 15 months.

56:32 And what we saw between 2024 and 2025

56:35 is that billionaires contributed by some estimations between 10,

56:39 15, and 25% of total campaign spending.

56:44 Then got a president that cut taxes

56:46 for the top.1% by an average of $300,000 and paid

56:52 for it by the largest cuts to Medicaid

56:56 health care for low-income people in American history.

57:00 That is that is a terrifying vision

57:04 of the future of plutoaucracy if that's an omen.

57:07 And if you look at the direction of billionaire incomes made possible

57:12 by the rise of technologies like AI which are currently in private markets which

57:18 means that retail investors do not even have an opportunity to benefit

57:22 from the tripling and triple quadrupling and decatupling

57:25 of anthropic and open AI's enterprise value.

57:30 that clearly points toward a world in which

57:32 billionaires have an an enormous amount of political

57:37 power and that and that scares me and I don't have a perfect solution to it.

57:43 It's something I'm thinking about a lot right now.

57:45 Had a conversation on my own podcast with Gabriel Zuckman about the feasibility

57:48 of um of billionaire taxes which are their own can of worms.

57:52 But I I I think it's absolutely a problem we

57:55 need to think about more in the next few years.

57:56 I guess I'm sort of struck by the degree to which we're avoiding

58:01 this sort of central question which is

58:04 who should be making big decisions right like

58:08 in the 50s60s like there were these public

58:11 figures like Robert Moses or like Robert

58:14 McNamera who were purportedly speaking for the public

58:18 interest and progressivism turned against that model.

58:22 We become culturally averse to power almost no matter where it is.

58:27 And that means we don't like billionaires, but we don't like autocrats.

58:31 We don't like uh powerful bureaucrats like

58:34 like we're just whoever is making the decision.

58:36 Our solution in every case is move the decision-making

58:39 power somewhere else without really thinking like well what is

58:44 the system we think would be fair to get

58:47 to an expeditious decision that actually does serve the public interest.

58:51 And I think like we we can have conversations

58:54 about the influence of money in politics but like

58:57 fundamentally what we need is government to be competent

59:00 in small doses so that we can grow from that.

59:03 The promise of abundance is that we will reempower

59:07 government to be able to make decisions expeditiously sort

59:09 of across the board and we should hold

59:12 those the public figures who are making decisions accountable through elections.

59:16 But like ultimately here the proof of the pudding is in the eating.

59:20 Um and we need to have uh uh

59:24 systems that allow some discretionary power to the people

59:28 who are in powerful parts of government to be

59:31 able to make decisions and then uh evaluate there.

59:34 I I would hate for us to predicate

59:37 our efforts to empower government to make decisions about housing,

59:41 about uh clean infrastructure, about school,

59:44 any of these issues on uh a change in the way we finance campaigns.

59:48 I I think we're gonna figure out how people feel

59:51 about AI more and more in the next few years.

59:54 And almost no matter how much money they put up against Alex Boris or whomever,

59:59 if AI turns out to be wildly unpopular, they're going to have a problem.

1:00:03 So, I think that actually gets us into AI,

1:00:06 which we've been circling here a little bit.

1:00:08 And one other group of people you will hear the word

1:00:11 abundance from quite a lot are the people who run AI companies.

1:00:17 For instance, you know, AI and robotics will will bring um

1:00:23 bring out what might be termed the age of abundance.

1:00:26 Um other people have used this word um and and and that this is

1:00:31 my prediction will be an age of abundance um for everyone.

1:00:34 I had like the one interest of like

1:00:36 radical abundance and just like what what what were

1:00:38 the kind of technological leverage points to just

1:00:41 like make the future like wildly different and better.

1:00:43 As we get closer to AGI and we made breakthroughs

1:00:45 in we we probably talked about last time material sciences,

1:00:49 energy fusion, these sorts of things helped by AI,

1:00:51 we should start getting to a position

1:00:53 in society where we're getting towards what

1:00:55 I would call radical abundance where there's a lot of resources u to go around.

1:00:59 So that's Elon Musk, Sam Alman, and Deisabis.

1:01:03 And one, I think a lot of people are very skeptical that these AI

1:01:07 companies are going to bring anything that would

1:01:09 feel to a normal person like abundance.

1:01:11 What they're instead hearing about is a scarcity

1:01:13 of jobs that is coming down the pike.

1:01:15 We thought of having AI in the book.

1:01:17 We mostly cut it out because it felt like it was moving too fast.

1:01:20 It has gotten a lot further now.

1:01:23 How do you think about the ways in which AI

1:01:26 could create abundance or also for other for people create scarcity?

1:01:30 I had an interesting conversation last year

1:01:33 when I was simultaneously working on abundance and this cover story that I wrote

1:01:36 for the Atlantic called the antisocial century.

1:01:38 And for that latter story, I talked to Bob Putnham,

1:01:41 Robert Putnham, the author of Bowling Alone.

1:01:43 And he made this interesting point about technology which

1:01:46 he significantly blames for the rise of solitude in America.

1:01:50 He said, "Too often we adopt a technology

1:01:55 and then we adopt that technologies values without

1:02:00 thinking about incorporating that technology into our values."

1:02:04 And so one example of his was the television.

1:02:07 And we're going to get to AI in a second.

1:02:09 He said with television, you know, most people put a television in their room

1:02:14 and then immediately started watching five, six hours of television a day.

1:02:17 It was as if the human body were designed by evolution to do

1:02:22 nothing but sit in a couch and watch streaming images on a screen.

1:02:25 That's how immediately it insinuated itself into modern life.

1:02:28 He said that that's different from say the Amish which are very very purposeful

1:02:32 about almost screening a technology to ensure

1:02:35 that it fit their values before incorporating it.

1:02:38 And so, for example, something like solar energy,

1:02:40 which they say does fit their values, it you can often find near Amish farms.

1:02:44 Whereas the television set,

1:02:45 they said it's going to interrupt the values that we have about

1:02:50 family interconnectedness and time spent looking at other people in the face.

1:02:53 And so, we're going to keep it out of our homes.

1:02:56 I don't think that we should take

1:02:58 the Amish approach to television with artificial intelligence.

1:03:02 I don't think we should ban it.

1:03:04 But I do think we should take a kind of Amish light approach to thinking

1:03:10 about incorporating this technology into our values rather

1:03:16 than adopting the values of artificial intelligence mindlessly.

1:03:21 What the latter would mean is allowing

1:03:26 data centers to be built absolutely any anywhere, including in many places,

1:03:32 as the Wall Street Journal reported in places

1:03:34 where residential developers are selling land that is

1:03:38 needed for homes for people to data centers to build a house for computer chips.

1:03:43 I don't want a data center mortorium in this country,

1:03:46 but stories like that feel awfully close to allowing

1:03:49 the values of AI to supplant the values of people,

1:03:54 which is having a home to live.

1:03:56 Because I I think there's a lot that I agree with there,

1:03:58 but but let me drop this down to, as you

1:04:00 put at the beginning here, the level of vibes.

1:04:03 I think one of the vibes projects in abundance is to try

1:04:07 to create a political vibe that is simultaneously progressive in the sense

1:04:12 that it cares about social goals and equality and distribution and a bunch

1:04:17 of things that you know progressives typically care about and prochemnology.

1:04:21 I mean right on the cover of our book right

1:04:24 we have this somewhat solar punky you know you see technology

1:04:29 and forestry and we talk about rewing you know very much

1:04:32 at the beginning because you have you know vertical farming right

1:04:34 where we are trying to create a kind of vision

1:04:37 of the way technology can be pulled into politics to you know

1:04:41 make things possible that are not currently possible to solve

1:04:45 and I would say the level of vibes that has gotten harder

1:04:49 because one there is a very

1:04:51 very reasonable sense that technology is concentrating

1:04:55 power more narrowly in the hands of a more narrow group of people.

1:04:59 Elon Musk is well on his way

1:05:00 at the moment to becoming the world's first trillionaire.

1:05:03 You see the power Sam Alman wields

1:05:05 that Daario wields Darede people are scared of AI.

1:05:09 They, you know, the way Jasmine Sun describes

1:05:11 AI populism is that it's an elite project, right?

1:05:13 That it's a sense it AI is really an elite

1:05:16 project that is like being shoved down people's throats,

1:05:18 not something they want,

1:05:19 but something that they're being forced to accept and adapt to.

1:05:23 And so at the at the level of vibes,

1:05:25 this sort of politics that merges progressive goals and uh a kind

1:05:31 of view that technology can be harnessed for them, it seems very far.

1:05:35 GLP1s are very widespread,

1:05:36 but I think the way the left feels about them is very unsettled.

1:05:40 Um, I I'm I'm curious for you to talk a bit

1:05:42 about about that level because I think it's very hard

1:05:45 for a positive politics to grow out of a deep enmity

1:05:48 and suspicion and yet I understand why the suspicion is there right now.

1:05:52 Yeah.

1:05:52 Let me talk first about AI and then let me get

1:05:54 to GOP ones because I I I I think they're quite different.

1:05:57 I think the populous energy,

1:05:59 the the anti-tech energy that faces artificial intelligence is very different

1:06:04 than the disperse anxiety that people feel about some of some

1:06:08 of the implications of GLP-1s despite this in many ways being like

1:06:11 one of the most popular drug categories in like the last few decades.

1:06:14 So, I think in that respect they they definitely

1:06:15 deserve a little bit of of um of distinction.

1:06:18 But I like the the thing I just meant about that because I think you're right.

1:06:20 It's just that I don't see any place where

1:06:22 the left is like excited about a new technology.

1:06:25 Right.

1:06:26 So, okay.

1:06:26 Yeah.

1:06:27 So, I really like the two, three sentences that we had about artificial

1:06:31 intelligence in the sci-fi vignette that kicked off

1:06:34 our book because while we don't have a fully fleshed out AI policy in that book,

1:06:40 we say two things that I think are are worth holding on to.

1:06:43 The first is that the profits

1:06:46 of artificial intelligence because it is a technology

1:06:49 that is built on human achievement and human

1:06:52 intelligence are taxed and redistributed to the public.

1:06:55 And number two, that the work week has shrunk.

1:07:00 And implicit in the idea that artificial intelligence allows the work week

1:07:03 to shrink is the idea that to the extent that it reduces labor,

1:07:08 that reduction of labor is not born

1:07:10 on the backs of a dramatic increase in unemployment,

1:07:14 but is rather distributed among a stable set of fully employed labor force

1:07:20 that is working a bit less and earning more because of higher productivity.

1:07:24 So, if I were crafting a sort of abundance AI message,

1:07:28 what I would say is this is rapidly looking

1:07:31 like it's going to become a trillion multi-trillion dollar industry.

1:07:35 We have to restore the ability to tax corporations that could

1:07:40 be among the most profitable in the history of capitalism.

1:07:43 That's part one.

1:07:44 We want to tax these companies and redistribute their income to the people.

1:07:48 But also, I think we need to think about

1:07:51 what kind of labor market policies we can begin

1:07:55 to build to ensure that there isn't a displacement

1:07:58 of workers so that if this technology makes people more productive,

1:08:02 it results in something that looks much more like a 4-day work

1:08:05 week than the equivalent 20%

1:08:07 of the economy just being shunted onto unemployment.

1:08:11 Um, on GLP1s, I definitely get the impression

1:08:15 that there is a left-wing, is it leftwing?

1:08:20 Um, there's an aversion to the technology within certain aspects of media.

1:08:26 Like there are magazines and newsletter writers who

1:08:29 are against GOP1s because um they promote a new

1:08:34 thinness culture uh or they might represent some

1:08:37 kind of unnatural way of getting a normal body.

1:08:40 I biohacking optimization culture peptides now clavvicular right which

1:08:45 is like a sort of whole weird dystopic looks maxing

1:08:48 that it accelerates us towards some kind

1:08:49 of transhumanist future with which we feel uncomfortable

1:08:52 and while enriching a small number of people

1:08:54 while enriching a small number of people but I I also

1:08:57 think it's important to look at the fact that this is

1:09:00 by all accounts the most popular category of drug in the last

1:09:06 2030 years I mean the pharmaceutical companies can't sell it fast enough.

1:09:10 The the peptide makers with the relationships to Chinese or whatever labs,

1:09:15 they can't sell it fast enough.

1:09:16 I mean, here you have an emerging technology

1:09:20 that looks like it might have implications for neurodeenerative disease,

1:09:24 for inflammation, for cardiovascular disease.

1:09:27 These are diseases that are are among

1:09:30 the highest mortality burden in the country, in the developed world.

1:09:34 Why aren't we devoting even more public

1:09:36 resources to studying this drug faster and finding

1:09:41 new ways of bringing down the cost in the next few years for all Americans?

1:09:45 What if the federal government spends a lot of money to promote

1:09:48 a certain drug category reward

1:09:51 certain companies with advanced market commitments,

1:09:53 hundreds, not not hundreds of millions,

1:09:55 billions of dollars for companies that build

1:09:57 these drugs so that the government essentially is buying

1:10:01 those drugs and then can distribute them to which

1:10:04 is exactly what we did for co vaccines.

1:10:07 And right now the federal government just sort of seems MIA

1:10:09 on this in a way that I'm not sure I entirely understand.

1:10:12 So if I were in government looking at this revolution,

1:10:16 I would frankly be interested in something

1:10:19 like an operation warp speed for GLP1s.

1:10:22 Mark, I want to pick up on something that Derek said a little

1:10:25 bit earlier in the AI part of that, which I think is really pregnant,

1:10:29 which is should abundance of time be a goal?

1:10:32 And one reason I ask is that you've

1:10:33 done a lot of thinking about the progressive movement.

1:10:35 It comes up a lot in in in your book.

1:10:38 And when I go back into the progressive movement,

1:10:40 one thing I am struck by is how much

1:10:43 broader its conceptions of human flourishing were than what

1:10:48 I think liberalism tends to offer or for that matter

1:10:50 socialism or democratic socialism tends to offer today.

1:10:53 You have a lot of talk about parks.

1:10:56 You have a lot of talk about public spaces.

1:10:57 You have a lot of talk about

1:10:58 the liberal arts and certain forms of enriching education.

1:11:01 Obviously, you have temperance movements and things like that.

1:11:04 And there's a lot of talk in that era of work

1:11:07 and the role it should play or should not play in our life.

1:11:10 And now we just sort of accept it as so central.

1:11:13 Um you know we have two earner families

1:11:16 and you know everybody works all the time.

1:11:18 But particularly if we do end up in this world

1:11:22 where AI is a labor replacing technology which you know

1:11:26 to some degree it will be should the goal be

1:11:29 that I mean the 5day work week isn't set in stone.

1:11:32 Maybe it should be four days.

1:11:33 Maybe it should be three.

1:11:34 I mean, Brink Lindsay in his sort of abundance adjacent new book,

1:11:37 The Permanent Problem, is is circling some of these ideas.

1:11:40 But I'm curious, like given your more historical perspective,

1:11:43 what you think of that and what you think of time as a thing,

1:11:46 leisure time, you know,

1:11:48 time that you have autonomy over as a long-term goal for abundance.

1:11:53 In the moment of every new technological transformation,

1:11:57 we have had some notion, some dream that maybe we could have less

1:12:02 work and more leisure uh for the same income.

1:12:06 And in most cases, it's part of the American

1:12:08 DNA to use the extra time to do more work.

1:12:12 Right.

1:12:12 I think you know canes famously expected

1:12:16 that we would be spending less time at work.

1:12:18 It' be our 15- hour work week by now.

1:12:20 Right.

1:12:20 Right.

1:12:21 Um but we did create the weekend right the labor movement.

1:12:25 I mean we have taken time back at times we have taken time back.

1:12:28 I suspect that we are going to find with the rise of China with with with the uh

1:12:35 enormous challenges that we face and the various new

1:12:39 technologies that we have in other realms that there's

1:12:42 going to be a demand for speedy progress

1:12:45 on all sorts of other issues and those who want

1:12:48 to spend time doing that are going to spend

1:12:51 all week and all weekend working on those challenges.

1:12:55 So I'm I'm less sanguin that we're going to have less time.

1:12:58 I I I do I mean I think what's so interesting about Derek's uh analysis

1:13:03 of what happened with GLPs is

1:13:05 that in in situations like warp speed we have clear

1:13:10 delineations of who makes decisions right we

1:13:14 are empowering people to take chances to uh

1:13:18 make you know enormously consequential decisions about where

1:13:21 money goes and to to try things quickly.

1:13:24 That is exactly what we don't have in these other realms of abundance.

1:13:28 Right?

1:13:28 It is very hard to figure out who makes

1:13:31 the decision about where the transmission line's going to go,

1:13:34 how we're going to build the uh the new transit line,

1:13:38 where the housing is going to go.

1:13:40 And I think like that's an interesting model uh in these other realms.

1:13:45 How are we going to how are progressives going to change

1:13:49 decision-m processes across the board so that we can make expeditious decisions?

1:13:53 I think the transmission lines uh question brings up another area

1:13:58 that both interfaces with technology obviously but but but also politics.

1:14:02 Uh for me a lot of abundance comes out

1:14:06 of thinking first about the Yimi movement and then thinking about

1:14:10 climate change and decarbonization and the need for a really

1:14:13 really really aggressive green energy buildout which was being conceived

1:14:17 of and attempted in the Biden administration and it became

1:14:20 very clear that the laws we have and the permitting

1:14:22 we have was not going to allow enough solar

1:14:24 and wind and transmission lines and so on to get placed.

1:14:28 Then Donald Trump gets elected and I would say a couple things happen.

1:14:32 One is he uh guts in the inflation reduction

1:14:35 acts credits for wind and solar trying to mess

1:14:38 all that up and also makes it in some

1:14:40 cases like harder to permit and harder to finance.

1:14:43 There were hopes that you would see big level permitting reform at least maybe

1:14:47 that would happen under a Republican presidency

1:14:50 but that has not happened in any real way.

1:14:52 Nor is Donald Trump exactly doing fossil fuel abundance because

1:14:55 he has gotten the straight of Hormuz into a complete mess.

1:14:58 And so, you know, uh, oil prices are really high,

1:15:01 but most of the debate is how to make oil cheaper again.

1:15:05 Like, when you think of where we were

1:15:07 talking about green energy a couple of years ago,

1:15:10 and you think of where we are now where it's just like,

1:15:12 can you even keep oil affordable?

1:15:15 It seems like a total absolute disaster.

1:15:20 And and I would add this and and then turn

1:15:21 it to you Derek which is one thing that worries me

1:15:24 is that when people lose political fights they sometimes like backfill

1:15:28 into just saying like well maybe they were wrong about everything.

1:15:30 I think we are acting like climate change science has somehow stopped being

1:15:35 true because the politics of climate

1:15:37 change have proven harder than people hoped.

1:15:40 But we are just warming the world really fast and there's no reason

1:15:44 to think that that will not have

1:15:45 all the terrible effects that people have feared.

1:15:47 And so I don't think this politics is gone forever because you're

1:15:50 going to have huge natural disasters and storms and things like that.

1:15:54 But I don't know.

1:15:55 I, you know, we've gone from a place where the question is how fast can we build

1:15:57 out the decarbonization to whatever the hell this is

1:16:01 now and it's a real it's a real fall.

1:16:05 It doesn't just seem like an abject disaster.

1:16:07 It is an absolute disaster.

1:16:08 I mean, this is what you and I were

1:16:10 talking about a lot with audiences in, you know, May and April of last year.

1:16:16 were saying that, you know,

1:16:16 Donald Trump wins this affordability election where if you ask people

1:16:21 who switched the Democratic to the Republican column, why did you switch?

1:16:24 They said over and over again, it's cost of living,

1:16:26 it's affordability, it's the price of housing.

1:16:28 What's happened to cost of living affordability under Donald Trump?

1:16:31 All of it has gotten worse.

1:16:33 And it's not just that it's gotten worse because like a comet

1:16:35 came in from outer space that Donald Trump couldn't possibly change.

1:16:39 It's often directly because of Trump's policies.

1:16:42 I mean, he is governed often very explicitly as a scarcity candidate.

1:16:46 There's a scarcity of labor in large part because

1:16:49 the amount of legal and anti and undocumented immigration

1:16:52 coming into this country has fallen off a map

1:16:54 such that the labor market is barely growing anymore.

1:16:57 We have trade scarcity.

1:16:59 We've essentially made it illegal for all all sorts of goods to be not

1:17:02 illegal but highly taxed all sorts of goods to be sold into the country.

1:17:05 Some of those goods are inputs into things like building transformers.

1:17:10 And if you look at why the cost of electricity and energy

1:17:12 is rising despite the fact that within the context of AI,

1:17:16 it's often blamed on the data centers.

1:17:18 When you talk to energy experts, they will say almost to a person,

1:17:22 it's not so much about the exciting reason

1:17:25 of AI is driving up the cost of your electricity.

1:17:28 It's much more the slightly more boring reason which is

1:17:30 that the hardware guts of the electrical grid are getting scarce

1:17:34 and more expensive in large part because we have tariffed

1:17:37 the inputs which makes it harder to build transformers and stations.

1:17:41 So he's made it difficult in so many different ways in order

1:17:44 to allow him to achieve the very thing that he was elected to achieve.

1:17:49 That is I think an absolute tragedy for America, for consumers, for families.

1:17:55 It is however, and I do mean this like on a separate plane,

1:17:58 an opportunity for people who think

1:18:01 of themselves as abundance liberals to refocus

1:18:04 this question around how do we solve these problems on the supply side?

1:18:09 How do we make it easier to build the housing that currently is not being built?

1:18:13 How do we make it easier to build

1:18:14 the transformers that currently aren't not only being built,

1:18:17 but are also in many cases being tariffed?

1:18:19 So I think Trump is a disaster,

1:18:21 but Trump's disaster is often instructive to the opposing party.

1:18:27 So this I do think is an opportunity for someone to run on the idea

1:18:31 that like we we we know that like economics works in many of these industries.

1:18:37 We know supply and demand works.

1:18:39 There are supply side solutions to many of these problems.

1:18:42 And if we implement them in a way that the uh Trump administration has not,

1:18:46 we can begin to fix some of these problems.

1:18:48 Okay.

1:18:48 This is a place where to go back to something

1:18:50 I was saying at the beginning of the conversation.

1:18:51 I see a big difference between having a vision and not uh so

1:19:00 the the big by word of the era right now is energy affordability.

1:19:04 We're all talking about affordability and I also think energy

1:19:06 should be affordable and people should be able to afford it.

1:19:09 That is not I think a forward-looking vision of this.

1:19:16 I want to see clean energy abundance described.

1:19:20 I want to see a political party that actually has a vision of a world

1:19:25 in which we have more energy and the fruits of that energy available to us,

1:19:29 available to people in in in poorer countries and is able

1:19:33 to describe why it wants that and how it's going to achieve it.

1:19:37 And this is a place where I think that you're we're sort of at the intersection

1:19:41 of a few things that people I think will come to believe have failed.

1:19:45 One is that climate politics has proven very very hard and I think

1:19:49 one reason it's proven hard is that over a long period of time endlessly

1:19:53 trying to motivate people to avoid a disaster that they cannot feel day-to-day

1:19:58 is very hard right you're trying

1:19:59 to create a tremendous amount of political motivation

1:20:02 by warning people of a thing that has not for the most part

1:20:05 happened to them yet and the you can do that to some degree

1:20:10 but I think the politics of climate have proven hard the degree to which

1:20:13 the public doesn't really prioritize It has been a a difficult lesson to learn.

1:20:18 Obviously, Trumpism has not like taken the mantle of cheap energy

1:20:22 away from the Democrats for all the reasons you just described.

1:20:25 But I think what separates abundance and what is

1:20:27 at least meant to be in my head from what

1:20:30 we're really seeing in a lot of places is

1:20:32 that you're supposed to have some vision of what energy,

1:20:37 clean energy, abundance is and what it looks like and what it can achieve.

1:20:41 And that is just not a grammar I think that people are used to talking about.

1:20:45 I think the left kind of has a like a worried relationship with energy.

1:20:50 It just wants to avoid the problems of fossil fuel energy use, right?

1:20:54 Decarbonization, etc.

1:20:55 The right just wants energy to be cheap and plentiful and to drill.

1:20:59 And the idea that there is some other future we

1:21:01 could attain that is not just the present but without

1:21:05 climate disasters or the present on the right with climate

1:21:08 disasters but a longer period of cheap fossil fuel oil.

1:21:12 Like I would like to see that like

1:21:14 brighter future described and and that's a place

1:21:17 where I think there's been a lot less by now than I would have hoped.

1:21:22 I might disagree with the way you're splitting

1:21:25 out the economic case and the vision case.

1:21:31 There's a way in which I think

1:21:32 the last few months in particular have demonstrated

1:21:39 that the case for clean electricity is also

1:21:44 the case for cheap energy in the long run.

1:21:48 we just saw is the degree to which a totalitarian

1:21:52 theoccratic regime can use drone weaponry to control an artery

1:22:00 of gas and oil in a way that can

1:22:05 raise the cost of fossil fuels for the entire world.

1:22:08 One way to not rely on that one artery is

1:22:12 to build more energy at home to insource your energy.

1:22:17 What are some ways to do that?

1:22:19 It's to take advantage of an unbelievable cost revolution in solar and storage.

1:22:25 Not to mention I would like win geothermal and nuclear

1:22:27 but those are um those are alternative for now to use

1:22:31 the cost revolution in solar and storage to build more

1:22:35 in this country such that we have not only uh

1:22:40 clean electricity but also clean electricity that isn't going to ride

1:22:44 the sort of insurance spikes of a world in which

1:22:47 there's war on the seas that every few months drives

1:22:51 up the cost of hydrocarbons that are put on ships.

1:22:53 I think the the distinction I am making though is between

1:22:59 a world that is being described in terms of the present, right?

1:23:03 We can have what we have now,

1:23:05 but it is not subject to Iran closing the straight of Hormuz and actually

1:23:10 imagining energy and clean energy as a generator of future wealth and change.

1:23:17 I think something that makes abundance

1:23:19 distinctive from where a lot of Democratic

1:23:21 party progressive politics has been for a long time and and you've

1:23:24 written a lot about this as well is I think there's been

1:23:27 a longunning skepticism you know going

1:23:30 back to the beginning of the environmental

1:23:31 movement of energy right you know you want to reduce reuse and recycle

1:23:36 and you know you want to put on a sweater and I

1:23:39 think that abundance is distinctively pretty

1:23:43 pro- energy it believes that a world

1:23:45 in which we all had access to much more energy would be

1:23:48 a better world dramatically so right

1:23:50 it would make possible all these technological

1:23:52 innovations like vertical farming and things that we really want to see

1:23:55 mass desalination and it believes that the technology is there or near there

1:24:01 to do that cleanly and so if you really invest in that you

1:24:04 know both in terms of things we know how to build like wind

1:24:06 and solar but are getting better at you know batteries and the things

1:24:09 that we are like we would like to sort of have revolutions

1:24:12 in like geothermal and nuclear something really different is possible And yes,

1:24:18 I agree that you could use the current moment to pivot to that.

1:24:21 What I'm saying is I am not seeing people really do that.

1:24:24 And I think it isn't actually an important dividing line.

1:24:27 Is what you're talking about just securing

1:24:30 a better energy supply than we have now?

1:24:32 Or is what you're talking about a world of energetic wealth,

1:24:37 clean energetic wealth that you can somehow describe,

1:24:41 but that is quite different than what we now live in?

1:24:43 I get I I just want to come back.

1:24:46 I think this is a perfect case for abundance in this sense to Derek's point.

1:24:52 We're now got incredibly expensive fossil

1:24:56 fuel energy because of the current crisis.

1:24:59 But set that aside.

1:25:01 We have at our fingertips technology that makes it possible for us

1:25:05 to replace much of that with clean

1:25:10 environmentally sensitive forms of electricity generation.

1:25:15 The thing that we don't have, the real cog in the wheel is transmission.

1:25:21 It is the fact that clean energy is created in certain places.

1:25:25 It used to be that you would you would mine the coal

1:25:28 or bring the oil or gas through a pipeline to the place

1:25:31 where it was going to be actually converted into electricity and then

1:25:35 it would be brought locally to the people who were nearby.

1:25:39 Now we've got the problem of having the wind and the solar and whatever else is

1:25:45 being generated in places that are far away

1:25:47 from where the load is going to be expended.

1:25:49 And we need to build lines that connect the generation

1:25:53 to the place where people want to use the electricity.

1:25:57 Like you've got a a solar farm here and you've got a uh

1:26:02 a city here and between the two the three of them are a wealthy neighborhood,

1:26:07 a pristine forest and a and a and a you

1:26:10 know a struggling more marginalized neighborhood.

1:26:13 The the line has to go through one of those three places.

1:26:17 We don't and abundant Democrats have not articulated the way

1:26:22 that we're going to come to that decision expeditiously.

1:26:25 We have sort of given into our fantasy that if

1:26:30 you just put these three groups who some of whom

1:26:32 are going to be affected by this new transmission

1:26:34 line into a room and have them articulate their problem,

1:26:37 we will magically come to some sort of consensus.

1:26:40 But in most cases, we don't and we often get tripped up by it.

1:26:44 And I think this is the big coming challenge for abundance.

1:26:48 We have to build a system that allows for us to make trade-offs.

1:26:52 We need a system where everyone has a voice and not no one has a veto

1:26:56 and we get to a decision expeditiously

1:26:59 and then it's not subject to endless litigation.

1:27:02 And the challenge for our movement for the abundance

1:27:05 generally for progressivism is how do we make government work?

1:27:09 And you're right that abundance should be bigger than let's get rid of red tape.

1:27:13 This is not getting rid of red tape.

1:27:15 This is metabolizing a whole series of of conflicting

1:27:19 interests so that we get to a decision.

1:27:21 Well, I agree with that.

1:27:22 At the core of abundance is the idea of a strong state,

1:27:24 a state capable of making decisions,

1:27:26 a ca a state capable of executing on those decisions, implementing them,

1:27:29 building things in the real world, getting things built in the real world.

1:27:33 The Trump administration began with Doge,

1:27:35 which on the one hand was enormously destructive of state capacity.

1:27:40 on the other hand is proof that you could do

1:27:42 a lot more to the state than people thought you could.

1:27:46 That the the the the rules,

1:27:48 the regulations were not nearly as binding as people thought.

1:27:50 And I am seeing Democrats begin to metabolize

1:27:53 the idea that if they are put back into power, they are going to need to take

1:27:58 some of those lessons and build something different.

1:28:00 And I want to play a clip from Pete Buddha Judge just the other day.

1:28:04 And my word of warning to my own political

1:28:07 party is that we would make a terrible mistake if

1:28:11 we thought that our job was to just take power

1:28:14 somehow and then put everything back the way it was.

1:28:20 That's not what we're here to do.

1:28:23 We're we're not out to go around and just find all the little bits and pieces

1:28:28 of everything that that that they smashed

1:28:30 and tape it together and say, "Here you go.

1:28:32 I give you the world as it looked in 2023.

1:28:36 That's not going to work.

1:28:37 It's not what we need.

1:28:39 So much has changed.

1:28:40 And the truth is they are destroying things right and left.

1:28:44 They're destroying a lot of good important things.

1:28:46 They're destroying some useless things, too, cuz they're destroying everything.

1:28:49 So now we get a chance to put things together on different terms.

1:28:53 So that Buddha Judge clip is like it's like fan service for me, right?

1:28:56 That's that's what I want to hear somebody saying.

1:28:59 But I want to say he goes on to say what those different terms should be.

1:29:03 And I think this is a really big unsettled question for Democrats,

1:29:07 which is they know, you heard it also in the the Newsome clip uh earlier.

1:29:11 They know that after Doge, after all this destruction,

1:29:15 and after also the recognition that things can work differently,

1:29:18 they have to work differently that they cannot just build back.

1:29:21 They can't even just build back better.

1:29:23 They have to build something different.

1:29:26 But I don't think they know on what

1:29:28 principles that different things should be built.

1:29:32 Yeah.

1:29:32 Mark, this is obviously your wheelhouse a bit.

1:29:34 What would you tell Pete Buddhajitch?

1:29:38 So we need to make it so that when

1:29:40 various bureaucracies within the federal government are thinking about

1:29:44 whether to site new uh uh new wind farms

1:29:49 off the coast and there are implications for energy

1:29:52 and there are implications for uh for the fishing

1:29:55 industry and there are implications for the wildlife

1:29:57 and for the birds and for the the energy

1:30:00 companies onshore and all of these things have divergent interests.

1:30:04 Right now, the federal government and government

1:30:07 generally gets caught up in those negotiations again

1:30:12 with the fantasy that if everyone gives their voice and we just have an equal

1:30:17 just I want to stop you for a second because I feel like

1:30:19 you're framing this as if it's you you keep saying just the fantasy.

1:30:24 Yeah, it's the law, right?

1:30:25 There are courts they are I talked to the people doing these decisions, right?

1:30:28 They are worried about lawsuits.

1:30:30 They are worried about the project getting dragged out.

1:30:32 So Elon Musk couldn't one reason Elon Musk just gutted things during

1:30:37 is he the Trump administration didn't try

1:30:39 to do anything through statute through law right

1:30:42 they didn't try to remake the civil

1:30:43 service or its rules except through executive order

1:30:47 you to to change things architecturally and to change things in terms of who can

1:30:52 decide what at the level you're talking

1:30:54 about to make power wieldable in this way

1:30:58 it requires new laws so that makes it harder Yes, the

1:31:03 because it can get filibustered and nobody's going to throw

1:31:05 you a parade for remaking the Administrative Procedures Act, right?

1:31:09 Who wants to spend all their time on that?

1:31:11 And so it I'm not saying that even directionally I disagree with you,

1:31:17 but I do think it's worth saying what you're describing is

1:31:20 not just like a bunch of progressives imagining it would be nice.

1:31:23 It's actually how the whole thing works.

1:31:25 You get sued if you don't follow it.

1:31:27 That's absolutely true.

1:31:28 And that's the system that we've built over the course of the last 50 years.

1:31:32 We need to begin like this is the challenge for abundance.

1:31:36 And you're right, it's not a simple fix.

1:31:38 It's not a it's not something that a Doge could have done.

1:31:41 We need to have in our mind a process that we believe

1:31:45 is fair and that when people don't get the outcome that they want,

1:31:50 they will abide it and understand that that was

1:31:52 determined to be in the public interest.

1:31:55 I am one of 17 Cincinnati Bengals fans in the entire world.

1:31:59 There there are 16 of us and we all know each other.

1:32:01 And uh there was a moment in the

1:32:03 amount of angry emails I'm about to get because of this comment.

1:32:08 Okay, there are 19 and the other ones are pissed.

1:32:10 Yeah, fair enough.

1:32:11 You'll get you'll get three.

1:32:12 Um uh in the Super Bowl a few years ago,

1:32:16 there was a call at the end against Logan

1:32:17 Wilson for pass interference at the end of the game.

1:32:20 And it was not pass interference.

1:32:21 And I I I mean I I feel very strongly about this.

1:32:24 We all 17 of us feel very strongly about this.

1:32:28 But it was called and the play went on.

1:32:30 And I think if that without that call,

1:32:32 the Bengals likely win the game, but we lost.

1:32:35 And I don't sit here today and litigate whether or not

1:32:39 the Bengals were actually Super Bowl champions several years ago.

1:32:43 We have a system today in which we haven't created within the government

1:32:48 a system by which we can take a whole series of conflicting signals,

1:32:53 requirements, uh, demands, concerns,

1:32:57 metabolize them into a decision where someone decides,

1:33:01 I understand that there's an environmental cost to that.

1:33:04 I understand that that's not great for the fishermen.

1:33:06 I understand that we're giving up some clean energy.

1:33:08 I like, but this is the thing that we're going to do.

1:33:11 And those who lose, who didn't get what they wanted, are forced to stand down.

1:33:15 And we I think this is the criticism that I have and the real

1:33:18 worry I have for abundance is I'm not sure that we are

1:33:21 articulating how we're going to make these trade-offs in a way that makes

1:33:25 sense and is both fair to those who need to have a voice,

1:33:28 but doesn't allow for interminable debate.

1:33:32 What's your version of this?

1:33:33 Doge was a total disaster.

1:33:34 I mean there's a way in which I think some people

1:33:38 say oh you know what we'll just do is we'll build Doge

1:33:40 but better that somehat begs the question like what is the thing

1:33:45 we want progressive abundance Doge to do better and there's a little

1:33:51 bit of a blank space there so let me try to fill

1:33:54 out some ideas one of the failures of the B administration

1:33:58 that you and I talked about a lot on the tour was the failure to spend money

1:34:02 authorized under the bipartisan infrastructure bill.

1:34:04 You know, I talked to a lot of people at the state

1:34:07 level about what they saw as the reason why rural broadband money,

1:34:11 tens of billions of dollars of it,

1:34:12 didn't actually build rural broadband and why several billion dollars

1:34:16 of electric vehicle charger stations money was also not spent.

1:34:20 And the answer that I kept hearing,

1:34:22 they felt like the people they were talking to in the Biden administration,

1:34:28 they felt like they were coming up with excuses

1:34:32 to extend the period of time to come up with more instruments of delay than were

1:34:37 necessary by the rules inscribed by the law itself.

1:34:41 And that brings me to a point that you might think

1:34:43 of as sort of like doge but better but I sometimes think

1:34:46 of as being like a little bit separate is this is this idea

1:34:49 that abundance is not just a set of ideas and laws and rules.

1:34:54 It's the people who execute them.

1:34:56 And one thing that I think the incoming hopefully Democratic administration 2029

1:35:03 will value is not just a new set of rules that value speed,

1:35:09 but personnel that value speed.

1:35:12 I actually think you can go quite far

1:35:15 by bringing in people who really really want laws

1:35:19 to be passed and then money to be spent

1:35:22 expeditiously and are looking for ways to do that legally,

1:35:25 not by violating the law because, you know,

1:35:27 as much as it's talked about how much Donald Trump

1:35:29 and Elon Musk when he was in government just like,

1:35:31 you know, ran through everything with a chainsaw and machete.

1:35:34 You look at all the various ways that Trump has lost in the courts

1:35:37 that have consistently slowed him down to do all kinds of things.

1:35:40 I mean, the Trump administration is now paying back $166 billion in tariff fees.

1:35:45 That's not moving fast.

1:35:46 That's moving fast, then moving very slow because

1:35:48 you have to undo everything you just did.

1:35:50 So, you want to follow the law,

1:35:52 but I also think you want to bring in people into government that really,

1:35:56 really want to move quickly.

1:35:58 And to the question of what do we want to do quickly?

1:36:00 I mean, the bipartisan infrastructure law was in many ways a very abundancy law.

1:36:04 They wanted to spend money to improve American infrastructure.

1:36:07 And in particular, I think if you look

1:36:08 at the delays happening right now with transmission lines and transformers,

1:36:12 we need to find some way either through regulation

1:36:16 or through legislation um or through personnel to build this stuff

1:36:20 much faster because you cannot electrify a grid if there's

1:36:23 like interconnection cues and transformer delays of months and years.

1:36:27 So that's one thing I think you'd really really want

1:36:29 to use a kind of maybe the progressive doge to do.

1:36:32 The other that I think is so important is right now the delay in the drug

1:36:38 development pipeline at the level of the FDA

1:36:41 and clinical trials is absolutely horrendous.

1:36:44 And there's a group of people including Rexandra Tesla

1:36:47 that are looking at what would clinical trial abundance mean?

1:36:50 How could you use a combination of artificial

1:36:53 intelligence and innovative public policy to renovate

1:36:58 the way that we test drugs to get the same safety benefits out of it,

1:37:03 but going at something like warp speed?

1:37:05 Because, you know, despite what the antivaxers say,

1:37:07 the co vaccines were really remarkably safe given the um health effects

1:37:12 that they the health benefits that they

1:37:14 they gave the American and global population.

1:37:16 But like Ezra like you know you talked about

1:37:18 this a lot um when when we were traveling the country.

1:37:20 I'm I'm wondering how your thinking has evolved here and what

1:37:23 you think a a good doge would look like in 2029.

1:37:26 So one of the lines I used often on the tour as you remember is

1:37:30 that uh the left is overformed by institutions

1:37:34 and the right is underformed by them.

1:37:37 And uh a different version of it was that the personality type of the left

1:37:41 has become bureaucratic and the personality

1:37:42 type of the right has become autocratic.

1:37:44 And I think in that is what where I think

1:37:47 the opportunity is and where I think the danger is.

1:37:50 One thing Doge very naturally did was created a a rallying

1:37:56 around the institutions of government among liberals among among others, right?

1:38:02 They're trying to gut the NIH and the National Science Foundation

1:38:05 and USAD and all these things and we need to defend them.

1:38:08 And I think one of the dangers and I think this is what Buddha Judge is getting

1:38:12 at is going to be to be like pushed

1:38:15 back into being the coalition of the status quo,

1:38:20 the coalition of the institutions,

1:38:22 the coalition telling you believe in government,

1:38:25 believe in science, you know, even if it's not working for you.

1:38:28 And I think something that that the left has to be very very very careful of is

1:38:34 the left is now the coalition that relies

1:38:37 on the people for whom the institutions have worked.

1:38:40 The left is the coalition of college grads.

1:38:43 And here you saying all left of center here.

1:38:44 I'm saying all left of center.

1:38:45 I don't mean the far left.

1:38:46 I mean the the left the left of center coalition in in this country,

1:38:50 the Democratic party.

1:38:52 And so it will naturally be fundamentally sympathetic to institutions.

1:38:56 And one of the things we we focus on the book

1:38:58 is this point which came up earlier from Nick Bagley about

1:39:02 the procedural fetish and and the argument he's making in that is

1:39:04 that lawyers and the Democratic party is full of lawyers.

1:39:09 Lawyers look at the question of legitimacy through

1:39:13 whether or not you have followed procedure, right?

1:39:15 How do you legitimize?

1:39:16 How do you say that what the state

1:39:17 is doing is appropriate while followed the rules?

1:39:20 And and Bagley, who is himself a lawyer who trains administrative law students,

1:39:25 who was also chief counsel for Gretchen Whitmer, he makes this point,

1:39:28 no, for most people, legitimacy is attained through outcomes.

1:39:32 And so what I understand to be

1:39:34 the meta argument running through all of abundance

1:39:37 is it the point of government is to deliver real things for real people.

1:39:46 And you have to know what it is you're trying to deliver, right?

1:39:48 If you're trying to deliver more housing,

1:39:50 then the only thing that matters is not if you

1:39:52 follow the rules or any of the rest of it.

1:39:53 Not saying you should like break the law, but but you need to make the law.

1:39:58 You need to structure the law.

1:40:00 You need to structure the institutions such that they deliver the housing.

1:40:04 If they don't deliver the housing, it does not matter how many laws you passed.

1:40:09 There is this debate, Noah Smith,

1:40:10 the the economist and writer, calls it checkism.

1:40:12 This tendency to I remember this from the 2020

1:40:15 primary among the Democrats to just

1:40:17 one up each other on how much money you were promising to spend on green energy.

1:40:21 It doesn't matter.

1:40:22 What matters is how much green energy you got for that money.

1:40:25 You know, and you get this with the NIH and other things.

1:40:27 I mean we did a lot of work on this in in the book

1:40:29 and you did a lot of work on this in the book.

1:40:30 The National Institutes of Health are a marvel.

1:40:33 They are also a gigantic pressure towards conservatism.

1:40:37 And here I don't mean it in the political sense.

1:40:39 I mean it in the caution sense in what gets studied.

1:40:42 They you know create more herd mentality right the more conventional wisdom.

1:40:46 You have to be very careful

1:40:47 about institutional failure particularly in government

1:40:50 where failing institutions cannot be outco

1:40:52 competed by you know newer younger corporations.

1:40:56 And so I think that the the principle for me which is like maybe

1:41:00 a little bit different than your question

1:41:01 of how do you centralize more decision-making authority

1:41:05 is how do you take the reality

1:41:08 and the constancy of institutional failure seriously

1:41:13 and in particular how do you do that when you are

1:41:15 the coalition of people who are

1:41:18 heavily formed by succeeding inside institutions.

1:41:22 What I find laudable in Elon Musk amidst the many things I find not

1:41:27 laudable in him is the relentlessness with which he tries to achieve his goals.

1:41:33 Right?

1:41:33 That guy believes in you know getting us to Mars and you know creating

1:41:38 an electric vehicle transition and all the rest

1:41:40 of it and nothing else matters to him.

1:41:43 He just tries to create organizations that run through walls and he

1:41:46 actually does make tremendous things happen in the world with that.

1:41:50 And I think that there is a culture among

1:41:52 Democrats to hear the word no and be like, well, the institution said no.

1:41:58 It said we don't do that.

1:42:00 It said we can't do that.

1:42:02 And then to explain it away, to then speak from the institutional perspective

1:42:06 and tell everybody why we can't do anything.

1:42:08 We can't do it because of the filibuster

1:42:09 and the filibuster is just the way the Senate works.

1:42:12 We can't do it because of the, you know,

1:42:14 the way notice and comment periods are structured

1:42:16 or we can't move faster because of environmental review.

1:42:19 Instead of finding these things and saying this is a problem and we

1:42:23 have to fix it because what we promise to do is deliver for people.

1:42:27 The way I would think about the different terms

1:42:29 is that the institutions are not the point of government.

1:42:34 Delivery is the point of government.

1:42:36 And so the point of the institutions is to deliver.

1:42:39 And if they are not delivering and if we don't know

1:42:41 if they're delivering then the institutions are not the thing we defend.

1:42:45 The institutions are the thing we upend, change, remake,

1:42:50 and we have to treat them as much more liquid and malleable

1:42:53 and have to take reports of their failure much more seriously than we do.

1:42:57 I think the NIH is a really interesting

1:43:00 flash point for the perspective that you're advancing.

1:43:04 Consider like three approaches to the NIH.

1:43:07 a sort of pro-establishment liberal approach,

1:43:09 an anti-establishment MAGA approach,

1:43:11 which we'll call just current policy in 2026,

1:43:14 and an anti-establishment abundance liberal approach.

1:43:18 So, the establishment approach would be to say

1:43:20 the NIH spends $40 billion a year, is the jewel of global biomedical research.

1:43:26 It is one of the most important successful institutions in America.

1:43:31 You cannot criticize it.

1:43:33 You cannot touch it.

1:43:34 it it exists in a kind of spectral plane

1:43:36 that we can simply not broke any criticism of.

1:43:40 That's sort of one pro-establishment approach.

1:43:42 The current anti-establishment MAGA approach essentially

1:43:45 says for a variety of reasons

1:43:46 that are too complicated for me to go into right now, we hate universities.

1:43:50 We don't trust scientists and we really don't like mRNA.

1:43:54 So, we're going to attack universities.

1:43:56 We're going to destroy a lot of their scientific programs.

1:43:58 We're going to cut NIH grants by billions of dollars and also basically

1:44:03 ban mRNA research because RFK and Donald Trump don't don't like it very much.

1:44:07 That's catastrophic.

1:44:10 But then you come to category number three and the abundance liberal approach is

1:44:13 not to say how dare you attack the NIH which is a perfect program.

1:44:17 It's celestial and you have no business criticizing it.

1:44:21 It's to say, you know what, current policy is horrific.

1:44:26 But what's also quite embarrassing is

1:44:27 the fact that according to their own testimony,

1:44:29 American scientists that are funded by NIH spend

1:44:33 up to 40% of their time filling out paperwork.

1:44:36 These are the smartest people in the world that we've entrusted with coming

1:44:41 up with the most important breakthroughs about the cosmos and the human body,

1:44:44 curing diseases, and what do we do for almost

1:44:47 half of their time force them to check boxes?

1:44:50 That's a failure.

1:44:51 And it's a failure that we inscribed with decades of cover

1:44:55 your ass rules that force scientists to essentially become bureaucrats.

1:44:59 It's to say again, what do we want to accomplish with NIH?

1:45:02 Don't we want an abundance of scientific breakthroughs?

1:45:04 And isn't a good way to do

1:45:05 that to unleash the productivity of scientists and unbburden

1:45:09 them from some of the paperwork uh requirements

1:45:11 that we've added in the last few decades?

1:45:12 Let's find a way to allow scientists to be scientists by reducing that burden.

1:45:17 That's an approach that I would like to see

1:45:19 a quote unquote good Doge lean into in 2029.

1:45:22 I think that the we're getting a a crucial distinction within

1:45:26 abundance that uh I I just think we need to acknowledge.

1:45:32 One is your description there of scientists being forced

1:45:37 to spend an incredible amount of time doing paperwork,

1:45:40 which is incredibly inefficient.

1:45:41 Like I don't I don't know anyone who's going to hear

1:45:44 that story and not think that's an obvious reform we need to do.

1:45:48 There is a sense that government doesn't work and sort

1:45:51 of in the spirit of Clinton's reinventing government initiative

1:45:54 from the 1990s that we should be rethinking these processes

1:45:58 so that we are able to work more efficiently.

1:46:01 I think that that is an important part of abundance.

1:46:03 I think to your earlier admonition that you don't want abundance

1:46:06 just to be like we're going to get rid of red tape.

1:46:08 That isn't that half of the challenge.

1:46:11 The other challenge is trying to metabolize conflict within

1:46:14 the government because some of that paperwork is ridiculous.

1:46:18 But there are moments where we're having ethical

1:46:20 challenges about whether we can do this study,

1:46:22 whether we've studied it to the point of feeling comfortable that it's

1:46:27 not going to have terrible side effects that we're not aware of.

1:46:30 We're going to have to make hard choices.

1:46:32 And the thing that we have yet to articulate,

1:46:35 I I have I think this is a criticism I have in my own book,

1:46:38 which is that I argue that we need to have uh

1:46:40 a system where people have a voice but not a veto.

1:46:43 I'm not sure that we have yet articulated

1:46:47 and it's going to take some law changes.

1:46:50 It's going to take some statutory changes.

1:46:51 It's going to take some regulatory changes.

1:46:53 and those the the bureaucrats and the liberals within government,

1:46:57 the people that will be in the the coming Democratic administration,

1:47:01 I think they do want to get things out quickly,

1:47:03 but they are deathly afraid of the consequences

1:47:07 of making a choice that comes at a cost,

1:47:10 particularly of a Democratic constituency.

1:47:12 I wanted as we kind of come to an end here to play a clip from Bernie Sanders.

1:47:16 He was asked by my colleague David Leanhart about abundance

1:47:19 and I thought his answer to this was really really really interesting.

1:47:23 If the argument is that we have a horrendous bureaucracy, absolutely correct.

1:47:30 It is terrible.

1:47:31 Uh I brought in over the years a lot of money into the state of Vermont.

1:47:37 It is incredible.

1:47:38 Even in a state like Vermont, which is maybe better than most states,

1:47:41 how hard it is to even get the bloody

1:47:43 money out because she has so many Oh my god.

1:47:45 We got 38 meetings.

1:47:47 We got to talk about this.

1:47:48 Got unbelievable.

1:47:49 I worked for years to bring two health

1:47:51 clinics into the state of Vermont that we needed.

1:47:53 I wanted two more to renovate one and build another one in this.

1:47:58 You cannot believe you cannot believe the level

1:48:02 of bureaucracy to build a bloody health center.

1:48:06 It's still not built.

1:48:07 All right.

1:48:08 So, I don't need to be lectured on the nature of bureaucracy.

1:48:11 It is horrendous and that is real.

1:48:14 But that is not an ideology.

1:48:16 That is common sense.

1:48:17 It's good government.

1:48:18 Sure, that's what we should have.

1:48:19 Ideology is do you create a nation

1:48:24 in which all people have a standard of living?

1:48:26 Do you have the courage to take on the billionaire class?

1:48:29 Do you stand with the working class?

1:48:30 That's ideology.

1:48:31 So, I think this ideology common sense distinction

1:48:35 Sanders is making is like a rich text.

1:48:36 But I want to hold it to the side for a minute.

1:48:39 I I love that answer from Sanders, but but I want to point something out.

1:48:43 I covered Sanders getting that money for community health clinics.

1:48:47 That was in the affordable care act which passed in 2010.

1:48:52 It is 2026.

1:48:55 He is saying one of the two is still not built.

1:48:59 And it I think one of the things I am saying around all this is

1:49:03 that nobody should be angrier than the left

1:49:08 if we have what Sanders calls a horrendous bureaucracy.

1:49:10 Mhm.

1:49:11 That kind of saying we all know bureaucracy sucks.

1:49:15 We all know the government can't do anything.

1:49:16 We all know the meeting structure is crazy

1:49:19 and saying but that's not the point of politics.

1:49:21 But I think it is the point of politics.

1:49:23 And I think that particularly if you are the political party

1:49:29 that in your ideology believes very fundamentally

1:49:32 that government can do big good things.

1:49:34 that actually confronting the ways in which bureaucracy is

1:49:38 horrendous just needs to be a very very high order

1:49:40 issue because if you can't do that then I

1:49:44 think the other parts of your ideology won't work out.

1:49:47 I think that yeah you can confront the billionaires,

1:49:49 you can raise taxes but if people don't trust you to spend the taxes well

1:49:53 then they're actually not in the long term going to help you do that.

1:49:56 I think you see this now with like Democrats promising to just cut and cut

1:49:59 and cut taxes on the middle class because

1:50:02 people don't believe their taxes buy them that much.

1:50:04 Yeah, raise them on the billionaires, but not on me.

1:50:07 And so my point here isn't a critique of Sanders.

1:50:09 I actually think what he's saying in that answer is really important

1:50:11 and something you don't hear that many people on the real left say,

1:50:16 but I do think just like in terms of prioritization,

1:50:20 the question here of what does it actually mean to prioritize

1:50:24 fixing the horrendous bureaucracy so you can build the damn health clinics?

1:50:30 Some things are the level of like principle and who decides,

1:50:32 but some things are the level of what do you choose to do?

1:50:35 And to me, it's very very core to abundance

1:50:38 that like you need a vision for where you're trying

1:50:39 to go and then in the near term you have

1:50:41 to choose to do the hard things necessary to get there.

1:50:45 I have two statements in a question.

1:50:47 Um, I had a 35 maybe 35 and a half minute

1:50:51 conversation with Roran Mandani last year over Zoom and the one sentence

1:50:56 that fell out of my mouth that got the most yep yep

1:50:59 yep on the other end of the zoom recording was when I said,

1:51:02 you know, it sounds to me like you're

1:51:05 saying that Democrats cannot ask government to add

1:51:10 more functions until it proves to the public

1:51:12 that government can function in the first place.

1:51:15 I think he recognizes that um despite

1:51:20 the attempt to distinguish common sense ideas from ideology,

1:51:24 you just heard from Sanders, in many cases, it is the ability of the left

1:51:29 to act with common sense that preserves the popularity of the ideology.

1:51:34 To add government functions,

1:51:35 you have to prove that government can function in the first place.

1:51:37 That's statement number one.

1:51:38 even two is that I think it's I think it's notable that in that quote

1:51:41 he says that common sense good governance is not an an ideology

1:51:47 but caring for the working class is and that's interesting because I

1:51:51 think that what he's just describing in the inability to build a health

1:51:54 clinic is essentially the idea that if Vermont politics were more common

1:52:01 sensical it would be more likely to help the working class so I'm

1:52:05 not sure I I I I have the same distinction between or I

1:52:10 see the reason to distinguish between a common sense policy and an ideology.

1:52:17 I think that the problems that America faces are not a shortage of ideologies

1:52:21 but a shortage of good governance and a shortage of common sense governing.

1:52:25 And so I wonder if I wonder to what extent

1:52:28 you as my co-author prize the degree to which abundance

1:52:33 is um an ideology to the exclusion of it being

1:52:37 a sort of mere common sense um approach to governance.

1:52:42 I'm glad you turned this back on me because I'm not sure

1:52:43 I realized I thought this until you just made me think about it.

1:52:47 Sanders is using the word ideology there when I think the word is vision.

1:52:52 when he's describing this distinction between good government, you know,

1:52:56 uh bureaucracy that actually works,

1:52:59 community health centers that actually get built, and then he says, you know,

1:53:03 ideology is do you create a nation

1:53:04 in which all people have a standard of living?

1:53:06 Do you have the courage to take on the billionaire class?

1:53:09 I think he is making a a distinction between

1:53:12 the way government society works right now and is it working

1:53:18 well or poorly and where you are trying to go

1:53:22 that it has not yet gone and I actually sort

1:53:26 of understand that distinction he's making I think that there

1:53:28 is a version of abundance which is just good government

1:53:33 and I think there's a version of abundance which is

1:53:36 a vision of a world that is quite unlike our own.

1:53:40 Um, you know, in a place like California, New York City,

1:53:44 a world where you could be a firefighter

1:53:47 in San Francisco or a firefighter in Brooklyn and be able to afford a home

1:53:52 in the city you're keeping from burning down, right?

1:53:57 That is no less radical right now than Medicare for all is.

1:54:00 Frankly, it's more radical um in those cities because at least we do actually

1:54:04 have uh healthcare coverage for at least some of the poor in this country.

1:54:09 What we're talking about with clean energy abundance,

1:54:11 a vision of a radically increased energetic standard of living

1:54:15 is actually a quite different world than we live in.

1:54:17 If we can actually figure out a way to make AI serve

1:54:21 the public's ends and not just be a way to replace white collar workers,

1:54:26 I think that could create a radically different world.

1:54:29 But but so yeah I I think there is a real distinction between a abundance

1:54:36 as efficiency and abundance as vision and to a bunch

1:54:40 of the points Mark that you're making

1:54:42 abundance is efficiency and good government

1:54:44 hard enough right you're really trying

1:54:47 to change the guts of how a lot of our institutions work and you're

1:54:51 changing things that are answers to hard problems and I probably believe

1:54:55 a little bit more than you do that some things are just overgrown.

1:54:57 They're not all like an actual effort to weigh values in a thoughtful way.

1:55:01 But but nevertheless, like changing that will be hard.

1:55:03 But the the point of changing all that, at least to me,

1:55:07 is to make it possible to go somewhere we haven't been.

1:55:11 A world in which your health care,

1:55:14 you don't have to be afraid of your health care.

1:55:17 You don't have to be and how much it will cost.

1:55:19 You don't have to be afraid of how much your rent is going to go up.

1:55:21 You don't have to be afraid of this economic

1:55:23 insecurity and procarity so many people live under.

1:55:26 I think that's very important and I believe in that.

1:55:28 And then I also think that there is this vision

1:55:30 of not just how to be more secure but how

1:55:34 to have possibilities open to us that we don't

1:55:37 currently have um and ways of living open to us

1:55:40 that we don't currently have or you know we

1:55:42 could have highspeed rail in this country you know bullet

1:55:44 train zooming around the way they do in Japan

1:55:46 and we don't that would feel really different to people.

1:55:49 Uh, and so if all abundance does is uh push forward zoning reforms for housing,

1:55:56 like that will be good, but it's not a I agree it's not a vision, right?

1:55:59 It's supposed to be creating some different world than the one we live in.

1:56:02 I'm glad you made the distinction because I if someone

1:56:04 said your book has no vision, I would say, well, it does begin with a, you know,

1:56:08 four-page vignette of what the future in 2050

1:56:10 would look like if we got abundance right.

1:56:12 For a long time, I would argue

1:56:14 that the progressive movement was born from abundance.

1:56:17 That the centralizing authority that it could do big things really

1:56:22 was the predominant ideology from the late 1800s through the 1960s.

1:56:28 That that was an abundantoriented approach to progressivism

1:56:32 and that we got away from that after that.

1:56:34 And we don't want to go back to the old,

1:56:36 but we need to find some core notion that government is capable

1:56:42 and willing to make the hard choices that will drive humanity forward.

1:56:47 Um, and I I just think that's a fairly

1:56:50 new conversation within the discourse on the left.

1:56:55 And if your book, my book, a bunch of other books,

1:56:58 if this movement refocuses on giving people

1:57:04 faith that these public institutions can work,

1:57:07 that they can make decisions expeditiously.

1:57:10 That is a huge boon, I think,

1:57:13 to the broader progressive project because in the absence of government working,

1:57:18 people turn to Trump.

1:57:21 It feels to me as though abundance as an ideology

1:57:25 or a vision or whatever you want to call

1:57:27 it is the most important antidote to the ascendants

1:57:34 of MAGA that the people that were Reagan Democrats

1:57:37 and that were uh you know Obama Trump voters

1:57:41 that the that the and and also the people who

1:57:44 are you know who would be considered our base

1:57:47 but simply don't come out to vote from election to election.

1:57:51 that they need to believe that when they're casting a ballot for a Democrat

1:57:56 that that Democrat is going to be

1:57:57 able to effectuate a change that is meaningful.

1:58:00 I think it's a good place to end.

1:58:02 So as our final question, what are three books you'd recommend to the audience?

1:58:05 And uh Mark, why don't we begin with you?

1:58:07 So uh the first book I always recommend

1:58:09 to anyone is Liz Cohen's Making a New Deal,

1:58:12 which I think is the greatest pure book of history that I've ever read.

1:58:17 The second book which I hope people will pick up is uh yoni apple

1:58:22 bomb stuck which gets to a lot of these issues uh explicitly in the realm

1:58:27 of housing talks about how a lack of geographic mobility for many

1:58:30 of the reasons that we have here

1:58:31 has really been the hindrance to socioeconomic mobility.

1:58:35 It's a great book.

1:58:35 And then the third uh you know to the degree

1:58:38 my book is in conversation with uh Robert Keros the power broker.

1:58:42 Um, I I think that that book was

1:58:45 indicative of a way the progressivism used to work

1:58:48 and people too often ascribe it to Moses the man

1:58:52 who was enormously powerful and influential in New York.

1:58:54 But there's a book by uh Mark Reeseman called

1:58:57 Cadillac Desert which essentially traces the same arc um

1:59:03 uh with a guy named Floyd Dominy running the Bureau

1:59:05 of Reclamation and building dams all across the West.

1:59:08 And it is the same core story

1:59:10 but in an entirely different uh realm of public policy.

1:59:14 Uh my three books number one weird choice maybe for reformed

1:59:18 Jew but Mere Christianity by CS Lewis in the first

1:59:22 30 pages in particular is probably the most interesting

1:59:25 analysis of the concept of morality that I've ever read.

1:59:30 Um, at my ripe old age of 39, uh, I find myself often wanting to like re-enter

1:59:36 reading experiences that I had when I was younger

1:59:38 in the hopes that like the reconsumption of that object

1:59:41 would like put me back in that mood again.

1:59:43 There was a period when I was in my 20s when I just moved to New York.

1:59:45 I read like a bunch of books that I adored.

1:59:47 Um, The Emperor's Children by Cla Massud,

1:59:49 The Interestings by Me Witzer, and The Secret History by Donna Tart.

1:59:54 And I just reread The Secret History by Donna Tart, and it is so good.

1:59:57 It's like I like I finished the book two weeks ago

2:00:00 and like entered like a brief like one hour period of morning like

2:00:04 that that wonderful experience you have with a novel where like the turning

2:00:07 of the last page is a true tragic event for the soul.

2:00:10 Um I think the secret secret to history is absolutely extraordinary.

2:00:13 Uh I have a four-month-old at home.

2:00:15 Uh so that means a lot of um audio books and um

2:00:19 the last book that I'm going to recommend is specifically an audio book.

2:00:23 Um, the audio book of Blood Meridian

2:00:27 by Cormick McCarthy is like the trippiest possible.

2:00:31 It's the It's It's an extraordinary book that that's basically

2:00:34 like um a sort of, if you haven't read it,

2:00:37 like a sort of 20th century Dante explaining an absolutely hellacious experience

2:00:43 of a bunch of people in uh the mid-9th century along the Texas Mexico border.

2:00:48 And the audio book is like the guy who

2:00:50 reads it has the most incredible sonerous southern accent.

2:00:55 It's just this like amazing auditory experience.

2:00:58 So if anyone wants to feel like incredibly tripped out

2:01:02 while they're making coffee in the morning for their family,

2:01:04 like definitely uh get the audio book of Blood Meridian.

2:01:07 It's a really extraordinary experience.

2:01:09 Derek Thompson, Mark Dunlman, thank you very much.

2:01:11 Thanks for having me.

2:01:12 Thank you.

2:01:17 Hey, hey, hey.