Latest / Pod Save America / Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson on How Democrats Can Build Their Way Back to Power

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Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson on How Democrats Can Build Their Way Back to Power · Pod Save America

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  Speaker 1: Welcome to Pod Save America. I'm Jon Favreau. We have
• 1:29
  Speaker 1: a special bonus episode for you today. If you're someone
• 1:33
  Speaker 1: who spent any time wading into the debates within the
• 1:36
  Speaker 1: Democratic Party about why we're doing so badly, why we
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  Speaker 1: have done so badly, which I'm sure you are if
• 1:43
  Speaker 1: you listen to this show, you have probably heard about
• 1:45
  Speaker 1: the Abundance Discourse. Abundance is a new book by Ezra
• 1:49
  Speaker 1: Klein and Derek Thompson. It is a book about governance
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  Speaker 1: and in large part how blue states and cities are
• 1:56
  Speaker 1: need to govern better and deliver more. It is about
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  Speaker 1: envisioning a liberalism that builds, that actually delivers on the
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  Speaker 1: promises Democrats make, particularly in places that Democrats control fully.
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  Speaker 1: The book is fascinating. It's very thought provoking. So obviously
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  Speaker 1: it's become the subject of a lot of online controversy
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  Speaker 1: and debate. Ezra and Derek were in LA this past
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  Speaker 1: week to talk about the book. So sat down with
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  Speaker 1: them here in the studio. It was supposed to be
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  Speaker 1: a quick interview, but it was such a, fascinating, fun
• 2:25
  Speaker 1: conversation that it went long and we decided we're just
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  Speaker 1: going to make this its own bonus episode for all
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  Speaker 1: of you guys. So without further ado, I hope you'll enjoy.
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  Speaker 1: And as always, if you're a member of the Discord community,
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  Speaker 1: I hope you'll let us know what you think. Would
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  Speaker 1: love to talk about it more there. Here's my conversation
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  Speaker 1: with Ezra and Derek. Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson, good
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  Speaker 1: to see you guys in person.
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  Speaker 2: Thanks for having us.
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  Speaker 1: Great to be here. So your new book, Abundance, has
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  Speaker 1: been out about a week now. And the sure sign
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  Speaker 1: of its importance is that there is a full-blown abundance
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  Speaker 1: discourse that's going on in an online debate where people
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  Speaker 1: are tearing each other to shreds. It's great. So I
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  Speaker 1: am excited to come in a week later to talk
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  Speaker 1: about the debate about abundance.
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  Speaker 2: It's time to work on the discourse.
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  Speaker 1: Right.
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  Speaker 2: It's a discourse-generating machine, as one person called it.
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  Speaker 1: It's perfect. Before we get into it, though, I should
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  Speaker 1: say I am a full-fledged abundance pilt. I'm in. I
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  Speaker 1: would love for you to, though, sell me on abundance like...
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  Speaker 1: I am not a partisan political junkie, but a skeptical,
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  Speaker 1: casual news consumer, which is most Americans. All right.
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  Speaker 2: I'll give this a shot and then Derek can jump
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  Speaker 2: in where I failed. We're trying to get Democrats in
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  Speaker 2: this case, but it could be both parties, to ask
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  Speaker 2: a pretty simple question, which is what don't we have
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  Speaker 2: enough of and how do we get it? And that
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  Speaker 2: seems like too simple of a question on which to
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  Speaker 2: base much of a politics question. And then you look around.
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  Speaker 2: And if you're in California, as we're in California right now,
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  Speaker 2: we don't have enough houses. And there are reasons for that.
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  Speaker 2: We don't have enough clean energy to meet our clean
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  Speaker 2: energy goals. And there are reasons for that. We don't
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  Speaker 2: have high-speed rail. And there are reasons for that. And
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  Speaker 2: if you go to the national level, we didn't get
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  Speaker 2: that rural broadband we were promised. And there are reasons
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  Speaker 2: for that, even though $ 42 billion was passed in favor
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  Speaker 2: of it or that nationwide network of electric vehicle chargers.
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  Speaker 2: And so at a pretty basic level, liberals should care.
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  Speaker 2: that the government delivers the things it promises to you.
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  Speaker 2: Like that should be baseline. And if it doesn't, nobody
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  Speaker 2: should be more pissed than we are. And if we're not,
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  Speaker 2: then over time, the government is going to get a
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  Speaker 2: reputation for not delivering and people are going to turn
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  Speaker 2: to political movements that promise to make it deliver in
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  Speaker 2: another much darker fashion. So like that's the sell here.
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  Speaker 2: Government should be about giving us more of the things
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  Speaker 2: we need to build our life on. It should be
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  Speaker 2: about making a future better than the past. Some of
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  Speaker 2: that better future is material abundance in different ways, energetic abundance,
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  Speaker 2: houses for 25-year-olds to live in that they can afford.
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  Speaker 2: And we've been failing at doing this. And so we've
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  Speaker 2: got to be able to work backwards from the failures
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  Speaker 2: and fix them.
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  Speaker 1: So I'll ask you, in the same character as someone
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  Speaker 1: who doesn't really know all this, why have liberals failed
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  Speaker 1: to do this? It's a complicated question.
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  Speaker 3: You know, something has happened in the last 50 years
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  Speaker 3: of liberalism that has marked a really clear shift in
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  Speaker 3: its character. If you go back 100 years to the
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  Speaker 3: beginning of the New Deal era, America was building like crazy.
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  Speaker 3: We were building roads, we were building bridges, we were
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  Speaker 3: building energy. We built and built and built. And sometime
• 5:38
  Speaker 3: around the 1960s, 1970s, the character of liberalism changed. And
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  Speaker 3: the politics of building gave way to a different kind
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  Speaker 3: of politics that we think of as the politics of blocking, essentially.
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  Speaker 3: You had the rise of environmental laws, which were very
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  Speaker 3: important in their age. The 1940s and 1950s were absolutely
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  Speaker 3: heinously disgusting. We needed a Clean Air and Water Act.
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  Speaker 3: We needed NEPA for its time. We needed ways to
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  Speaker 3: protect endangered species. But the rules that we wrote in
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  Speaker 3: the 1960s to protect the environment have created strictures and
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  Speaker 3: rules that keep us from building the things we need
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  Speaker 3: in the 2020s, like houses and energy. There was also
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  Speaker 3: a legal change that we get into in detail in
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  Speaker 3: the book, where we made it easier for neighbors to
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  Speaker 3: control what could and couldn't be built around them. And
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  Speaker 3: when neighbors have the ability to say no to any
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  Speaker 3: new development that might have a chance of creating new
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  Speaker 3: construction headaches or adding new parking headaches or maybe even
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  Speaker 3: reducing the value of their homes, when you give that
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  Speaker 3: power at the local level, it has the ability to
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  Speaker 3: stop development entirely. And that's really what we've seen in
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  Speaker 3: so many areas that are governed by liberals. I mean,
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  Speaker 3: the five states with the highest rates of homelessness are
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  Speaker 3: all governed by Democrats. There was a study that my
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  Speaker 3: colleague Yoni Applebaum talked about in a recent cover story
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  Speaker 3: in The Atlantic that found that in the state of California,
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  Speaker 3: every single time a city adds 10% vote share of progressives,
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  Speaker 3: the number of housing permits declines by 30%. So as
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  Speaker 3: an area becomes more liberal, it permits fewer homes. So
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  Speaker 3: I think, as Ezra said, it's so important, I think,
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  Speaker 3: to look very clearly in the mirror and say we're
• 7:20
  Speaker 3: at this moment right now where the opposition to Donald
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  Speaker 3: Trump needs to be popular and effective. And right now
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  Speaker 3: we have a Democratic Party that is incredibly historically unpopular
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  Speaker 3: and also incredibly ineffective in the places that it holds
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  Speaker 3: the most power, like New York. and California and Oregon.
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  Speaker 3: And so it's really important, I think, not just to
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  Speaker 3: have a movement that can criticize Donald Trump effectively, but
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  Speaker 3: also have a movement that can say, give us power
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  Speaker 3: because we've earned it. Give us power because we deserve it.
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  Speaker 3: Give us power because when we have it, we can
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  Speaker 3: build the things that are most important, houses, energy, even
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  Speaker 3: science and technology.
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  Speaker 1: Abundance is clearly a governing philosophy. To what extent is
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  Speaker 1: it also meant to be a campaign platform or the
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  Speaker 1: basis for a grassroots political movement? I mean, do you
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  Speaker 1: think it would work? You're the political professional, man. Most
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  Speaker 1: of my questions are like this because as I read
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  Speaker 1: the book, I got excited about it, but I started thinking,
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  Speaker 1: like the wheel started turning and I'm like, all right,
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  Speaker 1: how do you sell this? How does this look like
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  Speaker 1: in a campaign? Is this going to appeal to regular
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  Speaker 1: normie Dems?
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  Speaker 2: I'll say a couple things on this because I think
• 8:40
  Speaker 2: about it on a couple levels. Because there's one level
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  Speaker 2: on which there's a part of me that wants to say,
• 8:44
  Speaker 2: not my job and lie that I wasn't thinking about
• 8:49
  Speaker 2: this while writing the book.
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  Speaker 1: But it's funny, you clearly did because the book is,
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  Speaker 1: like I was saying, I was talking to Ben Rhodes,
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  Speaker 1: my former speech writing colleague in the Obama White House,
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  Speaker 1: and I was like, they wrote the book like it
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  Speaker 1: was A speech that a politician could give.
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  Speaker 3: A lot of it.
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  Speaker 1: Like, it's not, like, two in the weeds. It's a
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  Speaker 1: call to arms.
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  Speaker 2: So, I think a couple things. One, I would just
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  Speaker 2: say as a matter of experience.
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  Speaker 1: Like, you sort of.
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  Speaker 2: Don't know how things will play, how the material works
• 9:17
  Speaker 2: until you try it out on the crowd. And so,
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  Speaker 2: we've been sort of working on this in the back
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  Speaker 2: room for a long time. Then it comes out and
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  Speaker 2: people actually... It is memetic. People do want to argue
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  Speaker 2: about it. And nothing I have ever done in all
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  Speaker 2: of my years of politics has been picked up as
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  Speaker 2: quickly by actual politicians. So clearly they see something in it. Both,
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  Speaker 2: I think, something substantive, right, which is a framework for
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  Speaker 2: confronting some mistakes liberals have made and also a framework
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  Speaker 2: for thinking in a different way about the future, but
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  Speaker 2: also something political. I think the other thing that I
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  Speaker 2: would say, though, in terms of what I think works
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  Speaker 2: in it politically is.
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  Speaker 2: First, I think liberals have found themselves in a dysfunctional
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  Speaker 2: relationship with the future. I think we have lost most
• 9:58
  Speaker 2: of the people who are the big futuristic influencers. your
• 10:00
  Speaker 2: Elon Musks, your Marc Andreessens. And it's not exactly that
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  Speaker 2: I want them back at the moment. I have some disagreements,
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  Speaker 2: it turns out, with them. But that question of what
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  Speaker 2: is your relationship to technology? What is your relationship to
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  Speaker 2: what is coming? Is it fundamentally optimistic? Are you telling
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  Speaker 2: people's story? where they can imagine a life that is
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  Speaker 2: better for them in the future rather than a life
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  Speaker 2: that is built around different kinds of sacrifices. And I
• 10:25
  Speaker 2: actually think this is a pretty profound– I don't think
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  Speaker 2: I've said this anywhere. I think it's a pretty profound
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  Speaker 2: difference that American liberalism– it is a transformation of American
• 10:35
  Speaker 2: liberalism from, say, Obama to more or less the present.
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  Speaker 2: You know, the critique of Obamaism, as you know better
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  Speaker 2: than most, was it was teleological, right? You know, the
• 10:45
  Speaker 2: arc of history bends towards justice. It was relentlessly optimistic. So,
• 10:50
  Speaker 2: you know, the audacity of hope, right? All of it
• 10:52
  Speaker 2: is about looking to a future that you on a
• 10:54
  Speaker 2: very fundamental level believe is going to be profoundly better,
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  Speaker 2: morally better, economically better than the past.
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  Speaker 1: And a lot of the rhetoric is very abundance based.
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  Speaker 4: Ask.
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  Speaker 2: And I think that liberalism in the years since got
• 11:10
  Speaker 2: into a rhetoric of sacrifice. Moral sacrifice because we are
• 11:13
  Speaker 2: a nation built on sin and on stain. But also
• 11:17
  Speaker 2: environmental and material sacrifice because climate change is a disaster.
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  Speaker 2: Deforestation is a disaster. Biodiversity is a disaster. So it
• 11:25
  Speaker 2: wasn't always said explicitly, but I think liberalism had stopped
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  Speaker 2: having a theory of technology because it didn't like the
• 11:30
  Speaker 2: technologists anymore.
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  Speaker 1: It was.
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  Speaker 2: quite consumed with arguments, understandably so, about the deep injustices
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  Speaker 2: of the past. And I'm not saying they were not
• 11:39
  Speaker 2: true or there, but it was a tough politics. And
• 11:43
  Speaker 2: its environmental side, as things got worse, it had a
• 11:47
  Speaker 2: lot of trouble arguing what I think we should be
• 11:49
  Speaker 2: able to argue, which is that the clean energy future
• 11:53
  Speaker 2: should be fucking awesome. Not like our present, but a
• 11:56
  Speaker 2: little bit worse and more solar, but amazing. We are
• 11:59
  Speaker 2: doing miraculous things with this technology. Electric vehicles, made by
• 12:03
  Speaker 2: whomever now, are better than what came before them in
• 12:07
  Speaker 2: a million different respects. That is how Tesla became a
• 12:10
  Speaker 2: player in the market. There's a lot to be excited about,
• 12:13
  Speaker 2: but you have to orient the resources of government around
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  Speaker 2: making that true. I say all that because one of
• 12:17
  Speaker 2: the things we're trying to do with Abundance, and it's
• 12:19
  Speaker 2: why we started with this little sci-fi even yet for
• 12:21
  Speaker 2: a couple pages, is try to say that you win
• 12:24
  Speaker 2: in politics when your vision of the future is both
• 12:27
  Speaker 2: more exciting and more credible than the other people's vision.
• 12:30
  Speaker 1: Of the future.
• 12:31
  Speaker 2: And I think it's been a while since Democrats have
• 12:35
  Speaker 2: offered that kind of future forwardness. I think if you
• 12:38
  Speaker 2: look at Bill Clinton, he represented the future very much
• 12:40
  Speaker 2: against H.W. Bush and Bob Dole, certainly. I think if
• 12:43
  Speaker 2: you look at Obama, he represented the future against John
• 12:47
  Speaker 2: McCain and then Mitt Romney, who sort of stepped out
• 12:48
  Speaker 2: of the 1950s. And since that, it's been a little harder.
• 12:54
  Speaker 2: I think you've got to win the future back.
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• 14:16
  Speaker 1: I also had this experience reading the book where I would...
• 14:20
  Speaker 1: you know, get excited about the possibility for this to
• 14:22
  Speaker 1: be a democratic platform. And then I would go back
• 14:25
  Speaker 1: to my job of mainlining the news, which is mostly
• 14:29
  Speaker 1: about how, you know, a bunch of corrupt oligarchs are,
• 14:32
  Speaker 1: you know, turning America into Hungary and shipping off people
• 14:35
  Speaker 1: into foreign gulags. And it makes me wonder, like, how
• 14:38
  Speaker 1: do you think the politics of abundance meets the gravity
• 14:42
  Speaker 1: of the political crisis we're in right now?
• 14:46
  Speaker 3: I think the politics of abundance meets this moment somewhat perfectly.
• 14:50
  Speaker 3: I think when you look at the economic agenda of
• 14:52
  Speaker 3: Donald Trump or maybe let's be more accurately said the
• 14:55
  Speaker 3: personality of Donald Trump, which is manifesting itself in what
• 14:58
  Speaker 3: appears to be some kind of economic policy. It is
• 15:01
  Speaker 3: just one example of scarcity after another. I mean, this
• 15:05
  Speaker 3: man does not believe in the concept of a positive
• 15:08
  Speaker 3: sum interaction.
• 15:09
  Speaker 4: At all.
• 15:09
  Speaker 3: He doesn't believe in the concept of cooperation. And so
• 15:12
  Speaker 3: I don't think it's any surprise that when you look
• 15:14
  Speaker 3: at his economic agenda, you see him constantly identifying elements
• 15:18
  Speaker 3: of scarcity and then trying to take something else away, right?
• 15:20
  Speaker 3: So he says, we don't have enough manufacturing. So what
• 15:22
  Speaker 3: we need to do is have less trade. We don't
• 15:25
  Speaker 3: have enough housing. So what we need are fewer immigrants.
• 15:28
  Speaker 3: We don't have enough money. There's really high debts. What
• 15:30
  Speaker 3: we need is less healthcare for poor people by cutting Medicaid.
• 15:34
  Speaker 3: There's a lot of let's solve this scarcity here by
• 15:38
  Speaker 3: taking away something that America needs. And I think that
• 15:41
  Speaker 3: by juxtaposition, abundance is the exact opposite message. Yes, we
• 15:45
  Speaker 3: don't have enough houses. Let's fucking build more. Yes, we
• 15:49
  Speaker 3: don't have enough manufacturing of some critical goods that are
• 15:53
  Speaker 3: essential to national security. Let's have an explicit policy to
• 15:57
  Speaker 3: encourage their construction in America, not by cutting off trade,
• 16:01
  Speaker 3: but rather by working with our allies, our trading partners,
• 16:04
  Speaker 3: to build an industrial base that can take on the future.
• 16:07
  Speaker 3: So I see that being a very, very close fit.
• 16:10
  Speaker 3: I also frankly see the way this book sits alongside
• 16:14
  Speaker 3: Doge as being very apt, right? You have right now
• 16:18
  Speaker 3: in government nominally a department of government efficiency, but it's
• 16:22
  Speaker 3: basically a department of just slamming government to the ground
• 16:25
  Speaker 3: and then grabbing whatever can be discovered in the ruins
• 16:29
  Speaker 3: for Elon Musk, right? So I think by contrast, we're
• 16:32
  Speaker 3: talking about a vision of government efficiency that is very explicit,
• 16:36
  Speaker 3: going into specific programs, whether it's the Chips and Science Act,
• 16:40
  Speaker 3: high-speed rail in California, and saying, this is how government
• 16:44
  Speaker 3: isn't achieving its ends right now. And if we are
• 16:47
  Speaker 3: going to be the party that believes in government, we
• 16:49
  Speaker 3: have to be the party that makes government work. That's
• 16:52
  Speaker 3: a true department of government efficiency. And then the last
• 16:55
  Speaker 3: thing I guess I would say is, you know, the
• 16:57
  Speaker 3: book is very detailed about how government fails and how
• 17:03
  Speaker 3: to make government better. But to your point about speech
• 17:07
  Speaker 3: writing and meeting people in the moment at the level
• 17:10
  Speaker 3: of meme and vibes and emotions, I also think that
• 17:13
  Speaker 3: toward the end in our conclusion, we have this history
• 17:16
  Speaker 3: that we tell about political orders, about how America's changed
• 17:19
  Speaker 3: in the last 100 years with a New Deal order
• 17:21
  Speaker 3: that rose between the 1930s and and the 1960s and
• 17:24
  Speaker 3: a neoliberal order that was overseen by Ronald Reagan. And
• 17:28
  Speaker 3: one thought that I had as I was sort of
• 17:29
  Speaker 3: thinking about these two big political orders that have defined
• 17:33
  Speaker 3: American history in the last century is that each one
• 17:36
  Speaker 3: defined freedom for its own time. You know, Franklin D.
• 17:39
  Speaker 3: Roosevelt said, you know, he talked about the four freedoms,
• 17:42
  Speaker 3: freedom of speech, freedom of belief, from want, from fear.
• 17:45
  Speaker 3: And then Ronald Reagan redefined freedom in the 1980s. Freedom
• 17:48
  Speaker 3: didn't mean a kind of positive freedom. It was about
• 17:51
  Speaker 3: freedom from the government. I do think that it's not
• 17:58
  Speaker 3: too cheap to say that successful political movements often succeed
• 18:03
  Speaker 3: by defining freedom in the terms that the age demands.
• 18:06
  Speaker 3: And right now, I think that one of the main
• 18:09
  Speaker 3: issues that Americans have, the main internal crisis of America,
• 18:12
  Speaker 3: which in many ways define the 2024 election, is unaffordability.
• 18:16
  Speaker 3: And at the core of unaffordability is housing. It's the
• 18:18
  Speaker 3: biggest part of a typical family's budget, of almost any
• 18:21
  Speaker 3: family's budget, is rent or mortgage. Donald Trump won the
• 18:24
  Speaker 3: unaffordability election, and he's immediately driving up prices with his
• 18:27
  Speaker 3: trade policy. I think that housing policy is about freedom,
• 18:33
  Speaker 3: the freedom to live where you want to live, the
• 18:34
  Speaker 3: freedom to stay where you want to stay, the freedom
• 18:37
  Speaker 3: to not feel burdened by costs, especially the cost that's
• 18:41
  Speaker 3: the most important and emotionally intimate part of your life,
• 18:44
  Speaker 3: the the walls around your body and the ceiling and
• 18:47
  Speaker 3: the roof. Redefining freedom, I think, for our own age
• 18:51
  Speaker 3: through abundance is a message that I think politicians can
• 18:56
  Speaker 3: click into because it does show that we're not just
• 18:59
  Speaker 3: talking about fixing government here and there with this sort
• 19:02
  Speaker 3: of pointillist agenda. We are after something bigger and more capacious,
• 19:06
  Speaker 3: and I think politicians are seeing it right now.
• 19:08
  Speaker 1: It's interesting you brought up cost of living and the
• 19:11
  Speaker 1: affordability crisis because clearly when you talk to voters, especially
• 19:16
  Speaker 1: in the last election, but in every election I can remember,
• 19:20
  Speaker 1: cost of living issues are top of mind. And when
• 19:25
  Speaker 1: I think about, there's like an extra step with abundance
• 19:29
  Speaker 1: on some of this, where it's like when you start
• 19:31
  Speaker 1: testing a bunch of policies that Democrats have proposed for
• 19:35
  Speaker 1: the last, I don't know, however many years, the stuff
• 19:37
  Speaker 1: that does well is You know, in the ACA, it's
• 19:41
  Speaker 1: the insurance protections, you know, protection for pre-existing condition or
• 19:46
  Speaker 1: the protection or expansion of retirement and health care benefits or.
• 19:50
  Speaker 1: or a middle class tax cut or a child tax
• 19:52
  Speaker 1: cut or something that people are just going to get.
• 19:55
  Speaker 1: And with housing, you still have to make this up. OK,
• 19:58
  Speaker 1: we're going to build more housing and then that's going
• 20:01
  Speaker 1: to make housing cheaper. We I remember when we were
• 20:05
  Speaker 1: doing the Affordable Care Act. Me too.
• 20:08
  Speaker 2: I also remember that.
• 20:08
  Speaker 1: Remember that? A simpler time. And what Obama was always
• 20:13
  Speaker 1: very excited about were the cost-cutting measures in the Affordable
• 20:16
  Speaker 1: Care Act and bending the cost curve in the out years,
• 20:19
  Speaker 1: which is a line that I would try to get
• 20:21
  Speaker 1: out of everything. And that is clearly very important, but
• 20:24
  Speaker 1: that's not what people cared about. And I'm wondering how
• 20:27
  Speaker 1: you think about connecting... abundance to the affordability crisis directly.
• 20:33
  Speaker 2: Well, let me say something on healthcare, because as you know,
• 20:36
  Speaker 2: that's my credit line. That's where I come from, man.
• 20:40
  Speaker 2: You were talking about the discourse generation on abundance. And
• 20:43
  Speaker 2: one of the things I did not totally expect was
• 20:46
  Speaker 2: for at least some faction of the Bernie left to
• 20:48
  Speaker 2: see it as this big threat to them, which I
• 20:50
  Speaker 2: don't think it is. But I want to sort of
• 20:51
  Speaker 2: make this connection a little bit more explicit.
• 20:55
  Speaker 1: Go back to healthcare.
• 20:56
  Speaker 2: I used to cover the various single payer bills that
• 20:59
  Speaker 2: would arise in different state legislatures and nationally, right? And
• 21:03
  Speaker 2: all these different ideas for how to do universal healthcare.
• 21:07
  Speaker 2: And there were ideas that were much more expansive, much
• 21:09
  Speaker 2: more generous in what we ended up doing in the
• 21:11
  Speaker 2: Affordable Care Act. One of the truly lethal weak points
• 21:15
  Speaker 2: of all of these that would not come in when
• 21:17
  Speaker 2: you would pull it the first time, like, does it
• 21:19
  Speaker 2: sound good to you if Medicare gives everybody health insurance,
• 21:21
  Speaker 2: but would come in immediately when people began to debate it.
• 21:24
  Speaker 2: was the fear of rationing, the fear of wait times,
• 21:29
  Speaker 2: the fear of not being able to get what you
• 21:30
  Speaker 2: wanted or what you needed, which happens in other countries, right?
• 21:34
  Speaker 2: It is not a fake thing. And frankly, it happens
• 21:36
  Speaker 2: in our country. I would always say that the way
• 21:38
  Speaker 2: we ration care is by price. If you can't afford it,
• 21:41
  Speaker 2: you don't get it. In other countries, they do waiting
• 21:43
  Speaker 2: lines and different things. But imagine you did do Medicare
• 21:46
  Speaker 2: for all. Imagine some future, they've got to get selected
• 21:50
  Speaker 2: and wants to do something more like Medicare for all.
• 21:52
  Speaker 2: If you gave the kind of highly expansive health insurance
• 21:56
  Speaker 2: that Bernie Sanders' version of this envisions to every American,
• 22:01
  Speaker 2: what you would have immediately is a supply crisis in
• 22:04
  Speaker 2: medical care. We don't have enough doctors for that, not
• 22:06
  Speaker 2: enough nurses. There are key areas where we don't have
• 22:08
  Speaker 2: enough hospitals. You could very much have shortages of certain
• 22:11
  Speaker 2: kinds of drugs. We just saw this with Ozempic in
• 22:14
  Speaker 2: a certain way. You would need, in order to do
• 22:16
  Speaker 2: the kinds of things we want, to create the kind
• 22:20
  Speaker 2: of equity and possibility and social insurance we want, you
• 22:23
  Speaker 2: actually need the supply of the thing you're trying to
• 22:25
  Speaker 2: give people. And so this connects, I think, in some
• 22:28
  Speaker 2: ways to like the left-wing agenda, but it also then connects,
• 22:30
  Speaker 2: I think, to what you're talking about, the affordability crisis,
• 22:33
  Speaker 2: a coined term by my lovely wife. One of my
• 22:38
  Speaker 2: like potted models of politics right now is we had
• 22:41
  Speaker 2: a long period in American politics where what defined economic
• 22:45
  Speaker 2: politics were problems of demand. wages, how many jobs we had.
• 22:49
  Speaker 2: I mean, jobs day, right? Jobs data day was a
• 22:51
  Speaker 2: big deal for a long time and still is. But
• 22:53
  Speaker 2: the fundamental issue we had was an economy that for
• 22:56
  Speaker 2: a very long time had been running at low demand.
• 22:59
  Speaker 2: So in early 2020, my wife and I were at
• 23:02
  Speaker 2: the Atlantic, a colleague with Derek, writes this big piece
• 23:04
  Speaker 2: about the affordability crisis. And her sort of point there,
• 23:07
  Speaker 2: this is early in 2020, a month before COVID hits,
• 23:10
  Speaker 2: at least to our shores in a big way. She says, look,
• 23:12
  Speaker 2: like behind this economy, people think is good. If you
• 23:16
  Speaker 2: look at the core things people need to build their
• 23:18
  Speaker 2: life on, housing, child care, elder care, health care, and education,
• 23:25
  Speaker 2: it's all getting really expensive. It has been for a very,
• 23:28
  Speaker 2: very long time. It's eating up more and more and
• 23:29
  Speaker 2: more of people's budgets, even as they're getting these wage increases.
• 23:33
  Speaker 2: And you can sort of see this unusual divergence in
• 23:35
  Speaker 2: the data between an economy that looks good and people
• 23:38
  Speaker 2: feel pretty good about as consumers, but they're really getting
• 23:40
  Speaker 2: upset about this. And you can really see it beginning
• 23:43
  Speaker 2: to stress their budgets. Then we go through the pandemic.
• 23:45
  Speaker 2: And then comes inflation. And what inflation is, is like
• 23:48
  Speaker 2: a saliency portal for prices. We go from all the
• 23:51
  Speaker 2: attention in the economy being the demand side, wages and jobs,
• 23:55
  Speaker 2: to all of it being on prices. And even as
• 23:57
  Speaker 2: the price increases and consumer goods begin to slow down,
• 24:01
  Speaker 2: what is then left is like everybody's been staring at
• 24:03
  Speaker 2: prices for a long time. It's like, oh, shit, housing,
• 24:07
  Speaker 2: health care, elder care, child care. This has all gone
• 24:10
  Speaker 2: completely unaffordable. And energy has become a really big question
• 24:13
  Speaker 2: in this too with Russia and decarbonization. And so I
• 24:17
  Speaker 2: just think we're now in a period that the future
• 24:19
  Speaker 2: is going to be defined on affordability. We are in
• 24:21
  Speaker 2: a period where the big economic problem for a long
• 24:24
  Speaker 2: time is going to be things people need the most of.
• 24:27
  Speaker 2: We just don't have enough of them. And I think
• 24:30
  Speaker 2: it is actually pretty intuitive to people that you make
• 24:33
  Speaker 2: something cheaper by making more of it. And I think
• 24:36
  Speaker 2: one reason it is good for Democrats to admit this
• 24:40
  Speaker 2: is that there is a political power in admitting your
• 24:42
  Speaker 2: own mistakes. Like there is something that is unlocked, controversy, controversy, interest,
• 24:48
  Speaker 2: and to some degree, credibility. Democratic states are losing people,
• 24:51
  Speaker 2: not for no reason. The reason hundreds of thousands of
• 24:53
  Speaker 2: people are leaving California and Illinois and New York every
• 24:56
  Speaker 2: single year for Texas and Florida and Arizona, we survey them.
• 25:00
  Speaker 1: It's cost of living.
• 25:01
  Speaker 2: We've made the places we govern too expensive. And that's
• 25:03
  Speaker 2: because we have not created enough of the things that
• 25:06
  Speaker 2: we need And I think that requires not just like
• 25:09
  Speaker 2: a self-examination, but a message that says, we actually fucked up, right?
• 25:13
  Speaker 2: This didn't happen completely by accident, but we understand the
• 25:16
  Speaker 2: way in which we fucked up. And we have a
• 25:19
  Speaker 2: plan to not do it again. And I don't think
• 25:21
  Speaker 2: that what is energetic in that is like every individual
• 25:24
  Speaker 2: housing idea. I think it is the generalized notion that
• 25:27
  Speaker 2: the people came before me, whoever this imaginary politician is.
• 25:31
  Speaker 1: They made some mistakes.
• 25:32
  Speaker 2: Like we're in a different era now. And what I
• 25:34
  Speaker 2: have is a, not the continuation of, of the last
• 25:37
  Speaker 2: 30 years of liberal policies that you're already not happy about.
• 25:40
  Speaker 2: What I have is something new that takes the best
• 25:42
  Speaker 2: of that and then is alert to the things that
• 25:44
  Speaker 2: you're upset about because in this last 30 years, things
• 25:47
  Speaker 2: got worse for you in a bunch of real ways.
• 25:50
  Speaker 1: So you mentioned some of the critique from the left.
• 25:54
  Speaker 1: I'm sure you've read all of it or read most
• 25:57
  Speaker 1: of it. I'm sure you've talked about the Zephyr Teachout
• 25:59
  Speaker 1: review of abundance. I wanted to get your reaction to
• 26:02
  Speaker 1: one part of that because I think it summarizes a
• 26:05
  Speaker 1: lot of the criticism on the left. I mean, you
• 26:07
  Speaker 1: mentioned the Bernie side. There's also sort of like a
• 26:10
  Speaker 1: Warren-esque critique as well. And she writes, I still can't
• 26:13
  Speaker 1: tell after reading Abundance whether Klein and Thompson are seeking
• 26:15
  Speaker 1: something fairly small-bore and correct— we need zoning reform— or non-trivial and
• 26:21
  Speaker 1: deeply regressive— we need deregulation— or whether there is room within Abundance
• 26:25
  Speaker 1: for anti-monopoly politics and a more full-throated unleashing of American
• 26:29
  Speaker 1: potential— Matt Brunig has a similar critique. He says, it
• 26:32
  Speaker 1: would be a huge mistake to sideline whatever focus there
• 26:34
  Speaker 1: is on welfare state expansion and economic egalitarianism in favor
• 26:38
  Speaker 1: of a focus on administrative burdens in construction. Obviously. Now,
• 26:44
  Speaker 1: in the book, right, like it's not a book about
• 26:48
  Speaker 1: like monopolistic power practices and corporate concentration. So I get that.
• 26:53
  Speaker 1: I guess to the question that Teachout asked, is there
• 26:56
  Speaker 1: room in abundance for a critique of concentrated economic power
• 27:02
  Speaker 1: and anti-monopoly politics and all that? Of course there is.
• 27:07
  Speaker 3: It's been really interesting reading some of these reviews and
• 27:10
  Speaker 3: discovering within the critical reviews a kind of memoir of
• 27:16
  Speaker 3: the author's ideology.
• 27:19
  Speaker 2: We read books not as they are, but as we are.
• 27:21
  Speaker 3: That is precisely what I meant to say, but with
• 27:24
  Speaker 3: shorter words. And so, of course, someone interested in antitrust...
• 27:31
  Speaker 3: is going to read our book about abundance, the future
• 27:35
  Speaker 3: of America, and say, why isn't there a chapter or
• 27:38
  Speaker 3: seven on antitrust? And someone who's coming from a place of,
• 27:43
  Speaker 3: I'm a democratic socialist, why isn't there a chapter or
• 27:46
  Speaker 3: seven about how democratic socialism is the best way to
• 27:48
  Speaker 3: run a country?
• 27:49
  Speaker 1: I understand that.
• 27:51
  Speaker 3: I think the fair thing to say is that we are,
• 27:54
  Speaker 3: in many ways, asking for a set of reforms that
• 27:57
  Speaker 3: live alongside the existing welfare state and a strong antitrust
• 28:03
  Speaker 3: enforcement in a beautiful way. I mean, chocolate, peanut butter,
• 28:07
  Speaker 3: and whatever, raspberry jam, that seems like maybe would be
• 28:10
  Speaker 3: like a good trio. These are tastes that absolutely go
• 28:14
  Speaker 3: well together. And just because there's an issue that people
• 28:18
  Speaker 3: care about that isn't a full chapter of the book
• 28:20
  Speaker 3: doesn't mean it's not important to me and Ezra. I mean,
• 28:23
  Speaker 3: we talk about, in the book, about wanting these policies
• 28:27
  Speaker 3: To fundamentally help people's lives, we are not interested in
• 28:32
  Speaker 3: an abundance of things that fill a house. We're interested
• 28:35
  Speaker 3: in an abundance of homes. There's no chapter about making
• 28:38
  Speaker 3: it easier to build as many flat screen televisions as possible.
• 28:41
  Speaker 3: We're interested in the most important material conditions of people's lives.
• 28:44
  Speaker 3: To that end, of course, we support the Earned Income
• 28:47
  Speaker 3: Tax Credit and universal health care. and Social Security, and
• 28:51
  Speaker 3: we want to protect Medicare and Medicaid, and even expand
• 28:53
  Speaker 3: the child tax credit, which would be absolutely fantastic, not
• 28:57
  Speaker 3: only for reducing poverty in this country, but also helping
• 29:00
  Speaker 3: working class families afford to live in the cities that
• 29:03
  Speaker 3: they live. All these policies are worthy. But at the
• 29:06
  Speaker 3: same time, one frustration that I've had with the reviews
• 29:11
  Speaker 3: is that they don't see clearly that what we're trying
• 29:16
  Speaker 3: to do at the end of the day is to
• 29:17
  Speaker 3: help liberal government achieve liberal ends more efficiently. Just a
• 29:24
  Speaker 3: quick example. 2021, Joe Biden signs a bipartisan infrastructure bill.
• 29:29
  Speaker 3: He and Pete Buttigieg call it, rightly, the most important
• 29:32
  Speaker 3: infrastructure bill passed in the last several generations. There's $ 42
• 29:36
  Speaker 3: billion that are earmarked for rural broadband construction to help
• 29:41
  Speaker 3: the most poor and outside of mainstream metropolitan America people
• 29:47
  Speaker 3: hook up to the internet so that they can lead
• 29:49
  Speaker 3: richer lives, get in touch with doctors when they need to.
• 29:52
  Speaker 3: This is a classic progressive agenda. What happens is that
• 29:56
  Speaker 3: four calendar years later now, practically nobody's been hooked up
• 30:01
  Speaker 3: to rural broadband. And it's because the way the program
• 30:04
  Speaker 3: worked out through the Commerce Department is that there was
• 30:07
  Speaker 3: a 14-step process that began with the FCC drawing a
• 30:10
  Speaker 3: map and ended with the states essentially begging the Commerce
• 30:12
  Speaker 3: Department for money and being told, nope, you didn't file
• 30:14
  Speaker 3: that paperwork correctly. Nope, it's a bureaucratic issue there. Nope,
• 30:17
  Speaker 3: you have to refile it.
• 30:19
  Speaker 4: Yada, yada, yada.
• 30:20
  Speaker 3: Nothing is built. Donald Trump is trying to take over
• 30:23
  Speaker 3: the program, shut it down, and hand the whole thing
• 30:25
  Speaker 3: to Elon Musk. We want government to work. If government
• 30:30
  Speaker 3: has progressive aims and it can't accomplish them, you can't
• 30:34
  Speaker 3: blame the oligarchy for that. You can't blame monopolies for that.
• 30:39
  Speaker 1: You can't blame- Especially if you control the government.
• 30:41
  Speaker 2: If you control the government.
• 30:42
  Speaker 3: You certainly can't say the reason we didn't accomplish this
• 30:45
  Speaker 3: is that we don't have a welfare state akin to Denmark.
• 30:48
  Speaker 3: We failed to accomplish this program because government got in
• 30:52
  Speaker 3: its way and was subsumed with the kind of everything
• 30:54
  Speaker 3: bagel liberalism that Ezra's written about so eloquently. So this
• 30:58
  Speaker 3: is where I think the emphasis on, well, you should
• 31:01
  Speaker 3: talk more about antitrust and welfare states, misses the core,
• 31:06
  Speaker 3: a core function of this book, which is to say,
• 31:10
  Speaker 3: if you're trying to build a progressive political movement, you
• 31:14
  Speaker 3: should be obsessed with making political power work for liberals.
• 31:18
  Speaker 3: Because when it doesn't, the public will notice. And when
• 31:22
  Speaker 3: they notice, they either won't vote for you or they
• 31:24
  Speaker 3: will literally vote in the most expensive way with their
• 31:28
  Speaker 3: feet and spend thousands of dollars leaving the states and
• 31:30
  Speaker 3: cities that you govern.
• 31:31
  Speaker 2: I want to be a bit more of a bad
• 31:32
  Speaker 2: cop on this, which is to say that everything Derek
• 31:36
  Speaker 2: says is right. But also, there are a lot of
• 31:40
  Speaker 2: ways antitrust harmonizes here. And that if I were to
• 31:45
  Speaker 2: try to think about the nicest way to say this,
• 31:47
  Speaker 2: my friends in the The whole problem is oligarchy, part
• 31:51
  Speaker 2: of the party. And I believe a good part of
• 31:53
  Speaker 2: our problems are oligarchy. But there are certain kinds of
• 31:57
  Speaker 2: problems they're then willing to see and certain kinds they're
• 31:59
  Speaker 2: not as willing to see. So in housing, I find
• 32:02
  Speaker 2: a lot of them get obsessed with this idea that
• 32:05
  Speaker 2: private investors are buying up a bunch of rental housing.
• 32:09
  Speaker 2: And this is an extremely small part of the market
• 32:12
  Speaker 2: right now. And it's just not the main problem in housing.
• 32:15
  Speaker 2: But because it is the villain they are comfortable having,
• 32:19
  Speaker 2: it is where they want to put their focus. Kamala
• 32:21
  Speaker 2: Harris had, I was very excited when she brought out
• 32:23
  Speaker 2: her big plan for 3 million, to build 3 million
• 32:26
  Speaker 2: units of housing, but her plan never would have achieved
• 32:28
  Speaker 2: anything like it. It did have a big thing about
• 32:30
  Speaker 2: trying to do something about this private investor buying up
• 32:33
  Speaker 2: housing issue, though. So you can really get, I think,
• 32:35
  Speaker 2: taken off the track when you're very concerned with how
• 32:41
  Speaker 2: policy codes. A thing I found really interesting in Zephyr's
• 32:44
  Speaker 2: review was that Is it something good and small like
• 32:47
  Speaker 2: zoning reform? And like try doing zoning reform if you
• 32:49
  Speaker 2: think it's small, right? Or something bad like deregulation. Okay, interesting, right?
• 32:56
  Speaker 2: Deregulation is a word that I think shuts liberals down
• 32:59
  Speaker 2: a bit. And it shouldn't. A lot of what we're
• 33:03
  Speaker 2: pointing out in the book is that the player that
• 33:06
  Speaker 2: is often most regulated is not the market. It's the
• 33:08
  Speaker 2: government itself. If you want to understand why the government
• 33:11
  Speaker 2: can't build public housing effectively, I mean, in many ways,
• 33:14
  Speaker 2: the federal government building public housing is now functionally illegal.
• 33:17
  Speaker 2: It's been regulated out of possibility. If you want to
• 33:19
  Speaker 2: know why we didn't build California high-speed rail, if you
• 33:22
  Speaker 2: want to know why it's so expensive to build affordable
• 33:24
  Speaker 2: housing in a lot of liberal jurisdictions when you trigger
• 33:26
  Speaker 2: public money, it is because of the regulations we put
• 33:29
  Speaker 2: on government. In the same way that deregulating the market
• 33:33
  Speaker 2: can often allow corporations to do things they couldn't do
• 33:36
  Speaker 2: before and move faster, you can decide in any given
• 33:38
  Speaker 2: instance if that's good or bad, Deregulating the government can
• 33:41
  Speaker 2: do the same thing. We're inspired here not by some
• 33:44
  Speaker 2: conservative legal theorist but by Nick Bagley who was Gretchen
• 33:47
  Speaker 2: Whitmer's former lead counsel and has this great point about
• 33:50
  Speaker 2: the procedural fetish among liberal lawyers where he kind of
• 33:53
  Speaker 2: makes this whole argument that for some reason liberals are
• 33:56
  Speaker 2: always on the one hand defending against the Republicans' effort
• 34:00
  Speaker 2: to wrap the government in paperwork and administrative procedure as
• 34:03
  Speaker 2: a way of slowing it down but they never realize
• 34:05
  Speaker 2: that if they could unwrap it themselves it could actually
• 34:07
  Speaker 2: speed government up. So In general, I don't, like, I
• 34:11
  Speaker 2: am quite left. What I'm trying to build here is
• 34:13
  Speaker 2: a much more capable government. So I consider myself on
• 34:16
  Speaker 2: the left edge of this American debate. But we are
• 34:20
  Speaker 2: trying to be much more agnostic. The problems are different
• 34:23
  Speaker 2: in different places and in different domains. But if you
• 34:26
  Speaker 2: had done Bernie Sanders' Green New Deal with the old
• 34:29
  Speaker 2: environmental laws, you simply couldn't have built it. Like, you
• 34:32
  Speaker 2: just cannot build fast enough for what he wanted to
• 34:34
  Speaker 2: do unless you really restructure that. And so, again, going
• 34:37
  Speaker 2: back to the core question that we're trying to get
• 34:39
  Speaker 2: people to focus on in the book, what do we
• 34:41
  Speaker 2: not have enough of and how do we get more
• 34:43
  Speaker 2: of it? To me, what separates the left and the
• 34:46
  Speaker 2: right are goals. It's not means, but I find that
• 34:51
  Speaker 2: a lot of people in this debate, they seem to
• 34:53
  Speaker 2: think what separates the left and the right is means.
• 34:55
  Speaker 2: The right wants to deregulate, the left wants to regulate.
• 34:58
  Speaker 2: But what I care about in regulation is whether or
• 35:00
  Speaker 2: not it's achieving my goals or not. If I'm Regulating
• 35:04
  Speaker 2: the market in a way that harms my goals, like
• 35:07
  Speaker 2: making it too hard for developers to build market rate
• 35:10
  Speaker 2: or affordable housing, then that's bad even though my answer
• 35:13
  Speaker 2: there would be deregulation. And if I've regulated government in
• 35:16
  Speaker 2: a way that doesn't make sense for the government to
• 35:17
  Speaker 2: achieve my goals– but what matters is the goals. And
• 35:20
  Speaker 2: too often liberals are I think very symbolic in this
• 35:24
  Speaker 2: and not outcomes-oriented.
• 35:36
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  Speaker 4: what's new? Because we just saw each other. Never works.
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• 37:09
  Speaker 1: What I saw in some of the reviews is some
• 37:11
  Speaker 1: of it's a policy disagreement or, you know, sin of omission,
• 37:16
  Speaker 1: whatever it may be. But some of it's a political
• 37:19
  Speaker 1: concern in that the best political stories and the most
• 37:23
  Speaker 1: appealing political movements have villains. And, you know, abundance doesn't
• 37:27
  Speaker 1: have enough of a villain or to the extent there
• 37:29
  Speaker 1: is a villain, it's liberals. Or, you know, maybe they're well-meaning, right?
• 37:33
  Speaker 1: But like people who screwed up. I kind of think
• 37:35
  Speaker 1: that you could square the circle by just, you know,
• 37:39
  Speaker 1: fusing like an anti-monopoly politics and, you know, economic populism or,
• 37:44
  Speaker 1: you know, big enough welfare state. with the politics of
• 37:47
  Speaker 1: abundance by making the whole thing a fight against entrenched
• 37:52
  Speaker 1: special interests, whoever they may be. Sometimes they might be
• 37:55
  Speaker 1: like a big corporation or a monopolist. Sometimes it might
• 37:57
  Speaker 1: be NIMBYs or politicians who are just caught up in
• 38:00
  Speaker 1: their own, you know, years of old regulations that they
• 38:02
  Speaker 1: can't get out of the way. Like I kind of
• 38:04
  Speaker 1: feel like both of those can coexist.
• 38:06
  Speaker 2: I would like to see a lot of different political
• 38:07
  Speaker 2: flavors of this. Like Derek was saying earlier that there's like,
• 38:10
  Speaker 2: you know, it's raspberry jam and peanut butter and chocolate
• 38:13
  Speaker 2: and they go, but I would like to see a
• 38:14
  Speaker 2: lot of different combos. There is a very left-wing, even
• 38:18
  Speaker 2: democratic socialist version of abundance, right? If you're AOC and
• 38:21
  Speaker 2: you have a big public housing bill, which she has,
• 38:23
  Speaker 2: and you want to do a big Green New Deal,
• 38:24
  Speaker 2: which she does, there is a bunch of questions about
• 38:27
  Speaker 2: how you unlock supply and how you deepen state capacity
• 38:31
  Speaker 2: and how you bring back in the expertise you needed
• 38:34
  Speaker 2: to build these things when you've outsourced it for decades
• 38:36
  Speaker 2: now in order to achieve that agenda. And there's like
• 38:39
  Speaker 2: the Josh Shapiro version, right? His get shit done agenda
• 38:41
  Speaker 2: where he's bringing down procurement reform and he's bringing down
• 38:44
  Speaker 2: the times it takes to get a business license. And
• 38:46
  Speaker 2: he's making the government work a lot faster. And there's
• 38:48
  Speaker 2: a Jared Polis version in Colorado. And there's a lot
• 38:50
  Speaker 2: of versions because the question of how do you make
• 38:53
  Speaker 2: the state capable of doing what you want done actually
• 38:57
  Speaker 2: can work with a lot of different goals. And I
• 38:59
  Speaker 2: sort of want to see different people come up with
• 39:01
  Speaker 2: their versions of the villains and their versions of the
• 39:04
  Speaker 2: allies and so on. I have my own version of
• 39:05
  Speaker 2: this because I have my own politics. But we're trying
• 39:08
  Speaker 2: to create in the book a framework capacious enough that
• 39:13
  Speaker 2: It's not supposed to be one narrow politics, right? The
• 39:19
  Speaker 2: different flavors of the politics of redistribution are vast, right?
• 39:23
  Speaker 2: Bernie Sanders' version is different than Jared Golden's version, which
• 39:28
  Speaker 2: is different than Barack Obama's version, which is different. than
• 39:30
  Speaker 2: where Kamala Harris's version was, right? You can do a
• 39:33
  Speaker 2: lot when you ask this question of how do we
• 39:35
  Speaker 2: move money from richer people to working class people and
• 39:39
  Speaker 2: make their lives better through doing it, right? That's like
• 39:41
  Speaker 2: a very simple thought of like the marginal dollar is
• 39:43
  Speaker 2: worthless to a rich person. Let's move it to a
• 39:45
  Speaker 2: poor person. And you can do a lot with that
• 39:47
  Speaker 2: thought with a lot of different forms of politics and
• 39:49
  Speaker 2: a lot of different both like enemies and visions. By
• 39:54
  Speaker 2: the way, I think the obvious enemy Democrats are really
• 39:56
  Speaker 2: going to have in 2028 is the Trump administration. And
• 40:00
  Speaker 2: one of our views is that the Trump administration, as
• 40:01
  Speaker 2: Derek was saying earlier, is an administration of scarcity. And
• 40:04
  Speaker 2: this is a way to actually put them not on
• 40:06
  Speaker 2: the wrong side of institutions, but on the wrong side
• 40:09
  Speaker 2: of any kind of vision of the future you might
• 40:10
  Speaker 2: actually want to live in. Like I truly never tire
• 40:13
  Speaker 2: of trying to like convince people. That it's not just
• 40:16
  Speaker 2: that their means are bad, but that their vision of
• 40:18
  Speaker 2: the future, if they achieved everything they want to achieve,
• 40:21
  Speaker 2: completely sucks.
• 40:22
  Speaker 1: Well, it's scarcity, and it's scarcity that they want to
• 40:25
  Speaker 1: take it all for themselves.
• 40:27
  Speaker 3: Right, right. They don't just want to destroy the government.
• 40:28
  Speaker 3: They want to destroy the government for the purpose of
• 40:30
  Speaker 3: turning it into a kleptocracy, to turn a bunch of
• 40:33
  Speaker 3: wealth over to Elon Musk. give it to his companies,
• 40:35
  Speaker 3: and then also turn the money over to the Trumps, right? Oh, hey,
• 40:38
  Speaker 3: maybe we'll forgive the head of Binance if we can
• 40:40
  Speaker 3: invest in his company. Maybe if someone gives us $ 75 million,
• 40:43
  Speaker 3: we'll release them from the civil fraud charge that they
• 40:46
  Speaker 3: were on because they gave us $ 75 million. This is
• 40:49
  Speaker 3: classic Gilded Age, 1885 shit that I thought we lost
• 40:52
  Speaker 3: the 20th century, and we're just bringing it back with abandon.
• 40:55
  Speaker 3: That is easy to run against. It's a terrible state
• 40:58
  Speaker 3: for the country. But it's easy to run against. So
• 41:00
  Speaker 3: just quickly to your question, like who's the enemy here?
• 41:03
  Speaker 3: At the highest possible level, the enemy is very clear.
• 41:06
  Speaker 1: It's Donald Trump.
• 41:06
  Speaker 3: It's Elon Musk.
• 41:07
  Speaker 1: If J.D.
• 41:07
  Speaker 3: Vance runs and he's running on the legacy of Trump
• 41:10
  Speaker 3: and Musk, that sort of combination of cacistocracy and kleptocracy,
• 41:14
  Speaker 3: that's a clear high villain. At the local level, I
• 41:18
  Speaker 3: do think that this book offers, as you said, a
• 41:20
  Speaker 3: nice lens on the idea that sometimes we think of
• 41:23
  Speaker 3: special interests or we think of power as residing exclusively
• 41:27
  Speaker 3: at the level of big companies, right? But sometimes when
• 41:31
  Speaker 3: the problem is housing and the problem is nimbyism, the
• 41:36
  Speaker 3: power that you're fighting, the special interest that you're fighting
• 41:39
  Speaker 3: doesn't exist at that high level of company. It exists
• 41:41
  Speaker 3: at the level of the homeowners that show up at
• 41:44
  Speaker 3: city council meetings and say, I don't want to add housing.
• 41:47
  Speaker 3: here because it's going to reduce my home value. Creating
• 41:51
  Speaker 3: a mimetic charge against that nimbious world I think is very,
• 41:56
  Speaker 3: very important and relatively, not easily done, but it's a
• 41:59
  Speaker 3: clear story to tell. But the last piece of this
• 42:01
  Speaker 3: that I think is really important is that we live
• 42:05
  Speaker 3: in an anti-institutional and anti-establishment age. If you look at
• 42:09
  Speaker 3: trust institutions, it's plummeting for practically every single one and
• 42:13
  Speaker 3: among practically every demographic, especially for young people. One danger
• 42:17
  Speaker 3: that I see Democrats falling into is that as conspiracy
• 42:21
  Speaker 3: theorists and cranks and anti-institutional crazies migrate toward the right,
• 42:28
  Speaker 3: they leave the Democratic Party as the party of institutionalists.
• 42:33
  Speaker 3: and establishmentarians, and folks who are just like, well, if
• 42:36
  Speaker 3: you attack the NIH, all I will do is defend
• 42:39
  Speaker 3: the NIH, which now actually is a fairly reasonable thing
• 42:42
  Speaker 3: to do. If you criticize the government, I'm just going
• 42:44
  Speaker 3: to defend it. If you say we don't trust the
• 42:46
  Speaker 3: public health system, I'm just going to defend it. And
• 42:49
  Speaker 3: if we argue ourselves into a position, if Democrats argue
• 42:51
  Speaker 3: their way into a position where all they can do
• 42:54
  Speaker 3: is defend the status quo against the assaults of the
• 42:58
  Speaker 3: Trump administration, We have put ourselves in a situation where
• 43:01
  Speaker 3: we are fundamentally out of step with the sentiment of
• 43:05
  Speaker 3: the age, which is anti-institutional and anti-establishment. And one thing
• 43:09
  Speaker 3: the book, I think, does at a level of vibes,
• 43:13
  Speaker 3: not at the level of any particular sentence, but the
• 43:14
  Speaker 3: level of vibes, is offer people a vocabulary for, a
• 43:19
  Speaker 3: lens for, being the party of institutions that seeks to
• 43:24
  Speaker 3: understand how those institutions fail for the purpose of reforming them.
• 43:29
  Speaker 3: not the party that says the status quo is fine,
• 43:32
  Speaker 3: do not attack it, but rather the party that's completely
• 43:35
  Speaker 3: obsessed with understanding how government works, where it fails, where
• 43:39
  Speaker 3: the levers are that we can work so that we
• 43:41
  Speaker 3: can actually get shit done. I do think that it
• 43:44
  Speaker 3: offers parts of the left this new language for taking
• 43:50
  Speaker 3: institutions seriously and critically and at a time when voters
• 43:54
  Speaker 3: are honestly going to be for the foreseeable future angry
• 43:58
  Speaker 3: at the status quo.
• 43:59
  Speaker 2: I'm curious for your thought on this. One of my
• 44:03
  Speaker 2: glosses on the 2024 and even a little bit the
• 44:05
  Speaker 2: 2020 election, but that was such a weird election with
• 44:08
  Speaker 2: COVID and everything else, but is that the core thing
• 44:11
  Speaker 2: the Obama coalition lost was the politics of reform. Like
• 44:15
  Speaker 2: it kept most of its other pieces, but Obama was
• 44:18
  Speaker 2: a reformer. I think now people forget how much, but
• 44:21
  Speaker 2: you don't. How much of that early? It's like, you know,
• 44:23
  Speaker 2: the political consultants and, you know, cable news and red
• 44:26
  Speaker 2: and blue America, right? Like, you know, and money and
• 44:29
  Speaker 2: politics and the special interests. And it was this whole thing.
• 44:31
  Speaker 2: It wasn't totally true, but like everybody was deceiving you.
• 44:34
  Speaker 2: And they're like, there's this good politics right behind it.
• 44:37
  Speaker 2: But Bill Clinton was also a reformer. Donald Trump is
• 44:39
  Speaker 2: a reformer. The reformist impulse in American politics has always
• 44:44
  Speaker 2: been one of its most important streams. Like the people
• 44:47
  Speaker 2: who grab it have grabbed a lot of high ground.
• 44:50
  Speaker 2: And one of the most dangerous things to me about
• 44:52
  Speaker 2: both how Joe Biden and Kamala Harris ran was they
• 44:55
  Speaker 2: ran fully in defense of, not in reform of. Like,
• 45:00
  Speaker 2: it would be great if they had done like Doge
• 45:02
  Speaker 2: for real, not like the Department of destroying the government,
• 45:05
  Speaker 2: but the Department of actually making the government work better.
• 45:07
  Speaker 2: Bill Clinton did with reinventing government. Barack Obama often make
• 45:10
  Speaker 2: a big point of how he didn't like this, whatever
• 45:12
  Speaker 2: it was, the thing about the salmon.
• 45:13
  Speaker 1: The salmon, yeah. Who regulates the salmon. The Interior Department
• 45:16
  Speaker 1: regulates salmon when they're in freshwater. But commerce regulates them
• 45:20
  Speaker 1: when they're in seawater. And he wanted to– And then
• 45:23
  Speaker 1: I couldn't even– I almost– I got a call from
• 45:26
  Speaker 1: Gary Locke, the commerce secretary, the knight of the State
• 45:28
  Speaker 1: of the Union, yelling at me that this was wrong.
• 45:31
  Speaker 2: Even that, even that example. And he wanted to remake
• 45:34
  Speaker 2: the commerce department. He was never able to do it.
• 45:36
  Speaker 1: He wanted to combine it with SBA, with a small business.
• 45:38
  Speaker 2: So there was a lot– like there was a big reform.
• 45:40
  Speaker 2: He wanted to do a lot on money in politics.
• 45:43
  Speaker 2: Democrats have lost reforms. And this is a place where
• 45:46
  Speaker 2: I really do think the streams go together for us
• 45:49
  Speaker 2: and people to our left. On this, Bernie Sanders, and
• 45:51
  Speaker 2: never totally right, the power of money in politics is grotesque.
• 45:56
  Speaker 2: And it should be central to Democrats in an age
• 45:58
  Speaker 2: of both actual oligarchy and attentional oligarchy to try to
• 46:02
  Speaker 2: do something about it. But also, there are other forms
• 46:05
  Speaker 2: of power. And institutions, and I think this is something
• 46:07
  Speaker 2: people get at them, often become captured from within or
• 46:11
  Speaker 2: they become captured by local stakeholders and incumbents. Things that
• 46:15
  Speaker 2: were very well-intentioned like notice and comment periods on regulations
• 46:18
  Speaker 2: are now captured by lobbyists. It's not like your mom
• 46:20
  Speaker 2: who goes to a notice and comment period for like
• 46:22
  Speaker 2: the Affordable Care Act regulations. It's the entire health insurance industry.
• 46:26
  Speaker 2: We've created a lot of things that were meant to
• 46:28
  Speaker 2: create small to democratic participation and they've been captured by
• 46:31
  Speaker 2: big interests. And one of the things that we're trying
• 46:34
  Speaker 2: to say is in addition to money politics, which I
• 46:36
  Speaker 2: think of as a real problem, you also need to
• 46:39
  Speaker 2: be very skeptical about that government and institutions are working.
• 46:43
  Speaker 2: And you should be most skeptical if you are somebody
• 46:45
  Speaker 2: who believes in them. It's actually not a problem for
• 46:48
  Speaker 2: Republicans when the government fails.
• 46:49
  Speaker 1: It's great. They love it.
• 46:50
  Speaker 2: It's why they try to make it happen. It should
• 46:52
  Speaker 2: be a big problem for liberals when government fails. Like,
• 46:56
  Speaker 2: it should be a big problem that every really large
• 47:00
  Speaker 2: infrastructure project, California high-speed rail, the Big Dig, the Second
• 47:03
  Speaker 2: Avenue subway, that a blue state tries becomes like a
• 47:05
  Speaker 2: byword for government failure. And one of them in the
• 47:08
  Speaker 2: aftermath of it should have changed their procedures so fundamentally
• 47:12
  Speaker 2: that they believe it wouldn't happen again if they tried
• 47:14
  Speaker 2: it again. Zero of them have. It is the tolerance
• 47:17
  Speaker 2: of government failure on the left that I actually can't abide.
• 47:20
  Speaker 2: Like if you are the people who believe government should
• 47:22
  Speaker 2: do things, then make it fucking do things and when
• 47:24
  Speaker 2: it doesn't, get mad and change it. But just moving
• 47:27
  Speaker 2: on and making excuses and then saying like, well, what
• 47:29
  Speaker 2: about them? It's not good enough. And the way you
• 47:32
  Speaker 2: know it's not good enough is you're losing and you're
• 47:33
  Speaker 2: losing people. So like, yeah, like big government, but government
• 47:37
  Speaker 2: that actually Being trapped between one party that wants to
• 47:40
  Speaker 2: make government fail and another that doesn't really care if
• 47:43
  Speaker 2: it works, that's intolerable to me.
• 47:57
  Speaker 1: Pre-Trump, I think the challenge was a lot of this,
• 48:02
  Speaker 1: when you're actually talking about reforming government, making government more efficient,
• 48:05
  Speaker 1: making it work better, it wasn't as sexy as some
• 48:09
  Speaker 1: of the other stuff, right? So every time we would,
• 48:11
  Speaker 1: and Obama was very focused on this and we'd always
• 48:14
  Speaker 1: be like, well, it's too much of that in the
• 48:16
  Speaker 1: speech and the efficiency and people don't care as much
• 48:18
  Speaker 1: about that. And then there's the inertia of governing in
• 48:21
  Speaker 1: the bureaucracy, right? Like we, there was always a proposal
• 48:24
  Speaker 1: to combine education and labor departments, but then it was like, well,
• 48:28
  Speaker 1: which secretary do you keep? And then is Congress going
• 48:30
  Speaker 1: to let us do this? And all the things where,
• 48:32
  Speaker 1: you know, like you said, now that we have a
• 48:34
  Speaker 1: doge that's awful, but like you could imagine one where
• 48:37
  Speaker 1: You know, they're just shaking some things up within the
• 48:39
  Speaker 1: law and actually making some change. I think post-Trump and
• 48:44
  Speaker 1: as the country got more polarized, I think among democratic
• 48:47
  Speaker 1: strategists and politicians, there is this feeling that because we
• 48:52
  Speaker 1: are in such an existential crisis for democracy, if we
• 48:57
  Speaker 1: admit failure or focus on our own failures, then we
• 49:01
  Speaker 1: are just wasting time and energy and attention that could
• 49:05
  Speaker 1: be going towards the big fight. I don't agree with that.
• 49:08
  Speaker 1: I absolutely disagree with it. No, yeah, I don't think
• 49:11
  Speaker 1: it's right. I think that is at the core of
• 49:14
  Speaker 1: some of this. And you can see that with some
• 49:16
  Speaker 1: of the criticism of the book, too. It's like, well,
• 49:18
  Speaker 1: Donald Trump's destroying democracy and doge blah, blah. And they're
• 49:23
  Speaker 1: offering doge light? What is that? It's like, well, no.
• 49:26
  Speaker 1: But actual voters, they don't like the Democratic Party right now.
• 49:30
  Speaker 1: And they don't like the Republican Party much either. But
• 49:33
  Speaker 1: In order to like the Democratic Party again, they want
• 49:36
  Speaker 1: to hear an alternative and they want to hear that
• 49:38
  Speaker 1: you made some mistakes, that you actually believe that you
• 49:40
  Speaker 1: made those mistakes.
• 49:42
  Speaker 3: Bernie Sanders. I mean, tell me if you if you
• 49:43
  Speaker 3: disagree with this, this interpretation. Bernie Sanders seems to be
• 49:48
  Speaker 3: objectively the most popular figure in the Democratic Party right now.
• 49:51
  Speaker 3: He runs against the Democratic Party every day. So this
• 49:57
  Speaker 3: idea that Democrats should be afraid of self-criticism makes absolutely
• 50:02
  Speaker 3: no sense to me in the context of the most
• 50:05
  Speaker 3: famous self-critic of the Democratic Party being objectively the most popular.
• 50:09
  Speaker 2: Donald Trump, who ran against the Republican Party.
• 50:12
  Speaker 1: But they also, you know, Bernie's criticism is coded as
• 50:16
  Speaker 1: from the left, which then people on the left like that.
• 50:20
  Speaker 1: Any other criticism is coded as from the right or centrist.
• 50:23
  Speaker 3: Let's run the experiment of criticizing the Democratic Party from
• 50:27
  Speaker 3: the center. Let's have someone give it a shot. I
• 50:29
  Speaker 3: don't know that it's going to work. I don't consider
• 50:32
  Speaker 3: myself like some part-time political consultant. But like I said before,
• 50:38
  Speaker 3: I do think that the Biden-Harris model fell into a
• 50:43
  Speaker 3: trap of finding itself in defense of a status quo
• 50:47
  Speaker 3: that they knew to be unpopular. And that's a terrible
• 50:50
  Speaker 3: position to be in. You've found, you've wiggled your way
• 50:53
  Speaker 3: into the one corner that you know won't be majoritarian
• 50:56
  Speaker 3: popular because people are upset at the system.
• 50:58
  Speaker 1: I mean, it's coalition politics in the most, like in
• 51:01
  Speaker 1: the messiest way, right? Which is like, we need every
• 51:04
  Speaker 1: single person we can get in this fight against Donald Trump.
• 51:06
  Speaker 1: So I'm going to say, this is your, you know,
• 51:09
  Speaker 1: everything bagel policy. I'm going to say yes to everyone
• 51:11
  Speaker 1: and make everyone happy and keep the coalition together, which
• 51:14
  Speaker 1: is a very sort of Biden thing to do just personally.
• 51:17
  Speaker 1: And then we ended up with nothing.
• 51:20
  Speaker 2: But that was weakness. I mean, I think we all
• 51:22
  Speaker 2: see that now. That was Barack Obama had the direct
• 51:26
  Speaker 2: connection to his own coalition that allowed him to pretty
• 51:29
  Speaker 2: easily say no to its internal members. And Biden on
• 51:33
  Speaker 2: domestic policy didn't, or at least felt he didn't. I
• 51:36
  Speaker 2: would say in a different way, Hillary Clinton in 2016 didn't.
• 51:38
  Speaker 2: They were both trying to do what Obama was able
• 51:40
  Speaker 2: to do directly and They were trying to do it
• 51:44
  Speaker 2: in a mediated fashion, right? Do it through the groups,
• 51:46
  Speaker 2: through the institutions, through the sort of coalitional work of
• 51:50
  Speaker 2: party building. And both Hillary Clinton and Joe Biden are
• 51:53
  Speaker 2: party builders. They're both creatures of the party. They work coalitionally.
• 51:57
  Speaker 2: That's fine, but not at a time when people fundamentally
• 52:00
  Speaker 2: don't like your coalition. And it doesn't work if you
• 52:03
  Speaker 2: then don't govern in a way that makes you popular. Look,
• 52:07
  Speaker 2: I've been trying to say this to people recently because
• 52:09
  Speaker 2: I think it helps get at something. why the Liz
• 52:12
  Speaker 2: Cheney effort failed, but other things might succeed, which is
• 52:16
  Speaker 2: that the salient fact about independence is not that they
• 52:21
  Speaker 2: don't really like the other party, though that's true. It's
• 52:24
  Speaker 2: that they don't really like your party. And the way
• 52:27
  Speaker 2: Democrats tried to appeal to independence in 2024 was to
• 52:31
  Speaker 2: try to bring in other people who didn't like the
• 52:34
  Speaker 2: other party, right? We, but also Liz Cheney and Dick Cheney,
• 52:39
  Speaker 2: don't like Donald Trump. But actually the problem was these
• 52:43
  Speaker 2: people didn't like you and you needed to communicate to
• 52:46
  Speaker 2: them on some of it. You understood why they didn't
• 52:48
  Speaker 2: like you and you were going to make an.
• 52:50
  Speaker 1: Effort to address it.
• 52:52
  Speaker 2: When people have doubts about you, you have to like
• 52:54
  Speaker 2: not just deepen their doubts about the other people. You
• 52:56
  Speaker 2: have to actually allay their fears about you. And I
• 52:59
  Speaker 2: think that's a place where we've had some failures here.
• 53:01
  Speaker 2: And look, my view is this book, this argument, it
• 53:04
  Speaker 2: critiques the Democratic Party from the left, from the right.
• 53:06
  Speaker 2: It critiques just failure. And I think that's not actually
• 53:10
  Speaker 2: that ideologically coded or different ones are maybe coded ideologically differently.
• 53:14
  Speaker 2: But to what was said a minute ago, we actually
• 53:17
  Speaker 2: do have a ton of examples of politicians who run
• 53:21
  Speaker 2: with a somewhat arm's length relationship to the Democratic Party.
• 53:23
  Speaker 2: And Bernie Sanders is unusual in that he's been doing
• 53:26
  Speaker 2: it sort of from the left for a long time.
• 53:28
  Speaker 2: But if you look at who overperformed in the House
• 53:30
  Speaker 2: in 2024, they're the House Democrats trying to reformat the
• 53:34
  Speaker 2: blue dogs, right? They're a sort of, centrist-y, you know,
• 53:37
  Speaker 2: it's your Jared Goldens, it's your MGPs, it's a bunch
• 53:40
  Speaker 2: of them, right? And so we actually know this politics
• 53:43
  Speaker 2: works pretty well. We have a lot of evidence of
• 53:46
  Speaker 2: what works. And the politicians who are somewhat independent and
• 53:50
  Speaker 2: criticize the Democratic Party, look, I don't like where John
• 53:52
  Speaker 2: Fetterman has gone for a million different reasons, but he
• 53:54
  Speaker 2: has become more popular, not less, in Pennsylvania. And like,
• 53:58
  Speaker 2: people don't like the party's And they have a sense
• 54:01
  Speaker 2: like the most powerful special interest in this country, I think,
• 54:04
  Speaker 2: to a lot of Americans are not just like the
• 54:07
  Speaker 2: rich people, but the parties themselves. Like the parties themselves
• 54:10
  Speaker 2: are just collections of special interests. And if you can't
• 54:13
  Speaker 2: show in some way, like send a costly signal that
• 54:16
  Speaker 2: makes some people mad, that shows you are willing to
• 54:18
  Speaker 2: say no to people on your side, then what they
• 54:20
  Speaker 2: believe is you are completely corrupted by whatever that thing
• 54:24
  Speaker 2: is that corrupts everybody else too.
• 54:27
  Speaker 3: Yeah.
• 54:27
  Speaker 2: I do think we have to be honest about this.
• 54:31
  Speaker 2: I'm much more a Democrat. But people think the parties
• 54:35
  Speaker 2: themselves are zones of corruption. And the reason the politicians
• 54:38
  Speaker 2: who run to their left and to their right often
• 54:41
  Speaker 2: succeed better is that it is a way of showing
• 54:44
  Speaker 2: independence from a kind of special interest that most Americans
• 54:49
  Speaker 2: don't like, which is like the miasma of political dealmaking
• 54:54
  Speaker 2: and that are the two main political parties.
• 54:57
  Speaker 1: Which is what Trump ran against, Obama ran against, Bernie
• 55:00
  Speaker 1: Sanders ran against, three of the more successful-liked politicians of
• 55:04
  Speaker 1: the last couple decades. Which Democratic politicians seem abundance-pilled or
• 55:09
  Speaker 1: at least abundance-curious to you guys?
• 55:12
  Speaker 3: Jared Polis in Colorado, Josh Shapiro certainly in Pennsylvania. Shapiro
• 55:16
  Speaker 3: in particular not only features in a chapter for his
• 55:20
  Speaker 3: work on I-95, repairing the I-95 bridge that fell down,
• 55:24
  Speaker 3: Project should have taken 12 to 24 months under normal
• 55:26
  Speaker 3: conditions because of the emergency declaration that he announced. It
• 55:29
  Speaker 3: was instead rebuilt in 12 days. Great example of the
• 55:32
  Speaker 3: kind of abundance liberalism that we're pointing to, the kind
• 55:35
  Speaker 3: of get shit done liberalism that we're advancing. And then
• 55:38
  Speaker 3: I've seen in the last few weeks, he's sent a
• 55:41
  Speaker 3: bunch of tweets that are all about essentially making government
• 55:43
  Speaker 3: work faster, reducing permitting times. I mean, I think in
• 55:48
  Speaker 3: many ways, the policies that he's announced just in the
• 55:52
  Speaker 3: last week since the book came out are policies that
• 55:54
  Speaker 3: you could absolutely tie in a bow and label abundance-pilled,
• 55:58
  Speaker 3: not to suggest that he's only doing them because the
• 56:00
  Speaker 3: book came out, of course. So I think there are.
• 56:02
  Speaker 1: Great examples there.
• 56:03
  Speaker 2: Wes Moore has been interested here.
• 56:04
  Speaker 3: Wes Moore, Richie Torres, the representative from New York, in
• 56:07
  Speaker 3: response to.
• 56:07
  Speaker 2: Jake Auchincloss.
• 56:09
  Speaker 3: Jake Auchincloss, who we've both spoken to.
• 56:10
  Speaker 1: He's been on Ezra's show.
• 56:11
  Speaker 3: Richie Torres... in response to Ezra's colleague asking, where's the
• 56:16
  Speaker 3: Project 2029 of the Democratic Party, just tweeted the cover
• 56:19
  Speaker 3: of this book, which is A, I guess, wonderful advertising
• 56:23
  Speaker 3: that we certainly did not ask him to do, but B,
• 56:26
  Speaker 3: a great example of someone representing that the ideas of
• 56:30
  Speaker 3: this book are central to his idea of the future
• 56:33
  Speaker 3: of the Democratic Party. So I think that the early
• 56:36
  Speaker 3: nominees abound. And right now, they're mostly at the governor
• 56:39
  Speaker 3: and representative level. But I think it's growing. I think
• 56:44
  Speaker 3: people are picking up. In an interesting way, there are
• 56:47
  Speaker 3: some politicians who have read this book in a clearer
• 56:52
  Speaker 3: way than some of the critics. which is to say
• 56:54
  Speaker 3: that we ask people very explicitly in the conclusion to
• 57:00
  Speaker 3: see this book not as a list of the perfect
• 57:03
  Speaker 3: policies to work everywhere, but rather as a lens that
• 57:07
  Speaker 3: someone in San Francisco can look through that lens and
• 57:09
  Speaker 3: see the right policies to increase housing production in San Francisco.
• 57:12
  Speaker 3: And then someone in Georgia can look through that lens
• 57:14
  Speaker 3: and see the right policies to increase clean battery manufacturing
• 57:17
  Speaker 3: in Georgia. And someone can look through that lens in
• 57:19
  Speaker 3: the Commerce Department and say, next time we want to
• 57:21
  Speaker 3: spend $ 40 billion in rural broadband, let's get that money
• 57:25
  Speaker 3: out in nine months rather than not get the money
• 57:27
  Speaker 3: out at all in four years. I see a lot
• 57:29
  Speaker 3: of people reading the project as it was intended as
• 57:34
  Speaker 3: a kind of mimetic inspiration for them to apply their
• 57:38
  Speaker 3: own ideas about how is this going to work in Maryland?
• 57:41
  Speaker 3: How is this going to work for upstate New York?
• 57:43
  Speaker 3: How is this going to work for Pennsylvania? And I think,
• 57:46
  Speaker 3: I think that's cool. And it makes me optimistic that
• 57:49
  Speaker 3: there's a lot of people that are reading the book
• 57:51
  Speaker 3: in the way that we intended to be read.
• 57:53
  Speaker 1: On our, favorite platform, formerly known as Twitter. There's been
• 57:56
  Speaker 1: quite a bit of chatter, even some AI-generated images that
• 57:59
  Speaker 1: suggest the presidential candidate most suited to run on the
• 58:03
  Speaker 1: abundance agenda is you, Ezra. Care to comment or announce anything?
• 58:08
  Speaker 2: God help this country if it turns to me.
• 58:12
  Speaker 1: Some good AI.
• 58:14
  Speaker 2: Grok is making my life worse on the daily in
• 58:18
  Speaker 2: so many different ways.
• 58:20
  Speaker 1: Ezra Klein, Derek Thompson. The book is Abundance. It is fantastic.
• 58:23
  Speaker 1: Like I said, I'm abundance-billed. You don't have to convince me.
• 58:26
  Speaker 1: I think because I read it through the political lens.
• 58:30
  Speaker 1: And I do think it offers a very useful frame.
• 58:33
  Speaker 1: I heard you, Derek, say that it gives us another
• 58:36
  Speaker 1: axis to think about that's left-right and scarcity-abundance. And I
• 58:39
  Speaker 1: think that's well said. So everyone go get the book.
• 58:43
  Speaker 1: Thanks for coming by. Appreciate you guys.
• 58:44
  Speaker 2: Thank you so much, man.
• 58:45
  Speaker 1: Thanks, man. That's our show for today. Thanks to Derek
• 58:52
  Speaker 1: and Ezra for coming on. Tommy, Lovett, and I will
• 58:54
  Speaker 1: be back with a new show on Tuesday. If you
• 58:57
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• 58:59
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• 59:03
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• 59:07
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• 59:09
  Speaker 1: America podcast. Our associate producer is Farrah Safari. Reid Cherland
• 59:33
  Speaker 1: is our executive editor and Adrian Hill is our executive producer.
• 59:36
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• 59:40
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