What We Got Right — and Wrong — in ‘Abundance’

Upstanding citizens are always turning out to be secret criminals, and I wouldn't even call

my cousin Alan an upstanding citizen, but it's one thing to know and another thing to understand. Alan, murder, me, what the hell was Alan thinking? From serial productions and the New York Times, I'm Em Gesson, and this is the idiot. Listen, wherever you get your podcast. (music)

It's been a little over a year since Derek Thompson, and I published the book Abundance.

“Now, the book didn't begin, but I think of his Abundance movement, but it did mark a kind of kickoff”

of the idea as a, both an object in the discourse, something people are fighting over and creating functional wars over, and actually something politicians are claiming and trying to think through how they would turn into policy. Actually, being part of this has been a bit of a wild ride on a bunch of levels, it has created fights, I didn't expect opportunities, I didn't expect it can be a very weird experience. But I've been really wanting to come back to Abundance,

been a little distracted from it by the million things Donald Trump is doing, but if this

is to become something more than a synonym for efficiency, it has become part of a vision for a better world. I think there's some success to build on, but a whole lot more that actually needs to be done. So, I want to have on some other folks from within this intellectual

“hothouse to talk through what has happened, what we've learned from the arguments, the critiques,”

the coalitions that are forming and fracturing, and what we think needs to happen next. Derek Thompson is a contributing writer at the Atlantic, is of course coauthor of Abundance, and the author of a great sub-stack newsletter under his name. Mark Dunkelman is a fellow at the search light institute and at Brown University. And the author of a book that came out around the same time, why nothing works, which is about some very similar ideas

with a much more historical perspective. So, I'd add them on together to sort of talk

through what we've seen and what we think is coming. As always, my email is [email protected].

Mark Dunkelman, Derek Thompson, welcome to the show. It's good to be here. Throw a little bit here, yeah. So, our books came out a little more than a year ago, congratulations to everybody, but just at the high level, where's your head at? What do you feel good about, but you feel worried about a year and in Derek, start with you? So, maybe one way to think about the reaction to the fallout of Abundance is to think about its

impact at three different levels, the level of vibes, the level of legislation, and the level of outcomes. And the level of vibes, this is a 0.1 percentile outcome given where I was, March 1st of 2025, the degree to which the concept of Abundance has reached something like full penetration of the political discourse, certainly the discourse of the Democratic Party. You look at the fact that governors, Kathy Hockel, J.B. Pritzker, are talking about how their solutions

to the energy crisis or the housing crisis must begin with a supply side policy. That tells me that this is not just a word that's being banished about. It's a concept, look at problems, solve them on the supply side, that is being actively talked about at the level of governors, at the level of Congress, at the level of the Senate. So, Ron Mombani has called out the concept of Abundance and has paired his policy of rent freezes with the policy of helping

“developers build in New York City. So, that's the level of vibes. I think it's clearly”

entered this level of magnetic strength that is far beyond my wildest dreams of 13 months ago. At the level of legislation, I'd say it's like a BB+ one bill that Gavin Newsson signed is literally called Abundance and affordable homes near transit act. Abundance is right there in the first word. There's legislation that's been passed around the country that also has tried many times explicitly citing abundance to make it easier to build housing and easier to build

clean energy. But then, I think where the strongest criticism of our movement has to begin is at the level of outcomes. California should be commended for the law that it's signed and the work that folks like Scott Weener and Buffy Wix have done to advance the concept of abundance in that state. But if you have the misfortune of going to say Fred, the St. Louis data website

of the book Abundance by Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson in those statistics.

It's even more worth it to me. You look at 2015 to 2015, you don't even see the Yimbee movement. That is exactly right. And that's pretty concerning. We said in our book, Judge political movements by their outcomes. The bright side is maybe you could say it's too early to count our outcomes successes. But the very fair criticism of our movement right now is where are the outcomes,

“especially in states like California, where the volume of abundance has been allowed us. Mark?”

So I think I have a slightly more optimistic perspective. More optimistic than that. That's pretty optimistic. My view is that your book and the associated effort rethink progressive policy is a sort of a remarkable change in the sense that from the

beginning of the progressive movement in the late 1800s through the 1950s. Basically, the progressive

answer to most public policy questions was put the government in charge and it will make enormous strides, centralized power and we will bring power to the Tennessee Valley through the Tennessee Valley authority. We will remake the banking system through the Federal Reserve. We had a whole series of ideas that were grounded in this notion that we were going to have strong centralized power do big things. And then beginning in sort of the late 50s and into the 60s, a different idea,

which had been there at the beginning, but had really been sequestered by this sort of idea that big government could do big things, emerges. And their books like C. Wright Mills is powerly to then the SDS puts out the Port here on statement. And the core notion that they are beginning to seed inside the progressive movement is actually centralized power is bad. And we need to take on the core elite that have been making all these decisions. And the progressive movement

becomes about speaking truth to power in almost every form. And you see that in the reaction to the civil rights movement that's at that speaking truth to the power of Jim Crow, you see it in

a second wave feminism, you see it in the the objection to urban renewal to the highway program,

silence spring, ultimately the power broker, which is sort of my book is sort of in conversation with the power broker. But in all of these, all of these are strikes against the old progressive way of governing. It is to push power down to empower little people who have been bulldozed in the proverbial sense and in the literal sense to be able to stand up against centralized power. And that by the mid 1970s is the speaking truth to power is the central idea of the progressive

“movement. I think what abundance has done for the first time really since then is to open up a”

conversation about whether we need to rethink that core notion of what progressiveism is about. In the old notion, the sense was that we needed to in all cases put more oversight on government, rather than letting it cook. And now I think we're beginning to say, many of us on the far left and in more moderate circles, like we need government to function just sort of generally. And I think like that was not a conversation we were having 18 months ago in nearly the same way.

All right, so it's so both of you are speaking more in the grand march to triumph register here. So I'm going to come in with things I'm more worried about. So I probably agree with a lot of what you said there. But at the level of vibes, abundance has been more factionally controversial in the Democratic Party than I would have expected and has cut into it in ways that I wouldn't

“expect it sort of setting off a big populist liberal fight. And I think whether or not that fight”

is constructive and whether or not the synthesis that come out of it are constructive is unknown as of yet. My absolutely biggest worry, though, is not the critiques of abundance outside the tent, but a kind of small ballness that I see emerging inside the tent that when I think about failure modes for what this could be and what it could be becoming. It's an abundance ends up as a synonym for efficiency that we've rebranded on agenda for state capacity that it's just.

is about cutting red tape, as opposed to an actual radical vision of plentitude. And I think something that neither her books ended up doing all that well was really describing what that vision of the future would look like. You imagine a candidate, you know, running for the presidency in 2028. What are the ways that they describe what this abundant future is to look like? Is it your promising

to build just 5 million houses? Does that mean anything to anybody? How do you make clean energy

“abundance a concept that people can actually feel? How is that something people are excited about?”

And then this goes through another thing that I think is going quite poorly, actually. The back half of abundance is, you know, better than anyone, is about trying to build a progressive politics of technology. And I think the way particularly AI conversation has gone and the often quite merited anger that is building at AI leaders and AI companies. I see that is actually farther away than I did at the beginning of 2025. So with all that on the table, our book begins with

housing. I think housing is the place where you see the most legislative action where you see the

most governors and politicians talking about it. A lot of the examples in the book from California

where I am from where it was when we wrote much of the book, the government of California got to have a news from is very much embraced the abundance critique. And so I want to play this clip of Gavin Newsom on Jimmy Kimmel. It's California over-regulated because it feels like there are a lot of well-meaning laws, rules, et cetera that get in the way of building your house, of opening a restaurant. You know, I've experienced this myself. What do we do about that?

No, we, I mean, we need a liberalism that builds and we have to own that. And I'm very much part of this sort of new nomenclature we call this abundance agenda. And we've got to reconcile that. We've got to be more focused on time to delivery, not just rhetoric, not just what we're

“for. We got to actually deliver and manifest it. That's why this year we did the most significant”

housing reforms in our state's history. We did something that hadn't been done in decades. We

tried to dress land use reforms, what we call secret reforms. We weren't able to get it done. We finally

were able to get it done this year in a meaningful way. But this is a meaningful topic for Democrats to recognize we have to deliver on big and bold things. Trump breaks things. Democrats need to build things, but we have to actually deliver on that promise. Derek, what do you think when you hear that? I definitely don't want to give the same answer to every question. But I hear the governor of California describing a legislative victory in terms that literally, quote, our book, a liberalism that builds

abundance. He's being asked questions by a late night host that are basically like LLM summaries of our book. But then you look at the outcomes in California still hasn't actually increased housing starts in the what is it now? Six months since that bill was signed, nine months after the debate over that bill really began. That's not the fault of that legislation necessarily. You can think of it a couple ways. You can think one that there's a set of problems that have accumulated in California

over the last 50 years that have made it harder to build housing. And this is one important step to un-gunk that process. That's maybe that's an optimistic way to frame it. Another way to frame it is that legislation is not the only ingredient when it comes to housing construction. We're in an environment with an elevated interest rate where Trump is waging war against legal and undocumented

“immigration, which is complicating the fact that I think 40% of construction workers in California”

are foreign-borns. So the labor supply of construction work in California is scarce and therefore very expensive, also raised in the cost of housing. And you look around the country and there's just aren't a lot of housing construction triums at all for a variety of macroeconomic reasons. I care about outcomes. We care about outcomes. And if California, Illinois, New York, if they're going to pass laws that hold up abundance as the inspiration or motivation or philosophy of those laws.

And then three months, six months, two years later, we still don't have the fruits of abundance whether it's building more housing, building more clean energy. I am worried that that speaks to a gap between what I call the legislation vibes and the outcomes. Well, here is, I think, also another way of thinking about this that I've become more sensitized to in the York to publishing the book that I like to hear your thoughts on. So whether a housing project gets built can depend on a

series of things, but I think you can often break it into three things when there is demand for it. So one is just legally, can you get the damn thing built? Can you get the permits? Can you get the agreements? Can you get through if it's a big enough project? The city council or

that there's been at least the intellectual victory where there is something getting closer to

“a broad consensus that you should be able to build. Legally, that should be possible in places where”

we need housing. But then there's a question if can you finance the build? And then there's a question of how much does the build cost? What is the cost of construction in terms of materials, in terms of labor, in terms of how much you're paying labor, in terms of what kind of thing you need to build? And I think a good critique of the book that I've heard is one, we don't talk very much about financing. And one thing has been hard is that even as a lot of yes and my backyard bills are passing,

as you sort of mentioned quickly, the financing environment has gotten much worse because interest rates

went way up after the inflationary period. And the second is that cost of construction in a

place like California is a very fraught topic because nobody wants to see wages go down. There's a big deportation agenda happening under Donald Trump, which as you mentioned is making labor more expensive. But even as there's been a lot of victories on zoning and exempting things from environmental reviews, the financing side has gotten harder. I've definitely talked to mayors and others who say, look, I've got all these projects I want to see go forward. And we've made it possible

for them to go forward, but the financing, the projects are not penciling out and we don't have an answer to it. Yeah, the framework that I've developed for this, which I think is a critique of that first chapter of that housing chapter, is that to really understand housing in America,

“you need to understand a 50-year story, which is mostly about rules, a 20-year story, which is about”

business cycles and a five-year story, which is about the incredibly weird business cycle that has

followed the pandemic. Chapter one of our book, the housing chapter, does I think a very good job explaining the 50-year story of how a set of zoning and permitting and environmental legislation and rules that accumulated around the 1960s and 1970s has slowed housing construction across the country, but in particular, in blue cities and blue states where there is very, very hot demand. I think it did a good job of explaining that 50-year accumulation of rules, but there's also

the 20-year story, which is that after the Great Recession, the construction industry in this country was decimated and that led to the 2010s being the decade with the fewest houses built per capita of any decade on record. That's not just a rules story, that's a story about macroeconomics,

it's story about the fact that after the Great Recession, there just wasn't demand or available

labor or companies sufficient to build the kind of housing that we would need in the 2020s. And then what happened in the 2020s was just one piece of mayhem after another, you had the pandemic, you had inflation, you have now, I think, a scarcity of construction labor, which makes it more expensive to build in many places. And so I do think that to really understand the problems that states, that governors and mayors face when it comes to housing, you do have to understand

that there is this kind of like Russian nesting doll of problems, 50 years of rules, 20 years of macroeconomic crisis, and then five years of macroeconomic and financing crisis, and that's really put us where we are. And so I agree, I think, like you, I'm picking up, the criticisms

“that I heard about financing, about the fact that if you want to build this level of housing,”

you need to be obsessed with the question of how do we actually finance that construction, and how, especially, do we make loans to developers at a time of high interest rates possible for them to keep up with the level of housing construction that you want? Those are really, really strong critiques. I think they click into the story that we were telling the 50-year story, but I do think that it is fair to argue that our book missed that very important ingredient.

Mark, there's also a question of power here, but I know you've been very focused on. So I'm going to keep California in the front of my mind here, just because I know it very well, but very recently, using clashes between Governor Newsom and cities across California, because all these big bills are passing at the state level, and then the cities are using all kinds of often fairly innovative approaches to just making them not work, to drag in the

feet, right? This is a big conflict between Los Angeles and the state at the moment, but not only Los Angeles. And this is hard. The question of who should have the right to say yes, and who should have the right to say no? And I think even with conversations among people on the left, there's like a lot of contrasting intuitions here for good reasons. How do you think about this? Well, housing to my mind is sort of an outlier within the abundance agenda, because unlike in linear infrastructure,

transiting lines, train lines, electrical transmission lines, the challenge here is to empower someone who owns a plot of land to build housing or more housing on it. And I say that because

more housing, and the person that has purchased a plot of land wants to build housing, but the

“neighborhood doesn't, right? So you've got, it's sort of a sandwich, and it's the peanut butter”

and jelly that's coming up the works. And in this case, in the case of housing, like what Buffy Wicks and Scott Weiner have largely tried to do is to push power down to the homeowner, which feels good to us as progressives who want to speak truth to power. We don't like it when some oppressive force sitting above us tells us we can't do the thing that is good. And so empowering someone who lives near a transit stop who has an underutilized piece of land in the city that

they can build a bunch of housing on it, feels good to us, and that's largely what's passed. It's pushing power down to land owners that they can do more. And then you reach into these challenges of financing and whatnot. I have to say, in the scheme of things, like you guys are journalists, and I have sent a long time in politics, the idea that a year later you'd have a bunch of more housing built, because of a book, it seems a little far fetched to me. I agree with that.

But, you know, I like to standard your hold in yourself. Well, let me, I will add one thing on that

“because I think the way to think about why you should worry about this is that it's not like”

the last year, whereas the first time California or any of these states passed a bunch of

new housing bills. Yeah, they were, they were bigger and they were cleaner in that way, but there has been a decade of housing bills being passed in California. Yeah, dozens and dozens of bills, including many that were framed to me as transformative, they just weren't. And so to what you're saying, and as somebody's worked in politics, you've seen this, and as somebody's covered legislation, I've seen it. I think there's a tendency to assume when a bill has passed,

it's done. If you've been fighting for the bill, and you know, you're, you know, finally we got the duplex bill or whatever it is, well, it's passed. Great news, everybody. We're going to get our duplexes and often it doesn't work that way. A lot of things don't work in practice the way you think they would, and that implies to me, particularly on housing, that when you don't have enough consensus on the ground for something, it can be very, very, very hard to implement it because cities

and neighborhoods and planning commissions and so on use a lot of different tools to, you know, block the projects in other ways. I mean, the core question you're asking here, and I think we're all asking is who should decide what housing is built when and where? How should that decision-making process work? And so when I wrote why nothing works, the sort of the big, aha moment I realized was that for a lot of progressivism's history, our view was centralized that power in the hands of

“one person who will decide what is built and that's how levit towns were built, that's that's how”

Robert Moses built housing all over New York City, that's how the establishment built housing for a long time. And then we switched horses, right? We decided we didn't like that model because in many cases it was abusive to people who lived in communities that were bulldozed or they were discriminatory or they were not sensitive to what was happening in the environment. So we created over the course of 50 years, a whole series of laws that put new checks on those who would build housing.

And we're now beginning to try to dial back the number of veto points in the process. And you're right, it's been 10 years of small board changes and now I think more substantial changes. But I do think that you're going to see, you know, I'm from Rhode Island, we've got a bunch of more housing starts than we had. And I understand that it's not the immediate satisfaction of

suddenly we have 5 million more units across the country, but it is like it's a different discussion

among progressives. And that feels to me like a sea change. So something that I wrote about in our housing chapter was the anger in the 60s and the 70s that America was just getting uglier. The term ticket tacky comes from, you know, the song about the housing and daily city, like, you know, not too far south from San Francisco. Little boxes on the hillside, little boxes, made a ticket tacky, little boxes, little boxes, little boxes, little boxes all the same.

You had the accurate view that a lot of forests and rivers were being dispoiled and the growth machine, government construction, all of it, the public lost a kind of faith in it, because instead of this building, making their surroundings more livable, more beautiful, it just became the soulless, grage, you know, mixed use, anonymous, you know, construction.

aesthetics in whether or not people want to build. I don't know that I buy this idea at all,

at least I think it's incredibly underpowered as an explanation. So the claim on the table seems to be that Americans, 1950s and 1960s turned against the growth machine as you described it, primarily out of an aversion to the ugliness of the world. Ugliness is not the word that I would use. The word that I would use is environmental degradation. I mean, the environmentalist movement to the 1960s and 1970s was about the fact that people were dying from the air and dying from the water.

“That's not a question of aesthetics. That's a question of health. If you want to understand”

why it's easy to build in Texas, but difficult to build in California, and all you have is the beauty explanation. Well then you're essentially saying that continued building in Texas has made possible because Houston is so damn beautiful. Houston is not so damn beautiful. The reason that it's easy to build in Houston, I think has very little to do with like the aesthetic perfection of downtown Houston and much more to do with the fact that there's a system of customs and laws and a lack of

zoning regulation that simply makes it easier to build up and to build out. Same goes for Dallas, same goes for Austin, same goes for San Antonio. I want us to build beautifully. I want to build things that people love in part because I want the growth machine of the 21st century to have democratic approval such that we build houses, people love them. They want us to build more houses.

“I think that's a flywheel we should hope for. But if you really want to understand”

why pedolumus stop building in the 1970s, why you can't build in San Francisco, why it's so much harder to build in blue cities and blue states than in Texas, I don't think the beauty argument where the beauty paradigm gets you very far. I think that is probably right. I in some ways want to put beauty closer to the center of politics or at least say it is more important than we give a credit for in politics and also I don't think it explains why Austin

builds homes and you know Los Angeles doesn't. But I actually want to hold them on Austin for a second because one fight that still felt fairly lie. If when you're writing the book is does building

housing lower rents, right? There was an argument that because demand is always so high,

you can build homes but it doesn't do anything. It just allows more kind of wealthy people to move into them and you know maybe it's even like building freeways where it increases so much demand that you know you don't get any fast travel time. You've done some reporting on Austin. That's been a kind of hell of a story or the past year or two. What have we seen there? We've seen essentially as that Austin built an enormous number of homes in the 2010s and early

2020s and average rents have gone down down over the last 18 to 24 months. Austin is like the canonical story here but the story that I find more impressive in a way is Dallas, Texas. Dallas, Texas between 2019 and the early 2020s added a population equivalent to the size of urban Boston hundreds of thousands of people moved into the Dallas metro and if Dallas were like Los Angeles and San Francisco, the average price of a home in Dallas, Texas right now would be around

three billion dollars but that's not what happened. It would be so absurdly high you wouldn't

“you have to calculate it in like Bitcoin but what happened instead, housing prices in Dallas have”

actually declined over the last three and a half years. Dallas built so much that construction increased per capita throughout this period. Dallas builds more housing today than any other metro in the country. That is a triumph of allowing the housing market to work and that's because housing is not a special kind of good. It's a good that like so many other goods is responsive to supply and demand. Given a steady level of demand, if you restrict supply, prices go up, if you add supply,

prices stabilize and if you add enough supply, prices can actually go down. It's why you have in so many places where people want to live, prices going through the roof because we've simply made it too hard to build. It is really, really important to me that whatever explanation that people have for this phenomenon, some people say it's about billionaires or corporate interests, I say look to Texas. Texas has billionaires. Texas has corporate interests, but Texas also has an

entirely different set of rules and customs and permitting regulation that simply makes it easier for supply to respond to demand. And as a result, we have outcomes in Texas that are better than the rent freeze that Mamdoni has promised New York and other left-wing politicians have promised their own cities and states. We have something better than a rent freeze. We have rents going down because we've made it easier to build. See you mentioned Mamdoni and the rent freeze.

And of course, it's another side to agenda, which is to increase supply. Mamdoni is attempting

price controls paired with supply increases. You'll sometimes even hear these argued as one creating

the support for the other, right? Price controls creating political momentum for supply increases. I want to play a clip of Mamdoni here speaking in March. We're all here together today for an announcement where we launch the neighborhood builders' fast track. What this means is that we are creating a pre-qualified roster of developers. And in doing so, we are going to cut down on pre-development time for new projects from 18 months to 10 months. Now, when you couple that with the

referendums that were passed just late last year, that means that we are cutting down on the time it takes to build affordable housing in this city by up to two and a half years. And I say that

to you in a city where we know that time is money, where we know that too many of these kinds

of press conferences have then been followed by years of waiting and New Yorkers cannot afford to wait any longer. And so what this means in a tangible sense is the creation of a thousand additional affordable housing units on city-honed land across our city.

“Here's what I like about that clip and that I think reflects something bigger happening across”

democratic policymaking, which is a recognition that speed matters. And in a way that was, I think not admitted, a lot of policymaking actually took the view that delay was good. The delay was good because policy is complicated, it's a vector complicated. And what we need is a lot of process and time to surface information, surface objection, surface concerns. You can really see this in the way environmental reviews are conducted. You can see this in the

way that, you know, housing is built. And I don't think we often say like delay is good, but in practice we believe delay was good. I mean, there you have a democratic social stuff they're saying as a applause on time is money. And I think the sense that speed is progressive, it's more affordable, but also allows you to deliver at the time frame of elections and show government making different people's life. That is a principle that I am seeing people take more seriously. I'm not saying

“that's just our fault or anything that nature, but I think it's actually really important. And”

recognizing that delay is corrosive to democracy because you can't feel government in your life is a really, really, really important shift for democratic side policymaking to make. Mark, you've written about this explicitly. Among liberals, input was considered a costless for you. It was considered costless to have long periods of input, to prize input, to say that the ultimate expression of democracy is people standing up and telling their city council

don't build this thing anywhere close to me. That was seen as more democratic in some places in the actual vote for the mayor who promised to deliver housing to that city. And actually like found that like the people who showed up on Tuesday night at the city council meeting were the veto point that prevented him from allowing housing. Yeah, I mean, my general view here is that people also use the term procedure fetish. That's if progressive is just sort of like procedure

for procedures. Exactly, it's term. That's it, Nick Bagley's term. And we're not looking for procedure just because we like it. We're not looking for delay because we like delay, we have a fantasy. And we've had it now for several decades that if you get everybody in the room early enough in a planning process, you can create a product or an outcome that has no trade-offs.

“And the truth is that we're facing and one of the major barriers to abundances were facing real”

trade-offs here. I mean, I do want to point out, you know, the housing crisis in New York City,

there's always been a housing crisis in New York City. And we put all sorts of restrictions on what

government could do. The abundance discourse has wanted, in many cases, to pit us or you guys against the left. And that's not an accurate portrayal of what's happening. You're seeing Mamdaani Elizabeth Warren is author of the, maybe the most pro-abundant housing bill introduced forever in the Senate and has passed the Senate. And I think, you know, to the degree that there seems to be tension about this, here's an idea where it seems to me that there's growing consensus.

The polling outfit, Blue Rose recently did missurvey where they asked people whether they liked abundance messaging or populist messaging. And it turns out that the most popular messaging was a synthesis of abundance and populism. It was things like, quote, working Americans can't

not enough childcare. And what little gets built goes to the wealthy first. Democrats will build

“America that works for everyone, not just those at the top. That was the message that pulled the best.”

I don't think that that's despositive. I mean, testing messaging is not the be all and dollar politics. And look, there are philosophical differences between liberals and populists that we shouldn't run away from, like they exist. But the fights often obscured the degree to which individuals could hold simultaneously both populist and abundance principles. And I've come to think of this somewhat cheesely as the abundance mallet, which is to say economic populism in the

front and abundance in the back. So who's wearing the abundance mallet as a horrifying is that might be to imagine. Zora Mundani ran on freezing the rent, but here he is talking about making it easier and faster for developers to build in New York City. That would be fair. He ran on both.

“He did, yes, you're right. He ran on both. But I think if you pulled people and asked them,”

what did you hear more about freezing the rent or accelerating the time with which developers could start getting building in Manhattan and Brooklyn, I think most people associate him with the magnetic freeze the rent rather than the less magnetic shortening the permitting time from 18 months to 10 months. So he's one example. Another example I think is New Jersey governor, Mikey Cheryl, who ran on freezing utility increases, making it easier for people to afford electricity

by talking about price caps. But her second executive order was all about supply side renovations

to encourage the construction of solar and storage in particular by making it easier to build energy in New Jersey. So there again, you have the promise of freeze the utility increase in the front with the promise of expanding supply in the back. [Music] We're building up Crossplay. I've been playing against Dan. My colleague gets in New York times.

I'm going to play Stoop, STUPE across the tripward multiplier square. Cats played another move. Oh, and she did have an S. She played Stoop for 36 points. I've got a Z, which is 10 points. I can put my X over there. I can make box. I have two A's in some T's. I'm guessing Tenga is not a word. Let's see. Tenga is a word. Oh, don't know what Tenga means. So I'm going to press down on the word and oh, definition popped up former monetary unit

of Tajikistan. Something every time I play this game. Even though I'm about 50 points ahead,

one thing I've learned in Crossplay is that the game is never over. I just got a notification

and Dan played his last turn. Let's see who won. It's so close. But I did win. But I want to try to offer up the critique. So it is represented in the strongest way I can, which is the yes of course there can be a synthesis of populism and abundance. And you can see it in somebody like, you know, maybe a mom Donnie. But the in fact in practice, abundance has two huge problems from the populist perspective. One is that a lot of rich people

and billionaires really like it and are funding things with abundance in the name and that they are going to use abundance as a mask or a vehicle to push the democratic party, you know, back in their direction. And the other, which is like the big critique that gets made of certainly our book, I don't know if it is as true in the critique that gets made of yours, is it abundance just isn't focused on the right enemies that what politics should be about

is a confrontation with corporate power. And what abundance is at least perceived is trying to make politics about is a more positive sum. We can all build. We can all get along. It's a sort of more

“liberal approach to things. That I think is like the strongest version I can give up, but you can”

hear Elizabeth Warren make a version of this argument in a speech you gave not too long ago. So yes, we need more government efficiency a lot more, but many in the abundance movement are doing little to call out corporate culpability and billionaire influence in creating and defending

policy nerds worried about zoning, but for wealthy donors and other corporate aligned

democrats who are putting big time muscle behind making democrats more favorable to big businesses. It looks like the corporate tycunes have found one more way to stop the democratic party from tackling a rig system with too much energy. She goes on to note that Reed Hoffman, who's a tech billionaire and influential tech figure, has been sending the book around to people he knows. I want to ask this of both of you. What do you understand to be the relationship between

“abundance and corporations and abundance and concentrations of wealth and income and power? Mark?”

Look, I think there are certain cases where concentrated corporate power is a problem.

We're coming off a week where there were a bunch of victories for the anti-monopolis movement live nation and ticket master. I'm not sure that any of the three of us would voice any objection to a strong stance on abuses of corporate power in that realm. Simon, it goes to a lot of music shows. I really really hate ticket fees. I really don't like them. But my concern about that critique is that if you look at the stories, at least in my book and several stories in your book,

the problem in many cases is not created by corporate power. The last chapter of my book is about

an effort to build a clean energy transmission line through the state of Maine, which is really

just a string through a bunch of forests in Maine. It's proposed in 2016 and it's constructed in 2026. Not because there was some corporate behemoth that was standing in the way or trying to drive up its own. The fight there was about whether it was worth it to imperial some portion of a pristine forest in northern Maine with a wire and the way that people used the levers available within the government made it so that we could not replace something like 700,000 cars worth

of carbon into the atmosphere through old fossil fuel generation with clean hydro power coming from Canada. That's not a problem about corporate power. That's a problem with can government make

“an expeditious decision. I want to say something really clearly. I think the people who focus on”

corporate power being the most significant problem in America have some very good ideas. I also think frankly that we just heard from Elizabeth Warren, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau in a way is like kind of a very abundancey agency. I mean, it's consolidated what you see says earlier in that speech that the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau which she helped found and ideate is like an abundance before abundance. Oh, great. Maybe I'm just totally ripping off her point here because

I read it months ago, but I think she's right. I mean, it consolidated what used to be entirely dispersed regulatory authority in the government in order to bring it to bear to help consumers against corporate power. That strikes me as exactly what we were talking about when it comes to state capacity and your line which you repeated so much on our book tour about deregulating government, getting government out of its own way, getting government to work faster and better for the

“public. CFPB seems like an absolute unalloyed triumph in that respect. At the same time, I think”

people who fixate on corporate power while they have some very good ideas have some not very good ideas. I mean, last year, not going to open up this kind of worms all the way, but I was engaged in a very protracted debate against Antemenoply folks about the degree to which Dallas was a housing oligopoly. I don't think it is. I don't think we should be fixated on punishing builders who are successfully adding housing that seems like taking this one lens and applying it or it shouldn't be

applied. And that tells me that if the lens of corporate power leads to both some very good ideas and some not very good ideas, then it might not be the single best lens through which to see improving America. I am not a populist. I am a liberal. I am concerned not about corporate power specifically, but about power, about how power can manifest in strange places. It can manifest absolutely at the level of corporations and monopoly. It can also manifest at the level of the

neighborhood as Mark wishes explaining. When a group of neighbors stop a new apartment from going up

what is that if not the application of power? In 2017, the New York Times where we are sitting

published this incredible piece. I think when back and forth between us and notion, even if the

final didn't make it in the book, it was about the incredibly expensive per mile cost of connecting Grand Central to the Long Island Railroad. Why was it so expensive to build a train at a tunnel in New York? Partly it was about consulting fees. Partly it was about construction. Partly it was about the fact that public union staffing levels in New York City are like four times higher than they are in the

“typical city or state in Europe, France, Spain, the UK and that's why our construction costs are”

so much higher. So if I'm a popular sitting, I'm an interruptive. If I'm a popular sitting here, I'm somebody who more believes in this critique. Here's my answer to what you just said.

Yes, it's all true. Yes, if I'm I think making the best argument, I can make at least. Yes, that's

all true. But you sure seem more excited when you start talking about the power being misused by the neighborhood group, or by the public sector union, or by the poorly run government, and you sort of yacht a yachted your way past the corporate power. I think that some of the critique comes from a feeling, and I've my own answer to this, but I'm curious for yours, a feeling that yes, you could certainly have at a abundance, a version of abundance, that understood corporate power is one of

the many blockages, and you know, and often a very central blockage. But in practice a way, abundance is written the way many of the people arguing for it seem to argue for it. There's like a yeah, the anti-corporate folks are right, sometimes. Let's go back to talking about how government doesn't work, right? Let's go back to talking about where public sector unions increase costs, and that it's in that where the real message, the real priority set is revealed.

There's a way in which I'm not exactly sure how to answer that question. It's a really good

“question. Why am I more excited to make the point that I see more excited to make?”

You know that feeling when you're in a room, and everyone around you is like freaking out about something, and a weird way that like calms you down, because you're like, oh, everyone's freaked out about this thing. So I don't need to add my anxiety to like the medium level of anxiety in this room. That's kind of how I feel about certain aspects of fearing the influence of corporate power in monopolies and energy and entertainment. I see it's being covered. I see people writing about it.

I see people getting agitated about it. I think it's good that the government is winning lawsuits against entertainment companies that are abusing their own power to race ticket prices. I think it's good. But that's not what the debate is. I'm excited about adding an impression that I think we introduced you and I to the conversation, which is that we are so used to seeing this version of power exist at the level of corporations, and we're so used to seeing the way that

that can have pernicious impacts on consumers that we miss other instantiations of power, and a neighborhood can in strange way be an instantiation of power. It doesn't seem like some nefarious thing when a nice looking woman stands up at a city council meeting and says, I would prefer it in not build an apartment building behind my farm because I'm afraid of my horses being freed out by the construction noise, but I want us to see that is power if it stops an apartment building

from being built. So it's always difficult, but important maybe to respond to a question about

like affect. Maybe the first thing I should have said was I encourage people to read the transcript where my affect is invisible rather than watch this on YouTube or my affect is visible. But I really do think if I'm really reaching down and to understanding why am I passionate about getting people to see these other ways that, you know, surprising accumulations of power can

“stop things from happening in the public good, it's because that's where I think we're missing”

the story. This is a conversation, this conversation among progressives between the populists and the abundance mix or whatever we're called, that is more than a century old. It's the turn of the 20th century, I go through this in my book. The turn of the 20th century, the railroads have completely remade the American economy, power is accumulating, and the people who are concerned about these monopolies have two wildly different ideas about what to do about it. One idea is anti-monopoly,

it's brand-easy, and it's big as bad, small as beautiful, how do we carve these things up so that the old sort of 19th century kind of capitalism that Louis Brandeis had seen on the streets of

was we should build up what was then like just a shadow of a government so that it could accurately and powerfully regulate with centralized power, the RO's have proposed a Bureau of Corporations. We eventually get the Federal Trade Commission before that. We have the Interstate Commerce Commission which is a big bureaucracy designed to regulate the railroads. That's a different idea.

That is taking power as it is and pushing it up into some big, powerful, competent government

bureaucracy that will do the things that ordinary people can't do for themselves.

“And I think sort of the misunderstanding here is that those who say we need to attack”

corporate power are just taking the brand-easy and notion of it and that the abundance ethos horkens back to the old ideas that existed from the turn of the 20th century through the 1960s that we should be building up government power so that government is capable of taking on these corporations. That we have people in government who can make discretionary decisions about where we're going to build transmission lines, how we're going to improve transit,

where we're going to build housing, how we're going to regulate this and that. We want

bureaucracies to be able to move speedily and we want them to be able to make decisions in the public interest and strangely enough it is the reforms that we've seen since the 60s and 70s that have slowed government down so that they cannot be responsive to the corporate challenge. And so to my mind, like there's some confusion here and that the idea that we should abandon abundance in the name of just sort of attacking corporations misses the point that

government should be a competent institution that can accurately and thoroughly review and challenge corporations when they're doing wrong. Can I throw the baseball back to you? Like how do you how do you situate the corporate power critique in your current conception of abundance slash maybe alternative way to ask that question? A time machine materializes right next to us over here takes us back to December 2023

allowing us just enough time to add a chapter seven to the book called abundance and corporate power. Do you write that chapter and what do you put in it? So I have a couple of answers to this. One which is more to the way we wrote the book at the question I asked you about affect is it

“I think we wrote the book with a couple of thoughts but one was it was a book about blind spots”

of liberal and leftist governments. And interesting, this is actually an argument, right? The populace often do think this to be a blind spot of liberal governments. But to me corporate power is actually something that the left broadly speaking understands and is relatively attentive too. I mean, we are writing this book when Lena Khan was the chair of the FTC. So one thing that it just wasn't that much about was things where I thought

progress was kind of had the right idea. But that created the impression that it isn't concerned with that. And so I think then you get into two things that are more substantive. One is that I think when you are talking about building things and this is a book about building things, this is a movement about building things and typically building them in the real world. You are necessarily forced into a complex relationship with corporations and functionally

everything else because first things are built by corporations. Most things will continue to be built by corporations, whether you are talking about drug development where there is a mix of obviously public research but then the pharmaceutical industry actually does do a huge amount of drug development and you're not. Nobody has a theory of getting away from that to when you're talking about building commercial buildings, often building housing, decarbonizing, almost anything you can

think of that needs to be built at a large scale is going to be built in part by corporations.

“So you need to find a way to align corporate energy with your program just sort of being anti-corporate”

as an orientation isn't going to work. And so I think that's one other reason why I've always said

that the theory of power in abundance is liberal in the sense that it believes power can concentrate poorly anywhere. It can concentrate poorly among corporations, in government, among unions, in neighborhoods that there is no safe concentration of power. But here's where I think if I could add your chapter 7, I probably would. Yeah Mark, I take your point that a lot of the things we focus on in the book or frankly that you focus on in your book. Corporate concentration isn't the reason

the transmission lines aren't getting built. And it's not the reason that housing isn't

arguing for is that government should be stronger, more capable of being decisive. And then more capable of turning those decisions into actual concrete and steel and law on so on. And the way money affects politics at its highest levels from state houses to the federal government. I wouldn't have really thought of a campaign finance reform chapter in the book, the way we initially conceived of it. And also because I have a bunch of on campaign finance reform in my first book

in my own hand, like I've covered this. But I think the place where I think you could have put in a chapter 7, I think the place where on the one hand, I think progressivism already has like the

right view on this. But it has not been able to instantiate this UN diplomacy is the more powerful

“government is. The more worried you have to be about the distorting influence of money inside of it.”

And so a political system as porous to money as a one we have currently is becomes very dangerous. So I just put out a podcast about or with this congressional candidate, Alex Boris, who is running for Congress in New York. And this kind of super PAC that is funded by co-founders Palantir and OpenAI and Andrewson Horowitz is like dumping money to destroy him. And Boris is a former employee of Palantir. But what's going on there is he wants to regulate AI. And these companies and investment firms

that are making functionally unimaginable amounts of money from AI are kind of trying to build like a death star to destroy anybody who might regulate AI in a way they don't like. And so a system where you cannot trust there to be like a good structure of who has voice and who has influence because

it is so dependent on donors is not a system where just saying let's make government more powerful

and trust that people running it are going to do the right thing really works because you have a

“like a fundamental corruption of the central decision making apparatus. And I think it's a sense”

of that being true and a cynicism coming from that that well I'm not trying I buy a bunch of the critiques. I think that the feeling that if the billionaires who have all this influence like this book and implemented it you know or got really behind it in the system as it exists that it would just give them a really big voice because it's not specifically oriented towards taking some of their voice away. I think there's validity to that that's the version of it I would give credibility to.

Yeah I think I agree. I don't consider myself anti billionaire TM but I don't think you can look at what's happening with money in government right now and the increasing role that billionaires have over campaign finance and not be a little bit concerned about the last 15 months and what we saw between 2024 and 2025 is that billionaires contributed by some estimations between 10

15 and 25 percent of total campaign spending. Then God a president that cut taxes for the top

0.1% by an average of $300,000 and paid for it by the largest cuts to Medicaid health care for low-income people in American history. That is that is a terrifying vision of the future of plutocracy if that's an omen and if you look at the direction of billionaire incomes made possible by the rise of technologies like AI which are currently in private markets which means that retail investors do not even have an opportunity to benefit from the tripling and triple quadrupling

and decadoupling of anthropic and open AI's enterprise value. That clearly points toward a world in which billionaires have an enormous amount of political power and that scares me and I don't have a perfect solution to it. It's something I'm thinking about a lot right now. I had a conversation on my own podcast with Gabriel Zuckman about the feasibility of billionaire taxes

“which are their own can of worms but I think it's absolutely a problem we need to think about more”

the next few years. I guess I'm sort of struck by the degree to which we're avoiding this sort of central question which is who should be making big decisions. In the 50s, 60s, like there were these public figures like Robert Moses or like Robert McNamara who were purportedly speaking for the public interest and progressivism turned against that model. We become culturally averse to power almost no matter where it is and that means we don't like

whoever is making the decision. Our solution in every case is move the decision making power somewhere else.

Without really thinking like well what is the system we think would be fair to get to an expeditious

“decision that actually does serve the public interest and I think we have conversations about the”

influence of money and politics but like fundamentally what we need is government to be competent in small doses so that we can grow from that. The promise of abundances that we will re-empower government to be able to make decisions expeditiously sort of across the board and we should hold the public figures who are making decisions accountable through elections but like ultimately the proof of the pudding is in the eating and we need to have systems that allow some discretionary

power to the people who are in powerful parts of government to be able to make decisions and then

evaluate there. I would hate for us to predicate our efforts to empower government to make decisions about housing, about clean infrastructure, about any of these issues on a change in the way we finance campaigns. I think we're going to figure out how people feel about AI more and more in the next few years and almost no matter how much money they put up against Alex Borris or whomever if AI

“turns out to be wildly unpopular they're going to have a problem. So I think that actually gets”

us into AI which you've been circling here a little bit and one other group of people you'll hear the word abundance from quite a lot are the people who run AI companies for instance. AI and robotics will bring out what might be the age of abundance of people if you're so swear and and that this is my prediction of the age of abundance for everyone. I had like the one interest of like radical abundance and just like what were the kind of technological leverage

points to just like make the future wildly different and better. As we get closer to AI and we make breakthroughs and we probably talked about last time material sciences, energy, fusion these sorts of things help by AI we should start getting to position in society where we're getting towards what I would call radical abundance where there's a lot of resources to go around. So that's Elon Musk Simultment and Demiscus Abyss and one I think a lot of people are very skeptical that these AI

companies are going to bring anything that we feel to a normal person like abundance what they're instead hearing about is a scarcity of jobs that is coming down the pike. We thought of having AI in the book we mostly cut it out because it felt like it was moving too fast. It has gotten a lot further. Now, how do you think about the ways in which AI could create abundance or also further people create scarcity? I did an interesting conversation last year when I was simultaneously

working on abundance and this cover story that I wrote for the Atlantic called the Anti-Ssocial Century and for that latter story I talked to Bob Putnam, Robert Putnam the author of Bowling alone and he made this interesting point about technology which he significantly blames for the rise of solitude in America. He said to often we adopt a technology and then we adopt that technology's values without thinking about incorporating that technology into our values. So one

example of his was the television and we're going to get to AI in a second. We said with television

you know most people put a television in the room and then immediately started watching five six hours of television a day. It was as if the human body were designed by evolution to do

“nothing but sit in the couch and watch streaming images on the screen. That's how immediately”

it insinuated itself into modern life. He said that's different from say the Amish which are very very purposeful about almost screening a technology to ensure that it fit their values before incorporating it. So for example something like solar energy which they say does fit their values you can often find near Amish farms where is the television set they said it's going to interrupt the values that we have about family interconnectedness and time spent looking at other

people in the face and so we're going to keep it out of our homes. I don't think that we should take the Amish approach to television with artificial intelligence. I don't think we should ban it. But I do think we should take a kind of Amish light approach to thinking about incorporating this technology into our values rather than adopting the values of artificial intelligence mindlessly. What the latter would mean is allowing data centers to be built absolutely anywhere

including in many places. The Wall Street Journal reported in places where residential developers are selling land that is needed for homeless for people. Two data centers to build a house for

feel awfully close to allowing the values of AI to supplant the values of people which is having a home

“to live. I think there's a lot that I agree with there but let me drop this down to as you”

put it at the beginning here the level of vibes. I think one of the vibes projects in abundance is to try to create a political vibe that is simultaneously progressive in the sensitive cares about social goals and equality and distribution and a bunch of things that progressives typically care about and pro technology. Right on the cover of our book, we have this somewhat solar punky, you see technology and forestry and we talk about rewilding very much at the beginning

because you have vertical farming. We are trying to create a vision of the way technology can be pulled into politics to make things possible they're not currently possible to solve. And I would say the level of vibes that has gotten harder because one, there is a very, very reasonable sense that technology is concentrating power more narrowly in the hands of a more narrow

group of people. Elon Musk is well on his way at the moment becoming the world's first Trillionaire.

You know, you see the power of simaltment wields. It's a Dario wields star. On the day, people are scared of AI. You know, the way Jasmine Sun describes AI populism is since it is really an elite project that is like being shoved down people's throats and not something they want but something that they're being forced to accept and adapt to. And so at the level of vibes, this sort of politics that merges progressive goals and a kind of view the technology can be

“harness for them. It seems very far. GLP wants a very widespread, but I think the way the left feels”

about them is very unsettled. I'm curious if you talk a bit about that level because I think it's very hard for a positive politics to grow out of a deep and medium suspicion and yet I understand

why this suspicion is there right now. Yeah, let me talk first about AI and then let me get to GLP one

because I think they're quite different. I think the populist energy, the anti-tech energy that faces artificial intelligence is very different than the dispersed anxiety that people feel about some of the implications of GLP ones, despite this in many ways being like one of the most popular drug categories in like the last few decades. So I think in that respect they definitely deserve a little bit of distinction. The thing I just meant about that because I think you're right,

“it's just that I don't see any place for the left is like excited about a new technology, right?”

Okay, yeah. So I really like the two three sentences that we had about artificial intelligence in the sci-fi and yet the kicked off our book because while we don't have a fully fleshed out AI policy in that book we say two things that I think are worth holding on to. The first is that the profits of artificial intelligence because it is a technology that is built on human achievement and human intelligence are taxed and redistributed to the public and number two

that the workweek has shrunk and implicit in the idea that artificial intelligence allows the workweek to shrink is the idea that to the extent that it reduces labor that reduction of labor is not born on the backs of and dramatic increase in unemployment but is rather distributed among a stable set of fully employed labor force that is working a bit less and earning more because of higher productivity. So if I were crafting a sort of abundance AI message, what I would say is this is

rapidly looking like it's going to become a trillion multi trillion dollar industry. We have to restore the ability to tax corporations that could be among the most profitable in the history of capitalism. That's part one. We want to tax these companies and redistribute their income to the people. But also I think we need to think about what kind of labor market policies we can begin to build to ensure that there isn't a displacement of workers so that if this technology makes people more

productive, it results in something that looks much more like a four-day workweek than the equivalent

20 percent of the economy just being shunted on to unemployment. On GOP ones, I definitely get the

impression that there is a left wing, is it left wing? There's an aversion to the technology within certain aspects of media. There are magazines and news that are writers who are against GOP ones because they promote a new thinness culture or they might represent some kind of unnatural way of getting a normal body. Biohacking, optimization, culture, peptides now,

towards some kind of transhumanist future with which we feel uncomfortable and while enriching a small

number of people, while enriching a small number of people, but I also think it's important to look at the fact that this is by all accounts, the most popular category of drug in the last 20, 30 years. I mean, the pharmaceutical companies can't sell it fast enough. The peptide makers with their relationships to Chinese or whatever labs, they can't sell it fast enough. I mean, here you have an emerging technology that looks like it might have implications for neurodegenerative

disease, for inflammation, for cardiovascular disease. These are diseases that are among the highest mortality burden in the country, in the developed world. Why aren't we devoting even more public

resources to studying this drug faster and finding new ways of bringing down the cost the next

two years for all Americans? What if the federal government spends a lot of money to promote a certain drug category, reward certain companies with advanced market commitments, hundreds of millions, billions of dollars, for companies that build these drugs, so that the government, essentially, is buying those drugs and then can distribute them to the public, which is exactly what we did for COVID vaccines. And right now, the federal government just sort of seems MIA on this in a way that

I'm not sure I entirely understand. So if I were in government looking at this revolution, I would frankly be interested in something like an operation warp speed for GLP ones.

Mark want to pick up on something that Derek said a little bit earlier in the AI part of that,

“which I think is really pregnant, which is, should abundance of time be a goal.”

And what reason I ask is that you've done a lot of thinking about the progressive movement. It comes up a lot in your book. And when I go back into the progressive movement, one thing I am struck by is how much broader its conceptions of human flourishing were then what I think liberalism tends to offer for that matter. Socialism or democratic socialism tends to offer today. You have a lot of talk about parks. You have a lot of talk about public spaces. You have a lot

of talk about the liberal arts and certain forms of enriching education. Obviously, you have temperance movements and things like that. And there's a lot of talk in that era of work in the role it should play or should not play in our life. And now we just sort of accept it as so central. You know, we have two or in our families and you know, everybody works all the time. But particularly if we do end up in this world where AI is a labor replacing technology,

which, you know, to some degree it will be, should the goal be that, I mean, the five-day work week isn't set in stone maybe it should be four days. Maybe it should be three. I mean, Brink Lindsey and his sort of abundance adjacent new book, the permanent problem is is circling some of these ideas. But I'm curious, like given you a more historical perspective, what you think of that and what you think of time is a thing leisure time, you know, time that

you have autonomy over as a long-term goal for abundance. In the moment of every new technological transformation, we have had some notion, some dream that maybe we could have less work in more leisure for the same income. And in most cases, it's part of the American DNA to use the

“extra time to do more work, right? I think, you know, gains famously expected that we would be”

spending less time at work. And there are 15 hour workweek by now. Right, right. But we did create the weekend, right, the labor movement. I mean, we have taken time back at the time. We have taken time back. I suspect that we are going to find with a rise of China with the enormous challenges that we face and the various new technologies that we have in other realms that there's going to be a demand for speedy progress on all sorts of other issues. And those who want to spend time doing that

are going to spend all week and all weekend working on those challenges. So I'm less saying when that we're going to have less time. I think what's so interesting about Derek's analysis of what happened with GLPs is that in situations like warp speed, we have clear delineations of who makes decisions, right? We are empowering people to take chances to make, you know, enormously consequential decisions about where money goes and to try things quickly. That is exactly what we don't have

in these other realms of abundance, right? It is very hard to figure out who makes the decision about where the transmission line's going to go, how we're going to build the new transit line,

“where the housing is going to go. And I think like that's an interesting model in these other realms.”

How are we going to, how are progressives going to change decision-making processes across the board

I think the transmission line's question brings up another area that both interfaces with technology

“obviously, but also politics for me a lot of abundance comes out of taking first about the”

EMB movement and then thinking about climate change decarbonization and the need for a really, really, really aggressive green energy build out, which was being conceived of and attempted in the Biden administration and it became very clear that the laws we have and the permany we have was not going to allow enough solar and wind and transmission lines and so on to get placed. Then Donald Trump gets elected and I would say a couple things happen. One is he got into the

inflation reduction acts credits for wind and solar trying to mess all that up and also make

it in some cases like harder to permit and harder to finance. There were hopes that you would see

big level permitting reform, at least maybe that would happen under a public and presidency, but that has not happened in any real way. Nor is Donald Trump exactly doing fossil fuel abundance because he has got in the straight of her moves into a complete mass and so oil prices are really high but most of the debate is how to make oil cheaper again like when you think of where we were talking about green energy a couple of years ago and you think of where we are now or it's just like

can you even keep oil affordable? It seems like a total absolute disaster and I would add this and then turn it to you Derek which is one thing that worries me is that when people lose political

fights they sometimes like backfill into just saying like well maybe they were wrong about everything

“I think we are acting like climate change, science is somehow stopped being true because the politics”

of climate change are proven harder than people hoped but we are just warming the world really fast and there's no reason to think that that will not have all the terrible effects of people have feared and so I don't think this politics is gone forever because you're going to have huge natural disasters and storms and things like that but I don't know we've gone from place where the question is how fast we build out the decarbonization to whatever the hell this is now

and it's a real it's a real fall it doesn't just seem like an object disaster it is an absolute disaster I mean this is what you and I were talking about a lot with audiences and you know may in April of last year we're saying that Donald Trump wins this affordability election where if you ask people who switch the democratic to the republican column why did you switch they said over and over again it's cost of living it's affordability it's the price of housing

what's happened to cost of living affordability under Donald Trump all of it has gotten worse and it's not just that it's gotten worse because like a comet came in from outer space that Donald Trump couldn't possibly change it's often directly because of Trump's policies I mean he has governed often very explicitly as a scarcity candidate there's a scarcity of labor and large part because the amount of legal and undocumented immigration coming into this country has

fallen off a map such that the labor market is barely growing anymore we have trade scarcity we've essentially made it illegal for all sorts of goods to be not illegal but highly taxed all sorts of goods to be sold into the country some of those goods are inputs into things like building transformers and if you look at why the cost of electricity and energy is rising despite the fact that within the context of AI it's often blamed on the data centers when you talk to energy experts

they will say almost to a person it's not so much about the exciting reason of AI is driving up the cost of your electricity it's much more the slightly more boring reason which is that the hardware guts of the electrical grid are getting scarce and more expensive in large part because we have tear off the inputs which makes it harder to build transformers and stations so he's made it difficult in so many different ways in order to allow him to achieve the very thing that he was

“elected to achieve that is I think an absolute tragedy for America for consumers for families”

it is however and I do mean this like on a separate plane an opportunity for people who think of themselves as abundance liberals to refocus this question around how do we solve these problems on the supply side how do we make it easier to build the housing that currently is not being built how do we make it easier to build the transformers that currently aren't not only being built but are also in many cases being terrified so I think Trump is a disaster but Trump's

disaster is often instructive to the opposing party so this I do think is an opportunity for someone

supply and demand works there are supply side solutions to many of these problems and if we implement

them in a way that the Trump administration has not we can begin to fix some of these problems okay but this is a place where to go back to something I was saying at the beginning of the conversation I see a big difference between having a vision and not so the the big byword of the era right now is energy affordability we're all talking about affordability and I also think

“energy should be affordable and people should be able to afford it that is not I think a forward”

looking vision of this I want to see clean energy abundance described I want to say a political

party that actually has a vision of a world in which we have more energy and the fruits of that

energy available to us available to people in poor countries and is able to describe why it wants that and how it's going to achieve it and this is a place where I think that we're sort of at the intersection of a few things that people I think will come to believe have failed one is that climate politics has proven very very hard and I think one reason it's proven hard is it over a long period of time and let's see trying to motivate people to avoid a disaster that they cannot feel

day to day is very hard right you're trying to create a tremendous amount of political motivation

by warning people of a thing that has not for the most part happened to them yet and you can do

“that to some degree but I think the politics of climate have proven hard the degree to which the”

public doesn't really prioritize it has been a difficult lesson to learn obviously Trumpism has not like taken the mantle of cheap energy away from the Democrats for all the reasons you just described but I think what separates abundance and what is at least meant to be in my head from what we're really seeing in a lot of places is that you're supposed to have some vision of what energy clean energy abundance is and what it looks like and what it can achieve and that is just

not a grammar I think that people are used to talking about I think the left kind of has like a worried relationship with energy just wants to avoid the problems of fossil fuel energy use right decarbonization etc the right just wants energy to be cheap and plentiful and to drill and the idea that there is some other future we could attain the is not just the present but without climate disasters or the present on the right with climate disasters but a longer period of cheap

fossil fuel oil like I would like to see that like brighter future described and that's a place where

“I think there's been a lot less by now than I would have hoped I might disagree with the way you're”

splitting out the economic case and the vision case there's a way in which I think the last few months in particular have demonstrated that the case for clean electricity is also the case for cheap energy in the long run we just saw is the degree to which a totalitarian theocratic regime can use drone weaponry to control an artery of gas and oil in a way that can raise the cost of fossil fuels for the entire world one way to not rely on that one artery is to build more energy at home to

in source your energy what are some ways to do that it's to take advantage of an unbelievable cost revolution in solar and storage not to mention I would like when geothermal and nuclear but those are alternative for now to use the cost revolution in solar and storage to build more in this country such that we have not only clean electricity but also clean electricity that isn't going to ride the sort of insurance spikes of a world in which there's war on the seas that every

few months drives up the cost of hydrocarbons that are put on ships I think the distinction I am making though is between a world that is being described in terms of the present right we can have what we have now but it is not subject to Iran closing the state of Hormuz and actually imagining energy and clean energy as a generator of future wealth and change I think something that makes abundance distinctive from where a lot of democratic party progressive politics has been for

long time and you've written a lot about this as well is I think there's been a long running skepticism you know going back to the beginning of energy right you know you want to reduce

distinctively pretty pro energy it believes that a world in which we all had access to much more energy

would be a better world dramatically so right it would make possible all these technological innovations like vertical farming and things that we really want to see nasty salination and it believes that the technology is there or near there to do that cleanly and so if you really invest in that you know both in terms of things we know how to build like wind and solar but are getting better at you know batteries and the things that we are like we would like to sort of

have revolutions in like geothermal and nuclear something really different is possible and yes I agree that you could use a current moment to pivot to that what I'm saying is I am not seeing

“people really do that and I think it isn't actually an important dividing line is what you're talking”

about just securing a better energy supply then we have now or is what you're talking about

a world of energetic wealth clean energetic wealth but you can somehow describe but that is quite different than what we now live in. I get I just want to come back I think this is a perfect case for abundance in this sense to Derek's point we're now got incredibly expensive fossil fuel energy because of the current crisis but set that aside we have at our fingertips technology that makes it possible for us to replace much of that with clean environmentally sensitive

forms of electricity generation the thing that we don't have the real cog in the wheel is transmission it is the fact that clean energy is created in certain places it used to be that you would you would mine the coal or bring the oil or gas through a pipeline to the place where it was going

“to be actually converted into electricity and then it would be brought locally to the people who”

were nearby now we've got the problem of having the wind and the solar and whatever it else is being generated in places that are far away from where the load is going to be expanded and we need to build lines that connect the generation to the place where people want to use the electricity. You've got a solar farm here and you've got a city here and between the three of them are a wealthy neighborhood, a pristine forest and you know, a struggling, more marginalized

neighborhood the line has to go through one of those three places and abundance democrats have not articulated the way that we're going to come to that decision expeditiously we have sort of given into our fantasy that if you just put these three groups some of whom we're going to be affected by this new transmission line into a room and have them articulate their problem we will magically come to some sort of consensus but in most cases we don't and we often get tripped up by it

“and I think this is the big coming challenge for abundance we have to build a system that allows”

for us to make trade-offs we need to system where everyone has a voice and not no one has a veto and we get to a decision expeditiously and then it's not subject to endless litigation and the challenge for our movement for the abundance generally for progressivism is how do we make government work and you're right that abundance should be bigger than let's get rid of red tape this is not getting rid of red tape this is metabolizing

a whole series of conflicting interests so that we get to a decision. I agree with that and so I think that's actually a good place to get to the final piece here which is at the core of a abundance city of a strong state a state capable of making decisions a state capable of executing on those decisions implementing them building things in the real world the getting things built in the real world the tremonization began with douche which on the one hand was enormously destructive of

state capacity I'm going to have this proof that you could do a lot more to the state then people thought you could that the rules or regulations were not nearly as binding as people thought and I am seeing Democrats begin to metabolize the idea that if they are put back into power they're going to need to take some of those lessons and build something different and I want to play a clip from Pete Buttigieg just the other day. My word of warning to my own

political party is that we would make a terrible mistake if we thought that our job was to just take power somehow and then put everything back the way it was that's not what we're here to do we're we're not out to go around and just find all the little bits and pieces of everything that that they smashed and tape it together and say here you go I give you the world as it looked in

2023 that's not going to work it's not what we need so much has changed and the truth is they are

some useless things too because they're destroying everything so now we get a chance to put things

together on different terms so that Buttigieg clip is like it's like fan service for me right that's

“that's what I want to hear somebody saying but I want to say he goes on to say what those different”

terms should be and I think this is a really big unsettled question for Democrats which is they know you heard it also in the news some clip earlier they know that after doge after all this destruction and after also the recognition that things can work differently they have to work differently that they cannot just build back they can't even just build back better they have to build something different but I don't think they know on what principles at different things should be built yeah

mark this is obviously your wheelhouse event what would you tell people to judge so we need to make it so that when various bureaucracies within the federal government are thinking about whether to cite new wind farms off the coast and there are implications for energy and their implications for the fishing industry and their implications for the wildlife and for the birds and for the energy companies on shore and all of these things have divergent interests right now

the federal government and government generally gets caught up in those negotiations again with the fantasy that if everyone gives their voice and we just have an equal composition I want to

stop you for a second because I feel like you're framing the specifics you keep saying just

the fantasy yeah it's the law right there are courts they are I talk to the people doing these decisions but they are worried about lawsuits and they are worried about the project getting dragged out so one reason Elon Musk just gutted things that's right is he the Trump administration didn't try to do anything through statute through law right they didn't try to remake the civil service or its rules except through executive order to change things architecturally and to

change things in terms of who can decide what at the level you're talking about to make power wieldable in this way so that makes it harder yes the meat has it can get filibustered and

nobody's gonna throw you a parade for remaking the administrative procedures act right who wants to

spend all their time on that and so I'm not saying that even directionally I disagree with you but I do think it's we're saying what you're describing is not just like a bunch of progressives imagining it would be nice it's actually how the whole thing works you get sued if you don't follow it that's absolutely true and that's the system that we built over the course of the last 50 years like that this is the challenge for abundance and you're right it's not a simple

fix it's not something that a doge could have done we need to have in our mind a process that we believe is fair and that when people don't get the outcome that they want they will abide it and understand that that was determined to be in the public interest I am one of 17 sensory bangles fans in the entire world there are 16 of us and we all know each other and there was a moment in the world there was a call at the end against Logan Wilson for past interference

at the end of the game and it was not past interference and I feel very strongly about this we

“all 17 of us feel very strongly about this but it was called and the play went on and I think”

of that without that call the Bengals likely win the game but we lost and I don't sit here today and litigate whether or not the Bengals were actually suitable champions several years ago we have a system today in which we haven't created within the government a system by which we can take a whole series of conflicting signals requirements demands concerns metabolize them into a decision where someone decides I understand that there's an environmental cost to that I understand

that that's not great for the fishermen I understand that we're giving up some clean energy but this is the thing that we're going to do and those who lose who didn't get what they wanted are forced to stand down this is the criticism that I have and the real where I have for abundance is I'm not sure that we are articulating how we're going to make these tradeoffs in a way that makes sense and is both fair to those who need to have a voice but doesn't allow for

insurmountable debate. Let's see our version of this. Doshers to total disaster I mean there's a

“way in which I think some people say oh you know what we'll do is we'll build doge but better that's”

what begs the question like what is the thing we want progressive abundance doge to do better and there's a little bit of a blank space there so let me try to fill out some ideas one of the failures of the Biden administration that you and I talked about a lot on the tour was the

lot of people at the state level about what they saw as the reason why rural broadband money

“tensed billions of dollars of it didn't actually build rural broadband and why several billion”

dollars of electric vehicle charge stations money was also not spent and the answer that I kept hearing they felt like the people they were talking to in the Biden administration they felt like they were coming up with excuses to extend the period of time to come up with more instruments of delay than were necessary by the rules and scribe by the law itself and that brings me to a point that you might think of as sort of like doge for better but I sometimes think of as being like a little bit

separate it's this idea that abundance is not just a set of ideas and laws and rules

it's the people who execute them and one thing that I think the incoming hopefully

democratic administration twenty twenty nine will value is not just a new set of rules that value speed but personnel that value speed I actually think you can go quite far by bringing in people who really really want laws to be passed and then money to be spent expeditiously and are looking for ways to do that legally not by violating the law because you know as much as it's talked about how much Donald Trump and Elon Musk when he was in government just like you know

ran through everything with a chainsaw and machete you look at all the various ways that Trump has lost in the courts that have consistently slowed him down to do all kinds of things

I mean the administration is now paying back $166 billion in terrifese that's not moving fast that's

“moving fast then moving very slow because you have to undo everything you just did so you want to”

follow the law but I also think you want to bring in people into government that really really want to move quickly and to the question of what do we want to do quickly I mean the bipartisan infrastructure law was in many ways a very abundancey law they wanted to spend money to improve American infrastructure and in particular I think if you look at the delays happening right now with transmission lines and transformers we need to find some way either through regulation or

through legislation or through personnel to build this stuff much faster because you can not electrify a grid if there's like interconnection cues and transformer delays of months and years so that's one thing I think you really really want to use to kind of think the progressive dose to do the other that I think is so important is right now the delay in the drug development pipeline at the level of the FDA and clinical trials is absolutely horrendous and there's a group of

people including work Sandra Tesla that are looking at what would clinical trial abundance mean how could you use a combination of artificial intelligence and innovative public policy to renovate the way that we test drugs to get the same safety benefits out of it but going at something like warp speed because you know despite with the anti-vaxxers say the COVID vaccines were really remarkably safe given the the health benefits that they they gave the American

Global Population but like as we're like you talked about this a lot when when we were driving the country I'm wondering how you're thinking is evolved here and what you think a good dose would look like in twenty twenty nine so one of the lines I used often on tour as you remember is that the left is over four my institutions and the right is underformed by them and a different version of it was that the personality type of the left has become bureaucratic

“and the personality type of the right has become autocratic and I think in that is what”

where I think the opportunity is and where I think the dangerous one thing doge very naturally did was created a a rallying around the institutions of government among liberals among others right they're trying to gut the NIH and the national science foundation and USAID and all these things and we need to defend them and I think one of the dangers and I think this is what Buddha judge is getting at is going to be to be pushed back into being the coalition of the status quo

the coalition of the institutions the coalition telling you believe in government believe in science you know even it's not working for you and I think something that the left has to be very very careful of is the left is now the coalition that relies on the people for whom the institutions have worked the left is the coalition of college grads who's using all left of center here I'm saying all left of center I don't mean the far left I mean the the left of center coalition in this country

the democratic party so it will naturally be fundamentally sympathetic to institutions and one of the things we we focused on the book is this point which came up earlier from Nick Bagley about the procedural fetish and the argument he's making in that is that lawyers and the democratic party

have followed procedure right how do you legitimize how do you say that what the state is doing

is appropriate while followed the rules and Bagley who is himself a lawyer who trains administrative lost students who was also chief counsel for Gretchen Whitmer he makes this point no for most people legitimacy is attained throughout comes and so what I understand to be the meta argument running through all of abundance is it the point of government is to deliver real things for real

“people and you have to know what it is you're trying to deliver right if you're trying to deliver”

more housing than the only thing that matters is not if you follow the rules or any of the rest of it not saying you should like break the law but but you need to make the law you need to structure the

law you need to structure the institutions such that they deliver the housing if they don't deliver

the housing it does not fucking matter how many laws you passed there is this debate no Smith the economist and writer calls it checkism this tendency to I remember this from the 2020 primary among the democrats to just one up each other on how much money you're promising to spend on Gretchen energy it doesn't matter what matters is how much green energy you got for that money and so you know and you get this with the NIH and things I mean we did a lot of work on this and in the

book and you did a lot of work on this in the book the national institutes of health are a marvel they're also a gigantic pressure towards conservatism and here I don't mean it in the political sense I mean it in the caution sense in what gets studied they you know create more herd mentality

“right the more conventional wisdom you have to be very careful about institutional failure particularly”

in government we're failing institutions cannot be out competed by you know newer younger corporations and so I think that the principle for me which is like maybe a little bit different than your question of how do you centralize more decision making authority is how do you take the reality and the constancy of institutional failure seriously and in particular how do you do that when you are the coalition of people who are heavily formed by succeeding inside institutions what I find

lottable in Elon Musk amidst the many things I find not lottable in him is the relentlessness with which he tries to achieve his goals right back I believe and you know getting us tomorrow and you know creating an electric vehicle transition and all the rest of it and nothing else matters to him he just tries to create organizations that run through walls and he actually does make

“tremendous things happen in the world with that and I think that there there is a culture among”

Democrats to hear the word no and be like well the institution said no it said we don't do that it said we can't do that and then to explain it away to then speak from the institutional perspective and tell everybody why we can't do anything we can't do it because of the filibuster and the filibuster is just the way the Senate works we can't do it because of then you know the way noticing common periods are structured or we can't move faster because of environmental review

instead of finding these things and saying this is a problem and we have to fix it because what we promise to do is deliver for people the way I would think about the different terms is that the institutions are not the point of government delivery is the point of government and so the point of the institutions is to deliver and if they are not delivering and if we don't know if they're delivering then the institutions are not the thing we defend the institutions are

the thing we upend change remake and we have to treat them as much more liquid and malleable and have to take reports of their failure much more seriously than we do I think the NIH is a really interesting flashpoint for the perspective that you're advancing consider like three approaches the NIH a sort of pro establishment liberal approach an anti-establishment mega approach which will call just current policy in 2026 and an anti-establishment abundance liberal approach the establishment

approach to be to say the NIH spends 40 billion dollars a year is the jewel of global biomedical

research it is one of the most important successful institutions in America you cannot criticize

it you cannot touch it it exists in a kind of spectral plane that we can simply not broke any criticism of that sort of one pro establishment approach the current anti-establishment mega approach essentially says for a variety of reasons that are too complicated for me to go into right now we hate universities we don't trust scientists and we really don't like mRNA so we're going to attack the universities we're going to destroy a lot of their scientific programs we're going to

cut NIH grants by billions of dollars and also basically ban mRNA research because RFK

and the abundance liberal approach is not to say how dare you attack the NIH which is a perfect program it's celestial and you have no business criticizing it it's to say you know what current policy is horrific but it's also quite embarrassing is the fact that according to their own testimony American scientists that are funded by NIH spend up to 40% of their time filling out paperwork these are the smartest people in the world that we've entrusted with coming

up with the most important breakthrough is about the cosmos and the human body curing diseases

and what do we do for almost half of their time forced them to check boxes that's a failure and it's a failure that we inscribed with decades of cover your ass rules that force scientists to essentially become bureaucrats it's to say again what do we want to accomplish with NIH don't we want an abundance of scientific breakthroughs and isn't a good way to do that to unleash the productivity of scientists and unburden them from some of the paperwork

requirements that we've added in the last few decades let's find a way that was our scientists to be scientists by reducing that burden that's an approach that I would like to see

“a quote unquote good doge lean into in 2020 nine I think they're we're getting a crucial”

distinction with in abundance that I just think we need to acknowledge one is your description there

of scientists being forced to spend an incredible amount of time doing paperwork which is

incredibly inefficient like I don't know anyone who's going to hear that story and not think that's an obvious reform we need to do there is a sense the government doesn't work in sort of in the spirit of Clinton's reinventing government initiative from the 1990s that we should be rethinking these processes so that we are able to work more officially I think that is an important part of abundance I think to your earlier ammunition that you don't want to

abundance just to be like we're going to get rid of mid tape that is in that half of the challenge the other challenge is trying to metabolize conflict within the government because some of that paperwork is ridiculous but there are moments where we're having ethical challenges about whether we can do this study whether we've studied it to the point of feeling constable that it's not going to have terrible side effects that we're not aware of right we're going to have

“to make hard choices and the thing that we have yet to articulate I have I think this is a”

criticism I have my own book which is that I argue that we need to have a system where people have a voice would not have veto I'm not sure that we have yet articulated and it's going to take some law changes it's going to take some statutory changes it's going to take some regulatory changes and the bureaucrats and the liberals within government the people that will be in the the coming democratic administration I think they do want to get things out quickly but they are

definitely afraid of the consequences of making a choice that comes at a cost particularly of a democratic constituents I wanted as we kind of come to an end here to play a clip from Bernie Sanders he was asked by my colleague David Lee and Hart about abundance and I thought his answer to this was really really really interesting if the argument is that we have a horrendous bureaucracy absolutely correct it is terrible I brought in over the years a lot of money into the state of

Vermont it is incredible even in a state like Vermont which is maybe better than most states how

water is even get the bloody money out you're just so many oh my god we have 38 meetings got to talk about this got unbelievable I worked for years to bring two health clinics into the state of Vermont that we needed I wanted to more to renovate one and build another one in this you cannot believe you cannot believe the level of bureaucracy to build a bloody health center it's not built alright so I don't need to be lectured on the nature of bureaucracy it is horrendous

and that is real but that is not an ideology that is common sense it's good government sure that's what we should up ideology is do you create a nation in which all people have a standard of living do you have the courage to take on the billionaire class do you stand with the working class

“that's ideology so I think this ideology common sense distinction Sanders is making is like a”

rich text but I want to hold it to the side for a minute I love that answer from Sanders but I want to point something out I covered Sanders getting that money for community health clinics that was in the Affordable Care Act which passed in 2010 it is 2026 he is saying one of the two is still not built and I think one of the things that I am saying around all this is that nobody should be angry then the left if we have what Sanders calls a horrendous bureaucracy that kind of saying

the meeting structure is crazy and saying that's not the point of politics but I think it is

“the point of politics and I think that particularly if you are the political party that in your”

ideology believes very fundamentally the government can do big good things that actually confronting the ways in which bureaucracy is horrendous just needs to be a very very high order issue because if you can't do that then I think the other parts of your ideology won't work out I think that yeah you can confront the billionaires you can raise taxes but if people don't trust you to spend the taxes well then they're actually not in the long term gonna help you do that I think you see this

now with like Democrats promising to just cut and cut and cut and cut taxes on the middle class

because people don't believe their taxes by them that much yeah raise them on the billionaires

but not on me and so my point here isn't a critique of Sanders I actually think what he's saying that answer is really important some you don't hear that many people on the real left say but I do think just like in terms of prioritization the question here of what does it actually mean to prioritize fixing the horrendous bureaucracy so you can build the damn health clinics some things are the level of like principle and who decides but some things are the level of

what do you choose to do and and to me it's very very court abundance that like you need a vision

“for you trying to go and then in the near term you have to choose to do the hard things necessary”

to get there I have two statements in a question I had a 35 maybe 35 and a half minute conversation was wrong I'm down the last year of resume and the one sentence that fell out of my mouth that got the most yep yep yep on the other end of the zoom recording was when I said you know it sounds to me like you're saying that Democrats cannot ask government to add more functions until it

proves to the public that government can function in the first place I think he recognizes that

despite the attempt to distinguish common sense ideas from ideology you just heard from Sanders in many cases it is the ability of the left to act with common sense that preserves the popularity of the ideology to add government functions you have to prove that government can function in the

“first place that's statement one statement two is that I think it's notable that in that quote”

he says that common sense good governance is not an ideology but caring for the working classes and that's interesting because I think that what he's just describing in the inability to build a health clinic is essentially the idea that if Vermont politics were more common sensical it would be more likely to help the working class so I'm not sure I I have the same distinction between or I see the reason to distinguish between a common sense policy and ideology I think that

the problems that America faces are not a shortage of ideologies but a shortage of good governance and a shortage of common sense governing and so I wonder if I wanted to what extent you as my co-author prize the degree to which abundance is an ideology to the exclusion of it being a sort of mere common sense approach to governance I'm glad you turn this back on me because I'm not trying to realize but I thought this until you did Sanders is using the word ideology there

when I think the word is vision when he's describing this distinction between good government you know bureaucracy that actually works community health centers that actually get built and then he says ideology is do you create a nation in which all people have a standard of living do you have a courage to take on the billionaire class I think he is making a distinction between the way government society works right now and is it working well or poorly and where

you are trying to go that it has not yet gone and I actually sort of understand that distinction he's making I think that there's a version of abundance which is just good government and I think there's a version of abundance which is a vision of a world that is quite unlike our own in a place like California New York City a world where you could be a firefighter in San Francisco or a firefighter in Brooklyn and be able to fort a home in the city you're keeping from burning

down right that is no less radical right now than Medicare for all this frankly it's more radical in those cities because at least we do actually have health care coverage for at least some of the poor in this country what we're talking about with clean energy abundance a vision of a radically

actually figure out a way to make AI serve the public's ends and not just be a way to replace white

“color workers I think that could create a radically different world but see yeah I think there is a real”

distinction between a abundance as efficiency and abundance as vision and to a bunch of the points mark that you're making abundance is efficiency and good government hard enough right you're really trying to change the guts of how a lot of our institutions work and you're changing things that are answers to hard problems and I probably believe a little bit more than you do that something's just overgrown they're not all like an actual effort to weigh values in a thoughtful way but but

nevertheless like changing that would be hard but the point of changing all that at least to me is to make it possible to go somewhere we haven't been a world in which you don't have to be afraid of your health care you don't have to be and how much it will cost you don't have to be afraid of how much your rent is going to go up you don't have to be afraid of this economic insecurity

“and precarities so many people live under I think that's very important and I believe in that”

and then I also think that there is this vision of not just how to be more secure but how to have possibilities open to us so we don't currently have and ways of living open to us so we don't currently have you know we could have high speed around this country you know bullet trains zooming around the way they do in Japan and we don't that would feel really different to people and so if all abundance does is push forward zoning reforms for housing like that will be good but

it's not a I agree it's not a vision it's supposed to be creating some different world than the one we live in no I'm glad you made that distinction because if someone said your book has no vision I would say well it just began with a you know four page vignette of what the future in 2050 would look like if we got abundance right for a long time I would argue that the progressive movement was born from abundance the centralizing authority that it could do big things really was the

predominant ideology from the late 1800s through the 1960s so that was an abundant oriented approach to progressivism and that we got away from that after that and we don't want to go back to the old but we need to find some core notion that government is capable and willing to make the hard choices that will drive humanity forward and I just think that's a fairly new conversation within the discourse on the left and if your book my book a bunch of other books if this movement

refocuses on giving people faith that these public institutions can work that they can make

“decisions expeditiously that is a huge boom I think to the broader progressive project because”

in the absence of government working people turn to Trump right it feels to me as though abundance as an ideology or a vision or whatever you want to call it is the most important antidote to the ascendance of maga that the people that were Reagan Democrats and that were Obama Trump voters and also the people who are you know who would be considered our base but simply don't come out to vote from election to election that they need to believe that when they're cast in a ballot

for a Democrat that that Democrat is going to be able to effectuate a change that is meaningful like it's a good place to end so as a final question what if three books you'd recommend to the

audience and mark why don't we begin with you so the first book I always recommend to anyone is

Liza Beth Collins making the deal which I think is the greatest cure book of history that I've ever read. The second book which I hope people will pick up is Yoni Applebaum's stuck which gets to a lot of these issues explicitly in the realm of housing talks about how a lack of geographic mobility for many of the reasons that we have here has really been the hindrance to social economic mobility into great book and then the third you know to degree my book is in conversation

with Robert Caros the power broker I think that that book was indicative of a way that progressivism used to work and people too often ascribe it to Moses the man who was enormously

powerful and influential in New York but there's a book by Mark Reesman called Cadillac Desert which

essentially traces the same arc with a guy named Floyd Dominney running the Bureau of Reclamation and building dams all across the west and it is the same core story but an entire really different realm of public policy and I would love for listeners to the podcast just to understand the broader arc that I try to articulate in my book but of how progressivism has

we're choice maybe for a form Jew but mere Christianity by CS Lewis in the first 30 pages in

“particular is probably the most interesting analysis of the concept of morality that I've ever read.”

At my ripe old age of 39 I find myself often wanting to like re-enter reading experiences that I had when I was younger in the hopes that like the reconstruction of that object will

like put me back in that mood again. There was a period when I was in my 20s when I just moved

to New York I read like a bunch of books that I adored the Empress Children by Klamisood the Interest Dings by Meg Wellitzer and the Secret History by Donald Tart and I've just read the secret history by Donald Tart and it is so fucking good it's like I finished the book two weeks ago and like entered like a brief like one hour period of morning like that wonderful experience you have with a novel where like the turning of the last page is a true tragic event for the soul.

“I think the secret to history is absolutely extraordinary. I've a form on a th old at home”

so that means a lot of audiobooks and the last book that I'm going to recommend is specifically an audiobook the audiobook of Blood Meridian by Kormach McCarthy is like the trippiest possible. It's an extraordinary book that's basically like a sort of if you haven't read it like a sort of 20th century Dante explaining an absolutely hellacious experience of a bunch of people in the mid-19th century

“along the Texas Mexico border and the audiobook is like the guy who reads it has the most incredible”

sonorous southern accent. It's just this like amazing auditory experience so if anyone wants to

see like incredibly tripped out while they're making coffee in the morning for their family like definitely get the audiobook of Blood Meridian it's a really extraordinary experience. Derek Thompson, Arcton Comin, thank you very much. Thanks for having me. Thank you. This episode of This Reclanches Produced by Annie Galvin, factory game my Michelle Harris, our recording engineer is Amin Sahota, our senior audio engineer is Jeff Galvin with additional

mixing by Isaac Jones and Amin Sahota. Our executive producer is Claire Gordon. The show's production team also includes Roland who Marie Cassione, Marina King, Jack McCordic, Kristen Lynn, Emma Kelbeck, and Yon Kobel, original music by Pat McCusker, audience tragedy by Shannon Busta and Lauren ready. The director of New York Times pinning audio is Annie Rose Strasser special thanks to Brianna Johnson

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