Ezra Klein’s Call for ‘Abundance’ in America

In their new book, Abundance https://www.simonandschuster.com/books/Abundance/Ezra-Klein/9781668023488, journalists Ezra Klein (The New York Times) and Derek Thompson offer a hopeful vision for what the future of the U. S. can look like. Ezra returns to the show to discuss how his ‘agenda of abundance’ (6:15) is a response to the hollowing out of the middle class (11:26) and the dwindling housing market (16:30). Then, Klein explains how these regulatory inefficiencies have impacted California’s high-speed rail project (27:56), what we can learn from international construction (32:15), and why it’s so difficult to build in Blue states (40:00). On the back-half, we discuss the future of AI in the workforce (48:48), whether “Abundance” can serve as a prescriptive text for the Democratic Party (1:00:56), the hope he aims to engender in readers (1:08:18), and our path to meaningful progress in 2025 and beyond (1:14:16). Thoughts or future guest ideas? Email us at [email protected] mailto:[email protected]. See omnystudio.com/listener https://omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information. See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

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

• 0:08Sam Fragoso?

  Before we get into it today, next month will mark nine years of Talk Easy with Sam Fragoso, which is a sentence I'm only able to say because of everyone that has worked on this show and especially everyone that has listened to it. And so, in thinking about how to celebrate the anniversary, we've been mapping out some episodes that take us outside the podcast studio. Because as much as I love taping in beautifully soundproof rooms with no windows whatsoever, I want to continue expanding the scope of the program, which hopefully includes some of you and your stories. I'll share more in the coming

• 0:47Sam Fragoso?

  weeks and months, but if this vague invitation to sit down and talk sounds at all appealing, reach out to [email protected]. All I ask is that you include the city you're writing from and what you do for work, or what in a perfect world you'd like to do for work. Again, the email is [email protected]. I look forward to hearing from you. Now, on to the show.

• 1:30Sam Fragoso?

  This is Talk Easy. I'm Sam Fragoso. Welcome to the show.

• 1:48Sam Fragoso?

  Today, journalist, author, podcaster Ezra Klein.

• 1:53Sam Fragoso?

  I've been back and forth between New York and Los Angeles for the past couple months. And because these are predominantly liberal cities, and my hair length basically gives away my politics, the most common refrain I've heard from family, from friends, from strangers at a bar, in a cab, at the grocery store, is something like, "Post-election? Where is the Democratic Party? Hell, in 2025, what even is the Democratic Party? What's the plan here?" Well, Ezra Klein and co-author Derek Thompson have, if not a plan, at least a vision for what Democrats could look like next. The answer, at least in their eyes, is the title of their new book, Abundance, from Simon & Schuster. In

• 2:38Sam Fragoso?

  it, they offer what has been rendered a paradigm-shifting call to renew a politics of plenty, a call to face up to the failures of liberal governance in states like New York and California, and abandon the chosen scarcities that have stalled the American dream. Klein is the host of the popular New York Times podcast, The Ezra Klein Show, where he was one of the first and most prominent voices pleading to President Biden to not seek reelection. The Biden administration publicly rebuffed Klein's advances, or really anyone that made the claim that he was too old to be president, let alone to be running for president. Wherever you stand on Klein's position, which was widely shared by voters

• 3:22Sam Fragoso?

  across party lines, we now live in its aftermath. And so today, we talk to Ezra about the age of abundance he believes could be before us if Democrats choose to change course. We also unpack the ways in which federal and state governments have both fallen short and grown reliant on process and bylaws and bureaucracy.

• 3:44Sam Fragoso?

  And how we may go about upending and then reforming those intransigent systems. I don't blame anyone listening who has retreated from politics, or buried their heads in the sand, or their phones, or the new season of White Lotus, which is why we didn't just want to have a doom and gloom conversation about this political moment. There's plenty of that out there. Instead, what we landed on are a set of stories, questions, and ideas designed to move us forward and away from this administration's bleak vision of America. Something that we can all, across party lines, put our passion and energy and mind towards. Something abundant. And

• 4:29Sam Fragoso?

  so with that, here is Ezra Klein.

• 4:50Sam Fragoso?

  Ezra Klein, welcome back to the show. Great to be here. How you doing? Tired. Getting tired of the sound of my own voice, but otherwise, I'm good. Thankfully, we're catching you on the early side of this book tour of yours. So I just want to set the scene. We're here in New York City, talking about your new book, Abundance, which I don't know if you've noticed, but it's situated culturally and politically in a really interesting place. Because in recent years, there's been a glut of apocalyptic TV shows that are set in the near, sometimes distant, future. I'm thinking about The Last of Us, Station Eleven, Black Mirror. But come 2025,

• 5:35Sam Fragoso?

  these programs have just altogether stopped trading in political metaphors and have just quite literally set their stories in and around the Oval Office. I'm thinking about Zero Day on Netflix. There's Paradise on Hulu, both of which are set in an America in decline. Your book, however, is kind of diametrically opposed to those stories. And the reason you and your co-author Derek Thompson seem to be hopeful about this exciting future Is because of this big idea around abundance. So to begin, explain to people, what is abundance?

• 6:17Sam Fragoso?

  And then secondly, how did you come to the conclusion that abundance is the answer to this moment?

• 6:24Speaker 01

  Abundance is a politics that takes as its core tenet that to have the future we want, we need to build and invent more of what we need. It's really that easy. And it seems like it should be too easy. I say at the, in the beginning of the book, that that seems like too simple a thesis for a book. But then you look around and you're like, do we have enough housing? No. Do we have enough clean energy? No. Are we building enough public infrastructure? Building it well? Are we ambitious with it? We're not. Are we inventing enough of the things we want? No, we've actually been having a scientific slowdown for some time. It may be ending, but that's a thing we could talk about. So this is an effort to focus people on the supply side of the economy.

• 7:05Speaker 01

  I think that we got very used to think about demand, labor market demand, wage demand, et cetera. Many years around the financial crisis. But over a long period of time, we've been having a sort of slow growing affordability crisis. And now it is pretty central to our politics, also central to people's lives. You know, how, how many families do I know that have had to move out of a place like New York City or San Francisco because they couldn't afford to raise children there? So that is the motivating inquiry of the book. And then you ask this other question, like, why do you think it's possible? Of course it's fucking possible. Like, we don't know how to build apartment buildings. Like China could build 23,000 of miles of high speed rail in the time California has not built 500 miles.

• 7:48Speaker 01

  These are not technological problems. If we've made the process of politics impossible, you know, then that's on us. But this declinism, this feeling that we can't do anything, like, that's a luxury belief. That's a thing that is the product of not looking closely at why we don't solve problems that we know how to solve. The idea that San Francisco or New York City hasn't built enough housing. It's like, I don't know, go to Tokyo and ask them how they do it. Right? It's not rocket science. And I think our Vision of what is possible has become very sadly constrained.

• 8:23Speaker 02

  I mean, in 2023, 70,000 housing permits were issued in Metro Houston and just 40,000 in Metro New York, which has three times as many people. When you hear a stat like that, where do you see the pivot? Or how do you get to a pivot? Because that sounds pretty intractable.

• 8:45Speaker 01

  There's nothing intractable about it. I mean, even the measure you're using, right? Housing permits issued. Well, there's no physical limit on housing permits we can issue, whether you can build it, whether you can source the lumber you need and the sinks and the, you know, everything else you put in a home. But we have chosen this and nothing about that feels intractable to me. I mean, even, you know, using Houston as the, the counter example, Houston has not chosen this. So clearly it's not intractable.

• 9:14Speaker 02

  You're smiling through these answers so far, which I didn't expect, but you're taking a very upbeat, positive approach.

• 9:22Speaker 01

  I don't know if it's upbeat or positive, but I, one, I think there's something genuinely optimistic about recognizing the problems are not unsolvable, they're chosen. I mean, the thing you don't want is a problem you can't solve. There are plenty of those in life, but these are not them. And the second dimension is I think people, and liberals in particular, have to get a bit of fucking confidence back. We've become defeatist and declineist. We excuse away failures. We tell ourselves apocalyptic narratives of the future. Like, people have lived in much harder times than we do even now.

• 9:58Speaker 02

  Funny enough, that's where we ended our first conversation.

• 10:01Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah?

• 10:02Speaker 02

  I think that was at the beginning of 2022. And in the last act of the episode, we talked about how everyone always asks you, should I have children in this day and age? And you say, if you're emailing me. Asking to have kids, it is very likely that your kids will be amongst the most privileged children in the history of this planet.

• 10:27Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, that's fact.

• 10:28Speaker 02

  It's funny that in many ways, what was just a thought experiment on the podcast has been borne out in this book, that hopefulness, that optimism.

• 10:37Speaker 01

  I guess. I mean, I'm interested and delighted that people are absorbing such a vibe of hopefulness and optimism from a book that is a recitation at a deep, textured, specific level of government failure.

• 10:53Speaker 02

  So we need more confidence. You came in here, nice blazer. You look like ready to go on CBS Sunday morning. That's what we're missing is confidence.

• 11:01Speaker 01

  No, what we're missing is good policy.

• 11:03Speaker 02

  Okay.

• 11:03Speaker 01

  What we're missing is good process. We're not, but confidence is part of it. I mean, culture, governance is a temperament, governance is a culture. But no, don't, don't take from what I'm saying that all we need is confidence. We need to make it possible to build housing by right in California. That is something etched into statute. It's not just about how big of a man Gavin Newsom feels like this morning.

• 11:26Speaker 02

  So do you think the abundance agenda is a response to the hollowing out of the middle class? You write in the book that "an uncanny economy has emerged in which a secure, middle-class lifestyle receded for many, but the material trappings of middle-class success became affordable to most." Unpack that for us.

• 11:47Speaker 01

  I do think it is a response to it in part. I mean, you could think about the, I think, what people call the hollowing out of the middle class from two directions, right? One direction is how much money people make? Are their wages keeping up with inflation? And then there's like the cost of living. And I do think this is a response to what gets called the hollowing out of the middle class. But this is, among other things, a response to what is a crisis in affordability of the things people need. What I'm saying in that part of the book is we do have abundance of some things for the consumer goods. It is easy now to have a flat-screen television on your wall and almost impossible to go to public college, public college, debt-free.

• 12:28Speaker 01

  Right. Forty years ago, it was the opposite. You couldn't have a flat screen television, but you totally could go to public college debt free. There are a set of things. This is a point that my wife popularized back in 2020, Annie Lowry, in The Atlantic. A set of things that are, in many cases, the building blocks of a decent life, middle class or otherwise. Childcare, healthcare, housing, elder care, education, and to that I would add things like energy. And they have gotten over time more and more and more and more expensive, particularly those first five. So one thing happening in this book is we are trying to refocus Democrats on this question of the cost of living, this question of the supply of the things people need.

• 13:11Speaker 01

  Because in many of these cases, right, if I just ran through a list of things that we subsidize. We subsidize housing all over the place, right, from the mortgage interest deduction to, you know, to rental vouchers. We subsidize education, right, we give you Pell Grants, we have, you know, public education of all different kinds, we subsidize childcare. So why is it all getting so much more expensive? Well, one answer is that in many of these cases, we've constricted supply of the thing we're subsidizing. At the same time, we passed the Affordable Care Act, you know, we created Obamacare. We have nevertheless been constricting the supply of doctors, both by choking off the number of residency slots. And of course, we don't make it very easy to immigrate here and become a doctor. Like, we could make that cheaper if we wanted to. Housing, again, we subsidize people to buy homes

• 13:55Speaker 01

  in places where we have not made it possible to build enough new homes for the people who want them. What happens when you subsidize something where supply is constrained? You get a price increase, right? It's completely basic supply and demand. So one of the things liberalism has to get better at is looking at problems in society and saying, where can we solve this? Not through giving people more money to buy it, but through making more of the thing itself. If it's so basic, why did we continue making these mistakes? Part of it is that a version of liberalism, and I mean, there are symmetrical critiques you could make of conservatism, but I'm thinking about liberalism in blue states right now. There are versions of liberalism that arose in response to the New Deal era of liberalism.

• 14:36Speaker 01

  The New Deal liberals, they build a lot. It's a period of really torrid growth in American life. I just read this stat the other day, it's not in the book, but between 1950 and 1960, one single decade, America increased its total housing stock by 26%. One decade, increased by 26%.

• 14:58Speaker 01

  But a lot of the growth was reckless. A lot of it was thoughtless about the environment. You had things like Robert Moses, cutting highways through, you know, black communities. There was not a lot of space for input. A lot of things that were built, people felt were ugly, were soulless, right? The term tiki-taki comes from a song about Daly City just south of San Francisco. And so a sort of a different liberalism arose, and the new left. And the new left was very much about stopping government, stopping building, blocking things from happening, be they projects, it could be environmentally problematic, or for that matter, housing and changing the character of a city, of a county, of an area. And that was reasonable in its time.

• 15:39Speaker 01

  I mean, we did have to clean up the environment, which was choked with smog and, you know, where we had pollutants coloring the streams fluorescent. But now we live in this other era where the problem is we are not building the things we need fast enough. I mean, the environment is a great inversion here because we went from the problem really being that we were building too much, too fast, to the problem now, in this era where the only way to decarbonize is to build enough green energy that we can move an advanced economy onto green energy and continue to power it. We're not building nearly fast enough. So all these statutes, these movements, these ideas, these court cases, these ways of looking at the world, informed by the very, very potent environmentalism of the seventies and the eighties, it's not the right fit for our current problems.

• 16:24Speaker 01

  Like, it's very, very hard for society when the problem inverts itself on you.

• 16:29Speaker 02

  If the policies of the seventies and eighties were an appropriate response to what was happening at the time, it took, I think, up to 2016 for them to present themselves as a problem in an election. Because you can trace a clean line between what you've just said and the emergence of Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders in 2016. As both sides, the socialist left and the populist authoritarian right, although they weren't as authoritarian then, stopped believing that the life they wanted, the one that you were talking about, they started believing that that wasn't possible anymore. By the time the 2024 election came. The belief in that American dream, I think, had completely eroded.

• 17:13Speaker 02

  And it eroded not just in red states, but in blue states and blue cities. New York City, New York County, Manhattan shifted nine points right. Cook County, Chicago shifted eight points right. California, nearly every county moved towards Trump. LA, 11 points toward the GOP. There are many reasons for this shift, but one is how Trump and Vance, which you get out in the book, ran on a politics of scarcity. They framed illegal immigrants as competing with Americans for ever dwindling jobs and homes. They're here to take what you have. Do you think that this was effective because scarcity is an easier sell than abundance?

• 17:55Speaker 02

  In some primal way, is the fear of scarcity more powerful and galvanizing than the promise of abundance?

• 18:03Speaker 01

  I don't think so. I mean, I would add a little bit to that story. We had a huge generational financial crisis. And it was in this same period that I think the reality of global warming became truly undeniable. And so you actually had the problems beginning to change. The old order became discredited on multiple levels. On one level, the idea that these masters of the universe knew how to run the economy, it got shattered. The idea that if you just left it to them, we would have enough of the things we need, gone. And the idea that the economy was allocating resources and building things that made sense for the future, also gone, right? So this sort of deep faith we had, that you could leave it up to the markets and they

• 18:46Speaker 01

  would solve it for you, I think that is like the first thing that shattered. And the housing crisis got a lot worse after the financial crisis because one of the takeaways of that was don't build so much fucking housing. And it turned out the problem was not actually that we were building too much housing, so not in the places that people wanted it. There were a lot of financial problems in what we were doing, those mortgages. But going into a recession in home building, which is what we did for a long time, was not the right answer. So the housing crisis actually did get sharply worse in the after. Aftermath of that because we destroyed the home building industry for a period of time. And it's here, I think, that we begin to have Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump emerging. Because in the previous era, it felt settled who knew what they were doing.

• 19:30Speaker 01

  And all of a sudden, it didn't. And so new ideas, new arguments began to get entertained. To your question of whether or not scarcity is a more compelling argument, I don't think so. I mean, even Donald Trump, who I do think is a scarcity candidate, right? His answer to everything is less of something else, right? We have, you know, we don't make enough in this country, let's have less trade. We don't have enough homes, less immigration. We're spending too much, cut to destroy the government, right? He's fundamentally about the suspicion of the other and then using it to sort of cut into even what we have. But he does promise to his people an abundance, right? He does promise, if you're inside his world, if you're inside his movement, by taking away from everybody else, you're going to get more of it.

• 20:14Speaker 01

  And that was enough to swing not that much of the vote, right? What was the swing in the vote, 4.5 points? So it's not like the entire country upended itself here. Now Trump is in office and he is using terrorists to fucking wreck the global economy. So I don't think people got what they were hoping for. The other thing, obviously, is politics isn't just about delivery. It's also about your sense of who is on your side, your sense of the culture. I mean, Trump's appeal to his voters, just like Obama's appeal to his voters, or Bernie Sanders' appeal to his voters, is not purely material and nor is it purely transactional. It's emotional, it's about a story of America, it is about a feeling of respect. And all those things are ingredients in our politics, too.

• 20:55Speaker 02

  That trajectory you were describing before the 2008 financial crisis, and then a little bit after, that things mostly worked, that you believed government would do its job. Sure, there were fuckups, but in the end, it was moving in the right direction. You said at the end of 2024, that the thing I've changed my mind the most on in politics in recent years is how destructive bad regulations can be and how seriously I take it now when I hear that regulations or rules are ill-constructed. I think I found myself more frustrated and then ultimately quite angry at the way the Democratic Party became just the defenders of institutions and not the reformers of them.

• 21:37Speaker 02

  That shift that happened in you, when and why did that occur?

• 21:41Speaker 01

  So I was born an hour south of Los Angeles in Orange County. And I lived in California till I moved to DC when I was 21. Then I was in DC for 13 years and I moved back to California in 2018. And when I came back to California, one of the things that was sobering about it is one, it was clear it was not doing well. I mean, the housing crisis, the homelessness crisis, you know, I always think it's an amazing statistic, but at least in 2022, California had 12% of the population, 30% of the nation's homeless population and 50%, 50 of its unsheltered homeless population. There was clearly a crisis of disorder in California. People were angry there. Look, West Virginia is poorer than California. Right. It is higher unemployment than California.

• 22:26Speaker 01

  It is more drug addiction than California and it is a much lower homelessness rate than California because it has enough houses for people. That's striking. Um, it's like really as simple as that. It's a good metaphor, I quote from the book, uh, homelessness is a housing problem. Mm hmm. Where they basically say, think of it like musical chairs. If you've got 10 people in a game of musical chairs and there are 10 chairs, then even if somebody has a broken leg, everybody's going to get a chair. But if you've got nine chairs, then the person with a broken leg is not going to get a chair. Right? So these individual characteristics that we blame homelessness on, people having mental illness or drug addiction or losing their job, they do matter, but they primarily matter in a context where there isn't enough housing. So I go back to California. Here's a state.

• 23:09Speaker 01

  It is rich, is highly populated. Every statewide official is a Democrat and the outcomes are not what you would hope. I mean, some outcomes are fine. It's a very dynamic state. It's the home of the technology and culture industries. It is inventing the frontier of AI, but it is not affordable. It is, you know, one of the worst affordability crises in the country, the worst housing crisis in the country. It is not building fast enough to meet its own clean energy goals. Why? And it set me off on this inquiry about, okay, what are the issues not where, not at the national level where, you know, deranged Republican party is lighting things on fire, but in a blue state, a state I love. I mean, there was a version of this book that I thought about called What's the Matter with California? You know, it's kind of building on What's the Matter with Kansas, which was a kind

• 23:54Speaker 01

  of famous political book a couple of decades ago. And so, yeah, that sense that you had to kind of ask not just what was the problem over there, but what was this call coming from inside the house was, you know, that was a different, that's what happened to me.

• 24:09Speaker 02

  So I want to narrow the focus a bit, like, right now, Trump, by way of Doge, is taking a cleaver to the federal government in an attempt to make it, quote, "more efficient and functional." But it's not just Republicans that are frustrated with the inefficiency and stagnation. Democrats, too, as you write in the book, like John Podesta, who oversaw the Inflation Reduction Act for Joe Biden, has said, quote, "Delays are pervasive at every level of government, federal, state, and local. We got so good at stopping projects that we forgot how to build things in America." Why and how did Democrats and liberalism at large begin leaning into impeding innovation rather than cultivating it?

• 24:54Speaker 01

  I think a lot of it comes down to the rise of the new left that happened sort of in America in the 70s. And we talked about it as a left, but it was a two-sided thing. I mean, you have Ronald Reagan beginning to attack the government, right, the sort of conservative movement. But in terms of the story I am telling, is the role of the left in this. Ralph Nader is the leader of a movement to sue the government. That is what the institutions and statutes that Nader was part of largely do. They make it possible to sue the government for this or that infraction. And then you have these nonprofits staffed with tons of lawyers who spend all their time suing the government. Ralph Nader, when he's running for president in 2000, is asked, you know, what makes him qualified? And he says, "Nobody sued the government more than me." It's like, okay. We built things often

• 25:38Speaker 01

  for very good reasons, statutes for very good reasons, that made it possible for individuals or institutions to try to jump in front of government action and say, "Stop." But we just let it go too far.

• 25:51Speaker 02

  Although they make up 1% of the population, lawyers currently constitute, you write, more than one-third of the House of Representatives and more than half of the Senate. I did not know that before reading the book, which is just staggering. You write, "When you make legal training the default training for a political career, you make legal thinking the default thinking in politics. And legal thinking centers around statutory language and commitment to process, not results and outcomes."

• 26:21Speaker 01

  I'm picking up there on some work from Nick Bagley, who is a professor of administrative law at the University of Michigan. He was a former lead counsel for Gretchen Whitmer. And he has this Law Review paper, then a brief for the Niskanen Center, on something he calls the procedural fetish, liberalism's procedural fetish. His point there, as somebody who trains these lawyers, and is one of these lawyers, is that the way lawyers think about what makes government legitimate is whether or not government is following the procedures and the process laid out in statute, regulation, and legal interpretations of those statutes and regulations. But the way people think about what makes government legitimate is outcomes. Is it making their lives work? Does it work responsibly to them? Does it do the things it says it does?

• 27:04Speaker 01

  So take something like the Biden administration got $42 billion for rural broadband. By the end of the administration, it had functionally signed and no people up for rural broadband. And if you dig into this, there was this complicated 13 or 14 step process that states had to go through. And it's, you know, notice of funding opportunities and letters of intent and this and that and the other thing. And in theory, every one of those steps is there for legitimacy, right? To make sure like there's no graft and, you know, no corruption and nobody's getting picked for cronyistic reasons. And we're making sure to keep equity in mind when we put out the contracts. And in the end, nobody's getting fucking broadband. And so from some legal perspective, this was all very legitimate. Like, we laid out this approach and we thought we, you know, we balanced a lot of interests and we put all these different things into the project.

• 27:49Speaker 01

  And from a human, like a person, a voter perspective, it was like, you failed. You failed and you're wasting my time and my money. Right? High speed rail, they are following the law like beautifully in California. They've spent more than 12 years environmentally clearing the track, more than 12 years doing that. But nobody's riding high speed rail when they were told they would be doing so by 2020. It's not that you should have no process, not that you should have no legalism, but you can, with anything, turn the dial too far. Look, I'm not a fan of Doge. I'm not a fan of Elon Musk. And they're acting in a way that is fundamentally lawless.

• 28:25Speaker 02

  Someone could supercut what you just said and some of what J.D. Vance has said. And you'd go, there's a lot in the middle of that Venn diagram.

• 28:34Speaker 01

  Wonderful. I wish they would do the thing I am saying. I really do. Like, I wish Doj would try to make the government more effective, more efficient. I wish it would increase its capacity. I wish it would make it easier for it to hire good people. The thing is, I would love to have a genuine Department of Government Efficiency, not a Department of Burn the Fucking Thing Down and Profit From the Ashes, right? Like, that's where they've ended up. But if the personality type of the right is autocratic, the personality type of the left is bureaucratic, and both have real problems.

• 29:01Speaker 02

  And you are where?

• 29:02Speaker 01

  I am in the make shit work camp.

• 29:05Speaker 02

  Okay. That's gonna be your slogan when you run for office.

• 29:09Speaker 01

  God forbid.

• 29:10Speaker 02

  People want it.

• 29:11Speaker 01

  I have seen this meme going around. I am not, I am, I'm staying far away from that.

• 29:16Speaker 02

  You have a new beard that's looking good?

• 29:19Speaker 01

  It changed my, my image. It's like, you grow a beard, everybody's like, are you running? It's like, no, I just grew a beard.

• 29:25Speaker 02

  One listener question asked if you are trying to appear more dignified.

• 29:30Speaker 01

  Do you think my beard makes me seem more dignified?

• 29:32Speaker 02

  Not at all.

• 29:35Speaker 01

  I feel like I've lived a lot of years. I wanted to put the wisdom on my face.

• 29:39Speaker 02

  Yeah, you, you have a baby face. I think, I think you looked plenty dignified before, and you look just the same now. You mentioned high-speed rail, and you write in the book that liberals should be able to say, "Vote for us, and we will govern the country the way we govern California." Instead, conservatives are able to say, "Vote for them, and they will govern the country the way they govern California." Back in 2008, Californians voted for Prop 1A, which set $10 billion to begin construction on a high-speed rail line that would connect LA to San Francisco. The ride would take a little under three hours. The estimated cost, all said and done, was $33 billion, with a completion date sometime

• 30:19Speaker 02

  in 2020. Through your reporting in the book, and for The Times, how do you begin to understand and explain what happens next?

• 30:29Speaker 01

  High-speed rail choked to death on process. They're building it, but they have lowered their ambitions from, I mean, originally it was Sacramento to San Diego, but phase one was going to be LA to San Francisco. And now it's just Merced to Bakersfield. And if you know anything about California, connecting Merced to Bakersfield with high-speed rail would be nobody's idea of what you should do with high-speed rail, right? Even if you finish that, it's actually going to be a disaster because it's going to have nowhere near the ridership you need to support this unfathomably expensive rail project you've spent 30 years doing. What happens throughout this is death by a thousand cuts of process. Process that changes, you know, what the route is going to be initially, you know, they don't have the power to just like put the route in the direction they want to. They don't have the eminent domain powers. They don't have the environmental,

• 31:12Speaker 01

  you know, review powers. They don't exempt high-speed rail, even though it is an incredibly pro-environmental project. When they're trying to get the money from the federal government, they apply through an Obama-era stimulus program that gives preference for infrastructure projects that clean up air pollution in disadvantaged communities, which is one reason they start in central California, because you have poor communities with worse air pollution.

• 31:34Speaker 02

  Fresno is very troubled.

• 31:35Speaker 01

  Yeah. So now you're building in an area that, on the one hand, it's great to have high-speed rail going to Fresno, but if you build it there, it doesn't begin with like the backers and the political capital to keep it going effectively.

• 31:47Speaker 02

  For color and context, in high school in 2011, I, along with my friends, were excited about the prospect of high-speed rail. We thought, oh, wow, like, we're going to be we're going to go to college elsewhere, but we can go visit our families back here so quickly.

• 32:03Speaker 01

  I found it really sad, honestly, doing this reporting, because these are good people. They're working really hard in, under an impossible set of rules. I really want to say this as clear as I can. Building high-speed rail is a solved technological problem. You go to Europe and board high-speed rail. You go to Japan and board high-speed rail. You can go to China and board high-speed rail. We know how to do this. We really do. The issue is that we cannot do it under these processes. A good example is just, I was standing on one patch of freeway that they'd had to move by like, whatever, 100 feet. And I guess there'd been a mini-storage facility. And the legal wrangling. Over being because they had to move it. The legal wrangling over just that have been like two and a half years.

• 32:48Speaker 01

  You have to let the government act if it's going to do big, complex public infrastructure projects. If it is like what the amount of negotiation they told me, and then we'd be in these areas and they would say, oh, you know, as part of negotiations here, we're building a park, we're building a this, we're building that, they're building all these things also that were in high speed rail because it was part of getting the approvals and the, you know, the city council to be on board. And they were proud of it, but they shouldn't have been proud of it because the point was to build high speed rail and they weren't getting that done. And now this project is caught in California in this crazy position. They don't have enough money to even finish the Fresno, I'm sorry, the Merced Bakersfield line. They're building and everybody on it told me forthrightly that if you can't make it

• 33:31Speaker 01

  L A to S F, there's not really a reason to do this. To now make it L A to S F, they have something like $11 billion line of sight on, they've already spent or line of sight on something like $11 billion. They probably need a little bit less than 40 billion to do Merced Bakersfield. And to do the whole thing, if it all went well from here, 110 billion. The whole thing was said initially that it would cost 33 billion and be done by 2020. Now we're talking 110 billion done by God knows when. And they're just building in the hopes it is going to somehow create politics or people are going to keep throwing money at it because like eventually they'll want to finish this. And I think the thing that in addition to the failure of the actual project that upsets me most about the story is nothing has really changed. What do you mean? Look, you're California.

• 34:15Speaker 01

  You have as the most significant infrastructure project you have done in the last however many decades, one of these signal failures, like a, like a byword for failed public infrastructure. You'd think you would really root and branch remake the way the government there builds. One, maybe so you could actually finish high speed rail, but two, so nothing like it ever happened again. And they just didn't. And this is what I mean when I say that liberals excuse away failure. They explain it. They sort of like, you know, perseverate or move on from it or assume it's a, an exception to the rule, but they didn't fix it. If you did a high speed rail to there, you'd have the exact same outcome. And what do Republicans do with failure? I mean, not much. They're not trying to build a high-speed rail at all, is one thing

• 34:59Speaker 01

  we're saying. I mean, that's one issue. But the Republican Party, what I will say for it, at least at the national level right now, is it has transformed into something different after failure. I mean, George W. Bush basically discredited the Republican Party up until that point. And it took some time for this to work its way through the system. But Donald Trump takes over the Republican Party by running first and foremost against George W. Bush, against the Iraq War, against the financial crisis, against the feeling that free trade and immigration were ripping us off. And what he does is he takes over the party from the bushes. And what that party's turned into, I think, is ugly and a problem. But it is different, right? And, you know, one difficulty in California is

• 35:42Speaker 01

  that it's now a one-party state. And a lot of states are one-party states. Texas is a one-party state. I don't think one-party states learn that well, because they don't have enough competition to force them to learn.

• 35:54Speaker 02

  Do you think Democrats need someone to do a hostile takeover?

• 35:59Speaker 01

  I think they need to change. And I think they need to do things that are coalitionally and conceptually uncomfortable for them. They need to take apart pieces of legislation they consider crown jewels. They need to make government work in different ways than they're comfortable doing. They need to tell people in their coalition, no. They need to, when things move from we passed a bill to we're writing the implementations and regulations stage, they need to start saying no. And somebody's like, well, you know, if we're building all these semiconductor factories, maybe we should tell all of the companies applying for these grants that they all have to, you know, tell us how they'll diversify their subcontractor chains and put on onsite childcare. Maybe if you're

• 36:41Speaker 01

  doing something as hard as trying to reshore advanced semiconductor manufacturing, just try to do that. If you want to pass universal childcare, I also want to pass universal childcare. Like, let's do it. But don't put it into the semiconductor project, right? And that's a culture, I called everything bagel liberalism, where they're just like kind of piling more and more and more on the bagel. You know, and everything bagel is just enough is a very good bagel. With too much, as in everything everywhere all at once, it becomes like a black hole from which nothing can escape.

• 37:07Speaker 02

  I'm an everything bagel with scallion cream cheese.

• 37:10Speaker 01

  Yeah, that's a popular one in my house, actually.

• 37:12Speaker 02

  In advance of this episode, I spoke to Dan Richard, who was the chairman of High Speed Rail from 2012 to 2019. And he often absorbed a lot of the criticism the project faced. He was the director of BART up in the Bay Area before that. So it's not like he had no experience building transportation. And he offered four reasons as to why the project went off the rails. No pun intended. Judicial rulings based on CEQA that were crippling, creating excess costs and time delays.

• 37:47Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 37:47Speaker 02

  Which were passed by a man named Judge Michael Kenny.

• 37:50Speaker 01

  Oh, I like that he's naming names. He's pissed.

• 37:52Speaker 02

  Who Dan believed had a bias against the project. The myopia of the environmentalist movement. Tried profoundly to bring them into the conversation and fold them in. He received zero support from them. He said, quote, "CEQA has become the second amendment to them." Third was jealousy in the part of train operators. People who are working for public transit full time, who viewed high speed rail as this other kind of ancillary project that's happening over there. And there was a lack of cooperation. Plus, there's scarce resources. There's never enough cable scraps, for example. And then finally, when the project expanded to the Central Valley, as you said, politicians from San Francisco and Los Angeles

• 38:35Speaker 02

  became less and less interested in a rail that went through Fresno, Timmer said. Those are messy, human issues. A judicial bias, a myopia of movement, jealousy between contemporaries, and an elitist value assessment. And so, do you think high speed rail is uniquely unlucky when we talk about these big projects?

• 38:58Speaker 01

  No.

• 38:59Speaker 02

  Or just profoundly painfully human?

• 39:02Speaker 01

  I like that you called him. I think that's super interesting. I mean, I, one and two there track with what I track. Number three, I haven't heard that much about, although I did hear a lot about the issues with freight rail, because you often needed to build along freight rail tracks. It would close in the holiday season. I mean, In any kind of advanced, complex society, you just have a lot of interests you're balancing against each other. But the point of the book, I mean, the book is not a book about high-speed rail. I mean, I spent a lot of that chapter talking about the broad-based slowdown in construction productivity in the United States. There's a long time when construction grew at the rate of manufacturing productivity. I mean, we got better and better and better construction. And in recent decades, we've either flatlined or got worse. And that's true in high-speed rail.

• 39:45Speaker 01

  I mean, that's actually the really, really bad one, but it's true across things, right? We, you know, we built the Empire State Building in a year. Does anybody think we'd build it in a year now? But our machinery is better now. Our ability to do 3D drafting is better now. Why couldn't we build it faster? We opened the first 28 subway stations in New York City in four years. Could we do that now? Like, of course not. Every project is unhappy in its own way, as Tolstoy said about the family. But there is rhyming across them, right? And that's what that chapter about building is really about. There is a highly advanced societies, big societies of negotiations. And everything is too highly negotiated to work. One of the, one of the papers I found really interesting that I read during the writing

• 40:30Speaker 01

  of the book was about how small the firms that build housing are. Because it's just so difficult to work across county or city lines. Everything is about your ability to navigate the local politics and the local city council and the neighbors and whatever, that you don't have what you have in other areas where it's like, this just one company is just super good at building homes, so they build a lot of them and they do it across four states, right? And that's replicated a bunch of times across a bunch of companies. Manufacturing has very high productivity because we've learned how to do it in big factories and off-site. We could do modular home construction, but we make that politically very, very, very difficult. And so it just kind of keeps, like, everything, you can dig into it and find a reason and this thing on the project and, but the actual thing is that nobody had the power to decide.

• 41:14Speaker 01

  We were so caught up in negotiation and process and things to protect different players and interests from harm, that we made it too hard to act in a consequential fashion and make the thing actually happen.

• 41:25Speaker 02

  But a mix of those human setbacks do add up to how many years of this not happening?

• 41:33Speaker 01

  You keep saying human setbacks, and I see what you're saying there, but these don't strike me as fundamentally, oh, the tragedy of the human condition, because China is full of humans too, and they build high-speed rail.

• 41:42Speaker 02

  But China doesn't treat its citizens like human beings.

• 41:45Speaker 01

  Well, France builds high-speed rail. Do you think the French aren't treated like human beings?

• 41:49Speaker 02

  You know, we have a lot of lovely listeners in France. I can't answer that.

• 41:52Speaker 01

  But you don't believe that is the point, actually.

• 41:55Speaker 02

  No, I think, you write in the book that China, through imperialistic measures.

• 42:01Speaker 01

  Yeah, imperiousness.

• 42:03Speaker 02

  Strips people's rights away, but it also, but it creates high-speed rail.

• 42:08Speaker 01

  But don't use China, use France. France builds high-speed rail.

• 42:11Speaker 02

  It does seem France is less litigious.

• 42:13Speaker 01

  So that's one thing, right? We have built a lot of American government by, we do it through adversarial legalism. We do it through lawsuit. And this gets to this point about people. Yes, people have all these flaws. We have these complexities. We get our backs up. We get jealous of people on other projects. It's all true, but the default structures under which we work drive our behavior. So in Houston, where they don't have a zoning code, it's not that people love the idea that an apartment building will go up down the block. It's that they can complain about it, but they can't stop it, so it does. In San Francisco, you can stop it, so it doesn't. And the people are the same, but the question of like, at what level of government are decisions being made and in what way are they being made?

• 42:57Speaker 01

  Is your vision of democracy like everybody who voted for the governor or everybody who showed up at the planning meeting, right? These don't have answers. They're value judgments, they're matters of tradition and the way systems evolve and process. But I don't think that what doomed high-speed rail in California was the frailty of the sort of human temperament.

• 43:18Speaker 02

  I don't think that's the only reason. I think it is part of the equation, though. Is your vision of democracy and the future of it better represented in Houston than San Francisco?

• 43:29Speaker 01

  I mean, it depends on for what, but on housing, sure. One of the things that we've laid down in a lot of different jurisdictions over time are parking minimums.

• 43:38Speaker 02

  And what is that?

• 43:39Speaker 01

  So if you're building a residential structure per it, it works differently in different places, but you know, per the number of people you expect to be living in it or the square footage or whatever, it has to have a certain number of parking spaces per whatever your X is. And that adds a lot to the cost of the project. If you're doing things that are big multi-unit, you often then need to tunnel underground, which really adds to the cost of the project.

• 44:06Speaker 02

  Which sounds on the face well intentioned, but had the result of being pretty exclusionary.

• 44:11Speaker 01

  Yeah, very exclusionary because you're making everything much more expensive and then only richer people can afford it. I, I know liberals who are often, who often say to me like, oh, what we need is, you know, we, we don't, we need affordable housing, not, not all this like developer luxury stuff. It's like you layered on so many regulations, the only projects that pencil out for the developers are luxury condominiums. And then you're complaining that all you get are luxury condominiums, make it easier to build more kinds of things and they'll build more kinds of things.

• 44:37Speaker 02

  What do they say when you say that to them?

• 44:40Speaker 01

  I mean, everybody's like, oh, wow, what a great point. No.

• 44:44Speaker 02

  Is that what it's like when they come on Ezra Klein's show?

• 44:47Speaker 01

  Yeah, everybody just thinks I'm right about everything. It's wonderful.

• 44:49Speaker 02

  Do you feel responsible for, for Tim Walz getting the nomination and then us losing?

• 44:54Speaker 01

  Oh yeah, I definitely hold that one on my back.

• 44:57Speaker 01

  I wish they had used Tim Walz differently. I don't think, vice presidents don't win campaigns.

• 45:03Speaker 02

  And they don't lose them.

• 45:04Speaker 01

  But here you get, you had this guy who, the way he got onto your list and the way he got onto your ticket is by being good in free willing media environments.

• 45:14Speaker 02

  That's the way he got onto your list too.

• 45:15Speaker 01

  I know, and then you wrap him in bubble wrap, like, and you don't let him go out and you just like have him doing these canned speeches. Like that campaign was way too careful. They had a hard job because what they were really dealing with was like the cost of living and the sort of Biden administration being unpopular. But there are some respects in which they absorbed too much caution from the culture of the candidate and the administration. But to what you were saying earlier about how these conversations go, what I find, what my friends who are, you know, I think in some ways to my left think is that we need more affordable housing or maybe we need more public housing. And I don't disagree with that. But the thing is, if you want that, you need to deregulate the way the government itself builds housing.

• 45:54Speaker 02

  It's funny that you're describing them as to your left.

• 45:58Speaker 01

  Well, they would describe themselves as to my left.

• 45:59Speaker 02

  But in actuality, I don't think the policy manifests as something left-er than what you're describing.

• 46:05Speaker 01

  I agree with you on that. I have this, I often say that I think I'm to the left of the people who are not allowing government to work. But in terms of the way I think people understand the political spectrum, they would probably sit to mind. But the point, however you want to put them on the, you know, the dimensional scale. The point I'm making is that public housing is great. You can build a lot of it in places like Singapore. But if you do what we do here and you make it more costly, more procedurally complex, if you layer standards and goals that the private builders don't even have in order for the public to build anything, then you're not going to be able to build very much of it. And what you can build will be unaffordable. It'll be slow. In many cases, it won't be built at all.

• 46:49Speaker 01

  And so you cannot build public housing at scale under those conditions. If you want to build public housing at scale, you have to, we think about deregulation as something we do for the private sector. In some cases, that is necessary. But in this case, a lot of what we're talking about is deregulation of the public sector so the public sector can exercise power more effectively.

• 47:08Sam Fragoso?

  After the break, more from Ezra Klein.

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• 48:52Speaker 02

  I want to understand this idea a little bit more. You write in the book that "the world we live in, where manufacturing productivity rises and rises, even as construction productivity falls, is a new phenomenon, not a historical inevitability." How do you think AI... Plays a role in the way we may avoid that historical inevitability because it does feel fairly inevitable.

• 49:17Speaker 01

  It doesn't seem inevitable to me. Like if the rule is we're going to make it extremely difficult to build in the real world and we're going to outlaw things like modular construction and affordable housing. AI doesn't have a solve for that, right? I mean, AI can't act in the real world very well at all. What AI could probably do is lower the cost of drafting and make it easier to generate, you know, this or that design or come up with possible answers to a, like an engineering problem you're facing. But we have made advances like that already. We have made 3D drafting easier. You can do things on computers you couldn't do 30 or 40 years ago. And building has gotten much more expensive. So if we don't make it easier to build in the real world, there's nothing AI can do about that for us.

• 50:01Speaker 02

  I guess I'm asking, do you think AI will accelerate construction productivity by in part reducing humans' role in it?

• 50:09Speaker 01

  Not unless we choose to reduce our role. These are regulatory decisions.

• 50:13Speaker 02

  Okay. I bring that up because in a recent episode on your show, you talked about using this new OpenAI product called Deep Research. And you asked it to do this report on the tensions between Madisonian constitutional system and the highly polarized parties we now have. How did that go?

• 50:34Speaker 01

  So, yeah, so that's where I think you have this very different situation than construction productivity. Because that it wasn't doing anything in the real world. But within four or five or six or seven minutes, whatever it was, it generated a, you know, 10-ish page document that, look, I hire and have for years researchers to work with me on the show. They're incredibly brilliant people. It was better than anything any of them could have done in less than five or six days.

• 50:59Speaker 02

  And that's right now.

• 51:00Speaker 01

  That's right now. And that's the worst it'll ever be. I had another one recently where, you know, I've been following Donald Trump's trade wars and his tariff reports and I had it prepare this report around, there's a kind of dense 41-page paper by Trump advisor Stephen Moran about trade. And I had read the paper, but I was moving kind of fast and I wanted to see sort of critiques of it and other things. And some of these I'm doing, like I'm doing prep with my, my human researchers too, and myself, but I'm doing these a little bit to try to understand what the capabilities of the systems are. And it was astonishingly good. It was better than anything we had come up with. But what it has there is the ability to work in a sandbox of information available on the internet. And once you get into things you have to build in the real world, then you get into choke points that AI can't solve.

• 51:43Speaker 02

  Let's go back to the sandbox, because a lot of people work in sandboxes.

• 51:47Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 51:47Speaker 02

  Have jobs with healthcare that support their families, but work in sandboxes. People in marketing, plenty of journalists. How did you hold that when you discovered that this system, that is the worst it will ever be right now, did something that would take your very talented colleagues five to six days to do in less than seven minutes?

• 52:09Speaker 01

  I've been covering this now for, since Vox. So I wasn't, to be blunt, I wasn't surprised by it.

• 52:20Speaker 02

  Right.

• 52:20Speaker 01

  I have been living in this state of future shock for a long time now.

• 52:25Speaker 02

  You're pre-grieving.

• 52:26Speaker 01

  Yes. If you go back to this piece I did a couple of years ago, like This Changes Everything, it's an effort to kind of say that exact thing. And I think that everybody who really covers or really works with AI goes through every so often these moments of like, oh, my fucking god. But there is a kind of shock as you recognize the scope of what is coming and how culturally unprepared we are for it. I've been trying to think about how to do this as a piece of journalism. I have a three and a six year old. I don't know how they should be educated. This is the place like where my uncertainty is sitting right now. And this is the size of my uncertainty. Because I genuinely don't feel like I know

• 53:05Speaker 01

  what it is the economy or society will want value or reward in human beings in 20 years. Now, I'm not saying I don't know, like, anything. I'm pretty sure that other human beings will want us to be kind and, you know, hardworking, whatever. But in the way that a parent might say, might have said 10 years ago, well, as long as you're like a lawyer, or, you know, you get a college degree or something, you'll be fine. I'm not sure that's right. Is it safer to, like, raise somebody right now to be a lawyer or to be a plumber? Not obvious to me. I feel like this is like a little bit of an event horizon. Now, it's not that I think every job will go. I don't.

• 53:47Speaker 01

  And economies do adapt, but they don't adapt that fast. And they don't always adapt easily for the same people. The fact that the headline numbers of unemployment don't change that much doesn't mean you didn't have a lot of churn in who was employed and where and how. And so I am very, very, very concerned that we have right now, virtually hundreds of years under our belt of training ourselves to value people for their product and training people to value themselves for their product. Right? Work is an ideology. Work is, in many ways, I think capitalism is, you know, at least in this country, like the last dominant system of worth. We're not that religious anymore.

• 54:29Speaker 01

  Though we've created this technology that is aimed at like getting in front of that and being able to do that kind of work, knowledge work specifically, you know, as well or better than most human beings will be able to do it. Yes, most creative people, it's not replacing them, but a lot of work we are asking people to be as machines. And now we have actual machines. And it's not just it. I don't know how we will handle that as a policy matter, but I don't know how we will absorb that into our thinking about each other. And the fact that it won't happen as one big bang, where like half the, you know, the pandemic happened all at once. So we could sort of absorb like the fact that all these workers like had to stay home. It's not like, well, you're shitty at your job, right? We didn't blame people for that.

• 55:11Speaker 01

  But it'll happen fast, but slow, if that makes sense. You know, it'll be 8% unemployment in this area that used to have 2% unemployment or new graduates won't be able to get a job. And for a very long time, we're so used to being individualistic about this. And it's been so adaptive for our economy to tell people to blame themselves that we will blame them, we will harm their dignity, their self-worth. I think we're entering into something that could be very cruel. In some ways, you know, amazing things can come of it if we get it right. But yeah, terrible forms of upheaval could come from it, too.

• 55:43Speaker 02

  You said recently, we're about to get hit by a truck with AI. In the immediate, who are the casualties?

• 55:51Speaker 01

  I don't think we know. I mean, I think it is coming for, you know, what we call knowledge work first.

• 55:55Speaker 02

  Your researchers?

• 55:56Speaker 01

  Probably not mine.

• 55:57Speaker 02

  But only by dint of your goodness or your interest in working with people?

• 56:01Speaker 01

  No, but I mean, I have a bunch of things I need people to do, but I wouldn't expand my research team right now. I don't. Think that would make sense. It would definitely change. And this is something I've heard from a lot of people in a lot of industries. It's not that it makes them want to let anybody go. But in terms of would they hire more?

• 56:19Speaker 04

  Mm hmm.

• 56:20Speaker 01

  No, because it's very clear that the productivity of individual hire should be about to go way, way up. So you don't want more people. You want to figure out how to rebuild your systems. So the people you do have can take advantage of these AI products that are coming out. That most people still don't know how to use and very, very few companies have deeply integrated into their functioning. Or maybe it'll be as Dario Amade says, and we'll have these machines of loving grace. And we will have cures for autoimmune diseases that baffle us today and cures for cancers that are incurable. And maybe it will help us make breakthroughs in energy and energy become cleaner and more reliable. When I say I see this as like an event horizon.

• 57:03Speaker 01

  What I mean is that I really don't know what's on the other side of it. It might be better. Maybe this period in human history, when we valued people for what they can make, what they could produce, when we asked them to act like machines. Maybe this was a couple hundred years and it was never what we were supposed to be. Maybe we will find ways to value like the human experience much more fundamentally. It used to be that the rich didn't work. The point of being rich was to not work. The point of being rich was to follow your interests and play croquet and like bullshit with people at the naturalist society. Now we have this thing where it's like the point of being rich is to work and show how hard you work and all the podcasts you consume and all the books you read and, and, and, and, and.

• 57:46Speaker 01

  We have this culture where productivity has become like the dominant ethos. Maybe the culture to come will be more human. Maybe we found a machine that can act like a machine so we can be us. I don't know. I'm not like purely pessimistic. My view isn't stop it. And, you know, I could see also ways in which like maybe it creates a huge number of jobs in other areas.

• 58:09Speaker 02

  Where do you see your role in this? How are you thinking about the work you want to do and the role you want to play? Especially particularly when it comes to this abundance agenda?

• 58:21Speaker 01

  I mean, you know, I wear some different hats. I mean, abundance, I am trying to persuade people of the worth of these ideas. I'm trying to persuade, you know, on one level liberals and on another level, by the way, conservatives, right? There are ways in which I think red states have been able to implement pro housing policy more effectively than blue ones because they're not working off of as bad of a baseline. You know, then I have my podcast and my work and I try to explore a world that at different times I find, you know, wondrous and frightening and like there is, you know, very intense news that needs to be covered and very, you know, upsetting news right now that needs to be covered. Then also, you know, as you know, like novelists who you want to interview and beauty to try to explore.

• 59:04Speaker 01

  Like I try to make sense of things for myself first and then for an audience. For me, that's not changing. The AI has not replaced me yet, but you know, give it a couple of years.

• 59:13Speaker 02

  Do you believe that?

• 59:14Speaker 01

  I'm not sure it won't replace me.

• 59:15Speaker 02

  Okay.

• 59:16Speaker 01

  I think it is something we all should be thinking about, which is why I spend so much time on my show trying to get people to think about it. But I don't think we have answers because I don't think we really fundamentally have information. And look, you can talk to people, right? Talk to Gary Marcus, who think that, you know, at this point I've drunk the Kool-Aid and it's not going to get there. I think in many ways it kind of almost is there now, but, but, you know, there are people who are skeptical of this vision of the world or who believe it will top out right around where we are now.

• 59:41Speaker 02

  Nothing about the science and the data and people's experience, as you just described on the show, tells you that it's topped out.

• 59:49Speaker 01

  I think the question of replacement is actually a kind of interesting question. There are ways in which I think you could have a world where AI could replace a lot of us and doesn't because we actually just don't want it. So an example is maybe you could have told an AI to write a book like Abundance. I mean, a lot of this information is public and I just don't think if I told people that this book was written by ChatGPT, I think they just actually wouldn't want it, even if it were exactly as good. And I think a lot of things might be like that. The idea that AI could generate, based on inhaling, the entire corpus of podcasting that has ever existed. It could generate fake podcasts that are actually better and more listenable than anything we're really doing.

• 1:00:32Speaker 01

  Will people want it? Maybe, but also maybe not. I mean, right now, computers are better than human beings at chess. They just are. But more people are watching chess played than ever, right? The sport is in a renaissance. People just don't want to watch people play chess. Some of the things in the economy, some of the ways things work, we just prefer it. We just want a human being there on the other side. Maybe AI tutors for kids. They just are better, but we're just not going to want it. It's too creepy. I don't know.

• 1:00:59Speaker 02

  Let's bring the abundance agenda back to this current moment. Your colleague at The Times and a frequent guest of this show, Ested Herndon, wrote on Twitter, "I find it so telling that Democrats don't have a Project 2025 of their own. What is the liberal thesis for why the government isn't working? How would they fix things like education, homelessness, or crime? How would they go beyond the mantra of protecting institutions and actually improve them? And so, do you see this book, Abundance, as a kind of Project 2025 for Democrats? Are you giving this-

• 1:01:33Speaker 01

  It's a vision.

• 1:01:33Speaker 02

  Are you gifting this text to the Democratic Party in the hopes they adopt it?

• 1:01:37Speaker 01

  Project 2025 was a huge coalitional document organized by more than 100 groups on the right. So what that was doing was trying to create something like a policy menu that represented a broad enough swath to be, I don't want to call it consensus because people have different views of things, but something. That was Project 2025. Yeah, this is a vision. It's a, like, hopefully people take it and build policy menus off of it. Hopefully people take it and use it in ways we can't predict or we can't imagine. This is, you know, somewhere in between an analysis and a manifesto, right? There's a lot of original reporting. Hopefully this book has like the texture of government as it is lived and as it is practiced. But this is not a think tank report.

• 1:02:20Speaker 01

  This is, you know, for me and Derek, our best effort to answer some fundamental questions about what has gone wrong and to build a set of conceptual and policy tools and intellectual tools for how to ask the right questions to get good answers about how to fix it.

• 1:02:37Speaker 02

  I feel like we've explained some or most of the questions. What are some of the answers to make this go right?

• 1:02:44Speaker 01

  I mean, I think the answers are in different places to put first on your agenda, reducing costs by increasing supply. Like, again, it just, it sounds easy, but we don't do it. And so that means you have to look for what is the supply choke point. It's going to be different in clean energy than in housing, different in high-speed rail than in clean energy, different in, you know, higher education, perhaps, or parts of healthcare. Things rhyme culturally here, bureaucratically, but they're not the same. These issues are not symmetrical. But I think you should ask, like, I want universal healthcare. I mean, we're not that far from it after the Affordable Care, but we're further than I would like us to be. But also, if we were ever to have anything like Bernie Sanders' version of single payer,

• 1:03:28Speaker 01

  we would need a massive expansion in healthcare supply. We would need more doctors. We would be, we would need more nurses. We would need more hospitals. We would need more centers, right? And then we also need the capacity to do the surgeries and so on. So maybe we shouldn't be choking off the number of doctors by limiting residency spots. But you're not going to turn to the final chapter here and find 77 bullet points of solutions. That requires a level of expertise in every domain we're talking about that we would not pretend to have. Like, if you ask me right now, Ezra, write down how to build the next high-speed rail, right? Write down how California should unwind. It's, I don't know, right? That requires a lot of expertise on building, on, you know, procurement, on things that I don't have. But I can try to help you understand what went wrong.

• 1:04:13Speaker 01

  And, you know, you, you read this book and you found it hopeful. I think it is a hopeful book, but it is-

• 1:04:18Speaker 02

  I also found it frustrating.

• 1:04:19Speaker 01

  And that's fair. It is frustrating, but it is not a, a policy laundry list. But not because we're not trying to influence policy. We are. But we're trying to generate a lot of other people to influence policy, right? The hope of this book is that it's generative. Look, local government has tremendous power specifically over housing. It has a lot of authority on education and state governments, too. We're much too nationalized. I mean, one of the concluding points of my first book, Why Are Polarized? Is that as local media has weakened, as media has nationalized, as people who once would have read, like, a local paper and now subscribe to The New York Times, and people who once would have, you know, listened to Talk Radio, listened to Pod Save America, or Talk Easy,

• 1:05:04Speaker 01

  or The Ezra Klein Show, our attachments become national. And that focuses us on a politics it is hardest for us to affect. We might really be listened to locally, whereas like Donald Trump, or for that matter, Joe Biden, are not going to listen to us. One of the things that I find really exciting is just, you know, there are local abundance chapters now, right? That's wonderful. YIMBY has been like an incredibly, the Yes in My Backyard movement has been incredibly effective at this. There are local chapters of YIMBY all across the country.

• 1:05:31Speaker 02

  One of the things you and Derek do propose is that we do need a new, updated and contemporary set of laws to build. And I think the quick reconstruction of the I-95 Bridge in Pennsylvania back in 2023 is a good example, a democratically run state, doing something quickly and well. Talk to us about that.

• 1:05:54Speaker 01

  Yeah, so what happens there is you have a truck sort of flip over and set on fire and a portion of the I-95 outside Philadelphia collapses. And this is a huge artery for all commerce on the northeast corridor of the US. Josh Shapiro is the governor, and you know, he says at the beginning, he's like, this could take a year to rebuild. Like, I'm like, this is a very, very hard problem. But he uses an emergency declaration to functionally sweep away almost all of the rules. He decides to use union labor, but aside from that, functionally, everything the state of Pennsylvania has in its laws about how you do a rebuild is gone. And I talked to the Department of, the Secretary of Transportation there, and he sort of walks me through it in the book.

• 1:06:34Speaker 01

  And it's like, you know, instead of doing, you know, putting out a structure for contractors to bid, there is a, there are two contractors working nearby on different parts of the bridge for other reasons. And he basically pulls in both ends, like, you're on this right now. So like, they're basically on the job by that day, like, otherwise it would have taken like 12 or 24 months just to get that part. You know, things that you, they just would have normally done, full processes that they would have normally followed, everything is thrown out the window. They rebuild the thing in 12 days, you know, provisionally at least, so it's working again. It's, and it's the beginning of Josh Shapiro becoming a national figure.

• 1:07:11Speaker 02

  Mm-hmm.

• 1:07:11Speaker 01

  And one of the things I just say about that is that I'm not saying you shouldn't be using emergency declarations for everything, but if everybody agreed... As they did, including Joe Biden, who said Shapiro's doing a hell of a job, right? Like, if everybody agreed that was better, that was great, that was government working? And by the way, they did it, again, with union labor. It's not like they didn't do anything, you know, aside from rebuild the bridge. They did hold to things that were important to them. Then what does it say about our normal process? And it's not that you can't work backwards and understand why the normal process is there, right? Like, if the Secretary of Transportation could just grab some nearby, you know, contractors, then that also opens the door for a lot of corruption. But in trying to close the door to corruption, we've also closed the door to government working swiftly and effectively. Have we made the right choice? I don't think we have.

• 1:07:56Speaker 01

  Like, we've certainly turned the dial too far. You could allow things to happen quickly because inspectors general who are able to look at how contracts are awarded after, right? There's like a lot you could do to try to balance things better than we did. But Shapiro and them, they rebuilt fast, and I think there's a lot to learn from it.

• 1:08:12Speaker 02

  Do you think Democrats, maybe more so than Republicans, need a crisis to act?

• 1:08:21Speaker 01

  I think government in general to change often demands crises to act.

• 1:08:26Speaker 02

  Like an Operation Warp Speed?

• 1:08:27Speaker 01

  Yeah, an Operation Warp Speed. I'm not sure, I mean, Republicans right now under Trump are sort of creating crises, but I'm not sure in general that they, that they do that, or that they're more willing to act. I mean, Democrats want to act, they just, both parties don't want to act in ways they don't like acting. I think that's what I would say about it, right? Republicans, we need a real crisis to raise taxes. They're not going to raise taxes just because the deficit is high, right? They would need a real, like, something would have to force them to do that. And Democrats to, like, break bureaucracy to say government is not working, right? I think they need something real. So you're dealing with, how do you make parties and coalitions go against their instincts and some of their, their, at least heretofore ideological approaches?

• 1:09:06Speaker 02

  Democrats believe they are working and acting in the name of working families. Is that true?

• 1:09:14Speaker 01

  I mean, sometimes, but what I say about the cities, right? The big places they govern, like New York City or New York State, is if you are governing in a way that has made the place you govern unaffordable for working families and you're losing them by the hundreds of thousands, then no, you're not governing on behalf of working families.

• 1:09:32Speaker 02

  And that exodus continues across many cities.

• 1:09:34Speaker 01

  That is to say, Democrats-

• 1:09:35Speaker 02

  So can they fairly say that they are actually in any way, at this point, working on behalf of working families?

• 1:09:42Speaker 01

  Yes, they could say in some ways they are, right? They do things like pass paid leave and free school lunch. There are a lot of things Democrats do that are good, but in a world where they are losing both the support and the residency of working families, I think they have some real soul searching to do.

• 1:09:58Speaker 02

  In dialogue with them, whether it's on the show or off the air, at the DNC or wherever you're going, do they hear that critique? Like, do they feel it fundamentally?

• 1:10:09Speaker 01

  I think a bunch of them do. This stuff is easier to nod your head along to. The conversation is always easy. People hold multitudes inside of them. They believe the critique and they believe the opposite of the critique, pretty depending on how it's framed. The question is going to be when the chips are down and they are governing again, do they do things they have been unwilling and resistant to do? Can they, right? Do they have the power? Sometimes they want to, right? You have a governor or a mayor or legislators who want to, but they can't get the votes on the Board of Supervisors or in the legislature, whatever it might be. So often you have overlapping powers that make this very, very difficult. So I don't think it's really, like, I'm complicating this because, yeah, sometimes they want to and they can't. Sometimes they think they want to and they don't want to go through what it would take to do it.

• 1:10:54Speaker 01

  But we're going to see, right? The Democratic Party, it treated Donald Trump's first administration as an aberration. It didn't think it needed to change that much. I think now it does. So we're going to see what emerges on the other side of that.

• 1:11:07Speaker 02

  When did you get angry at the Democratic Party? Something shifted.

• 1:11:11Speaker 01

  I mean, seeing government fail made me angry.

• 1:11:16Speaker 02

  Did being castigated for saying Biden shouldn't run affect you?

• 1:11:19Speaker 01

  Oh, no.

• 1:11:20Speaker 02

  That didn't bother you?

• 1:11:21Speaker 01

  This book was written largely before that. So to the extent you're picking up off of what's in the book, I did not get angry about housing supply in mid 2023. The piece that leads to this book, The Economic Mistake the Left is Finally Confronting, that piece is from 2021.

• 1:11:37Speaker 02

  Right.

• 1:11:37Speaker 01

  I find what the party did around Biden impressive. Like, I'm not angry about that. The party actually eventually did mobilize to do something never done before in the modern era and got him to not run again. It was too late, and I think a lot of people deserve blame on this. But no, the idea that I'm harboring anger for that, like, that made me respect the Democratic Party a lot more. It actually did something hard at a time when Republicans were bowing the knee to Donald Trump. Like, I don't have that view on the Democratic Party.

• 1:12:01Speaker 02

  But you harbor anger where, then?

• 1:12:03Speaker 01

  California shouldn't be unaffordable. It shouldn't be. New York shouldn't be unaffordable. These are choices. We shouldn't be making them.

• 1:12:11Speaker 02

  You write that either we build faster or accept catastrophe. There is no third option. In the coming years, how do we go about doing the former? And do you worry that we are moving towards the latter?

• 1:12:27Speaker 01

  I mean, I definitely think we're moving towards the latter. That quote you just used, that's from the section on decarbonization. Like, if we don't build enough clean energy, we will have unchecked climate change. And where are we? Donald Trump got elected. He pulled America out of the Paris Climate Accords. And he's trying to throw the solar and wind industries into chaos while accelerating the construction of fossil fuel infrastructure. We were not moving fast enough, even when we were moving in the right direction. And now the government of the United States is doing everything they can to move us in the wrong direction. I think if you're not worried, you're not paying attention. Elections have consequences, and this one's had more severe consequences than most. So I wish, I'm not going to end this one on a note of optimism.

• 1:13:11Speaker 01

  On that particular question and policy area, I'm feeling somewhat heartbroken.

• 1:13:18Speaker 02

  How do you hold that, like, day to day in your life? As someone who's, like, given as much as you have to this?

• 1:13:24Speaker 01

  Politics is a fight. I have the blessing of being able to. Feel some agency in it, right? I actually find it much harder when I can't write about things and report on them. The feeling of powerlessness is the hardest thing. But yeah, I don't, I wouldn't say I experience it as a, the, the point is not that politics is not giving to me what I've given it to it. But I, you know, I'm in this because I want the world to go well for people when I think it's on the wrong track and I think the consequence is going to be dire. I feel that, I think, the way anybody does.

• 1:13:55Speaker 02

  You calling yourself a realist, I don't think I've ever heard you say that. You are a realist and yet so much of this book, especially the prologue, reads incredibly utopian. And so I do feel like it is worth holding at least some of what you believe, even if it's not all of what you believe is possible, together.

• 1:14:16Speaker 01

  Sure.

• 1:14:16Speaker 02

  So why don't you set it up for us?

• 1:14:18Speaker 01

  So the book opens with a, a sort of short vignette that is trying to imagine the world in 2050, a good world in 2050. People keep calling it a utopia, but, but I actually don't really think of it that way. It's just a world where technology has kept going and we've solved some of the problems that face us today. And so we sort of write, "You open your eyes to dawn and turn in the cool bed sheets. A few feet above your head affixed to the top of the roof, a layer of solar panels blink in the morning sun. Their power mixes with electricity pulled from several clean energy sources, towering wind turbines to the east, small nuclear power plants to the north, deep geothermal wells to the south.

• 1:15:00Speaker 01

  Forty years ago, your parents cooled their bedrooms with jewels dredged out of coal mines and oil pits. They mined rocks and burned them, coating their lungs in the byproducts. They encased their world, your world, in a chemical heat trap. Today, it seems barbaric. You live in a cocoon of energy so clean it barely leaves a carbon trace and so cheap you can scarcely find it on your monthly bill." You walk to the kitchen to turn on the sink. Water from the ocean pours out of the faucet. It's fresh and clear, piped from a desalination plan. These facilities use microbial membranes to squeeze out the ocean salt. Today, they provide more than half of the country's fresh used water. Previously, overtaxed rivers such as Colorado have surged back now that we don't have to rely on them to irrigate our farms and fill our coffee mugs.

• 1:15:44Speaker 01

  In Phoenix and Las Vegas, previously parched cities are erupting in green foliage. I'll end it on green foliage because one thing I like about the vignette and also something we're trying to do in the book is that in the 70s, I do think one of the fundamental ruptures that happened in liberalism was between growth and the environment. The idea was that to grow more was to despoil the environment. Small is beautiful, the population bomb. Now, the situation we think is the opposite. I mean, you can see it if you look at the cover. But I actually think there is a synthesis to be had, the only synthesis to be had, the only, the narrow path to the good future, is you're finding technological ways to make modernity environmentally sustainable.

• 1:16:27Speaker 01

  Because the option is not what I think some of the degrowth people think it is, that we give up on much of modernity. The option is just that we burn the planet to a crisp. The option is just we do it unsustainably. And so when we talk about the possibility of desalination to let overtaxed rivers recover, when we talk about the possibility of lab-grown meat to allow huge amounts of Earth's land to be wild, the question is whether or not we will embed any of this in wise and just policies. I like to think that we will, we can. But you know, what you were saying earlier, politics is a fight. It doesn't yield without a fight. You win, you lose, like, but things take a course eventually. And we're in a pretty bad moment, I think.

• 1:17:10Speaker 01

  But I hope that we're in a moment that has a kind of a thesis, antithesis, synthesis dynamic to it, where the depredations of what Trump is, mixed with a kind of like aggressive pro-institutionalism of Biden, will create something in between what I've described elsewhere as a, you know, a party that doesn't make government work and a party that wants to make government fail. Maybe we do get the party that wants to make government work.

• 1:17:36Speaker 02

  In 2025, when people ask you, Ezra, should I have kids? What do you say?

• 1:17:42Speaker 01

  Yes, people should have kids.

• 1:17:44Speaker 02

  Just as you said in 2022.

• 1:17:45Speaker 01

  Yeah. At some point, I think people need to begin asking themselves, like, the human experience is a beautiful thing. It's not really just about your experience. It's about theirs. And the idea that we're living in like the terminal point of human history is wild. I am grateful my kids get to experience this world. I think it's a beautiful thing to continue. I think human experience is precious, not just mine, theirs. Right? It's not about how good my weekend is. So often, my weekend is very good with them. It's about their weekend. If you ask me, like, do I want, you know, if I could double my lifespan, of course I would. Of course, I want to experience what's coming next. But they'll get to. Like, that's a comfort, too.

• 1:18:21Speaker 02

  Well, I know I'm not alone in saying this, but it is a great comfort to be passing through in this moment at the same time that you are. As always, thanks again for coming on and for all the time.

• 1:18:34Speaker 01

  Thank you very much. Really appreciate it. Really appreciate your time as well.

• 1:18:37Speaker 02

  Ezra Klein, take care.

• 1:19:42Sam Fragoso?

  And that's our show. If you enjoyed today's episode with Ezra Klein, be sure to share it on social media, tag us at Talk Easy Pod. You can also leave us a review on Apple, give us five stars on Spotify. All of it helps us continue making this program each and every Sunday. I want to give a special thanks this week to the team at Simon & Schuster. I also want to thank David Cameron, Dan Richard, and of course, our guest today, Ezra Klein. His new book, Abundance, co-written by Derek Thompson, is now available wherever you do your reading. To learn more about Ezra, or to look at the transcript from today's episode, visit TalkEasyPod.com. For more episodes, I'd recommend our

• 1:20:27Sam Fragoso?

  conversations with Gia Tolentino, George Saunders, and Astead Herndon. To hear those and more Lemonada podcasts, visit on Apple, Spotify, or wherever you listen. You can also subscribe to Lemonada Premium for bonus content. Just hit the subscribe button on Apple, or head to lemonadapremium.com. Lastly, be sure to follow us on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, at Talk Easy Pod. Oh, and if you want to reach out about that project I mentioned in the beginning, our email is [email protected]. Talk Easy is produced by Caroline Reebok. Our executive producer is Janikse Bravo. Today's talk was edited

• 1:21:08Sam Fragoso?

  by Matt Sasaki and mixed by Andrew Vastola. It was taped out of City Vox in New York City. Our music is by Dylan Peck. Our illustrations are by Chris Shennon. The additional research this week comes from Pierce Harvey. This episode was made in partnership with the good people at Lemonada Media, and I'm Sam Fragoso. Thank you for listening to Talk Easy. I'll see you back here next week with Seth Rogen. Until then, stay safe, and so long.

• 1:21:50Speaker 05

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• 1:23:11Speaker 06

  I'm Dan Heath. On What It's Like to Be, I interview people about their jobs. Here's a married couple that drives a long haul truck together.

• 1:23:19Speaker 07

  We backed up and they loaded fresh dead rats.

• 1:23:22Speaker 06

  I mean, how many rats would you guess were back there?

• 1:23:25Speaker 07

  There were 32,000 pounds of them.

• 1:23:27Speaker 06

  32,000 pounds of frozen dead rats.

• 1:23:31Speaker 07

  That's it.

• 1:23:33Speaker 06

  Find out what it's like to be a long haul trucker, a couples therapist, or an FBI agent, all on the podcast What It's Like to Be.