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

“Abundance” came out a little over a year ago. It’s been exciting — and a little disorienting — seeing how it’s rippled out into the world, and the ways it’s been embraced and debated and critiqued. So I wanted to take a moment to talk through what’s really happened in the last year – with Derek Thompson, my “Abundance” co-author, and Marc Dunkelman, whose book “Why Nothing Works” came out around the same time, and circles the same ideas. What has the abundance movement actually achieved in the last year? Where has it fallen short? And what have the three of us learned from our critics? Mentioned: Ezra is moderating a forum on housing and affordability with some of the top California gubernatorial candidates. The event is on Friday, May 8, in Oakland, CA. You can buy tickets here. Use the code EKSHOW for 20 percent off your order. Abundance by Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson Why Nothing Works by Marc J. Dunkelman Derek Thompson’s Substack The Power Elite by C. Wright Mills The Power Broker by Robert A. Caro “The Most Expensive Mile of Subway Track on Earth” by Brian M. Rosenthal “Why Are Palantir and OpenAI Scared of Alex Bores?” by The Ezra Klein Show “The Anti-Social Century” by Derek Thompson Bowling Alone by Robert D. Putnam The Permanent Problem by Brink Lindsey “Bernie Sanders: ‘There Ain’t Much of a Democratic Party” by Bernie Sanders and David Leonhardt Book Recommendations: Making a New Deal by Lizabeth Cohen Stuck by Yoni Appelbaum Cadillac Desert by Marc Reisner Mere Christianity by C. S. Lewis The Secret History by Donna Tartt Blood Meridian by Cormac McCarthy, Narrated by Richard Poe Thoughts? Guest suggestions? Email us at [email protected]. You can find transcripts (posted midday) and more episodes of “The Ezra Klein Show” at nytimes.com/ezra-klein-podcast, and you can find Ezra on Twitter @ezraklein. Book recommendations from all our guests are listed at https://www.nytimes.com/article/ezra-klein-show-book-recs. This episode of “The Ezra Klein Show” was produced by Annie Galvin. Fact-checking by Michelle Harris, with Annika Robbins and Kate Sinclair. Our senior engineer is Jeff Geld, with additional mixing by Isaac Jones and Aman Sahota. Our recording engineer is Aman Sahota. Our executive producer is Claire Gordon. The show’s production team also includes Marie Cascione, Rollin Hu, Kristin Lin, Emma Kehlbeck, Jack McCordick, Marina King and Jan Kobal. Original music by Pat McCusker. Audience strategy by Shannon Busta and Lauren Reddy. The director of New York Times Opinion Audio is Annie-Rose Strasser. And special thanks to Brianna Johnson.

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

• 0:00Ezra Klein?

  We've got an announcement before we begin the show today. I am going to be hosting a forum on housing and affordability with some of the top California governors candidates on Friday, May 8th. We're going to discuss why housing in California, my beloved home state, is so damn expensive, and what each candidate hopes to do about it. The event is being co-hosted by the New York Times Housing Action Coalition and the Turner Center for Housing Innovation at UC Berkeley and the San Francisco Foundation. Tickets are on sale now, so get them while they're available. We'll include a link and a promo code in the show notes.

• 1:03Ezra Klein?

  It's been a little over a year since Derek Thompson and I published the book Abundance. Now, the book didn't begin what I think of as the 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 factional 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.

• 1:48Ezra Klein?

  But if this is to become something more than a synonym for efficiency, if it's to 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. He's, of course, a co-author of Abundance and the author of a great Substack newsletter under his name. Mark Dunkelman is a fellow at the Searchlight Institute and at Brown University,

• 2:33Ezra Klein?

  and the author of a book that came out around the same time, Why Nothing Works, which is about some very similar ideas, but with a much more historical perspective. So I want to have 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].

• 2:57Ezra Klein?

  Mark Dunkelman, Derek Thompson, welcome to the show.

• 3:00Speaker 01

  It's good to be here.

• 3:00Ezra Klein?

  Thrilled to be here, yeah. So our books came out a little more than a year ago. Congratulations, everybody. But just at the high level, where's your head at? What are you feeling good about? What are you feeling worried about a year? And Derek, start with you.

• 3:16Speaker 01

  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. At the level of vibes, this is a 0.1 percentile outcome, given where I was March 1 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 Hochul, JB 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 bandied about. It's a concept.

• 3:59Speaker 01

  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. Srinamam Dhaney has called out the concept of abundance and has paired his policy of rent freezes with a 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 memetic 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 plus. One bill that Gavin Newsom signed is literally called Abundant and Affordable Homes Near Transit Act. Abundant is right there in the first word. There's legislation that's been passed around the country that also has tried many times

• 4:41Speaker 01

  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 signed and the work that folks like Scott Wiener and Buffy Wicks 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 and looking up housing starts in California between, say, 2021 and 2026, you do not see the publication of the book, Abundance by Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson, in those statistics.

• 5:17Ezra Klein?

  What's even more worrisome to me, you look at 2015 to 2020, you don't even see the YIMBY movement.

• 5:22Speaker 01

  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 outcome 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 the loudest?

• 5:45Ezra Klein?

  Mark?

• 5:46Speaker 02

  So I think I have a slightly more optimistic perspective.

• 5:50Ezra Klein?

  More optimistic than that? That's pretty optimistic.

• 5:54Speaker 02

  My view is that your book and the associated effort to 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.

• 6:22Speaker 02

  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 there are books like See Right Mills' Power Elite, and then the SDS puts out the Port Huron Statement.

• 7:04Speaker 02

  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 speaking truth to the power of Jim Crow. You see it in second wave feminism. You see it in the objection to urban renewal, to the highway program, Silent Spring, ultimately The Power Broker, which is, my book is sort of in conversation with The Power Broker.

• 7:49Speaker 02

  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 progressivism is about.

• 8:30Speaker 02

  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.

• 8:55Ezra Klein?

  All right. So, 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, Derek, 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 syntheses that come out of it are constructive is unknown as of yet.

• 9:38Ezra Klein?

  My absolutely biggest worry, though, is not the critiques of abundance outside the tent, but a kind of small-balledness 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 that abundance ends up as a synonym for efficiency, that we've rebranded an agenda for state capacity, that it's just, I always hear people like, I don't disagree with cutting red tape, as if like all abundance is, is about cutting red tape, as opposed to an actual radical vision of plenitude. And I think something that neither of our books ended up doing all that well was really

• 10:23Ezra Klein?

  describing what that vision of the future would look like. You imagine a candidate, you know, running for the Democratic nomination in 2028 or running for the presidency in 2028.

• 10:35Ezra Klein?

  What are the ways that they describe what this abundant future is to look like? Is it you're 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 to 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 as actually farther away than

• 11:20Ezra Klein?

  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 are from California, where I am from, where I was when we wrote much of the book. The governor of California, Gavin Newsom, has very much embraced the abundance critique. And so I want to play this clip of Gavin Newsom on Jimmy Kimmel.

• 11:45Speaker 03

  Is California overregulated? 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?

• 12:00Speaker 04

  No, 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've tried to address 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.

• 12:42Speaker 04

  Democrats need to build things, but we have to actually deliver on that promise.

• 12:47Ezra Klein?

  Derek, what do you think when you hear that?

• 12:48Speaker 01

  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 and 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 could think of it a couple of ways. You could think, one, that there's a set of problems that have accumulated in California

• 13:31Speaker 01

  over the last 50 years that have made it harder to build housing. And this is one important step to un-gunk that process. Maybe that's an optimistic way to frame it. Another way to frame it is that, you know, 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 born. So the labor supply of construction work in California is scarce and therefore very expensive, also raising the cost of housing. And you look around the country and there just aren't a lot of housing construction triumphs at all for a variety of macroeconomic reasons. I care about outcomes.

• 14:16Speaker 01

  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.

• 14:42Ezra Klein?

  Well, here is, I think, also another way of thinking about this that I've become more sensitized to in the after publishing the book that I'd 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? Could you get the agreements? Can you, you know, get through if it's a big enough project, the city council or the planning board or whatever? And we focus a lot on that. And I would, I would say when I look around 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 of can you finance the build?

• 15:28Ezra Klein?

  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 it even is a lot of yes, in 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.

• 16:13Ezra Klein?

  But even as there's been a lot of victories on zoning and exempting things from, you know, 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, the projects are not penciling out and we don't have an answer to it.

• 16:34Speaker 01

  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.

• 17:19Speaker 01

  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 a 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

• 18:01Speaker 01

  the problems that states, the 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? 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?

• 18:45Speaker 01

  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.

• 18:56Ezra Klein?

  Mark, there's also a question of power here that 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- You've seen 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 dragging their 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 within conversations among people

• 19:36Ezra Klein?

  on the left, there's like a lot of contrasting intuitions here for good reasons. How do you think about this?

• 19:44Speaker 02

  Well, housing, to my mind, is sort of an outlier within the abundance agenda because unlike in linear infrastructure, transit 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 in this circumstance, in the world of housing, the challenge is that the state wants 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 gumming up

• 20:29Speaker 02

  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 a, an underutilized piece of land in a 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 so that they can do more. And

• 21:11Speaker 02

  then you, you reach into these challenges of financing and whatnot. I have to say, In the scheme of things, you guys are journalists and I have served a long time in politics, the idea that a year later you'd have a bunch of more housing built because of a book is seems a little far fetched to me.

• 21:26Ezra Klein?

  I agree with that.

• 21:27Speaker 02

  But, you know, I like the standard you're holding yourself to.

• 21:30Ezra Klein?

  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 was the first time California or any of these states passed a bunch of new housing bills. 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. Dozens and dozens of bills, including many that were framed to me as transformative, that just weren't. And so to what you're saying, and as somebody who's worked in politics, you've seen this and as somebody who's covered legislation, I've seen it. I think there is 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.

• 22:14Ezra Klein?

  Great, 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.

• 22:43Speaker 02

  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, sort of the big aha moment I realized was that for a lot of progressivism's history, our view was centralize that power in the hands of one person who will decide what is built. And that's how Levitt Towns were built. It's that, 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

• 23:25Speaker 02

  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 bore changes, and now I think more substantial changes. But I do think that you're gonna see, you know, I'm from Rhode Island, we've got a bunch of more housing starts than we had. And that, like, I understand that it's not the immediate satisfaction of suddenly we

• 24:10Speaker 02

  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.

• 24:19Ezra Klein?

  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 tiki-taki comes from, you know, the song about the housing in Daly City, like in, you know, not too far south from San Francisco.

• 24:37Speaker 05

  Little boxes on the hillside, little boxes made of tiki-taki, little boxes, little boxes, little boxes, all the same.

• 24:50Ezra Klein?

  You had the accurate view that a lot of forests and rivers were being despoiled, and the growth machine, government construction, all of it, that the public lost a kind of faith in it. Because instead of this building making their surroundings more livable and more beautiful, it just became these soulless, grayish, you know, mixed-use, anonymous, you know, construction. And so actually, one thing that has been very, very badly underplayed here is the centrality of aesthetics in whether or not people want to build.

• 25:27Speaker 01

  I don't know that I buy this idea at all. At least, I think it's incredibly underpowered, this next nation. 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 of 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

• 26:10Speaker 01

  in California, and all you have is the beauty explanation, well, then you're essentially saying that continued building in Texas is 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.

• 26:54Speaker 01

  I think that's a flywheel we should hope for. But if you really want to understand why Petaluma stopped 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 or the beauty paradigm gets you very far.

• 27:14Ezra Klein?

  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 it 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 then on Austin for a second because one fight that still felt fairly live when we were 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 faster travel time. You've done some reporting on Austin. That's been a kind of hell of a story over the past year or two. What have we seen there?

• 28:00Speaker 01

  What we've seen essentially is that Austin built an enormous number of homes in the 2010s and early 2020s and average rents have gone down, 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 $3 billion. But that's not what happened.

• 28:41Ezra Klein?

  $3 billion?

• 28:41Speaker 01

  Yeah, you're joking. It's like, it would be so absurdly high. You wouldn't, you have to calculate it 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

• 29:25Speaker 01

  actually go down. That'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 Mumdani has promised New York and other left-wing politicians have promised their own cities and states.

• 30:09Speaker 01

  We have something better than a rent freeze. We have rents going down because we've made it easier to build.

• 30:14Ezra Klein?

  So you mentioned Mumdani and the rent freeze. And of course, it's another side to his agenda, which is to increase supply. Mumdani is attempting a synthesis, I think you're seeing much more often now on the democratic side, which is 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 Mumdani here speaking in March.

• 30:43Speaker 06

  We're all here together today for an announcement where we launched 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.

• 31:08Speaker 06

  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.

• 31:25Speaker 03

  Yes, sir.

• 31:26Speaker 06

  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 1,000 additional affordable housing units on city-owned land across our city.

• 31:47Ezra Klein?

  Here's what I like about that clip, and that I think reflects something bigger happening across democratic policymaking, which is...

• 31:56Ezra Klein?

  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. Its effects are complicated. And what we need is a lot of process and time to surface information, to surface objections, 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 believed delay was good. I mean, there you have a democratic socialist out there saying, as an applause sign, time is money. And I think the sense that like, speed is progressive.

• 32:39Ezra Klein?

  It's more affordable, but also it allows you to deliver at the timeframe of elections and show government making a difference in 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 of 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.

• 33:08Speaker 01

  Mark, you've written about this explicitly. Among liberals, input was considered a costless virtue. 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 than 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.

• 33:41Speaker 02

  Yeah, I mean, my general view here is that people also use the term procedure fetish. There's just progressives just sort of like procedure for procedure's sake.

• 33:52Ezra Klein?

  Nick Bagley's term.

• 33:53Speaker 02

  That's 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 abundance is, we're facing real trade offs here. It's, 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

• 34:36Speaker 02

  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 Mam Donnie, Elizabeth Warren is author of the, maybe the most pro abundant housing bill, introduced it 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.

• 35:11Speaker 01

  The polling outfit Blue Rose recently did this survey 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 afford the basics, and it's because we stopped building them. Not enough housing, not enough energy, not enough childcare, and what little gets built goes to the wealthy first. Democrats will build an America that works for everyone, not just those at the top." That was the message that polled the best. I don't think that that's dispositive. I mean, testing messaging is not the be all and end all of politics. And look, there are philosophical differences between liberals and populists

• 35:52Speaker 01

  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 cheesily as the abundance mullet, which is to say economic populism in the front and abundance in the back. So who's wearing the abundance mullet, as horrifying as that might be to imagine? Zorin Mumdani ran on freezing the rent, but here he is talking about making it easier and faster for developers to build in New York City.

• 36:28Ezra Klein?

  To be fair, he ran on both.

• 36:29Speaker 01

  He did. Yes, you're right. He ran on both. But I think if you polled 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 memetic freeze the rent rather than the less memetic shortening the permitting time from 18 months to 10 months. So he's one example. Another example, I think, is New Jersey Governor Mikey Sherrill, 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.

• 37:14Speaker 01

  So there again, you have the promise of freeze the utility increase in the front with the promise of expanding supply in the back.

• 37:48Ezra Klein?

  So I was going to do this later, but I think I'm going to do it now because I think one of the dangers of this conversation is that the three of us largely are pro-abundance. And I have done previous episodes where I've had critics sitting at, in fact, this very table. But I want to try to offer up the critique so it is represented in the strongest way I can, which is that, yes, of course, there can be a synthesis of populism and abundance, and you can see it in somebody like, you know, maybe a Mumdani. But that, in fact, in practice, abundance has two huge problems from the populist perspective.

• 38:22Ezra Klein?

  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 that 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 as trying to make politics about is a more

• 39:03Ezra Klein?

  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, but you can hear Elizabeth Warren make a version of this argument in a speech she gave not too long ago.

• 39:17Speaker 07

  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 those very inefficiencies. Instead, abundance has become a rallying cry, not just for a few 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 tycoons have found one more way to stop the Democratic

• 40:02Speaker 07

  Party from tackling a rigged system with too much energy.

• 40:07Ezra Klein?

  She goes on to note that Reid Hoffman, who's a, you know, 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?

• 40:33Speaker 02

  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-monopolist movement, Live Nation and Ticketmaster. Like, I'm not sure that any of the three of us would voice any objection to taking a strong stance on abuses of corporate power in that realm. So many goes to a lot of music shows. I really, really hate ticket fees. I really don't like them. So the, but my concern about that critique is that if you look at the stories, at

• 41:14Speaker 02

  least in my book and several stories in your book, like, the problem in many cases is not created by corporate power. Like, you know, 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, like, a string through a bunch of forests in Maine. It's proposed in 2016 and it's constructed in 2026. Like, not because there was some corporate behemoth that was standing in the way or trying to drive up its own. Like, the fight there was about

• 41:53Speaker 02

  whether it was worth it to imperil 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 hydropower coming from Canada. Like, that's not a problem about corporate power. That's a problem with can government make an expeditious decision?

• 42:31Speaker 01

  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 abundancy agency. I mean, it consolidated what used to be-

• 42:50Ezra Klein?

  She says earlier in that speech that the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, which she helped found and ideate, is like an abundance before abundance.

• 42:58Speaker 01

  Oh, great. Then 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 can of worms all the way, but I was engaged

• 43:41Speaker 01

  in a very protracted debate against anti-monopoly 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 where 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.

• 44:25Speaker 01

  It can manifest absolutely at the level of corporations and monopoly. It can also manifest at the level of the neighborhood, as Mark was just explaining. When a group of neighbors stop a new-

• 44:37Speaker 01

  Apartment from going up by lobbying the city council and mayor to not build housing where it should be added. 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 went back and forth between us and Notion, even if the final didn't make it in the book. And 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, 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

• 45:18Speaker 01

  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.

• 45:27Ezra Klein?

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

• 45:29Speaker 01

  Sure.

• 45:30Ezra Klein?

  If I'm a populist 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 yada, yada, yadded your way past the corporate power. I think that some of the critique comes from a feeling, and I have my own answer to this, but I'm curious for yours. A feeling that, yes, you could certainly have an abundance, a version of abundance,

• 46:12Ezra Klein?

  that understood corporate power as one of the many blockages and, you know, and often a very central blockage. But in practice, the 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.

• 46:41Speaker 01

  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 seem more excited to make?

• 46:56Speaker 01

  You know that feeling when like, when you're in a room and everyone around you is like freaking out about something? And in 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 median 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 raise ticket prices. I think it's good.

• 47:40Speaker 01

  But that's not where 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 a 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 to not build an apartment building behind

• 48:23Speaker 01

  my farm because I'm afraid of my horses being freaked out by the construction noise." But I want us to see that 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 where my affect is visible. But I really do think it's, if I'm really reaching down into understanding, like, 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.

• 49:04Speaker 02

  This is a conversation, this conversation among progressives, between the populists and the abundance nicks, or whatever we're called, that is more than a century old. It's the turn of the 20th century, and 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 Brandeisian. It's big is bad, small is 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 Louisville, Kentucky as we'd grown up, could be reestablished?

• 49:47Speaker 02

  But there was a second idea, which 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. Theodore Roosevelt 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, you know, we need to attack corporate power are just taking the Brandeisian notion of it, and that the

• 50:32Speaker 02

  abundance ethos hearkens 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.

• 51:14Speaker 02

  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...

• 51:27Speaker 02

  Government should be a competent institution that can accurately and thoroughly review and challenge corporations when they're doing wrong.

• 51:38Speaker 01

  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?

• 52:07Ezra Klein?

  So I have a couple of answers to this. One, which is more to the way we wrote the book and the question I asked you about affect, is that 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 governance. And interestingly, this is actually an argument, right? The populists often do think this to be a blind spot of liberal governance. But to me, corporate power is actually something that the left, broadly speaking, understands and is relatively attentive to. I mean, we were writing this book when Lina Khan was the chair of the FTC. So one thing that it just wasn't that much about was things where I thought progressives

• 52:51Ezra Klein?

  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're talking about drug development, where there is a mix of obviously public

• 53:32Ezra Klein?

  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, you know, 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.

• 53:55Ezra Klein?

  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 seven, 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.

• 54:37Ezra Klein?

  Corporate concentration isn't the reason the transmission lines aren't getting built. And it's not the reason that housing isn't getting built in, you know, this or that city. But one thing that we are at a principles level 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 and so on.

• 55:07Ezra Klein?

  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 on campaign finance reform in my first book, in my own time, I'm like, I've covered this. But I think the place where I think you could have put in a chapter seven, 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 into policy, is the more powerful government is, the more worried you have to be about the distorting influence of money inside of it.

• 55:51Ezra Klein?

  And so a political system as porous to money as the 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 you know, this kind of super PAC that is funded by co-founders Palantir and OpenAI and Andreessen Horowitz is like dumping money to destroy him. And Boris is a former employee of Palantir. 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

• 56:35Ezra Klein?

  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 the 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 while I'm not sure I buy a bunch of the critiques, I think that the feeling that

• 57:16Ezra Klein?

  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.

• 57:35Speaker 01

  Yeah, I think I agree. I

• 57:39Speaker 01

  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% of total campaign spending. Then got 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, healthcare for low-income people in American history. That is

• 58:25Speaker 01

  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 decatuppling of anthropic and OpenAI'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

• 59:08Speaker 01

  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 in the next few years.

• 59:17Speaker 02

  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? Right? Like, 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 billionaires, but we don't like autocrats. We don't like powerful bureaucrats. Like, we're just, whoever is making the decision, our solution in every case is move the decision-making power

• 1:00:00Speaker 02

  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 can have conversations about the influence of money in 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 abundance is 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--

• 1:00:46Speaker 02

  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 Bores or whomever, if AI turns out to be wildly unpopular, they're going to have a problem.

• 1:01:18Ezra Klein?

  So I think that actually gets us into AI, which we've been circling here a little bit. And one other group of people, you will hear the word abundance from quite a lot, are the people who run AI companies, for instance.

• 1:01:33Speaker 08

  AI and robotics will bring out what might be termed the age of abundance. Other people have used this word, and that this is my prediction, it'll be an age of abundance for everyone.

• 1:01:44Speaker 09

  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?

• 1:01:53Speaker 10

  As we get closer to AGI and we make breakthroughs and we probably talked about last time, material sciences, energy, fusion, these sorts of things helped by AI. We should start getting to a position in society where we're getting towards what I would call radical abundance, where there's a lot of resources to go around.

• 1:02:09Ezra Klein?

  So that's Elon Musk, Sam Altman and Demis Tassabis. And one, I think a lot of people are very skeptical that these AI companies are going to bring anything that would 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 for other people create scarcity?

• 1:02:40Speaker 01

  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-Social 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, "Too often, we adopt a technology, and then we adopt that technology's values without thinking about incorporating that technology into our values." And so, one example of his was the television. And we're going to get to AI in a second. He said, "With television, you know, most people put a television in their room and then immediately started

• 1:03:24Speaker 01

  watching five, six hours of television a day. It was as if the human body were designed, by evolution, to do nothing but sit on the couch and watch streaming images on a 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." And so, for example, something like solar energy, which they say does fit their values, you can often find near Amish farms. Whereas 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."

• 1:04:05Speaker 01

  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, as the Wall Street Journal reported, in places where residential developers are selling

• 1:04:45Speaker 01

  land that is needed for homes for people to data centers to build a house for computer chips. I don't want a data center moratorium in this country, but stories like that feel awfully close to allowing the values of AI to supplant the values of people, which is having a home to live.

• 1:05:05Ezra Klein?

  I think there's a lot that I agree with there, but let me drop this down to, as you put 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 sense that it cares about social goals and equality and distribution and a bunch of things that progressives typically care about, and pro-technology. I mean, right on the cover of our book, right, we have this somewhat solar punky, you know, you see technology and forestry and we talk about rewilding, you know, very much at the beginning because you have, you know, vertical farming, right?

• 1:05:44Ezra Klein?

  We are trying to create a kind of vision of the way technology can be pulled into politics to, you know, make things possible that are 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 Sam Altman wields, Dario wields, Dario Amadei. People are scared of AI. You know, the way Jasmine Sun describes AI populism is a sense that AI is really an elite project that is like being shoved down people's throats, not something they want,

• 1:06:27Ezra Klein?

  but something that they're being forced to accept and adapt to. And so at the, at the level of vibes, this sort of... Politics that merges progressive goals and a kind of view that technology can be harnessed for them, it seems very far. GLP-1s are very widespread, but I think the way the left feels about them is very unsettled. I'm curious if you could talk a bit about that level, because I think it's very hard for a positive politics to grow out of a deep and median suspicion. And yet I understand why the suspicion is there right now.

• 1:07:00Speaker 01

  Yeah, let me talk first about AI and then let me get to GLP-1s. 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-1s, 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.

• 1:07:24Ezra Klein?

  The thing I just meant about that, because I think you're right, is just that I don't see any place where the left is like excited about a new technology.

• 1:07:32Speaker 01

  Right. So, okay, yeah. So I really like the two, three sentences that we had about artificial intelligence in the sci-fi vignette that 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 work week has shrunk. And implicit in the idea that artificial intelligence allows the work week to shrink

• 1:08:12Speaker 01

  is the idea that to the extent that it reduces labor, that reduction of labor is not borne on the backs of a 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

• 1:08:54Speaker 01

  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 work week than the equivalent 20% of the economy just being shunted onto unemployment. On GLP-1s, 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. Like, there are magazines and newsletter writers who are

• 1:09:39Speaker 01

  against GLP-1s because they promote a new thinness culture, or they might represent some kind of unnatural way of getting a normal body.

• 1:09:48Ezra Klein?

  Biohacking optimization culture, peptides now, clavicular, right? Which is like a sort of whole weird dystopic looks-maxing thing.

• 1:09:56Speaker 01

  That it accelerates us towards some kind of transhumanist future with which we feel uncomfortable.

• 1:10:00Ezra Klein?

  And while enriching a small number of people.

• 1:10:02Speaker 01

  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

• 1:10:47Speaker 01

  finding new ways of bringing down the cost in the next few years for all Americans? What if the federal government spends a lot of money to promote a certain drug category, rewards 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?

• 1:11:09Ezra Klein?

  Which is what we did for COVID vaccines.

• 1:11:10Speaker 01

  At cost, 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-1s.

• 1:11:29Ezra Klein?

  Mark, I 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 one 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 than 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

• 1:12:09Ezra Klein?

  education. Obviously, you have temperance movements and things like that. And there's a lot of talk in that era of work and 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 circling some of these ideas. But I'm curious, like, given your more historical perspective, what you think of that and what

• 1:12:53Ezra Klein?

  you think of time as a thing, leisure time, you know, time that you have autonomy over as a long-term goal for abundance?

• 1:13:03Speaker 02

  In the moment of every new technological transformation,

• 1:13:07Speaker 02

  We have had some notion, some dream, that maybe we could have less work and 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, Keynes famously expected that we would be spending less time at work.

• 1:13:27Ezra Klein?

  It would be in our 15-hour work week by now.

• 1:13:29Speaker 02

  Right, right.

• 1:13:30Ezra Klein?

  But we did create the weekend, right, the labor movement. I mean, we have taken time back at times.

• 1:13:35Speaker 02

  We have taken time back. I suspect that we are going to find with the 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 sanguine that we're going to have less time. I mean, 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

• 1:14:15Speaker 02

  of who makes decisions, right? We are empowering people to take chances, to make 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 is going to go, how we're going to build the new transit line, where the housing is going to go. And I think 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 so that we can make expeditions decisions?

• 1:15:23Ezra Klein?

  I think the transmission lines question brings up another area that both interfaces with technology, obviously, but also politics. For me, a lot of abundance comes out of thinking first about the EMB movement and then thinking about climate change and 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 permitting we have was not going to allow enough solar and wind and transmission lines and so on to get placed.

• 1:15:57Ezra Klein?

  Then Donald Trump gets elected and I would say a couple of things happen. One is he guts into the Inflation Reduction Act's credits for wind and solar, trying to mess all that up and also makes it in some cases like harder to permit and harder to finance.

• 1:16:12Ezra Klein?

  There were hopes that you would see big level permitting reform, at least maybe that would happen under a Republican 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 strait of Hormuz into a complete mess. 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, where 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

• 1:16:53Ezra Klein?

  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 has somehow stopped being true because the politics of climate change have 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 that 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. You know, we've gone from a place where the question is how fast can we build out the decarbonization to whatever the hell this is now. And it's a real, it's a real fall.

• 1:17:35Speaker 01

  It doesn't just seem like an abject disaster. It is an absolute disaster. I mean, this is what you and I were talking about a lot with audiences in, you know, May and April of last year. We're saying that, you know, Donald Trump wins this affordability election, where if you ask people who switched 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 in large part because the amount

• 1:18:19Speaker 01

  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

• 1:19:01Speaker 01

  the electrical grid are getting scarce and more expensive in large part because we have tariffed 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,

• 1:19:45Speaker 01

  but are also, in many cases, being tariffed? 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 to run on the idea that, like, we know that economics works in many of these industries. We know 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.

• 1:20:14Ezra Klein?

  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 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 see 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

• 1:20:58Ezra Klein?

  poorer 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 that, over a long period of time, endlessly 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.

• 1:21:43Ezra Klein?

  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 a like a worried relationship with energy. It just wants to avoid the problems of fossil fuel energy use, right? Decarbonization, et cetera. 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.

• 1:22:28Ezra Klein?

  That 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.

• 1:22:46Speaker 01

  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

• 1:23:29Speaker 01

  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 wind, 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

• 1:24:12Speaker 01

  that every few months drives up the cost of hydrocarbons that are put on ships.

• 1:24:16Ezra Klein?

  I think the distinction I am making, though, is between

• 1:24:23Ezra Klein?

  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 Strait 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 a 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 the environmental movement of energy, right? You know, you want to reduce, reuse and recycle. And, you know, you want to put on a sweater.

• 1:25:05Ezra Klein?

  And I think that abundance is 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, mass desalination. 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.

• 1:25:50Ezra Klein?

  And I think it is an actually an important dividing line. Is what you're talking about just securing a better energy supply than we have now? Or is what you're talking about a world of energetic wealth? Clean energetic wealth that you can somehow describe, but that is quite different than what we now live in?

• 1:26:09Speaker 02

  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.

• 1:26:49Speaker 02

  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 else is being generated in places that are far away from where the load is going to be expended. And we need to build lines that connect the generation to the place where people want to use the electricity. But 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 a, you know, a struggling, more

• 1:27:33Speaker 02

  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 are 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.

• 1:28:14Speaker 02

  We need a 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 progressives is 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.

• 1:28:42Ezra Klein?

  Well, 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 abundance, the idea 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, getting things built in the real world. The Trump administration began with Doge, which on the one hand was enormously destructive of state capacity. On the other hand, it's proof that you could do a lot more to the state than people thought you could, that the rules, the 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 are going to need to take some of those lessons and build something different.

• 1:29:25Ezra Klein?

  And I want to play a clip from Pete Buttigieg just the other day.

• 1:29:28Speaker 11

  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.

• 1:29:44Speaker 11

  That's not what we're here to do.

• 1:29:47Speaker 11

  We're, we're not out to go around and just find all the little bits and pieces of everything 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 destroying things right and left. They're destroying a lot of good, important things. They're destroying some useless things too, because they're destroying everything. So now we get a chance to put things together on different terms.

• 1:30:17Ezra Klein?

  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 wouldn't 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 Newsom 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 that different things should be built.

• 1:30:55Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:30:56Ezra Klein?

  Mark, this is obviously your wheelhouse a bit. What would you tell Pete Buttigieg?

• 1:31:02Speaker 02

  So we need to make it so that when various bureaucracies within the federal government are thinking about whether to site new wind farms off the coast, and there are implications for energy and there are implications for the fishing industry and there are implications for the wildlife and for the birds and for the energy companies onshore, 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 conversation.

• 1:31:38Ezra Klein?

  I want to stop you for a second because I feel like you're framing this as if it's, you keep saying just the fantasy.

• 1:31:43Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:31:44Ezra Klein?

  It's the law, right? There are courts. They are, I talk to the people doing these decisions, right? They are worried about lawsuits. They are worried about the project getting dragged out. So one reason Elon Musk just gutted things during Doge 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.

• 1:32:19Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 1:32:19Ezra Klein?

  Because it can get filibustered and nobody's going to 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 as 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.

• 1:32:43Speaker 02

  That's absolutely true. And that's the system that we've built over the course of the last 50 years. Like 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 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 seventeen Cincinnati Bengals fans in the entire world. There are sixteen of us and we all know each other. And there was a moment in the

• 1:33:16Ezra Klein?

  You might have angry emails I'm about to get because of this comment.

• 1:33:20Ezra Klein?

  There are nineteen and the other ones are pissed.

• 1:33:22Speaker 02

  Yeah, fair enough. You'll get you'll get three. In the Super Bowl a few years ago, there was a call at the end against Logan Wilson for pass interference at the end of the game. And it was not pass interference. And I feel very strongly about this. We all seventeen 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 Super Bowl 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,

• 1:34:07Speaker 02

  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 worry I have for abundance, is I'm not sure that we are articulating how we're going to make these trade offs in a way that makes sense and is both fair to those who need to have a voice, but doesn't allow for interminable debate.

• 1:34:41Ezra Klein?

  What's your version of this?

• 1:34:42Speaker 01

  Doge was a total disaster. I mean, there's a way in which I think some people say, oh, you know, what we'll just 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 failure to spend money authorized under the bipartisan infrastructure bill. You know, I talked to a lot of people at the state level about what they saw as the reason why rural broadband money, tens of billions of dollars of it, didn't actually build rural broadband, and why several billion dollars of electric

• 1:35:25Speaker 01

  vehicle charger 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 inscribed by the law itself. And that brings me to a point that you might think of as sort of like those bit better, but I sometimes think of as being like a little bit separate, is 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 2029 will value

• 1:36:11Speaker 01

  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 Trump administration is now paying back $166 billion in tariff fees. That's not moving fast, that's moving fast then moving very slow because you have to undo everything

• 1:36:55Speaker 01

  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, bipartisan infrastructure law was in many ways a very abundancy 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 cannot electrify a grid if there's like interconnection queues and transformer delays of months and years. So that's one thing I think you'd really, really want to use a kind of progressive Doge to do.

• 1:37:37Speaker 01

  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 Rexandra Teslow, 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 despite what the anti-vaxxers say, the COVID vaccines were really remarkably safe, given the health benefits that they gave the American and global population.

• 1:38:20Speaker 01

  But like, Ezra, like, you know, you talked about this a lot when we were traveling the country. I'm wondering how your thinking has evolved here and what you think a good Doge would look like in 2029?

• 1:38:30Ezra Klein?

  So, one of the lines I used often on tour, as you remember, is that the left is overformed by 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 danger is. One thing Doge very naturally did was created 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.

• 1:39:13Ezra Klein?

  And I think one of the dangers, and I think this is what Buttigieg 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 if it's not working for you. And I think something that the left has to be very, 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.

• 1:39:47Speaker 01

  And you're saying all left of center here.

• 1:39:49Ezra Klein?

  I'm saying all left of center. I don't mean the far left. I mean, the left of center coalition in this country, the Democratic Party. So it will naturally be fundamentally sympathetic institutions. And one of the things 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 is full of lawyers, lawyers look at the question of legitimacy through whether or not you have followed procedure, right? How do you legitimize? How do you say that what the state is doing is appropriate while following the rules? And Bagley, who is himself a lawyer, who trains administrative law students, who was also chief counsel for Gretchen Whitmer, he makes this point, no, for most people,

• 1:40:33Ezra Klein?

  legitimacy is attained through outcomes. And so what I understand to be the meta argument running through all of abundance is that 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, then the only thing that matters is not if you follow the rules or any of the rest of it. I'm 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, Noah Smith, the economist and writer, calls it checkism.

• 1:41:17Ezra Klein?

  This tendency to, I remember this from the 2020 primary among the Democrats, to just one up each other on how much money you are promising to spend on green 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 other things. I mean, we did a lot of work on this in the book, and you did a lot of work on this in the book. The National Institutes of Health are a marvel. They are 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 where failing institutions cannot be outcompeted by, you know, newer, younger corporations.

• 1:42:01Ezra Klein?

  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 laudable in Elon Musk amidst the many things I find not laudable in him is the relentlessness with which he tries to achieve his goals. Right? That guy believes in, you know, getting us to Mars and, you know, creating an electric vehicle transition and all the rest of it.

• 1:42:45Ezra Klein?

  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, you know, the way notice and comment periods are structured, or we can't move faster because of environmental review. Instead of finding these things and saying,

• 1:43:28Ezra Klein?

  this is a problem and we have to fix it because what we promised 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.

• 1:43:42Ezra Klein?

  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.

• 1:44:05Speaker 01

  I think the NIH is a really interesting flashpoint for the perspective that you're advancing. Consider like three approaches to the NIH. A sort of pro-establishment liberal approach, an anti-establishment MAGA approach, which we'll call just current policy in 2026, and an anti-establishment abundance liberal approach. The establishment approach would be to say, the NIH spends $40 billion 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's sort of one pro-establishment approach.

• 1:44:50Speaker 01

  The current anti-establishment MAGA 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 Donald Trump don't like it very much. That's catastrophic. But then you come to category number three. 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.

• 1:45:34Speaker 01

  But what'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 even trusted with coming up with the most important breakthroughs about the cosmos and the human body, curing diseases. And what do we do for almost half of their time, force 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

• 1:46:17Speaker 01

  them from some of the paperwork requirements that we've added in the last few decades? Let's find a way to allow 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 2029.

• 1:46:31Speaker 02

  I think that we're getting a crucial distinction within 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 that government doesn't work, and 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 efficiently. I think that is an important part of abundance. I think to your earlier admonition that you don't want abundance just to be like, we're

• 1:47:14Speaker 02

  going to get rid of red 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 comfortable 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 in my own book, which is that I argue that we need to have a system where people have a voice but not a 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,

• 1:47:58Speaker 02

  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 deathly afraid of the consequences of making a choice that comes at a cost, particularly of a democratic constituency.

• 1:48:17Ezra Klein?

  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 Leonhardt, about abundance. And I thought his answer to this was really, really, really interesting.

• 1:48:29Bernie Sanders?

  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 hard it is to even get the bloody money out? You have so many, oh my God, we have 38 meetings, we've got to talk about this. Unbelievable. I've worked for years to bring two health clinics into the state of Vermont that we needed. I wanted two 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 still not built. All right.

• 1:49:14Bernie Sanders?

  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 have. 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.

• 1:49:38Ezra Klein?

  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.

• 1:50:00Ezra Klein?

  It is 2026. He is saying one of the two is still not built. And I think one of the things I am saying around all this is that nobody should be angrier than the left if we have what Sanders calls a horrendous bureaucracy. That kind of saying, we all know bureaucracy sucks. We all know the government can't do anything. We all know the meeting structure is crazy and saying, but that's not the point of politics. But I think it is a 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,

• 1:50:41Ezra Klein?

  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 going to help you do that. I think you see this now with like Democrats promising to just cut and cut and cut taxes on the middle class because people don't believe their taxes buy them that much. So 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 answers really important. It's something you don't hear that many people on the real left say. But I do think just like in terms

• 1:51:26Ezra Klein?

  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 core to abundance that like you need a vision for where you're 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 and a question.

• 1:51:57Speaker 01

  I had a 35, maybe 35 and a half minute conversation with Ron Mumdani last year over Zoom. 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

• 1:52:39Speaker 01

  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 number 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 class is. 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 commonsensical, it would be more likely to help the working class. So I'm not sure I have the same distinction between, or I see the reason to distinguish

• 1:53:24Speaker 01

  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 wonder 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.

• 1:53:52Ezra Klein?

  I'm glad you turned this back on me because I'm not sure I realized I thought this until you did. Sanders is using the word ideology there when I think the word is vision.

• 1:54:02Ezra Klein?

  When he's describing this distinction between good government, 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 the 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're 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.

• 1:54:44Ezra Klein?

  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 or New York City, a world where you could be a firefighter in San Francisco, or a firefighter in Brooklyn, and be able to afford a home in the city you're keeping from burning down. That is no less radical right now than Medicare for all us. Frankly, it's more radical in those cities, because at least we do actually have healthcare 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 increased energetic standard of living, is actually a quite different world than we live in.

• 1:55:26Ezra Klein?

  If we can actually figure out a way to make AI serve the public's ends, and not just be a way to replace white collar workers, I think that could create a radically different world. But, so 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 as efficiency and good government, hard enough. Right? You're really...

• 1:55:56Ezra Klein?

  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 some things are 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 healthcare. 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 precarity 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,

• 1:56:41Ezra Klein?

  but how to have possibilities open to us that we don't currently have and ways of living open to us that we don't currently have. You know, we could have high-speed rail in 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 would 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.

• 1:57:09Speaker 01

  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.

• 1:57:19Speaker 02

  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,

• 1:58:03Speaker 02

  my book, a bunch of other books, if this movement refocuses on

• 1:58:10Speaker 02

  Giving people faith that these public institutions can work, that they can make decisions expeditiously, that is a huge boon, 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

• 1:58:55Speaker 02

  election to election, that they need to believe that when they're casting a ballot for a Democrat, that that Democrat is going to be able to effectuate a change that is meaningful.

• 1:59:05Ezra Klein?

  I think it's a good place to end. So, as our final question, what are three books you'd recommend to the audience? And Mark, why don't we begin with you?

• 1:59:12Speaker 02

  So, the first book I always recommend to anyone is Elizabeth Cullen's Making the New Deal, which I think is the greatest pure book of history that I've ever read. The second book, which I hope people will pick up, is Yoni Appelbaum's Stuck, which gets to a lot of these issues explicitly in the realm of housing. He talks about how a lack of geographic mobility, for many of the reasons that we have here, has really been the hindrance to socioeconomic mobility. It's a great book. And then the third, you know, to the degree my book is in conversation with Robert Caro's 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.

• 1:59:57Speaker 02

  But there's a book by Mark Reisman called Cadillac Desert, which essentially traces the same arc with a guy named Floyd Dominie running the Bureau of Reclamation and building dams all across the West. And it is the same core story, but in an entirely 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 changed and how our ideas about how to drive progress have evolved.

• 2:00:30Speaker 01

  My three books. Number one, weird choice maybe for reformed Jew, but Mere Christianity by C.S. 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 re-enter reading experiences that I had when I was younger in the hopes that the re-consumption of that object would put me back in that mood again. There was a period when I was in my 20s, when I just moved to New York, where I read a bunch of books that I adored. The Emperor's Children by Claire Masood, The Interesting's by Meg Wolitzer, and The Secret History by Donna Tartt. And I just reread The Secret History by Donna Tartt, and it is so fucking good.

• 2:01:12Speaker 01

  It's like, I finished the book two weeks ago and entered a brief, like, one-hour period of mourning. Like, that wonderful experience you have with a novel where the turning of the last page is a true tragic event for the soul. I think The Secret History is absolutely extraordinary. I have a four-month-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 Cormac McCarthy is 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

• 2:01:54Speaker 01

  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 amazing auditory experience. So if anyone wants to feel incredibly tripped out while they're making coffee in the morning for their family, definitely get the Audiobook of Blood Meridian. It's a really extraordinary experience.

• 2:02:21Ezra Klein?

  Derek Thompson, Mark Dunkelman, thank you very much. Thanks for having me.

• 2:02:24Speaker 01

  Thank you.

• 2:02:35Ezra Klein?

  This episode of The Israel Clans is produced by Annie Galvin, fact-checking by Michelle Harris. Our recording engineer is Aman Sahota. Our senior audio engineer is Jeff Geld, with additional mixing by Isaac Jones and Aman Sahota. Our executive producer is Claire Gordon. The show's production team also includes Roland Hu, Marie Cassillon, Marina King, Jack McCordick, Kristin Lynn, Emma Kehlbeck, and Jan Kobal. Original music by Patton McCusker. Audience strategy by Shannon Busta and Lauren Reddy. The director of New York Times Pinning Audio is Annie Rose Strasser. Special thanks to Brianna Johnson.