Ezra Klein & Derek Thompson: Less Obstruction, More Government

Scarcity is a policy choice — one liberals need to reject and replace with abundance, according to journalists Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson in their new book, Abundance. They say that by building a wall of bureaucracy in front of growth, Democrats have created an affordability crisis, hindering their own progressive goals and leading voters to flee blue cities and states. Kara talks to Klein and Thompson about concerns around equity and access; the tech industry’s culpability in all of this; which Dems are best positioned to pursue an abundance agenda; and how pursuing abundance can help fight the Trump-Musk agenda of cruelty. Klein hosts the popular New York Times podcast The Ezra Klein Show and writes an accompanying column on the intersection of politics, policy and society. Thompson is a staff writer at The Atlantic, writes the weekly Work in Progress Newsletter, and hosts the Plain English podcast. Correction: Ezra Klein was a founder of Vox.com, a news site created in 2014. He was not a co-founder of Vox Media, the company that publishes On With Kara Swisher. Questions? Comments? Email us at [email protected] or find us on Instagram and TikTok @onwithkaraswisher Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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

• 0:00Kara Swisher?

  I'm sorry, I don't look so good today. I just got back from a lot trip.

• 0:02Speaker 01

  For coming from Australia, you're.

• 0:04Kara Swisher?

  No, then I went to South by Southwest.

• 0:06Speaker 01

  Oh, Jesus Christ, Kara.

• 0:07Kara Swisher?

  Yeah.

• 0:07Speaker 01

  You have extraordinary energy out there.

• 0:21Kara Swisher?

  Hi, everyone. From New York Magazine and the Vox Media Podcast Network, this is On with Kara Swisher, and I'm Kara Swisher. My guests today are Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson, authors of the new book called Abundance that reconsideres the effects of liberal policies in blue states. Derek Thompson is a staff writer at The Atlantic and the author of the Work in Progress newsletter. He also has a podcast, Plain English, and is the author of books Hitmakers and On Work: Money Meaning Identity. Ezra and I used to be colleagues at New York Times Opinion. I was recently on his Times podcast, The Ezra Klein Show, talking about Elon Musk. He's also the author of the 2020 book, Why We're Polarized. We go back a long way. I actually got him into podcasting when we worked at Vox Media. Ezra

• 1:06Kara Swisher?

  and Derek are both prominent writers and thinkers on the left who have a history of offering provocative takes and criticisms of the Democratic Party. You may remember that last year Ezra was an early voice calling on then-President Joe Biden to step out of the 2024 election. But in the end, it happened, and he was right. That caught the ire of many Democrats, and this book will likely be no different. In it, they claim that the Democratic well-meaning policies of one generation have created an affordability crisis that's leading voters to flee blue cities and states. They argue, in order to create a world they want and to win back voters, Democrats need a serious paradigm shift away from the politics of scarcity. I sat down with them last Wednesday to talk about what the abundance agenda might

• 1:51Kara Swisher?

  look like, how Democrats can make the necessary trade-offs to pursue that agenda. I also want to talk about their strategy to punch left, so to speak, with a book that shames liberals, and whether that's the best strategy in our current times. Our expert question comes from San Francisco Mayor Daniel Lurie, the Democratic leader of a city they spent a lot of time talking about in the book. Stay with us.

• 2:29Speaker 02

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• 3:13Speaker 03

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• 3:57Speaker 04

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• 4:16Speaker 05

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• 4:36Kara Swisher?

  Ezra, Derek, welcome. Thanks for being on On. I'm excited to talk about your new book, Abundance. I have an abundance of skepticism on this thesis, but I want to be convinced by the two of you. So let's get into it. So your story opens with a kind of utopian vision board, and I've heard this from Silicon Valley people a million times. You know, this is kind of their thing that they do, this idea of how we're going to live. I've seen a million movies they've made. Microsoft made one a couple of years ago that's looked like what you described. And let me describe it. Our homes are cocoons of clean energy. Our fridges are stocked with meat. We're not a single animal had to die for. Poverty is all but gone. Our pharmaceuticals are made in space. Housing is plentiful. It's very dreamy.

• 5:21Kara Swisher?

  And you say the future could be ours if only liberals would get out of the way. Sort of shame on us, in other words. And you blame the left in a lot of this book for making it too hard to build the things we need more of: housing, public transportation, energy, healthcare, especially in blue states, or at least in states with a long history of liberal policies like California, also places where innovation really happens in our country. So your big idea is scarcity is a choice. I don't know necessarily if it is one, so I'd love you to convince me. Because a little bit of it feels like, if only we didn't have so much regulation, which sounds a lot like Elon Musk and Donald Trump. So I'm not going to compare you to them, but Ezra, you start giving me the grand thesis, and then Derek.

• 6:04Speaker 01

  Great. So I appreciate the beginning of skepticism here. It wouldn't be a Kara interview without it. So I don't think we would say, I don't want to speak for Derek, that the left is the only thing standing in the way of our little vignette at the beginning. That is a bit of a scene setter, meant to get people thinking more about the future than the past. One of the things that I think we both believe about politics is that... We really spend a lot of time arguing over on the right, the imagined glories of the past, on the left, the injustices. I think I tend to be more sympathetic and aligned with the left's view of that, but but we don't really spend nearly enough time talking in a serious way about what we would like the future to look like. Some things in that vignette are futuristic, right? Lab-grown meat is not available at any kind of scale.

• 6:49Speaker 01

  Star pills seem pretty plausible, but again, not available at any kind of scale or even any level of production. Having enough homes is not, right? The utopia is here, it's just unevenly distributed. We've got more or less enough housing in Houston. We can do that. Tokyo has a much better set of housing policies than San Francisco does.

• 7:09Kara Swisher?

  Trains, high-speed trains.

• 7:10Speaker 01

  Trains, right, yeah. You can you can you can bore at high-speed rail in Europe or Japan or China. The reason we're focused here on the left is because we are of the left, right? And the way in which we're different than than Elon Musk or Donald Trump is it values and the world you're trying to build actually matter. And that is another reason we began with that vignette. So it is true that in many ways, like the right wants to deregulate energy. And we I wouldn't exactly call it deregulate what we want to do, but we want to reform energy regulation. So it's much easier to build clean energy. The difference between us and the right is we don't want to build more fossil fuel energy. What we want to do is speed run our ability to build clean energy. And we're just not anywhere near on our decarbonization goals. And there are a bunch of reasons for that. But one

• 7:54Speaker 01

  of the big ones is it's incredibly difficult to lay down transmission lines, interstate transmission lines.

• 7:58Kara Swisher?

  Or build nuclear energy or do any of that stuff.

• 8:01Speaker 01

  Or do modular nuclear, all of it. If we're going to decarbonize, we need to build a huge amount of electricity, and then we need to move that electricity from where it's generated, places that have a lot of sunshine or a lot of wind or a lot of offshore wind or geothermal or whatever it might be, to where it's needed. And we can't do that if we can't build transmission lines. So the reason we are focused on liberalism here is two reasons. One is we're liberals, our goals are liberal, and this is a book about how to achieve goals that we feel we share with most Democrats, most liberals. Another is, look like we're all living here in the MAGA era. And it's not the only reason I think the right has been rising and winning. But I think one way that you sideline more

• 8:45Speaker 01

  Dangerous political movements is you prove out the success of your own.

• 8:48Kara Swisher?

  That you can build things, that this idea of let's build things.

• 8:51Speaker 01

  And just the sense, the ambient sense, that the states you govern are well governed. And right now, I think it'd be very hard for Gavin Newsom to run for president and say, which he's going to try to do, hey, vote for me and this whole place will become like California.

• 9:04Kara Swisher?

  Well, he's going MAGA now, apparently. So we'll see. We'll see where he's going. Derek?

• 9:09Speaker 07

  I think it's a great question. Why criticize the left?

• 9:12Kara Swisher?

  I'm not saying not to.

• 9:13Speaker 07

  At a time when the right is so scandalously unethical. We have, in this country, a right wing movement that is trying to destroy government. And not just destroy it, destroy it to take it over, to purge the state of all ideological disagreements, so that a public government can be co-opted for private ends. You've talked about this so much, on this show, on your show with Scott. You've got a telecom policy that, oh, just happens to want to depend on Starlink, which is owned by Elon Musk. You've got a president that'll just happen to make an advertisement for Tesla yesterday to bump up the stock of his co-doum-fret. This is a government that is defined by kleptocracy and kakistocracy.

• 9:55Speaker 07

  We have the misfortune of having a right wing government that is government of theft and government by the worst people. All of that is to say that America needs an opposition, a counterparty, that is powerful and popular and strong and capable. And I think right now, instead, we have a left that is none of the above, that is unpopular. The Democratic Party polls worse even than Donald Trump, that is weak in many of the places that it governs, and is also, let's be honest, incompetent at achieving its own ends. Housing abundance is a progressive priority, but the states with the highest rates of homelessness, the top five, are all governed by Democrats.

• 10:37Speaker 07

  Homelessness is highest often in the places where blue governs. It's meaningful that climate change is a progressive priority, but it is Texas and Georgia that is leading the country in the construction of renewable energy. It matters, I think, that the left cannot achieve its ends in the places where it has power. And I want liberalism to use the places that it governs as an advertisement for liberalism. California should be able to say, "Vote for us and we'll make America like California." Instead, we have a Republican Party that seems to find purchase in the argument, "Vote for us, Republicans, or else Democrats will make America like California." Right? The places that we govern now have become anti-advertisements for our cause.

• 11:22Speaker 07

  If we want to stand up against the right, I think we really need to build a movement that is powerful and popular and competent. And so that's why I think it's worth taking a good hard look in the mirror.

• 11:32Kara Swisher?

  So one of the arguments that, of course, that California is a mess, this and that, yet most innovation comes from California, most food comes from California, most movies come from California. And when you have states like Florida, which is trying to become innovative, everybody moving there, it's over. The whole movement to Miami is over, as far as I can tell. Austin, they're making a go for it, but it's certainly not the same thing, right? Where things are starting. But in the book, you write a lot about California. And I would agree, for the first time, I've thought California might go Republican this year or next year, right? It's possible. It's certainly trending that way. You could see it moving, especially after the fires and everything else. So in the book, you write that middle-class families are leaving these blue cities and states like California, New York, Illinois, because they're no longer affordable.

• 12:17Kara Swisher?

  And one of the biggest reasons you give is lack of affordable housing. You also blame excessive regulation, democracy by lawsuit, NIMBY, not in my backyard, it's been a big issue in California. And you really drill down on San Francisco. But there's also the tech economy that pushed up prices in the Bay Area and Seattle, which exacerbated housing and homelessness. There's a mentality of care that is very different than other states, where they're just homeless people, they don't exist, shove them out, right? It's a different mentality, too. There was a housing crisis in Austin where tech has... Trying to move to or trying to make fetch happen there. Prices have gone down there recently.

• 13:00Kara Swisher?

  Talk a little bit about why you think that is because if six-figure salaries, the world's most successful tech companies become the floor for housing prices. What can any city do about that? Because prices, as I said, in Austin, now they're building like crazy in Austin. I was just there yesterday. How do you combat that? The idea of when you have a successful place, people tend to go there.

• 13:22Speaker 01

  You build like crazy, right? This one is so, there's so much in the book that's not straightforward and honestly, dreams we have that might not even work out. But this one is just a solved problem if you want to solve it. This is just a choice. I mean, there are other things here that are really hard. You know, we could star pills, lab grown beet. But whether or not you build apartment buildings, that is a solved technological problem. We have just chosen not to do it. And we could talk about why we've chosen not to do it, but we have just chosen not to do it. We've gated the cities. It is true, as you say, Cara, that we had a huge run up in innovation, in technological wealth. And what we should have done then is build a lot of homes. I mean, that's what New York City did, you know, in mid-century, as it became arguably

• 14:07Speaker 01

  the most important economic city in the world. Now, we have a little bit more trouble building homes now, but we built it at an unbelievably torrid pace. So did California in mid-century. I mean, there was a period when a huge percentage of national home building was just happening in California. Derek has a great vignette about Lakewood and like the speed at which they were producing homes there. There's this period in which Marin could have been building a lot of homes. They shut off the water. They made it so you could not add more homes to the water in order to make it so more people couldn't move there. And then they had a drought and they had to run a huge pipe across the bridge. So Marin did not stop having any drinking water because it tried to make it so hard to build new things and in doing had made themselves vulnerable to drought. So.

• 14:51Speaker 01

  It is true that wealth should create appreciation, but you can build ahead of that. I mean, that's how the whole of America worked for a long time.

• 14:58Kara Swisher?

  So obstructionism is really what you're talking about. Obstructionism of, you know, I've built in San Francisco. I know the difficulties of every major city. It's not, it's not just San Francisco, it's other cities. In other cities, you can do whatever you want, right? There's issues in San Francisco around earthquakes and safety and things like that, which they tend to focus in on and others don't, right? Like, let's not worry about safety. But speaking of Austin, for example, the city council is officially nonpartisan. The Democrats, the ones pushing initiatives by YIMBYs, which is yes in my backyard, to increase housing there. Are Democrats learning from the mistakes of San Francisco and New York, creating policies that fend off, Derek? Is there, are there cities like that, that, that push that idea?

• 15:41Kara Swisher?

  I know Daniel Lurie in San Francisco is trying to push that idea of building housing in empty buildings, all kinds of different ideas.

• 15:50Speaker 07

  Look, there was an attitude that came up in the 1960s, 1970s, that associated doing good with stopping construction in the physical world. And to be fair to this generation, it was a response to a world of different problems. The air was disgusting, the rivers were disgusting. In 1943, residents of Los Angeles woke up to smog so thick they thought that it was a Japanese chemical attack. Up until the 1970s and 1980s, as Ezra was talking about on another show, smog in Los Angeles was still disgusting. The environmental rules and this attitude of stop building so much with fossil fuels was incredibly important for its own age. But the successes of one generation can become the disease of the next generation.

• 16:35Speaker 07

  We have been in a housing recession in California for, by some accounts, the last 37 years. That's not because of oligarchy, and it's not because of the right. This is a state that is governed entirely by progressives. And progressives, I should say, of a certain mindset that says that the way to save this country is to stop physical world construction. But to your point, something is changing, right? Institutional renewal is a theme of this book. Sometimes one generation gets so fed up with the problems of the previous generation that it screams for change. And what you're seeing, I think, starting from California, I think San Francisco was the patient zero of this good virus and it's spreading across the country, is this sense

• 17:20Speaker 07

  of yimbiism. We've gone too far in stopping physical construction in the world. We have to be pro-housing rather than pro-permitting. And as a result, I think among young people, among young progressives, you're seeing them much more likely to say, if housing is so important, why do the places governed by the left do so poorly on housing? And if housing is our priority, let's actually prioritize it and let's find ways to take away the rules that are standing in the way and allow, in some cases, markets to flourish and supply to meet the demand that exists. And I am really inspired by that. There's a lot of self-criticism in this book that we've already covered, but here's a place where I think we are absolutely seeing something fantastic in the world, a generational

• 18:03Speaker 07

  response to a real crisis in this country and a crisis that I think in many cases is of the left's making.

• 18:11Kara Swisher?

  We'll be back in a minute.

• 18:21Speaker 02

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• 19:06Kara Swisher?

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• 19:49Kara Swisher?

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• 20:19Kara Swisher?

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• 21:01Kara Swisher?

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• 21:26Kara Swisher?

  Housing affordability, the one thing that's motivating people, it doesn't hurt that Texas does not have personal state income tax. Texas also has one of the lowest corporate tax rates in the nation. Elon Musk is steering legal disputes of users of X to a federal court in the northern district of Texas. There's a new business court. A lot of corporations are moving there because they don't like Delaware's fairness. You know, they don't like to lose in these Delaware courts. So do Democrats just have to do that and say, we're going to just drop taxes? We're just going to do the same thing to keep people here?

• 21:59Speaker 07

  Sure, yeah. I think Democrats need an attitudinal change, and I think that they need a political change. I think the attitudinal change needs to be that you represent doing good with seeing positive outcomes. And positive outcomes here means that housing stock where you live is growing when it's in high demand. But that requires a political change, right? I think in the last 50 years, Democrats have become very good at the politics of blocking at the local level. How do we stop things from happening? And we need to fall in love with the politics of building at the local level. And sometimes that means allowing markets to work. And there has been, in the last few decades, I think, often for very good reason, I want to point out, a skepticism on the left toward markets.

• 22:40Speaker 07

  People see that when markets flourish, inequality grows at the level of national income. But there are many cases where allowing markets to work a little bit better helps the working class and the lower class. And housing is one of them. If you make it impossible to build housing, then the housing stock stops moving, stops growing, and the returns all go to the incumbents, the people who own the houses that do exist, which means allowing market forces to work means creating new housing stock that the low-income can move into. I do want to add, though, because we are doing, both in the show and frankly, in the book, a lot of criticism of the left. This is not a problem that Donald Trump is fixing.

• 23:22Speaker 07

  Donald Trump won in 2024 because of, to quote Ezra's partner, Annie Lowry, "an affordability crisis in this country." Too many Americans said, "The rent is too damn high. The price of groceries is too damn high." The price- That everything is too damn high. And what's the biggest ticket item in most families' spending in a year? It's housing.

• 23:42Kara Swisher?

  Right.

• 23:43Speaker 07

  Donald Trump could have said, I am running to make America more like Texas.

• 23:46Kara Swisher?

  And one would imagine he would do that.

• 23:48Speaker 07

  What's he doing instead? He's raising tariffs on the most important inputs on housing. In lumber from Canada, in drywall material from Mexico. All that's going to do is raise the price of housing. And you don't have to take my word for it. Right after the tariffs were announced, the National Association of Home Builders came out and basically wrote a kind of politely worded memo that was like, what the fuck are you doing? I thought you were trying to fix an affordability crisis. So this is not a problem where the left has a monopoly of blame, to be clear.

• 24:15Kara Swisher?

  So talk about this pro-business idea. Because one of the things is, they suddenly, all the tech, all the tech people made their money in California and then they immediately moved to Las Vegas, or Texas, or Florida, instantly. And it was a tax, it was a tax fate, is what it was.

• 24:30Speaker 01

  I think there's a lot of that to it. I think there are a couple of things we're saying about taxes. So one, I lived in San Francisco, I live now in New York City, both high tax jurisdictions. I know a lot of people who are upset about taxes. But almost always, the phrase of the complaint that I hear is, I am paying all these taxes and what am I getting for it? And I think that what am I getting for it is really important.

• 24:51Kara Swisher?

  Yes.

• 24:51Speaker 01

  People are like, what the hell am I getting for it? Look at the New York City subway. It feels like it's getting worse to me.

• 24:55Kara Swisher?

  Look at the homeless on the streets.

• 24:57Speaker 01

  Look at the homeless on the streets.

• 24:58Kara Swisher?

  Cleanliness.

• 24:59Speaker 01

  So there's a big dimension here. Not, I don't think the most important question is how high the tax rate is. I think the most important question is how much people think they are getting for their taxes. We keep talking about deregulation, we keep talking about markets. And I worry we're making this sound, like it just fits into this very traditional cleavage. What we want to do oftentimes here is deregulate government. Because the thing that we have made it too hard to do, and this is largely, this is why liberals have a role in this, not just right. The thing we've made it too hard for government to do is act itself. So the problem with California's high-speed rail system wasn't that we overly regulated markets, it's that we overly regulated government itself and made it too hard for government to act. The reason it's

• 25:44Speaker 01

  Been incredibly hard and expensive to build affordable housing, which often uses public subsidy. And I've done a lot of writing on this and I have a lot of it in the book. Is that when you touch public money, the government has imposed a series of standards on itself that make construction slower and pricier and more expensive. You can see this with affordable housing in SF. You can see it with what happened with Measure HHH in Los Angeles. So I would like to see, and this is where I actually feel like I'm to the left of a lot of people who think they're to my left in this conversation. I want a stronger government. I want a more capable government. I want a government more capable of acting. I don't want to do what Elon Musk is doing and take a chainsaw to government capacity. What I want to do is make it possible for for government to use capacity when the Biden administration

• 26:27Speaker 01

  got $42 billion for rural broadband and managed to hook zero people up or approximately zero people up to rural broadband in years. What was happening there was not that we had overly regulated markets. We had overly regulated government in process, in notice and comment periods, in legal review. Such a government cannot act capably, efficiently, and rapidly.

• 26:48Kara Swisher?

  Every episode we get a question from an outside expert. Let's hear yours because it's sort of in in this area of who gets to decide.

• 26:55Speaker 09

  This is Daniel Lurie, the new mayor of San Francisco, and my question is this. How do you view the proper balance between citizen input and the need to move fast on reforming the structure of local government?

• 27:08Speaker 01

  It's a great question and honestly, not an easy one. I think that input is important and the ability of then somebody to decide is more important. That input cannot just be a method of delay. We even the words we use are citizen input. That's great. Citizen input. Which citizens, right?

• 27:28Speaker 07

  Let me give you a model of, I think, how housing works the local level by answering the mayor's question with another mayor's story. I was talking to a mayor in North Carolina about the difficulty of adding housing. And he said, here's what happens. A developer will come along and say, I want to build this apartment building in an area that lots of people want to move to, including lots of working class people. And there will be a city council meeting and city. In that city council meeting will be 90 people who don't want that housing development to be built versus maybe two or three people who say, actually, it'd be kind of nice to have somewhere else to move to in the city.

• 28:06Speaker 07

  So the input that the city council is hearing in that meeting is 90 to 95% don't build anything, keep this city just the way it is. So you could say that's citizen input. I'm listening to my citizens. But for every one person in that room that's saying, I want new housing, there are maybe a thousand people not in that room who want new housing. And why aren't they in that room? Maybe because they're working at the time of the city council meeting. Maybe they're low income, maybe they're low education and don't know the city council meeting is happening in the first place. And so if you do government by testimony at city council meetings, you risk having

• 28:48Speaker 07

  a government that is overly responsive to older, often white homeowners who have the time and knowledge, who go to the city council meetings and speak up against new housing. You have government that is hyper representative of them and that under represents the many, many people that don't want, that want the housing to be built in the first place.

• 29:06Kara Swisher?

  So how do you get correct citizen input? You have questionnaires, you ask the homeless, people who want to move to the city who don't live there yet? How do you then know what the input is?

• 29:16Speaker 07

  It's a great question. Let me give an extreme answer and then maybe Ezra can walk me back off the plank if he disagrees. Democracy is input. Mayor Lurie was elected. That's input. The people have entrusted in him the ability to have the courage to make decisions that help the city. And if he subordinates his power to the volume of comment every single time someone decides they want to build something new in San Francisco, comment that will be overwhelmingly negative because the incumbents have more to lose and are more empowered and aware of these review processes.

• 29:51Kara Swisher?

  They're very noisy.

• 29:52Speaker 07

  They understand the politics of noise. And if you subordinate. Democracy to the politics of noise, you will get outcomes that are status quo and stasis. That's the world that we've built since the 1970s. So I would love more mayors and more governors to have confidence in and conviction in the fact of their power. You compare the record of not building in places like California to an outcome that, as reported on in the book, which is what happened when a bridge fell down in I-95 in Pennsylvania.

• 30:27Kara Swisher?

  Josh Shapiro built it.

• 30:28Speaker 07

  Josh Shapiro could have said, "We have a law in this country. We have customs of review and environmental review and bidding processes. And yes, it might take the normal 24 months to rebuild this bridge that is an absolutely essential artery to economy on the East Coast. We're going to take the full 24 months. We ought to put the process first." He said, "No, opposite day. We're going to put the outcomes first. You two construction companies that just happen to be in the area, boom, you got the bid. We're not even having anyone else supply. We're going to use union labor, but otherwise, we are going to optimize for speed rather than optimize for process." And that bridge was rebuilt in not 24 months, not 12 months, 12 days.

• 31:09Speaker 07

  Is Josh Shapiro less popular because he cast away the norms of valuing processes? No, he's much more popular.

• 31:16Kara Swisher?

  Unless the bridge falls in 10 years, then he'll be blamed, but he'll be present.

• 31:19Speaker 07

  That's a good point. Neither of us had the time machine to go 10 years into the future to see if the bridge was terribly built.

• 31:24Speaker 01

  I was just going to say, in a way, though, one thing about this is we're using the easy example, where there is at least some match between the level at which something is happening and the level of government that has control. So when you're talking about housing, I think you should think of housing as an issue that has much bigger than local effects, but it is a thing where you can imagine the people who are directly affected showing up. You have a lot of issues where you need to build things, and the people who are showing up and don't want to build are right in terms of their direct interests. So when we talk about transmission lines, it's really important for the country that we have enough transmission lines.

• 31:57Kara Swisher?

  High-speed rail.

• 31:58Speaker 01

  High-speed rail. It actually does not help you out if high-speed rail is coming through right where you are, if you're nowhere near a terminal to get on it and you don't plan to use high-speed rail. There are a lot of things in government and in the development of a nation where we have losers. We're trying to make winners at one level.

• 32:16Kara Swisher?

  Well, the highways that went right over beautiful neighborhoods and ruined them.

• 32:19Speaker 01

  Right. We have to figure out how to balance that. But on the other hand, we've gone too far. There are a lot of things where, yeah, like it's not going to be great for everybody. But we need to be able to have public infrastructure in this country. We need to be able to move energy around in this country. We need to be able to not just like build enough homes, but you know, redo Penn Station. And that will create losers in order to create, if you redo Penn Station, it's good for a huge amount of transportation on the East Coast. And this is where things get hard. You often have things working at the wrong level of government and you couldn't possibly have citizen input because all the people who would benefit never even know the thing happened, right? If you get the energy, you don't know which transmission line.

• 33:00Kara Swisher?

  And people don't benefit too. So Trump doesn't really listen to people either, and neither does Musk. And that's their whole thing is we're just going to do it. Let's talk about that because you're not saying no government. What's going on right now in DC with Doge is let's just get rid of it. Musk is saying, cut Amtrak, privatize NASA. Let's let the private sector run these because they'll run them better. And it's a moving of privatization of government. Let's get everybody out of our way so the market can win. You're talking about obstructionism. They're talking about, let's just tear it down and start again.

• 33:31Speaker 01

  We are talking about making it possible for government to act and build. And they are talking about making it impossible for government to act and build. Right, it is that, it is that stark. I want more trains run by the government and run more effectively and built by the government and built more effectively. And he wants to make it impossible for the government to build trains, right? There's just a huge difference between trying to destroy state capacity and trying to build it. And yes, it was very clever of them to call Doge the Department of Government Efficiency. Because who doesn't want efficient government, right? It's like when George Bush had like, you know, I forget the exact name of the bills, but it was like the Clean Air and Water Act. And it was about making it easier to dump pollution in, you know, the air and the water.

• 34:14Speaker 01

  There is an Orwellian-ness to this, but efficiency needs a goal, right? I mean, if you want a government that can be more efficiently taken over by Elon Musk's companies, then yeah, Doge is doing great. If you want a government that can more efficiently do things in service of the public and execute big public projects, I'm like, no, it's not doing great. Goals here really matter. And what they're doing is trying to build something that is more open to high levels of crony capitalism, right? It's a sort of an oligarchic takeover. I just want to fight that. I don't believe in it.

• 34:47Kara Swisher?

  How do you avoid that? How do you solve this Goldilocks dilemma? Like, how do you decide where to look like you're not obstructionist and at the same time not looking like... Their whole argument is private people can do it better, markets can do it better. Government is broken irreparably, and it cannot fix these things, and it shouldn't. How do you make the case, when you don't have the results, that the private sector might, for example?

• 35:13Speaker 07

  Well, they're wrong. Governments should do these things, because these things exist very squarely in the realm of for government. John Maynard Keynes said something that we quote in our book, which is something along the lines of, "Government should not do what the private sector can already do, but just a little bit better. Government should do what the private sector cannot do." So I don't think the government should get into the business of building cars, just because someone at the Department of Transportation is like, "You know what? I kind of like the Ford F-150, but I had this idea of us making something that's like a little bit different, with like slightly like, you know, larger wheels." No, government should stay out of what the private sector is already doing efficiently. What the private sector does not do efficiently is healthcare. The private sector does not do infrastructure efficiently.

• 35:54Speaker 07

  Public education, public transportation, public support for science? The NIH is like $50 billion. Where are the private philanthropists putting up $50 billion to irrigate basic research in this country? That doesn't exist. And the benefits of public research belong to the public. So this should be very squarely in the realm of government. But I cannot emphasize enough just how different our solutions to the problems of America are from this administration. I think in a very, very clear way, this administration is looking at American problems and American scarities and saying, let's solve these problems with even more

• 36:35Speaker 07

  scarities. The administration says that the US cannot afford our debt. And therefore, we have to say we can't afford healthcare for the poor, right? They say, we don't have a healthy economy, so we need a recession. We need economic growth. We don't have enough houses, so we need fewer immigrants. We don't have enough manufacturing, so we need less trade. Every single problem that the Trump White House identifies, it finds a way to destroy government in order to solve that problem. What we're saying is, in many of these cases, the problems being identified are problems of ineffective governance. But they're not problems that can be solved by a larger or new kind of private sector effort. It has to be solved by government working better. And that's why it's so important, I think, for liberals to be obsessed with the problem of government working better.

• 37:22Kara Swisher?

  We'll be back in a minute.

• 37:35Kara Swisher?

  Support for this show comes from Indeed. When the pressure's on and you need to hire the right person for the job, Indeed Sponsored Jobs has got your back. Instead of forcing you to spend tons of time searching, Indeed Sponsored Jobs matches you with quality candidates fast. According to their data, sponsored jobs posted directly on Indeed are 95% more likely to report a hire than non-sponsored jobs. Join the 3.3 million employers worldwide that use Indeed to connect with quality talent that fits their needs. Spend less time searching and more time actually interviewing candidates who check all your boxes. Less stress, less time, more results. When you need the right person to cut through the chaos, this is the job for Indeed Sponsored Jobs. And listeners to

• 38:18Kara Swisher?

  the show will get a $75 sponsored job credit to help get your job, the premium status it deserves, at indeed.com/podcast. Just go to indeed.com/podcast right now and support our show by saying you heard about Indeed on this podcast. That's indeed.com/podcast. Terms and conditions apply. Need the right hire fast? Then this is the job for Indeed Sponsored Jobs.

• 38:46Speaker 03

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• 39:30Speaker 04

  I'm Josh Mucio, host of The Pitch, where startup founders raise millions and listeners can invest. For our sweet season 16, we're giving you more of what you love and less of what you don't.

• 39:41Speaker 10

  I definitely start to blank out when we're talking about like middleware AI wrappers.

• 39:46Speaker 04

  Software is out. Actual cool stuff is in. We've got consumer brands. We're building 8Sleep for daytime. Hardware that helps blind people see. They kept asking for middle finger. Next thing we knew, we had like 10 students running around flipping each other off. We've got deep tech to change the weather.

• 40:03Speaker 05

  Our big vision is to make it rain and snow on demand.

• 40:07Speaker 11

  What if you wanted to not make it rain somewhere else? Like one day, we're just like, screw Arizona.

• 40:14Speaker 04

  And dairy?

• 40:16Speaker 06

  I never imagined my life journey would be milk.

• 40:18Speaker 04

  Season 16 of The Pitch is out now. Listen wherever you get your podcasts. This season is presented by Engine.

• 40:27Kara Swisher?

  It looks like people are rejecting the Elon method here. Obviously, the chainsaw method. It doesn't seem particularly popular because it seems kind of stupid. Like, why just cut everything without thinking about it? But Ezra, you and I talked about Elon Musk on the show. As you point out, this is a person who's benefited for decades from a more abundant government strategy. Many of the tech billionaires similarly get government loans, government contracts, tax subsidies from both Obama and Biden administrations. They're still benefiting from lack of government intervention and lack of regulation. Their allegiance, though, isn't with the Democrats anymore. So how do we get abundance politics? It doesn't just benefit the wealthy and the already powerful. How do you get them on board with this?

• 41:09Kara Swisher?

  Because this, what Derek was just talking about, works just fine for them.

• 41:14Speaker 01

  I, my first question, to be honest, isn't how the billionaires will come on board. I mean, some will, some won't. They have their own politics, right? Reid Hoffman maintains a sort of liberal politics, and I think a lot of them are just sort of moving with the wind. I don't think they're only motivated by tax policy. They are somewhat motivated by tax policy, but there are plenty of them. They're right now, not the most public ones, but you know, Kozla and others have sort of maintained- Buffett for years. Traditional democratic politics, Buffett for years, of course. The thing that worries me about the attachment of what I would call like the tech billionaire futurist influencer class, because in addition to being tech billionaires and industrials, right? What are Musk and Andreessen and David Sacks- Don't leave out Andreessen. Chamath, right? They're influencers, right?

• 41:58Speaker 01

  They've worked very hard on X over years now to become the most significant futurist influencers that there are. That has changed the meaning of Donald Trump in this term, much more, I think, than Democrats initially appreciated. Donald Trump used to be about the past, right? He was a kind of like last gasp of the 1950s power structure. He feels like the future. And he feels like the future. Now, I think they're going to do everything they can to chainsaw that future. We're talking the day after he did this infomercial at the White House for Tesla, where he ends by calling it Tesla, which was very funny. But they are not covering themselves in glory here. But Democrats, I think, do need to take back a vision of the future. One thing we've talked a lot less about in this conversation, but it's very, it's a real motivation of the book,

• 42:41Speaker 01

  and it's a big part of the book, is our effort to sort of say that invention has to be, and the pulling forward of technologies in a thoughtful way has to be central to the progressive agenda, because there are problems you can only solve that way. And that's why, in that early vignette, we do sort of talk about things like star pills and lab-grown meat. Let me do a minute on lab-grown meat here. Sure, please. I'm a vegetarian vegan, depending on when you catch me. And there are like a million problems, including animal suffering. But even to people who don't care about that, if you think about climate change, if you think about deforestation, which is leading to biodiversity loss, the huge drivers of that are the amount of land we turn over to grazing animals. You have this situation where, yeah, if we could reduce that,

• 43:23Speaker 01

  we would solve particularly our habitable land problem and our water problems and our deforestation problems and our biodiversity problems. But we're not going to do it by convincing people to go vegan, right? Nobody likes it when they hear that. You're going to have to technologically solve your way out of that problem. Maybe you can't do it. I'm not sure you can. But you definitely can't do it if you don't try. If you think about just straightforward decarbonization, cement production, if you just made it into a carbon emission, would be the third largest country of carbon emissions in the world. It's huge. We don't have a way at this moment to affordably create cement that's green. We're going to need to figure that out. We need the government to put a lot of money behind that because a private market currently can't finance it. How much having universal health insurance is worth to you

• 44:08Speaker 01

  really depends on what things we know how to cure. So there is quite a lot. And decarbonization in general, if we had not done what we've done with bringing down the price of solar by 90%, wind energy by 80%, battery storage by about the same, we would have no pathway here except for huge levels of sacrifice and degrowth. So there's a lot here, I think, where liberals need to sort of rebuild the relationship with technology. I think it got fouled up because I hate the billionaires who are the symbols of technology, your Zuckerbergs, your Musks. But that has soured too many on the idea of technological innovation as a force for positive change in a way that I think is damaging.

• 44:44Kara Swisher?

  One of the things that you do touch on in the book, although not a lot, is artificial intelligence. And it sort of runs through the abundance discussions. Everyone I talked to, Vinod Khosla, he uses the word abundance. Sam Altman uses the word abundance. The same thing with a lot of the more positive leaning and mostly liberal billionaires here when they're talking about it. AI runs very deep through this. The idea that we will work less, that we will get more, that prices will come down. Ezra, you've been talking to a lot of people about this topic. You recently had Ben Buchanan, Biden's top AI advisor, on your show. And yet, the race for AI is just what you're talking about. It feels like it's being dominated.

• 45:24Kara Swisher?

  And Trump could pick a single winner in this platform. Talk a little bit about the AI race.

• 45:33Speaker 07

  I don't consider myself an AI optimist or an AI pessimist. I consider myself an AI realist. I try to follow what's happening as it's happening. And I think this technology is unbelievably powerful and that in a few years, it is going to have major implications for the US economy. I think the US government absolutely needs an AI. AI policy, but before AI actually does make contact with macroeconomics and the labor force, it's going to make contact with energy policy. This is an incredibly energy-intensive technology, and it is being built and will continue to be built until somebody outlaws it, which I don't think AI progress should be outlawed, which means we have to solve for the problem of its building. That's an energy problem.

• 46:17Speaker 07

  These data centers are unbelievably energy-thirsty, and we can live in a world where they are slurping up energy that is produced by burning what's in the ground, oil and natural gas, or we can make it easier for the places where these data centers are located to build clean energy, solar, wind, geothermal, yes, even nuclear, and maybe next-generation energy like enhanced geothermal and even fusion. But in the short term, we have to build things. You have to build the technology that that clean energy comes from. You have to site the solar farms. You have to build the wind turbines. You have to develop the geothermal plants. You have to build the nuclear power plants, even modular, which could take many years.

• 46:58Speaker 07

  And I do think it's important that, right now, there are many parts of this country that just are not ready for that level of clean energy construction. And so, to a certain extent, I think this is another case where in order for progressives to have the outcomes that are their priorities, which is less climate change, they need to rethink their processes. How do we make it easier to achieve the outcomes that we want here?

• 47:21Kara Swisher?

  So you are in AI accelerations because there's, of course, the safety issues. And I think Vance is the one that said it in Paris. I'm not here to talk about AI safety. I'm here to talk about AI opportunity. Ezra, how do you look at this?

• 47:34Speaker 01

  We intentionally, we had a lot of discussions about this, kept the role of AI pretty limited in the book.

• 47:39Kara Swisher?

  Yes, you did.

• 47:40Speaker 01

  But when we were writing it, it felt so radically uncertain to both of us that to say a lot about how it was going to play into anything felt like it was going to date the book rapidly as developments went one way or another. I still feel, honestly, radically uncertain, except for a certain amount of confidence that the size of the shift is increasingly going to be seismic. I'm very concerned about the safety things that you mentioned there, Cara. And one of the things, though, that worries me is that We have ended up in an AI race, not just between a bunch of companies in Silicon Valley, though that too, but between America and China. And the the sort of reality of our policy, and this was true under Joe Biden too, right? Not just under Donald Trump and J D Vance, is I think there are sort of three goals on AI.

• 48:25Speaker 01

  There's make it safe, make it fast, and make it ours. And the dominant goal, the one that always wins is make it ours. And make it ours tends to require make it fast and make it safe. We're just sort of hoping, and if you talk to any of them, they're like, well, the first role of making it safe is making it ours. So that's what we're doing. So one, I just, we better hope that strategy works because we're definitely trying it. The second thing, though, is that I don't have all that much that's good to say about J D Vance. And I thought his speech was contemptuous of people he shouldn't have been contemptuous of, like almost everything that comes out of his mouth, right? That's his style. That's his brand. Yeah, that's his brand. But what I did agree with him on is I do think the question of how to take the best

• 49:07Speaker 01

  advantage of the opportunities that AI will unlock has not been well thought through. And I didn't think, by the way, it was well thought through there. But one example is that if there's one thing I am pretty confident AI is going to do, if you think about, say, the Alpha Fold model that made us much more able to protect the structure of folding proteins, if you think about some of the work being done by Patrick Collison's ARC Institute towards making models of, you know, a single cell or models of other things in the the human body, it should really accelerate our ability to come up with good drug molecule candidates. I mean, I think everybody believes that's going to happen. And if that's true, then what we have to do is think about, well, what is going to be the next bottleneck? If we want Sam Altman's material abundance world of AI, even if you believe AI could

• 49:48Speaker 01

  produce that, material abundance has to happen in the real world of physical materials. And that means you need to open up the the system such that you could source, for instance, rats, mice, monkeys, and ultimately, humans much more effectively to test out drugs as they move through the safety mechanism. It's very slow and cumbersome to do right now. There are a lot of ways we can make it easier to test things. There are a lot of ways we could make, we could just frankly, put more resources into making it possible to trial these candidates and, you know, bring these things into fruition much earlier. We could have had GLP-1s decades ago. We've had these drugs for for decades. And that goes into places like energy, too. It goes into anything you think AI might be able to do in the material world, which

• 50:32Speaker 01

  is frankly, what I am most interested in AI doing. I'm not that interested in endless, like, Chatting with LLMs, I'm very interested in having new drug discoveries. Well, then we're going to have to think through what is going to be the point of friction as we increase the sort of candidates and possible discoveries we can make and then turn into products or technologies or machines or innovations of some type. And that requires, you know, opening up systems that have become corroded and sclerotic. And like that, we could be doing right now and frankly, be good if we did it, even if the AI never came to fruition.

• 51:04Speaker 07

  I have to emphasize just how dramatically what Ezra says points to the deprivation and depravity of Trump and Musk's vision. They're trying to cut FDA. They see that the way to a better future is by cutting and slashing and burning.

• 51:18Kara Swisher?

  Yeah, you call it the bonfire of cruelty.

• 51:21Speaker 07

  If you understand, right, yes. If you understand how drug development works, you would want to increase the staffing at the FDA in order to provide better evaluations of drug candidates and to approve the best drugs faster. If you want to make the process of developing lifesaving drugs faster, you should see a larger role for FDA competence rather than by slashing it, you're adding to the waitlines that people face when they develop a phase three drug candidate that has to pass FDA approval. It's just another case where saying slash, slash, slash does not lead you to actually accelerating the good things you want to see in the world. In fact, it makes it harder and slower for those things to happen.

• 52:00Kara Swisher?

  So, so you all criticize, I will end on that, but you criticize everything bagel liberalism. Everything bagels are delicious, let me just say. Trying to do everything, be everything to everyone, it ends up in a black hole of doing nothing. That's essentially what you're saying in the middle of the book, actually. So what each of you, what values do you think the Democrats should run on? Which should they scrape off the bagels, so to speak? And who is good at this? Each of you, very briefly. Ezra, you start.

• 52:28Speaker 01

  So the everything bagel metaphor is sort of exactly that. It's a everything bagels are great precisely because we don't add too much to them. In the movie Everything Everywhere All at Once, they try to add truly everything to an everything bagel that becomes a black hole. The point of that actually isn't that you need to give up on these values. It's that you have to choose between them in individual projects, right? The fact that you should not be putting a bunch of subcontractor diversity projects into your national security effort to reshore semiconductor manufacturing doesn't mean you shouldn't do other things to increase the diversity of small businesses or make it possible for for new kinds of people to, you know, get great STEM training. It's just not to put it all into the same project, making that project unfinishable. I don't actually think liberals have the wrong values.

• 53:13Speaker 01

  I think they have the wrong approach to choosing between them. I want to see leaders who make trade offs. Josh Shapiro, I think, would be a very good example here. What he did with the I 95 bridge repair is he signed an emergency declaration. He cleared out in doing that a huge amount of procurement and contracting process, but but he chose to use union labor. He didn't throw every value overboard. He threw everything but getting the bridge done fast and using union labor. And then it was a huge victory for Josh Shapiro, for people's belief there in government, and for their belief that unions could do things effectively well and fast. Compare that to high speed rail, which kind of tried to put everything into it, including, by the way, the federal government gave money to start in the Central Valley because that would be better for air pollution. But it's not actually been good for air pollution because we didn't end up building

• 53:58Speaker 01

  high speed rail that that ever carried a single passenger.

• 54:01Kara Swisher?

  In the first place, and it wasn't where people were taking it. Derek, what about you?

• 54:05Speaker 07

  I was talking to a Democrat from a southern state, having an off the record conversation about the implementation of the broadband provision of Biden's infrastructure bill. Biden was very proud of that infrastructure bill. P. Buttigieg called it the most important infrastructure bill in generations of Democratic policymaking. But of the $42 billion that we allocated or authorized for broadband construction to help rural and low income Americans, practically none of it was built. And I was talking to this guy who was very deeply involved in broadband construction in the South, and he said for months, For years, it was taking so much time to fill out the paperwork and send it to Commerce and get replies from Commerce and then fix the replies from Commerce and then

• 54:47Speaker 07

  send back the paperwork, until suddenly the calendar flips from 2021 to 2024, practically nothing is built, and this bill that was supposed to be an advertisement for the Biden administration instead becomes a cudgel that the Trump administration or Trump campaign uses to beat them over the head with. By larding the implementation of these bills with so many different riders that are expressions of progressive interests, we've made it impossible to achieve progressive outcomes.

• 55:13Kara Swisher?

  You're talking about results. All right, give me a name of someone other than Josh Shapiro. Who else is animating this idea of abundance from your perspective?

• 55:21Speaker 07

  Look, I think there are many mayors and many governors in this country that are absolutely abundance-pilled. And that's because I think at the local level, you cannot be entirely wrapped up with the attentional politics of national media. You just have to get shit done.

• 55:40Speaker 01

  I think Jared Polis has a good link on this, the Democratic governor of Colorado. And it's one reason Democratic support has held up in Colorado in a way that it hasn't elsewhere.

• 55:48Kara Swisher?

  Because of that. Okay, so there's an idea that animates, the last question, a lot of arguments in the book, which that voters leaving California, New York will give Republican-led states an advantage in the Electoral College. Is another scenario possible that these voters, many of whom are liberal, probably could shift the politics in these red states? Could Texas turn purple? Could Florida go back to being a battleground? And then the second part of it is, what you did call, Derek, Doja, bonfire of cruelty. Ezra, you called out the cruelties Trump followers submit to in order to prove their loyalty. Obviously, what we're seeing, they're doing in terms of immigration, transgender rights. How does your framework of abundance stand a chance against the politics of cruelty, which tend to work?

• 56:32Kara Swisher?

  Government doesn't work. It all sucks. How do you get beyond that?

• 56:37Speaker 01

  So, one, I don't think the politics of cruelty is popular at all. I don't think that's what people wanted. I think they wanted, I mean, some people want that, but I think what they wanted was lower prices on eggs. I think they wanted affordable life. I think they wanted the country to feel strong and led again. And it's always worth just reminding ourselves, this is a quite close election that was decided in the popular vote by, you know, 1.5 point lead. So I think they're going way, way, way too far and obviously creating the possibility for a huge backlash. I don't, though, think that the migrations we're seeing are likely to substantially change the makeups of these states. One is that we do have some evidence on this, and as you would sort of expect, there is a bit of selection effect. If you really hate the politics of Texas, you're a little bit

• 57:20Speaker 01

  less likely to move there. So, you know, you are seeing more sort of red Californians, like, believe. And Florida has gone much, much, much more red recently for a variety of reasons. I don't think that's going to unwind itself. Arizona, of course, has become much more of a competitive state, and it's got two Democratic senators and it's got a Democratic governor. So we'll see. The composition effects of these things are always complicated, and I think it's very, very hard to draw straight demographic lines into the future. People who do that tend to end up embarrassed. But I think one thing Donald Trump has proven is that you can, by being willing to challenge orthodoxies within your own party, change the composition of who is attracted to that party. You know, he's brought in people like RFK Jr. and the people who like RFK Jr., and those people who used

• 58:05Speaker 01

  to be Democrats. And he's also really enhanced the GOP's appeal to the working class. Republicans won in 2024, it looks like, voters who made under $50,000 and voters who didn't have a college education. So that was a change from the past. Coalitions change depending on what they support. And one way they change is seeing leaders emerge who are willing to admit and battle the mistakes they've made in the past, as Trump, to his credit, was on the Iraq War in the Republican coalition, as Trump was, you know, in certain ways on trade, and I think morally, but nevertheless, as he did on immigration, where he wrenched the Republican Party far to the right on it. But you can change parties, and in changing them, you change your votes for them.

• 58:46Speaker 07

  Democrats, by losing population in California and New York and Illinois and Minnesota, they aren't just losing people.

• 58:57Speaker 07

  I think they're losing an argument. And the argument that they're losing is the idea that they're the party of the working class. At the same time, I don't think that Donald Trump and Elon Musk are winning an argument themselves. If they were winning an argument, they would come into office, popular, and they would get more popular. And instead, the exact opposite is happening. With every passing day and every new happening and unhappening of a tariff, they're becoming less popular. So they're not winning any kind of argument for the working class either. And I think the opportunity for an idea like abundance in a book like this is that every 50 years or so, America's political order changes. And what we're saying is that right now, if liberals love government, they have to find ways to make liberal government work. And here are some ways you can do it.

• 59:40Speaker 07

  You value process a little bit less and you value outcomes a little bit more. You don't just have a negative identity that is anti-Donald Trump, you have a positive vision of the future. So positive and explicit, in fact, that you can write a three-page vignette to start a book about it that says, here's what life will be like in 2050.

• 59:56Kara Swisher?

  Space pills!

• 59:57Speaker 07

  Space fucking pills, baby. We almost called the book Space Fucking Pills.

• 1:00:00Kara Swisher?

  Space fucking pills. There's also, as you write, no guarantee the next political order will align with our values. The opposite is just as likely.

• 1:00:08Speaker 07

  You gotta fight for it.

• 1:00:09Kara Swisher?

  You gotta fight for it. So last, very last, single question. Where does it start? Housing, right? Housing, you seem to be saying, is doable. I'd love you each to say three things that the Democrats have to push. Is it housing, space pills, nuclear energy?

• 1:00:27Speaker 01

  In blue states where they govern right now, they should make it possible to build housing by right. They need to do permitting reform, significant permitting reform next time they have national power, because otherwise, they cannot build enough green energy or transmission lines. So that's two. And after Elon Musk and Donald Trump destroy state capacity by firing huge numbers of people at random, Democrats have to come in and rebuild it, in part by doing things like civil service reform, which make it easier to hire and fire in reasonable ways and also make it easier for people who work in the federal government to exercise autonomy and agency and manage and make decisions. But more broadly, also bring in a lot more in-house expertise for all that Musk talks about, you know, firing the bloated federal workforce.

• 1:01:11Speaker 01

  The size of the civilian federal workforce is the same now as it was in like the 60s. We actually need to bring a lot more expertise in-house so we can manage things more effectively and do them more effectively. And Democrats should make it possible to attract great talent and make it so that great talent enjoys working in government. Those are my three.

• 1:01:28Kara Swisher?

  Derek?

• 1:01:29Speaker 07

  Yeah, my number four is obviously space pills. But just to go back to Ezra's number one. Housing, housing, housing here, it cannot be underrated. The demographic, the voting cohort that is most likely to change its minds generation to generation or election to election is young people. Young people went or moved dramatically toward Donald Trump between 2020 and 2024. That's a sign that Donald Trump won an argument with young people, but it's also a sign that this is a group that is incredibly liquid in terms of its political allegiances. There was a Wall Street Journal article about delays in adulthood, about how people in their 20s and 30s aren't finding housing and they're not coupling and they're not having kids. This starts, I think, in many ways with the fact that housing

• 1:02:13Speaker 07

  is unaffordable in so many places and the average age of first-time homeowners has gone from the mid 20s to the upper 30s in this country. Young people, I think, are using their vote and using their feet to scream at their leaders, we need places we can live that we can afford. And I absolutely support a political movement and a political cause that begins with the idea that the freedom, the freedom to live where you want to live is absolutely core to the American dream and the good life in this country. And so you need to focus like hell on this issue of housing.

• 1:02:47Kara Swisher?

  All right, we'll end that. Maybe Musk is doing everyone a favor by chainsawing because now we can see what we like. People will renew their appreciation of government when you see what it looks like without it.

• 1:02:57Speaker 07

  From your lips to God's ears, yeah.

• 1:02:59Speaker 01

  Yeah, right.

• 1:02:59Kara Swisher?

  I don't know, we'll see. Anyway, thank you so much.

• 1:03:01Speaker 01

  Thanks so much.

• 1:03:02Speaker 07

  Thanks so much, Gary.

• 1:03:10Kara Swisher?

  On with Kara Swisher is produced by Christian Castro-Russell, Kateri Yocum, Dave Shaw, Lissa Soep, Megan Burney, Megan Cunane, and Klein Lynch. Nishat Kurwa is Vox Media's executive producer of audio. Special thanks to Annika Robbins. This episode was engineered by Steve Bone, and our theme music is by Track academics. If you're already following the show, we'll send you your first bottle of space pills. If not, Donald Trump has a car for you, and there's an abundance of Teslas because nobody's buying them anywhere. Go wherever you listen to podcasts, search for On with Kara Swisher, and hit follow. Thanks for listening to On with Kara Swisher from New York Magazine, the Vox Media Podcast Network, and us. We'll be back on Thursday with more.

• 1:04:01Speaker 02

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• 1:05:29Speaker 04

  I'm Josh Mucio, host of The Pitch, where startup founders raise millions and listeners can invest. For our sweet season 16, we're giving you more of what you love and less of what you don't.

• 1:05:40Speaker 10

  I definitely start to blank out when we're talking about like middleware AI wrappers.

• 1:05:45Speaker 04

  Software is out. Actual cool stuff is in. We've got consumer brands. We're building Eight Sleep for daytime. Hardware that helps blind people see. They kept asking for middle finger. Next thing we knew, we had like 10 students running around flipping each other off. We've got deep tech to change the weather.

• 1:06:03Speaker 05

  Our big vision is to make it rain and snow on demand.

• 1:06:06Speaker 11

  What if you wanted to not make it rain somewhere else? Like one day, we're just like, screw Arizona.

• 1:06:14Speaker 04

  And dairy?

• 1:06:15Speaker 06

  I never imagined my life journey would be milk.

• 1:06:18Speaker 04

  Season 16 of The Pitch is out now. Listen wherever you get your podcasts. This season is presented by Engine.