It has been a little over a year since

Derek Thompson and I published

Abundance.

And so I wanted here at the just over a

year mark to have a check-in. What has

happened? What hasn't happened? Which of

the arguments have changed our minds?

Which politicians actually seem to be

doing something with the idea? And where

does it all go from here? Derek Thompson

is a contributing writer at The

Atlantic. is 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 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 esc.com.

>> Mark Dunkelman, Derek Thompson. Welcome

to the show.

>> It's good to be here.

>> 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 pet at? What are you

feeling good about? What are you feeling

worried about a year? And Derek, start

with you. So maybe one way to think

about the reaction to the fallout of

abundance is to think about its impact

at three different levels. The level of

vibes, the level of legislation, and the

level of outcomes. At the level of

vibes, this is a 0.1 percentile outcome

given where I was March 1st of 2025. Um

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, you know, governors Kathy

Hokll, JB Pritsker 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

banded about. It's a concept. Look at

problems, solve them on the supply side

that is being actively talked about at

the level of governors, at the level of

Congress, at the level of the Senate.

Um, Zoran Mdani 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 it it's clearly entered this

level of of mimetic 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+. Um, you know, one

bill that Gavin Newsome signed is

literally called Abundant and Affordable

Homes Near Transit Act. you abundant is

right there in the first word. Um

there's legislation that's been passed

around the country that also has tried

um many times explicitly citing

abundance to make it easier to build

housing and easier to build clean

energy. But then I think where the

strongest criticism of our movement has

to begin is at the level of outcomes.

You know, California should be commended

for the law that it signed. 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.

>> What's even more worrisome to me, you

look at 2015 to 2026, you don't even see

the Yimi movement.

>> That is exactly right and that's pretty

concerning. Um, 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.

>> Mark,

>> so I think I have a slightly more

optimistic

perspective.

>> More optimistic than that.

>> That's pretty optimistic.

My view is that your book and the

associated effort to rethink progressive

policy

um uh is a sort of a remarkable change

in the sense that from the beginning of

the progressive movement in the late

1800s through the 1950s,

basically the progressive answer to most

public policy questions was

put the government in charge and it will

make enormous strides, centralize power

and we will bring power to the Tennessee

Valley through the Tennessee Valley

Authority. We will uh 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 uh

sequestered by this sort of idea that

big government could do big things uh

emerges and there are books like Cight

Mills's power elite and then the the SDS

puts out the portion statement and the

core notion that they are beginning to

seed inside the progressive movement is

actually uh centralized power is bad and

we need to uh take on the core elite

that have been making all these

decisions and uh the progressive

movement becomes about speaking truth to

power in almost every form and you see

that uh in the reaction to uh the civil

rights movement that's that speaking

truth to the the power of Jim Crow you

see it in uh secondwave feminism you see

it in the uh the objection to Uh you you

see that in the reaction 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. But

in all of these all 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 uh to be able to stand

up against centralized power and that by

the mid1 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. 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 uh and in

more moderate circles like we need

government to function uh just sort of

generally and I think like that was not

a conversation we were having 18 months

ago in in nearly the same way.

>> All right. So so both of you are are

speaking more in the uh grand march to

triumph

uh register here. So I'm gonna 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

expected. Sort of setting off a big

populist liberal fight. And I think

whether or not that fight is

constructive and whether or not the

synthesis that come out of it are

constructive is unknown as of yet. My

absolutely biggest worry though is not

the critiques of abundance outside the

tent, but a kind of

small balness that I see emerging inside

the tent. When when I think about

failure modes for what this could be and

what it could be becoming, it's an

abundance ends up as a synonym for

efficiency that we've rebranded 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 planitude. And I think

something that neither of our books

ended up doing all that well was really

describing what that vision of the

future would look like. You know, you

imagine a candidate, you know, running

for the Democratic nomination in 2028 or

running for the presidency in 2028.

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 this goes to another thing

that I think is going quite poorly

actually.

The back half of abundance, as you know

better than anyone, is about trying to

build a progressive politics of

technology. And I think the way

particularly the AI conversation has

gone and the often quite merited um

anger that is building at AI leaders and

AI companies. I see that as actually

farther away than I did at the beginning

of 2025.

So with all that on the table, uh our

book begins with housing. I think

housing is the place where you see the

most legislative action, where you see

the most um governors and and and

politicians talking about it. A lot of

the examples in the book are from

California, where I'm from, where I was

when we wrote much of the book. The

governor of California, Gavin Newsome,

has very much embraced the abundance

critique. And so I want to play this

clip of Gavin Newsome on Jimmy Kimmel.

>> Is California overregulated? Because it

feels like there are a lot of

well-meaning laws, rules, etc. that get

in the way of building your house, of

opening a restaurant. Uh, you know, I've

experienced this myself. What What do we

do about that?

>> No, we I mean, we need a liberalism that

builds and we have to own that. And I'm

very much part of this sort of new

nomenclature. We call this abundance

agenda and we've got to reconcile that.

We've got to be more focused on time to

delivery, not just rhetoric, not just

what we're for. We got to actually

deliver and manifest it. That's why this

year we did the most significant housing

reforms in our state's history. We did

something that hadn't been done in

decades. We'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. Democrats need to

build things. But we have to actually

deliver on that promise. Speaking of

Trump's reform,

>> Derek, what do you think when you hear

that?

>> I 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 to

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 ways. You could

think one that there's a set of problems

that have accumulated in California over

the last 50 years that have made it

harder to build housing. And this is one

important step to ungunk that process.

That's 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 uh triumphs at all for a

variety of macroeconomic reasons. I care

about outcomes. We care about outcomes.

And if California, Illinois, New York,

if they're going to pass laws that hold

up abundance as the inspiration or

motivation or philosophy of those laws,

and then 3 months, 6 months, 2 years

later, we still don't have the fruits of

abundance, whether it's building more

housing, building more clean energy. I I

I am worried that that speaks to a gap

between what I call the legislation

vibes and the outcomes. Well, here is I

think also another way of thinking about

this that I've become more sensitized to

in the year 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 into

three things when there is demand for

it. So one is just legally, can you get

the damn thing built? Can you get the

permits? Can you get the agreements? Can

you, 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. I would say when I look

around that there's been at least the

intellectual victory where there is a

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

>> 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 um is one, we don't talk very

much about financing. And one thing

that's been hard is that even as 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 um 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 um wages go down. Um there's a big

deportation agenda uh happening under

Donald Trump, which as you mentioned is

making labor more expensive. But even as

there's been a lot of victories on

zoning and exempting things from, 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."

>> 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 20year story,

which is about business cycles, and a

5-year story, which is about the

incredibly weird business cycle that has

followed the pandemic. Chapter one of

our book, The Housing Chapter, does, I

think, a very good job explaining the

50-year story of how a set of zoning and

permitting and environmental legislation

and rules that accumulated around the

1960s and 1970s has slowed housing

construction across the country, but in

particular in blue cities and blue

states where there is very, very hot

demand. I think it did a good job of

explaining that 50-year accumulation of

rules. But there's also the 20-year

story, which is that after the Great

Recession, the construction industry in

this country was decimated. And that led

to the 2010s being the decade with the

fewest houses built per capita of any

decade on record. That's not just a

rules story. That's a story about

macroeconomics. It's 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 like one piece of

mayhem after another. You had the

pandemic. You had inflation. You have

now I think a scarcity of construction

labor which makes it more expensive to

build in many places. And so I do think

that to really understand the problems

that states, the governors and mayors

face when it comes to housing, you you

do have to understand that there is this

kind of like Russia nesting doll of

problems. 50 years of rules, 20 years of

macroeconomic crisis, and then five

years of macroeconomic and financing

crisis. And and that's really put us

where we are. And so I I agree. I think

and like you, I'm I'm 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? Those are really really strong

critiques. I think they click into the

story that we were telling the 50-year

story. Um but I do think that that it is

fair to argue that our book missed that

very important ingredient.

>> Mark, there's also a question of power

here that I know you've been very

focused on. So I I'm going to keep

California in the front of my mind here

just because I know it very well. But

very recently we've seen huge clashes

between Governor Nuome and cities across

California because they are all these

big bills are passing at the state level

and then the cities are using all kinds

of often fairly innovative uh 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, you know, people on the left,

they're very there's like a lot of

contrasting intuitions here for good

reasons. How do you think about this?

Well, h housing to my mind is sort of an

outlier within the abundance agenda

because

uh unlike in linear infrastructure,

transit lines, train lines, uh

electrical transmission lines, um 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 they're

up here 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 it's the peanut

butter and jelly that's that that's

gumming up the works. Uh to I think mix

metaphors. Um uh and in this case, in

the case of housing, like what Buffy

Wixs 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, right? We we we don't like it

when some oppressive force sitting above

us uh tells us we can't do the thing

that is good. Um, and so empowering

someone who lives near a transit stop,

who who has a a 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 the land owners

that they can do more. And then you you

reach into these challenges of financing

and whatnot. I have to say in the scheme

of things I you guys are journalists and

I have spent 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. I agree with that. But but but you

know uh I I like the standard you're

holding yourself.

>> Well, let me I 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.

>> 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. Right? if you've been fighting for

the bill and you know you're you know

finally we got the duplex bill or

whatever it is well it's passed

great 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 um 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 uh

tools to you know block their projects

in other ways.

>> I mean the 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 how should

that decision-m process work? And so

when I wrote Why Nothing Works, the sort

of the big aha moment I realized was

that for a lot of progressivism's

history, our view was centralize that

power in the hands of one person who

will decide what is built. And that's

how Levittowns were built. It's that

that's how Robert Moses built housing

all over New York City. That's how uh

you know s sort of the the establishment

built housing for a long time. And then

we switched horses, right? We decided we

didn't like that model because in many

cases it was abusive to people who lived

in communities that were bulldozed or uh

they were discriminatory or they were

not sensitive to what was what was

happening in the environment. So, uh we

created over the course of 50 years a

whole series of laws that put new checks

um on on those who would build housing.

And uh 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 uh of of small bore changes and

now I think more substantial changes. Um

but I do think that you're going to see,

you know, I'm from Rhode Island. we've

got a bunch of more housing starts than

we had and that like I understand that

it's not the immediate satisfaction of

suddenly uh we have five million more

units across the country but it is like

it's a different discussion among

progressives and that feels to me like a

a sea change.

>> So 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 ticky tacky comes from, you know,

the song about the uh housing in Daily

City, like in, you know, not too far

south from San Francisco. 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 gray, you know,

mixeduse um anonymous uh you know,

construction. And 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.

>> I don't know that I buy this idea at

all. Um at least I think it's incredibly

underpowered as an explanation. So the

claim on the table seems to be that

Americans 1950s and 1960s turned against

the growth machine as you described it

primarily out of an aversion to the

ugliness of the world. Ugliness is not

the word that I would use. Right. The

word that I would use is um uh

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

in California and all you have is a

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, I think

that's a fly flywheel we should hope

for.

But if you really want to understand

why pedaluma 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.

>> I think that is probably right. I 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 uh 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?

>> 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. No, I'm

just joking. It's like it would be so

absurdly high you wouldn't you have to

calculate it in like Bitcoin. But what

happened instead is that housing prices

in Dallas have actually declined over

the last three and a half years. Dallas

built so much that construction

increased per capita throughout this

period. Dallas builds more housing today

than any other metro in the country.

That is a triumph of allowing the

housing market to work. And that's

because housing is not a special kind of

good. It's a good that like so many

other goods is responsive to supply and

demand. Given a steady level of demand,

if you restrict supply, prices go up. If

you add supply, prices stabilize. And if

you add enough supply, prices can

actually go down. It's why you have in

so many places where people want to

live, price is 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 Mani has

promised New York and other uh left-wing

politicians have promised their own

cities and states. We have something

better than a rent freeze. we have rents

going down because we've made it easier

to build.

>> So, you mentioned Mani and the rent

freeze and uh of course there's another

side to his agenda which is to increase

supply, right? Mandani 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 uh one creating the

support for the other, right? Price

controls creating political momentum for

supply increases. I want to play a a

clip of Mam Donnie here speaking in

March.

>> And we're all here together today for an

announcement where we launched the

neighborhood builders fasttrack.

What does that mean? Because I know it

doesn't explain itself.

What this means is that we are creating

a pre-qualified roster of developers and

in doing so we are going to cut down on

pre-development time for new projects

from 18 months to 10 months.

Now, when you couple that with the

referendums that were passed just late

last year, that means that we are

cutting down on the time it takes to

build affordable housing in this city by

up to 2 and 1/2 years.

>> And I say that to you in a city where we

know that time is money.

>> Yes, sir. Here here's what I like about

that clip and that I think reflects

something bigger happening in across

democratic policym which is a

recognition that speed matters and in a

way that was I think not admitted a lot

of policym actually took the view that

delay was good that 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, 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 said like delay is good,

but in practice, we believed delay was

good. I mean, there you have a

democratic socialist out there saying as

a applause line, time is money. And I

think the sense that uh like speed is

progressive. It's more affordable, but

also it allows you to deliver at the

time frame 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 policym to make. 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

for h who promised to deliver housing to

that city. and they're 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.

>> People also use the term procedure

fetish as if progressives just sort of

like procedure for procedure sake.

>> Nick Bagley's term.

>> That's Nick Bagley's term. And um my

general view here is that 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 tradeoffs. And the truth is that

we're facing and one of the major

barriers to abundance is we're facing

real trade-offs here. I 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. We are now trying

to figure out I think Mdani Warren

people in the moderate wing of the party

people who are further left how are we

going to do this in a fair and

expeditious way and I I think the

abundance discourse has wanted in many

cases to pit

us or you guys against the left

and that's not an accurate portrayal of

what's happening you're seeing

Mom Donnie Elizabeth Warren is author of

the maybe the most pro-abundant housing

bill introduced forever uh in the Senate

and has passed the Senate and I I think

you know to the degree that uh there

seems to be tension about this here's an

idea where it seems to me that there's

growing consensus. The polling outfit

Blue Rose um 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

stop building them. Not enough housing,

not enough energy, not enough child

care. 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 pulled the best. I don't

think that that's dispositive. I mean,

testing messaging is not the beall

endall of politics. And look, there are

philosophical differences between

liberals and populists that we shouldn't

run away from. Like, they exist. But the

fights often obscured the degree to

which individuals could hold

simultaneously both populist and

abundance principles. And I've come to

think of this somewhat cheesily as the

abundance mullet, which is to say

economic populism in the front and

abundance in the back. So who's wearing

the the abundance mullet, as horrifying

as that might be to imagine? Zor Mamdani

ran on freezing the rent, but here he is

talking about making it easier and

faster for developers to build in New

York City.

>> To be fair, he ran on both.

>> He did. Yes, you're right. He ran on

both. But I think if you pulled people

and asked them, "What did you hear more

about? Freezing the rent or accelerating

the time with which developers could

start getting building in Manhattan and

Brooklyn." I think most people associate

him with the mimemetic freeze the rent

rather than the less mimetic uh

shortening the permitting time from 18

months to 10 months. So he's one

example. Another example I think is um

is New Jersey Governor Mikey Cheryl who

ran on uh freezing uh utility increases

um making it easier for people to afford

electricity by talking about price caps.

But her second executive order was all

about supply side uh renovations uh to

encourage the construction of solar and

storage in particular by making it

easier to build energy in New Jersey. So

there again you have the promise of

freeze the utility increase in the front

with the promise of expanding supply in

the back. So, uh, I was going to do this

later, but I 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 are proabundance. 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

mom Donnie but that in fact in practice

abundance has two huge problems from the

populist perspective.

One is that a lot of rich people and

billionaires really like it and are

funding things with abundance in the

name and that they are going to use

abundance as a mask or a vehicle to push

the Democratic party, you know, back in

their direction. Um, 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

positive sum. We can all build, we can

all get along. It's a sort of more

liberal uh approach to things. That I

think is like the strongest version I

can give. But you can hear um Elizabeth

Warren make a version of this argument

in a a speech he gave not too long ago.

So yes, we need more government

efficiency, a lot more. But many in the

abundance movement are doing little to

call out corporate culpability and

billionaire influence in creating and

defending 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

party from tackling a rigged system with

too much energy.

>> She goes on to kind of note that Reed

Hoffman, who's a, you know, tech

billionaire and and influential tech

figure, has been sending the book around

to to people he knows. I want to ask

this of of both of you. What do you

understand to be the relationship

between abundance and corporations and

abundance and concentrations of wealth

and income and power? Mark, look, I

think there are certain cases where

concentrated corporate power is a

problem. Uh we're we're coming off a

week where there were a bunch of

victories for the anti- monopouist

movement, uh Live Nation and Ticket

Master. Like I'm not sure that any of

the three of us would voice any

objection to taking a a strong stance on

abuses of corporate power in that realm.

>> As someone who goes to a lot of uh music

shows, I really really hate ticket fees.

I really don't like them. So, so, so

there you go. I But my concern about

that critique is that if you look at the

stories, at least in my book and several

of the stories in your book, like the

problem in many cases is not created by

corporate power. Like, you know, the 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 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 uh standing

in the way or trying to drive up its

own. Like the the the fight there was

about 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 uh made it so that

we could not replace something like

700,000 cars worth of carbon into the

atmosphere through old fossil fuel

generation with clean hydro power coming

from Canada. Like that's not a problem

about corporate power. That's a problem

with can government make an expeditious

decision.

>> Durk, 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

>> she says earlier in that speech that the

Consumer Financial Protection Bureau

which she helped found and and and

ideulate is like an abundance before

abundance.

>> Oh great then maybe maybe I'm just

totally ripping off her point here

because I I read it months ago but I

think she's right. I mean it

consolidated what used to be entirely

disperse 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

unaloyed 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 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 but about

how power can manifest in strange

places. It can manifest absolutely at

the level of corporations and monopoly.

It can also manifest at the level of the

neighborhood. As Mark was just

explaining, when a group of neighbors

stop a new apartment from going up by

lobbying the city council and mayor to

not build housing where it is 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 that 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 like four

times higher than they are in the

typical city or state in Europe, France,

Spain, the UK. And that's why our

construction costs are so much higher.

>> So if I'm a if I'm a populist sitting

here, I'm going to interrupt you. Sure.

>> If I'm a populist sitting here, I'm

somebody who more believes with this in

this critique.

>> Here's my answer to what you just said.

>> Yes, it's all true. Yes. Uh if I'm a 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

yada your way past the corporate power.

I think that some of the critique comes

from a a feeling and I have my own

answer to this but I'm curious for for

yours. a feeling that yes, you could

certainly have an abundance, a version

of abundance that understood corporate

power as one of the many blockages and

you know and 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.

There's a way in which I'm not exactly

sure how to answer that question. Um,

it's a really good question.

Why am I more excited to make the point

that I seem more excited to make? Um,

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.

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

pernitious 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

nicel lookinging woman stands up at a

city council meeting and says, "I would

prefer to not build an apartment

building behind my farm because I'm

afraid of my horses being freaked out by

the construction noise." But I want us

to see that that that is power if it

stops an apartment building from being

built. So, it's always difficult to but

but but important maybe to respond to a

question about like affect. Um maybe the

first thing I should have said was I

encourage people to read the transcript

where my affect isn't visible rather

than watch this on YouTube where my

affect is visible. But I really do think

it's like that if if I'm really reaching

down into understanding like why am I

passionate about getting people to see

these these other ways that you know

surprising accumulations of power can

stop things from happening in the public

good. It's because that's where I think

we're missing the story.

>> This is a conversation, this

conversation among progressives between

the populace and the abundance nicks or

whatever we're called, uh, that is more

than a century old, right? At 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 brandian. It's uh 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

Brandeise had seen on the on the on the

streets of Louisville, Kentucky as being

grown up could be reestablished. But

there was a second idea which was we

should build up what was then like just

a shadow of a government that so that it

could accurately and and powerfully

regulate uh with centralized power. The

Roosevelt proposed a bureau of

corporations. We eventually get the

federal trade commission. Before that we

have the interstate commerce uh

commission which is a big bureaucracy

designed to to regulate the railroads.

Um 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 uh I I I think sort of

the misunderstanding here is that those

who say you know we need to attack

corporate power are just taking the

Brendesian notion of it and that the

abundance ethos hearkens back to the old

ideas that existed you know 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. Um, and we 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 they cannot be

responsive to the corporate challenge.

And so to my mind like there's a some

confusion here and that the the the idea

that we should abandon abundance in the

name of just sort of attacking

corporations misses the point that

government should be a competent

institution that can accurately and

thoroughly

review and challenge corporations when

they're doing wrong.

>> Can I throw the baseball back to you?

like h 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? Um

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 7 to the book

called abundance and corporate power.

Do you write that chapter and what do

you put in it?

>> So I have a couple answers to this. Um,

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

and interesting 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 Lena Khan was the chair

of the FTC. So, one thing that it just

wasn't that much about was things where

I thought, you know, progressives 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 research but

then the pharmaceutical industry

actually does do a huge amount of drug

development and you're not there's no

nobody has a theory of getting away from

that. Um 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, 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. Um, and so I think that's

one other reason why I 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 uh concentration of power. But

here's where I think if I could add your

chapter seven um I probably would.

Yeah, Mark, I take your point that a lot

of the things we focus on in the book uh

or frankly that you focus on in your

book um 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 uh turning those decisions

into actual concrete and steel and law

and so on. and the way money affects

politics at its highest levels from

state houses to the federal government.

I wouldn't have really thought of a

campaign finance reform chapter in the

book the way we initially conceived of

it and also because I have a bunch on

campaign finance reform in my first book

in my own head. I'm like I've covered

this.

But I think the place where I think you

could have put in a a chapter 7 I think

the place where on the one hand I think

progressivism already has like the right

view on this but it has not been able to

instantiate this view into policy is the

more powerful government is the more

worried you have to be about the

distorting influence of money inside of

it. And so a political system as porous

to money as the one we have currently is

becomes very dangerous. So, I I just put

out a a podcast about um or with this

congressional candidate, Alex Boris, who

is running uh for Congress in um in New

York, and you know, this kind of super

PAC that is funded by co-founders

Palunteer and Open AI and Andre Horowitz

is like dumping money to destroy him and

and Boris is a former employee of

Palunteer, but what's going on there is

he wants to regulate AI and these

companies uh and investment firms firms

that are making functionally

unimaginable amounts of money from AI

are kind of trying to build like a death

star to destroy anybody who might

regulate AI in a way they don't like.

And so a system where you cannot trust

there to be like a good structure of who

has voice and who has influence because

it is so dependent on donors is not a

system where just saying let's make

government more powerful and trust that

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 the cynicism coming from that

that well I'm not try I I buy a bunch of

the critiques I think that the feeling

that if the billionaires who have all

this influence like this book and

implemented it you know or got really

behind it in the system as it exists

that it would just give them a really

big voice because it's not specifically

oriented towards taking some of their

voice away. I think there's validity to

that. That's that that's the version of

it I would uh give credibility to.

>> Yeah, I think I agree. I

I don't consider myself anti-billionaire

TM, but I don't think you can look at

what's happening with money and

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.1%

by an average of $300,000

and paid for it by the largest cuts to

Medicaid health care for low-income

people in American history.

That is that is a terrifying vision of

the future of plutoaucracy 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

decatupling of anthropic and open AI's

enterprise value.

that clearly points toward a world in

which billionaires have an an enormous

amount of political power and that 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. Had

a conversation on my own podcast with

Gabriel Zuckman about the feasibility of

um of billionaire taxes which are their

own can of worms. But I I I think it's

absolutely a problem we need to think

about more in the next few years. I

guess I'm sort of struck by the degree

to which we're avoiding this sort of

central question which is who should be

making big decisions right like in the

50s60s like there were these public

figures like Robert Moses or like Robert

McNamera 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 uh

powerful bureaucrats like like we're

just whoever is making the decision. Our

solution in every case is move the

decision-making power somewhere else

without really thinking like well what

is the system we think would be fair to

get to an expeditious decision that

actually does serve the public interest.

And I think like we 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 reempower government to

be able to make decisions expeditiously

sort of across the board and we should

hold those the public figures who are

making decisions accountable through

elections. But like ultimately here the

proof of the pudding is in the eating.

Um and we need to have uh uh systems

that allow some discretionary power to

the people who are in powerful parts of

government to be able to make decisions

and then uh evaluate there. I I would

hate for us to predicate our efforts to

empower government to make decisions

about housing, about uh clean

infrastructure, about school, any of

these issues on uh a change in the way

we finance campaigns. I I think we're

gonna 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 Boris or whomever,

if AI turns out to be wildly unpopular,

they're going to have a problem. So, I

think that actually gets us into AI,

which 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,

>> you know, AI and robotics will will

bring um bring out what might be termed

the age of abundance. Um other people

have used this word um and and and that

this is my prediction will be an age of

abundance um for everyone. I had like

the one interest of like radical

abundance and just like what what what

were the kind of technological leverage

points to just like make the future like

wildly different and better.

>> As we get closer to AGI and we made

breakthroughs in we 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 u to go around. So that's Elon

Musk, Sam Alman, and Deisabis. 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 for

people create scarcity?

>> I had an interesting conversation last

year when I was simultaneously working

on abundance and this cover story that I

wrote for the Atlantic called the

antisocial century. And for that latter

story, I talked to Bob Putnham, Robert

Putnham, 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 technologies

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 watching five, six hours of

television a day. It was as if the human

body were designed by evolution to do

nothing but sit in a couch and watch

streaming images on a screen. That's how

immediately it insinuated itself into

modern life. He said that 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, it 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. 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 any anywhere, including in

many places, as the Wall Street Journal

reported in places where residential

developers are selling 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

mortorium 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. Because I I think there's a lot

that I agree with there, but 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

you know progressives typically care

about and prochemnology. 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 rewing you know very much at the

beginning because you have you know

vertical farming right where 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 to becoming the world's first

trillionaire. You see the power Sam

Alman wields that Daario wields Darede

people are scared of AI. They, you know,

the way Jasmine Sun describes AI

populism is that it's an elite project,

right? That it's a sense it AI is really

an elite project that is like being

shoved down people's throats, not

something they want, 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 uh a kind of view

that technology can be harnessed for

them, it seems very far. GLP1s are very

widespread, but I think the way the left

feels about them is very unsettled. Um,

I I'm I'm curious for you to talk a bit

about about that level because I think

it's very hard for a positive politics

to grow out of a deep enmity and

suspicion and yet I understand why the

suspicion is there right now.

>> Yeah. Let me talk first about AI and

then let me get to GOP ones because I I

I I think they're quite different. I

think the populous energy, the the

anti-tech energy that faces artificial

intelligence is very different than the

disperse anxiety that people feel about

some of 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 they

definitely deserve a little bit of of um

of distinction. But I like the

>> the thing I just meant about that

because I think you're right. It's just

that I don't see any place where the

left is like excited about a new

technology.

>> 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 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 is the

idea that to the extent that it reduces

labor, that reduction of labor is not

born 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

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 4-day work week than the

equivalent 20% of the economy just being

shunted onto unemployment. Um, on GLP1s,

I definitely get the impression that

there is a left-wing, is it leftwing?

Um, there's an aversion to the

technology within certain aspects of

media. Like there are magazines and

newsletter writers who are against GOP1s

because um they promote a new thinness

culture uh or they might represent some

kind of unnatural way of getting a

normal body. I biohacking optimization

culture peptides now clavvicular right

which is like a sort of whole weird

dystopic looks maxing

>> that it accelerates us towards some kind

of transhumanist future with which we

feel uncomfortable

>> and while enriching a small number of

people

>> while enriching a small number of people

but I 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 2030 years I mean the

pharmaceutical companies can't sell it

fast enough. The the peptide makers with

the 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 neurodeenerative

disease, for inflammation, for

cardiovascular disease. These are

diseases that are are among the highest

mortality burden in the country, in the

developed world.

Why aren't we devoting even more public

resources to studying this drug faster

and finding new ways of bringing down

the cost in the next few years for all

Americans? What if the federal

government spends a lot of money to

promote a certain drug category reward

certain companies with advanced market

commitments, hundreds, not not 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

which is exactly what we did for co

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 GLP1s.

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 in 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 or for that matter socialism or

democratic socialism tends to offer

today. You have a lot of talk about

parks. You have a lot of talk about

public spaces. You have a lot of talk

about the liberal arts and certain forms

of enriching education. Obviously, you

have temperance movements and things

like that. And there's a lot of talk in

that era of work and the role it should

play or should not play in our life. And

now we just sort of accept it as so

central. Um you know we have two earner

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 5day work week isn't

set in stone. Maybe it should be four

days. Maybe it should be three. I mean,

Brink Lindsay in his sort of abundance

adjacent new book, The Permanent

Problem, is is circling some of these

ideas. But I'm curious, like given your

more historical perspective, what you

think of that and what you think of time

as a thing, leisure time, you know, time

that you have autonomy over as a

long-term goal for abundance. In the

moment of every new technological

transformation,

we have had some notion, some dream that

maybe we could have less work and more

leisure uh 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 canes

famously expected that we would be

spending less time at work.

>> It' be our 15- hour work week by now.

>> Right. Right. Um but we did create the

weekend right the labor movement.

>> I mean we have taken time back at times

>> we have taken time back. I suspect that

we are going to find with the rise of

China with with with the uh 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 I'm less sanguin that

we're going to have less time. I I I do

I mean I think what's so interesting

about Derek's uh analysis of what

happened with GLPs is that in in

situations like warp speed we have clear

delineations of who makes decisions

right we are empowering people to take

chances to uh make you know enormously

consequential decisions about where

money goes and to to try things quickly.

That is exactly what we don't have in

these other realms of abundance. Right?

It is very hard to figure out who makes

the decision about where the

transmission line's going to go, how

we're going to build the uh the new

transit line, where the housing is going

to go. And I think like that's an

interesting model uh in these other

realms. How are we going to how are

progressives going to change decision-m

processes across the board so that we

can make expeditious decisions? I think

the transmission lines uh question

brings up another area that both

interfaces with technology obviously but

but but also politics. Uh for me a lot

of abundance comes out of

thinking first about the Yimi movement

and then thinking about climate change

and decarbonization and the need for a

really really really aggressive green

energy buildout 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. Then Donald

Trump gets elected and I would say a

couple things happen. One is he uh guts

in the inflation reduction acts 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.

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 gotten the straight of

Hormuz into a complete mess. And so, you

know, uh, 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 and I would add this and and then

turn it to you Derek which is one thing

that worries me is that when people lose

political fights they sometimes like

backfill into just saying like well

maybe they were wrong about everything.

I think we are acting like climate

change science 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. I,

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.