Ezra Klein: 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.

Ezra Klein: Mark Dunkelman, Derek Thompson. Welcome to the show.

Mark Dunkelman: It's good to be here.

Derek Thompson: Thrilled to be here. Yeah.

Ezra Klein: 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.

Derek Thompson: 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.

Ezra Klein: What's even more worrisome to me, you look at 2015 to 2026, you don't even see the Yimi movement.

Derek Thompson: 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 Dunkelman: so I think I have a slightly more optimistic perspective.

Ezra Klein: More optimistic than that. That's pretty optimistic.

Mark Dunkelman: 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.

Ezra Klein: 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.

Ezra Klein: 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?

Derek Thompson: 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.

Ezra Klein: 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 much worse. 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."

Derek Thompson: 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.

Ezra Klein: 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?

Mark Dunkelman: 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.

Ezra Klein: 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.

Mark Dunkelman: 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.

Derek Thompson: 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.

Ezra Klein: 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 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.

Derek Thompson: 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.

Ezra Klein: 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 Dunkelman: 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.

Ezra Klein: I want 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 Dunkelman: 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.

Derek Thompson: 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 manifest also 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?

Ezra Klein: 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?

Derek Thompson: 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.

Ezra Klein: 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. >> 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.

Derek Thompson: 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?

Ezra Klein: And I want to play a clip from Pete Buddha Judge just the other day. >> And my word of warning to my own political party is that we would make a terrible mistake if we thought that our job was to just take power somehow and then put everything back the way it was. That's not what we're here to do. >> So that Buddha Judge clip is like it's like fan service for me, right? That's that's what I want to hear somebody saying. But I want to say he goes on to say what those different terms should be. And I think this is a really big unsettled question for Democrats, which is they know, you heard it also in the the Newsome clip uh earlier. They know that after Doge, after all this destruction, and after also the recognition that things can work differently, they have to work differently that they cannot just build back. They can't even just build back better. They have to build something different. But I don't think they know on what principles that different things should be built.

Mark Dunkelman: We need to have in our mind a process that we believe is fair and that when people don't get the outcome that they want, they will abide it and understand that that was determined to be in the public interest. >> I'm not sure that we are articulating how we're going to make these trade-offs in a way that makes sense and is both fair to those who need to have a voice, but doesn't allow for interminable debate.

Ezra Klein: I wanted as we kind of come to an end here to play a clip from Bernie Sanders. >> If the argument is that we have a horrendous bureaucracy, absolutely correct. It is terrible. Uh I brought in over the years a lot of money into the state of Vermont. It is incredible. Even in a state like Vermont, which is maybe better than most states, how hard it is to even get the bloody money out because she has so many Oh my god. We got 38 meetings. We got to talk about this. Got unbelievable. I worked for years to bring two health clinics into the state of Vermont that we needed. I wanted two more to renovate one and build another one in this. You cannot believe you cannot believe the level of bureaucracy to build a bloody health center. It's still not built. >> I covered Sanders getting that money for community health clinics. That was in the affordable care act which passed in 2010. It is 2026. He is saying one of the two is still not built. And it I think one of the things I am saying around all this is that nobody should be angrier than the left if we have what Sanders calls a horrendous bureaucracy.

Mark Dunkelman: So uh the first book I always recommend to anyone is Liz Cohen's Making a New Deal. The second book which I hope people will pick up is uh yoni apple bomb stuck. And then the third uh you know to the degree my book is in conversation with uh Robert Keros the power broker. >> There's a book by uh Mark Reeseman called Cadillac Desert which essentially traces the same arc um uh with a guy named Floyd Dominy running the Bureau of Reclamation and building dams all across the West. Derek Thompson: Uh my three books number one weird choice maybe for reformed Jew but Mere Christianity by CS Lewis. There was a period when I was in my 20s when I just moved to New York. I read like a bunch of books that I adored. Um, The Emperor's Children by Cla Massud, The Interestings by Me Witzer, and The Secret History by Donna Tart. And I just reread The Secret History by Donna Tart, and it is so good. The last book that I'm going to recommend is specifically an audio book. Um, the audio book of Blood Meridian by Cormick McCarthy is like the trippiest possible.