Speed Is a Choice: Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson on Abundance After Trump's Return
The Long Now Foundation
At a Long Now Talk in San Francisco on March 27, 2025, the journalist and author Michael Pollan hosted Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson, co-authors of Abundance. The book argues that American liberalism has lost the ability to build and deliver: housing, clean energy, infrastructure, and science. Pollan's opening question framed the evening. The book was finished before Donald Trump returned to office, so how does it read now, when Trump appears to be acting out a distorted version of its themes by gutting regulations, torching grant programs, and talking about efficiency? Klein and Thompson argued that the moment makes their case more urgent. If liberals cannot make government deliver, they said, the political and democratic consequences are no longer abstract.
A Book Born Into a Different Timeline
Thompson explained the timing. Most of the book was written in 2023 and early 2024, it was essentially done by August or September 2024, it was edited through the fall, and it was updated slightly after the election. Pollan suggested it reads differently than it would have under a Kamala Harris administration. Thompson agreed, but said its arguments are "more profound and more urgent" now than they would have been in that alternate reality.
Thompson's reasoning started with why Trump won. In his account, voters who switched from Democrats to Republicans, and young people who voted Republican in greater numbers than in decades, gave the same answer when asked why: "affordability, affordability, affordability." Trump could have governed as the affordability president and declared an obsession with housing on day one. Instead, Thompson said, one of his first acts was raising tariffs by 25% on Canadian lumber and Mexican drywall gypsum, two of the most important inputs for home construction.
Pollan had called Trump's actions almost "a sick parody" of the book. Thompson preferred to call Trump a "tragic dark foil." As Thompson characterized it, Trump answers every shortage by taking something else away. There isn't enough housing, so there should be less immigration. There isn't enough manufacturing, so there should be less trade. Science isn't good enough, so the scientific infrastructure gets smashed. "Every element of scarcity is met with another element of scarcity," Thompson said. The abundance response is to make it easier to build homes, to support advanced semiconductor manufacturing rather than attack the CHIPS and Science Act, and to plan for growth rather than engineer a recession.
Thompson then turned to the Democrats. He cited a recent CNN figure putting the party's approval at 29%, which he described as the lowest in the poll's history. He also noted that the five states with the highest homelessness are governed by Democrats, as are the cities with the worst housing and public-disorder crises. He credited Klein with a line from the book: Democrats should be able to say "vote for us and we'll run America like California," but it is "tragically useful" for Republicans to make the same argument as a warning. "If we don't show Americans that we can use power to make their lives better," Thompson asked, "do we even deserve to win?"
Why the Book Landed Harder Than Expected
Klein said the reception had surprised both authors. Because of attention like the CNN segment Pollan mentioned, which discussed "abundance" as a concept while barely naming the authors, Klein had been asking himself why the book was hitting the way it was. He said he had covered politics a long time and the interest from inside the political system was "something different." In the Harris-wins timeline, he guessed, the Democratic Party would have said something like "thanks, those are some good points, we'll try a little bit harder," or treated the authors as one more interest group.
Klein's explanation was that the stakes have become "chillingly real." The fear that liberal democracy itself could be lost if liberals leading a democracy cannot deliver no longer feels hypothetical to people. Klein described a Biden adviser explaining the 2024 loss by saying elections are four-year cycles while their agenda needed to be measured in decades. According to Klein, the world in which someone can say that is gone: "You don't get decades. If you don't win on the four-year cycle, your agenda is undone."
Rediscovering Speed as a Progressive Value
Pollan objected that much of what the book proposes, such as building millions of housing units, will take a long time. Klein rejected the premise as "learned helplessness." He listed historical comparisons. The Empire State Building was built in a year. When Medicare passed, people had Medicare cards a year later. The Affordable Care Act took four years to take effect. Under Biden, it took three years for Medicare simply to begin negotiating drug prices. The bipartisan infrastructure bill's median road completion date is 2027, "not because asphalt takes six years to lay down."
Klein's central example was rural broadband. Congress appropriated $42 billion in 2021, and people still didn't have it. Laying cable does not take that long. What takes long is the 14-stage process of challenges, plans, and counterproposals. He added that California high-speed rail's timeline is effectively "forever," while China, Spain, and France complete similar projects without access to secret technology or, he joked, a harder-working population. The first 28 stations of the New York City subway opened within four years. Planning for the Second Avenue subway began, by Klein's recollection, in the 1950s.
The phrase he returned to was "speed is a choice." Nuclear fusion can't be willed into existence, but apartment buildings, infrastructure, and healthcare delivery can. In his view, the country chose slowness because it believed more process would make policy more just, more equitable, and more representative. He asked whether that had worked: is liberal democracy doing better, is the public happier, is California better? His answer was no. He called this the book's one "truly optimistic point": "We made the 14-stage process. We can unmake it." Klein also said that if he were rewriting the book now, he would make the case for speed as a progressive value more strongly.
What, If Anything, Trump Teaches About Speed
Pollan asked whether Trump, who has undeniably accelerated the pace of government, had shown that the system can change quickly. Thompson was cautious. Trump is "breaking a lot of things," he said, and the courts are blocking much of it while the public reacts. Thompson pointed to Elise Stefanik's UN ambassador nomination being pulled, which he read as Republicans fearing a Democratic wave even in a Trump district he described as plus-22. Politics, he noted, is not only about virtue but about maintaining power, and many of Trump's actions appear to be both blocked by courts and punished by voters.
The lesson Thompson did take was about the range between extremes. If Biden-era "procedural fetish" is at one end and Trump's recklessness at the other, "there are a lot of gradients of speed between A and B."
He then walked through the broadband program in detail, saying the authors had become somewhat obsessed with it as an object lesson. The FCC draws a map of undercovered areas. States can challenge it. States then draw their own maps, which can also be challenged. States apply for funding, and the Commerce Department can reject applications over an imperfectly completed equity matrix or procurement process. Thompson acknowledged that, taken point by point, "it's not obvious which ones of them are stupid," because equity and accurate maps matter. His point was that the Biden administration "optimized for process" and not for speed.
Where Slowness Actually Gets Written
Asked whether the fault lay in the legislation or in local rules, Klein said it depends, but in the broadband case the delay came from the regulations. Congress essentially told the Commerce Department to write rules, and that is where the process grew. Klein said the rooms where regulations get written have become "a much bigger problem than I used to think." Policy reporters, himself included, focus on the fight over the bill and then move on once it passes. In his view, that is when the real process begins, and it is the easiest place to hand out concessions.
He described a Democratic policymaking culture that is "highly coalitional," in which every part of the coalition gets something. His example was the CHIPS and Science Act, meant to spend more than $30 billion luring advanced semiconductor manufacturing back to the U.S. as a national security priority, since the country had lost it by no longer being cost-competitive. Nothing in the bill, Klein noted, required Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company to plan for increasing women's representation in the local construction workforce, yet that requirement appeared in implementation. There is no particular reason to think TSMC has expertise in that task in Arizona, he said, "but we said yes to someone there," and then to many others. Because this work is tedious, it happens "out of the light."
Klein offered two remedies. First, Congress should be more aggressive and less deferential to agencies by writing deadlines into legislation, including what he called "exploding money" that disappears if not spent by a certain date. He said some members of Congress had raised this with him since the book came out. Second, administrations at the federal and state level must make speed an explicit priority.
He also named a factor administrations don't fully control. Compared with Europe, he said, the U.S. restrains government through lawsuits, and individuals, groups, and cities can sue for almost any reason. He cited the California Environmental Quality Act (CEQA), which he said is routinely used for purposes that are non-environmental "under any measure of the term." For example, unions use its provisions to sue projects and win labor concessions. "Maybe you want the labor concessions," Klein said, "but not using the environmental bill." Anything made through statute can be unmade through statute, he argued, but those are "difficult, bruising fights" that people are not excited to have. People want to build the bridge, not argue about how bridge-building regulations are written.
Outcomes Versus Process: Environmentalism for the 2020s
Pollan pressed on trade-offs. Many of the rules that slow building have admirable goals and were won at great cost in the 1970s to protect workers, disabled people, and wetlands. How does an abundance agenda decide which rules to override?
Thompson answered by distinguishing laws that regulate outcomes from laws that regulate process. He first emphasized how bad things were before those laws: the mid-century growth machine left the water and air "disgusting." He cited a fact from the book: in the month the poet Dylan Thomas died in New York of a respiratory illness, dozens of people died of air pollution in the city, and it was not front-page news. Living in the richest city in the richest country meant accepting some risk of "simply dying of breathing." The Clean Air Act, the Clean Water Act, the National Environmental Policy Act, and species protections answered the problems of their era.
But Thompson argued that "the medicine of one generation can yield the disease of the next." Environmentalism became very good at saying stop and at giving people legal tools to block things. That made it harder to build dense infill housing, solar, wind, and nuclear power, all of which Thompson called good for the environment. He gave the example of a single tree saved by blocking an apartment building, while overlooking the thousands of trees lost when the housing gets built as sprawl in a cleared forest instead. Being an environmentalist in the 2020s, he argued, requires a "more planetary" view centered on climate change and a new attitude toward building.
The key distinction, in Thompson's framing, is that the Clean Air and Clean Water Acts largely worked by regulating outcomes: air must be this clean, a tailpipe can emit only so much. NEPA and CEQA, by contrast, "have not considered outcomes. They are steroids for process elongation." Opponents can use them to delay almost any physical change indefinitely, which ironically blocks what environmentalists should want. Thompson said he did not blame the environmentalists of the 1960s and 1970s. They "answered the questions of their age," and today's task is to answer different questions. Pollan agreed that climate change "scrambles" environmentalism, because dealing with it requires building, which clashes with the romantic American pastoral ideal.
Klein summarized his view with a line he'd been using on tour: "we should make our environmental protections protect the environment again." He mentioned CEQA reform bills from California legislators Scott Wiener and Buffy Wicks, which drew applause from the audience. He wanted such laws to define what counts as environmental protection. It is fine to designate specific wetlands for very high scrutiny, he said. What he objected to is the idea that "literally any project can be sued for not properly considering every single consequence it might lead to."
Klein then described reporting that did not make it into the book, on congestion pricing in Manhattan. The policy passed in 2019 and, as of around 2023, had been held up for more than three years by an environmental assessment, not even a full environmental review, despite being an entirely pro-environmental policy. In Europe, he said, a challenger would go to the environmental agency and be told that every study shows the policy helps. In New York, the agency was asked to model effects such as the impact on the incomes of low-income cab drivers in Queens. Klein recounted MTA head Janno Lieber telling him that running and rerunning models for four years is not better for the environment than getting cars out of Manhattan. "We should have goals and we should try to achieve those goals," Klein said. "Instead... we have process and we try to achieve that process."
Limits to Growth and the Problem With the "Pie"
Pollan recalled the 1972 Club of Rome report The Limits to Growth. MIT researchers used early computer models to project that unchecked exponential growth would exceed Earth's carrying capacity and collapse civilization around the present day. Pollan noted that growth has real costs: building millions of homes means pouring a great deal of concrete.
Klein used the question to attack the metaphor that growth is like "growing the pie," which he said he'd never gotten to criticize on tour. The metaphor "gets nothing right, including its own internal structure." Growing a pie would just produce more pie. Growing an economy produces change. An economy growing 2 or 3% a year transforms rapidly into something unrecognizable, which he said Thompson's passages in the book illustrate by imagining someone falling asleep in one era and waking in another full of aspirin, televisions, and rocket travel.
According to Klein, the limits-to-growth intuition was wrong on pollution. Societies pass through a period of intense pollution as they get richer and then get cleaner. London once had unbreathable air. Los Angeles often did when he grew up nearby in the 1980s and 1990s. China did more recently, and Delhi does now. London and LA are now breathable, and China is improving. Thompson added that the UK had just closed its last coal-fired power plant ahead of schedule.
Klein made two further points. First, the only real chance is to grow in a way that makes life less resource-intensive. Second, he dislikes the label "pro-growth" because growth is not always good. GDP added by covering the country with coal plants would be bad, while the same growth from solar, wind, and possibly nuclear would be good. "We are trying to grow in a direction," he said, meaning trying to change in a direction. That is why the book argues technology should be "yoked" to a social purpose. He cited examples of government-driven technology: solar, wind, and batteries were "technological miracles induced by government policy," through tax credits in the U.S. and Germany and direct subsidies in China. Operation Warp Speed "pulled a futuristic vaccine out of the future" and priced it at zero dollars. Redistribution achieves wonderful things, Klein said, but some problems can only be solved through technology, and he argued progressivism needs to put technology at the center of its vision.
Can You Count on Technology Arriving? The Penicillin Story
Pollan pushed back: technology does not always arrive on schedule. The book's opening utopian scenario depends on solving clean energy, and fusion has long been "around the corner." Klein replied that the scenario doesn't require fusion, only building what is already possible, such as solar, wind, nuclear, and advanced geothermal. He acknowledged that some things, like green cement and clean fuels, don't exist yet. Asked whether to wait, both said no, and Thompson argued for deliberate policy instead.
Thompson told the story of penicillin. The familiar version has Alexander Fleming, in 1928, returning from a vacation to find that something, perhaps blown in through an open window, had killed the staphylococcus in a petri dish. He traced it to the Penicillium genus. Thompson called that story romantic but "utterly insufficient." Thirteen years later, he said, Fleming, Florey, and Chain were at a dead end. By 1941 they had done some mouse studies and a human trial on five people, two of whom died. Journalists covering medicine at that point, he joked, would have dismissed a mold "that killed 40% of its phase one clinical trial."
According to Thompson, what changed things was that Florey and Chain brought penicillin to the United States just as Vannevar Bush and others were building the wartime Office of Scientific Research and Development, which was spinning out the Manhattan Project and radar work at MIT's Rad Lab. Motivated by the military value of reducing bacterial infections, the government figured out how to grow penicillin in vats and moved it through large trials. It became what Thompson called perhaps the most important scientific discovery of the 20th century. "It was made a product because of a deliberate federal policy to grow it, to test it, to distribute it."
He drew a parallel with Operation Warp Speed and mRNA. Thompson mentioned that mRNA vaccines are now in phase three trials against pancreatic cancer, which killed his mother about 13 years ago. As he explained it, that cancer produces few neoantigens for the immune system to detect, and an mRNA vaccine was designed to target them. He gave some credit to the first Trump administration, in particular Alex Azar and officials under him, for funding science "from two ends": money upfront to companies like Pfizer, Moderna, and Johnson & Johnson, plus an advance market commitment as a "pull mechanism." That meant a promise to buy working vaccines for billions, even from the ninth company to succeed, and distribute them at no cost. They also removed FDA bottlenecks and worked with Corning to develop vials for transport. Thompson said this frontier is now in jeopardy, with scientists reportedly removing "mRNA" from grant applications. He called it a "shonda" but also an opportunity for Democrats.
"Dark Abundance" and the Opening for an Opposition
Klein elaborated on that opportunity. Trump took the one thing his first administration achieved, lit it on fire, and put its foremost enemy, "a Kennedy," in charge of Health and Human Services. Klein described a hypothetical "dark abundance" Trump: an all-of-the-above energy strategy, "warp speed for everything," build everything everywhere, combined with no civil liberties and one-man rule. Instead, Klein said, Trump attacks solar and wind and has destroyed vaccine acceleration.
Klein argued that one of the "most lethal" things Democrats did was let Trump negatively polarize them into defenders of the status quo. The opening now is for an opposition that resists what Trump is doing to the federal government while offering "a vision for a much more plentiful future," materially and scientifically. Returning to Pollan's question about technology, he said whether a breakthrough appears is partly luck, "whether or not the spore blew in on the heavenly breeze," but also partly policy: "We shift the probabilities." He joked about Democratic yard signs reading "we believe in science" and said: "Don't believe in science. Do science and then make it into things people need."
On science funding, Klein said the NIH should not be destroyed and scientists should not be fired or forced to scrub "mRNA" from proposals. He mocked keyword searches that cancelled grants on soil diversity because a search tool "doesn't know the difference between DEI diversity and agricultural soil diversity." But he also argued that current grant-making, according to virtually every study he cited, pushes scientists toward "more herdlike ideas, safer ideas." Science requires risk and failure, and government should support both. He noted that Republicans created and perpetuate much of this problem by mocking odd-sounding research. His examples were shrimp on treadmills and GLP-1 drugs, which came from studying venom from a lizard's mouth, with no one anticipating the result. Trump's line about "making mice transgender," Klein said, is false, and the broader habit of ridiculing strange-sounding grants "denies us of things we might one day need."
The Neighbor Next Door: A War for Defaults, Not Hearts
Pollan played a deliberately provocative role on housing. He said he owns a nice house in the Berkeley Hills, that a six-unit, four-story building was proposed next door that would cut his property values and shade his garden, and that he had a good lawyer. He asked them to convince him not to sue. (He later clarified it was hypothetical.)
Thompson answered that the trade-off was real: "There's a plant that's going to lose sun and there's six families that are going to get a house." He said he barely wanted to elaborate beyond that. Change has trade-offs, but so does stasis. If every shadow over a garden justifies endless legal challenges, no urban multifamily housing gets built. He cited a proposed 500-unit building in San Francisco, 100 of them below market rate, on a Nordstrom valet parking lot, which he said was rejected by the city's board shortly after the state's 2021 single-family zoning law passed. Still, Thompson conceded that as a matter of persuasion there is no use pretending new housing has no cost. "We want to build cities for people," he said.
Klein took a different angle: "I actually don't want to persuade you." It is Pollan's "God-given right" not to want an apartment building down the block, but it should not be his legal right to stop it. Houston and Austin can build, Klein argued, not because Texas eliminated selfishness but because people there don't have the tools to block construction. Democracy still operates through mayors, governors, and legislators who set the rules. He gave California's accessory dwelling unit (ADU) laws as an example. The first law had loopholes that cities exploited, and it took 10 to 15 years of repeated legislation, but now ADU growth is "explosive." One in five homes built in the state is an ADU, he said, and nobody now claims the state was better before them. The YIMBY fight, in Klein's framing, is not mainly for hearts and minds but "a war for the policy default." People should be free to complain about change; they just shouldn't be able to control it.
Audience Questions: AI, Children, and Teachers
An audience member asked about artificial intelligence, noting that the book discusses it mostly as an infrastructure issue. Thompson confirmed that the book's treatment is narrow and centered on AI's large energy demands. He said it matters that new energy be clean, both to meet the needs of data centers and to keep them in the U.S. rather than, for example, the UAE. He said the authors didn't go deeper because AI was changing so fast that writing about it would be like describing the temperature outside his window.
Speaking for himself, Thompson said his greatest excitement is about AI in medicine, especially drug repurposing, which had been covered in a recent New York Times article. Just as language models map relationships among words, he suggested, similar maps could link the molecular effects and side effects of already-approved drugs, surfacing unexpected uses. He pointed to GLP-1 drugs, derived from Gila monster saliva, first used for type 2 diabetes, then found to cause weight loss, and later associated with anti-inflammatory effects that may benefit cardiovascular health, compulsions and addiction, and possibly dementia. Such a map might surface those connections years faster.
His greater worry was social. He cited his Atlantic cover story "The Antisocial Century," which reported that face-to-face socializing has fallen to at least a 70-year low. He said tens of millions of people, especially young people, are forming relationships with AI chatbots. Thompson said he doesn't begrudge anyone that, but he values human relationships. He worries that the validation, responsiveness, and constant agreement people seek could be delivered by machines more efficiently than by people. Mentioning his 19-month-old daughter, he said he fears a world where she learns that the machine in her phone provides unconditional affection more readily than any person. He said he is less worried about an "Einstein for IQ" that destroys the world than an "Einstein for EQ" that replaces human relationships.
Another audience member noted that San Francisco builds fewer homes per year than half the number of babies born there, and asked how abundance would change raising children in cities. Klein called the answer straightforward. He knows many families who left San Francisco because they couldn't afford to raise children there, and he sees the same in New York. Working families should be able to afford to raise children in the cities they live in and love.
A preschool teacher then asked about housing for early childhood educators. The teacher described living paycheck to paycheck in San Francisco despite having a master's degree and a Georgetown education. Klein said the issue isn't special deals for teachers over firefighters or retail workers. The measure of good city governance is whether the people who keep the city running can live there. "If the working class cannot live where you govern, you are not the party of the working class." He mentioned a friend who was a San Francisco firefighter and couldn't afford to raise children there. He pointed to Tokyo, where he said people can live on the median wage because the city builds a great deal of vertical housing.
Klein criticized the idea, which he attributed to Michael Bloomberg, that cities are "a luxury good." Cities are meant to be places where all kinds of workers live, and restricting access cuts off one of humanity's fundamental routes to opportunity: moving from poorer places to richer ones. He cited data from the book showing that this migration accounted for about a third of the 20th-century drop in income inequality, and that the flow has now reversed, with people moving from richer places to poorer ones. He said enough housing should be built to make rent affordable, and that there should also be dedicated affordable housing, since he does not believe all housing should be market rate.
The Most Dangerous People, and How to Stop Them
The final question, posed by a couple, asked who the most dangerous person in the world is and how to stop them. Thompson called the obvious answer a "hanging piñata" and chose to discuss the degree of danger posed by Donald Trump and Elon Musk rather than rank them. He called what happened to Musk "a tragedy." In the book, Musk appears as a walking advertisement for public-private cooperation. Thompson said Tesla's Model X exists because of a 2010 loan created by a 2007 government policy and built on by the 2009 Recovery Act, and that SpaceX exists because of government contracts. Instead of embodying what a forward-looking government can do, Thompson said, Musk has taken "a wrecking ball" to the institutions that would build that future. He gave the example of cuts at the Department of Education that undermine tracking whether children's literacy and numeracy are improving. "Why in the world would you be incurious about the degree to which our education system works?" Thompson said he doesn't know if they are the most dangerous people in the world, but they may be the most powerful, and "danger is a function of power."
On how to stop them, Thompson's answer was simple: "you win." Winning requires Democrats to prove they deserve power by pointing to what they built where they govern, not what they spent. He said Democrats have fallen into equating success with dollar figures, such as $1.2 trillion for infrastructure, without asking what got built. He cited a Chicago mayor who touted spending $11 billion on 10,000 affordable units, about $1.1 million per unit. He ended with a phrase he said he may have picked up in Silicon Valley: "culture is what you tolerate." As long as Democrats tolerate homelessness, housing scarcity, and blocked clean energy, and put "kindness is everything" signs on lawns in neighborhoods zoned only for single-family homes, Thompson said, they are "the party that tolerates hypocrisy. And that has to change."
Thank you so much for that warm welcome. It's wonderful to be on this stage again and to be with you two guys for whom I have such admiration. Welcome back to San Francisco. Thank you.
And California warmly welcomes you, Derek. I appreciate that. Thank you. I felt like Manny's comments about it being so great that you do your writing here were a little pointed. I think they were. I think they were. Well, I wrote a lot of this book here. Anyway, California loves you guys, even though you really dump on California in this book. Yeah. Criticism is an act of love, Michael.
Anyway, congratulations on the book. It is very rare that a book can ignite a national conversation and you've done that. I was watching CNN on Monday morning and they did a whole segment on abundance, the concept, not your book. They barely mentioned you, but they talked about it as this, you know, meme. So it's been mainstreamed and at this point it's floated free of your bylines and it has its own existence in the political ether. So I think that's quite an achievement and it comes at a very propitious time. The Democratic Party is flailing in the market for new ideas and along comes abundance. So anyway, congratulations on that.
So the book was finished before Trump took office and it reads quite differently than it probably would have had Kamala Harris won. It's kind of an interesting head experiment to read it through both lenses, but we are in this lens of Trump having won. And I had an experience, I don't know if other people have too, of some cognitive dissonance reading about the sclerotic grant process for NIH and medical grants and scientific grants, and now they've just been torched. The fact that regulations are getting in the way of building the way we need, and then having all the EPA regulations torched, the fact that the president is arrogating new powers so he can act more freely, and the fact that apparently efficiency is a thing.
And I'm just kind of curious how you reflect on that. I mean, there are things that Trump is doing that are kind of, it's almost like a sick parody of your book. How do you process that? And you say at one point in the book, let me see how you put it: if liberals do not want Americans to turn to the false promise of strongmen, they need to offer the fruits of effective government. So, how does the book feel to you and the idea of abundance in light of Trump's election? And how did we get here?
Look, we wrote most of this book in 2023, early 2024, right? The publishing schedule is such that this book was essentially done by August, September. We edited it through the fall. We updated it a little bit after the election and then it's out in the world. And you know, one thing you cannot control when you write a book is the environment in which it is born. And you're right that this book reads differently now than it would read if there was a Kamala Harris administration. I would make the argument that this book and its themes and its arguments are more profound and more urgent now than they would be in the alternate reality of Kamala Harris winning in November.
Oh, good. I know where the Abundance Network is sitting. You're outed.
So why? You have right now, I think, in the White House a president who was elected because of an unaffordability wave. If you ask Americans that switched from the Democratic column to the Republican column, why did you switch? If you ask young people, why, given that historically 20-somethings have been the most progressive generation in American history, why did you vote for Republicans more than any period in the last few decades? The answer is always the same. It's affordability, affordability, affordability. And Donald Trump could have come into office as the affordability candidate. He could have governed in his first few weeks as the affordability president. He could have said on day one, I am obsessed with housing, and the first thing we're going to do is make housing as cheap as possible and to make it as abundant as possible in the places where housing scarcity is the biggest problem. He did not do that. His first thing as president was to raise tariffs by 25% on the lumber that we get from Canada and the drywall gypsum that we get from Mexico, immediately increasing two of the most important inputs for home construction.
In many ways, I see Trump as being a kind of tragic dark foil for the arguments in this book rather than a parody, as you put it. I take the argument, but I see him as a very clear foil. This is someone who looks at every problem that America has and has a solution that requires taking away something that America needs. He says, "America doesn't have enough housing, and so the solution is going to be we need less immigration. Or America doesn't have enough manufacturing, and so what we need is less trade. Or America doesn't have enough high-quality science as I would define it, and therefore I'm going to smash the entire scientific infrastructure." Every element of scarcity is met with another element of scarcity. And in contrast to that, I think a message of abundance is incredibly powerful. We're saying, "Yes, we don't have enough houses. We should make it easier to build them. Yes, we don't have enough manufacturing, especially in areas of key goods of national security interest like high-tech semiconductors. We should have a policy that makes it easier to build them, not smash the CHIPS and Science Act." Yes, we have issues when it comes to our national debt. We shouldn't engineer a recession. We should plan for growth.
And so from my perspective, there's many of the arguments in the book that exist in perfect juxtaposition to what's happening in Washington right now.
And I would just add by saying this: at a moment where Donald Trump is an absolute wrecking ball for not only economic growth, but also for constitutional order, Democrats need an opposition that is popular and that is effective. Most importantly, effective. And right now, the Democratic opposition is historically unpopular. 29% is the recent approval rating according to CNN, lowest in the history of the poll. And they're not effective in the places that they govern. The states with the highest homelessness, the five states with the highest homelessness, are all governed by Democrats. The cities with the worst housing crisis and the worst public disorder crisis all tend to be governed by Democrats. We've created a situation where Democrats have turned the places in which they have the most power into advertisements for the opposition rather than advertisements for our own movement.
I mean, Ezra has a great line from the book, which I have to credit him, where he says something along the lines of: Democrats should be able to say, vote for us and we'll run America like California. But it is tragically useful for Republicans to make the exact same argument. Vote for them. Yeah. They might make America like California. We need to turn the places where we have the most power into advertisements for our movement. Because if we don't show Americans that we can use power to make their lives better, do we even deserve to win?
So let's... Do you want to add something to that?
I'm going to try not tonight to do the thing where we abundantly both answer each question. It will happen. But on the first, something you said caught for me, which is it's hard to live in the other timeline. And I've been thinking about, as this book has detonated with much more force than either of us expected, why? Like, what would it have been like if we brought it out in the other timeline, the Kamala Harris wins timeline? And I think the Democratic Party would have said, "Hey, thanks. Those are some good points. We'll try a little bit harder." Or another interest group pushing. Yeah, you know, during the nomination process.
I've been trying to think. One of the questions I've gotten a lot in the last couple days, you know, because of things like that CNN segment, is actually, what the hell is happening here? Like, why is this hitting the way it is? I mean, the kind of reception and interest we're getting inside the political system. I've been doing this a long time. This is something different. Yeah. And I think it's because I think that Democrats, and I'm not saying we're the only answer to it, but I think in a way that if Kamala Harris won they would not. I think the stakes have changed. And I think, look, we would not have written this book if we didn't think there was a problem. But I think the sense that if you do not make liberal democracy, and liberals leading a democracy, deliver again, you might just lose liberal democracy has become chillingly real to people.
And so this world where Joe Biden loses for re-election and his top adviser says, "Well, the problem is elections are four-year cycles and our agenda needed to be measured in decades." The world where you can say that is gone. You don't get decades. If you don't win on the four-year cycle, your agenda is undone and you will have serious conversations about what elections look like in the future at all.
But a lot of what you're proposing is going to take a while. Building, you know, millions of new units of housing. It... No. How do you demonstrate effectiveness within the frame of...
I really, this is a learned helplessness that we have gotten into. We built the Empire State Building in a year. When Medicare was passed, people got Medicare cards one year later. It took the Affordable Care Act four years. Under Biden, it took three years for Medicare to just begin negotiating drug prices.
We have chosen slowness, and in doing so we have broken the cord of accountability in democracy. Not the Inflation Reduction Act, the bipartisan infrastructure bill: its median road completion time is 2027. That's not because asphalt takes 6 years to lay down. The reason we didn't get rural broadband after appropriating $42 billion for it in 2021 isn't because it takes that long to lay down broadband cable. It doesn't. It's a 14-stage process with challenges and plans and counterproposals. We have chosen slowness because we thought we had the luxury of time.
And one of the parts of this book that is present, but if I were rewriting it now I would write it more strongly, is we need to rediscover speed as a progressive value. The idea that government delivers at a pace where you can feel it, that's not a luxury. That's how you keep a government.
And so this thing where we've gotten used to everything taking forever, like literally in the case of California high-speed rail, I think the timeline is officially forever. It's not like in China they have access to advanced high-speed rail technology we don't. Or in Spain or in France, you're telling me the French work so much harder than we do? But they complete things on a normal timeline. We built the first 28 subways of the New York City subway system in four years. 28 of them we opened in four years. The Second Avenue subway, I think we started planning for it in the 1950s.
So it's all to say, I think this is something that actually slowly we have forgotten. Speed is a choice. Look, we can't make nuclear fusion tomorrow. We can't solve the hard problem of consciousness to predict a coming Michael Pollan work tomorrow. But we can build apartment buildings. We can build infrastructure. We can deliver healthcare. We have chosen to stop. And we've chosen to stop because we thought that would make all the policies better, more just, more equitable. There would be more voice in them. And now we look around, and did it make it better? Is liberal democracy doing better? Is the public happier? Are more people being represented in the kind of government we have? Is California better? And the answer is no. And it's like the one truly optimistic point of this book, which is that we chose these problems. And if you chose a problem, you can unchoose it. Not that it'll be easy, but unlike, you know, if the boundary was physics or technology, it's at least possible. We made the 14-stage process. We can unmake it.
Do you think Trump has taught us anything? Because he has certainly sped up the pace of government, if we can say one semi-positive thing. But I mean, look at what he's doing. He's suggesting that this system can be changed quickly. Is there anything to take from that?
I think it's important to look at what Trump is doing and also look at what he's failing to do. You know, Trump is moving very, very quickly and breaking a lot of things, and the courts are stopping a lot of what he's doing, and the public is reacting to what he's doing. And Republicans, it seems to me, are so scared now of a backlash to Trump that you have Elise Stefanik now not being able to be the ambassador to the UN because even in a plus-22 Trump district, they're afraid of a Democratic wave overtaking her. Elections happen, and God willing we'll get one in another 22 months and another four years. And that cycle is important.
You know, we were talking backstage about how politics isn't just about virtues. Politics is about the ability to maintain power. And you know, a lot of Trump's actions aren't just unconstitutional; we are seeing indications that they are being blocked by the courts and punished by popular reaction.
So I don't want to take too much of a lesson from what Trump is doing. But I do want to take a lesson from this: if the status quo of slowness and procedural fetish under the Biden administration was over here, and Donald Trump is over here, there are a lot of gradients of speed between A and B. And it goes back to what Ezra just said about, for example, the $42 billion rural broadband program, which we've gotten a lot of mileage out of by becoming obsessed with, because it really is such an interesting object lesson in this book and the messages of this book.
I mean, the short story here again is that the 2021 bipartisan infrastructure bill is passed. Biden calls it the most important infrastructure bill in modern American history. $42 billion allocated, authorized for rural broadband. A classic progressive end. We're going to hook people up to the internet so they can join the internet economy and benefit from telehealth. A perfect progressive end. There's a 14-step process that involves the FCC drawing a map of what parts of the country are undercovered. And there's a challenge period where the states can say, "Nope, you actually missed this area over here." And then the states can draw their map. And then there's a challenge period for that. And then the states can apply for funding and the Commerce Department can say, you didn't fill out this equity matrix perfectly and you didn't fill out this procurement process perfectly. But the point is, the point is...
I actually, you like, I just, you need to get it so long. You need to get it to get it. Like, the details are the point.
Yeah. And it's important to say that if you go point by point through those details, it's not obvious which ones of them are stupid, because equity matters and maps matter and understanding the undercovered places matters. But the point is that Biden optimized for process and for details, as boring as they can be to enumerate on a stage. He didn't optimize for speed. Speed is a choice and you can optimize for it.
How could he have? Is it the way the bill is written, or the fact that there are all these local rules and regulations?
It depends on the issue. And in this case, it's actually how the regulations get written. When Congress passed the money, they just said basically, and the Commerce Department shall write some rules. That's where it happened. And something I've started thinking a lot more about: you know, we got this nice little Schoolhouse Rock song about how a bill becomes a law. Yeah. God forbid anybody writes one about how a law becomes a rulemaking process, which becomes a notice and comment period. What has begun to happen in the rooms where regulations are
written is a much bigger problem than I used to think. And I'm a policy reporter. I covered this stuff, but you know, we like the big fight over the bill. And then the Affordable Care Act passes or the Inflation Reduction Act passes and we're like, you did it. And we move on to the next one, but you didn't do it, because then the process really begins. And it's much easier to do your giveaways, to say yes, in that part of the process.
And so one of the things I think we're taking aim at a bit here is a culture of policymaking, and the culture of policymaking is one that is, particularly on the Democratic side, highly coalitional, and every part of the coalition comes in and gets a little bit. So you have a bill that's about reshoring advanced semiconductor manufacturing. Nothing in the CHIPS and Science Act said, as we try, as a national security priority, to reshore advanced semiconductor manufacturing, which we lost because we are no longer cost competitive, so we're going to spend more than $30 billion trying to entice these companies back. Nothing in the bill said make sure the Taiwanese Semiconductor Manufacturing Corporation comes up with a plan to increase the representation of women in the local construction force. You can say a lot about the Taiwanese Semiconductor Manufacturing Corporation. They're quite remarkable. But there's no particular reason to believe they have expertise in increasing the representation of women in construction in Arizona. But we said yes to someone there.
Yeah. And then we said yes in a bunch of others. And it is tedious to go through these things. But actually, precisely because it is tedious, it's happening out of the light. And then what we can see is that often, not specifically in chips, although some other things that are interesting happen there, the outcomes aren't particularly good.
So I would say two things about it. One is that I would like to see Congress begin to... It has outsourced a huge amount to the agencies, and that's great if the agencies do a great job, but they're actually not doing a great job, at least not the way we've been running these rules. So I think Congress should actually be much more aggressive, and this is something some members of Congress have said to me since the book: they should be saying, we want this done by X. This is exploding money. We are giving you this money, but this money evaporates if you don't use it. You can do things like that. The child tax credit was authorized for one year, right? That ended up being a huge mistake. But these things could be like, if you don't spend it, it's gone. That's one thing.
The other is that it has to be the priority of the administration or the state administrations to make speed the priority. Now, then there are other things they don't control. Compared to, say, Europe, we restrain our government through lawsuit. We have a very, very intense legal process by which individuals and groups and cities and so on can sue for almost any reason. Right? The California Environmental Quality Act is routinely used for, under any measure of the term, non-environmental reasons. There are some fights over how to reform it going on right now. And you'll see a bunch of unions fighting for it, not because they're worried about the wetlands. The California Environmental Quality Act is routinely used by them. They will sue you using its provisions, which are in theory for the environment, in order to get labor concessions on the build, right? And maybe you want the labor concessions, but not using the environmental bill, right?
And so there's a lot of legislation you need to revisit because it's been captured by different kinds of interests or turned to a different kind of process than you intended. So you can change it. Anything we made through statute, we can unmake through statute. But you have to choose to change it. And these are very difficult, bruising fights which people aren't excited to have. They're excited to build a bridge. They're not excited to fight over the exact method by which bridge building regulations are written.
Right. Right. So, but you know, you talk a lot about the various rules and regulations that keep us from building, but a lot of them, of course, have very admirable goals. This is the environmental movement. These are victories won in the 1970s at great cost. They protect workers, they protect the disabled, they protect wetlands. How do you decide which ones to override and which ones to respect? I mean, how does an abundance agenda navigate that question?
I think it's worthwhile to think about the difference between laws that work based on outcomes versus processes. So you're absolutely right, and I want to be clear about exactly how right you are. The world that we built with the growth machine of the middle of the 20th century was absolutely freaking disgusting. The water was disgusting. The air was disgusting. We were just spoiling the country.
I mean, there's, I think, a fact in the book that the month that Dylan Thomas, the poet, died in New York City of a respiratory illness, dozens of people died of air pollution in New York City in the 1940s. And it was not front page news at all. It was simply what happened. To live in the richest city in the richest country in the world meant to have a certain risk of simply dying of breathing.
We responded to that by passing a series of laws: the Clean Air Act, the Clean Water Act, the National Environmental Protection Act. We passed laws to protect specific species. And these laws answered the problems of the 1950s and the 1960s.
But sometimes what happens is that the medicine of one generation can yield the disease of the next generation. And right now I think that what being an environmentalist means to me in the 2020s is something subtly but distinctly different from what being an environmentalist meant in the 1960s. There was a time when it was appropriate for environmentalism to be a movement of stop, to be a movement of blocking.
But what happened is we got so good at saying stop, and so good at giving people legal tools to say stop, and so efficient at the politics of blocking, that we made it difficult to add infill housing and dense housing in urban areas, which is good for the environment, and build solar energy, which is good for the environment, and add wind energy, which is good for the environment, and advance nuclear power. We made it harder to do the things that are necessary to, I think, be an environmentalist in the 2020s, which is to care for global warming. In some ways we talk about the tree that you can save by saying no to a building that requires tearing down that tree, forgetting about the thousands of trees that are going to be killed if, instead of the apartment building being built over that tree, it's built in a sprawling suburban area that has to knock down a forest. We have to have, I think, a more planetary sense of what it means to be an environmentalist, and that means, I think, having a new attitude toward building.
And so I think that we need to embrace a culture of institutional renewal and ask what does it really mean to be an environmentalist in the 2020s. It means making it easier to build houses in dense urban areas and making it easier for places to add solar and wind and geothermal and nuclear and maybe even next-generation enhanced geothermal.
I think that we need to find a way to match our processes and our outcomes. And it is important, I think, that the Clean Air and Water Act worked in many ways by regulating outcomes. This air needs to be this clean. This tailpipe cannot have this level of emissions. That is an outcome-based regulation. What NEPA and CEQA have done is they have not considered outcomes. They are steroids for process elongation. They make it easier for people who want to stop states and companies from doing anything, enacting any kind of change in the physical world, to delay them forever, in such a way that ironically makes it harder to build the very things that are inherent to what you should want if you're an environmentalist in the 2020s. And that's the tragic irony to me of the environmentalist revolution. It's not what happened in the 1960s and 1970s. I don't hate the environmentalists of the 1960s, 1970s. They answered the questions of their age, and it is our responsibility to take up the baton and do the same and answer the questions for our age, because they are different questions.
I completely agree. I think climate change really scrambles what environmentalism should do and be, because to deal with climate change you have to build, whether it's nuclear power, whether it's solar. And that's very much against the American pastoral idea of environmentalism, which is a very romantic idea, a very powerful idea, but is dated in some ways. We're going to have to intervene in ways we didn't think we had to.
Absolutely agree with that. I have a joke that I've started telling on the trail. It's not really a joke, like all these things, but we should make our environmental protections protect the environment again. Like, it would just be good if I was talking to people.
Well, I mean, look, right around here, you have Scott Wiener and Buffy Wicks, who are rolling out, or just have rolled out, I think, in the case of Wicks today, in fact, big CEQA reform bills.
And we get this sort of question a lot, and I'm not saying you're asking because you've just agreed with everything Derek said, but I do want to answer it, because I do think sometimes it comes up in this strange way where what I want these bills to do is to protect the environment and define what that means, and define when things are pro- or anti-environmental. You know, if you want to say we have defined these wetlands as specifically protected places, and there needs to be a very high level of scrutiny to anything that gets proposed to be built there, that's great. The idea that literally any project can be sued for not properly considering every single consequence it might lead to is, as Derek put it, just steroids for process.
I spent a bunch of time, while we were writing this book, it didn't end up making it in, reporting on congestion pricing in Manhattan, which got passed in 2019 and as of something like 2023 had been held up for more than three years, not even in environmental review, in an environmental assessment. And congestion pricing is entirely a pro-environmental policy.
Like, in Europe, the way this would work is somebody would go to the bureaucracy, the environmental agency, and say, "I don't think this protects the environment." And they would say, "Well, every study we've ever done on it says it does, so thank you." But no. And here they're coming in and saying, "Well, you need to run a model on what it's going to do to the incomes of low-income cab drivers in Queens," right? As an actual example. And the head of the MTA, Lieber, said to me, "It is not better for the environment to have me running and rerunning these models for four years than to have me get the cars out of Manhattan." And that, I think, really gets at the absurdity of where we've gotten to. We should have goals and we should try to achieve those goals. Instead, what we've done is we have process and we try to achieve that process.
Yeah. So I came of age politically in the 1970s, long before you guys did, or sometime before you did, and there was another very powerful meme then called limits to growth. Your agenda is very much about growth. It's a very pro-growth agenda. In 1972, the Club of Rome publishes this book. A bunch of MIT scientists put it together using these new tools called computers to run projections of exponential growth, what it would do to the planet. And they suggested that if we didn't put limits on growth, we would exceed the carrying capacity of the Earth, which is a closed system, and civilization would collapse right around now.
There is a tension between growth and things like climate change. I mean, if we build millions of new units of housing, we're going to be pouring a lot of concrete. There is more pollution with growth. I mean, growth has costs. So how does an abundance agenda navigate that tension between growth and the costs of growth?
Can I grab this? Yeah. All right. I've not gotten to talk at all on the tour about really one of my favorite things I've written in the book, which is how much I hate the metaphor that growth is like a pie. So if you've been around politics at all, you've probably heard this metaphor where they'll say something like, "Oh, you want to grow the pie, right? You don't just want to cut the pie into ever smaller pieces, as redistribution does. Pro-growth politics. You want to grow the pie." If you grow a pie... How do you grow a pie? Which you don't. As I say in the book, the problem with this metaphor is it's hard to know where to start, because it gets nothing right, including its own internal structure.
But if you somehow grew a pie, what you would get is more pie. If you grow an economy, what you get is change. Growth is a measure of change. An economy that grows at two or 3% a year, year on year, is an economy that will transform extremely rapidly into something unrecognizable. Derek has these beautiful passages in the book where it's like you fall asleep in this year and you wake up in this year and we've got aspirin and televisions and rocket travel and all these amazing things.
And the reason this is, I think, really important is that this intuition they had was wrong. Take the air pollution example of a minute ago. One thing we now see over and over and over again is that as societies get richer, as they grow, they pass through a period of intense pollution. There was a time when it was London where you couldn't breathe. When I grew up in the 1980s and 1990s outside Los Angeles, Los Angeles was a place where you often couldn't breathe. Then a couple years ago it was China. Yeah, now it's Delhi, right? And it keeps moving. But the thing is, as these places get richer, they get cleaner. Now London's air is, I don't want to say sparkling, air doesn't sparkle, and I'm better at metaphors than the pie people, but it's quite breathable. I've been there. And so is LA. And it's getting cleaner in China. And there we are. In the UK, in fact, they just closed the final coal-powered energy plant in the country, ahead of schedule.
I think there are two things here. One is that you can grow, and in fact our only real chance is to grow in a way that makes our lives less resource intensive. But the second thing that I think is really important: I really don't like the term pro-growth politics or pro-growth economics, because I don't consider growth always a good thing. If you tell me that we have added a tremendous amount of GDP by layering coal-fired power plants all across the country, I will tell you that's bad. If we did it by building more solar panels and wind turbines and maybe nuclear power, that would be good. I actually think we have to have quite strong opinions on growth. We are trying to grow in a direction, and that is to say, we are trying to change in a direction.
And one of the things this book tries to do is say that technology should come with a social purpose. We should yoke technology to a social purpose. For too long we've seen technology as something the private sector does, which is often true, but not always. The miracles of solar and wind and battery power that have given us the only shot we have to avoid catastrophic climate change have been technological miracles induced by government policy, by tax credits in the US and in Germany, by direct subsidies in China. Operation Warp Speed pulled a futuristic vaccine out of the future and into the present. And then when it did it, it said the price of this vaccine will be zero dollars. There are things you can achieve through redistribution, and they are wonderful and remarkable, and we
should achieve them. But there are things you can achieve and problems you can only solve through technology, through change. And one of the core views of the book, which we've been talking a bit less about on the trail, is that progressivism needs to put technology much more at the center of its vision of change because the problems it seeks to solve cannot be solved except by technology in many cases. So we cannot do—
There's a logic there, though. I mean, there's an assumption there that technology will arrive when you want it to, right? I mean, I agree technology can change the terms of all these debates, and especially the debate around growth. But there is, you know, technology doesn't always arrive on time when you want it. I mean, a lot of your book stands on abundant clean energy, right? I mean, the whole scenario at the beginning of the book, which is this utopia that you paint in so many ways, depends on the fact that we've solved the energy problem. Can we count on that? I mean, fusion has been around the corner for a long time.
Well, nothing in that one requires fusion. I mean, that one just requires building what we know how to build, at least on the energy side. But— And you mean solar, nuclear? Solar, nuclear, wind, advanced geothermal. We can do all that. I mean, but Derek should talk about this part because he did more of the reporting here, but there are things we don't have yet, like green cement and fuel, and that's— Yeah, so do we wait for that, or we build and then— No, you don't wait.
We don't wait. No, let's be deliberate about it. I mean, why do we have penicillin? Why does penicillin exist? Well, the story that people know if they went to medical school or if they picked up a book on, like, coolest inventions in history is that in 1928 Alexander Fleming, Scottish microbiologist, went on vacation somewhere, I couldn't figure out where, comes back to his lab two weeks later, and he's been studying Staphylococcus, he's been studying bacteria, and he looks at one of his petri dishes and the Staphylococcus, which typically looks under a microscope like a cluster of grapes, in fact I think Staphylococcus is sort of derived from the Greek for, like, grape cluster, realizes that it's been zapped. There's nothing left in the petri dish. And when he figures out that there's been some substance that maybe has blown in through an open window that's zapped the bacteria in the dish, he realizes that it's from this genus called Penicillium and he calls it penicillin. So that's the breakthrough that everybody knows and it's amazing. Penicillin blew in through an open window, like God was just like, here you go.
That's a story that people know and it's romantic and it's beautiful and it's utterly insufficient to understand why we have penicillin, because after 13 years Fleming and Florey and Chain, the fellas who won the Nobel Peace Prize for the discovery of and nourishing of the discovery of penicillin, were totally at a dead end. In 1941 they had done a couple studies with mice. Kind of seemed like penicillin was doing some stuff. They did a couple human trials on five people. Two of them died.
So if you stop the clock 13 years after penicillin's discovery, and, you know, Ezra and I were journalists in the 1940s, like, you know, we were medical innovation journalists, and someone was like, hey folks, hey guys, how do you feel about penicillin, this mold that blew in through a window that killed 40% of its phase one clinical trial, we'd be like, "Sounds like it sucks. Why are you even asking about it?"
But that's not where the story ends, because Florey and Chain brought penicillin to America. And it was just as Vannevar Bush and some incredibly important mid-century scientists and technologists were building this office within the federal government, a wartime technology office called the Office of Scientific Research and Development. And they were in the process of spinning out the Manhattan Project and building radar at Rad Lab at MIT. And they said, "Yeah, we'll take a look at this thing penicillin. I mean, after all, if we could reduce bacterial infections in our military, we could absolutely outlive the nemesis for years and years."
So, long story short, they figure out how to grow it in vats. They figure out how to move through phase three clinical trials. They realize that it is unbelievably effective at a variety of bacteria whose names I don't know and don't mean grape for grape clusters. And penicillin turns out to be maybe the most important scientific discovery of the 20th century. It wasn't made important because Fleming discovered it on a petri dish. It was made real, it was made a product, because of a deliberate federal policy to grow it, to test it, to distribute it.
Operation Warp Speed is very similar. You know, mRNA vaccines right now are being tried in their own phase three clinical trials to cure pancreatic cancer. And pancreatic cancer is the most fatal cancer that basically exists. My mom died of pancreatic cancer about 13 years ago. It is essentially a kind of death sentence because, among other things, the cancer produces very few neoantigens, very few novel proteins that the immune system can detect and attack. And we made an mRNA vaccine that can attack them.
Why does it exist? Well, it exists because, and this is where we have to give a little bit of credit, if not to Donald Trump himself, at least Azar and some of the bureaucrats who worked under him, they had this idea that what we should do in a pandemic is to fund science from two ends. We should subsidize science by saying, hey, you know, Pfizer or Moderna or Johnson & Johnson, here's money up front. But also we should fund it, and this is especially important, as a pull mechanism using what they call an advance market commitment. If you build a vaccine that works, we'll pay you billions of dollars so that we buy it out and can distribute it to the public at a cost of $0.00. Even if you're the ninth person to build a vaccine, we'll still give you $5 billion. And that encourages everybody to try their damnedest to build it.
So, we build it. It works. They take out all sorts of bottlenecks at the FDA. They even work with Corning, the glass manufacturer, to develop these little vials that carry the mRNA vaccines on trucks to bring them to CVS without them spoiling on the way. And now we have this new frontier of medical science, although it's in jeopardy now, and scientists are removing mRNA from grant applications.
That is a huge total shanda. That is a shanda, but also an opportunity for Democrats. How so?
Because Donald Trump took the one thing his first administration actually achieved and lit it on fire. Yeah. And appointed its fore— I feel like if I say this whole sequence aloud I sound insane— and appointed the foremost enemy of his one actually good policy to be in charge of the Department of Health and Human Services, right? And also it's a Kennedy. Yeah. Just like, I know, you couldn't make this up.
Look, there is a world, and this goes back to your thing about dark abundance, there is a world where Donald Trump is dark abundance. Dark abundance, like dark energy. Yes. And it's like all-of-the-above energy strategy, Warp Speed for everything, build everything everywhere, supercharge American trade, and no civil liberties and I'm king.
Instead he, I mean, I'm not going to repeat Derek's great riff here, but he hates all the good stuff he once sort of did or promised: trying to destroy solar and wind, destroyed Operation Warp Speed and any possibility for, you know, vaccine acceleration, and you could just sort of go down the line. And what that creates is an opportunity for an opposition that isn't just a defense of American institutions as they existed before. One of the most lethal things the Democrats ever did was allow Donald Trump to negatively polarize them into the defenders of the status quo.
What it allows now is for an opposition party to arise that, yes, is a resistance to what Donald Trump is trying to do to the federal government, but is also a vision for a much more plentiful future. And that's plentiful materially, but plentiful scientifically. The thing that Derek, in that beautiful answer, is saying in response, I think, to your very good question, to put it simply, is that we're not just hoping technology appears. Whether or not it appears is, yes, partially luck and reality, whether or not the spore blew in on the heavenly breeze. But it's also partially policy. We shift luck. We shift the probabilities.
Democrats have these, you know, yard signs which have been so helpful for our book. Like, it's beautiful. I see this coming. Yeah. Really? But they always say, "We believe in science." Don't believe in science. Do science, and then make it into things people need.
And we have a— I mean, this goes back to your first question, Michael. We focus a lot in the back half of the book on the way we do grant work and the NIH, because it's really important. No, it shouldn't be destroyed. No, the scientists shouldn't all be fired or unable to put the words mRNA in their grant proposals because the people who promised to bring back free speech are now doing Control-F and cancelling grants on soil diversity, because Control-F doesn't know the difference between DEI diversity and agricultural soil diversity.
But it's also not good that in virtually every study you run of this, the way we do grant making now pushes scientists towards more herdlike ideas, safer ideas, away from daring ideas, away from things that are counterintuitive. A lot of science requires risk and it requires failure. And the government should be in the business of supporting risk and failure. And by the way, we give Democrats a lot of criticism here, but this is a huge problem that Republicans have created and that they perpetuate. Great science often sounds bizarre. You never know what you're going to get from running shrimp on a treadmill.
Like, we have— I mean, again, this is on this thing, it's like being married for a long time, you start saying your partner's lines. Yeah. But we got GLP-1s because somebody decided to start squeezing the venom out of a lizard's mouth and seeing what it could do. Yeah. And nobody thought it was going to give us GLP-1s. And they didn't even realize for a long time really what they had. You need a system that takes science so seriously, that believes in it so much, that really does allow it to fail. And so when Donald Trump stands up there and is like, "We're making mice transgender," which, one, we're not, but two, maybe we should. San Francisco answer. Yeah. This world where they look for grants in science that sound a little strange to make fun of them is a bad world, because it denies us of things we might one day need.
Yeah. We're going to turn to questions in a minute, so formulate your questions. We haven't been talking too much about trade-offs. Technology is helping us get over some of them, but you've got some very strong passages about building houses and not in my backyard. When I read your passages on housing, I get a little bit defensive. I have a very nice house in the Berkeley Hills. You used to live in a very nice neighborhood in Bernal Heights, I guess. But you make a very good case that homeowners like me bear some responsibility for the housing and homeless crisis.
Well, now I would say welcome to the struggle session. Yeah. Well, I was going to ask you to help me struggle with this. I am, you know, they're proposing a six-unit, four-story thing right next to me.
I know it'll please the crowd, but it's going to cut into my property values. It's going to, you know, it's going to shade my garden. I won't be able to garden anymore. Help me, convince me that I should not sue or complain. It's your turn. And I have a good lawyer.
Noted. The trade-off exists. There's a plant that's going to lose sun and there's six families that are going to get a house. There's a part of me that doesn't even want to elaborate beyond that calculation. So I'll only elaborate briefly.
I think Ezra put it best. There's no such thing as change without trade-offs, but there's also no such thing as stasis without trade-offs. The world in which that house is never built, the world in which every slant of shade over every plant is moral justification for an infinitude of legal challenges, is a world in which no housing will be built, because there is not a single piece of urban multifamily housing construction that isn't going to change the neighborhood somewhat.
You know, I remember when I was doing research for coming to California, because I didn't live here and wanted to have some California stories for the tour, I saw that, I think it was the month after the single-family zoning law was passed in 2021, there was an apartment building for 500 units in San Francisco that was denied by the board of representatives. 100 of those units would have been below market rent. It was going to be built on a Nordstrom valet parking lot. And it was rejected by the board. A part of me is just purely angry about that, and not just because I have no love lost for Nordstrom or valet parking, but also because it seems so unbelievably obvious that that Nordstrom valet parking lot is doing very, very little for the city of San Francisco, and 500 families being able to live in downtown San Francisco is doing quite a bit for the city.
But even there, even there, as a matter of persuasion, I recognize that maybe something is being lost for some people. At a certain level of persuasion, maybe it does no good to pretend that there is no cost to adding new housing. There is a cost to everything. But it is, I think, just undeniable to me that in the final calculus, we want to build cities for people.
I want to pick this up just real quick. And the thing I want to say to Michael Pollan, the constructed character we have here, is I actually don't want to persuade you of this. It is your God-given right to not want an apartment building down the block. It just should not be your legally given right to stop it.
Like, the reason they can build apartments in Houston and Austin but not San Francisco and Berkeley is not because we got rid of selfishness in Texas. We just don't give people there the tools to stop it. And these defaults people are perfectly happy with. People are leaving here and moving there, right? They're not furious. They're not upset. And it's not that you don't have democracy anymore if you can't block every housing development. You do. You have mayors and you have governors and you have state senators, and they're supposed to write rules that work.
Look, it took this state decades of working on it to make it so you could finally build an ADU on land you already own. And it wasn't the first bill they passed that made it possible. The first bill they passed, it turned out that they had all these loopholes, and the cities fought it and they fought it, and they passed another bill and they fought it, and it took like 10, 15 years, and now ADU growth is explosive. One out of every five homes built in the state is an ADU. But I think the moral of the story is that for all the fighting, for all the 15 or 20 years of battle that took, is anybody mad now? Does anybody run around being like, "This was a great state before the ADU"?
Yes, I was in an ADU today. Lovely. A lot of natural light. I really think that we have sometimes made this too much a question of persuasion. It's not that everybody should support every— like, God bless the YIMBYs, but this is not always a war for hearts and minds. And as anybody who's been involved in YIMBY organizing knows, you're not going to win a bunch of the hearts and minds. It's a war for the policy default. Yeah. It's a war on the basis of: can you build within certain parameters or not? Because you should be able to complain about the things that are changing around you. That's free speech. That's being a human being.
You just shouldn't be able to control it. Yeah. So complain, don't sue. Yeah. No. Don't be allowed to be, don't be able to sue. Okay. Thank you. It was hypothetical, by the way. Just want you to know, 'cause I've been shamed by this audience. Like Bill, Bill, as you can see, we attract a representative family of the population. All opinions are represented here equally.
All right, we're going to turn to your questions right now. And if you bring up the lights a little bit. There we go. Where is our first question? We're going to take this first question, second row in the front. Thank you.
Hello. You're both noted AI observers, and I flipped to the index of your book for artificial intelligence and I see there are some pages on it. It looked to me like it might be about infrastructure and the need to build that out. I just wanted you to comment about that. We're in San Francisco and AI for better or worse is growing here. But also a broader perspective maybe on the threat or maybe the impact that AI could have on an abundance agenda beyond the infrastructure also.
Great question. So right, as you noted, we talk about AI in a very admittedly narrow way in this book, which is through the infrastructural demands and the energy demands that it will take to build out AI. AI is an incredibly energy-thirsty technology, as everyone in this room knows much better than the average room. And it's very important to us that the energy that's built in the next generation is not the kind of energy that was built in the last generation. We want to move away from coal and oil and we want to move toward solar and wind. And that's why it's so important for me, for us, that we make it easier to build those kind of technologies in states that are currently governed by Democrats, which have in a variety of ways, I think sometimes even ironically, thrown up environmental blockages to building energy that would be better for the environment.
So I believe in energy super abundance, but I also want to build it using clean energy. That's the way in which we get into energy policy in the book, because I do think that at the federal level we're clearly seeing that the need to continue to build AI and to site that technology here, rather than site the data centers in, say, the Middle East, the UAE, requires that we build the energy necessary to provide for those data centers.
On the issue of AI substantively, the reason that we, I think the reason that we didn't go deeply into it, I don't want to speak too much for Ezra, but I think we're on the same page here, is that AI was changing so fast as we were writing the book that to write a chapter confidently about AI policy would be a little bit like writing a chapter about the temperature outside of my window. It's just changing so quickly, you'd have to delete the sentence by the time you finish it.
That said, when I think about AI and the risks and benefits that I'm most attuned to, it might not be the classic risk-benefit that other people are attuned to. On the benefit side, the conversations that I have with folks in AI that I'm most thrilled by are the interaction between artificial intelligence and medical science. There was an article in the New York Times recently about using artificial intelligence and large language models for drug repurposing, which is an idea that I just love, because it clicks so intuitively to me with what I understand to be the marvel of large language models, where the same way that you can build essentially a map of meaning of all the words and all of the clauses that exist in all of human language and all of human literature, and draw maps of connections between them such that when you prompt an AI, it can answer with tokens by drawing a kind of grid between those ideas. Similar maps of meaning exist in science, and one of them is the map of the molecular effects of and the side effects of the drugs that have already been approved by the FDA.
And so if you have a malady or you have a rare disease or you have any kind of something that you're suffering from when you go to a doctor, how miraculous would it be if we could create this map of molecular functionings of drugs that already have been approved, such that we might find a drug that was approved for something all the way over here and it works for something all the way over here. And you don't need to be some futurist to realize that that's possible, right?
As Ezra got the ball rolling on a story, we slurped some saliva out of a Gila monster and realized that if you synthesized the protein, it was pretty good for type 2 diabetes. And then in some phase three clinical trials realized that people were losing a lot of weight. And then not only were they losing a lot of weight, in further studies realized that GLP-1 drugs are actually anti-inflammation drugs that seem to have benefits for cardiovascular health, reducing compulsions, reducing addictions, and perhaps even, because of reducing brain inflammation, being protective against dementia, right? No one thought of that when they were taking the saliva from the lizard. But once you've approved the drug and you have this map of side effects, it might be easy for people to make that connection faster. So you wouldn't have to wait years or decades to realize that glucagon-like peptide-1 receptor agonists happen to be fantastic for something like dementia. That's very exciting to me.
What's less exciting to me is the social side. I wrote a cover story for the Atlantic a few months ago called "The Antisocial Century," and there was a section toward the end of it. "The Antisocial Century" was an essay about the fact that face-to-face socializing in American life has declined to at least a 70-year low and perhaps an all-time low. And toward the end, there's a section about artificial intelligence and the fact that tens of millions of people, especially young people, are developing relationships with AI chatbots.
I again don't begrudge someone a relationship with whatever carbon or silicon-based life form they want to form a relationship with. But what concerns me is this idea that I quite value human relationships. I think they're quite important to me, and I think they're important to other people even if they don't recognize that themselves. And I think something that people might want from relationships are things like validation and receptiveness and a willing partner to text back and a sense the other person is always going to say, "I understand and you're right." That can be learned by a large language model and might even be more efficiently delivered than from a person. Will certainly be more efficient. Certainly. Yeah. Right.
And that's scary to me. And it's particularly scary to me because, you know, Ezra has young children. I have a 19-month-old. I don't know what that world is like where she grows up in a world where if what she wants is validation, if what she wants is a ready reply, if what she wants is the promise of an unconditional love that will never come with anger, what if she comes to learn that it's the phone and the machine within the phone that delivers that more readily than any human in her life? That's a pretty scary thought to me.
So even before we get to the possibility of superintelligence bringing down energy grids, at the moment I'm actually even less concerned about us inventing an Einstein for IQ that can destroy the world. I'm worried about inventing an Einstein for EQ that can replace human relationships with silicon-based ones.
We should go to... Thank you. [Applause] If it's okay, I'm not going to let you answer that. I was not. Thank you. Good, good, good. Next question. This question is from the front and center upstairs.
Thank you. So San Francisco builds fewer homes each year than half the number of babies born here. Do you think escaping scarcity can allow people to stop fretting that their kids might be shut out of good schools or safe neighborhoods or stable careers? How do you see abundance improving what it means to raise children or grow up in a city?
I think that's very straightforward. I know personally a lot of families who left the city because they couldn't afford to live here with a child, and those families are friends of mine, right? It was tragic. And I see it happen in New York, where I live now. It's almost like it's such a straightforward answer that I don't know how to do what we're usually doing here and embellishing it, but it would be good if working families in cities that liberals govern, and even that they don't, could afford to raise their children in the city they live in and love. So. [Applause]
This question's downstairs on your left.
Hi, thank you so much. I've heard you use the words housing and families, but I'm wondering if you could speak to housing for teachers, in particular preschool teachers, early childhood teachers. I, you know, have the benefit of being in a small percentage that can live basically paycheck to paycheck in San Francisco as a preschool teacher. I also have a master's and went to Georgetown. I am the exception, and it's very hard for me. So yeah, what do you see as the solution forward? What's happening policy-wise? Could you please speak to that? Thank you.
Do I take it? Yeah. Sure. I mean, first, you do incredibly hard work. You know what's easy is sitting with a book all day. Like, I have kids in preschool. Teachers, that's tough work. And yeah, you should be able to live in the city. Some parts of this are just, it's all the same problem. And the problem isn't conceptually hard. We have just made it hard. It's not that preschool teachers should get a deal that firefighters don't get, that retail workers don't get. It's that the measure of whether you are governing your city well is whether or not the people who serve the city by doing all the work that keeps that city a place people want to live can live there.
And I try to say this in everything I write about this as clearly as I can, because this is the thing I'm trying to convince Democrats of. If you can't, then it doesn't matter if you're winning elections. It doesn't matter what your popularity rating is. If the working class cannot live where you govern, you are not the party of the working class. That's it. [Applause]
Look, I had a friend who was a firefighter in San Francisco. Couldn't afford to live here with children. Person actually keeping this city from burning down again. Like, again, it's not complicated. And also it's not like we have not figured this out elsewhere. Tokyo, you can live in Tokyo on the median wage. Like, you just can. They just build a lot of housing. The city is incredibly vertical.
And that's where I think some of the sort of arguments that get made... I think I want to put it like this. One thing that infected a bunch of thinking about cities in recent decades and was very poisonous was the idea that cities are a luxury good. Michael Bloomberg had said this a number of times about New York City explicitly. New York City, he said, is a luxury good, and luxury goods have luxury prices. Cities are not supposed to be a luxury good. They're not like getting a speedboat or fancy art. They're supposed to be places people live, all kinds of people who work there.
And one reason that's really important is that when you gate them, you're gating one of the most fundamental mechanisms of opportunity and mobility that humanity has had, that this country has had, which is people moving from poor areas to richer areas and getting richer by being there. And so when we make it something where the working class has to commute in and can't do that, then you have broken the direction of opportunity, right? We actually have data about this in the book, that it used to be that people moved from poor places to richer ones, and now they're moving from richer places to poorer ones. And that movement was responsible in the 20th century for about a third of the drop in income inequality. But we've thrown the process into reverse. And so of course we are making income inequality worse.
So yeah, the answer here isn't that hard. There needs to be enough housing such that it is cheap enough for you to rent it. And yes, because getting there would be quite difficult, there also should be a lot of housing that's affordable, right? I am not of the view that all housing should be market rate. But I think it's really important to keep saying that it is important to do that, even though it is simple to think about, because it's not just about letting people live here. It's also about, like, this is what social mobility is. It's the ability to live in the places you work and benefit from them.
This question is upstairs in the front to your right.
Hi. This is a question that both my husband and I combined wanted to ask. The first question is, who do you both think is the most dangerous person in the world right now? That's my husband's question. And then my question is, how do we stop them?
Good marriage. Cannot believe I gave Ezra the last question.
I mean, there's like an obvious hanging piñata in front of me, I swear. Now you're going to hit it. Yeah. I hit it. Take a whack. Yeah. I mean, look, rather than say that Donald Trump and Elon Musk are the most dangerous people in the world in a way that provides a great degree of certainty about that remark, let me make some comments about the degree to which I think they're dangerous. Is that a decent filibuster?
I think what's happened to Elon Musk is a tragedy. This is someone who is in our book as a kind of walking advertisement for what the government can do with the private sector if they understand each other and work together. The Tesla Model X exists because of a loan in 2010 created by a government policy in 2007 and built on by the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act in 2009. Tesla is what it is because of a government policy that sought to build technology that helped us solve the energy and climate change crisis. SpaceX exists because of government contracts.
And rather than enter government and represent a reflection of the good that can be done if government has a positive vision of the future, he has taken a wrecking ball to many of the institutions and policies that are most important to build that future. I mean, some of the decisions just absolutely boggle the mind and make no sense as anything other than a catastrophically callous attempt to purge the government of progressives for the sin of having ideas that he doesn't like at this moment but happened to actually sometimes like six years ago.
Even deep cuts, like what he's doing at the Department of Education, destroying the degree to which we can learn about whether or not children are improving their literacy and numeracy scores year after year. We're gutting those programs for what? Why in the world would you be incurious about the degree to which our education system works?
So I think the danger that he poses and Donald Trump poses to the constitutional order is vast, but the danger that they pose to all sorts of corners of American life is unbelievably depressing to me. And I don't know if they're the most dangerous people in the world, but I think at this moment they might be the most powerful. And to a certain extent, danger is a function of power. This is as true for technologies like artificial intelligence as it is for people. And it really profoundly depresses me to see that someone who has been such an obvious and objective beneficiary of some really interesting and important, wise governance has decided to turn himself into a kind of dark wrecking ball for the future.
And the how to stop him part of the question: you win. You win, and what's a good platform to win on? And a good platform to win on is abundance. But in all honesty, you win. And a part of winning, I think, is proving to people. It's my first
answer is going to be my last answer maybe here. I think it's absolutely essential that the Democratic Party and liberals in America prove that we deserve the power that we seek. And the way to prove that is to be able to point to the places that we have power and say, "Look what we did. Look what we built. Don't just look at what we spent."
And I think over the last few decades, Democrats have gotten into a weird rut where we associated success with the dollar amounts that we could brag about, with the amount of money we could spend and not the things that we could build. And so we were proud to say we have 1.2 trillion for infrastructure and then what do we build? And we were proud to say, you know, the poor mayor of Chicago who bragged about spending 11 billion on 10,000 affordable units, $1.1 million per affordable unit. What are you doing, man?
Not division. Not to... I think you need a culture change in the Democratic Party, and one thought that I had in Ezra's first reply is he was talking about what's been tolerated with Democrats and liberals in the last few years is that, I don't remember where I heard this term first, maybe it was someone in Silicon Valley, but I kind of love it: culture is what you tolerate. Culture is what you tolerate. And people associate your culture by looking at what you tolerate.
And as long as Democrats are going to be the party that tolerates homelessness and housing scarcity and not building clean energy and putting signs in our front lawn that said kindness is everything while our backyard is zoned for single-family housing, we're the party that tolerates hypocrisy. And that has to change.
I think that's a terrific place to stop. I want to thank you both for giving us some light in a very dark time and some hope, but not empty hope. I mean, with a real path in front of it. So anyway, will you join me in thanking these guys?
[Music]
Article published