Chapo Trap House - 919 - Abruendance Agenda feat. Madinah Wilson-Anton & Matt Bruenig (3/24/25)

Episode Date: March 24, 2025

Delaware state rep Madinah Wilson-Anton returns to the show to brief us on Elon Musk’s attempts to rewrite the state laws of Delaware to help him secure a $50 billion+ compensation package. We discuss the “race to the bottom” in state business laws, and the new wave of assaults on basic legal legitimacy in pursuit of complete oligarchical control. Then, Matt Bruenig joins us to discuss the hot new word on all the wonks’ lips: ABUNDANCE. We review the Abundance Agenda, Matt gives us his takes on the policies, and we evaluate the Abundance potential as a viable organizing principle for the moribund Democratic party. Check out NLRB Edge, Matt’s labor law newsletter: https://www.nlrbedge.com/

All I'm gonna do is hit the drum. Hello, everybody. It's Monday, March 24th, and this is your Chop-O. In just a little bit, Felix and I will be talking to Matt Brunig about the cool new trend that's sweeping the nation. It's called abundance and all the kids are into it. Felix and I will be talking to Matt Brunig about the cool new trend that's sweeping the nation. It's called abundance and all the kids are into it. So we'll be figuring out what this new fangled trend is all about with Matt. But first, we have another issue to discuss. There's something rotten in the state of Delaware. And we know this, thanks to our listener and

Delaware correspondent, Representative Medina Wilson Anton. Medina Wilson-Anton. Medina, welcome back to the show. Thanks for having me back. Wish it was better circumstances. Well, OK. So there's goings on in the state of Delaware. There's a...

You wanted to talk to us. There's a political fight going down right now over something called Senate Bill 21. What is the bill? What are the stakes here and what's the fight over? Yeah. So every year, as your listeners know, we update the Delaware corporate code with our court of chancery and all that. This year, instead of going through the normal process where we have a bunch of people in a closed door meeting decide what those changes should

be, we had different people in a a closed door meeting decide what those changes should be. We had different people in a different closed door meeting, including folks that represent Tesla, that represent Metta, and who knows who else, because there's no attendance list. And they've decided that they need to change our corporate governance in the state of Delaware because companies are leaving. They're calling it DEGZIT, D-E-EXIT. And this is important because about a third of our state's revenue comes from the corporate franchise. So we have over 2 million corporate entities that

are headquartered here in the state. We have, I think, close to half of Fortune 500 companies. And we're known as that destination because of our court of chancery. And what really worries me about this bill is that it's catering to a select few techno bro oligarchs and not the majority of what often are referred to as our customers, the thousands of other companies that are headquartered here that want to be able

to go to the court of ch chance rate and have judges decide on cases and not just have the code prescribe how things should go. And so we've heard from a lot of different folks from across the country. We've heard from the largest pension fund in the country, the California state employees pension fund, and lots of others that have said, pump the brakes, wait a minute, this makes us nervous. We're invested in these companies and we don't want controllers like Elon Musk in Zuckerberg just raiding companies like they're little piggy banks. So like what are the proposed changes to the court of the famous court? I mean, Medina, there are some, there are some great courts in this country,

you know, the Supreme Court, the Fifth District, Southern District of New York. But for my money, the GOAT Court of America is Delaware's court of chancery. What are the proposed changes to this court that, like, for instance, Mark Zuckerberg and Elon Musk and those supportive of that agenda, like, what are they attempting to fix about Delaware's chancery court? That's a great question. Yeah, I mean, I would agree with you.

I think the Delaware Court of Chancery is kind of the Jalen Hurt's, if you will. It doesn't get it, you know, doesn't get enough respect. But, you know, it's just it's got a ring. We've got it. Once that ring, you know, yeah, low key MVP. Yeah. So what these guys want is no accountability. What we've been told is that there is worry in the corporate world that the court of chance theory is becoming unbalanced, unpredictable. And when they say unpredictable and unbalanced, they basically just mean balanced.

What? The laws that are on the books were supposed to follow those? This all started because Elon had this compensation package in 2018 with Tesla where he was supposed to get paid over 50 billion and the Tesla shareholder brought it to court and was like, wait a minute, we didn't have enough information before we made this decision. There wasn't an actual fair negotiation taking place because he has control basically over the folks on the other side of the negotiation table. And this was proven in court because he admitted, Elon admitted in court, that there was no one to negotiate with, so he negotiated against himself. And so he loses that, the compensation package is thrown out, he goes on a tirade and is

like, Delaware is run by woke activist judges, which as much as I love Jalen Hurts and his all female management team, not exactly, you know, the Jalen Hurts and Saquon Barclays at the Chancery Court are there. They're what they're woke. The I. Hires. Yeah, so they basically so he he goes on a diary. So the court acts a 50 billion dollar sort of severance pay or like a stock option package for Elon Musk because it wasn't I don't know what was improperly properly negotiated. And now this gets on his radar.

And now we have this bill to essentially what like just remove any and all oversight of this court. I mean, I'm looking at the I'm looking at the some. They want to make it really simple to be able to make these transactions. And the arguments that were that are being made to us, it's like it's impossible to have a negotiation where you have an independent director like, how am I supposed to find an independent director? And it's like, um, I don't know, just don't hire your brother.

I don't know. Don't like, like hire someone qualified to run the company. It doesn't have to be your bestie. And like what they really want is to be able to have someone that is, that has their best interests and not the company's best interests on both sides of the negotiation table. That's what this bill will do. The other thing that it'll do is make it way more difficult for plaintiffs to actually investigate wrongdoing. So part of how

this all came out is because someone was able to actually investigate through email, through text messages. They don't want any of that to be the case anymore. They want it to be much more difficult. And what like was the newest news, I guess, I think it was last week that came out that there are at least two cases right now that could result in billions in liability for Zuckerberg and Metta that will just get thrown out because this bill of pass as written will go into effect for cases that have not been filed prior to February 17th, which is an interesting date to pick. And so it's very clear what this bill is intending to do. It's trying to continue to concentrate wealth in the hands of these

techno oligarchs. They're literally writing laws to benefit themselves. I mean, it doesn't get more. It's just olig themselves. I mean, it doesn't get more. It's just oligarchy. Like, I mean, it's ridiculous. Yeah, I'm just reading from the just some reporting on it says, among other things, SB 21 would alter how companies can use independent directors to ensure the deals they've made will not be subject to court scrutiny and would limit the records that shareholders can obtain from companies

when investigating possible breaches of fiduciary duty. Could you just give us a quick primer on how the chancery court works and why there is a chancery court and why is this unique feature of Delaware, as you said, as the state that is home to something like, as you mentioned, what, two million different corporate entities. So like, how does a court of Chancery work as like a legal system for corporate governance? Yeah, well, part of what's, you know, a draw is that it's very business friendly. So it's not like they're throwing out 50 billion dollar packages left and right. Like this was an egregious case.

That's why it went that way. But it's very efficient. The judges are all well-versed in corporate law and business practices. And so companies know that they're going to get a quick turnaround. They're going to get a judge who actually knows what they're talking about and understands the subject at hand. Now, part of the criticism that we're hearing lately is the fact that the judges don't rotate. And so there are some companies that are like, oh, this judge just doesn't like me. She has it out for us. Like,

they keep putting us in front of her every time we have an issue and she just doesn't like us. And like I brought up in some meetings where I'm like, look, if that's the concern, then maybe we talk about rotating judges or you can opt into a lottery pick or something, but you don't just throw out judicial discretion altogether on these matters of transactions because you think she doesn't like you or whatever or she's woke. It'd be great if our judges were all woke, in my opinion, but I don't think that's the case. Get a rope-skeeter on the bench again. It's just a very efficient and it has a lot of precedent, right, because it's been around

for so long. And hopefully it will continue to be despite this bill passing and trying to make it obsolete. And could you give some some background on the like the inciting incident here, which is the the Tesla stock options, the $50 billion payout to Elon Musk. What was the issue with that payout? And why did the, how did the court decide and how did it reach that decision? Yeah, so part of it, the two parts that I remember, is the one I shared where he admitted that there was no one advocating on behalf of the company. It was him on both sides, because the director was not an independent director. And the other was the fact that they found that some of the benchmarks that

were part of the compensation package, so like they're like, you know, we're going to hit this in Q1, we're going to hit that in Q2. They found information that showed that they'd already internally figured out that they were going to hit one of those benchmarks and that the other wasn't actually a stretch goal. And so they were misrepresenting to the company shareholders what actually was likely to happen and they were able to prove that when they went and investigated those that documentation. And so cases like that we're talking about not existing in the future, right? Like basically shareholders will not have a way of holding folks like him accountable. And you're just kind of left to assume that the minutes include all the information that's relevant.

Now, I want to go back to something you talked about in the opening here, this concept of exit and that like, OK, so Delaware has for a while now been the kind of like, hey, we you know, this is the the corporate charter state. We have no rules like our other states trying to sort of out under regulate Delaware. And it's like, what is spurring this threat to leave? And what what would it mean for Delaware? And like with these companies to camp to a even less regulated state for banking? Yeah. So that's a big part of this conversation. Texas and Nevada are both trying to market themselves as states that are business friendly. They are what I'll say is they are racing

to the bottom. They are completely controller friendly. Shareholders do not have rights really in their in those courts. And so in my opinion, we're not even in the same league. And so what makes me nervous about this as someone who, you know, yeah, I'm a leftist but I also care about my constituents and I care about our state's budget. We're in a situation right now with the feds where like we might be losing billions in federal funding.

We can't afford to lose the franchise. For me, this is an easy decision because I think one, protecting our budget and protecting the franchise goes hand in hand with voting against this bill. Because if we're undermining our court of chancery, which is what sets us apart, and what really is attractive to the majority of companies, like the great vast majority of companies, we're not competing with Nevada or Texas. What worries me about passing the bill though, is if Delaware becomes more like Texas than Nevada,

companies are gonna decide, you know what, maybe instead of going to Delaware, we're just gonna stay in our home state. And somebody actually sent me a proxy statement, basically like the admin at a company saying, like, hey, let's send this to our shareholders and see what they think about leaving Delaware. And they were like, isn't this scary? Like, they want to leave, they don't want to be here. And it was about going to Indiana. And I'm like, this is what worries me. Like, I

don't want all of these companies to just go to every other state because Delaware is not special anymore. And so I think it's important that when we talk about this bill, we realize that it's really just another example of attacking our institutions, attacking judges, and saying that things are just, you know, they're not fair because we didn't get our way in court. That's really what it comes down to. It seems to be part of a broader crisis in not just liberalism, but specifically American institutions that all these things that were understood to be in place roughly, you know, since the end of World War Two, things like a sense of propriety with like the chance record or the functions of like an independent media or whatever like institutional

safeguards there are on anything in America, whether they're courts or regulation or whatever that previous generations understood these things as sort of necessary to maintain a sense of propriety to keep this whole thing going that giving a fig leaf to the idea of like legal oversight, the privacy of the courts, all of this, it was important to maintain legitimacy. And as sort of like a, um, uh, self, a self cleaning feature in the system, but now, um, all of their successors are are just they're looking at all those things. And it isn't just like, you know, Elon Musk, move fast and break things types. It's also some some liberals going, what the fuck is the point of these stupid regulations that

have kept this entire thing going this entire time. Whether it's like foreign policy or something more on the state level like this. There's just a complete crisis where they're looking at the guardrails that built this entire thing and going, this is stupid. Yeah. I mean, I think a lot of people have learned the wrong lesson from Greece. Like there's so many companies that love Delaware because of the court of Chancery. And instead of us like really like standing strong in that and feeling confident that we're teasing on our hair and putting leather pants on and going,

tell me about it. What are we doing here? What are we doing? Medina also looking into this. there is a group of Wilmington lawyers who are instrumentally instrumental in this bill. And I just have to read the name of the law firm because it's so funny to me. It's Richard's Layton and Finger, which I think is a hilarious name for a law firm. But can you tell us anything about Richard's Layton and Finger and their interests in advancing this bill. That sounds like a law firm you could hire in Elden Ring if reformed Jew was a class. Oh, what can I say about Richard's, Leighton and Finger? They have no interest in the bill other than that they care about Delaware.

I mean, that's what I've been told. Yeah. OK. And how about how about Delaware's governor, Governor Matt Meyer? What can you tell us about him and where does he stand on this bill?

Yeah, Matt Meyer. I think he's doing his best. I wasn't in these backroom meetings with Matt. I can only imagine that they had him up against the wall with their hands right under his chin. I don't know, like he's fairly new. You guys remember our last governor stepped down

a little bit early to be mayor. Delaware's out your trend setting. We're doing what we're trying to do. Yeah, New York's following suit right now. Yeah, so he's new. Part of the messaging around this has been like, it was day one on the job and we realized that there was a huge problem that no one had paid attention to before. And like, I don't know, that one's kind of hard for me to believe too.

It's not like the last governor wasn't like a corporate shill. So if this was really a problem, I feel like he probably would have had his eye on it. But yeah, I've met with, you know, people in his office. I've also read some of the memos that they put out where I'm just like, oh, God, like, it's painful. Because like, he's been on like national TV every week for some reason. And in one of them, they ask him, Well, what would you say if Elon Musk was here? And he's like, Elon? Who? And they all just like blink and look at it.

And like, I don't know, I'm, I'm a comic, I feel like if I bombed that bad, I would kill myself. Like, I like per Felix's comment about like, just sort of just stripping the copper wire out of like what used to be like the basic infrastructure of like American corporate governance and global capitalism, etc, etc. What do you think of like the ramifications not just for Delaware, but for the rest of the country in like a state of affairs in which not just like corporations or wealthy people can lobby the government, but

like figures like Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg not content to get their way merely 99 percent of the time. And like even their most egregious swindles can just say, I don't like this court anymore, change it. I mean, it's pretty terrifying. I just keep thinking about this Elon Musk Tesla package as an example, because that's $56 billion we're seeing now. So that was in 2018. Now in 2025, Elon is single-handedly taking Tesla share values every day, a new low. And I just think about people that are good people that maybe didn't invest in Tesla because they are Nazis, but because they want to retire someday. And when we get rid

of these regulations and like safeguards for shareholders that expect folks that are running companies to run them the best way possible, we're hurting everyday people. Like, a lot of the folks that we've heard from are people that represent pension funds, that represent teachers and, you know, firefighters from across the country. And it's really scary to know that because a couple defense attorneys in Delaware are upset that plaintiffs' attorneys get paid. This is, this is what like was really honestly eyeopening for me in these meetings. They're so jelly that plaintiff's attorneys invest time and resources into investigating these cases and then win. Like I had to like sit there and be like, wait, how does judge duty work again?

Like, am I not understanding the American justice system? Because like you would think that having like, one of the things that we actually aren't voting on tomorrow, but that was originally put in front of us was, and I, uh, a proposal to cap plaintiff attorney's fees. I'm like, well, if we're capping fees, didn't we cap both sides? Like, I don't get it. And I was thinking about it this morning. both sides. Like, I don't get it. And I was thinking about it this morning. It's kind of like

being upset that an attorney who represented a kid who got brutalized by the police got paid. And it's like, oh, can you believe the attorney got paid X thousands of dollars when the city settled? Like, that's the problem. It's like, no, the problem is the cop beating up the kid. And like, how much did the defense attorney get paid? Like, are we going to talk about that? Like, what are we doing? I mean, that is, weirdly enough, that exact phenomenon is the cause behind some of the worst Alec back state laws in, you know, really since like the 80s or 90s. One of the reasons that it's almost fucking impossible to file a class action medical suit in Texas and a lot of other southern and some Midwestern states is because of that specifically. Like conservative lawmakers who hated class action plaintiff attorneys and said that not only are these guys annoying assholes, they're actually the reason that like, you know, health care or whatever else they're getting at is so expensive.

And it annihilated tort reform and like made it so that you're you know if you're in Dallas, your doctor can like put your elbow on backwards. That's what they're trying to do here. They want to make it like what they've been telling me in some of these meetings is like, well, think about it. Like, the attorneys who won the Tesla compensation package thing, they got like X hundred million dollars. And I'm like, and they saved shareholders, billions of dollars. And they're like, no, they didn't. They did. Like, they act like X hundred million dollars and I'm like, and they saved shareholders billions of dollars. And they're like, no, they didn't. They did. Like they act like there's not a return to the shareholder through that work. And it really, I got to tell you guys, I've been feeling like I'm crazy listening to some of these things. And then I go into another meeting and I'm like, oh right, no, okay. They're just like, they're misrepresenting things in line to me. I have to like in order to sleep, I have to watch like the minute mashup of Patrick Mahomes getting sacked like over and over again. The Super Bowl is like moving.

It's such a weird line from people, I mean, especially in this case, but also like, you know, the same the same case with tort reform where it's like, okay, is it good or bad for there to be a highly mercenary environment in America where you can get paid $100 million for being really good at corporate law? Is that good or bad? Are we just arbitrarily deciding that the one type of person that is not allowed to make $15 million is a class action attorney?

Why? Like, either it's all okay or none of it is. Right. Right. Well, I did suggest capping fees on both sides and no one was interested. Right. Yeah. Medina, when is this bill being voted on?

And like, what kind of like, what are you doing right now with votes or organize people or just talk to people in Delaware about not passing this law? Yeah. So the bill was officially actually the agenda for tomorrow, Tuesday, just about an hour ago, which is pretty late. So they've waited for a while to put that out publicly. I am introducing some amendments to try to kind of make it better. They will likely fail, but, you know, gotta do what you gotta do, try to, you know, make the world a better place. So that's what I'll be doing. And then there's so many folks that have been mobilized around this issue. I got thousands, literally thousands of emails last week, so much so that they shut. My Outlook sent me a message and was like, you got a lot of emails. We're just going to shut it off. Wait, wait, wait. Outlook does that? I don't think

Gmail did that feature. Did I get DDoS'd or something? It's weird. It works in the same way as those Canadian euthanasia laws. Yeah. So, yeah, a lot of folks were reaching out about it. There's a lot of money on both sides, and that's another one of those like, okay for me, not for these situations where they're like, there's millionaires and billionaires on both sides. And we're like, so which which ones are the good ones?

The pension funds or? So there's been a lot of money kind of thrown into mail and ads and all that. So we'll see what happens. But, you know, it's hell world. So probably the worst thing will happen. Well, Medina, I want to thank you for your time and just remind our listeners that despite what you make here, the Tesla Cybertruck is still a great car. And think of the value that you get with driving a car like that.

It's all computer. I love the CEO of the car company being like, just a fair warning, people will try to kill you and light you on fire in this car, but we're working on it. They're terrorists, though. They're terrorists. I don't worry about that. Yeah. Look, it's one of the safer modes of transit you can possibly do is ride in a Tesla Cybertruck.

Look, nearly most of them have been recalled recently, but there are still a few good ones out there. Did you see the thing where they were like, they're trying to respond to the vandalism thing, and they're like, we actually have like 87 cameras that record 360 degrees inside the car and outside of it, and then they were like, but it isn't recorded and doesn't go anywhere.

Because they realized- I'd like a door that can open. Yeah, breaking like 5,000 laws to do that. All right. Medina, Wilson, Anton, thank you for your time letting us know about what's going on in Delaware right now. Best of luck with the vote tomorrow. And this is something we'll keep an eye on.

So thanks for letting us know about this and thanks for your time coming on. Yeah, thanks for having me. Last time I came on, I got in a lot of trouble and I have a feeling I'll be in trouble tomorrow for this. All right. Well, everyone, follow Medina Wilson Anton and if Medina, if there's anything like in the waning hours before this bill gets, is there just anything that you'd like our listeners to like do with this interview or just, or just like to be

aware of it? Should they call people in Delaware, call their local representative? I mean, what would you counsel people to do about this? Yeah, definitely. If you live in Delaware, call your state rep, tell them that you want them to vote no. If you live in Delaware and your state rep votes yes, I don't know, maybe think about what you want to do with your time in the next couple of years, because we're all up every two years.

Last time I was on here, I told you guys about how our speaker of the house was anti-Semitic. And surprise, surprise, she denied it, but I got in trouble for that. And then she lost her primary to a working family's party candidate. Um, first time candidate. So like, you know, none of us are, uh, above, you know, a challenge. And I would encourage folks that are fed up, whether you're in Delaware or anywhere else, to throw your hat in the ring because we got a lot of goops out here making really important decisions that impact

all of us. So yeah, as corny as it is, my thing is get off the sidelines, get into the action, get that pick six, pull a Cooper to Jean on your birthday. Medina, Wilson, Anton, Thanks again so much for your time. Thanks. All right, we are back and joining Felix and I right now is Matt Brunig. Matt, welcome back to the show. No, thanks for having me. So the buzzword of the moment. If you are a political sicko, if you follow the political

news, if you're online, if you've probably seen the word abundance being used very frequently over the last couple of days, and it's sort of it's the hottest new thing since 1 billion Americans. So Matt, like, so it's a movement to like kind of rebrand the Democratic Party and like a new sort of future future looking way to build and innovate our ways out of the intractable problems of the 21st century. It's got a book by Derek Thompson and Ezra Klein selling this new package. So like, Matt, like as simply as you can describe it, what is the abundance agenda? Well, you know, I mean, in the broadest sort of gloss,

it is this sort of like modernist future, futurist kind of ambition. But the book abundance, you know, as much coverage as there's been about it, it really just kind of says two things. The first thing is that the administrative burdens, the red tape, if you will, that go into construction are too high and need to be lowered, and that our innovation system in the US is broken. There's too much risk aversion. So, it's a very ambitious, very ambitious and world changing

agenda. I mean, like, and also very original as well. I've never never heard such daring thoughts uttered in political circles. There is too much red tape. And we've got to build more things. Yeah, no, it's it's kind of like Matt Iglesias is the rent is too damn high, which I think came out in 2012, but also applied to trains and energy facilities. Yeah, the power plants are too damn small. But but not like this.

So this is like the book is like it's a number of things. It's like it's sort of a list of policy prescriptions But it's also a kind of philosophical I don't know creed accord attempting to kind of shake off the doldrums of this past election and and sort of rebrand the democratic Party in like as you said like a very future oriented but also politically moderate vein Like i'm interested like in in the abundance agenda like who are the the culprits that are identified for like sort of stymieing building new

housing and innovation? Yeah the enemy you know they're they're kind of cagey about that and that's been kind of one of the interesting parts about the discourse is some people have criticized you know where are the enemies who are the people who are opposing this and then it kind of falls to other people, mostly at the Niskanen Center, to kind of fill in the gaps. And, you know, I mean, I guess really it's those pesky nimbies at the end of the day that are the big, you know, barriers to construction. And then I guess sort of like, Dr. Lobbies and other professional class people who thrive on red tape and, you know, the consulting class and things like that. The PMC writ large, I guess. That's like the power center that is holding the future back.

Well, I mean, this book arrives at a current moment where like, you know, after the 2024 election, I think like the consensus is that the current Democratic Party is fucking washed and like they need to do something. They need to get voters back. Either they need to be more moderate or they need to do something different. And like this book arrives at like the same week that like Bernie Sanders, for instance, is turning out like tens of thousands of people in Denver and all over the country to essentially a message about fighting oligarchy and identifying the culprits that are ruining the lives of

people in this country as essentially the entrenched money and power of billionaires. But like, is it a coincidence that the abundance agenda is arriving at the exact moment when there is like a concerted push to rebrand the Democratic Party in a more social democratic direction? And what do the authors of abundance, Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson, how do they feel like, are any like broad universal programs or policies, does any of that make it into their abundance prescription? No, there are no welfare components to it at all.

I mean, you're right that I think, whether this was a happenstance on their end or plan this out this way, they're definitely, we're in this period where everything is, the Democrats got nothing, right? Schumer has nothing. No one even knows what to say. We did industrial policy. Lena Conran, the FTC, for four years. We tried everything. And so what can we do? What are we going to say? And this is the fresh thing, right? I guess, right? Like we could just keep going back and saying, what about universal health care? What about child care? But we've been saying that. We don't ever really deliver. They tried the Build Back Better bill and it failed. And so I guess instead of rehashing

all that, let's try something new. We can... And that something new is getting rid of red tape. Getting rid of red tape. And over regulation. But from there, you'd sell it in a much broader way. Like the book starts with a depiction of 2050, as the authors imagine it. And can I read that, by the way? Yes, please do.

Because I yeah, go ahead, go ahead. OK, my favorite part of the book and, you know, I perused it. But by far the best part of the book by far is the opening section. It begins as such. You open your eyes at dawn and turn in the cool bedsheets. A few feet above your head, affixed to the top of the roof, a layer of solar panels blinks in the morning sun. Their power mixes with electricity pulled from several clean energy sources, towering

wind turbines to the east, small nuclear power plants to the north, deep geothermal wells to the south. Forty years ago, your parents cooled their bedrooms with jewels dredged out of coal mines and oil pits. They mined rocks and burned them, coating their lungs with the byproducts. They encased their world, your world, in a chemical heat trap. Today that seems barbaric. You live in a cocoon of energy so clean, it barely leaves a carbon trace and so cheap, you can scarcely find it on your monthly bill.

The year is 2050. It goes on. You open the refrigerator. In the fruit and vegetable drawer are apples, tomatoes, and an eggplant shipped from the nearest farm mere miles away. These crops don't grow horizontally across fields. They grow vertically on tiered shelves

inside a tall greenhouse. These skyscraper farms spare countless acres for forests and parks. As for the chicken and beef, much of it comes from cellular meat facilities which grow animal cells to make chicken breasts and ribeye steaks. No live animals needed, which means no confinement and slaughter. Once prohibitively expensive, cultivated meat scaled with the help of plentiful electricity. When your parents were young, nearly 25% of all global land mass was used to raise livestock for human consumption.

That is unimaginable now. Much of that land has rewilded. Out of the window and across the street, an autonomous drone is dropping off the latest shipment of star pills. Several years ago, daily medications that reduced overeating, cured addiction, and slowed cellular aging were considered miracle drugs for the rich, especially when we discovered that key molecules were best synthesized in the near-zero gravity conditions of space. But these days, automated factories thrum in low orbit.

Cheap rocketry conveys the medicine down to Earth, where it saved millions of lives and billions of healthy years. So it's quite a utopian portrait of what America in 2050 will look like. And like that's the vision to like, this is what we have to get to. This is like, this is like a, like a piece of found audio in a bio shock. You like play this and then you get sawed in half by a robot. It is. I think there is something very telling about this. You know, part of the question is where is this coming from? And I think one of the places it's clearly coming from is,

as I say in my piece, the refugees of the effective altruists movement after it imploded and the fixation, the long amount of time he spends on cellular meat, because that's like a real fixation of them. And you know, whatever, I'm not like against cellular meat and lab-grown meat or what have you, but it's kind of a weird thing to put as your like utopian. Like most, a lot of people find that kind of off-putting. It's not like, not racing towards cellular meat. And then I also thought the, another potentially dystopian thing that they don't

view as dystopian is this idea that the sky is full of thrumming low factories. Earth has Earth has an electron shell of factories that are like okay, we've we've fixed the entire power grid to be like and you know, I am in favor of nuclear energy. I'm I'm working on my own energy positive fusion in my bathroom right now, and I think I'll be able to scale it in five years and You know lab-grown, you know lab-grown protein Great. I'm a fan of animals. Absolutely. But a like,

it'll be something like that, like new, the, you know, the power grid is nuclear, blah, blah, blah. Um, and then something psychotic, like they're going to be pills that are shipped to you by fucking rockets, which is like, okay, do we give a shit about the environment or not? Because they're apparently, there we give a shit about the environment or not? Because there apparently there's apparently a rocket being sent from low Earth orbit every 10 seconds. The specific thing that it's bringing is Ozempic that's being grown in space and sit down by like an Amazon drone.

It's like, okay, so great. We're going to have factories in the sky that make our ozempic. And that's gonna be dropped off by drones to make sure we don't overeat our cellular meat. That's what we're racing towards. There's a second right after this where it says, outside the air is clean and home in

with a purr of electric machines all around you. Electric cars and trucks glide down the road, quiet as a light breeze and mostly self-driving. Children and adult commuters follow on electric bikes and scooters, some personally owned and some belonging to subscription networks run by the city. I love the idea that like in a future where energy is just free, there's still some fucking subscription services for electric scooters. Because I mean, it's just like Utopian vision of the future where like, yeah,

low orbit factories to shoot rockets from Zempik at you by a drone. But like there's still all this shitty stuff that currently exists now, like subscription scooter companies. Yeah, you still have to pay your park mobile every time you park your scooter. This is like if the WeWork guy was Paul Atreides. Well, I mean, look, it's a nice vision of the future. It's clean. The environment is better. I mean, they make they take efforts to show about how much more free time everyone will have now in this future, because, you know, AI will help people be more productive and certainly not put them out of work.

But like, how do we get to that vision? I guess like, how does the policy connect up? Because like, they keep saying that like, the problem of the present cannot just be confined to the distribution of wealth and resources. Like that's part of the problem, but we need to go further than that. We need to invent the future now, because 100 years ago they didn't have, you know, helicopters or whatever. Yeah, so I think this is where the book kind of muddles a little bit, because it was clearly

meant to be two books. Obviously, there's two authors, and they just kind of decided there was enough affinity to push them together. But you know, you have the one piece of it, which is just more construction. But like more construction, hey, yeah, great, more houses, that's all well and good, but that's not innovation and futurism or anything like that. It's just more apartments, more nuclear facilities, whatever.

We have all that, we just want more. Okay, great, but how are we getting all this new stuff? And that's where the sort of the problems with the innovation system come in. And basically, in this, I think is Derek Thompson's part of the book. Basically, it's just we need to fund more risky science. Like we're too risk averse in what we fund. It's kind of like, you know, we give it to these older scientists who are doing really safe stuff. We need to kind of give it to like wacky scientists who like. We need to come up with new wacky stuff. We need a billion Dr. Yaqub scholarship programs at every major American university. We're

inventing a new kind of white people that's going to invent the future. If we sew the bankman-free twins together, or brothers. I forget what they are. Do you think they could fix the crypto market? I do. So you have that. And the way they tell it in the book, it's very narrative based and it's hard to kind of get your head around. So a big part of that is they say,

hey, here's a great story. The lady who came up with mRNA vaccines, she for like 15, 20 years, no one would give her grant money. Like people just ignore her. They thought that she wasn't really going anywhere with it. And then she did actually go somewhere with it. And so how many other of those ladies are there out there? And I'm like, I don't know. Could it have just been her? You know, I don't know how many there are. Like, and how do you, you know, it's very speculative.

How do you know what kind of scientific discoveries are just kind of lying on the road somewhere and if the NIH would give them a little bit of money, they would go somewhere. I have no idea. They don't really make a stab at it. They do end up basically saying, we need a meta-science to study that question. Oh, God. Oh,, God. Oh, God.

Look, there are certain like of the list of policy preferences that these people have, like I'm sure like any one of us could find certain things that we think are preferable or even a good idea. But like where I get tripped up with this is like going back to like the Yimby thing. It's like they want to build all this stuff, they want to like have a like a futuristic infrastructure, they want to change, like, you know, the scope of innovation and technology. And like, I've seen a lot of the defenses of this book talk about how like, this is harkening back to like a New Deal era of like, you know, big grand projects. But like, what's missing from this is like,

not just like any desire to have the government actually build anything, but like it exists in a time where there is no real state apparatus or even party apparatus to like translate this into anything real. And what we're left with is just basically like we need to let the current crop of billionaires and real estate speculators and drug companies just sort of cook. And you know, maybe in a hundred years time, we'll be having a low orbital factories. Yeah, definitely. It definitely, I would say, defers more to like unleashing private capital to make these investments and the government's roles to kind of prod it along, give grants out, subsidize, promise to make advanced market commitments to buy stuff that they

come up with and produce for new innovations. It's definitely not in the, I don't know, works progress administration vein of let's just build some big old state-owned enterprises and see what we can do there. It actually reminds me of a, there's a paper we put out at People's Policy Project called, I think it was called the Nordic Model Invents the Goods. And it was about how Nordic countries dealt with like, like their version of the, what the Inflation Reduction Act, which was our climate bill, is they just created state-owned enterprises to like do stuff. Like in Denmark, they have a state-owned enterprise that is like building a giant island out in the water to like catch wind. And it's like, I don't know, whatever, but it's like, yeah, it's great.

It's that it really, they have the crazy futuristic depictions of it, except it's, it's like the government is just like, oh, we're going to build a giant island and catch waves and wind and pipe it back to the shore. And here like the equivalent would be, we're going to get your permit done faster and we'll promise to buy the first gigawatt hour of output. I have not read this book. I don't plan on doing it unless force is gunpoint. But do the authors ever try to reconcile why in the last 20 or 30 years with this like explosion in tech wealth and, and investment and look like the immense liquidity of zero interest

rates, um, why like the farthest they have gotten is, you know, city bikes and Roku. Well, I mean, they're going to tell you it's because that that's where the money can flow. You can actually put it into Roku, but you can't build the buildings or whatever. Roku city is still just a mere dream of your glint in the eyes of the abundant crats. That I mean, this gets back to like you said, like this is the sort of the cast offs of the implosion of the effective altruism movement, which is, you know, a little, little downstream from the Yimby movement. And like Yimbyism, it's like, they have this one idea that like, it's zoning laws of the problem. Like the problem, the reason rent is high and like, you know, we have a housing crisis is that there's just aren't enough houses and we need to build more of them.

And the reason we're not building more of them is like, you know, restrictions on density and height limits and local HOAs, etc, etc. But like, where this falls apart from me is this idea that like the solution is we need to get rid of zoning regulations or like we need to make it easier to build things, but only to allow the like private actors to build things in the hopes that like the idea is in like in 10 years time, the rent will decrease by one percent. And like not only is that like inadequate to the situation, I don't understand how that's an attractive political message because like this is not just about policy. This is about reshaping the message of the Democratic Party to get back, you know,

this, you know, voters that they feel that they should should be getting, getting the votes from. Yeah, I had a piece in my review, actually, that was on this point. voters that they feel that they should be getting the votes from. Yeah, I had a piece in my review actually that was on this point and then I cut it out because it was starting to get too long, but I do think there is a risk here. You know, let's suppose, and I think it's reasonable to suppose that relaxing zoning, kind of making the rules easier to build, that that is a necessary part of getting to abundant housing

and you know everyone has a house and it's all cheap and all that but it's not sufficient there's so much more you have to do beyond that to actually get to your goal and so there's a real risk as you go out there and you say we're going to cut the red tape cut the zoning unleash private capital let them go at it and then you still run up against other problems that haven't been knocked out. And then these people who have now gone with you and said, yeah, okay, build whatever you want in my neighborhood, we're gonna get rid

of all this discretionary power to stop stuff and whatever. And then they turn around and you haven't really delivered. So like, yeah, I do think it would, sometimes it can be a little bit not fair to just kind of say, oh, well, this won't solve all the problems and only solve some of them. But if it's gonna be the main focus of your politics,

it probably does need to solve all, like it needs to get rid of all the issues with the housing scarcity issue, not just the one. And then maybe like you said, you can reduce rents by 5%, 10% over a few years or something. But like, what is their attitude about like, you know, are they ever oppressed or like, and a cultural conflict? Why can't the government just do these things? Like, why can't the government just have its own drug company or health insurance program or housing or education. Like, why can't the state just do the things that need to get done to take us to the awesome, you know, the awesome future,

the land of tomorrow that we all want to be living in in 2050? Yeah, they don't ever really approach that question. I think, you know, they're ostensibly officially agnostic about, OK, are we going to do this through the state? Are we going to do this through private actors? It's just kind of get it done. But, you know, it does raise the question. And I think if you had to push them, they would say, because this is always where people, they would say, well, that's just not politically possible. Like, I think it's hard to convince people to have the government

build more public housing, you know, because it's got such a bad reputation or people are so worried about, you know, sort of communists. It's so easy to sink like a government run prescription drug company as like socialist and people won't go for that. And so, you know, and part of my review kind of fixates on this. What invariably happens with proposals like this is they end up proposing something that actually has its own political problems, like political cell problems. And then when you say, why not this? They'll end up rejecting that for similar reasons. They'll say, oh, that's not politically practical. So there's a lot of like selectivity that goes into deciding what is and isn't politically practical and what politically impractical things you nonetheless want to push

forward and try to achieve. And so for them, the politically impractical thing they're willing to do is like take on the homeowners and rip up all the zoning, even though that seems somewhat unpopular. But they're not willing to go as far as to say, why not build some big old state-owned enterprises and have them just go out stamp housing everywhere, stamp rail everywhere and stuff like that. Yeah, I mean, it seems like the country

that they should be emulating is China. Yes. They mentioned China in the book. If we want to build the future, I mean, I think we should be looking to the CCP for, like, how did they do it? Yeah, no, they mentioned it in the book. And they do kind of say that, yeah, China, California

couldn't build the high-speed rail, but China has built, you know, like, 25,000 miles of it in the last five years or something like that. And they're kind of like, that's great. but then they don't follow up as to like, as best they do is they say, well, they're kind of still in the like nascent developing nation period where the government is willing and able to just kind of, you know, run roughshod over everyone and everyone just kind of cool with it because they're cool with high levels of growth.

But when you get to this sort of mature economy level, people are more, you know, risk averse or they're less willing to kind of go with it. But but yeah, that would have been a great part of the book to say, OK, China's done twenty seven thousand miles of this in California, couldn't even get like ten miles of it done. What did China do? Maybe we should copy that. But no, they didn't. They didn't pursue that threat.

Another aspect of the book is that they make it very clear that this is a book. What did China do? Maybe we should copy that. But now they didn't they didn't pursue that threat. Another aspect of the book is that they make it very clear that this is a book. This is an argument that's pitched at liberals. Right. Like they're not trying to convince right wingers here. Like even though even though I think that's mostly the people who are funding the abundance agenda and then and they somehow have dozen abundance institutes that have somehow come out of nowhere to sort of be the vanguard of this new movement. I mean, like, yeah, it's getting funding from like right wing and libertarian sources. But like, what is the pitch that they're making to like forget forget the left, but like to liberals here about like what they're wrong about and what needs to change?

Yeah, I mean, liberals are are are too focused. They say this is a let me quote this directly, because I was so shocked when I read this. American liberalism has measured its successes and how near it could come to the social welfare system of Denmark. So that's where you guys are wrong. You've been focused too much

on implementing the Nordic model in the US, which is absurd because obviously the only politician who has really like emphasized that by name was Bernie Sanders and liberals are defined as like the center left. They hated the shit out of him for it and really attacked him for it and said it was like everyone gets a pony and whatever it was that Hillary Clinton was saying. But that I guess is their, that's how I viewed it. Now other people say this is more vague and it's unclear what they meant, but they're saying, look, liberals, you guys have made a mistake.

You've been focused too much on social welfare, building welfare states, redistribution. You need to be focused on building the future, increasing growth and innovation and production. And we're here to get you back on the right track. I mean, I guess like this is what's so stunning to me about that opening section about what 2050 could look like. Yeah, that sounds like a nice country to live in. That sounds like a nice future, nice, nice future world. But like 25 years in the past here in the present, like look at the state of this fucking country. And like, how are we going to get to Elysium when like we don't even have a public health care system in this country?

Yeah, I mean, it's funny. They do kind of say, look, part of their way of of contrasting what they want from the welfare state is they kind of say welfare state stuff is easy. Right. You just change some rules. Oh, good. But, you know, you change some rules in the tax code, you change some rules in the welfare state code, you just kind of send money is out money out through computers. It's building stuff that's

hard. And I thought, you know, in a way it's kind of like the Kennedy, you know, we don't do whatever the hell he said, you know, we do it because it's hard and all that. But I was reading and I was thinking, well, you guys can't even do the easy stuff. So what am I meant to believe that now you can take this on? Like, you're right. Like literally change a little bit of lines in the computer and you can take this on. Like, you're right. Like, literally change a little bit of lines in the computer and you can just send money into people's accounts like they did it during COVID. But you don't do it. You can't even get that done. And yet, I'm meant to believe you're going to start building vertical farms and starship fucking pharmacies and stuff. Yeah, like the abundance thing is interesting because it, I get the sense they've been working

on this for a while and that's why, as Will mentioned, there's like 17 abundance institutes, there's like abundance for kids. I was just, I was going to CVS the other day to pick up my small dick medicine. And I got canvassed by Abundance for Southeast Asians. So clearly they've been working on it. But the thing that it's, its debut comes immediately after the acceleration people who sound shockingly similar to this. Similar ideas where it's like, okay, nuclear power, great projects that aren't so much

developmentalist as they are streamlining the consumer experience even further. further, and this huge emphasis on turning space into, I guess, a combination between a pharmaceutical lab and Costco. Abundance is ostensibly the future of the left, and the acceleration movement is supposed to be like, once we get done with all the small problems, like taking care of the vicious anti-Semitism problem, we can go to space and like have nuclear fusion powered planes. But like both movements are so stymied by like everything, like the easy things that you point out. The right wing people are, you know, they're trying to privatize social Security and they're

like, how does fucking Outlook work? I'm gonna kill myself. And, you know, the Democrats, like, can't even hold town halls without a, you know, Korean war veteran cutting their head off with a katana. But they're both gonna fucking, you know, do nuclear cold fusion and go to space now. Yeah, it is weird to kind of, you know, essentially bemoan a lack of state capacity and then, you know, put forward an agenda that requires a tremendous amount of state capacity and not really explain very well how do we get here from, or there from here.

And obviously state capacity is being destroyed even more now that Musk is kind of just firing people at random. So, you know, I don't know, it's kind of like having an agenda that's like, what if we did really cool things and like, why don't we do these cool things, we should do them. You're like, you know. You know?

It'd be like, I should just become a professional basketball player. They make a lot of money. It is the political and state equivalent of breaking up with your girlfriends so you can become a League of Legends pro and then going, well, I think I need to have five or six kids within the next month. Matt, in your review of abundance, I think you make a very good point, which is that like a lot of the sort of prescriptive policies that they're talking about is like not exactly like a new thing.

And in fact, it has been what the government's been doing. You write here, indeed, we have now seen what it looks like when the government supports and subsidizes technological innovation and implementation without concerning itself with the inegalitarianism of the system. His name is Elon Musk. In his desire to promote electric vehicles and rocketry innovations, the US government made him the richest man in the world, and then he used his riches to take over a major political communications platform, and then the government. And like this isn't like another huge hurdle to this is the idea that it will be the philanthropic and humanist impulses of the billionaire class that will lead us

into a future in which we are all liberated from sickness and work. Yeah I think you know they it suffers from a lack of political economy I think is what some people might say. The way you structure the system has a feedback effect on how the system then proceeds. That was kind of put in there because, again, I feel like a lot of this is very much framed as you guys fight over this. You guys with your dumb scarcity mindset fight over distribution, redistribution, clawing at the same piece of the pie. We're going to focus on the future, growth, innovation, new stuff, whatever, and

not focus so much on that. And then, okay, well, if you have this vast inequality and this is the way your system runs, what you're going to be doing is minting a bunch of these new billionaires and we just did that and he's kind of like destroying everything. So you do need to focus on how this thing's actually going to work distributionally and if you just like take insanely unequal hypercapitalism and just feed it with technology subsidies that still may end up destroying itself because, you know, it generates these, you know, monster figures who have so much unchecked power. Here's, in the book that you write about Elon Musk, and I have this quote here.

The authors write, Musk has become a lightning rod in debates over whether technological process progress comes from public policy or private ingenuity. But he is a walking advertisement for what public will and private genius can unlock when they work together. We saw what he's a walking advertisement. Yes. I mean, I agree with that. Let's put his face on our fucking book. This is what we want right here.

Yeah. But it's just like if he's a walking advertisement for what public will and private genius can unlock when they work together, what are they thinking of? What are some examples of Elon Musk genius getting us closer to this abundance future? Yeah. Well, this goes to sort of how do you what do you make of a CEO? You know, the most sort of extreme Elon fanboys seemed to believe that he invented batteries and rockets

personally in some kind of lab as opposed to just presiding over a company where other people did those things. Presiding even is a strong word. I mean, ostensibly, he's running three companies and the government, right? What does he do? There's no way he's doing these things. So but yeah, I guess so that that just gets, I guess, more to the question of he was the CEO of these companies, which I believe preceded him anyways.

He just bought into them at a certain time. Maybe he's a good manager. I don't know. It's kind of hard to believe based on just his public figure. But But yeah, I saw Tesla stock price. So another indication. Is he a management genius? I pro you know, it seems unlikely but Yeah, so I'd like to read probably probably my other favorite passage from this book I'm just gonna read this here quote

from this book. I'm just gonna read this here. Quote, invention, the act of solving problems by bringing new products, systems, and ideas into existence is the basis of human progress. Consider a thought experiment. The average lifespan of an American today is about 80 years and declining. I should mention. The world of 2025 is therefore just three modern lifetimes away from the world of 1785. Three 80 year olds-olds holding hands across time. To travel back three lifetimes to the 1780s is to enter a world without a car, toilet paper, or large scale production of soap. In the realm of food, it is a world before can openers, pasteurization, or

modern refrigeration. In medicine, it is a world without antibiotics, anesthesia, or a single vaccine. What principally distinguishes the past from the present is not biology nor psychology, but rather technology. If the world has changed, it is because we have changed the world. That is the quality of the writing here, but like the point being is like, yeah, like the world we live in is different from the past and it's different thanks to things like cars and electricity. Yeah, technology is important.

Yeah. But like, you know, I mean, but like certainly like there are some drawbacks to living in 2025 as well. I mean, yeah, the life expectancy is longer. That's good. And like we can think of like the ease, comfort and safety of the world we live in now is thanks technology. But like there are still like intractable, horrible problems that exist and are getting worse every day.

You know, it reminds me of the early socialists when they were writing. They would write stuff like that, which, which was always really fun to read. They would, they would say, look, we, we discovered, we were able to figure out how the planets revolved around the sun and we've learned all this stuff about science and gravity and whatever. And then from there, they would pivot to saying, and if we can solve all that, learn all of that, if we can, I guess we'd say now put a man on the moon, we absolutely can wipe out poverty. Oh my God, that's so easy by comparison. And you know, that was sort of the hopeful kind of pitch for a while. Yeah, we can solve all these problems,

and then we just don't. And so it's funny, right? It's like, okay, great. Yeah, wow, we really revel. You're right. Like we can revolutionize really radical things in society. We can make it to where everyone has a car. We can, we can, we can build planes and fly and then yet there's people right down the street just living under a bridge And we can't resolve that and there's kids who are hungry and we can't give them food We fight over whether or not we can even give them food in school, you know So there are limits I guess to human ingenuity and it seems like you should attend to those things instead of just kind of thinking Well, I'll wave my hand and the technology will get so good. Especially because these problems are not like we're not waiting for a technological solution to school lunches, right?

We're not waiting for a technological solution to the problem of lack of health insurance, right? Like we don't need it. We don't need like some new revolution in physics or quantum mechanics to achieve these things, but then it just gets back to the problem of the distribution of wealth and resources and power in our society. Right, right. You can create a new future, but how that future is distributed is a whole separate question and those and the one doesn't resolve the other. I mean, that's definitely what we've what we've witnessed over time here. One does not fix the other, and you really shouldn't say, well, we need to maybe refocus on technology and not worry so much about these distributional questions because new technology that is not channeled

in the right way leads to Musk on the one end and crushing poverty on the other. And what about the world outside of the America of 2050? Like, where all the lithium is being mined to like, produce all of these electric cars and scooters. Like, is the global supply chain and like, the resources that will power this new, abundant future, is that addressed anywhere in the book? Because I didn't find it. No, no, there's no question of sort of the third world issues. Malcolm Harris actually raised this in his piece in Baffler.

I think they were using some, you know, in response to their example of the automobile, he was saying, well, yes, everyone in the United States got an automobile, but the rubber was coming from slaves in South America or something. So yeah, I don't know, you know, how they intend to generate global justice through this. I mean, they can't even resolve the question of justice

inside the United States itself and how it's going to be distributed. Well, I can't imagine how they're going to answer the question of distributing all these new fancy things to, you know, Africa or South America. So, I mean, like, as a long-time observer of Ezra Klein, and I really have to give him credit for being like an OG in the, you know, digital opinion and entertainment complex. I mean, he gets paid coming and going. But what I'm interested in is, like, not just book is like it's a rollout for like I said a rebranding of the Democratic Party and like hopefully a new more optimistic politics that will sort of

Shepherd back into the coalition, you know billionaires and people who are maybe made a little uneasy by radical policies like Medicare for all But I'm just wondering like what have you seen so far Like, how is this going to translate into a winning political message? Like, how do they conceive of the abundance agenda being like the like the centerpiece of a 2028 Democratic presidential vote? Like, what's the message going to be here? Build more things. Build more things. Yeah, we're going to be the party that builds and creates the future.

I think I guess if you keep it at that level of abstraction, I do think they need to rewrite the first part. You know, they shouldn't have a politician out talking about cellular meat and stuff like that. Something like that, I guess. You're going to have an Obama-like figure telling a soaring story about this beautiful future we're all going to work towards together. And the specific policies is, you're probably just not going to be able to talk about those that much because they're just so narrow and hard to, you know, what are we going to make permitting faster for buildings? That's not something you throw out on the stump exactly in the same way that you can, like Bernie did, and say,

we're going to give everyone healthcare. That's not a, you know, so the mechanics of how they build this beautiful future are seemingly hard to sell because they're so technocratic and red tape and bureaucracy focused. But I guess they hope that as long as they can kind of paper those over with these beautiful futuristic visions that maybe you can just kind of throw that at people. Now when it comes to like the the housing part of this agenda, it should be noted that like a lot of what is in like the abundance policies prescriptions were essentially kind of part of Bernie 2020's housing policy about like you know like literally was like cutting red tape to make it easier to build, you know, a multi-story residential units where the otherwise would

be, you know, blocked by local concerns and NIMBYism. But like I saw, I saw Matt Iglesias the other day saying like, yeah, Bernie has some good ideas, but he screws it up with like rent control. And you know, here in New York City, Zoran Mamdani is running for mayor right now, and one of the elements of his platform is a freeze on rent. I would just like to ask you, Matt, broadly, because you follow this stuff closer than I do. What is the argument about why it's bad to lower rent or to freeze rent or that landlords make too much...

Because the opposition to this seems to be like landlords should have the right to make as much money as possible charging rent and like the market is the rational force for determining how much a unit can be rented per month in like a major American city. Like, what is the argument against like lowering rent by fiat or just like freezing it? Yeah, I mean, the classic argument is when you lower the rent that people can charge, that's going to make developers less willing to create more units because the return on creating more units will go down.

There's a couple problems with that in practice, which is one, rent control typically only applies to existing buildings. So they'll say buildings built before such and such date will be subject to this rule and not new buildings. And then two, and this gets a little bit muddled because of their other proposals, but the amount of the quantity of housing that's being built is being driven by the planning decisions. It's not like we don't have enough developers who want to build things.

It's that, you know, what they can build is circumscribed by all these rules. That's their whole point. So you know, the classical case against it kind of falls apart. I guess you can kind of start moving into other points about maybe it's distributionally unfair. It's kind of like random lottery. If you happen to get into a rent control unit, then you win the lottery and if you don't, then you don't. There's cheating that goes on. Obviously, people will get a rent control unit and then sublet it out to someone at a market price. You know, I don't know, there's there's stuff like that. But the main

point, which is that it's going to reduce the quantity of housing supplied, can runs up against their own argument, which is that the quantities of housing supplied is already hugely capped by zoning and everything else. In sort of trying to take on the abundance agenda as a whole, like do you think that there are that there is anything worthwhile like in this book that is like worthy of praise or rather than criticism? Yeah, I mean, the proposals themselves, I think I said in my review, it would be fine

to just put that in a project 2029 style document, you know, like I think the project 2025 was like 500 pages or something. If you wanted to put 20 pages in there where you got a subject matter expert for each one of these to say, yeah, okay, so for transmission lines we need to relax law A, B, and C in order to make the permitting process go this and this bit faster. That all seems fine. That's all well and good. They're just kind of small-bore technocratic fixes

that could have really significant impacts and may be very necessary for us to, you know, generate enough clean energy for the country and all that. It's all well and good. I think the problem just is when they go beyond, like, here's a list of technocratic fixes that I think will increase efficiency and output and growth and go into this real grandiose vision while also saying that maybe we need to displace other focuses that people have historically had on the left and really go in hard on this. I think that when they step out of that and go to that higher level, that's where I think things

really fall apart. Matt, if you were to be put in charge of, for instance, like a project 2029 or let's say like a socialist-led department of government efficiency, what would be the abundance agenda that you think would be like would go the longest way to getting us towards that utopian future described in the opening passages of Abundance. Oh man, that's a good question. I mean, I think an interesting question is just, what is your theory of how innovation and technology comes about?

Before this book, or I guess we could say even now, the right really emphasizes like incentives, right? If we increase the payoff to innovative behavior, more people will go out and innovate. And that always seemed very crazy to me and doesn't seem to like map with our understanding of a lot of inventions, which seem to kind of come out of nowhere.

These guys are saying, oh, you just need to reduce permitting and bottlenecks and then we'll get a lot more innovation. And you know, like I said, bet more money on kind of wacky scientists and stuff. To me, it seems like it kinda comes randomly almost. A lot of it just kinda comes out of nowhere. People who just kinda get interested in it,

I don't know, give some money to, every autistic person, just give them some money and let them cook for a while. That seems to be where a lot of this stuff comes from. There are other arguments people make that I think are kind of interesting, right? It seems like a lot of our smartest people, if you will, talented people who might be more innovative and come up with stuff, they kind of get shunted off into finance and real estate because that's where they can do quantitative hedge fund trading and make millions and millions of dollars.

So there seems to be a lot of misallocation of talent that comes from capitalist inequality and what kinds of sectors get big payoffs and what kind of sectors don't. So I guess I have a much more of a like, it's hard to like force innovation. It kind of just kind of comes as it comes, you know, people sort of come up with things and hopefully you can capture it and implement it. But it's going to be hard to like systematically just like push the innovation button. And what are the Ubuntu crats like, how do they feel about the competing message

that like, I think they're kind of scoring off right now in the big crowds that Bernie Sanders and like AOC are turning out at the moment? And like, you know, leave criticisms of them aside for a second. Like, what is their response to the fact that like, their agenda has a book, but like the the the politics that they're essentially making a case against seem to have all the energy in the democratic field right now. Yeah, that's a good point. I mean, I saw the numbers that 30,000 people came to watch Bernie Sanders and AOC is kind of crazy.

I yeah, I you can't get me to one of those rallies. So I don't even know like who's out there. I did see Matt Iglesias was suggesting that it's kind of just like diehard burning people. Like, you know, he's got a big list and they're just real kind of fanatical and so they'll come out. If he could get 50 of his diehard fans in a room together, that would be a huge achievement. It was funny though, because then Dave Weigel had a counter whose he's out actually reporting at these things and he was saying that, you know, based on the numbers they had that the majority of people at these big rallies were not people that

were on the Bernie or AOC email lists or any, you know, had any other connections. If you just look at the photos of the rally, most of the people have white hair. Most of them seem fairly elderly. So like just based on that demographic, I would assume they're not being drawn from like the DSA well primarily. The thing that I've gotten from people who have gone to them, my friend went to the one in Colorado that had like 30,000 people is that a lot of the people there are just they're desperate for some to be under some like locus of energy for like anti Trump, anti-Ethnic

stuff. And this is the only thing that seems to have any actual Authenticity and energy I did see a glacius his other argument for you know Why no one should even care about this was that Bernie has high name recognition so like Presumably, you know Hakeem Jeffries could do this Presumably, you know, Hakeem Jeffries could do this. No, that is a good point, but it does kind of cut against, and then Weigel was saying this as well, it's just a lot of these people never voted for Bernie or obviously AOC, and they're just out,

it's kind of like anti-Trump stuff, and these guys are capturing the energy. I guess last, in 2016, they would have been reading about Mueller and, you know, getting into like Russia gate and the more those twins, those weird. Oh, the Krasnestans. They would have been giving money to those guys and instead they have to go to a Bernie rally. Yeah. I mean, like I said, like it seems like one of the reasons that people are

coming out for these huge rallies is like a because like what they're seeing from the party that they're that they want to support is that they have no idea what they're doing and that they're like telegraphing that they're just going to like roll over for Donald Trump and Elon Musk. But like, you know, like the fight, the Oligarchy Tour, it identifies a culprit. It assigns blame to, and not just it assigns blame, it assigns blame to particularly two figures that people loathe, that people hate and can see written on their faces, them just like, just vandalizing and fucking over everything about people, about our government and our

public life in this country. But it seems hard to like as a political message to replace oligarch tech billionaires and Nazis like Elon Musk with the homeowners association of a neighborhood that doesn't want, you know, multi-level housing built in it. You know, that's bad. Don't get me wrong. But like it doesn't seem like the scale is off here for a national political message. Yeah, yeah. And the other thing about the making it a national thing is and some of the reviewers have pointed this out.

They really kind of talking about mostly a few cities in California and New York, you know, New York City, essentially. They're really obsessed with these kind of New York state and California state and how badly that they've governed those states. They even say in the book, this is not really true of Texas and Kentucky and Ohio. A lot of the rest of the country don't have these problems. If that's the case, how would it become the locus of liberalism across America? Maybe it's a thing for Gavin Newsom to take up. Well, I guess he's running for president. But maybe it's something for a state party in California, New York, or a local city council

in those states. But how is it a national agenda where when you have lots of parts of the country where there's no zoning and housing's fine and people build stuff whenever, you know? I don't know. I just, the best of luck to the abundacrats, I suppose. I mean, I don't have much more on this. I really, I got to be honest with you, I really did not want to talk about abundance because it seems to me just about like the least important thing possible considering what's going on in the world right now.

Well the fact of the matter is you're gonna you're gonna be hearing about this a lot more. Because I tried to skip it. Yeah because it just seems to me it's just like oh surprise surprise the Democrats we need a bold new message. What is it gonna be? We're gonna we're gonna have more neoliberalism essentially. Just as long as it's not focused on yeah like the welfare state or redistribution of wealth or removing the power and rights of the billionaires that are destroying this country and the world at the same time yeah pretty much I mean they say it's very specifically in the book they say look Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders

there they both were popular for the same reason, which was people just feel like they can't achieve the life they wanna achieve in this system. And both of them were able to take advantage of that scarcity mindset and focus on zero sum redistribution about how other people are taking from you. And we're gonna cut through that. We've got a new way between a socialist, the socialist left, and the populist authoritarian

right. A new way, a third way, potentially. Yes, a third way. I'm just going to read the concluding paragraph here. Abundance contains within it a bigness that benefits the American project. Abundance contains within it a bigness, a noble spirit in bigans, even the least abundant man. He says here, it is the promise not just of more, but of more of what matters. It is a commitment to the endless work of institutional revival. It is recognition that technology is the heart of progress and has always been. It is a determination to align our collective genius with the needs of both the planet and each other. Abundance is liberalism, yes, but more than that, it is a liberalism that builds.

There you go. There you go. Put that on a bumper sticker. All right. I just think... Abundance contains within it a bigness. Yeah, so hopefully that'll be the last I ever have to think about abundance, but probably that's not going to be the case. I don't have much more here. Matt Brunig, thank you so much for reading Abundance and talking to us about it. Yeah, thanks for having me. Signing off for today, Chris, do we have anything to plug? No, Matt, do you want to plug anything at the end of the show?

Yeah, let's do NLRB Edge, my my, my sub stack about the National Relations Board. Great. I'll throw that in the description. All right. All right. Till next time everybody, abundantly, I'll be talking to you soon. Abundance, war, not a tank! Abundance, abundance, abundance, war, not a tank!