The Bulwark Podcast - Derek Thompson: An Abundance Agenda for the Future

Episode Date: December 15, 2022

The success of Operation Warp Speed has been orphaned by both sides — the left won't credit Trump for any policy success, and too many on the right won't get vaxxed. Plus, crypto had a magical pull in an era of declining trust in institutions, and the unifying theory that explains all the crazy disruption in 2022. Derek Thompson joins guest host Tim Miller. Join the gang from The Next Level in Seattle this January 21 for an evening of politics and savage love with our special guest Dan Savage. Learn more here. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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Are they suggesting you can just put a bucket under a leak in your ceiling? That's not good enough. Your Toronto apartment should be safe and well-maintained. If it isn't and your landlord isn't responding to maintenance requests, RentSafeTO can help. Learn more at toronto.ca slash rentsafeTO. Hello and welcome to the Bulwark Podcast. I'm Tim Miller, in for Charlie Sykes for the next two days. Before we get to our really great guest, I want to shout out that we're going on the road next year. Our first event is public. We're going to Seattle, January 21st. Come make a weekend out of it. See the Space Needle. We have a special guest, Dan Savage, the legendary sex advice columnist,

founder of the It Gets Better Project, former frenemy of mine. It's going to be really spicy. I think that you all have a good time. You can get tickets at the Bullwark slash No BS, or just click on our events page at the bulwark.com. One other thing I wrote yesterday, we're not going to get into this today. I wrote yesterday about what was such a big deal about the respect for marriage act bill signing. And I went down the DOMA history trail a little bit, you know, got a little emotional. So check that out in yesterday's triad if you hadn't had a chance yet. Tomorrow on the podcast, we're going to get super, super political, a lot of rank punditry. So today I wanted to zag a little bit with a little bit of politics, but our guest is Derek Thompson, writer for The Atlantic,

host of the Plain English podcast on The Ringer, font of knowledge across culture, economics, tech, politics, maybe some other stuff. I think he mentioned following sperm counts in a recent podcast. I don't know if we're going to get into that today, but this is going to be really good. Stick around for it. But first, my aspirational friend, Sudan Arca. Derek, we're going to talk about some selfish holes today. Derek, thank you so much for doing this. It's my pleasure to be here. Thanks so much, Tim. Man, it's going to be good. I have to admit something. Your invite is part of a plot that I'm engaged in

to make myself the guest Denver Nuggets expert on Bill Simmons' podcast, if the Nuggets should ever make the finals. So you might notice the homage there in the intro. And, you know, I'm just, I'm watching 82 games a year on NBA League Pass. I'd like to, you know, channel that time into something useful. So just, you know, no pressure, just throwing that out there. I will pass along the good word. Absolutely. I mean, look, you have maybe the best player in the NBA, maybe three-peat MVP. My theory about, and we'll quickly leave basketball if that is your preference, but one thing that I've noticed about NBA MVPs versus champions is that some of

the best players typically pass their peak as MVP candidates before they start winning their championships. So like LeBron won a bunch of MVPs and then he won a championship. Giannis won an MVP. Maybe he won two MVPs before he won his championship. Look where you are along that path. Jokic has two MVP awards. Maybe this is your year, if not next year. You are incredibly well set up. I'm not sure.

I'm getting the tingles. Yeah, you're getting the tingles over here. That is a great observation. I hadn't thought about it like that. The West is stacking up nicely for us. We could use jamal murray and michael porter to play a little better but uh you know we'll see i'm feeling good i'm feeling good this is related to your theories of everything i will take your nba championship theory mvp theory and just put it in my back pocket till june so you were on bill's podcast i don don't know, a couple weeks ago, and I was listening to you guys. And he kind of had you on to posit that essentially 2022 marked the end of an era, basically, particularly in the area of kind of tech and business and politics and how they're overlapping on these big platforms sort of marked by the Elon must take over Twitter.

I'm curious for you, you know, you've written a lot of interesting stuff this year. At the biggest possible picture, like what do you think is the defining change of 2022 as we head into, you know, what is maybe a new era? And we can get down into the particulars after that. Yeah, I would say I have a pretty clear theory of what happened this year. I don't know that it's a correct theory, but it's pretty clear. I think you can summarize it in two words, interest rates. That's what happened to the world. And it's particularly what happened to the world of technology and media and digital entertainment and consumer tech more broadly. So can I just tell a quick macro econ story? All right. So let's go back to 2007, 2008. The world falls apart. The housing crash destroys the US economy. The ripple effects circumnavigate the globe. It is a real,

honest to God, crisis. Interest rates drop to zero. The central banks of the world say we have to find some way to stimulate demand in a period of collapsing financial security and high unemployment. Interest rates go to zero. And they go to zero at a time when something has just been invented in 2007. The iPhone. The smartphone revolution is taking off and with it the app revolution. And in a time of low interest rates and a universal computer in people's pockets, there is a boom of consumer apps that rely on lots of VC funding, lots of easy cash comingCs, and we're getting a lot of money from advertising, that means that our users don't have to pay a thing. So it was an era of incredibly cheap digital tech apps. I once wrote a piece called the Millennial Consumer Subsidy, where I said that if

you're a typical millennial consumer, and let's just say New York, to be totally cliche about it, and I think- How about Oakland? Let's call it Oakland. I don't know. Maybe it's an age-redacted elder millennial in Oakland. Or Seattle. Right. It could be Spokane. I was living in Manhattan when I wrote it. But yeah, let's say Oakland. Let's say it's 2015. We're in the middle of this era of low interest rates and tech. The digital media revolution is absolutely booming. If you woke up and you took an Uber to work and your work was in a WeWork and you ordered DoorDash for lunch and then you came home in a Lyft and you Pelotoned and then you went to bed in a Casper mattress. No, I wasn't Pelotoning.

Okay, everything besides this so far is lining up, but I was not Pelotoning. If you did all of this, you were interacting with a suite of companies, let's say seven companies, that were on pace to lose around $15 billion that year. They were not companies the way we understand companies to exist. They weren't profitable at all. They were financial vehicles for taking venture capital money and subsidizing the lifestyles of people like you, Tim, and people like me. And so- Thank you, Mark Andreessen. I appreciated that subsidy. And thank you, the entire Silicon Valley ecosystem on Sand Hill Road. That's what happened for 10 years.

We had a very specific and very bizarre microclimate of conditions that allowed for a very particular kind of company to exist that was not making a lot of money, but was widely popular. So huge user base, no profit. Frankly, there's a lot of companies that fit this category. Uber might be one of them. Twitter is one of them. Twitter has lost more money than it's earned in its history. So you come to the end of this period, you have the pandemic, you have the inflation crisis of 2021 and 2022. Interest rates start to rise. The cost of everything gets higher. You want to buy a house, your mortgage rate is higher. You want to take on a loan, that gets more expensive. And all of these companies that are used to just not having to make money, suddenly

they have to make money and the world changes. They have to raise prices on customers and their stock prices collapse. And so that's the world that we're living in right now. Take your pick of media company or a digital streamer, Netflix or Disney tech company, all of them are in the tank when it comes to their stock prices. All of them are trying to raise money at the same time. Elon's doing this as well at Twitter. And that is what Bill and I were talking about when we said, this is the end of an era. It's an end of an era of cheap money made possible if necessary by the housing crash. And now we're in chapter two of this story of the 21st century. And we're trying to figure out what does a business model for chapter two look

like? Well, you prefaced all that by saying you're not sure if you were right about that theory. But I have a little bit of good news for you is that a colleague of mine at the Bullock, Jonathan Last, shares that theory and has been railing against Zerp forever. Zerp, by the way, zero interest rate policy. Yeah, right. Which is what I'm talking about. Yeah. And we sell JBL is always right at the board. So, you know, he has a reputation and you guys are aligned on this one, which is a good sign. So I guess I have two follow ups on this topic before we move on. This seemed obvious for a long time. Is it just one of those situations where money is always flowing and, you know, let the good times roll as long as money's flowing? Like, why stop doing this?

Like, why wasn't there anybody during the later part of this period zagging and saying, you know, hey, maybe I should build a company that actually makes money instead of relies on, you know, forever growth and zero interest rates forever? What's your sense for that? That's a great question. I'll say two things. First, I don't want to represent as if none of the companies created in the 21st century don't make money.

I mean, Google might be the best business model ever invented in humankind. They make a metric shit ton of money. Meta makes money. Amazon makes money. Lots of these really sophisticated and built-out tech companies make a ton of money. Amazon makes money. Lots of these really sophisticated and built out tech companies make a ton of money. It's this sort of younger crop of Web2 apps that were used to an environment

where they could grow and expand and conquer the world without mastering what's sometimes called unit economics. That is, does your typical consumer make you money or are you subsidizing your typical consumer? So that takes us, I think, to the next part of the question, which is, you know, why didn't people see this coming? The truth is that it was very confusing, I think, to sophisticated economic watchers why we seem to have killed inflation. And truly, for the first 20 years of this century, and maybe going back the last 25, 30-ish years, inflation was nowhere to be seen. It's not just that you couldn't see it in the US, you couldn't see it in Canada. Go to Europe in 2018. Where's inflation? Go to Japan. Where's inflation? The entire developed world seemed to have killed inflation. It was like inflation was smallpox. Like we had eradicated a disease from the planet.

It was really strange. And there were absolutely people saying, uh, what happened? Like, I remember I must've written maybe like 10 articles where I just like called up smart people and I said, where's inflation? And they all had their own theory, but it really was a mystery. Where did inflation go? And then in 2020 and 2021, as we were facing this, you know, once in a century pandemic, we were trying to stimulate the economy. We were pushing it to its farthest degree of being able to handle inflation. And then we tipped over the edge. We tipped over the edge in terms of stimulating demand and inflation went up to what, seven, eight, above 8% in Europe. It's even higher because of energy crises there. And so that's what happened. We

didn't know how far we could push this machine. And then we pushed it and we got the highest inflation rate in the last 40 years. I want to get back to COVID. But first, one other little side impact of the zero interest rate policy over the past, certainly the last decade, influenced this, in my opinion, is the crypto boom. You know, money's free and people have to find something to do with their capital. Do you see that connection between this overarching theory of these companies, these consumer apps, also playing a role in what appears at this point to be a pretty clear crypto bubble? Or maybe you don't think it's a bubble? What's your take on all that? I think it's actually a bubble. I'm very biased when it comes to crypto.

Biased against or biased for because you have a lot of Doge coins. Biased against. No, good point. Good point. Yeah, no, I'm not even hedged on this position by holding a bunch of Doge. I don't think it makes a lot of sense. I think it's a technology in search of a use case. And the clearest use case that it has is that for people who have a lot of money in low income countries that don't have traditional banking structures, it's a really good way to move your money around without having state control over your capital. But look, here's my story of how crypto fits into this. And I guess it's a two-part story. Number one is that one of the problems with everything maturing is that tech companies needed a new supernova of energy as they realized that the app revolution was coming to an

end. They needed something else to move on to, something else to get them excited. And hardware is hard. Biotech is hard. It's difficult to say, well, we're done with building out consumer tech, so next we're going to take all of this money and just spend it on cancer prevention medication. Biotech is booming to a certain extent, but they needed something else. And in particular, I think they needed something else that wasn't capital intensive, something that was like software, but even more so something even less marginal cost than software. And what's less marginal cost than software that does something? How about software that does shit? Like that's

crypto. And so they invented this like new philosophy of and technology for accomplishing ends that were, as of now, somewhat invisible. Crypto allows for, you know, you have the blockchain technology, you have distributed databases, you have all sorts of stuff that is sort of mathematically ingenious, but doesn't actually cash out, I think, in a lot of great use cases. But that is where I think Silicon Valley went in an era of low interest rates. Okay, we've conquered the mountain of consumer tech. What's the next mountain that's just like it, but even better? And crypto just had this magical pull on a certain philosophy of decentralized power in an era of declining trust in institutions. It was a beautiful story with a beautiful piece

of math, and it doesn't make a lot of sense, I think, as an actual technology for a lot of use cases. I will say, maybe I'm wrong. Like, history is long. And technology is sometimes, you know, decades past between the discovery of electricity and the lighting of the first light bulb. Like, maybe crypto is the electricity of the future. But like, right now, I do not see it. So I'm also biased. And I'm not that smart when it comes to math. I didn't do that well at George Washington University in my math classes. So I always had self-doubt when it came to this. But I looked at crypto also, and I understand the uses of blockchain and, like you said, certain in other countries where their currency isn't stable. But it just seems so obviously stupid to me. Like this

notion that like your Dogecoin, somebody was going to buy it at this absurd value in 2032 after the hype was over, like always felt to me preposterous and obviously preposterous. And yet in the meantime, all these really smart, very economically literate, very rich, very successful people were all in on this. Back to our friend Marc Andreessen, right economically literate, very rich, very successful people were all in on this, back to our friend Marc Andreessen, right? You know, completely committed to the notion that there is something real here and that all of us that didn't see it are blind. And, you know, we're like the people that didn't understand the World Wide Web at the start of the internet. My unifying theory, which ties us into politics of what happened there is that these folks had, you know,

motivated reasoning, right? And that very similar to my friends in the Republican Party who ended up sticking around with Trump, even though they all saw that a disaster was coming eventually, you know, they're all making money, they're all getting more power. And that there is this connection between, you know, that experience that we lived through in politics that I've written about and what these guys were living through is that it was greens all the way, you know, greens forever, rockets were going to the moon, and like, why question it while it's going on? Is that too cynical of an assessment, do you think, of why all these smarties got so wrapped

up in something that seems, I mean, obviously at least somewhat scammy. I mean, and that so many of them went along with SBF, who was like very plainly scammy. Let me say two things. First, on the issue of whether it's too cynical to say that most people were in it for less than sincere reasons. I think every movement is diverse. You know, not all Republicans are the same. Not all Democrats are the same. A lot of Republicans actually hate each other. A lot of Democrats hate each other. You look at a company, and sometimes I think it's interesting when you don't work for a company and you say like, oh, everyone at Amazon just wants X. And then you know someone at Amazon, and it's

all infighting, right? Once you get inside of a movement, you realize just how diverse that movement is. And crypto, I think to a certain extent, is like any other movement. It's not what we think of as like a 20th century cult. It's more like a political party organized around a particular principle. And with any political party, there's a lot of intra-institutional hate and disagreement. You can see that right now playing out with SBF. There are people who think that centralized exchanges for trading cryptocurrencies represent an important future for this technology. And there have been people, made especially right or prescient by the downfall of FTX, who say, no, the point of this movement is to decentralize power.

So having a centralized exchange in which you can trade your Doge and your Bitcoin is a violation of the fundamental principle and potential of this technology. So that's part number one, that I don't want to paint with too broad a brush, but your theory is absolutely possible. The second thing to say is, here's a little analogy. Imagine you have a really rich friend that you hang out with on the weekend. I do. I have that. Yeah. So you have this rich friend that you hang out with on the weekend and it's just so frigging fun to hang out with him or her. You go to the best restaurants and you go to the best bars and they're always ordering like the top flight wines or bourbons and you just have like the top flight wines or bourbons, and you just have like the most deluxe experience with them.

And you go home to your partner or whatever, and you say, God, that guy is just awesome. And a wise partner might say, is he awesome or is he just rich? Like, is the quality of your experience, is it high because this person has a lot of money or because this is a really inherently fun person to hang out with? They're smart.

They're clever. They're just a great hang. Crypto was that guy. It was hard for a long time to understand, is this thing good? Is it workable because it's smart or because the numbers are going up every month? So like in 2020 and 2021, early 2021, the numbers were just going up every single month. Bitcoin was worth more every March than it was in February. And it was happening to Doge. And the VC money was pouring in and all these people that I really have respected in tech were just like, my corner of the universe is

getting richer and more full with brilliant engineers and thinkers and philosophers and product managers than it's ever been. This is the most exciting period in tech that I've ever experienced. And I couldn't figure out, are they right? Or are the numbers just going up? And so it seems like they're right, but we're experiencing a bubble. And I think that proverbial guy actually isn't that great a hang. I think he's just rich. And if he didn't have that money, and he couldn't buy the Belvedere, and he couldn't buy, you know, the cognac, and you weren't being given special access to the velvet rope lounge at the club, you'd realize if you hung out at the diner with this dude, he's not actually that great at all. Like, take away the bubblicious money and he's not actually that great. And I wonder to a certain extent whether that's what's happening with crypto right now. When you analyze the technology outside the context of an asset bubble, what exactly are we doing except just recreating a casino for betting up asset prices? And I think a lot of people told themselves they were at a revolution and they were actually just sitting at a casino. Metaphors like that is why your podcast is so good, Derek. I have some crypto friends that listen to this podcast and that are going to be upset with the

last eight minutes of content that we just put out. If I'm remembering correctly, that you had a in-defense of crypto effort where you brought in somebody on plain English? Oh yeah, Paki McCormick. Yeah, Paki McCormick is a tech writer. He has a sub stack called Not Boring. He's awesome. I really like Paki. I think he's like a sensational philosopher of the movement and analyst. He's a really fun read. He's really fun to talk to. You know, I disagree with him about a lot of this. I agree with him about a lot of other things like our general disposition on American technology and progress and optimism is very similar. There's just a collar of disagreement here in terms of the

utility of crypto as a movement in tech. And I would say for all the people who are listening and pulling their hair out that I'm missing some incredibly thrilling aspect or beautiful use case for this technology. You may very well be right. The history of science and technology is long, and that's why I'm so interested in it. Politics is fascinating, but you have a midterm, and then you have another midterm. You have an administration that comes into the White House, and then they leave. Politics is in part interesting because it ends. It's finite. The terms are finite. The elections are finite. Everything ends in politics. It's like sports. Sports is interesting because the games end and there's a box score and box score is the most finite thing in the world.

It's there. It exists. It can't be changed. Science and technology is the exact opposite. It's a story that doesn't end. It's the opposite of a movie. It's not the Lion King, the movie, it's the Lion King, the Broadway show, right? It literally never stops playing. Something is invented like electricity and then there's new use cases, and it changes decade to decade. And crypto is going to be a long Broadway run. We're going to be living with this technology for decades. And it's possible that I'm right speaking to you in December of 2022.

But then we have this podcast in the metaverse with our stable diffusion avatars in 2032, and crypto is powering the entire thing. And your AI voice says to me, Derek, weren't you wrong 10 years ago? And my AI voice says to you, yes, I was incredibly wrong. And yeah, then we go to our casinos in the sky. I paid the $3.99 for my lens of pictures. And I would be wrong in 2032. But handsome as fuck. And so that's fine. I did too. I don't pay money for anything on my phone. Anything. And I was like, sorry, I need handsome black and white photos of me as a rock star.

Lensa, take my money. If you haven't done the Lensa, people listening, it's worth it. I have the Lensa photos of myself, the handsome photos of myself, and this week's Not My Party, which is also on all these various topics on Snapchat. We're doing crypto and AI and all the fun stuff this week. So please, if you want to see Handsome Me, go check it out. I want to do a hard pivot into,

I don't think it's your most recent article, but maybe your second to last article was about, I'll let you describe it, but essentially the limits of our technological advances and how we have become enamored with Eureka moments and have not been that good

about implementing them. So I want you to talk about that article and then kind of get into Operation Warp Speed and how that was maybe a counter example of where we have been doing stuff right. Sure. Yeah, this is a big, long piece in the magazine. In the magazine, it's called The Eureka Theory of Progress is Wrong. And look, it's 7,000 words long, so it's difficult to summarize the whole thing in a sentence. But let me try to summarize the whole thing in basically a sentence with maybe two semicolons. America is the world's capital at inventing things, but we're often not very good at building what we invent. We invented the microchip, but Taiwan is probably the most

important country in the world when it comes to manufacturing microchips, which is one of the reasons why it's so important that China doesn't invade it. We invented the solar cell, but Japan and Europe stole the technological frontier of solar energy from us, the 1980s and 1990s, and really led the solar revolution in the early 21st century. The US led the world in wind energy in 1986. I believe at one point, California had like 96% of the world's wind energy. And then we just gave up that technological frontier as well and just stopped building wind turbines. The same at nuclear power. The US obviously invented nuclear power, Manhattan Project. Under Eisenhower, we took the technology that powered the nuclear bomb and

turned it into a technology that could power people's homes and light bulbs. In the last 20 years, we have closed more nuclear plants than we built. The U.S. invented, I think I said I was going to do this in one sentence, and I'm just basically giving a full paragraph. So I apologize for the thesis. This is a really long, this is a Charlie Sykes sentence, so it's an homage. One last example. The U.S. invented the elevator. The U.S. invented the skyscraper. But we also have a shortage of homes. We have a shortage of urban apartment building, which relies on building skyscrapers that use elevator technology. So my thesis is, here's a thesis in a sentence, finally. Maybe it sounded like a

sentence if you were listening on Two Speed. The U.S. is amazing at inventing things that were not as amazing at implementing what we invent. That's the one sentence. And the true story of progress is not just what you invent, it's what you build. That is progress. And so Operation Warp Speed is a really interesting example of a technology that we didn't just invent, mRNA technology for vaccines, but where the Trump administration, with the help of people in the Senate and Congress and throughout government, actually remarkably built what we invented and turned the obstacle course of vaccine development into a glide path that allowed us to take the 10-year period of vaccine development, which is typical, and turn it into something more like a 10-month vaccine development period.

And I think this is a policy that's somewhat been orphaned by the left and the right. The left has orphaned Operation Warp Speed because we don't like to give Donald Trump credit for stuff. And the right has somewhat orphaned Operation Warp Speed because it seems like roughly 30 to 40 percent of Republican adults under the age of 65 don't want to take the vaccine. And so it's really important to surface the significance of this policy, Operation Warp Speed, in the context of American progress? Yeah, this is especially frustrating for me as a former Republican. I felt like this should be our

space, right? It's like the free market. In this case, it's a public-private partnership, which is an important element of it. But it is innovation. It's American ingenuity. I mean, it's all the stuff that, you know, from Gauzy speeches, from Republican conventions past, you know, we used to have pains to all this American greatness. And yet, now, the party is, in a lot of ways, anti-American ingenuity, right, and tears down the people that are driving American growth. And I think that the prime example of this, that it's a party-wide rot, and not just, you know, Donald Trump's like petty New York jealousies, which I think was one element to this during the Trump era, is the fact that Ron DeSantis is grabbing right onto it. So I want to play just a clip of DeSantis from earlier this week talking about their investigations into the vaccine.

Because in Florida, you know, it is against the law to mislead and to misrepresent, particularly when you're talking about the efficacy of a drug. We see just the other just recently, Florida got three point two billion through legal action against those responsible for the opioid crisis. And so it's not like this is something that's unprecedented. So today I'm announcing a petition with the Supreme Court of Florida to impanel a statewide grand jury to investigate any and all wrongdoing in Florida with respect to covid-19 vaccines. And we anticipate that we will get the approval for that. That will be something that will be impaneled, most likely in the Tampa Bay area. And that will come with legal processes that will be able to get more information and to bring legal accountability for those who committed misconduct. What do you think about this, Derek? I mean, this is crazy, right?

This is a big, huge success of a Republican administration. And they're like dabbling in conspiracies and saying that we need to investigate this. And it's certainly implying that people shouldn't be taking their boosters. How do you process that? I'll start by processing the substance, and then we can get on to the implication in a second. So on the substance, there's a couple things that are just true about both this virus and the vaccine. The thing that is true about the virus is that it is significantly more dangerous to people over effects that we've seen seem to be concentrated in young men, like the myocarditis side effect that DeSantis mentioned. It's not entirely clear how severe the side effect is, how common it is.

And of course, we're stacking it up against a virus that has killed a million plus Americans. But there is the whiff of truth here. There's the whiff of smoke here in that it is important for any public health institution to pay attention to the balance of benefit and risk for any novel therapy. Now, the fact is, I think the U.S. government has done a very good job of paying attention to that balance. I think we've done a good job of reporting via the CDC how many cases there have been of young people that have had side effects in terms of heart issues as a result of taking this vaccine. In fact, many times the vaccine deniers who say they hate the federal

government and public health institutions and the CDC nonetheless rely on federal data to prove that the vaccines are bad, right? And it's like, you're using data from people that you say are corrupt in order to draw the opposite conclusions of the people who are collecting the data. It seems a little bit confused to me. So overall, I want to represent myself as not someone who is like, you know, descended from like the Pfizer HQ to say these vaccines are absolute mana from heaven. That's your job, Tim. Yeah, exactly. As a corporatist, former Republican neoliberal, I will do that. Okay, right. So yeah, I just want to make sure that that space is covered. So we have all our bases there. Of course, there are issues that we want to pay attention to. And I frankly just believe that those issues have been paid attention to. I consider myself a

realist, but not a not a skeptic and certainly not paranoid about the idea that something catastrophic is being hidden here. Now, moving on to your first question, which was so important. Why has the Republican Party turned so sharply against a policy success of Donald Trump? I think it's just so interesting how narratives can concretize in this way. Let me spin out another narrative that Earth 2 Donald Trump might be giving to Earth 2 Republicans who are extremely pro-vax. Donald Trump on Earth 2 could say, I am amazing. I created the Apollo program of the 21st century. And whereas the original Apollo program from that fucker JFK only landed a metal box on a desert satellite that had nothing on it, that gives us nothing

in return. I landed this incredible hole in one project in the most incredible like vaccine accomplishment in the history of science. This is one of the most extraordinary things anyone has ever done in America. I did it. I'm Donald Trump. I'm the best and the most awesome. Furthermore, you know who I hate and who I've told you that I hate for years, if not decades? It's the Chinese. And look at them. They are locking down Shanghai. They're locking, you probably won't pronounce it like that. They're locking down Shanghai. Their vaccines don't work. Their vaccines don't work. They're locking down their entire economy.

They're entering a recession. They're completely pathetic. Xi looks like a loser. People are rioting in the streets. That's what happens when you don't use the Trump vaccine. Look how sad it is that our geopolitical adversaries are getting crushed by their inability to own the scientific frontier. I own it. I am bestriding it. I put a big Trump sign on the technological

frontier of biotech. I'm amazing. Worship me. Send me to my third term as US president. You've achieved something that seven years of Republicans and Trump fans who are unable to achieve, Derek, which is like, you made me almost excited for Donald Trump for a second. Me and my Trump derangement syndrome. You just offered the vaccine for my Trump derangement syndrome just by talking like that. It's legitimately interesting to me why no one talks like that in the Republican Party. I mean, maybe there are, I wouldn't say no one, there's tens of billions of Republicans, but why almost no one represents that particular message that says

Republicans did something incredible. Now, the anti-Trump members of the administration, like Scott Gottlieb, right? Like the Trump skeptical members of the Trump administration are the only ones that ever talk like that. Exactly. I know Scott a little bit, but I don't even know the degree to which I would call him a self-ID Republican. I understand his resume would point in that direction, but if Trump ran again, I'm not sure that he would do so. And I think that it's so interesting that like for a variety of reasons that click into, I think, declining trust in institutions as institutions have legitimately moved a little bit to the left and their professional managerial class has moved a bit to the left.

As institutions have listed left, Republicans have become more anti-institutional. They hate everything that seems like an institution. Cranks, I think, have self-sorted into the Republican Party. Used to have anti-vax cranks sort of evenly distributed among the far left and the far right. You had the health nuts in Berkeley who were like, I think that vaccines were developed by people and it doesn't come straight out of whatever Brussels sprouts, and so I don't want to put it in my body. But now all the people that are anti-vax basically are Republicans. You've had this weird self-sorting mechanism. And as a result, no one has this message in the GOP. And I frankly find that very interesting. And say we should be doing more things like Operation Warp Speed. The CDC is sclerotic. And we have all these potential other innovations that we could be pushing through that these pencil pushers in Washington are keeping from us because they're corrupted.

And you could use that even to say the CDC was too cautious and too conservative at times and, you know, letting us use this amazing vaccine and get our economy back going again and open back up. Those criticisms would have some legitimacy, right? Not just a whiff of it with the myocarditis, but like some actual legitimacy. And they would be in the spirit of a free market kind of Republican tradition. And I just think it's so telling that like, that is not the route that not just Trump is going, but that, you know,

the person that is being set up as a successor is going. Well, I couldn't agree more. I mean, I wrote a piece earlier this year called The Abundance Agenda, where I laid out... That's what I was going next. We are so good at this. Okay, there we go. Where I laid out, you know, it wasn't a political manifesto, but it wasn't not a political manifesto. It was me saying, I think that we're in a weird period in America where we are suffering from rolling crises of scarcity.

This was a time we didn't have enough free COVID tests and people had to queue in DC when it was, you know, 15 degrees for an hour to get a COVID test. We didn't have enough booster shots for a while. Fauci told us not to wear masks in March, March 2020 because there weren't enough masks to go around. And I zoomed out and I said, you know, scarcity is the story of the 21st century for the U.S. We don't have enough houses. We don't have enough doctors. The U.S. has the fewest general practitioners per capita of any country in the OECD. You look at prices, you know, skyrocketing for things like childcare and medicine,

that speaks to institutional scarcity as well. The US invented solar cell technology. We had the technological edge in wind turbines, but we can't build enough clean energy because, frankly, people on both the left and the right just keep using regulatory obstacles to throw in the path of people trying to decarbonize the grid. We have all of these aspects of institutional sporadicism, as you put it, all across the economy, at the FDA, at the CDC, within states, within government. And I want a government that builds. I want a government that does cool shit. I want a government that builds a lot of that which is good for most American people. And that's a policy of explicit abundance.

And so I think it's really important, and this has sort of been an intellectual project of mine for the last year, to answer this question, why doesn't America build what it invents? How did we become the R&D lab of the world that can't actually actualize all of these things in the physical space? So yeah, I think it's a huge big question. And what's your answer to that question? How do you explain it? You're filling this void, so I kind of observe it, and others have been banging your drum also in the punditocracy, kind of because there isn't a natural political coalition for this,

which doesn't make a lot of sense, right? I mean, you could point to certain politicians. I think that Jared Polis would probably see himself as an abundance politician. But the main drivers, I mean, certainly the Republican Party is going the other way. And there are some, I think, some traditional interest groups on the Democratic side that prevent this. What's your assessment for why? I mean, in some ways, look, I'm proud of you for coming up with this great idea, but it also seems kind of obvious, right? Like, don't we need more of all this stuff? Like, why is something that obvious being so resisted, do you think, in our political culture?

I think the answer to that question is that we prefer to talk about culture than to think about the material world. And so the most successful politicians are those that talk and rage about the culture war rather than those that try to answer questions that materially affect people's lives. That's like the cynical answer. There's some political science that somewhat supports it. There's this idea from Ronald Englehart that in countries that surpass a

certain threshold of material well-being, the locus of political debate moves to post-materialism, that is to say, culture wars identity, rather than questions of how do we deliver abundant energy to rural America? How do we build enough houses in New York? I don't think it's entirely the case that culture war makes up the entire frontier of political discussion. There are debates about policy, of course, but there's just so much more energy in the culture war. And that might be a reason why the abundance agenda hasn't been centered by someone before today. isn't there more focus on abundance, we suffer from a slew of bottlenecks and political barriers to regulatory overgrowth and corporate greed and cultural biases. And I think a lot of it just redounds to culture. I think Americans have developed on both sides a bizarre scarcity mindset about the physical world. We don't want affordable apartments built to where we live because what if that reduces our housing? We don't want new energy installation because we don't like the sound of construction.

We're comfortable enough that we can afford status quo biases. And so we say the physical world can't be changed. Nothing can be changed. And so I think that if I had to sort of summarize it in like just one psychological effect, it would be that it's just familiarity bias all the way down. There's too many people who say we have to return, even with the V in the place of the U, we have to return to either, if you're a Republican, the 1950s, if you're a Democrat, maybe the 1960s, if you're a reactionary, the 1550s. We have to return to some decade.

And I just don't think that's true. Every past decade sucked in some way. The 1950s were absolutely terrible in so many ways. 1960s were dreadful in so many ways. 1550s, God forbid. Like we have to build the future, but it is a political challenge to get people excited about that,

which doesn't yet exist. I think the comfort is an observation that I also share that there's a lot of explanations of Trump was this, you know, it was this great economic anxiety that drove people to him. And I do think that that was true for certain parts of the country. But for large parts of Trump's coalition, the upscale parts of his coalition, the people having the boat parades, it was to me, comfort. They were comfortable enough that they could take a flyer on a racist game show host that made them feel good inside, right? That if they're in times of deep distress, you know, they might have wanted

to turn to a steadier hand. Hey, I want to, I want to finish on just two things really quick. One, I have to trigger the audience here a little bit. I was shocked. I didn't think it'd be triggering, but I linked to your colleague yeah. Demas. And her article yesterday about the answer to homelessness being your abundance agenda. I don't know if she said that, but essentially it was more homes as the answer to homelessness. Seems obvious. There were a lot of commenters in our sub-stack who replied and were like, no, I mean, it's the weather in California and it's, you know, all these other explanations, which seems insane to me. So you concur with that solution, right? I mean, like there are mental health issues, there are other

things at play here. But the fundamental issue with our homelessness crisis is that we haven't built enough homes. I absolutely agree with her. I'm not a housing expert, but I share her bias that homelessness in many cases, if not most cases, is a story of housing scarcity and not predominantly a story of good weather or drug addiction. I'd say this, if we build more houses and it doesn't immediately solve the homelessness crisis, but it helps to reduce average housing costs in California, that will be good enough. It's like saying you should take vitamin C because it might reduce your chance of contracting COVID by 1%. Let's say that's wrong. Let's say that the only benefit of taking vitamin C is that it's good for you in every other way. You should still take

vitamin C. So I think she's right in this case. I don't think this is like a crank theory about COVID. I think that she has a lot of empirical support for the idea that building more houses is a solution to homelessness. Even if she's wrong, I would love to I've been waiting through our comments section. So I can tell you there are the other complaints, but we can, I'll do a whole nother housing episode the next time I guest house. I want to give you a chance, final thing before we go. Your most recent article is about the discoveries of the year, big discoveries of 2022. And so why don't you just bring us home on a high note with your favorite one, maybe that hasn't gotten as much attention. And I can direct people to the article if they want to get more. Sure. My personal favorite breakthrough of 2022 to play with is chat GPT, because I think it's just an astonishing alien technology. Probably the most important breakthrough of 2022 from in biotech is the fact that, and you can read about this in the piece, Breakthroughs of the Year in the Atlantic, this was the best year for cancer therapies in the history of humanity. We had some absolutely unheard of results for rectal and breast cancer. And it's just astonishing

what scientists are able to do right now and how far they push the scientific frontier in oncology. And so I'm just really grateful to be alive in an age where we are accelerating in that department. So I think that biotech is just at the beginning of a long, long century. And that in many cases, you know, when you and I are talking from our hologram avatars 10, 20 years from now, we'll say the most important thing that happened in 2022, nothing to do with politics. It wasn't interest rates. It wasn't inflation. All that stuff ended. All those stories ended. The interest rates went down. The inflation went down. What changed was that we had these breakthroughs in biotech that made life better and bigger for everyone. Dude, that is so good. Thank you so much for doing this. Plain English is Derek's podcast.

You should definitely check it out. Read him at The Atlantic. I'm going to be back tomorrow with a little bit more comfort food, a little bit more con owning, a little bit more political analysis, some more dunking on Ron DeSantis, the things that you guys really enjoy

and come here for. But I appreciate the fact that you've enriched us, Derek. Go Nuggets. And let's do this again next year. Yeah, let's have an abundance of Nuggets championships in the 2020s. How about that? Dude, your lips to God's ears. Thank you, everybody.

I'll be back tomorrow. We'll do this all over again. Peace.