The Prof G Pod with Scott Galloway - Abundance Is the Key to Fixing America — with Ezra Klein & Derek Thompson

Episode Date: March 27, 2025

This episode features a conversation with Ezra Klein, New York Times columnist and host of The Ezra Klein Show, and Derek Thompson, Atlantic staff writer, author, and host of the Plain English podcast.  Scott discusses with Ezra and Derek their new book, “Abundance,” which is all about how America learned to fail at abundance — and how the left can fix it by embracing growth, progress, and the messy trade-offs of governing.  Follow Ezra, @ezraklein. Follow Derek, @DKThomp. Scott opens with his thoughts on the pros and cons of living in the UK.  Algebra of Happiness: action absorbs anxiety.  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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The all new Accura ADX is a compact SUV crafted to take you where you need to go, without any compromises. With available Google built-in, all-wheel drive, and a 15-speaker bang and all of some premium sound system, the all-new ADX is crafted to be as alive to the world's possibilities as you are. The all-new ADX, crafted to match your energy. Acura, precision crafted performance. Learn more at Acura.com.

["Route 342, Bambi"] Episode 342, Route 342 is an east-west highway in New York. In 1942, Disney released Bambi. I used to call my girlfriend Bambi, and she thought it was because she had big, beautiful eyes. No, it was because I wanted to shoot her mother with a hunting rifle. Go, go, go! -♪

Welcome to the 340-second episode of the Prov G Pub. What's happening? The dog is home in London. I'm back in London town. People say, why did you move to London? People always say that. And I say, well, why am I in London? I'm an influencer, not a decision-maker around these issues.

The mother of my children said seven years ago, we're moving to London in five years, or seven and a half years ago. And then she actually called my bluff, came over here, bought a house, and brought the kids in school. And then boom, we're in London. So let's stack rank London.

What's the good, what's the bad people. He, do you like it? Do you love it? No, I don't love it. I don't love it. Uh, there's some, let me start with the good. It's a world-class city. I think mostly because it became a haven for private capital or wealthy people

looking to engage in tax avoidance. And let's be honest, that's what you do when you get rich. it became a haven for private capital or wealthy people looking to engage in tax avoidance. And let's be honest, that's what you do when you get rich. And part of the reason people are rich is because they're obsessed with money and they think about it a lot. Things you're obsessed with, you tend to be better at than things you're not obsessed with.

And Prime Minister Tony Blair at the time passed a series of private property laws that said, if you're a war criminal or an oligarch or just made a shit ton of money and you're worried about taxation, you can bring all your capital here and it's safe and no one can come for it and take it. And also whatever money you keep offshore,

we will not tax. And if you think about it, well, you don't get to do that in America. If you make a bunch of money in businesses in Korea or whatever, and you repatriated and bring it home, such you can spend it on hookers and cocaine. That's where I go.

That's where the dog goes. Then you get taxed on it as you should be. And in the UK, that money, as long as it stays outside of the UK, you don't get taxed on it. So we get a lot of rich people coming here. Anyways, what do I like about the UK? Let's stack rank it.

It is a great city. I've been coming to London for about, probably 50 years I've been coming to London for about, ah, probably 50 years. I've been coming here since I was a little, since I was a wee one, since I was a wee skipper, because both my parents are from the United Kingdom. My father from Glasgow, my mother from London. And this place is slowly but surely, it got in the mother of all facelifts

over the last 50 years. In the 80s, this was not a nice city. The food sucked, the infrastructure was crumbling. There weren't a lot of innovative businesses here. It just wasn't where you would decide to spend a lot of money. Now it really is sort of the most probably livable city if you're coming from America and an English speaker. So there's really interesting people. It is a world-class city. Premier League football, another amazing thing. Best thing about the UK in my view, proximity to the continent. And also, I will say that people are very welcoming here.

You come here and people immediately say, oh, you're new. I had someone come up to me in the park and say, oh, you're new, come over, we have dogs, we'll have dinner. I'm not comfortable with that. I don't want to go to strangers house for fear that I walk in and it's sort of weird and I think I'm trapped here for two and a half hours. But anyways, people have dinner parties when you arrive, very nice. I found very warm and welcoming culture. The downside, the downside. The second worst thing about it here, the business environment is really anemic, comatose.

I just don't find there's the same entrepreneurial flair. I don't know what it is, but I have found that the majority of the economy here is about serving wealth that's been created elsewhere, that there isn't a lot of organic value creation. Most of the entrepreneurs are starting businesses to serve money made elsewhere. They're starting a restaurant, they're starting a wealth management company, they're starting a hotel. There's very little, I think, of a taxing here. I mean, a little bit, a little bit of payments,

but it's just not that same risk-taking infrastructure, whatever you might want to call it. By far, the worst thing about it here, oh my God, the weather, Jesus fucking Christ. It's cloudy and gray and 52 degrees. Whoa, good news is it'll be like that for the next, I don't know, seven years. Oh my God.

It is just, I don't, I didn't realize, I'm gonna, I'm absolutely gonna retire like Arizona or something. Not true, retiring to Aspen, retiring to Aspen. Cause the sun, at least for me, I have that disorder, seasonal disorder. I don't know, is that really a disorder? I'm wanting to have sun all the time.

But oh my gosh, I just can't handle it. I just cannot handle it. We've been here two and a half years. Oh, I forgot, actually, you know what? The best thing, the best thing about the UK is the schooling system. The schools are getting great here. My two boys are so happy, thriving, doing great in school.

Oh, another free gift would purchase. I don't have horror fantasies about waking up or getting up and turning on the TV and seeing my kids school in the news because of a mass shooter. You just really don't have that here. Why? Because they're fairly reasonable people.

Anyways, that's my breakdown of the UK, the United Kingdom. I would say to anyone who has the pleasure or the luxury or is fortunate enough to ever live abroad, I absolutely think you should. I could not do better than my life in the US. I could not do better than my life in the US. I will not do better than my life in the US. I love it there. I am very American.

I didn't realize how American I was till I left. But you don't wanna do better. What you wanna do is different. And if you have the resources or the opportunity to live abroad, you should. And I think there's kind of two times when you figure it out. One, when you're young,

because when you're young, you can dance between the raindrops. You can just go out, have a pint, meet friends, you don't have to live in a nice place. You're more flexible. If it's not great for your career, you can recover. Or quite frankly, when you have a lot of money. And I know that sounds douchey.

Oh, we should all be able to move to Europe. Yeah, but you can't. The reason I moved to Europe, people say, oh, you wanted to get out of the US because of Trump? No, not at all. I'm here because of the US, not because I wanted to leave. I'm here due to the prosperity I recognize of the US because of Trump? No, not at all. I'm here because of the US, not because I wanted to leave.

I'm here due to the prosperity I recognize in the US. And the reality is in a city like London or living in Europe, especially with a family or moving, you just need to lubricate it with a lot of money. It's probably true if you want to live in New York or San Francisco or LA, but still, the reason I'm in Europe is because America let me. All right, moving on.

In today's episode, we speak with Ezra Klein, the New York Times columnist and host of the Ezra Klein show and Derek Thompson, Atlantic staff writer, author, and host of the Plain English podcast. We discuss with Ezra and Derek their new book, Abundance, which is all about how America learned to fail at abundance and how the left can fix it by embracing growth progress

and the messy trade-offs of governing. So I did enjoy this conversation. I mean, something that plagues the United States, it's interesting, Derek and Ezra would say that the left suffers from sort of the bureaucratic states, 12 times as much to build a mile of subway in New York versus Paris, which isn't known for its efficiency.

We spent all this money on charging stations and none of them happened. I don't know if that's something that just plagues the left, quite frankly. Although what's interesting is that kind of these Republican run cities just seem to be better run right now than democratically run cities. But anyways, that is what it is. I enjoyed it. They're both really fascinating guys. Derek's at the Atlantic.

Ezra is at the New York Times. They're both just super thoughtful guys. And also they seem like nice guys. I'm glad they're doing so well. And I am glad that they're doing so well. guys. Derek's at the Atlantic, Ezra is at the New York Times. They're both just super thoughtful guys and also they seem like nice guys. I'm glad they're doing so well and I enjoy having them on the pod as will you. So with that, here's our conversation with Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson.

All right, let's bust right into it. Gentlemen, where does this podcast find you? Ezra, where are you? I am in New York. You're in New York. And Derek? I'm in Chapel Hill, North Carolina. Nice. We were just talking about it.

I'm doing a cause for it with my son and he's decided that he's interested in UNC and I asked him why and he said, because of the logo. And I thought, well, that's absolutely the right reason to pick a university. So your new book, Abundance, is about where America, liberalism, and the Democratic Party went wrong over the last few decades. You argue that right-wing populism thrives on scarcity, and the answer is abundance. Let's start there.

What does that abundance look like? I'll start with you, Derek. I think abundance is a positive vision of the future that liberals can build if we get out of our own way. And I think it starts first with actually having a goal. This book is about politics and it's about policy, but it opens actually with a sci-fi vignette of what the world of 2050 could look like if we get everything right in housing, in energy, in science and technology and governance. But these are different markets, and different markets have different problems, and they and technology and governance. But these are different markets and different markets had different problems

and they have different bottlenecks. And so part two, after you have a goal of where you wanna go is understanding what industries you're actually working in. And a lot of this book is looking back over the last 50 years at how housing policy went wrong, often in blue cities and how we failed to build clean energy in this country,

even when liberal cities and liberal governors tend to say that they want to build clean energy in this country, even when liberal cities and liberal governors tend to say that they want to build clean energy to help climate change. And then finally, I think that abundance requires us identifying the bottlenecks that are in our way and the policies that we don't have yet that could improve our outcomes. So for example, I think it's pretty remarkable

that when you think about how important science and technology are to improving people's health and improving people's lives This country doesn't have a national invention agenda. The Democratic Party doesn't have one You might expect that Elon Musk now that he's associated himself with the MAGA movement would inscribe a kind of wise Techno-optimist idea within that party. He hasn't he has no vision of what America can be he has a vision of what he wants to tear down. And so we believe very strongly in having a positive vision

for the future, understanding the world and where we've gone wrong. And then finally in resolving the bottlenecks to actually build that future. Is there any additional color there? I mean, I'll give our one sentence, which is that the thesis of abundance is that to have the future we want, we need to build and invent more of what we need.

Okay. So abundance is a really nice word. Tell me on the ground what that means. Let's talk about energy. Does that mean drill, baby drill? Like, how does this notion of abundance impact our energy policy? So I often get this question of if you think we've gone wrong in so many places, if you think the government has hindered so much

construction, so much innovation, why are you not just a conservative? Don't we already have a Republican party? The world you are trying to achieve matters. When there's actually a huge disagreement I have with things like Doge, which is efficiency towards what? I hear all these tech-right people tell me that they're readying the government for AI and I'm like, okay AI that does

What what is its value function? What is its prompt? What are you unleashing it on? you have to know what you're trying to build and the I think two of the core tributaries of the book are housing and decarbonization We are very very worried about the absence of sufficient housing in the big, particularly the cities, although not only, that drive the American economy. And we're simply not going to meet decarbonization goals. I mean, we're probably at this point not going to meet them anyway. But you're not going to meet decarbonization goals if you can't build solar, wind, battery manufacturing

facilities and other things at a much, much, much faster pace than we've seen so far and that are frankly possible under the way liberal governments, including national and democratic governments tend to create the rules for construction. So yeah, our theory is not just more of everything. I think we have a line in the book that it's not an omnidirectional moreness. You have to choose what you need more of. Look, we've had also, as you know better than anybody, Scott, an abundance of consumer goods for a long time.

And behind that abundance of consumer goods where 40 years ago, you could go to public college debt-free, but you couldn't have a flat-screen television anchored on your wall in your house. Now you probably can't go to public college debt-free, and you can have a flat-screen television. So we kind of constructed government and the global economy to make the things that fill a house cheap and the things that build a life expensive. Child care, healthcare, education, housing, energy,

and a set of other things that we think of as more of the building blocks of production and the building blocks of flourishing. And so we in the book sort of run through these, not just at a policy level, but also at a more conceptual level, sort of one by one, housing, energy, state capacity, these structures that lead to invention, and then the structures and ways we turn that invention into actual technology that is produced in a way people can use. You have to choose and if there's any one I think pathology we are pulling at inside the way liberals govern and we're both you know American liberals, it's that we often

don't choose. We lower things up with too many goals, too many standards, too many regulations, and we don't take seriously that if you're gonna achieve anything, you need to focus on achieving that thing. Getting anything done well is hard, and we pretend it's easy and then act surprised when we fail.

So Derek, I love the idea of abundance, but I'll put forward a thesis and you respond. We don't suffer from a lack of abundance. What we suffer from is this oligarchical zeitgeist where we've decided to optimize the U.S. for the top 1%. And we don't suffer from an increase in market capitalization and an increase in wealth. What we suffer from is policies that essentially insert

certain companies in between the consumer on some public goods, including healthcare, housing, prison system, where the objective or the metrics are shareholder value, not the public good. The private company inserts themselves in the middle. It does a great job, innovation applies technology, and then creates market power, raises the prices, and we end up with one in four households

with children in red states, our food insecure. Isn't it, I mean, quite frankly, just to sound like a liberal, isn't our problem not abundance, but quite frankly that we are slowly but surely sequestering all the abundance to the 1%? Sometimes I would say the answer to our problems is that the oligarchy is getting

in the way of achieving our outcomes. But let's talk about housing for a second. Why is it that California has the worst affordable housing crisis in the country? Why is it that the five states with the highest rates of homelessness are all states that are governed by Democrats? Is it because the oligarchy is stronger in democratic states or is it because in place after place governed by Democrats, we have allowed habits and customs and rules and regulations

to get in the way of what you and I and Ezra all want, which is more housing supply. Scott, your last great note for your last great newsletter was about housing being the most important topic for the 2028 election. We have seen the average age of first time homeowners go from 25 to 37 years old. We now have a record high number of young people

who say they cannot afford a home because the cost of housing as a share of average incomes has gone up and up and up. Of course, I think sometimes the problems in housing have to do with incumbents, but sometimes the problems in housing have to do with us ourselves and the rules that we write. So you look at a place like Portland, Oregon. In Portland, Oregon, every single mayor and every single governor that's elected says housing is our priority. But if you ask, can we build outside of the current lines that are drawn by the 1972 land use laws, they say, no, we can't do that. If you ask if you can build a new apartment building that blocks a view of Mount

Rainier, they say, actually, our view of Mount Rainier is more important than additional new housing units. So I do think that of course there are many situations where the most important problem to focus on is the problem of entrenched money. But in many cases, for the issues that you and I care most about, which is housing supply and housing abundance, I think we need to take a good long look in the mirror and recognize something I think has gone wrong on our own side, if the cities and the states that have the worst

housing prices are also governed by liberals. And also I would say the costs of escalating housing prices is not just seen in how much housing is eating up the budgets of people who live in these cities. It's also the people who are leaving these cities. California is losing people. New York state is losing people. Illinois is losing people. Minnesota is losing people. Working class families, as Ezra just said in his beautifully done new video for the New York Times, working class families are leaving blue states and moving to states that are more likely

to be governed by Republicans. Of course, there are all sorts of indictments that we can make of the power of oligarchy in this country. And we can talk about the many ways that Elon Musk is turning government into some kind of kleptocratic mania. But look, if we're really trying to understand why is the housing crisis worse

in blue states and blue cities, I think we need to look in the mirror as well. Ezra, you talk about, or you say in the book that for a future that's pro-growth, pro-technology, and has pro-liberal values, what does that actually look like in practice? Give me more. Well, let's talk about, I mean,

beyond just clearing out, going from talk about, I mean, beyond, beyond just clearing out going from NIMBY to YIMBY, like they've done in Austin or in a minute Minneapolis, give me an example beyond housing of how kind of a pro technology pro growth and pro liberal values, how that actually impacts things on the ground. I think you guys could could have written your book just on housing, because I think what you're saying really resonates with people, where we've turned it into an investment class and turned over housing permits to homeowners and took it out of the hands of bureaucrats,

and homeowners have an incentive to restrict the supply. But give me another example in another sector of how you think kind of being pro-tech and pro-growth might change our current approach. Let's talk energy, because I think energy is a useful one. Imagine a world where it just turned out we never invented a form of energy that didn't require burning fossil fuels, right? We figured out natural gas,

we figured out oil and petroleum, we figured out coal, but we never invented the solar panel, we never figured out what to do with a wind turbine, didn't figure out hydro power or geothermal. You would have this, I think, politically impossible problem, which is that the only way to do anything about greenhouse gas emissions would be to radically cut the living standards of functionally everybody who uses energy around the globe. Right, there just wouldn't be another way around it.

You could try to make your burning of coal more efficient, but if we did not keep moving the technological frontier forward, I mean, I grew up, I don't know where you grew up, Scott, but I grew up outside LA. And when I grew up, you still had LA coded in smog. You would still go in and you'd be like looking at this. You think, is it cloudy or can I not breathe?

Yeah. I remember I grew up in LA. I remember coming home from school and your chest would hurt when you breathe in. Yep. And what's crazy today, and it's a way I think, you know, that the only future is not degrowth. What's crazy today is LA is richer. It's bigger and you can breathe the air. And that happens in a lot of places.

I mean, London used to be unfathomably smoggy. I mean, go back to any writing about the Industrial Revolution. So OK, so we didn't end up in that world. We ended up in a world where, due to a series, by the way, of policies, right, government funding of research, the German subsidies, particularly for solar, Chinese subsidies for the solar industry,

we ended up, over the past 10, 15 years, driving the price of solar down by 90 percent, driving the price of wind down, I think, it's by 79 percent, and the battery storage around by something comparable. It is only because of that genuine set of technological miracles, and I don't use miracles here to mean just luck, right? That was a huge amount of policy and human ingenuity. Do we have any capacity to have a politics

around climate change that is not just a politics of sacrifice because politics of sacrifice do not typically work and they have a terrible tendency to elect strong men from the authoritarian, right? You go to people and you say, we're gonna cut how much energy you have, we're gonna ration your energy. Nothing destabilizes a polity faster. Think about the yellow vest riots in France.

Think about how Kamala Harris in a time of high energy prices was running not on the climate investments of the Biden-Harris administration, but on the oil and gas production increase of the Biden-Harris administration. So one of the aims of the book is to repair what we think of as a dysfunctional relationship that has emerged between liberals and technology. There is a tendency to put technology, I think, practically after 2016, it's run by a bunch of oligarchic billionaires. There's a ton of certainly in the liberal mind, disinformation and propaganda on Facebook. They're both sort of turn on technology.

But there's a lot you just can't solve without technology, and a lot about your politics that really change if you get the right technological advancements. We're saying we're not using housing for this example, but modular housing would do a lot to change the politics of housing if you could use them in a lot of cities because you could do public housing much more cheaply, and you could also do non-public housing much more cheaply. Energy and You could also do non-public housing much more cheaply. Energy and continued advance of things like modular nuclear could really, really, really make possible a situation where you could have countries like China and India continue to grow and continue to give people vastly better lives while also cutting carbon emissions.

It could leapfrog the kind of development we went through. It's also true for healthcare. So I spent a lot of my career as a reporter on healthcare policy and sort of my intention in that reporting is I care about universal healthcare policy. I was all over Obamacare and the Affordable Care Act. But how valuable having any kind of health insurances, how valuable having private health insurances, how valuable Medicare is, Medicaid is, is dependent on what devices, treatments, surgeries, pharmaceuticals are there. Medicare and Medicaid that cover Ozempic is more valuable than Medicare and Medicaid that

does not cover Ozempic or Wigovia or the other ones. And if it didn't exist, they would all be less valuable, right? There are people with huge numbers right now of autoimmune conditions we don't understand. These insurance products would be a hell of a lot more valuable to people if we knew how to cure those and the insurance could cover the cures. So there's a lot you just can't do if you don't innovate. We don't figure out green cement and jet fuel. We're not hitting our climate targets one way or the other. So liberalism has to have a technological agenda in addition to a social insurance agenda,

and that means taking the mechanisms and institutions of technological progress and then the distribution of the fruits of that technological progress seriously. So Derek, when we talk about energy policy, just to steal man this, that the very Republican state of Texas is now producing more wind energy than anyone, and that economics ultimately wins out. Or that's a case study, and ultimately that creates less bureaucracy, let the market decide, more wind energy, lower cost of energy, more tax revenue to reinvest in our schools. Isn't the conservative agenda more of an abundance agenda?

It's interesting. We've gotten a version of this question a few times, and I think it's a really good question. invest in our schools. Isn't a conservative agenda more of an abundance agenda? It's interesting. We've gotten aversion to this question a few times. I think it's a really good question. Certainly, Texas and Texas politicians do not have as their North Star the idea that climate change is the most important policy in the world, right? It is liberals and it's progressives who have all of the backpack pins that say let's ban oil and let's fix climate change. Nonetheless, as you point out, you can't ignore the fact of outcomes. It is Texas that is building the most renewable. And it is often places like Georgia and Iowa, not run by Democrats, but run often by Republicans who do not value climate change as a top order priority that are building the most renewable energy.

And that speaks to the fact that in some cases, if you allow a market to work without the interference of NIMBY politics, you sometimes, ironically, end up with more progressive outcomes. This is as true in energy as you could say it is in housing. What stands in the way of housing in San Francisco, in Los Angeles, in Boston, in Portland, is not demand to live there. It's constrictors on supply. And in the same way, I think there are people in California and New York who want to build

in Massachusetts, who want to build more solar and want to build more wind, but they can't do it because the political processes in these states have gotten so good at the politics of blocking that they've prevented the politics of building. Even building things that are in liberals' interests, houses, solar, wind, geothermal, even if you're a certain kind of progressive nuclear. So I think you've put your finger on

a really, really important tension between the processes that liberals have and the outcomes that they want. Why are our outcomes living in Texas if our priorities live in San Francisco? That is an incredibly important question for the progressive movement to ask itself if it wants to answer the question

and actually build the things that we say we want to build. We'll be right back. This is Advertiser Content from Mercury. Hey, I'm Josh Mucciio, host of The Pitch, a Vox Media Podcast where startup founders pitch real ideas to real investors. I'm an entrepreneur myself. I know and love entrepreneurs, so I know a good pitch and a good product, especially if it'll make an entrepreneur's life easier.

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Mercury. Banking that does more. Mercury is a financial technology company, not a bank. Banking services provided by Choice Financial Group, Column NA, and Evolve Bank & Trust, members FDIC. Craft is where function meets style. It's where precision meets performance. It's where doing it yourself meets showing the world what you're capable of. The all-new Acura ADX is a compact SUV

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Learn more at Acura.com. Today explained here with Eric Levitt, senior correspondent at Vox.com, to talk about the 2024 election. That can't be right. Eric, I thought we were done with that. I feel like I'm Pacino in 3. Just when I thought I was out, they pulled me back in. Why are we talking about the 2024 election again? The reason why we're still looking back is that it takes a while after an election to get all of the most high quality data on what exactly happened. So the full picture is starting to just come into view now. And you wrote a piece about the full picture for Vox recently, and it did bonkers business

on the internet. What did it say? What struck a chord? Yeah. So this was my interview with David Shore of Blue Rose Research. He's one of the biggest sort of democratic data gurus in the party. And basically, the big picture headline takeaways are, On today explained. You'll have to go listen to them there. Find the show wherever you listen to shows, bro. As I see the epicenter of all the things you're talking

about are the perfect sort of bad things, whether it's an obsession with scarcity or the administrative state getting in the way of objectives or losing, kind of losing the plot. I think the epicenter for everything you guys are talking about is my industry where you have when the Dean announces we've rejected 85% of applicants what are the faculty and the alumni do they stand up and they applaud. I'm curious if you've thought about how this scarcity or non-abundance mindset has infected higher education and what policy recommendations

you guys would make to address this problem. I've thought about it a bit. Higher Ed is not a huge focus of the book. But in some earlier, some Californian and in some earlier work, one of the things I think about in terms of what happened to the California of the past, I don't think there is a greater public achievement, certainly not in education in the world than the University of California system. Oh, right on my brother. Literally right the fuck on.

I am here because of the generosity of California taxpayers and the Regents of UC. Anyway, sorry, I was gonna go ahead. It's an extraordinary, I went to UC Santa Cruz, I went to UCLA, right? Like I am a full on product of California public schools through California higher ed. What was your tuition when you were going?

Who was a long time ago. I don't remember it offhand. I'm worried I'm gonna give you the out of state. Mine was $7,000. I think mine was like, yeah, like it was like $10,000, I believe. No, no, no, mine was 7,000 for all seven years of undergrad and grad.

Do you remember the admissions rate at UC when you applied? No. For me at UCLA, it was 76% when I applied and I was one of the 24%. You wanna hear something? When I, so UC had, when I was in, I was a shit student, I had a 2.2 when I graduated high school.

You had a lot of trouble paying attention. UC had a thing then called eligibility. And it was a sliding scale. But if you got above a 3.3 or above a 1400 on your SATs or something in between that sliding scale, you were guaranteed admission to Riverside or Santa Cruz. Or UCI or yeah. No, by the time I went, UCI wasn't doing eligibility anymore because they were too blocked up.

I don't know if any of them do it anymore. But when I went, that's how I got into Santa Cruz. I qualified in on test scores. But the thing is, like in my lifetime and well before it, having built the most remarkable public university system the world has ever known and like take nothing away from Cal State's or the community colleges there, which are also great. They added exactly one UC campus Merced. Fuck did we stop building UCs for?

Did California stop having people? Did we stop needing great universities? But I've like looked into this and I mean, one is, Oh my God, like the fighting in the legislature over where to go and you know, who gets it and whose ox gets gored. And we just stopped building a bunch of different kinds of things. We can't build high speed rail, but we also to build new UCs. You know, we don't build houses, but we also don't build enough clean energy. I think the other thing I would say, because I do agree with you, Scott, and have pretty intense views on this. I don't know. I have people I respect who will tell me well, you know

The you know, if you double or triple the size of Harvard, it wouldn't be Harvard anymore and it would lose quality I don't know that I buy that but you could sure as hell Open these places up to a lot more innovation You could sure as hell do a lot of new things and put a lot of money into new institutions And I wonder about the fact that we don't I was it was a good piece in the New Yorker recently by Adam Gopnik It's not what we're here to talk about but here's what we're talking about about the Gilded Age and he was making this point about how the robber barons were

Monsters in a million different ways. They're also remarkable in other ways. But man, did they leave behind cultural institutions and institutions of learning. Vanderbilt's a great university, really is. What are they all doing today? What are they all doing today? And he was making the point about museums and art. I was in Pittsburgh for a family event recently,

and man, the museums there are great. The federal government has stopped building, but also there's nothing like the construction of cultural institutions that the rich did in that era. The rich of this era are building their personal rocket companies and getting their yachts, but they're not creating like new institutions of local or for that matter national value. So there's something I think about our

institutional our absence of institutional ambition. Elon Musk sure has the ambition to destroy things that have been built in the public sector, but not to make new ones. And you just kind of see this replicated. There is, as we stop the narrow version of this, is it as we find that we cannot build rail at any acceptable cost point, we do a lot of less building of rail with tunnels in it because tunnels are expensive and they're difficult to do. In other countries, you do a lot more tunneling because they still believe they can build rail. And when you believe you can build rail and actually finish it on time and on budget, you'll do the hard versions

of rail, which include tunnels. And I think there's something like that that is infected. A lot of state governments, for that matter, the federal government, a lot of societies wealthy where they just don't really believe in building great new institutions. And like that's a poverty that is catching up with us and I think will continue to in the coming decades. Like the metaverse doesn't cut it. I think it's impossible to argue against the notion that we used to have these individuals of extraordinary talent that would practice full body contact violence of capitalism and then became very civic minded with the spoils

of that full body contact violence of competition. It appears now we have the former and not the latter. My fear though is that waiting on the better angels of these billionaires to show up is not a strategy. And that I have now become, I've kind of just gone full Bernie Sanders and I'd like you both to respond to this. And I believe that we just need

a massive alternative minimum tax. My tax rate for the last 10 years has been 17%. I'm very transparent about, from my 30s and 40s, I was averaging over 30%. Then I got very wealthy, and my tax rate has been cut in half. I mean, in order to make these sorts of big, bold investments in rail in UC

and still have the money to pay for our Defense Department, Medicaid, Medicare, doesn't it simply, quite frankly, just come down to restoring a progressive tax policy? Derek, any thoughts? Sure, I'm absolutely a fan of restoring progressive tax policy in this country. We're progressives in the American tradition, which means that we believe in big muscular programs

in the new deal, in the style of the new deal. We believe in social security. We believe in Medicare and Medicaid. We know that we're going to continue to have to spend hundreds of billions of dollars on defense, not only to defend the country, but also to invest in military technology to keep Americans and countries that have American values safe. But also, yes, institutions cost a lot of money. Next generation energy costs money to build and sometimes it even costs money to subsidize. Fusion technology does not exist right now and getting it off the ground might be a very expensive enterprise. The same with building high-speed rail across the country if that's what we want to do.

So absolutely, I believe that progressivism requires sufficient funding. But I also think that an important part of this book, an important framework of abundance, subtly nudges the question toward the opposite side of the ledger, which is how do we solve the problems that we have with supply, not the demand that comes from taxpayer money, which is important,

but also the strategy that comes or the outcomes that come from expanding supply. In a way, that's the unspoken question that we've been circling around this whole conversation. In housing, how do we solve the affordable housing crisis with supply, with not reducing a corporate income tax, but actually reducing a corporate income tax, but actually reducing a building tax in the cities that have the highest demand for housing and where we have the highest rates of homelessness. In energy, how do we make it easier to build

not only oil and drilling and fracking for natural gas, but also building the next generation of energy technology and solar, wind, geothermal, and beyond, even nuclear? Even in science institutions, the answer to your question, how do we deal with the fact that education and college costs in this country have gone through the roof and it is prohibitively expensive now to afford four years of excellent elite college in this country? Well, how do we solve that problem with supply? How do we train our eyes from the fact that the UC system essentially stopped building new branches and new schools?

And in fact, it's not just the UC system. I mean, name an elite college that has been founded in the last 100 years. I think two of the last ones that are in to the top 25 of any kind of institutions that we used to spring up and pop up every five years in the last half of the 19th century. And to Ezra's point, I don't think it's a coincidence that the same time that we were inventing things left and right and building houses and building roads and building canals and building telegraph wires in the late 19th century,

we were also building institutions. And there was some strange thing in the air that even some of the most unethical people in this country who did stuff like Rockefeller did to the trade industry of using his monopoly power to essentially shut down companies and start riots, nonetheless had a bone in his body that said, I want to use my money to build something new that doesn't exist yet. Why doesn't that bone exist

in the bodies of billionaires today? So I do think that on top of your very important point, that a critical part of shoring up government finances and the next generation is going to be having sufficient tax revenue, and that sufficient tax revenue is going to be necessary to build a lot of the things in the physical world, expensive things that we want to build. I also want us to think about the question, how do we solve this problem with supply? And think about all the various stations and departments and corners that that question can apply to even outside of the scope of our book,

which is, as we've said, focused so much on housing and energy and science? I want to say these questions are not distinct from each other. And I particularly want to say here, look, I will tax a rich to any level anybody wants to tax a rich. I think the marginal value of those dollars, they're just points on a board at a certain point, and you should be taxing the shit out of them. And we still gotta use that tax money well. And the reason California has not built, has absolutely failed to build high-speed rail is not tax dollars. We tax plenty in California.

And China has a hell of a lot less in tax dollars per capita than we do, and they've built 23,000 miles of high-speed rail in the time California has failed to build 500. In New York City and New York State, taxes here are high. It's a fairly high-tax jurisdiction, at least compared to other places. The Second Avenue subway,

highest cost per kilometer of rail ever recorded in human history. There's no amount of taxing we can do that is going to allow us to build a bunch of subway if it's all going to cost like that. And by the way, the next phases are projected to cost more. We have to use taxpayer dollars well. And the fact that rich people have too much money and we should tax more of it doesn't exempt us from the need to use taxpayer dollars well and I think this is a conceptual and political mistake Democrats and liberals make a lot because taxing rich is popular it's great

but the reason people don't trust us on all kinds of things and something I try to keep telling people is like yeah Donald Trump won in 2020 foreign cost of living he won because people trusted him on inflation over Democrats. But if you go look at exit polls in 2020, when people are tired of Donald Trump, he was even with Joe Biden on the economy. If you go look at 2016, he was ahead of Hillary Clinton on the economy even as he lost the popular vote. People do not trust Democrats on the economy.

They don't trust Democrats to spend your money well. And part of the reason is we often don't spend people's money well. Now, Musk and Trump don't give a shit about where money is being spent well and poorly. They're trying to gut the Social Security Administration, which spends money incredibly effectively, incredibly effectively. They're gutting the IRS. And when you cut people to the IRS, they don't audit rich people and you lose money, right? They're not trying to save money. They're not trying to make government more efficient. But there is not trying to save money. They're not trying to make government more efficient, but there is not an amount of money we can tax people

where that is going to lead to the kind of public infrastructure we want if we cannot build that public infrastructure. AOC has a bill to do more public housing. That's great. I want public housing to be palatial. I want it everywhere. But if we force public housing to operate

under the rules that it currently does, which makes it much more expensive to build public housing, Brandon Johnson, the mayor of Chicago, just tweeted out trying to brag about this, that they had spent, I think it was 1.1, what was it, 11 billion? It was, I believe it was $11 billion

on 10,000 affordable units coming out to 1.1 billion. Yes, or yeah, may as 10,000. So yeah, it was coming out to $1.1 million per affordable housing unit funded by the city. We can't be spending $1.1 million on affordable housing unit. And the answer is not, we should tax rich people more. Maybe we should, but everybody's getting taxed there

deserves a better return on their dollar than $1.1 million for this. So yeah, tax rich people more, oligarchy is a big problem. I'm very worried about oligarchy of attention. We have most of the world's attention being dominated on various social media platforms, but like five guys who are all lined up next to each other, Donald Trump's inauguration.

I've seen a bunch of people be like, well, what about political power? Yeah, political power is a big problem. But one way you get political power is you convince people you're using their money well. And to do that, you have to accept and admit that you've been using it badly, and tell people you got a plan to do it better in the future, or they don't trust you. And in a lot of cases, they don't trust us now, and they have a good reason for that.

I don't want to spend too much time harping on the poor mayor of Chicago, whose approval rating at this point is way below the Mendoza line, but I think it's really important to distinguish that form of liberalism from the kind of liberalism we're advancing in this book. There's a kind of checkbook liberalism that associates success with how much money you can spend. That's the liberalism that brags about $11 billion spent on 10,000 affordable units. There's another kind of liberalism that brags not about how much you spend,

but about how much you build. And that's the kind of liberalism that brags not about how much you spend, but about how much you build. And that's the kind of liberalism that would say, look how easy it was for us to build 10,000 affordable units, forget the price tag, look how quickly we did it. And look at the people who are now living there. That's an outcome based liberalism that I think is very different from the kind of progressivism that has become a habit on the left in the last few years. Yeah, look how awesome are high-speed rails in California. Don't you want that, Texas?

Yeah, well, even just, you know, manufactured homes cost 30 to 50% less that are dropped on a piece of land as opposed to building on site. I think at some point in this longer conversation, we gotta talk about unions, if we're gonna talk about inefficiency. But while I have you here, I would be remiss not to ask you guys to find, because I think you've done, both have done really

good podcasts on this. It strikes me, and this is a bit of a softball amongst three progressives, that the exact opposite, the anti-Christ to an abundance culture, are tariffs. Can you give me any sense for the rationale or any color you wanna add on the current obsession with tariffs across the current administration? Derek, I'll let you go first. I think Donald Trump is a scarcity candidate. I think his political success was created by a sense of scarcity,

a sense that America wasn't growing fast enough, a sense that people couldn't afford fast enough, a sense that people couldn't afford what they wanted to afford, whether it was groceries or housing. What we've seen the first few weeks of the Donald Trump administration is that he's using America's existing shortages to demand more deprivations. He's saying Americans don't have enough housing and therefore we need fewer immigrants. America doesn't have enough manufacturing and therefore we need fewer immigrants. America doesn't have enough manufacturing, and therefore we need higher tariffs, which are essentially a tax on imports, right?

America doesn't have enough science that we think answers the kind of questions that we want, and therefore we're going to gut scientific institutions entirely. I think that's an approach to politics that essentially says we solve our problems of scarcity with just more scarcity. And we're asking for the exact opposite. We're asking for abundance. We're saying, yes, there is an affordable housing crisis in this country and especially in many

of the cities that people want to live. Let's get out of our way and solve this problem with supply. Yes, we agree with Secretary of Treasury Besson's plan to increase total American energy production, let's not hamper our ability to build solar, wind, and geothermal, which are certainly the energy technologies of the future. Let's get out of our way and make it easier to build those things as well. And so I think tariffs are just a perfect, just quintessential example of the way that Donald Trump looks at the problems of American society today,

looks at the shortages and the scarcities and deprivations that we have, and layers more scarcity on top of it. That's his instinct. And in a way, maybe I'm even giving him and his political habits even too much credit by assigning them any kind of ideological character. I do think that personality explains everything that Donald Trump wants to do. He's someone who likes to make big pronouncements, make people feel like they're less than,

get on the phone, work out a deal. Donald Trump wants to do. He's someone who likes to make big pronouncements, make people feel like they're less than, get on the phone, work out a deal. And so he likes a world where he threatens tariffs against the entire world and takes phone call after phone call after phone call from individual world leaders to work out little deals between him and that leader to get something for himself and the people who support him.

This is not in any capacity a strategy to make more for Americans who want more. This is not a strategy that's going to do anything for housing, certainly. I mean, the National Association of Home Builders, I don't know if you saw this when you were putting together your newsletter, the National Association of Home Builders came out with a message after the tariff announcement that said, this is going to be a catastrophe. Our inputs include lumber from Canada and drywall material from Mexico, and now we're

going to increase the taxes on those inputs by 25%. This is a president who understood his mandate, which was all about unaffordability in this country, to immediately raise the two key inputs of housing by 25%. It's complete effing madness. Thinking about solving your problems by expanding supply is so much more rational than whatever nonsense we're getting from the government right now. Can I read you all JD Vance tweet that I've been really looking for an opportunity to tee off on, but now maybe I have it. JD Vance tweets. This was yesterday. We're speaking on March 11th, president Trump's economic policies are simple. If you invest in and create jobs in America, you'll be rewarded. We'll lower regulations and reduce taxes.

But if you build outside of the United States, you're on your own. Okay. Um, so this toy model of the economy they have is such Lunacy what if you're a restaurant and you've built your restaurant in the United States and you employ people locally to cook your food and serve your customers and clean your dishes. But like most restaurants, some percentage of the fruit and produce that you use is imported from Mexico.

So here you are investing locally, creating American jobs, and you're not having your taxes cut and your regulations cut. You just had a large tax put on one of your main inputs, which is food. What if I happened to just like, you know, be in the kind of waiting room place and I don't know why I opened up Wine Spectator because I don't actually like wine, but it had an alarmed editorial in Wine Spectator about how American wineries, their biggest export market is Canada. And so here are these wineries here they are growing their grapes in America, they employ people in America to pick their grapes and make

their wine and bottle their wine and etc. But because they want to sell to Canadians and Donald Trump is starting a trade war with Canada, they are getting a big price of being made less competitive. What if you're a machine, what if you're a, you make advanced machinery and a bunch of the input materials and intermediate materials you need are sourced in from Europe or from Japan, but you do the assembly of making this highly value added product here. Like, are they helping you out? No, they're not. Because one, like at the core of their politics is suspicion of the rest of the world. It is suspicion of immigrants. It is suspicion of other nations. It is suspicion of immigrants, it is suspicion of other nations, it is suspicion that trade

can ever be positive sum, that cooperation is something we should actually do, that you are made stronger by having beneficial interactions with each other. In the way that Derek said a minute ago that a lot with Donald Trump comes down to personality, there are people like JD Vance around him trying to theory wash his intuitions, but what Trump fundamentally doesn't understand is as much interpersonal as it is economic. He's not a person who believes in cooperation. He's a person who believes in dominance. And he wants to run everything that way too. And so he wants to dominate these other countries and close our border because at the absolute

guttural level, he thinks you're either winning or losing in every single interaction. And that is not the way the economy works. This is not the year 1210 AD. Like this is 2025, we have a complex global economy and we are on the forefront of it, racing ahead of Europe in productivity, watching China fall behind where we thought they would be five years ago

because we've been we've had plenty of failures along the way and plenty of people we didn't help out and plenty of things we didn't protect or invest enough in but their tariffs their immigration policy and their whole general attitude and mental architecture that informs what they do doesn't actually make sense even when they try to explain it, which is why I was doing a podcast on tariffs the other day. It was the day after Donald Trump's big speech. During the podcast, they kept exempting things from their tariff policy while I was trying

to explain their tariff policy. Trump was at the speech the night before saying he had talked to the heads of the big three automakers and they were all thrilled and I'm literally talking about this in the podcast And my producers like they just exempted auto goods and then later in the show I'm talking about wasn't it Trump who did the USMCA trade deal the US Mexico Canada trade deal in his first term said it was An amazing trade deal now. The first thing he's doing is tariffs on Canada and Mexico What like what happened to his great trade deal? Couple hours later, they're at least delaying tariffs on USMCA goods. They haven't thought about this.

They haven't thought about the knock on effects. They don't have a model of the economy that makes sense. Stephen Moran, the head of the CEA, his paper, which people are looking at as a holy grail of what all this actually means. He talks about a narrow path in this dense 41 page paper about how maybe all this goes perfectly. And his whole theory is that you work with other countries in a way that they don't put retaliatory tariffs

back on you. If they do put retaliatory tariffs back on you, then his whole theory collapses. It's already happening. We're already off the narrow path. They have not thought about this shit. They're just breaking things. We'll be right back.

So we want to introduce you to another show from our network and your next favorite money podcast for ours, of course, net worth and chill host Vivian too, is a former Wall Street trader turned finance expert and entrepreneur. She shares common financial struggles and gives actionable tips and advice on how to make the most of your money. Past guests include Nicole Yoder, a leading fertility doctor who breaks down the complex world of reproductive medicine and the financial cost of those treatments, and divorce attorney Jackie Combs, who talks about love and divorce and why everyone should have a prenup. Episodes of Net Worth and Chill are released every Wednesday. Listen, wherever you get your podcasts or watch full episodes on YouTube. By the way, I absolutely love Vivintu.

I think she does a great job. We're back with more from Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson. Well, I have you here. You're both great communicators. You're both strategists. You understand positioning, you understand messaging. What thoughts do you have? So as a progressive, I found that I was sort of flat-footed

and just overwhelmed, just sort of, they're flooding the zone with things that are meant to, I think, distract us, enrage us, male versus female, Gulf of cheaper eggs, DEI causing helicopter crashes, because I don't think they want us focused on the fact that they're about to increase the deficit by $800 billion a year to give guys like me a tax cut, that we're surrendering to a murderous autocrat.

I think they're saying, look over here, because they don't want to focus on the important things that are just sort of indefensible. I'm curious what advice, and this has probably already happened, and Derek Ollich go first, Democratic Party calls and says, okay, we really got to figure out our messaging and our strategy here. And assuming that, assuming that people understand that some of these policies are probably just economically ruinous. I don't even think it's the terrorists

are the most damaging thing. I think it's our inconsistency. You want to see what he's going to do around terrorists or economic policy. Look at who had lunch with last. And you can't, you can't have a consistent, when no country knows who they're waking up next to, they're remiss to do anything with you. It's like, well, he could call this off tomorrow. Like that's just no way to operate an economy, much less a country.

What advice would you have for Democrats and the DNC who say or like mine and think, yeah, we need to take, you know, re-usurp government and constitutional authority, this economic plan is disastrous. What strategy, you're in the war room with James Carvel right now, advising 2026 congressional candidates and then 2028.

What strategies do you think we need to deploy, Derek? I think we lost two games in 2024. I think we lost a substantive game with affordability, and I think we lost an attention game. This is definitely something that Ezra can speak to. I would tell Democrats, remember why we lost the 2024 election. It was because a plurality of Americans said that they couldn't afford the life that they wanted. They couldn't afford the 2024 election. It was because a plurality of Americans said that they couldn't afford the life that they wanted.

They couldn't afford the good life. And Democrats should be absolutely laser focused on how to provide the good life for Americans. And that means pointing out all of the lurid ways that Donald Trump is getting in the way. I mean, raising tariffs while trying to build a manufacturing base is one of the craziest things I've ever heard. I mean, the worst thing you can possibly do when you're building a manufacturing base in any country is to make it impossible for

domestic manufacturers to sell overseas. The first thing you want to do if building an industrial base, this is what South Korea did, it's what Taiwan did, is find a way to make it easier for your domestic companies to sell overseas, not to get every overseas buyer to hate you so much that they retaliate their tariffs up to 50%. So the first thing that I would say is remember why we lost. We lost because of affordability. How do we focus on affordability? How do we give people a set of new answers on affordability? And frankly, I think our book does that. It does that by shifting attention toward

how do we solve these problems with supply? And especially how do we solve the mother of all affordability problems, which is housing with supply? In many cases, the good news here is that Donald Trump, for all of his authoritarian power, does not control housing policy in San Francisco. He does not control housing policy in Boston. He does not control housing policy in San Francisco. He does not control housing policy in Boston. He does not control housing policy in Los Angeles.

It is those cities run by those citizens and the people that they elect who control housing policy there, which means that they have the ability to answer problems no matter what Donald Trump does. Focus on affordability. The second big mistake that I think the Democrats made in 2024 and in the previous few years is I think that we've become afraid of talking to people who disagree with us. There's been a kind of purity culture that has come up on the left. And sometimes you could argue it came up for good reason.

Democrats were fighting for causes that they found incredibly worthy and they didn't want those causes contaminated by voices that they disagreed with. But as a result, I think it's created an insular character on the left that doesn't feel like it is extending an arm for people in the center who agree with some of what we support, but not everything that we support. So I want to, from a substantive standpoint, absolutely focus like a laser on the issue of affordability. Not only because it's the number one reason why we just lost, but because I think it's going to be the number one cause of the 2020s. And then number two, I want us to have a different attitude

toward reaching out to people who might disagree with us about things that even we find incredibly important. I want us to be less embarrassed and less shy about talking to the center, because ultimately it's not just about building a coalition that's 48% plus one. Ultimately, what we want, I think, is to redefine what the Cambridge historian Gary Gerstel calls a political order, a set of political and economic rules that doesn't just win two and four-year elections but actually can last for decades the same way that the new deal order lasted for decades. And to do that you have to reach way beyond the 48% that's automatically going to vote for you in every quadrennial election. You have to reach out to the 55 and the 60% and that requires not just a different kind of substantive focus, I think

it requires a different theory of how to communicate. I think that's pretty damn good. I'll add very little to it. Uh, two things. One is that you have to take seriously that people don't like you. You have to take seriously the democratic party brand is trash. I mean, just look at it in the polling. It's less popular than Donald Trump himself. And Donald Trump is not a popular person or candidate.

So one thing you're going to have to do is deal with the fact that you've lost people's faith and the only way to gain it back is to show in some way or another you've changed in some way or another that you have rethought something. And that gets to the second, which is that the Democratic Party is become over time. It has become over time too internally coalitional, too afraid of giving offense, too afraid of disappointing any members of its coalition, its interest groups. Donald Trump, if he's proven anything, it's that you can reshape what a party is about. Now he's done it autocratically, but over time, Donald Trump has substantially changed what the Republican Party is on trade,

on immigration, on Russia, on Ukraine, on national security, on whether it is important for your leaders to lead a decent Christian life or whether you want like the God of the Pagans, Elon Musk, with his, as somebody put it, 13-ish children to be your standard bear alongside Donald Trump with his three marriages, et cetera, and endless sexual harassment cases, lawsuits, reports. So you can change what you are. When what you are currently, in the case of the Democratic Party, is a party that says it's of the working class and is losing working class voters, whether now defined by income

or education, then you have to change, right? Or you are not the thing you think you are. And I think Democrats need to change. And that means in public saying how the next generation of them is going to be different and what they have rethought and what they are not going to do the same next time as this time. You are going to need resistance. If I was in the room with James Carville, I could not disagree with more of the James who I have tremendous respect for. The Democrats should, as he put it in the Times, play dead and wait for the Trump administration to collapse of its own weight. I don't think that works. I don't think it's leadership. But they do need, in addition to being a resistance, to be an alternative.

And they need to admit the places where they failed as an alternative. And then the next standard bearer, the people competing to be the next standard bearer, need to show how they'll be different because they need to unlock the energy, the attentional energy of creating some internal fights, of making some people mad. And so you see that, you see that debate we're having and that I'm winning, you know, if you win it, like that shows that if you vote for us this time, you're getting something that you're going to like better, or at least it's gonna be different than what you got last time.

There is a tension energy and controversy. Democrats have been too afraid of it. I wanna propose a thesis. I have two questions and I'll let you guys go. You've been generous through time. I think that we oftentimes get focused on, we study to the wrong test. And I'm trying to think what is the goal?

What is the mission? AI, GDP, productivity, I think it's all a means to the wrong test. And I'm trying to think what is the goal? What is the mission? AI, GDP, productivity, I think it's all a means to the ends, but the ends are creating an operating system, a platform and economy that enables people to have deep and meaningful relationships. And the three of us, I believe I'll have partners and are raising children.

And much to my surprise, I have found that that has given me purpose and a sense of being and a sense of satisfaction that I didn't, I didn't anticipate I wasn't planning to have children. For me, the unifying theory of everything that should be we reverse engineer all of our public policy and economic decisions to one thing, and that is people 18 to 40 should have the opportunities to meet each other, mandatory national service, more freshmen classes, more third places, quite frankly, more alcohol, such that they can tax remote works, one in three relationships begin at work, such that we have more people, quite frankly, having more sex, falling in love, and then have the economic wherewithal to have children, universal child tax credit, pre-K, minimum wage of $25 an hour,

quite frankly, just stuff more money in their pockets such that we go back to where we were 40 years ago where 60% of 30 year olds have a kid versus 27% now. I don't think it's because people don't like kids, I think it's because they can't afford them. But the unifying theory of everything is that any able-bodied American should at least have a reasonable chance that they will have the opportunity to meet somebody and the economic viability to have a family. And that everything should be reverse engineered towards that

opportunity for young people. That that's the unifying theory of everything and should drive all of our economic and social policies. Your thoughts. I wrote a cover story for The Atlantic called The Antisocial Century, where I said that maybe the most important social problem facing this country

is that Americans spend a record amount of time alone and a record low amount of time in physical face-to-face contact. And as I've continued to report out this story, one of the more interesting parts of it actually relates incredibly deeply to housing. If you take a look at sort of the life cycle of American aloneness, teens have fewer friends,

teens hang out with their friends less, 20-somethings date less, and then 30-somethings are less likely to get married, 40-somethings less likely now to have children. There's a kind of life cycle effect of this drawing back from interpersonal relationships, which Scott, I'm hearing you say, is absolutely core to your vision of the good life.

I personally don't think that it is a political agenda's job to define and inscribe the good life explicitly into people's lives. I think it's the job of a political agenda to build a platform, a stage upon which people can make free choices that make them happy. And the most important part of that platform and stage that I think many young people today are missing

is affordable housing. If you look at the think many young people today are missing is affordable housing. If you look at the share of young people who still live with their parents in their 20s and even early 30s, it's higher than it's ever been outside of a recession. It's very, very hard to go on a successful date and get married when you're still living with your parents in your 20s and 30s.

And the reason that people are living with their parents in their 20s and 30s. And the reason that people are living with their parents in their 20s and 30s is not because they don't have the courage that people in the 1980s have, or don't have the gumption that people in the 1990s have, it's they don't have the money that they need often to afford a place of their own in the cities where they want to live. And a part of abundance,

I think that every great political movement has in America been a kind of redefinition of freedom. Right? The New Deal order was about defining the four freedoms of speech and belief from want, from fear. And in the 1980s, Ronald Reagan created a new political order in this country that some call neoliberalism, which redefined freedom, not freedom of, but freedom from, freedom from government. In a way, I think abundance is another redefinition of freedom.

And at the heart of that freedom is the freedom to live where you want to live, because we have a rational housing market in this country that makes it affordable to have a place of your own in the place you want to live. And I think if we had that, I think if we had a reasonable supply-focused housing policy in this country, you would have more young people

not living with their parents, living alone, starting what some call adulthood a little bit earlier, having the confidence that their money goes further so they can afford better dates with whoever they want to date, and therefore becoming more likely to get married, to get married and have kids, because as we know, But their money goes further so they can afford better dates with whoever they want to date. And therefore becoming more likely to get married, to get married and have kids because as we know, fertility rates tend to very commonly track coupling rates.

If you want a country with more kids, you need to make it easier for young people to couple. I think absolutely core to that is making it easier for people to live where they want to live. And that fundamentally is a housing story. So the answer to your question is that it leads, as so many things lead in our book and in American life today, it leads to housing.

I'd like to do a whole podcast with the two of you on this. I definitely agree with Derek that the answer to your question is that people should buy our book. Like that is clear. I think beyond that, I'm probably more pessimistic than both of you are. So I'm a left natalist. The lead up here that you offered is mine too. I think that family is important. I think children are important.

I am worried about falling fertility rates and I'm worried about them because of what it means about human flourishing, not just what it means about societies replacing themselves. I've done a bunch of podcasts on this. I've done a bunch of reporting on this. I really recommend the new Gideon Lewis Krauss piece on South Korea and the New Yorker from a couple weeks ago. replacing themselves. I've done a bunch of podcasts on this. I've done a bunch of reporting on this. I really recommend the new Gideon Lewis Krause piece on South Korea and the New Yorker from a couple of weeks ago. But look, you can have the most, from the liberal perspective,

pronatal policy you can possibly imagine, right? That's Sweden, Denmark. Their fertility rate has collapsed too. All their great parental leave and paid family leave and universal pre-k and you know Egalitarian tax system it didn't do it. They're down at 1.1. I Don't know that we know at least outside of policy interventions of a scale That nobody really wants to think about

What we could do that would dramatically change that. I think it's cultural, it's also technological in terms of birth control and fertility windows and all the rest of it. I'm not sure we know how to do it. I do agree though, that we could make the whole thing a hell of a lot easier. I do agree that housing is a big part of that and economics are a big part of that.

And also I agree that culture is a big part of that. And I think it matters that, I think you see in JD Vance with his scolding of childless cat ladies, I sort of have this thing that comes from something the sort of conservative British feminist, Louise Perry said in a Barry Weiss interview, where she she has this point that the difference between Andrew Tate and Jordan Peterson is that Tate is a pagan and Peterson is a Christian, which I thought was interesting. And it made me think about how you could cut the Trump administration the same way, like Elon Musk is a pagan, JD Vance is a Christian, that kind of thing. But JD Vance's scolding

of people was an effort to change culture, right? I think that's why he was doing it and also because he's become very resentful. I think the left has given up on having even any way to talk about what family structures it believes in I don't think you're gonna be able to go back to the 50s the way some of these people think you will that includes people Like Perry, I think you're gonna have to imagine things that are new thing I think that housing actually be a part of it But also in terms of experimenting more like I know a lot of people want to raise kids in co-living situations It's extremely hard to figure out how you can

Collocate with your six best friends, you, who are coupled and all raise your kids together. I don't think it should be that hard. I think we should make that a lot easier to experiment with. We like the thing where we're raising all these kids in two working parent families are often one single parent family. That's a huge experiment in human history. That is not how we did it. So making things that are a little bit more clan-based, a little bit more communal possible again, but you can't do it if 70% of the housing land in this country is owned for single family. So I think you don't just need to make new things possible.

I think you need to make experimentation possible. And I think culturally, I do think the left needs to figure out how to not just be so individualistic about this. I hear so many people talk about, and they ask me about in my AMAs and stuff, having kids, like it's just a cost benefit analysis, like taking a trip to Costa Rica.

I think there's something more valuable about that. And it's not just about your life. It is also about the degree to which we should cherish the existence and the gift of existence others get to have, right? The question of me having kids is not, are my weekends better or worse? Their experience of the weekend is important.

In many ways more important than mine. And so I do think there's cultural dimensions to this too that are not easily amenable to policy, but do require a kind of set of discussions and a sense of what is the good life, particularly in a fairly secular age that liberals are pretty uncomfortable having. I'm not sure abundance of the book solves all of that, but it definitely solves enough of it that you should go check it out.

Ezra Klein is a New York Times columnist and the host of the Ezra Klein Show podcast. Previously, he was the founder, editor-in-chief, and then editor-at-large of Vox. Derek Thompson is a staff writer at The Atlantic and the author of the Work in Progress newsletter. He's also the author of the books Hitmakers and On Work, Money, Meaning, Identity, and the host of the podcast Plain English. Their new book Abundance is out now. I said this off mic. I just admire you guys so much. I think you're fearless. I think you're great storytellers. Just keep on keeping on gentlemen. Well done. Thank you, man. I appreciate it Scott. Thanks so much Algebra of happiness a lot of young, more young people than ever as a proportion of the population are struggling with anxiety. And I did a podcast yesterday with Anthony

Scaramucci and Dan Harris from 10% Happier. And Dan has really been, you know, the term is brave, but very useful in helping other people discuss and address their anxiety. He struggles with panic attacks. And he talks a lot about different cognitive behavioral therapy to help them manage through that anxiety. And he has this statement that I just love, and that is action absorbs anxiety. And I'm gonna share a story that is not a hallmark story,

but I think it's relevant. I coach young men and one young man in junior college, about early twenties, we're just sort of talking and I could kind of tell what's on his mind. I'm like, what's on your mind? So everything's fine. He's like, yeah. He's like, I'm a little bit freaked out right now.

And I said, what's up? And he said, I've been having trouble paying. I'm like, what do you mean by that? I have trouble paying, but it's cause I have a little bit freaked out right now. And I said, what's up? And he said, I've been having trouble paying. I'm like, what do you mean by that? I have trouble paying, but it's because I have a huge prostate. He goes, no, it's been feeling funny and weird down there. And I'm worried I have an STD. And I said, well, have you had unprotected sex recently?

And he said, yes, I have. And I said, look, I know exactly how to do this. I know exactly what you need to do right now. Right now, you need to go to urgent care or there are all sorts of STD clinics in your city. He lives in a city and you need to get tested right away. And on the way to the doctor, you're gonna start to feel better

because you're taking action. And fortunately, we live in a society right now where the vast majority, if not all of STDs can even can be handled or addressed. And as soon as you start taking action against this problem or this issue, you're going to feel better. Action absorbs anxiety. And at the end of life, you're not going to regret what happened to you. You're going to regret being so stressed out about it. And that is if you're not going to regret what happened to you. You're going to regret being so stressed out about it. And that is, if you're worried about anything with your health,

you immediately go to the fucking doctor. And maybe that's a point of privilege for me because I have the money. But if you have resources, if you're insured, if you can go to urgent care, you want to address the situation. Whenever your health is bothering you, immediately, the moment you make the appointment, you start feeling better.

I'm addressing it. Action absorbs anxiety. You want to move against this. This is really upsetting me. This is bothering me. How am I going to solve it? Fuck, I can't get an internship. I can't get a job.

Well, OK. What do you need to do to get a job? You need to send out resumes. You need to put together a resume. When you start putting together your resume that action starts absorbing your anxiety It's very simple get out of your head get out of here at the end of your life You're not gonna be upset about an STD scare not being able to get a job Or or a health scare the thing you're gonna be worried about

Or the thing you're gonna regret is how anxious you were about it. And here's what you do. You move to action. Action absorbs anxiety. This episode was produced by Jennifer Sanchez. Our intern is Dan Shalon. Drew Burrows is our technical director. Thank you for listening to the ProppG pod from the Box Media Podcast Network.

We will catch you on Saturday for No Mercy, No Malice, as read by George Hahn. And please follow our Proppgy Markets pod wherever you get your pods for new episodes every Monday and Thursday. I'm sorry, the tea's just better here. The tea's just better. It's like porn for me is better after an edible. The tea's just better. Wrong analogy.

Wrong analogy.