Rebecca Lendl:

Welcome to The Long Now Podcast — thank you for being with us. // I’m your host Rebecca Lendl, Executive Director here at The Long Now Foundation.

Today we’re with Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson — in a talk moderated by Michael Pollan — on their new book Abundance, a once-in-a-generation, paradigm-shifting call to renew a politics of plenty.

At first glance, Abundance appears to be tackling a shorter now than our usual millenia-spanning fascinations over here at Long Now. But what we love about what they’re up to is that the Abundance agenda is fundamentally about taking a longer view. Looking at the governance structures, cultural narratives, and incentives that lift us up over time.

Their conversation invites us to look closely at how we collaborate across generations — a ‘limits to growth’ logic of the past may not be the ‘grow and innovate’ logic needed for the future. If, as Derek notes in the conversation, culture is what we tolerate — how do we create a culture really equipped to respond to the moment we’re in and the futures we want, not just the logics we’ve inherited?

If you’re interested in learning more, you’ll find a ton of great resources in our show notes.

Now, before we dive in, a quick note —

In our age of compounding crises, this work of imagining new possibilities may seem daunting. But challenges that feel impossible to tackle within a single human lifetime become conceivable when you have a longer timescale — and a community collaborating across generations.

Here at The Long Now Foundation, we are a counterweight — deepening our capacity to move wisely in these times of uncertainty. If you feel so inspired, we hope you’ll join us. Head over to longnow.org/donate to become a member and get connected to a whole world of long-term thinking.

With that, we’re excited to share with you — Abundance with Ezra Klein & Derek Thompson hosted by Michael Pollan.

Michael Pollan:

Anyway, congratulations on the book. It is very rare that a book can ignite a national conversation and you've done that. So the book was finished before Trump took office and it reads quite differently than it probably would have had Kamala Harris won. It's kind of an interesting head experiment to read it through both lenses, but we are in this lens of Trump having won.

The fact that regulations are getting in the way of building the way we need and then having all the EPA regulations torched. The fact that the president is arrogating new powers so he can act more freely. And the fact that apparently efficiency is a thing. And I'm just kind of curious how you reflect on that. I mean there are things that Trump is doing that are, it's almost like a sick parody of your book. How do you process that? And you say at one point in the book that "If Liberals do not want Americans to turn to the false promise of strong men, they need to offer the fruits of effective government." So how does the book feel to you and the idea of abundance in light of Trump's election and how did we get here?

Derek Thompson:

I would make the argument that this book and its themes and its arguments are more profound and more urgent now than they would be in the alternate reality of Kamala Harris winning in November.

Michael Pollan:

So why? Make that case.

Derek Thompson:

You have right now, I think, in the White House, a president who was elected because of an unaffordability wave. If you ask Americans that switched from the Democratic column to the Republican column, "Why did you switch?" If you ask young people why, given that historically twenty-somethings have been the most progressive generation in American history, why did you vote for Republicans more than any period in the last few decades? The answer is always the same. It's affordability, affordability, affordability. And Donald Trump could have come into office as the affordability candidate. He could have governed in his first few weeks as the affordability president. He could have said on day one, "I am obsessed with housing and the first thing we're going to do is make housing as cheap as possible, and to make it as abundant as possible in the places where housing scarcity is the biggest problem."

He did not do that. His first thing as president was to raise tariffs by 25% on the lumber that we get from Canada and the drywall gypsum that we get from Mexico immediately increasing two of the most important inputs for home construction. In many ways I see Trump as being a kind of tragic dark foil for the arguments in this book rather than a parody, as you put it. I take the argument, but I see him as a very clear foil. This is someone who looks at every problem that America has and has a solution that requires taking away something that America needs. He says America doesn't have enough housing and so the solution's going to be we need less immigration. Or America doesn't have enough manufacturing and so what we need is less trade.

Or America doesn't have enough high quality science, as I would define it, and therefore I'm going to smash the entire scientific infrastructure. Every element of scarcity is met with another element of scarcity. And in contrast to that, I think a message of Abundance is incredibly powerful. We're saying, "Yes, we don't have enough houses, we should make it easier to build them. Yes, we don't have enough manufacturing, especially in areas of key goods of national security interest, like high-tech semiconductors. We should have a policy that makes it easier to build them, not smash the Chips and Science Act. Yes, we have issues when it comes to our national debt. We shouldn't engineer a recession. We should plan for growth."

And so from my perspective, there's many of the arguments in the book that exist in perfect juxtaposition to what's happening in Washington right now. And I would just add by saying this, that at a moment where Donald Trump is an absolute wrecking ball for not only economic growth but also for constitutional order, Democrats need an opposition that is popular and that is effective. And they're not effective in the places that they govern. The states with the highest homelessness, the five states with the highest homelessness are all governed by Democrats. The cities with the worst housing crises and the worst public disorder crises all tend to be governed by Democrats.

We've created a situation where Democrats have turned the places in which they have the most power into advertisements for the opposition rather than advertisements for our own movement. I mean Ezra has a great line from the book, which I have to credit him where he says something along the lines of Democrats should be able to say, vote for us and we'll run America like California. But it is tragically useful for Republicans to make the exact same argument, "Vote for them, they might like make America like California." We need to turn the places where we have the most power into advertisements for our movement because if we don't show Americans that we can use power to make their lives better, do we even deserve to win?

Michael Pollan:

So do you want to add something to that.

Ezra Klein:

Something you said caught for me, which is it's hard to live in the other timeline. And I've been thinking about, as this book is hit with, has detonated with much more force than either of us expected. Why? What would it have been like if we brought it out in the other timeline?

Michael Pollan:

On the Kamala Harris wins?

Ezra Klein:

The Kamala Harris wins timeline. And I think the Democratic Party would've said, "Hey, thanks, those are some good points. We'll try a little bit harder." I think the stakes have changed look, we would not have written this book if we didn't think there was a problem. But I think the sense that if you do not make Liberal democracy and Liberals leading a democracy deliver again, you might just lose Liberal democracy has become chillingly real to people.

And so this world where Joe Biden loses for reelection and his top advisor says, "Well, the problem is elections are four-year cycles and our agenda need to be measured in decades." The world where you can say that is gone. You don't get decades. If you don't win on the four-year cycle, your agenda is undone and you'll have serious conversations about what elections look like in the future at all.

Michael Pollan:

But a lot of what you're proposing is going to take a while, building millions of new units of housing.

Ezra Klein:

No.

Michael Pollan:

How do you demonstrate effectiveness within the frame of...

Ezra Klein:

This is a learned helplessness that we have gotten into. We built the Empire State Building in a year. When Medicare was passed, people got Medicare cards one year later. It took the Affordable Care Act, four years. Under Biden, it took three years for Medicare to just begin negotiating drug prices. We have chosen slowness and in doing we have broken the cord of accountability and democracy. The Bipartisan Infrastructure Bill. Its median road completion time is 2027. That's not because asphalt takes six years to lay down. The reason we didn't get rural broadband after appropriating $42 billion for it in 2021 isn't because it takes that long to lay down broadband cable. It doesn't. It's a 14-stage process with challenges and plans and counter-proposals. We have chosen slowness because we thought we had the luxury of time. And one of the parts of this book that is present, but if I were rewriting it now, I would write it more strongly. Is we need to rediscover speed as a progressive value.

The idea that government delivers at a pace where you can feel it, that's not a luxury. That's how you keep a government. And so, this thing where we've gotten used to everything taking forever, literally in the case of California high-speed rail, I think the timeline is officially forever in China. It's not like they have access to advanced high-speed rail technology we don't, or in Spain or in France. You're telling me the French work so much harder than we do? But they complete things on a normal timeline. We built the first 28 subways of the New York City subway system in four years, 28 of them reopened in four years. I think this is something that actually slowly we have forgotten. Speed is a choice.

Look, we can't make nuclear fusion tomorrow. We can't solve the hard problem of consciousness but we can build apartment buildings, we can build infrastructure, we can deliver healthcare. We have chosen to stop and we've chosen to stop because we thought that would make all the policies better, more just, more equitable. There would be more voice in them. And now we look around. And did it make it better? Is Liberal democracy doing better? Is the public happier? Are more people being represented in the kind of government we have? Is California better? And the answer is no. And it's like the one truly optimistic point of this book, which is that we chose these problems and if you chose a problem, you can un-choose it. Not that it'll be easy, but unlike if the boundary was physics or technology, it's at least possible. We made the 14-stage process, we can un-make it.

Michael Pollan:

Do you think Trump has taught us anything? Because he has certainly sped up the pace of government, if we can say one semi-positive thing. But look at what he's doing. He's suggesting that this system can be changed quickly. Is there anything to take from that?

Derek Thompson:

I think it's important to look at what Trump is doing and also look at what he's failing to do. Trump is moving very, very quickly and breaking a lot of things. And the courts are stopping a lot of what he's doing and the public is reacting to what he's doing. And Republicans, it seems to me, are scared now of a backlash to Trump that you have Elise Stefanik now not being able to be the ambassador to the UN because even in a +22 Trump district, they're afraid of a Democratic wave overtaking her. Elections happen and God willing, we'll get one in another 22 months and another four years. And that cycle is important.

We were talking backstage about how politics isn't about just about virtues. Politics is about the ability to maintain power and a lot of Trump's actions aren't just unconstitutional. We are seeing indications that they are being blocked by the courts and punished by popular reaction. So I don't want to take too much of a lesson from what Trump is doing. But I do want to take a lesson from this. That if Democrats are here, if the status quo of slowness and procedural fetish under the Biden administration was over here and Donald Trump is over here, there are a lot of gradients of speed between A and B. And it goes back to what Ezra just said, about for example, the $42 billion rural broadband program, which we've gotten a lot of mileage out of by becoming obsessed with because it really is such an interesting object lesson in this book.

The short story here again is that 2021, Bipartisan Infrastructure Bill is passed. Biden calls it the most important infrastructure bill in modern American history, $42 billion allocated, authorized for rural broadband, a classic progressive end. We're going to hook people up to the internet so they can join the internet economy and benefit from telehealth, a perfect progressive end. There's a 14-step process that involves the FCC drawing a map of what parts of the country are under-covered and then there's a challenge period where the states can say, "Nope, you actually missed this area over here." And then the states can draw their map and then there's a challenge period for that. And then the states can apply for funding and the commerce department can say, "You didn't fill out this equity matrix perfectly and you didn't fill out this procurement process perfectly."

Michael Pollan:

We get it.

Derek Thompson:

But the point is-

Michael Pollan:

Actually, just it's so long.

Derek Thompson:

You need to get it. You need to get it to get it. The details are the point and it's important to say that if you go point by point through those details, it's not obvious which ones of them are stupid because equity matters and maps matter and understanding the under-covered places matter. But the point is that Biden optimized for process and for details as boring as they can be to enumerate on a stage. He didn't optimize for speed. But speed is a choice and you can optimize for it.

Michael Pollan:

How could he have? Is it the way the bill is written or the fact that there are all these local rules and regulations?

Ezra Klein:

It depends on the issue and in this case, it's actually how the regulations get written. When Congress passed the money, they just said basically, "And the Commerce Department shall write some rules."

Michael Pollan:

That's where it happened.

Ezra Klein:

And something I've started thinking a lot more about, we got this nice little schoolhouse rock song about how bill becomes a law? God forbid anybody writes one about how law becomes a rule-making process which becomes a notice of common [inaudible]. What has begun to happen in the rooms where regulations are written is a much bigger problem than I used to think. And I'm a policy reporter, I cover this stuff, but we like the big fight over the bill. And then the Affordable Care Act passes or the Inflation Reduction Act passes and we're like, "You did it." And we move on to the next one. But you didn't do it then the process really begins. And it's much easier to do your giveaways to say yes in that part of the process. And so we've begun to.

One of the things I think we're taking aim at a bit here is a culture of policy-making. And the culture of policy-making is one that is particularly on the Democratic side, highly coalitional and every part of the coalition comes in and gets a little bit. So you have a bill that's about reshoring the advanced semiconductor manufacturing that has nothing in the Chips and Science Act said. As we try as a national security priority to reshore advanced semiconductor manufacturing, which we lost because we were no longer cost competitive. So we're going to spend more than $30 billion trying to entice these companies back.

Nothing in the bill said, "Make sure the Taiwanese Semiconductor Manufacturing Corporation comes up with a plan to increase the representation of women in local construction force." You can say a lot about the Taiwanese Semiconductor Manufacturing Corporation. They're quite remarkable, but there's no particular reason to believe they have expertise in increasing the representation of women in construction in Arizona. But we said yes to someone there. And then we said yes in a bunch of others. And it is tedious to go through these things, but actually precisely because it is tedious, it's happening out of the light. And then what we can see is that often, not specifically in chips, although some other things that are interesting happen there, that the outcomes aren't particularly good.

So I would say two things about it. One is that I would like to see Congress be much more aggressive. And this is something some members of Congress have said to me since the book. They should be saying, "And we want this done by X." Like, "This is exploding money. We are giving you this money, but this money evaporates if you don't use it." You can do things like that. The child tax credit was authorized for one year. That ended up being a huge mistake, but these things could be like, "If you don't spend it's gone." That's one thing.

The other is that it has to be the priority of the administration or the state administrations to make speed the priority. Now, then there are other things they don't control. Compared to, say Europe, we restrain our government through lawsuits. We have a very, very intense legal process by which individuals and groups and cities and so on can sue for almost any reason, right? The California Environmental Quality Act is routinely used for, under any measure of the term, non-environmental reasons. There's some fights over how to reform it going on right now and you'll see a bunch of unions fighting for it, not because they're worried about the wetlands. The California Environmental Quality Act is routinely used by them. They will sue you using its provisions which are, in theory, for the environment in order to get labor concessions on the build.

And maybe you want the labor concessions but not using the environmental bill. And so, there's a lot of legislation you need to revisit because it's been captured by different kinds of interests or turned to a different kind of process than you intended. So you can change it. Anything we made through statute, we can unmake through statute. But you have to choose to change it. And these are very difficult bruising fights which people aren't excited to have. They're excited to build a bridge. They're not excited to fight over the exact method by which bridge building regulations are written.

Michael Pollan:

Right, right. But you talk a lot about the various rules and regulations that keep us from building, but a lot of them, of course, have very admirable goals. This is the environmental movement. These are victories won in the 1970s at great cost. They protect workers, they protect the disabled, they protect wetlands. How do you decide which ones to override and which ones to respect? How does an Abundance agenda navigate that question?

Derek Thompson:

I think it's worthwhile to think about the difference between laws that work based on outcomes versus processes. So you're absolutely right and I want to be clear about exactly how right you are. The world that we built with the growth machine of the middle of the 20th century was absolutely frigging disgusting. The water was disgusting, the air was disgusting. We were just spoiling the country. I think a fact in the book that the month that Dylan Thomas, the poet, died in New York City of a respiratory illness, dozens of people died of air pollution in New York City in the 1940s and it was not front page news at all. It was simply what happened. To live in the richest city, in the richest country in the world meant to have a certain risk of simply dying of breathing.

We responded to that by passing a series of laws, the Clean Air Act, the Clean Water Act, the National Environmental Protection Act. We passed laws to protect specific species and these laws answered the problems of the 1950s and the 1960s. But sometimes what happens is that the medicine of one generation can yield the disease of the next generation. And right now, I think that what being an environmentalist means to me in the 2020s is something subtly but distinctly different from what being an environmentalist meant in the 1960s. There was a time when it was appropriate for environmentalism to be a movement of stop, to be a movement of blocking. But what happened is we got so good at saying stop and so good at giving people legal tools to say stop and so efficient at the politics of blocking that we made it difficult to add infill housing and dense housing in urban areas, which is good for the environment, and build solar energy which is good for the environment, and add wind energy, which is good for the environment and advance nuclear power.

We made it harder to do the things that are necessary to, I think, be an environmentalist in the 2020s, which is to care for global warming. In some ways we talk about the tree that you can save by saying no to a building that requires tearing down that tree, forgetting about the thousands of trees that are going to be killed if instead of the apartment building being built over that tree, it's built in a sprawling suburban area that has to knock down a forest. We have to have, I think, a more planetary sense of what it means to be an environmentalist. And that means, I think, having a new attitude toward building. And so I think that we need to embrace a culture of institutional renewal and ask what does it really mean to be an environmentalist in the 2020s?

It means making it easier to build houses in dense urban areas and making it easier for places to add solar and wind and geothermal and nuclear and maybe even next-generational enhanced geothermal. We need to find a way to match our processes and our outcomes. And it is important, I think that. The Clean Air and Water Act worked in many ways by regulating outcomes. "This air needs to be this clean. This tailpipe cannot have this level of emissions." That is an outcome-based regulation. What NEPA and CEQA have done is they have not considered outcomes. They are steroids for process elongation. They make it easier for people who want to stop states and companies from doing anything, enacting any kind of change in the physical world to delay them forever in such a way that ironically makes it harder to build the very things that are inherent to what you should want if you are an environmentalist in the 2020s.

And that's the tragic irony, to me, of the environmentalist revolution. It's not what happened in the 1960s, 1970s, I don't hate the environmentalists of 1960s, 1970s. They answered the questions of their age. And it is our responsibility to take up the baton and do the same and answer the questions for our age because they are different questions.

Ezra Klein:

What I want these bills to do is to protect the environment and define what that means and define when things are pro or anti-environmental. If you want to say we have defined these wetlands as specifically protected places and there needs to be a very high level of scrutiny to anything that gets proposed to be built there, that's great.

The idea that literally any project can be sued for not properly considering every single consequence it might lead to is, as Derek put it, just steroids for process. I spent a bunch of time while we were writing this book, it didn't end up making it in, but reporting on congestion pricing in Manhattan, which got passed in 2019 and as of something like 2023 had been held up for more than three years, not even in environmental review, in environmental assessment. And congestion pricing is entirely a pro-environmental policy. In Europe, the way this would work is somebody who would go to the bureaucracy, the environmental agency and say, "I don't think this protects the environment." And they would say, "Well, every study we've ever done on it says it does, so thank you, but no."

And here they're coming in and saying, "Well, you need to run a model on what it's going to do to the incomes of low-income cab drivers in Queens," as an actual example. And the head of the MTA said to me, Lieber, he's like, "It is not better for the environment to have me running and rerunning these models for four years than to have me get the cars out of Manhattan." And that, I think, really gets at the absurdity of where we've gotten to. We should have goals and we should try to achieve those goals. Instead, what we've done is we have process and we try to achieve that process.

Michael Pollan:

So I came of age politically in the 1970s, long before you guys did or sometime before you did. And there was another very powerful meme then called Limits to Growth. Your agenda is very much about growth. It's very pro-growth agenda. In 1972, the Club of Rome publishes this book. It was bunch of MIT scientists put it together using these new tools called computers to run projections, exponential growth, what it would do to the planet, and they suggested that if didn't put limits on growth, we would exceed the carrying capacity of the earth, which is a closed system and civilization would collapse right around now. There is a tension between growth and things like climate change. If we build millions of new units of housing, we're going to be pouring a lot of concrete. There is more pollution with growth. Growth has costs. So how does an Abundance agenda navigate that tension between growth and the cost of growth?

Ezra Klein:

I've not gotten into talk at all on the tour about really one of my favorite things I've written in the book, which is how much I hate-

Michael Pollan:

Here's your chance.

Ezra Klein:

... the metaphor that growth is like a pie. So if you've been around politics at all, you've probably heard this metaphor where it's like they'll say something like, "Oh, the economy's not... You want to grow the pie. You don't just want to cut the pie into ever smaller pieces as redistribution does, pro-growth politics, you want to grow the pie." If you grow a pie-

Michael Pollan:

How do you grow a pie?

Ezra Klein:

... which you don't. As I say in the book-

Michael Pollan:

You plant the pie?

Ezra Klein:

... the problem with this metaphor is it's hard to know where to start because it gets nothing right including its own internal structure. But if you somehow grew a pie, what you would get is more pie. If you grow an economy, what you get is change. Growth is a measure of change. An economy that grows at two or 3% a year, year-on-year is an economy that will transform extremely rapidly into something unrecognizable. Derek has these beautiful passages in the book where it's like you fall asleep in this year and you wake up in this year and we've got aspirin and televisions and rocket travel and all these amazing things. And the reason this is, I think, really important is that this intuition they had was wrong. Take the air pollution example of a minute ago. One thing we now see over and over and over again is that as societies get richer, as they grow, they pass through a period of intense pollution.

There was a time when it was London where you couldn't breathe. When I grew up in the 1980s and 1990s outside Los Angeles, Los Angeles was a place where you often couldn't breathe. Then a couple of years ago it was China, now it's Delhi. And it keeps moving. But the thing is as these places get richer, they get cleaner. Now, London's air is, I don't want to say sparkling, air doesn't sparkle and I'm better at metaphors than the pie people, but it's quite breathable, I've been there. And so is LA and it's getting cleaner in China. And in UK, in fact, they just closed the final coal-powered plant, energy plant in the country ahead of schedule. I think there are two things here. One is that you can grow and in fact our only real chance is to grow in a way that makes our lives less resource-intensive.

But the second thing that I think is really important, I really don't like the term pro-growth politics or pro-growth economics because I don't consider growth always a good thing. If you tell me that we have added a tremendous amount of GDP by layering coal-fired power plants all across the country, I'll tell you that's bad. If we did it by building more solar panels and wind turbines and maybe nuclear power, that would be good. I actually think we have to have quite strong opinions on growth. We are trying to grow in a direction, that is to say we are trying to change in a direction. And one of the things this book tries to do is say that technology should come with a social purpose. We should yoke technology to a social purpose that for too long we've seen technology as something the private sector does, which is often true, but not always.

The miracles of solar and wind and battery power that have given us the only shot we have to avoid catastrophic climate change have been technological miracles induced by government policy, by tax credits in the U.S. and in Germany, by direct subsidies in China. Operation Warp Speed pulled a futuristic vaccine out of the future and into the present, and then when it did it, it said the price of this vaccine will be $0. There are things you can achieve through redistribution. And they're wonderful and remarkable and we should achieve them, but there are things and you can achieve and problems you can only solve through technology, through change. And one of the core views of the book, which we've been talking a bit less about on the trail, is that progressivism needs to put technology much more at the center of its vision of change because the problems it seeks to solve cannot be solved except by technology in many cases. So we cannot do-

Michael Pollan:

There's a logic there though. There's an assumption there that technology will arrive when you want it to. I agree, technology can change the terms of all these debates and especially the debate around growth, but technology doesn't always arrive on time when you want it. A lot of your book stands on abundant, clean energy, right? The whole scenario at the beginning of the book, which is this utopia that you paint in so many ways depends on the fact that we've solved the energy problem. Can we count on that? Fusion has been around the corner for a long time.

Ezra Klein:

Well, nothing in that one requires fusion. That one just requires building what we know how to build, at least on the energy side.

Michael Pollan:

You mean solar, nuclear and-

Ezra Klein:

Solar, nuclear, wind, advanced geothermal. We can do all that. But Derek should talk about this [inaudible] reporting here, but there are things we don't have yet like green cement and green fuel.

Michael Pollan:

Yeah. So do we wait for that or we build and then...

Derek Thompson:

No, you don't wait.

Michael Pollan:

We don't wait, no?

Derek Thompson:

Let's be deliberate about it. Why do we have penicillin? Why does penicillin exist? Well, the story that people know if they went to medical school or if they picked up a book on coolest inventions in history is that 1928, Alexander Fleming, Scottish microbiologist went on vacation somewhere. I couldn't figure out where. Comes back to his lab two weeks later and he's been studying staphylococcus, he's been studying bacteria. And he looks at one of his Petri dishes and the staphylococcus, which typically looks, under a microscope, like a cluster of grapes. Realizes that it's been zapped. There's nothing left in the Petri dish. And when he figures out that there's been some substance that maybe is blown in through an open window that's zapped the bacteria in the dish, he realizes that it's from this genus called penicillium and he calls it penicillin.

So that's the breakthrough that everybody knows and it's amazing. Penicillin blew in through an open window. God was just like, "There you go." That's a story that people know and it's romantic and it's beautiful and it's utterly insufficient to understand why we have penicillin. Because after 13 years, Fleming and Flory and Shane, the fellows who won the Nobel Peace Prize for the discovery of and nourishing of the discovery of penicillin were totally at a dead end. 1941, they had done a couple of studies with mice, kind of seemed like penicillin was doing some stuff. They did a couple human trials on five people, two of them died.

But that's not where the story ends because Flory and Shane brought penicillin to America and it was just as Vannevar Bush and some incredibly important mid-century scientists and technologists were building this office within the federal government, a wartime technology office called the Office of Scientific Research and Development. And they were in the process of spinning out the Manhattan Project and Building radar, Rad Lab at MIT. And they said, "Yeah, we'll take a look at this thing, penicillin. After all, if we could reduce bacterial infections in our military, we could absolutely outlive the nemesis for years and years." So long story short, they figure out how to grow it in vats. They figure out how to move through phase two clinical trials. They realize that it is unbelievably effective at a variety of bacteria.

And penicillin turns out to be the most important maybe scientific discovery of the 20th century. It wasn't made important because Fleming discovered it on a Petri dish. It was made real, it was made a product because of a deliberate federal policy to grow it, to test it, to distribute it. Operation Warp Speed is very similar. mRNA vaccines right now are being tried in their own phase three clinical trials to cure pancreatic cancer. And pancreatic cancer is the most fatal cancer that basically exists. My mom died of pancreatic cancer about 13 years ago. It is essentially a kind of death sentence because among other things, the cancer produces very few neoantigens, very few novel proteins that the immune system can detect and attack, and we made an mRNA vaccine that can attack them. Why does it exist? Well, it exists because, and this is where we have to give a little bit of credit if not to Donald Trump himself, at least a czar, and some of the bureaucrats who worked under him, they had this idea that what we should do in a pandemic is to fund science from two ends.

We should subsidize science by saying, "Hey, Pfizer or Moderna or Johnson Johnson, here's money up front." But also we should fund it, and this is especially important, as a pull mechanism, using what they call an advanced market commitment. "If you build a vaccine that works, we'll pay you billions of dollars so that we buy it out, can distribute it to the public at a cost of $0 and 0 cents. Even if you're the ninth person to build a vaccine, we'll still give you $5 billion." And that encourages everybody to try their damndest to build it. So we build it, it works. They take out all sorts of bottlenecks on the FDA. They even work with Corning, the glass manufacturer to develop these little vials that carry the mRNA vaccines on trucks to bring them to CVS without them spoiling on the way. And now we have this new frontier of medical science.

Ezra Klein:

The thing that Derek, in that beautiful answer, is saying in response, I think, to your very good question, to put it simply, is that we're not just hoping technology appears. Whether or not it appears is, yes, partially luck and reality, whether or not the spore blew in on the heavenly breeze, but it's also partially policy. We shift luck, we shift the probabilities. Democrats have these yard signs which have been so helpful for our book. It's beautiful.

Michael Pollan:

You guys see this coming?

Ezra Klein:

But they always say, "We believe in science." Don't believe in science, do science and then make it into things people need. This goes back to your first question, Michael. We focus a lot in the back half of the book on the way we do grant work and the NIH because it's really important. No, it shouldn't be destroyed. No, the scientists shouldn't all be fired or unable to put the words mRNA in their grant proposals because the people who promised to bring back free speech are now doing Control+F and canceling grants on soil diversity because Control+F doesn't know the difference between DEI diversity and agricultural soil diversity. But it's also not good that in virtually every study you run of this, the way we do grant making now pushes scientists towards more herd-like ideas, safer ideas, away from daring ideas, away from things that are counterintuitive.

A lot of science requires risk and it requires failure. And the government should be in the business of supporting risk and failure. And by the way, we give Democrats a lot of criticism here, but this is a huge problem that Republicans have created and that they perpetuate. Great science often sounds bizarre. You never know what you're going to get from running shrimp on the treadmill. But we got GLP1's because somebody decided to start squeezing the venom out of a lizard's mouth and seeing what it could do. And nobody thought it was going to give us GLP1's. And they didn't even realized for a long time really what they had. You need a system that takes science so seriously, that believes in it so much that it really does allow it to fail. And so when Donald Trump stands up there and is like, "We're making mice transgender," which, one, we're not. But two, maybe we should.

Michael Pollan:

San Francisco answer.

Ezra Klein:

This world where they look for grants in science that sound a little strange to make fun of them is a bad world because it denies us of things we might one day need.

Michael Pollan:

We haven't been talking too much about trade-offs. Technology is helping us get over some of them, but you've got some very strong passages about building houses and Not In My Backyard. When I read your passages on housing, I get a little bit defensive. I have a very nice house in the Berkeley Hills. You used to live in a very nice neighborhood in Bernal Heights, I guess. But you make a very good case that homeowners like me bear some responsibility for the housing and homeless crisis.

Ezra Klein:

Welcome to the struggle session.

Michael Pollan:

Well, I was going to ask you to help me struggle with this. They're proposing a six unit four-story thing right next to me. I know it'll please the crowd, but it's going to cut into my property values, it's going to shade my garden. I won't be able to garden anymore. Help me, convince me that I should not sue or complain.

Ezra Klein:

It's your turn.

Michael Pollan:

And I have a good lawyer.

Derek Thompson:

Noted. The trade-off exists. There's a plant that's going to lose sun and there's six families that are going to get a house. There's a part of me that doesn't even want to elaborate beyond that so I'll only elaborate briefly. I think as you put it best, there's no such thing as change with trade-offs, but there's also no such thing as stasis without trade-offs. The world in which that house is never built, the world in which every slant of shade over every plant is moral justification for an infinitude of legal challenges is a world in which no housing will be built because there is not a single home, not a single piece of urban multi-family housing construction that isn't going to change the neighborhood somewhat.

Even I remember when I was doing research for coming to California because I didn't live here and wanted to have some California stories for the tour, and I saw that, I think it was the month after the single-family zoning law was passed in 2021, there was an apartment building for 500 units in San Francisco that was denied by the Board of Representatives. 100 of those units would've been below market rent. It was going to be built on a Nordstrom valet parking lot and it was rejected by the board. A part of me is just purely angry about that and not just because I have no love lost for Nordstrom or valet parking, but also because it seems so unbelievably obvious that Nordstrom Valley parking lot is doing very, very little for the City of San Francisco and 500 families being able to live in downtown San Francisco is doing quite a bit for the city.

But even there, even there, as a matter of persuasion, I recognize that maybe something is being lost for some people. At a certain level of persuasion maybe it does no good to pretend that there is no cost to adding new housing. There is a cost to everything, but it is, I think, just undeniable to me that, in the final calculus, we want to build cities for people.

Ezra Klein:

I want to pick this up just real quick. And the thing I want to say to Michael Pollan, the constructed character we have here is, I actually don't want to persuade you of this. It is your God-given right to not want apartment building down the block. It just should not be your legal given right to stop it. The reason they can build apartments in Houston and Austin, but not San Francisco and Berkeley is not because we got rid of selfishness in Texas. We just didn't. We don't give people there the tools to stop it. And these defaults people are perfectly happy with. People are leaving here and moving there. They're not furious. They're not upset. It's not that you don't have democracy anymore if you can't block every housing development. You do. You have mayors and you have governors and you have state senators and they're supposed to write rules that work.

Look, it took this state decades of working on it to make it so you could finally build an ADU on land you already own. And it wasn't the first bill they passed that made it possible. The first bill they passed, it turned out they had all these loopholes and the cities fought it and they fought it and they passed another bill and they fought it and it took like 10, 15 years. And now ADU growth is explosive. One out of every five homes built in the state is an ADU. But I think the moral of the story is that for all the fighting, for all the 15 or 20 years of battle that took, is anybody mad now? Does anybody run around and be like, "This was a great state before the ADUs." I was in an ADU today. It was lovely, a lot of natural light. I think that we have sometimes made this into too much a question of persuasion.

God bless the YIMBYs, but this is not always a war for hearts and minds. And as anybody who's been involved in YIMBY organizing nos, you're not going to win a bunch of the hearts and minds, it's a war for the policy default. It's a war for on basis. Can you build within certain parameters or not. Because you should be able to complain about the things that are changing around you, you should. That's free speech. That's being a human being. You just shouldn't be able to control it.

Michael Pollan:

Yeah, so complain, don't sue.

Ezra Klein:

Yeah, don't be allowed to.

Michael Pollan:

Don't be able to sue. Okay, thank you. It was hypothetical by the way. I want you to know because I've been shamed by this audience like, "Build, build."

Ezra Klein:

As you can see, we attract a representative sample of the population. All opinions are represented here equally.

Michael Pollan:

All right, we're going to turn to your questions right now.

Audience:

Hi. Thank you so much. I've heard you use the word housing and families, but I'm wondering if you could speak to housing for teachers. I have the benefit of being in a small percentage that can live basically paycheck to paycheck in San Francisco. As a preschool teacher, I also have a master's and went to Georgetown. I am the exception and it's very hard for me. So what do you see as the solution forward? What's happening policy-wise? Could you please speak to that.

Audience:

Thank you.

Ezra Klein:

First, you do incredibly hard work. It's easier sitting with a book all day. I have kids and preschool teachers, that's tough work. And you should be able to live in the city. Some parts of this are just all the same problem. And the problem isn't conceptually hard. We have just made it hard. It's not that preschool teachers should get a deal that firefighters don't get, that retail workers don't get. It's that the measure of whether you are governing your city well is whether or not the people who serve the city by doing all the work that keeps that city a place people want to live can live there. And I try to say this in everything I write about this as clearly as I can because this is the thing I'm trying to convince Democrats of. If you can't, then it doesn't matter if you're winning elections. It doesn't matter what your popularity rating is. If the working class cannot live where you govern, you are not the party of the working class. That's it.

Again, it's not complicated. And also, it's not like we have not figured this out elsewhere. Tokyo, you can live in Tokyo on the median wage. You just can. They just build a lot of housing. The city is incredibly vertical. One thing that infected a bunch of thinking about cities in recent decades and was very poisonous was the idea that cities are a luxury good. Michael Bloomberg has said this a number of times about New York City explicitly, "New York City said it's a luxury good and luxury goods have luxury prices." Cities are not supposed to be a luxury good. They're not like getting a speedboat or fancy art.

They're supposed to be places people live, all kinds of people who work there. And one reason that's really important is that when you gate them, you're gating one of the most fundamental mechanisms of opportunity and mobility that humanity has had, that this country has had, which is people moving from poor areas to richer areas and getting richer by being there. And so, when we make it something where the working class is to commute in and you can't do that, then you have broken the direction of opportunity. We actually have data about this in the book that it used to be that people move from poor places to richer ones and now they're moving from richer places to poorer ones. And that movement was responsible in the 20th century for about a third of the drop in income inequality. But we've thrown the process into reverse.

And so, of course, we are making income inequality worse. So, the answer here isn't that hard. There needs to be enough housing such that it is cheap enough for you to rent it. And yes, because of getting there would be quite difficult, there also should be a lot of housing that's affordable, right? I am not of the view that all housing should be market rate, but it's, I think, really important to keep saying that it is important to do that even though it is simple to think about because it's not just about letting people live here. It's also about this is what social mobility is. It's the ability to live in the places you work and benefit from them.

Audience:

Hi, this is a question that both my husband and I combined wanted to ask. The first question is, who do you both think is the most dangerous person in the world right now? That's my husband's question. And then my question is, how do we stop them?

Michael Pollan:

Good marriage.

Derek Thompson:

Look, rather than say that Donald Trump and Elon Musk are the most dangerous people in the world in a way that provides a great degree of certainty about that remark, let me make some comments about the degree to which I think they're dangerous. Is that a decent filibuster? I think what's happened to Elon Musk is a fucking tragedy. This is someone who is in our book as a kind of walking advertisement for what the government can do with the private sector if they understand each other and work together. The Tesla Model X exists because of a loan in 2010 created by a government policy in 2007 and built on by the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act in 2009. Tesla is what it is because of a government policy that sought to build technology that helped us solve the energy and climate change crisis.

SpaceX exists because of government contracts. And rather than enter government and represent a reflection of the good that can be done if government has a positive vision of the future, he is taken a wrecking ball to many of the institutions and policies that are most important to build that future. Some of the decisions just absolutely boggle the mind and make no sense as anything other than a catastrophically callous attempt to purge the government of progressives for the sin of having ideas that he doesn't like at this moment, but happened to actually sometimes like six years ago. Even deep cuts like what he's doing at the Department of Education, destroying the degree to which we can learn about whether or not children are improving their literacy and numeracy scores year after year. We're gutting those programs. For what? Why in the world would you be incurious about the degree to which our education system works?

So I think the danger that he poses and Donald Trump poses to the constitutional order is vast, but the danger that they pose to all sorts of corners of American life is unbelievably depressing to me. And I don't know if they're the most dangerous people in the world, but I think at this moment they might be the most powerful. And to a certain extent, danger is a function of power. This is as true for technologies like artificial intelligence as it is for people. And it really profoundly depresses me to see that someone who has been such an obvious and objective beneficiary of some really interesting and important wise governance has decided to turn himself into a kind of dark wrecking ball for the future.

Michael Pollan:

And the how to stop him part of the question?

Derek Thompson:

You win, you win.

Ezra Klein:

And what's a good platform to win it on, Derek?

Derek Thompson:

And a good platform to win on is abundance. You win, and a part of winning, I think, is proving to people. My first answer is going to be my last answer maybe here. I think it's absolutely essential that the Democratic Party and Liberals in America prove that we deserve the power that we seek. And the way to prove that is to be able to point to the places that we have power and say, "Look what we did. Look what we built. Don't just look at what we spent." And I think over the last few decades, Democrats have gotten into a weird rut where we associated success with the dollar amounts that we could brag about, with the amount of money we could spend and not the things that we could build. And so we were proud to say we have $1.2 trillion for infrastructure. And then what do we build? And we were proud to say... Poor mayor of Chicago, who bragged about spending $11 billion in 10,000 affordable units, $1.1 million per affordable unit. What are you doing, man?

Michael Pollan:

Not division.

Derek Thompson:

I think you need a culture change in the Democratic Party. And one thought that I had in Ezra's first reply as he was talking about what's been tolerated with Democrats and Liberals in the last few years is that, I don't remember where I heard this term first, maybe it was someone in Silicon Valley, but I kind of love it. Culture is what you tolerate. Culture is what you tolerate and people associate your culture by looking at what you tolerate. And as long as Democrats are going to be the party that tolerates homelessness and housing scarcity, and not building clean energy and putting signs in our front lawn that say kindness is everything, while backyards are zoned for single-family housing, we're the party that tolerates hypocrisy and that has to change.

Michael Pollan:

I think that's a terrific place to stop. I want to thank you both for giving us some light in a very dark time and some hope, but not empty hope, with a real path in front of it. So anyway, will you join me in thanking these guys?

Rebecca Lendl:

If you enjoyed this Long Now Talk, head over to longnow.org to check out more Long Now Talks and programs, and of course to become a member and get connected to a whole world of long-term thinking.

Huge thanks to our generous speakers, Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson, along with our moderator Michael Pollan.

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