Derek Thompson
Appearances
Fresh Air
This Anti-Social American Life
Lots of his studies, including some randomized studies, seem to find that people, even introverts, are made much happier by these brief encounters in our lives with people on a train or the clerks in the store that we're visiting than And what I think is really profound about that mistake that we're making is that, yes, maybe it's just a 15-minute conversation with someone on a train.
Fresh Air
This Anti-Social American Life
Or maybe it's just a 10-minute conversation with someone in a store. And all that's improving is just the little experience of that little 10 minutes. Well, life is just one 10-minute experience after another. That's all it is. That's true. The way you live your minutes is the way you live your decades.
Fresh Air
This Anti-Social American Life
And I think that it's really important to remember that these little social experiments that we do, these little bits of socializing that we experience, they can be really beautiful. They can really beautifully transform our experience that day and people around us. And so I do think that you don't want to underrate the power of these small little gestures.
Fresh Air
This Anti-Social American Life
This is a really big and important question, and I'll start by answering it this way. I work from home. I support working from home. I wish that more companies had more flexibility about work from home. But I try to not lie to myself about the costs of or even the effects of working from home. There are days where I just don't see people outside of my family at all.
Fresh Air
This Anti-Social American Life
And of course, homebound life means more time with the people that I love. It means more time with my family. It also has a cost. It means I see the world less. I'm around other people less. I feel a little bit lonely. And not lonely in a healthy way where it's easily discharged and I just go out and see people. I spend more time of chosen aloneness day after day after day.
Fresh Air
This Anti-Social American Life
I recognize these own costs in my life. And I think that we need to recognize that just as offices are an invention of the 19th century that did one thing well, getting white-collar workers together, and did many other things poorly, for example, requiring long commutes. Work from home is another technology. And every technology has both the rose and the thorns.
Fresh Air
This Anti-Social American Life
It does some things very well, such as reducing commute time and giving people more flexibility over their lives. But it does other things terribly, like getting people around other people with whom they might have wonderful conversations. Some companies I think that do this really wonderfully, Pure Remote, often will build into their weeks mandatory ritualistic hangouts.
Fresh Air
This Anti-Social American Life
Every month, everybody gets together. Every two months, everybody gets together. I think the problem is, especially for young people who aren't established at work and really can be profoundly lonely, who need to build friends, need to build networks, if they're working from home, There's many times, I think, where the company isn't an office. It's not a building that people go into.
Fresh Air
This Anti-Social American Life
The company is a group chat that happens to issue a W-2 statement every January. That's a very different phenomenon. And we should just be honest with ourselves when we're reckoning with what are the benefits of, the real benefits of, and what are the costs of, the real costs of spending so much time working hard. at home alone.
Fresh Air
This Anti-Social American Life
It's really wonderful to be here, and I'm excited to talk to you as well.
Fresh Air
This Anti-Social American Life
I'm researching for a piece about this right now. I think it's really interesting to think about a kind of life cycle interpretation of the antisocial century. And here's what I mean by that. Different data sources suggest all of the following.
Fresh Air
This Anti-Social American Life
that teens have fewer friends than they used to, that high schoolers hang out with their friends less than they used to, that 20-somethings are less likely to date than they used to be, less likely to have sex than they used to have as well, that 30-somethings are less likely to get married than they used to be, and that 40-somethings are less likely to have children in their household than they used to be.
Fresh Air
This Anti-Social American Life
And so these are different trends. And I don't want to suggest that all of these things are somehow caused by one thing, like the television or the smartphone, but they're all happening at the same time. It's every station of human relationship that's in simultaneous decline. And that's really fascinating and troubling.
Fresh Air
This Anti-Social American Life
Yeah, I do think that sometimes I am guilty of talking about these phenomena as if they're exclusively about digital technology and our inner world of our emotional need for private time or other people. But just as important as changes to the inner life of Americans, I think, are changes to the external world of America.
Fresh Air
This Anti-Social American Life
This is a story that seems to go back at least 60 years. There was a very famous book written in 2000 called Bowling Alone by the sociologist Robert Putnam.
Fresh Air
This Anti-Social American Life
Between the early 1900s and 1950, we built a ton of what the sociologist Eric Kleinberg calls social infrastructure. We built library branches and community centers and public pools, and we built places for people to spend time outside of their home and their work. In the last 50, 70 years, we haven't built nearly as much of this stuff.
Fresh Air
This Anti-Social American Life
Absolutely, yeah. Third space or third place is a term that some people have for the place that's not your home and the place that's not your work. And so it's a place that you choose to be with people you're not related to and you're not financially obligated to be around them by dint of the fact that that's where you get your W-2 from.
Fresh Air
This Anti-Social American Life
And so they're important because these places build community. The literal structures that house these third spaces seem to be in decline, and we've simply built less of them.
Fresh Air
This Anti-Social American Life
Kleinenberg was in Chicago at one point reporting for one of his books called Palaces for the People, and he was talking to a community leader in Chicago about the fact that more young men seem to spend time at home, whether it's playing video games or looking at their phones. We're working out. But he said, you're right. They're working out. They're lifting weights. They're playing video games.
Fresh Air
This Anti-Social American Life
They're looking into their phone. They're not spending time outside of their home. And a community leader said, you can blame the phones if you want to, but it's just as much about the fact that look around. Where would they spend time? The social infrastructure is dilapidated compared to where it was 50 or 70 years ago.
Fresh Air
This Anti-Social American Life
There's been very little ingenuity spent on building out the external world of social infrastructure. Whereas there's been an enormous amount of ingenuity spent on making our phones more compelling for us to spend time alone on our couches.
Fresh Air
This Anti-Social American Life
And Putnam traced the entire 20th century and showed that in the first half of the 20th century, people were significantly more social, more likely to join unions and clubs and associations, more likely to get married, more likely to have children. Just about every measure of sociality was rising as if on a single wave for the first 50 or 60 years of the 1900s.
Fresh Air
This Anti-Social American Life
Something very interesting and troubling is happening for men, that's for sure. Whether it's related to the incel meme or the incel news peg that exists out there, I'm less certain of. But what's very clear in the data is that alone time has increased most for young, single, less educated men.
Fresh Air
This Anti-Social American Life
And there's further research that looks at all leisure time and breaks it out into a bunch of different categories with a bunch of different labels. And basically the exercise is about... How much time do people spend in sedentary leisure, watching television, versus active leisure, say working out or playing a sport?
Fresh Air
This Anti-Social American Life
And how much of each of those categories is spent with other people, say watching TV with your spouse or with a friend, or watching TV alone? And for young, less educated, unmarried men, the rise of sedentary alone time has just soared. We're talking about watching TV by yourself, playing video games by yourself. Alone active time would be like working out by yourself.
Fresh Air
This Anti-Social American Life
But the one line, the one graph line that was just clearly striking in the data that I reviewed is sedentary alone time for single young men. That group clearly has something going on that is a steroidal version of what's going on for everybody else.
Fresh Air
This Anti-Social American Life
That article was alarming to many people, surprising to many people. It certainly wasn't surprising to Jason Fagone, who's an author I spoke to, who's writing a book about the fact of and the rising phenomenon of people having relationships with AI. Companion AI has millions of users. Millions of people have relationships with text bots, essentially.
Fresh Air
This Anti-Social American Life
Jason told me about characters from his forthcoming book, one who's A young man who, I think this is actually very similar to a Black Mirror episode, tragically lost his fiancée, instructed a chatbot to essentially have the personality of his deceased fiancée and use that chatbot in order to work through his grief. He wasn't pretending to date a silicon-based version of his dead fiancée.
Fresh Air
This Anti-Social American Life
He was using the fiancée essentially as he would use an extension of a therapist to work through the traumatic grief of losing someone who you love more than anyone in the world. So things like that are happening. You know, you were born in the 1970s. I was born in the 1980s.
Fresh Air
This Anti-Social American Life
There's going to be kids born in the 2010s, the 2020s who might grow up in an era where lots of people seeking friendships are balancing two different alternatives. On the one hand, there are these carbon-based life forms, otherwise known as people, that you can be friends with. But people are messy, and sometimes we talk too long, like maybe I'm doing with the answer to this question.
Fresh Air
This Anti-Social American Life
And then in the second half of the 20th century, something changed, and people became less likely to marry, less likely to have children, less likely to join associations, less likely to spend time with people, really less likely to do just about everything.
Fresh Air
This Anti-Social American Life
And we have private lives of our own. And sometimes we're selfish, and we're not very good at validating the feelings of others. And on the other hand, you have an AI that you can instruct to talk as long as you want to answer the question in exactly the way that you want, who's going to validate whatever you say, who has no life to lead of his or her own. You're saying anthropomorphizing the AI.
Fresh Air
This Anti-Social American Life
And they might simply decide that silicon-based friendships are superior to carbon-based friendships. I think it's a real possibility that's looking a square in the face.
Fresh Air
This Anti-Social American Life
And the book is really extraordinary in that it traces everything from big social phenomena like marriage to tiny social phenomena like how many – thank you cards or greeting cards you fill out every year, and finds that just as all manner of socializing was on a surging wave in the first half of the 20th century, that wave crashed and declined in the second half.
Fresh Air
This Anti-Social American Life
One of the most interesting conversations I had in the reporting process for this piece was a conversation with Mark Dunkelman, who's a researcher and author at Brown University. And Mark told me that ironically and surprisingly, this age of the digitization of everything has actually made some relationships much closer.
Fresh Air
This Anti-Social American Life
You know, it's possible to text your partner throughout the day hundreds of times and stay connected to them and, you know, any best friends that you have, stay connected to them in ways that are totally impossible. And so you can think of this as being the inner ring of intimacy has grown stronger or it's potentially grown stronger for some people in this age of the smartphone.
Fresh Air
This Anti-Social American Life
At the same time, the fact that we have access to social media and group texts plugs us into networks of shared affinities that we could also never really experience 20 or 30 years ago. So, for example, Mark's case was he's a big Cincinnati Bengals fan living in Providence, Rhode Island.
Fresh Air
This Anti-Social American Life
And he said, you know, look, there's like 17 other Cincinnati Bengals fans in the entire state of Rhode Island. There's no one around me who shares my interest in the NFL. But because of the internet, I can talk to this global tribe of Bengals fans and we can stay connected with each other.
Fresh Air
This Anti-Social American Life
And he made this really profound point that while the inner ring of intimacy is strengthening and the outer ring of tribe is also strengthening, there's a middle ring of what he calls the village that is atrophying. In the village are our neighbors, the people who live around us.
Fresh Air
This Anti-Social American Life
So I think that we are socially isolating ourselves from our neighbors, especially when our neighbors disagree with us. We're not used to talking to people outside of our family that we disagree with. And this has consequences on both sides. For the Republican side, I think it's led to the popularization of candidates like Donald Trump, who essentially are a kind of all-tribe, no-village avatar.
Fresh Air
This Anti-Social American Life
He thrives in out-group animosity. He thrives in alienating the outsider and making it seem like politics and America itself is just a constant us versus them struggle. So I think that the antisocial century has clearly fed the Trump phenomenon. If you don't understand a movement that has received 200 million votes in the last nine years,
Fresh Air
This Anti-Social American Life
Perhaps it's you who've made yourself a stranger in your own land by not talking to one of the tens of millions of profound Donald Trump supporters who live in America and, more to the point, live in your neighborhood to understand where their values come from. You don't have to agree with their politics. In fact, I would expect you to violently disagree with their politics.
Fresh Air
This Anti-Social American Life
But getting along with... And understanding people with whom we disagree is what a strong village is all about. Understanding someone who doesn't share your politics but also sends their daughter to the same dance class, has an issue with the same math teacher that you have an issue with, has a problem with the same falling down bridge in your community that you have a problem with,
Fresh Air
This Anti-Social American Life
A lot of people are familiar with Robert Putnam and his thesis of bowling alone, but what really startled me is that there was a tremendous acceleration of alone time in the 21st century.
Fresh Air
This Anti-Social American Life
Finding ways to see people who disagree with us as full-blooded people who share some of our underlying values is a part of what living in a community is all about. And I do think that just as the antisocial century has turned parts of the right into this angry, all-tribe, no-village style of politics, it is also partly responsible for why so many progressives—
Fresh Air
This Anti-Social American Life
claim to not understand the most successful political movement of their time.
Fresh Air
This Anti-Social American Life
I think it plays an enormous role. I could spend all sorts of time criticizing institutional media, but the truth is I think this is a demand problem, which is to say it's an audience problem fundamentally. I think that most people want news that makes them feel a sense of fluency. Fluency is this term from psychology that has a very specific meaning.
Fresh Air
This Anti-Social American Life
It's not like being able to speak Spanish very well or English very well. Fluency refers to a style of metacognition, a feeling that we have about thinking. I have a personal theory that might be wrong, but it's just my theory, that what most people want from news is fluency. What they want from their news is a feeling that is adjacent to entertainment,
Fresh Air
This Anti-Social American Life
that the thoughts that they have when they're consuming that news make them feel good. Maybe it makes them feel a good kind of curiosity. Maybe it makes them feel a good kind of self-righteousness. Maybe it makes them feel a good kind of anger or outrage.
Fresh Air
This Anti-Social American Life
But what they want is that sense of fluency, and that sense of fluency tends to come from media that we agree with, that doesn't make us feel this disfluent sense of someone who I trust to be on my side is now saying something that's not on my side. I don't like that feeling. And then I also think that the news itself, you know, we can't let ourselves off the hook.
Fresh Air
This Anti-Social American Life
If the people who are reading the New York Times or reading the Atlantic or listening to NPR feel like they don't understand, you know, the most important political movement of this time, which clearly is the Donald Trump movement. He's the president. It's Republicans who control the Senate.
Fresh Air
This Anti-Social American Life
Well, clearly, the media, institutional media, we have failed to teach or reflect some kind of truth about our nation to the people who rely on us to understand the truth of our nation. And I suppose to connect all of this back to the antisocial century, we all need to get out a little bit more.
Fresh Air
This Anti-Social American Life
And if we want to be appropriate and wise consumers of news, we want to be wise consumers of news that make us sometimes feel a little bit uncomfortable about the future.
Fresh Air
This Anti-Social American Life
The answer is very straightforward. You leave your house, you hang out with people, or you invite more people to your house in order to have dinner parties, which have also declined tremendously in the last 20 years. This is an easy problem to solve on the surface. The problem is, what about the collective action issue?
Fresh Air
This Anti-Social American Life
It is easier to hang out with your friends in the physical world if your friends are already likely to or have demonstrated a willingness to hang out in the physical world. It's easier to throw a dinner party if the couple guests that you're inviting over already go to dinner parties, have already demonstrated that they want to go out on Friday night
Fresh Air
This Anti-Social American Life
Absolutely. Technology is at the heart of it. There's many things we can point to that changed in the 1960s and 1970s. But I'm very persuaded that if you want to understand the marrow of this issue, you should be looking at the most important technologies of the 20th century. which are the car and the television. And the automobile, I would say, privatized people's lives.
Fresh Air
This Anti-Social American Life
go over to people's houses on Friday night in order to have wine and chicken and steak or whatever. So I do recognize there's a collective action problem here to solve. But I also think it's really important not to overcomplicate this by suggesting that it requires some enormous cultural shifts.
Fresh Air
This Anti-Social American Life
I think that our little decisions, the little minute-to-minute decisions that we make about spending time with other people, these decisions can scale. They create patterns of behavior. And patterns of behavior create cultural norms. And those cultural norms can scale as well, and they can create ages. And right now, I think we're in an age of anti-socializing. We're in an age of withdrawal.
Fresh Air
This Anti-Social American Life
We're in an age of it's totally fine to be at a party and look down at your phone for 30 minutes. I think that a different kind of future is possible and that future rests on, is built on these tiny little decisions. Should I text a friend when I have a little bit of time or should I go on Facebook? Should I hang out with my friend or should I just text them?
Fresh Air
This Anti-Social American Life
Should I make some date for a bunch of people who are on a group text and live in the same town but never get together to actually see each other? And so we're constantly in a state of catching up but never in a state of hanging out. These are all things that everyone listening knows how to do. My wish is that a few actions here and there could actually trigger a behavioral cascade.
Fresh Air
This Anti-Social American Life
It allowed us to move into the suburbs, to move away from density, which is to say other people, spend more time alone in our backyards and alone in our houses. But then along in the 1950s, 1960s came another technology that really fit right with the automobile, and that's the television. And if the car privatized our lives, I think the television privatized our leisure.
Fresh Air
This Anti-Social American Life
And when you dig into the numbers, it is extraordinary just how much TV changed what it meant to be alive in the last 50 years of the 1900s. There is federal data suggesting that that between 1960 and the 1990s, the average American added about six hours of leisure time to every week. That's an extra 300 hours of leisure time every year.
Fresh Air
This Anti-Social American Life
And think about if you were waking up on January 1st and someone said, how do you want to spend an extra 300 hours of leisure that I'm giving you this year? Do you want to learn how to play an instrument or learn a new language or read all the books you wanted to read? We didn't do any of that. We basically spent all that time watching more television.
Fresh Air
This Anti-Social American Life
So coming up to the age of the smartphone, even before you get to that infamous device, you had, I think, the automobile and the television set sort of setting the ground for what has been an enormous decline in face-to-face socializing.
Fresh Air
This Anti-Social American Life
To me, this is the most important conceptual scoop of the essay. As you mentioned in your open, everyone wants to talk about loneliness these days. Vivek Murthy says that loneliness is an epidemic. You have ministers of loneliness being granted new positions in places like the UK and Japan. Everyone wants to talk about loneliness.
Fresh Air
This Anti-Social American Life
But among the many people that I spoke to for this article, I talked to the NYU sociologist Eric Kleinberg, who passed along a relatively familiar within sociology definition of loneliness. Loneliness, he said, is the gap between felt social connection and desired social connection. Loneliness is a healthy thing to feel in the right doses. It's what gets us off the couch to spend time with people.
Fresh Air
This Anti-Social American Life
But in fact, I think a lot of Americans don't feel lonely as we typically define that feeling. Rather than spend time alone and think to themselves, I should be around more people. I think many Americans in the last 20 years particularly are spending more time alone by choice year after year after year.
Fresh Air
This Anti-Social American Life
So the reason why I think this is really important to point out is that there's a lot of very, very smart people who have read this article and read previous articles about loneliness who look at the hard data and they say, you actually can't show with a lot of survey data that loneliness is rising. Actually, loneliness seems to be very stable. My point is they might be right.
Fresh Air
This Anti-Social American Life
And maybe the social crisis that we have today is rising solitude without rising loneliness.
Fresh Air
This Anti-Social American Life
They might feel that way, but it is not a coincidence, I think, that if you ask generation after generation how many friends do you have, it turns out to be the most phone-bound generations, young people, who have the fewest friends. If you ask people over the last 30, 40 years, how many times do you spend hanging out with your friends? That number has declined by 50% for high schoolers.
Fresh Air
This Anti-Social American Life
If you ask high schoolers going back over the last 20 years, how anxious do you feel? How consistently depressed or anxious or sad do you feel? Those numbers are near all-time highs. So it's very, very hard to say for sure what people feel when they look into their phones. And I should absolutely grant the premise that a lot of time that people spend on their phones is social after a fashion.
Fresh Air
This Anti-Social American Life
You have to put all of this together, that the same generation that's spending a historic amount of time on their phone has fewer friends, spends less time with their friends, feels more depressed, feels more anxious. That tells me that the phone time we have that seems to be a substitute for face-to-face socializing is a poor, poor substitute.
Fresh Air
This Anti-Social American Life
It's a lovely thought and it's a spooky thought that many of these videos that we see that sometimes move us are moving us when we're alone and the person who filmed that emotional video is also alone, editing the video alone, tracking the comments alone. And so that rather than have a disclosure of emotional intimacy between two people that are there for each other, we rather have a broadcast
Fresh Air
This Anti-Social American Life
of emotional intimacy shared by one person who is alone with millions of other people who are also alone. That is an uncanny reality that we live in. And I should say, I thought when I came into this essay writing process, I felt like I had all the facts at my disposal.
Fresh Air
This Anti-Social American Life
I had poured over the Federal American Time Use Survey, and I could point to the numbers and say, face-to-face socializing has declined 20% for Americans in the last 20 years, and alone time is at the highest rate that we have going back to data in the 1960s. But what I didn't have were stories. And here's where my wife was actually very helpful to me, ironically, because she's on TikTok.
Fresh Air
This Anti-Social American Life
And she said, there's this trend or this theme on TikTok where young people will film celebrations and funny dances when a friend cancels plans. Now, I should back up and say, we all know that feeling of having the worst, most busy, exhausting week in the world, and it's Friday night, and we're exhausted and want to go to bed at 9.30.
Fresh Air
This Anti-Social American Life
And a friend calls at 8.30 for the 8.45 reservation that we had, and they say, I'm sorry, I have to cancel. And we celebrate internally. I understand that feeling. I'm not a monster. I'm not a robot. However, Put the following facts together. The most socially isolated generation in recorded history has a trend of filming celebrations of when their friends cancel plans. That's a strange fact.
Fresh Air
This Anti-Social American Life
That's a strange juxtaposition. And if you go back to Kleinenberg's definition of loneliness being the urge the drive to fix your alone state by being around other people. What do we do about the fact that it seems like so many young people who spend more time alone than any previous generation of recorded history celebrate and dance when they get more alone time and me time and isolation.
Fresh Air
This Anti-Social American Life
Something strange is happening here, and it does a disservice to the strangeness to call it mere aloneness.
Fresh Air
This Anti-Social American Life
When I was finishing edits for this essay, I was reading a book, Dopamine Nation, about the functioning of our dopamine systems. And I learned that there's two different ways of measuring dopamine. There's phasic dopamine, which is sort of the dopamine hits that we receive from certain experiences. And there's our tonic dopamine, which is the baseline level of dopamine that we have.
Fresh Air
This Anti-Social American Life
And without making this overcomplicated, because I might not fully understand it ourselves, sometimes when we have a really high high dopamine experience, there's less dopamine, or to be colloquial, less drive that we have left over. And what I think is happening with smartphone use is something like this.
Fresh Air
This Anti-Social American Life
We pull out our phones and we're on TikTok or Instagram or we're on Twitter and we're flipping, flipping, flipping with our thumbs. And while externally it looks like nothing is happening, internally the dopamine is flowing and we are just thinking, oh my God, we're feeling outrage, we're feeling excitement, we're feeling humor, we're feeling all sorts of things. We put our phone away.
Fresh Air
This Anti-Social American Life
And our dopamine levels fall. And we feel kind of exhausted by that which was supposed to be our leisure time. And a friend then asks us to go out. They say, hey, do you want to come meet me for drinks? And what we think isn't, I've just been reading a book. I've been enjoying perfect quiet. I really want to be around people. I'm healthily lonely. Instead, we think, I'm exhausted.
Fresh Air
This Anti-Social American Life
And thinking about leaving this house, and getting my hair done, and doing my makeup, or putting on the right clothes, and maybe using the subway, and maybe the subway's broken, or getting into a car, but I don't want to call the Uber, we start imagining all the misadventures of getting out of the house. And we think, that seems like too much energy to expend. And I'm in a low energy state.
Fresh Air
This Anti-Social American Life
So I'm just going to say no to the friend. And in fact, I might even celebrate if they end up canceling their plan in the first place. One way to summarize what I think is happening here is that we are donating our dopamine to our phones rather than reserving our dopamine for our friends.
Fresh Air
This Anti-Social American Life
And as a result, we find ourselves in this uncanny space where we simultaneously have more time to ourselves but are made so exhausted by that alone leisure time that we're pulling back from opportunities to be truly social.
Fresh Air
This Anti-Social American Life
I think they are important things in our lives, and they're important things in their lives too. I talked to the psychologist Nick Epley at the University of Chicago. for this piece.
Fresh Air
This Anti-Social American Life
And he makes this really interesting point that there's many people, especially introverts but including some extroverts, who sometimes withhold conversation with strangers or even with people they do know because they assume that the other person just won't want to talk to them or the other person will find them uninteresting.
Fresh Air
This Anti-Social American Life
And he says that that's typically not true, that there's a great deal of human interaction that's governed by a principle of reciprocity, which is to say, if I'm nice to you, you'll be nice to me. If I give you a compliment, you'll say thank you. If I tell a joke, you'll smile, even if it's a terrible joke. This is how humans get along, is through this kind of reciprocal engagement.
Fresh Air
This Anti-Social American Life
And many times we forget that. And so we withhold conversation from other people. And in particular, we withhold deep conversation with other people, fearing that deep conversation will be found annoying by the people around us. But it's typically not. It's typically deeply enjoyed.
Fresh Air
Best Of: Louis Armstrong's Early Years / Our Anti-Social Century
It's really wonderful to be here, and I'm excited to talk to you as well.
Fresh Air
Best Of: Louis Armstrong's Early Years / Our Anti-Social Century
This is a story that seems to go back at least 60 years. There was a very famous book written in 2000 called Bowling Alone by the sociologist Robert Putnam.
Fresh Air
Best Of: Louis Armstrong's Early Years / Our Anti-Social Century
And Putnam traced the entire 20th century and showed that in the first half of the 20th century, people were significantly more social, more likely to join unions and clubs and associations, more likely to get married, more likely to have children. Just about every measure of sociality was rising as if on a single wave for the first 50 or 60 years of the 1900s.
Fresh Air
Best Of: Louis Armstrong's Early Years / Our Anti-Social Century
And then in the second half of the 20th century, something changed, and people became less likely to marry, less likely to have children, less likely to join associations, less likely to spend time with people, really less likely to do just about everything.
Fresh Air
Best Of: Louis Armstrong's Early Years / Our Anti-Social Century
And the book is really extraordinary in that it traces everything from big social phenomena like marriage to tiny social phenomena like how many – thank you cards or greeting cards you fill out every year, and finds that just as all manner of socializing was on a surging wave in the first half of the 20th century, that wave crashed and declined in the second half.
Fresh Air
Best Of: Louis Armstrong's Early Years / Our Anti-Social Century
A lot of people are familiar with Robert Putnam and his thesis of bowling alone, but what really startled me is that there was a tremendous acceleration of alone time in the 21st century.
Fresh Air
Best Of: Louis Armstrong's Early Years / Our Anti-Social Century
Absolutely. Technology is at the heart of it. There's many things we can point to that changed in the 1960s and 1970s. But I'm very persuaded that if you want to understand the marrow of this issue, you should be looking at the most important technologies of the 20th century. which are the car and the television. And the automobile, I would say, privatized people's lives.
Fresh Air
Best Of: Louis Armstrong's Early Years / Our Anti-Social Century
It allowed us to move into the suburbs, to move away from density, which is to say other people, spend more time alone in our backyards and alone in our houses. But then along in the 1950s, 1960s came another technology that really fit right with the automobile, and that's the television. And if the car privatized our lives, I think the television privatized our leisure.
Fresh Air
Best Of: Louis Armstrong's Early Years / Our Anti-Social Century
And when you dig into the numbers, it is extraordinary just how much TV changed what it meant to be alive in the last 50 years of the 1900s. There is federal data suggesting that between 1960 and the 1990s, the average American added about six hours of leisure time to every week. That's an extra 300 hours of leisure time every year.
Fresh Air
Best Of: Louis Armstrong's Early Years / Our Anti-Social Century
And think about like if you were waking up on January 1st and someone said, how do you want to spend an extra 300 hours of leisure that I'm giving you this year? Do you want to learn how to play an instrument or learn a new language or read all the books you wanted to read? We didn't do any of that. We basically spent all that time watching more television.
Fresh Air
Best Of: Louis Armstrong's Early Years / Our Anti-Social Century
So coming up to the age of the smartphone, even before you get to that infamous device, you had, I think, the automobile and the television set sort of setting the ground for what has been an enormous decline in face-to-face socializing.
Fresh Air
Best Of: Louis Armstrong's Early Years / Our Anti-Social Century
To me, this is the most important conceptual scoop of the essay. As you mentioned in your open, everyone wants to talk about loneliness these days. Vivek Murthy says that loneliness is an epidemic. You have ministers of loneliness being granted new positions in places like the UK and Japan. Everyone wants to talk about loneliness.
Fresh Air
Best Of: Louis Armstrong's Early Years / Our Anti-Social Century
But among the many people that I spoke to for this article, I talked to the NYU sociologist Eric Kleinberg, who passed along a relatively familiar within sociology definition of loneliness. Loneliness, he said, is the gap between felt social connection and desired social connection. Loneliness is a healthy thing to feel in the right doses. It's what gets us off the couch to spend time with people.
Fresh Air
Best Of: Louis Armstrong's Early Years / Our Anti-Social Century
But in fact, I think a lot of Americans don't feel lonely as we typically define that feeling. Rather than spend time alone and think to themselves, I should be around more people, I think many Americans in the last 20 years particularly are spending more time alone by choice year after year after year.
Fresh Air
Best Of: Louis Armstrong's Early Years / Our Anti-Social Century
So the reason why I think this is really important to point out is that there's a lot of very, very smart people who have read this article and read previous articles about loneliness who look at the hard data and they say, you actually can't show with a lot of survey data that loneliness is rising. Actually, loneliness seems to be very stable. My point is they might be right.
Fresh Air
Best Of: Louis Armstrong's Early Years / Our Anti-Social Century
And maybe the social crisis that we have today is rising solitude without rising loneliness.
Fresh Air
Best Of: Louis Armstrong's Early Years / Our Anti-Social Century
They might feel that way, but it is not a coincidence, I think, that if you ask generation after generation how many friends do you have, it turns out to be the most phone-bound generations, young people, who have the fewest friends. If you ask people over the last 30, 40 years, how many times do you spend hanging out with your friends? That number has declined by 50% for high schoolers.
Fresh Air
Best Of: Louis Armstrong's Early Years / Our Anti-Social Century
If you ask high schoolers going back over the last 20 years, how anxious do you feel? How consistently depressed or anxious or sad do you feel? Those numbers are near all-time highs. So it's very, very hard to say for sure what people feel when they look into their phones. And I should absolutely grant the premise that a lot of time that people spend on their phones is social after a fashion.
Fresh Air
Best Of: Louis Armstrong's Early Years / Our Anti-Social Century
You have to put all of this together that the same generation that's spending a historic amount of time on their phone has fewer friends, spends less time with their friends, feels more depressed, feels more anxious. That tells me that the phone time we have that seems to be a substitute for face-to-face socializing is a poor, poor substitute.
Fresh Air
Best Of: Louis Armstrong's Early Years / Our Anti-Social Century
One of the most interesting conversations I had in the reporting process for this piece was a conversation with Mark Dunkelman, who's a researcher and author at Brown University. And Mark told me that ironically and surprisingly, this age of the digitization of everything has actually made some relationships much closer.
Fresh Air
Best Of: Louis Armstrong's Early Years / Our Anti-Social Century
You know, it's possible to text your partner throughout the day hundreds of times and stay connected to them. And, you know, any best friends that you have, stay connected to them in ways that are totally impossible. And so you can think of this as being the inner ring of intimacy. It's grown stronger or it's potentially grown stronger for some people in this age of the smartphone.
Fresh Air
Best Of: Louis Armstrong's Early Years / Our Anti-Social Century
At the same time, the fact that we have access to social media and group texts plugs us into networks of shared affinities that we could also never really experience 20 or 30 years ago. So, for example, Mark's case was he's a big Cincinnati Bengals fan living in Providence, Rhode Island.
Fresh Air
Best Of: Louis Armstrong's Early Years / Our Anti-Social Century
And he said, you know, look, there's like 17 other Cincinnati Bengals fans in the entire state of Rhode Island. There's no one around me who shares my interest in the NFL. But because of the internet, I can talk to this global tribe of Bengals fans and we can stay connected with each other.
Fresh Air
Best Of: Louis Armstrong's Early Years / Our Anti-Social Century
And he made this really profound point that while the inner ring of intimacy is strengthening and the outer ring of tribe is also strengthening, there's a middle ring of what he calls the village that is atrophying. And the village are our neighbors, the people who live around us.
Fresh Air
Best Of: Louis Armstrong's Early Years / Our Anti-Social Century
So I think that we are socially isolating ourselves from our neighbors, especially when our neighbors disagree with us. We're not used to talking to people outside of our family that we disagree with. And this has consequences on both sides. For the Republican side, I think it's led to the popularization of candidates like Donald Trump. who essentially are a kind of all tribe, no village avatar.
Fresh Air
Best Of: Louis Armstrong's Early Years / Our Anti-Social Century
He thrives in outgroup animosity. He thrives in alienating the outsider and making it seem like politics and America itself is just a constant us versus them struggle. So I think that the antisocial century has clearly fed the Trump phenomenon. If you don't understand a movement that has received 200 million votes in the last nine years,
Fresh Air
Best Of: Louis Armstrong's Early Years / Our Anti-Social Century
Perhaps it's you who've made yourself a stranger in your own land by not talking to one of the tens of millions of profound Donald Trump supporters who live in America and more to the point, live in your neighborhood to understand where their values come from. You don't have to agree with their politics. In fact, I would expect you to violently disagree with their politics.
Fresh Air
Best Of: Louis Armstrong's Early Years / Our Anti-Social Century
But getting along with... And understanding people with whom we disagree is what a strong village is all about. Understanding someone who doesn't share your politics, but also sends their daughter to the same dance class, has an issue with the same math teacher that you have an issue with, has a problem with the same falling down bridge in your community that you have a problem with,
Fresh Air
Best Of: Louis Armstrong's Early Years / Our Anti-Social Century
Finding ways to see people who disagree with us as full-blooded people who share some of our underlying values is a part of what living in a community is all about. And I do think that just as the antisocial century has turned parts of the right into this angry, all-tribe, no-village style of politics, it is also partly responsible for why so many progressives...
Fresh Air
Best Of: Louis Armstrong's Early Years / Our Anti-Social Century
claim to not understand the most successful political movement of their time.
Fresh Air
Best Of: Louis Armstrong's Early Years / Our Anti-Social Century
I think it plays an enormous role. I could spend all sorts of time criticizing institutional media, but the truth is I think this is a demand problem, which is to say it's an audience problem fundamentally. I think that most people want news that makes them feel a sense of fluency. Fluency is this term from psychology that has a very specific meaning.
Fresh Air
Best Of: Louis Armstrong's Early Years / Our Anti-Social Century
It's not like being able to speak Spanish very well or English very well. Fluency refers to a style of metacognition, a feeling that we have about thinking. I have a personal theory that might be wrong, but it's just my theory, that what most people want from news is fluency. What they want from their news is a feeling that is adjacent to entertainment,
Fresh Air
Best Of: Louis Armstrong's Early Years / Our Anti-Social Century
that the thoughts that they have when they're consuming that news make them feel good. Maybe it makes them feel a good kind of curiosity. Maybe it makes them feel a good kind of self-righteousness. Maybe it makes them feel a good kind of anger or outrage.
Fresh Air
Best Of: Louis Armstrong's Early Years / Our Anti-Social Century
But what they want is that sense of fluency, and that sense of fluency tends to come from media that we agree with, that doesn't make us feel this disfluent sense of someone who I trust to be on my side is now saying something that's not on my side. I don't like that feeling. And then I also think that the news itself, you know, we can't let ourselves off the hook.
Fresh Air
Best Of: Louis Armstrong's Early Years / Our Anti-Social Century
If the people who are reading the New York Times or reading the Atlantic or listening to NPR feel like they don't understand, you know, the most important political movement of this time, which clearly is the Donald Trump movement, he's the president, it's Republicans who control the Senate.
Fresh Air
Best Of: Louis Armstrong's Early Years / Our Anti-Social Century
Well, clearly, the media, institutional media, we have failed to teach or reflect some kind of truth about our nation to the people who rely on us to understand the truth of our nation. And I suppose to connect all of this back to the antisocial century, we all need to get out a little bit more.
Fresh Air
Best Of: Louis Armstrong's Early Years / Our Anti-Social Century
And if we want to be appropriate and wise consumers of news, we want to be wise consumers of news that make us sometimes feel a little bit uncomfortable about the future.
Fresh Air
Best Of: Louis Armstrong's Early Years / Our Anti-Social Century
The answer is very straightforward. You leave your house, you hang out with people, or you invite more people to your house in order to have dinner parties, which have also declined tremendously in the last 20 years. This is an easy problem to solve on the surface. The problem is, what about the collective action issue?
Fresh Air
Best Of: Louis Armstrong's Early Years / Our Anti-Social Century
It is easier to hang out with your friends in the physical world if your friends are already likely to or have demonstrated a willingness to hang out in the physical world. It's easier to throw a dinner party if the couple guests that you're inviting over already go to dinner parties, have already demonstrated that they want to go out on Friday night.
Fresh Air
Best Of: Louis Armstrong's Early Years / Our Anti-Social Century
go over to people's houses on Friday night in order to have wine and chicken and steak or whatever. So I do recognize there's a collective action problem here to solve. But I also think it's really important not to overcomplicate this by suggesting that it requires some enormous cultural shifts.
Fresh Air
Best Of: Louis Armstrong's Early Years / Our Anti-Social Century
I think that our little decisions, the little minute-to-minute decisions that we make about spending time with other people, these decisions can scale. They create patterns of behavior. And patterns of behavior create cultural norms. And those cultural norms can scale as well, and they can create ages. And right now, I think we're in an age of anti-socializing. We're in an age of withdrawal.
Fresh Air
Best Of: Louis Armstrong's Early Years / Our Anti-Social Century
We're in an age of, it's totally fine to be at a party and look down at your phone for 30 minutes. I think that a different kind of future is possible and that future rests on, is built on these tiny little decisions. Should I text a friend when I have a little bit of time or should I go on Facebook? Should I hang out with my friend or should I just text them?
Fresh Air
Best Of: Louis Armstrong's Early Years / Our Anti-Social Century
Should I make some date for a bunch of people who are on a group text and live in the same town but never get together to actually see each other? And so we're constantly in a state of catching up but never in a state of hanging out. These are all things that everyone listening knows how to do. My wish is that a few actions here and there could actually trigger a behavioral cascade.
Fresh Air
Best Of: Louis Armstrong's Early Years / Our Anti-Social Century
It was a real pleasure. Thank you.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#462 – Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson: Politics, Trump, AOC, Elon & DOGE
Ezra articulated the principle beautifully. And just to put some meat on the bones, abundance is about being incredibly concrete about what you want to accomplish in the world. Then it's about understanding how to accomplish that. A stage of the process that I think Doge has entirely skipped. I don't think we've reached the stage of understanding.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#462 – Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson: Politics, Trump, AOC, Elon & DOGE
We've destroyed and then maybe it's sometimes promised to understand the thing that we've destroyed after the fact. You want to set goals. You want to understand how to meet those goals. And then you want to meet them. And the problem with liberalism of the last few years and last few decades is that we've become disconnected from outcomes. Really, really crystal clear example.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#462 – Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson: Politics, Trump, AOC, Elon & DOGE
So Joe Biden in 2021 signs the bipartisan infrastructure law. And he and Pete Buttigieg call it, truthfully, one of the most important infrastructure bills passed in the last few decades. $1.2 trillion to do exactly what Ezra and I want to do, to build in the world.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#462 – Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson: Politics, Trump, AOC, Elon & DOGE
There's a piece of that law that's a $42 billion program called BEAD, which stands for Broadband Equity Access and Deployment, I think. $42 billion to build rural broadband. Fast forward to 2024, practically none of it is built. We're now four calendar years after it was passed.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#462 – Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson: Politics, Trump, AOC, Elon & DOGE
And the program is, at this point, it seems like it's going to die and they're just going to transfer the whole thing to Starlink. So why? We want to understand why does government fail to achieve its outcomes and how can we learn from those failures to allow government to succeed at its outcomes? Well, you look into it.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#462 – Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson: Politics, Trump, AOC, Elon & DOGE
And it turns out that in order to take these $42 billion and send it to the states, the states had to go through a 14-stage process in order to get the money. First, the FCC had to draw a map of the places where America needed more rural broadband. And then there was a challenge period where people could question the map.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#462 – Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson: Politics, Trump, AOC, Elon & DOGE
And the FCC would remake the map, and then the challengers would sue them to change the map again.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#462 – Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson: Politics, Trump, AOC, Elon & DOGE
Then the states had to file a letter of intent and a five-year action plan and a funding program, all of which could be subject to their own challenge periods. And in each of these challenge periods, the Commerce Department is going back to the states and saying, we really like your five-year plan, but your workforce development program didn't pass this matrix.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#462 – Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson: Politics, Trump, AOC, Elon & DOGE
of equity and you didn't reach out to the right bidders over here. And if you try harder to reach out to more people who just aren't white men to be your employees, that would be fantastic if you could put that into the new edit that you submit to us. And of course, there are delays because every state has to do its own programs. The Commerce Department is backed up. Yada, yada, yada.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#462 – Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson: Politics, Trump, AOC, Elon & DOGE
You get to a point where Out of 56 states and jurisdictions that have applied to begin the 14-stage process, by the time the Democrats lose the election in November 2024, three out of the 56 have passed all 14 stages, and very little of the money has actually been spent because of all the problems that Ezra and I discussed about how hard it is to build in the physical world.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#462 – Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson: Politics, Trump, AOC, Elon & DOGE
$42 billion, therefore, dies upon contact with planet Earth. That's not government achieving its goals. And a doge that we were sort of, you know, duumbrates of in this parallel universe is one that would try very clearly to, A, articulate a goal. What are we trying to do here? We're trying to build rural broadband. Why?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#462 – Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson: Politics, Trump, AOC, Elon & DOGE
Because we think connectivity is incredibly important to the economy of the future. It helps people's health. It helps the economy of rural areas. Let's build rural broadband. Two, what are the roadblocks? What are the bottlenecks? What's hard about taking a pot of money that exists in Washington and actually creating broadband networks in rural Kentucky?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#462 – Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson: Politics, Trump, AOC, Elon & DOGE
Let's understand what those roadblocks are so that we can do two things. We can take away the things that need to be taken away to accelerate the program. And maybe we can add new policies that will accelerate the spending because bottom line, we want to make a difference in the world. That's a world where government is, to borrow Ezra's language, deregulated itself.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#462 – Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson: Politics, Trump, AOC, Elon & DOGE
It's easier for the government to achieve its goals. I think that it's really important at the level of sort of a principle here.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#462 – Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson: Politics, Trump, AOC, Elon & DOGE
that liberals fall out of love with this procedural fetish that has dominated the left over the last half century and fall back in love with outcomes, to be ruthlessly obsessed with how liberalism has failed and how these kinds of failures aren't just technocratic stories to tell in a podcast.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#462 – Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson: Politics, Trump, AOC, Elon & DOGE
I think this is fundamental to why Democrats are losing the communications war in an era of anti-establishment and anti-institution. We find ourselves in the reflexive position of having all the cranks, so to speak, having left the Democratic Party, and we're the ones who defend all institutions. We're the ones who defend the establishments. We're the ones saying government can only do good.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#462 – Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson: Politics, Trump, AOC, Elon & DOGE
But as a result, we lose the ability to talk to people about how government fails. and how they can see that failure and how sometimes they're literally leaving cities and states run by Democrats because that failure is so effing obvious to them. So this isn't just about the BEAD program. It's not just about 14-step programs. It's not just about rural broadband.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#462 – Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson: Politics, Trump, AOC, Elon & DOGE
It really is about a higher level principle of political communication. How do you develop a liberalism that in an age of anti-establishment anger both reflects that anger and channels it for proactive purposes by not just doing destruction, destruction, but creative destruction.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#462 – Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson: Politics, Trump, AOC, Elon & DOGE
, , , , , , , , , , , , ,. E e e, X. M. M. M. M. M. M. M. M. M. M. M. M. M. M. M. M. M. M. M. M. M. M. M. M. M. M. M. ,, d, d, d, d, d, d ,, ,, ,, ,, ,, , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,
Lex Fridman Podcast
#462 – Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson: Politics, Trump, AOC, Elon & DOGE
Cutting is really hard. Government spends trillions of dollars. And if you cut billions of dollars, someone is going to feel that pain and they're going to scream. And so you look at defense spending under Reagan, you look at overall spending under Reagan. Reagan might be one of the most archetypally conservative presidents of the last 40, 50 years.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#462 – Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson: Politics, Trump, AOC, Elon & DOGE
He utterly failed in his attempt to shrink government. Government grew under Reagan. Defense grew, all sorts of programs grew. So I think that one thing we're sort of scrambling around in our answers is that at a really high level, there are differences between liberalism and conservatism in American history. But often at the level of implementation, it can be a little bit messy.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#462 – Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson: Politics, Trump, AOC, Elon & DOGE
Sure. You know, despite the fact that our book is a deep, diagnosis of modern liberalism with a ton of criticism of the last half decade in politics, I am at root a profound optimist about everything. Just at a general personality sense, right?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#462 – Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson: Politics, Trump, AOC, Elon & DOGE
To a certain extent, a question like this is attempting to elicit a little bit of what can be considered analysis of the world, but you're also eliciting what is fundamentally like personality, right? What makes you optimistic? I've just always been a real optimist. I'm optimistic about science and technology, especially in the realm of biomedical science in a big way.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#462 – Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson: Politics, Trump, AOC, Elon & DOGE
I think if you look at what's happening right now in mRNA cancer vaccines, in CAR T-cell therapy for redesigning T-cells to attack cancers,
Lex Fridman Podcast
#462 – Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson: Politics, Trump, AOC, Elon & DOGE
If you look at the GLP-1 drug revolution and some of these studies that have been done on the fact that GLP-1 drugs, while they were initially synthesized from lizard venom to help people with type 2 diabetes, turn out to have these effects that seem to reduce body-wide inflammation.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#462 – Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson: Politics, Trump, AOC, Elon & DOGE
that not only rewires our minds and makes it easier for people's desired sense of moderation to be actualized, so people who want to eat more fruits and vegetables seem to find it easier to eat more fruits and vegetables when they're on GLP-1 drugs, but also because there's probably a lot of neurological issues that are fundamentally issues of inflammation, including maybe dementia and Alzheimer's, we might have accidentally, from the tongue of a lizard,
Lex Fridman Podcast
#462 – Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson: Politics, Trump, AOC, Elon & DOGE
a partial medicine for Alzheimer's disease. The ability of science to connect these dots in the cosmos just absolutely thrills and fascinates me. And I hope that we get better at making those connections.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#462 – Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson: Politics, Trump, AOC, Elon & DOGE
And while I have a lot of fears about AI, many of them shared by Ezra, I am really interested in the possibility of AI being useful for synthesizing large bodies of knowledge to allow people to make cross-domain comparisons. I think a lot of inventions in tech history are essentially ingenious recombinations of ideas.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#462 – Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson: Politics, Trump, AOC, Elon & DOGE
To a certain extent, you look at something as fundamental or archetypal as Thomas Edison inventing the incandescent light bulb. What did he do? He just tested 10,000 different materials and figured out that actually it was like a very special kind of bamboo that burned for the right amount of time and said, boom, I did it. I made the incandescent light bulb. The ability to have a machine...
Lex Fridman Podcast
#462 – Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson: Politics, Trump, AOC, Elon & DOGE
or accelerate the degree to which we understand what those 10,000 materials can do, or synthesize knowledge so people can combine it and say, we're going to take a little bit of CRISPR over here and a little bit of cancer science over here to develop a gene therapy that targets a particular inhibitor that allows the immune system to attack a protein that is explicitly related to pancreatic cancer.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#462 – Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson: Politics, Trump, AOC, Elon & DOGE
Even Bush's foreign policy that Ezra was describing, sort of from a big sense of American history, is very like Wilsonian, right? This sense of like it's America's duty to go out and change the world. Or to use a current example, McKinleyan. Or McKinley and right. And a lot of people compare Donald Trump's foreign policy to Andrew Jackson. This sense of we need to pull back from the world.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#462 – Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson: Politics, Trump, AOC, Elon & DOGE
I do absolutely believe that that we might be on the doorstep of those kind of breakthroughs. And that makes me incredibly optimistic because I think at base, it's like, you know, what's life about, right? What's abundance about? Why housing and energy? Well, because we think they're fundamental to living a good life.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#462 – Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson: Politics, Trump, AOC, Elon & DOGE
You need a place to live and people deserve the freedom to live where they want to live. Energy is what powers the entire economy. And more energy would power technologies that we can't even imagine or just be getting to, whether it's supersonic flight powered by clean fuel or fusion technology that basically gives us infinite solar energy, the sun's actual energy in a particular location.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#462 – Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson: Politics, Trump, AOC, Elon & DOGE
I mean, these are beautiful things that can happen. But also, I think the good life is about health. It's about health and it's about the wealth that comes and the freedom that comes from finding health in your own life.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#462 – Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson: Politics, Trump, AOC, Elon & DOGE
And I am incredibly optimistic that we might be at the cusp of a real golden age in taking all these little ingredients that we've spent decades on, whether it's genomics and proteomics and a little bit of AI. We're at a moment right now, I hope,
Lex Fridman Podcast
#462 – Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson: Politics, Trump, AOC, Elon & DOGE
where we can have this explosion of combinatorial intelligence and that hopefully, in an optimistic way, AI could be useful in accelerating us toward that future. But I also think, to the point of this book, we have to get institutions right too.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#462 – Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson: Politics, Trump, AOC, Elon & DOGE
These are discoveries that are going to happen inside of institutions and how those institutions work and how they're funded and the incentives that are created by law or by technology really matter in terms of the world that we build.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#462 – Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson: Politics, Trump, AOC, Elon & DOGE
And so that's why I think it's really important to not only be obsessed with what the technology can do, but how it's instantiated in the institutions that we have, because it ultimately is institutions and individuals that build the world, not technology acting on its own.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#462 – Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson: Politics, Trump, AOC, Elon & DOGE
America first. We need to care about what's inside of our borders and care much less about what's outside of our borders. Sometimes the differences between Republican and Democrat administrations don't fall cleanly into the lines of liberal versus conservative because those definitions can be mushy.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#462 – Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson: Politics, Trump, AOC, Elon & DOGE
There's two really big questions on the table that I think click together in an interesting way. You asked, one, why did Trump win? And two, why do Democrats have this certain communication style that might make them less interested in coming on to an unstructured three-hour conversation with you? Let me try to tell a story that connects them. I think Trump's victory in 2024 was overdetermined.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#462 – Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson: Politics, Trump, AOC, Elon & DOGE
There are a lot of factors here. Number one, if you look internationally, incumbents lost all over the world. They lost in the U.S., they lost in Europe, they lost in pretty much every developed country at rates that we really haven't seen in 50 years. And that's largely because the inflation crisis that came after COVID created an absolute disaster for incumbent establishment power.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#462 – Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson: Politics, Trump, AOC, Elon & DOGE
People couldn't bring prices down. Voters were furious. And they were destroying establishment orders all over the world. Democrats happened to be in power. And as a result, they got the brunt of it. That's number one. Number two, if you look at elections over the 21st century, two things are true.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#462 – Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson: Politics, Trump, AOC, Elon & DOGE
One, almost every election is unbelievably close for reasons that I'm not sure I entirely understand. The parties have gotten really good historically, bizarrely good. at getting each group to come to the polls with about 48%, such that every election is a battle over the next 1.5%. And in a world like that, little thermostatic swings are very important.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#462 – Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson: Politics, Trump, AOC, Elon & DOGE
And what we've seen over the last few years, and there's this theory about thermostatic public opinion in American politics that says that What often happens in politics is one party has a very compelling message of change. They become the establishment and then they become the victims of exactly the weapon that they marshaled.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#462 – Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson: Politics, Trump, AOC, Elon & DOGE
That then the next outgroup party says we have a theory of change and we're going to throw out the bums. And the next party comes in and they overreach and then they lose. In a world where you have thermostatic change and every election is very close, you tend to have elections swinging back and forth. So I think that also explains why
Lex Fridman Podcast
#462 – Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson: Politics, Trump, AOC, Elon & DOGE
Democrats and Republicans have struggled to hold onto power for six-year, eight-year, 12-year terms the same way they did, say, in the 1930s or 1960s. But finally, you have to look at what kind of character Donald Trump is and what kind of a media figure he is.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#462 – Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson: Politics, Trump, AOC, Elon & DOGE
We were just talking off camera about how every age of communications technology revolution clicks into focus a new skill that is suddenly in critical demand for the electorate, right? The world of radio technology is a world in which Franklin Delano Roosevelt can be powerful in a way that he can't be in the 1890s. And then you have the 1950s.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#462 – Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson: Politics, Trump, AOC, Elon & DOGE
Dwight Eisenhower, 1956, I believe, was the first televised national convention. Famously, the 1960 presidential debates between JFK and Richard Nixon take an election that is leaning toward Nixon and make it an election that's leaning toward JFK because he's so damn handsome and also just electrically compelling on a screen.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#462 – Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson: Politics, Trump, AOC, Elon & DOGE
We have a new screened technology right now, which is not just television on steroids. It's a different species entirely. And it seems to favor, it seems to provide value for individuals, influencers, and even celebrities and politicians who are good at something like live wire authenticity. They're good at performing authenticity, as paradoxical as that sounds.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#462 – Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson: Politics, Trump, AOC, Elon & DOGE
Trump is an absolute marvel at performing authenticity, even when the audience somehow acknowledges that he might be bullshitting. He's just an amazing performer for this age. And it speaks to the fact that He seems to be, to borrow Ezra's term, remarkably disinhibited in front of every single audience.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#462 – Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson: Politics, Trump, AOC, Elon & DOGE
There doesn't seem to be this sort of background algorithm in his head calculating exactly how to craft his message to different audiences. He just seems to be like a live wire animal in front of every audience. And I think that compares very distinctly to the democratic character of bureaucratic caution in our age.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#462 – Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson: Politics, Trump, AOC, Elon & DOGE
And there is a really important distinction between this vibe of the Trumpian ruler and Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#462 – Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson: Politics, Trump, AOC, Elon & DOGE
and much of my writing is an attempt to do a little bit of a very specific dance. Ezra touched on this, I think, really beautifully. We're in an era right now of anti-institution politics, anti-establishment politics. And Democrats are at risk right now as being seen as the party that always defends institutions, the party that always defends the establishment status quo. And that is...
Lex Fridman Podcast
#462 – Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson: Politics, Trump, AOC, Elon & DOGE
an absolute death knell, I think, for this century's angry anti-establishment politics. So what we're trying to do is essentially say, here's a way to channel the anger that people have at the establishment, but toward our own ends, right?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#462 – Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson: Politics, Trump, AOC, Elon & DOGE
We believe that we have answers on housing and energy and high-quality governance and science and technology, really good answers that are fiercely critical of the status quo in Democrat-led cities and Democrat-led states. We're trying to be oppositional in a way that's constructive rather than just destructive.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#462 – Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson: Politics, Trump, AOC, Elon & DOGE
It's also possible that you're going to find as you try to interview Democratic politicians that the exact same thing that happened with tech CEOs is going to happen among Democratic politicians. You interviewed some tech CEOs and then they did a great job and their friends were like, you were fantastic on the Lex Friedman podcast. That was such a great thing that you said in, you know, minute 97.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#462 – Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson: Politics, Trump, AOC, Elon & DOGE
And then there becomes a bit of a meme that you can create really high value moments for yourself if you appear on Lex's podcast. And then it becomes less risky for the next marginal CEO to say yes. And I think right now what we're talking about fundamentally is not physics. It's culture. It's just norms.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#462 – Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson: Politics, Trump, AOC, Elon & DOGE
I think there's a fear of low expected value if you're a high ranking Democratic politician and if you do a podcast like this. What if I say the wrong thing and it goes viral and my bookers and my agenda people and myself just feel terrible for the next few weeks because all we see on blue sky and X is just people hating.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#462 – Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson: Politics, Trump, AOC, Elon & DOGE
But if you get one interview that goes well, if you talk to Wes Moore, let's say, and there is a five minute segment where he articulates some vision of liberalism in the 2020s that everyone says, my gosh, that is the best possible articulation of what the Democratic Party can stand for the next four years that I've ever heard.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#462 – Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson: Politics, Trump, AOC, Elon & DOGE
Suddenly what's happened is that appearing on the show becomes massively de-risked. And in fact, the risk valence entirely switches. We are leaving dollars on the floor by not appearing on this guy's podcast because I'm AOC. I'm a sensational communicator. If Wes Moore can do it, I can do it even better.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#462 – Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson: Politics, Trump, AOC, Elon & DOGE
And so I think to a certain extent, there's a little bit like of a riot theory phenomenon here. The person who throws the first stone in a riot has to be very courageous. The person who throws the hundredth and first stone in a riot doesn't need to be courageous at all.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#462 – Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson: Politics, Trump, AOC, Elon & DOGE
And there might be a little bit of that going on that people need to see proof of high expected value before it breaks what we're acknowledging to be a bit of a communications norm on the left.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#462 – Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson: Politics, Trump, AOC, Elon & DOGE
It's about having something to say. We wanted to talk to you and talk together about how much we wanted to talk to you. Because we got something to say. We wrote a 300-page book about how much we have to say. We love going on podcasts and television shows and radio and then doing live events to tell people what we have to say.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#462 – Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson: Politics, Trump, AOC, Elon & DOGE
We think this idea of abundance isn't just important for redefining what the American left means. We think that the outcome of thinking abundantly about housing and energy and science and technology is what politics is all about. It's about giving people the good life, and we think this is the path toward it.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#462 – Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson: Politics, Trump, AOC, Elon & DOGE
So certainly one thing that's profoundly motivated us is having something very concrete that we just want to get out there in the world. My sense as a writer, as a thinker, is I want my software running on as many pieces of hardware as possible. I want to get my ideas out there as much as possible and who gets credit for them and where the idea goes. And that's all secondary.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#462 – Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson: Politics, Trump, AOC, Elon & DOGE
I believe in ideas because they're important. And so I want to talk to people who have large platforms about those ideas, because how else is the idea getting to the mainstream except through those large platforms? That's how broadcast technology works in the first place. So maybe one thing that you're touching on is a little bit of ideological ambiguity.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#462 – Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson: Politics, Trump, AOC, Elon & DOGE
Maybe a part of this is this sense that people don't know exactly what it is they have to say for three hours. All I can say for sure is that we know.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#462 – Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson: Politics, Trump, AOC, Elon & DOGE
Well, my piece about the abundance agenda, which I wrote in 2022, started with me standing outside waiting for a COVID test. And this was a period where two years after the pandemic started, COVID tests were still being rationed. And it was like 21 degrees outside. And I was getting very, very frustrated about the fact that still we seem to have a scarcity of COVID tests.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#462 – Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson: Politics, Trump, AOC, Elon & DOGE
And as I'm sitting outside just freezing my ass off and just getting really mad, I'm thinking, you know, it's not just COVID tests we've had scarcity. We also had a scarcity of COVID vaccines early on in the rollout, which created this really discombobulated scheme for distributing the early COVID vaccines.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#462 – Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson: Politics, Trump, AOC, Elon & DOGE
And then also you go earlier into March and May of 2020, and we had a shortage of PPE equipment for our doctors to remain safe as they were taking care of a pandemic. And I thought, you know, it's interesting that this entire experience of the pandemic has essentially been defined by this concept of scarcity. And as I zoomed out a little bit, I thought, you know, it's not just the pandemic.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#462 – Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson: Politics, Trump, AOC, Elon & DOGE
It's really so much the 21st century economy that's been defined by scarcity. Ezra beautifully described the degree to which housing unaffordability has become the economic problem of our time. In the history of political orders, each political order is in part defined by the internal crisis. The Great Depression springs New Deal liberalism. Stagflation springs neoliberalism.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#462 – Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson: Politics, Trump, AOC, Elon & DOGE
Now we're in this molten moment where we're waiting for the new political order to emerge. And it's going to emerge because of the lever, because of the power of housing affordability. You have to solve that problem if you want to solve the problem of American anger about prices. And part of this is just pure arithmetic.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#462 – Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson: Politics, Trump, AOC, Elon & DOGE
If you look at any family's budget, the biggest part of their budget in any given year is the part that goes to rent or mortgage. It's housing, housing, housing. And housing connects to everything else. It connects to innovation. You want cities to agglomerate, to bring smart people together. Housing relates to all sorts of other affordability.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#462 – Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson: Politics, Trump, AOC, Elon & DOGE
Like if you care about the cost of child care or elder care, you want to make it cheaper to house institutions, buildings that can care for children, which means you want to bring those rents down. And so I thought as I'm zooming out on this concept of scarcity in the 21st century, we have chosen to make housing scarce.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#462 – Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson: Politics, Trump, AOC, Elon & DOGE
In some of the most productive cities and states often run by Democrats, we have rules, zoning rules, historic preservation rules, permitting processes, environmental reviews, laws that we created that have gotten in the way of making abundant the most important material good there is, which is housing.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#462 – Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson: Politics, Trump, AOC, Elon & DOGE
And as I kept sort of working myself into a lather and getting mad about the world, I thought, you know, it's actually not just housing. It's clean energy, too.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#462 – Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson: Politics, Trump, AOC, Elon & DOGE
There's lots of environmentalists who are on my side and believing very fervently in climate change who've made it very difficult to site solar panels or site solar farms or to raise wind turbines or to advance geothermal or to accept nuclear power. We have chosen to make clean energy scarce as well.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#462 – Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson: Politics, Trump, AOC, Elon & DOGE
And then finally, the ultimate boss of scarcity was the pandemic itself, which constricted the supply of all sorts of goods around the world, setting the price of everything to the moon. And that's why inflation wasn't just an American phenomenon, not just a North American phenomenon. It was a global phenomenon.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#462 – Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson: Politics, Trump, AOC, Elon & DOGE
And I thought what we need to solve for this crisis of penumbral scarcity is an abundance agenda. an approach towards solving America's problems that puts abundance first. And Ezra and I have a very focused definition of abundance. We believe, we say in the first page of the book, America needs to build and invent more of the things it needs. We believe that housing is critical.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#462 – Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson: Politics, Trump, AOC, Elon & DOGE
We believe energy is critical. We talk a lot about science and technology. But we really put government effectiveness at the heart of this. Because one really deep vein of our book is a criticism of where liberalism has gone wrong in the last 50 years, where liberalism has gone from, in the New Deal era, a politics of building things.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#462 – Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson: Politics, Trump, AOC, Elon & DOGE
I mean, FDR and the progressives transformed the physical world, not just with infrastructure projects, but with building roads, the highway system under Dwight Eisenhower. We changed the physical world during the decades, the 1930s to the 1950s. But in the last half century, liberalism has become very good at the politics of blocking rather than the politics of building.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#462 – Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson: Politics, Trump, AOC, Elon & DOGE
And if you look at the way that liberals define success in the last few decades, it's often about success defined by how much money you can spend rather than how many things you can actually build. I mean, you look at the fact that, for example, in the book, we have so many examples that California authorizes more than $30 billion to build a high-speed rail system, which basically doesn't exist.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#462 – Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson: Politics, Trump, AOC, Elon & DOGE
Just last week, the mayor of Chicago bragged that they spent $11 billion building 10,000 affordable housing units. That's $1.1 million per affordable housing unit. That's absolutely pathetic.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#462 – Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson: Politics, Trump, AOC, Elon & DOGE
We have a story in the book about a $1.7 million public toilet built in San Francisco, $1.7 million for a toilet because of all of the rules that get in the way and raise the price of building public infrastructure like public bathrooms in San Francisco and California.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#462 – Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson: Politics, Trump, AOC, Elon & DOGE
So liberalism, I'm worried over the last 50 years, has become so good at the politics of blocking and the politics of associating the money authorized as success rather than what you build in the physical world that we've lost sense of material abundance, of how important outcomes are and not just processes.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#462 – Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson: Politics, Trump, AOC, Elon & DOGE
And so this is a book that's trying to nudge the Democratic Party back to what we think are, in a way, historically its roots. thinking about what Americans need and making it easier for government to act efficiently to provide them. And that really does, I think, begin with housing and energy.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#462 – Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson: Politics, Trump, AOC, Elon & DOGE
Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#462 – Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson: Politics, Trump, AOC, Elon & DOGE
Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#462 – Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson: Politics, Trump, AOC, Elon & DOGE
There's certainly a lot of regulation that you wanna get out of the way. I mean, you look at California, for example, you were just giving a beautiful summary of just how important it is for people to be able to move next to economic opportunity. If you look at the number of houses that have been permitted in the state of California,
Lex Fridman Podcast
#462 – Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson: Politics, Trump, AOC, Elon & DOGE
Over the last 40 years, it's basically just a squiggle line down. The tragedy here, just to put a really fine point on it, is that the city wasn't gated by geography or by destiny.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#462 – Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson: Politics, Trump, AOC, Elon & DOGE
Yeah, yeah. Elijah Otis invented the elevator in like the 1850s. This is not exactly a breaking technology. We chose to do this. We wrote these laws. We, people, are filing these lawsuits. We, judges, are accepting these lawsuits and determining that this building can't be built.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#462 – Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson: Politics, Trump, AOC, Elon & DOGE
This is entirely self-inflicted, and it's why over and over again in this book, we call it a manufactured scarcity, which is like a little bit of a funny term. How do you manufacture the absence of something? No, a manufactured scarcity means... You didn't have to do this. This is a human-made rule whose purposeful goal was to make it harder to add to the supply of something.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#462 – Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson: Politics, Trump, AOC, Elon & DOGE
And in this case, especially since the 1960s, we have made it purposefully difficult to add housing supply. And the outcome just followed the process. You see housing supply decline often in the richest cities and these states that are governed too often by progressives. How do we undo it? Yes, a huge part of it exists at the layer of law, right?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#462 – Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson: Politics, Trump, AOC, Elon & DOGE
California is already trying to change its laws, right? End single family zoning, make it easier to add accessory dwelling units called ADUs. We're changing this at the level of law. But one thing I'm very fixated on is making sure that we also communicate to people that it has to be changed at the level of mindset and even at the level of political courage.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#462 – Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson: Politics, Trump, AOC, Elon & DOGE
Because here's like a model of what often happens. You're the mayor of some city and you want to add a housing development of, let's say, 500 units, right? 500 apartment unit building is going to be set up by some developer. And there's a city council meeting to determine whether or not this apartment building is going to be built.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#462 – Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson: Politics, Trump, AOC, Elon & DOGE
Because of loss aversion and because the people who tend to go to city council meetings are older and richer and homeowners, Guess what the overwhelming volume of reaction is in those city council meetings? It's a lot of people who feel like they have something to lose saying you cannot put up this building. You cannot add these apartments. It's going to ruin the character of the neighborhood.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#462 – Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson: Politics, Trump, AOC, Elon & DOGE
It's going to create traffic. It's going to be like an eyesore because I don't like buildings that are that tall. Any number of excuses can come out of like the Pez dispenser of excuses. You take care of one, there's going to be another that comes to the surface.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#462 – Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson: Politics, Trump, AOC, Elon & DOGE
And so what often happens is that these mayors or these people sitting on the city council will look out into this room of 50 people saying, no, no, no. And they'll say, I'm going to represent the feedback that I see. And I'm going to vote no on the addition of this housing, on the addition of these housing units, the addition of this apartment building.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#462 – Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson: Politics, Trump, AOC, Elon & DOGE
Where political courage comes into play is the ability to say, you know what? I want everyone here to know that I hear you. I'm listening to you and I represent you. And so I'm grateful that you showed up to the city council meeting.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#462 – Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson: Politics, Trump, AOC, Elon & DOGE
But for every one person here who says they see a benefit to adding a new apartment building, I know that there are 10,000 people in the city that didn't have the wealth or the knowledge to be here at this meeting. And they're going to benefit from more housing because that's going to bring down their housing costs. And I represent them as well.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#462 – Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson: Politics, Trump, AOC, Elon & DOGE
I don't just represent, you could say, the circle of care that I can see right now. I also represent the circle of voters that we can't see right now. who are in the city or who are in the state or might even want to move to the state but currently can't because housing prices are too high on account of housing supply being restricted.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#462 – Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson: Politics, Trump, AOC, Elon & DOGE
And so one thing we're trying to get liberals to have is a sense of political courage to stand up against this very visible nimbyism and say, we represent interests that aren't necessarily visible at this city council meeting. We represent the larger interest of housing abundance
Lex Fridman Podcast
#462 – Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson: Politics, Trump, AOC, Elon & DOGE
So we're going to always default to saying yes rather than default to saying no just because the people who happen to come to these meetings are NIMBYs.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#462 – Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson: Politics, Trump, AOC, Elon & DOGE
I love this question of deregulation. But I also sometimes find it very frustrating because sometimes I find that people's sense of regulation is so specifically coded. Regulation is just rules. If you change the word from regulation to rules, I think it'd be easier for people to see some rules are good and some rules are stupid. We all understand that in life. That's what regulations are.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#462 – Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson: Politics, Trump, AOC, Elon & DOGE
They're just rules. And sometimes they give us exactly the outcomes we want. And sometimes they give us the outcomes we would never hope for. And here's a good example. You back to the 1940s, 1950s. America was fucking disgusting. disgusting. The air and the water was horrifying.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#462 – Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson: Politics, Trump, AOC, Elon & DOGE
In 1943, residents of Los Angeles woke up to a smog that was so black, they thought the Japanese had launched a chemical attack against America. In New Hampshire, in the rivers next to textile mills, sometimes the rivers themselves would run green and purple and red, depending on what textile colors were being dumped into the river. You had the Ohio River on fire in the 1960s, 1970s.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#462 – Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson: Politics, Trump, AOC, Elon & DOGE
The world of mid- 1900s America was truly sickening, and it made people sick. And so we passed a raft of environmental rules, and some of them achieved exactly what we wanted. The air we breathe and the water we drink is cleaner because of the Clean Air and Water Acts. We did extraordinary things with this era of regulation.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#462 – Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson: Politics, Trump, AOC, Elon & DOGE
Some of these regulations were about outcomes, that the Clean Air and Water Act regulates specific pollution levels in the air and the water or the emissions coming out of tailpipes. Some of the regulations, though, were about process. NEPA is the National Environmental Protection Act, and it, among many other things...
Lex Fridman Podcast
#462 – Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson: Politics, Trump, AOC, Elon & DOGE
empowered individuals and citizens to sue the government and organizations, businesses to stop construction or fill out environmental reviews to prove that their construction would meet muster, wouldn't degrade the environment too severely. This opened the door to an infinitude of lawsuits to wrap up any effort to build anything in red tape forever. So fast forward to 2021.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#462 – Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson: Politics, Trump, AOC, Elon & DOGE
The month after Gavin Newsom, governor of California, signs the law to end single-family zoning in California, seems like a massive win for the pro-housing yimbies of California. The month after that law was passed, the Board of Supervisors in San Francisco
Lex Fridman Podcast
#462 – Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson: Politics, Trump, AOC, Elon & DOGE
decided to rule against an apartment building that would have added 500 total units and 100 below market rent units, so something like public or social housing, that was going to be built on a Nordstrom parking lot, just about the best possible place you could add housing in the world, a Nordstrom parking lot, because the builders, the
Lex Fridman Podcast
#462 – Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson: Politics, Trump, AOC, Elon & DOGE
So this is a world in which the most housing-starved city in America is being starved even more of housing because of the expression of or the power of the instrumentalization of a rule past the 1970s that has allowed people to sue to stop the physical world from being changed. And I think it goes back to this idea that sometimes...
Lex Fridman Podcast
#462 – Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson: Politics, Trump, AOC, Elon & DOGE
The solutions of one era can become the problems of the next generation. It was really good to pass the set of environmental bills that we did in the 1960s and 1970s because it addressed the extremely real problem of air and water and land being degraded by industry. But we're in a new world. And the problem environmentalism today is in part a problem of global warming.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#462 – Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson: Politics, Trump, AOC, Elon & DOGE
And we have to build not only dense housing, but also clean energy. And the same rules that were designed to help the environment in the 1960s and 1970s are sometimes ironically used in a way that hurt the environment in the 2020s. And that's one reason why we as liberals need a paradigm shift.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#462 – Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson: Politics, Trump, AOC, Elon & DOGE
I think the steel man is very easy to make here. Department of Government Efficiency. That sounds like an organization that's needed if government is inefficient. And one of the themes of our book is just how inefficient government can be. Not only at building houses, building energy, often at achieving its own ends. Building high-speed rail when it wants to build high-speed rail.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#462 – Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson: Politics, Trump, AOC, Elon & DOGE
Adding affordable housing units when it wants to add affordable housing units. I love Ezra's line that we don't just need to think about deregulating the market. We need to think about deregulating government itself, getting the rules out of the way that keep government from achieving the democratic outcomes that it's trying to achieve.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#462 – Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson: Politics, Trump, AOC, Elon & DOGE
This is a world in which a department of government efficiency is a godsend. We should be absolutely obsessed with making government work well, especially if we're going to be the kind of liberals who believe that government is important in the first place. So that to me is the sort of pillbox version of a steel case for a Department of Government Efficiency.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#462 – Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson: Politics, Trump, AOC, Elon & DOGE
I think if you talk to people at Doge or talk to people who are authors of Project 2025, who are at Heritage, who are chiefs of staff of the people working for Heritage, if you have a truth serum conversation with these folks and you say, defend what's happening. This is what they're saying. They're saying something metastatic.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#462 – Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson: Politics, Trump, AOC, Elon & DOGE
has grown inside of government, not just over the last few years under Joe Biden, but over the last few decades, maybe going all the way back to FDR and even Woodrow Wilson. We have allowed an administrative state to accumulate like barnacles on a ship around the executive branch. And it's keeping the executive branch from being able to translate the democratic will into policy.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#462 – Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson: Politics, Trump, AOC, Elon & DOGE
Because there's never any president who is purely elected by the people. They're elected into an office that is already pre-contaminated by the bureaucracy itself. And we're trying to take all of that away.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#462 – Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson: Politics, Trump, AOC, Elon & DOGE
We're trying to I mean, this is this is very just explicitly the case they're going to make trying to make government more democratic, not less by allowing the democratic, the elected president guide in a lead in a pure way.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#462 – Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson: Politics, Trump, AOC, Elon & DOGE
One of the big problems of the FDA is slow approval of phase three clinical trial drugs, right? Everyone in this country who believes in science and technology wants the most life-saving drugs to be brought into the public marketplace as soon as possible and competed against with other drugs so the price comes down and helps to extend people's lives and health spans.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#462 – Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson: Politics, Trump, AOC, Elon & DOGE
I think everyone agrees that that is an outcome worth fighting for. And if they don't, certainly, Ezra and I are willing to say that's an outcome that we want. That's what we want from our science policy. What happens if you cut probationary employees at the FDA? The FDA doesn't become more efficient.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#462 – Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson: Politics, Trump, AOC, Elon & DOGE
It becomes less efficient because the same amount of work spread over fewer people means longer delays in terms of approving phase three clinical trial drugs and deciding whether or not to approve them for public consumption. So in this really, really clear and very specific example, I think we can see the problem with not having articulated goals.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#462 – Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson: Politics, Trump, AOC, Elon & DOGE
You don't know whether the job to be done is to take away employees or to add them. I think if instead what Doge had done is come in and say, you know what, Elon Musk and a bunch of other people from Silicon Valley, one thing we take very seriously is the importance of scientific and technological progress.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#462 – Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson: Politics, Trump, AOC, Elon & DOGE
Because if you look back over decades and centuries, what distinguishes our generation from every other generation in terms of its health and its power is science and technology. And we want to infuse government with a sense of science and technological progress.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#462 – Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson: Politics, Trump, AOC, Elon & DOGE
And to that end, one thing we want to do is to have a smarter and more efficient FDA so that people can experience life-saving medicines.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#462 – Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson: Politics, Trump, AOC, Elon & DOGE
I think what you would do is research the bottlenecks that exist to American science and pharmaceutical policy and say, we should hire more people at the FDA to accelerate drug approval, decide which drugs are to be rejected and which drugs are to get the FDA label. That is the opposite of the Doge approach. And this really, I think, puts a fine point to the problem of a Doge without goals.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#462 – Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson: Politics, Trump, AOC, Elon & DOGE
When Elon takes over Tesla, when Elon is... at SpaceX, when Elon's at X, I would imagine, and you know this better than me because you know him, and maybe most importantly, for the purposes of this part of the conversation, you know the people who work for him. I'll bet if you ask the people who work under Elon at X, Tesla, SpaceX, they say, I know exactly what Elon wants.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#462 – Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson: Politics, Trump, AOC, Elon & DOGE
This is his goal for the super heavy rocket. This is his goal in terms of humanoid robots. This is his goal in terms of profitability of Twitter. and the growth of our subscription business, and how we're going to integrate new features, there's probably a really clear mind meld. Right now, I have no sense that there's a mind meld.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#462 – Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson: Politics, Trump, AOC, Elon & DOGE
And in fact, I have the exact opposite sense, that rather than an example of creative destruction, which would be a mitzvah of entrepreneurship, we have an act of destruction destruction. We have destruction for the sake of destruction. It's much cleaner to me from an interpretive standpoint to describe Doge as an ideological purge of progressivism
Lex Fridman Podcast
#462 – Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson: Politics, Trump, AOC, Elon & DOGE
performing an act of or performing the job of efficiency rather than a department of actual efficiency itself.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#462 – Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson: Politics, Trump, AOC, Elon & DOGE
That's certainly true in the last 100 years. It was New Deal liberals who enlarged the government in the 1930s. It was Republicans who acquiesced to that larger government in the 1950s. And then starting in the 1970s, 1980s, it's typically been conservatives who tried to constrict government. Sometimes they failed. while liberals have typically tried to expand, certainly, taxing and spending.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#462 – Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson: Politics, Trump, AOC, Elon & DOGE
But one thing that I was thinking as Ezra was talking, and I was just writing this down because I thought Ezra's answer was really lovely, but at a really high level, I thought, maybe you disagree with this, I thought about distinguishing between liberals and conservatives based on three factors. What each side fears, what each side values, and what each side tolerates.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#462 – Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson: Politics, Trump, AOC, Elon & DOGE
As Ezra said, we're sort of speed running a particular experiment here of what does executive power look like if we do away as much as possible with checks and balances? And I would submit that we're already starting to get some feedback loops from the market. The stock market is not the economy, but it is a very clear voting mechanism.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#462 – Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson: Politics, Trump, AOC, Elon & DOGE
And what's clear is that many institutional and retail investors think that the current economic regime is pushing us toward a recession that we don't have to have. Right. Donald Trump has insulated himself from any feedback loop or any sense of criticism that his tariff policy might not be the best course of strategy for American industry or global relations.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#462 – Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson: Politics, Trump, AOC, Elon & DOGE
And as a result, what we have is, I think, fairly described as a kind of purposeful chaos. I mean, What other term can you use if a tariff is being announced at 9 a.m. and then taken away at 3.30 p.m. and then 10 days later announced at 9.37 and then renegotiated at 2.45? This is not a principled theory of the perfect tariff level on international trade.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#462 – Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson: Politics, Trump, AOC, Elon & DOGE
This is, I think, much more parsimoniously explained by just an expression of Donald Trump's personality. This is a New York real estate guy. He loves making big, awesome pronouncements and then using those big, awesome pronouncements in order to negotiate little one-on-one dealings where he can rest for himself a personal sense of power or money or pride.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#462 – Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson: Politics, Trump, AOC, Elon & DOGE
Announcing these tariffs in a sort of chaotic way forces world leaders to get on the phone with him and say, Donald, what can I give you to bring down the tariff? This is personality standing in for politics. in a way that's totally unmolested by anybody else's sense of, hey, that'll maybe chill it on the tariff policy. Hey, let's maybe slow down on the deportations.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#462 – Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson: Politics, Trump, AOC, Elon & DOGE
I'm not so sure about this particular move over here. Instead, you have an executive branch that's just a full manifestation of Donald Trump's mind. And I do think that the early returns, if you look at consumer sentiment, if you look at the stock market, if you look at the 10-year yield,
Lex Fridman Podcast
#462 – Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson: Politics, Trump, AOC, Elon & DOGE
I think liberals fear injustice and conservatives often fear cultural radicalism or the destruction of society. And as a result, they value different things. Liberals, I think, tend to value change. And at the level of government, that can mean change in terms of creating new programs that don't previously exist.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#462 – Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson: Politics, Trump, AOC, Elon & DOGE
You have a range of, let's call them aggregated economic information telling us that the economy, consumers, employers, investors do not like what's happening now, which is going to be a really interesting test case. Donald Trump's first four years in office, right? Love him or hate him. were four rather successful years of economic growth.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#462 – Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson: Politics, Trump, AOC, Elon & DOGE
Low unemployment, steady growth, low inflation, pretty much every economic indicator in the green. We're already in the red in many of the economic indicators that never even blinked yellow under his first administration. And I personally don't think it's a coincidence that you're getting these red indicators
Lex Fridman Podcast
#462 – Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson: Politics, Trump, AOC, Elon & DOGE
At a time when Donald Trump is having an entirely different experience of being president, where there is no Mnuchin to tell him, hey, maybe let's cool it off in the tariffs. The one more thing I would add here is you said, you know, maybe maybe Trump's presidency is a kind of right wing abundance. Right. And I think that's that's it's a worthy question. Right.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#462 – Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson: Politics, Trump, AOC, Elon & DOGE
Is Donald Trump just doing his own version of abundance? And we should, even if we disagree with his process, ideologically sort of root for the outcomes that are that are likely under it. Here's why I don't think so. Let's say that you, or just someone as a conservative, shares our view that they want housing to be abundant.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#462 – Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson: Politics, Trump, AOC, Elon & DOGE
I think what they should really root for is to reduce the tax for building and make it easier to add housing units cheaply. Well, houses are made out of materials. Two of the most important materials in home building are soft lumber and drywall. Soft lumber we import from Canada. Drywall, one of the key ingredients, we import from Mexico.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#462 – Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson: Politics, Trump, AOC, Elon & DOGE
One of the first things that's going to happen if you raise a 25% tariff on lumber from Canada and drywall from Mexico is that the cost of housing is going to go straight up. And this isn't my personal opinion. This was a March 7th memo sent by the National Association of Home Builders, essentially in a kind of controlled panic, saying... please don't do a tariff policy like this.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#462 – Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson: Politics, Trump, AOC, Elon & DOGE
You're going to screw over home builders, even though ironically you, Donald Trump, were elected by Biden to Trump voters who were mad about the price of housing. So I am not in the moment optimistic that his centralizing style is going to be economically useful for Americans, whatever their interests.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#462 – Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson: Politics, Trump, AOC, Elon & DOGE
My sense of the early feedback and of the early returns is that he in fact does not have a very clear and beneficial economic agenda. He has a personal agenda. He likes taking phone calls from international leaders and working out little deals with them.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#462 – Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson: Politics, Trump, AOC, Elon & DOGE
I don't think that's in the larger interest of economic growth, and certainly I don't think it's in the specific interest of reducing housing prices.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#462 – Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson: Politics, Trump, AOC, Elon & DOGE
It's typically been liberals, for example, who've been trying to expand health coverage while conservatives have tried to cut it back. Just in the last few years, it was Biden who tried to add a bunch of programs, whether it was infrastructure, the Chips and Science Act, the IRA, and then Trump comes into office and is unwinding it. And then I also think they tolerate different things.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#462 – Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson: Politics, Trump, AOC, Elon & DOGE
I think liberals are more likely to tolerate a little bit of overreach, a little bit of radicalism in terms of trying to push society into a world where it hasn't been. Well, I think conservatives are more likely to tolerate injustice. They're more likely to say there's a kind of natural inequality in the nature of the world, and we're not going to try to overcorrect forward with our policies.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#462 – Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson: Politics, Trump, AOC, Elon & DOGE
And so I think that Even at a layer above what Ezra was articulating with the policy differences between liberals and conservatives, there's almost like an archetypal difference between what they fear and value and tolerate.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#462 – Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson: Politics, Trump, AOC, Elon & DOGE
Liberals fearing injustice, seeking change, tolerating sometimes a bit of what people might think of as overreach, while conservatives fear that overreach, value tradition, and often tolerate injustice.
Plain English with Derek Thompson
How Gen Z Sees the World
And to a certain extent, investing has always been somewhat memetic. We can tell ourselves that people bet on stocks because they're doing this very fancy calculation of future cashflow potential. But fundamentally, people allocate and have always allocated their income towards certain assets because they think that asset price will go up faster than other asset prices.
Plain English with Derek Thompson
How Gen Z Sees the World
But there does seem to be something distinct about this generation's penchant for investing in cryptocurrencies and stocks where there really is no case for the asset to go up in value, other than that it's really obvious that a lot of people are talking about it right now.
Plain English with Derek Thompson
How Gen Z Sees the World
Last fall, you wrote about a memo that was written by the YouTube megastar MrBeast titled How to Succeed in MrBeast Production. This was a 30-page account to how to work with MrBeast, and you called it a guide to the Gen Z workforce, thinking of it as the first Gen Z corporate leader manifesto. And what's interesting is that MrBeast is clearly not... I would say, the handsomest man in the world.
Plain English with Derek Thompson
How Gen Z Sees the World
Something seems to be happening that is pushing off what we've historically thought of as the definition of this state that we call adulthood. I think understanding this phenomenon of delayed adulthood requires us first understanding the shifting realities and psychological preferences of America's young people. Generation Z.
Plain English with Derek Thompson
How Gen Z Sees the World
He's not the most charming. He's not the most talented in terms of some talent show competition. He's not the best singing or best dancing. But he does seem to be singular, absolutely singular, at the ability to attract and sustain this currency that you're talking about, attention. What is it that you think Mr. Beast understands about attention?
Plain English with Derek Thompson
How Gen Z Sees the World
I'm going to hate the player just a little bit here, but I'm willing to have you push back against my even minor hatred of the player. You compare the Mr. Beast memo to other famous corporate leader memos like the Jeff Bezos Day One philosophy and Steve Jobs' Odes to Simplicity. In those letters... there was a virtue that was communicated that existed outside of the ecosystem of the business.
Plain English with Derek Thompson
How Gen Z Sees the World
Jeff Bezos was saying there is something special about having a day one mentality to refresh one's sense of curiosity day by day. And you could take that idea and port it to other parts of life and say, oh yeah, that's a way to live. Or you could take Steve Jobs' ode to simplicity and say, there's something beautiful here that I could transport to music or to visual arts.
Plain English with Derek Thompson
How Gen Z Sees the World
But there's a section of the Mr. Beast quote that really, to me, nails the distinction between him and previous corporate leaders. He says, quote, Your job here is to make the best YouTube videos possible. It's not to make the best produced videos, not to make the funniest videos, not to make the best looking videos, not the highest quality videos.
Plain English with Derek Thompson
How Gen Z Sees the World
It's to make the best YouTube videos possible, end quote. I think I could talk about this excerpt for an hour. I don't think we have an hour. But let me tell you what I hear there. I think most people in creative industries have values that exist in tension between art and commerce, right? I want to produce podcasts that many people listen to. I also want to learn something.
Plain English with Derek Thompson
How Gen Z Sees the World
which was born between the late 1990s and early 2010s, are less likely than previous generations to say they'll achieve the American dream. They have record high rates of anxiety. They often graduated into a pandemic economy or entered high school during the school shutdown years. Defined by forces of scarcity and phone-driven media and global crisis, this generation is different.
Plain English with Derek Thompson
How Gen Z Sees the World
A musician wants to sell at a stadium. They also want to make music they're proud of. Am I unfair in suggesting that this memo very cleanly obliterates that tension. The job here is very explicitly not to make anything resembling art. The job is to satisfy the YouTube success gods. Clicks, duration, the end.
Plain English with Derek Thompson
How Gen Z Sees the World
And I don't even think that Mr. Beast is a bad person or that this memo is somehow unusually demonic in some kind of way. I am more interested in it as an artifact of Gen Z work psychology. Like, what do you think we learn about the forces acting on this generation by reading this memo and taking it seriously?
Plain English with Derek Thompson
How Gen Z Sees the World
That answer pulls together a lot of ideas for me that I hope I'm able to communicate in this response. Um, I think one of the obvious but sneakily profound facts of the internet is that it makes outcomes clear. We know how many people a tweet reaches or a post reaches. We know how many people upvote our Reddit comments. And it's impossible to forget these positive and negative feedback loops.
Plain English with Derek Thompson
How Gen Z Sees the World
And for a long time, I've wanted to understand how different, Today's guest is Kyla Scanlon. She's 27 years old, but that's the least important thing about her. As an older Gen Z representative, she is also quite brilliant.
Plain English with Derek Thompson
How Gen Z Sees the World
We are shaped by them in ways that we haven't been so explicitly shaped by a numerate feedback system in previous generations. And it seems to me that this makes people who are participating in the online attention economy more explicitly outcome-oriented, less focused on process, and more focused on what are the numbers.
Plain English with Derek Thompson
How Gen Z Sees the World
And there's a way in which this approach deadens art, I think, because it fixes our attention solely on the final question of how many people clicked on this link and how many seconds did they remain on the browser tab. But there's actually, I think in your answer, a really smart way
Plain English with Derek Thompson
How Gen Z Sees the World
opposite side of the coin here, which is that if work is seen as explicitly about outcomes rather than inputs, then people can have a very different relationship with, say, how hard they work. It's not about the number of hours that you're sitting at a desk. It's purely about what did you make this week and what are the numbers.
Plain English with Derek Thompson
How Gen Z Sees the World
And there's something deadening about that to a certain extent, I think, creatively. But there's also, I think, something maybe... capitalistically freeing about an attitude toward work that isn't so fixated on were you here for 40.0 hours in the previous five days? Maybe just last thoughts there before we move on to politics.
Plain English with Derek Thompson
How Gen Z Sees the World
As a financial commentator on TikTok and Instagram and Substack, she's coined several terms like vibe session that have made their way into the cultural lexicon, the New York Times, and even federal economic reports.
Plain English with Derek Thompson
How Gen Z Sees the World
I want to talk about politics for a bit. It is universally assumed and possibly even universally true that young people today have lost their trust in institutions. Before we talk about the way in which that is inflecting politics, what do you think this loss of institutional trust really means? And why do you think institutions, so to speak, have lost the trust of young people?
Plain English with Derek Thompson
How Gen Z Sees the World
For a while, I've wanted to have a conversation about young people that doesn't make me the subject of a bunch of Reddit memes of Steve Buscemi holding the skateboard above his head, asking how do you do, fellow kids.
Plain English with Derek Thompson
How Gen Z Sees the World
I'm always interested in this question of how much of people's unhappiness with the world is about the world versus the inner psychology of people. So for example, I can name all sorts of ways that the institutions that have lost trust might deserve some of that lost trust. If progressives no longer trust the Supreme Court because of the Roe v. Wade decision, I understand that.
Plain English with Derek Thompson
How Gen Z Sees the World
If there are moderates that don't trust public health institutions because they think that they recommended COVID policies that those moderates or conservatives don't agree with, I understand the way that the institution's decisions ended up eroding trust.
Plain English with Derek Thompson
How Gen Z Sees the World
At the same time, I think it's no defense of public health or city governance institutions to point out that young people today are plugged into attention ecosystems on their phone, where we know for certain that negativity goes viral, that outrage goes viral, that out-group animosity goes viral.
Plain English with Derek Thompson
How Gen Z Sees the World
And when you put those things together, it seems like a perfect recipe for smartphone users always finding some reason to hate the establishment. So when you talk to young people and when you think about this clear across the board collapse in institutional trust, how much of this is actual institutional failure versus a technologically determined outcome due to the dynamics of media economics?
Plain English with Derek Thompson
How Gen Z Sees the World
I wanted to talk to somebody smart who was a member of Gen Z and who had conducted their own surveys of Gen Z. And I'm very honored to have Kyla tell me how young people today think and what they want and what that means for America writ large. I'm Derek Thompson. This is Plain English. Kyla Scanlon, welcome back to the show. Thanks for having me.
Plain English with Derek Thompson
How Gen Z Sees the World
Yeah. Of their waking hours inside of technology in some way. Yeah. Exactly. When it comes to Gen Z politics, I feel like there are several claims that people often make that are conflated, and I want to disentangle them as best I can and present them to you for your evaluation. Claim number one is that young people are shifting right overall.
Plain English with Derek Thompson
How Gen Z Sees the World
So in 2024, for example, young men and young women shifted at least 10 points toward the Republican Party. The second claim is that young men and young women are polarizing away from each other. So by some survey measures, young women today are more liberal than they used to be, and young men today are more Republican than they used to be. In your opinion,
Plain English with Derek Thompson
How Gen Z Sees the World
writings and your research and you're talking with young people, what's real here? Are young people really becoming more conservative or does it only seem that way maybe because older generations are struggling to pin down their political identity?
Plain English with Derek Thompson
How Gen Z Sees the World
There's a kind of outsized fear that young people in the U.S., because of the schism between young men moving into the Republican Party while young women, by some measures, are becoming more liberal year by year, There's some fear that the U.S. is going to retrace the gender politics of, say, South Korea, where you have this 4B movement. No dating, no sex, no marriage, no children.
Plain English with Derek Thompson
How Gen Z Sees the World
This is a radical movement. This is not reflective of the general population. What is reflective of the general population is that Korea has the lowest fertility rate in the world. And so I think that's partly why it's highlighted this concern for what could happen if gender politics really go out of whack.
Plain English with Derek Thompson
How Gen Z Sees the World
Do you think this is a completely overblown fear of older people who don't know what they're talking about? Or do you see signs of real political frustration among young people that goes beyond these sort of I should say here, do you see signs of real political frustration between young men and women that goes beyond the routine frustrations of just dating when you're 23, 24 years old?
Plain English with Derek Thompson
How Gen Z Sees the World
Let's do both of those topics as a follow-up. I wanna get to the antisocial century and the state of Gen Z romance in a second, but I don't think I've given you a chance to really give me your full-throated thesis statement
Plain English with Derek Thompson
How Gen Z Sees the World
You have published several essays recently on how Gen Z thinks about the world that I think are pretty exceptional. And they really cover just about everything. Young people's relationship to finance, media, politics, romance, dating, work, psychology. And we're going to try, try to run through all of that with the upfront proviso that
Plain English with Derek Thompson
How Gen Z Sees the World
on how housing supply and high housing prices and the rapidly rising age of the first-time home buyers in America is playing a role in shaping the psychology of Gen Z. You've brought it in through the back door for some of my questions that didn't mention housing, but let's bring it in through the front door. How is housing and the question of housing anxiety shaping Gen Z?
Plain English with Derek Thompson
How Gen Z Sees the World
You should not apologize. I should be the one apologizing for not having made it to the first question.
Plain English with Derek Thompson
How Gen Z Sees the World
There's been a lot written about delays in adulthood and delays in what some people unfortunately call adulting, which is to say in previous decades, there was a certain expectation that by a certain age, the vast majority of Americans will have bought their first house, gotten married, had their first child. And the age at which the typical American is meeting those expectations
Plain English with Derek Thompson
How Gen Z Sees the World
old-fashioned milestones for adulthood is going up and up and up. A part of that, I think, is absolutely a housing story. Another part of it is, I think, a story about isolation. I think young people are dating less in part because they're just seeing other human beings less.
Plain English with Derek Thompson
How Gen Z Sees the World
I wrote a cover story called The Antisocial Century about this phenomenon, but I want to talk about it with you in the context of dating. So I met my wife on the dating app Bumble back in 2015. I've read in several places that the apps are really struggling to retain users. Bumble in particular, I learned this from you, is down 90% since its IPO. And when you look into why...
Plain English with Derek Thompson
How Gen Z Sees the World
It turns out that young people just aren't dating at nearly the rates that previous generations were at this age. Just 56% of Gen Z adults have been in a romantic relationship during their teen and early 20-something years compared with over 70% of baby boomers and Gen Xers. That's according to the Survey Center on American Life, which you quoted in your Substack essay.
Plain English with Derek Thompson
How Gen Z Sees the World
Every time somebody says, this generation is like X, they're engaging in some massive, unforgivable overgeneralization. So let's start, actually, by addressing that generalization problem head-on. Let's get specific. When we say Gen Z today, that means everybody born between the late 1990s, early 2010s.
Plain English with Derek Thompson
How Gen Z Sees the World
Kyla, why do you think Gen Z doesn't date?
Plain English with Derek Thompson
How Gen Z Sees the World
Do we have evidence that young people, even into their 20s, are dating significantly less than previous generations? Or do we not yet know that to be a fact? Because there could be a story that teenagers are dating less But by the time the typical American is 25, 26, 27 years old, they're more or less as likely to date as any previous generation.
Plain English with Derek Thompson
How Gen Z Sees the World
It's just that we've set back or delayed the average first age of first boyfriend, girlfriend, right? Do we have any evidence here suggesting that there's a clear story for the state of dating in people's mid-20s?
Plain English with Derek Thompson
How Gen Z Sees the World
You mentioned that one reason why young people might be more loathe than previous cohorts to date is that there's higher rates of social anxiety. And as you've written about, there's higher rates of overall anxiety. Gen Z adults are consistently more likely than older generations, and Gen Z teens in particular, to say that they experience negative emotions almost or all of the time.
Plain English with Derek Thompson
How Gen Z Sees the World
That is to say, all teenagers 13 and up and most 20-somethings today are in this category of Gen Z. You write that the best way to see Gen Z clearly is to divide this generation into three subgroups that you call Gen Z 1.0, 1.5, and 2.0. Break that down for us.
Plain English with Derek Thompson
How Gen Z Sees the World
There's been a big, frothy debate about why this is happening. How much of this is smartphones? How much of it is young people just depressed about the state of the world? How much of it is... memes being shared online that are essentially spreading depression like a kind of silicon-based plague. What do you think is going on?
Plain English with Derek Thompson
How Gen Z Sees the World
What would be your full explanation for why Gen Z has such higher rates of anxiety than previous generations?
Plain English with Derek Thompson
How Gen Z Sees the World
One effort at arriving at a kind of concluding statement is that I hear you saying that Generation Z is shaped by this three-headed hydra of anxiety. The first head, the first wave is the arrival of the smartphone. The second is the arrival of the pandemic. And the third is economic reality. Housing today is a source of anxiety and AI is at the edge of being a source of anxiety.
Plain English with Derek Thompson
How Gen Z Sees the World
And so you have this sort of three-headed hydra of smartphones, pandemic, and economic realities. I'm also trying to take to heart this idea that there's been this loss of institutional trust, which has nudged young people toward individual sources of authority.
Plain English with Derek Thompson
How Gen Z Sees the World
And that includes their preference for high-risk investment strategies, what you call Fafonomics, taking on high-risk investments, meme coins, meme stocks, day trading, sports gambling, These ways of making money are gamified, and they are in some ways a replacement for institutional means of investing and saving money.
Plain English with Derek Thompson
How Gen Z Sees the World
And the last bit that I'm trying to remember for myself is this idea that young people are shaped by this tension between social anxiety in the physical world And in the digital world, the difficulty of constructing an algorithmic self, I love this term that you introduced me to, an algorithmic self. I don't think we are meant to to have to discover algorithmic selves.
Plain English with Derek Thompson
How Gen Z Sees the World
I think this is kind of bullshit. I don't think people are meant to discover who they are in front of an audience of thousands of strangers they can't see. That doesn't seem evolutionarily fit to the species. It seems kind of effed up. And so I can absolutely see how that would really scramble young people's sense of who they are and what they're for.
Plain English with Derek Thompson
How Gen Z Sees the World
What have I missed that you think is really important If a middle-aged guy like me is trying to get his head around not the instrumental question of is this generation more conservative or more liberal, but rather like the forces shaping this generation, what is that summary statement, Miss?
Plain English with Derek Thompson
How Gen Z Sees the World
I love this distinction between the smartphone as a tool and the smartphone as an environment. The air you breathe, something as invisible and boring as just like oxygen. How does that distinction, even within Gen Z, shift the relationship they have to their phones?
Plain English with Derek Thompson
How Gen Z Sees the World
One observation that you've made in some of your essays is that even young people have a very complicated relationship with, say, TikTok and Twitter. About half of young people wish those social media apps didn't even exist.
Plain English with Derek Thompson
How Gen Z Sees the World
Is there a way in which we can look inside this generation and say, the group that sees smartphones as a tool think this way about technology, and the group that sees smartphones as the oxygen they breathe see it as a different force in their life?
Plain English with Derek Thompson
How Gen Z Sees the World
I think it's really interesting to think about bringing to the foreground these two forces of the smartphone and the pandemic, and thinking about ways that not only is this group shaped by them, they're also shaped by the backlashes against those forces. You describe the 1.5 generation as being more distrustful of institutions.
Plain English with Derek Thompson
How Gen Z Sees the World
having maybe spent all four years in college or many of their high school years in schools that were shut down or schools that limited their mobility. So it's not just that they were shaped by the pandemic, they're shaped by the politics of backlash against the pandemic response.
Plain English with Derek Thompson
How Gen Z Sees the World
And then with the smartphone, what I'm hearing you say is that they're not just shaped by the technology itself, they're shaped by their negative relationship with it. They're maybe more inclined to feel like my life might be better if I weren't cursed with the inevitability of having to deal with these technologies.
Plain English with Derek Thompson
How Gen Z Sees the World
Before we move on to investing, maybe just dilate on that a bit, the fact that maybe we think about young people being shaped by the forces that engender them in a positive way, but it can just as easily happen in the other direction, that they're shaped negatively by their formative environments.
Plain English with Derek Thompson
How Gen Z Sees the World
What does Gen Z want? In December of last year, The Wall Street Journal's Rachel Wolf published a wonderful essay that was entitled, What Happens When a Whole Generation Never Grows Up? Wolf reported that American 20-somethings and 30-somethings today are bypassing the traditional milestones of adulthood. Dating, marrying, having a kid, buying a home.
Plain English with Derek Thompson
How Gen Z Sees the World
Let's look at finance and investing for a minute. The Atlantic's Annie Lowry has written that young people, and young men in particular, seem unusually drawn to novel forms of high-risk betting. They are the largest owners of meme coins, cryptocurrencies. They're the largest buyers of meme stocks. Rates of sports betting are rising.
Plain English with Derek Thompson
How Gen Z Sees the World
I think this ties into one of my favorite Kyla coinages, which you've described as the emergence of Fafonomics, F-A-F-O, Fafo being an acronym for fuck around and find out. What is Fafonomics by your definition? And what makes it a particularly Gen Z phenomenon?
Plain English with Derek Thompson
How Gen Z Sees the World
What if someone comes along and says, look, I look at the statistics of real income growth, not over the last four years where inflation has definitely warped the picture, but over the last few decades, America's richer than it used to be. Young people are richer by various measures than they used to be. Where does this sense of, or possibly reality of financial nihilism come from?
Plain English with Derek Thompson
How Gen Z Sees the World
They're less likely in many cases to be doing any of this. This delay of adulthood, or the delay of these adulthood markers, let's say, begins quite early. Teens in the 2020s are now less likely to date than previous generations. 20-somethings are more likely to live with their parents. 30-somethings are less likely to be married, and 40-somethings less likely to have kids.
Plain English with Derek Thompson
How Gen Z Sees the World
There's two themes that you're touching on that I want to be very clear about as I'm hearing them, and it's risk versus attention. So you've pointed out the fact that young people today can look at the economy and recognize that there is more risk in terms of the rising cost of housing.
Plain English with Derek Thompson
How Gen Z Sees the World
Maybe there's anxiety about career progression, anxiety about artificial intelligence, or the fact that at the moment, as Roger Karma has written for The Atlantic, the job market is quite frozen, unusually frozen right now. There's not as much hiring as you would expect. But I also want to bring media economics into this as well. There's this concept of meme coins or meme stocks.
Plain English with Derek Thompson
The Trump-Musk Doctrine: F-ck Around and Find Out
For the past month, chaos and confusion have gripped Washington, D.C., and the federal bureaucracy, A slew of federal judges have already ruled that Trump and Musk have violated the law, typically by exceeding the powers of the executive branch and attempting to defund agencies that were initially funded by Congress, the legislative branch.
Plain English with Derek Thompson
The Trump-Musk Doctrine: F-ck Around and Find Out
But what I want to focus on today is not Musk's methods or his motivations, but rather to judge him by his outcomes. Doge exists, in theory, to seek efficiency. And the need for efficiency today is understandable. The federal government is deep in debt. Our interest payments now exceed what we spend on defense. And even if the U.S.
Plain English with Derek Thompson
The Trump-Musk Doctrine: F-ck Around and Find Out
It seems to me like you're outlining two ways that healthcare spending can go awry. In a fee-for-service, FFS system, doctors or insurers are biased to deliver more and more and more services even when patients don't need it, and that drives up costs across the system. But in the alternative scenario of capitation, now you're encouraging healthcare
Plain English with Derek Thompson
The Trump-Musk Doctrine: F-ck Around and Find Out
insurers to turn away or find ways to deny care for the sickest patients. And that means, you know, not including oncologists in your network. So there's these two rocks that we're trying to navigate between. Mike, I want to keep the explanatory pace here slow and steady so everyone's on the same page. But what Tim has outlined is that the government has a very serious interest
Plain English with Derek Thompson
The Trump-Musk Doctrine: F-ck Around and Find Out
in properly reimbursing doctors who care for sick patients. We want to align government payments with actual patient illness. Like that's the gold standard here, right? But that means that the government needs a way of actually determining, actually seeing which patients are actually very sick and need more treatment. So how are doctors telling the government how sick their patients are?
Plain English with Derek Thompson
The Trump-Musk Doctrine: F-ck Around and Find Out
Let's use, say, a diabetes patient as an example.
Plain English with Derek Thompson
The Trump-Musk Doctrine: F-ck Around and Find Out
And just because that's the first time we're mentioning diagnosis codes, just define exactly what you're talking about. And you can even use a really quick example.
Plain English with Derek Thompson
The Trump-Musk Doctrine: F-ck Around and Find Out
had no issue with its debt, it would still be a mitzvah to find ways to make government work better. To take the same tax dollar further. To do one more unit of good. but like some out-of-control chemotherapy that attempts to kill a cancer and instead ravages the healthy cells. The first few weeks of Doge have showed us an out-of-control organization wrecking blind havoc across government.
Plain English with Derek Thompson
The Trump-Musk Doctrine: F-ck Around and Find Out
So I think that if someone's listening along, they're thinking, this sounds like it makes all the sense in the world. The fee-for-service system is going to be biased toward more fees for more services. We don't want that. That's totally runaway spending.
Plain English with Derek Thompson
The Trump-Musk Doctrine: F-ck Around and Find Out
The capitation system that Tim just outlined is a flat fee per patient, and that means that the sickest patients are going to be denied care that they absolutely need because they're treated or paid for the same as if they're just an average patient. So that system... What we want is a way to make sick patients legible to government.
Plain English with Derek Thompson
The Trump-Musk Doctrine: F-ck Around and Find Out
It sounds like this is an absolutely perfect system, like it would make all the sense in the world. Now, this is what I want to do now. It's going to be a little bit nerdy and hopefully not a total failure, but I really do want an unimpeachable understanding of how diagnostic coding works so we can understand how it goes wrong.
Plain English with Derek Thompson
The Trump-Musk Doctrine: F-ck Around and Find Out
And since there's three of us here and we're talking about what is sort of a three-party coordination, there's a patient, there's a doctor, there's an insurer, I thought we could role play this. So Tim, you're gonna be my doctor. Mike, you're Medicare. And I'm Derek. I'm Derek, a pre-diabetic, 80-year-old with very mild memory loss. And I've just moved to the area, Tim.
Plain English with Derek Thompson
The Trump-Musk Doctrine: F-ck Around and Find Out
So this is my very first visit to the doctor's office. It's very nice, by the way. You know, your Sarasota office is lovely. You should know, by the way, there's a sports illustrator from 2007 in the waiting room, and you might need to replenish your magazine selection, but we can talk about that later. Tim, you call me into the doctor's office. What happens now?
Plain English with Derek Thompson
The Trump-Musk Doctrine: F-ck Around and Find Out
Their effort to trim the fat keeps cutting deep into bone over and over again in a way that I worry will eventually do serious damage, even if it's hard to specifically predict what the worst damage will look like.
Plain English with Derek Thompson
The Trump-Musk Doctrine: F-ck Around and Find Out
So Tim, Mike has just laid out a scenario where the insurance company has coded me as full-blown type 2 diabetic, full-blown dementia, and also as a person suffering from skin cancer. This is a scenario where it's the insurer with their foot on the accelerator for adding diagnostic codes. You're the doctor. Are there also some cases where it's the doctor who's so-called up-coding him or herself?
Plain English with Derek Thompson
The Trump-Musk Doctrine: F-ck Around and Find Out
When you consider very closely what Musk and Doge have attempted to do in the last few weeks, I think the only objective conclusion one can reach at this point is that what's happening in government is not just a reign of terror. It's a reign of ineptitude. Let's start at the Department of Energy, where Doge recently laid off more than 1,000 workers.
Plain English with Derek Thompson
The Trump-Musk Doctrine: F-ck Around and Find Out
What I find so interesting about this and stories like this is I am such a sucker for cases where seemingly good intentions can go awry because we've established it seems to make so much sense that we would want to find a way to make patient sickness legible to the government And the way we discovered to do that, or the way we arrived at, is diagnostic codes.
Plain English with Derek Thompson
The Trump-Musk Doctrine: F-ck Around and Find Out
But Tim and Michael, as you've explained, there's all sorts of reasons for both the insurer and the doctor to pretend as if their patients are sicker than they actually are, because the more severe the diagnostic code, the more money everybody in the system gets. So Michael, this is a practice that is known in healthcare as upcoding.
Plain English with Derek Thompson
The Trump-Musk Doctrine: F-ck Around and Find Out
And both of you published a paper several years ago showing evidence that upcoding is not just a hypothetical in Medicare Advantage, but a likely fact in Medicare Advantage. Before we talk about like the history and how to fix this, how do we know you're right? What is the best evidence that this is happening at a wide scale?
Plain English with Derek Thompson
The Trump-Musk Doctrine: F-ck Around and Find Out
Among those laid off were 300 staff at the National Nuclear Security Administration. We're talking scientists, engineers, and safety officials responsible for safeguarding nuclear warheads. Roughly 100 people were reportedly laid off from the Pantext plant in Texas, the most important nuclear assembly and disassembly plant in the country, before they were called back into the office.
Plain English with Derek Thompson
The Trump-Musk Doctrine: F-ck Around and Find Out
So this is really clear evidence that Medicare Advantage enrollees are being deliberately coded as being significantly more sick than equivalent patients are in the public Medicare system. And This is costing Medicare, therefore the federal government, billions of dollars a year.
Plain English with Derek Thompson
The Trump-Musk Doctrine: F-ck Around and Find Out
According to the GAO, FBI, upcoding and related misrepresentation of clinical information costs somewhere between $10 and $100 billion to the U.S. federal government annually. This is why we're looking here for waste or fraud. Very quickly, Michael, before I go back to Tim on the history of this practice. What's the difference between waste and fraud?
Plain English with Derek Thompson
The Trump-Musk Doctrine: F-ck Around and Find Out
And what's the right way to think about this upcoding phenomenon we're talking about today as being waste, improper payment, or fraud, someone's actually lying here?
Plain English with Derek Thompson
The Trump-Musk Doctrine: F-ck Around and Find Out
Tim, the term that we've used today is upcoding, and contained in that term suggests the idea that there is an optimal code that we should use for people, and that Medicare uses the right code, and Medicare Advantage upcodes, therefore uses the wrong code.
Plain English with Derek Thompson
The Trump-Musk Doctrine: F-ck Around and Find Out
Is it possible, actually, that Medicare is undercoding, or that historically we've been undercoding, and that in a way, what we're talking about as waste is actually a lot of doctors and insurance companies recognizing the true illness of patients rather than exaggerating their illness.
Plain English with Derek Thompson
The Trump-Musk Doctrine: F-ck Around and Find Out
Daryl Kimball, the executive director of the nonpartisan Arms Control Association, said, quote, the Doge people are coming in with absolutely no knowledge of what these departments are responsible for, end quote. Next, we have Veterans Affairs, where the Trump administration offered buyouts to tens of thousands of employees before realizing that, once again, they'd made a mistake.
Plain English with Derek Thompson
The Trump-Musk Doctrine: F-ck Around and Find Out
Mike, I'm thinking about this as like blame pie. In the little play that we did where I was the pre-diabetic 80-year-old patient, it seemed like the insurance company got the biggest slice of the blame pie. In some cases, maybe it's the doctors who have the bigger slice of the blame pie. They're the ones doing the upcoding. But I was reading some journalistic reports of diagnostic codes.
Plain English with Derek Thompson
The Trump-Musk Doctrine: F-ck Around and Find Out
And I saw that many doctors say that they are advertised software programs that promise to make them more money. And those software programs essentially do the upcoding of the patients themselves, right? The software developers are like, we promise that we'll make you a physician more money. How do we make you more money?
Plain English with Derek Thompson
The Trump-Musk Doctrine: F-ck Around and Find Out
We essentially take every pre-diabetic and we code them as type two diabetic and voila, you end up getting a larger payment to your clinic. How big of the blame pie here should go to the software that these companies are using?
Plain English with Derek Thompson
The Trump-Musk Doctrine: F-ck Around and Find Out
This is the problem with you economists. I keep wanting to cut up the blame pie with economists when I talk about healthcare. And they always say that we don't believe in moral systems. Well, I believe in moral systems. So pretend you're me and give me an approximation for the blame size pie percentage.
Plain English with Derek Thompson
The Trump-Musk Doctrine: F-ck Around and Find Out
Now, maybe your impression of the typical federal employee is somebody who pushes paper around all day, but if you're familiar with the VA, you know the agency provides health and psychiatric care to millions of U.S.
Plain English with Derek Thompson
The Trump-Musk Doctrine: F-ck Around and Find Out
Tim, you and Michael first started looking at upcoding about 10 years ago. How much more prevalent has this practice got in the last 10 years?
Plain English with Derek Thompson
The Trump-Musk Doctrine: F-ck Around and Find Out
war vets, which means if you offer buyouts to Veterans Affairs, what you're going to get is a lot of underpaid doctors, nurses, and psychologists saying, okay, see ya, and leaving offices that are already understaffed. which is exactly what was about to happen, until days after the buyout offer went out, thousands of doctors, nurses, and psychologists and other essential staff got a second notice.
Plain English with Derek Thompson
The Trump-Musk Doctrine: F-ck Around and Find Out
Other countries have sick people. Other countries have public insurance systems. They deal with all of the problems we've talked about today. How do we avoid incentives to over-treat? How do we avoid incentives to under-treat? How do we make the sickness of the patients that exist in each country's population, legible to the government insurer.
Plain English with Derek Thompson
The Trump-Musk Doctrine: F-ck Around and Find Out
Is there something that the US can learn from another country that would help us align payments in this one?
Plain English with Derek Thompson
The Trump-Musk Doctrine: F-ck Around and Find Out
Mike, one thing that I really like about Tim's reply there is that... You guys are economists. You study trade-offs. And one thing that frustrates me in the conversation about government spending is when people deny the existence of trade-offs. Government spending tends to go somewhere. Someone is benefiting.
Plain English with Derek Thompson
The Trump-Musk Doctrine: F-ck Around and Find Out
Sometimes that money seems like it's inefficiently spent, but then you take that spending item away and you realize the good that it was doing, the people it was employing, the communities that it was propping up. Healthcare is no different. If you cut 10% of American healthcare spending, it's not as if that's like fat spending.
Plain English with Derek Thompson
The Trump-Musk Doctrine: F-ck Around and Find Out
that's zapped from an animal's body and the animal keeps going around like being like really, really ripped, right? It's not like, you know, adipose tissue that can just be burned away. That's money that's going to support jobs and companies and people and patients, right? Economics is trade-offs. Healthcare is trade-offs. Government spending is trade-offs.
Plain English with Derek Thompson
The Trump-Musk Doctrine: F-ck Around and Find Out
That's a theme that I'm picking up from what Tim's putting down. But let's talk about solutions here. Like obviously the politics of healthcare reform are horrendous. People tend to dislike healthcare in the aggregate, but you get a lot of screaming when individual plans are changed.
Plain English with Derek Thompson
The Trump-Musk Doctrine: F-ck Around and Find Out
And so there's this interplay between lots of fury at the system, but also a status quo bias that makes it difficult to change the system. Where do you think change can or should start here when we're thinking about the phenomenon of upcoding and Medicare Advantage?
Plain English with Derek Thompson
The Trump-Musk Doctrine: F-ck Around and Find Out
Oops, sorry, no, your buyout offer has been rescinded. At the Department of Education, which the Trump administration seems very intent on destroying, Doge recently terminated $1 billion in contracts.
Plain English with Derek Thompson
The Trump-Musk Doctrine: F-ck Around and Find Out
But rather than end these ideological programs that Musk says he wants to eliminate, these cuts decimated the Institute for Education Science, which funds many of the most famous and longstanding studies in all of education research, including several longitudinal studies on student achievement and school effectiveness.
Plain English with Derek Thompson
The Trump-Musk Doctrine: F-ck Around and Find Out
Final question, guys. This is a really interesting and unique moment of public attention on waste and fraud and government spending.
Plain English with Derek Thompson
The Trump-Musk Doctrine: F-ck Around and Find Out
You know, whether one conceives of Elon Musk and Doge as a wrecking ball to dismantle bureaucratic progressivism or a good faith effort to identify fraud or some combination of the two, there is a ton of heat right now, a ton of energy on the fact of and the question of government waste.
Plain English with Derek Thompson
The Trump-Musk Doctrine: F-ck Around and Find Out
What would be your parting wisdom to people who are listening to news about government waste, seeking out government waste themselves, if people from the government are listening to the show right now? What's the parting wisdom that you would leave with these folks?
Plain English with Derek Thompson
The Trump-Musk Doctrine: F-ck Around and Find Out
In the big picture, it's hard to think of a better nonpartisan role for government than data collection, or sort of uniquely positioned to do it. But Trump and his team have gutted now some of the best education data tools we have. It's not just progressives who are aghast at this.
Plain English with Derek Thompson
The Trump-Musk Doctrine: F-ck Around and Find Out
what you often have is not obvious waste or fraud, but rather good intentions gone slightly awry and trade-offs shifting ever so slightly out of balance. I really like the way that Tim described the dual-sided problems of a fee-for-service system versus a capitation system. On the one hand, if you pay doctors
Plain English with Derek Thompson
The Trump-Musk Doctrine: F-ck Around and Find Out
to provide more services, you may accidentally or on purpose encourage healthcare inflation to run rampant. On the other side, if you try to control healthcare spending with capitation, you might accidentally or on purpose keep certain patients from getting the care that they need. Diagnostic codes emerge from a recognition of a problem that's real.
Plain English with Derek Thompson
The Trump-Musk Doctrine: F-ck Around and Find Out
but they create an incentive whose costs might number in the tens of billions of dollars in terms of excess payments. I simply find that a very, very interesting illustration of the principle that policy is hard and policy is trade-offs. And people who pretend sometimes to have as their third job be the identification of government waste, fraud, and abuse.
Plain English with Derek Thompson
The Trump-Musk Doctrine: F-ck Around and Find Out
Nat Malkus, a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, a conservative think tank, told the Washington Post, quote, there's a lot of bloat in IES. There's a lot of problems to be solved. But these are problems you solve with a scalpel and maybe a hatchet, not a bulldozer. Doge's cuts will go much further.
Plain English with Derek Thompson
The Trump-Musk Doctrine: F-ck Around and Find Out
need to remember just how hard and complicated this system actually is. Thank you very much. And we'll talk to you later this week.
Plain English with Derek Thompson
The Trump-Musk Doctrine: F-ck Around and Find Out
By reputation, Elon Musk and Donald Trump are builders. Musk has grown two of the largest hardware innovation companies in the world with Tesla and SpaceX. And as for Trump, he once told Golf Digest magazine, quote, I own buildings. I'm a builder. I know how to build. Nobody can build like I can build. Nobody. End quote.
Plain English with Derek Thompson
The Trump-Musk Doctrine: F-ck Around and Find Out
At the FDA, the Trump administration has fired hundreds of employees, with the deepest cuts among those involved in testing food and medical devices. At the CDC, more cuts are expected to decimate the Epidemic Intelligence Service, which pays disease detectives around the world to find and stop epidemics in other countries before they spread.
Plain English with Derek Thompson
The Trump-Musk Doctrine: F-ck Around and Find Out
At the NIH, the world's crown jewel of biotech funding, the administration is set to slash personnel and funding in a variety of ways. Now, if you're a fan of Elon Musk and Donald Trump and you're listening to the show, your hope will be that these cuts are all fat and no bone.
Plain English with Derek Thompson
The Trump-Musk Doctrine: F-ck Around and Find Out
But I beg you to remember, this is the same organization, Doge, that in an attempt to refocus the energy department on nuclear security, initially gutted the division with the words nuclear security in the title. So far, few areas have received more attention in this government-wide assault than USAID, the Department of Global Aid, which the Trump administration has effectively destroyed.
Plain English with Derek Thompson
The Trump-Musk Doctrine: F-ck Around and Find Out
Elon Musk seems to be on a gleeful and personal mission to dismantle USAID, placing most of its employees on leave, closing its headquarters, and moving what's left of it to the State Department. According to one report, the administration says it plans to reduce USAID staffers from around 10,000 to 600.
Plain English with Derek Thompson
The Trump-Musk Doctrine: F-ck Around and Find Out
The irony is that once upon a time, Marco Rubio was one of the most outspoken defenders of global aid. In February 2017, he said, quote, it's critical to our national security. We don't have to give foreign aid. We do so because it furthers our national interest.
Plain English with Derek Thompson
The Trump-Musk Doctrine: F-ck Around and Find Out
In 2019, he said, quote, anybody who tells you that we can slash foreign aid and that will bring us to balance is lying to you, end quote. Today, however, Marco Rubio is in the awkward position of being the Secretary of State, overseeing the dismantling of foreign aid. The human costs are the real tragedy here.
Plain English with Derek Thompson
The Trump-Musk Doctrine: F-ck Around and Find Out
Unless we course correct again and immediately replenish our global health grants, there's no getting around the fact that a lot of poor people around the world are just going to suffer and die in order to save the typical American taxpayer about $5 a year. The U.S. pays for insecticide sprays in Uganda, for pregnancy services in Zambia, for health clinics in the poorest parts of the world.
Plain English with Derek Thompson
The Trump-Musk Doctrine: F-ck Around and Find Out
Most notably, the president's emergency plan for AIDS relief, a.k.a. PEPFAR, has already saved an estimated 25 million lives and prevented more than 5 million babies from being born with HIV. It's not yet clear if PEPFAR will be spared, like the VA doctors, for example, or left to wither away like so much the Department of Education.
Plain English with Derek Thompson
The Trump-Musk Doctrine: F-ck Around and Find Out
This blitzkrieg has astonished even the most famous critics of USAID programs. William Easterly, an economist, has written that American aid does often prop up dictators and go to waste. But in an interview with New Yorker, he called Trump's USAID demolition plan, quote, horrific.
Plain English with Derek Thompson
The Trump-Musk Doctrine: F-ck Around and Find Out
Elon Musk has hinted that Doge will simply reverse any measures that go too far amid rising criticism. This sounds good in theory, right? Move fast, cut the stuff that looks bad, add back the stuff if you miss it. But in practice, you cannot just cut 10,000 programs at once and reinstall them on a one-by-one basis depending on whether the volume of criticism passes some imaginary threshold.
Plain English with Derek Thompson
The Trump-Musk Doctrine: F-ck Around and Find Out
Whatever you think of the failures of Biden and the failures of progressive governance, which are legion, fuck around and find out is not a suitable replacement. But fuck around and find out does appear to be our current methodology of government.
Plain English with Derek Thompson
The Trump-Musk Doctrine: F-ck Around and Find Out
But now these two are united in Washington, and the duumvirate of Trump and Musk has made their mark in the first month of this administration, not by building, but rather by its opposite, which is demolition.
Plain English with Derek Thompson
The Trump-Musk Doctrine: F-ck Around and Find Out
Once again, an actual department of government efficiency, one that operated within the bounds of the law, one that sought to carefully understand what government does before seeking to identify waste and fraud, would be a wonderful thing to have. So what would it look like? Where would we start?
Plain English with Derek Thompson
The Trump-Musk Doctrine: F-ck Around and Find Out
In the biggest picture, the federal government has three dominant jobs, healthcare, social security, and defense. Those three areas account for between 60 and 75% of total federal spending every year. And according to the US Government Accountability Office, it's healthcare spending in particular that is growing the fastest and where the size of waste and fraud is likely the greatest.
Plain English with Derek Thompson
The Trump-Musk Doctrine: F-ck Around and Find Out
In particular, the GAO has scrutinized excess payments made by the government to private insurance companies under the Medicare Advantage system. So I read that GAO report and I thought to myself, I don't know much about the Medicare Advantage system or the reasons behind excessive payments. So I want to talk to experts who do.
Plain English with Derek Thompson
The Trump-Musk Doctrine: F-ck Around and Find Out
Today's guests are Michael Jerusso, an associate professor of economics at the University of Texas, Austin, and Tim Layton, a professor of healthcare policy at UVA. We talk about why it makes sense to look for savings in healthcare first, where excess payments come from, how so-called upcoding costs the US up to $100 billion a year, why it happens, and how to fix it.
Plain English with Derek Thompson
The Trump-Musk Doctrine: F-ck Around and Find Out
It is a myth that there exists some pot of $10 billion just lying around, doing nothing, gathering dust, allocated for some dead person. Every dollar of federal government spending goes to a living person in a real place doing a thing. No bushels of cash are being shipped to Mars. And that means that every dollar we cut will have a recipient on the other end who is losing a dollar.
Plain English with Derek Thompson
The Trump-Musk Doctrine: F-ck Around and Find Out
To take government efficiency seriously requires thinking about both sides of this equation. What do we get when we spend this dollar versus what do we lose when we take that dollar away? I'm Derek Thompson. This is Plain English. Michael Geruso, welcome to the show. Thank you so much. Happy to be here. Tim Layton, welcome to you as well. Thanks. Excited to chat.
Plain English with Derek Thompson
The Trump-Musk Doctrine: F-ck Around and Find Out
With the creation of the Department of Government Efficiency, aka Doge, Musk has claimed for himself an extraordinary amount of power, serving as the iron fist of the White House, rooting out what he sees as the plague of wokeism in government, halting grants, freezing payments, lighting fires in various departments, and generally firing as many people as he can get away with.
Plain English with Derek Thompson
The Trump-Musk Doctrine: F-ck Around and Find Out
Mike, so we've got Doge out there scouring the government for savings, and I wanted to bring on some economists to talk about where a search and destroy effort for wasteful spending might actually find billions of dollars in waste. So first question, why am I even talking to you? Why are we starting with health spending?
Plain English with Derek Thompson
The Trump-Musk Doctrine: F-ck Around and Find Out
Right, like cutting NIH by $10 billion is a 20% cut, one out of every $5 that universities are getting for medical research suddenly gone. But in Medicare, you're talking at about 20%, but 1%. So that's why it makes sense to focus on these bigger buckets. Tim, we're talking about government acting essentially as the nation's largest insurance company, Medicare, Medicaid, Veterans Affairs.
Plain English with Derek Thompson
The Trump-Musk Doctrine: F-ck Around and Find Out
And if we're gonna understand how to hunt for waste and even fraud in government health spending, I think we should understand a little bit about how government spending on healthcare actually works. So, Tim, let's say I go to the doctor with chronic leg pain.
Plain English with Derek Thompson
The Trump-Musk Doctrine: F-ck Around and Find Out
The doctor could prescribe me Tylenol, or he could send me off to get five blood scans, an MRI scan, a CT scan, and a prescription for new nerve pain therapy that costs $10,000 a month, right? Washington doesn't know what treatment plan is right. Is it the Tylenol that's like two cents? Or is it this other plan that's like 20,000 bucks a month?
Plain English with Derek Thompson
The Trump-Musk Doctrine: F-ck Around and Find Out
So how does the government, acting on behalf of the taxpayer, approaching this very challenging question of how to reimburse good care with an eye toward controlling costs?
Plain English with Derek Thompson
How AI Could Change the Future of Music
So what I have to ask here, as I'm listening to the trembling strings and other instruments just emerging to add little pointillist spookiness in a way that just sounds quite human, have you gone back to look at whether... Bernard Herrmann has been totally ripped off here. Like, is this, to a certain extent, just playing something that exists as a fully completed soundtrack to a Hitchcock film?
Plain English with Derek Thompson
How AI Could Change the Future of Music
Or do you detect, do you know that there's true originality here with, I guess, originality in heavy quotation marks?
Plain English with Derek Thompson
How AI Could Change the Future of Music
In your WNYC segment, you said that you're genuinely afraid that this technology could replace you. How would it replace you?
Plain English with Derek Thompson
How AI Could Change the Future of Music
There are three layers here that are so interesting to me that I want to make sure we hit in this conversation. The first is the practical layer, which is should musicians use this technology? And if they use it, how should they use it? The second layer is moral or ethical. Is this technology legal? And even beyond legal, are these tools right to use? Do they rob us of something?
Plain English with Derek Thompson
How AI Could Change the Future of Music
Do they rob the original makers of music that's been fed into these generative AI systems of something? And then third, I think that these technologies raise really fascinating questions that exist at the realm of culture and even something that touches on philosophy. And I want to make sure that we save some time for those. Let's start with the practical.
Plain English with Derek Thompson
How AI Could Change the Future of Music
You had a come to Jesus moment with this technology that has for now salved at least some of your existential dread. What was it?
Plain English with Derek Thompson
How AI Could Change the Future of Music
Well, just to stay in the realm of the practical here, There is so much music that's written alone, right? It's somebody in the attic with a piano, in the basement with a guitar. They're just by themselves, staring at the wall without thinking, moving their fingers, moving their mouths, making sounds. They don't have a writing partner. And, you know, AI is not John Lennon.
Plain English with Derek Thompson
How AI Could Change the Future of Music
Now, maybe you're impressed by this. Maybe you're not impressed by it. Or maybe your reaction is, the mood is all wrong. Dallas fans should be screaming angry about the Luka trade. After all, they lost Luka Doncic for a player, Anthony Davis, who is injured so often that his nickname is Street Clothes.
Plain English with Derek Thompson
How AI Could Change the Future of Music
It's not one one-thousandth of John Lennon. And certainly using it doesn't make you Paul McCartney. But It sounds to me like you're saying the existence of these tools that create a kind of sandwich, human to AI, back to human sandwich.
Plain English with Derek Thompson
How AI Could Change the Future of Music
As absurd as this might sound to some people, and frankly, it sounds a little absurd to me too, it does create the possibility of a partnership where you write this little guitar riff, you write a little piano piece, you wonder, is this a thing? You record it, you feed it to the AI, it adds other instrumentation and something new pops out that then you can run with.
Plain English with Derek Thompson
How AI Could Change the Future of Music
Is this kind of how you see working with AI now?
Plain English with Derek Thompson
How AI Could Change the Future of Music
Before we get ahead of ourselves, let me just dribble some cold water on all of this. Do you have any sense that musicians actually want to work with these tools? Like since your WNYC piece, did musicians write to you to say, sorry, dude, this is completely alien and messed up? Or were they interested in using AI as an extension of their creativity?
Plain English with Derek Thompson
How AI Could Change the Future of Music
So when you and I were emailing back and forth about doing this show, you proposed what I initially considered a pretty weird experiment. You said, Derek, if you want to make a little piece of music and send it to me, I can use my AI tools to build something out of it. So... I dabble on the piano a little bit. I don't play anything very good, but I can sort of play triads.
Plain English with Derek Thompson
How AI Could Change the Future of Music
Well, in that case, you can instruct the AI to try out an angry 1990s-style pop-punk screamo song with some punchy lyrics about losing Luca for Mr. Streetclothes. Ladies and gentlemen, fair warning, the following is extremely not safe for work.
Plain English with Derek Thompson
How AI Could Change the Future of Music
I can hunt and peck little melodies. And last week, I happened to be at a recording studio finishing the second half of the audiobook of Abundance. So I'm in the studio. They have beautiful pianos there. I sat down and I played something that I'd come up with.
Plain English with Derek Thompson
How AI Could Change the Future of Music
And this is like a little interpolation, a little riff on one of my favorite pieces of classical music, a concerto by Shostakovich, who is a 20th century Russian composer that I like. So I recorded it. I emailed it to you. And I said, I imagined it could serve as the basis of a Danny Elfman style, Tim Burton fantasy or a Pixar fantasy tale theme. And here's how it goes.
Plain English with Derek Thompson
How AI Could Change the Future of Music
When I think about this song and the degree to which I wrote it, I feel very weirdly like two things are true. One is that I did not write this. I didn't come up with the inspiration of the original arpeggio. I certainly didn't finish the track that you just played. But that sits alongside this very strange other thing that when I sent this audio file to my wife,
Plain English with Derek Thompson
How AI Could Change the Future of Music
and my wife said she liked it, I reflexively felt a little bit proud. I felt proud about something that I'm not entirely sure I even did. I wonder, A, whether that makes any sense, and B, whether it touches on the emotional, legal, moral, artistic messiness of creating art with AI.
Plain English with Derek Thompson
How AI Could Change the Future of Music
So there's a practical question. If people use this technology, how should they use it? And I think our humble examples show how AI can essentially amplify the little brain seeds of musicians. But there's a very important and very distinct question, which is, should people use it? Is there something morally or spiritually or creatively corrupting about the use of these tools?
Plain English with Derek Thompson
How AI Could Change the Future of Music
Okay, so what do we make of these songs? They're impressive in their own way. They certainly resemble real songs. I think they're funny enough that I absolutely did send them to Dallas Mavericks fans in my life. But they're more impressive as a fancy parlor trick than as great music. They're a bit like an actor who's magnificent at impersonations, but far from virtuosic at actually acting.
Plain English with Derek Thompson
How AI Could Change the Future of Music
You're touching on aspects of culture and philosophy that I really do want to hold until the end. So before we do that, let's talk about the law. The state of play in AI music is that the major labels have filed lawsuits against several of the major AI startups in this space. Those lawsuits are ongoing.
Plain English with Derek Thompson
How AI Could Change the Future of Music
And from my reporting, it is not 100% clear how the courts will ultimately come down on this issue of fair use and copyright in generative AI. So in the absence of any hard and fast ruling here, I think we should just talk about it. Do you think these tools are legal?
Plain English with Derek Thompson
How AI Could Change the Future of Music
The YouTuber Cleo Abram, who's covered this space, has a lovely way of formalizing this question of legal responsibility in music. She has this two by two box of copy versus inspiration, pay versus not pay. And there's two squares of this box that are obvious to practically everybody. Everybody acknowledges that if you copy something to produce a paid product, you pay the person you're copying.
Plain English with Derek Thompson
How AI Could Change the Future of Music
That is practically universally recognized as what you should do or what is legal under copyright law. It's also generally understood that if you're merely inspired by somebody, you don't have to pay them, right? If you interview... Modern artists, if you interview Kendrick Lamar or Taylor Swift and you say, who's inspired you?
Plain English with Derek Thompson
How AI Could Change the Future of Music
And they give an answer, you're not going to immediately say, oh, why haven't you cut them a check for the fact of their inspiration? Nobody thinks like that. AI does scramble this in an interesting way because it creates this black box where inspiration and outright theft are intertwined.
Plain English with Derek Thompson
How AI Could Change the Future of Music
And a point that you made that I think is really important is that if I use a Spotify link in my commercial, that is, if I make commercial use of a song, I have to pay the person who owns the song.
Plain English with Derek Thompson
How AI Could Change the Future of Music
But these AI companies are, in a weird way, making commercial use of music, not by copying it, but rather by putting it into this weird black box where inspiration and theft and synthesis is all mixed up and jumbled. So how do you think these questions ought to be resolved?
Plain English with Derek Thompson
How AI Could Change the Future of Music
Like I'm not putting these songs on any sincere playlist. And so while I've been fascinated by these music AI tools, I wasn't sure I knew exactly what to say about them. Now that was until several weeks ago when I heard the film, TV, and podcast composer Mark Henry Phillips describe his experience with AI music tools on WNYC's On the Media.
Plain English with Derek Thompson
How AI Could Change the Future of Music
I want to hold in this image of a black box. In your radio segment, you had a very beautiful yet strange insight. You said people don't know how their favorite songs were made. But musicians also don't know how the process of writing music works. Musicians aren't conscious of what they're doing. They mess around. They discover the song at their fingertips, at the tip of their tongue.
Plain English with Derek Thompson
How AI Could Change the Future of Music
They're just sort of guessing what the next note is. Those are your words. They're guessing what the next note is. You must have been aware when you said that how close to the bone that description of creativity is to generative AI, which is often described as prediction, next token prediction. And it raises a really interesting question about creativity.
Plain English with Derek Thompson
How AI Could Change the Future of Music
I don't even know if there's a true psychology of creativity yet, but certainly the philosophy of creativity. As a musician who uses AI, Do you see a profound similarity between your creation process of listening, remembering, creating, and the creation process of artificial intelligence, which is pre-trained, has a memory of sorts, and synthesizes that memory in response to prompts?
Plain English with Derek Thompson
How AI Could Change the Future of Music
Phillips explained how a sophisticated user of these tools could eliminate much of the composition work that professional musicians today rely on to make ends meet. What struck me as a funny game is to Phillips a dead serious matter. the difference between work and disemployment. Mark is today's guest.
Plain English with Derek Thompson
How AI Could Change the Future of Music
How do you think this is going to change the process of the experience of making music? It seems to me like in a world where you don't have these kind of automatic feedback loops from an AI, independent, alone music writers are living inside their head, waiting for something to happen, waiting to hear it, and that feedback loop is entirely internal, right?
Plain English with Derek Thompson
How AI Could Change the Future of Music
They have an instinct, the instinct is represented by a sound of the piano or the guitar or voice, then they have taste, they judge the sound, and then they adopt or they change or they keep going.
Plain English with Derek Thompson
How AI Could Change the Future of Music
But it seems like the world that you're describing is a world in which writing music is more like being an editor, more like being a manager, because you are creating something that then you're feeding into a system that you can evaluate at a distance, evaluate almost as if it's someone else's work, which is so interesting to do, and then incorporate the output from that AI partnership to pull back into your own work.
Plain English with Derek Thompson
How AI Could Change the Future of Music
Do you see this as changing in some real good, bad, meaningful ways the process of writing music?
Plain English with Derek Thompson
How AI Could Change the Future of Music
We talk about the job of modern music composition, why some AI tools are eerily good at certain aspects of the job. We talk about copyright law and the ethics of creative ownership. But above all, Mark gets my brain worrying about the very nature of creativity, how great new ideas like songs come to be in the first place.
Plain English with Derek Thompson
How AI Could Change the Future of Music
What I really liked about that answer is that you're holding on the table two possibilities for the future that really pull us in different directions. One is that these tools are simply too weird for artists to feel comfortable using. As you said, writing music is not like writing paragraphs. Nobody thinks, today certainly, that spellcheck intrudes on the authenticity of essay writing.
Plain English with Derek Thompson
How AI Could Change the Future of Music
Nobody thinks that. But working with AI to write music does, in a small or maybe even enormous way, feel like an unwelcome intrusion to some people. an unwelcome intrusion into a process of creativity that feels to the artist like it's meant to be in the space of for humans only. I think that is absolutely a possible future.
Plain English with Derek Thompson
How AI Could Change the Future of Music
But there's another possible future where these tools, because they're so good at the small tasks that you've specified, at finishing incomplete work, at filling out
Plain English with Derek Thompson
How AI Could Change the Future of Music
unfilled out ideas will be ingrained in the music writing habits of young people today, and we'll see AI move into the world of music not because a bunch of 40 and 50 year olds suddenly adopt it, but rather because they'll be demographically replaced by musicians who today are only 15 or even five years old. And that's where I want to close is taking that possibility seriously.
Plain English with Derek Thompson
How AI Could Change the Future of Music
I'm very persuaded by this idea that is sometimes called stuck culture theory, which says that something's happened in the last few decades in film, in celebrity, maybe to a certain extent in music, where cultural progress feels more frozen than it used to be. And it's like the one factoid that I always go back to lean on here is that in 1996, when
Plain English with Derek Thompson
How AI Could Change the Future of Music
almost all of the top 10 films in America were an original screenplay. And today, really for the last 10 years, practically very few of the biggest blockbusters are original screenplays. It's sequels, adaptations, and reboots as far as the eye can see. And you know, stuck culture theory can extend to TV as well.
Plain English with Derek Thompson
How AI Could Change the Future of Music
The idea that Gen Z is still watching The Office and Friends, and there really aren't a lot of shows made in the last 10, five years that have achieved that sort of pantheon status. I wonder if AI will make music more stuck as well. Because if AI is essentially training the future of musical creativity on a perfect understanding of music's past,
Plain English with Derek Thompson
How AI Could Change the Future of Music
we might get stuck in the grooves of perpetual refinement in a way that keeps music from evolving the way it's historically evolved. And I wonder how much stock you put into that sort of cultural story.
Plain English with Derek Thompson
How AI Could Change the Future of Music
The line between stealing and riffing and interpolating in artistic history has always been blurry. Picasso famously said, good artists copy, great artists steal. And this is not just a theoretical fact. Many of my favorite musicians were famous borrowers.
Plain English with Derek Thompson
How AI Could Change the Future of Music
Mark Henry Phillips, thank you very much. Thank you. Many thanks to Mark Phillips. I think my main takeaway from this interview is the distinction between inputs and outputs with AI. I think a lot of people that consider themselves or present themselves as AI skeptics tend to be very critical of the outputs of artificial intelligence. They'll say, look at this piece of writing. It's so wooden.
Plain English with Derek Thompson
How AI Could Change the Future of Music
Or listen to this song. It's such a cliche. But where I see AI being sneakily effective and ultimately potentially transformative is as an input. It's the way that it allows software programmers to accelerate their coding. It's the way that it allows white-collar workers or writers to accelerate their research. And it's the way that it allows musicians or composers, potentially,
Plain English with Derek Thompson
How AI Could Change the Future of Music
to work on something, a little ditty, send it out to some artificial AI assistant, and then get something back that's just a little bit better or even just a little bit different than the thing that they delivered to the AI.
Plain English with Derek Thompson
How AI Could Change the Future of Music
That's AI as an effective input, as maybe we'll see in a few years a kind of universal input to the creative economy across white-collar work and writing and music and all sorts of idea generation. AI as the all-purpose input, I think, is a really interesting idea to play with. And I'm very grateful that Mark helped me concretize it. We'll talk to you Friday.
Plain English with Derek Thompson
How AI Could Change the Future of Music
Some of Led Zeppelin's most famous songs, Days and Confused, Whole Lotta Love, were such obvious lifts that after years of court cases, the band agreed to add the plaintiff's name to the song credits. But analogies to music and art history fall short to capture the weirdness of this moment.
Plain English with Derek Thompson
How AI Could Change the Future of Music
Today, AI, music, and the future of creativity. In the last few years, several generative AI platforms for music have caught my attention. One of them is Suno, which allows you to request a song by typing in a simple prompt. You specify the style, the lyrics, the mood that you want, and the AI will interpret those inputs and produce a musical composition.
Plain English with Derek Thompson
How AI Could Change the Future of Music
Neither Picasso nor Jimmy Page had access to an external technology whose deliberate function was to slurp up musical elements from millions of songs, store their essence in silicon memory, and serve them up in a kind of synthetic stir fry on an order-by-order basis. Musicians have been writing music with partners for decades, even centuries.
Plain English with Derek Thompson
How AI Could Change the Future of Music
But what happens to music when that partner becomes a machine? Will it open up new horizons in songwriting and composition? Or in a funny way, will superintelligence make the future of music more average than ever? I'm Derek Thompson. This is Plain English. Mark Henry Phillips, welcome to the show.
Plain English with Derek Thompson
How AI Could Change the Future of Music
And these days, how do you explain your job to someone, say, at a party?
Plain English with Derek Thompson
How AI Could Change the Future of Music
Tell me about the first time you discovered an example of AI music that made you feel like this might be the beginning of a professional existential crisis.
Plain English with Derek Thompson
How AI Could Change the Future of Music
So for people who don't know Toots, who don't know reggae outside of Bob Marley, what did we just listen to as a musician? What made you stand up and go... This is a little bit spooky. This threatens my professional ego.
Plain English with Derek Thompson
How AI Could Change the Future of Music
So let's start with an extremely stupid example. I have several friends from Texas who were distraught by the trade that sent basketball phenom Luka Doncic to the Los Angeles Lakers. Now, if you're listening along, you're not a basketball fan.
Plain English with Derek Thompson
How AI Could Change the Future of Music
You've said this technology has given you existential dread about your job. I want to provide a really clear apples to apples comparison of human work and AI work. So on the WNYC segment, you talked about scoring a scene where a couple is getting to know each other. And this is a cute, romantic, slightly goofy scene. Tell me what you did next.
Plain English with Derek Thompson
How AI Could Change the Future of Music
The only thing to know here is that this was probably the most shocking trade in NBA history, shipping off one of the league's best players at the 11th hour with no warning. So let's say you wanted to console or troll the Luka fan in your life. You might tell the AI to spin up a weepy pop folk song about losing Luka in February to Los Angeles. And within about 30 seconds, You would get this.
Plain English with Derek Thompson
How AI Could Change the Future of Music
And I heard Huckabee vibes too. Exactly. Is what I got from it. There's a goofiness. There's a bit of irony in it. You know, it's not the most straightforwardly sincere sound, if that makes sense. But there's a cuteness to it and a knowing winky cuteness to it is what I get from this soundtrack.
Plain English with Derek Thompson
How AI Could Change the Future of Music
So in this case, you had a job. And to do this job, you prompted yourself, come up with a John Bryan-style soundtrack for a movie scene. And here's where things get weird. Let's imagine that you're not Mark Phillips' composer. You are Mark Phillips' movie producer. And you want to score a romantic comedy scene with a John Bryan vibe.
Plain English with Derek Thompson
How AI Could Change the Future of Music
But rather than hire a musician, you just tell the music AI to spin something up. Now, Mark, you've done this exercise. What is the AI's version of a John Bryan soundtrack?
Plain English with Derek Thompson
How AI Could Change the Future of Music
So Mark, I think people could debate whether your John Bryan riff was better or whether they prefer the AI version. But there are, in fact, much more impressive examples. In one job, you were asked to score a scene that had an Alfred Hitchcock vibe. And so you went to AI to see if it could cook something up that sounded like a Hitchcock film.
Plain English with Derek Thompson
How AI Could Change the Future of Music
So a classical orchestra playing something anxious and evocative for a thriller. What happened?
Plain English with Derek Thompson
ABUNDANCE! With Ezra Klein
This looks to me like a regime of scarcity. Now, of course, Republicans will disagree. They'll argue that in the long run, their politics is designed to solve America's problems. We can already see many ways in which the problems that got Donald Trump elected in the first place are being exacerbated by his first policies. Take, for example, affordability and housing.
Plain English with Derek Thompson
ABUNDANCE! With Ezra Klein
Let me answer your question directly just after I reflect in the crypto conversations. If I recall, you called me and essentially said, there's a piece of this technology that many people I consider smart are so interested in that I want to be similarly interested in. Are you interested in it?
Plain English with Derek Thompson
ABUNDANCE! With Ezra Klein
And the feeling that I had about crypto in 2021 is for better or worse, very similar to the feeling that I have about crypto in 2025, which is that I think it is historically remarkable for any technology to become or to mint multi-billion dollar wealth before it demonstrates a use case outside of creating an asset class to bet coins up to the moon. And I'm still incredibly confused by it.
Plain English with Derek Thompson
ABUNDANCE! With Ezra Klein
And I was confused about it on the phone in 2021. And four years of thinking about it has unfortunately not revealed much more, to use a telianism, a definite optimism about this technology. But it was, I remember that those conversations about crypto were sort of the beginning of our being in touch in a different kind of way in the run-up to this project.
Plain English with Derek Thompson
ABUNDANCE! With Ezra Klein
What I do remember, maybe the day of or the day after publishing the Abundance Agenda essay, is that you texted me and essentially said what you just said here on this call. You said, I think we might be circling the same book and we could race each other to the finish line or maybe we should write the book together. And I texted you back and said, yeah, maybe we should write this book together.
Plain English with Derek Thompson
ABUNDANCE! With Ezra Klein
And I tell my wife, hey, you know, I think I might write this book about... abundance, the abundance agenda with Ezra Klein. And she takes my phone and she does that thing where you pull back the text message. You can see the timestamp. And she sees that you sent your text at like 1247 p.m. and that I responded to the text at 1247 p.m.
Plain English with Derek Thompson
ABUNDANCE! With Ezra Klein
And she's like, you didn't have the forbearance, the self-respect to wait 15 seconds before saying yes. You were so desperate to say yes to this project in less than a minute. And I was like, yes, I think that I think this could be a really fun thing. I do think that we are coming at this idea, at the same idea, from opposite sides.
Plain English with Derek Thompson
ABUNDANCE! With Ezra Klein
Anything else we should hit about the run-up to the collaboration on this book before we dive into the book itself?
Plain English with Derek Thompson
ABUNDANCE! With Ezra Klein
Just to jump in, yes, the paper is called Cost Disease Socialism by Stephen Tellis, Sam Hammond, and Daniel Takash.
Plain English with Derek Thompson
ABUNDANCE! With Ezra Klein
Housing costs are too high in this country, obviously. And home construction has lagged for decades. The problem is particularly bad for young people who shifted significantly toward the Republican side in 2024. The median age of first-time homebuyers in America recently surged to an all-time high. And delays in homebuying are having a ripple effect.
Plain English with Derek Thompson
ABUNDANCE! With Ezra Klein
On the topic of liberals needing to care about productivity in a new kind of way, especially when interest rates are high, I would also want to throw out Eli Dorado and Noah Smith, who I think did really good work on setting the table for a lot of ideas that make their way into the book.
Plain English with Derek Thompson
ABUNDANCE! With Ezra Klein
They're playing a part in the decline of dating and marrying and starting a family. What do Trump's tariffs do to help this situation? Well, don't ask me. Ask the National Association of Home Builders.
Plain English with Derek Thompson
ABUNDANCE! With Ezra Klein
Yes. Someone asked me recently how my vision of the book shifted from the original abundance essay to the final book abundance. And I loved this question. So I want to turn it toward you. How is the book that exists now different from the one you imagined in say 2022?
Plain English with Derek Thompson
ABUNDANCE! With Ezra Klein
Because in a March 7 memo, they pointed out that Trump's tariffs on Mexico and Canada threatened to drive up the cost of two of the most important materials for building a house, soft lumber, which we import from Canada, and drywall materials, which we source from Mexico. An America that has to source all of its own wood and drywall is not a richer country than the one we have today.
Plain English with Derek Thompson
ABUNDANCE! With Ezra Klein
I think the biggest difference between the essay and the book is the level of political critique. I think that in part, maybe due to my own personality, which is pathologically agreeable and seeking optimism wherever I can find it, I did not initially see this book as requiring the depth of political critique of liberalism in the last 50 years that the book that we wrote has.
Plain English with Derek Thompson
ABUNDANCE! With Ezra Klein
And I think that that critique is utterly necessary to understand the problems of the last 50 years and how to fix them. I mean, just to pivot off of your point about the degree to which Ralph Nader and the legalism of the 1960s and 1970s changed the character of liberalism, and in many ways defined the character of modern liberalism, there's a great line from, what is this, page 89 of the book.
Plain English with Derek Thompson
ABUNDANCE! With Ezra Klein
This is in... the chapter that we have about energy and the way that liberals have gotten in their own way in terms of building precisely what they want to build, say, clean energy like solar and wind. The PBS news anchor Jim Lehrer once asked Ralph Nader why he was qualified to be president in 2000. And Nader could have said, no one can make government work better than me.
Plain English with Derek Thompson
ABUNDANCE! With Ezra Klein
No one is better at understanding how to make government effective than me. But he didn't say that. What he said is, quote, I don't know anybody who has sued more agencies and departments. There was this idea, this identity of liberalism that said that the way to prove that you're a good progressive is to stop governments and businesses from changing the physical world.
Plain English with Derek Thompson
ABUNDANCE! With Ezra Klein
And maybe that was, in some places, a responsible... response to the environmental degradation of the middle of the 20th century. But now that our problems aren't what can we stop building, but rather what have we stopped building? The houses and the solar farms and the wind turbines. We need to have an identity shift.
Plain English with Derek Thompson
ABUNDANCE! With Ezra Klein
from a liberalism that's proud of suing government to a liberalism that's proud of making government actually work. Sabin has a great line in the book Public Citizens that you were calling out where he says in the 1960s, 1970s, quote, it was as if liberals took a bicycle apart to fix it, but never quite figured out how to get it running properly again. And in many ways, I never thought of
Plain English with Derek Thompson
ABUNDANCE! With Ezra Klein
the book project emerging from the abundance agenda as being a book project about identifying the ways that liberalism took the bicycle apart. But I think it's really important to figure out how liberalism took the bicycle apart if, in fact, we're going to get it properly running again.
Plain English with Derek Thompson
ABUNDANCE! With Ezra Klein
It's a poorer country where American homebuyers have to pay the price for pointless protectionism. Now, here is where Democrats should be able to stand up and show that they have a winning response to the politics of scarcity. But they don't. In many places run by Democrats, what they're offering instead is just another kind of scarcity.
Plain English with Derek Thompson
ABUNDANCE! With Ezra Klein
To dive into the book itself, there's any number of ways that a book about liberalism and the future of politics could begin. You could start with culture. You could start with taxes and redistributive welfare policies. We start with housing.
Plain English with Derek Thompson
ABUNDANCE! With Ezra Klein
Our first big chapter is about housing, the problem of rising housing prices, and the problem of constraints on housing construction in many of the places where people most want to live, like San Francisco. Why is housing so foundational to your sense of this project?
Plain English with Derek Thompson
ABUNDANCE! With Ezra Klein
Many cities run by Democratic leaders are laden with rules and litigation norms that block new housing, new transit, new energy. As my Atlantic colleague Yoni Applebaum told us on a recent show, in California cities where the share of progressive votes goes up by 10 points, the share of housing permits issued declines by 30%. Where the supply of homes is constricted, housing prices soar.
Plain English with Derek Thompson
ABUNDANCE! With Ezra Klein
There are a lot of conceptual tensions in this book that I think are very important. Scarcity versus abundance being one of them.
Plain English with Derek Thompson
ABUNDANCE! With Ezra Klein
And you've really dilated on this right now within the housing market, this idea that in many places, people who call themselves liberals and progressives, and even sometimes people that have lawn signs in their front yards that say kindness is everything, nonetheless sit in houses zoned for single families and
Plain English with Derek Thompson
ABUNDANCE! With Ezra Klein
resist and often sue to block the development of affordable housing units that would cast a shadow over their own house. And so a part of this project is redefining liberalism away from the liberalism of the clenched fist toward a liberalism that recognizes that growth itself can be a good. Another really critical tension here that really echoes throughout the book in almost every chapter
Plain English with Derek Thompson
ABUNDANCE! With Ezra Klein
And where the availability of homes is constricted, homelessness rises. As of 2023, the five states with the highest rates of homelessness are New York, Hawaii, California, Oregon, and Washington. They're all run by Democrats. If Trump's opponents are going to win at the polls, they will need to build a new kind of political movement.
Plain English with Derek Thompson
ABUNDANCE! With Ezra Klein
is the tension between process versus outcomes in government. I think maybe the best way to make this tension crystal clear to people is to see it through a prism that you call everything bagel liberalism. Why don't you do here for everything bagel liberalism what I asked you to do at the top of the show for supply side liberalism? What is this idea? Where did it emerge from?
Plain English with Derek Thompson
ABUNDANCE! With Ezra Klein
one that aims for what my co-author Ezra Klein and I call abundance. Ezra and I are liberals. There's no getting away from that. We believe in taxing and spending, on healthcare and social security and welfare and schools and science. But we also believe in a liberalism that is different in character from the one that's emerged in the last few decades.
Plain English with Derek Thompson
ABUNDANCE! With Ezra Klein
In the last half century, we write, folks on the left became so fixated on spending money that they lost sight of what spending actually does in the world. This emphasis on process over outcomes, dollars over deployment, is evident everywhere you look.
Plain English with Derek Thompson
ABUNDANCE! With Ezra Klein
The chapters in this book are housing, energy, government, science, and technology. And I do think that one of the strengths of the final product is the rhyming of themes. One wouldn't necessarily think that the problems in construction would be similar to the problems in, say, biomedical breakthroughs.
Plain English with Derek Thompson
ABUNDANCE! With Ezra Klein
But in fact, we have empirical evidence showing that productivity in construction is flatlining or down, at the same time that we have evidence that productivity in biomedical science is flat or down. The same way that you just pointed out that an abundance, unfortunately, of paperwork is slowing down the construction of affordable housing in places like California.
Plain English with Derek Thompson
ABUNDANCE! With Ezra Klein
Well, if you look at American science, By some surveys, scientists say they spend between 30 and 40% of their time filling out paperwork, either filing for grants or checking the boxes after those grants are filed or won. And so in many cases, the problems that governance has and the problems that liberalism has developed
Plain English with Derek Thompson
ABUNDANCE! With Ezra Klein
rhyme across housing and energy and building and government and science and technology itself. And so I do think it's one strength of the book is the degree to which without pushing on this rhyming too hard, you can see the same problems raise their head again and again and again in place after place.
Plain English with Derek Thompson
ABUNDANCE! With Ezra Klein
In 2008, California approved more than $30 billion for a high-speed rail system that has lingered in construction purgatory for more than a decade. In San Francisco, procedural kludge famously drove up the cost of a public toilet to $1.7 million. Yes, for one toilet. Chicago's mayor recently bragged that his city invested $11 billion to build 10,000 affordable housing units.
Plain English with Derek Thompson
ABUNDANCE! With Ezra Klein
I think that the way that we fund science in this country is A, unbelievably important. The National Institutes of Health is probably the most important biomedical institution in the world. B, it hasn't changed very much in the last 70 years.
Plain English with Derek Thompson
ABUNDANCE! With Ezra Klein
And if you or anybody listening knows anything about bureaucracies, if a bureaucracy doesn't experience some kind of institutional renewal generation after generation, it's going to build a series of habits that even its practitioners agree are bad. And in fact, the scientists, the practitioners that I spoke to about the way the NIH works
Plain English with Derek Thompson
ABUNDANCE! With Ezra Klein
told me pretty much invariably that it was biased against the most important high-risk research, that it tended to waste scientists' time, and that it advantaged conservative ideas and older scientists while we have a good understanding that much of the best work that's been done in scientific history
Plain English with Derek Thompson
ABUNDANCE! With Ezra Klein
been radical ideas from young scientists i mean this is absolutely core to a kuhnian theory of paradigm shifts the idea that it was not a group of you know graybeards who came up with quantum mechanics the 1900s 1910s 1920s it was people like einstein and planck building on a couple discrepancies that they were finding in the record to build an entirely new theory of how the world works that has in fact been core to not only the development of nuclear power
Plain English with Derek Thompson
ABUNDANCE! With Ezra Klein
but also the electronics revolution. Great ideas often come from young scientists, and it is young scientists who say the system isn't working. There's a great quote from John Dench, who serves as the director of research and development in functional genomics at the Broad Institute. And he told me, people need to understand how broken the system is
Plain English with Derek Thompson
ABUNDANCE! With Ezra Klein
So many really intelligent people are wasting their time doing really, really uninteresting things. Writing progress reports, coming up with modular budgets five years in advance of the science. I mean, again, you take so many of the criticisms
Plain English with Derek Thompson
ABUNDANCE! With Ezra Klein
described about the construction of affordable housing at DeHaanan, and you just change a few words here and there from funding source to public and public housing to, you know, R01 grants and checkboxes for scientific funding, and it's essentially the same story.
Plain English with Derek Thompson
ABUNDANCE! With Ezra Klein
So we have, I think, an urgent need for institutional renewal at the National Institutes of Health, given how important their discoveries are to improving and extending human life. I don't think Elon Musk understands the first fucking thing about the NIH. I don't think he did any research.
Plain English with Derek Thompson
ABUNDANCE! With Ezra Klein
I don't think he spoke to anybody about how exactly the NIH works, how it evolved, where it came from, what its habits are, which habits are good, and which habits are bad. What I see instead is... I'm not inside of his head, but what it looks to me like is a pretty pure play of ideological punishment of universities that they think are woke. So they're going after Columbia.
Plain English with Derek Thompson
ABUNDANCE! With Ezra Klein
They're going after Harvard because the indirect costs are 55, 65% there. They're attacking science to punish the cultural ideas of scientists and not going into the institution of science and renewing it to solve 21st century problems.
Plain English with Derek Thompson
ABUNDANCE! With Ezra Klein
So that would be the pretty clear cut that I would draw between our approach to understanding the NIH and fixing it and the Doge approach to slashing and burning the NIH because they have a cultural bugaboo about the ideas of scientists. I can pick up there, but it's also a... There's a couple questions about the book making contact with the world that I want to get to before we have a hard out.
Plain English with Derek Thompson
ABUNDANCE! With Ezra Klein
So... I don't think I'm violating some unspoken covenant with our editor, Ben, our wonderful editor, Ben, by saying that the original publication date of this book was actually last year. The original plan is for Abundance to come out in the middle of the summer of 2024 to make contact with that presidential election. June 2024 and March 2025 are completely different worlds.
Plain English with Derek Thompson
ABUNDANCE! With Ezra Klein
From a political standpoint, they're practically different planets. And for the sake of putting together- Yeah, you have a kid now. The kid was born in 2023. So that's the same world. But I guess 18 months is a different world from nine months, certainly on the sleeping front.
Plain English with Derek Thompson
ABUNDANCE! With Ezra Klein
That's $1.1 million per affordable housing unit. This is a shameful record of ineffectiveness. It's pathetic. The places where Democrats hold power shouldn't be advertisements for how bad they are at wielding it. If Democrats want to be the party that believes in government, they have to show that government can actually build what it intends to build.
Plain English with Derek Thompson
ABUNDANCE! With Ezra Klein
But for the sake of putting together a readable and finished product, I think we absolutely needed to take those extra months. But every few days, I think to myself, just how differently this book- would have existed inside the news cycle if it came out during, say, a Biden to Harris handoff period versus today, which is an era of just lurid chaos in the Trump administration.
Plain English with Derek Thompson
ABUNDANCE! With Ezra Klein
How do you think the timing of this book's new publication date deepens its message or complicates it?
Plain English with Derek Thompson
ABUNDANCE! With Ezra Klein
It was going to be published in the summer of 2024. I don't remember exactly the date. I think it was supposed to come out just before.
Plain English with Derek Thompson
ABUNDANCE! With Ezra Klein
It was supposed to come out just before the DNC convention because we wanted the book to influence the DNC platform.
Plain English with Derek Thompson
ABUNDANCE! With Ezra Klein
What Ezra and I propose in our book is a political movement that does just that, a liberalism that works, a liberalism that builds. Today's guest is the New York Times' Ezra Klein. We talk about abundance, the book, and why it exists, and we talk about abundance, the idea. and why we think it matters. I'm Derek Thompson. This is Plain English. Ezra Klein, hello and welcome.
Plain English with Derek Thompson
ABUNDANCE! With Ezra Klein
Ezra, our friend Tyler Cowen has this term that I love called a Straussian read. And a Straussian read of a book is an interpretation of the book that is not explicitly inside of the book itself. It's a vibe of the book that you pick up off the page, even if it's not articulated in the letters themselves.
Plain English with Derek Thompson
ABUNDANCE! With Ezra Klein
And we were recently on a podcast the other day that made me wonder about a particular Straussian read of this book. The parties, as you know better than anybody, are polarized by education. I wonder what we think of this idea that they're also polarized by personality. In many ways, the character of liberalism that we are trying to shift
Plain English with Derek Thompson
ABUNDANCE! With Ezra Klein
is overly deferential to process, to infinite listening, and not sufficiently committed to action and outcome. That's how you get what Nick Bagley, as quoted in the book, calls the procedural fetish of our side.
Plain English with Derek Thompson
ABUNDANCE! With Ezra Klein
On the other hand, I think a criticism that you and I both share of Donald Trump is that his style assumes a kind of kingly power in the executive branch in a way that assumes something close to absolute power and is inclined to run roughshod over norms and bureaucracies and laws that exist to channel voices to reach a consensus.
Plain English with Derek Thompson
ABUNDANCE! With Ezra Klein
This might be a simplified diagnosis, but one interpretation of the personality differences between the modern left and the modern right is that the left believes in language and process and listening and trusts bureaucracies and rules that respect those, while the modern right believes in a kind of extreme centralization of executive power that actively seeks to destroy bureaucracies.
Plain English with Derek Thompson
ABUNDANCE! With Ezra Klein
I wonder if you see... this personality polarization as a live wire in politics right now? And if so, is what we're asking for is for liberalism to have a bit of a personality shift, not a personality flip all the way to the other end of Trumpist extreme authoritarianism, but a personality shift that is values process a little bit less and values outcomes and action a little bit more?
Plain English with Derek Thompson
ABUNDANCE! With Ezra Klein
I am thrilled to be on Plain English. What a wonderful and rare opportunity to talk to you about abundance. This is exciting. We're gonna answer somewhere between 10,000 and 11 billion questions about this book in the next few weeks. So I wanted to hold this conversation to the relatively high bar of what can we talk about together here that other interviewers probably won't even think to ask us.
Plain English with Derek Thompson
ABUNDANCE! With Ezra Klein
And the first thing that I thought of is that nobody else knows the story of why this book exists in the first place. So in my personal chronology, the story of this book starts in the fall of 2021. I am rolling off of book leave for a related but distinct project on the history of technological progress in America.
Plain English with Derek Thompson
ABUNDANCE! With Ezra Klein
I agree the pendulum needs swinging, and I'm grateful that you helped me try to swing it, both in the book and in the show. Ezra Klein, thank you very much, and I'll talk to you in 35 minutes.
Plain English with Derek Thompson
ABUNDANCE! With Ezra Klein
I haven't had a very easy time with book leave because, as it turns out, writing a book is, among other things, a total pain in the ass. But one of the themes of this progress book that I was writing was the distinction between invention and implementation. Just because somebody comes up with a good idea does not mean that it's going to change the world. Ideas are cheap, building is hard.
Plain English with Derek Thompson
ABUNDANCE! With Ezra Klein
And I'm rolling off of book leave with this idea sort of swimming in my head. And in September 2021, I see that you have published an essay in the New York Times that's called, quote, the economic mistake the left is finally confronting. And you use this essay to introduce a term that you call supply-side progressivism. What was this essay about? Why did you read it?
Plain English with Derek Thompson
ABUNDANCE! With Ezra Klein
In his recent address to Congress, Donald Trump promised a golden age of America. But when you take a closer look at his policies, when you squint through the blur of tariffs added and removed and re-added and re-removed, I think the picture that moves into focus is something very different than an expansive vision of the future. It's something more like a pinched vision of the present.
Plain English with Derek Thompson
ABUNDANCE! With Ezra Klein
So I read your essay, and I'm inspired by it. I'm inspired by... I'm happy to hear that, Derek.
Plain English with Derek Thompson
ABUNDANCE! With Ezra Klein
I absolutely was. I was inspired by the substance of it, this fusion of liberalism and technology, which I found important but didn't quite find an interesting way to articulate in an important way. But I'm also inspired by a semantic move that you make. You take this concept of, this ideology of progressivism, which in recent years has been judged and defined on the demand side.
Plain English with Derek Thompson
ABUNDANCE! With Ezra Klein
Progressives ask, in many cases, to be judged on how much they spend to make the world a better place. And you do this really clever maneuver where you flip the yardstick. You say, what if we judged liberalism not by what it spent, but rather by what it built? That's what Yimbyism does. It says, how much housing have you built? Not how much have you spent on housing.
Plain English with Derek Thompson
ABUNDANCE! With Ezra Klein
That's what Yimbyism for clean energy would be for. Not just how much have you authorized to spend on solar, how much solar have you deployed? And I'm thinking about it as it meets my own project about this distinction between invention and implementation. And maybe similar to you, there's a bunch of ideas that are swirling around in my head waiting to be conjoined into one idea.
Plain English with Derek Thompson
ABUNDANCE! With Ezra Klein
And it's January 2022, and I'm standing in line in the freezing cold in Washington, D.C., waiting for some rationed COVID test because Omicron is circulating. And it's cold, and I don't do well in the cold, and I'm just angry. It's been two years since the pandemic started. There aren't enough tests. And before that, there weren't enough vaccines. And before that, there wasn't enough PPE.
Plain English with Derek Thompson
ABUNDANCE! With Ezra Klein
And as I'm getting angrier and angrier, I'm thinking if you zoom out, there's been a supply chain crisis in the pandemic, in the post-pandemic era. And if you zoom out again and look at the entire century, it's been defined by a housing crisis and a clean energy scarcity and even a shortage of doctors.
Plain English with Derek Thompson
ABUNDANCE! With Ezra Klein
Again and again, the Trump White House has pointed to existing shortages to demand new sacrifices. They say America cannot afford our debt, and therefore, we can't afford healthcare for the poor. They say America doesn't have enough manufacturing, and so we must accept less trade. They say America doesn't have enough housing, and so we need fewer immigrants. Less for less.
Plain English with Derek Thompson
ABUNDANCE! With Ezra Klein
And I write this sort of controlled screed that says this is a century that has been pockmarked by scarcity. And what if we could fix that with an abundance agenda?
Plain English with Derek Thompson
ABUNDANCE! With Ezra Klein
I'd write this piece, the Abundance Agenda piece, and I have a sense now of where the story goes in my head, but what do you recall is the bridge that takes us from this moment to us getting together and deciding faithfully to work on a book together?
Plain English with Derek Thompson
The End of Reading
But what makes this story so cool is that the modern sci-fi narrative is interspersed with another story that's set in the past. Here we have a Christian missionary introducing written language to a young man named Djingi in a preliterate African tribe. And Djingi initially finds the technology of writing very strange and not helpful.
Plain English with Derek Thompson
The End of Reading
That last example is so great because a part of me wants to be very fair to that teacher. Maybe her approach is just better than reading Homer's Odyssey alone. It's more multimedia. It meets students where they're at. It teaches them about a life skill using the media they're already engaged with, YouTube, music videos, music. It approaches the Odyssey as a practical text about life.
Plain English with Derek Thompson
The End of Reading
And in many ways, the Odyssey was probably first communicated between storytellers as a kind of civics education, right? A practical guide to the values of ancient Greece.
Plain English with Derek Thompson
The End of Reading
This clicks into the final thing that I want to talk to you about, which is that I feel like you and I are circling this idea that education has become more instrumental and fixated on accountability and pre-professional in the last few decades. And this is a shift that has happened both at the level of education policy and at the level of parent and student psychology.
Plain English with Derek Thompson
The End of Reading
Maybe young people are reading less, not because they're less intelligent, but because they are funneling their intelligence toward explicit resume building. And all things equal, if you're a 16, 17-year-old who has two hours free on a Wednesday, you can read for fun or you can practice violin.
Plain English with Derek Thompson
The End of Reading
And that violin practice is going to directly increase your odds of getting into a good college much more than reading 100 pages of your favorite novel, right? In a way, reading is a very inefficient means of burnishing a resume. It's also... comparatively an inefficient means of getting that next unit of enjoyment compared to, say, watching television or watching some movie on Netflix.
Plain English with Derek Thompson
The End of Reading
So how much do you think this shift away from reading full books has to do with the intense pressures of achievement culture, which are squeezing book reading out of a lot of kids' lives?
Plain English with Derek Thompson
The End of Reading
His tribe has relied on oral tradition to remember and to share knowledge. But over time, Jujingi learns to read and to write, and he realizes that the process of reading is changing the texture of his thought, his own relationship to the past and to ideas.
Plain English with Derek Thompson
The End of Reading
So million dollar question. What is this all about? What's really so valuable about reading whole books?
Plain English with Derek Thompson
The End of Reading
And as he changes, he begins to have fights with the elders in his tribe when they tell one story and he can consult a written document that tells another. And the story by Ted Chiang, The Truth of Fact, The Truth of Feeling, essentially pings between these two narratives.
Plain English with Derek Thompson
The End of Reading
I agree with much of that. I think at a personal level, I feel smarter when I'm in a phase of my life where I'm reading books consistently and where the practice of reading is knit into the fabric of my day-to-day habits. And the truth is, when I think about the people I know who I consider very successful and There are very few of them who are like, yeah, I don't read.
Plain English with Derek Thompson
The End of Reading
I don't have enough concentration to focus on a book or long essay. I'm just incredibly successful, and yet I have no faculty of reading concentration. Those things don't hang together, in my experience. And maybe this is an older millennial thing, and Gen Z and Gen Alpha will develop an entirely different and more multimedia suite of skills
Plain English with Derek Thompson
The End of Reading
Two different technologies introduced in two different societies, re-mem versus reading, looking at how they change the texture of our relationship to ideas. That's the sci-fi story, in any case. In reality, we don't have anything like technologically perfect photographic memory. And in many cases, we seem to be losing reading as well.
Plain English with Derek Thompson
The End of Reading
the same way that literacy replaced the skills of orality that you described. But I really do have a hard time thinking of people in my life who are successful who don't read as a habit. And one level deeper here, I think that the most important ideas require a concentration and a focus that benefits from hanging with an idea, staying inside of it for more than a minute or two.
Plain English with Derek Thompson
The End of Reading
And that level of concentration is very different than the kind of attention required to, say, watch a video for an hour, watch TV for an hour. There's a lean back aspect to watching video. But nothing against TV and film. There's something about reading that feels to me like the necessary co-creation of an idea.
Plain English with Derek Thompson
The End of Reading
It's like the author had an idea, and they put their idea, their little brain movie, into letters. And now my eyes are scanning the letters and I have to build in my own inner brain movie an idea drawn from those letters. It's up to me to bring that film of the inner mind to life. And in that way, reading really is a different kind of co-creation, I think.
Plain English with Derek Thompson
The End of Reading
And I feel like if we lose that level of concentration and that ability to co-create complex ideas, I mean, I know I'm high, high, high on a soapbox right now, but I really do think there's something quite profound that's lost if our teachers and our schools determine that this kind of patient thoughtfulness isn't valued anymore.
Plain English with Derek Thompson
The End of Reading
Many thanks to Rose Horwich of The Atlantic. Next up, we broaden our analysis because, of course, it is lurid and fascinating to realize that students at some of America's most prestigious colleges and universities cannot read entire books, or I suppose in some extreme cases, cannot hold their attention through the end of a single sonnet.
Plain English with Derek Thompson
The End of Reading
But elite college students are, by definition, a elite, small sliver of the total population of students. So what's happening? to literacy and reading for that total population of students. Here we turn to Nat Malkus of the American Enterprise Institute, who studies education policy in the US.
Plain English with Derek Thompson
The End of Reading
And he's recently published a report on reading and literacy scores of students nationwide in fourth and eighth grades. During the pandemic, there was a lot of attention paid to so-called COVID learning loss. But as Nat explains and has explained in this show before, COVID masked or accentuated a deeper decline in student achievement that goes back at least 10 years.
Plain English with Derek Thompson
The End of Reading
And this decline is particularly sharp in reading. To explain why this phenomenon isn't just about elite college students, but rather about our middle schoolers as well, We welcome Nat. Nat Malkus, welcome back to the show. Glad to be here. So student test scores in reading and also in subjects like math seem to have peaked around 2013, but they've been declining now for more than a decade.
Plain English with Derek Thompson
The End of Reading
And this is a trend that goes beyond the pandemic, beyond issues about COVID learning loss. Just start us off with the big picture. What's going on here with student reading scores?
Plain English with Derek Thompson
The End of Reading
Leisure reading, by some accounts, has declined by half so far in this century alone. Literacy scores are declining for fourth and eighth graders at alarming rates. And even college students today are complaining to teachers and professors that they can't read entire books at, say, Columbia University because they were never taught to read entire books in high school or middle school.
Plain English with Derek Thompson
The End of Reading
And who's leading this decline in reading achievement? Are we talking about a decline among elite college students, high achieving students? Are we talking about the decline being concentrated somewhere else?
Plain English with Derek Thompson
The End of Reading
So when we talk about student reading scores declining, the biggest story is that the worst readers are getting worse. Who are we talking about here, like demographically speaking?
Plain English with Derek Thompson
The End of Reading
And how significant is America's achievement gap compared to other countries for which we have good data?
Plain English with Derek Thompson
The End of Reading
Before we go on, I don't want the answer to this question to put people entirely to sleep, but you've mentioned NAAP and TIMSS. Can you just tell us really briefly, like, how do we know what we know in the world of student literacy here? What's NAAP and what's TIMSS?
Plain English with Derek Thompson
The End of Reading
The book itself, that ancient piece of technology for storing ideas passed down across decades, is fading in curricula across the country, replaced by film and TV and YouTube. So why does this matter? Why, with everything happening in this country and around the world, would I be interested in reading?
Plain English with Derek Thompson
The End of Reading
So we've established the phenomenon here. This is not just a crisis of elite college students not being able to read books. This is a broader crisis of American students in fourth, eighth grade, maybe even through high school, who have meaningfully worse literacy scores than they did just 10 years ago, and this is a decline that's being accelerated by the worst performing students.
Plain English with Derek Thompson
The End of Reading
That's the phenomenon we're starting with. I'm most interested in the questions of why. What is going on here? What could explain this? I think we should start with policy. Was there a policy shift in K through 12 education that lines up with this change? You said something seems to have happened between 2012 and 2015. Is there a policy shift here that could begin to explain what's going on?
Plain English with Derek Thompson
The End of Reading
And why don't you just explain which of those policies were?
Plain English with Derek Thompson
The End of Reading
I'd love to go just a little bit deeper into this policy shift, because one thing that's interesting to me about the way you describe No Child Left Behind and Every Student Succeeds Act, so No Child Left Behind and ESSA, is that we tend to think about Republicans being interested in states' rights and devolving power to the states.
Plain English with Derek Thompson
The End of Reading
And we tend to think about Democrats as always wanting to concentrate power at the federal level. But am I wrong in saying that ESSA seemed to actually return more power to the states? It defanged No Child Left Behind by giving the states more flexibility in terms of using the results of these federal tests or of these student achievement scores. And it was a reaction.
Plain English with Derek Thompson
The End of Reading
to schools who thought that No Child Left Behind was too rigid in its focus, too much of a one-size-fits-all straitjacket. Am I wrong in seeing this education policy shift you're describing as somewhat complicating certain stereotypes about Republican versus Democratic policymaking?
Plain English with Derek Thompson
The End of Reading
Well, at the end of Ted Chiang's story, he appends a little author's note where he thanks a scholar named Walter Ong and a book called Orality and Literacy. Orality here meaning a culture of spoken language. According to Ong, literacy is not just a skill. It's a means of restructuring our thoughts and our knowledge.
Plain English with Derek Thompson
The End of Reading
Just want to make sure that I have a really granular understanding here of how you think the shift to ESSA might have played a direct role in the decline of literacy scores. What would be the most parsimonious way to draw that connection?
Plain English with Derek Thompson
The End of Reading
All right, and just as long as we're setting the table with possible explanations, we've talked about a shift in national policy. I want to talk about a shift in teaching philosophy. A couple years ago, there was this burst of media attention around the decline of phonics education in America. and a shift toward methods including whole language approaches.
Plain English with Derek Thompson
The End of Reading
That is, a shift away from spelling out or pronouncing words by connecting letters or sounds toward sort of gulping words whole. To what extent do you think young American reading issues can be traced all the way back to this pedagogical change that we've seen, this shift away from phonics-based education?
Plain English with Derek Thompson
The End of Reading
In oral cultures, Ong says, knowledge is preserved through repetition and mnemonic and stories. Orality requires the synchronous presence of multiple people in a place at the same time. And for that reason, oral cultures tend to be highly social.
Plain English with Derek Thompson
The End of Reading
So we've talked about national policy. We've talked about pedagogy. I think people are waiting for us to talk about screens, smartphones, and maybe even to a certain extent, televisions. Let me set us up this way. Screens, I think, would not be the best explanation if it turned out that this decline in literacy was only happening among one very particular cohort of students, because
Plain English with Derek Thompson
The End of Reading
What that would imply is a cohort effect, which is to say a policy change, and that cohort was affected by that policy change. But if screens are relevant, then what we would really expect to see are declining literacy scores across the board, not just for one micro-generation of students, but for older students, for younger students, even for adults.
Plain English with Derek Thompson
The End of Reading
Is there any evidence, Nat, that literacy scores, reading scores, are declining for adults as well?
Plain English with Derek Thompson
The End of Reading
To what extent does that rule in screens as an explanation here for the decline of literacy and reading scores in America?
Plain English with Derek Thompson
The End of Reading
Writing, by contrast, fixes words in place, which means one person can write their thoughts and another person decades later can read those precise thoughts with no error in the transliteration. This word fixing allows literate culture to develop abstract thinking. They are, after all, outsourcing the work of memory to a page, right?
Plain English with Derek Thompson
The End of Reading
So what would be your stylized explanation here? Like if you were going to write an essay for The Atlantic or the New York Times op-ed section, and the editor approached you and said, Nat, what I want you to do is to write an essay about why
Plain English with Derek Thompson
The End of Reading
reading scores are declining, why literacy scores are declining, not only for students, fourth grade, eighth grade, but also it seems for adults across the country. Something's happened in the last 12 years and it's crying out for an explanation, especially among the lowest performing readers. What do you think is going on?
Plain English with Derek Thompson
The End of Reading
Well, let me engage with that conjecture because I find it quite plausible. Judging from other data that you linked to in your recent report, the American Time Use Survey, going back to the last 20 years, asks people, how much time do you spend reading for personal interest? That is the verbatim language in ATUS. How much time do you spend reading for personal interest?
Plain English with Derek Thompson
The End of Reading
And leisure reading, by this definition, has declined about 30% in the last 20 years for all Americans. And then I went to break it down by age. I think the National Academies actually has a page where they break down the Bureau of Labor Statistics data by age.
Plain English with Derek Thompson
The End of Reading
And according to their breakdown, the largest declines in reading for pleasure isn't actually among young people at all in the last 20 years. Quite the opposite. It's seniors. And the vast majority of that decline actually seems to have happened before 2013. So when I put all of that together and think what, again, I think you set this up really beautifully.
Plain English with Derek Thompson
The End of Reading
What is an explanation that meets all of these criteria? It seems to me that in the last 20 years, both with the rise of cable television and then streaming and also smartphones, our leisure time, the texture of our leisure time is shifting from written communication to video and oral communication.
Plain English with Derek Thompson
The End of Reading
We just spend less of our leisure time engaging with the written word and more leisure time engaging with video and audio products. And I wonder if that has to do with
Plain English with Derek Thompson
The End of Reading
the decline in reading proficiency that we're seeing across ages, is that essentially the written word is being out-competed, and so new generations of people, young and old, are less facile with reading, and therefore are scoring lower on their reading because of this victory of video communications over written. How do you feel about that?
Plain English with Derek Thompson
The End of Reading
When I write something on a note, it acts as an extension of my memory. And this allows for more complex and analytical thought. It's amazing and incredible to me that ancient storytellers could memorize the Iliad or the Odyssey, but you simply could not, say, invent calculus or quantum mechanics. without writing stuff down from time to time.
Plain English with Derek Thompson
The End of Reading
So I'm going to check myself and ask you, and also to a certain extent myself, this question. So what? You know, young people, older people, they're reading fewer books. They don't necessarily have the level of concentration or the drive to sit with long magazine stories or beach reads or old Russian novels or new nonfiction. They just don't really want to do that anymore.
Plain English with Derek Thompson
The End of Reading
They'd prefer to watch television, watch videos, maybe read but only in the chunks offered by X, Twitter, What's so wrong about that? Why should we be concerned about this outcome?
Plain English with Derek Thompson
The End of Reading
You mentioned that some states are sowing phonics back into their young child literacy education policies. And anything else? What gives you cause for optimism in this space?
Plain English with Derek Thompson
The End of Reading
And even by some miracle, if you did, if Isaac Newton did like just think of calculus in his head, he would have to explain it in a story to someone who would explain it in a story to someone. And you would have to pass down this incredibly complex system of thought across generations.
Plain English with Derek Thompson
The End of Reading
Nat Malkus, thank you very much. Thanks for having me. Many thanks to Nat, many thanks to Rose.
Plain English with Derek Thompson
The End of Reading
I think one thing for me to take away from this episode is not just the fact that elite college students are reading fewer books, or that leisure reading is declining across the country, or that reading scores are declining for many Americans at the fourth and eighth grade level, but rather to remind us, remind myself of the context here.
Plain English with Derek Thompson
The End of Reading
that this is all happening during a period where literate culture seems to be giving way to a more oral culture, as Walter Ong called it. And this involves not just a shift in the way that we communicate information, it involves a shift in the texture of thought, in the culture of thought, in the kind of ideas that go aerodynamic. And I want to keep thinking about this.
Plain English with Derek Thompson
The End of Reading
Maybe I'll have Joe Eisenthal on the show to talk about his big ideas on this, because I really do think this is a profound shift, a shift away from the book, the text, reading as the centerpiece of education toward a kind of educational philosophy that sees books as, as I said earlier, just one other planet in the solar system.
Plain English with Derek Thompson
The End of Reading
I think something important is happening here and I'd love to explore it further. Thanks for listening and we'll talk to you next week.
Plain English with Derek Thompson
The End of Reading
The Bloomberg writer and podcaster Joe Weisenthal has written several wonderful riffs over the last few years about what he sees as this shift today from written culture to oral culture. He's called it the biggest story of our time.
Plain English with Derek Thompson
The End of Reading
Today, the decline of reading in America. So I recently read a wonderful short story by the science fiction writer Ted Chiang, which is called The Truth of Fact, The Truth of Feeling. It's featured in his collection of short stories entitled Exhalation. And this short story unfolds along two parallel tracks.
Plain English with Derek Thompson
The End of Reading
Quote, many of the things that modern institutions are built on, formal logic, reasoning, examining the evidence, are downstream of the ability to contemplate the written word. End quote. Today, however, Joe thinks we're completely rewiring the logic engine of the human brain.
Plain English with Derek Thompson
The End of Reading
And the decline of reading in America, while surely not the whole of this phenomenon, is, I think, an important part of it. Today, we have two conversations, one with a journalist and one with an academic. First, Atlantic staff writer Rose Horowitz shares her reporting on the decline of reading at elite college campuses.
Plain English with Derek Thompson
The End of Reading
And second, Nat Malkus of the American Enterprise Institute tells us about the alarming decline in literacy across our entire student population and even among adults. And then with Rose and with Nat, we discuss what it all means. What do we lose when we lose deep reading? I'm Derek Thompson. This is Plain English. Rose Horowitz, welcome to the show.
Plain English with Derek Thompson
The End of Reading
Your essay in The Atlantic magazine was entitled The Elite College Students Who Can't Read Books. And it begins with Nicholas Dames, who has taught the Great Books course at Columbia University for decades. Several years ago, he had an experience that he described to you as jaw-dropping. What happened?
Plain English with Derek Thompson
The End of Reading
And this essay really struck me because I had just been to dinner with some friends in the area with kids. And I was telling them about this reporting that you were doing on students who cannot read books at Columbia University. And the mother goes, oh, my God, it's the same thing. with our kid. I don't understand it. They don't read books anymore in middle, early high school.
Plain English with Derek Thompson
The End of Reading
And I go, okay, that's obviously not true. Your child goes to one of the best schools in the Chapel Hill, Durham area. I'm going to leave the name of the school anonymous because I want to keep these folks anonymous. They certainly weren't on the record with me. But, you know, we call her child over and I say, you know, what do you mean you don't read books?
Plain English with Derek Thompson
The End of Reading
In the modern narrative, which takes place sometime in the near future, a journalist is assigned to cover a new technology called re-mem, which allows people to film their entire lives and play back memories on a retinal projector. In other words, it's a technology that grants every person perfect photographic memory of every event in their life.
Plain English with Derek Thompson
The End of Reading
And they go, well, we just studied Animal Farm in our class and we read excerpts of Animal Farm and watched some YouTube videos about it. And I basically lose my mind. I'm like, Animal Farm is a children's It's like 90 pages long. So that was my anecdotal experience confirming your reporting.
Plain English with Derek Thompson
The End of Reading
You did much better than just go to someone else's house and happen to fall into a conversation about their children. You spoke to 30 professors and teachers for this story. Tell us how widespread this phenomenon is.
Plain English with Derek Thompson
The End of Reading
These are good anecdotes. You talk to a lot of professors at a lot of different universities. Do we have something here that is more systemic? Either someone like Gallup or Pew surveying thousands of students to see whether we have really clear data showing that high schoolers, college students are reading significantly fewer books.
Plain English with Derek Thompson
The End of Reading
If we're looking for reasons here, then as cliched as it might seem, I do think we have to start by looking at screens and social media. Let's keep this out of our voices first and keep it with your reporting. How did the professors and the teachers that you spoke to describe the way that screened media seemed to be eclipsing books for their students?
Plain English with Derek Thompson
The End of Reading
A little bit like that great Black Mirror episode written by Jesse Armstrong. And this journalist explores the ways that re-mem changes people's lives, how it resolves fights between couples over who said what to whom, how it makes it impossible for certain people to forget fights in their past that they might want to forget.
Plain English with Derek Thompson
The End of Reading
A theme of your reporting is that college students can't read entire books because of a pipeline problem. High schools aren't teaching full books. Middle schools are moving away from full books. What role do you think education policy at the middle and high school level is playing here?
Plain English with Derek Thompson
The End of Reading
When I think back on my time in middle and high school, everything in my English and history classes revolved around a list of books. Like, you got this reading list at the beginning of the year. And it was all full of books. History books, American history, global history, Great Gatsby, Catcher in the Rye, The Bluest Eye. And our education revolved around the text.
Plain English with Derek Thompson
The End of Reading
Something I'm hearing you say is that books have been slowly decentered, so to speak, in modern education. Like they're no longer the sun around which the education revolves. They're just another planet. Do you have any evidence that books are being marginalized in this way?
Plain English with Derek Thompson
Plain History: The Astonishingly Successful Presidency of James K. Polk
Bob, so it's Polk for the Democrats, and on the opposing side, we have Henry Clay for the Whig Party. And Clay, I remember from my high school American history classes, is basically being the most important statesman of the 19th century to never become president. Like every compromise to delay or allay the threat of civil war has Clay's name on it.
Plain English with Derek Thompson
Plain History: The Astonishingly Successful Presidency of James K. Polk
And this poor guy, he runs for president more or less continuously between the 1820s and 1840s, losing over and over and over again. He's like the Buffalo Bills of the 19th century. So that's the showdown. You've got the great statesman Clay with maybe his best chance of becoming president. He's facing the dark horse, Polk. Bob, what is this election about?
Plain English with Derek Thompson
Plain History: The Astonishingly Successful Presidency of James K. Polk
Is Texas the overriding issue or other broader economic issues that define this race?
Plain English with Derek Thompson
Plain History: The Astonishingly Successful Presidency of James K. Polk
But according to the Pulitzer Prize-winning historian Daniel Walker Howe, the answer to the question, who is America's most successful president, might be none of the above. If success means articulating your goals and achieving all of them, none of those three are perfect fits. George Washington's negotiations with Britain failed to secure the recognition of US maritime rights.
Plain English with Derek Thompson
Plain History: The Astonishingly Successful Presidency of James K. Polk
It's interesting because looking at it from sort of the 30,000 foot Wikipedia level, you think James Polk is not a dark horse. He's the only person in American history to serve as Speaker of the House and President. That sounds like somebody who would be very firmly in the political limelight.
Plain English with Derek Thompson
Plain History: The Astonishingly Successful Presidency of James K. Polk
But to both of your points, he had a bit of the stink on him because he had just lost in consecutive elections to resume his governorship of Tennessee. So He had that feeling of a loser about him until Jackson's people got behind him and pushed him over the finish line. So we have this election of 1844, and it's fascinating. It's one of the closest elections in American history.
Plain English with Derek Thompson
Plain History: The Astonishingly Successful Presidency of James K. Polk
Clay, in what is certainly his best chance to become president, fumbles the Texas question and loses support among immigrants and anti-slavery voters in the North. It should also be said this election is rife with fraud. both you point out, in the Plaquemines Parish near New Orleans, the Democratic vote is larger than the entire white male population of all ages, including toddlers and babies.
Plain English with Derek Thompson
Plain History: The Astonishingly Successful Presidency of James K. Polk
So historians are quite sure now that Democrats essentially boarded voters on a steamboat and just sent them down river to vote over and over and over again, a little riverboat tour of voter fraud.
Plain English with Derek Thompson
Plain History: The Astonishingly Successful Presidency of James K. Polk
But Walter, to you, before we dive into the meat of the show, which is Polk's presidency and what he accomplished in his four years, how do you think we should remember the 1844 election, the initial subject of your book project?
Plain English with Derek Thompson
Plain History: The Astonishingly Successful Presidency of James K. Polk
Incredible that something as significant as, is the state of California part of America or Mexico, part of Canada or Mexico, hangs on 5,000 votes cast 180 years ago. So... James K. Polk, heir to Andrew Jackson, dark horse candidate, miraculously becomes president. The world is aghast.
Plain English with Derek Thompson
Plain History: The Astonishingly Successful Presidency of James K. Polk
The Times of London calls Polk's election, quote, the triumph of everything that is worst over everything that is best in the United States. end quote. And immediately upon becoming president, Polk proves that he's an absolute force of nature, especially in the arena of foreign policy, as you alluded to, and as we'll discuss, I think, for the rest of this interview.
Plain English with Derek Thompson
Plain History: The Astonishingly Successful Presidency of James K. Polk
FDR's court packing plan famously and infamously backfired. And while it seems kind of mean, absurd to blame Abraham Lincoln for his own assassination, I don't think it's debatable that his second term was a failure by his own standards, since his vice president, Andrew Johnson, who became president, had policies that were totally at odds with Lincoln's vision of reconstruction.
Plain English with Derek Thompson
Plain History: The Astonishingly Successful Presidency of James K. Polk
Bob, there's this term that's floating around in the ether in the mid-1840s, manifest destiny. Where did this term come from, and what did it mean at the time?
Plain English with Derek Thompson
Plain History: The Astonishingly Successful Presidency of James K. Polk
When Polk becomes president, the U.S. doesn't have Texas. We don't have the territories comprising California, Nevada, Utah, or much of what is now Arizona or New Mexico. We certainly didn't have Oregon or Washington State. And when Polk leaves the office four years later, we have all of this.
Plain English with Derek Thompson
Plain History: The Astonishingly Successful Presidency of James K. Polk
Half a million square miles, more than the entire acreage of the original 13 colonies appended to the United States. I want to talk about Oregon first, and then I want to talk about the Mexican-American War that wins America so much of its western flank. Let's start with Oregon. When we say Oregon in the 1840s, this is not the Oregon that we know today.
Plain English with Derek Thompson
Plain History: The Astonishingly Successful Presidency of James K. Polk
It's a vast stretch of land that goes from the 42nd parallel, which is the current California-Oregon border, all the way up through what is now most of British Columbia. Area had been home to Native Americans for thousands of years before the British come in. Why don't you pick up the story here? How did this territory go from being dominated by the British and the Hudson's Bay Company specifically
Plain English with Derek Thompson
Plain History: The Astonishingly Successful Presidency of James K. Polk
to even being a target of U.S. acquisition?
Plain English with Derek Thompson
Plain History: The Astonishingly Successful Presidency of James K. Polk
No, if success means achieving every single major thing you set out to do, then identifying the most successful president forces us to look a little bit further. In 1845, James K. Polk, newly elected president by a whisker-thin margin, confided to a friend, George Bancroft, the four goals of his four years in the White House.
Plain English with Derek Thompson
Plain History: The Astonishingly Successful Presidency of James K. Polk
Walt, I want to stay with you for a bit to talk about Polk's acquisition of Oregon before we go back to Bob. You wrote in your book that Polk's winning Oregon, his successful negotiation with Great Britain, required a considerable amount of diplomatic skill because in a way, Polk was trapped between two extremes.
Plain English with Derek Thompson
Plain History: The Astonishingly Successful Presidency of James K. Polk
On the one hand, the Democratic Party wanted him to risk war against Britain to obtain all of Oregon country, all the way up to 5440. 5440, your fight, that northern parallel right up against modern Alaska. But Polk is savvy enough, or just plain not stupid enough, to know the U.S. can't afford to go to war against the British Empire. So how does he maneuver his way through this?
Plain English with Derek Thompson
Plain History: The Astonishingly Successful Presidency of James K. Polk
Bob, as Walt just explained, one really interesting thing about Polk's negotiating strategy here is that he is playing up the Democrats' unreasonableness as a bargaining chip at the same time that he's negotiating down his position with the Brits. What do you consider the most impressive piece of Polk's diplomatic accomplishment here?
Plain English with Derek Thompson
Plain History: The Astonishingly Successful Presidency of James K. Polk
So what I find so interesting about this deal is not just its success, but the fact that it comes together in truly the nick of time, because not 10 days after the British accept the Oregon partition proposal, which again, gives the US modern Washington state and Oregon and leaves Britain in control of what is now British Columbia,
Plain English with Derek Thompson
Plain History: The Astonishingly Successful Presidency of James K. Polk
Number one, acquire Oregon from Great Britain.
Plain English with Derek Thompson
Plain History: The Astonishingly Successful Presidency of James K. Polk
Just 10 days later, word reaches London that war has broken out between Mexico and the United States. Like one of those amazing pieces of history, because I wonder sometimes like if the Mexican-American war had started two weeks earlier, Britain might have driven a much harder bargain and Seattle and Portland might not be parts of Canada.
Plain English with Derek Thompson
Plain History: The Astonishingly Successful Presidency of James K. Polk
But Walt, this now brings Mexico into the picture and it brings Texas back into the picture. How does war with Mexico begin?
Plain English with Derek Thompson
Plain History: The Astonishingly Successful Presidency of James K. Polk
Number two, acquire California from Mexico. Number three, reduce the tariff. And number four, establish an independent treasury.
Plain English with Derek Thompson
Plain History: The Astonishingly Successful Presidency of James K. Polk
And just a quick geography asterisk here. Texas in 1846 is not Texas as we know it today. The Nueces River is both north and east of the Rio Grande. So much of West Texas, or what we call West Texas today, was disputed territory back then. So back to you, Walt. How does war with Mexico begin?
Plain English with Derek Thompson
Plain History: The Astonishingly Successful Presidency of James K. Polk
As Howe writes in his book, What Hath God Wrought, quote, judged by these objectives, Polk is probably the most successful president the United States has ever had.
Plain English with Derek Thompson
Plain History: The Astonishingly Successful Presidency of James K. Polk
Bob, I think the conventional wisdom today is that the Mexican-American War was an extraordinary act of manipulation and aggression by the U.S. I mean, here you have Polk sending Zachary Taylor and American soldiers into contested territory, essentially daring Mexico to fire the first shot, and then running back to the Senate to scream that war has already begun.
Plain English with Derek Thompson
Plain History: The Astonishingly Successful Presidency of James K. Polk
What part of this conventional wisdom, this idea of Polk as an imperialist manipulator who used illegitimate power to manufacture a necessary war, what part of that analysis do you think we might get wrong?
Plain English with Derek Thompson
Plain History: The Astonishingly Successful Presidency of James K. Polk
In fact, if you really wanted to press the case, Polk's term was even more successful than his objectives. By winning the Mexican-American War of 1846 to 1848, he didn't just acquire what we now think of as California. He acquired what is now West Texas, most of Arizona and New Mexico, half of Colorado, and all of modern Utah and Nevada.
Plain English with Derek Thompson
Plain History: The Astonishingly Successful Presidency of James K. Polk
Walt, I'd love to know where you stand here, because I can see both sides. On the one hand, it seems very clear that Polk essentially engineered a war by sending Zachary Taylor into a contested area and then using Mexican aggression to tell the Senate that they had to declare a state of war or recognize, I should say, a state of war. On the other hand...
Plain English with Derek Thompson
Plain History: The Astonishingly Successful Presidency of James K. Polk
Independent Texas had just won a war, a war of independence. Santa Ana had been captured by Sam Houston and had said that Texas could be independent. Mexico refused to ratify that agreement. They refused to pay debts they owed to other countries. They had no ability to really hold on to this vast territory that Mexico City itself couldn't defend with its military.
Plain English with Derek Thompson
Plain History: The Astonishingly Successful Presidency of James K. Polk
And so it was an unstable and declining empire facing a much more competent and rising empire to the north. And when power faces power in this way, it's the more powerful country that always gets its way. How do you feel about the real politic or moral question around the beginning of the Mexico-American War?
Plain English with Derek Thompson
Plain History: The Astonishingly Successful Presidency of James K. Polk
The original 13 colonies made up about 400,000 square miles. James Polk expanded the U.S. by roughly 1 million square miles. And he did it in one term. And that's why Polk is the subject of today's show.
Plain English with Derek Thompson
Plain History: The Astonishingly Successful Presidency of James K. Polk
So the U.S. attacks Mexico on multiple fronts. Zachary Taylor comes down from the north. Winfield Scott leads an amphibious assault on Veracruz before encircling, capturing Mexico City. And America wins the war in about two years. And the legacy of war with Mexico is really immense. I mean, just from the raw political standpoint, the brigadier general is Zachary Taylor.
Plain English with Derek Thompson
Plain History: The Astonishingly Successful Presidency of James K. Polk
Another general is Franklin Pierce. Another general is Ulysses S. Grant. Polk's Secretary of State was James Buchanan at the time. So within two decades, all of those men become elected president. And in fact, besides Abraham Lincoln, every president elected between 1844 and 1876 is played a key role in the Mexican-American War. I mean, that's 32 years.
Plain English with Derek Thompson
Plain History: The Astonishingly Successful Presidency of James K. Polk
It's like if every president elected between 1992 and 2024 all fought in the Gulf War. Truly a very, very different time. But I want to make sure that we go deeper on the issue of slavery. Bob, first you. How does the acquisition of all of this new territory affect the economics of the slave trade and the debate around slavery?
Plain English with Derek Thompson
Plain History: The Astonishingly Successful Presidency of James K. Polk
Absolutely seminal. Quoting the historian Daniel Walker Howe here, the consequences of the election of 1844 went far beyond Texas annexation, important as that was. If Henry Clay had won the White House, almost surely there would have been no Mexican War, no Wilmot Proviso, and therefore less reason for the status of slavery in the territories to have inflamed sectional passions, end quote.
Plain English with Derek Thompson
Plain History: The Astonishingly Successful Presidency of James K. Polk
Walt, as the North and the South are falling to quarreling over the spoils of war in the West, something else is happening. In 1848, gold is discovered in California. How does the discovery of gold and the gold rush play into Polk's legacy?
Plain English with Derek Thompson
Plain History: The Astonishingly Successful Presidency of James K. Polk
Because I don't think another president in American history has so large a gap between his modern reputation and his actual achievement. Now, here's where it gets interesting, because the nature of Polk's achievements are not what we associate with presidential greatness. Unlike Washington, he didn't wage war for independence, but rather for conquest.
Plain English with Derek Thompson
Plain History: The Astonishingly Successful Presidency of James K. Polk
What if it had been discovered 40 years ago? Britain probably would have tried to wage war against Mexico and might have extended the Oregon Territory, and British Columbia might be a kind of long column from Baja, California, all the way up to Alaska, if Britain could have sent its navy against the Mexicans in, say, the 1820s, 1830s. It really is unbelievable that the discovery of gold happens...
Plain English with Derek Thompson
Plain History: The Astonishingly Successful Presidency of James K. Polk
12, 24 months after the end of the Mexican-American War. It's just, it's ludicrous, ludicrous providence.
Plain English with Derek Thompson
Plain History: The Astonishingly Successful Presidency of James K. Polk
You know, one question, before we get to Polk and his death and legacy, one question I'm not sure I have clarity on, I'm not sure the best way to ask it, but it seems very important to me that the people who lived in Texas, you know, certainly at the time, 1840s, the white men who lived in Texas, who had political power, wanted to be annexed by the U.S., that there was a self-determination case for Texas to belong with the U.S.,
Plain English with Derek Thompson
Plain History: The Astonishingly Successful Presidency of James K. Polk
With the rest of the Mexican territory, from modern New Mexico up through Utah, Nevada, into Northern California, do modern historians have any sense of that area's self-determination in the 1840s Or was it such a motley group of settlers and Mexicans and Native Americans that it's hard for us to say that there was any self-identifying nationality?
Plain English with Derek Thompson
Plain History: The Astonishingly Successful Presidency of James K. Polk
Unlike Lincoln's war and emancipation, which ended slavery, Polk's embrace of westward expansion and manifest destiny extended the territory for and the market for slavery. And unlike FDR, Polk did not go to war for liberal humanitarian interests. He went to war for old-fashioned national interest.
Plain English with Derek Thompson
Plain History: The Astonishingly Successful Presidency of James K. Polk
So after he leaves the presidency, James Polk goes on a speaking tour through the South. Unfortunately, he essentially travels directly into the hurricane of a cholera outbreak. And for a man with a long history of stomach issues, this is courting disaster. He dies soon after leaving the presidency. I believe he has the shortest post-presidency lifespan of any president, even to date.
Plain English with Derek Thompson
Plain History: The Astonishingly Successful Presidency of James K. Polk
And on his tombstone, A.O.P. Nicholson supplies the following lines, quote, "'By his public policy, he defined, established, and extended the boundaries of his country. He planted the laws of the American Union on the shores of the Pacific.'" Bob, if you're writing Polk's Tombstone Epitaph, what would you write? What would you remember about this man?
Plain English with Derek Thompson
Plain History: The Astonishingly Successful Presidency of James K. Polk
We've talked a lot about Polk's expansion, welcoming Texas into the Union, bluffing the British out of half of Oregon, going to war with Mexico to grab California and the Southwest. We haven't talked as much about how he expanded the executive power of the presidency. But in fact, Arthur Schlesinger in his classic book, The Imperial Presidency, he gives a lot of room to Polk.
Plain English with Derek Thompson
Plain History: The Astonishingly Successful Presidency of James K. Polk
He describes him as a micromanager who totally redefined the presidency in his brief four years. How would you say Polk expanded and redefined the executive power of the presidency in his time?
Plain English with Derek Thompson
Plain History: The Astonishingly Successful Presidency of James K. Polk
Now, I don't think it's useful for people in the 2020s to exclusively insist on judging history by 21st century values. But what makes Polk's presidency so rich is that even his contemporaries considered him to be a manipulator.
Plain English with Derek Thompson
Plain History: The Astonishingly Successful Presidency of James K. Polk
I want to close by asking what both of you think American history would look like without James K. Polk. What if Henry Clay had won the election of 1844? Is California part of America today? Does Clay find a way to avoid or somehow minimize the Civil War by paying off Southern slave owners, as he said he wanted to do in several occasions?
Plain English with Derek Thompson
Plain History: The Astonishingly Successful Presidency of James K. Polk
Ulysses S. Grant, who fought in the Mexican-American War, called it, quote, the most unjust war ever waged by a stronger against a weaker nation.
Plain English with Derek Thompson
Plain History: The Astonishingly Successful Presidency of James K. Polk
I know that counter histories are a little bit difficult, or maybe the problem with them is that they're too easy. You can always make something up and it's unfalsifiable. But I'd love to get your brains on it. So Bob, we'll start with you. What is American history like without James K. Polk?
Plain English with Derek Thompson
Plain History: The Astonishingly Successful Presidency of James K. Polk
It's interesting because there are two ideas there that I think are are in tension. The idea on the one hand that the discovery of gold in California in the 1840s immediately changed the fate of and the value of California to any empire that wanted to acquire it. And on the other hand, the idea that maybe the U.S.
Plain English with Derek Thompson
Plain History: The Astonishingly Successful Presidency of James K. Polk
There are two great books about James Polk that I've read, which have been published in the last 20 years. And I'm very pleased that today we have both authors on the show. Walt Bornemann is the author of Polk, The Man Who Transformed the Presidency and America. And Bob Mary, who is the author of A Country of Vast Designs, James K. Polk, The Mexican War, and The Conquest of the American Continent.
Plain English with Derek Thompson
Plain History: The Astonishingly Successful Presidency of James K. Polk
would have expanded to the Pacific even if Polk didn't try to acquire California in the mid-1840s. Do you see a tension there?
Plain English with Derek Thompson
Plain History: The Astonishingly Successful Presidency of James K. Polk
Walt, what about you? What does American history look like without Polk?
Plain English with Derek Thompson
Plain History: The Astonishingly Successful Presidency of James K. Polk
This was a lot of fun. I really appreciate it. Walt Bornemann, Robert Mary, thank you very much.
Plain English with Derek Thompson
Plain History: The Astonishingly Successful Presidency of James K. Polk
Thanks, Derek, very much. Many thanks to Bob Mary and Walt Bornemann for this show. We would love to hear your feedback for Plain History. What do you think about this little podcast in a podcast? What are some Plain History episodes that you think we should cover? Send emails to plainenglish at spotify.com and we will see you next week.
Plain English with Derek Thompson
Plain History: The Astonishingly Successful Presidency of James K. Polk
I'm Derek Thompson. This is Plane History. Walt Bornemann, welcome to the show. Hi, Derek. Good to be with you. Robert Mary, welcome.
Plain English with Derek Thompson
Plain History: The Astonishingly Successful Presidency of James K. Polk
Before we dive into this material, I just want to first say it's really thrilling to be able to have two different James Polk biographers here to help me understand this incredibly pivotal time in American history. And before we dive into the material, I'd love to know what drew you to the subject. So, Walt, let's start with you. There are so many stories to tell about American history.
Plain English with Derek Thompson
Plain History: The Astonishingly Successful Presidency of James K. Polk
What's so interesting to you about James Polk?
Plain English with Derek Thompson
Plain History: The Astonishingly Successful Presidency of James K. Polk
So I want to draw back the curtains here in the election year of 1844. And the U.S. is defined at this time, it seems, along two axes, north, south, east, and west. And in the north, industrialization is surging. In the agrarian south, slaves make up about a third of the population. Cotton is by far America's biggest export. East of the Appalachian Mountains is home to still 90% of the U.S.
Plain English with Derek Thompson
Plain History: The Astonishingly Successful Presidency of James K. Polk
population, but west of the Mississippi, migration is booming. We are about to enter the heyday of the Oregon Trail. The concept of manifest destiny is on the people's lips. And the year 1844 also happens to be an extraordinary one in telecommunications history. This is the year that Samuel Morse sends the first telegraphic message with four words, "'What hath God wrought?'
Plain English with Derek Thompson
Plain History: The Astonishingly Successful Presidency of James K. Polk
And on top of all this, there's the seismic presidential election and the looming issue of Texas, newly independent Texas. Bob, why don't you set the table for us with Texas? What should we know about Texas in the year 1844?
Plain English with Derek Thompson
Plain History: The Astonishingly Successful Presidency of James K. Polk
Today, our second episode of Plain History kicks off with a fun, if impossible, question. Who was the most successful president in American history? I'd say we start with the obvious nominees here. George Washington defeated the British Army and then led the country born through his military accomplishment. Abraham Lincoln saved the Union and its slavery.
Plain English with Derek Thompson
Plain History: The Astonishingly Successful Presidency of James K. Polk
Walt, I wanna connect some dots here before I throw it back to you. As Bob said, Texas defeats Mexico, and Sam Houston very quickly appeals to the US to annex Texas, to protect it from Mexico. President Martin Van Buren says no. In the 1840 election, Van Buren gets walloped by William Henry Harrison. Harrison is elected. He dies in a month. John Tyler takes over the presidency.
Plain English with Derek Thompson
Plain History: The Astonishingly Successful Presidency of James K. Polk
Tyler promises Sam Houston, trust me, I can get annexation through the Senate. You can trust me. He fails. The Whig Party soundly rejects that annexation treaty. And that sets us up to appreciate, I think, the full stakes of the 1844 election.
Plain English with Derek Thompson
Plain History: The Astonishingly Successful Presidency of James K. Polk
Let me try to set up the election of 1844 in a way that allows you to expand a bit on the role of puppet master Andrew Jackson here. So the Texas question is simmering, and Democrats have to choose their presidential candidate to face Henry Clay in the election. And At first, this looks like a murderer's row of mid-century luminaries. Andrew Jackson is not running for president.
Plain English with Derek Thompson
Plain History: The Astonishingly Successful Presidency of James K. Polk
He's practically on death's door. But almost everybody else is trying to get on the ticket. John Calhoun, the pro-slavery states' rights champion, has tried to get on the ticket. Martin Van Buren, Jackson's former vice president and one of the Democratic Party's founders, he's interested in being on the ticket. Louis Cass,
Plain English with Derek Thompson
Plain History: The Astonishingly Successful Presidency of James K. Polk
Jackson's secretary of war, who was in charge of Indian removal, also wants to get on the ticket. But somehow, none of these men make it through the final ballot, and the presidential nomination swings to James K. Polk, the dark horse who nobody saw coming. Walt, how did Polk's political career set him up for this moment?
Plain English with Derek Thompson
Plain History: The Astonishingly Successful Presidency of James K. Polk
Franklin D. Roosevelt came into office when the U.S. was facing one of its worst economic crises ever. And more than a decade later, he'd remade the federal government and the U.S. economy with the U.S. bestriding the planet on the verge of total victory in World War II at the pinnacle of our geopolitical power. Those are three excellent, excellent choices.
Plain English with Derek Thompson
Can a Vaccine Cure the World’s Deadliest Cancer?
I think this sets up our challenge nicely. Cancer is often immunologically invisible. It grows by evading the immune system, by disguising itself. And pancreatic cancer is particularly good at this disguise. So the challenge for cancer scientists here, I think, is made quite clear. How do we make pancreatic cancer visible to the immune system?
Plain English with Derek Thompson
Can a Vaccine Cure the World’s Deadliest Cancer?
How do we turn on enough T cells that our bodies can mount a sustained attack in the tumors? So this brings us to cancer vaccines. What's a cancer vaccine?
Plain English with Derek Thompson
Can a Vaccine Cure the World’s Deadliest Cancer?
Today, a landmark cancer vaccine and the race to solve one of the hardest problems in science. There is no such thing as a disease called cancer. Because cancer is not a disease, singular. It's not COVID or measles. Cancer is a category, an umbrella term covering hundreds and possibly thousands of what are better thought of as rare diseases. Take, for example, the thing we call lung cancer.
Plain English with Derek Thompson
Can a Vaccine Cure the World’s Deadliest Cancer?
So let's talk about your discovery. And I want to build up to last month's breakthrough slowly. Your lab studies rare survivors of pancreatic cancer. It studies them to understand how these survivors' immune systems are different. What have you found?
Plain English with Derek Thompson
Can a Vaccine Cure the World’s Deadliest Cancer?
So you find these group of super survivors and your goal is to replicate their immune system response for other patients. Why did you try to do this through RNA vaccines?
Plain English with Derek Thompson
Can a Vaccine Cure the World’s Deadliest Cancer?
All right, you build these RNA vaccines with your colleagues in biopharma. You conduct your first cancer vaccine clinical trial. Tell us what you did. Tell us what you found.
Plain English with Derek Thompson
Can a Vaccine Cure the World’s Deadliest Cancer?
So at the highest level, it seems like you've proved that a cancer vaccine, a personalized cancer vaccine, can teach certain patients' immune systems to recognize a previously unrecognizable cancer. That sounds exciting to me. What's most exciting about this result to you?
Plain English with Derek Thompson
Can a Vaccine Cure the World’s Deadliest Cancer?
Lung cancer as a category is very common. But there are at least a hundred distinct types of lung cancer, each unique in their molecular identity, proteins, or genetic mutations. It's sometimes said that the world is waiting on the cure for cancer, but this sentiment is off by one letter. The world is waiting on the cures for cancers.
Plain English with Derek Thompson
Can a Vaccine Cure the World’s Deadliest Cancer?
All this good news, and we still haven't covered the breakthrough that you reported in Nature last month. What did you discover in the last two years that demanded yet another positive update on these cancer vaccines?
Plain English with Derek Thompson
Can a Vaccine Cure the World’s Deadliest Cancer?
So people are familiar with RNA vaccines for COVID. How is this class of therapies that you're developing similar or different to the mRNA therapies that we know from Pfizer and Moderna?
Plain English with Derek Thompson
Can a Vaccine Cure the World’s Deadliest Cancer?
It's a fabulous answer. And it raises a question that with the COVID vaccines, we could scale them immensely with the understanding that you got the same COVID vaccine that I got, that my wife got, that my friend got. All the same shot, and it could be batched in one place and just mass manufactured. You cannot do that, by definition, with a personalized cancer vaccine.
Plain English with Derek Thompson
Can a Vaccine Cure the World’s Deadliest Cancer?
what is the hope in terms of scaling up these kinds of therapies? Because I can imagine someone listening to this and thinking, this is incredibly exciting, but if we have to resect a tumor and then send the genetic material to Germany And then in a few days or weeks, Germany sends back to the doctor's office the recipe for the novel proteins that are being spit out by this virus, by this cancer.
Plain English with Derek Thompson
Can a Vaccine Cure the World’s Deadliest Cancer?
We are waiting on a thousand perfect keys to pick a thousand stubborn locks. And today's episode is about the hardest lock of them all, pancreatic cancer. I will never forget the sunny Sunday morning in 2012 when I went out to brunch with my parents in Washington, D.C. I was 25 years old, and my mom, who was pretty much the cheeriest person in the world, was in a quiet and concerned mood.
Plain English with Derek Thompson
Can a Vaccine Cure the World’s Deadliest Cancer?
And now you have to develop a vaccine to take on those novel proteins. It sounds like a very complicated process. It will be difficult to scale for a patient population that counts in the hundreds of millions. What is the hope on scaling?
Plain English with Derek Thompson
Can a Vaccine Cure the World’s Deadliest Cancer?
Interesting. So it's sort of like, let's say that at a molecular level, we discover that there are basically, let's say, 30 types of pancreatic cancer. And you can just have those cancer vaccines all on a shelf. And I can have some genetic test that's done that gives my doctor a good sense that if I have this type of cancer, it's likely to be Pancreatic cancer type number 19.
Plain English with Derek Thompson
Can a Vaccine Cure the World’s Deadliest Cancer?
And so you can dose me even before you've resected anything because you have a good enough idea that I'm likely to be a good candidate for that particular dose. rare disease vaccine.
Plain English with Derek Thompson
Can a Vaccine Cure the World’s Deadliest Cancer?
Let's talk about some caveats here. First, to pick up on something you've said a few times, these vaccines are for secondary prevention. Can you spell that out?
Plain English with Derek Thompson
Can a Vaccine Cure the World’s Deadliest Cancer?
She'd been dealing with stomach pains that wouldn't go away. And her doctor had just run tests for several serious conditions. A few weeks later, she called me to deliver the news. A tumor on her pancreas. Cancer. Not operable. You have to promise me one thing, she said. You will not look up the survival rate for pancreatic cancer.
Plain English with Derek Thompson
Can a Vaccine Cure the World’s Deadliest Cancer?
The second caveat that I want us to hang with for a second is that you've alluded to the fact that this is not a randomized trial. This is a study that split patients into two groups, those who had a powerful immune response to the vaccine and those who didn't have a powerful response.
Plain English with Derek Thompson
Can a Vaccine Cure the World’s Deadliest Cancer?
And the patients with the stronger immune response tended to stay cancer-free for longer, which suggests that something is working. But maybe that something is the vaccine, and maybe that something is not the vaccine. We don't know for sure without an RCT.
Plain English with Derek Thompson
Can a Vaccine Cure the World’s Deadliest Cancer?
How in your research did you attempt to control for the possibility that the signal you were picking up on wasn't the effectiveness of the cancer vaccine at all, but rather just an underlying fact of the responder group having much stronger immune systems?
Plain English with Derek Thompson
Can a Vaccine Cure the World’s Deadliest Cancer?
Vaccines are an ancient technology. Edward Jenner invented, so to speak, discovered the first vaccine in the 1790s against smallpox. Cancer is very old, hundreds, thousands of years old. What makes this moment in personalized cancer vaccines so exciting for you?
Plain English with Derek Thompson
Can a Vaccine Cure the World’s Deadliest Cancer?
When we hung up the phone, obviously I looked up the survival rate. Nine in ten people diagnosed with this disease die within the next five years. Most die much sooner. And within 18 months, my mom is gone. Cancer's power lives in its camouflage, its subterfuge.
Plain English with Derek Thompson
Can a Vaccine Cure the World’s Deadliest Cancer?
Thank you for that breakdown. So what you've described are four pillars that in a way are four barriers to building a cancer vaccine. One, make the cancer visible to the immune system. Two, a vaccine platform, in this case, RNA. Three, target the right T cells, and finally figure out the patients who can mount an effective response. What does the frontier here look like?
Plain English with Derek Thompson
Can a Vaccine Cure the World’s Deadliest Cancer?
What's the next challenge that you're trying to solve for?
Plain English with Derek Thompson
Can a Vaccine Cure the World’s Deadliest Cancer?
The immune system is often compared to a military search and destroy operation, with our T-cells serving as something like expert snipers, hunting down antigens and seeking them out. But cancer kills so many of us because it looks so much like us. In his book, The Song of the Cell, Siddhartha Mukherjee says that what makes cancers so hard to treat is their invisibility.
Plain English with Derek Thompson
Can a Vaccine Cure the World’s Deadliest Cancer?
And you, Vinod, what are you personally most excited for in the world of cancer vaccines?
Plain English with Derek Thompson
Can a Vaccine Cure the World’s Deadliest Cancer?
Vinod Balachandran, thank you so much.
Plain English with Derek Thompson
Can a Vaccine Cure the World’s Deadliest Cancer?
Many thanks to Vinod Balachandran. One thing I'm taking away from this episode is this concept of immunological invisibility. This idea that cancer is so deadly in part because of how it disguises itself from our immune system. And therefore, one job of cancer vaccines is to make cancer's proteins revisible to the immune system, to teach our T cells and our bodies to recognize
Plain English with Derek Thompson
Can a Vaccine Cure the World’s Deadliest Cancer?
antigens that they would otherwise be blind to. It's such an interesting challenge to try to solve for, and I'm very excited to do more shows on the frontier of immunotherapy, checkpoint inhibitors, and all the various ways that we're trying to teach our immune systems to be not just human, but superhuman, to see cancers, even where cancers try to be invisible from us. We'll talk to you next week.
Plain English with Derek Thompson
Can a Vaccine Cure the World’s Deadliest Cancer?
The proteins that cancer cells make are, with a few exceptions, the same ones made by normal cells, except cancer cells distort the function of these proteins and hijack the cells toward malignant growth. This double-headed problem, cancer's kinship to the self and its invisibility, is the oncologist's nemesis.
Plain English with Derek Thompson
Can a Vaccine Cure the World’s Deadliest Cancer?
To attack a cancer, one has to first make it re-visible, to coin a word, to the immune system. End quote. In this way, pancreatic cancer is the invisible emperor of all maladies. Almost no other disease is so good at hiding itself from the immune system for so long. Now here's the good news.
Plain English with Derek Thompson
Can a Vaccine Cure the World’s Deadliest Cancer?
This might be the brightest moment for progress in pancreatic cancer research in decades, and possibly ever. In the last few years, scientists have developed new drugs that target the key gene mutation responsible for out-of-control cell growth.
Plain English with Derek Thompson
Can a Vaccine Cure the World’s Deadliest Cancer?
Recently, a team of scientists at Oregon Health and Science University claimed to have developed a blood test that is 85% accurate at early stage detection of pancreatic cancer. This is absolutely critical given how advanced the cancer typically is by the time it's caught. And last month, a research center at Memorial Sloan Kettering published a truly extraordinary paper
Plain English with Derek Thompson
Can a Vaccine Cure the World’s Deadliest Cancer?
Hey folks, first a programming note. I'm going to be on the road traveling around the country talking about Abundance, the book I co-wrote with Ezra Klein, for much of the month of March and April. We'll be in New York City, then Cambridge, D.C., L.A.,
Plain English with Derek Thompson
Can a Vaccine Cure the World’s Deadliest Cancer?
Using mRNA technology similar to the COVID vaccines, a team of scientists designed a personalized therapy to buff up the immune systems of people with pancreatic cancer. Patients who responded to this treatment, this cancer vaccine, saw results that boggled the mind. 75% of the responders were cancer-free three years after their initial treatment.
Plain English with Derek Thompson
Can a Vaccine Cure the World’s Deadliest Cancer?
Not just alive, mind you, which would be its own minor miracle, but cancer-free. The vaccine, administered within a regimen of standard drugs, stood up to the deadliest cancer of them all and seemed to have won. And today's guest is the head of that research center, the surgical oncologist Vinod Balachandran. The concept of a personalized cancer vaccine is still unproven at scale.
Plain English with Derek Thompson
Can a Vaccine Cure the World’s Deadliest Cancer?
But if it works, the potential is enormous. Because again, cancer does not exist as a singular disease. Cancer is a category of rare diseases, many of which are exquisitely specific to the molecular mosaic of the patient. Cancers are personal. And perhaps in a few years, our cures for cancers will be equally personalized. I'm Derek Thompson. This is Plain English.
Plain English with Derek Thompson
Can a Vaccine Cure the World’s Deadliest Cancer?
Vinod Balachandran, welcome to the show.
Plain English with Derek Thompson
Can a Vaccine Cure the World’s Deadliest Cancer?
I'd love you to help me understand why pancreatic cancer is so lethal from the perspective of an oncologist. So we have thrown billions and billions of dollars into cancer research and clinical trials, and pancreatic cancer deaths are just going up. Why has the scientific cavalry failed to make a dent in this cancer?
Plain English with Derek Thompson
Can a Vaccine Cure the World’s Deadliest Cancer?
Silicon Valley, San Francisco, Seattle, Chicago, Atlanta, Chapel Hill, and then back to New York with maybe a couple other book events added throughout the spring and early summer. I'm incredibly excited for this book to be live in the world. I'm incredibly excited to talk about this book. We're going to include a link to the Simon & Schuster abundance tour in the episode notes.
Plain English with Derek Thompson
Can a Vaccine Cure the World’s Deadliest Cancer?
Let's tell this story then. In oncology, you have these waves of treatment as you describe them, chemotherapy, then targeted therapy, then immunotherapy. I think most people know about chemotherapy, but pick up the story there. What is targeted therapy and immunotherapy and how have those frontiers failed in the quest to take on pancreatic cancer?
Plain English with Derek Thompson
Can a Vaccine Cure the World’s Deadliest Cancer?
What this means, though, for the show is that I'm just going to be really busy for the next five weeks. So we're going to reduce the frequency of Plain English episodes to once a week through about the middle of April. I expect that around then I'll be able to have time to do two shows a week because I love doing the show.
Plain English with Derek Thompson
Can a Vaccine Cure the World’s Deadliest Cancer?
Why? What makes pancreatic cancer so resistant to this type of treatment?
Plain English with Derek Thompson
Can a Vaccine Cure the World’s Deadliest Cancer?
As I was reading about immunotherapy, and in particular about the challenge of teaching our T cells to recognize antigens, to recognize cancer as an enemy rather than a self, it seemed to me like there's this dance that's going on that I thought of a little bit like red light, green light. If there's no infection in our bodies, T cells don't need to attack healthy cells, red light.
Plain English with Derek Thompson
Can a Vaccine Cure the World’s Deadliest Cancer?
If we get a virus or a bacteria and our immune system clicks on and mounts a defense, the T cells turn on, like T cell green light. But cancer's sneaky. It can hide from the immune system, and it sometimes produces proteins that block those T cells that turn the green light back into a red light. But these checkpoint inhibitors, they remove that block.
Plain English with Derek Thompson
Can a Vaccine Cure the World’s Deadliest Cancer?
They flip the green light back on so the T cells can do their job and fight the cancer. Is that one way to see the game here? It's about how do we use medicine to turn on our T cells when cancer is so good at turning them off?
Plain English with Derek Thompson
Can a Vaccine Cure the World’s Deadliest Cancer?
So wanted to make sure that you knew we're going down to about one episode a week for the next few weeks as I go around the country to talk about abundance. And if you're in, especially Atlanta, Chapel Hill, Seattle, Chicago, New York, I know that there are a few tickets left in those cities. We would love to see you there.
Pod Save America
Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson on How Democrats Can Build Their Way Back to Power
That's a true department of government efficiency. And then the last thing I guess I would say is, you know, the book is... very detailed about how government fails and how to make government better.
Pod Save America
Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson on How Democrats Can Build Their Way Back to Power
But to your point about speech writing and meeting people in the moment at the level of meme and vibes and emotions, I also think that toward the end in our conclusion, we have this history that we tell about political orders, about how America's changed in the last 100 years with a New Deal order that rose between the 1930s and the 1960s and a neoliberal order that was overseen by Ronald Reagan.
Pod Save America
Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson on How Democrats Can Build Their Way Back to Power
And one thought that I had as I was sort of thinking about these two big political orders that have defined American history in the last century is that each one defined freedom for its own time. You know, Franklin D. Roosevelt said, you know, he talked about the four freedoms, freedom of speech, freedom of belief, from want, from fear. And then Ronald Reagan redefined freedom in the 1980s.
Pod Save America
Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson on How Democrats Can Build Their Way Back to Power
Freedom didn't mean a kind of positive freedom. It was about freedom from the government. I do think that it's not too cheap to say that successful political movements often succeed by defining freedom in the terms that the age demands.
Pod Save America
Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson on How Democrats Can Build Their Way Back to Power
Right now, I think that one of the main issues that Americans have, the main internal crisis of America, which in many ways define the 2024 election, is unaffordability. And at the core of unaffordability is housing. It's the biggest part of a typical family's budget, of almost any family's budget, is rent or mortgage.
Pod Save America
Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson on How Democrats Can Build Their Way Back to Power
Donald Trump won the unaffordability election and he's immediately driving up prices with his trade policy. I think that housing policy is about freedom.
Pod Save America
Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson on How Democrats Can Build Their Way Back to Power
the freedom to live where you want to live, the freedom to stay where you want to stay, the freedom to not feel burdened by costs, especially the cost that's the most important and emotionally intimate part of your life, the walls around your body and the ceiling and the roof.
Pod Save America
Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson on How Democrats Can Build Their Way Back to Power
And redefining freedom, I think, for our own age through abundance is a message that I think politicians can click into because it does show that we're not just talking about fixing government here and there with this sort of pointillist agenda. We are after something bigger and more capacious. And I think politicians are seeing it right now.
Pod Save America
Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson on How Democrats Can Build Their Way Back to Power
I was going to say, yeah.
Pod Save America
Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson on How Democrats Can Build Their Way Back to Power
Of course there is. It's been really interesting reading some of these reviews and discovering within the critical reviews a kind of memoir of the author's ideology. We read books not as they are but as we are. That is precisely what I meant to say but with shorter words. And so, of course, someone interested in antitrust is going to read our book about abundance, the future of America.
Pod Save America
Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson on How Democrats Can Build Their Way Back to Power
and say, why isn't there a chapter or seven on antitrust? And someone who's coming from a place of, I'm a democratic socialist, why isn't there a chapter or seven about how democratic socialism is the best way to run a country? I understand that.
Pod Save America
Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson on How Democrats Can Build Their Way Back to Power
I think the fair thing to say is that we are, in many ways, asking for a set of reforms that live alongside the existing welfare state and a strong antitrust enforcement in a beautiful way. I mean, chocolate, peanut butter, and whatever, raspberry jam, that seems like maybe would be like a good trio. These are tastes that absolutely go well together.
Pod Save America
Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson on How Democrats Can Build Their Way Back to Power
Just because there's an issue that people care about that isn't a full chapter of the book doesn't mean it's not important to me and Ezra. We talk in the book about wanting these policies to fundamentally help people's lives. We are not interested in an abundance of things that fill a house. We're interested in an abundance of homes.
Pod Save America
Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson on How Democrats Can Build Their Way Back to Power
There's no chapter about making it easier to build as many flat screen televisions as possible. We're interested in the most important material conditions of people's lives. To that end...
Pod Save America
Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson on How Democrats Can Build Their Way Back to Power
Of course we support the Earned Income Tax Credit, and universal healthcare, and social security, and we want to protect Medicare and Medicaid, and even expand the Child Tax Credit, which would be absolutely fantastic, not only for reducing poverty in this country, but also helping working class families afford to live in the cities that they live. All these policies are worthy.
Pod Save America
Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson on How Democrats Can Build Their Way Back to Power
But at the same time, One frustration that I've had with the reviews is that they don't see clearly that what we're trying to do at the end of the day is to help liberal government achieve liberal ends more efficiently. Just quick example. 2021, Joe Biden signs a bipartisan infrastructure bill.
Pod Save America
Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson on How Democrats Can Build Their Way Back to Power
He and Pete Buttigieg call it, rightly, the most important infrastructure bill passed in the last several generations. There's $42 billion that are earmarked for rural broadband construction to help the most poor and outside of mainstream metropolitan America people hook up to the internet so that they can lead richer lives, get in touch with doctors when they need to.
Pod Save America
Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson on How Democrats Can Build Their Way Back to Power
This is a classic progressive agenda. What happens is that four calendar years later now, Practically nobody's been hooked up to rural broadband.
Pod Save America
Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson on How Democrats Can Build Their Way Back to Power
And it's because the way the program worked out through the Commerce Department is that there was a 14-step process that began with the FCC drawing a map and ended with the states essentially begging the Commerce Department for money and being told, nope, you didn't file that paperwork correctly. Nope, there's a bureaucratic issue there. Nope, you have to refile it. Yada, yada, yada.
Pod Save America
Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson on How Democrats Can Build Their Way Back to Power
Nothing is built. Donald Trump is trying to take over the program, shut it down, and hand the whole thing to Elon Musk. We want government to work. If government has progressive aims and it can't accomplish them, you can't blame the oligarchy for that. You can't blame monopolies for that. You can't blame- Especially if you control the government. If you control the government.
Pod Save America
Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson on How Democrats Can Build Their Way Back to Power
You certainly can't say the reason we didn't accomplish this is that we don't have a welfare state akin to Denmark. We failed to accomplish this program because government got in its way and was subsumed with the kind of everything bagel liberalism that Ezra's written about so eloquently.
Pod Save America
Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson on How Democrats Can Build Their Way Back to Power
So this is where I think the emphasis on, well, you should talk more about antitrust and welfare states, misses a core function of this book, which is to say if you're trying to build a progressive political movement, you should be obsessed with making political power work for liberals because when it doesn't, the public will notice.
Pod Save America
Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson on How Democrats Can Build Their Way Back to Power
And when they notice, they either won't vote for you or they will literally vote in the most expensive way with their feet and spend thousands of dollars leaving the states and cities that you govern.
Pod Save America
Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson on How Democrats Can Build Their Way Back to Power
Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.
Pod Save America
Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson on How Democrats Can Build Their Way Back to Power
I absolutely disagree with that.
Pod Save America
Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson on How Democrats Can Build Their Way Back to Power
Bernie Sanders. I mean, tell me if you if you disagree with this, this interpretation. Bernie Sanders seems to be objectively the most popular figure in the Democratic Party right now. He runs against the Democratic Party every day. So this idea that Democrats should be afraid of self-criticism makes absolutely no sense to me in the context of the most famous self-critic of the Democratic Party
Pod Save America
Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson on How Democrats Can Build Their Way Back to Power
being objectively the most popular. Donald Trump, who ran against the Republican Party.
Pod Save America
Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson on How Democrats Can Build Their Way Back to Power
Let's have someone give it a shot. I don't know that it's going to work. I don't consider myself like some part-time political consultant. But like I said before, I do think that the Biden-Harris model fell into a trap of finding itself in defense of a status quo that they knew to be unpopular. And that's a terrible position to be in.
Pod Save America
Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson on How Democrats Can Build Their Way Back to Power
You've wiggled your way into the one corner that you know won't be majoritarian popular because people are upset at the system.
Pod Save America
Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson on How Democrats Can Build Their Way Back to Power
Right.
Pod Save America
Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson on How Democrats Can Build Their Way Back to Power
It's a complicated question. You know, something has happened in the last 50 years of liberalism that has marked a really clear shift in its character. If you go back 100 years to the beginning of the New Deal era, America was building like crazy. We were building roads. We were building bridges. We were building energy. We built and built and built.
Pod Save America
Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson on How Democrats Can Build Their Way Back to Power
Jared Polis in Colorado, Josh Shapiro certainly in Pennsylvania. Shapiro, in particular, not only features in a chapter for his work on I-95, repairing the I-95 bridge that fell down. Project should have taken 12 to 24 months under normal conditions because of the emergency declaration that he announced. It was instead rebuilt in 12 days.
Pod Save America
Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson on How Democrats Can Build Their Way Back to Power
Great example of the kind of abundance liberalism that we're pointing to, the kind of get shit done liberalism that we're advancing. I've seen in the last few weeks he's sent a bunch of tweets that are all about essentially making government work faster, reducing permitting times.
Pod Save America
Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson on How Democrats Can Build Their Way Back to Power
I mean, I think in many ways the policies that he's announced just in the last week since the book came out are policies that you could absolutely tie in a bow and label abundance-pilled, not to suggest that he's only doing them because the book came out, of course. So I think there are great examples there. Westmore has been interested here.
Pod Save America
Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson on How Democrats Can Build Their Way Back to Power
Westmore, Richie Torres, the representative from New York, in response to- Jake Auchincloss. Jake Auchincloss, who we've both spoken to. He's been on Ezra's show. Richie Torres, in response to Ezra's colleague asking, where's the Project 2029 of the Democratic Party, just tweeted the cover of this book, which is, A, I guess, wonderful advertising that we certainly did not ask him to do, but B-
Pod Save America
Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson on How Democrats Can Build Their Way Back to Power
And sometime around the 1960s, 1970s, the character of liberalism changed and the politics of building gave way to a different kind of politics that we think of as the politics of blocking, essentially. You had the rise of environmental laws, which were very important in their age. The 1940s and 1950s were absolutely heinously disgusting. We needed a Clean Air and Water Act.
Pod Save America
Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson on How Democrats Can Build Their Way Back to Power
a great example of someone representing that the ideas of this book are central to his idea of the future of the Democratic Party. So I think that the early nominees abound, and right now they're mostly at the governor and representative level, but I think it's growing. I think people are picking up. In an interesting way, there are some politicians
Pod Save America
Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson on How Democrats Can Build Their Way Back to Power
who have read this book in a clearer way than some of the critics, which is to say that we ask people very explicitly in the conclusion to see this book not as a list of the perfect policies to work everywhere, but rather as a lens that someone in San Francisco can look through that lens and see the right policies to increase housing production in San Francisco.
Pod Save America
Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson on How Democrats Can Build Their Way Back to Power
And then someone in Georgia can look through that lens and see the right policies to increase clean battery manufacturing in Georgia. And someone can look through that lens in the Commerce Department and say, next time we want to spend $40 billion in rural broadband, let's get that money out in nine months rather than not get the money out at all in four years. I see a lot of people...
Pod Save America
Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson on How Democrats Can Build Their Way Back to Power
reading the project as it was intended, as a kind of mimetic inspiration for them to apply their own ideas about how is this going to work in Maryland? How is this going to work for upstate New York? How is this going to work for Pennsylvania? And I think that's cool. And it makes me optimistic that there's a lot of people that are reading the book in the way that we intended to be read.
Pod Save America
Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson on How Democrats Can Build Their Way Back to Power
We needed Need Before It's Time. We needed ways to protect endangered species. But the rules that we wrote in the 1960s to protect the environment have created strictures and rules that keep us from building the things we need in the 2020s, like houses and energy.
Pod Save America
Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson on How Democrats Can Build Their Way Back to Power
There was also a legal change that we get into in detail in the book, where we made it easier for neighbors to control what could and couldn't be built around them.
Pod Save America
Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson on How Democrats Can Build Their Way Back to Power
And when neighbors have the ability to say no to any new development that might have a chance of creating new construction headaches or adding new parking headaches or maybe even reducing the value of their homes, when you give that power at the local level, it has the ability to stop development entirely And that's really what we've seen in so many areas that are governed by liberals.
Pod Save America
Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson on How Democrats Can Build Their Way Back to Power
I mean, the five states with the highest rates of homelessness are all governed by Democrats. There was a study that my colleague Yoni Applebaum talked about in a recent cover story in The Atlantic that found that in the state of California, every single time a city adds 10% vote share of progressives, the number of housing permits declines by 30%.
Pod Save America
Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson on How Democrats Can Build Their Way Back to Power
So as an area becomes more liberal, it permits fewer homes. So I think, as Ezra said, it's so important, I think, to look very clearly in the mirror and say we're at this moment right now where the opposition to Donald Trump needs to be popular and effective.
Pod Save America
Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson on How Democrats Can Build Their Way Back to Power
And right now we have a Democratic Party that is incredibly historically unpopular and also incredibly ineffective in the places that it holds the most power, like New York. and California and Oregon. And so it's really important, I think, not just to have a movement that can criticize Donald Trump effectively, but also have a movement that can say, give us power because we've earned it.
Pod Save America
Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson on How Democrats Can Build Their Way Back to Power
Give us power because we deserve it. Give us power because when we have it, we can build the things that are most important, houses, energy, even science and technology.
Pod Save America
Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson on How Democrats Can Build Their Way Back to Power
I think the politics of abundance meets this moment somewhat perfectly. I think when you look at the economic agenda of Donald Trump, or maybe let's be more accurately said, the personality of Donald Trump, which is manifesting itself in what appears to be some kind of economic policy, it is just one example of scarcity after another. I mean, this man...
Pod Save America
Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson on How Democrats Can Build Their Way Back to Power
does not believe in the concept of a positive-sum interaction at all. He doesn't believe in the concept of cooperation. I don't think it's any surprise that when you look at his economic agenda, you see him constantly identifying elements of scarcity and then trying to take something else away. He says, we don't have enough manufacturing, so what we need to do is have less trade.
Pod Save America
Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson on How Democrats Can Build Their Way Back to Power
We don't have enough housing, so what we need are fewer immigrants. We don't have enough money. There's really high debts. What we need is less health care for poor people by cutting Medicaid. There's a lot of let's solve this scarcity here by taking away something that America needs. And I think that by juxtaposition, abundance is the exact opposite message. Yes, we don't have enough houses.
Pod Save America
Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson on How Democrats Can Build Their Way Back to Power
Let's fucking build more. Yes, we don't have enough manufacturing of some critical goods that are essential to national security. Let's have an explicit policy to encourage their construction in America, not by cutting off trade, but rather by working with our allies, our trading partners, to build an industrial base that can take on the future. So I see that being a very, very close fit.
Pod Save America
Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson on How Democrats Can Build Their Way Back to Power
I also frankly see the way this book sits alongside Doge as being very apt, right? You have right now in government, nominally, a department of government efficiency, but it's basically a department of just slamming government to the ground and then grabbing whatever can be discovered in the ruins for Elon Musk, right?
Pod Save America
Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson on How Democrats Can Build Their Way Back to Power
So I think by contrast, we're talking about a vision of government efficiency that is very explicit. going into specific programs, whether it's the CHIPS and Science Act, high-speed rail in California, and saying, this is how government isn't achieving its ends right now. And if we are going to be the party that believes in government, we have to be the party that makes government work.
The Bill Simmons Podcast
The Future of Everything With Derek Thompson
This new reality that liberals are coming to terms with the fact that we have been too obsessed with only talking to ourselves, with this purity of insularity. And maybe in the next four years, our job is to build a coalition by accepting people who don't entirely agree with us, who sometimes use the quote unquote wrong word.
The Bill Simmons Podcast
The Future of Everything With Derek Thompson
It's really important, I think, to be more flexible about a big, big tent strategy.
The Bill Simmons Podcast
The Future of Everything With Derek Thompson
Yeah, so the term abundance came from an article that I wrote three years ago called The Abundance Agenda. And basically, I was standing outside in February or January of 2022 waiting in line for rationed COVID tests and just getting really fucking upset because I was like, we're two years into this pandemic. We don't have enough COVID tests. Before that, we didn't have enough COVID vaccines.
The Bill Simmons Podcast
The Future of Everything With Derek Thompson
Before that, we didn't have enough masks or PPE. This pandemic has just been one scarcity after another. And as I'm sitting in line and moving my feet and getting really angry at the world, I was thinking, it's not just the pandemic, actually. that's seen this sort of crisis of scarcity, there's not enough housing in the cities that need it most.
The Bill Simmons Podcast
The Future of Everything With Derek Thompson
We don't have enough PCPs, enough general care doctors in this country because for a variety of reasons, we shrink the number of residency slots or cap the number of residency slots and thereby restrict the number of people that can become doctors to allow doctors to have a higher wage or at least had this law that did that a couple decades ago that's been really, really bad in terms of doctor abundance.
The Bill Simmons Podcast
The Future of Everything With Derek Thompson
And over and over again, I just saw in clean energy and housing and healthcare, this really has been like the century of manufactured scarcity, scarcity that we didn't deserve. And so I thought what we need to answer this is an abundance agenda.
The Bill Simmons Podcast
The Future of Everything With Derek Thompson
We need a movement that combines, say, elements of liberalism with the sort of fervor for national greatness on the right with this sense that libertarians have of trying to find bad rules that exist in the world and pull them out. So I call it The Abundance Agenda. And yeah, long story short, Ezra Klein and I knew each other. He reached out. He said, I'm interested in these ideas.
The Bill Simmons Podcast
The Future of Everything With Derek Thompson
Do you want to write a book together? And I said, yes. And I think right now the concept of abundance is really interesting because Donald Trump ran to, by his own term, to make America great again, to create a golden age for America.
The Bill Simmons Podcast
The Future of Everything With Derek Thompson
But when I look at some of his policies, he says we don't have enough housing, so what we need is fewer immigrants, or we don't have enough manufacturing in this country, so we need less trade. Maybe he'll say we don't have, our debt is a big problem, so we need to spend less on healthcare. And it just kind of seems to me like he has this less is less mentality.
The Bill Simmons Podcast
The Future of Everything With Derek Thompson
And, you know, against that, juxtaposed to that, I think it's really interesting to think about liberals becoming a movement of more is more, right? A movement of abundance. And so that's where the idea came from. And that's how I sort of see it clicking into the news cycle today.
The Bill Simmons Podcast
The Future of Everything With Derek Thompson
We did not. No, we saw each other for a total of like maybe 11 hours in person.
The Bill Simmons Podcast
The Future of Everything With Derek Thompson
Yeah, we kind of broke the book down into two. We joked at the beginning of the process that the book might end up being a little bit like, remember the Outkast album, Speaker Box, Love Below, where Andre 3000 took one half of the album and Big Boy took the other half of the album? This book is a little- Who is Big Boy in this? Not getting into that one.
The Bill Simmons Podcast
The Future of Everything With Derek Thompson
I guess I would like to think that I'm Andre 3000. But yeah, so we both basically wrote the introduction by, I drafted it, sent it to him, he redrafted, sent it back to me, I redrafted. Same kind of thing with the conclusion. And then with the middle of the book, we kind of just had one person be the CEO of those chapters. So Ezra was kind of the CEO of the chapters about housing and energy.
The Bill Simmons Podcast
The Future of Everything With Derek Thompson
We definitely leaned a lot on his work on this chapter about how to make liberal governance better. And then there are chapters about science and technology. And I'm really deep in reporting on science and technology. And so I was the CEO of those chapters. And so we did a lot of cross-editing.
The Bill Simmons Podcast
The Future of Everything With Derek Thompson
But I would say there's definitely, there was like a mutual understanding between us that one person was going to be the primary drafter of each individual chapter.
The Bill Simmons Podcast
The Future of Everything With Derek Thompson
It is. And in fact, just like Speakerbox Love Below, Ezra narrates the first half of the book and I narrate the second half of the book. So I guess maybe in this context, I am big boy because I think his CD came second in that album, that double album. But yeah, we recorded it separately.
The Bill Simmons Podcast
The Future of Everything With Derek Thompson
I think Bill Clinton was genuinely inspiring in 1991, 1992. I was six years old at the time. So this is just my sense.
The Bill Simmons Podcast
The Future of Everything With Derek Thompson
And then the obvious answer is when I was graduating from college in Northwestern, Barack Obama was an absolute sensation. And so I would say that Obama might have, at least at the moment for me, felt like the most... movementy president of the post JFK era. All right.
The Bill Simmons Podcast
The Future of Everything With Derek Thompson
I think you put your finger on something pretty important. And tell me if you agree with this interpretation. We have a story in the book about how in the 1960s and 1970s, there was a legal revolution on the liberal side where you had an amazing growth of lawyers, the 1960s, 1970s, who went into law in order to be progressives. They were like, I'm going into law for the Civil Rights Act.
The Bill Simmons Podcast
The Future of Everything With Derek Thompson
I'm going into law for environmentalism. Since then, Bill, Think about all the lawyers that have run for president or won the presidency on the Democratic side. Kamala Harris, lawyer. Bill Clinton, lawyer. Barack Obama, constitutional law professor. I think since Jimmy Carter, it's just basically been a very long line of lawyers or people who you basically associate with lawyers.
The Bill Simmons Podcast
The Future of Everything With Derek Thompson
Hillary Clinton, lawyer, again. Democrats have become the party of rules and Republicans become the party of bad boy outsiders, right? Like people coming in to crash the system. And there's something inspiring about that inherently, about the idea of someone coming in from the outside to crash the system. In a way, going back to Dirty Harry and Rambo, that was the appeal.
The Bill Simmons Podcast
The Future of Everything With Derek Thompson
These guys aren't of the institutions that are boring and staid and sclerotic and broken. These are the outsider heroes. And I think the Democrats do, to your very point, have an issue with being so legalistic, not just in terms of their outlook and how they think about process and politics, but also just who they put up to bat to become president.
The Bill Simmons Podcast
The Future of Everything With Derek Thompson
It's a lot of people who look like they're essentially auditioning to edit the law review rather than win a popularity contest among people that increasingly are going to be getting their information from TikTok and Instagram. And I think that there's like, you know, I didn't go to law school. My dad was a lawyer, so my best friends were lawyers.
The Bill Simmons Podcast
The Future of Everything With Derek Thompson
I'm definitely not anti-lawyer, but certainly law school and being a lawyer teaches you to practice a certain kind of care, right? A certain kind of carefulness. I think that kind of, that carefulness is actually a real kryptonite for political success these days. Carefulness makes you look like you're a phony, makes you look like there's strings attached to you.
The Bill Simmons Podcast
The Future of Everything With Derek Thompson
It's interesting. Ezra and I had a conversation maybe, I don't know, I guess a full year ago now where the book was being extended, right? Ezra and I were just, we were busy. I was doing my podcast. He was doing his podcast. We couldn't quite finish the book in time. The book was supposed to come out just before the Democratic National Convention happened. of last year.
The Bill Simmons Podcast
The Future of Everything With Derek Thompson
Say what you want about Donald Trump, but the man is... fantastically disinhibited, no strings attached. He says whatever comes to his mind.
The Bill Simmons Podcast
The Future of Everything With Derek Thompson
And there seems to be maybe in this age of social media and TikTok and people loving the performance of authenticity, something that's holding, to your point, Democrats back if they're essentially going to treat every presidential contest as who's America's next top lawyer.
The Bill Simmons Podcast
The Future of Everything With Derek Thompson
And you're not allowed to criticize one of the least popular presidents in American history.
The Bill Simmons Podcast
The Future of Everything With Derek Thompson
Bernie Sanders, love him or hate him, is fundamentally sincere. The anger that he has toward billionaires, the anger that he feels about capitalism, the frustration that he feels with the Democratic Party, none of that is faked.
The Bill Simmons Podcast
The Future of Everything With Derek Thompson
And I remember thinking like, man, it's too bad that our book can't come out and shape the messaging for the Democratic Party in 2024. At this point, for better or for worse, and there's certainly a lot of worse if you're a Democrat, I think there's a moment right now where there's a lot of people asking, what's the future of the Democratic Party? We're polling at 29% according to CNN.
The Bill Simmons Podcast
The Future of Everything With Derek Thompson
I was talking about this with Ezra the other day, and I don't know how you feel about this theory, that in a weird way, sincerity, or certainly the performance of sincerity is becoming more important in politics today. Kamala Harris struggled with sincerity. There was a sense of like, you're not Joe Biden,
The Bill Simmons Podcast
The Future of Everything With Derek Thompson
We tried very hard to make sure Joe Biden wasn't on the ticket, but also you can't criticize Joe Biden or say any way that you're different than him. There's clearly strings attached to you. You're not saying how you feel. You were on the team. With Bernie Sanders, there's something really wonderfully sincere about his politics, even though they are not my politics. Donald Trump,
The Bill Simmons Podcast
The Future of Everything With Derek Thompson
He's a he's a bullshitter extraordinaire. But I think there's something very sincere about the degree to which he hates elites. He's the Queens guy who never felt accepted by the Manhattan Club. And he hates those guys and has been waiting to have the opportunity to get back at them. And so when he talks about hating the liberal elite, it's not faked at all. And people can feel it.
The Bill Simmons Podcast
The Future of Everything With Derek Thompson
That authenticity just it oozes out of him. And so I think you're right. I think the next big democratic leader is either gonna be someone who comes from within the system, who has a very sincere critique of the system, Bernie Sanders style, right? I'm a senator, I've been a senator for a long time, but I'm not one of those guys. I'm not an insider.
The Bill Simmons Podcast
The Future of Everything With Derek Thompson
I can criticize the system because I'm so mad at it. or are you gonna have a real true outsider, right? I don't know what the Donald Trump of the Democratic Party looks like. There's people like Mark Cuban who it's certainly seen like they're circling for a run. I think his vibe is very different than Donald Trump's, but you're going to see, I think, folks like him
The Bill Simmons Podcast
The Future of Everything With Derek Thompson
who are essentially celebrities, even reality show celebrities, who are not politicians, but have just dabbled a little bit in political communications, who jump into the race in 2027 and are like, I'm not touched by anything the Democrats have done. I've never sat on a committee. I've never cast a vote. So I can criticize all the things that I'm mad about with California and DC and New York.
The Bill Simmons Podcast
The Future of Everything With Derek Thompson
I think it's either going to be like an outsider who's on the inside or an actual true outsider.
The Bill Simmons Podcast
The Future of Everything With Derek Thompson
Bill, it's going to be amazing if the Luka Doncic trade is the most important political issue of 2028. Are you just going to be like a pig in shit? Is that just going to be like the best possible moment for you?
The Bill Simmons Podcast
The Future of Everything With Derek Thompson
I'm fascinated by what I'm going to call the end of the Moneyball era. So the first few decades of the 21st century in sports, if you were going to write some kind of history, I think you'd call it the Moneyball era, right? It's the era of analytics. And analytics proved so powerful, not just for producing wins, like Michael Lewis described in his original book, but for changing the game itself.
The Bill Simmons Podcast
The Future of Everything With Derek Thompson
In baseball, famously, singles reach an all-time low, strikeouts reach an all-time high. Data's changed pitching and pitching angles and arm angles and launch angles for hitters. The three true outcomes are through the roof. And then in basketball, also famously, it's led to the rise of threes.
The Bill Simmons Podcast
The Future of Everything With Derek Thompson
It's the lowest overall approval for the Democratic Party in the history of the time series. A lot of folks asking, you know, where does the party go from here? What's the future of liberalism? And, you know, Ezra and I just happened to have been asking each other this question for the last two and a half years of our lives and put it together in a book. Came out about 14 hours ago.
The Bill Simmons Podcast
The Future of Everything With Derek Thompson
As Maury Ball took over and everyone recognized, three is more than two, so even if your percentage is a little bit lower, it's much more efficient. In both those cases, the sport was optimized. It was solved like a math problem. And I think it's notable that, by the way, this didn't happen for football, right? Football dominates ratings for many reasons, many, many reasons.
The Bill Simmons Podcast
The Future of Everything With Derek Thompson
But one of them, I think, is that football is so freaking complicated that it's constantly evolving and changing rather than being optimized toward like a single endpoint. So that's the recent past. And my observation slash prediction here is that the era that we're entering into is
The Bill Simmons Podcast
The Future of Everything With Derek Thompson
is an era in which Moneyball is exhausted, data analytics teams are exhausted, there's no more advantages to eke out with just being more nerdy about math, and the sports are going to push back against the nerds. And so in baseball, we're already seeing this, right? We're seeing pitching timers and pitching clocks and bigger bases and fewer defensive shifts.
The Bill Simmons Podcast
The Future of Everything With Derek Thompson
Essentially, we're creating human rules to push back against the mathematical machine. And now in December, and you know much more about this than I do, but Adam Silver on Fox Sports says they're now talking inside the commissioner's office about the fact that there are too many threes, too much homogeneity in offensive strategies.
The Bill Simmons Podcast
The Future of Everything With Derek Thompson
They're asking Joe Dumars to come in, and he's already in, but to look at rolling out new rules. And what I think is really interesting about this is how it's going to change the conversation about sports. I think we spent so long optimizing for team winning that we denuded what made sports interesting. This is an observation from my friend Connor Sen. We've lost what made sports interesting.
The Bill Simmons Podcast
The Future of Everything With Derek Thompson
And the last piece to this is we sort of move into an age where we're going to fight back against math. And there's going to be more sort of human-driven interventions to make sports interesting and diverse and weird again, rather than everything accumulating toward the same style. Maybe two years ago, I came on your show and talked about the Bravo sports fan, right?
The Bill Simmons Podcast
The Future of Everything With Derek Thompson
The idea that the conversation around sports is becoming bigger than sports. I think this is going to be a new topic or a bigger topic of conversation, this sense that Math fixed sports in a very specific way. And now we need all hands on deck to push back against it. Because especially with baseball and basketball, the ratings are down. They're losing out to a sport in football.
The Bill Simmons Podcast
The Future of Everything With Derek Thompson
It's too complex to be optimized. And so I think you're going to have a deeper conversation about how do we make sports weird again and push back against the math nerds. So that's my prediction.
The Bill Simmons Podcast
The Future of Everything With Derek Thompson
It's called Abundance. And yeah, it's been fun talking about it.
The Bill Simmons Podcast
The Future of Everything With Derek Thompson
Bill, what you're describing is Bill GPT, right? You're the body language doctor. And what you're saying is I'm picking up- Right, I'm picking up on a bunch of like just subtextual clues. Like I can just kind of see like that guy when he scores makes a face that tells me he has the kind of determination to get much better between the ages of 19 and 23.
The Bill Simmons Podcast
The Future of Everything With Derek Thompson
So he's worth bumping up 10 spots in the draft.
The Bill Simmons Podcast
The Future of Everything With Derek Thompson
I will say, if every team has access to AI, you're going to have the same thing happen that happened with Moneyball, is that every team is going to think the exact same, and that advantage is going to get arbitrage to zero.
The Bill Simmons Podcast
The Future of Everything With Derek Thompson
So it's like, who are going to be the Golden State Warriors and Houston Rockets of using AI to automate body language doctoring? That's the next step.
The Bill Simmons Podcast
The Future of Everything With Derek Thompson
Yeah, the original intent, look, the book was always going to be a deep critique of the Democratic Party from two Democratic voters, a deep critique of modern liberalism from two guys who self-identify as liberal. And one of our critiques is just that the Democratic Party and liberals have gotten out of the business of building. This is an organization or a movement, a coalition.
The Bill Simmons Podcast
The Future of Everything With Derek Thompson
Well, you made me think of two very different things, but I love this idea. So first, a labor glut. if there aren't enough spaces for all the extraordinarily talented NBA players in today's league, a couple things can happen. One is that you rapidly add more teams.
The Bill Simmons Podcast
The Future of Everything With Derek Thompson
But the other is, I wonder, could we reach a point where there are simply so many exceptional basketball players that a second league becomes popular enough, can populate itself with enough extraordinary... Like the ABA 60 years ago. With enough extraordinarily talented players, and it doesn't even need to be the exact same as the NBA. It could be a three-on-three league, a four-on-four league.
The Bill Simmons Podcast
The Future of Everything With Derek Thompson
It could be a different kind of sport. But what you're saying is there are so many essentially B-plus to A-plus basketball players between the age of 19 and 40. that there aren't enough spots for them on an NBA court. And you can either add NBA teams, which will in some ways maybe dilute the quality of the NBA, or you can have an entirely separate product that some of these players actually go to.
The Bill Simmons Podcast
The Future of Everything With Derek Thompson
Maybe it's funded by Saudi money. Maybe it's funded by, you know, UAE money. Maybe it's just some other- It's a six-team league, you know. Right, some other way for 19-year-olds who are like, I'm really good, but I'm also probably, like my peak might be like winning sixth man of the year. Am I better off competing for six man of the year for the next, you know, 12 years of my life?
The Bill Simmons Podcast
The Future of Everything With Derek Thompson
Or should I be the star of a new league that is funded by, you know, some petro state? I'm not even trying to defend like some funded league.
The Bill Simmons Podcast
The Future of Everything With Derek Thompson
Yeah, I'm more making a sketching out a prediction rather than saying what I hope happens. You could absolutely see something like that happen because to a certain extent, what makes it work in golf is that there's just enough
The Bill Simmons Podcast
The Future of Everything With Derek Thompson
It's gotten really, really good at spending money and at judging success by how much money you spend. But it's brought us to a world where California brags about authorizing $30 billion to build a high-speed rail system that does not exist. Just two weeks ago, the mayor of Chicago bragged about spending $11 billion building 10,000 affordable housing units.
The Bill Simmons Podcast
The Future of Everything With Derek Thompson
very good golfers that are like basically in this very crowded top tier so that's one possibility that we could definitely talk about the other is this question of like where does value flow
The Bill Simmons Podcast
The Future of Everything With Derek Thompson
in an NBA where it's just not that hard to build the Houston Rockets, which is to say where it's not that hard to build a team that's exceptional and eight players deep and probably gonna get the third or second seed in the Western Conference. There's just enough, there's enough talent for maybe 20 teams to be the Houston Rockets. Where does value flow in that world?
The Bill Simmons Podcast
The Future of Everything With Derek Thompson
And it makes me think like, you know, it's a total cliche to be like, you know, coaching matters. But is it possible that like coaching matters more in a world where there's, as you put it, a labor glut around the B plus, A minus player? Like, for example, in a parallel universe where every NBA basketball player was Quinton Grimes, right? Every player was just a clone of Grimes.
The Bill Simmons Podcast
The Future of Everything With Derek Thompson
Where would value flow in that league? There'd be no value in being Quentin Grimes. Literally everyone is the exact same player. The value would entirely be at the level of the coaching quality. And so in a world where you have just so many very, very good, but maybe not super duper star, you know, Gildas Alexander stars, but just a bunch of like top 50 style players.
The Bill Simmons Podcast
The Future of Everything With Derek Thompson
Is that a world where actually coaching is incredibly valuable? Where owners should be paying 20, 30, 50 million dollars to grab Spolstra and bring it to their team. Because it's just that game changing to have a coordinating genius at that level rather than just accumulate a bunch of really talented athletic 6'6 guys.
The Bill Simmons Podcast
The Future of Everything With Derek Thompson
And this is exactly where Bill GPT comes into the picture, right? You're saying we need some technology for scanning physiology and saying, you know, you have a Kevin Durant body. No, you have a Wemba Nyama body or you have a Paul George body and you could somehow from that scan, maybe have some kind of like prediction matrix for their likelihood of getting injured.
The Bill Simmons Podcast
The Future of Everything With Derek Thompson
That's $1.1 million per affordable housing unit. I mean, this is pathetic. Democrats need to be the party that builds things. And especially after 2024, which as you know, as everyone knows, was an affordability election. If you ask people who changed their mind between 2020 and 2024, why did you go from Democrat to Republican? Over and over again, it's groceries. It's especially housing.
The Bill Simmons Podcast
The Future of Everything With Derek Thompson
Like, I'm not sure to be perfectly honest, I'm not sure such a thing is possible. Like I, I, I, It's not obvious to me that Paul George's leg injury in the Olympics, that horrific dunk where he had the compound fracture, I'm not sure there's any AI that could have possibly predicted that. It might have just been a totally freak accident.
The Bill Simmons Podcast
The Future of Everything With Derek Thompson
But I do think it's possible that at the level of how a body fits together, Or even at the level of genetics.
The Bill Simmons Podcast
The Future of Everything With Derek Thompson
Before we move on, what was your prediction with Gladwell in 2000? And how did that prediction hold up now that you're in the world of 2025?
The Bill Simmons Podcast
The Future of Everything With Derek Thompson
And last question from me on the sports side, because I am so interested in this angle of what does edge look like? In 2005, edge meant Moneyball. It meant we have the nerds and you don't. So we're going to understand the value of on-base percentage and you won't. And that's why we're going to win, even though we spend three times less than you. But now everybody understands Moneyball.
The Bill Simmons Podcast
The Future of Everything With Derek Thompson
And everyone understands health. And everyone understands personal trainers. And everyone understands you probably shouldn't eat a lot of sugar. And sleep is very important. And heart rate variability, this and that. When you look at sort of the next generation of smart guys running NBA teams, like the JJ Reddicks, is there some other thing you think they've unlocked?
The Bill Simmons Podcast
The Future of Everything With Derek Thompson
Some new edge that they're starting to peel back that maybe 10 years from now will be the conventional wisdom whose value is arbitrage to zero?
The Bill Simmons Podcast
The Future of Everything With Derek Thompson
It's affordability, affordability, affordability. And really, if you take a close and honest look at the cities and the states that are run by Democrats, They often do the worst on affordability. San Francisco, Los Angeles, Boston, DC, where I'm from. I mean, these are some of the places that the working class are leaving and where you have really high rates of homelessness.
The Bill Simmons Podcast
The Future of Everything With Derek Thompson
I wonder if you're going to agree with this. So we've had the golden age of TV. We've had the platinum age of TV. I want to try to name what's happening right now in the world of prestige television, which you know very well. And I want to call it the gilded age of television for reasons that some people might violently disagree with, but it's culture, it's taste, that's okay.
The Bill Simmons Podcast
The Future of Everything With Derek Thompson
So gilded age, gilded age. means thinly covered with gold paint, but not actually gold. And the reason I think that this era of television is gilded is that I think we've reached an important inflection point Prestige TV today looks so fucking good.
The Bill Simmons Podcast
The Future of Everything With Derek Thompson
If you compare the cinematography and art direction of the best shows of the 21st century, The Sopranos, The Wire, Breaking Bad, avant-garde shows like Twin Peaks, if you compare their cinematography to... White Lotus or Severance or 20-minute continuous shot episodes from The Bear, television looks unbelievable right now. It's like a movie.
The Bill Simmons Podcast
The Future of Everything With Derek Thompson
Even better, that episode of Severance about Gemma was more technically impressive than some of the most beautifully shot movies I've ever seen. And I feel like maybe we don't even talk about how lucky we are to live in an age where prestige TV is so next level sumptuous.
The Bill Simmons Podcast
The Future of Everything With Derek Thompson
And yet, I think this era of impossibly beautiful art direction and technical achievement and gorgeous cinematography is coinciding with this other very important trend. which I'll summarize as, I think we've lost the plot on plot.
The Bill Simmons Podcast
The Future of Everything With Derek Thompson
Like Severance, I like the show more than our mutual friend, Annie Greenwald, but there's no question that like from a plot momentum standpoint, some of its episodes grind things down to an absolute halt. Like White Lotus, I love the show. The first four episodes of this season could have been 90 minutes in terms of what it set up plot-wise.
The Bill Simmons Podcast
The Future of Everything With Derek Thompson
Last year, I remember we talked about the fact that it seems like almost every single prestige miniseries has at least two to four episodes in the middle of it, which is half the miniseries, where nothing happens, right? We're presumed innocent. The guy gets a heart attack. And then 45 minutes later in plot, he's bouncing up. He's fine. He's fine. He's running a half marathon. He's totally good.
The Bill Simmons Podcast
The Future of Everything With Derek Thompson
And one of our ideas is that it goes back to housing. These places have gotten really, really bad at building homes. And if you're going to call yourself the party of the working class and you cannot build houses for the working class, that is a major, major problem. And you probably do deserve to get your butt kicked in every few elections. So we're trying to change that.
The Bill Simmons Podcast
The Future of Everything With Derek Thompson
He just had a heart attack because Kelly needed to stretch the plot to eight episodes. Something weird has happened here where it's almost like we've gotten too good at cinematography.
The Bill Simmons Podcast
The Future of Everything With Derek Thompson
At the same time that storytelling has really fallen off a cliff from an efficiency standpoint, we now just accept as television viewers that entire hour-long episodes of expensive, famous, well-reviewed, critically acclaimed television will just have nothing happening on the plot front. And so that's what I'm calling the gilded age of television.
The Bill Simmons Podcast
The Future of Everything With Derek Thompson
It's golden on the outside, but from a plot standpoint, I think we actually have a crisis of screenwriting, a crisis of forward momentum that's partly created by the fact that the incentives of television economics today calls for making things longer rather than making things efficient.
The Bill Simmons Podcast
The Future of Everything With Derek Thompson
as I understand it, absolutely nothing. But it's interesting that the way these two ideas can fit together, like Prestige TV as white noise and Prestige TV as this visually sumptuous product in which no plot is actually developing, they're kind of the same idea, right? It's kind of, you know that TV channel?
The Bill Simmons Podcast
The Future of Everything With Derek Thompson
maybe on cable systems that have a ton of channels where it's just like a burning log, right? Like it's popular in Sweden to just like turn on the TV and just have like a log. It's just a fireplace, right? In a way, like that's what a lot of television is. It's gorgeous. You look at it. It makes you feel good.
The Bill Simmons Podcast
The Future of Everything With Derek Thompson
But like you don't actually have to attend to like the plot specifics because it's just really operating at the level of vibes that unfold throughout the television scene.
The Bill Simmons Podcast
The Future of Everything With Derek Thompson
We're trying to change the soul of the Democratic Party to a certain extent, from a party that associates success with how much you spend to a party that associates success with how much you build.
The Bill Simmons Podcast
The Future of Everything With Derek Thompson
Yeah, and there's a way in which if you're going to have a show like White Lotus that's going to be whatever, eight, maybe 10 episodes long, I don't know how long this particular season is. There's a sense that like, it reminds me of, I used to watch House all the time when I was younger. And what I loved about House is that I could always take a nap in the middle of House.
The Bill Simmons Podcast
The Future of Everything With Derek Thompson
And then I could fall asleep between like minute 15 and minute 52 because I knew how the diagnosis was presenting itself. I understood the symptoms. I knew they were going to click through a bunch of false diagnoses. And then at minute 53, House would have some eureka moment and he would say, oh, it's lupus. Oh, it's this brain, you know, blood barrier situation.
The Bill Simmons Podcast
The Future of Everything With Derek Thompson
And with shows that are designed to be little mystery boxes, There's a sense that the audience has that's like, I'm going to understand the nature of the mystery in episode one. I'm going to have the mystery solved for me nine hours from now. So in the middle, it's like, what do you do?
The Bill Simmons Podcast
The Future of Everything With Derek Thompson
And I'm not taking anything away from the wonderful television detectives that The Ringer and other places employ, but I do think that from the perspective of someone who is not paid to analyze television, It's honestly just like a lot of beautiful images. Beautiful white noise. Beautiful white noise where the plot is moving very slowly.
The Bill Simmons Podcast
The Future of Everything With Derek Thompson
I mean, Tim Ratliff basically was on like SSRIs for like two and a half hours, just like falling asleep. I was like, we can probably move this character forward a little bit. Yeah. Not just waking up and going into naps.
The Bill Simmons Podcast
The Future of Everything With Derek Thompson
I have three responses. One is that you're describing, I think, a really clean generational difference. I'll bet if you looked at the average age that ABC and NBC are giving their advertisers for those late night shows, I'll bet that average age is going up and up and up, not only because
The Bill Simmons Podcast
The Future of Everything With Derek Thompson
of younger people moving toward non-cable bundle options, but also because, to your point, 20-somethings and 30-somethings, 40-somethings, if they're doing talk shows, they're doing talk shows on YouTube. They're looking at their laptop screen. They're not necessarily opening up. They're not going to TV and waiting until 11.30 in order to get their talk shows.
The Bill Simmons Podcast
The Future of Everything With Derek Thompson
Yeah, it's such a good question. I really think it's the question. Because if you go back 100 years, You know, I love the story that we tell actually in the conclusion, which is a story about what a historian named Gary Gerstle calls political orders. And this guy Gerstle has a beautiful way of making sense of the last 100 years of American history.
The Bill Simmons Podcast
The Future of Everything With Derek Thompson
So my first response was going to be that you're looking at a generational difference. The second response was going to be that... I think new media and old media are going through a period of becoming more like each other.
The Bill Simmons Podcast
The Future of Everything With Derek Thompson
The late night shows are becoming more like YouTube podcasts at the same time that the YouTube podcasts are becoming more like late night shows in the way that they film, in the way that they cut, in the way that they sometimes mix a little bit of interview with a little bit of play. And even sometimes this is literal, right?
The Bill Simmons Podcast
The Future of Everything With Derek Thompson
When ESPN wants to add a new, whatever it is, late morning, early afternoon show, they're not necessarily launching something from scratch. They're going straight to YouTube and saying, Pat McAfee, we're just going to take your YouTube show and just basically simulcast it on ESPN.
The Bill Simmons Podcast
The Future of Everything With Derek Thompson
I wouldn't be surprised to see some YouTube networks start to try to take shows that maybe failed in the cable bundle, but then might work with the economics of YouTube because it's very different than the economics of cable.
The Bill Simmons Podcast
The Future of Everything With Derek Thompson
So I think something that we're going to see, I mean, it's obviously already happening right now, but something that we're going to see is that these things are going to blend. The next Jimmy Cable is going to look a lot like a successful Netflix or YouTube experiment with someone like John Mulaney.
The Bill Simmons Podcast
The Future of Everything With Derek Thompson
At the same time that Netflix is so very clearly just trying to have the next Jimmy Fallon with John Mulaney, right? So I think we're going to see these success models come together.
The Bill Simmons Podcast
The Future of Everything With Derek Thompson
Yeah, this is where it'd probably be useful to phone a friend and get Curtis on the line here. But I will bet that just thinking of these broadcasters as institutions, institutions tend to be quite defensive, right? They have bureaucracies built up around certain products that they have, right? One product is late night. I don't know how many people work for Jimmy Fallon or Jimmy Kimmel.
The Bill Simmons Podcast
The Future of Everything With Derek Thompson
It's probably, is it hundreds? Yeah, it's over 200. It's certainly over 200. Yeah. you're not just gonna lay 200 people off, especially when you have a cultural footprint that's thriving, as you said, on YouTube. It's a loss for you emotionally.
The Bill Simmons Podcast
The Future of Everything With Derek Thompson
He says there's really been two dominant political orders. And a political order is his term for a set of ideas that underneath the headlines and the scrum between the parties, both sides kind of agree about. So between the 1930s and 1960s, you had what he called the New Deal Order.
The Bill Simmons Podcast
The Future of Everything With Derek Thompson
I don't know for sure, and I don't understand the economics of this perfectly, but here's a scenario. You're NBC. Do you place a call to call her daddy? Do you place a call to one of these podcasters? It's like- Call her daddy.
The Bill Simmons Podcast
The Future of Everything With Derek Thompson
She has money. One, she can do once a week. She has money. Does she have the kind of cultural imprint that someone has when they're the face of NBC or the face of ABC? Maybe it doesn't matter.
The Bill Simmons Podcast
The Future of Everything With Derek Thompson
Maybe 10 years from now, no one gives a shit about being the face of NBC or ABC. But Jimmy Kimmel, he does a lot more than just host a late night show. He hosts the Oscars.
The Bill Simmons Podcast
The Future of Everything With Derek Thompson
He is the face of ABC. He's at the upfronts talking about all the offerings of his network to all of the advertisers.
The Bill Simmons Podcast
The Future of Everything With Derek Thompson
Is Alex Cooper, that's your name? Yeah. You tell Alex Cooper, you say... you're already one of the most important people for Gen Z. What if we made you one of the most important celebrities in the world? What if you were the face of Hollywood? That's what you have on offer?
The Bill Simmons Podcast
The Future of Everything With Derek Thompson
If you do one show a week for us, you can also host the Oscars, you can also talk to these, maybe she says yes, maybe she says no, but I think that's the prediction that I guess I'm making is, The next star is going to come from the talent folks at ABC and NBC looking at the top 30 podcasts saying who's like under 35 here that we can get to be our face.
The Bill Simmons Podcast
The Future of Everything With Derek Thompson
And you're going to continue to see late night on TV and talk show podcasts on YouTube continue to become more and more like each other.
The Bill Simmons Podcast
The Future of Everything With Derek Thompson
Okay. There's a positive take here, and I like to be positive. So I do want to shout out something right now that we've talked about before on this show, which is the state of GLP-1 drugs.
The Bill Simmons Podcast
The Future of Everything With Derek Thompson
Had a guy on my show to talk about all of the research that's coming out now, that they can look at hundreds of thousands, millions of people at Veterans Affairs who've been on GLP-1s now for several years and say, let's take a look at this huge observational study and see what is the effect of GLP-1 drugs on everything. And Bill...
The Bill Simmons Podcast
The Future of Everything With Derek Thompson
It's freaking wild, the positive effects these drugs are having on people's lives. It's not just helping people lose weight. It's not just helping people become more cardiovascularly healthy. Because inflammation is so bad for our brains, and one effect of rapid weight loss and the way that this seems to work inside of our system is that it reduces cellular inflammation.
The Bill Simmons Podcast
The Future of Everything With Derek Thompson
And this was a response to an internal crisis, the Great Depression, and an external crisis, which was you had socialism everywhere and FDR needed to redefine liberalism for our age. And he said, look, we're going to spend a lot of money and we're going to build a lot of things. But something happened in the 1960s and 1970s, and it's that America changed.
The Bill Simmons Podcast
The Future of Everything With Derek Thompson
Is that it seems like this is reducing rates of dementia and Alzheimer's and even some symptoms of schizophrenia. I mean, we have found this like lever in the body that seems to have basically a positive effect on everything.
The Bill Simmons Podcast
The Future of Everything With Derek Thompson
so this is not my way of saying everybody get on an eli lilly drug like it's not a pharma ad i'm just saying we are at this really exciting moment of having accidentally discovered this gila monster venom that we synthesize into a diabetes type 2 drug that we found had effects for weight loss and now we're doing more research on it and it's very difficult now to find a single station of human health
The Bill Simmons Podcast
The Future of Everything With Derek Thompson
that GLP-1 drugs don't seem to help. I mean, it's not great for muscle retention. That's really important. Muscle retention is really important as people age and people lose a lot of muscle on these drugs. But it's really interesting to me the effects it seems to have on cardiovascular health and psychological health.
The Bill Simmons Podcast
The Future of Everything With Derek Thompson
So I want to shout out the positive effects of that because I like to be positive on the show and in general. And my tech prediction is a negative one. I want to talk about our brains for a second.
The Bill Simmons Podcast
The Future of Everything With Derek Thompson
That was great. Feel free to jump in on positivity if you want. But this is a subject that I think is near and dear to your heart. So brains. So for the last few decades, something really cool has happened to human intelligence. Sometimes we think of IQ as like this natural ceiling to our intelligence.
The Bill Simmons Podcast
The Future of Everything With Derek Thompson
And the good news is that's just not true because there's this famous effect in global IQ that's called the Flynn effect, F-L-Y-N-N. It's named after a researcher named James Flynn. And James Flynn did these global studies and found that average IQ scores had increased all over the world for the last few decades thanks to better nutrition and better education.
The Bill Simmons Podcast
The Future of Everything With Derek Thompson
But a few years ago, that improvement started to wobble. And my hot take now is that just as in the last few years, the, I think, true conventional wisdom about smartphones was that they were contributing to a mental health crisis among young people. I think the next conventional wisdom about smartphones is they are making us stupid. If you look at- I'm so fired up about this one.
The Bill Simmons Podcast
The Future of Everything With Derek Thompson
If you look at literacy scores and numeracy scores for teenagers, they're going down. Not just in the US, in the UK, around the world. But Bill, it's not just teenagers. I use smartphones all the time. You use a smartphone all the time. If you survey adults, their numeracy scores are going down. Their literacy scores are going down.
The Bill Simmons Podcast
The Future of Everything With Derek Thompson
There was a new internal crisis, which was stagflation. There was stagnation, no economic growth, and inflation. And you had this new external crisis, which was the Soviet Union meant something very different in the 1970s than it did in the 1930s. And you really had this era where liberalism went from building a lot of things to blocking a lot of things.
The Bill Simmons Podcast
The Future of Everything With Derek Thompson
On the podcast, Plain English, just the other week, I did an episode on what I call the decline of reading. by a variety of measures. Americans read much less than they used to. They read fewer books, they read fewer magazine articles. Everything has become chunkified. Everything has become really, really fast. You look at it, it's an X post, you move on with your life.
The Bill Simmons Podcast
The Future of Everything With Derek Thompson
And I think what's happening is that intelligence, which is a really fuzzy thing, is partly about concentration. You can't really be smart if you can't concentrate on an idea for a long time to see all of its little nooks and crannies. I think that smartphones are basically taking a wrecking ball to our concentration.
The Bill Simmons Podcast
The Future of Everything With Derek Thompson
And as a result, I think we're going to find over the next few years of studies that average intelligence around the world is actually in clear decline. Now, here's where I think it gets even weirder. AI is coming. AI is really smart, and this world in which our machines are getting exponentially smarter while we're getting linearly dumber is a weird future to be moving into.
The Bill Simmons Podcast
The Future of Everything With Derek Thompson
And I think what we're going to see at the level of students and at the level of young employees and even just overall adults is there's gonna be a major schism in how people use AI. It's some people will use AI to consume information, to make thinking easier, and some people will use AI to do deep research.
The Bill Simmons Podcast
The Future of Everything With Derek Thompson
If you, Bill, wanted to ask ChatGPT, which has this function called Deep Research, where it can write like 10, 20-page papers based on a prompt that you give it, Give me all the information about the smartest physiology of endurance among professional athletes.
The Bill Simmons Podcast
The Future of Everything With Derek Thompson
What should we be looking at if we're trying to predict 20-year careers for basketball players, whether it's shoulder physiology or how knees fit together or overall body type? And it can give you a list that is annotated with citations that makes you smarter about how to be, not just body language doctor, but the Bill Simmons that's trying to predict the next great hidden gem.
The Bill Simmons Podcast
The Future of Everything With Derek Thompson
Some people are gonna use AI. to consume, but some people are going to use it as a tool. And so not only are smartphones going to make us literally dumber, I think we're also going to see intelligence inequality grow as AI increases the return to curiosity, while at the same time, it accelerates the decline in deep thinking among a huge group of people.
The Bill Simmons Podcast
The Future of Everything With Derek Thompson
And liberalism got very, very good at putting up red tape and suing the state and suing companies to stop doing things. You wouldn't have thrown Vietnam in that? Oh, yeah. I would definitely throw Vietnam into it to the extent that Vietnam was a problem that LBJ couldn't solve with the set of political ideas that he had at his disposal that he inherited from FDR, right?
The Bill Simmons Podcast
The Future of Everything With Derek Thompson
Yeah. I want to be careful when I make these critiques because it's such a familiar critique. Basically, every generation, when I was doing research for this podcast, The End of Reading, every generation accuses young people of using whatever communication technology is available to them for destroying their brain. What's different is This is so important.
The Bill Simmons Podcast
The Future of Everything With Derek Thompson
What's different about today is that we have very clear, not just American, but international data that reading and numeracy scores are going down for both students and, in some places, for adults. And I think that the way, the communication technology that's available to us just has to shape the way we think.
The Bill Simmons Podcast
The Future of Everything With Derek Thompson
I mean, to go back, say, 2,000 years, or 4,000, 3,000 years, I guess, like ancient Greece, People used to just casually memorize the Odyssey. They could just hold the Iliad in their head. I think I'm pretty smart. I think I'm really good at memorizing. I was an actor before I was a writer, so I had to memorize long parts and Shakespearean monologues.
The Bill Simmons Podcast
The Future of Everything With Derek Thompson
I can't get even close to memorizing the first 0.5% of the Odyssey. But people's minds used to be like capacious in a different way to be able to just hold memory. And now we have writing. We've been able to outsource memory to computers and pages and tweets. And so we don't need to remember everything because we can read it. We can look at our notes.
The Bill Simmons Podcast
The Future of Everything With Derek Thompson
But now we have something new that's come along. Some way of very efficiently sort of chunkifying all communication in this battle royale for our attention such that we're very good at grabbing people's attention briefly, but not very good maybe at holding their attention for a long period of time if there's a complex thought that we need to untangle. And so I do think that
The Bill Simmons Podcast
The Future of Everything With Derek Thompson
The TikToks and Instagrams and Twitters of the world don't just shape how we pay attention. They do shape the way we think. And I think the early returns to their effect in our thinking are pretty scary.
The Bill Simmons Podcast
The Future of Everything With Derek Thompson
There was a period in American history where America just won wars. We just won World War I, won World War II. Korea was a little bit of a mess. Vietnam was a real quagmire, right? The first quagmire where we- We're questioning our ability to win on a global stage.
The Bill Simmons Podcast
The Future of Everything With Derek Thompson
I thought about this a little bit, especially as I've talked to people in AI who think about once we develop or if we develop something like AGI or even super intelligence, what is that technology likely to be used for? And one thing it's likely to be used for, you could say, is breaking encryption. So how is that going to be used?
The Bill Simmons Podcast
The Future of Everything With Derek Thompson
What happens if China develops an incredibly sophisticated technological tool for breaking encryption and threatening the internet systems that you described? I certainly hope that the first expression of, example of the technology is not to bring down something that is national. That's very hard.
The Bill Simmons Podcast
The Future of Everything With Derek Thompson
There's so many different systems and so many redundancies to sort of hack the entire American internet. But what's scary and maybe more plausible to me, because I think this is such an important thing to talk about, is folks say in China, spending a lot of time thinking about what internet systems are most vulnerable.
The Bill Simmons Podcast
The Future of Everything With Derek Thompson
If we want to prove the threat of our technology, what we should do is not try to eat the entire elephant. Find the weakest part of the elephant and take it down to prove to the American government that we have the goods that could potentially take down everything.
The Bill Simmons Podcast
The Future of Everything With Derek Thompson
And that caused a crisis, I think, in confidence in governments and institutions that was totally of a piece with this general era of, hey, we've had too much government for a while. How about the individual? How about the little guy? And you had this era where there was this really important shift toward individualism.
The Bill Simmons Podcast
The Future of Everything With Derek Thompson
So let's say, for example, that they discover that, you know, whatever, like some internet system in Portland on the West Coast, something in Seattle, they find a weakness in so that they take down like an energy grid in like, you know, suburban Seattle or something. That's a situation where they're essentially sending a warning signal and they're saying,
The Bill Simmons Podcast
The Future of Everything With Derek Thompson
Don't make us upset or we'll do that but worse. Right. Or we'll take down the West Coast. And that's a world where we're really in trouble because we have interests, for example, in China not invading Taiwan. We have humanitarian interests in Taiwan not falling under the power of the CCP.
The Bill Simmons Podcast
The Future of Everything With Derek Thompson
But also some of, most of, the vast majority of the most valuable semiconductors manufactured in the world are manufactured in Taiwan. So if there's a blockade of Taiwan, we would have, a real crisis in terms of not just electronics manufacturing around the world, but also AI itself. So what if China
The Bill Simmons Podcast
The Future of Everything With Derek Thompson
wanted to make sure, wanted to make sure that America wasn't going to intervene in some kind of attack. And they said, we're going to threaten the American government and say, if you intervene, we're going to bring down a system. And Donald Trump says, I'm blustering. I don't believe you. That's not going to happen. And they say, okay, watch this.
The Bill Simmons Podcast
The Future of Everything With Derek Thompson
And they press the proverbial button and something happens in Portland or Seattle or a pension system in Cleveland. And that's the clear demonstration of, oh, holy shit, They've developed an encryption breaking technology that's powerful enough to at least demonstrate the possibility of doing real harm.
The Bill Simmons Podcast
The Future of Everything With Derek Thompson
Now they've developed a sense of leverage over the American government that has enormous geopolitical implications because now our interests can't be purely expressed in Taiwan. We are in some ways, we're incentivized to cower to China for fear that they're going to do something.
The Bill Simmons Podcast
The Future of Everything With Derek Thompson
This is one reason why not only people in the US government, but also many of the people at the Frontier Labs in San Francisco are so obsessed with holding the technological frontier in AI. It's because if you lose the technological frontier in AI, either on the offensive or defensive side, you do potentially risk losing the ability to uphold American values where they are in American interests.
The Bill Simmons Podcast
The Future of Everything With Derek Thompson
And what we're trying to say here in this book is that we kind of have to get back to building. Some of the biggest problems in this country, especially, again, you look at 2020, or 2024, the election. Some of the biggest problems in this country are affordability. And one way that we want to fix affordability is by building a lot more homes where people want to live.
The Bill Simmons Podcast
The Future of Everything With Derek Thompson
No, I pay everything's my phone. Yeah.
The Bill Simmons Podcast
The Future of Everything With Derek Thompson
It is unbelievable. So a slight preview. We're doing a series on Plain English that we call Plain History, which is history episodes. And I'm working on one. It's going to be big. I think it's going to be cool on the moon landing. And one of the coolest things about the moon landing There was no internet in the 1960s. How the fuck did they get to the moon in less than a decade without an internet?
The Bill Simmons Podcast
The Future of Everything With Derek Thompson
Imagine, let's say, if NASA was hacked by the Chinese Communist Party and NASA was like, we're not going to have any internet for the next decade, but we still want to get a rover to the moon or a rover to Mars. We have to do it. No Excel, no Google Docs, no email. This isn't like an unsolved problem. We literally did it 60 years ago.
The Bill Simmons Podcast
The Future of Everything With Derek Thompson
We developed a technology to not only land a man on the moon, the craziest thing is having the part of the spaceship orbiting the moon while Neil Armstrong is walking around that we have to then take off from the moon and hook up with this thing orbiting around the moon and then blast us back to Earth. Built all of this without an internet. It's unbelievable.
The Bill Simmons Podcast
The Future of Everything With Derek Thompson
So I am not, of course, rooting for a world in which NASA and the US government's technological capabilities are catastrophically hacked by the Chinese Communist Party. But I suppose the silver lining is we could still get to the moon without the internet. We know it because we did it.
The Bill Simmons Podcast
The Future of Everything With Derek Thompson
We're in New York right now. Next is Boston, your home. Yep. Our talk is at First Parish Church in Cambridge. Nice. And then we're going to D.C. and then L.A., San Francisco, Palo Alto, Seattle, Chicago, Atlanta, Research Triangle.
The Bill Simmons Podcast
The Future of Everything With Derek Thompson
San Francisco, LA, DC, New York. Doing that actually requires unwinding a lot of what liberalism has built up in terms of legal norms and legislation and stuff like environmental review. It requires unwinding a lot of that and getting back to basics. That's essentially what the book is trying to do.
The Bill Simmons Podcast
The Future of Everything With Derek Thompson
I told her. Did you just have a kid? We have a 19 month old and it's been made clear to my wife that she gets a really, really nice gift after all of this. Like maybe an island, you know, like certainly a beautiful piece of jewelry. All right. Congrats on the book.
The Bill Simmons Podcast
The Future of Everything With Derek Thompson
It's a getting back to basics book about how to build old-fashioned liberals to solve the problems of a new age.
The Bill Simmons Podcast
The Future of Everything With Derek Thompson
Yeah, and I think you said two things there that I find really interesting. One is I took a class at Northwestern about the degree to which, it's exactly this, the degree to which vibes of movies in certain eras are a reflection of the politics and geopolitics of the time.
The Bill Simmons Podcast
The Future of Everything With Derek Thompson
And one factoid I remember from that class was exactly about the 1960s and 1970s where they said, you know, look at the Dirty Harry movies and the Rambo movies. Those guys were fighting against a system. They weren't like... They weren't a flavor of a guy defending a system, right? Like an honorable cop representing a series of honorable cops going back generation after generation.
The Bill Simmons Podcast
The Future of Everything With Derek Thompson
It was a guy fighting against the system. And I was totally in keeping with this idea in the 1970s that like this sort of collectivist era of the New Deal was just run amok. It was too much bureaucracy. It was too much the man trying to tell you what to do. The real heroes are the ones that push back against the man.
The Bill Simmons Podcast
The Future of Everything With Derek Thompson
And you can kind of hear echoes of that even in Reagan's own rhetoric where he says the scariest words in the English language are, I'm from the government and I'm here to help. That was the beginning of this anti-institutional flavor that I think is still alive here in America. So what you said reminded me of that. But then going to this idea of like, what do you do about the fact?
The Bill Simmons Podcast
The Future of Everything With Derek Thompson
that trust in institutions is kind of gone. And I'm gonna try to be hyperbolic here, but it's very difficult. It's very difficult to find a single institution that hasn't seen an absolute collapse in trust in the last 30 years. The presidency, the Congress, the courts, science, big companies, tech companies,
The Bill Simmons Podcast
The Future of Everything With Derek Thompson
The police, I mean, the military, we're in an age right now where in order to be a successful politician and in order to be a successful political movement, you need an answer for the age of anti-institutionalism.
The Bill Simmons Podcast
The Future of Everything With Derek Thompson
And one challenge I think for Democrats today is that, this is a little bit mean maybe, but as the cranks and conspiracy theorists somewhat realign into the Republican Party and folks like RFK, who used to be on the far left are now on the right, The Democratic Party has become the party of status quo institutional guys, people that are defending these institutions that aren't popular.
The Bill Simmons Podcast
The Future of Everything With Derek Thompson
And one thing our book tries to do in a lot of different ways is say, we got to cut that out. we have to be able to point to the very, very clear failures of government and public health and regulatory bodies and say, these folks have failed. And if we're gonna be the party, Democrats, if we're gonna be the party of government,
The Bill Simmons Podcast
The Future of Everything With Derek Thompson
We sure as hell be the party that is obsessed with making government work. And that requires renewal. It requires change and reform and being honest about where you failed. And so, yeah, I think that's a huge part of this little mindset shift that we're trying to have here.
The Bill Simmons Podcast
The Future of Everything With Derek Thompson
Yeah, Ezra and I have done a lot of podcasts with folks on the right. And I think it's really, really important to talk to the center right and the far right and be, I think liberals and maybe the left has gotten a little bit too obsessed with purity, a little bit too obsessed with this idea of if you're the wrong person, if you said the wrong word, that we're not going to associate with you.
The Bill Simmons Podcast
The Future of Everything With Derek Thompson
We're going to cut you out of the movement. Guys, at the end of the day, elections are popularity contests. And the job is to grow the tent. And there's this question of like, who's going to be the liberal Joe Rogan in the 2020s? Well, you know, there used to be. a liberal Joe Rogan. His name was Joe Rogan.
The Bill Simmons Podcast
The Future of Everything With Derek Thompson
Joe Rogan was a Bernie Sanders fan in 2016, and many things happened, and I don't want to just associate his political shift with just how he was treated by the left, but something clearly happened where I think liberals started to say, you know, we shouldn't allow people or we're going to judge people who are in our coalition for showing up on Joe Rogan and talking to someone who we think is conspiratorial.
The Bill Simmons Podcast
The Future of Everything With Derek Thompson
Guys, elections have to be about persuasion. You have to be willing to talk to everybody. And, you know, I'm not... Gavin Newsom is a complex political figure, but he's very, very good, I think, at reading... Complex is a compliment for that fucking guy. He's very good, though, Bill, at... at putting his finger to the wind and knowing when the moment has changed.
The Bill Simmons Podcast
The Future of Everything With Derek Thompson
And the fact that he's starting a podcast and talking to Steve Bannon and Charlie Kirk, whether or not that is a useful strategy for running the state of California, probably not. Useful strategy for winning the Democratic primary in 2028, maybe not. But does it reflect the reality that you're pointing to?
The Bulwark Podcast
Derek Thompson and Elizabeth Weil: The Trend Toward Solitude
I'm reading a book called – it's the big book about dopamine. I think it's called Dopamine Nation. But it's a book about the biochemical function of dopamine. And there's this thing where if you get a huge dopamine hit – from something, you get a sort of blast of dopamine between your neurons, and then it lowers what's called the tonic level of dopamine, as if like, kind of like with a store.
The Bulwark Podcast
Derek Thompson and Elizabeth Weil: The Trend Toward Solitude
If everyone rushes to the store and buys all of the Pottery Barn couches, there's less in inventory, and so there's just less couches in the store. It can be the same with dopamine. A rush of dopamine can reduce the amount that's available to you. And I have the following biochemical theory of what our smartphones are doing to us that I'm just going to present to you.
The Bulwark Podcast
Derek Thompson and Elizabeth Weil: The Trend Toward Solitude
And maybe your biochemist listeners can tell me whether this is crazy or maybe on target. I think what's happening is something like this. I think people are sitting at home on couches and in bed. looking at TikTok or Instagram or Twitter, and dopamine is being flushed out of their system. They're going hit, hit, hit, hit, and they're putting their phones away.
The Bulwark Podcast
Derek Thompson and Elizabeth Weil: The Trend Toward Solitude
And rather than feeling rejuvenated by what is definitionally leisure time, They're actually dopaminergically exhausted. So when their friends say, hey, do you want to come out? Do you want to hang out with me? They think, no, hell no. That requires an adventure in the unknown. I have to get dressed. I have to put on my makeup. I have to do my hair. I have to leave my house.
The Bulwark Podcast
Derek Thompson and Elizabeth Weil: The Trend Toward Solitude
We have never in our lifetime spent this much time alone and this little time socializing with other people. And I think that statistic needed an anchoring. It needed a naming. It needed a big picture treatment because the way we spend our minutes is the way we spend our lives. And if we're spending our minutes alone, well, that has huge implications for The economy, we can talk about that.
The Bulwark Podcast
Derek Thompson and Elizabeth Weil: The Trend Toward Solitude
I have to get in the car. I have to take the subway. That sounds like a bunch of potential misadventures. And I don't have the, what does dopamine do? Gives you drive. I don't have the available biochemical drive to hang out with you right now. So I'm going to say no. I'm actually going to feel great about saying no. And what am I going to do instead? Probably just hang out with my phone.
The Bulwark Podcast
Derek Thompson and Elizabeth Weil: The Trend Toward Solitude
So in a way, I worry that, and again, this is not fully tested, or maybe it is. I hope people can flush it out.
The Bulwark Podcast
Derek Thompson and Elizabeth Weil: The Trend Toward Solitude
This is the hypothesis that I hope they respond to. I wonder if we are essentially donating our dopamine to our screens, donating dopamine to the parasocial relationships we have with people through our phone. And as a result, we have less drive to invest in the actual social relationships in our lives, that the dopamine is flowing toward parasociality rather than toward actual sociality.
The Bulwark Podcast
Derek Thompson and Elizabeth Weil: The Trend Toward Solitude
I don't mean to keep saying to every prompt, I have two thoughts. But I, again, have exactly two thoughts. The first thought is that we know for a fact that the amount of time that teens spend on their phones has gone from, definitionally, something close to zero 30 years ago, to today, about a third of their waking hour. So the typical...
The Bulwark Podcast
Derek Thompson and Elizabeth Weil: The Trend Toward Solitude
person, teenager, adult is consciously awake for about a thousand minutes a day. That's kind of interesting. You can think to yourself like every 10 minutes that you spend is therefore 1% of your waking day. And you can say, well, how do I want to spend the next percent? Well, over 300 minutes is is how much the typical teen spends in front of a screen, so a third of their waking life.
The Bulwark Podcast
Derek Thompson and Elizabeth Weil: The Trend Toward Solitude
Just mathematically, it's inevitable that if teens are going to be spending a third of their waking life in front of a screen, the vast majority of that screen time is alone and often at home. And so they're not spending that time with friends in person. Some people could argue that that activity is social after a fashion.
The Bulwark Podcast
Derek Thompson and Elizabeth Weil: The Trend Toward Solitude
If they're texting with their friends or calling their friends, but you and I both know, and anyone who's a parent in this show knows, a lot of that time is really just spent, as you said, using the thumb to flick, flick, flick, flick. The second thing I would say is that you've pointed out that...
The Bulwark Podcast
Derek Thompson and Elizabeth Weil: The Trend Toward Solitude
For our politics, I hope we talk about that. And really, for our personalities. I think that our personalities change when we spend less and less time around other people with every passing year.
The Bulwark Podcast
Derek Thompson and Elizabeth Weil: The Trend Toward Solitude
Children today, especially teenagers today, and especially, especially teenagers of middle and upper middle and even upper class families are overscheduled under intensive parenting in order to burnish extracurriculars so that they can maximize their chances to get into a top 20 college. Right. Those extracurricular activities are not necessarily, or often not entirely, social activities.
The Bulwark Podcast
Derek Thompson and Elizabeth Weil: The Trend Toward Solitude
If you ask teens, for example, as the Monitoring the Future study does, how much time do you spend actually going out with friends a week? Or what percent of, say, 12th graders go out with friends two or more times a week? In the 1980s, it was 75, 80% of boys and girls who were 17, 18 years old going out with friends two or more times a week. Now it's closer to 50%.
The Bulwark Podcast
Derek Thompson and Elizabeth Weil: The Trend Toward Solitude
from 80% to 50%, an absolute collapse in going out with friends. So it's possible that what you see is attention. And I acknowledge that parts of it might be attention because if kids see their extracurricular activities as being highly social, well then maybe you're just getting, you know, you're killing two birds with one stone there.
The Bulwark Podcast
Derek Thompson and Elizabeth Weil: The Trend Toward Solitude
What you're actually seeing maybe is that intensive parenting is squeezing social time out of teenagers' lives because they are so highly pressured to think of the 1,000 minutes in every day as an exercise in maximizing their chance of getting into the best possible college rather than thinking about some of those 1,000 minutes as being about social leisure time.
The Bulwark Podcast
Derek Thompson and Elizabeth Weil: The Trend Toward Solitude
spending time, whether it's sedentary, hanging out on the couch or active playing sports with friends in a social fashion.
The Bulwark Podcast
Derek Thompson and Elizabeth Weil: The Trend Toward Solitude
So the most important fact in the article is that according to a famous book by Robert Putnam called Bowling Alone, between the 1960s and 1990s, Americans participated in associations and clubs, bowling leagues and union clubs, less and less and less. And when the book came out in 2000, it caused a huge debate. Was Robert Putnam just lying with statistics? Did he have this all wrong?
The Bulwark Podcast
Derek Thompson and Elizabeth Weil: The Trend Toward Solitude
I'm really glad you brought that up. Eric Kleinberg's a sociologist at New York University who's been incredibly influential broadly, but specifically to me. And I leaned on him a lot for this article.
The Bulwark Podcast
Derek Thompson and Elizabeth Weil: The Trend Toward Solitude
And he made a point that I think is so, so important that as much as people like me want to focus on changes to the, let's call it internal world of screens and television and smartphones and dopamine dumping toward TikTok, a lot of this is about changes to the external world. It's about changes to the physical world.
The Bulwark Podcast
Derek Thompson and Elizabeth Weil: The Trend Toward Solitude
This is a theme of the book that I wrote with Ezra to a certain extent, but America built a lot of social infrastructure in the first half of the 20th century, not only through the New Deal, but also up through the 1950s. We didn't just build roads and bridges. We built a lot of libraries. We built a lot of rec centers. We built a lot of community centers. We built physical places.
The Bulwark Podcast
Derek Thompson and Elizabeth Weil: The Trend Toward Solitude
for people to go when they left their homes and weren't at work. And sometimes these are sometimes clichédly called third places, but it can be useful to think of that sort of third place outside of your one home and two office. We don't build these places. anymore, especially in low-income areas.
The Bulwark Podcast
Derek Thompson and Elizabeth Weil: The Trend Toward Solitude
Eric's written a lovely book, Palaces for the People, about this precise phenomenon that America in particular has really gotten out of the habit of building public physical places for people to spend time in when they can't afford to spend time in multimillion-dollar homes and multimillion-dollar schools and multimillion-dollar something else.
The Bulwark Podcast
Derek Thompson and Elizabeth Weil: The Trend Toward Solitude
And so it is really important to remember that these trends are worse for low income Americans, even though the fears of too much solitude sometimes seem like an upper middle class complaint. In a weird way, this is a lower middle and lower class problem first and foremost.
The Bulwark Podcast
Derek Thompson and Elizabeth Weil: The Trend Toward Solitude
It is poor men and poor single men in particular, poor young single men in particular, who have the fastest growing rise in pure aloneness and solitude these days.
The Bulwark Podcast
Derek Thompson and Elizabeth Weil: The Trend Toward Solitude
Was America really at the beginning of a golden age of hanging out? But in the last 20 years, socializing has declined another 20% for all Americans and more than 40%, or roughly 40%, for teenagers and the poorest Americans. We're in a social depression, and it has enormous implications, I think, for just about every station of human life.
The Bulwark Podcast
Derek Thompson and Elizabeth Weil: The Trend Toward Solitude
So Mark Dunkelman, who's a wonderful writer and researcher at Brown University, has this really lovely schema where he says that, ironically, this era of social isolation has actually deepened our relationships in two specific ways. In the so-called inner ring of family and friends, you know, you have—we were just talking about intensive parenting—
The Bulwark Podcast
Derek Thompson and Elizabeth Weil: The Trend Toward Solitude
Intensive parenting is, to a certain extent, kind of extremely social if you consider sociality spending time with your kids and obsessing with your partner over how your kids should spend their time. We're much closer to our families, spend more time with our families than we used to. That's the inner ring. And there's a far outer ring that I think of as sort of tribe. It's easier for you.
The Bulwark Podcast
Derek Thompson and Elizabeth Weil: The Trend Toward Solitude
You're a Nuggets fan. Is that right?
The Bulwark Podcast
Derek Thompson and Elizabeth Weil: The Trend Toward Solitude
Yeah. Okay. It's easier for you.
The Bulwark Podcast
Derek Thompson and Elizabeth Weil: The Trend Toward Solitude
Right. It's easier for you to follow other Nuggets fans. It's easier for you to contact reporters in Denver to ask, you know, what can the team do in order to build more talent around Jokic, who's just this generational star. You can follow the sport and follow people who share your ideological preferences in a dozen other ways or your aesthetic preferences.
The Bulwark Podcast
Derek Thompson and Elizabeth Weil: The Trend Toward Solitude
You know, I don't know what kind of music you like, but I'll bet it's easier for you to follow people who listen to your type of music in a way you never could 40 or 50 years ago, right? You're like... You could DM writers at The Athletic to be like, I think you should write this about Jokic. These are relationships that weren't possible 50 years ago. So where does that leave us?
The Bulwark Podcast
Derek Thompson and Elizabeth Weil: The Trend Toward Solitude
Where the inner ring of sociality for many people is stronger, that is close family, and the outer ring of sociality is stronger, of tribe. Well, it means that what's atrophying is the middle ring. And the middle ring, if we call the inner ring family and the outer ring tribe, that middle ring is village, right? We know our neighbors less. We know our cities less.
The Bulwark Podcast
Derek Thompson and Elizabeth Weil: The Trend Toward Solitude
We know the people who live around us less. And one reason why I think that matters a lot for politics is being around people who aren't our family and don't share all of our ideological preferences like our echo chambers do, being around people that are around us but different I think, is a naturally moderating instinct.
The Bulwark Podcast
Derek Thompson and Elizabeth Weil: The Trend Toward Solitude
It allows us to see people who are different than us as human and reasonable and having their own set of interests and sometimes even sharing our own interests, recognizing that the person who's voting for a candidate you consider heinous actually shares many of your key priorities. That's moderating.
The Bulwark Podcast
Derek Thompson and Elizabeth Weil: The Trend Toward Solitude
In a world without that cooling agent, you get people like Donald Trump, who I think is a classic all-tribe, no-village avatar.
The Bulwark Podcast
Derek Thompson and Elizabeth Weil: The Trend Toward Solitude
I also think that as long as we're just trying to diagnose evenly across the board, I think that you have some progressives who struggle to see how half the country could like Donald Trump in the first place when their neighbors, in many cases, are voting for Donald Trump. People can say, no, well, Derek, there's this theory of the big sort.
The Bulwark Podcast
Derek Thompson and Elizabeth Weil: The Trend Toward Solitude
We tend to live around people who agree with us about everything. Well, a third of Brooklyn voted for Donald Trump, right? In a room of 18 people, six of them voted for Donald Trump in Brooklyn. So I do think that the cold medicine that I do have for progressives like me or liberals like me is that
The Bulwark Podcast
Derek Thompson and Elizabeth Weil: The Trend Toward Solitude
If we feel like we're living in a country that's alien to us, when half the country, roughly speaking, every four years votes for this guy, maybe it's because we have made ourselves strangers in our own land. And maybe we should try to reach out and understand people who seem like ideological aliens to us.
The Bulwark Podcast
Derek Thompson and Elizabeth Weil: The Trend Toward Solitude
So many thoughts came to mind as you were saying that, which I agree so much with. Let me try to rank them in my head. Arlie Russell Hochschild was a sociologist, I believe, at UCLA. I don't know if you've spoken to her.
The Bulwark Podcast
Derek Thompson and Elizabeth Weil: The Trend Toward Solitude
She wrote a great book called Strangers Who Own Land. And she just wrote another one. I think it was Stolen Valor, I think is what it's called. And I was emailing with her for this essay. And her comments did not make it into the final draft. But I'll tell you this right now.
The Bulwark Podcast
Derek Thompson and Elizabeth Weil: The Trend Toward Solitude
She said that in a lot of the homes, a lot of the mobile homes that she was visiting in these deep red areas in rural Kentucky, a couple of things were true. Number one, the largest piece of furniture was the television set. People were spending a ton of time in front of Fox News. and they were spending less time outside of their homes.
The Bulwark Podcast
Derek Thompson and Elizabeth Weil: The Trend Toward Solitude
And that had an interesting effect, where among this group, one of the most important issues to them was fears of migrants. But if you look at census data, one of the areas with the lowest share of immigrants in America is rural Kentucky. So people living in villages or villages, people living in cities and rural towns,
The Bulwark Podcast
Derek Thompson and Elizabeth Weil: The Trend Toward Solitude
that had the lowest share of immigrants thought that the most important problem facing this country was immigration. That to me is at least a suggestive sign of a world where people aren't prioritizing the issues in their so-called village, that middle ring, because the middle ring is atrophied. What they're prioritizing is the outer ring of tribe.
The Bulwark Podcast
Derek Thompson and Elizabeth Weil: The Trend Toward Solitude
The national political becomes the local story, right? The classic, you know, All politics is local? No. All politics is focal. All politics is whatever Fox News or Ben Shapiro or whatever can get you to pay attention to that is a national storyline. That's politics today in the age of the internet.
The Bulwark Podcast
Derek Thompson and Elizabeth Weil: The Trend Toward Solitude
The other point that I want to make, and you on-ramped me to this, is that there's a Danish political scientist named Michael Bank-Peterson. who's found that among people who are socially isolated, they tend to become more nihilistic, and they adopt a political attitude that he calls the need for chaos.
The Bulwark Podcast
Derek Thompson and Elizabeth Weil: The Trend Toward Solitude
These are people who have lost faith in the political process entirely, and they're disconnected from the knotty and complex politics politics and processes of the world around them.
The Bulwark Podcast
Derek Thompson and Elizabeth Weil: The Trend Toward Solitude
And so they tend to be much more likely to agree with pronouncements like, I need chaos all around me. When I think about our political and social institutions, I cannot help thinking, just let them all burn. They tend to see politics as as a kind of at an arm's length, distant show, a kind of post-manesque reality show that affects their lives, but is also in some way bigger than their lives.
The Bulwark Podcast
Derek Thompson and Elizabeth Weil: The Trend Toward Solitude
It's a story for them to participate in more than a set of policies that can affect their day-to-day experience. And as a result, what they demand is entertainment. What they demand is chaos. And that to me is absolutely scary.
The Bulwark Podcast
Derek Thompson and Elizabeth Weil: The Trend Toward Solitude
Let me challenge myself to be relatively brisk for these, which is rather than write small essays over audio. The most important breakthrough is a kind of half vaccine that's been developed for HIV. HIV kills hundreds of thousands of people a year, tens of millions of people around the world. suffer from HIV.
The Bulwark Podcast
Derek Thompson and Elizabeth Weil: The Trend Toward Solitude
We haven't developed a vaccine for HIV, but we've developed a shot that people can take twice a year that seems to protect them 98 to 100% from HIV. I mean, that's very close to what we have with the COVID shots. We call those vaccines, which I, of course, think we should. It's extraordinary that we've developed this drug.
The Bulwark Podcast
Derek Thompson and Elizabeth Weil: The Trend Toward Solitude
And if we can scale it like we scaled the COVID vaccines, it's possible that we really could take a dent out of this disease that's killed millions and millions of people. So, you know, I think the news is biased toward negativity. And I like writing this article because it forced us to see the positive. And this is an amazing, amazing therapeutic.
The Bulwark Podcast
Derek Thompson and Elizabeth Weil: The Trend Toward Solitude
Well, yeah, first on whether it was people pulling out of voting entirely versus being persuaded, the numbers are still coming in. But just looking at Wikipedia right now, Trump received 74 million votes in 2020. He received 77 million votes in 2024. Harris received 75 million votes in 2024 versus Biden's 81 million.
The Bulwark Podcast
Derek Thompson and Elizabeth Weil: The Trend Toward Solitude
We're going to end up very, very close to where we were in terms of total votes cast. So I'm not... as persuaded by the idea that this was about people not voting for Harris, I frankly think there were a lot of people who voted for Joe Biden, who then voted for Donald Trump. And we should be curious then why that happened.
The Bulwark Podcast
Derek Thompson and Elizabeth Weil: The Trend Toward Solitude
And this clearly, I think, especially happened among people who lived, who are Hispanic, number one. And the swings among metro areas was absolutely extraordinary. I mean, just reading from the reporting that I did, this was back in November, excuse me, In the New York metro area alone, Manhattan shifted nine points right. Brooklyn shifted 12 points right. Queens shifted 21 points right.
The Bulwark Podcast
Derek Thompson and Elizabeth Weil: The Trend Toward Solitude
And I really wanted this piece to be very specific about the thing I was talking about. So Robert Putnam was famous and in some quarters controversial for talking about a concept that he called social capital. So the idea was that people have literal capital.
The Bulwark Podcast
Derek Thompson and Elizabeth Weil: The Trend Toward Solitude
The Bronx shifted 22 points right. In Florida, Orlando, and Miami, and Houston, and San Antonio, and Dallas, all these places shifted about 10 points to the right. So did Wayne County, Detroit, Cook County, Chicago, all of them about 10 points to the right. This is not a 10-point shift. is not just about Biden folks sitting out. This is about people who wanted to vote for Donald Trump showing up.
The Bulwark Podcast
Derek Thompson and Elizabeth Weil: The Trend Toward Solitude
And I think people on the left and liberals need to look at liberal governance in liberal states and blue states and in blue cities to ask the question, Why in the states that we run and in the cities that we run, did Donald Trump move the electorate double digit percentage points to the right? That's a big, big question.
The Bulwark Podcast
Derek Thompson and Elizabeth Weil: The Trend Toward Solitude
Yeah, and the truth is, I don't know exactly how to bake and slice the blame pie right now. I think that we're in a moment.
The Bulwark Podcast
Derek Thompson and Elizabeth Weil: The Trend Toward Solitude
I just mean as a product. I take that. Look, the pie will have to be baked and sliced. I mean, if these are policy errors, then we should know what they are so that we don't make them again. Like, the Western U.S. is not going to turn into Brazil in the next 10 years, right? This is no forthcoming rainforest. It's going to get drier and drier and hotter and hotter.
The Bulwark Podcast
Derek Thompson and Elizabeth Weil: The Trend Toward Solitude
And pressure gradient differences between the Pacific Ocean and the inland California Nevada desert, which was what causes the Santa Ana winds, these factors aren't going away. So if we're going to live in nature, we ultimately have to live in nature and that requires technology and it requires smart public policy.
The Bulwark Podcast
Derek Thompson and Elizabeth Weil: The Trend Toward Solitude
I think at the moment, there's probably a lot of conflation happening right now around how much of this is just The Santa Ana winds are an incredibly strong force of topographical fact. How much of this is the fact that there hadn't been a fire here for a long time? And so the so-called fuel, the vegetation and the housing simply created a lot of kindling. How much of this was the fact that
The Bulwark Podcast
Derek Thompson and Elizabeth Weil: The Trend Toward Solitude
They have financial capital where you can just look at someone's W-2 or tax returns and you can say, all right, well, Michael is rich and Nathan is poor. But there's also something that you can call social capital. Are you rich in relationships? Are you rich in friendship? Are you rich in the kind of community networks that you live in?
The Bulwark Podcast
Derek Thompson and Elizabeth Weil: The Trend Toward Solitude
California or Southern California had received an astonishingly low amount of rain, which again made the kindling perfect for fire. And then how much of this is a public policy failure, whether it's on the housing development side, the brush clearing side, or
The Bulwark Podcast
Derek Thompson and Elizabeth Weil: The Trend Toward Solitude
after the fact, because there's a lot of people angry right now about the insurance policies, which again, I think it's important, but insurance doesn't cause fire. So it's important to talk about what part of the blame pie we're looking at here. So there's a lot that we don't know and a lot to disentangle on the cause front and then on the response front.
The Bulwark Podcast
Derek Thompson and Elizabeth Weil: The Trend Toward Solitude
And I just, I really want people to be specific when they're describing the how and assigning blame, but there's no question that we're looking at an event right now. I have family that's dramatically affected by these fires. We're looking at an event right now that is going to, I think, I don't think this is alarmist. I think it's going to reshape California for the next few years.
The Bulwark Podcast
Derek Thompson and Elizabeth Weil: The Trend Toward Solitude
I mean, if you have parts of that city where people are spending millions of dollars on homes and those homes are uninsurable, what's that going to do to the Palisades? What's that going to do to Malibu? What's it going to do to Pasadena?
The Bulwark Podcast
Derek Thompson and Elizabeth Weil: The Trend Toward Solitude
What's it going to do by ripple effect to other parts of Los Angeles and Southern California and even parts of Northern California if this state becomes uninsurable? It's just huge, huge questions.
The Bulwark Podcast
Derek Thompson and Elizabeth Weil: The Trend Toward Solitude
And that's what Putnam was really scrutinizing is, is social capital for Americans declining? Can we say that social capital is declining for America the same way that we could say in a recession that income is declining for America? I'm trying to identify and pinpoint an even more specific and objective statistic
The Bulwark Podcast
Derek Thompson and Elizabeth Weil: The Trend Toward Solitude
The American Time Use Survey, which is run by the Bureau of Labor Statistics, is a government survey that every year asks Americans, how much time do you spend doing all the stuff you do? How much time do you spend eating dinner? How much time do you spend sleeping? How much time do you spend filling out greeting cards? And they also ask, how much time do you spend alone?
The Bulwark Podcast
Derek Thompson and Elizabeth Weil: The Trend Toward Solitude
And how much time do you spend in face-to-face socializing? And those numbers are at their respective historic points, right? We've never spent so little time socializing face to face. We've never spent so much time alone. So what I felt I had here was an absolutely objective fact that I wanted to sort of dig into. What else can I discover that's truly historic about this moment?
The Bulwark Podcast
Derek Thompson and Elizabeth Weil: The Trend Toward Solitude
And I mean, Tim, the statistics are just unbelievable. I mean, like the amount, for example, that people spend hosting dinner parties, for example, has declined by 30% in the last 20 years. I mean, it's just remarkable.
The Bulwark Podcast
Derek Thompson and Elizabeth Weil: The Trend Toward Solitude
It's exactly right. It's an accumulating story. And there's a way to tell the story. You mentioned Postman and Putnam. There's a way to tell the story that's a technological story. And I don't think this is the only way to tell it, but I think it's a compelling way to tell it. You say the first half of the 20th century was really remarkably social. Marriage rates were up. Fertility went up.
The Bulwark Podcast
Derek Thompson and Elizabeth Weil: The Trend Toward Solitude
Union rates were up. The amount of time that people spent socializing between the early 1900s and about 1950 was just up, up, up across the board. What happened then in the 1960s, 1970s? And the technological answer is that first we got the car. And cars are wonderful. Our family has two cars, right? I'm not criticizing cars as a product.
The Bulwark Podcast
Derek Thompson and Elizabeth Weil: The Trend Toward Solitude
But one thing they allow you to do is to move away from other people. It allows people to move to the suburbs. They can privatize their leisure time, spend more time alone in their own backyards, less time around other people. Okay, maybe not a huge, enormous crisis. But then comes the television set. And when you add the car and the television set, then the following thing happens.
The Bulwark Podcast
Derek Thompson and Elizabeth Weil: The Trend Toward Solitude
Between the 1960s and 1990s, the average American adds about six hours of leisure time per week. We work a little bit less. Which is awesome. Think about all the things you could do at that time. So what could you do at that time? You could learn a new language. You could read books. You could go out with friends more. You could watch more movies in movie theaters.
The Bulwark Podcast
Derek Thompson and Elizabeth Weil: The Trend Toward Solitude
You could learn how to play pickup basketball with your friends more. What did we do instead? We devoted basically all that time to TV. I think something like 90% of that time was spent just watching TV. It was almost as if we invented a technology that tapped into human beings' latent desire to become audience members.
The Bulwark Podcast
Derek Thompson and Elizabeth Weil: The Trend Toward Solitude
As if underneath everything that there is in a human being, at the very bottom of it is, we just want entertainment. I mean, I guess we're just going to keep plagiarizing Neil Postman here. We just want to be entertained. And so the television just served this enormous need for the typical American to relax into their leisure time, to have sedentary rather than active leisure time.
The Bulwark Podcast
Derek Thompson and Elizabeth Weil: The Trend Toward Solitude
So you have this force of the car, followed by the force of the television set. And then in many ways, I think the digital revolution, for all of its wonders, and there are true wonders, many of them that it has, it made it even easier for us to choose, select the conveniences of solitude. I could go out to dinner with friends, or let's be honest, I could order in.
The Bulwark Podcast
Derek Thompson and Elizabeth Weil: The Trend Toward Solitude
I could go out to a movie with friends, or let's be honest, I could watch Netflix. And there's nothing wrong with DoorDash. And there's nothing wrong with Netflix. But scaled over time and throughout the country, decision by decision, Americans are spending more and more of their time and more of their choices are to privatize their leisure.
The Bulwark Podcast
Derek Thompson and Elizabeth Weil: The Trend Toward Solitude
And that's brought us to this point, this mountain of forces with the car and then the television set and then the digital revolution.
The Bulwark Podcast
Derek Thompson and Elizabeth Weil: The Trend Toward Solitude
Let me break it into two. And I'll start with a preamble. There's nothing wrong with people being introverted. I am introverted. There's nothing wrong with enjoying a moment's quiet. I love quiet time. I mean, I think I say in the article, you know, I'm the father to a 17 month old who is wonderful and extremely loud.
The Bulwark Podcast
Derek Thompson and Elizabeth Weil: The Trend Toward Solitude
So I know firsthand that there is nothing closer to heaven than a glass of wine at a hotel bar in a city that is not my home. Yeah.
The Bulwark Podcast
Derek Thompson and Elizabeth Weil: The Trend Toward Solitude
There we go. Well, look, a glass of wine in a hotel room can be wonderful. I prefer the sort of the swirling bustle around me, like the sort of buzz of anonymity that comes with being alone drinking in a bar in a city that I don't live in.
The Bulwark Podcast
Derek Thompson and Elizabeth Weil: The Trend Toward Solitude
I find something lovely about that, but different strokes for different folks, and I do not want, and I really hope this comes across both in the essay and I can say it very explicitly here in the podcast. This is not the case against introversion. This is not the case against some solitude or the case against quiet. This is...
The Bulwark Podcast
Derek Thompson and Elizabeth Weil: The Trend Toward Solitude
a realization of what happens when we lean too much into introversion, even agoraphobia, a refusal to leave our home, too much quiet, too much solitude. What if the dose goes up and up and up? It's the same with any therapeutic. Lots of drugs are good in short supply and very dangerous in large supply. What are some of the bad things about this? Well, number one,
The Bulwark Podcast
Derek Thompson and Elizabeth Weil: The Trend Toward Solitude
Researchers have found again and again that solitude does not correlate with life satisfaction. In fact, people who spend more time alone consistently say that they're less happy with their lives. This is partly because people who spend more time alone often tend to be lower income people and income also seems to correlate with happiness. That's the first thing.
The Bulwark Podcast
Derek Thompson and Elizabeth Weil: The Trend Toward Solitude
Maybe the deeper and more complicated idea here is that I think that many people mistakenly seek too much solitude because they believe that it's good for them. So here's what I mean. There was a study that was done, one of my favorite studies in the piece, by Nick Epley, who's a psychologist at the University of Chicago.
The Bulwark Podcast
Derek Thompson and Elizabeth Weil: The Trend Toward Solitude
And he did this fascinating study where he asked commuter train passengers to make a prediction. How would they feel if they were asked to spend the ride talking to a stranger? And like, you know, think to yourself, how would you feel? Well, a lot of people said like, you know, no, wait, quiet solitude is going to make for a much better commute than having a long chat with someone I don't know.
The Bulwark Podcast
Derek Thompson and Elizabeth Weil: The Trend Toward Solitude
They might not be interested in me. They might be awkward and weird. I don't want to do it. So we ran an experiment. And some people were asked to keep to themselves, and some people were instructed to talk to a stranger. And they were told the longer the conversation, the better. The deeper the conversation, the better. And afterward, people filled out a questionnaire. How did they feel?
The Bulwark Podcast
Derek Thompson and Elizabeth Weil: The Trend Toward Solitude
And despite this strong assumption that the best commute is a silent one, Two things were found. Number one, that people instructed to talk to strangers reported feeling significantly more positive than those that kept to themselves. And maybe most importantly, that effect size was just as strong for introverts versus extroverts.
The Bulwark Podcast
Derek Thompson and Elizabeth Weil: The Trend Toward Solitude
And what Epley says, the title of this paper is called Mistakenly Seeking Solitude, is that many people, especially in an economy that allows us to keep to ourselves, assume that we'll be happier keeping to ourselves. But in a weird way, if we were forced by external forces, essentially, if we were forced to pretend as if we were a little bit more extroverted than we feel, we might be happier.
The Bulwark Podcast
Derek Thompson and Elizabeth Weil: The Trend Toward Solitude
And that might be the central social tragedy of our time, that we live in a world that allows us to pretend as if we are deep, deep introverts. But we might be happier if external forces forced us to pretend as if we were a little bit more extroverted than came naturally.
The Bulwark Podcast
Derek Thompson and Elizabeth Weil: The Trend Toward Solitude
The big picture here is that this is a long, long, long article that really pivots around one simple statistic, just one fact. And that fact is that Americans spend more time alone and less time in face-to-face socializing than we ever have going back at least 60 years in official government data and maybe going back 100, 150 years, given how social the first half of the 20th century was.
The Bulwark Podcast
Derek Thompson and Elizabeth Weil: The Trend Toward Solitude
I have two things to say about this. And I also found this part of reporting incredibly interesting. I have to give a shout out to my wife because I am basically not on TikTok. And while I was deep in the weeds reporting out this essay, she says, do you know about this trend?
The Bulwark Podcast
Derek Thompson and Elizabeth Weil: The Trend Toward Solitude
where these 20-somethings or teens will celebrate in creative ways to music when a friend cancels plans, often because they're too tired or anxious to leave the house. And it's them wrapping themselves in a huge, comfy blanket and being like, oh, thank God my plans are canceled. Again, just as with introversion, some sympathy is due here.
The Bulwark Podcast
Derek Thompson and Elizabeth Weil: The Trend Toward Solitude
We've all been in the position of having a dramatically overscheduled week, and then the friend cancels for Friday night, and we're like, oh, Jesus, I wanted to get to bed by 9.30 p.m. This is fantastic. But the sheer number of these videos, I think, is a little bit alarming, because this is, statistically, the most socially isolated generation ever.
The Bulwark Podcast
Derek Thompson and Elizabeth Weil: The Trend Toward Solitude
in recorded history, and you see people responding to their isolation by celebrating not hanging out. What is that about? And in the piece, I talk about how I think, in many ways, our smartphones have stunted our social development. But while I encourage people to read the piece, I actually want to work out a theory that's not in the piece but that I've thought about more with you.
The Daily Show: Ears Edition
Trump Defies Court Order & Deports Migrants, Lewis Black vs. Air Travel | Ezra Klein & Derek Thompson
Chat GPT wrote that sentence. It's so easy now.
The Daily Show: Ears Edition
Trump Defies Court Order & Deports Migrants, Lewis Black vs. Air Travel | Ezra Klein & Derek Thompson
Für eine lange Zeit hat die Linke geschaut, was sie subsidieren könnte. Wenn wir nicht genug Gesundheitsversorgung haben, können wir dir eine Gesundheitsversorgung anbieten. Das ist Obamacare. Can we give you food stamps to get food? Pell grants to get higher education? Rental vouchers to get housing?
The Daily Show: Ears Edition
Trump Defies Court Order & Deports Migrants, Lewis Black vs. Air Travel | Ezra Klein & Derek Thompson
Then you look at places where liberals govern and a lot of it doesn't work because we don't have enough of the core thing. If you give people a bunch of rental vouchers in New York City, in San Francisco, what often happens is they can't get housing because there isn't enough of it or the price goes up. Higher education is a similar dynamic. Healthcare has some dynamics like that.
The Daily Show: Ears Edition
Trump Defies Court Order & Deports Migrants, Lewis Black vs. Air Travel | Ezra Klein & Derek Thompson
You gotta at a certain point focus on building enough of the things you need. Housing is a big one. I'm from California. I'm from Irvine, California, down south from Los Angeles. I lived in San Francisco during much of the writing of the book. This is a solved problem. We know how to build apartment buildings. We know how to build homes. We just don't let people do it.
The Daily Show: Ears Edition
Trump Defies Court Order & Deports Migrants, Lewis Black vs. Air Travel | Ezra Klein & Derek Thompson
And the result is that California... New York, Illinois verlieren hunderttausende von Menschen pro Jahr.
The Daily Show: Ears Edition
Trump Defies Court Order & Deports Migrants, Lewis Black vs. Air Travel | Ezra Klein & Derek Thompson
So viele, dass wir im Jahr 2030, nach dem Kampagnen, wo wir die politische Macht aufgrund der Bevölkerung wiederholen, nachdem das alles so weitergeht, ein Demokrat, der alle Staaten gewonnen hat, Kamala Harris gewonnen hat, und auch Michigan, Pennsylvania und Wisconsin gewonnen hat, noch nicht die Präsidentschaft gewinnen würde, weil die blauen Staaten so viel Macht verloren hätten, indem sie Arbeitsklasse-Familien in die roten Staaten führten.
The Daily Show: Ears Edition
Trump Defies Court Order & Deports Migrants, Lewis Black vs. Air Travel | Ezra Klein & Derek Thompson
Also ja, man muss diese Dinge lösen.
The Daily Show: Ears Edition
Trump Defies Court Order & Deports Migrants, Lewis Black vs. Air Travel | Ezra Klein & Derek Thompson
I gotta say, man, the thing that surprised me least in the election was the blue shift to Trump. That blue cities and blue states had the biggest shift to the right. Because this was an affordability election. And we're actually, I think, just generally in a new age in American politics. For a very long time after the financial crisis, the problem the economy had was demand.
The Daily Show: Ears Edition
Trump Defies Court Order & Deports Migrants, Lewis Black vs. Air Travel | Ezra Klein & Derek Thompson
We didn't have enough demand. We didn't have enough jobs. We didn't have high enough wages. And everybody on both sides talked endlessly about demand. And in the background for a long time, for decades, there had been this building affordability crisis. In healthcare, in housing, in education, in childcare, in eldercare. And nobody was really doing anything about it. And then the pandemic hit.
The Daily Show: Ears Edition
Trump Defies Court Order & Deports Migrants, Lewis Black vs. Air Travel | Ezra Klein & Derek Thompson
and inflation hit and the entire like Sauron's eye of American politics moved to prices and inflation calmed in parts, right? It's not going up the way it was, although we'll see how the tariffs go. But the affordability crisis then was in full view and it got worse and it got worse. And so we're in this era Yes.
The Daily Show: Ears Edition
Trump Defies Court Order & Deports Migrants, Lewis Black vs. Air Travel | Ezra Klein & Derek Thompson
Das war der schlimmste Zeitpunkt, den ich in der amerikanischen Politik erinnern kann. Und das Problem, das die Liberalen immer weiterentwickeln, ist, dass sie immer versuchen, Donald Trump zu schießen. Nicht basierend auf dem, was er für die Menschen leidet, sondern auf das, was er für die Institutionen macht.
The Daily Show: Ears Edition
Trump Defies Court Order & Deports Migrants, Lewis Black vs. Air Travel | Ezra Klein & Derek Thompson
And if the Democratic Party is going to win, if it's going to beat the populist right, which is coming up again and again, not just here, but in other countries, you have to have answers to the problems people face in their lives, not answers to the abstract questions of politics, not answers to... Not answers to who is on the side of democracy, but answers to whose states are better governed.
The Daily Show: Ears Edition
Trump Defies Court Order & Deports Migrants, Lewis Black vs. Air Travel | Ezra Klein & Derek Thompson
Which places do you want to live? Who has something to say about what is making your Tuesday hard?
The Daily Show: Ears Edition
Trump Defies Court Order & Deports Migrants, Lewis Black vs. Air Travel | Ezra Klein & Derek Thompson
I'm so glad you asked. So, you don't get long-term results in politics without short-term results. And this is a thing I think Democrats have really forgotten. We've been doing high-speed rail in California for a long time. Nobody's winning any elections on that. Under Joe Biden, they passed $42 billion for rural broadband. It passed in, I think, 2021, early 2022.
The Daily Show: Ears Edition
Trump Defies Court Order & Deports Migrants, Lewis Black vs. Air Travel | Ezra Klein & Derek Thompson
By the end of 2024, you know how many people were hooked up to rural broadband? A couple dozen. We passed $7.5 billion for electric vehicle chargers to build a nationwide EV charger network. We built a couple dozen by the end of his presidency. You cannot win elections if you are passing billions of dollars that people cannot feel within two or three or four years.
The Daily Show: Ears Edition
Trump Defies Court Order & Deports Migrants, Lewis Black vs. Air Travel | Ezra Klein & Derek Thompson
And that does not have to happen. In the time that California has not built 500 miles of roads, China baut 23.000 Meilen von High-Speed-Rail. Wir können das machen, um sicherzustellen, dass Geld durch die Regierung schneller fließt, ist, wie man sicherstellt, dass die Leute wissen, dass die Regierung in ihren Leben eigentlich wichtig ist. Wenn es zu langsam geht, wissen sie es nicht.
The Daily Show: Ears Edition
Trump Defies Court Order & Deports Migrants, Lewis Black vs. Air Travel | Ezra Klein & Derek Thompson
Und dann kommt jemand raus und sagt, oh, wähl für mich. Ich bin der starke Mann. Ich kann es alleine lösen. Ich werde es funktionieren. Und dann hast du den Risiko, dass sie ihm glauben werden.
The Ezra Klein Show
The Origins of Abundance
And she's like, you didn't have the forbearance, the self-respect to wait 15 seconds before saying yes. You were so desperate to say yes to this project in less than a minute. And I was like, yes, I think that I think this could be like a really fun thing. I do think that we are coming at this idea at the same idea from opposite sides.
The Ezra Klein Show
The Origins of Abundance
Anything else we should hit about the run up to the collaboration on this book before we dive into the book itself?
The Ezra Klein Show
The Origins of Abundance
Just to jump in, yes, the paper is called Cost Disease Socialism by Stephen Tellis. Sam Hammond and Daniel Takash.
The Ezra Klein Show
The Origins of Abundance
What can we talk about together here that other interviewers probably won't even think to ask us? And the first thing that I thought of is that nobody else knows the story of why this book exists in the first place. So in my personal chronology, the story of this book starts in the fall of 2021.
The Ezra Klein Show
The Origins of Abundance
And on the topic of liberals needing to care about productivity in a new kind of way, especially when interest rates are high, I would also want to throw out Eli Dorado and Noah Smith, who I think did really good work on setting the table for a lot of ideas that make their way into the book.
The Ezra Klein Show
The Origins of Abundance
I am rolling off of book leave for a related but distinct project on the history of technological progress in America. I haven't had a very easy time with book leave because, as it turns out, writing a book is, among other things, a total pain in the ass. But one of the themes of this progress book that I was writing was the distinction between invention and implementation.
The Ezra Klein Show
The Origins of Abundance
Yes. Someone asked me recently how my vision of the book shifted from the original Abundance essay to the final book, Abundance. And I loved this question. So I want to turn it toward you. How is the book that exists now different from the one you imagined in, say, 2022?
The Ezra Klein Show
The Origins of Abundance
Just because somebody comes up with a good idea does not mean that it's going to change the world. ideas are cheap, building is hard. And I'm rolling off of book leave with this idea sort of swimming in my head. And in September 2021, I see that you have published an essay in the New York Times that's called, quote, the economic mistake the left is finally confronting.
The Ezra Klein Show
The Origins of Abundance
I think the biggest difference between the essay and the book is the level of political critique. I think that in part, maybe due to my own personality, which is pathologically agreeable and seeking optimism wherever I can find it, I did not initially see this book as requiring the depth of of political critique of liberalism in the last 50 years that the book that we wrote has.
The Ezra Klein Show
The Origins of Abundance
And I think that that critique is utterly necessary to understand the problems of the last 50 years and how to fix them. I mean, just to pivot off of your point about the degree to which Ralph Nader and the legalism of the 1960s and 1970s changed the character of liberalism, and in many ways defined the character of modern liberalism, There's a great line from, what is this, page 89 of the book.
The Ezra Klein Show
The Origins of Abundance
This is in the chapter that we have about energy and the way that liberals have gotten in their own way in terms of building precisely what they want to build, say clean energy like solar and wind. The PBS news anchor, Jim Lehrer, once asked Ralph Nader why he was qualified to be president in 2000. And Nader could have said, no one can make government work better than me.
The Ezra Klein Show
The Origins of Abundance
No one is better at understanding how to make government effective than me. But he didn't say that. What he said is, quote, I don't know anybody who has sued more agencies and departments. there was this idea, this identity of liberalism that said that the way to prove that you're a good progressive is to stop governments and businesses from changing the physical world.
The Ezra Klein Show
The Origins of Abundance
And maybe that was, in some places, a responsible... response to the environmental degradation of the middle of the 20th century. But now that our problems aren't what can we stop building, but rather what have we stopped building? The houses and the solar farms and the wind turbines. We need to have an identity shift.
The Ezra Klein Show
The Origins of Abundance
from a liberalism that's proud of suing government to a liberalism that's proud of making government actually work. Sabin has a great line in the book Public Citizens that you were calling out where he says in the 1960s, 1970s, quote, it was as if liberals took a bicycle apart to fix it, but never quite figured out how to get it running properly again. And in many ways, I never thought of
The Ezra Klein Show
The Origins of Abundance
The book project emerging from the abundance agenda is being a book project about identifying the ways that liberalism took the bicycle apart. But I think it's really important to figure out how liberalism took the bicycle apart if, in fact, we're going to get it properly running again.
The Ezra Klein Show
The Origins of Abundance
To dive into the book itself, there's any number of ways that a book about liberalism and the future of politics could begin. You could start with culture. You could start with taxes and redistributive welfare policies. We start with housing.
The Ezra Klein Show
The Origins of Abundance
Our first big chapter is about housing, the problem of rising housing prices, and the problem of constraints on housing construction in many of the places where people most want to live, like San Francisco. Why is housing so foundational to your sense of this project?
The Ezra Klein Show
The Origins of Abundance
And you use this essay to introduce a term that you call supply side progressivism. What was this essay about? Why did you read it?
The Ezra Klein Show
The Origins of Abundance
There are a lot of conceptual tensions in this book that I think are very important. Scarcity versus abundance being one of them.
The Ezra Klein Show
The Origins of Abundance
And you've really dilated on this right now within the housing market, this idea that in many places, people who call themselves liberals and progressives, and even sometimes people that have lawn signs in their front yards that say kindness is everything, nonetheless sit in houses zoned for single families and
The Ezra Klein Show
The Origins of Abundance
resist and often sue to block the development of affordable housing units that would cast a shadow over their own house. And so a part of this project is redefining liberalism away from the liberalism of the clenched fist toward a liberalism that recognizes that growth itself can be a good. Another really critical tension here that really echoes throughout the book in almost every chapter
The Ezra Klein Show
The Origins of Abundance
is the tension between process versus outcomes in government. I think maybe the best way to make this tension crystal clear to people is to see it through a prism that you call everything bagel liberalism. Why don't you do here for everything bagel liberalism what I asked you to do at the top of the show for supply side liberalism? What is this idea? Where did it emerge from?
The Ezra Klein Show
The Origins of Abundance
The chapters in this book are housing, energy, government, science, and technology. And I do think that one of the strengths of the final product is the rhyming of themes. One wouldn't necessarily think that the problems in construction would be similar to the problems in, say, biomedical breakthroughs.
The Ezra Klein Show
The Origins of Abundance
But in fact, we have empirical evidence showing that productivity in construction is flatlining or down, at the same time that we have evidence that that productivity in biomedical science is flat or down. The same way that you just pointed out that an abundance, unfortunately, of paperwork is slowing down the construction of affordable housing in places like California.
The Ezra Klein Show
The Origins of Abundance
Well, if you look at American science, by some surveys, scientists say they spend between 30 and 40% of their time filling out paperwork, either filing for grants or checking the boxes after those grants are filed or won.
The Ezra Klein Show
The Origins of Abundance
And so in many cases, the problems that governance has and the problems that liberalism has developed rhyme across housing and energy and building and government and science and technology itself.
The Ezra Klein Show
The Origins of Abundance
And so I do think it's one strength of the book is the degree to which without pushing on this rhyming too hard, you can see the same problems raise their head again and again and again in place after place.
The Ezra Klein Show
The Origins of Abundance
I think that the way that we fund science in this country is A, unbelievably important. The National Institutes of Health is probably the most important biomedical institution in the world. B, it hasn't changed very much in the last 70 years. And if you or anybody listening knows anything about bureaucracies, if a bureaucracy doesn't
The Ezra Klein Show
The Origins of Abundance
experience some kind of institutional renewal generation after generation, it's going to build a series of habits that even its practitioners agree are bad. And in fact, the scientists, the practitioners that I spoke to about the way the NIH works told me pretty much invariably that it was biased against the most important high-risk research, that it tended to waste scientists' time and
The Ezra Klein Show
The Origins of Abundance
And that it advantaged conservative ideas and older scientists while we have a good understanding that much of the best work that's been done in scientific history have been radical ideas from young scientists. I mean, this is absolutely core to a Kuhnian theory of paradigm shifts, the idea that it was not a group of graybeards who came up with quantum mechanics in the 1900s, 1910s, 1920s.
The Ezra Klein Show
The Origins of Abundance
It was people like Einstein and Planck building on a couple discrepancies that they were finding in the record to build an entirely new theory of how the world works that has in fact been core to not only the development of nuclear power, but also the electronics revolution. Great ideas often come from young scientists, and it is young scientists who say the system isn't working.
The Ezra Klein Show
The Origins of Abundance
There's a great quote from John Dench, who serves as the director of research and development in functional genomics at the Broad Institute. And he told me people need to understand how broken the system is.
The Ezra Klein Show
The Origins of Abundance
So many really intelligent people are wasting their time doing really, really uninteresting things, writing progress reports, coming up with modular budgets five years in advance of the science. I mean, again, you take so many of the criticisms and
The Ezra Klein Show
The Origins of Abundance
that you described about the construction of affordable housing at Tehanan, and you just change a few words here and there from funding source to public and public housing to, you know, R01 grants and checkboxes for scientific funding, and it's essentially the same story.
The Ezra Klein Show
The Origins of Abundance
So we have, I think, an urgent need for institutional renewal at the National Institutes of Health, given how important their discoveries are to improving and extending human life. I don't think Elon Musk understands the first fucking thing about the NIH. I don't think he did any research.
The Ezra Klein Show
The Origins of Abundance
I don't think he spoke to anybody about how exactly the NIH works, how it evolved, where it came from, what its habits are, which habits are good, and which habits are bad. What I see instead is I'm not inside of his head, but what it looks to me like is a pretty pure play of ideological punishment of universities that they think are woke. So they're going after Columbia.
The Ezra Klein Show
The Origins of Abundance
They're going after Harvard because the indirect costs are 55, 65% there. They're attacking science to punish the cultural ideas of scientists and not going into the institution of science and renewing it to solve 21st century problems.
The Ezra Klein Show
The Origins of Abundance
So that would be the pretty clear cut that I would draw between our approach to understanding the NIH and fixing it and the Doge approach to slashing and burning the NIH because they have a cultural bugaboo about the ideas of scientists.
The Ezra Klein Show
The Origins of Abundance
I can pick up there, but there's also a... There's a couple questions about the book making contact with the world that I want to get to before we have a hard out. So... I don't think I'm violating some unspoken covenant with our editor, Ben, our wonderful editor, Ben, by saying that the original publication date of this book was actually last year.
The Ezra Klein Show
The Origins of Abundance
The original plan is for Abundance to come out in the middle of the summer of 2024 to make contact with that presidential election. June 2024 and March 2025 are completely different worlds. From a political standpoint, they're practically different planets. And for the sake of putting together- Yeah, you have a kid now. The kid was born in 2023. So that's the same world.
The Ezra Klein Show
The Origins of Abundance
But I guess 18 months is a different world from nine months, certainly on the sleeping front. But for the sake of putting together a readable and finished product, I think we absolutely needed to take those extra months. But every few days, I think to myself, just how differently this book would have existed inside the news cycle if it came out during, say, a Biden to Harris handoff period.
The Ezra Klein Show
The Origins of Abundance
versus today, which is an era of just lurid chaos in the Trump administration. How do you think the timing of this book's new publication date deepens its message or complicates it?
The Ezra Klein Show
The Origins of Abundance
It was going to be published in the summer of 2024. I don't remember exactly the date. I think it was supposed to come out just before. Just around that first debate, maybe. It was supposed to come out just before the DNC convention because we wanted the book to influence the DNC platform. Take it away.
The Ezra Klein Show
The Origins of Abundance
Ezra, our friend Tyler Cowen has this term that I love called a Straussian read. And a Straussian read of a book is an interpretation of the book that is not explicitly inside of the book itself. It's a vibe of the book that you pick up off the page even if it's not articulated in the letters themselves.
The Ezra Klein Show
The Origins of Abundance
And we were recently on a podcast the other day that made me wonder about a particular Straussian read of this book. The parties, as you know better than anybody, are polarized by education. I wonder what we think of this idea that they're also polarized by personality.
The Ezra Klein Show
The Origins of Abundance
In many ways, the character of liberalism that we are trying to shift is overly deferential to process, to infinite listening, and not sufficiently committed to action and outcome. That's how you get what Nick Bagley, as quoted in the book, calls the procedural fetish of our side.
The Ezra Klein Show
The Origins of Abundance
On the other hand, I think a criticism that you and I both share of Donald Trump is that his style assumes a kind of kingly power in the executive branch in a way that assumes something close to absolute power and is inclined to run roughshod over norms and bureaucracies and laws that exist to channel voices to reach a consensus. This might be a simplified diagnosis, but
The Ezra Klein Show
The Origins of Abundance
One interpretation of the personality differences between the modern left and the modern right is that the left believes in language and process and listening and trusts bureaucracies and rules that respect those, while the modern right believes in a kind of extreme centralization of executive power that actively seeks to destroy bureaucracies.
The Ezra Klein Show
The Origins of Abundance
I wonder if you see this personality polarization as a live wire in politics right now. And if so, is what we're asking for is for liberalism to have a bit of a personality shift, not a personality flip all the way to the other end of Trumpist extreme authoritarianism, but a personality shift that values process a little bit less and values outcomes and action a little bit more.
The Ezra Klein Show
The Origins of Abundance
I agree the pendulum needs swinging, and I'm grateful that you helped me try to swing it, both in the book and in the show. Ezra Klein, thank you very much, and I'll talk to you in 35 minutes.
The Ezra Klein Show
The Origins of Abundance
So I read your essay and I'm inspired by it. I'm inspired by... I'm happy to hear that, Derek. That's a sweet thing of you to say. I absolutely was. I was inspired by the substance of it, this fusion of liberalism and technology, which I found important but didn't quite find an interesting way to articulate in an important way. But I'm also inspired by a semantic move that you make.
The Ezra Klein Show
The Origins of Abundance
You take this concept of this ideology of progressivism, which in recent years has been judged and defined on the demand side. Progressives ask, in many cases, to be judged on how much they spend to make the world a better place. And you do this really clever maneuver where you flip the yardstick. You say, what if we judge liberalism not by what it spent, but rather by what it built?
The Ezra Klein Show
The Origins of Abundance
That's what yimbyism does. It says how much housing have you built, not how much have you spent on housing. That's what yimbyism for clean energy would be for, not just how much have you authorized to spend on solar, how much solar have you deployed. And I'm thinking about it as it meets my own project about this distinction between invention and implementation.
The Ezra Klein Show
The Origins of Abundance
And maybe similar to you, there's a bunch of ideas that are swirling around in my head, waiting to be conjoined into one idea. And it's January 2022, and I'm standing in line in the freezing cold in Washington, D.C., waiting for some rationed COVID test because Omicron is circulating. And it's cold, and I don't do well in the cold, and I'm just angry.
The Ezra Klein Show
The Origins of Abundance
It's been two years since the pandemic started. There aren't enough tests. And before that, there weren't enough vaccines. And before that, there wasn't enough PPE. And as I'm getting angrier and angrier, I'm thinking if you zoom out, there's been a supply chain crisis in the pandemic, in the post-pandemic era.
The Ezra Klein Show
The Origins of Abundance
And if you zoom out again and look at the entire century, it's been defined by a housing crisis and a clean energy scarcity and even a shortage of doctors. And I write this sort of controlled screed that says this is a century that has been pockmarked by scarcity. And what if we could fix that with an abundance agenda?
The Ezra Klein Show
The Origins of Abundance
I'd write this piece, the Abundance Agenda piece, and I have a sense now of where the story goes in my head. But what do you recall is the bridge that takes us from this moment to us getting together and deciding faithfully to work on a book together?
The Ezra Klein Show
The Origins of Abundance
Let me answer your question directly just after I reflect in the crypto conversations. If I recall, you called me and essentially said, there's a piece of this technology that many people I consider smart are so interested in that I want to be similarly interested in. Are you interested in it?
The Ezra Klein Show
The Origins of Abundance
Ezra Klein, hello and welcome. I am thrilled to be on Plain English. What a wonderful and rare opportunity to talk to you about abundance. This is exciting. We're going to answer somewhere between 10,000 and 11 billion questions about this book in the next few weeks. So I wanted to hold this conversation to the relatively high bar of
The Ezra Klein Show
The Origins of Abundance
And the feeling that I had about crypto in 2021 is for better or worse, very similar to the feeling that I have about crypto in 2025, which is that I think it is historically remarkable for any technology to become or to mint multi-billion dollar wealth before it demonstrates a use case outside of creating an asset class to bet coins up to the moon.
The Ezra Klein Show
The Origins of Abundance
And I'm still incredibly confused by it, and I was confused about it on the phone in 2021, and four years of thinking about it has unfortunately not revealed much more, to use a telianism, a definite optimism about this technology. But it was, I remember that those conversations about crypto were sort of the beginning of our being in touch in a different kind of way in the run-up to this project.
The Ezra Klein Show
The Origins of Abundance
What I do remember, maybe the day of or the day after publishing the Abundance Agenda essay, is that you texted me and essentially said what you just said here on this call. You said, I think we might be circling the same book and we could race each other to the finish line or maybe we should write the book together. And I texted you back and said, yeah, maybe we should write this book together.
The Ezra Klein Show
The Origins of Abundance
And I tell my wife, hey, you know, I think I might write this book about... abundance, the abundance agenda with Ezra Klein. And she takes my phone and she does that thing where you pull back the text message so you can see the timestamp. And she sees that you sent your text at like 1247 p.m. and that I responded to the text at 1247 p.m.