The Prof G Pod with Scott Galloway
Abundance Is the Key to Fixing America — with Ezra Klein & Derek Thompson
Thu, 27 Mar 2025
This episode features a conversation with Ezra Klein, New York Times columnist and host of The Ezra Klein Show, and Derek Thompson, Atlantic staff writer, author, and host of the Plain English podcast. Scott discusses with Ezra and Derek their new book, “Abundance,” which is all about how America learned to fail at abundance — and how the left can fix it by embracing growth, progress, and the messy trade-offs of governing. Follow Ezra, @ezraklein. Follow Derek, @DKThomp. Scott opens with his thoughts on the pros and cons of living in the UK. Algebra of Happiness: action absorbs anxiety. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices
Chapter 1: Why did Scott Galloway move to London?
Welcome to the 342nd episode of the Prop G Pop. What's happening? The dog is home in London. I'm back in London town. People say, why did you move to London? People always say that. And I say, well, why am I in London? I'm an influencer, not a decision maker on these issues. The mother of my children said seven years ago, we're moving to London in five years or seven and a half years ago.
And then she actually called my bluff, came over here, bought a house and brought the kids in school and then boom. We're in London. So let's stack rank London. What's the good? What's the bad? People are like, do you like it? Do you love it? No, I don't love it. I don't love it. Let me start with the good.
It's a world-class city, I think mostly because it became a haven for private capital or wealthy people looking to engage in tax avoidance. And let's be honest, That's what you do when you get rich. And part of the reason people are rich is because they're obsessed with money and they think about it a lot. Things you're obsessed with, you tend to be better at than things you're not obsessed with.
And Prime Minister Tony Blair at the time passed a series of private property laws that said if you're a war criminal or an oligarch or just made a shit ton of money, And you're worried about taxation. You can bring all your capital here and it's safe and no one can come for it and take it. And also, whatever money you keep offshore, we will not tax.
Chapter 2: What are the pros and cons of living in the UK?
And if you think about it, well, you don't get to do that in America. If you make a bunch of money in businesses and career or whatever and you repatriate it and bring it home such you can spend it on hookers and cocaine, that's where I go. That's where the dog goes. Then you get taxed on it, as you should be.
And in the UK, that money, as long as it stays outside of the UK, you don't get taxed on it. So we get a lot of rich people coming here. Anyways, what do I like about the UK? Let's stack rank it. It is a great city. I've been coming to London for about probably 50 years.
I've been coming here since I was a little, since I was a wee one, since I was a wee skipper because both my parents are from the United Kingdom. My father from Glasgow, my mother from London. And this place has slowly but surely gotten the mother of all facelifts over the last 50 years. In the 80s, this was not a nice city. The food sucked. The infrastructure was crumbling.
There weren't a lot of innovative businesses here. It just wasn't where you would decide to spend a lot of money. Now it really is sort of the most probably livable city if you're coming from America and an English speaker. So there's really interesting people. It is a world-class city. Premier League football, another amazing thing. Best thing about the UK in my view, proximity to the continent.
And also, I will say the people are very welcoming here. You come here and people immediately say, oh, you're new. I had someone come up to me in the park and say, oh, you're new. Come over. We have dogs. We'll have dinner. I'm not comfortable with that. I don't want to go to a stranger's house for fear that I walk in and it's sort of weird and I think I'm trapped here for two and a half hours.
But anyways, people have dinner parties when you arrive. Very, very nice. I found it very warm and welcoming culture. The downside, the downside. The second worst thing about it here, the business environment is really anemic, comatose. I just don't find there's the same entrepreneurial flair.
I don't know what it is, but I have found that the majority of the economy here is about serving wealth that's been created elsewhere, that there isn't a lot of organic value creation. Most of the entrepreneurs are starting businesses to serve money made elsewhere. They're starting a restaurant, they're starting a wealth management company. They're starting a hotel.
There's very little, I think, of a tech scene here. I mean, a little bit, a little bit of payments, but it's just not that same risk-taking infrastructure, whatever you might want to call it. By far, the worst thing about it here, oh my God, the weather. Jesus fucking Christ. It's cloudy and gray and 52 degrees. Well, good news is it'll be like that for the next, I don't know, seven years.
Oh my God. It is just, I didn't realize. I'm absolutely going to retire to like Arizona or something. Not true. Retiring to Aspen. Retiring to Aspen. Because the sun, at least for me, I have that disorder, seasonal disorder. I don't know. Is that really a disorder? Wanting to have sun all the time? But oh my gosh, I just can't handle it. I just cannot handle it. We've been here.
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Chapter 3: How can America fix its abundance problem?
And a lot of this book is looking back over the last 50 years at how housing policy went wrong, often in blue cities, and how we failed to build clean energy in this country, even when liberal cities and liberal governors tend to say that they want to build clean energy to help climate change.
And then finally, I think that abundance requires us identifying the bottlenecks that are in our way and the policies that we don't have yet that could improve our outcomes.
So for example, I think it's pretty remarkable that when you think about how important science and technology are to improving people's health and improving people's lives, this country doesn't have a national invention agenda. The Democratic Party doesn't have one. You might expect that Elon Musk, now that he's associated himself with the MAGA movement, would inscribe a kind of
wise techno-optimist idea within that party. He hasn't. He has no vision of what America can be. He has a vision of what he wants to tear down. And so we believe very strongly in having a positive vision for the future, understanding the world and where we've gone wrong, and then finally in resolving the bottlenecks to actually build that future.
Ezra, any additional color there? I mean, I'll give our one sentence, which is that The thesis of abundance is that to have the future we want, we need to build and invent more of what we need.
Okay, so abundance is a really nice word. Tell me on the ground what that means. Let's talk about energy. Does that mean drill, baby, drill? Like, how does this notion of abundance impact our energy policy?
So I often get this question of, if you think we've gone wrong in so many places, if you think the government has hindered so much construction, so much innovation, why are you not just a conservative? Don't we already have a Republican Party? The world you are trying to achieve matters. There's actually a huge disagreement I have with things like Doge, which is efficiency towards what?
I hear all these tech-right people tell me that they're readying the government for AI. And I'm like, okay, AI that does... What? What is its value function? What is its prompt? What are you unleashing it on? You have to know what you're trying to build. And I think two of the core tributaries of the book are housing and decarbonization.
We are very, very worried about the absence of sufficient housing in the big, particularly the cities, although not only, that drive the American economy. And We're simply not going to meet decarbonization goals. I mean, we're probably at this point not going to meet them anyway.
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Chapter 4: What role does technology play in achieving abundance?
Of course, I think sometimes the problems in housing have to do with incumbents, but sometimes the problems in housing have to do with us ourselves and the rules that we write. So you look at a place like Portland, Oregon, In Portland, Oregon, every single mayor and every single governor that's elected says housing is our priority.
But if you ask, can we build outside of the current lines that are drawn by the 1972 land use laws, they say, no, we can't do that. If you ask if you can build a new apartment building that blocks a view of Mount Rainier, they say, actually, our view of Mount Rainier is more important than additional new housing units.
So I do think that, of course, there are many situations where the most important problem to focus on is the problem of entrenched money.
But in many cases, for the issues that you and I care most about, which is housing supply and housing abundance, I think we need to take a good long look in the mirror and recognize that something I think has gone wrong on our own side if the cities and the states that have the worst housing crisis are also governed by liberals.
And also, I would say the costs of escalating housing prices is not just seen in how much housing is eating up the budgets of people who live in these cities. It's also the people who are leaving these cities. California is losing people. New York State is losing people. Illinois is losing people. Minnesota is losing people.
Working class families, as Ezra just said in his beautifully done new video for the New York Times, working class families are leaving blue states and moving to states that are more likely to be governed by Republicans. Of course, there are all sorts of indictments that we can make of the power of oligarchy in this country.
And we can talk about the many ways that Elon Musk is turning government into some kind of kleptocratic mania. But look, if we're really trying to understand why is the housing crisis worse in blue states and blue cities, I think we need to look in the mirror as well.
Ezra, you talk about or you say in the book that for a future that's pro-growth, pro-technology and has pro-liberal values. What does that actually look like in practice? Give me more. Well, let's talk about, I mean, beyond just clearing out, going from NIMBY to YIMBY, like they've done in Austin or in Minneapolis.
Give me an example beyond housing of how kind of a pro-technology, pro-growth, and pro-liberal values, how that actually impacts things on the ground. I think you guys could have written your book just on housing, because I think what you're saying really resonates with people, where we've turned it into an investment class.
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Chapter 5: Is the conservative agenda more aligned with abundance?
We're saying we're not using housing for this example, but modular housing would do a lot to change the politics of housing if you could use them in a lot of cities because you could do public housing much more cheaply and you could also do non-public housing much more cheaply. Energy and continued advance in things like modular nuclear could really, really, really
make possible a situation where you could have countries like China and India continue to grow and continue to give people vastly better lives while also cutting carbon emissions. It could leapfrog the kind of development we went through. It's also true for healthcare. So I spent a lot of my career as a reporter on healthcare policy.
And sort of my intention in that reporting is I care about universal healthcare policy. I was all over Obamacare and the Affordable Care Act. But how valuable having any kind of health insurance is, how valuable having private health insurance is, how valuable Medicare is, Medicaid is, is dependent on what devices, treatments, surgeries, pharmaceuticals are there.
Medicare and Medicaid that cover Ozempic is more valuable than Medicare and Medicaid that does not cover Ozempic or Wagovi or the other ones. And if it didn't exist, they would all be less valuable, right? There are people with huge numbers right now of autoimmune conditions we don't understand.
These insurance products would be a hell of a lot more valuable to people if we knew how to cure those and the insurance could cover the cures. So there's a lot you just can't do. If you don't innovate, if we don't figure out green cement and jet fuel, we're not hitting our climate targets one way or the other.
So liberalism has to have a technological agenda in addition to a social insurance agenda. And that means taking the mechanisms and institutions of technological progress and then the distribution of the fruits of that technological progress seriously.
So Derek, when we talk about energy policy, just to steel man this, that the very Republican state of Texas is now producing more wind energy than anyone, and that economics ultimately wins out, or that's a case study. And ultimately that creates less bureaucracy, let the market decide, more wind energy, lower cost of energy, more tax revenue to reinvest in our schools.
Isn't a conservative agenda more of an abundance agenda?
It's interesting. We've gotten a version of this question a few times, and I think it's a really good question. Certainly, Texas and Texas politicians do not have, as their North Star, the idea that climate change is the most important policy in the world, right? It is liberals and it's progressives who have all of the backpack pins that say, let's ban oil and let's fix climate change.
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Chapter 6: How does scarcity mindset affect higher education?
I went to UC Santa Cruz. I went to UCLA. Right. Like I am a full on product of California public schools through California higher ed. What was your tuition when you were going? It was a long time ago. Yeah. I don't remember it offhand. I'm worried I'm gonna give you the out of state.
Mine was $7,000.
I think mine was like, yeah, it was like $10,000, I believe.
No, no, no, mine was 7,000 for all seven years of undergrad and grad. Do you remember the admissions rate at UC when you applied? No. For me, at UCLA, it was 76% when I applied, and I was one of the 24%.
You wanna hear something? So UC had, when I was in, I was a shit student. I had a 2.2 when I graduated high school. You had a lot of trouble paying attention. UC had a thing then called eligibility, and it was a sliding scale, but if you got above a 3.3 or above a 1400 on your SATs or something in between that sliding scale, you were guaranteed admission. To Riverside or Santa Cruz. Or UCI.
No, by the time I went, UCI wasn't doing eligibility anymore because they were too blocked up. I don't know if any of them do it anymore. But when I went, that's how I got into Santa Cruz. I qualified in on test scores.
But the thing is, in my lifetime and well before it, having built the most remarkable public university system the world has ever known, and take nothing away from Cal State or the community colleges there, which are also great, they added exactly one UC campus, Merced. fuck did we stop building UCs for? Did California stop having people? Did we stop needing great universities?
But I've, like, looked into this and, I mean, one, it's, oh my god, like, the fighting in the legislature over where to go and, you know, who gets it and whose ox gets gored and... We just stopped building a bunch of different kinds of things. We can't build high-speed rail, but we also don't build new UCs. You know, we don't build houses, but we also don't build enough clean energy.
I think the other thing I would say, because I do agree with you, Scott, and have... pretty intense views on this. I don't know. I have people I respect who will tell me, well, you know, if you double or triple the size of Harvard, it wouldn't be Harvard anymore and it would lose quality. I don't know that I buy that. But you could sure as hell open these places up to a lot more innovation.
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