DEREK THOMPSON: The American dream in the last few decades has come apart. You can choose affordability, or you can choose upward mobility, but you can't have them both together. That's terrible. Liberals have associated success with how much money they can authorize and spend rather than what they can build in the world. What's the difference between D-O-G-E as it exists in a Trump administration, and an actual obsession with making government deficient? It's like, what if we landed a man on the moon, and then like never talked about the Apollo program? That's how I feel about Operation Warp Speed. What you can't debate is the sheer objective, existential fact that Americans are more alone than ever, and that in many ways we're choosing this aloneness. I'm Derek Thompson. I'm a journalist, and I'm the co-author of the book "Abundance" with Ezra Klein.

- [Narrator] "Going from collapse to abundance with Derek Thompson."

- So several years ago in 2021, Ezra Klein wrote a column for "The New York Times" about an idea that he called supply-side progressivism. And his insight was that for the last few decades, the liberal movement, Democrats, in America had been very, very good at spending money to help people. We had Social Security, we had Medicare, we had Medicaid, we had all sorts of tax expenditures like the Earned Income Tax Credit. These are really, really important in terms of improving people's lives, reducing poverty, helping people live happier lives in this country and achieve the American dream. But at some point over the last few decades, liberals had fallen out of practice with building in the physical world. And so Ezra said what we need in America is not just a demand-side progressivism, which is to say taxing and then spending, but also a supply-side progressivism, which is fixated on actually building in the physical world. So I thought that was a really, really interesting article, and I had been thinking about these issues for a while, and I thought, you know, if you look at this issue across the economy, whether it's housing or clean energy, or even in many places, the availability of doctors, the story of the American century has just been one scarcity after another. So Ezra had been working on his idea of supply-side progressivism, and I had this idea of an abundance agenda, and we had been texting back and forth about a bunch of stuff over the previous few months, and we just got our heads together and thought, it kind of feels like we're writing the exact same book just using different language. And maybe rather than race each other to the finish line on two parallel tracks, we should merge the tracks and co-write this book together. And so that's how the book "Abundance" came to be. And as we continued talking about these ideas on the phone, in person, we thought, yes, this is absolutely about an agenda of a platform of making abundant the most important elements of modern life: housing, energy, science, technology. But it's actually just more than that. It's more than just a positive vision of the future, which is important. We also realized that in order to get this book right, we needed to take a long, hard look in the mirror at the legacy of liberals over the last few decades. If you look at the largest states governed by Democrats, New York, California, Illinois, Minnesota, Oregon, Washington, these states are losing population. And so it's not just that Democrats are losing elections on this issue of affordability, they're losing people. And while voting is an expensive act, you have to take hours out of your day to do it, the most expensive act is voting with your feet, which is to say moving. And if the middle class of America, the working class is leaving areas that are governed by liberals, that is a profound indictment of the liberal movement in this country. And so, much of this book is not only a positive vision of abundance, which is a big capacious hopeful word, it's also a very critical analysis of where liberalism has gone wrong in the past 50 years and how we can right it for the next generation.

- [Narrator] Chapter 1: The failure of liberal housing policy.

- You know, there's lots of ways to explain the 2024 election, but I think the most parsimonious explanation is that it was an affordability election. Many Americans felt like the last four years, and in many ways the last few decades, had just gotten too unaffordable when it came to the most important parts of their life, especially housing. And you look at this right now, you know, an extremely high share of Americans are spending more than 30% of their income on rent or on mortgages. It was just recently reported a few weeks ago that the average age of the first-time home buyer has increased to an all time high. It's very, very difficult for many Americans to afford rent, but it's particularly hard for young people to buy into this market. And so I don't think it's a coincidence that you saw young people, and, in particular, young men move sharply away from the Democratic party, which has historically been the home of young voters toward the Republican party. It was a vote of protest. It was people saying the current status quo is absolutely inexcusable. And the truth is, it is inexcusable. You know, for a long time in this country, we did a very good job of adding houses in America's most productive places. So a place like San Francisco or Los Angeles or New York would get richer, and then housing supply would meet the demand of people who wanted to move to where the American dream was possible. But something very strange has happened to the American dream in the last few decades. In many cases, Americans are moving to more affordable areas, but these affordable areas aren't as good at social mobility and helping the lower class move into the middle class move into the upper class. So on the one hand, you have these cheaper places where upper mobility is difficult, and on the other hand, upper mobility is often very high in places like Boston, New York, San Francisco, Los Angeles. These are productive places where people move and benefit in many ways from their proximity to innovation and productivity. But these places are so impossible to afford a home in that people are leaving rather than staying. And so if you think of the American dream as being this idea of you can choose where you live, and wherever you live, you will also have the benefit of upward mobility, working your way into an affordable middle class, the American dream in the last few decades has come apart. You can choose affordability or you can choose upward mobility, but you can't have them both together. That's terrible. That's the opposite of the American dream. That is, you have to choose between the two things that you want. And the reason this happened, I think, is a really interesting and profound historical story. At some point in the last 50 to 60 years, something changed in the way these cities treated housing supply. You saw a proliferation of zoning, for example, single family zoning. But even more importantly, you had a revolution of laws and customs that allowed neighbors to decide what could and couldn't be built around them. This is around the time that you have the rise of the so-called NIMBY movement, not in my backyard. But, you know, the NIMBY instinct, this idea that we don't want the places around us to change, that's an ancient instinct, right? That's a hominid instinct where we all have familiarity bias. We all have a little bit of fear about change. It was only in the last 60 years that a revolution of legal norms outfitted neighbors with the tools to block new development, and so they did. And they blocked development in San Francisco and Los Angeles and New York and Boston. They found ways to essentially tie up new development projects in so much red tape that it made it impossible for developers, whether in the private sector or for public housing to enter markets and say, "We're excited about building affordably." And as a result, you just had buildings slow down. If you look at the number of housing units permitted in California over the last say 40 years, it's basically a staircase down. You have higher permitting in the 1980s and in parts of the 1990s, higher permitting in the 1990s and parts of 2000s, and then it eventually just peters away. This is a world in which we've essentially given ourselves the tools to stop the construction of the most important product in American lives in the places where Americans often most want to move. Another way of thinking about this is that, you know, power is more complicated than just the way that the rich have it and the poor don't. Sometimes the way that power works is a little bit subtler. So, for example, think about why it's difficult to add apartments in housing constrained areas. Often something that'll happen is there'll be a city council meeting, and the the city council will vote on some new development, and the people who show up to that meeting tend to be older, they tend to be richer, and they tend to own homes. And so overwhelmingly what you'll hear at that city council meeting is people saying, "Don't build it," "I have a good reason for you not to build it," "I own a home and I'm concerned about the construction," "I'm concerned about the parking," "I'm concerned about the detours," "I'm concerned about the possibility that this is going to interfere with my way of life or even reduce my housing values." All valid concerns for those individuals, but who's often not represented at these meetings are the poor and the unhoused and the housing insecure and the young who don't own homes. And so in a way, you could think this is also an expression of power, not corporate power of rich companies having power over poorer consumers, but of the gentry, home owners, having power over non-homeowners. And I think having a sophisticated understanding of how power works in America requires us to have a broader sense of when minority interests are taking over from majority interests, right? The power that's exercised by a company lobbying the federal government to give them a tax cut is a great example of that company using their might to wrest a private profit out of a public system. But that is the exact same thing that happens when a group of homeowners stops a housing project from being built because it violates their private interest. I wanna be absolutely clear here. You know, some people read this project and say, "Derek, are you just trying to build 10,000 story skyscrapers in Los Angeles and fit the entire country into like a 10-square mile block in one part of Los Angeles?" No, absolutely not. You know, if people wanna move to the suburbs, they should be able to move to the suburbs. But if people wanna move to cities, they should be able to move to cities, right? The concept of housing abundance, as I see it, is very much an argument about freedom. It's about the freedom to live where you want to live. And if someone wants to live in the suburbs of Plano, Texas, they should live in Plano, Texas. But if someone wants to live in San Francisco, or maybe just as importantly, if someone's born in the Bay Area and they want to stay, but they can't afford to stay because they're a teacher, they can't afford to stay because they're a firefighter, well, that's not a world that I feel comfortable living in or co-creating. That's a broken world where we're forcing the middle class to leave the places they were born. And so what you see, I think, is that it's not a coincidence that the most expensive places to live often have the highest rates of homelessness. There's a study of California housing that suggests that every single time a California city adds 10% to its progressive vote share, the number of houses permitted in that city declines by 30%. This is a bit of a terrifying statistic. It suggests that as a city becomes more progressive, in fact, its housing supply declines over what you would expect. In fact, the five states in America that have the highest rates of homelessness are all governed by Democrats. If you walk the streets of the Tenderloin in San Francisco or Downtown Los Angeles, sometimes what you'll see is this maw of tents, right? You descend into this kind of urban dystopia that's tucked underneath what's otherwise the richest parts of the world. And you can't help but wonder, how does this reality coexist with wealth? Why is there so much homelessness in places like San Francisco and Los Angeles, which are not only rich, but also quite progressive, where voters care deeply about homelessness? You know, California has 12% of America's national population, but 30% of its homeless population and 50% of its unsheltered population. How can that be? Well, there's a book called "Homelessness is a Housing Problem" by Colburn and Aldern, which says that if you look at individual lives of the homeless and the unsheltered, you might often find examples of struggles that are particular to that person. You know, maybe someone lost their family, maybe someone's going through a divorce, maybe someone's a drug addict or a recovering drug addict, maybe someone's just dealing with mental illness, or incredible income security. But they point out that these individual stories are relatively common across the country. People with mental illness live in Texas. People with income insecurity live in North Dakota. So why are there so many homeless people in California specifically? And the answer they say is that it is a housing supply story. California has simply done a terrible job keeping up with the number of people who need to live in, especially, its densest cities. These are precisely the conditions that lead to homelessness, to housing insecurity. And the reason I think it's valuable to think about housing insecurity rather than just homelessness is that many people who are homeless aren't homeless for years and years at a time. They fall in and out of homelessness. And what is the thing that makes it difficult for them to find consistent housing? It's the availability of housing that is affordable to them. It's not because that's where the mentally ill concentrate. It's not because that's where drug addicts tend to be. It's also because that's where the lack of housing tends to be. And so people who are dealing with altogether human problems are more likely to find that their altogether human problems lead to homelessness. So typically, when I go on long enough complaining about liberal housing policy, it sounds to some people like I'm just making an argument to be, say, a Texas Republican, to simply say the entire country should just be like Texas. We should all be conservatives. Now, I do think, by the way, that states like California and Oregon could take a lesson from Texas, just the same way maybe they could take a lesson from say Japan or Madrid when it comes to construction productivity. But fundamentally, what I want is good outcomes, right? The good outcome that I'm looking for is, can we do a better job of adding housing in the places where people want to live? But there's a deeper story to tell here I think, which is a story about the tragedy of good intentions. When I look at the environmental movement in America, and I look at this story as an 80-year story. You know, you go back to the 1940s, 1950s, and the environmental laws that were created after this period were utterly necessary. Utterly. America was an ugly place to live in, in the 1940s and 1950s. The air was disgusting, the rivers were disgusting. The amount of pollution that was coming out of our tailpipes was disgusting. In 1943, the residents of Los Angeles woke up to a smog so thick, they thought the Japanese had launched a chemical attack on the city. They hadn't. We had launched a chemical attack on ourselves. The industrial revolution of the second half of the 19th century, and first half the 20th century despoiled the environment. And so we responded to that despoliation by passing a set of laws and enacting a set of customs to stop government and business from building without reserve. We passed a series of environmental bills, the Clean Air Act, the Clean Water Act, the National Environmental Protection Act. We passed laws to protect endangered species and migratory birds. We passed a set of laws that in many ways have made the world better without question. Today, if you are an environmental critic or even a critic of liberal housing policy like me, and you drink clean water and you breathe clean air, you are inhaling the benefits of the environmental revolution before you exhale your criticism of them. But what happens sometimes in American history is that the solutions to one generation become the problems of the next generation. We solved a set of problems in the middle of the 20th century, like pollution throughout the country, that have now made it harder to change the physical world. We created through NEPA a way for individuals to sue the state and to sue businesses to stop them from making any change to the physical environment around them. And what that's done is make it harder to build dense housing or add solar panels or add wind turbines. And so ironically now that dense housing is good for the environment and clean energy is good for the environment, the very environmental laws passed in the 1960s and 1970s now make it difficult to be a real environmentalist in the 2020s. Every generation needs to consider the project of institutional renewal. That was the job environmentalists in the 1960s and 1970s when they looked at the problems of their age and said, "Let's develop a new set of laws and norms and customs to solve problems." They did. But now we're left with the after wash. We're left with the legacy of one generation's solutions becoming this generation's disease. The disease is the inability to build. The disease, is the fact that liberalism, which used to be an ideology of building, has become an ideology of blocking. And that's why we need a new age of institutional renewal today. We need a new set of laws and customs and rules that make it easier to build densely and to add clean energy and to allow government to do what government wants to do, build high-speed rail, build bridges, build infrastructure for a cost that isn't eye watering, but it's us that have gotten in our own way. I think one really fair criticism of our project is that we're too focused on rules and norms and laws, and we don't talk enough about corporate power, right? We don't talk enough about antitrust. We don't talk enough about monopolies. We don't talk enough about the ways that companies act in illegal ways to violate consumer interest. There's something to that. You know, these issues are not full chapters in our book. But one thing that we're trying to do here is identify issues that maybe liberals aren't paying close enough attention to yet. So just because we're criticizing housing rules in cities governed by liberals, and just because we're interested in procurement rules and government processes to make it easier to build rural broadband doesn't mean that we're not interested in corporate power and inequality and monopoly and how these issues can be brought to bear in all sorts of ways that make American's lives worse. Those issues all exist. But we also think that if what you wanna understand, fundamentally, is in housing the most important product and most expensive product in most people's lives, why is Texas building it and California isn't? Why is Utah building it and Oregon isn't? You can't blame oligarchy. You can't really blame monopoly. You can't really explain this with just gesturing to income inequality. What you're looking at fundamentally is different rules leading to different outcomes. And we want liberals, progressives, people who share our priorities to take a good long look in the mirror and say, "Yeah, there's a lot of problems in the world that are worth caring about. But sometimes the bottleneck between where we are and where we want to be are rules that, ironically, we've co-created." And in a way that's where we have the most power to change, because they were often rules that we wrote and instantiated and voted on and kept, and that's why we focus on them.

- [Narrator] Chapter 2: The untapped potential of government efficiency.

- It's not just housing that we can't build in this country anymore, it's just about everything. We can't build housing fast enough. We can't build clean energy fast enough. We can't build affordable transit. The most expensive mile of subway in the world is in New York City. We can't build infrastructure. California authorizes $33 billion to build a high-speed rail system that 15, 20 years later does not exist. We can't build skyscrapers as fast as we used to. We can't build just about anything at the speed or affordability that we were once able to just decades ago. And this isn't just about the fact that the physical world has been entangled in rules and laws that make it hard for business to build. Often it's the government getting in its own way. So here's a quick example. A couple years ago, 2021, Joe Biden signs the bipartisan infrastructure bill. $1.2 trillion to build in this country. You know, if you're an abundance person like me, you would think this bill must be the perfect bill. Like, our book could have just been entirely about how wonderful it is. But then you look at the implementation of this bill. So there was a part of this bill that's called B-E-A-D, Broadband Equity Access and Deployment. And this was $42 billion to build rural broadband for underserved Americans. But now, today, four calendar years after that bill was passed, practically no rural broadband has been built. How is that possible? How did the government so get in its own way that we couldn't actually implement a law that we were proud of? Well, you look into it, and it turns out that in order for states to get access to that pot of $42 billion, they had to go through a 14-step process to get access to the money. So step number one, the FCC had to draw a map of the underserved parts of the country. And then there was a challenge period where the states could say, "Oh, no, actually you said that this part is underserved, but you should have said that this other part is underserved." And then the states get to apply for the funding. And there's a five-year plan and there's an application for the full funding. And at each moment, the Commerce Department can reply and say, "You didn't fill out this application correctly. You aren't looking out for your workforce development. You didn't have the right procurement rules over here." And they haggle back and forth. And this has taken so long that of the 56 states and localities that have started the 14-step process, only three by March 2025 have gotten through the entire process. This is an example of the goals of government running up against the processes of government, such that the processes overwhelm the goals. Now, what makes this difficult, I think, is if you go through those 14 steps, there's no one step that's obviously crazy. Yeah, the FCC probably should draw a map to indicate to states and the federal government where we wanna add rural broadband. The states should be able to challenge that map. There should be some kind of dialogue between the federal government and the states about how exactly to price rural broadband and who we should contract in order to build out rural broadband. All of these steps one by one make sense in a way. But when you put it all together, what you have is an impossibility of actually implementing the law itself. And it wasn't built because government doesn't have the muscle memory to get out of its own way when it wants to make progress in the physical world. So now we have DOGE, right? Department of Government Efficiency. And from a certain vantage point, you would think I'd be a huge fan of DOGE, right? One of the major criticisms of this book is that government isn't efficient enough at achieving its own ends. The problem with DOGE, however, is that it might call itself a department of government deficiency, but in practice it's a department of government evisceration. It's a project to destroy government as we understand it, not to help it work more efficiently. So what does that mean? Well, you look at what DOGE has done, for example, in the FDA, right? The Federal Drug Administration is charged with approving, for example, phase three clinical trial drugs that are healthy and can help Americans lead longer and healthier lives. But look at what DOGE has done to the FDA. They haven't just laid off dozens of people, they've laid off so-called probationary employees who are often highly educated, young, upwardly mobile, recently promoted employees who are exactly the type of people you would want to hire more of at the FDA in order to make that department more efficient. I think the most parsimonious way to explain what DOGE is doing is not working to make government more efficient, but working to destroy the parts of government that it associates with the progressive administrative state so that power in the executive branch can be fully centralized around whatever Donald Trump wants to do. That's not my vision of government efficiency. But I do have a vision of government efficiency. I do think it's a huge problem that in the last few decades liberals have associated success with how much money they can authorize and spend rather than what they can build in the world. That's how you get a world where, for example, you know, Californians are proud to authorize $33 billion to build a high-speed rail system, but no high-speed rail system exists. Or a world where Biden is proud to announce $7.5 billion for electric vehicle charger stations, and practically none of it is built. So I am very interested in actual government efficiency. I am interested in government getting out of its own way and making it easier to achieve what are often progressive ends, building high-speed rail, connecting low-income Americans to the internet, building out a network of electric vehicle charger stations to electrify and clean America's relationship to energy. These are all my goals, and these are all things that current progressive governance cannot do efficiently. So yes to government efficiency, no to DOGE. So in many cases, politics is fought along axes. Are you liberal or are you conservative? Do you believe in higher taxes or do you believe in lower taxes? And one of these axes that you hear about a lot is, should government be bigger or smaller? I'd prefer to think about a different axis, which is, should government be more or less effective? Should government work faster or slower? For example, in June 2023, a bridge along I-95 collapsed in Pennsylvania, an absolute crisis for the region. Almost 200,000 cars pass over that bridge every single day. So we're talking about millions of trips being interrupted every single week. Under typical conditions, it would've taken about 12 to 24 months to rebuild that bridge. But instead, the governor of Pennsylvania Josh Shapiro declared an emergency. He said, "We're not going to have normal processes to rebuild this bridge. We won't have environmental review. We won't go through the typical procurement process. We're not going to have a typical bidding process. I'm gonna point to two construction companies that are already in the region, and I'm going to award the contracts to them expeditiously. I'm gonna hire union labor, and they're gonna work 24/7 to build as fast as possible." And they did. And rather than this bridge getting built in 12 months, it was rebuilt in 12 days. Is that an example of big government? Small government? No, big versus small is simply the wrong axis along which to evaluate this political success. This was about fast government, effective government. It was about prioritizing speed and outcomes in the physical world. In a way, the story of the I-95 bridge is like the photo negative of the story of the last 50 years of American governance and building in this country. Because what was prioritized here was the question, how do we do something that is absolutely critical to the public good as fast as possible? Rather than listen to as many different groups as possible, make this process as fair as possible, no matter how long it takes to complete it. Speed was prioritized over process and the voters loved it. Josh Shapiro became like a minor celebrity or maybe even major celebrity in American politics because of this achievement. And I want other people to recognize that this is possible. It's possible to choose speed. It's possible to choose outcomes. And the problem of American governance and, unfortunately, liberal governance over the last 50 years is that we haven't chosen outcomes and we haven't chosen speed. We've chosen a particular system of listening to input in a way that made it impossible to actually do things. So "Abundance," this project is, it's trying to do a lot of things. We're trying to execute a bit of a paradigm shift on the left to think and be fixated less with process and be fixated more with outcomes. But there's also, I think, a way to define this project in slightly grander terms, which is to say that we're interested in defining a new political order for America. And the term political order has a really interesting origin. So it comes from the University of Cambridge historian Gary Gerstle, and he defines a political order as a set of ideas that both parties agree about. And so underneath sort of the penumbra of headlines and political fights that people tend to associate with politics, right, politics being a fight between two sides, he says history actually moves forward because there's a set of ideas that the parties agreed to underneath that scrum. And there's been two political orders he said in the last 100 years that have really defined American history. The first political order, which came up in the 1930s and declined around the 1960s, is the New Deal order. And the New Deal order, like all political orders, was defined by an internal crisis and an external threat. The internal crisis was the Great Depression. The external threat was the specter of socialism that FDR had to provide an answer to in creating a new set of rules and administrative law to answer the problems of this country. And so FDR and the New Dealers, they didn't just create new social security programs like Social Security itself, but they also built in the physical world. They built bridges and roads, the Tennessee Valley Authority, canals and infrastructure. They hired millions of people with the Works Progress Administration. And they really did change the country. And the reason you know a political order is real is that someone from the opposite party acquiesces to that order. So Dwight Eisenhower becomes president in the 1950s, and Eisenhower could have thrown out New Deal liberalism, but instead he said, "I believe in social welfare. I want to extend the record of building." And so he did. He passed the Interstate Highway Act. He signed the Interstate Highway Act. He continued this legacy of building that FDR had inaugurated. But what happened in the 1960s and 1970s is that there was a groundswell against New Deal liberalism. And that groundswell came from multiple directions. There was this new age of individualism, and it was ascendant on the left with the rise of the beatniks in the new left, and it was ascendant on the right with the rise of libertarian economics. The truth is, there were just new problems in the 1960s and 1970s that the previous political order didn't know how to solve. There was stagflation, which is a stagnant economy plus inflation. There was the Vietnam War, which collapsed people's trust in government institutions. There was the Soviet Union, which represented something totally different in the 1970s than it did in the 1930s. And so Americans felt like we needed a new set of rules to answer the problems of that age. And Ronald Reagan was the answer. And rather than represent a New Deal approach to government, he said the scariest words in the English language are, "I'm from the government and I'm here to help." And he started this program of pulling back government, finding ways to cut its involvement in people's lives. And it wasn't just Ronald Reagan, it was also Jimmy Carter who was deregulating. And Bill Clinton, who talked about the age of big government being over. They were, in some ways, the Democratic Eisenhowers acquiescing to an order that was really created by Republicans. And this era of neoliberalism, it wasn't just about deregulation. In many ways, it was about giving individuals the power to stop the government from doing stuff. And so this was an age in which permitting exploded and environmental review exploded, and it became harder to build houses and energy and infrastructure, and the build time of all these things bloomed. So I think that the problems of the 2020s require a new paradigm shift, a new political order, New Deal liberalism built without care for the environment. Neoliberalism found a way to surround government in so many rules that we can't actually build what we want to build. And so in a way, you could think that the New Deal order created bureaucracy and the neoliberal order created a vetocracy, a democracy of veto points. And now we're left with a government that is both big and weak. "Abundance" says in order to solve the problems of the 21st century, we need a government that is effective. Not big and weak, but fast and effective, right? Not just an idea can thrive in 2, 4, 6 year election cycles, but hopefully something more like a political order for the future.

- [Narrator] Chapter 3: Innovation requires implementation.

- So we've have a line in this book that something like, "To have the future we deserve, we need to build and invent the things we need." And that word invent I think is really important and sometimes lost in this conversation. You know, it is, of course, important to build what we know. We know how to build homes, we know how to build elevators, apartment buildings, we know how to build energy. Sometimes we just choose not to do it very quickly. But progress, human progress is often about, and maybe even exclusively about in the long run, the discovery of things we don't know and that we don't yet understand how to build, right? If what you wanna understand is, why is life in 2020 better than life in 1920 and much better than life in 1820 and completely different than life in 1720? The answer is nothing to do with human psychology or biology. It's a story of technology. In 1720, there was no such thing as a vaccine. In 1820, there was no such thing as electricity. In 1920, there was no such thing as penicillin. 2020 is better because we invented those things. And, you know, sometimes I think liberals are very interested in, as I am, the concept of universal health insurance. I'm a huge supporter of universal health insurance. But I think if you're really honest about the value of universal health insurance, you'll agree that an insurance card today is valuable, not just because it guarantees you access to a doctor, but because it guarantees you access to a set of therapies and techniques and medicines that had to be invented, often very recently. I mean, the IV plastic bag was invented about 60 years ago. The oximeter, MRI and CT scan machines, these are all inventions of the last few decades. In many cases, there are drugs available today in cancer, in type II diabetes, for obesity that are inventions of the last few years. The value of health insurance is contingent not just on the fact of health insurance, but on what health insurance buys you. And that's a story of science. So if we wanna be interested in making American's lives better, which ultimately is the project of "Abundance," I think we should be absolutely obsessed with the question of, how do we accelerate science? This is a deep question, and it's actually a very different question than how to get out of our way to build houses because we don't really understand how science works. Like, we kind of do, right? We have the scientific method, we understand it's good to randomize trials. We understand that empiricism is good, but if someone asked like the smartest scientist in America, or maybe gathered all the smartest scientists in America and said, "What's the formula for discovering what we don't know? We have no idea. There is no formula. You just try your best. And the reason I think that answer is an indictment of our current system is that the National Institutes of Health, which is the crown jewel of biomedical research in the country and maybe in the world, the National Institutes of Health is in its current iteration, a 70/80-year-old bureaucracy. Its processes are old, its habits are old, and in fact its outcomes I think are highly bureaucratic. There's lots of evidence that suggests that the way that the NIH works encourages science that is incremental rather than brave, high risk and high reward. Lots of evidence that suggests that the NIH tends to fund older, more established researchers because of their reputation and their grantsmanship, their ability to write grants, rather than support young scientists who with any reasonable understanding of scientific history, often have the most interesting breakthrough ideas. And maybe most importantly, lots of evidence to suggest that the average scientist in America now spends up to 40% of his or her time filling out grants or filling out paperwork. This is astonishing to me, I think. I mean, imagine if the American academia collectively contracted a virus that gave them all a chronic fatigue disorder, such that every single talented scientist in America had to sleep for half the year rather than practice science, I think we'd say this is an absolute catastrophe for American progress. We have to solve the problem. But this is reality. And it's not a virus that came from some other country or some pathogen. It's a bureaucratic pathogen that we invented and infected ourselves with. So right now, you know, criticisms of the American science system are admittedly hard to make because if you look what's happening with Donald Trump and DOGE, they are ransacking American science. They're slashing grants, they're going into NIH and fussing with it and banning words and banning certain kinds of scientific research. And I think that is all terrible. I think the slash-and-burn approach to the NIH is terrible. But where I think it's really, really important for liberals to not be the simple pro-institutionalists who always just defend the status quo when they see it attacked. We need to recognize that some institutions are being attacked in part because they're blame worthy. There are problems at NIH and we should solve them. There are shortcomings of modern innovation science, and we should address them. I would love to see a world, for example, where the National Institutes of Health recognize that we don't really know how to fund science effectively. And as a result, what we should do is actually take a page from science and run a bunch of experiments. We should run peer review against what's called a golden ticket policy, where one person on a peer review panel will say, "You know what? I love this idea. I'm just going to award it. My RO1 grant itself, even if no one around me agrees." Maybe we should randomize it so that sometimes we just award grants by lottery. Maybe we should give some young promising scientists money for 20 years to do whatever they want to do without ever having to reapply for funding, so they don't have to waste their time with filling out grants and filling out paperwork. I think we should have an abundance of experiments, and then we measure the results and we see what actually works. How do you fund science to answer the most important questions? How do you accelerate the discovery of drugs like GLP-1 drugs? Which have proved astonishingly successful for type II diabetes and weight loss and even it seems body-wide inflammation that seems to be beneficial for things like dementia and Alzheimer's. How do we accelerate and make more efficient the discovery of these types of breakthroughs? Right now, we don't know. And the problem as I see it is that the NIH isn't being experimental enough in confronting the fact that it doesn't know how to fund science most efficiently. So I think we should turn government into a kind of laboratory for experiments. And this in fact goes right back to the piece that I said about, what does government efficiency mean, right? What's the difference between D-O-G-E as it exists in a Trump administration and an actual obsession with making government efficient? In some cases, it's about, I think, taking speed more seriously and saying, right now it takes five years to go through the process of building, you know, rural broadband. It should probably maybe be closer to nine months. In science, it's a little bit different. In science, it's about recognizing that we need a culture of experimentation inside the government, and that's how we're going to learn how to break open the most important biological mysteries that are keeping us from living healthier and longer lives. So one of my favorite stories from this book is the story of penicillin. Penicillin was famously discovered in 1928 by the Scottish scientist Fleming, and it was discovered famously by accident. Fleming was returning to his lab after a vacation, and he had been researching bacteria and saw that in this little Petri dish where he was holding the bacteria, something seemed to have flown in through the window and landed in that dish and liquidated the colony. And when he went under the microscope to figure out exactly what had done it, he discovered that it was a mold from the genus Penicillium. And so he named the product itself penicillin. This is a really, really famous story in scientific history because it does kind of seem like maybe the most important drug of the 20th century, I mean, the most important antibacterial of the 20th century blew in through this guy's window and landed on a Petri dish in his lab. Like truly the breath of God. But let's say you took the story of penicillin 13 years forward in the early 1940s, and you stop the clock at say 1942, only five human beings in the history of this medicine had ever been tried with penicillin, and two or three of them had died. So if you would stop the clock in 1942, you would say this clearly isn't a medicine that's going to do anything for anyone. It's just hit a dead end. And the problem was that the scientists who were working on penicillin couldn't grow it in sufficient batches to test it in people. And so they went from the UK, which was submerged in war in World War II to the US, and they got really, really lucky because just as they took penicillin to the US, the US had started this program called OSRD, the Office of Scientific Research and Development, which was launched by FDR to coordinate all technological and scientific innovation during the war. So the Manhattan Project, which built the nuclear bomb, spun out of this. And one of the most important achievements of the OSRD was that they found a way to grow penicillin at scale, to test it at scale. And three years after scientists took penicillin to the US, we had grown it to the extent that the death rate from bacterial illness among American and British soldiers declined by a factor of 18. The lesson here is that what made penicillin the most important scientific discovery in medicine of the 20th century was not the discovery itself, it was implementation. And I think this is a lesson that is sometimes lost for fans of progress and also for people in government. Invention matters, but implementation matters more. Invention is how you take an idea from zero to one. Implementation is how you take an idea from one to one billion. That's the story of penicillin. It's a story of scaling. And when I look at American history in the last 70 years, I'm worried that we've somewhat fallen out the habit of implementation, right? An American invented the elevator, and somehow we can't build apartment buildings. Americans invented nuclear power, but we basically stopped building nuclear power plants after the 1970s. Americans invented the solar cell, but we let the frontier of solar development escape to Germany and Japan, and now China. An American invented, or Americans invented the transistor. But if you look at where the most advanced semiconductors are being built in the world, the vast majority of them are being assembled in Taiwan, not America. So over and over again, I'm worried that while America clearly wins all the Nobel Prizes, if there were a Nobel Prize for implementing what we invent, we would not be so dominant. Now, here's where I think there's actually a success story that's been wildly underrated. And it's Operation Warp Speed, which is the program under Donald Trump that in 2020 accelerated the development of mRNA vaccines that saved millions of American lives and maybe tens of millions of lives around the world. Operation Warp Speed has a very, very, very strange reputation right now. Republicans don't like to brag about it because they've somewhat negatively polarized themselves against vaccines, and in particular, mRNA vaccines, and in particular, particular the way that mRNA vaccines as a medicine got enmeshed with vaccine mandates. And so their objections to the mandates became conflated with objections to the underlying therapy. But then on the Democratic side, I think what you see is that a lot of people don't talk about Operation Warp Speed because they don't wanna give a lot of credit to a program that was initiated under Donald Trump. But Operation Warp Speed was a marvel, right? We did with mRNA vaccines in 2020 what the World War II machine did for penicillin in the 1940s. We took the germ of an idea, a little synthetic mRNA recipe that at first existed only in a lab, and we blew it out so that it could be implemented at scale, delivered to billions of people around the world. And Operation Warp Speed did this in a really canny way. There was push funding, so direct subsidies for pharmaceutical companies. But there was also what's called pull funding. We told some of these companies that we would guarantee a billion dollar payment for these vaccine discoveries or these vaccine products, even if another company had beaten them to market. And in this way encouraged many, many, many different companies to try their best to pour money into the investment for developing, you know, vaccines for Covid. Then once the vaccines were created, the government created this sort of glide path that allowed them to go from being in a lab to being injected into people's arms. We made it easier, for example, for the vaccines to be transported in special glass vials that were built by Corning. So we contracted with glass companies in order to help companies like Moderna transport these vaccines across the country. And then finally, and very importantly, we, you know, having bought all the vaccines, the federal government could have charged Americans whatever they wanted, and they charged Americans the price of $0 and 0 cents. So we had this extraordinary all of government achievement with Operation Warp Speed. And what is its legacy? We've basically forgotten about it. It's like what if we landed a man on the moon and then like never talked about the Apollo program? That's how I feel about Operation Warp Speed. I want there to be an Operation Warp Speed for everything. I want there to be an Operation Warp Speed for cancer drugs, if we can. An Operation Warp Speed for addiction pills. An operation warp speed for inflammation. An Operation Warp Speed for cardiovascular medicine. An Operation Warp Speed for dementia, for obesity, for clean cement. Cement that we manufacture that doesn't just cook the planet. In fact, if cement were its own country, sort of a weird thing to think about, it would be the seventh largest emitter of carbon dioxide in the world, but it's necessary. It's necessary to build things. So how do we build cement without releasing tons of carbon dioxide in the process? That's a project where I would love to see an all of government effort to accelerate the development of. When you look at what's happening right now, for example, in artificial intelligence. Artificial intelligence is a larval technology, right? Anybody is lying to you if they say they know exactly how it's going to work out. On the positive side, if it's going to accelerate drug discovery. On the negative side, if it's going to lead to a world of utter chaos. But one thing we seem to know for sure is that artificial intelligence is unbelievably energy thirsty. It takes a ton of electricity to train these models, to outfit the data centers where the models live in silicon. And if the federal government is going to play a major role I think in making sure the data centers that house AI are built in America, rather than built say in the Middle East, we really need to find a way to not only allow energy to be built efficiently, but also I think make it easier to build clean energy in this country. Because in the absence of clean energy, you're just going to burn more fossil fuels and accelerate climate change. So where are the Operation Warp Speeds for accelerating enhanced geothermal, for accelerating modular nuclear power or even fusion power? Where are the Operation Warp Speeds for everything, considering how fantastically successful the first Operation Warp Speed was? It's really bizarre that we like received this lesson that an all of government focus and implementation can do extraordinary things, break the land speed record for the fastest vaccine ever created. And we're basically just doing nothing with that lesson, right? This book says, "No, we need to take the lesson of OWS very seriously, and look at other places like medicines or clean cement or carbon removal, where these kind of mechanisms can really serve to take technologies that might now live in the 2040s and pull them closer to the 2020s."

- [Narrator] Chapter 4: The anti-social generation.

- So, obviously, the world has changed a lot in the last 50, 60 years. When you go back to 1960, college was affordable, but it was impossible to buy a flat screen television because they did not exist. And today you have the opposite, where it's very easy to buy a flat screen television, but college is often massively expensive for many, many families. But it's not just this world of unaffordability that has settled in, and this world of blocking and this world of red tape. I think at the individual level, something very profound and existentialist change about American life, which is, that American life has gotten significantly more alone. Robert Putnam wrote this famous book called "Bowling Alone" in 2000, where he pointed out that, you know, going back to the 1950s, you saw pretty linearly this decline in associations, in groups, in friendships, in people seeing each other. I mean, he traced this decline across so many different areas. If I recall from the book, he even said that people write fewer greeting cards and thank you notes than they did just 50 years earlier. And it's funny because in 2000, a lot of academics rose up and they said, you know, "Bob Putnam, he's just wrong. He's looking at this the wrong way." In fact, "If you look at it the right way," they said, "all sorts of social interactions are totally blooming. This is like a golden age for people being together." But now, 20, 25 years have passed, and it turns out that Putnam was even more right than he knew. So the American Time Use Survey, which is an official government survey run by the Bureau of Labor Statistics, asks Americans every year, how much time do you spend doing stuff? How much time do you spend eating dinner? How much time do you spend working? How much time do you spend sleeping? And one question they ask is, how much time do you spend in face-to-face socializing with people who are outside of your home? And it's found that the average American now spends 20% less time socializing in person than they did just 20 years ago, and a record amount of time spent alone by themselves. I think this might be the most fundamental fact of American life that there is. You can debate all sorts of things about how the texture of American life and American values have changed. What you can't debate is the sheer objective, existential fact that Americans are more alone than ever, and that in many ways we're choosing this aloneness. So if you trace the decline of socializing over the last 60 years, in many ways, I think it is a story cleanly told by technology. Technology is not the only thing that plays a role here, but it's a critical thing that plays a role here. You go back to the 1960s, and then you have the rise of the car, and the rise of the car allows people to drive away from downtown areas and populate the suburbs. And this happens to be a period, by the way, where the sociologist Eric Klinenberg has written social infrastructure, which was being built like crazy between the 1930s and 1950s, kinda starts to wither away in cities, and so Americans move out to the suburbs. In this way, you could say the car privatized American lives. But then right after the popularization of the car, you have the invention of the television. And if the car privatized American lives, I think the television privatized American leisure. People chose to spend their leisure time just sitting on a couch watching the tube. There's an amazing statistic that between the 1960s and the 1990s, the average American gained about 300 hours of leisure time every single year. And you sort of step back and think like, if someone told you that you had an extra 300 hours added to your waking consciousness in the next 12 months, what would you do with it? Would you learn another language? Would you read "The Odyssey"? Would you spend more time with your kids? Would you pick up sewing or pottery? Well, it turns out that Americans actually had this gift in the second half of the 20th century, and they spent those extra 300 hours of leisure doing almost exclusively one thing, watching more television. So then you get in the 21st century, and if the car privatized American lives and the television privatized American leisure, the smartphone privatized our attention. Smartphones allow us to be alone, even when we're around other people. You can be in a cafe and be alone. You could be at a party and be alone. You can essentially choose to turn your waking consciousness into an experience of aloneness whenever you want. Now, some people are going to say that, "Derek, this entire criticism is unfair because the time we spend in our phones is actually very social, right? We're texting people, we're emailing, sometimes we're calling, we're FaceTiming." And yes, some time that we spend on our phones is social after a fashion. But I really don't think it's at all a replacement for being with people. I think if we're honest with ourselves, we know this. The experience of texting a friend is often the experience of catching up, but the experience of being with a friend is the actual texture of friendship. And so, as physical world friendships become funneled into our devices, I think we lose so much of what makes human relationships valuable in the first place. So I've called this phenomenon the anti-social century, and I call it the anti-social century rather than the lonely century for a very specific reason. You know, loneliness, as defined by some sociologists, is the feeling that someone has when there's a gap between their felt sociality and their desired sociality. It's me on the couch watching TV and being like, "Man, I kind of wanna get a drink with that friend." Loneliness is the biological instinct that's healthy in many cases that pushes me to get off the couch. That's not the instinct that most people feel today. Instead, the instinct is, in many cases, to stay on the couch. There's this trend on TikTok that some people call cancellation, which is young people often in their twenties, in many cases, the most socially starved generation in American history. They have fewer friends than previous generations. They spend less time with their friends in previous generations. And what happens is they'll film this little dance that they do when a friend cancels plans. They'll say, "Oh my God, thank God my plans were canceled. I can spend more time at home alone." Is that loneliness? No, that's the opposite of loneliness. That's someone celebrating when the opportunity to socialize is canceled. That's the decision to be alone, an anti-social decision, not an expression of healthy loneliness. And what's happening here I think is actually really interesting. Like, at a level of biochemistry, I think it's absolutely fascinating, because here's what I think is happening. I think a lot of people are experiencing their leisure time by dumping their attention into their phone. And as they're flicking through TikTok and they're flicking through Instagram, they're thinking dopamine hit, dopamine hit, dopamine hit. And what happens sometimes when we experience a really high dopamine period is that our reserve levels, our so-called tonic levels of dopamine drop. And so we're spending all this time on our phones, we put our phone down, and we're like a little exhausted. And maybe a friend texts at that very moment and says, "Hey, you wanna get a drink?" "Hey, you wanna get dinner?" "Hey, you wanna just hang out outside the house?" And what populates in our head is all the various ways that the adventure of leaving our home could actually be a misadventure. "Ugh, I gotta do my hair." "Maybe I have to do my makeup." "I have to find the new jeans that I wanna wear." "I have to travel to meet them." "I might not be able to park." "The subway might be delayed." "It might be a boring conversation with them." "I'm not so sure that I have the emotional energy to be there for my friend right now." And so all we think of is the misadventure rather than the adventure of socializing. And so we say no, and instead we just go back to our phones. We are essentially dumping our dopamine, our drive, into our screens rather than gifting it to other people. We're reserving our energy for glass rather than actual friendship. And to me this is one of the most tragic things about modern life, you know? And I truly, now, I see it everywhere. I see it in the fact that there are restaurants where I go to now, where I'll go into the restaurant, and rather than see people seated in the chairs, I'll just see a bar filled with brown paper bags for people to enter the restaurant, take the bag, and go home. And it turns out that today the restaurant industry is 74% by foot traffic off premises, which is to say that the restaurant industry right now is three-quarters about people grabbing food to eat at home rather than eating together with people from outside of their home. I see it on social media where, for example, there's like this TikTok trend of dudes who will brag about their morning routines, right? This is often like a very handsome man who wakes up in the morning and goes to the morning routine where he meditates, and he journals, and he works out, and he drinks his water, and he has his smoothie, and he journals again, and he goes into the sauna and he does his cold plunge. He has the perfect self-optimized morning. And in these video dioramas of a life well lived, there are no people except for him. He wakes up in bed alone. He spends his life alone. There's no child; there's no wife. It's just a vision of life perfected that is essentially a monk. But rather than devote one's life to say God, something outside the body, he's a secular monk, devoting himself entirely to muscles and journaling and meditation. And I can't help but see this and connect it to the fact that Americans seem to be dating less than ever and coupling less than ever, getting married later in their lives, having fewer children. You can almost think about this as like a total life scale effect, where teenagers, by record, have fewer friends and spend less time hanging out. 20 somethings are dating less, 30 somethings are marrying less, and 40 somethings have fewer kids. Those are the social costs of the anti-social century. It's a world where people who might be biochemically tricked to not listen to the voice of loneliness, the biological urge to be with people, demanding too much aloneness for themselves, so much aloneness that it's actually bad for them. And the cost of this at an emotional and psychological level are obvious. Rates of anxiety are going through the roof. Rates of social anxiety are going through the roof. Young people have never been more depressed. Or never said they had fewer friends. We're doing this to ourselves, and we don't have to. There's this idea from the author Neal Stephenson called Amistics, which is a term that he adopted from the Amish that he thinks of as the values that we give to technology. And he points out that the Amish are famous for rejecting all technology, but in fact, they don't reject all technology. They sometimes have washing machines. They have solar power. Instead, what they have is a very narrow filter for technology. They only accept technology into their lives if they believe it is in service to a preexisting value. So they say no to televisions because they think televisions might interfere with hangs between families, but they say yes to solar power because it can empower their lives. I wonder if all Americans could benefit from an Amistic sensibility. You know, rather than adopt any technology that makes our lives more convenient, and then just live with the emotional and psychological consequences of that adoption, what if we instead filter technology for our values? Maybe our values are romance or family togetherness. Maybe our value is a digital or actual Sabbath. Maybe our value is maintaining our ability to concentrate on a single thing for longer than the 15 seconds it takes to swipe between TikTok videos. What would the world look like if we had values first and technology second, rather than adopted technology first and just live with whatever values came downstream of them? I think it would be a better world. I think it'd be a more purposeful world. I think it'd be a more social world. And I fundamentally think it'd be a happier world too. So I'm a natural optimist. I think we can fix this problem, but before we talk about how to fix this problem, I think I have to be a realist and discuss how it could get worse. So right now, we're seeing the rise of generative AI. And one way that people are using AI is not just to use large language models like ChatGPT, to say, ask questions like a search engine, many of us are treating it like a friend. There's this company Character.AI that has tens of millions of users. These are people who are essentially developing emotional relationships with chat bots, even if those chat bots aren't as advanced as they might be in the future at giving us everything that we want from an emotional relationship. I mean, I find this future that we're sleepwalking into to be both plausible and extremely scary. And yes, you know, people are gonna hear like, "Oh, you're just recreating the plot line of 'Her.' This is not a prediction, this is just you reciting the summary of a movie that came out a decade ago." But I think it's worth taking seriously the fact that many young people today have a relationship with their friends that exists almost exclusively through the phone, through texting, and maybe sometimes calls, but mostly texting and sharing memes. When you're texting with someone, like phenomenologically, what's your relationship with them? You're just exchanging bubbles. Here's my text bubble, here's your text bubble, here's my text bubble. At a level of experience, phenomenology, what is the real difference between texting a friend and texting an AI, right? I get the difference between a person and a machine, but the experience through your phone is very similar, which is why I'm worried that it's like we're blazing a trail upon which AI companions will easily walk. And right now, you know, people like me, I'm 38 years old, so I think it's frankly, utterly ridiculous to have an emotional relationship with artificial intelligence. But change often works through demographic replacement. Today's young people might grow up in a world where these chat bots are frankly not yet super intelligent at science and medicine, but super proficient at being friends, at giving people emotional validation, at being available for us. I mean, if I text my best friend, it might take him five hours to reply. If I text a chat bot, it's going to reply instantaneously. It's not busy in the way that people are busy. And so I think about a future where young people say, you know, "It's actually easier for me to develop an emotional relationship with silicon-based life forms than carbon-based life forms," as creepy as that is to say. They'll discover that what they want out of a relationship, validation, a sense of availability, a sense that there's a responder who understands their deepest fears. They might discover that's more efficiently gleaned from silicon than from carbon. And that's a very real future, I think, to look out for and to fear, and even to plan against if you are a parent like me. But I'm also, I'm a fundamentally optimistic person, and I think that these problems can be solved. I mean, fortunately, the antidote to the anti-social century does not have to be invented, right? This is not something like Alzheimer's or pancreatic cancer where we're waiting on scientists to invent a cure. The cure is us. The cure is other people. The cure is leaving your house. The cure is getting up off your couch. The cure is filling the down times of life, not with more TikTok and Instagram and X, but rather with calling a friend, calling a family member, reaching out to other people, planning the next hangout. And I understand that these issues are not easy to solve. You know, I can make it seem like there's problems that an individual can solve on their own. I understand that they are collective problems, right? If you wanna plan a dinner among friends, it's much easier if five dinners with friends have already been planned so that you're clicking into a habit rather than creating it. Much easier, for example, to have a Sunday tradition if that Sunday tradition is called church rather than a Sunday tradition called a book club or a workout club or just coffee with friends, right? The congregation itself, the religious congregation, is a beautiful answer to the collective action problem. Lots of people are already coming together because they believe in God and a set of religious institutions that are embodied and synchronous and together. Hard to recreate that sometimes in the absence of an organizing principle like a belief in God and an afterlife. But, again, we are the ones who can change this. We're not waiting on anything to be invented. We're not waiting on anything to be discovered. We can get together with our friends, with our family to simply prioritize the value of being around other people over the value of a convenience-driven life that's just made super efficient by whatever technology happens to be at our disposal.