The following conversation was featured on Radio Abundance, Episode XXIII: Abundance Energized! Alex Trembath is the Deputy Director of The Breakthrough Institute.Steve M. Boyle, Executive Director of YIMBY Democrats for America:

Hello, and welcome to Radio Abundance! We are here with Alex Trembath. He's the Deputy Director of the Breakthrough Institute, and this is his second appearance on Radio Abundance.

Hey Alex, welcome to the program!Alex Trembath, Deputy Director of The Breakthrough Institute:

Thanks for having me back, Steve.Steve M. Boyle, Executive Director of YIMBY Democrats for America:

Hey, we are thrilled that you are back. We had an amazing conversation about two months ago.

You know, the Breakthrough Institute was very early to the world of Abundance, long before Abundance had a name, with fingers in a lot of areas, but especially energy and the environment, sending out a call to the world that our approach to the environment was neither helping the environment nor ourselves and proposing a better route through what you call "eco-modernism" in terms of how we can build a greener world and a more energy-efficient world while also lowering the cost of energy and making it easier for people to live where they want to live and live near where they work — building a world with more energy, more food, and a better environment for all of us and every creature on earth.

Is that a reasonably accurate description?

Alex Trembath, Deputy Director of The Breakthrough Institute:

That was great.

Steve M. Boyle, Executive Director of YIMBY Democrats for America:

Amazing. So in that last conversation, which I will link to because it was phenomenal, we talked about the origins of The Breakthrough Institute. We talked about your work in energy. And we talked quite a lot about nuclear energy and safety. We went through different nuclear accidents and talked about why it was safe and really analyzed them. So it's a really phenomenal conversation, and one of my favorites. We're not going to retread old ground, but I highly recommend that.

So, we are really excited to talk more because there's so much to this area. You also work on things like agriculture and food. We're really excited to talk about Abundance when it comes to food.

You are also doing events! In fact, our audience may have heard of or may also be about to attend the Abundance Conference in DC. You are one of the biggest if not the biggest and certainly one of the key organizers and producers of that. So, I figured we'd start there.

Let's start with just what it is, right? To anybody who is not already initiated or who does not already have their ticket, what's the Abundance Conference?

Alex Trembath, Deputy Director of The Breakthrough Institute:

Yeah, we're really excited about it. It's two weeks from today, as we're recording. It's September 4th and 5th in Washington DC.

This is really the national gathering of the broad Abundance movement that we all and that all your listeners know and love. At this point, there's 15 think-tank and activist co-hosts and a number of sponsors as well. We're going to have over 500 people there, from every walk of life.

We're going to have thinktankers and journalists and philanthropists and advocates and activists and investors and technologists and elected officials at the state, national, and local level. Our hope is that this becomes the annual convening of the Abundance Movement.

This is the second time that we're doing this event. We launched a pilot Abundance Conference in DC last year that we all really loved, and we wanted to do it again and make it bigger and make it better.

You know, I've been doing events for over 10 years. I won't say it's not hard! It is hard work! Logistically. Substantively.

But it wasn't hard to build interest for this event. Let me say that we sold out six weeks in advance. We have a waiting list of over 200 people at this point!

My hope is that we can accommodate more people and ideas in the future.

We're really excited. We're going to cover housing (obviously), energy, infrastructure, Artificial Intelligence, healthcare, immigration, families, state capacity, governance, and on and on and on — the wide swath of the Abundance Agenda.

We’ve got some pretty incredible speakers lined up. I'm just really excited!Steve M. Boyle, Executive Director of YIMBY Democrats for America:

You’ve got incredible speakers! You've got some amazing speakers, some amazing partners. Give us some razzamatazz for a second? Let's name-drop a little bit! Who's coming?

Alex Trembath, Deputy Director of The Breakthrough Institute:

Yeah, so obviously 2025 is the year of the publication of Abundance by Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson.

You know, Derek Thompson, who really coined the term "the Abundance Agenda" in 2021 — which was kind of a Rubicon for a bunch of us, right? We talked in our last conversation, Steve, about how a bunch of us within Abundance, including Breakthrough and the YIMBY movement and organizations like Niskanen had been doing Abundance-y stuff for years or more. The Federation of American Scientists is a co-host on this event, and they've been operating for over half a century at this point on a whole bunch of stuff related to nuclear and science and technology. But, it really was just over the last few years that we all found each other in this new context under this new tent called Abundance.

So, we're thrilled that David Brooks from The New York Times is going to be interviewing Ezra and Derek about their book and the reaction to it over the last six months or so. We're also thrilled to have dozens of elected officials from around the country, including a number of Members of Congress who will be on stage, as well as Representatives from State legislatures and Mayors and local Representatives from City Councils and local government.

We're also thrilled to have the Governor of Utah. Spencer Cox is going to come talk about what Abundance looks like in his home state of Utah.

Those are a few of the big keynotes that we're excited to have planned for this year's conference. And then, beyond that, like I said, we've got 15 co-hosts and a bunch of philanthropic and other sponsors focused on a range of issues that I could never hope to program in my many years of planning and executing climate-and-environment-focused conferences.

We've got The Institute for Progress helping us figure out a panel on Immigration and The Federation of American Scientists spearheading a panel on the next Golden Age of American Science and Science Investment. We've got The Niskanen Center helping us with a panel on families.

We've got the whole YIMBY movement — Welcoming Neighbors Network, Metropolitan Abundance Project, The Abundance Network, YIMBY action — collaborating on a session, sharing lessons from what worked for communications and organizing in the housing sector to what might work in other Abundance sectors, like energy or infrastructure.

I'm really just scratching the surface here! It's a lot of partners. A lot of sweat equity. A lot of ideas. A lot to be excited about.

Steve M. Boyle, Executive Director of YIMBY Democrats for America:

You mentioned you've been throwing events before. This is something we share and love, and we'll talk about the importance of events in a second.

But you mentioned you've had a decade of experience throwing events in the world of energy and climate and the environment. So, going back to last year — so, pre-Rubicon, we're back in Gaul — how did this come together in the first place?

Because 15 partners and co-producers or however you want to call it, that's a big number to come out of the gate with that! So, going back to last year, what was the origin story of kicking this off?

Alex Trembath, Deputy Director of The Breakthrough Institute:

You know, it was a few years ago that I ended up in conversations with folks from some of these co-hosts, just talking about what it would look like and what the purpose and strategy of an Abundance gathering in our nation's capital would look like.

Like, “what should we and why would we convene to co-host an Abundance conference in DC?” And I was talking with folks again, from like The Institute for Progress and The Foundation for American Innovation and The Niskanen Center, about this realization that we are all marching to the same tune.

We are — with significant kind of substantive and even ideological differences between us — all part of this Abundance coalition, this Abundance movement. And last year, really, I and Derek Kaufman, who founded Inclusive Abundance in 2024, spearheaded the first Abundance Conference in DC along with four other co-hosts: The Federation of American Scientists, Institute for Progress, The Niskanen Center, and The Foundation for American Innovation.

And that went really well. It was six co-hosts and a bunch of sessions and panels. We had folks who were at the time working in the Biden Administration. We had Jerusalem Demsas, who this week launched a new magazine, interviewing Patrick Collison, one of the benefactors but also one of the visionaries behind the Progress and Abundance movements. And it just really felt in that event like momentum was building, and a bunch of us wanted to do it again, expand the tent, and democratiz...

Abundance Energized! Alex Trembath of The Breakthrough Institute on Radio Abundance

Powered by Wave AI