D (3:27)

Out of your back.

B (3:28)

Like the book was just like a lot of like bad, bad, bad, bad. But I do think that like the beginning, the opening and the conclusion are a little bit optimistic. I think that's a part of why some people read the book and they said this is optimistic. I think some of them just looked at the COVID I think certainly some of our critics just looked at the COVID and then wrote their critiques. But like, I think some people just draw a certain attitudinal vibe from the book, that the COVID has, you know, a cut open earth and half of it is blooming with a bunch of flora and fauna. But I also think that like, and this is like the serious point that I want to make, that when people feel a vague sense that shit is broken, there's a kind of optimism that's inherent to specificity, that even without trying to sound optimistic or hopey changey, just telling people that they're right about their vague spectral feeling that shit is broken, that housing can't be built, that energy can't be built, that government doesn't work, that we can't invent being able to be really specific about. I know, I think why you're upset, it's because this rule is getting in our way. It's because this process is getting in our way. It's because this cultural attitude is getting in our way. When you can be specific for someone who feels this spectral sense of anxiety, that specificity registers as optimism. And I think that's obviously true both for someone writing a book and also probably for a politician crafting a message. It's easy to be vague and hopeful. It's easy to be vague and negative. What's harder is understanding very concretely what am I angry about? What is the specific concrete motivation for the thing that makes me passionate. And the book really was written in a flight of passion because we really were upset about the ways that so many different processes and especially those laws and rules in liberal states and liberal cities are getting in the way of us building and inventing.

C (5:25)

Congressman, what do you think about the idea of needing to have a offensive, forward facing vision?

D (5:31)

I agree. And I mean, Americans know what Democrats are against. They don't know what we're for. And if we are going to earn Americans trust to govern at the state and the federal level, we have to explain what we are for. And what Derek and Ezra have done is they've written an economics textbook for the Democratic Party. And when you read an economics textbook, what you learn is that, hey, most of the time markets work pretty well. And when markets are not working very well, ask yourself what the bottlenecks are that are impairing the market function. And the criticism that they're getting from the left is, oh, you're insisting that it's only the government, that it's impairing the functioning of markets. Well, sometimes it is. You know, zoning laws are impairing the functioning of housing and energy permitting laws are impairing our ability to build nuclear. But sometimes it's big business that are making markets not work well. Right. You look at the pharmacy benefit managers that are the middlemen of drug pricing. They're making our drug pricing supply chain all messed up. And I think good economics tells you you're agnostic as to what is an impairment of a functioning market. You just go, unplug that bottleneck.

C (6:36)

So, Congressman, you just said bottleneck twice. So I have to move ahead in the script and ask the question you two both knew was coming. Demand Progress. A lefty anti corporate power group put out a poll last week. And we could have qualms at the wording and the framing, but like at a key level, it put together two messages. One was a populist message putting corporations and corporate power at the center of America's problems. The abundance version of the message focused on bottlenecks. Housing, manufacturing, energy, et cetera, transportation as being key to the story here. Democrats in their poll found the bottleneck story less compelling than the corporate power story. I Would love to hear both of your reaction to the broad takeaway of the result rather than the, you know, qualms we can have at the world.

D (7:20)

Yeah, it's, it's, it's what happens when you test an economics textbook against like a romance novel and tell people, what do you like to read better? Like, it's such a bad faith poll.

B (7:30)

I would never go out there and.

D (7:32)

Campaign on like, let's be bottleneck detectives to figure out whether, you know, four story modular needs to have a steel chassis under HUD regulations. Like, no, I'm gonna say housing's too expensive, you're mad at your landlord for keeping on raising the rent. The best thing we can do is to give your landlord more competition by building some housing.

B (7:50)

Okay.

D (7:51)

Like you, of course, you, you campaign in poetry and you govern in prose. And I'm, I'm pretty unwilling to accept the lecture on corporate power from the left when they are carrying the water for the most pernicious, nefarious corporations in modern history, which are the social media corporations. Every time we try to take on big tech, which are attention fracking our children, which are corroding our civil discourse, which are monetizing our attention spans, it's the left that's carrying the water for their spurious political arguments. They're the ones who are in the, in the pocket of these big tech companies.

B (8:24)

I think it's a really compelling answer. I certainly did not think when I started my book leave in 2023 that eventually sentences from chapter five would be poll tested against the case against corporate power. But I think it's important to say that, like, you know, we didn't write the book for it to be a good bumper sticker. We wrote the book for it to be a good book. And good books can inspire good bumper stickers, and good books can maybe inspire good politicians. But bumper stickers shouldn't be book quotes. And frankly, nobody votes for a book in an election. They, they vote for people. And people are these really. This is gonna be an obvious one. Complex things. Like Franklin Delano Roosevelt was not John Maynard Keynes turned into a person. Right? He was this complex thing. He was a patrician who was a rebel against his own class, who was taking some ideas from an economist named John Maynard Keynes and turning that into an entirely new kind of political order that was so popular, it redefined American life for 20 years and arguably for the next century. But to say to he would. It wouldn't have made any sense for FDR to take a page from a Keynes textbook and say I should poll test this against my case against Herbert Hoover. No, it's okay to be inspired by an idea and not want to make that idea the single thing that you talk about in precisely that language to voters. So I, I'm, I'm, in a weird way, honored. I'm, I'm, I'm flattered that they chose to make like, almost literally a sentence from like, page 167, a concept that you would poll test against. Something that sings beautifully in the poetry of campaign language, which is the biggest problem in American, in American life is corporate power or something like that. Um, but I, I, I think fundamentally, you know, elections are hypotheses. I want people who want to run for office to be inspired by these ideas and understand the right, or figure out the right language to run inspired by this book without necessarily quoting something that's just ripped from page 168.

C (10:37)

And a follow up to you, Derek. So after this poll came out, the sort of abundance, Twitter generic response was basically, this is a governing agenda, it's not a campaign plan. And you put out a really interesting tweet, I think it was yesterday or the day before, where you said, it's actually much more complicated than that. There's a relationship between governing and elections. So please expand on that. And I'd love to hear that from you too, Congressman, how you think about this relationship between the two.

B (11:01)

Well, so some people, I think, after this poll came out, and I haven't honestly spent a lot of time thinking about this poll, but we've now doubled the amount of time that I spent thinking about this poll on this stage. The poll came out, and I saw some people defend me and Ezra by saying, you have to understand that abundance is about policy, not about politics. And this was a sentence that I sometimes saw being offered as a way of almost apologizing for the fact that the quote from page 168 didn't poll particularly well. And the truth is that while I, of course, respect and I'm grateful for everybody who comes to our defense, I don't actually agree that abundance is about policy, not politics. I don't like drawing this really sharp line between policy and politics. I think good policy, good ideas, makes good outcomes more likely. And it's easier to practice politics when you have good outcomes. John Joe Biden had terrible outcomes in 2023 and 2024 because of inflation. Incumbents all over the world had terrible outcomes because of inflation. That made politics really, really hard. But I think that good ideas make good outcomes more Likely and good outcomes make good politics more possible. So I don't like this idea that abundance is just about policy, not about politics. No abundance. The ideas in this book are about pre. About fixing the cost of living crisis, about making housing cheaper, about making energy cheaper, about making governance higher quality, about making scientific breakthroughs that save our lives, the lives of our children, our parents and our. And our lovers and our partners more likely. In a world where we get those good outcomes, good political messaging is a cinch. You elected me, I made the world better. Elect me again. That's straightforward. You don't need any poll testing in order to get that message across. It's much harder where you have to start paying the really brilliant consultants. A lot of money is when you were elected and you had bad policies and then everything went to shit. And now what do you do? Right. That's the world that Donald Trump is, I think, bringing himself into when he gets elected because of a cost of living election. And the first thing that he does is raise the cost of everything that makes politics real, really, really hard on him. And you can see in the approval rating because it's fallen pretty precipitously in the last few weeks.

C (13:19)

And, Congressman, something you can very helpfully let Derek and I do is take this conversation away from purely just housing. You know, speaking of interpreting the book, you'd think from the discourse and reviews that you two, you and Ezra had written a book that was 98% about housing, and then there was 2% of science and technology and innovation. But there's a broader side here. And, Congressman, when you and I have spoken about abundance, I've appreciated your ability to bring abundance beyond just housing in terms of an agenda. So I'd love for you to talk about that. And then, Derek, you could come in and talk about the undersold story of the science and tech.

D (13:50)

Absolutely. So, for example, I think one of the big ideas Democrats should campaign on is curing Alzheimer's. By the year 2050, we're going to have 15 million Americans with Alzheimer's disease. Each one's going to require three caregivers paid or family. And the emotional financial burden, both as a country fiscally and on individuals, is going to be just absolutely staggering. And you know what? We actually have basically no idea how to cure Alzheimer's right now. And the scientific moonshot that this president is orienting the country towards is Mars. If Elon Musk wants to go to Mars, fine. But I think we should be oriented towards curing Alzheimer's disease, which is actually going to help people much more materially in the near term. And we use that as the cornerstone of a scientific agenda that calls for more than doubling our research and development intensity from about 2 1/2% of GDP where it's at now post war low, to closer to 6%, which is about where it was after World War II. And it's about where innovation powerhouses like Taiwan and South Korea and Israel are at right now. So you give people that, that goal and then you say, and let me tell you how we're going to get here and why, why it makes sense to invest in the National Institutes of Health and the National Science foundation, et cetera. Similarly, on education, I think this is a massively untapped area for Democrats. Democrats made a catastrophic mistake by closing the schools in 2020 and 25 million American students are behind grade level on reading and writing right now. And you know what? Candidly we don't have a plan and we owe a plan to the American people because it was Democrats that did it. And part of that plan needs to be surging one on one high dosage tutoring to every single student in America. We know how to do it now. I've seen it in my own district. We got to build a thousand trade schools to get people building again. But we need to have a really ambitious education agenda that taps into the brilliance of the American people. We're so obsessed right now. Or not. We, the administration is so obsessed about all these Chinese students doing research in America. It's like, yeah, you know what, the Chinese are outscoring us on science and math right now. Stop worrying about the Chinese students. They're scoring well. Worry about American students right now who are entering ninth grade with a sixth grade education.

C (16:09)

And Derek, I'd love you to explain like your sort of interpretation of like the recovered side of like the science and innovation part of the story.

B (16:16)

Well, one of my favorite parts of the book to research was Operation Warp Speed, which I think is probably the strangest public policy in modern American history. It's arguably, I mean representative, you're the expert here. Is it the most successful medical innovation policy in American history on a bang for buck basis? Is it that or the sort of acceleration of like penicillin in World War II? It's gotta be right up there.

D (16:43)

It's right up there for sure.

B (16:44)

Right up there with maybe bang for buck, the most life saving innovation policy in American history. Save more lives than the Apollo Project for sure. What happened after Operation Warp Speed? Republicans became even more of an anti Vax policy, anti Vax party. Donald Trump never talks about the law and Democrats barely talked about the law themselves. And so, I mean, imagine if we landed on the moon like eight years into the Apollo Project and no party talked about it like that. That's the equivalent of what happened after Operation Warp Speed succeeded in bringing down the fastest vaccine development from 10 years to 10 months. I think any rational government should have said, how do we do Operation Warp Speed for anything? How do we take the lessons from this policy and say, okay, we had this idea that said we're going to set this incredibly ambitious goal. We're going to map out the whole life cycle of developing a vaccine. We're going to understand where we need to push money at the front end. We're going to understand where we need to do what's called pull funding, which is to say we're going to promise you a prize if you develop this vaccine and we'll give you the money at the end of the process. And we're going to go through. There's a life going around me. We're going to find a way to make sure that every single time a company faces a bottleneck, like for example, the vaccine has to be sent in these very, very cold little glass containers. We're going to contact Corning, a glass manufacturer, to make sure that they make exactly the containers that can bring this vaccine across the country to cvs. I mean, it's unbelievable what we did and nobody cares. It's unbelievable how few people care, especially in the party responsible for the accomplishment because they were in power. I think it's crazy. And I do think that any rational, smart government or state would say what other challenges are amenable to this kind of policy. Is Alzheimer's amenable to an operational speed? Maybe not, because we don't even know yet, like what the fundamental basic science of or basic reality of Alzheimer's is. So we, you know, we thought that there was a plaque hypothesis, the amyloid plaque hypothesis threw a bunch of money into there and it didn't particularly work. But I would love us to take seriously this idea that yes, housing is important, yes, energy is important, but the future is also something that Democrats should be excited to talk about. And the future is made better by precisely these kind of breakthroughs.

C (19:06)

Something I'm curious to hear about from the two of you. So I spent most of my career covering the populous, right? And when you do that, what you come to realize is regardless of its merits, like the sort of case from magazine Forward Elites drove this country into the decade for four years, over four decades, elites drove this country into the. And MAGA is going to overturn those elites. They're going to attack their institutions and that will magically make things better. I really struggle to see center and center left coded institutions also coming up with their own version of a story that I think will make sense for Americans. What's happening in this moment right now. I think the populist left has a story. I don't think the center has a story to the same degree. So I'd love to hear from the two of you, what story would you tell? And this could extend abundance about America in the year 2025.

D (19:57)

I think it's. Let me start by saying I don't know the answer to that question. And that's okay, because it's the year 2025, and Democrats, for the first time in 20 years, have an totally open primary ahead of us in 2028. And we should be having a vigorous internal debate. Messages, policies. And as we go out there and talk to voters about them, you'll see it in New Jersey and Virginia with the gubernatorial races. You'll see it in the midterms. You'll see it, of course, in the presidential primary. Voters will tell us what resonates and what doesn't. So it's. We should all be putting ideas out there, I would say. One thesis that I would have is it's about taking back control. I think one of the very core themes along all developed economies over the last 10 to 15 years has been a spiraling sense that things are getting out of control, that whether it's migration patterns, whether it's the cost of living, whether it's the competence of governance, that voters feel like I don't have control anymore. And this presidency has felt out of control, even to Trump voters, people who are reluctant Trump voters. And I do think there is a message that can resonate amongst Democrats amongst, you know, never Trump Republicans, amongst unenrolled voters about we are going to help you take back control. Take back control where we can stabilize the politics. Take back control where you feel like you can breathe financially in the middle class, where you're not getting squeezed by housing and energy and childcare prices so badly that your prospects are dimming and your kids are even worse. It's this sense of agency in a world that felt like. It feels like it's been spiraling.

B (21:30)

I love this question. I don't have a perfect answer to it. If we were having. If you and I, Marcia, if we Were having like a debate on this stage. If you and I were like, like running in a primary and you. And you said that, you said, the far right has a story and they've won. The far left has a story, the center doesn't have a story, and that's a problem. What I would say in response to.

D (21:55)

That is.

B (21:58)

Yeah, stories are for children. Americans need a plan. Americans need solutions. So I would prefer to tell the audience, turning to them, you know, gesturing broadly to say, yeah, the right has a story, it's bullshit. The left has a story, I think it's wrong. You don't need a story. You need a place to live. You need an electricity bill that you can afford. You need childcare that you can afford. That won't bankrupt you. I'm not a storyteller. I'm not going to tell you a bunch of just so stories about how to make the future better, because those stories tend to be bullshit. And you're better than that. You deserve more than that. You have problems and I recognize them and I wrote a book about it and I think I have solutions. That's what I would say. Now, backing out of that, what I just did, is also storytelling, right? It is essentially saying like this. The story that I would tell is essentially that American politicians in some categories have fallen too in love with this idea that you don't have an agenda until you have a story. No, you can have an agenda. You can just have the answers. You can just have a plan to make people's lives better. And you don't necessarily have to wrap it up in a complex story that like, belittles elites or finds the bad guy or says, you know, if a company gets relatively big, it's always evil. You don't have to lie to people to win elections. And I think it's useful to say, and I, and I think it's useful. I think it's useful for folks maybe in this room and maybe people who like the book to say, you know, maybe one way that we can distinguish ourselves is by not feeling like the only way to win is to tell a story that deep down he recognizes a lie.

C (23:45)

So last closing 30 second limit answer.

A (23:48)

For the two of you.

C (23:49)

One of the things that Ezra said when he was promoting the book was the many ways he wrote his parts of abundance to repair the left's relationship to technology. And with the tech industry, and obviously with Elon falling out with Trump, we've seen some sort of, I think, naive, like, let's just get Elon back. Like, it's easy and there's no cost there. But just sort of close from the two of you how Democrats should think about the tech center when it comes to these abundance ideas and an agenda.

D (24:14)

In general, I am very receptive and supportive of tech in the world of atoms, we need to have more technology for factory built housing, for small modular nuclear reactors, for shipbuilding technologies. I am very hostile to the direction of technology in the world of bits, because right now you got Mark Zuckerberg talking about AI chatbots replacing friends for kids. And you know, I got three little kids and I don't want them to have AI friends. I want them to have real friends. And these companies are out of control.

B (24:45)

Adams over bits.

D (24:46)

Amen to that.

C (24:47)

Perfect place to end. Thank you for joining us all here to.