B (4:31)

So the thing that gets me most.

A (4:32)

Excited about Abundance isn't the flashy conferences, the foundation money pots, or even the book itself.

B (4:38)

It's that covering this topic for the.

A (4:40)

Past year has introduced me to a whole crew of 20, 30 and 40 somethings who bring their own spins to the idea. You haven't heard of many, if any of them yet, but you definitely will. Third, and this comes out in the conversation, we should recognize that the abundance label spans the ideological left, right and center. While there is definite agreement on the idea that we need to build more things in this country and make it easier to do so fast. All of the different wings who attach themselves to the label have serious intellectual and practical disagreements with one another. Too much of the abundance discourse has taken the language about there being a movement way too literally and then lazily thrown all these different actors together into the same bucket. I think ideas and the people who advance them should be allowed to stand on their own, within reason, of course, especially this early in the game. An Abundance left winger shouldn't have to answer for a center right think tank support of the AI State regulatory ban that recently failed in Congress. An Abundance right winger, on the other hand, shouldn't have to answer for left abundance's attempt to make nice with Lina Khan and the antitrust movement. Each abundance wing serves a different audience, proposes different specific policies after we move beyond the agreement on building more, and has its own theory of the case and power to wrap this all together, as I said at the start of this intro, I'm emceeing the Abundance 2025 conference in D.C. this September and all of the above themes and content in this debate will be covered. I've posted a link to the registration page in the Show Notes and we'll discuss more about the conference in upcoming episodes. I would love to see anyone who can make it there. Hope you all enjoy the debate and conversation.

B (6:28)

Jeff Hauser and Paul Williams, welcome to the Realignment.

C (6:32)

Thank you so much for having me.

D (6:33)

Thanks. Glad to be here.

B (6:36)

So I'm really excited to moderate guide the Realignment's first ever technical kind of debate, though I hope that it's also more of a conversation because I think, as folks will find, there's not quite a proposition itself. We're sort of discussing here, really just exploring the word but the world of abundance. But I want to, before we get into all the specifics, really give both of our guests a chance to introduce themselves. So Jeff, we'll kick off. Just do your name, rank, serial number, organizational status, of course, and then just give a quick POV that you hold on abundance so people can sort of root where you're coming from on this.

C (7:14)

Sure. Thanks for having me. Jeff Hauser I'm the founder and Executive Director of Revolving Door Project. We fight corporate power in politics and so we just tend to blame corporations and who are being unfettered for a lot of what goes wrong in our country. And we think that's true with a lot of the issues that are discussed in the Abundance book. We share the notion that what the left has historically called snob zoning and racial redlining are bad things. And so we definitely support more housing. But much of the rest of the abundance book leaves us quite cold.

B (7:50)

Great. How about you, Paul?

D (7:52)

My name's Paul Williams. I'm the founder and executive director of center for Public Enterprise. We're a nonprofit think tank. We work on housing, energy, public finance. We do research and reports on strategies for more economic development and do a lot of work directly with housing agencies, state housing finance agencies, housing authorities, green banks, and other institutions that that support economic development.

B (8:23)

Great. And what's your perspective on abundance?

D (8:25)

And my perspective on abundance is, you know, in the course of all of our work with these agencies that support affordable housing and clean energy development, in addition to all the financing work that that we do to help drive more investment and production, we also hear that permitting and zoning and regulatory barriers get in the way of these public agencies too, in all the important work that they're doing. So our view is that there's a lot of things that we need to do in the country to achieve abundance of all of these things that we want, housing, energy, and we need an all of the above approach to get it all done.

B (9:04)

I think when I'll just cut in and out here and why I was particularly interested in hosting the two of you. So I am in the abundance camp. I'm a senior fellow at the Niskanen Center. I'm also the emcee of the Abundance Conference this September. I emceed the last one as well too. But at the same time the realignment is funded by the Hill foundation. And I do a lot of work in the post neoliberal space. So my general perspective is that you can both be anti corporate power and anti corporate concentration and point to all the problems that exist therein. You could also be very skeptical of the oligarchy, but also believe that a lot of the ideas that folks who work on abundance are focused on, namely increasing supply, focusing on modernizing regulations, and really addressing state capacity challenges and questions are perfectly compatible with the idea that the neoliberal sort of status quo, the way we organized our politics since the 1980s, is broken and doesn't work. So I just think that to a certain degree there's a false debate here. And the other thing I'll add, and then I'll throw questions at the two of you, which you can also feel free to respond to each other's answers on, is just that my frustration with the abundance debate has been the more D.C. new York and San Francisco in focus, the More, there are clearly two camps of people who are on one side of the corporate power versus abundance question. But when I went back home to Oregon, when I talked to elected officials and their staff off the record, they are often just saying, we think this is a false choice and we think it's perfectly possible that you can be pro Lina Khan when it comes to her work on antitrust, but also think that a lot of the problems of the Biden era and broader problems within American liberalism can be explained by the abundance framework. So that's just like kind of my opening statement. So I'd love for the two of you, we'll go throw it back to you, Jeff. Take this any direction you want. And then we could get like a little more specific.

A (10:50)

But we can go from there.

C (10:52)

Sure. I mean, we came to the abundance debate in 2023 and maybe even a little bit earlier as we were following the fight over the Manchin Barraso permitting bill and through the course of that debate. And we don't do legislative actions, but we were aware of it. There was the argument out there that the left had to accept more natural gas pipelines and just more of all of the above in order to allow for more green energy to get on the grid. And we didn't buy that. We thought that when Joe Manchin killed Richard Glick's nomination to be head of FERC for a second term, that he really undermined the ability of FERC to reform laws to get more clean energy onto the grid, which we definitely think is a huge problem. And so we thought, like, when Joe Manchin, the literal coal baron, was carrying the water of both the coal and natural gas industries, that, that his attack on FERC was an example of how we were slowing down the green energy revolution that this country very much needs. And so we fundamentally don't agree that it with an all of the above approach on energy. And we were just alarmed to see people like Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson and Nata Glacias invoke clean energy as an excuse to do more natural gas pipeline drilling, more natural gas exports and more transmission of natural gas. So that's how we came to this fight.

A (12:24)

And Paul, feel free to jump in.

B (12:25)

And find any perspectives you have or I could get specific with questions.

D (12:29)

Why don't we take a question first and then we'll go into back and forth.

B (12:32)

Yeah. And just so actually, here's a question for you, Paul. So something, Jeff, that you did that I will say just to frustrates me and probably frustrates Derek And Ezra specifically is that abundance is more than just the book. It's more of in just the two of them. Obviously there are funders, there are personalities, there's different debates, different perspectives. There are right wing abundance people, there are centrist abundance people, there are left abundance people, and then there are left abundance people. So I think it'd be helpful from you, Paul, to sort of get your perspective, because I don't think you presume to speak for Derek, Ezra, Matt Iglesias, et cetera.

D (13:07)

True. Yeah, I mean, you know, I speak for myself. A story that I like to talk about that I think is looked over or just not well known is the story of where the modern YIMBY movement came from. Now, obviously, there have been challenges to restrictive zoning laws for a long time, since the 1960s and 70s when it really started happening in suburban America. And there were, there were challenges with, you know, Fair Housing act and updates to the Fair Housing act on some of these restrictive zoning policies that many of which were racial in nature. But the modern YIMBY movement, which is now, I think, as we would all recognize, a relatively large collection of organizations across the country who are collectively advocating for specific changes to zoning laws, supporting things like transit oriented development, ad use, all of these sorts of things that we see. It really came out of the San Francisco Bay area in the early 2000 and tens. And the piece of the story that I think is not well known is really what happened in 2012, 11, 13, 14. There were a lot of younger people who were living in the San Francisco Bay area who were. It was a challenging time in the economy. It was hard to get jobs, but there was this kind of tech investment boom starting to happen in the area. And so there were a lot of young people who were looking for places to live and had gotten jobs, but they could not afford the single family homes in San Francisco. And so when there were apartment projects that were being proposed in San Francisco and Oakland and Berkeley, these younger people would say, oh, that's great. Like now I can actually, you know, this, this should get built because then I can go live in San Francisco, right? Like, there needs to be more houses there. And they would go to the meetings about these proposed buildings, and the meetings would be flooded with homeowners from the area who went to the meeting to say, no, no, no, no, no, don't build this building. It blocks this thing, it blocks the view. It's like near the coastline, all of these things. And these young people were like, what's going on? Like, I want to Live in San Francisco, I can't afford these houses. And all of the people who own the houses are saying, no, no, no, no, no apartment buildings. We don't want that here. And what formed from that was a group called the Bay Area Renters Federation, SF barf. And you're right, I mean, it's funny, the acronym is barf, and that was the first real YIMBY group. And all of the kind of California YIMBY groups that have emerged kind of out of that network came from SF barf, which was a federation of renters who were going to bat against homeowners who were opposed to apartment projects in San Francisco. And I think it's really important to, to have a little bit of that history to understand where these ideas came from, because I think, I don't know, we see all this stuff, the way people write about it and talk about it. Sometimes you get the impression that, like, this is a kind of, you know, somebody over there is like funding this and they have some, you know, you know, ulterior motive and so on. And it's like, oh, what happened is renters who couldn't afford to live in San Francisco got mad, started forming these organizations and convinced people that this was a thing worth doing and devoting resources to and put these organizations together that have now gone on to do some really important work changing zoning laws, and I think really contributing a lot of the, the kind of backbone to what has emerged as an abundance framework.

B (16:49)

Quick follow up, Paul. I'd be curious, what is the difference between YIMBY ism, as you articulated it, and abundance as a whole? Because I think there are a lot of people, especially in the sort of left oriented part of the audience, who would say, okay, that makes sense, that story resonates with me. But Jeff did bring up a very good point about like sort of abundance permitting frameworks being used to like sneak a bunch of other things in, like, you know, the permitting and the natural gas and fossil fuels. So what's the difference between these two things?

D (17:19)

Right. You know, I think we can talk about the permitting, the federal permitting bill. You know, I think, I think a big piece of that story is it has to come into the picture to understand why that permitting bill looked the way it did is a filibuster. Because in order to pass that bill, you need 60 votes. And in order to get 60 votes, you have to get people to vote for it who are not on your team. But I think to the general question of energy permitting, I think the Texas story actually is a really great example, because Texas outpaces every state in the country in solar development and wind development, and not just because there's more land, you know, on a, on a per square mile basis or whatever basis to account for Texas's size. Texas outpaces everybody in energy development. In part it's because of the way ercot, the, the utility regulator in Texas is structured with their interconnection and so on. But it's also in part due to permitting laws across the state that allow for really quick approvals that allow that stuff to get built more quickly. Whereas you look at a state like Ohio where you have counties all across Ohio who have just outright banned any solar and wind development, and they've done so through their permitting laws. And so these kinds of things do have a real effect. It's really similar kinds of things that you see in, in housing zoning and permitting where counties or cities will put in place these laws to block the kinds of things that they don't want and to allow the kinds of things that they do want. And it just means worse outcomes on energy affordability and housing affordability for, for everyone in the vicinity. So I think there is actually a lot of similarity and you know, I hear that from people on the left too, that yimbyism is different from abundance. And I, and I, I just don't think, think that's the case. I mean, certainly there are people who use the term abundance to describe something that maybe I don't like, but, but like on the, you know, core issue for, for housing and energy, there are many places with systems in place that block the investment and development of these things that we want. And, and, and the kind of. The playbook is, is very similar, I think, to, to address that.

B (19:39)

Love, they had a response from you, Jaffa, where we could take it in a different direction.

C (19:42)

Sure. Just obviously I do not want to associate myself with San Francisco homeowners who are against density. I support infill construction, building up big buildings near transit adus. I support 99% of what I take to be the yimby housing agenda. I also still support rent control, which is its own other question, and rent stabilization and the like. I mean, the only disagreements I might raise relate to, say, Texas and the floodplain around the Guadalupe river, which is, you know, the site of unfortunate recent tragedies. And I think, you know, we should consider whether or not we should have people living in places which are susceptible to flooding as the people unfortunately living near that river in Texas, and whether or not we should Rebuild Malibu and other parts of Los Angeles that are right near, you know, very likely to be go on fire. Like I just don't want people to suffer from flooding or fire. So I believe in health and safety restrictions on housing. But I totally associate myself with the YIMBY movement's effort to, you know, increase density in San Francisco, New York City, Washington D.C. across the country. I'll also just note that in what I thought was a pretty fair article, Raj Korma Karma in the Atlantic had a piece about how the Sun Belt is seeing burgeoning housing prices and a lot of what's gone on. You know, the housing costs associated with zoning. The examples in the Abundance book and in the national literature tend to center on these like big coastal elite cities. But we're beginning to see massive increases in housing elsewhere because it turns out a lot of the Sunbelt didn't actually have that much better rent were housing laws. They just had more sprawl available to be built. Like they hadn't finished adding single family homes further and further out. And so they were able to expand for a while without increasing costs and now they're running out of that space. So I don't even think it's necessarily the case that the laws in New York City were any worse than the laws in Atlanta. That just Atlanta wasn't completely filled in yet and now it is and so we're seeing it. But I support greater density everywhere and I don't really think the left is generally opposed. I know there's like some random San Francisco DSA people who I really don't want to associate with, but I don't even think that's true for most members of dsa, as Mamdani's victory in New York City demonstrates. So I don't really think attributing like I feel like the book kind of does. San Francisco homeowners are the people, people that the left needs to be responsible for. And just because they vote for the pro LGBTQ national political party does not mean that they are progressive. And when they're acting as the upper middle class and rich homeowners of San Francisco, I think they much more represent forces of the center right in this country than they do the left. And I don't think the left should have to answer for their NIMBY behavior.

B (22:46)

So Jeff, I'm actually in Austin and I'm actually literally right on the edge of the Hill Country. So the flooding example is really close to home. I think the thing I push back on you on or just ask you to interrogate a little deeper here is obviously no one proposed a world where we solve America's housing crisis by building on the floodplain. So I guess the question that I ask for you is, is it not possible that we could take an abundance framework of hey, housing prices are a big issue. There is a affordable housing gap in a lot of cities and a lot of places people want to live. Places like Austin where there's been a increase in prices but also a bit of a rent decrease of late. Isn't it possible that we could balance not building on floodplains and if anything making the floodplains safer while also building more housing? It feels that you're sort of establishing a false choice there.

C (23:43)

Oh no, no, I'm saying I'm disagreeing with Derek Thompson to be very specific. As we exchanged, we had an exchange about this in January relative to Malibu and he thought it was a no brainer that we should rebuild in these places. And I thought that literally we should take some of that land around LA that is prone to wildfires, that Mike Davis had written a book saying that like basically we're going to see a lot of Los Angeles burn and unfortunately he was prescient and we should instead double down on infill in downtown Los Angeles. That we should build much more densely in downtown la, but possibly take some of the border lands between inhabited in nature and use that as a buffer zone so that people can be safer. So yeah, I definitely am all in favor of Austin getting more dense. And I think that like in general an environmentalist should kind of be very cool with the idea of cities getting much more dense and there being less land used for housing in exurban and rural areas, not as an attack on exurban or rural people, but as both a safety measure at times that's not the main thing, but also just, you know, returning more land to either nature or other uses.

D (24:59)

Yeah, I jump in on, on that because I think this is. This actually gets to one of my. One of the things that I think has gone awry with the discourse as it relates to this book and the rollout and all of the conversations it's created is there's a large and growing. I think, unfortunately, although I hope we can shrink it disconnect between the national pundit and media class conversation and the local and state based organizations that are actively doing abundance related work in their states and cities every day. Because to take the kind of environmental group's point, obviously I very much agree. I think a lot of the state Environmental organizations and local environmental organizations, Sierra Club chapters and so on, should obviously be very supportive of increasing density in urban areas, because when you do that, then you allow more people there so that they don't have to go out and sprawl. The issue is, unfortunately, that that hasn't been the case in many of these, in many of these states. And, you know, there's. There's some pretty good kind of documentation and write ups of the challenges that a lot of these EMB and abundance organizations have had bringing some of the environmental groups to the table on these issues. And part of it's just, you know, who is the constituency of, you know, who's the member of this kind of local group. And a lot of times it might just be, you know, some of those homeowners who were opposed to the apartment building in San Francisco in 2014 or whatever it may be. And I think that this is so, you know, you get a little bit of talking past each other going on. And this is why I want to bring this up because, you know, you have people in these state organizations who are, you know, actively trying to pass bills and get a coalition of people to vote for this zoning change thing for transit Oriented Development. And they're complaining about environmental groups because some of these environmental groups are opposed to their bill. And then it crosses with kind of the national conversation and people say, oh, they're bashing environmental groups. And I think it's important to always step back and look at what are these local organizations doing and trying to change and what are the barriers to them doing it.

B (27:19)

So, Paul, something I'm really curious about speaking to how Jeff kicked off the episode. I'm curious as to your thought about the role of corporate power and even antitrust within these spaces, because a very frustrating answer that Derek Thompson gave during the book tour that I think in many ways kind of kicked off some of the unhelpful discourse was when he was at 69 historic synagogue in D.C. someone in the audience asked about antitrust, and he said, it's a very interesting movement. There are a lot of important thinkers there. But I just ultimately don't think that the story of anti antitrust explains what's happening in California vs Texas vis a vis building. And the sort of politician side of me was frustrated by that answer because the politician would just say, the work that Lina Khan has done is so interesting. I'm not an antitrust expert. I'm sure someone who could study housing and building construction could find some sort of bottleneck that's corporate Concentration related. I think if that answer had been given, which I think an answer that Derek would be very comfortable giving or hearing, that would have, I think, not kicked, that wouldn't have activated the suspicions that a lot of people on the more populous left have that ultimately this is just sort of a very centristy movement that's not interested in, you know, attacking the status quo. So I'll just ask you, like, what do you think about the role of corporate power and concentration in these spaces?

D (28:33)

Totally. You know, I saw that answer too and, and I quote tweeted it and I said this is a bad answer and I wish Derek had not, you know, and I told him I don't think this is a good answer. The way I would have approached that question is, is the way that I've had these conversations with other antitrust people that I talk with is when you have a city with really strict zoning and permitting laws for housing, for example, and it, you know, like New York City where in order to get a zoning change you need to go through this ULURP process. Unified land use review process takes five years. Who are the developers and investors who are able to buy land, hold it for five years, wade through that process, pay all of the attorneys, pay for all of the people to go work at all of these community meetings and talk to all the community members and take all of their input into consideration and et cetera. The only people who are able to do that are very large developers with very large investors at their back. So the people that are locked out of doing anything to increase density along transit corridors, for example, none of your small and mid size developers are able to really do anything in that process. They're not able to play in that game. And so you have a process that only allows the big guys to play and all of your smaller local actors are just locked out of the process. So to me this is a total layup for, total layup for anti monopoly work is like all of these cities are blocking all the small and mid sized developers from really doing much of anything and they only let the big guys play. And if we changed our zoning laws to make this process less wild and, and intense, we could unlock more competition, have more people building more housing and that would be good for everyone. So that's, that's my, that's my approach to that question.

B (30:24)

Jeff, Now I'd love to hear your perspective on both what Paul just said, but your broad sort of thoughts on the corporate power antitrust angle.

C (30:33)

Sure. So I'll first talk about housing and then I have a short point about the corporate power errors of the book from my point of view on the housing issue. Revolving Door Project started writing back in 2023 urging Biden to make Kamala Harris in charge of fighting corporate greed. And we used as our example realpage and we said that then Vice President Harris ought to have meeting like events outside the homes of the key people at RealPage do something to elevate RealPage. And you might say what is RealPage? And I'd say exactly this is the fact that RealPage is not one of the most famous companies in the country and one of the greatest villains is one of the like biggest mistakes of the Biden administration, the Harris administration. But it's a type of mistake I feel like the one this movement at least is represented by its national leading voices is perpetuating. Because RealPage is a company that exists to facilitate the collusion of of landlords on setting prices. They literally go into markets and they sell people. You give us the data on how many apartments your building has, what's, what's occupied, what is not, what are your rents and we will recommend prices to you. And so they become the hub of a hub and spoke conspiracy. Or at least this is what's been alleged by many attorneys general who have filed lawsuits, plaintiffs who'd filed lawsuits, and these lawsuits are moving along. So these are at least credible accusations. So this is a classic Hubble spoke conspiracy whereby everyone shares information and they get to raise prices collectively. And there is evidence that the markets that have RealPage see higher rents as a result of this collusion. Because obviously if you know what your competitors are going to charge, what their supply is, renters don't have access to that information. It creates an asymmetry, it creates the opportunity for collusion. And that's in fact what Bill Page was marketing their service to landlords or saying we will help you raise your rents. So at a time in which rents are a huge political issue, this should have been a defining fight of the Biden Harris administration. But instead we had a lot of pundits say you shouldn't attack corporations for inflation, that you should blame the Biden stimulus and don't go deal with corporate power. It pulled incredibly well. Future Forward said that the ad in which Harris she made an advertisement featuring RealPage and it was her top performing ad that they tested. But they never ad, they never aired the advertisement. And I think it's just because there was a wing in the Democratic Party, including David Plouffe who was running our campaign, Tony west, the candidate's brother in law who comes out of Silicon Valley. They were not comfortable with this sort of attack. And I don't think people like Derek Thompson and Ezra Klein are comfortable discussing real page. To my knowledge they haven't. Matt Iglesias has downplayed this story and I think that's, that creates a lot of anger among people who might share their views about residential zoning, but think that there should be an acknowledgment of corporate bad actors. And then just on the broader point about what their approach is, just on page three of the book when they're explaining the vision for the Klein and Thompson are putting forth, they write, AI is built in this future on the collective knowledge of humanity and so its profits are shared. But nothing in the book describes how the political economy would come to be such that AI profits would be shared widely. And I really challenge somebody to look at contemporary American politics and come to a conclusion that that is likely to be the case.

B (34:31)

And Paul, just to build on that real quick, because I think it actually gets to the A piece I'm wanting to write at some point is just sort of describing the different wings of the abundance movement because I understand why everyone, both critical and pro abundance, will refer to there being a unified move. But obviously that is literally not true ideologically. And one of the ideological touch points here that I think Derek and Ezra found themselves on a weird sort of end on was like the AI conversation. So specifically like I saw a few weeks ago, like the Abundance Institute, which is a like center right to conservative abundance organization, they were in favor of that state based AI regulatory ban, something which was incredibly voted down in the Senate. Once people sort of heard about what the actual deal was. There was a lot of like left, right and center, I think popular disagreement with that policy. So without expecting to give like a perfect answer to, I was just giving that as an example of like where these tension points come in. To build on Jeff's point, how do you think about the role that AI and techno optimism plays in this abundance conversation?

D (35:30)

Yeah, I mean, so like this Abundance Institute, never heard of them. They're not doing anything on zoning laws or you know, clean energy development that I'm aware of. So you know, that again, that's the space I work in and I think that's the space where frankly the most energy is right now for, you know, getting these real resources, real infrastructure investment and development happening on the AI. You know, I don't, I don't really have a policy position on, on what exactly should be done there? I guess some people do, but yeah, I don't. So sorry.

B (36:11)

Well, no, no, when we make the question more specific, the specific question would.

D (36:15)

Be.

B (36:17)

The strongest pushback I saw from a lot of abundance skeptics, even some people who are friendly with the abundance movement was that a lot of abundance thinking on the center left, beyond just Derek and Ezra, is premised on a very technology centric optimistic vision of where progress is taking us. So to your point about the 2010s and the tech industry rooting, a lot of yimby thought, I think a lot of like Obama era liberalism was rooted in optimism about the technology industry and the future it was providing for us. So I'd just be curious what you think about because another movement that's adjacent to abundance of L Yimbyism is progress studies, which is like a optimistic sort of. So you can talk about like that part because I'm interested in that sort of dynamic.

D (37:03)

So here's what the first thing I'll say. I'll say a couple of things. First thing I'll say is that that may be true. In Washington D.C. the people that I have most contact with are the state based abundance organizations that are pushing for law changes in their states to unlock more affordable housing and clean energy. And the people who do that are not, I don't think, the same people who are doing all of the kind of progress studies and techno optimism work. Most of the people, most of the people who are state legislators and local city council members who are driving all of this activity that all of this discussion is based around, I think that's actually an important thing to remember. If it were not for all of these state legislators and organizing groups in California, New York, Texas, Washington D.C. this book would never have been written and this conversation would not be happening. These groups were the foundation for all of this happening. And those people are large. They're not the same people that you're talking about. And frankly, I agree that all of the things that I think Derek has written about Operation Warp Speed, I think are fantastic. And I think that's actually an really important thing to look at. And I think it is a good recognition that the type of thing that we did with Operation Warp Speed to get these vaccines so quickly is somewhat similar to the type of things that we're asking states to do for housing development and clean energy development, which is we have a lot of rules that are in the way that sometimes serve a good purpose and sometimes just create blockages that we don't need and let's change the way we do development and change the process for how we make things happen so that we can get some of these things that we need faster. So I think that makes total sense to me. I will just say I think that the core organizations that are doing this work that I think make up the abundance movement, despite all of the national spotlight being elsewhere for whatever reason, that's not what their focus is. Does that answer your question?

B (39:11)

It does. Jeff, please give whatever your response was going to be and I've got a question for you.

C (39:15)

Sure. Just in the past week or so, Joe Lonsdale, who is one of the co founders of Palantir and is a big AI investor, has announced that he is going to fund a bunch of AI proficient people to work at the FDA in order to hasten the approval of new medicines techniques. I'm not totally sure what but Joe Lonsdale of Palantir, not somebody I necessarily trust. Like he's got all sorts of right wing ties and I'm worried about what might get approved and he has enormous conflicts of interest. So what you know, put aside, even if his intentions were the best in the world, if you're having somebody who's funding a bunch of people to work at the FDA and to make approvals happen faster and they happen to be a VC investor in a range of purported medical devices and miracle drugs, you know, that creates some obvious conflicts of interest and some obvious worries. And I do think that some of the like I'm not saying every rule at the FDA is right, I'm not expert enough to know but the idea that you might want to have some restrictions on things like this or be concerned about the conjunction of AI medical innovation and running the government, I think that is the type of thing we should be very worried about. And just like saying, well, operation warp speed, which I think did work well and I'm very pro vaccine and I'm pro government spending lots of money to encourage more vaccines. But that like RFK juniors, FDA like I just have a lot of questions here and I think it does go to show that Lonsdale, who's a big supporter of the right leaning aspects of the abundance movement, is like a real danger and is benefiting from some of the interpretations at least of the book.

B (41:09)

So the question I ask you Jeff. So when Ezra was promoting the book, he said one of his objectives was repairing the left and liberalism broadly's relationship with technology. And one of my frustrations with the book, once again, Joe Longsdale is in Austin with me. So we're doing lots of Austin stuff on this episode was the opening chapter is focused on the future. That's the talk about the third page you're referencing. But if anything, I wish the book had sort of focused on the past. We'll talk about Mark Duckelman's book in a second. But I'm just really interested in the fact that if you look at what happened during the New Deal specifically within the Hill country, well, it was across the whole country. But my specific example comes from Robert Caro's telling of LBJ's story in the Path to Power, where he is writing about how rural electrification brought people in the Hill country from the 17th century to the 20th century. And that was driven by technology. It was driven by public private partnerships. The market wasn't delivering it. But I think that's version of, I think, the abundance project, where you could see, hey, technology can provide something for people, but the market will always deliver that progress. So we could find innovative structures to get that done. So I guess my question for you would be what before we get into the corporate power product, just what is your thought about technology as an accelerator of progress, starting from the question of like Marc Andreessen and Joe. We'll get into Joe and Mark in a second. But just sort of what do you think about technology? Because that's the other reason why the project warp speed example is notable in the book. And no one wants to focus on those chapters as much as the housing ones. The point of that story was government can move quickly, government can move aggressively, and it could solve problems when you're focused aggressively on state capacity. So I'd love to just get your thoughts on technology and how maybe and this is what Dunkelman's writing about, like liberalism maybe lost something after the 1970s where the more negative relationship driven by valid things occurred.

C (43:04)

Sure. So working backwards, I was disappointed that when I bought the book, when I finally had a copy, that the word Solyndra didn't appear because I think it's a really telling example of what actually tends to when Democrats are overly circumspect in power. Why is it and I think the bizarre success of the right wing movement in attacking Obama's stimulus for one company's approach, which turned out to be not the winning approach in the solar market, but was an option at the time, and most of their other solar investments paid off handsomely. They got so much negativity for it. I don't know what level of profanity is or is not allowed on the podcast, but they got so much of that profanity for Solyndra that there was a reticence to do things like that. And I do wish that there were more self confidence among Democrats generally that it's pretty much my point of view on all matters, but particularly with respect to doing things like investing directly. So I agree with the idea that the government should spend more and do more directly. I think that going back to, and I have the Karo books right by my desk and holding one now in my hands, I think that the need for electrification was so clear and well understood that if you provided as the government the public was going to reward you and if you didn't, they were not. And it was pretty clear. So while there were some self interested parties who made out a little bit too well, which is part of how Lyndon Johnson got elected in the first place, he did help the whole country get electrified more quickly. And that was an unmitigated good. But we need checks and balances, we need a media, we need an engaged citizenry, and we need to make sure that these technological advances don't work mostly to help the oligarchs.

B (45:10)

And so Paul, considering your work on Clean Power, I'd love to hear your thought on how, because actually I just had a great conversation for this podcast where someone pointed out that if we look at New York's requirements around permitting specifically that related to CHIPS act funding and building semiconductor chip fabs, a lot of those requirements were rooted in the backlash to Amazon's failed HQ2 bid. Because what happened was they tried to do HQ2 in Queens, it didn't work and there's a lot of backlash. People just sort of saw it as a corporate giveaway. So this person was sort of arguing from I know you're on Team Abundance, but think about this seriously. Part of the reason why we do have requirements and expectations is that that's what the public is actually demanding. And we can't just do giveaways to corporations or to anyone who's basically engaging power or seeking from the public's public monies to accomplish things. So I'd love to hear what your rubric would be for when it makes sense for government to impose requirements, restrictions, paperwork, et cetera, as we're thinking about balancing out, actually needing to build things.

D (46:14)

Yeah, I, you know, I think this is a great question and I'm going to tie it back to housing because what we do a lot of on the housing team is again, work with these housing finance agencies across the country to help Them significantly expand the volume, how much multifamily housing they build every year, which, and just to throw a stat out that I think is under recognized, we do around 400,000 units of new multifamily construction in the United States in a given year. One in five of those is housing finance agency financed. So this, these agencies are about a fifth of the new multifamily construction market, which is a much larger share than I think people recognize from the perspective of financing project. When you add a requirement for XYZ onto the project, it will add cost to the project. And there are many requirements that we put onto projects that, you know, we have the tenement laws in New York that outlawed, you know, buildings that, you know, units that didn't have windows or bathrooms or running water or any of these things. Obviously there are all sorts of requirements that are not at all up for negotiation for, you know, health and safety standards and so on. But regardless, you know, it is the case that anytime you, you know, you put a, a certain requirement on it adds cost to the project. And so I think the way to balance this question is if you are New York state, for example, and you want to see a semiconductor manufacturing facility built in your state, then what you do is you work with that semiconductor manufacturer and find out, you know, what things you can do that you want to do that will still allow the project to be built. Because I think the challenge we get ourselves, the difficulty to get ourselves into in a lot of places is we just go out without looking at individual projects and say, I want this, this, this, this, and this. And then projects come in that you may really want, but it's not able to happen if it has to do all of those 10 things and then the project never materializes. Which I think is the wrong approach. I think the right approach is saying, I'm a pro. I'm proactively trying to do economic development. I want this thing to occur. I'm going to work with this and try and figure out what things will make it work and what things will break it. Because at the end of the day, I want to see the investment happen because I want these jobs to happen in my state. That's an approach that we kind of take with a lot of the work that we do is try to avoid that kind of everything. Bagel of here's all my sets of rules, and if you pass the bar, then you get to do something. And if you don't, go away, because I think at the end of the day, what we want is we want the housing to get built. We want the manufacturing facilities to get built. We want the energy to get built.

B (49:03)

Jeff, I'd be curious because I want to focus on the specific language around working with the builders, the constructors, industry, in this case. What's really interesting for me, I host a podcast called Arsenal of Democracy, but it's focused on mobilization and war and national security. But it's rooted in the story of the 1940s, where, speaking of Joe Lonsdale funding people, the FDA, you had people from industry going into the war industry going into government. Bill Knudsen came from the auto industry. So what's awkward about my liberalism is I understand that corporate power can be a problem, but I also recognize there is something called expertise and experience and the ability to balance these things. And I think what the World War II era FDR administration did a very good job of doing was balancing the needs and interests of labor, industry and government in of itself. I'd like you, as the leader of the Revolving Door Project, to maybe puncture my sort of story time of how this is something that could just be done, because I would just assume that you'd be more skeptical of the idea that you can just work with an individual corporation to find the perfect balance of regulations and mandates and paperwork to actually achieve a project. Maybe I'm putting words in your mouth, but I would just suspect that you'd be skeptical of the sort of rosy retelling of history that I would organize my thought around.

C (50:18)

Sure. I think if you look at World War I versus World War II, one of the big differences was the Truman Committee and the focus on the profite hearing and the recognition that World War I became incredibly unpopular in America and led to isolationism, in part because of all of the profiteering that happened during World War I. Like, there was just incredible profiteering. And so in World War II, when the government worked necessarily with industry to mobilize, you know, a war economy, you had a couple different things going on. One, you had the Truman Committee really looking at costs, and when Harry Truman became vice president because he did good congressional oversight, and this is like one of our favorite examples, Revolving Door Project does. We strongly think Democrats should recognize that oversight issues can be kitchen table issues, and they're not at odds with focusing on the big ugly bill and other Trump misconduct that Democrats should be talking a lot about oversights. That's like one of the big things we do. So that was helpful. Another thing that FDR did is helped the American labor movement become incredibly powerful. And so when you had business leaders go into government from General Motors and elsewhere, they, they knew they had a, a strong labor movement that was powerful both within FDR's administration, but back at their company itself. And so they people were circumscribed by both by Congress, by labor within the Democratic Party and labor in the private sector economy. And that is a better timeframe. But moreover, the business people who came into government were not in policy making, they were in implementation. And so we have no problem with the idea that if you need to hire a computer programmer, it might be the case that you hire somebody from Google because they might really know more about computer programming or be on the cutting edge of AI or whatever machine learning that you need. And we're never against the idea that you hire somebody from a private sector hospital to be a doctor at the va. That's also totally fine. We don't want to treat business experience as a substitute for public policy experience. And so right now, if you're the head of Goldman, you think that your entry level job in the federal government is Secretary of the treasury, and we don't think you're qualified be Secretary of the Treasury. We think those are public policy issues. You may be very accomplished in your world of finance, which we may have our views up, which we do. But regardless, even if you're more positive, it's a different thing. We don't think people in government should go immediately run Goldman Sachs, and in turn we don't think so. But could you bring somebody in who has a management expertise, who has a knowledge of a technological base? Could you bring in a private sector scientist to help deal with COVID Sure, we're not opposed to that, but we're opposed to giving policymaking authority to somebody on the basis of their private world connections. And we're also worried that if they just spend a few years in government, what they're going to really be doing is thinking about how those few years in government can make them richer when they revolve back out. Whereas career people can become very associated with the agencies with which they work so they can become more mission aligned. If you know you're a career person, as in you are going to retire, your last job is that job in public service. Your legacy is whether or not you did a good job in government. If you're doing two or three years in government, we're more skeptical. Obviously in a war against Hitler, you'd hope some people might be able to become a little more mission blind, even if they're not going to become career and government people. So maybe we're slightly less worried at a time of war. But like in general, these are some of the provisos. Experience matters, so do your incentives.

B (54:29)

So we've got our last seven minutes or so. So I just want to offer a bit of commentary and get Yalls perspective on this. So I think listeners by this point will notice that this didn't turn into an acrimonious debate like we see on Twitter. And I think it's not merely just because I'm amicable, but I worry, Jeff, that and this is sort of kind of the editorial point I wanted to take of in the episode that a lot of the critiques that have come out of abundance are either focused on right wing. So we're talking about the purely like left liberal conversation are focused on right wing figures with negative purchase within the broad Democratic party. So for example, like Joe Lonsdale or are in tactical and editorial mistakes that Ezra and Derek made when writing the book. So maybe getting a little too specific about specific cases about how broadband was specifically held up. So I worry we've been too focused on that like centering the conversation. Because I think the thing that I want to make sure doesn't sound like Cope is that because Derek and Ezra are famous, I think a lot of people think that the urge to sort of force the conversation away from them is about like me sort of like wishing I was Ezra or wishing that Derek was on the podcast two times a week when really it's about I think Paul's perspective that abundance is way more than Derek and Ezra. And it's actually like these like literally tens, if not hundreds of groups who've been working on this for far longer than the book. So that's just like my concern. I would hope that moving forward, not just so I critique you, but just sort of that like as you are thinking about this policy area, you'd think about the very state and local side which I think you've raised a lot of concerns about the national level conversation. But I just think the local conversation is really where a lot of this is going to mean something. It's going to be because of the local institute. So I would just be curious what your thoughts on that sort of POV is.

C (56:25)

Well, first off, I just want to be clear that in terms of residential housing, I think as I said there's like 99% agreement. And we are not when we are criticizing abundance, we are really criticizing the book and the adherence. And it is incredibly influential in Washington D.C. and we are a principally federal and or national economic, media oriented organization. So I agree that a lot of what we're saying doesn't certainly doesn't apply to local groups fighting for more housing and is somewhat like separate from the conversation at a state and local level. I do, you know, we do some state and local work. There's corporate capture there. We want to do more of it. We want, you know, democratic statewide officials to go up to the, you know, be as good as they can be. But I think that it's going to be complicated for abundance groups. I guess I just wish that YIMBY groups would not choose the abundance rubric then because I do think that word is now going to be associated with the bestselling book like the seriously, not just nominally 14th on the bestseller one length bestselling book, but this is genuinely a well selling book. And so I would say that the snob zoning rubric which existed going back to the civil rights movement to talk about the various ways in which ostensibly race blind zoning restrictions were put in place that kept out both people of color, but also like poor white people, that those things are bad and there should be a way to attack that without associating yourself with this book, I guess would be how I would urge it because I think it's inherent to the word at this term at this point, abundance. And just the final thing I'll say is I have to I'm about to edit a piece by my colleague. The word abundance was very popular in the 1930s and there was like a a lot of articles about in the New Republic from a very left standpoint. So as a concept it is appealing and it is protean, but I think for the moment in our politics it is going to be associated with Ezra Andera.

B (58:38)

I'd be curious for your closing thoughts.

D (58:40)

Paul yeah, you know, on that there are a couple there are groups around the country, Abundant Housing, Massachusetts, Abundant Homes, Los Angeles. They were around before the book came out and think the I don't think it's reasonable to expect them to go and change the name of their organization. They have done many successful things in their state doing these things and changing these laws. I don't think it's reasonable to expect them to go and kind of change their name in order to disassociate from a national conversation. I think frankly it falls on the national conversation a little bit and I think it's important to recognize that what I hear from some of these organizations is that the way the national conversation is going and the polarizing from both sides. And I think this happens nationally from critics of abundance and proponents of abundance. There's kind of this, you know, increasing kind of battle stance that people have against one another. And when I hear from the organizations who are doing work to change zoning laws, which I think everyone agrees is good, that that national conversation makes their actual coalition building harder at the state level. And I think it's, it's really important when we speak about this, when we have platforms nationally to consider that what we're saying and the stance for taking and all of these things might be making it harder for people who are working really hard to change laws we all agree should change.

B (60:08)

That is a great thing. Actually, let me just end with a quick, fun fact. I know we've got a hard stop in a minute, but I had a conversation back in Portland with someone who works on housing. And what's so fascinating about this conversation is that this person also raised Paul's point of being very worried about the polarization of the debate because in a lot of these red states who have passed better zoning regulatory regimes than blue states have. This person pointed out though, that the coalition that gets it done done is like right wing and it's progressive because it's actually the people in the center left and center right because they have those sort of like suburban single family home constituencies that are most opposed to it. So this person was just telling me I've been very frustrated as a progressive who's worked in housing for the past decade because I'm now hearing, and this is where I think I want to just echo your point, Paul. This national level conversation is actually spilling into the local. And he just said, I've just been feeling like I'm going to have to spend a year doing damage control. So I know there's all sorts of really technical claims in the book and in the discourse that we haven't really covered here. But I think, I hope folks get away from a takeaway perspective that there is the space for common ground is bigger in a non superficial sense than I think the Twitter discourse would suggest. So I think that's a great place to leave. And Jeff and Paul, I really appreciate you two coming on the show.

D (61:26)

Thank you so much for having us.