Derek Thompson: Winning Without Anger

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Speaker 46 Hello and welcome to the Bullware Codcast. I'm your host, Tim Miller.

Speaker 47 Delighted to have back my man Derek Thompson.

Speaker 46 Last week, he left the Atlantic as the staff writer and moved his writing to Substack.

Speaker 15 Water's Warm over here on Substack.

Speaker 50 He also hosts the podcast, Plain English, and his latest book you might have heard of. It's called Abundance, co-written with some guy named Ezra Klein.

Speaker 35 How you doing, Derek?

Speaker 9 I'm doing great, man.

Speaker 9 Before we go on, I just want people to know the reason that I'm standing in an entirely vacant room with nothing on the shelves is that the movers are here and I am moving from Chapel Hill, North Carolina to Washington, D.C.

Speaker 9 in approximately four and a half hours. So that is why it looks like I'm speaking to you from the least abundantly outfitted room in America.

Speaker 51 Yeah, it's a very unabundant room.

Speaker 29 But I thought maybe that was intentional, right?

Speaker 54 Like there's a contrast in your life, you know, kind of bringing a yin and yang.

Speaker 9 I'm going in the opposite direction.

Speaker 9 I feel like, you know, Ezra's on abundance right now, I'm just like, where can I carve out a niche niche here? Like, let's just swing in the entire opposite direction.

Speaker 9 Like, monkish living, totally stoic, Steve Jobs in the 1970s, just like an open room, a lamp, a chair, and a computer. That's going to be me a substack.

Speaker 55 Well, we have an abundant amount of topics to get to, but I do have to pay.

Speaker 14 Why are you moving to Washington, D.C.?

Speaker 10 What a horrible life choice for you.

Speaker 9 I love to be aware of that.

Speaker 46 You were like, I need to be around the most annoying people in the earth.

Speaker 58 I want to be on the side of the soccer field with my children and have people be asking me about what's happening in the reconciliation bill.

Speaker 9 What was it about D.C.

Speaker 38 that was appealing to you?

Speaker 9 I'm from McLean, Virginia. D.C.
is home. I've got a ton of friends who live in Washington, D.C.
and have for the last, whatever, 35, 39 years of my life. So I got a lot of people there.

Speaker 9 My wife, wonderful wife, I was down here in North Carolina because she was finishing up her PhD in clinical psychology. Now she's doing a postdoc at Children's National Hospital in Washington, D.C.

Speaker 9 And look, I like it when people come up to me in the playground and ask about the reconciliation bill.

Speaker 9 You know, you and I just might be built different when it comes to our appetite for ways and means committee conversations.

Speaker 51 We are definitely built different.

Speaker 17 We're also built different on, you know, desire to go to Bullfelders as a hanging out spot.

Speaker 60 Anyway, there are a couple of good things about D.C.

Speaker 62 I do miss all my 930 Club anthem vibes.

Speaker 63 But

Speaker 15 boy, anyway, I think it's going to be a negative life choice for you.

Speaker 47 You can report back. We'll come back.

Speaker 50 We'll do a pod next summer, and you can report back on one year in Washington.

Speaker 9 Great.

Speaker 9 We'll do the one-year retrospective. I love North Carolina.
The truth is, I love cities. I mean, I don't know if you live like in a downtown, like urban area.

Speaker 19 Yeah, I'm like in New Orleans, New Orleans.

Speaker 28 Okay.

Speaker 9 Yeah.

Speaker 9 I love being somewhere where I can walk out of my door and actually walk somewhere.

Speaker 9 And Chapel Hill is fantastic in a lot of ways, but it's very difficult to walk outside of your sort of suburban complex and just like traipes to the coffee shop. And I'm a traipser.

Speaker 9 I want to leave that front door and be able to have a coffee in my hand in 10 minutes and walk around. Yeah, I hear you.

Speaker 34 I mean, I can walk to bars, lunch, a grocery store even.

Speaker 46 That's good living.

Speaker 59 Okay, great.

Speaker 25 You know, I can trapes right on down the street.

Speaker 58 So I can do so without having any lobbyists in my way.

Speaker 50 Anybody in pleated khakis and a blue blazer.

Speaker 35 All right, let's get down to business.

Speaker 46 Zoran Mamdani, who recently did interviews with both of us, looks pretty well situated to likely be the next mayor of New York.

Speaker 57 He's going to have to run against the incumbent mayor Eric Adams, running as an independent in the general election.

Speaker 52 There's also the guy with the beret will be running on the Republican ballot line.

Speaker 46 So I guess it's possible that he could lose.

Speaker 56 Pretty surprising how handily he beat Andrew Cuomo last night.

Speaker 57 I think when I had him on, I said it was about a coin flip race, which I thought was actually a little kind to Zoran at the time.

Speaker 68 I thought maybe it was kind of 60-40 in favor of Andrew.

Speaker 48 And so the fact that he won isn't as surprising as the degree to which he won.

Speaker 64 I mean, Cuomo basically only won in know, the precincts that have the highest percentage of working-class black folks, the Orthodox Jewish neighborhoods in the Upper East Side.

Speaker 70 Like, that was basically the only parts of New York that Cuomo won in.

Speaker 69 I know it was pretty much a sweep for Zoron.

Speaker 12 So, anyway,

Speaker 41 what are your political takeaways?

Speaker 71 And then I want to talk about kind of the substantive policy side of Zoron.

Speaker 9 Well, let's start with the political media takeaways.

Speaker 9 I think that this guy did have a 30-40% chance of winning, and then he appeared in the Bulwark podcast, and then he became the presumptive mayor of New York City.

Speaker 9 So, clearly, the bulwark bump TM here is something to take across.

Speaker 35 Why not the plain English bump?

Speaker 9 Hey, I'll talk about the plain English bump too. I'm just let's first talk about the bulwark bump.
I mean, I do think it's important to say, like,

Speaker 9 I bring up the podcast appearances not just to be funny, but to point out that like, I remember a couple of years ago, remember when like Pete Buttigieg came on the scene and similarly started from like 0.5% total approval rating and then went up and up and up.

Speaker 9 And a part of that was his mere interest in being everywhere. He would talk to anybody.
He would do any podcast. He would do any television show.

Speaker 9 He trusted in his articulateness and his ability to take on any question in any environment. And he also had something to say.
And, you know, say what you want about Zoron's policies.

Speaker 9 And I have a lot to say about Zoron's policies, as I know you do as well. This is someone who's running for something.
He believes clearly in a

Speaker 9 criticism of the Democratic Party, and he wants to talk about it to anyone who will speak to him.

Speaker 9 It's difficult sometimes to get someone on the phone when they're mere hours away from a primary or election contest.

Speaker 9 We were supposed to talk on Wednesday, then it was bumped to Thursday, bumped to Friday. We ended up talking at 5.35 p.m.

Speaker 9 on a Saturday after he'd spent hours hanging out with people at various election parties or various pre-election parties.

Speaker 9 You know, I do think that before we get to the substance here, it speaks to what I think should be a model for politicians in the modern age, which is that like this isn't an age of enormous monolithic broadcasts anymore, where you just do this one CBS hit and then you're done.

Speaker 9 You have to piece together the fragmentation of media and make yourself available everywhere and talk to everybody in order to get the message out. And he clearly, he clearly tried to do that.

Speaker 9 The other lesson that I'm taking from this, and I'm really interested to know, frankly, what your takeaways are here, because I don't think you want to

Speaker 9 be too rash about scaling a lesson from a Democratic primary in New York City to be like the guiding lesson for Democrats running everywhere across the country. The country is not New York City.

Speaker 9 Only New York City is. But one lesson I take here is that we're in an anti-institutional, anti-establishment, anti-status co-age.

Speaker 9 And I think that if you're going to run for the Democratic Party, you have to find some way to run against the Democratic Party.

Speaker 9 And that I think is true in Georgia and Maine and Ohio and New York City.

Speaker 9 Andrew Cuomo representing the establishment gave him money, but it didn't give him a message.

Speaker 9 It gave him something like the opposite of a clear message that voters want to hear when they're upset, when they no longer trust what the party stands for, when they want to hear a new articulation of its brand.

Speaker 9 And so while I don't think that an event like this, as shocking as it is, and maybe just because it's shocking, because it's such a surprise, you don't want to jump to any kind of national conclusions.

Speaker 9 But if I had to draw one out to like make it my Monday morning quarterbacking tweet, it would be Democrats around the country to run for the party, run against the party.

Speaker 9 Find the way that your heresy, your heresy is authentic and clear and communicable to the public, because that's what a lot of people are looking for right now.

Speaker 7 Yeah, we largely agree on all that, which I guess isn't surprising.

Speaker 53 I did 42 minutes with Bill Crystal last night of a deep dive.

Speaker 24 So if people want my long form takes, they can go listen to that.

Speaker 9 Give me your short form.

Speaker 9 I would love to know what you think about this. Yeah, sure.

Speaker 54 My short form is: similar to your anti-establishment point, I think that Democrats need to be much more willing to just try different shit and be and offer types of candidates that are heterodox and different in different places.

Speaker 50 And that's going to look differently in Nebraska than it does in New York City, for sure.

Speaker 53 But I just think that, like,

Speaker 37 the Democratic candidates lately, they're cookie cutter.

Speaker 50 And I could do the ads myself.

Speaker 9 And AI literally is going to be able to do the ads this fall of, like, oh, I'm a fighter.

Speaker 70 Like, here's my family picture.

Speaker 46 And here, and I care about kitchen table issues. And Donald Trump is terrible, right?

Speaker 71 It's just like you can tune it out, and it becomes like the, you know, peanuts, like, wah, wah, wah, wah, wah, the Democratic ads.

Speaker 46 And so I think Zoron tried something. He ran a campaign that was authentic to him.

Speaker 41 I think he ran a really great campaign.

Speaker 58 In addition to what you're saying about how he went everywhere, like he benefited from Cuomo just like being a caricature of the worst type of Democratic campaign, right?

Speaker 56 And Cuomo went nowhere.

Speaker 46 We asked Cuomo to come on the bulwark.

Speaker 58 He didn't get the bulwark bump.

Speaker 67 He didn't want to come.

Speaker 68 I saw that Cuomo took a black car five blocks from where he was staying to where he was voting yesterday.

Speaker 9 And it's just like, this isn't, it isn't what people want in 2025.

Speaker 12 So I do think, I worry that like.

Speaker 48 the DSA folks will take from this that the DSA model works everywhere.

Speaker 51 And I don't think that is the takeaway.

Speaker 54 And like, I worry that the establishment folks just kind of say, well, you know, Andrew Cuomo was such a bad candidate.

Speaker 61 And this is kind of a one-off, fluky thing.

Speaker 57 And I don't actually have to learn anything from this.

Speaker 56 And I think that both of those would be the wrong takeaways.

Speaker 67 Like, I think that there's a way to kind of channel the Zoron model tactically for different types of candidates.

Speaker 41 And I think that you got to recruit candidates that are, I say what you wonder about Zoron.

Speaker 53 He was authentically Zoron, you know, and I think the Democrats need different types of candidates too, in different types of places.

Speaker 25 You need somebody that is authentically Texas, authentically Georgia, right?

Speaker 48 And I feel like the Democrats have been recruiting a lot of people that are like, I grew up in suburban Atlanta and then I moved and I went to, you know, I went to an Ivy League school and then I went to McKinsey or I became a JAG officer.

Speaker 46 You know, I did the check mark box of my career and then I moved home and now and I was a Victorian and now I'm running back at home. Like there's a lot of the same types of people running.

Speaker 46 So that's my main takeaway from the campaign.

Speaker 35 And, you know, I don't know.

Speaker 51 I think it's possible that Zoron in various ways could could drag down other Democrats as he becomes kind of a boogeyman, like in an AOC type sense.

Speaker 51 But I thought he was very, and despite the goof, or maybe not a goof, despite I think his poor answer to my question about globalizing the intifada, I thought in both of our interviews, he's smart and adaptable in a way that some of the other DSA types aren't.

Speaker 61 I think that he was very, I think, in tune with trying to appeal to a broader demographic than his core demographic.

Speaker 66 I don't know if you felt that way when you talked to him.

Speaker 9 Yeah, as you were talking, a couple of thoughts came to mind, two or three.

Speaker 9 One is that I think it's really notable that the substance of his campaign wasn't what some political science nerds call post-material. It wasn't about identity.
It wasn't focused on who we are.

Speaker 9 It was focused on what we need. It was focused on materialism, on prices and groceries and the cost of housing.

Speaker 64 I mean, just look at his poster was for a New York you can afford.

Speaker 9 I think this is another one. A New York You Can Afford.

Speaker 9 And if you look at why Democrats shifted to the Republican column in 2024, I think I was talking to, it was either David Shore or some other pollster about this.

Speaker 9 They said the top four reasons why people left the Democratic Party were cost of living, economy, inflation, and housing, which is another way of basically saying cost of living, cost of living, cost of living, cost of living.

Speaker 9 Like we're in a cost of living moment right now. That is the character of the dissatisfaction that people have about the status quo.

Speaker 9 That there's an establishment that is interested in having fights over here about identity and not interested in having fights here in the center of what Americans need, which is for life to feel cheaper.

Speaker 9 And that's one reason why I think Mamdani and I got along on our call. And I say got along in like with big quotation marks.
Like, I don't like rent freezes as a policy.

Speaker 9 I don't like his municipal grocery store plan as a policy. I have major doubts about, or questions certainly, about his ability to be an executive, a manager.

Speaker 9 How good is this guy at running something? This is a massive unknown. It's actually very hard to tease out in like an interview.

Speaker 9 How would I assess the managerial skills of a 33-year-old charismatic democratic socialist? Very, very hard to do.

Speaker 9 But the focus of materialism was something we could get along with because fundamentally, what I care about, what abundance is about, and what Mamdani is about, are about outcomes that make life more affordable for New Yorkers and for Americans.

Speaker 9 And so there was something there that I think was very interesting and successful. Another thing that

Speaker 9 your point raised for me is that

Speaker 9 there's this big question of like,

Speaker 9 should Democrats run as socialists or as left populists or as abundancy folks or as whatever something else?

Speaker 9 And my answer to that question, and it's so unsatisfying on like a conference stage or on a podcast, is

Speaker 9 people vote for people,

Speaker 9 not just for messages themselves.

Speaker 9 And so there were a bunch of folks I saw responding to Abundance when it first came out in March and April, saying, these dweebs, these nerds want us to run on regulatory changes and zoning reform, but look at Bernie Sanders.

Speaker 9 What Americans really want is just an angry guy saying, fuck all this.

Speaker 9 And now we have Mamdani, who's not angry at all. Like, he's almost buoyant.
Like, he's almost so happy that it's a little cheesy. But I, as a former musical theater nerd, do not find cheesy at all.

Speaker 9 I'm like,

Speaker 9 I know you. I spent a lot of time with people who have exactly this energy.
I know it. And I like it.

Speaker 53 A musical theater nerd who went to a liberal arts college who ran for student government.

Speaker 8 Like, I got it.

Speaker 9 Right.

Speaker 9 That's an archetype I'm a little bit familiar with.

Speaker 9 But it goes to show that, like, there was this certainty that the model to be most successful in American politics today was to run with anger.

Speaker 9 And now, the rising star on the left could not be a worse demonstration of that principle.

Speaker 9 He's unbelievably optimistic and non-stop smiley on these social media videos, even as he's talking straight to camera about the situation in New York affordability being completely fucked.

Speaker 9 He's very good at doing something there that blends the message of, I think, materialism with a style of like, optimism is almost too thin a word here, but a style of, this doesn't have to be an angry critique.

Speaker 9 There's room in this party for us. I'm someone who you would see an open door into a party and say, I want to be in a room with that guy.

Speaker 9 And so I think it does go to show that like poll testing issues. isn't worthless, but it doesn't capture the degree to which people vote for people.

Speaker 9 And I do think we're often surprised by the kind of people who end up being most compelling.

Speaker 9 The Sanders model and the Mamdani model could not be any more different, I think, from a sort of dispositional standpoint.

Speaker 25 But the fact that they're both working on the- Now the lefties would say to you, Derek, that's because you misunderstand this.

Speaker 61 Like the lefties on the social media would say, you misunderstand politics altogether and that your model is flawed, the neoliberal, you know, kind of capitalist model.

Speaker 67 And the reason that both Bernie and Zoron resonated had nothing to do with their personalities.

Speaker 62 It had to do with this deep well of interest in overthrowing the capitalist system and putting your finger in the eyes of the corporate elites and giving people free buses and et cetera.

Speaker 47 Maybe.

Speaker 26 I mean, I don't think that that's probably true in Texas, but like maybe that is true.

Speaker 53 And it wasn't about personality at all.

Speaker 74 What would you say to that?

Speaker 9 Maybe they're right. I don't think they're right.
But like, you know, politics is like science. You have a hypothesis, you throw it out there, you see what happens.

Speaker 9 My guess is that someone running with Momdani's politics is going to be most successful in a congressional district that's approximately plus 50 Democrats, which is what, you know, Brooklyn and Manhattan are.

Speaker 9 There's a lot of districts where Democrats have to win that aren't plus 50 Democrats. They're plus one, they're negative two, they're negative five.
These ones are.

Speaker 26 He ran up a 68% victory over Cuomo and Greenpoint, I think.

Speaker 9 I love

Speaker 9 Greenpoint as much as anybody.

Speaker 9 I love Greenpoint. Yeah, there's not a lot of those.
Americans in Greenpoint. But this goes again, this isn't my sort of sly dig at the DSA.

Speaker 9 It's just a fact that, as you said at the beginning, different people are going to be successful in different contexts.

Speaker 9 A Democratic socialist running to represent one of the most liberal cities in America at a time of deep dissatisfaction with both the Democratic Party and with affordability is going to have a certain level of success that that same DSA candidate is not going to have running to be the senator from Ohio or Maine or Georgia.

Speaker 9 These are just really different places.

Speaker 9 And so that's one place where that's one reason why I'm trying to keep saying we need to be humble about the degree to which we can scale the lessons of an incredible story, an extraordinary story from New York.

Speaker 9 We have to be humble about the degree to which this is a lesson that spreads across the country like peanut butter.

Speaker 78 Hi, I'm Martine Hackett, host of Untold Stories, Life with a Severe Autoimmune Condition, a production from Ruby Studio in partnership with Argenix.

Speaker 81 This season, we're sharing powerful stories of resilience from people living with MG and CIDP.

Speaker 75 Our hope is to inspire, educate, and remind each other that even in the toughest moments, we're not alone.

Speaker 77 We'll hear from people like Corbin Whittington.

Speaker 81 After being diagnosed with both CIDP and dilated cardiomyopathy, he found incredible strength through community.

Speaker 88 So when we talk community, we're talking about an entire ecosystem surrounding this condition, including, of course, the patients at the center, that are all trying to live life in the moment, live life for the future, but then also create a new future.

Speaker 91 Listen to Untold Stories, Life with a Severe Autoimmune Condition on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

Speaker 2 We the people, in order to form a more perfect union.

Speaker 4 These words are more than just the opening of the Constitution.

Speaker 6 They're a reminder of who this country belongs to and what we can be at our best.

Speaker 10 They're also the cornerstone of MS Now.

Speaker 15 Whether it's breaking news, exclusive reporting, election coverage, or in-depth analysis, MS Now keeps the people at the heart of everything they do.

Speaker 24 Home to the Rachel Maddow Show, Morning Joe, the briefing with Jen Saki, and more voices you know and trust, MS Now is your source for news, opinion, and the world.

Speaker 26 Their name is new, but you'll find the same commitment to justice, progress, and the truth you've relied on for decades.

Speaker 35 They'll continue to cover the day's news, ask the tough questions, and explain how it impacts you.

Speaker 40 Same mission, new name, MSNow.

Speaker 42 Learn more at MS.now.

Speaker 57 I have two more things I want to talk to you about regarding Zoron, and I guess we'll do the substantive one first.

Speaker 64 You know, we won't do meta Twitter commentary first.

Speaker 65 My main takeaway from our interview was I think he was listening to the critiques of, you know, that comes from abundance, but that comes from the center left and at least wanted to engage with them.

Speaker 51 I thought that his engagement was kind of limited, right?

Speaker 65 And to me, like his poor answer when it came to my question about like whether the phrase globalized intifada makes him uncomfortable, my reaction to it was less that like, oh, this guy's an anti-Semite that hates Jews.

Speaker 50 And my reaction to it was more like, this guy doesn't want to pick a fight with kind of a core demographic base that he has.

Speaker 66 Like, well, and essentially his core base were folks that were protesting and that were activists on the left.

Speaker 38 He doesn't want to do something that like unnecessarily rankles those folks.

Speaker 61 And to me, that would be the concerning thing about him as a mayor of New York, right?

Speaker 73 Like that, and when in your interview, similarly, you asked him if the costs being high on the subway were related to public sector union costs.

Speaker 50 And like he wouldn't really even broach

Speaker 62 the possibility, right?

Speaker 31 It was he had some other, I think, accurate assessments for why costs are too high, consultants and, you know, various red tape, but like he didn't want to do anything that was critical of the public sector unions.

Speaker 65 That would be my substantive concern for him, that like he's, he's going to be kind of tied to whatever, the group interests on the progressive side.

Speaker 19 What do you make of that, critique?

Speaker 9 New York City spends more per capita than any city in America.

Speaker 9 So the degree to which New York City's problems are fundamentally a function of its inability to spend enough money strikes me as not a very sound argument.

Speaker 9 I think that what ails New York is that in many cases, they are spending too much money in the wrong ways. And fixing those procedural bureaucratic problems requires making enemies.

Speaker 9 Because every single time you amend a process or you cut funding from some area, you're angering a constituency.

Speaker 9 And if you're running as a DSA candidate, you're very likely set up to anger a left-wing or liberal constituency that you're going to rely on for the next election.

Speaker 55 you can't just tax the bankers more?

Speaker 9 You can try.

Speaker 9 There's certainly no law against trying to raise taxes on the rich in New York even further to take New York from being the most high-tax place in America or the most high-spending place in America on a per capita basis, even the higher per capita spending place in America.

Speaker 9 But that doesn't seem to me to be the thing that actually ails New York.

Speaker 9 What ails New York to me is that many of the processes there, many of the procedures there are just obviously broken in part because of allies of the Democrats.

Speaker 9 So the point that I made to him, and I'm really glad that you teed this up, is that

Speaker 9 he seems to care a lot about transit construction costs. And in 2017, the New York Times wrote the story called something like the most expensive subway mile in the world.

Speaker 9 It was a long two, 3,000 word story.

Speaker 9 And a part of this reporting, which has been confirmed in other places, is that New York City underground construction tends to have staffing levels that are four times higher than the international average.

Speaker 9 Four times higher. You simply cannot, as a company or an organization, produce things in a cost-efficient way if you are legally required to have 4x the standard staffing level.
That's not possible.

Speaker 9 So at some point, I think that fixing problems of affordability in New York is going to require angering some of the constituencies that are responsible for lifting Zoran Mamdani to power.

Speaker 9 And I don't know the degree to which he can do that.

Speaker 9 And I absolutely see, I think it's really astute of you to point out the degree to which your question about globalizing intifada and my question about public sector unions in New York, while at one level seem to have nothing to do with one another, are in fact versions of the same underlying question.

Speaker 9 Do you have, will you have the power and the courage to upset people who are on your side in order to achieve the outcomes that you tell folks like me you want?

Speaker 9 That, like the managerial competency question, is a question that you just, I just don't know the answer to, and I still harbor major doubts about, because I do think that in order to fix New York's problems, he's gonna have to piss off some people that are on side.

Speaker 9 That's really, really hard to do, especially, last point, especially if you have a personality type that is as agreeable. as his is, right?

Speaker 9 I'm not trying to like psychoanalyze him from afar, but like as a sort of like toxically, like pathologically agreeable person myself, nothing makes me more uncomfortable than angering someone I recognize to be my friend.

Speaker 9 And if you put someone like me in government,

Speaker 9 it's going to be tough because I'm going to have a really, really hard time making decisions. It's easy to tweet about pissing people off.
It's harder to actually do it.

Speaker 9 And I would say that's a really, really smart reason to be skeptical about Mom Dani actually achieving the things he says he wants to achieve.

Speaker 63 It's been the biggest cultural shift for me moving from being in Republican politics to now, you know, being in opposition to the Republicans is everybody around me is agreeable, except for the far left types.

Speaker 9 Like

Speaker 47 the main Democratic base.

Speaker 41 It's like a very agreeable group that creates an unusual social dynamic at times.

Speaker 27 And Zoran was so agreeable, so affable, so friendly.

Speaker 62 And I can understand what the appeal is of him, even though we have some ideological disagreements.

Speaker 78 Hi, I'm Martine Hackett, host of Untold Stories, Life with a Severe Autoimmune Condition, a production from Ruby Studio in partnership with Argenix.

Speaker 81 This season, we're sharing powerful stories of resilience from people living with MG and CIDP.

Speaker 75 Our hope is to inspire, educate, and remind each other that even in the toughest moments, we're not alone.

Speaker 77 We'll hear from people like Corbin Whittington.

Speaker 81 After being diagnosed with both CIDP and dilated cardiomyopathy, he found incredible strength through community.

Speaker 88 So when we talk community, we're talking about an entire ecosystem surrounding this condition, including, of course, the patients at the center that are all trying to live life in the moment live life for the future but then also create a new future listen to untold stories life with a severe autoimmune condition on the iHeartRadio app Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts we the people in order to form a more perfect union these words are more than just the opening of the constitution they're a reminder of who this country belongs to and what we can be at our best.

Speaker 10 They're also the cornerstone of MS Now.

Speaker 15 Whether it's breaking news, exclusive reporting, election coverage, or in-depth analysis, MS Now keeps the people at the heart of everything they do.

Speaker 24 Home to the Rachel Maddow Show, Morning Joe, the briefing with Jen Saki, and more voices you know and trust, MS Now is your source for news, opinion, and the world.

Speaker 30 Their name is new, but you'll find the same commitment to justice, progress, and the truth you've relied on for decades.

Speaker 35 They'll continue to cover the day's news, ask the tough questions, and explain how it impacts you.

Speaker 40 Same mission, new name, MS Now.

Speaker 42 Learn more at ms.now.

Speaker 67 I have a few like abundance random policy notes around the country that you're seeing.

Speaker 46 New York, also New York State, is going to try to build a nuclear plant. Kathy Hochhole made that announcement.

Speaker 25 This feels like kind of a random niche issue.

Speaker 57 Like with all the crazy things going on in the world, why would I want to talk about this right now?

Speaker 48 But it also feels like kind of an inflection point and kind of important that a Democratic state actually

Speaker 64 is going to try to and a democratic politician is actually going to try to push this through.

Speaker 66 I don't know what you make of the nuclear story.

Speaker 9 let me give you my big thoughts on nuclear number one i think nuclear power is awesome i wish we built 70 more nuclear power plants the 1950s 1960s it would make climate change easier it would make energy abundance easier it would have been a pure and absolute mitzvah for the country but it's not 1961 it's 2025 nuclear power plants are the most expensive construction project in the world.

Speaker 9 I was talking to one energy analyst who said that the Votel power plant in Georgia costs something like eight to 10 Burj Khalifas, right?

Speaker 9 Imagine in a way hearing Kathy Hochl say, what we're going to do in New York is build eight to ten Burj Khalifas. It's be like, wow, that's certainly $10 billion.
It's certainly very expensive.

Speaker 9 Nuclear power is incredibly expensive to build, and it takes a long time to build for a variety of regulatory and site construction reasons. So my enthusiasm here, my optimism here is tempered.

Speaker 9 I'm an energy abundance guy, and I'm an all of the above energy abundance guy. Solar, wind, geothermal, absolutely nuclear.

Speaker 9 I think we're going to have to rely on natural gas for a long time to keep energy prices low as we make this clean energy transition.

Speaker 9 So I want to be really enthusiastic about any governor, especially a Blue State governor, saying we're going to build nuclear power.

Speaker 9 But I'm also interested in outcomes, the outcome of actually getting affordable power from a nuclear power plant that's already built.

Speaker 9 And if it's going to take an average of 10 to 15 years and 10 to 15 billion dollars to build a nuclear power plant, it just makes me a little bit concerned about the degree to which my enthusiasm for this announcement should actually translate into hope that this announcement becomes energy that folks in Albany and New York City can use.

Speaker 9 So that's my general outlook.

Speaker 9 But look, Spencer Cox in the governor of Utah also made an announcement about energy abundance and a kind of like race to the top of energy construction and permitting acceleration among Democratic and Republican governors around energy and housing.

Speaker 9 You know, these are the kind of vibe shifts that ultimately I would want abundance to have.

Speaker 6 Okay.

Speaker 49 I'm glad glad you're tempered, but I don't know, like the sclerotic Albany democratic established this being like, this is bad that we can't build nuclear.

Speaker 26 We should do it faster.

Speaker 70 That's something that's something.

Speaker 20 I guess you just want more.

Speaker 9 You want more. It's good.
Of course, it's good. It's a step in the right direction.

Speaker 9 You hear what I'm saying.

Speaker 9 Like, of course, it's good for them to go from we don't want to build nuclear, we want to shut nuclear power plants down, which is where we've been, to we want to build nuclear power plants because we recognize that nuclear power is going to be a critical part of our energy future.

Speaker 9 That transition is nothing but good, right?

Speaker 9 That said, I think it's worth being realistic about how difficult it is to build nuclear power and how long it takes to build it.

Speaker 9 And so I want us to sort of like temper our enthusiasm and our pride in this announcement with a recognition that like doing this stuff is very hard and the announcement itself is not the end of the journey.

Speaker 9 That said, I want to talk to Kathy Hochl about this. I would love.

Speaker 9 to learn more about the details of this plan, especially to learn if she has some ideas for really accelerating the typical timeline of nuclear construction.

Speaker 55 We'll see if you're

Speaker 55 see how tempered your excitement is about this other one.

Speaker 48 California is passing a budget today with some from some housing reforms.

Speaker 53 It includes, just prepare yourself, listeners.

Speaker 24 There are going to be a couple of wonky terms here in this list.

Speaker 65 So just, you know, you can chat GPT and ask about them.

Speaker 66 We're not going to explain what every word means.

Speaker 46 Infill housing projects are now exempt from CEQA.

Speaker 67 That's the environmental regulation in California that prevents anything from being built.

Speaker 57 And now it must be approved or denied in four to six months.

Speaker 67 A buy-right development must be improved in 90 days.

Speaker 54 There's an update to the Permit Streamlining Act.

Speaker 9 This is good.

Speaker 9 This is good.

Speaker 9 It's amazing. It's awesome.

Speaker 9 It's awesome, right?

Speaker 9 You know, I don't know that there's like a single silver bullet that's going to fix California's issues, but if there's 10 silver bullets, this is absolutely one of the silver bullets, right?

Speaker 9 In civil housing, we're talking about dense urban housing, making it easier to build that kind of housing, which is close to the best jobs.

Speaker 9 Not only is it good for the middle class that wants to live in downtown areas, it's also frankly good for the environment because sprawl is worse than density for the environment.

Speaker 9 Speeding up CEQA, basically meaning that you can build this infill housing without going through an environmental review process, that's sensational. Accelerated permitting, I think that's awesome.

Speaker 9 Look, this is what the kind of like technocratic achievements of an abundance movement will have to look like.

Speaker 9 You know, it's not going to be incredibly easy things that you can immediately throw a mission accomplished banner on.

Speaker 9 It's going to be stuff like amending a CEQA law here, amending an environmental review here, making it easier to build here, faster to permit here, reform zoning there.

Speaker 9 This package of policies, which I've been following for a while out of California, when Ezra and I were out doing our book tour, Scott Weiner and Wix were just beginning to put this package together.

Speaker 9 So the fact that

Speaker 9 a version of it seems to be nearing the finish line, I think this is purely wonderful. And it's exactly the sort of stuff that Ezra and I were rather explicitly explicitly calling for in the book.

Speaker 24 As somebody that is,

Speaker 50 you know, ideologically more than sympathetic to everything that you're writing about all this, going back to the political side of it, we're just talking about all this right now.

Speaker 22 The thing that strikes me is it does feel a little bit like a weakness.

Speaker 53 Like I was making a joke last night, like where

Speaker 61 we were watching on social media the positive reaction to Zoron from kind of the DSA left types, and it was like

Speaker 13 abundance in shambles, you know, free buses for all.

Speaker 68 like i'm gonna i'm gonna drink ezra klein's perfect beard in tears you know and like bad a glacier's hardest hit like they're like all so excited and i get it and there's something to be excited about about about i understand why young folks in particular are excited about zoron who haven't had a lot of democratic candidates to be excited about but his messaging like the shorthand of it is is easy to grasp on to like the you know whether it's the free buses whether it's you know the grocery stores it's hard to kind of imagine an inverse Like, how do you build excitement in the inverse for what we're just talking about in CEQA?

Speaker 9 Like, it's hard to imagine Derek Thompson, like, tweeting after the Mikey Sherrill victory, you know, something like, come town in shambles, like, permitting reform momentum.

Speaker 10 You know, it's like, it's permitting reform summer.

Speaker 46 You know, it's hard to memeify.

Speaker 47 Do you think about that at all? Do you care about that?

Speaker 9 I care about it. I do.
But also,

Speaker 9 look, the first post I wrote on Substack was about this phenomenon that I call the poster politician divide in the left. If your way of engaging with left abundance

Speaker 9 discourse is to dunk your head into Twitter and allow your cerebrum to just marinate in Twitter conflict, you will think that abundance and the left are enemies.

Speaker 9 That will be the only conclusion that you can possibly draw.

Speaker 9 But then if you have a phone or a Twitter account and you call up or follow some of the texts or DMs of progressive and left-wing politicians, they're much more pro-abundance.

Speaker 9 RoCanna is one of the most pro-Medicare for all congressmen in Washington.

Speaker 9 He has tweeted several times about how pro-abundance he is and how many parts of this book he think are necessary components of the Democratic Party. You look at, you know.

Speaker 9 Zoran Mamdani comes on my show and I have conversations with people like on his campaign about how enthusiastic they are for him to talk to me about this book that he really enjoyed and that sort of changed his mind about several ways and reintroduced some ideas about government efficiency, making government work, the fact that outcomes are more important sometimes than processes.

Speaker 9 learning from the mistakes of other leftists like Brandon Johnson in Chicago, how to not just do Chicago redux as a left-wing mayor of New York City.

Speaker 9 There's a lot of positivity about abundance principles in our 30, 37-minute conversation.

Speaker 9 And there's been a ton of conversations that I've had off the record on background with progressive and left-wing politicians across the country, not just at like a national level, like representatives.

Speaker 9 I'm talking about like people running for local office in Texas, in California, in Florida. And again and again, the message is like

Speaker 9 this book and its theme that we as Democrats cannot ask the public to allow us to add more government functions unless we prove that government can function in the first place totally resonated with us.

Speaker 9 You know, one of my favorite ways of sort of synthesizing the book was Wes Moore, the governor of Maryland, who said America has to move, the Democratic Party, he said, has to move from being a party of no and slow to a party of yes and now.

Speaker 9 Like what a great sort of campaign poetry synthesis of like the 230-page book of abundance.

Speaker 9 So I do think that it is, of course, worth paying attention to like what the left is saying on Twitter or Blue Sky or Instagram or whatever else. It's not that the discourse doesn't matter.

Speaker 9 It's that the discourse is not the world. The discourse isn't actually politics.
What's politics to me are what politicians are saying and thinking and doing.

Speaker 9 And if you follow what politicians are saying and thinking and doing, both publicly like Kathy Hochul and the forthcoming law in California, and privately, the way that politicians and the left, progressive politicians are talking to their own staff about the lessons they take from this book, it's really important to me that you have, again, this poster-politician divide where the posters are against the book and saying, you know, whatever, drink the lips, tears.

Speaker 9 The politicians aren't saying that at all.

Speaker 9 And so ultimately, if what I want is for this book to have power and influence, I'm not going to judge it by the number of retweets on a Wednesday morning in June of some post that shit post in the book.

Speaker 9 That's in some ways the worst way to judge the influence of the book. The way to judge the influence of the book is to call up a politician who's trying to do something and say, were you influenced?

Speaker 9 Did we change your mind?

Speaker 59 I like that answer.

Speaker 29 I worry a little bit that it's cope. As somebody that wants the amount of side to win, I worry about that because I do worry that you can't market your way out towards energy, really.

Speaker 54 Like popular energy just kind of exists.

Speaker 65 And, you know, I remember thinking back to like being with Jeb on the plane and him being like frustrated about like why he wasn't resonating with the Republican base.

Speaker 66 And we had a couple scotches and I said to him,

Speaker 15 honestly, man, like you can say fuck more.

Speaker 58 You can take off your glasses or put them back on.

Speaker 25 We can

Speaker 25 change the slogan.

Speaker 67 But like the energy is with Trump.

Speaker 50 And I worry that like, you know, I saw a social media post of an of Abundance meetup group and I would love everybody at that meetup.

Speaker 46 It'd be very nice, but it just looked like a dorky Derek and a dorky Matt Aglesius, just like 10 years younger than the two of you, you know, and then like last night, Zoron's party is like, it's like, you know, it's bumping.

Speaker 50 They're doing their, you know, everybody's vibing.

Speaker 47 I don't know.

Speaker 38 That part of it is tough to like figure out how to channel all that.

Speaker 37 And I'm not really even looking for you to answer it.

Speaker 66 It's just something I'm thinking through.

Speaker 9 Sure. It was, was my previous answer, Coke? I don't think so.

Speaker 9 But if someone's interested in putting together like a marketing deck for a politician in 2027, 2028, of course, I don't think that the first thing they should run on or the message that they should set the bumper sticker printers to running on is something like,

Speaker 9 unleash nuclear abundance, exempt infill CEQA. Like, that's not the bumper sticker.
Of course, I get that.

Speaker 9 But what I keep saying is the following two things, when people ask me versions of this question, which I want to be clear, it's a perfectly fair question. It's a perfectly fair question.

Speaker 9 It's an important question. Number one, the book's three months old.
It's three months old.

Speaker 9 Like, we're going to learn about like how, like, what messages connect with people and what messages come out of the book. We're going to learn.

Speaker 9 There are years to figure out ways that this book clicks into a message that people care about. One message is the way that Wes Moore is talking, right?

Speaker 9 That the Democratic Party can't be the party of no and slow. It has to be the party of fast and now.

Speaker 9 Another way, frankly, of making the messages of the book stick is that this is a book that's fundamentally about how do we fucking solve people's problems?

Speaker 9 How do we go from like a Republican Party that just breaks shit and a Democratic Party that doesn't do shit to a government that gets shit done?

Speaker 9 There are versions of, and again, I'm not trying to take the sort of, you know, old Jeb Bush advice of just throw a four-letter word on it.

Speaker 9 But like there are ways, I think, of taking a book that was me and Ezra trying to say true things about American politics and policy and turning it into

Speaker 9 a message that works. But the most important reaction I have to the question like this, the most important reaction to this question is

Speaker 9 people don't vote for books, they vote for people. And we don't know yet the kind of individuals that are going to take up this message and run on it in 2027.
We don't know their charisma.

Speaker 9 We don't know their willingness to go on every single show. We don't know if they're funny, if they're agreeable.

Speaker 9 Like, Mamdani understands something that exists at a level that isn't captured by abundance versus left populism. I think he understands something that's true about attention.

Speaker 9 He understands that to get people's attention, to hold it, to take it away from somebody else requires that you present a version of yourself to people on social media and on podcasts that other people want to be with.

Speaker 9 People want to be at the party with you. They want to be, you know, we used to say before, like, you want to grab a beer with this person.
I think it's more complicated now.

Speaker 9 It's like, do you want to listen to this person talk for three hours on Joe Rogan on a phone while you're watching Love Island in the background? A different kind of general vibe of hang.

Speaker 9 Those are elements that cannot be predicted or prescribed by a book that's about the right housing policy and the right way to think about government efficiency.

Speaker 9 These are different problems to solve for, and people will try to solve for them. It's really, it's like almost like not my job to perfectly anticipate and describe the kind of person who will have

Speaker 9 this ability to grab and hold attention while also running on ideas from the book that I think would dramatically improve people's lives.

Speaker 65 Next time you can ask that question, you can just crib from RuPaul, and you can just say, you need somebody that has charisma, uniqueness, nerve, and talent.

Speaker 9 Charisma, uniqueness, nerve, and talent.

Speaker 20 Because Zoron has.

Speaker 9 Zoron has it.

Speaker 9 He had all of it.

Speaker 9 I had a feeling that might be an acronym.

Speaker 9 You got it. And then

Speaker 9 it was. Okay, good.

Speaker 70 What kind of

Speaker 50 speaking of people with no charisma, uniqueness, nerve, or talent, John Thune and Mike Johnson?

Speaker 67 What do you make of what's happening with the whatever tax and budget bill over on the hill?

Speaker 50 It feels anti-abundance to me.

Speaker 60 I would just like to hear you cook on their

Speaker 62 legislative plans.

Speaker 9 I like it. Yes, it's one of the fucking worst bills I've ever seen in my life.

Speaker 9 It's a debt bomb. It lowers taxes on people who do not need a tax cut in order to cut services for people who need those services.

Speaker 9 The idea that at this point in the economy, with inequality what it is, with the needs of the poor, especially in an affordability crisis what they are, the fact that we're going to give million dollar tax cuts to folks that run

Speaker 9 used car lots so that we can take Medicaid away from poor people in Alabama and Louisiana is absurd and disgusting. And

Speaker 9 I cannot believe they're actually going through with this. I do think they're going to go through with it.
I'm not sure the Republican Party can take a vacancy spot here.

Speaker 9 I think they have to pass some version of the big and beautiful bill. It's going to include an enormous amount of tax cuts that weight overwhelmingly toward the richest 1%.

Speaker 9 And the only way to make the numbers work is to cut government spending.

Speaker 9 And government spending tends to be much more progressive, which means you're taking money away from low-income people who need food stamps and snap and healthcare.

Speaker 9 I think this is the sort of thing that Republicans today feel like is an expression of their values and an expression of their donor interests.

Speaker 9 And I also hope, and maybe this is just a bit of projection, but I certainly hope that it's the sort of thing that come mid-end of 2026, Democrats are going to be able to very successfully pin this and the behavior of Donald Trump together to create an incredibly compelling argument for throwing a lot of bums out of office.

Speaker 9 So I think it's a pretty horrendously depressing bill.

Speaker 9 And the silver lining as a sort of pathologically optimistic person, the silver lining to me is that a bill this horrendous cannot help but be an albatross around the neck of the people who vote for it.

Speaker 4 And when you combine it with the rest of the agenda, like it's pretty astonishing how like anti-cost cutting, their entire anti-affordability, the entire agenda is.

Speaker 68 I mean, this bill and the tax cut for rich folks combined with making healthcare more expensive, getting rid of health care for poor people, getting rid of SNAP benefits for poor people, on top of that aggressive tariff tax increase on everybody that's buying goods.

Speaker 50 On top of that, we're going to mass deport the people that are making and building things, which are going to make those things more expensive.

Speaker 32 I mean, like, the whole economic agenda, it's significantly worse than the Trump 1.0 agenda, and it is particularly ill-suited for the economic moment I think we're in.

Speaker 19 Do you agree with that?

Speaker 9 It is so shockingly out of step with this economic moment that I honestly sometimes just can't believe they're going through with it. I mean, Donald Trump won, as I said, an affordability election.

Speaker 9 He won because enough Americans either went to the polls for the first time and voted for a Republican because they felt like life was unaffordable, or they shifted from the Democratic to the Republican column because they felt like life was unaffordable.

Speaker 9 And like, how do you make life affordable? You make it cheaper to build houses, you make energy cheaper, you make life cheaper, you make things like healthcare and education cheaper.

Speaker 9 And what are they doing?

Speaker 9 One of the first things that he did in office is to announce a tariff on Canadian lumber and Mexican drywall. That's like immediately threatening to rise the costs of home construction.

Speaker 9 What does he do on something like manufacturing, which we would want to be more efficient in this country?

Speaker 9 He creates a trade war, which raises the input costs for things that we build in this country, which means it's harder to build anything in this country. What does he do for energy?

Speaker 9 Well, the Big Beautiful Bill and a bunch of other Trump policies not only hurt solar and wind construction, they also raise energy costs across the board.

Speaker 9 Energy costs are looking to double in some places in this country in the next year. This is one of the more important, important, I think, stories to emerge from the economy in the next few months.

Speaker 9 And then finally on healthcare, I mean, we're going to give, again, we're going to give like sole proprietors of S-Corps million-dollar tax cuts that they do not need.

Speaker 9 Like that used car salesman is going to vote for you, a Republican, no matter what you do in the next six months.

Speaker 9 We're still going to give you a 700 or give you and your class a $700 billion tax cut that requires us to cut Medicaid by $700 billion.

Speaker 9 It's completely insane to me.

Speaker 9 And it's one place where, you know, as I've gone around the country, as Ezra and I have done this book tour, it's almost been too easy for us to make the point that a message of abundance stands up poetically against a scarcity agenda from the Trump administration.

Speaker 9 We're not even beginning to talk about things that I care a ton about and initially came on the show a lot to talk about. Things like science policy.
We're cutting the NIH by $18 billion, by 40%. Why?

Speaker 9 We could amend the Big Beautiful Bill. We could reduce the corporate income tax cut by about 0.7% to save that $18 billion.

Speaker 9 Instead, we're going to take it away from Harvard scientists studying the molecular basis of Alzheimer's and infectious disease. What the fuck are you doing?

Speaker 9 Like, it's so astonishing to me that they're running on this explicit agenda of scarcity.

Speaker 9 And unfortunately, you know, for the country and narrowly, usefully, for my ability to talk about it on podcasts, it could not be more anti-abundance.

Speaker 65 I'm giving you snaps.

Speaker 78 Hi, I'm Martine Hackett, host of Untold Stories, Life with a Severe Autoimmune Condition, a production from Ruby Studio in partnership with Argenix.

Speaker 81 This season, we're sharing powerful stories of resilience from people living with MG and CIDP.

Speaker 77 Our hope is to inspire, educate, and remind each other that even in the toughest moments, we're not alone. We'll hear from people like Corbin Whittington.

Speaker 81 After being diagnosed with both CIDP and dilated cardiomyopathy, he found incredible strength through community.

Speaker 88 So when we talk community, we're talking about an entire ecosystem surrounding this condition, including, of course, the patients at the center that are all trying to live life in the moment, live life for the future, but then also create a new future.

Speaker 91 Listen to Untold Stories, Life with a Severe Autoimmune Condition on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

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Speaker 26 Because we're both sickos and just can't help but do discourse.

Speaker 67 We went too long. We went longer than I meant to on

Speaker 9 Soron and

Speaker 24 the meta discourse around Zoron.

Speaker 26 So I have a few other notes of things I wanted to talk to you about.

Speaker 47 We're not going to be able to get to all of them.

Speaker 46 I wanted you to reply to Mark Cuban's bull pitch on this podcast for AI, which I found completely uncompelling.

Speaker 57 You had two recent podcasts I like, one on the unifying theory of America being unhealthy and one on smartphones and mental health.

Speaker 46 Which one of those

Speaker 65 are you hottest to trod on right now, those three topics?

Speaker 37 You get to be the host.

Speaker 9 I saw the clip of Cuban telling you that he wasn't going to run for president, which I think is a lie. I think you think it's a lie.

Speaker 9 Tell me what he he said about AI so I can respond to that because I'd love to talk about AI. It went on for a while.

Speaker 31 The short original part of the clip, he talked about, and I think, which is something that is true that I agree with, is just the entrepreneurial opportunities for AI for somebody that's a young person that's up, sorry, that's to learn about a topic.

Speaker 32 You know, he's just like, it's going to be unimaginable compared to the past.

Speaker 59 I agreed with that part.

Speaker 74 Here is the second part of his bull pitch I was a little less compelled by. I'd like for you to listen to.

Speaker 92 It's going to be really tough to know what's real and what's not real.

Speaker 92 And you may not need real people to create entertainment, which means that, no, don't, don't do that because that, in my mind, I think it's going to force more face-to-face communication.

Speaker 9 I just love that in your pro pitch.

Speaker 93 It's like, it's going to be hard to tell what's real and what's not real.

Speaker 9 And that's in the positive pitch. Well, yeah, but

Speaker 92 that is positive in some respects, right? Because it becomes so easy to overwhelm, to flood the zone, if you will, with stuff that isn't real.

Speaker 92 People are going to want stuff that is real and will want more face-to-face communications.

Speaker 92 In business as well, when you get all these fake voices calling you as a sales bitch, it's like if you're the company that has a salesperson at least knocks on your door or shows up face-to-face, you're going to appreciate that.

Speaker 92 If you don't know what's real or not, you're going to want somebody telling it to your face so you know it's real and that you can trust it.

Speaker 9 That's insane.

Speaker 9 Mark Cuban's really smart.

Speaker 9 I don't dislike him. I don't dislike him at all.
This is not coming from a place of like, I couldn't wait to call some opinion of Mark Cuban. It's insane.
That's just a bad take.

Speaker 9 I have an article going up in my sub stack in about 10 minutes,

Speaker 9 which is called Young People Face a Hiring Crisis, AI is Making It Worse. And let me try to do this essay really quickly because it clicks exactly into the point that Mark Cuban's making.

Speaker 9 There's a lot of conversation around the fear that AI is taking entry-level jobs from young people graduating from college.

Speaker 9 And in fact, you can see the unemployment rate for young college graduates begin to tick up much faster than the overall unemployment rate. That's scary.

Speaker 9 The macroeconomic data here is not entirely conclusive. So I went and called up a bunch of college career office directors to ask, what are you seeing in the entry-level labor market?

Speaker 9 What are your students saying about their job applications? And they said something that totally stunned me.

Speaker 9 They said that today it is not uncommon for young people to use artificial intelligence to apply to 300 jobs, 500 jobs, even 1,000 jobs in a matter of months. It's not uncommon.

Speaker 9 And as a result, a lot of employers, in response to this AI barrage, are putting up their own AI bulwark, so to speak.

Speaker 9 They are using AI to conduct early-round interviews, to surveil early-round interviews, to look at body language and facial expressions.

Speaker 9 They're sometimes using AI to filter for these job applications so that a young person applies to a job and five seconds later, you know, they're getting a no from some AI that's doing a bunch of keyword searches.

Speaker 9 And what I heard from these college career counselors is that it is making the job search process so unbelievably anxiety producing for young people because they are often not talking to potential employers at all.

Speaker 9 They're talking to chatbots created by these employers to handle the barrage of AI-enabled job applications.

Speaker 9 The process of looking for a job is becoming so fundamentally inhuman that like the economic anxiety that people feel about the labor market right now is being layered with this enormous like dystopian psychological anxiety about like who the hell am I even talking to when I apply to work?

Speaker 9 I'm not against AI. I think AI is like really interesting technology in so many ways.

Speaker 9 But one thing that we've seen from technology like smartphones and even things like Netflix, sometimes when a technology is super convenient and creates a kind of frictionlessness to our lives, it removes the human experience.

Speaker 9 And that's exactly what's happening to job hunts across the country.

Speaker 9 And it's going to make, it's going to create a scenario, I think, where young people especially are going to feel like AI is not just an economic technology, it's a social technology.

Speaker 9 Young people are going to use it to replace therapists. They're going to use it to replace friends.

Speaker 9 As weird as that sounds, they're absolutely going to find ways to take questions that are for friends and redirect it toward AI chatbots. It's already happening.

Speaker 9 There's a company called Character AI that has tens of millions of unique users a month.

Speaker 9 And it's going to happen in these sort of historically interpersonal exchanges like the job hunt, which are going to become more automated in ways that are going to feel weird and berserk and dystopian and fundamentally antisocial.

Speaker 9 And that's why, like, you know, as much as I care about abundance, and it's absolutely the most important project that I'm working on right now, the other theme that I am most interested in talking about on this sub stack and just in podcasts generally is this idea I have about the antisocial century.

Speaker 9 That in so many ways, not only are we empirically talking to each other less, having fewer face-to-face interactions, but also this AI wave that is coming is going to not just change the way we work, it's going to change the way that we engage with other people.

Speaker 9 It's going to deform social relations in ways we're not going to understand until it's already happening.

Speaker 9 So, right now, my big thesis is the transition line, the pipeline between college and the workforce is drenched in AI right now. Young people are cheating on tests.

Speaker 9 GPAs barely mean anything anymore because what's the value of a college assessment if you don't know if the underlying assessment is like how good were you at looking up chat GPTing, like history of the Habsburg Empire, or actually understanding the Habsburg Empire.

Speaker 9 The job application process is enabled by AI. The human resources process is now automated by AI and now entry-level jobs themselves, I think, are being replaced at some level by AI.

Speaker 9 If we want to understand what's happening with this technology in the world, we should study this pipeline from from college to the labor force like hell.

Speaker 9 And I would be shocked if the near-term outcome was anything like Mark Cuban predicted.

Speaker 58 I'm glad you picked that topic because I'm obsessed with this.

Speaker 50 I'm going to keep talking about it, even though this is obstinately a never Trump or politics pod, because I just, we have to fight against it.

Speaker 48 Like, there's a dehumanization element to this that, like, must be fought.

Speaker 32 I'm not a Luddite.

Speaker 34 There's a lot of cool stuff happening with AI, but this notion that like we're going to go through this period where the slop gets so bad and the dehumanization is so intense that folks will crave human contact.

Speaker 50 That's not a bet that I want to make, actually.

Speaker 9 Is the following a fair analysis the last 70 years of television technology?

Speaker 9 That television is so good at allowing people to watch human relations that it's created a renaissance of people hanging out in the physical world. No.
Don't say no. The exact fucking opposite.

Speaker 9 Television is so unbelievably entertaining.

Speaker 9 It's so good at just getting our little dopamine to slew us through our brains that we sit on the couch and we watch it for five, six, seven hours a day, especially if you're an American senior.

Speaker 9 And it reduces the amount of face-to-face socializing. Face-to-face socializing has declined by 20% in the last 20 years.

Speaker 9 That's after Bowling Alone by Robert Putnam came out, looking at the decline of socializing in the previous 50 years. These technologies aren't evil.
I don't think Netflix is evil or HBO is evil.

Speaker 9 I think that technologies that make life frictionless have a side side effect of often removing frictions we didn't know we needed to be healthy and happy.

Speaker 9 It's taken us a while to discover that with TV. It'll take us a while to really see it maybe in some ways with AI, but it's a thesis I hold to very, very strongly.

Speaker 78 Hi, I'm Martine Hackett, host of Untold Stories, Life with a Severe Autoimmune Condition, a production from Ruby Studio in partnership with Argenix.

Speaker 81 This season, we're sharing powerful stories of resilience from people living with MG and CIDP.

Speaker 77 Our hope is to inspire, educate, and remind each other that even in the toughest moments, we're not alone. We'll hear from people like Corbin Whittington.

Speaker 81 After being diagnosed with both CIDP and dilated cardiomyopathy, he found incredible strength through community.

Speaker 88 So when we talk community, we're talking about an entire ecosystem surrounding this condition, including, of course, the patients at the center that are all trying to live life in the moment, live life for the future, but then also create a new future.

Speaker 91 Listen to Untold Stories, Life with a Severe Autoimmune Condition on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

Speaker 2 We the people, in order to form a more perfect union.

Speaker 4 These words are more than just the opening of the Constitution.

Speaker 6 They're a reminder of who this country belongs to and what we can be at our best.

Speaker 10 They're also the cornerstone of MS Now.

Speaker 15 Whether it's breaking news, exclusive reporting, election coverage, or in-depth analysis, MS Now keeps the people at the heart of everything they do.

Speaker 24 Home to the Rachel Maddow Show, Morning Joe, the briefing with Jen Saki, and more voices you know and trust, MS Now is your source for news, opinion, and the world.

Speaker 30 Their name is new, but you'll find the same commitment to justice, progress, and the truth you've relied on for decades.

Speaker 35 They'll continue to cover the day's news, ask the tough questions, and explain how it impacts you.

Speaker 40 Same mission, new name, MS Now.

Speaker 42 Learn more at ms.now.

Speaker 19 All right.

Speaker 51 We're going to challenge you right now, Derek.

Speaker 55 This is going to be personal growth.

Speaker 7 I have a series of rapid-fire questions.

Speaker 33 You only get two sentences to answer each of them.

Speaker 50 On the topic of smartphones and mental health, we're not going to get to that.

Speaker 33 You should go listen to Derek's podcast, Plain English.

Speaker 50 It's really great.

Speaker 33 And sign up for his new sub stack.

Speaker 70 Rapid fire.

Speaker 16 That's your fault.

Speaker 46 You titled it, Your Unifying Theory of America Being Unhealthy. So if it's a unifying theory, you should be able to offer it in two sentences.

Speaker 71 Why is America unhealthy?

Speaker 9 Americans eat too much. Caloric surplus is probably the most parsimonious explanation for the rise in obesity.

Speaker 9 It leads to not just subcutaneous fat, the fat that we can see, but something called visceral fat that's deeper under our skins and around our organs.

Speaker 9 Visceral fat, along with other effects of eating too much, caloric surplus, releases toxins into the blood that raises chronic inflammation.

Speaker 9 And chronic inflammation is the sort of fountain spring from which so many long-term diseases like cancer, cardiometabolic disease, heart attacks, and Alzheimer's become more likely to be.

Speaker 50 So we intervene on that how?

Speaker 57 We stop.

Speaker 65 How do you stop that process of those various subterranean fats that you went to?

Speaker 9 Look, here's a metaphor. The human being is a car.

Speaker 9 The modern world is a brick dropped on the accelerator. And as a result, we are accelerating the degree to which we consume, consume, consume.

Speaker 9 We are putting ourselves in a state of permanent caloric surplus, and this is leading to record high levels of obesity.

Speaker 9 I wish there were some obvious, easily scaled, non-medical solution to this problem. Eat less and exercise more? Of course, one should do that.
It's really, really hard for a variety of reasons.

Speaker 9 The reason to be optimistic here is that glucagon-like peptide 1 receptor agonists, otherwise known as GLP-1 drugs, otherwise known as Ozempic and Zetbound, seem to be sensational at taking the brick from the accelerator and placing it on the brake.

Speaker 9 And one of the next pieces that I'm writing right now, the first piece I'm going to write next week, is about how these GLP-1 drugs are among the most astonishing medical breakthroughs of the last 100 years, and maybe one of the most astonishing medical breakthroughs of the last several hundred years.

Speaker 9 For reasons we don't quite understand, they seem to be good at everything. They don't just help us lose weight.
They don't just reduce chronic inflammation.

Speaker 9 They don't just reduce levels of neurodegenerative diseases like Alzheimer's, where that's being studied right now.

Speaker 9 They seem to be good at just about every single bodily system that we've measured, and a ton of money is going into making them better.

Speaker 9 So, I am not optimistic about a sudden, spontaneous renaissance of Americans working out more and eating more broccoli.

Speaker 9 I am optimistic, though, that GLP1 drugs could be like one of the most important scientific discoveries of the century.

Speaker 60 All right, that was very challenging, and you did fail the test.

Speaker 38 But

Speaker 9 there were a ton of semicolons. If you could get a picture of the video,

Speaker 9 those are all semicolons.

Speaker 54 This could maybe be two words.

Speaker 50 Person in the public life that drives you the most insane right now.

Speaker 61 Who's annoying you the most in all of public life?

Speaker 9 JD.

Speaker 6 It's the same.

Speaker 6 I see.

Speaker 26 We're so aligned, Derek.

Speaker 35 Maybe we should merge our podcast.

Speaker 47 The Atlantic writer, you're going to miss the most.

Speaker 24 You left The Atlantic.

Speaker 74 This is the unofficial podcast of The Atlantic, since we have so many Atlantic guests.

Speaker 9 Am I going to get in trouble if I don't say Jeff Goldberg?

Speaker 7 If you said Jeff Goldberg, I would be offended.

Speaker 9 I'm going to save Jeff Goldberg because that's the answer least likely to get me into trouble. But I have so many, I have so many friends.

Speaker 9 That is the Atlantic.

Speaker 9 I love Jeff Jeff, too.

Speaker 70 That is a pathetic answer.

Speaker 13 You began this podcast by extolling the virtues of Democratic candidates who were candid, who went on podcasts and took tough questions.

Speaker 14 There you are copping out.

Speaker 9 When I run for mayor of Washington, D.C., maybe I'll give you more honest, interpersonal answers.

Speaker 15 All right.

Speaker 46 Ezra Klein's most annoying tick on the Abundance Tour?

Speaker 9 Most annoying tick?

Speaker 9 Tick. Yeah, you had to do joint interviews with him.
What was his most annoying tick? Certainly.

Speaker 9 I don't find Ezra particularly annoying. I'd love to know what he thinks of my, I'll say this.

Speaker 9 It's interesting when you're on the road with someone, when you're just around someone talking for just like fucking hundreds of hours, you pick up these little things that they say and you start using them.

Speaker 9 My favorite thing that he does is he has this line where

Speaker 9 he says, I'd like to make a cut here. It's a way for him to answer a difficult, I think, it's a way to answer a difficult question in two different ways.

Speaker 9 So if you ask me, who are you going to miss the most at The Atlantic? I could say, I'm going to make a cut here.

Speaker 9 There are people who I appreciate the most at The Atlantic, and there are people who I love texting with and slacking with the most at the Atlantic. So I'd like to make a cut here.

Speaker 9 This is a horrible tick.

Speaker 3 This is extremely annoying.

Speaker 9 I'm glad that it says something about your partnership, but this doesn't annoy you.

Speaker 9 Ezra, I don't think it's annoying. I think it's magnificently useful.
And I'm sorry for the way that Tim is bastardizing my answer to this question.

Speaker 70 Okay. Finally, we need to fix the NBA injury problem.

Speaker 17 I saw you posted about this.

Speaker 15 Yeah. It's unbelievable that

Speaker 33 so many of the last few years of playoffs have been ruined by injuries.

Speaker 72 I mean, the tragedy and the drama and kind of the operatic nature of game seven and having the pacers as unlikely underdog, you know, having it be stripped away from them by Tyrese Halliburton, their star player getting injured in the first five minutes with an Achilles tendon tear.

Speaker 27 At some level, I feel horrible for Tyrese, but it did make for good drama.

Speaker 54 But over the course of years now, there are just so many more injuries than when we were growing up.

Speaker 64 How do we fix it?

Speaker 9 I'm not sure how easily this is fixable. I think the reasons for this go go to the fact that

Speaker 9 these players are unbelievably athletic and the style of play involves

Speaker 9 a lot more

Speaker 9 play from behind the three-point line so that there's more sort of start-stop drives and start-stop defenses where if there's more three-point shots and you're say a wing defender on the Denver Nuggets and you're playing, you know, I'm the Boston Celtex.

Speaker 9 I do nothing but take threes.

Speaker 9 You're constantly going from a stop position or sort of flow position near the basket to sprinting out to three-point line because Jalen Brown is taking his 17-3 of the game.

Speaker 9 And a game, I think, that has more of this, like of these like sudden accelerations from incredibly athletic people is going to have more injuries. That said, the season is way too long.

Speaker 9 And the consequences of its too longness are legion. I mean, not only is so much of the regular season just completely worthless, two-thirds of the teams make the playoffs or the play-in.

Speaker 9 So why do I give a fuck about a game in the middle of January if it has no bearing on the outcome of the season?

Speaker 9 Like, the Indiana Pacers started this season, what, like, like 14 and 19, and they were like maybe one Achilles away from winning the championship.

Speaker 9 So, why am I watching any basketball in November at all? So, I think the season itself needs to be shrunk in order to make the games matter more.

Speaker 9 And I do think that allowing more time between the games might reduce strain on people's tendons and ligaments, which might cash out into your injuries toward the end of the season.

Speaker 9 But the most important thing about your question is that it's just exactly right.

Speaker 9 I mean, it's difficult to think of a playoff in the last few years that wasn't like defined by or potentially defined by a major injury, whether it's like, you know, Jamal Murray getting injured in the middle of Jokic's prime,

Speaker 9 whether it's Giannis getting injured or Embiid never being able to play in the postseason or Tatum getting injured or Halliburton getting injured. Or there have been seasons where like in the West,

Speaker 9 when the Warriors

Speaker 9 won the championship. Like, hats off to Seth Curry.
That was a a magical year.

Speaker 9 But if I recall, like, it was like four of the top 10 or five of the top 10 players in the Western Conference were like injured by the end of that playoffs. Like, Kawhi wasn't playing.

Speaker 9 Paul George was like, you know, barely holding it together. All these other players, like, who you would want to compete in the Western Conference championship were injured.

Speaker 58 Jamal, they played against us that year.

Speaker 93 Yeah. Jamal.

Speaker 9 Right. Yeah, maybe Chris Paul.

Speaker 9 So I think that we're reaching a point where the product, which is already bad during the regular season because the games kind of don't matter, is also getting diminished in the postseason because you're basically flipping a coin on the Achilles and knee tendons of every star player by the end of the middle of June.

Speaker 9 And that's a huge problem, I think, for the league.

Speaker 47 All right. I'm going to let you get to your move.

Speaker 48 I have a little self-criticism. We're going to do less social media discourse, and I'm going to endeavor to find an area of disagreement the next time you come on, if that sounds good.

Speaker 9 Okay, cool. All right, great.
Let's disagree about something.

Speaker 50 Yeah, and I think really the only one is that you decided to move to Washington.

Speaker 48 So I guess that's one topic, but I'll try to find a substantive area of disagreement the next time we get together.

Speaker 26 That's Derek Thompson. Go subscribe to a substack.

Speaker 50 Appreciate you coming on on a moving day, and we'll talk to you soon, brother.

Speaker 9 Thanks, my friend.

Speaker 25 All right, man. Thanks so much.

Speaker 72 Appreciate you.

Speaker 54 Everybody else, come back tomorrow for another edition of the Bulwark podcast.

Speaker 2 We'll see you all then. Peace.

Speaker 9 Take a bite of the big apple.

Speaker 9 Oh, God. Love New York, New York, New York, New York, New York.
Feel so free, feel so free, feel so free. It's my religion.
Love New York, love, New York, love, New York, love, New York, New York.

Speaker 9 Feel so free, feel so free, feel so free. It's my religion.

Speaker 9 Out of control,

Speaker 9 time's moving slow.

Speaker 9 Bell is home.

Speaker 9 But I'm ready to go.

Speaker 9 Black car picked me up from the airport. Dropped my bags at the Bowery Hotel.

Speaker 9 Next stop to the club, I'm a dance whore.

Speaker 9 Kick, drum, juke, I'm a gun. Love me, you can feel me, you can feel me off.
Feel so free, feel so free, feel so free, it's my religion. Love me, you claw for you, you love me, you can feel

Speaker 9 me off. Feel so free, feel so free, feel so free, it's my religion.
Hand on my pulse,

Speaker 9 sex in the air.

Speaker 9 Feeding my soul,

Speaker 9 answering my prayer.

Speaker 9 Black car picked me up from the airport

Speaker 9 Dropped my bags at the Barry Hotel

Speaker 9 Next up to the club on the dance hall Kick drum chuke gum of the gun Love me, love me your club New York New York New York You're so freaking so freaky just a feed religion Honey Love me your love New York New York New York You're so freaking so free just to feed your religion

Speaker 9 figure it from the email. Cause it's a free disappearance from religion.

Speaker 9 I need to be a family. You can figure it from the email.
Cause I feel so free to feed some religion.

Speaker 9 I've been on the way down and I

Speaker 9 hear it over.

Speaker 9 I've been on the way down and I

Speaker 9 hear.

Speaker 9 I've been on the way.

Speaker 36 The Bulwark Podcast is produced by Katie Cooper with audio engineering and editing by Jason Brown.

Speaker 9 She'd throw things, wander, and started hoarding.

Speaker 94 Mom's Alzheimer's was already so hard. But then we found out she had something called agitation that may happen with dementia due to Alzheimer's disease.
And that was a different kind of difficult.

Speaker 94 So we asked her doctor for more help.

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Speaker 95 Learn more about these and other side effects at Rexulti.com. Tap ad for PI.

Speaker 94 I'm glad her doctor recommended Rexulte.

Speaker 95 Talk to your loved ones, doctor. Moments matter.

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