Ezra Klein

That's pretty optimistic.

All right, so both of you are speaking more in the grand march to triumph register here.

So I'm going to come in with things I'm more worried about.

So I probably agree with a lot of what you said, Derek, but at the level of vibes...

Abundance has been more factionally controversial in the Democratic Party than I would have expected and has cut into it in ways that I wouldn't expect it, sort of setting off a big populist liberal fight.

And I think whether or not that fight is constructive and whether or not the syntheses that come out of it are constructive is unknown as of yet.

My absolutely biggest worry, though, is not the critiques of abundance outside the tent, but a kind of small ballness that I see emerging inside the tent.

That when I think about failure modes for what this could be

and what it could be becoming.

It's that abundance ends up as a synonym for efficiency, that we've rebranded an agenda for state capacity, that it's just, I always hear people like, I don't disagree with cutting red tape, as if like all abundance is is about cutting red tape, as opposed to an actual radical vision of plenitude.

And I think something that neither of our books ended up doing all that well

was really describing what that vision of the future would look like.

You imagine a candidate running for the Democratic nomination in 2028 or running for the presidency in 2028.

What are the ways that they describe what this abundant future is to look like?

Is it you're promising to build just 5 million houses?

Does that mean anything to anybody?

How do you make clean energy abundance a concept that people can actually feel?

How is that something people are excited about?

And then this goes to another thing that I think is going quite poorly, actually.

The back half of abundance is, you know better than anyone, is about trying to build a progressive politics of technology.