Derek Thompson: An Abundance Agenda for the Future

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It’s in our nature.

Hello, and welcome to the Bulwark podcast. I’m Tim Miller in for Charlie Sykes for the next two days. Before we get to our really great guests, I wanna shout out that we’re going on the road next year. Our first event is public. We’re going to Seattle, January twenty first.

Come make a weekend out of it. See the space needle. We have a special guest Dan Savage. The legendary sex advice columnist founder of it. It gets better project.

Former frenemy of mine. That’s gonna be really spicy. I think that you all have a good time. You can get tickets at the bulwark slash no b s or just click on our Events page at the bulwark dot com. One other thing, I wrote yesterday, we’re not gonna get into this.

I wrote yesterday about what was such a big deal about the respect from marriage act, Bill signing. And I went down the Doma history trail a little bit, you know, got a little emotional. So check that out in yesterday’s tryout if you hadn’t had a chance yet. Tomorrow on the podcast, we’re gonna get super super political, a lot of rank on the tree. So today, I want to zag a little bit with a little bit of politics, but our guest is Derek Thompson, writer for the Atlantic.

Post of the plane English podcast on the ringer, font of knowledge across culture economics, tech, politics, maybe some other stuff. I think he mentioned following sperm counts in a recent podcast. I don’t know if we’re gonna get into that today. But this is gonna be really good. Stick around for it.

But first, my aspirational friend. Sedan archives. Derek, we’re gonna talk about some selfish souls today. Derek, thank you so much for doing this. It’s my pleasure to be here.

Thanks so much, Tim. Ma’am, it’s gonna be good. I have to admit something. Your invite is part of a plot that I’m engaged in to make myself the guest Denver Nuggets expert on Bill Simmons podcast if the if the nuggets I should ever make the final. So you might notice the the homage there in the intro.

And you know, I’m just I’m watching eighty two games a year on NBA League Pass. I’d like to, you know, channel that time into something useful. So just, you know, no pressure. Just throwing that out there.

I will pass along the good word. Absolutely. I mean, look, you have maybe the best player in the NBA, maybe three Pete, MVP. My theory about and we’ll quickly leave basketball if that is your preference. But one thing that I’ve noticed about NBA MVPs versus Champions is that some of the best players typically pass their peak as MVP candidates before they start winning their championships.

So, like LeBron won a bunch of MVPs and then he won a championship. Johannes won an MVP, maybe he won two MVPs before he won his championship. Look where you are along that path. Yokic has two MVP awards. Maybe this is your year, if not next year.

You are incredibly well set up. I’m

not sure. Tingles. Yeah. You’re getting tingles over here. That is a great observation.

I hadn’t thought about it like that. The west is stacking up nicely for us. We could use Jamal Murray and Michael border to play a little better. But, you know, we’ll see. I’m feeling good.

I’m feeling good. This is related to your theories of everything. I will take your NBA championship theory, MVP theory, and just put it in my back pocket till June. So you were on Bill’s podcast, I don’t know, a couple weeks ago, and I was listening to you guys. And he kind of had you on the deposit that essentially twenty twenty two marked the end of an era, basically, particularly in area of kind of tech and business and politics and how they’re overlapping on these big platforms, sort of marked by the Elon, must take over Twitter.

I’m curious for you, you know, you’ve written a lot of interesting stuff this year. Like, the biggest possible picture, like, what do you think is the finding change of of twenty twenty two as we head into, you know, what is maybe a new a new era, and and we can get down into the particulars after Yeah.

I would say I had a pretty clear theory of what happened this year. I don’t know that it’s a correct theory, but it’s it’s pretty clear. I think you can summarize it in two words. Interest rates. That’s what happened to the world.

And it’s particularly what happened to the world of technology and media and digital entertainment and consumer tech more broadly. So can I just tell a quick, like, macro econ story? Alright. So — Yeah. — let’s go back to two thousand seven, two thousand eight.

The world falls apart, the housing crash destroys the US economy, the ripple effects, just circumnavigate the globe, It is a real honest to god crisis. Interest rates drop to zero. The central banks of the world say we have to find some way. To stimulate demand in a period of collapsing financial security and high unemployment. Interest rates go to zero and they go to zero at a time when something has just been invented in two thousand seven.

The iPhone The smartphone revolution is taking off and with at the app revolution. And in a time of low interest rates and a universal computer in people’s pockets, there is a boom of consumer apps that rely on lots of VC funding, lots of easy cash coming in, and also rely on advertising. And if your business model is we’re getting a lot of money from Silicon Valley DCs and we’re getting a lot of money from advertising. That means that our users don’t have to pay a thing. So it was an era of incredibly cheap digital tech apps.

I once wrote a piece called the Millennial Consumer Subsidy, where I said that if you’re a typical Millennial Consumer and let’s just say New York, you totally cliche about it. And I think I’m not Oakland. Let’s call it a big I

don’t know. Maybe it’s a age redacted, elder millennial, and Oakland.

Of course. See at all.

Right. Be spoken. I was living in Manhattan when I wrote it. But, yeah, let’s say open. Let’s say since two thousand fifteen, we were in the middle of this era of low interest rates and tech and the Digital Media Revolution is actually booming.

If you woke up and you took an Uber to work and your work was in a WeWork and you ordered DoorDash for lunch, and then you came home in a lift, and, you know, you pelletized, and then you went to bed in a cast or mattress. No.

It wasn’t pelletizing. Okay. Everything besides this so far is is lining up, but I was not telephonic. If

you did all of this, you were interacting with a suite of companies, let’s say, seven companies that were on pace to lose around fifteen billion dollars that year. They were not companies the way we understand companies to exist. They weren’t profitable at all. They were financial via goals for taking venture capital money and subsidizing the lifestyles of people like you Tim and people like me.

And so Thank you, Mark Anderson. I appreciated that subsidy. And

thank you the entire Silicon Valley ecosystem on Santill Road. That’s what happened for ten years. We had a very specific and very bizarre microclimate of conditions. That allowed for a very particular kind of company to exist that was not making a lot of money but was widely popular. So huge user base, no profit.

Frankly, there’s a lot of companies that, you know, fit this category. Uber might be one of them. Twitter is one of them. Twitter has lost more money than it’s earned in its history. So you come to the end of this period, you have the pandemic, you have the inflation crisis of twenty twenty one and twenty twenty two, interest rates start to rise, the cost of everything gets higher, you wanna buy a house, your mortgage rate

is higher, you wanna take on a loan, that gets more expensive, and all of these companies that are used to just not having to make money, suddenly they have to make money and the world changes, they have to raise prices on customers, and their stock prices collapse. And so that’s the world that we’re living in right now. Take your

pick of media company or digital streamer, Netflix, or Disney, tech company, all of them are in the tank when it comes to their stock prices. All of them are trying to raise money at the same time. Elon’s doing this as well at Twitter. And that is what Bill and I were talking about when we said, this is the end of an era. It’s an end of an era of cheap money made possible if necessary by the housing crash And now we’re in chapter two of this story of the twenty first century, and we’re trying to figure out what does a business model for chapter two look like.

Well, you prefaced all that by saying, you’re not sure if you

are right about that theory, but I have a little bit of good news for you. Is that a colleague of mine at the Bolar Jonathan last shares that theory and has been railing against the Serb forever and his

Serb, by the way. Yeah. Zero interest rate policy. Yeah. Right.

Which is what I’m talking about.

Yeah. Yeah. And we sell JBL is always right. Team is at the board. So, you know, he has a reputation, and you guys are aligned on this one, which is a good sign.

So I guess I have two follow ups on this topic before we move on. This seemed obvious for a long time. Is it just one of the situations where money is always flowing? And, you know, let the Good Times role as long as money’s flowing. Like, why stop doing this?

Like, why why wasn’t there anybody during the later part of this period zagging and saying, you know, hey, maybe I should build a company that actually makes money instead of relies on, you know, forever growth and zero interest rates forever. What’s

your sense for that? That’s a great question. I’ll say two things. First, I don’t wanna represent as if none of the companies created in the 21st century don’t make money. I mean, Google might be the best business model ever invented in humankind.

A make great point. A metric shit ton of money. Meta makes money. Amazon makes money. Lots of these really sophisticated and built out tech companies make a ton of money.

It’s this sort of younger crop of of web two apps that were used to an environment where they could grow and spend and conquer the world without mastering what’s sometimes called unit economics. That is does your typical consumer make you money or are you subsidizing your typical consumer? So that takes us, I think, to the next part of the question, which is, you know, why didn’t people see this coming? The truth is that it was very confusing, I think, to the sophisticated economic watchers. Why we seem to have killed inflation.

And truly for the first twenty years of this century. And maybe going back the last twenty five thirty ish years, inflation was nowhere to be seen. It’s not just that you couldn’t see in the US, You couldn’t see it in Canada. Go to Europe in twenty eighteen. Where’s inflation?

Go to Japan. Where’s inflation? The entire developed world seemed to have killed inflation. It was like inflation was smallpox. Like we had eradicated a disease to the planet.

It was really strange, and there were apps absolutely people saying, what happened? Like, I remember, I must have written maybe like ten articles where I just, like, called

up smart people and I said, Where’s inflation? And they all had their own theory? But it really was a mystery. Where did inflation go? And then in twenty twenty and

twenty twenty one, as we were facing this once in a century pandemic, we were trying to stimulate the economy. We were pushing it to its far this degree of being able to handle inflation, and then we tipped over the edge. We tipped over the edge in terms of stimulating demand and inflation went up to what? Seven, eight, above eight percent in Europe. It’s even higher because of energy crises there.

And so that’s what happened. We didn’t know how far we could push this machine, and then we pushed it, and we got the highest inflation rate in the last forty years.

Yeah. I wanna get

back to COVID, but first one other little side impact of the zero interest rate policy over the past. Certainly, the last decade influenced this. In my opinion is the crypto boom. You know, money’s free and, you know, people have to find something to do with their capital. What do do you see that connection between this overarching theory of these companies, these consumer apps, you know, also, you know, playing a role in, you know, what appears at this point to be a pretty clear crypto level?

Or maybe you don’t think It’s a bubble. What’s your take on all that? I

think it’s actually a bubble. I’m

very biased when it comes to crypto. Bias against or buy us four because you have a lot of doze coins. Buy us

again. No. Good. Good. Good.

Good. Oh, yeah. No. I’m not even hedged on this position by holding a bunch of doze. I don’t think it makes a lot of sense.

I think it’s a technology in search of a use case. And the clearest use case that it has is that for people who have a lot of money in low income countries that don’t have traditional banking structures, it’s a really good way to move your money around without having state control over your capital. But look, here’s my story of how crypto fits into this. I guess it’s a two part story. Number one is that one of the problems with everything maturing.

Is that tech companies needed a new supernova of energy as they realized that the app revolution was coming to an end. They needed something else to move on to, something else to get them excited. And hardware is hard. Biotech is hard. It’s difficult to say, well, we’re done with building out consumer So next, we’re gonna take all of this money and just spend it on cancer prevention medication.

Biotech is booming to a certain extent, but they needed something else. And in particular, I think they needed something else that wasn’t capital intensive. Something that was like software, but even more so, something even less marginal cost than software. And what’s less marginal cost than software that does something? How about software that does shit.

Like, that’s a crypto. Like, they and so they invented this, like, new philosophy of and technology for accomplishing ends that were as of now somewhat invisible. Crypto allows for, you know, you have the blockchain technology, you have distributed databases, you have all sorts of stuff that is sort of mathematically a genius, but doesn’t actually cash out I think in a lot of great use cases. But that is where I think Silicon Valley went in an era of low interest rates. Okay.

We’ve conquered the mountain of consumer tech. What’s the next mountain that’s just like it but even better? And crypto just had this this magical pull on a certain philosophy of decentralized power in an era of declining trust institutions It was a beautiful story with a beautiful piece of math and it doesn’t make a lot of sense I think as an as an actual technology for a lot of use cases. I will say, maybe I’m wrong, like history is long. And technology is sometimes, you know, decades passed between the discovery of electricity and the lighting of the first light bulb.

Like, maybe crypto is the

electricity of the future. But, like, right now, I I do not see it. So, I’m also biased, and, you know, I’m not that smart when it comes to math. And I didn’t do that well at George Washington University in my in my math classes. So I always had self doubt when it came to this.

Right? But I looked at crypto also, and I understand the uses of blockchain and and like I said, certain, you know, in other countries where their their currency isn’t stable. But it just seems so obviously stupid to me. Like, this notion that, like, your doze coin, somebody was gonna buy it. At this absurd value in two thousand and thirty two after the hype was over, like always felt to me preposterous and obviously preposterous.

And yet, in the meantime, all these really smart, very economically literate, very rich, very successful people we’re all in on this back to our friend Mark and recent. Right? You know, completely committed to the notion that there is something real here and that all of us didn’t see it or blind and, you know, we were like the people that didn’t understand the worldwide web at the start of the Internet. My unifying theory, which ties us into politics, of what happened there is that these folks had, you know, motivated reasoning. Right.

And that very similar to my friends in the Republican party who ended up sticking around with Trump even though they all saw that a disaster was coming eventually. You know, they’re all making money. They’re all getting more power. Mhmm. And that there is this connection between you know, that experience that we lived through and politics that I’ve written about.

And what these guys were living through is that it was greens all the way, you know, greens forever. Rockets were going to the moon and, like, why question it while it’s going on? Is that too cynical of an assessment? Do you think of why all these smarties got so wrapped up in in something that seems

I

mean, obviously, at least somewhat scammy. I mean and that’s so many, someone along with SDF who was, like, very plainly scammy?

Let me say

two things. First, on the issue of whether it’s too cynical to say that most people were in it for less than sincere reasons. I think every movement is diverse. You know, not all Republicans are the same. Not all Democrats are the same.

A lot of Republicans actually hate each other. A lot of Democrats hate each other. You look at a company and sometimes I think it’s interesting when you don’t work for a company and you say, like, oh, everyone at Amazon just wants x. And then you know someone at Amazon and it’s all in fighting. Right?

Like, once you get inside of a movement, you realize just how diverse that movement is. And crypto, I think to a certain extent, it’s like any other movement. It’s not it’s not what we think of as like a twentieth century cult. It’s more like a political party organized around a particular principle. And with any political party, there’s a lot of intra institutional hate and disagreement.

You can see that right now playing out with SDF. There are people who think that centralized exchanges for trading cryptocurrencies represent an important future for this technology. And there have been people made us, especially right or pressured by the downfall of FTX. Who say, no. Like, the point of this movement is to decentralize power.

So having a centralized exchange in which you can trade your doze in your Bitcoin is a violation of the fundamental principle and potential of this technology. So that’s part number one that I don’t wanna paint with too broader brush, but your theory is absolutely possible. The second thing to say is, here here’s a little analogy. Imagine you have a really rich friend that you hang out with on the line. I do.

I

have that. Yeah. That’s a

good question, man. Yeah. So you have this rich friend that you hang out with on the weekend and it’s just so freaking fun to hang out with him.

Or her, you go to

the best restaurants and you go to the best bars and they’re always ordering like the top flight wines or bourbons and they you just have like the most deluxe experience with them and you go home to your partner or whatever and you say, God, that guy is just awesome. And a wise partner might

say, is

he awesome or

is he just

rich? Like, is the quality of your experience?

Is it

high because this person has a lot of money? Or because this is a really inherently fun person to hang out with. They’re smart. They’re clever. They’re just a great hang.

Crypto was that guy. It was hard for a long time to understand, is this thing good is it workable because it’s smart or because the numbers are going up every month? So, like, in twenty twenty and twenty twenty one, early twenty twenty

one, the numbers were just going up every single month. Bitcoin was worth more every March than it was in February. And it was happened to doze. And the VC money

was pouring in and all these people that I really have respected in tech were just like, my corner of the universe is getting richer and more full with brilliant engineers and thinkers and philosophers and product managers than it’s ever been. This is the most exciting period in tech that I’ve ever experienced. And I couldn’t figure out, are they right? Or are the numbers just going up. Right?

And so it seems like they’re right, but we’re experiencing a bubble. And I think that proverbial guy actually isn’t that great a hang. I think he’s just rich. And if he didn’t have that money and he couldn’t buy the belvedere and he couldn’t buy you know, the cognac and you weren’t being given special access to, you know, the velvet rope lounge at at the club, you’d realize if you hung out of the diner with this dude, he’s not actually that great at all. Like, take away the bubblicious money and he’s not actually that great.

And I wondered to a certain that’s what’s happening with crypto right now. When you analyze the technology outside the context of an asset bubble, what exactly are we doing except just re creating a casino for bedding up asset prices. And I think a lot of people told themselves they were at a revolution and they were actually just sitting at a casino. Not

a force like that is why your podcast is so good, Derek. We I have some crypto friends that listen to this podcast and that are gonna be upset with the last eight minutes of content that we just put out. If I’m remembering correctly that you had a in defense of Crypto, effort? Were you brought in somebody on plain English? Oh, yeah.

Patrick McCormick.

Yeah. Patrick McCormick is a tech writer. He wrote he has a sub stack called not boring. He’s awesome. I really like Becky.

I think he’s like a sensational, like, philosopher of the movement and analyst. He’s a really fun read. He’s really fun to talk to. You know, I disagree with him about a lot of this. I I agree with him about a lot of other things.

Like, our our general disposition on American technology and progress and and optimism is very similar. We just there’s just a collar of disagreement here in terms of the the utility of crypto as a a movement in tech. And I would say for all the people who are listening and pulling their hair out that I’m missing some incredibly thrilling aspect or beautiful use case for this technology, you may very well be right. The history of science and technology is long, and that’s why I’m so interested in it. Politics is fascinating.

But you have a midterm and then you have another midterm. You have an administration that comes to the White House and then they leave. Politics is in part interesting because it ends. It’s finite. The terms are finite.

The elections are are finite. Everything ends in politics. It’s like sports. Sports is interesting because the games end. And there’s a box score and box score is the most finite thing in the world.

It’s there it exists. It can’t be changed. Science and technology is the exact opposite. It’s a story that doesn’t end. It’s the opposite of a movie.

It’s not the liking the movie. It’s the liking the Broadway show. Right? It literally never stops playing. Something is invented like electricity and then there’s new use cases and it changes decade a decade.

And Crypto is going to be a long, broad way run. We’re going to be living with this technology for decades. And it’s possible that I’m right speaking to you in December of twenty twenty two. But then we have this podcast in the metaverse with our stable diffusion avatars in two thousand and thirty two, and crypto was powering the entire thing. You know?

And and your AI voice says me, Derek, when she wronged ten years ago, and my AI voice says to you, yes, I was incredibly wrong. And, yeah, then we go to our our casinos in the sky. I

paid the three ninety nine for my lens of pictures, and I would be wrong in twenty thirty two, but handsome is fuck. And so, that’s fine. I did too. I don’t pay money for anything on my phone.

Anything. And I was like, Sorry. I I need handsome, black, and white photos of me as a rock star, Lenza take my money. If you haven’t done the Lenza people

listening, it’s worth it. I have the lens of photos myself to handsome photos myself in this week’s not my party, which is also on all these various topics on Snapchat. We’re doing crypto and AI and all the fun stuff this week. So please, if you wanna see handsome, Miggo, check

it out. I wanna do

a hard pivot into I don’t think it’s your most recent article, but maybe your stuck last article was about, I’ll let you describe, but essentially, the limits of our technological advances and how we have become enamored with the Eureka moments. And have not been that good about implementing them. So don’t you talk about that article? And then and then kind of get into operation warp speed and how that was maybe a counter example of where we have been doing stuff right. Sure.

Yeah. This

is a big long piece in the magazines. Okay. In the magazines called the Eureka theory of progress is wrong. And look, it’s seven thousand words long, so it’s difficult to summarize the whole thing in a sentence. But let me try to summarize the whole thing in basically a sentence with maybe two semicolons.

America is the world’s capital at inventing things, but

we’re often

not very good at building what we invent. We invented the microchip But Taiwan is probably the most important country in the world when it comes to manufacturing microchips, which is one of the reasons why it’s so important that China doesn’t invade it. We invented the solar cell. But Japan and Europe stole the technological frontier of solar energy from us in the nineteen eighties and nineteen nineties. And really led the solar revolution in the early twenty first century.

The US led the world in wind energy in nineteen eighty six. I believe at one point California had like ninety percent of the world’s wind energy. And then we just gave up that technological frontier as well and just stopped building wind turbines. It’s saying that nuclear power The US obviously invented nuclear power Manhattan project. Under Eisenhower, we took the technology, the power of the nuclear bomb, and turned it into a technology that could power people’s homes and light bulbs.

In the last twenty years, we have closed more nuclear plants than we built. The US invented think I said I’m just gonna do this in one sentence, and I’m just basically giving a full paragraph. So I apologize for the piece. This is

a really long this is a Charlie Sykesha sentence. So it’s an homage. One last

example. The US invented the the elevator. The US invented the skyscraper, but we also have a shortage of homes. We have a shortage of urban apartment building, which relies on building skyscrapers that use elevator technology. So my thesis is, here’s a thesis in a sentence.

Finally, Maybe it sounded like a sentence if you’re listening on two speed. The US is amazing at inventing things that were not as amazing at implementing what we

invent. That’s

the one sentence. And the true story of progress is not just what you invent. It’s what you build that is progress. And so operation warp speed is a really interesting example of a technology that we didn’t just invent mRNA technology for vaccines, but where the Trump administration with the help of people in the senate in congress and throughout government actually remarkably built what we invented and turned the ops particular course of vaccine development into a glide path that allowed us to take the ten year period of vaccine development, which is typical and turn it into something more like a ten month vaccine development period. And I think this is a policy that’s somewhat been orphaned by the left and the right.

The left is orphaned operation work speed because we don’t like to give Donald Trump credit for stuff. And the right has somewhat orphaned operation web speed because it seems like roughly thirty to forty percent of Republican adults under the age of sixty five don’t wanna take the vaccine. And so it’s really important to surface the significance of this policy operation warp speed in the context of American progress.

Yeah. This is especially frustrating for me as a former Republican. I felt like this should be our space. Right? It’s like the free market.

In this case, it’s a public private partnership, which is an important element of it. But It is innovation. It’s American ingenuity. I mean, it’s all the stuff that, you know, from gazi speeches, from Republican conventions past, you know, at least to have pains to all this American greatness and yet now the party is in a lot of ways anti American ingenuity. Right?

And and tears down the people that are driving American growth. And I think that the prime example of this that it’s a party wide rott and not just, you know, Donald Trump’s like petty New York jealousies, which I think was one element to this during the Trump era, is the fact that Ron DeSantis is grabbing right onto it. So I wanna play a just a clip of DeSantis from earlier this week talking about their investigations into the vaccine. Because

in Florida, you know, it is against the law to mislead and to misrepresent, particularly when you’re talking about the efficacy of the drug. We see just the other just recently Florida got three point two billion through legal action against those responsible for the opioid crisis. And so it’s not like this is something that’s unprecedented. So today, I’m announcing a petition with the Supreme Court of Florida to impanel a statewide grand jury to investigate any and all wrongdoing in Florida with respect to COVID-nineteen vaccines. And we anticipate that we will get the approval for that.

That will be something that will be in paneled, most likely in the Tampa Bay area, and that will come with legal processes that will be able to get more information and to bring legal accountability for those

who committed misconduct. What do you think about this, Derek? And this is crazy. Right? This is a big huge success of our Republican administration.

And they’re like dabbling in conspiracies and and saying that we need to investigate this and it’s certainly implying that people shouldn’t be taking their boosters. How do you process that? I’ll start by processing the substance

and then we can get onto the implication in a second. So on the substance, There’s a couple things that aren’t just true about both this virus and the vaccine. The thing that is true about the virus is that it is significantly more dangerous people over the age of sixty five and to people under the age of thirty five. And so the need for a vaccine on an individual basis declines with age as you go down. And it is also the case that the side effects that we’ve seen seemed to be concentrated in young men, like the myocarditis side effect that DeSantis mentioned.

It’s not entirely clear how severe the side effect is, how common it is, and of course, we’re stacking it up against a virus that has killed a million plus Americans. But there is there is the width of truth here. There’s the width of smoke here in that it is important for any public health institution to pay attention to the balance of benefit and risk for any novel therapy. Now the fact is, I think the US government has done a very good job of paying attention to that balance. I think we’ve done a good job of reporting via the CDC how many cases there have been of young people that have had side effects in terms of heart issues As a result to taking this vaccine, in fact many times, the vaccine deniers who say they hate the federal government and public health institutions in the CDC Nonetheless, rely on federal data to prove that the vaccines are bad.

Right? And it’s like you’re using data from people that you say are corrupt order to draw the opposite conclusions that the people are collecting the data, it seems a little bit confused to me. So overall, I I wanna represent myself as not someone who is like, you know, descended from like the Pfizer HQ to say these vaccines are absolute manga from heaven, that’s your job Tim? Yeah. Exactly.

It’s a

corporateist, former Republican, Neil Webb Show. Yeah.

We’ll do that. Okay.

Right. So yeah. I

just wanna make sure that that space is covered. So do we have all our bases there? Of there are issues that we wanna pay attention to. And I frankly just believe that those issues have been paid attention to. I can tell myself a realist but not not a skeptic, and certainly not paranoid about the idea that something catastrophic is being hidden here.

Now moving on to your first question, which was so important. Why has the Republican Party turned so sharply against a policy success of Donald Trump? I think it’s just so interesting how narratives can concretize in this way. Let me spin out another narrative that Earth two Donald Trump might be giving to Earth two Republicans who are extremely pro vacs. Donald Trump on Earth too could say, I am amazing.

I created the Apollo program of the twenty first century. And whereas the original Apollo program from that fucking JFK only landed a metal box on a desert satellite that had nothing on it that gives us nothing in return, I landed this incredible hole in one project in the most incredible, like, vaccine accomplishment in the history of science. This is one of the most extraordinary things anyone has ever done in America. I did it. I’m Donald Trump.

I’m the best and the most awesome. Furthermore, you know who I hate and who I’ve told you that I hate for years, if not decades, it’s the Chinese. And look at them. They are locking down Shanghai. They’re locking you probably won’t pronounce it like that.

They’re locking down Shanghai.

Their vaccines

don’t work. Their

vaccine scenes don’t work. They’re locking down their entire economy. They’re entering a recession. They’re completely pathetic. She looks like a loser.

People are rioting in the streets. That’s what happens when you don’t use the Trump vaccine. Look how sad it is that our geopolitical adversaries are getting crushed by their inability to own the scientific frontier. I own it. I am bestriding it.

I put a big Trump sign on the technological frontier of biotech. I’m amazing. Worship me, send me to my third term as US president. You’ve

achieved something that’s seven years of Republicans and Trump fans who are unable to achieve, Derek, which is like You made me almost excited for Donald Trump. For a second,

me and

my Trump Derangement Syndrome. You just offered the vaccine for my Trump Derangement Syndrome just by talking like

it’s

legitimately interesting to me why no one talks like that in the Republican Party. Well, I mean, like, maybe there are I wouldn’t say no one. There’s tens of billions of Republicans, but why almost no one represents that particular message that says, Republicans did something in redderable. Now the anti

Trump members of the administration, like Scott Gottlieb, right, like the Trump skeptical members of the Trump administration are the only ones that ever talk on.

Exactly. I know Scott a little bit, but I didn’t know the degree to which I would call him a, like, a self ID Republican. I I understand his resume. Right. What point?

And that direction point? But If Trump ran again, I’m I’m not sure that if he would do so. And I think it’s so interesting that, like, for a variety of reasons that click into, I think, declining trust in in institutions as institutions have legitimately moved a little bit to the left and their professional managerial class have moved a bit to the left. As institutions have listed left, Republicans become more anti institutional. They hate everything that seems like an institution.

Cranks, I think, have self sorted into the Republican party, used to have anti back crank sort of evenly distributed among the far left and the far right. You had the health nuts in Berkeley who were like, I think that vaccines were developed by people and it doesn’t come straight out of, like, whatever brussel sprouts and so I don’t wanna put in my body. But now all the people that are anti Vax basically are Republicans. You’ve had this weird self sorting mechanism. And as a result, no one has this message in the GOP, and I frankly find it very interesting.

Howard Bauchner:

We’re getting me riled up now, so

we’ll stop after this. But If you wanna criticize Levy’s institutions, you could still go this route. Right? And say we should be doing more things like Operation Warp speed. Right?

Like, the CDC isclerotic and, like, we have all these potential other innovations that we could be pushing through that these, you know, pencil pushers in Washington are keeping from us, you know, because they’re corrupted. Right? And and you could use that even to say the CDC was too cautious and too conservative at times and and, you know, letting us use this amazing vaccine seen and get our economy back going again and open back up, those criticisms would have some legitimacy. Right? Not just a a whiff of it with the myocarditis, like, some actual legitimacy.

And they would be in the spirit of a free market kind of Republican tradition. And I just think it’s so telling that, like, that is not the route, that not just Trump is going, but that, you know, the person that this is being set up as the successor

is going. Well,

I couldn’t agree more. I mean, I wrote a piece earlier this year called The Abundance Agenda, where I laid this out. Was going next.

We are

so good at that. Okay.

There we go.

Where

I laid out, you know, it wasn’t a political manifesto, but it wasn’t not a political manifesto. It was me saying, I think that we’re in a weird period in

America

where we

are suffering from rolling crises of scarcity. This was a time we didn’t have enough free COVID tests and people had to Q in DC when it was fifteen degrees for an hour to get a COVID test. We didn’t have enough booster shots for a while. Fauci told us not to wear masks in March twenty twenty because there weren’t enough masks to go around. And I zoomed out and I said, you know, scarcity is the story in the twenty first century for the US.

We don’t have enough houses don’t have enough doctors. The US has the fewest general practitioners per capita of any country in the OECD. You look at prices, you know, skyrocketing for things like childcare and medicine. Now that speaks to institutional scarcity as well. The US invented solar cell technology.

We had the technological edge and wind turbines But we can’t build enough clean energy because, frankly, people on both the left and the right just keep using regulatory obstacles to throw in the path of of people trying to decarbonize the grid. We have all of these aspects of institutional conservatism as you put it all across the economy, at the FDA, at the CDC, within states, within government, and I want a government that builds. I want a government that does cool shit. I want a government that builds a lot of that which is good for most American people. And That’s a policy of explicit abundance.

And so I think it’s really important, and I this is sort of an intellectual project of mine for the last year. To answer this question, why doesn’t America build what it invents? How did we become the R and D lab of the world? That can’t actually actualize all of these things in the physical space. So, yeah, I

I think it’s a it’s a huge big question. And what’s your answer to that question? How do you explain it? You’re filling this void, say, kind of observe it, and others have have, you know, been banging your drum also in the pond in accuracy. It kind of because there isn’t a natural political coalition for this.

Which which, like, doesn’t make a lot of sense. Right? I mean, there’s certain you could point to certain politicians. I think that you know, Jared Polis would probably see himself as an abundance politician. But, you know, the the main drivers I mean, certainly, their public party is going the other way, and there are some, I I think, some traditional you know, interest groups on the Democratic side that prevent this.

Like, what what’s your assessment for why? I mean, in some ways, this I’m proud of you for coming up with this great idea, but it also seems kind of obvious. Right? So I don’t need more of all this stuff. I got, why is something that obvious?

Being so resisted do you think in our political culture?

I think the answer to that question is that we prefer to talk about culture than to think about the material world.

And so

the

most successful politicians are those that talk and rage about the culture war rather than those that try to answer questions that materially affect people’s lives. That’s like the cynical

answer.

There’s some political science that somewhat supports it. There’s this idea from Ronald Binglehart that in countries that surpass a certain threshold of material well-being. The locusts of political debate moves to post materialism. That is to say culture, wars, identity, rather than questions of how do we deliver abundant energy to rural America? How do we build enough houses in New York?

I don’t think it’s entirely the case the culture war makes up the entire frontier of political discussion. If there are debates about policy, of course, there’s just so much more energy in the culture war, and that might be a reason why the abundance agenda isn’t hasn’t been centered by someone before today. You know, why materially isn’t their more focus on abundance. We suffer from a slew of bottlenecks and political barriers to regulatory overgrowth and corporate greed and culture biases And I think a a lot of it just read downs to culture. I think Americans have developed on both sides a a bizarre scarcity mindset about the physical world.

We don’t want affordable apartments built to where we live because what if that reduces our housing? We don’t want new energy installation because we don’t like the sound of construction. We’re comfortable enough that we can afford status quo biases. And so we say the physical world can’t be changed. Nothing can be changed.

And so I think that if I had to sort of summarize it in like just one psychological effect, it would be that it’s just familiarity bias all the way down. There’s too many people who say, we have to return even with the V in the place of the EU. We have to return to either if you’re a Republican, the nineteen fifties, if you’re a Democrat, maybe the nineteen sixties, if you’re a reactionary, the fifteen fifties, like, we have to return to some decade. And I just don’t think that’s true. Like, every past decade sucked in some way.

The nineteen fifties were absolutely terrible in so many ways. Nineteen sixties were dreadful in so many ways. Fifteen fifties. God forbid. Like, we have to build the future.

But it is a political challenge to get people excited about that, which doesn’t yet exist. Howard Bauchner: I think

the comfort is an as an observation that I also share that there’s a lot of explanations of Trump was this, you know, it was this great economic anxiety that drove people to him. And I I do think that that was true for certain parts of the country. But for large parts of Trump’s coalition, the upper scale part of Trump’s coalition, the people having the bold parades, was to me comfort. They were comfortable enough that they could take a flyer on a racist game show host that made them feel good inside. Right?

That if they’re in times of deep distress, you know, they might have wanted to turn to a steadier hand. Hey, I want to I wanna finish on just two things really quick. One, I have to trigger the audience here a little bit. I I was I didn’t think it’d be triggering, but I I’d linked to your colleague, Jerusalem Davis. Is that his name?

Yeah. Dennis Davis. And her article yesterday about the answer to homelessness being your abundance agenda. And she didn’t know how to say that, but essentially as more homes as the answer to homelessness. Seems obvious, either a lot of commenters and are a subject who replied and were like, no.

I mean, it’s it’s the weather in California and it’s, you know, all these other explanations, which seems insane to me. So you concur with that solution. Right? I mean, like, there are mental health issues. There are other things that play here.

But the fundamental issue with our homelessness crisis is that we haven’t built enough homes. I actually

agree with her. I’m not a housing expert, but I share her bias that homelessness in many cases, if not most cases, is a story of housing scarcity and not predominantly a story of good weather or drug addiction. I’d say this, If we build more houses and it doesn’t immediately solve the homelessness crisis, but it helps to reduce average housing costs in California that will be good enough. You know? Yeah.

It’s like saying, you should take vitamin c because it might reduce your chance of like, you know, contracting COVID by one percent. Right? Let’s say that’s wrong. Let’s say that the only benefit of taking vitamin c is that it’s good for you in every other way. You should still change vitamin c.

So I think she’s right in this case. I don’t think this is like a crank theory about COVID. I think that she has a lot of empirical support for the idea that building more houses is a is a solution to homelessness. But even if she’s wrong, I I would love to hear the objection to relaxing restrictions on home construction. Traffic, we

don’t have enough water. I can tell you. I was just I’ve been waiting through our comment section, so I can tell you that the other complaints. But we can I’ll do a whole another housing upset the next time I guess, Josh. I I wanna give you a chance final thing before we go.

Your your most recent article is about the discoveries of the year, big discoveries of twenty twenty two. And so why don’t you just bring us home on a high note with your favorite one, maybe that hasn’t gotten as much attention, and I can direct people to the article if they want to get more.

Sure. My personal favorite breakthrough of twenty twenty two to play with is chat GPT because I think it’s just an astonishing alien technology. Probably the most important breakthrough of twenty twenty two from in biotech is the fact that and you can read about this in the peace breakthroughs of the year in the Atlantic. This was the best year for cancer therapies in the history of humanity. We had some absolutely unheard of results for rectal and breast cancer.

And it’s just astonishing what scientists are able to do right now and how far they push the scientific frontier in oncology. And so I’m just really grateful to be, you know, alive in an age where we are accelerating in that department. So I think that biotech is just at the beginning of a long, long century and that in many cases, when you and I are talking from our Polyram Avatar is ten, twenty years from now. We’ll say the most important thing that happened in twenty twenty two, nothing to do with politics. It wasn’t interest rates.

It wasn’t inflation. All that stuff ended. All those stories ended. The interest rates went down. The inflation went down.

What changed was that we had these breakthroughs in biotech that made life better and bigger for everyone. That

is so good. Thank you so much for doing this. Plain English is is Derek’s podcast. You should definitely check it out, read them at the Atlantic. I’m gonna be back tomorrow.

With, you know, a little bit more comfort food, a little bit more con owning, you know, a little bit more political analysis, some more dunking on Ron DeSantis, the things that you know, you guys really enjoy and come here for. But I I I appreciate the fact that you’ve enriched us, Derek, go nuggets, and let’s do this again next year. Yeah.

Let’s have an abundance of nuggets championships in the 2020s. How about that? Dude, your lips

to god’s ears. Thank you, everybody. Buddy. I’ll be back tomorrow. We’ll do this all over again.

Peace.

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