“When I say I see this moment as an event horizon, what I mean is that I don’t know what’s on the other side of it. It might be better. Maybe this period in human history, when we valued people for what they can make, what they could produce—when we asked them to act like machines—maybe this was just a couple hundred years. We have this culture where productivity has become the dominant ethos. Maybe we’ll find ways to value the human experience much more fundamentally.”
-Ezra Klein, episode 407 of Talk Easy with Sam Fragoso
In their new book, Abundance, journalists Ezra Klein (The New York Times) and Derek Thompson offer a hopeful vision for what the future of the U.S. can look like.
Ezra returns to the show to discuss how his ‘agenda of abundance’ (6:15) is a response to the hollowing out of the middle class (11:26) and the dwindling housing market (16:30). Then, Klein explains how these regulatory inefficiencies have impacted California’s high-speed rail project (27:56), what we can learn from international construction (32:15), and why it’s so difficult to build in Blue states (40:00).
On the back-half, we discuss the future of AI in the workforce (48:48), whether “Abundance” can serve as a prescriptive text for the Democratic Party (1:00:56), the hope he aims to engender in readers (1:08:18), and our path to meaningful progress in 2025 and beyond (1:14:16).
Thoughts or future guest ideas? Email us at mail@talkeasypod.com.
Show-notes:
- Read Abundance, written by Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson.
- Listen to the podcast The Ezra Klein Show and find his reporting in The Times.
- Find our first talk with Ezra from 2022.
- Hear his 2024 interview with Minnesota Governor Tim Walz.
- Follow Ezra on Instagram and Twitter.
- Read Annie Lowrey’s 2020 Atlantic piece The Great Affordability Crisis Breaking America.
- For more talks, hear our conversations with Jia Tolentino, George Saunders, and Astead Herndon.
- Order your Talk Easy mug in cream and navy or our vinyl record with Fran Lebowitz.
Illustrations by Krishna Shenoi.
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