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EZRA KLEIN: I've really come to hold this view strongly. The opposite of despair is not hope, it's curiosity. Curiosity is almost always actually there. Even when hope isn't. An openness to mystery, to the knowledge that things are unknowable, that the future will be different than the past, in some way or another, is almost always there.

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ALISA ROSENTHAL: Hey all what’s going on, thanks for checking out Chicago Humanities Tapes - the audio arm of the live Chicago Humanities Spring and Fall Festivals. I’m your host Alisa Rosenthal, here to help us answer humanity’s biggest questions through thoughtful conversations between today’s brightest minds.

Our Spring 2025 Festival is currently underway with events happening in Bridgeport, Lincoln Park, and the Art Institute - head to chicagohumanities.org for ticket information.

Today: Ezra Klein, popular podcaster of The New York Times’ The Ezra Klein Show and best-selling author of Why We’re Polarized in conversation with Derek Thompson, host of the podcast Plain English with Derek Thompson and contributing writer to The Atlantic. Together, Klein and Thompson have written a book called Abundance - how do we get closer to equality when it seems like we’re getting farther from having enough resources for everyone? They’re joined by historian and science fiction author Ada Palmer, who writes in a genre called “hope punk.” And that’s exactly what this hour feels like - a realistic but ultimately joyful chat that tells progressives “hey, if you build it, they will come.”

I’ll throw the links to their book and podcasts in the show notes, as well as links to some of the figures they’ve mentioned if you’re interested in learning more.

This is Ezra Klein, Derek Thompson, and Ada Palmer live at the Chicago Humanities Spring Festival at the UIC Dorin Forum in April 2025.

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DEREK THOMPSON: Hello!

EZRA KLEIN: Hello!

ADA PALMER: It's wonderful to be here, we love UIC, we're just hearing all sorts of great things about it. We were just having a wonderful discussion of the concept of progress and the history of the concept of the progress and how it transformed in, here's my historian hat, the 16th and 17th centuries, which is something you go into in parts of the book if you wanted to plunge in.

DEREK THOMPSON: Sure, first off, hello Chicago. I went to Northwestern. I started 21 years ago and it's always a joy to be back and this is such a beautiful and warm welcome. So thank you for having us. It might seem like a strange time to talk about progress. It's a dark moment in America in so many ways. But this book does begin with a sci-fi vignette of what the world would look like in 2050 if we got everything right. If we got housing abundance right, if we've got energy abundance right. If we got new technologies and science right. And we begin with that sort of science fiction vignette of the future because to me, progress is really, really important. It's important to believe in, it's important hope for, it's to work for. And the funny thing is before we wrote this book, I was working on an entirely different book that was about looking at themes of progress with this big wide angle, going back to, as you said, the 17th, 16th centuries. How does the world actually get better? How do we actually, as I define progress in this now defunct and will never see the light of day project, I said progress is the reduction of pain and the increase in of power for the many, like a pain and power test for progress. How do do we do that? How do we reduce pain and increase power for the many? And in many ways, I think it has to begin with science. It has to begin with technology. It has begin with a kind of obsession with seeing the world as a kind of menu of mysteries that you're invited to pull knowledge out of. And this was an idea that goes all the way back to Francis Bacon and the 15 and 1600s in England, but it goes right up today to the NIH and the NSF or what the scientists who are there and working, despite the horrible things that are happening with the Trump administration. And in many ways, this book is looking at what progress means today in America and in the next generation. We have a chapter about housing, a chapter about energy, a chapter about science, a chapter that technology. To me, those are maybe the four pillars of progress. Where do you live? Is there sufficient energy not only to power your life, but to power new technologies that we can scarcely imagine, whether it's factories that slurp the skies of carbon dioxide or machines for that hum in low orbit in outer space, that produce new kinds of medicine that can only thrive in production in low gravity environments and that are shipped down to us here, that can help us to whatever, GLP-1 drugs, anti-Alzheimer's drugs, anti-dementia drugs, all these kinds of things are in the works. And in order to accomplish these things, you can't just hope for it. You need a theory of the state. You need the theory of government. And so around housing and energy and science and technology, we have a theory of how to make government better. So this is a book that goes deep into the last 50 years about where we think liberalism and progressivism has gone wrong in many of the places that it holds the most power. But in many ways, I love the idea of elevating its definition as being a book about progress, progress in our age, and how do we learn from the past in order to get the most progress out of the next generation.

ADA PALMER: And also reigniting our confidence in progress in something that was such a collective and unifying project for so long in the wake of the 17th century, in which humanity had so much investment and excitement. And we came to doubt and fear progress more recently than that, when we saw its side effects, right? When we understood pollution, when we started to see environments devastated by it, we wondered, what are we doing? Are we doing something wrong? But that doesn't mean we doubt the whole project, right? That means we doubt how we were managing it, we manage it better.

EZRA KLEIN: So first I wanted to just say, as Derek did, thank you to all of you for being here. Thank you particularly to Ada for being here, which I was very, very excited when she said yes, because I'm a huge fan of her books. And then she sent me, both of us, her new book, Uninventing the Renaissance. Which, she's like, there's this chapter in there that you'll really like, it'll have overlap. And I read the chapter and I was like, damn it, this book is good and now it's 700 pages that I have to read. Sometimes like a cruelty to a new book being really good and it's now on your shelf. One of the fun things about this conversation and this particular stop on the tour is to talk about a part of the book that we've been able to talk less, but that I do think is important, which is how did we lose the future?

ADA PALMER: Yeah.

EZRA KLEIN: And I think there are a bunch of ways into this, but let me use one in current politics. One thing I think liberals have underestimated is how much Elon Musk and Mark Andreessen, and in a strange way, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., changed the meaning of Donald Trump. In 2016, Donald Trump's meaning was the past. He was this last gasp of a dying order. Make America great again, right? It was all reaching backwards. And then there was this sort of sense of teleological demographic triumphalism that had taken hold of the Democratic party, the emerging Democratic majority. Okay, fine, maybe we lost this one, but you're gonna get swamped by this rising wave of demographic change. And then, Trump came back meaning something different because he won over a bunch of the people who for many represent the future. And the people who had led many on the left to give up on a vision of the future, because I think also what happened in 2016 and to some degree in 2020 was a growing disenchantment that if this is what technology meant, social media platforms that are poisoning our politics and enriching a very small number of billionaire white guys, well, then I want no part of it. But there was this other story happening in the Biden administration, which was not well told by Joe Biden. But if you looked at what they were doing, everything they were going relied on a theory of technology in the state if it was going to work. So the answer to COVID, to the extent there was an answer to the COVID, was not endless lockdowns. It was dragging an mRNA vaccine from the future into the present. And that was partially, of course, on the Trump administration's watch. But it was then Biden and his administration who came in to deploy that. And then if you look at their theory on climate change, it was about inventing and deploying those inventions to build our way out of climate change. There was no possible pathway without the genuinely miraculous advances in solar and wind and battery technology. You look at the Chips and Science Act. Again, that was a vision of the future and advanced semiconductor manufacturing happening here in America. You look the Bipartisan Infrastructure Bill with its investments in green hydrogen and rural broadband and a bunch of other things, that pulsing in the policies of this sort of era of liberalism is actually much more of a reliance on getting technology right, and in some ways much more of a confidence that we can get technology right. That if we create these hubs for green hydrogen and green cement, that we'll actually get it. You know, we have a pretty damn good record recently when the states begin to put their muscle and resources behind it of actually getting it. And so one of, I think, the political projects here, not just the policy projects, but is to try to reimagine, as the Trump administration wrecks and degrades the present, a liberalism that has a quite clear vision of the future, that talks not just about what has gone wrong in the past, but what could go right in the future and doesn't see that future as just an outcome of redistributing the present. I always say that almost any liberal can tell you the five social insurance programs they wanna create or expand. But very few have an answer to which five technologies do you want to see the government organize its resources and capacity to bring forward from the future into the present. But technology, when yoked to good policy, it's how we make what's to come a lot better than what we have now. We have this line in the beginning of the book that I really like, that we should aspire to more than parceling out the present, we should do that, but we should imagine something very different too.

ADA PALMER: Which is at one time a very modern way of thinking, but also brings me back to my own period as a very period way of think. In the Renaissance, when you start building a cathedral, you don't know how you're gonna finish it yet, right? Florence builds the foundation, planning on building a dome that can't be built, that no one knows how to build it, trusting that by the time they finish building the lower sections, some clever Florentine will invent it, and he does. "Cathedral thinking" is an important phrase, right? That we can trust the next generation, that we can the next decade, that we should prepare for the technologies we're expecting because we need to remember the other presidential motto before the poisoned one, yes we can.

EZRA KLEIN: Is that a guy from Chicago? [Laughter] Look, if you can't get a Chicago crowd to clap for an Obama [unclear], then this is not going to go well tonight, if we can't something for that.

DEREK THOMPSON: Well, I love that perspective. And you could think of society as the cathedral that's never finished. America is the cathedral that's ever finished. You're always building on what came before. And sometimes you're destroying what came before, but you're always working with what you came before, and certainly a theme of this book that courses through it, that appears in many, many different chapters, is that something happened to America, and really to the character of liberalism in the 1970s that has to be grappled with if we're gonna understand where we go from now. Partly this was a technology story and partly I think this was an environmental story. There's a technology story that if you look at the ways in which we measured and achieved progress in this country for the first half of the 20th century, it was mostly in the realm of physical objects. It was cars and it was planes and it the Tennessee Valley Authority and it nuclear power plants. Progress typically meant progress in the physical world, in the world of atoms. And then since the 1960s, 1970s, progress has, for a variety of reasons, been funneled into a smaller space, into the world of bits, the internet, our phones, social media. And sometimes that kind of progress has come with very clear side effects. I think that that story of this shift that happened in the 1960's, 1970's, in the realm of progress, it traces or mirrors a story that happened in our relationship to the planet, our relationship to nature and the environment. If you ask people what it meant to be an environmentalist in the 1960s and 1970s, it meant having an answer to the question, how do we stop companies from destroying our country and our planet? And in many ways, the response of the environmentalist community in the 60s was responding to something that was very, very real. I mean, America in the 1940s and 1950s was absolutely disgusting. The air was disgusting, the water was disgusting. We tell stories in the book about how in 1943, the residents of Los Angeles woke up to a smog that was so thick, they thought the Japanese had launched a chemical attack. The month that Dylan Thomas, the poet, one of my favorites, died in New York City in the 1940s, several dozen people died of air pollution in Manhattan that month, and it didn't make the front page of a newspaper. It was simply de rigueur that if you lived in the richest city, in the rich country, in the world you would have a certain chance of dying of air pollution. And so we responded to the crises of that time. We passed the Clean Air Act. We passed the Clean Water Act. We passed a National Environmental Policy Act. We passed variety of legislations that made it more onerous to build in the physical world because we responded in the crises at the time. And at the same time, there was a legal revolution that made is easier for individuals to sue the state or to sue businesses to stop them from changing the physical environment around them. This is a world or a legal regime that made it much easier, for example, for neighbors to be NIMBYs, to say essentially, I don't want this apartment built anywhere near me, I'm going to say no. I don't want this new energy facility built near me. I'm gonna say no. In many ways, these were responses to the problems of that era. But this is a different time. One of the most important crises, I think, of the 21st century is a crisis of affordability. And at the heart of afford ability is housing. That's the biggest part of the typical family's budget. Rent or mortgages. We don't build enough housing in this country, and we make it incredibly difficult to add housing where Americans most want to live because of these rules. And maybe most ironically in the realm of environmentalism, if we really want to build a world that allows people to live modern lives, that doesn't just burn what we find in the ground, we have to make it easier to build solar and wind and enhance geothermal and nuclear power. Serious energy that is low emission. [Applause] But here's the really profound irony. The success of the environmental revolution of the 1960s makes it harder for the environmental movement of the 2020s to work, because it's so hard to build in the physical world, even if what you're trying to do is add solar here, and wind over here, and a nuclear power plant over here. And so I think what's very important is to see not that the environmental revolution of 1960s failed. It didn't. It succeeded. But institutional renewal is the charge of every generation. And now we have to take up the baton. It's our responsibility to see that there's a new paradigm shift that we need for our own age. But many of the problems that are most severe for the American economy and even the American spirit when it comes to the inability of people to live where they want to live, many of these problems require that we build in the physical world houses and energy and transit and infrastructure. And that requires that liberals and progressives fall out of love with the politics of blocking and fall back in love with a politics of building. [Applause]

ADA PALMER: That brings to something that I often discuss with my fellow science fiction writers as an interesting problem, especially when we're thinking long term about the history of a world, whether real or imagined, which is the world doesn't stay saved. We save it. We work hard to save it, we feel cathartically triumphant when we've saved it and then the world is in peril again, right? We saved the world when we defeated fascism in World War II. We saved the world when we passed these first environmental policies in the 60s and 70s. We've saved the word several times within living memory. Every time was hard and a lot of work, and we're tired. We didn't want to have to save the world again, right? It feels as if the hero should get to go home and live happily ever after. But unfortunately, this is a series with a lot of sequels. And the world didn't stay safe and it's hard for us to adapt to the new one when we were deeply invested in saving the world the previous time.

EZRA KLEIN: I love that. This must be how the Avengers feel. Like... again? One thing that Derek's answer brought up for me, and my goal here tonight is to say nothing I have said anywhere else on the tour. So you're gonna hear only half-baked ideas. I've been thinking on the tour a lot about speed and the idea of speed as a progressive virtue. Let me expand on something Derek said, and talk about a little bit how we saved the world. And also, I think we should be honest. We didn't save it. There were people then who saved it, and we're sort of coasting. The tool we created was the tool of delay, the tool of delay through lawsuit. Delay through process, delay through planning, delay through notice and comment. Not just delay, right? The point isn't that we thought delay was intrinsically good. But if you think about what is happening across a lot of the different processes we're looking at, from the way environmental reviews work and the way they changed over time, to how housing gets built and the kinds of meetings and planning boards and zoning commissions and so on that you have to go through, to just thing after thing after thing. The implicit assumption is it delay is somewhere, extended time is somewhere between neutral and positive. And there's a reason, it's not a crazy idea. Because that will give you time to surface information you did not otherwise have. That is what environmental assessment and review are. That is, what lengthy notice and comment and challenge periods are. That is the architecture of lawsuit that we made possible, which is quite unusual. America restrains and what's the other word I'm looking for? America restrains and holds together government by lawsuit in a way that Europe does not. In Europe, the bureaucracy gets a lot more trust. The bureaucrat is assumed to be an expert, assumed to relatively public-spirited, and as such, when a challenge goes to them, except in unusual cases, they get to decide it. If the people who run the environmental agency make a decision, they're considered typically more capable of making that decision than a random court. In America, we're like, let's go to the court. And so we did this across a bunch of domains, and this is a lot to do with the word we term neoliberalism, which we have a very thin definition of in politics. But neoliberal was not just the veneration of markets, it was the denigration of the state and the rise of the individual. And there are conservative versions of it and liberal versions of, but the liberal version of it was to make it much more possible for the individual to get in front of the state. Again, for very good reasons. The environmental reasons Derek brought up. But a lot of our building was unjust. You have a real history of that here in Chicago, where I live in New York. The examples of that are all over. The problem over time though, and this is true, we were talking about Machiavelli backstage and I guess fine, Machiaveli came up with everything early but Machiavelli said that any process or bureaucracy, paraphrasing here, over time becomes its own problem. It curdles, it coheres into something that is not what it was intended to be. All of these processes over time have been captured, expanded. It's not that they don't do some good now, but often who they're doing good for is not who you think. We have so many processes meant to create democracy, meant to offer participation, and the only people who show up are lobbyists. Because how the hell would you know to be there? We have so many processes that are built to protect the environment, but that local interests sue having no intention of doing anything for the environment, looking for unrelated concessions. In California, where I'm from, Rick Caruso, who's a sort of former Republican who ran for L.A. Mayor, he's using the California Environmental Quality Act to sue to stop a development near his mall. His mall is not what I think you traditionally think of when you think of protecting the environment. So we have these different processes. One of the things that they've done over time though is wall us off from another kind of information. Not the kind of information you get from a process, but the kind of information you get from acting in the real world and being able to iterate fast and learn fast. And so we ask at so many different levels of government for really truly brilliant and public spirited people to be almost endlessly procedural. I talked to a person recently who had been overseeing a major initiative under Joe Biden. And it's an initiative that did not go great. And he was trying to correct some things he felt I had that were, well, flush out some things that I had set on the door. But what he said to me is that other parts were much worse than you could have possibly imagined. And he said, I spent, and this actually shocked me. Again, this is a Biden appointee. He said, I would estimate I spend 60 to 70% of my time doing internal government procedural work that had nothing to do with the success of the project. And I said, really? You would actually say 60, 70? He thought. And he said, no, but I would say 40 to 50. And I've heard things like this again, and again, and again and again. And so the point here, in addition to it's not just that we need to renew institutions, it's that we to renew principles. What we had in the 70s was a sort of an agreement that the government was doing too much with too little information. And there were too few opportunities for those affected to get into the process and make themselves heard. Now we created processes that are actually quite porous, actually quite slow. And it turned out there were too many opportunities for anybody affected and who had the money to get into the processes to make themselves heard. And now we need to make it possible for the government to experiment again, to try things, to do things quickly, and to do them well and cheaply so it can actually build affordable housing affordably. So nuclear energy gets cheaper and safer over time, not just more expensive as we lose the knack for building it. Speed should be a progressive virtue. Delay isn't just for gathering information. Delay has a cost, both in terms of what it can do to a project, but also in terms of the people who don't get to benefit from a project that could have taken one year and instead takes 5 or 10 or as in the case of things like high-speed rail in California, never happens at all. [Applause]

ADA PALMER: You make me think about the speed with which the future has come or hasn't come, and also our problems with the speed at which information moves and hasn't moved. Because we are living very much in the middle of an information revolution. And when you talk about how only lobbyists know how to show up for something, one of the challenges here is that how we get our information has been revolutionized three times in the past 20 years. And it takes time for new networks to develop to get us our information and for us to develop new ways of vetting what information is and isn't reliable. We're all living in a moment in which information is coming by new networks. So we have to learn how to trust and new tools for learning how to try to develop. This is why we're all scared of fake news. This is where we're surrounded by misinformation. One of the authors who has a long rant about fake news and misinformation and how it's misleading people, especially politically, is Shakespeare, who goes on about this at several different points in his plays, including Winter's Tale, because humanity has actually been living in a constant string of information technology revolutions since 1450. By this point, we are an information revolution species. And one of the problems in an information revolution is that it always causes what my colleague Kathleen Belew well-named the early adopter effect. The first adopters of a new way to communicate will always be the people who couldn't communicate under the earlier mechanism for communication, whether it's because they couldn't afford it or couldn't access it, whether there was a law stopping them or whether they were just being pushed off by social rules. This is why the first community to populate every new social media network is sex workers who get pushed off of every other way to communicate, followed by queer groups, linguistic minorities, fringe religious groups, and the political fringes in every direction, which means every time there's an information revolution, all the populations that anyone is afraid of gets louder, right? All the fringes get louder. All of the minorities get louder because they show up to the new information and the new media before the majority shows up. And this was absolutely true in 1450 and in 1610 and is true now and makes us as a society then struggle to develop, how do we tell people that there is a town hall? How do we which are the trustworthy newspapers and when that's changed? which is something that was also in the process of transforming in the 17th century when the scientific revolution and the scientific method are born. Bacon was also one of the first subscribers of early newspapers. And it's within the same generation that the scientific academy begins publishing the very first academic journals as we can now recognize them and science becomes a public project. But they're also trying to solve our media ecosystem problem. How do we deal with the fact that information technology is changing faster than we can develop tools for figuring out who to trust within it. [Applause]

EZRA KLEIN: There was so much good stuff in that question. Go enjoy yourself, Derek.

DEREK THOMPSON: You set a table, a banquet, fit for the end of a Shakespearean pastoral play.

ADA PALMER: We have a Shakespeare nerd here too.

DEREK THOMPSON: We'll get into that in a second. I want to start by saying, I'm tempted to give a canned answer here, but Ezra so annoyingly has announced that he's no longer giving answers he's given at other places on the tour. So I guess I'll just have to come up with something fairly original as a response to that question. So Hamlet said... [laughter] "I could be bound in a nutshell and count myself a king in infinite space," which is sort of like the first reference to an echo chamber in world literature, the idea that you could be bounded in a certain space and considerate the world. That's what an echo chamber is, that you can only see a small sliver of the universe, and yet you can mistake that sliver for the universe.

EZRA KLEIN: Damn, that was good. [Laughter]

DEREK THOMPSON: Don't ask me to quote more Shakespeare. Everything comes from Act 5 of er Act 2 of Hamlet. I think this connects to something we were talking about earlier, which is the way in which the direction of technological progress changed and disoriented us. In the golden age and silver age of science fiction we dreamed of the idea that we wouldn't be here. Humanity would not be in buildings built in the 20th century, talking over 20th-century technologies, microphones, for audiences that were sitting in high-gravity rooms. We imagined that we would be gone, exploring the stars, inhabiting the stars. And inherent to that vision was the prediction that as transportation technology got more efficient, it would lead us in one direction, away from Earth. And instead, what we've gotten in the last 60 years is that transportation technology actually hasn't gotten that much more efficient. The planes still fly at approximately the same speed they did 50, 60 years ago. In many cases, they fly slower, if you consider the Concorde existed in the 20th century. And supersonic flight doesn't really exist at scale in the 21st. Cars don't go that much faster. In many ways, transportation technology was bounded, not only by various laws and rules, but also by the laws of gravity and physics itself. And instead, what we did is progress along information technology. So we thought that we would make transportation more efficient. And instead we made information more efficient, and whereas efficient transportation leads us to the stars, information efficiency, it turns out, leads us to chaos. Why is, I think, a really big, important, and open question? And at this very moment, I'm not sure how I'm going to land the plane and bring it back to the book, but I'm just going to keep flying, and we're going to see where this goes. Jay Van Bavel, who's an NYU psychologist who I love researches the way that the internet warps language and communication. He's found that on the internet, and especially on social media, certain modes of communication go viral. Negativity goes viral. For every negative word in a headline, its odds of being clicked on by a typical news consumer increases by two percentage points. So if you're ever wondering why there isn't more positive news, in the news, you can blame journalists, and maybe you should, but you can also blame yourselves, and you absolutely should. [Laughter] Because people on the internet are, I think it has to do with a kind of evolutionary electric awareness of negativity in your environment that you alight to it. So negativity goes viral on the internet. In-group out-group animosity goes viral on the internet, he's found. If you have a certain message that you want to craft, it makes much more sense to craft that message with an out-grouped villain than to simply craft that message to honor a kind of truth that doesn't have a hero villain narrative. And maybe most importantly, he has found that certain emotions go viral online as well. Especially high arousal negative emotions. Not just negative emotions like sadness that make you want pull in, but anger and even more importantly, outrage. And so by making information more efficient and by making information networks more efficient, we accidentally unleashed this kind of communicative monster that emphasizes negativity, in-group, out-group outrage, and high arousal negative emotions. To me, this is an enormous problem to recognize that whenever you're trying to talk to people on the internet, you are swimming in this toxic water. And it makes a book like this that ultimately wants to be -I'm trying to do it- [laughter] that ultimately wants to be an optimistic and constructive project, it can make it difficult to sell without it being swept up in the toxic negativity that can surround a lot of political conversation. But just because communications networks are negative and outrageous doesn't mean that progress always has to be built by negativity and outrage. I think there's a world outside of the internet. It's at the ballot box. [Applause] I think people exist in face-to-face communication and not just in face to glass communication. And I do think that a part of making this project likely, a part making this political project feasible, is getting people a little bit off of those screens and getting them back into rooms. Into rooms where, for example, they're debating a next developer plan in front of the city council. In rooms where you're talking back to your representative and telling them how you feel about the fact at the NIH is suffering $10 billion in cuts. Debates are good for, fit for, evolutionarily, screens. But political change can be fit for rooms just like this. And so even though I am very pessimistic about the overall evolution of technology that makes information more efficient, I still reserve in some part of me an optimism about American politics.

EZRA KLEIN: So I think we can agree [applause] that that was a terrible answer by Derek, and he should be shunned for it. Just to riff on that for a minute, without trying to go viral. I think a couple things here are worth saying. My first book, Why We're Polarized, had a lot about media and information. And one thing that I just am, we had like two decades in this country of a semi-healthy media environment. And it got really into our heads that that was the normal thing. But mostly it was crap. Like you go back to the early papers, they're all slanderous. You go to mid-century American politics, it's highly conspiratorial and more potently so than now. the John Birch Society McCarthyism. We did not, like Henry Ford had a newspaper called the Dearborn Independent which has published the protocols of the elders of Zion. We did invent fake news in the year of our lord 2017. We just didn't. And there's something we were talking about backstage, but something I always try, you cannot imagine in my line of work how many ideas, particularly now with AI, you get pitched for like how to clean up the information environment. And I was trying to say to people, the problem we have with news and information is not a supply problem, it's a demand problem. If people wanted more good information, they could have it. But what people actually want information that flatters their biases. They want information that fits where they are. You tell me where somebody is, and I'll tell you what kind of information they like. And so a lot of theories of this that are about digital literacy and other things, they don't work, because they're mistaking a supply problem, a demand problem for a supply problem. People are choosing to seek out things that we don't always wish they would, which doesn't mean it's all terrible. I mean, social media has a lot in it that I think is very specifically bad. But there's a lot of forms that I think are much more promising right now. This was an election in which long-form interview podcasting, which two of us up here, three of us up here now do. I was looking at your podcast today. Your conversation with Ken Lewis saved to listen to. So that is not a format built on negativity and high arousal negative content. Now that it's getting clipped out for video, it's going a little bit more that way. But there is a lot of pluralism in the kinds of information people seek out. My worry is that the speed of the revolution here is accelerating. That it feels to me like we've just gotten a handle on the last thing when the new thing keybones us. And the one I worry about there is AI. And it's obviously fashionable to worry about AI. And if you want to be honest about it, if you ask the AI for a process on most stories, it'll give you something better than what you're getting elsewhere, it's not that bad. But my worry is actually about the deterioration of human faculties that's going to come along with it. What is AI good for? It's good for summarizing other things, and it's for writing your first draft. Well, reading the actual things and writing the first draft is how human beings become smarter and more creative. That's where all the energy goes, right? I can tell you, editing this book, I'm not saying it was a picnic, but by the time you're there, most of the real work is done. The thing that I occasionally, when I was having bad days on the writing, would go to ChatGPT and try to feed it something and see what it would give me. And the thing ChatGPT could never say is "the problem with this chapter is that you need to go back and do more work. You need to read more books. You need do more reporting. You actually have to go walk the high-speed rail track and talk to the engineers." It could only answer "yes." It could try to rewrite what was already there. And none of this book, I will say, is written by ChatGPT, and I wouldn't have used it that way. But thank you, I guess. Low bar. I'm a big, when it comes to technology, like big into Marshall McLuhan and Neil Postman. And the question of technology is not what it affords us, it's also how it changes us. When you spend a lot of time on X, you begin to think shorter thoughts. When you get used to information moving fast, it gets harder to read long books. That's why the people who write long books have to now use a very inventive voice with a lot exclamation points to keep me reading. When, like, every medium changes us. And my worry about the one we're moving into is it's a medium of outsourcing. That what we are taking off is, I talked to this AI researcher a while back who talked about the boring apocalypse version of AI, which is like an endless world in which every worker is using AI to expand the number of words and everything they turn around, and then every manager is using AI to compress it again. And it's like just AI's endlessly making the one-sentence email into a long, polite email, and then AI's endlessly summarizing the long, polite email into one. That's the dystopia that we're already in, to be clear. Our capacity to publicly reason is important. And it is built on the capacity to reason. It's not just built on a flow or speed of information. It's built on what that information teaches us to do. Information trains us. It trains our minds. I think the book turned out to be an incredible technology, not just for the transmission of information, but for the honing of a mind. It's like the right amount of stimulus, but space for associational thinking. I think the Internet is worse for it, and I think AI is about to get very, very bad for it. This is something we talked about putting in the book, should we have a chapter on supply of attention or something. We can never figure it out, so we didn't, because we would have ended up looking stupid. But it's important, and it's worth thinking about. The final thing I'll say on this is we've talked a bit about the shattered sci-fi dreams of the 1950s. But one thing those books also had in them, this is a point I've taken from J. Storrs Hall, who I don't agree with him on a lot. He's got a very sort of right-wing version of futurism, but I agree with them on this very much. One of the things they got wrong, those books all imagined that in the future, it's not just technology that would keep advancing, it is how we govern and reason together. It would be our social institutions that would be unrecognizable in the year 2000, in the year 2020, in the year 2050. That they would keep getting better, that we would figure out technocracy or AI-assisted reasoning or something. But in the world of Star Trek, there aren't a lot of zoning board meetings. [Laughter] And what they got wrong, our technology largely did keep getting. Better even transportation technology got at least a bit better. Our technologies of governance got worse. We are probably worse at this than we were in the 90s. And that's true in a lot different places and for a lot a different reasons. But that question of how we actually advance the technologies of institutions, advance the technologies to social deliberation, actually try things, try new ways of doing things, see what the experiment yields, we're much worse at doing that with how we govern than how we build. [Applause]

ADA PALMER: We have just a couple minutes before Q&A. So in response to the first topic, I'm just going to make a quick recommendation. Disclaimer, I do not work with this group at all, but there is a group called Fix the News, which you can sign up for a free weekly newsletter of all the under-reported good news from the world. They will arrive in your inbox once a week and update you about lives saved by malaria vaccine rollout and the scale of the solar revolution and advances in democracy around the world and you can feel your blood pressure going down as you read it So I highly recommend as a counter to the negativity that circulates a lot just subscribing to Fix the News. Highly recommended. The other topic that as soon as I knew this book existed I was eager to talk with you guys about and I know we only have a couple minutes for but I want to is despair and how appealing despair can be. Which is not something that a lot of people let ourselves think hard about. But as a science fiction writer, I come from a movement called hope punk. Hope punk science fiction is a recent movement within SF in which we've realized that so many of our imagined worlds, so much of the SF that's been poured out since the year 1995 basically has been either dystopia or grim dark or apocalypse or post-apocalypse. Everything is Hunger Games or Mad Max, that to write a book about a future worth living in, about a future that might turn out okay, that still has problems, but in which progress has turned out to be real, things have moved to be a little bit better, humans are still working hard, we have solved some of our problems, our governments are a bit better. Has actually turned into a form of protest against a kind of a consensus of despair and there is a way in which despair is very emotionally easy. If there's nothing we can do and we're doomed then we can go home and binge watch something on television. If we're doomed then we don't have a responsibility to take action It's very easy for example for people to move straight from climate change denial to climate change despair saying it wasn't real. Oh, it's too late. Either way, you are released from the obligation of feeling that your actions affect the world. As a historian, looking deeply at major crises in the world's past, you know, I work on the Black Death. During COVID, so many journalists asked me, if the Black Death caused the Renaissance, is COVID going to cause an economic boom and a golden age? And the answer was, that is such a terrible question, it took 700 pages to answer it. But in fact, what that question wants to be true is that it wants it to be the case that we can sit back and do nothing and the wheels of history will somehow grind on without our hard work and make a golden age if something sufficiently bad happens. And despair is the opposite. The history will grind on, we don't have to work. But when we zoom in, all historical changes were actually individual human beings working really, really hard. And that is scary. And it's exhausting. And it takes a lot of emotional commitment to admit that the future could be all right if we work hard. And one of the things your book is trying to do is get to people and say, no, despair is how we lose. Hope is a form of resistance. Belief that progress is real and we can have abundance is a from of protest in so grim a moment. [Applause] And I would love to hear you also comment on how important it is for us to fight against the tempting easiness, the tempting emotionally satisfying easiness of despair.

DEREK THOMPSON: I'll start, and Ezra can wrap us up here. Obviously, you're tempting me with a Handler quotation, with a question about despair, like my god. "O! If this too too solid flesh would melt, thaw, resolve itself into a dew." So, I consider myself an optimist, and... I don't know if optimism is something that's cultivated or something that is just sort of like sewn into the genetics. But we've been talking about optimism a bit on this tour and it's forced me to define what I think optimism is. I don't think optimism is a belief that the world will only get better. I don't think that optimism is a believe that the arc of history will always bend towards justice. I think you only need to open up a newspaper or a computer or a phone these days to know that sometimes the arc of history wobbles and bends towards injustice. The way I like to think about optimism is that optimism is the belief that the world is soft clay and you have two hands, that the universe is sensitive to effort. And you see this at different layers. You see it at the level of technology. There's this concept that we've been talking about a lot, which is sometimes called rights law or learning by doing, that in many cases... The more you build of something, whether it's a chip, or a solar panel, or a wind turbine, or a piece of a nuclear power plant, the more you build it, the more you learn, which makes it easier to build the next one, which you learn from even more, which makes it even easier to build a next one. There's a flywheel of progress that comes from simply making things in the world. And that is inherently optimistic. This is true also, at maybe a more abstract level in parts of politics. If you look at the situation in California housing right now, it is horrendous across the board if all you see is a map of, say, permits in California, housing permits in in California over the last 40 years. It's basically a staircase down. But there's also people in the California Senate, YIMBYs, Yes in My Backyard, who have been fighting for years and years to build an elite coalition to change California laws and make it easier to build ADUs, to create exclusions for CEQA and make it easier build downtown housing, to expedite permitting, to build clean energy, to backfill the cuts the NIH by spending more on science. I think that the the tenor of the ability to see reality in the California Senate now is superior to what it was 10, 15 years ago. And so that, too, is progress, progress that you could see as fitting within this definition of optimism, that effort changed the world. Effort created the possibility of new coalitions and new laws. And so fundamentally, I do think that this book is optimistic, not only because it takes science and technology seriously, and therefore seriously understands that in science and technology, the more you build, the more learn, but also because it's trying to take seriously a political project that can grow. Right now, the abundance movement is very small, all things considered, very small. But it's growing. And I would say that that's proof that the world is soft clay and we can put our thumbprint in it. [Applause]

EZRA KLEIN: The only thing I'll add is that I've really come to hold this view strongly. The opposite of despair is not hope, it's curiosity. Despair is a certainty about the future state of the world. Hope is also itself a kind of, I don't know, hope for me, the way it falls on the ear and on the system is like an application of effort to believe in a future you don't really believe in. Like to force a certainty or an openness you don't actually have. But curiosity is almost always actually there. Even when hope isn't. An openness to mystery, to the knowledge that things are unknowable, that the future will be different than the past, in some way or another, is almost always there. I think that, and I mean this is maybe the journalist in me talking, but there is always so much in the moment that doesn't fit. There are always so many seeds in a moment that are going to grow into something you don't expect. I mean the book is full of them. The California Environmental Quality Act sequel, which Derek just mentioned, when it was signed into law by Ronald Reagan, nobody thought it was a big deal. It didn't even get a full article in the LA Times. It just changed over time, it was one of those things that nobody saw exactly how important it was going to be. A lot of the modern internet is formed by an amendment that then house member Ron Wyden offered to one of the telecommunications bills in the 90s. Nobody really saw it as a big deal, but it created the speech structure that the entire modern internet has built off of. The future is not a linear extrapolation from the present, it just isn't. And it doesn't mean you have to force yourself to believe it will get better. I don't, again, hope never quite connects for me, but you should always be curious. You should always looking at those things that don't quite fit or that seem to you like other people are underestimating them or overestimating them, it's just all a little bit weirder. Maintaining that openness, that willingness to apprehend reality as it is, and thus its contingency as it really is. I find a lot of comfort and sucker in that. I think back in this political moment a lot to 2005, early 2005, when George W. Bush had won re-election despite at that point the Iraq War was already proving a that's built on lies. But Democrats, after winning the popular vote in 2000, were comprehensively rejected. And in that moment, all they could see was the structure of the moment around them, which seemed set. There were all these books back then about the permanent Republican majority, and they were gonna pass Medicare Part D and win over senior voters forever. And there was this sense that politics had been reshaped, and you could just draw it out, right? The right had won over all the evangelical churches, and James Dobson was this person we heard about all the time back then. Democrats, the narrative was they had lost the heartland and they needed somebody who was sort of more like George W. Bush, right? Who was clear and brush on his ranch in Texas. And they began thinking about maybe the Montana governor, Brian Schweitzer, because he wears a bolo tie. Like that, the American people might like Democrats better in bolo ties. Who wins in 2008? But Barack Hussein Obama, right? It was like functionally - [applause] it was a functionally unimaginable politics. And the reason people couldn't see it, the reason it would have seemed crazy in 2005 to say that Obama should run, was that people were incurious in a way about the future. They were too certain about the shape of the present. And they were looking to win last year's election. So one of our debates sometimes with people in this space, but just something I think we both believe, but something that, it's not that it gives me hope, it just, I just think it's true, is that we just don't know the future. And that saves you, I think, from both despair and false optimism or hope. Like the thing you should just be is open. Because all the people before you made all these confident predictions, they were wrong. [Applause]

ADA PALMER: We have just a couple of minutes for Q&A. If you want to ask your question, there are three different ways to do it. You can do so by web. Or you can text chumanites and your question. Or you can scan the QR code on the screens with your camera app and send in your questions. Our first question, how can political parties directed toward pluralism function in this new information environment which prizes the opposite or does it prize the opposite?

DEREK THOMPSON: Ezra had a biological reaction to that question, so I think you should take it.

EZRA KLEIN: It does not prize the opposite. I really want to say this, that one of the signal failures of both parties in recent years, and one of reasons elections have been so close, is they've done a terrible job at pluralism. The problem with the information environment is that it, because we end up in the walnut shell, it creates a false public in our minds. A public that believes things that are clearer and not accurate to what the actual fractious complex public really believes. And so the Democrats will get themselves caught in a chamber where all of a sudden their sense of disagreement begins to evaporate. And it becomes, you enter a situation where Donald Trump was cruel to undocumented immigrants of the debate in the 2020 Democratic primary, is whether or not to decriminalize unauthorized border crossing, where it becomes about Medicare for all and abolishing private health insurance. It's not that these are even necessarily all bad ideas. Certainly I'm a fan of many forms of Medicare for all. But that sense that you have to balance the disagreement and the fear people who don't agree with you feel, that began to evaporate because Democrats and particularly their staffing class were caught in their own echo chamber. On the right, it becomes this world of... Well, Donald Trump really won the election in 2020. The party that attains an actual governing majority next will be the one that rediscovers pluralism, the one rediscovers leaders able to hold the contrasting opposites of this country in a single person. That is what great political leaders throughout American history do. They embody one impulse, but they also either embody or at least can respect its opposite. And the other ones that are coming in contrasting directions. In many ways, the signal failure and signal danger of social media is not what it does to the public, it's what it does to elites, because it's the elites who are all on social media all the time arguing politics with each other. It's the elite's hanging on every tweet or X from JD Vance or Elon Musk. They're talking to one another, not to everybody. And so I've seen this in both parties. One of Joe Biden's great advantages in 2020 was he was just too old to be on social media. So he didn't pick up a lot of bad habits from it. And that was true for basically everybody around him. It came with some disadvantages, but I keep saying this in different shows and I just had John Hyde on the show today. That the politician, the problem with Musk and Trump and them is that they, if Biden, like we have this thing of like continuous opposites right now. If Biden was a pause on the social media era, like they are the complete summoning of it, right? To the point that Musk brain-rotted himself so much on Twitter, he had to buy it so it could never be taken anywhere away from him. There is this dynamic of like, they're like golems summoned from like this particular era of the internet. The person who comes next, it's not just what they're going to believe about policy that's going to be important. It's that they're gonna be native enough to this to hate it. Native enough to the this era of information to run against it, to channel the anger so many of us feel about what it has done to our politics. Like [applause] that is going to be like what is required of the next set of politicians. And that is gonna require resisting the false certainty of social media and rediscovering the political power of pluralism. [Applause]

ADA PALMER: We have a question about historic preservation, especially as it relates to housing or older buildings and their role in the abundance agenda. And here, I'm reminded of a time I was on the Science Fiction Advisory Board for the XPRIZE Foundation, that incentivizes technological innovation. We were discussing what technology we could propose to invent that would revolutionize housing by 2050. And with a hundred science fiction people on the call, all of them were talking about smart house, solar house, 3D printed house, house of the future. And as the historian in the room, I was the only one who said most of the buildings we inhabit in 2050 have already been built. What we need to talk about if we want to revolutionize all of them is something that revolutionizes things that exist and allows them to co-exist with the new housing that needs to be built. So do you want to jump in on what exists as well as what needs to built?

DEREK THOMPSON: Yeah, sure. I can do historic preservation, I think, pretty quickly.

ADA PALMER: Great, I know a lot of cathedrals that want to hire you.

DEREK THOMPSON: No Shakespeare quote for this. Look, history exists, and some pieces of history deserve to be preserved. But it's precisely because that sentiment is plausible that historic preservation laws have been abused in city after city to, for example, say, spare, as they do in the place where I typically live, Washington, DC, designate entire strip malls as zones of historical preservation so that apartment buildings can't be built there. Of course, any rule that says you may no longer designate any part of the city as a piece of history that deserves a different set of rules is going overboard. You have to recognize that you're living in a world of trade-offs. And so much of this book, honestly, like if this book does not have a tagline, and I think it's fabulous it doesn't have a tagged line. If it did have a tagline that was [laughter] designed to appeal to only the most narrow, specific group, it would be something like "the politics of trade-offs." This is a book about how trade-offs exist in American politics and how they can go wrong. In a world where historic preservation laws do not exist, you cannot preserve pieces of cities, pieces of history that probably deserve to be preserved for hundreds of years because they tell a city where it came from and how in its connection to its past. But a world in which historic preservation laws are used, the way they're used today, flippantly and egregiously to designate whole swaths of cities is totally out of bounds for building actual housing for people to live in. So you can preserve something that happened to be built in 1947 that looks like shit. That's bad for people. [Applause] It's bad to the people who live in that city, and it's bad the people who could move to that city. So I recognize that maybe there's an aspect of, I won't say our, my view on historic preservation law is that incurs a certain trade off, that sometimes someone's going to lose a particular building that means something to them. That world has to be countered with a world where if you allow neighbors or allow cities to say that anything that is old enough cannot be replaced, you are choosing to live inside of a museum, and cities should not be museums. [Applause]

ADA PALMER: You're really making me want to show you around my haunt, which is Florence, which is the city that is a museum and manages to build new housing regularly.

DEREK THOMPSON: Even the museums are building houses.

ADA PALMER: That every building is 500 years old. But they have very refined laws for this that work and preserve some things while having, you know, there are problems. I stayed at Machiavelli's uncle's apartment. It has the worst bathroom in the world, due partly to some of these laws. But it's divided into 17 apartments where people can live, which is what's needed, right? So these things can be balanced. The world can learn from other cities. We have the question, "What should we be pushing our local governments to? If we want our local government to think about abundance and implement abundance on the level that we have the power to do activism, to talk to just our congresswoman or our local city council, how can we push toward the implementation of the abundance agenda on the level of everyday people's power?"

EZRA KLEIN: I would say two things. One is to be focused on results, not on process. [Applause] Very specific people clapping very hard. And the second is to be very focused on cost of living. Mayor Brandon Johnson here got a certain amount of pushback on Twitter recently for tweeting in a list of things that he felt that they had done well in Chicago, like look, Chicago's on the move, that they have built 10,000 units of affordable housing for $11 billion. And people ran the division on this. And it came out badly. But here's the thing I want to say, that you would be shocked how often this kind of thing is happening. So there was a case in San Francisco that I ended up reporting a bunch on, where they held a ribbon cutting because they had got $1.7 million to build a small outdoor toilet in a park that was already hooked up for water. So like in New York, they had actually similar issues with restroom public ribbon cuttings. People, a huge number of blue cities and states have accepted just absolutely eye-watering cost of construction in a way that makes them unaffordable. I was talking to the mayor of San Jose, we both were, actually, and one of the things we were talking about was he's very pro-development, very pro-housing, he's got all these projects that he's cleared. And he said, nothing's getting built, because they can't get the financing because of the interest rate environment. And I said, damn, well, Texas has the same interest rate environment you do. They're building plenty of houses. What's going on here? Said, well in California, our cost of construction is like twice as high. So one of the things that we have just allowed to happen is we've just not taken the cost of making things, building things seriously, and a lot of that comes from process, it comes from concessions and coalitional politics, and it comes from different kinds of standards or other goals we're putting into them. And maybe some of these things are fine. But they are not all fine if they have made it unaffordable to live and thrive and build in the places liberals govern. The thing that I, if there is anything that is a central political need, something that liberals really should have learned from 2024. Like, I'm not worried about the politics of wokeness. I think that is gone, and I think that what that's moving to is a politics of cruelty, and the American people don't like cruelty. But what lost the election for Democrats in 2024 was the cost of living. It was bad, and they lost credibility on it. What they need is to win back credibility on the cost of living. They can't really do that nationally at this moment. Donald Trump is gonna wreck his own reputation on that. But, in the cities and states where they govern, they can actually do it. They can show that they have learned things. They can show they can do projects and public infrastructure in a way they hadn't before. And they could do that quickly. What we have made in procedure and process, we can unmake. And that's a power we have now, not a thing we have to wait for the Trump administration to fail in order to do. [Applause]

ADA PALMER: We are just about out of time, so I wanted to invite, if you have any final thoughts or final note on which you'd like to leave us, a note of, if not hope, then curiosity or energy, or certainly action, which I think is something that everyone is hungry to feel ready for in our ecosystem of exhaustion. [Laughter]

DEREK THOMPSON: I love where Ezra ended, so I'm going to retweet him a bit, even if that's a cop-out. I think a major theme of this book, and a major theme of the conversations that we've had about this book, is that, for a variety of reasons, liberals and progressives in America have associated good politics with good processes. We've associated success, sometimes, with how much money we can say we spent on behalf of the public. And there is a clear limit to the benefit of associating political success with how much you value process and how much money you can authorize. Because you can brag about authorizing, say, $42 billion for rural broadband and not build any. Well, what's the point of the brag? You can brag that authorizing $7.5 billion, as the Biden administration also did, for electric vehicle charger stations. It didn't build any. So what's the point of the brag? I think one part of this book, one paradigm shift that we're trying to eke out here, is to ask liberals and progressives to define political success not just by their veneration of process and not just by the pride they feel about the size of the dollar amount on the paper that has a signature on it, but by what is actually built. Did you build a house? Did you built nuclear energy? Did you building a train? Did you build a bridge? The politics of building is what I want liberalism to be associated with in the next generation. And it's my hope that as more people associate the left, not with what they can spend, but with what can build, that it's not just infrastructure and houses that we can build in this country, it's power as well. [Applause]

EZRA KLEIN: When we were backstage talking with Ada, and I really want to thank her for being up here tonight and adding [applause] and adding so much to this conversation. And her book, Inventing the Renaissance, really is like a book I opened it because [unclear] is like, could you read this chapter? And I was like, okay, well, I should. And I'm like, it's great, you should get it. But we were talking backstage. She was saying that eras in history are often defined by the question everyone is trying to answer. That they are built on good or at least mimetic questions. And something that I really believe our book boils down to just functionally one question that we are trying to insert back to the center of politics particularly liberal politics. And I want to say, it's not the only question worth asking, but it is one we need to ask a lot more often and take a lot serious than we do. And it's just this: what do we need more of and how do we get it? That's it. And it's pretty simple, and you think we don't need to ask it, and we wouldn't if we were. But we're not. Right? And you know that because in the places where we govern, but also the country broadly, it's like we don't have enough homes. We don't have enough clean energy. We don't have enough public infrastructure. We don't have enough effective government capacity. And there are many, many places where we need inventions, where we need the government to take seriously what technology can do that we are not putting energy behind. One of the ones I like to talk about in uses and examples, we should have, and there's a guy named Nick Revelle, he's been doing a lot of work on this, Operation Warp Speed worked. We should have a lot of them. One of the ones we should have is for addiction, because we know that, for instance, GOP1s are showing a lot promise on addiction, and the addiction story in America is not just a despair story, it is a technology story. We have made the technologies of addiction extraordinarily potent and small and easy to manufacture. That's why fentanyl is such a hard problem. We will need technological answers. We are, for some reason, not spending much time on getting them. The question, what do we need and how do we get it, is just a really helpful one. And it brings you to many different answers, some of them traditionally coded liberal, some of the not. But what I think it does is focus us on ends. Focus us on the things we are trying to use politics to provide for people. In the end, that's what politics is actually about. Providing for people the things they need to build the life they want. That is abundance. [Applause]

ADA PALMER: I would just love to thank you for that question, as well as that answer. Thank both of you for helping us ask the question we need to ask to build our generation's level of the cathedral and not fail to build our generation's level of cathedral. And ending on a Chicago note, I think you've brought us also again to a good, familiar answer. Yes, we can. Thank you. [Cheering and applause]

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ALISA ROSENTHAL: For more information on Ezra Klein, Derek Thompson, and Ada Palmer, head to the show notes or chicagohumanities.org.

Chicago Humanities Tapes is produced and hosted by me, Alisa Rosenthal, with help from the staff at Chicago Humanities who are programming and producing the live events. If you like the podcast programming, the best way to support us is to subscribe from wherever you get your podcasts, and that way you’ll be the first to know when a new episode drops. Thanks for listening! We’ll be back in two weeks with another new episode for you. But in the meantime, stay human.

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