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you. You can send an email to podcast that Nori.com or fill out our podcast survey anonymously in our newsletter, which you can find at nor e.com. Subscribe, and thank you so much for listening to another season of reversing climate change. Hello and welcome to reversing climate. I'm Ross, Kenyan, Paul gamble CEO of nori and one of my fellow co-founders is here with me. Hi Paul. Hey Rosco.
Hello. We have the distinct pleasure of having Matthew yglesias on today, co-founder of box host of the podcast, the weeds writer journalist and author of 1 billion, Americans, the case for thinking bigger. Hey, Matt hello. Hello. Thanks for coming on the show. We're so happy to have you. I'm really glad to be here. Yes, indeed. Well, this book we We have thoughts about it. We care about this issue a lot. We think it's really important,
we like that. You tried to thread a very unique needle on it and we were thinking that maybe the best way to get started is if you could run us through the basics of what you're trying to accomplish with it. Okay. So the point of 1 billion Americans is that there should be 1 billion Americans, you know, and so you can say, like, why why 1 billion Americans yet? Basic reason, look, we have a world of sort of Growing geopolitical competition with China in particular, to an
extent. India coming up there, too. It's because we finally have rapid population growth in some very large countries that have historically been quite poor. This is mostly good. It has reduced poverty around the world. You know, it's something to celebrate but the sort of dream of the 90s that economic growth in China would lead to liberalization and democratization and an Embrace of a All based Global Order that
is totally not happened. And no, American political leaders are saying, oh, that's fine. We'll just be number two. Let's submit to Chinese hegemony, but they're also known talk. Realistically about what you're going to do about it, right? So like Obama said well we need to win the future with I don't know what it was. Like some grant for people to get technical education and Community College but she don't think it's a fine idea, we should do that but it's
ridiculous. Compared to the scale of the problem. Trump was like, maybe going to ban Tick-Tock or then now maybe he won't. And, you know, maybe we should maybe we shouldn't. But taking on China's video, me maps is like not it's not going to get it done, you know, if we think about the fundamentals, it's like, you know, China is about Mexico in terms of per capita living standards, maybe Bulgaria depending on how you look at it better food than Bulgaria, though.
So maybe closer to Mexico and that sense. But there's this huge great power Because there's 1.2 billion Chinese people, so I say, let's Embrace yellow. You look historically right the United States really big deal in the world Canada, nice country, not a big deal. Why? We're big deal because we have 10 times their population and we have 10 times the population because our leaders historically made it a priority to get people to move here and so I think we should look going forward.
We should support families with children. We should do more in terms. Of paid leave and terms preschool in terms of child allowance so that people can have two to three kids per family. Which is what they say they want instead of one or two, which is what they actually have right now. And we should be more open to immigration and we should see this as the real American greatness. Agenda is to grow the population.
We're not obviously going to triple it overnight because it takes time to build houses of things, but we should aim for aggressive population growth rather than settling for for stagnation and National Decline. And that is the book and this is usually when people start yelling at me about climate change. So, oh yeah. I'm going to save that Downstream or just a little bit.
I really like about this book that you state your assumptions and your values, very close to up front and the book which I find is weirdly uncommon. So I do admire that, but you chose to frame this book in geopolitical, terms about world leadership and competition between countries.
Which I associate you in boxes, being a relatively Progressive outfit, but that doesn't seem to be something that we think of, in fact, sometimes I think of the left, I almost get the sense that they wouldn't mind at the United States gave up its World hegemon status. So I don't know. How is it reaction been to this portion of it.
How did you land there? Well, so if I took can play psychiatrist, I think a lot of people on the left would be more comfortable with a world in which They themselves lived in a country that was more, like, Canada or New Zealand or Denmark. Like like a country that just doesn't have hegemonic aspirations.
They're not comfortable with that aspect of the American national project and so they don't like to talk about it at the same time when you kind of Bear Down, are there people in America who say will be better if China was hegemonic? Would it be better if we had a global Military? Hegemon, they cared even Less about human rights in the United States. That was more autocratic more
racist and like, no, right. Nobody actually thinks that it's just also not something that Progressive minded people want to embrace. And, you know, I had a professor a long time ago by the name of Glen Morgan and he wrote a really interesting Book 15 years ago and it's called the idea of a European super-state and it was encouraging, the European union to become more integrated, much more integrated. And have like a single European military entity, you know?
And so there would be like, 'you aircraft carriers and an EU nuclear Arsenal and European like Euro Navy Seals and his whole argument. You know, this is the bush era. His argument was that like America, you know, has become this like, quasi, Rogue State and we can't count on the Americans anymore. So we need to do it for ourselves, and that's a super interesting argument. And if I were European, I think I would be doing takes all the time. How Professor Morgan had that,
right? But one way or another like, that's not what happened, right? We got brexit. We've had a sort of loosening of the European common border strategy and you know, so from the American perspective it's like you sort of got to take it or leave it right. There isn't some other like nicer country that's going to come along and be hegemon. We're not going to have Iceland become the world's number one power. There's only two real contenders and America is by far.
I think Think the better horse to bet on, hmm. Okay, already anticipating angry emails. We'll see what happens with that. Okay, we'll go into the position now, where people going to. Now start yelling about climate change will play that role for you here. Thank God. Yeah. Yeah I'll step into the breach and do this for you. So a lot of people that we speak with they tend to have very strong sympathies towards D
growth. Economics about humans making a strategic Retreat. You could even say from growth from a consumption. In and living simpler lives. This is definitely more of a wizardly rather than profit approach. We develop technology, we invite people in, they immigrants start businesses, they develop technology. We're all better off and we develop new alternatives to polluting Enterprises. Is that broadly your position? Yes. I mean you know I think there's a lot that can be said about
de-growth. I tend not to spend that much of my time focusing on why it's wrong. Because Cuz, you know, I think of the actual politics of the United States like the big issue is that the American government is doing like barely anything to combat climate change and we should, in fact, be doing a lot. But I think it would happens is that because, you know, we have this tremendous gap between sort
of culture and politics, right? So it feels to a lot of people that it's like, when we've been talking about climate change for all these years and we're not solving the problem. So obviously, The problem is borderline unsolvable and therefore we need D growth somehow and and that will solve it. But like the truth is that what we need to do like it's frustrating that we're not doing it but it's like we need to do the things that boring sensible.
People have been saying, we need to do for like a bajillion years. Like, we need to price pollution externalities and we need to invest money in technology, is unlike its super tedious. It's like I'd people like want the answer to be more exciting than that because the politics is hard but it's just hard and like if we price externalities and invest in technology effectively then we can have a prosperous growing society, that mitigates climate change and
responsible way. And if we don't do that stuff, like asking everyone to go live on a farm and compost or something like we're thicker sweaters. It's like, that's not a real idea. It doesn't mean He said, like the country of Vietnam is not going to stop industrializing because American environmentalist would like them to write. One of the inevitable outcomes of larger scale.
Climate change, is mass migration from place to place, and we had Bryan Caplan on the show while back to talk about his book open borders. So, if you want 2/3 of a billion more people living in America, I'm assuming you're going to have to have more immigrants. Where do you think you might differ from kaplan's approach? Whoa, so I mean, I agree with Brian about a lot of things, he's an economist, I think his economic analysis of immigration is really, really good.
I think he quotes me and his book and I quote him in my book. So on one level like we're very similar on the other hand, like Brian is a hardcore anti-nationalist. So I think his vision of immigration is in part about sort of dissolving, The American Nation, And in a kind of important way where as I see it the opposite way that like, I want to strengthen the American Nation. I think that people moving here has been a source of national
strength. I think that people are right to be skeptical of the idea of totally indiscriminately opening up the borders, but that black we should, in fact, be much more open to immigration, you know, both to make the country. I mean, primarily because like it will make America a better stronger, greater, whatever name.
Nation, right? It isn't the population leveling off a good thing, in some people's eyes, like, break that down, what you were just saying, like, why would it make us stronger and how does having children relate to that too? Sure, you know, I mean, I think the most basic way that it makes you stronger ready. Makes us stronger country is Market size, right? The, the United States for a long time for about a hundred years, a little bit more has been the world's number one economy.
And we've been the world's number one economy for so long that we don't Think about that or what it means, right? But a lot of privileges come with that like anyone anywhere, who invents anything wants to bring it to the American market, right? It's just a fact because our Market is so big secondarily when our government wants to regulate things, you know, if we want to say, okay, everyone has
to use high efficiency. Dishwashers companies will complain about that because they don't want to do it, but if we tell them they have to do it, they will go do it right? New Zealand. Can't just order people to change their whole manufacturing process because they want you to nobody cares about the New Zealand Market, they'll just walk away, right? So, they've got a nice little country there with a lot of sheep. And the occasional movie shoots there and a high standard of
living. But in World terms, they have to take or leave the world as they find it. And it's been a world shaped by the United States, which is fairly benign as a world for sort of nice guy developed. Is to live in. China is less of a nice guy and they are growing. And you see, they have become already the world's number one market for movie tickets. And so there was a great report in pain America. That pain America put out in August about the consequences of
this. And it means that right now Hollywood shapes their movies. According to the demands of Chinese censors, right? The PRC movie censorship office serves the role of the EPA for Like we regulate dishwashers, they regulate the content or movies and as they get bigger,
they get more influence. So right now, they tell Disney, you can't have a Tibetan character in Doctor Strange, so they change it. So the ancient one is no longer Tibetan. It's played by Tilda Swinton and you know, she has no determinant ethnicity. But as he keeps going right, as they get bigger, do they start telling Disney? Well, ABC News can't cover human rights in Tibet. Do they tell NBC Universal that you? MSNBC, CNBC can't cover these kind of issues. And what do we say, right?
These are profit-seeking companies, if that's what they got to do to get in the China market like that's what they'll do you see with American technology companies ride? So Apple has this big song and dance about user privacy but there's just a huge exception for phone sold in the China market and if the China Market gets bigger and bigger and China starts, telling them look to get access to the China Market.
You have to let the Chinese government's, Snoop on everyone's data, not just for China. Chinese phones. But for phones sold all throughout Asia, like, is Apple going to say no to that? This is, I think the basic concern that you've got to have a lot of countries get by just fine with being small, but that's because America has been the big country, right? And I think it's in our interest, it's in our interest to coordinate better with allies.
I mean, there's a lot of like, Council on Foreign Relations type stuff. You could think about here that we're not doing, but basically like the fundamentals of national strength, come down. Population size times per capita GDP, right? So we all talk all the time about how to grow our GDP, you know, we have some ideas but it's hard. It's hard to grow as fast as a poor country. That's catching up, but we can grow our population, Matt. You kind of sound like a
conservative here. What gives very conservative? I'm super duper duper right wing in this book. Except that my two ideas that we should expand the welfare state to take more care of parents and children and then we should be more open to immigrants so those are Upper left wing ideas, so, you know, so, everyone loves you. I'm beloved by all know. I'm look, it's been interesting.
So, the reason that this is a good book to purchase and read Because that's the point of all this is that so much shit that you can buy today. It's like, it's so tedious, you know, so like the bestseller list is like, 11 books about how Donald Trump is a maniac. And I think one book about have Liberals are destroying the country and everybody knows what
those books say. You know, like you don't need to read them you don't even need to have them on the Shelf like everybody knows you already think about Trump. It's boring. This is a book that you know I got some very good reviews and some right-wing Publications I got some bad reviews and some left-wing ones I got vice versa.
I got Libertarians who like it, Libertarians who hate it, social conservatives who like it social conservatives who hate it and it's because it is actually an interesting book that is not just like tedious. Station of the same talking point. So people have taste and distinction from all political Persuasions love this book. And, you know, knuckle-dragging cretins from all around the Spectrum, think it's bad and no, ruthless ruthless.
Yeah, most of the thinker's. I come back to time and time again. Are those that I find it really any issue that breaks neatly into what I can imagine the right. Will say and what I imagine the left will say I know is just going to be a boring played out thing. We've been debating for decades and I really don't want to To play in it. And I love that people like Wendell Berry or Dorothy day that I find very surprising. I'm just like, oh, I don't
always agree. But this is a at least you're saying something new and I respect that and there's definitely a lot of that in this book. So if you like that, I'm gonna pay you that compliment. Matt, you're also in that category of poking, everyone in the eye and giving everyone a hug too. Yeah. I mean, I just like, you know, It's a weird thing about being a like politics writer like I am which is that Agents come after you every once in a while.
They're like oh you should write a book but so many of the books that I think people in my line of work, right? Just end up being boring and our takes are better consumed in in short form. So I wanted to write a book that was interested, you know? So I like I wasn't writing one and I wasn't writing one. And then I came up with this idea that I actually thought was interesting. I have a lot of ideas that I think are true and correct.
Act. But like a 200 Pages for me of like Donald Trump seems like he doesn't know what he's doing or wow. Republicans. They really like cutting taxes on rich people but also their kind of racist. It's like, who cares? You know, those are tweets, those aren't books. I love Twitter, I love tweets. But like this is a book. It's not that long of a book but even a short book is like it's kind of a lot of pages. So I wanted to make it interesting you know to put forward a proposition that I
think is correct. That we should have a billion Americans that people have a lot of questions about, and then I tried it like, actually go through it and be like, here's how we can change housing to accommodate them. Here's how we can change Transportation policy to accommodate them. Here's what I think, the like Eco pessimists and dystopian is get wrong. Here's what the cultural decline is, get wrong. Here's what you ought to know about immigration economics.
Here's what you don't know about welfare state design. It's like, you know, it's chock full of facts and figures and information Brad plumbers climate writer at the Times. He paid me. I thought a great compliment the other day. He said, like separate from the argument. I learned a lot from this book, which is good because like, Brad's a super smart guy, you know, he knows a lot and it's good to write a book that people
can learn from. Okay. One of the things that I noticed in reading this book is how much it made me appreciate cities. So, I've basically always been a city dweller, either Suburban exurban actually in the heart of various cities, and all I can see now in spending time in cities, is the squalor and the noise. And I find them to be very frustrating. And I've since moved a little bit farther out of the core of Seattle. So it's more quiet and I'm more.
Okay, with living in the proximity of the city. But I spend so much time on this show well, like, talking about. Wendell Berry comes basically every episode and this sort of idealized rural existence. And I need someone to bring us back to the center of that because I think I've overdone it. So convinced me that cities are actually a really important and good thing I said you see great the think about were living Is that? I don't know. I don't want to be too
provocative here. I know I go. Okay, I won't be mean about it. So okay, you have cities right? And in the cities we would all starve to death if not for the farmers in the countryside. You know that's just a fact. We need those Countryside. People at the same time, the people living in the countryside would all be dirt, bore subsistence Farmers. If not for cities and urban life, you know, you can have an idealized vision.
That's the countryside. But you can also look, I mean, you can look in a lot of Asian countries to this day and see people living in Huts doing back-breaking labor, 10 hours a day. In rice patties, you know growth stunted because I have no protein and that's the natural state of Rural Life, right? We Elevate above that. The reason that life in rural America or rural Australia, Canada France, whatever it might be, is actually pretty good.
Is that we have like Technologies and wealth that come out of cities and ideas and things like that. And that's just a cities like in World historical terms, like agglomerations of human beings. Right now in America, we also have a lot of very specific things about Central.
City municipalities versus suburbs that are near them, but obviously like the whole like the suburbs exist as part of an urban Fabric and it's totally reasonable for like some people Live over here and some people are live over there. You know, you want to find a neighborhood that sort of suits you. But the point is that like the city has to exist for all of that to make sense.
So I basically agree with you on that and I've always lived in cities and I tend to like cities and whenever I think about the idea of moving to a more rural area, I get a little scared, basically scared of missing out on different cultural things and being close to the amenities that I like. But one Of the frustrations. I have living in the city is how
cities are governed. And, you know, before we started recording this, you who are starting to share an opinion about like how the Los Angeles metro system is poorly run. And here in Seattle, we've committed to an over 50 billion dollar light rail system. That won't even be fully operational until like, almost the year 2040. And then meanwhile, compared to China your foil in this book who are able to build mass transit systems in like a week.
Half, what are we doing wrong? How do we improve that? What are the mechanics of making cities? Work better for their residents? Yeah, I mean there's a lot that we are doing wrong. I mean, the point I was making, you know, we're talking before is that like I think Progressive minded. People are aware that big cities in America are not like perfectly governed like if you just kind of ask them, right, you'd be like have like how's it going in? Los Angeles is everything.
Perfect? They be like, No in fact there are significant problems and Listen, not to knock it but just like every city is like that and yet you can't say oh well, the problem here is Republicans, right? It's like we are actually struggling to govern ourselves and Achieve what it is. We want to achieve, you know, I think a lot of that comes down fundamentally to land use questions, right? So like the LA Metro, I'm quite familiar with the Saga on this and its really sad like they
have spent. An incredible amount of money building, a subway system in Los Angeles. And, you know, of course, it's not that big of a subway system relative to the size of the city. It's totally understandable that it hasn't been enough investment to transform Ela into like a true mass transit City. But it's much more extensive transit system than like a small European city would have but it has almost no ridership because
La for starters. They run trains very infrequently and the trains don't run frequently. They say because they can't afford to run them frequently, but that's because fare collection is so low because the
ridership is so low. And then, the ridership is so low in part because they didn't change any of the land use, they didn't say okay you can build tall apartment buildings now near these train stations and you know Seattle, I don't know as well but I was there last year and I was taking whatever the train is in. The airport and, you know, you sort of cruising south of downtown and to what look like, you know, reasonably built-up areas, but you'll be right there
by a station and it's like, parking lots, you know, or one story, you know. It's kind of like strip mall style retail and it's not zoned to say okay, you know you're within a quarter mile walk from this light rail station, you could just put up a like a big ass Tower and then you go into To like really, really the center of the city. And there is like, some part of town where they have allowed people to put up big ass towers and there's a bunch of cranes
there. And so that everyone in Seattle is like, oh my God, there's so much development here and there is, in fact, more development in Seattle than there is in San Francisco where there's like basically none but still a majority of the land in not in the Seattle metro area. But in the city of Seattle itself is zoned for
single-family detached houses. And you know, it's fine people like single-family detached houses, what do you make it illegal to build denser stuff, you get huge housing, affordability problems, you get, you don't have the density to support Transit. Ridership. And so you have everybody kind of kick it around and it's like well I want somebody else to take the light rail.
You don't like but not me. I want to keep driving my car and I want parking everywhere but that's not how cities work like if you look at cities you know whether it's Paris or Berlin. Or Hong Kong or Singapore or New York, write that like have substantial Transit, ridership, they have made themselves too dense for to be convenient to drive in park, your car somewhere. Where do you fall on buses versus trains?
Because like, I used to have to commute to downtown Seattle and the bus route that I took came every 15 to 30 minutes. And then going home was a total nightmare and I just always kept finding myself thinking like We, if we would just reroute some of the 50 billion dollars that we put into this train system, that won't even be usable for 20 years, into just more buses with more frequent service with that improve it would ridership go up. What does the research say on
that? What's better here? So, you know, it's not that like buses are good and trains are bad or something. I do think that what's true is that when you have a city at the scale of Seattle say, Say, probably the best thing to do is to look at your bus Network and try to make it better, right? That the sort of quality of the bus service is a limiting factor on ridership. They're investing in rail, I think is really, really
worthwhile. But the reason to do it would be to facilitate very dense development near the rail stops. And I guess like that's what I'm saying about l.a., right? They kind of wanted to like take La as it exists, then come up with spend a lot of money. Like the voters of l.a. were willing to truly open their wallets to this goal but they wanted to do was get somebody else to ride the Metro. Yeah. So that their life could be exactly the same the with less traffic in it and it doesn't
work like that, right? Like the LA Metro is this great achievement, you know, like they spent a lot of money on it. It's a lot of tunnels. Owls, it does in fact, work, but the reason to do something like that would be to rezone to have big apartment buildings near the train stations and then a lot of people would ride the train but it would be a different kind of city after that, right? But it would be a better city after that and that that's what people should do.
Like if they if they want to be have like green growth and you know Green New Deal and bababababa like the whole point of the new deal was for things to be different. Aunt after it was done, then they were previously a lot of progressive thought. It feels like people want progress without change. Hmm, you know. And like yeah, have that. Yeah, it sounds like you're saying like, like an l.a. the train system, that's the end in
and of itself. But you're suggesting that like rail investment should be a means to an end of which is increasing density so that more people can live and work affordably in cities. Okay yes exactly. You know a or there are some places in America that are so dense. Yeah, I'm sorry. You have bus routes that have such heavy ridership. In a few places there's like a couple routes in New York that are like this. Maybe one in San Francisco.
Maybe one here in Washington DC where I live that just upgrading them to rail would it'd be justified this in terms of the number of people who would do it. But in the typical American city, you know, Los Angeles, Seattle, Houston, Dallas, you're looking at big cities, there's like a lot of demand to live in them and the purpose of building. A rail network, should be to
reshape the urban form. So you can achieve a higher level of, you know, Urban density or Bannock - I don't know what the but the right, what the right verb is but it's like people would live. Are the train stations, you know, like that's what trains are for.
The thing that they are good at is that the geometry of Rail lines is that they move human beings more efficiently than roads do. But if you don't want that outcome, then there's no point, I mean, I think trains look nice as do a lot of people but like that's not a good reason to build them. I used to live in LA and to take the trains and times the the red line off of Vermont and I had to go downtown I would do that or go into the valley. He was fine and it worked. Okay.
I've heard La described as the United States is first post. Modern city without just a clear Center where there is various different types of centers, depending on where you would want to go. It wasn't like, downtown LA was where all commercial activity was concentrated. In fact, probably quite the opposite. So how do you build an environment like that? It does that model really, makes sense for it in the same kind of ways it might with Manhattan. Well, so I mean I think it does,
right? So you take away, right? And if you just Posit massive up zoning of all of the Metro stations, right? Then that starts to create a thing where more people are living near those stations sometimes because they want to ride the train but honestly maybe they have no desire to ride the train. It's just that houses are really expensive everywhere in California. So if you build giant apartment, buildings, like anywhere in Los Angeles, some people will live
in them. So now all the sudden you have a lot of people and their living near Metro stations and now companies are are thinking about where to locate Office Buildings and commute patterns matter, right? But the Metro Network converges on downtown, Los Angeles just like things do in classic cities. So once you have a bunch of people who are living near Metro stations, then if you put your office downtown, that becomes a convenient way for a lot of people to get to you.
Whereas, if you have it in, you know, wherever else, Culver City, it's maybe not as good. So it becomes a reason to have a sort of more centralized kind of thing. You know, I would also say that Americans sometimes think that like Los Angeles and New York are the only cities in the world. So if New York is very like centralized and then l.a. isn't it's like well a is super weird but there's a lot of multi-centered cities in the
world, right? Paris doesn't have a hyper Focus downtown Berlin has sort of several distinct City centers because of the unique history that it's It had over the years so it's fairly normal for cities to be a little bit less. Like Manhattan is an island like New York is actually a little bit of the weird City more than Allah is, but La is a, you know, it's built around freeways but that's because like they built these freak ways and then they built the city around it.
Now, they built all these Rail lines and you have to let the city build around them. Hmm. Okay. I'm gonna take a little bit of a different direction here. Matt, we listened to your podcast with Tyler, Colin, if you're listening and you haven't heard conversations with Tyler often quite a good way, to spend your time listening to a podcast, it's a good show but you had an interesting comment about how centralizing in order
to decentralize. So I think I speak for Paul and I hear I think we both like subsidiarity. We want institutions to be as small and as local as it actually makes sense to with the scale. Obviously if it just doesn't make sense for something to be small scale, and it needs to be larger in order to function properly, I'm not ideological about it. Well, I try not. Got to be at least.
But do you think a more populous country would make federalism in this sort of 50 different states experimenting work better and actually make that a more functional way to govern? Well, I think the book does not get into this and, yeah, I think you say it's a whole separate book or something like that. Details, like, people should ask themselves, why? American Federalism is so crappy because it's like a good idea, right? I think you discuss a lot of
different. Problems and people will reach the conclusion. That federalism might be useful here. And federalism really is should be useful, right? But if you look at it empirically, what happens is that the dominant player in state politics is the state legislature even more? So, you know, Congress is more powerful than the presidency but State politics are even more tilted to the legislature.
That's in part because they don't have the National Security Arena. Now, which is a huge part of the president's job. It's in part because the executive branch tends to be disaggregated, so you'll have a separately, elected Attorney, General of an insurance commissioner controller or Treasurer other things like that to these hyper empowered legislators.
And then you look at State Legislative elections and you see that people's voting behavior is an almost pure function of their approval of the president of the United States. You know what I mean? So like people vote Republican for State Legislature in Louisiana because they like Donald Trump and that has obviously nothing to do with how good a job. The legislature is doing of making policy for Louisiana and people for governor show a lot more creativity.
So, Louisiana and Kentucky have Democratic Governors, Massachusetts and Maryland have Republican Governors and that's because of specific things that were happening in the States. But the governor's don't actually have a lot of authority. Those States, the legislators do and they're often very gerrymandered on top of that. So I think that's all pretty bad, right? And if we want to have a real politics of federalism, we need to have real State politics. And that means seven, mix of
empowering. The governor more relative to other officials because you have real electoral competition there and it means trying to differentiate the political party system like in Canada. You can have totally separate parties in your provinces then you have in national federal politics so that people say look in my Quebec election, I vote based on Quebec issues and then in my Canada election, I vote based on candidate shoes and we don't have any of that in
America and it makes federalism very, very weak as a sort of like effective strategy for addressing governance. Yeah. I see your point there.
One of my like, This bugaboos is, I'm just not a fan of the Seventeenth Amendment and the idea of changing the way the senators are elected to be popularly voted upon, rather than by the state legislatures, but sounds like you're arguing against putting more power in the hands of the legislators, but I guess just in general, you know, we've got this, like, major partisan increasingly partisan times that are happening, and that doesn't seem to be slowing down.
So, we basically have a federal government that doesn't work well. Well, at all and if we triple the country's population is that going to make things better or worse? Like how do we make the government more responsive to that many people. Well, so I put the card in the horse, the other way, around my claim is that our politics has become dysfunctional because in the post-cold war environment, we have stopped really having a politics that's about improving America.
And we've instead At this politics, that's about pitting Americans against each other and fighting with each other, right? And it's not that having a larger population will fix that problem. It's that raising our gaze away from picking fights with each other and toward thinking, about America's role in the world and how we can be the dominant. Great power of the next century and the century after that will naturally create a more constructive. Politics. Because he know.
So like one thing in the book is I'm talking about how we should do more, you know, to support people with like Day Care subsidies and, you know, I give my view of what's the right way to do that. But I could totally imagine a conservative person, putting more weight on deregulation is a solution a left-wing person. Might say, I say that we should give some support to stay at home parents.
A left-wing person might disagree with that a cultural Every day of might think it's absolutely essential. This is like a lie. You can disagree about in politics, but the premise of that disagreement would be that we agree that we should be doing something to financially support and child. Rearing, right, right.
And then we're having a conversation about how do we do that and then we can have I do if you guys know the book, great classic Business book, getting to yes, you know about how to have constructive negotiations right now. It's like if we want to reach a solution that I think we can, I don't think the values that divide Americans are this like unbridgeable void, but there's significant and mostly the way our politics is setup files, you just don't want to bridge The
Divide, right? They want to find reasons to break up and then say, ah, Fu. And so like we can't solve any problems that way and we're not going to. And if you're satisfied with the country, just kind of go. Down the tubes. You know, that's fine. But it seems bad to me. We have the Cold War and that was the unifying thing. It was like what fueled the space race and other types of projections of American cultural values around the world? And we've basically lost it.
This is like the fukuyama like end of History kind of thing. Like we we haven't really had anything like that to unify us since 1990 or so and it sounds like your argument is well this is a thing that we can all aspire to And so if we can agree on the ends, then we can start debating. The means which is where actual policy discussions. Take place. Yeah, I mean, I agree with that.
And if you, if you read fukuyama's book, which people sometimes dunk on, right, having read his last chapter is actually quite pessimistic. Like he's not saying, this is gonna be great. He's actually predicting that we're going to have very divisive politics dominated by demagogues and nonsense, which I think it's more or less, what?
Happened. And as everybody says, like, history is not in fact, over we have a bunch of big challenges and you know, something that I think is interesting about the cold war is it wasn't just well, okay, we did the Space Program to stick it to the Soviets but that at that time you would not have had an advocate of the free enterprise system stand up and say, well, you know what, if millions of people have stagnating wages, Ages for a generation and KitKat health
insurance, and their children are living in poverty. That's just the market for you, right? Because that would sound like a pitch for communism, right? People believed it people who believed in capitalism wanted to make the system work, right? They undertook an obligation to not just say that, like, in theory, this would be better, but that like, actually it had to be better, right?
We accepted that challenge and we sort of don't Have that now, right, there's no sense that America needs to live up to its values or that America needs to deliver for its people. And I think that that time that moment of innocence is sort of slipping away and it's time to start thinking about what do we plan to do in this world? Okay, I'm fairly sympathetic, though. The idea that 1 billion Americans could be a similar rallying call that we can all unify around like the space race.
Yes. I mean it just seems like we let more people in and we have more children. That's not like a defeat communism. Go to the Moon Planet American flag. It seems to be number one forever. Being number will get you think number one forever. There we go. Okay. Yeah. That's that's controversial in its own way, but if I'm going to live in a country, I probably would want it to be the world leader.
I don't know. I'm not nearly as embarrassed about that as I should be, but you're saying, I'm saying, you should own it. It's like I think one of the Things in American politics today is like nobody is like a who cares number one. Number two. Everybody says everyone speeches like this is the greatest country on Earth, but then you look at these IMF projection is this like, well, in purchasing power parity terms were already
number two, in exchange rate. Terms were still number one, but everyone thinks China's exchange rate is fake. So maybe we'll still be number one for like five or six more years. And so, like you said, Joe Biden's platform, he is going to be like the last president for whom America was the the number one economy in the world that that sounds really bad actually, when you state it that way. So what are we going to do about it, right?
Like I say, grow the population across I was going to say like I mean when I visit like other westernized countries that have like you know, roughly similar cultural values to what we have here in the US and there. And if I go to a store or a grocery store or I turn on the TV or whatever everything that I'm seeing our cultural exports from the United States. And I can imagine being a citizen of one of those countries and just being like a little bit annoyed and jealous
and envious. That everything like runs through America, you have no idea how many times people will say, like oh Ross from friends, and I'm like, I'm not even like some random country. I've been to all the time. Yeah. Right. So that to me seems like a good reason. Like, I mean, I agree with Matt's objective here. I like being in the country, that is the cultural exporter. Because that means that, when I participated A pate in the
culture. I'm participating in the thing that ultimately affects much more around the world than if I were just a kiwi and New Zealand and my only expert export is Flight of the Conchords. Yeah. And what we do in the shadows and lower strings. Right on the right now, I look, I it says something like, everybody knows, right? If you grew up in New Zealand and you're smart and you're ambitious and, you know, you do really well in high school and whatever and you want to like,
Get in the world. You know, you got to end up moving to London or New York or San Francisco or something like that. It's that is that going to happen in Auckland, right? And that's an important part of the American identity. I think that like we are this great Hub of stuff, right? Cultural stuff, technical Innovation, we've got all kinds of problems. Obviously a red knows all about that but we also have the opportunity for a level of of greatness that does not exist
elsewhere, right? And like maybe closer to the main theme of you guys that show, right? It's like I have no idea where the person who invents a amazing way to like suck carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere will be born like, could be anywhere, but I have a really strong odds that that company that does that stuff will be an American company. You know like that person is
going to come now. Maybe not right you could imagine it China Japan Germany. There's like a few other plausible contenders but they're also pretty big countries in the scheme of things and now like it could totally be a person from Iceland or you know Honduras or God knows where but they are going to migrate to a big country with big cities, a big base of investors and technically skilled people and customers and a A government that can think in terms of big
projects, because just like, that's how the state-of-the-art moves forward, and nothing against New Zealand, or Portugal, or the Czech Republic or there's lots of nice little countries out there. You know? And every once in a while they give us something like Legos at a Denmark but like the big stuff gets done by the big countries and that's like a deep in America's DNA and fiber and I don't think we should like reject that and like shrink Ourselves down. I think we should embrace it.
One of the long-running debates on the show although we've mostly had people who think the answer is yes. And I believe you will think this as well. People listening should have kids, right? If they're like I don't know because of the climate you're saying just have kids, your kid might solve climate change. Yeah, I mean, there's that and there's I mean, Look, if you don't want to have kids don't have kids, right?
And if you want to come up with a high-minded reason for it you can say climate change is the reason. I mean that's fine. I just like I mean I was a philosophy major in college and I don't really go deep into this population ethic stuff but it's like everybody understands that like Thanos is the villain and the Avengers movies. I don't want to that everyone does. But yes. Okay well I mean I mean who
knows? I got some weird callers from like Marin County and that that really We made me wonder but like, just not having there. Be people is not a solution to problems, like it's a, you're just like you're looking through the telescope in the wrong direction. It's like, yeah, the the tacitus, the the Romans, what, created A Wasteland and call it peace. Like there's no problem if there's no humans, but yeah,
it's like yeah. Okay. I like, I mean if you don't want to have children, you don't want to have children. Like that's fine. I have one kid. I'm very happy with that. I feel like to would be very stressful, but like, I'm going to tell you that I did that for other people, you don't have him, it just makes my life easier to have a small family. This one Viewpoint that is like well people are the solution because you know, like who might invent like the next great.
I don't know. A solar panel that works at night or something but it's just more than that. It's not like people are the topic of the discussion. So to just say, like, well if we didn't have any people then we wouldn't have the problem. Like that's weird. That's neither here nor there and you know, like some Day. One of these like nutty, spree Killers who pop up every once in
a while and do something. Horrifying will write in their Manifesto. That like they're really worried about climate change and then conservatives are going to all go dunk on the left about it. That's going to be shitty and unfair. But but like it's shitty an unfair because I nobody actually thinks that just like extirpating. Humanity is a fix quote-unquote to environmental problems and so it's been a perverse.
You know, I I have Gotten some reviews by people on the left who are like, oh man, like this is really terrible on climate grounds, but none of the people on the left who say that seemed to actually disagree with me, that we should have a generous immigration policy, or that we should spend money on preschool and we should have paid parental leave. So it's a little like where's the beef here?
Like there was this old school like real dystopian thread in the environmental movement where they were like all tied in with population control? People and anti-immigration people, but they decided like 20 or 30 years ago, that that was racist and bad and wrong, and they're right. But then like they need to own that and you can't just like opportunistically invoke climate change. So we had a your colleague David Roberts on Once Upon a Time and I don't think he would mind me saying this.
I will think about it before and edit it if I need to. But got a lot of nasty notes about it because we tried so hard to be like, David surely, surely there's something worth saving. Right-of-center this conservative idea is that have some value. There are things happening with Republicans and climate. There are things to hope for, he was very nice, but gave Very little ground on that. Wait, Matt. So is there anything you'd like to add as an addendum to David's
visit? So look, I mean, on one level, I think I agree with his perspective which is that the institutional Republican party is not just sitting there waiting for a more reasonable climate proposal.
And then they'll say, hey, yeah, like let's do a bipartisan climate Bill, like the reason they don't want to do that is more fundamental That being said like I think I mean, again, I I'd look at Los Angeles, I look at New York City, you know, like you've look at places where Republicans are not a factor and you ask yourself like are these guys doing what it really takes to address climate change and they're not, you know, they're tied up in nimbyism and like d growth stuff and not really
contributing in a meaningful way and it just goes to show that like the problem is bigger and more complex. Then the Republicans are bad. Right? What I think is true, is that so, say in 2016 Republicans had lost the election and lost control of the Senate and Democrats had filled, scalia's seat with Merrick Garland, and
then Kennedy had gotten bored. And, you know, say like the past four years have gone really differently that might have made Republican party, Elites really sad about losing and they would have said man we should stop losing elections.
And it seems like our climate denialism is really unpopular, so, maybe we should come to the table with some climate Solutions. And there's plenty of right-of-center people who have reasonable climate solution, ideas, just like, waiting there for Republicans to say, they want them, right? They don't want them is the problem. And so if you beat them badly and make them sad, they might go use those Solutions, you know, I just like anybody else, right? So it's like when Jay, Kratz,
lost enough elections in a row. They decided they were tired of everybody thinking. They had no ideas on crime. And so they came up with some ideas, right? Like if we Republicans lose, they'll come up with ideas on the environment. There's smart people, they're not evil people even. It's just that like right now, they think their current posture is a winning strategy, you know, so I say climate change, they say oh you want to ban
hamburgers so I don't know. Like that's that's dumb, that's a juvenile approach to politics but that's where we're at right now. But the The solution isn't that there's going to be some Utopia like conservative politics, right is basically you have the interests of businessmen and you have the sort of socio-cultural majority saying it likes its way of doing things, and that is the most natural form of politics in the world. Right?
Like everywhere on the planet, there is conservative politics for that. What exactly it's content is changes all the time. So it's like conservatism will always be with us and if you have Solutions like in Germany, they have some good climate policies because the conservative party like wanted to do them and that's how things
happen. It's like leftists it's like you know we say things and we have ideas and we might win election sometimes but like things happen because conservatives get on board. No, I actually agree with that. I think it is fair to say that in general.
Neural politicians are opportunistic, they seek out power, Above All Else and that if there were a complete and total drubbing of the Republican party in 2016, I do think that there is potentially some truth to the idea that maybe they would start adopting positions that were more popular among the electorate. That does not currently support Republicans. I think that's I think that's
fair and legitimate. Yeah I don't I don't have much disagree with their, I will also second that there are lots of people who are Trying to engage with conservatives and Republicans on issues of climate change. I mean, Benji backer has been on the show multiple times now, talking about that, and they're bobbing list as well. There are plenty of groups like that. So I think it's just a matter of time before eventually these
things become so widespread. I mean, like culturally and I thought you distinguish between these things pretty well earlier, Matt that culturally like climate change is an issue that everyone is aware. Of more and more people are in support of doing something about. And it's just politics, that is lagging behind. And there's no way that that doesn't catch up. So I think we can be optimistic about that for the future. It's just a matter of how do we make that happen as quickly as
possible. Yeah, and I mean the problem with climate change, unfortunately, is that the timeline on which really bad things start happening, is just pretty aggressive, you know? I mean so you know so it's like Obama like to quote, Martin Luther King about how the Arc of the universe is long but it bends toward Justice, right?
And so you know, in the 1880s like reconstruction is completely undone and then it takes 80 years after that to get to the Civil Rights Act, and the Voting Rights Act. And of course that's not like the end of racism or racial problems but it's a huge step forward but that 80-year timeline. That's awful. You know, for the people who lived under Jim Crow 4 Two and
three generations. And the good news is that we can now, like, big picture, it and said, well, we'll look back from the year 2374 and say maybe that wasn't so long, but if you know, irreparable harms are over ready underway. So it's like, natural for activists to just be impatient and I never want to tell anyone to like hey, calm down, you
know, the problems not sir. At the same time, like the political process is what it is. And if say 2016, because it seems like three presidential election losses in a row, is kind of like a magic number which point a political party starts. Seriously rethinking things, but it's not like, you know, I don't like I'm optimistic.
It's not like no, right-of-center people have good ideas on climate change or that it's impossible to imagine a conservative movement that Embraces meaningful climate action and just don't like it. Not going to happen like just for no reason or because I write like a really good take about bipartisan Solutions. It's like there has to be an electoral event that makes the people who are leaders in that movement say, you know, the like gun nuts and the anti-abortion
Fanatics and like, they need to say, man, I don't want to lose elections over this like right? Coal-mining nonsense. Like, who cares? And that's how Coalition politics works, right? Like people get thrown under the bus. The people who didn't, See like gay couples, get married, like, who knows what happened to them, right? Like, right Republicans. Put them in the deep freezer someplace because I became an embarrassing issue. It's sort of counterintuitive to
think. But like, I mean, if you are a conservative or Republican and you don't like the green New Deal, then you have to engage on the issue because if you're not even participating in that conversation, then there's no bulwark against that and it's just going to be continued like one-sided policy discussion, right? I mean and I would love Love to see a more pro-growth. Technology-focused, but serious, not like, oh well, solve it with
technology. So we don't need to do this regulation but like, here's my 300 billion, huge moonshot techno Utopia like do something. You know, like something big, and then we can have a debate about that but right now it's like well, you have a couple big ideas Rolling through environmental circles. And then you've got, you know, I don't know what, you know, you've got. Like let's pretend that windmills are going to make birds extinct and you know that's that's dumb.
This suck a lot of dumb stuff in pain. Yeah. Yeah. I mean government is really good at some things and its really bad at doing other things and I think we would all benefit if there were more Diversified voices discussing like how to actually achieve these goals like I would so much rather have the government. Spend its resources, investing in research and development of Technologies and Grant programs for things like converting to regenerative agriculture or
whatever. I would rather not see the government create a jobs like a make-work program that's intended to solve like some social problem at the same time as currying. Environmentalism and that's just like not a discussion that anyone is open to having right now but it sounds like you are and I wish more people were like that. So electoral politics, right? Is zero sub. Like, only one person can be president. Only one person can went out
seat, but policy is positive. So, you know what I mean? Like, if you, if you have a serious conversation, we're one person says, my top priority is to reduce carbon dioxide emissions. And somebody else says my top priority is to have a vibrant Farm economy like their ways to reconcile, those two things, if people State their top priorities and then they want to reconcile them. And that's true for like, any too.
Priorities right? It's like we human beings are smart and we can make win-win deals on pretty much any topic, but you have to want to make a deal, right? You have to accept the premise that we should be doing something on the climate front, rather than using the issue opportunistically to win votes and we're just, haven't been there, you know what I mean? Like, we haven't been.
In a place where elected officials but I mean on climate elected officials on the right in particular have not wanted to reach a deal. They've just construed a deal on a climate bill would be a win for the Left, Right? Double a lot of fun. Thanks for coming out and hanging with us. Matt, thank you. And yeah, one last question. I'll make it a short one though. What are the odds that we get to 1 billion Americans the century?
I don't know. The odds are against it but I don't think it's wildly, implausible. We would need to achieve something like Canada's population growth rate. So, you know if enough people buy the book, I'll Justin's are going to be like, hey I guess we want a billion Americans, I guess I should read it, you know, and then we'll get it done. So it's really on you. The podcast listening, audience to decide whether or not it happens. I can't predict my own sales. You are a professional.
That was so skillfully. Executed, where should someone buy this if they want to support? What? You're up to. Well, I mean, it depends, you know, if you are a sort of Neo pastoralist, you should buy it at your local independent bookstore. You can go to book shop.com and order it from them. And that's great.
We'd love independent, bookstores, in the book game, on the other hand, you know, if you are a techno modernist, you might think, an e-book is a lot more environmentally friendly, and we're available in the Google Play Store, Amazon Kindle, whatever apples bookstore is called, I think, just Apple Books. So it's everywhere. Also audiobook, if you just love my voice, so, Watch. I actually read the audiobook script so you can hear me ramble even more on Audible and other platforms.
So this really a lot of great ways to buy this book. There's no wrong way to do it. Okay, link links in the show notes of. Go ahead Paul, what's that a magic? So I can vouch for the audiobook. I listen to it in one go while I was driving home from California. A couple weeks ago. So there you go. Yeah, it's a good. Listen, there's also a factual error about the population of Detroit. In the text, which is corrected in the audiobook.
So, excellent, real-time updates, you can get less fake news about a population of Detroit back media by consuming an audio, great great. Well thanks again, Matt. Thank you, Matt. Thank you. Yeah. Thanks for being on this one. If you like the show, please bring review us on iTunes or apple podcast that is these days. The reviewing really helps helps get this content out to more people. Thanks so much for listening. Tell your friends, and we appreciate it.
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