So I recently listened to Ezra's conversation with Sherry Turkle about AI relationships and companionship. One thing that struck me was how surprisingly closed-minded Turkle seemed about the potential benefits of AI therapy and companionship. Even when Ezra brought up some interesting counterarguments (e.g. potential benefits for lonely or socially isolated older adults), I got the impression that she wasn't particularly willing to seriously entertain them. And this got me thinking about something broader.

Judging from real-life conversations as well as what I read on Reddit, it seems like many socially liberal people, who generally pride themselves on being open-minded and progressive, seem surprisingly closed-minded when it comes to AI and specifically with regards to AI in social issues (for this discussion, let's set aside economic and environmental concerns).

Whether it's AI in education, therapy, companionship, or alleviating loneliness, I often see these possibilities dismissed almost instinctively without much serious consideration.

My suspicion is that, for many people, this opposition starts with a gut feeling that something about all of this is unnatural or wrong, and the intellectual justifications come afterward. And ironically, this reminds me of the similar kind of intuition-driven reasoning that liberals often criticize conservatives for when it comes to challenging traditional social norms.

I consider myself somewhat liberal, and I'm not even trying to argue that all these AI applications in various social settings are necessarily good ideas. Some might work, others might not. But shouldn't being open-minded mean being willing to explore these possibilities rather than dismissing them outright simply because they challenge our existing notions of how things should work? Or am I just strawmanning a position that relatively few socially liberal people actually hold?

I find it strange that some people who are otherwise so willing to challenge traditional social norms seem to draw such a firm line when AI enters the picture.

Thoughts?

From Derek’s into: “This is the paradox — at the very moment that the political commentators are writing obituaries for Abundance, lawmakers across the country are passing some of the most significant Abundance-style reforms in decades”

Please stop doing AI episodes
If you did this many episodes on literally anything else we’d be sick of it too

Jerusalem Demsas and Matt Yglesias debate which historical figures deserve to be canceled and which shouldn’t have been. With the Trump administration pushing to restore statues of figures removed during the “Great Wokening,” they ask what a statue, a holiday, or a name on a school is actually for. Jerusalem lays out her test: why we honor someone and whether their cruelty is the main thing they’re remembered for. Matt argues the bigger problem is that we undercommemorate people, and that we should want more statues, not fewer.

Plus, a peer review on whether machine learning can predict who will be shot, and how much power the government should have to use that data.

https://x.com/random_walker/status/2110010174890967374

I recall the reaction here to the "AI as Normal Technology" episode was mixed, so I think Narayanan's summary of the points he was making is helpful. He also notes that the producers told him multiple times to use less technical language, which is interesting because I recall many posters here saying he sounded like he was out of his depth, but that was a choice by the producers rather than a reflection on his technical knowledge.

Talking about a specialized topic on a podcast that has a big and broad audience is a balancing act. The producers stopped me many times during the interview to tell me I was being too technical (understandable!). I tried to be nuanced but this conversation is necessarily a distilled version of the arguments [Sayesh Kapoor] and I have made in our essays... which are themselves written for a somewhat broad audience and hence distilled in complexity from our notes and 1-1 discussions with peers.

(Full tweet below in a reply)

Americans spend more time alone than ever, as parties, nights out with friends, and dinner gatherings become less common. Cellphones, social media, TV, and the internet have made it easier than ever to fill our free time without other people.

Research suggests friendship is less about instant chemistry than repeated time together. It takes roughly 50 hours to turn an acquaintance into a casual friend and more than 200 to build a close one. School makes those hours easy to accumulate but adult life doesn’t.

Today, Derek talks with psychologist Adam Grant, author of Vibe: The Secrets of Strong Connections in a Lonely World, about what we misunderstand about chemistry and closeness and how we might get people to start hosting a damn dinner party again.

Subscribe to our YouTube channel here:
https://www.youtube.com/@PlainEnglishwithDerekThompson

If you have questions, observations, or ideas for future episodes, email us at PlainEnglish@Spotify.com.

Host: Derek Thompson
Guest: Adam Grant

Posting this here as it's relevant to all the AI-related interviews Ezra has done lately.

AI apocalypse, recession fears, sky-high mortgage rates, and now, the plague? Last week, a researcher at a plague institute in Siberia died after developing severe pneumonia, sparking rumors of biowarfare and fears of a new epidemic. How much of the story is fact vs. fiction, and what does it tell us about the growing threat of biological weapons?

Today, Derek is joined by physician and former White House COVID-19 response coordinator Ashish Jha to make sense of the story. They discuss what’s really happening in Russia, the current state of bioweapons research around the world, how AI could make biological weapons more accessible, and what families, governments, and societies can do to prepare.

Subscribe to our YouTube channel here:

https://www.youtube.com/@PlainEnglishwithDerekThompson

If you have questions, observations, or ideas for future episodes, email us at PlainEnglish@Spotify.com.

Host: Derek Thompson

Guest: Ashish Jha

Producer: Devon Baroldi

Additional Production Support: Ben Glicksman

This is the list:

Bad Friends

Behind the Bastards

Call Her Daddy

Conan O'Brien Needs A Friend

Crime Junkie

Dateline NBC

Good Hang with Amy Poehler

Las Culturistas with Matt Rogers and Bowen Yang

Love Trapped

Matt and Shane's Secret Podcast

Morbid

MrBallen Podcast: Strange, Dark & Mysterious Stories

My Favorite Murder with Karen Kilgariff and Georgia Hardstark

New Heights with Jason & Travis Kelce

Pardon My Take

Pod Save America

Revisionist History

Rotten Mango

SmartLess

Stuff You Should Know

The Bill Simmons Podcast

The Daily

The Joe Rogan Experience

The Megyn Kelly Show

The Mel Robbins Podcast

The Shawn Ryan Show

The Toast

The Tucker Carlson Show

This American Life

This Past Weekend w/ Theo Von

Am I going crazy ???

I am about to finish Abundance. While I don’t agree with everything, I definitely found it thought-provoking. I appreciate all the effort that went into that research.

I am interested in finding other books that tackle the same issue: how to create a richer and healthier society for all of us. What are your recommendation?

Encouraged by the momentum gathering behind a permitting overhaul, the Build America Caucus is rolling out its agenda for the next Congress.

Energized by progress on permitting and housing legislation this term, an “abundance”-inspired caucus is rolling out a detailed agenda for next term.

Reps. Josh Harder(D-Calif.) and Celeste Maloy(R-Utah) launched the bipartisan Build America Caucus in 2025 with the goal of cutting red tape to build “faster, better, and cheaper,” specifically in housing and energy permitting. Congress overwhelmingly passed a sweeping housing affordability package in June, and senators announced a bipartisan permitting deal last week.

“It’s clear that this has become — even beyond our caucus — a real governing philosophy, uniting factions across both parties all over the country,” Harder said in a Wednesday interview.

Now the approximately 40-member caucus is rolling out a 95-page package of proposals, first shared with POLITICO, that outlines abundance-oriented proposals touching on health care, transportation, child care and research. On artificial intelligence, for example, the agenda proposes standardizing federal data sets in a format that is ready for AI-driven analysis.

Whether the caucus will actually lead on legislation next term remains to be seen. Control of the House is still weeks from being determined in the midterms, but a wide-ranging bipartisan agenda is a rarity on an increasingly polarized Capitol Hill.

The caucus is split evenly between Democratic and Republican members, who are primarily but not exclusively moderates. Maloy explained in a Thursday interview that the caucus is releasing its agenda before the midterm results are known to ensure that neither party sought an upper hand during negotiations.

Liberal New York Times commentator Ezra Klein and Atlantic writer Derek Thompson proposed the “abundance” philosophy as a response to Democratic Party’s 2024 political woes. While it has faced some criticism from progressives and labor groups, the call to cut red tape has picked up momentum with several high-profile politicians, including New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani, a left-wing Democrat, and Utah Gov. Spencer Cox, a GOP moderate.

Maloy said she sees a role for the approach to governing in Republican politics, too.

“I just think we need to get out of the mindset that all of the good ideas have already happened, and now we’re just fighting over the crumbs,” Maloy said. “I know ‘abundance’ is kind of a buzzword right now, but I do think we need to have an abundance mindset. I mean, in the United States, that’s how we always solve problems. We think big.”

What do you think about these proposals? What would Ezra Klein think about these proposals? Will any of these proposals become law? Exactly how influential is that abundance book going to turn out to be?

For anyone who hasn't been following it, BAAJA is the new bipartisan Senate permitting deal. Broadly, it speeds up environmental review and legal challenges, makes permits harder to revoke, and includes major transmission/grid reforms.

Seems very relevant to the abundance argument: making it easier to build transmission and clean energy also means making it easier to build pipelines, mines and other stuff the left may not want.

I imagine support here will probably be pretty one-sided, but I'm interested in the arguments against it too. Curious whether people see BAAJA as a good example of the “groups” problem, or a case where that critique is too simplistic.

Also didn’t fully understand this part, but it seems like the bill is almost trying to use government power to force utilities to modernise when their profit incentives push them toward the status quo

.https://punchbowl.news/article/energy/utilities-lose-power-permitting-bill/?_gl=1\*a5h9qe\*_up\*MQ..\*_ga\*MTQ5MzI4NjkyMy4xNzkxMTcwNTQ4\*_ga_PZYDHRSVTB\*czE3OTExNzA1NDgkbzEkZzEkdDE3OTExNzA1ODMkajI1JGwwJGg0NDk0OTg2MCRkMjUyUlYyMElnRnFmeXdCQ00wbTlkNkdpUnRHbzd5RExpZw..

Relevance: Ezra often discusses how impordent houssing is. This article is about a particular form of high density houssing that may also help ameliorate Americans' social atomization.

Nate Silver joins DT to analyze the state of the midterm races, and why it’s looking like Dems may have the edge in several tough races. The most interesting point I heard was DT bringing up the idea that Democrats perceived “lack of a party identity” that hurt them in 2024 is actually an advantage in off year elections. Without a kingmaker like Trump, the party has been able to run different types of candidates in different states without having to conform to what any one person wants.

Personally, I think the only reason Democrats have a chance of retaking the Senate right now is because the GOP ran a bunch of absolutely atrocious MAGA candidates like Walker and Lake in winnable races over the last few years. In contrast, I think all the Democratic Senate candidates in swing states this year range from excellent (Talarico, Cooper, Ossoff), to decent (Jackson). There’s nobody who seems likely to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory in a very favorable environment. I also think there’s something to the theory that the Democratic base shifting to higher education voters correlates with the type of people who turn out at higher rates in off year elections.

Hope you all enjoy! Here are some highlights:

• We spoke a lot about where Annie diverges from conservative opinions about individual responsibility. A conservative might feel that working-class Americans have a responsibility to pull themselves up by their own bootstraps, or that poverty is primarily a product of individual choices. Annie largely rejects that view, and you can see that in how stringently she opposed things like work requirements in welfare policies. It was fun to hear her unpack why.
• How much of the time tax comes from the fear of fraud? There's a piece I referenced called "The optimal amount of fraud is non-zero" by Patrick McKenzie, which posits that private sector firms tolerate some degree of fraud to avoid over-burdening the experience for all other consumers. I wonder if the public sector should follow its lead.
• Towards the end, we had a pretty interesting discussion about the nature of DEI initiatives and whether or not they contribute to the time tax. I referenced a section of the Abundance book out loud to her, and she gave a really interesting response. Hope you enjoy that section!
• It turns out that Annie is the one who told Ezra to grow out his beard, lol 😅