From New York Times opinion, this is the Ezra Klein Show. So this week on Tuesday, March 18th, my book, Abundance came out. I am excited about it. You have heard parts of it on

the show. And I've been trying to restrain myself from completely overloading this feed with

content about the book or its ideas. But I did do this show with my co-author, Derek Thompson,

on his great podcast, plain English. And Derek took us through something that I really enjoyed

and hadn't expected to do, which is an intellectual genealogy of the book, how this came to be,

both in terms of he and I working together, he and I coming to these ideas, and all of the other

different writers and forces and movements and researchers who helped inform it.

I thought it was worth sharing with all of you, too. Ezra Klein. Hello and welcome.

I am thrilled to be on plain English.

What a wonderful and rare opportunity to talk to you about abundance. This is exciting.

We're going to answer somewhere between 10,000,

and 11 billion questions about this book in the next few weeks. So I wanted to hold this conversation

to the relatively high bar of what can we talk about together here that other interviewers

probably won't even think to ask us. And the first thing that I thought of is that

nobody else knows the story of why this book exists in the first place. So in my personal

chronology, the story of this book starts in the fall of 2021. I am rolling off of book leave

for a related but distinct project on the history of technological progress

in America. I haven't had a very easy time with book leave because, as it turns out, writing a book

is, among other things, a total pain in the ass. But one of the themes of this progress book that I was

writing was the distinction between invention and

implementation. Just because somebody comes up with a good idea does not mean that it's going to

change the world. Ideas are cheap, building is hard. And I'm rolling off of book leave with this

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