It's the Brian Larry Show on WNYC. Good morning, everyone. We've got a summer Friday edition of the show today. We've put together some conversations from earlier in the year, edited just a bit for clarity

and for time, including a deep dive into the question of balancing fairness with inclusiveness

when it comes to trans athletes and sports competition. Plus, my conversation with legendary

broadcaster Bob Costas. But we start here with this interview from March with the authors of a new book

that made a lot of news for taking Democrats and progressives to task for creating new problems

of scarcity in trying to correct for policy mistakes from the past. We pick it up here.

You might call what we're about to hear tough love for liberalism from two people

who care about it. Journalists Ezra Klein from the New York Times and Derek Thompson from the Atlantic

have co-authored a new book called Abundance. Derek and Ezra suggests that Donald Trump

won the election last year, not because of his vision for America, but because of the

failures of present-day liberalism. They say those failures have produced some political ironies.

Red states are actually producing more clean energy than blue states. Big blue cities have the

worst housing shortages. They call some of this the problem with everything

bagel liberalism. Not that they're fans of Republicans, they say both parties have embraced

a wrong-headed politics based on the idea of scarcity. Hence the title of the book, Abundance,

let's hear more. As Reclin is a columnist and podcast host for the New York Times. His

latest book was the bestseller Why We're Polarized from 2022. Derek Thompson is a staff

writer at the Atlantic and host of their podcast, Plain English. He's also an NPR news analyst

and a CBS News contributor, and he wrote a national bestseller,

too, called Hit Makers, The Science of Popularity in an Age of Distraction.

Ezra and Derek, thanks for making us think with your original framing here, and welcome back

both of you to WNYC.

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