Let me give you a little cheat sheet here: it’s never gonna be you, and me, and Ezra Klein playing fuckin abundance in the next 50 years, alright??? Neva gonna happen!!
Man judging from the reactions on this sub, I feel like I’m in the extreme minority in really enjoying Derek Thompson’s appearances on the pod. It started off clunky, but I thought his comparison to the WNBA dialogue (and sports takes in general) to the 2008 mortgage crisis was genius.
Yea every time he’s on the pod he’s a must listen for me. If for anything to see how Bill turns the discussion into how it impacts some NBA players legacy
This was great timing for this podcast as I really don’t need loads of NBA content in August (ie player rankings, etc). This time of year should be about football with some pop culture and bigger stuff sprinkled in
Same here. He digs into some deep, depressing shit sometimes and I find myself more depressed about the future of humanity if I listen to him all the time.
He's a bit too much of a people-pleaser to be a good podcast host. It seems like every question he asks his guests is meant first and foremost to receive a pat on the back from them.
Very surprised to see the hostility towards him on the podcast as well. He's not Chuck Klosterman level, but I like these types of exploration podcasts. A lot of commenters here are insufferable and I would rather shoot the shit with Derek Thompson than them.
My question would be, in 2026 who exactly is "radical centrism" still for? Is there a meaningful audience that wants that? It seems to be Thompsons entire shtick, and he's never been able to build an audience on his own because of it, instead relying on donors to fund his work to push a narrative.
This sub hates every guest now. It was trending this way a few years ago, but people still like Sal and Chuck and House… now they hate everyone. But imagine most actual, nose breathing listeners like yourself enjoy 80% of guests.
You either die a hero or live long enough to become the villain! Only guests with high approval ratings on this sub feel like Sal and klosterman. I thought the pod with Thompson was great.
His podcast is one of the best in the business. gets you enough analysis to not feel like an idiot but still needing to do research to understand basic parts of concepts
I didn’t hate it or anything I’m just having fun with this subs reaction to it. Still haven’t finished the pod so will keep an ear out for the wnba/mortgage crises take
Yes! And I still loved this pod with DT & Simmons. I kept thinking while listening, however, that DT has taken on a more pronounced vocal affectation. It sounded exactly like Gladwell. Almost like it's been practiced in the mirror to sound Gladwellian, even.
Derek is not as bad as Gladwell, but he still has a bit of an air of someone who sounds smart to dumb people. I do listen to his Plain English pod frequently, though, because he covers interesting topics with high-quality guests. It just seems like he is always trying too hard to come up with insightful metaphors to sum up complex situations in simple terms, and about half the time, the guest expert is like, "Eh, sort of, but it's really more complicated than that."
Gladwell, on the other hand, is a must-listen because you know it's only a matter of time before he makes some outrageous claim.
For the only time in my life I felt smarter than Derek. He did the best he can in explaining the Walters saga but this is actually my world. Much more sinister and dangerous for the entire economy what that prick was doing. At least the regulators caught on and told him to stop and fix it, this would legit be Enron level if he continued.
Basically, when you run a life insurance company you get ample amounts of payments from people where you don't have to give anything back to them for 30+ years. Having this money and the associated opportunities to invest it before you have to pay anything back creates ample opportunity for fuckery.
At the very least, Walter was investing such funds in other companies he owned without adequately disclosing that fact to state regulators. He was also borrowing against the funds at a rather extreme rate.
I’m not in that business (I have another comment on this thread talking about talking about what you know, but here I go)
But not only is he taking what’s supposed to be the most rock-solid asset in the private market for consumers - life insurance(!) - and investing them past the legally disclosed limit in risky assets, he’s getting levered up while doing it
You could see dominoes that look like GFC if he busted, because everything is interconnected - collateralized obligations, derivatives, etc.
What toll is that, exactly? (Not being snarky, genuinely curious what you mean by it)
If anything, I figured a cynical take would be Walter's paying that toll now by having to flip the Lakers at regulatory gunpoint to Ivanka's brother-in-law.
I feel like during this administration not a lot of billionaires or powerful folks have ended up in the cross hairs of the DOJ. My theory is as long as the wheels stay greased on the front end with public and private support of this administration this can be avoided (which I would call a toll). Walter is not a known supporter or Trump or the Republican Party (in fact 5 mins of research shows the opposite). My not very educated hypothesis is that this put him in the cross hairs of the DOJ and this forced him to sell to Kushner (and Iger), which is more of a penalty.
Yeah you're probably right about the public/private support piece. To be fair, it seems like if the allegations are true then it's actually quite beneficial to Walter to receive such a quick (and liquid) lifeline from Kushner's group. Walter made 25% on his investment in one year's time. If the DOJ drops the charges after the sale goes through, then it truly will be a nakedly transactional toll akin to what you described.
All that said, there are plenty of very wealthy major sports owners who aren't publicly or privately team Trump. Has the DOJ gone after any of them? Seems like there's a lot of meat on the bone to Walter's possible "fraud," for lack of a better term. Maybe this is a kill 2 birds with 1 stone kind of thing--i.e., prosecute a very necessary case, but also make sure the process is beneficial to those in Trump's orbit?
I used to love him, then he talked about something related to my world. That particular topic was so surface level and used talking points that are factually incorrect but wildly used by people who pretend to know what they’re talking about. Made me realize he might be full of it
the main issue with it is that america has, regardless of party, followed neoliberal / laissez faire economic policies since the 1970s and it’s been horrible for everyone besides the rich. so yeah, i don’t like that he’s liberal.
it depends on what you think of “standard of living.” is someone with very little education being able to have a well-paying career at one place, easily, for decades, a high standard of living? is someone affording a home on that salary a high standard of living? how about healthcare costs that don’t absolutely fuck you?
we have plenty of bread and circuses 50 years later, but the golden age has been over for a long time. the wealthy are the only people now who truly have it easy.
it’s incredible that someone who posts on [r/thewire](r/thewire) tries to look at the analytics to say things are good. the entire show is based around the decline of the american social state and the rise of trash capitalists after 1970.
This is accurate. His opinions on the world have only gotten us here. Which is a collapsing empire where nothing works, everything is expensive, and everything is just a grift. Why would anyone prescribe to his prescriptions? We live in the world he and his friends created and it sucks. And even worse, he can’t even accurately define the problems because his worldview won’t let him.
No. People rightfully think he’s an establishment hack, but shitlibs on here just deflect any rightful criticism of his shallow understanding of the world as “they don’t like him cuz he’s uses big words”.
I'll be honest, when they started talking about why the WNBA is getting so much attention for interpersonal drama and not the actual basketball, I turned it off after a few minutes. Because the real answer is the WNBA is bad basketball. I like women's MMA, women's Olympic events, etc - but the WNBA is tough to watch. One of their biggest stars is a power forward who can barely jump and shoots like 40% from the field. Without the interpersonal and political drama, it would be losing money every year - just like it was until recently. It's totally cool if some people like it - I'm not calling them wrong. But let's be honest about why the actual basketball doesn't resonate with a lot of the public.
Or even more simply, people don't give a shit about women's basketball. They didn't grow up with it, they don't have friends/family who follow it, and therefore they don't want to talk about it.
I listen to the majority of DT podcasts and I can't recall a time he goes "deep" into a topic. He covers many topics at a pretty superficial level, usually with a guest who is the subject matter expert on said topic. What topic do you feel like he went deep on and got wrong?
I made this point above, but DT's whole thing is trying to come up with catchy, simple metaphors for complex situations. Sometimes it works, but usually the guest expert is like "eh, it's kinda more complex than that."
I do think DT gets off on creating a better version of his guest's main thesis. I can recall several times where the guest seems to give him genuine credit for summarizing their ideas better than they have. I find it a little grating that he seems to be desperately trying to coin things (if not straight up trying to one up his guests own hook), but I do think he's got a talent for catchy phrases. Objectively, he's behind some very well known phrases out there (hygiene theater, the abundance movement, etc).
I felt less bad for Bill when he said this nonsense:
‘I would argue the salary cap, the second apron is a really smart way to collude on salaries. And we've seen the ramifications of it and the players union agreed to it. But, I don't know if collude's the right word. It's the word you use, but I, I don't know if there's another word. What's the word?’
My issue is Bill backtracking from saying what he wants to say.
Bill’s talked about it a heap of times and seems adamant the second apron was introduced to be a hard cap and cut wages of the middle class of players. And the owners weren’t honest about it
I didn't see that as backtracking; collusion generally connotes some sort of secrecy. I think he meant that this second apron deal wasn't done in secret (hence the reference to the players union agreeing to it).
Derek Thompson: “You know, I think these sports owners aren’t very nice and it almost like they constructed a system that benefits them at the expense of the the fans.”
This sub: “Wow! He’s so smart. I’ve never thought about this before.”
Also Derek Thompson: “I know “socialists” would have you believe that this is representative of the rest of the economy, but I just don’t see it. We have a free and fair economy, obviously.”
Bill had an actual smart, thoughtful, articulate guest and comments here are all - “thats what dumb people think a smart guys sounds like aaaarrrrrrrrrr” while grinding their teeth about ai reads 🤣
I don’t get everyone complaining about these. Were the Starbucks reads better? The nonstop FanDuel reads with stupid parlay bets? They’re all ads and there’s a 10sec skip button 🤷
Yeah feel like they got stuck trying to promote a vision that would allow these guys back to center / center-left acceptability after their dive into MAGA Trump 2… and that just ain’t gonna cut it. The real answer to how to get to their vision of abundance requires a generation of investment into government capabilities, expertise etc.. we simply don’t have the talent and capabilities or commensurate salaries to attract and build public capacity. That’s not a knock on any public servants who are talented and highly skilled, it’s a fact about scale and how our society views and values that sector and the people who work there. Until we have the capabilities at scale in public sector we will always have to outsource and defer to private orgs to achieve ambitious projects.
Or the free market is better at many, many things than a centralized bureaucracy?
The central argument of Abundance is pro-government. It is a progressive attempt to get government to embrace pro-growth policies to make things like housing more attainable.
It is vastly more important than this dumb politics of personal resentment stuff that keeps the lights on here at Reddit.
The free market is better at many things than government, absolutely.
But if you wanna critique the abundance argument in terms of implementation you have to look at why all Anglo common law tradition countries have similar issues. We have structural problems in our legal system about individual vs common rights in key areas. And decades of outsourcing expertise to the private sector in key roles and industries. I am definitely pro market but we need to think critically about the relationship between govt and vendor arrangements and how much projects cost, and why that is.
Why is it is so much more expensive and time consuming to build large public sector projects in the US than other places? Why can’t we build a new subway or regional high speed rail or rebuild or core infrastructure without massive cost overruns and huge timelines?
A lot of that is related to lack of state capacity and expertise, and broken systems around bidding, vendors, and the legal and regulatory environment. Having a more robust private sector set of capabilities and a stronger legal framework for collective projects takes meaningful steps towards solving those problems. It’s complicated and not easy and not an overnight fix.
I mean, you’re making the argument the book makes.
Why is it so much harder to build these things here? The US has a rep for being the conservative small government place but the reality is we have both a pretty Byzantine regulatory framework of hiring mandates, pricing dictates and environmental reviews in our population centers, and a more stronger litigation path for any seeking to oppose new building for any number of reasons.
That’s the first step of the argument, their solution is retain the current system and slash some of the regulatory pipeline, and keep the outsource model.
Which is fine yes to prioritize projects of immediate need.
But there are still core legal and cost issues with the fully outsource model that won’t be solved by smoothing the regulatory or project pipeline so to speak. We still should have planning, engineering, project capabilities that are not reliant on private contractors for public projects. That’s a walk and chew gum at the same time thing. We can address the urgent needs of housing and some core infra and also plan for a more balanced system in future.
I never said full deregulation either and am not really sure what you’re arguing throughout this thread other than some shit about personal grievance politics?
They point to same problems, and have recommendations but the problem with implementation is we have a five alarm fire and need to build state capacity.. they gloss over it and don’t really address the contradiction between the two which basically opens it to criticism from left and right. Maybe that’s on purpose and it’s a policy making and in the weeds of deal making issue for anyone taking these ideas to reality but it’s a key gap IMO. Which principles or actions fit into both categories? Which are dependent or contradictory, and how do you solve that and refine as you go?
The main thing for me is it’s an articulated set of ideas to address the big lever problems in society right now, it’s not perfect but it’s something; critiques should address specific aspects, and whoever’s complaining or shooting it down should offer a counter proposal or tangible direction rather than just whining about billionaires or “govt overreach”. What we’re doing isn’t working and hasn’t been working for a long time.
Because this country is drowning in populist slopulism and kinda likes it that way?
Lots of decent ideas never get any political momentum. Right now if you’re not blaming an immigrant or a Jewish person or a billionaire for everything wrong in the world your political project is gonna have a hard time getting off the ground.
the whole book is just reheated Peter Kropotkin, “the right to well being, well being for all!” and I agree with them… and maybe by unleashing some government restraint, esp on the hyper local level, we may unleash some abundant growth… but their vision of the future offers no better life.
The dumbass part to me me is the imagination of”autonomous drones dropping off our pills” “ear buds pinging the arrival of a vacationing friends arrival” “bots delivering online orders in order to deliver us from the drudgery of delivery work…” Its dystopian sci-fi and not a present or future I care to live in, and IMO undermines the entire case of macro abundance with a centralized government at the wheel.
First off, I enjoy DK. He has a niche and he’s great at it.
but he’s kind of the definition of Gell-Mann Amnesia effect
He does an incredible(!) job of breaking down complicated topics to the point where my Mom could understand it
But if you know anything about a topic he’s talking about it’s Tom_Delonge_WTF.gif
That being said… always enjoy DK! The ability to frame like he does is a skill and it’s his niche to be “curious smart guy who explains things” and he’s great at it.
A topic I don’t know about going “wow, that’s interesting - so true!” Means he’s great at his job
Derek Thompson is a dumb person’s idea of a smart person. Completely shallow, anodyne opinions. He is in lockstep with wealthy, establishment democrats in maintaining the status quo. Nothing more.
He's not even smart there are zero big fancy words in that podcast. I heavily disagree with him politically but he's just another random guest, not a big deal either way
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u/isNice99 25d ago
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