New Cities & Digital Dopamine: Congressman Jake Auchincloss on Radio Abundance

Transcript

0:00 Welcome to Radio Abundance, a podcast by YIMBY Democrats for America. It's time to build again, folks. Fascism never made America great, but when progressives build, that's where you'll find American greatness. Tonight's guest is United States Congressman Jake Auchincloss. A staunch champion for abundance, Congressman Auchincloss joined us for our premiere episode of Radio Abundance in the spring to help launch YIMBY Democrats for America. Today, he makes his in-person debut on Radio Abundance in Washington, D.C. to talk about his thoughts on Charter Cities and Digital Dopamine. That's coming up right now on Radio Abundance. Please welcome your host for the evening, YIMBY Democrats for America Executive Director Steve Boyle. Hello, and welcome to Radio Abundance, and welcome back to Radio Abundance, Congressman Jake Auchincloss.

0:50 Thanks for having me back. It's very exciting to be sitting down with you today. It's not quite coming full circle, but it does feel a little bit like entering a new act because you were pretty massive part of launching Radio Abundance and YIMBY Democrats for America. And if you can believe it, that was just a tad over five months ago. So it has not been very long, but it has been an amazing road. And I really don't think any of that would have happened if not for our first guests, which was you and Governor Westmore and his housing secretary, Jake Day, all three of whom are military veterans, which we thought was very cool. So just, you know, unending, unyielding gratitude for that. And I feel like and hope you can take a little credit for anything that comes after, because I don't think any of this would be happening if not for that little leap of faith and trust and excitement. It's an honor to meet you in person.

1:43 Yeah, likewise. And congratulations on your success in the last half of the year. Thank you so much. You know, and we obviously knew about you coming in, had heard you on the Ezra Klein show and read the things you've written and already knew you were a proponent of YIMBYism in abundance. And I've I've said before that you are, I think, one of our the one of the most specific and most ambitious, if not the most of each, which is very exciting. And I got a nice little reminder of that the other day. This past week, there was a big abundance conference. But right before the abundance conference, Congressman Jimmy Gomez, through his own, I think it was the National Summit on the Housing Affordability Crisis, which I assumed was planned around the abundance conference. But as far as I can tell, they didn't know about the conference till last minute.

2:30 No one about the conference knew about them. And it seems like Congressman Richie Torres and I were the only people at both. But it was sort of spectacular. Before I praise you on your specific role, since I think a lot of people still need to hear about it. Can you tell us a little bit about what that was and how you got involved with it? Jimmy Gomez of California organized a few hundred housing experts, developers, policymakers to come to Washington and talk about housing affordability, which, in my view, is the greatest domestic economic challenge facing the middle class, the working class in the United States. We need five million more units of housing. Rent mortgages are taken up half of the average family's take home pay. And Jimmy shone a spotlight on it and brought together a bunch of different points of view.

3:18 You know, one imagines you've got a pretty busy life as a congressman. But if you have any time for more work, I'd propose you as the moderator for every housing conversation from now on. Because what I recall is, you know, I think you came in and from the very start said, look, we're going to focus on solutions today, so what's your plan? And somebody said, you know, I like gentle density, which who doesn't? And you said, yeah, but what's your plan? NIMBYs hate gentle density. How will you get them to like it? At another point, somebody said, well, you know, we've looked around and we've found that people don't really like homes that are higher than three stories. And you said, and I do this more sassy, but you're not sassy. You're quite military. So I'll try and do it more you. But you did say, do you think we're going to build five million new homes in the next decade if we don't build anything higher than three stories?

4:05 And I just thought that was an impressive dose of clarity and fortitude and really appreciated it. Wait till we talk about getting rid of parking and the kind of hard conversations that requires. Cool. Next question on my list is Congressman Achenklaas. Tell me about getting rid of parking and the hard conversations that requires. Parking is like the dark energy of housing and urban planning. Dark energy, as you probably know, is out there in the universe. It warps all of space, time, and matter, but physicists have been unable to detect it. And when you look into cities and how they're laid out, their built environment, their affordability structures, their social cohesion, it's shocking how much all of it cascades down to the very banal issue of parking.

4:51 Because what we have done in this country is we have subsidized housing for cars and limited housing for people. And so what we've gotten is a lot of places to park and not enough places to live. And, in fact, those two issues are intertwined because folding in the cost of car storage into the cost of construction of housing does a couple of things. One, it makes housing more expensive. But two is it entrenches the single-family-zoned horizontal sprawl of post-war American built environment. And that's bad for housing affordability, it's bad for public health, it's bad for community development. And parking is the cornerstone issue of that. Henry Grabar, I think I might be saying his name wrong, wrote a book last year called Paved Paradise, where he talks about this issue in parking.

5:41 He'd actually be a great guest for you. And when you go after parking, it's like the Social Security of local politics. It's like it's the third rail that you touch. But I had a lot of fun as a city councilor waging battles to get rid of parking minimums and to basically force the public to stop subsidizing car storage.

6:02 You know, I like to say that America does have abundant housing and, in fact, abundant free housing. It's just for people's most valuable possessions and not for people. Right. You gave me a guest recommendation. I'll give you a partner recommendation. I think Congressman Laura Friedman, who made significant progress in this California, would be quite a good ally on this. Terrific. She's a member of the Build America Caucus as well. And you're right, she has done incredible work at the state level on housing and parking issues. And done it in a really challenging political environment. You also see up in more northern California, I think, Buffy Wicks in the state assembly is terrific on this issue as well. And demonstrating that this is the dichotomy between being sort of a YIMBY and being pro-tenant protections is a false one. What someone like Buffy does so effectively is advocate for strong tenant protections and advocate for more housing.

6:55 I mean, it feels like we've got our hands pretty full trying to build homes and defeat fascism. When do we get to have the parking? I mean, when would that even become a realistic thing to bring up in Congress? So, first of all, I don't think it's an issue that really belongs at the federal level. I am a federalist and think that we want our states and cities doing the bulk of domestic policymaking. And I've never been more confident in my view of that than I have with Donald Trump in the White House, when our most important bulwark probably has been the Tenth Amendment and this idea of the separation of powers between state and federal government. But city councilors and, yes, even governors, I do think, have to take this issue on. And the issue of subsidizing cars folds its way through a lot of our public policy. Let me give you one example.

7:41 We know that congestion pricing works really effectively. It worked in London. It's worked in a lot of European cities. New York is doing it. It is working the most predictable policy achievement of all time. It works. Very challenging to do because it requires federal, state, and local collaboration on a politically tricky issue. There is another way to basically get to congestion pricing, which is to say to do market-based pricing of parking in the inner core of a city. You're functionally doing the same thing. You're saying if you're driving into the city, you're going to pay to internalize that. But you're doing it when you store your car versus when you are driving under a toll. And on the parking issue, cities don't need state and federal sign-off. So cities can do congestion pricing through their parking policy and don't have to do the New York City 15-year dance.

8:33 You know, you think about pedestrianizing cities and making them more walkable, and you have all the challenges of changing something. And we know, of course, that cities used to be, that roads used to be for pedestrians and horses, right? Streetcars were so filled American cities that when the Japanese wanted to figure out how to build rail, they went to Los Angeles to study it, which sounds ridiculous today. But it is hard to change things, which brings me to this segue. You can, in fact, do things anew, and you have an op-ed out recently calling for the construction of new cities. Yes. America used to build cities all the time. Every time Americans bumped into a river, they would build a new city there, and it was, I think, central to our dynamism, our sense of confidence as a country, economic growth, productivity.

9:26 We stopped doing that at some point. And if you ask people, well, why don't we do it again, they'll say, oh, well, we can't do that. And you're like, well, why? Why can't we? We have plenty of land. That's not the issue.

9:39 We have the need for it. We have the need for more transit infrastructure, for more housing, for more energy infrastructure. And a city is basically a pressure-tested environment where all of them have to get built really fast. And so I teamed up with John Gruber, who's the chair of the MIT Economics Department, and he and I wrote a long piece for the States Forum, which is basically a journal for state policymakers, describing step-by-step how you might go about building new cities. The core idea is there is a lot of state-owned land in America that is not locally zoned and that is near existing hubs. So I'll give the example of Massachusetts, with which I'm most familiar. There are two decommissioned military bases in Massachusetts, both of them within 20 to 40 minutes of Boston.

10:23 Hundreds of acres of paved land with a fair bit of horizontal infrastructure, including wastewater treatment.

10:30 Let's build two cities there, right? And at one of them, we built about 7,000 units. At the other one, there's some commercial development. But truly putting a flag in the ground and saying, we are going to build 100,000 units of housing. Massachusetts needs 250,000. We are going to build a nuclear power plant. We're going to lift the moratorium in our state. We are going to think differently about the built environment. We're going to have no cars here and create really walkable communities. And people's heads will explode.

11:00 And yet I would say, build that city and tell me if it's not leased up within 17 milliseconds with multi-generational walkable living. I'll give you another site in the San Francisco Bay Area, where I'm from. Right across the water from San Francisco, right next to Oakland, is the island of Alameda. And on the island of Alameda is an old naval base, which is just an empty, unused runway. I think it's maybe two miles by two miles surrounded by water on three sides with views across the entire bay and maybe the best weather in the world. And it's empty. Yes. And what's cool about these ideas is that they can integrate with other experiments out there. So there's a woman, Devin Zagel, who is creating a new city called Esmeralda, and it's part of a project called Edge Cities.

11:49 And so this is Edge Esmeralda. And what she's doing is she's basically iterating on what community looks like. So once a year, I'm going to get some of the details wrong here, but once a year, these folks come together. I think it's in California. And they live together. They bring their whole families. And they kind of figure out collectively what a different sort of municipal structure would look like. Why not, like, invite that crew to one of these decommissioned sites? You put some basic infrastructure down. But then you don't have the chicken and egg problem so much, where it's like, well, I don't want to put $2 billion of infrastructure spending down if I'm not quite sure what's going to come with development. You do it iteratively. You create an ecosystem slowly and humbly rather than command and control top-down planning of a city.

12:34 You know, this is an obsession of mine, and in part because I don't come from politics. I actually come from the world of, like, large-scale events and immersive experiences and themed entertainment, which is to say a lot of my friends work for Disney and Universal Studios. And this past year, this year, in Orlando, they built Paris. I mean, their little Harry Potter world looks like Montmartre. It is walkable and beautiful and tree-lined and gorgeous buildings, and it feels the same. But if you could actually stay, and people will fly across the country and the world, they'll pay hundreds of dollars. But if you could actually sleep there and there wasn't roller coasters and mascots, it would be a crime. So building a city, like, it's not, this isn't elusive. I can get you their phone numbers. We actually, these aren't lost arts.

13:19 It's just illegal. That's right. No, and that's true across all of the great cities of America today. New York City couldn't be built under New York City's zoning code. Boston couldn't be built under Boston's zoning code, right? We have made it illegal to build the kinds of places that people pay money to vacation at. Yeah. So the question, then, is who is building them? Is it governments building them? Are governments making this sort of imaginary infrastructure and then selling the land to private companies? Like, how do you actually imagine it happening? I think it can happen in different ways, and I think you would see differences in northeastern states versus mountain west states, for example, and how it would be done, where northeastern states have more state-owned land that are near population hubs, that mountain west states have more federal land that's not near population hubs. So you're going to see different experiments. Again, I'll speak to what I just know better, which is the northeast, which is to say, I think it has to, the key is to bypass local zoning, the key, which we can do at these decommissioned military bases.

14:12 The key is to put some capital down that basically de-risks it for private sector development. You do want the private sector involved here. There is no need. The private sector wants to build housing in this country. They want to do it. They see the latent demand they want to build. So it would be, I think, a poor use of public funds to be building housing that the private sector should be paying for. But, you know, wastewater treatment and some of the basic infrastructure does need to be financially de-risked. And then I think the key is you've got to have connectivity to the labor market. So what makes it work initially is that you've got reliable commutes between the greater Boston area and this new site, which we would have in Massachusetts. And then, like I said, is sort of that edge Esmeralda concept, which is to say, instead of like, oh, build it and they will come, and the way that, like, Saudi Arabia is building Noam, right, or, you know, Xi Jinping has this, like, new city next to Beijing that, like, some, you know, autocrat decrees will be.

15:10 No, be more humble than that. Say, hey, listen, we know that people, like, here's our concept. We want to, you know, go car-free. We want to have walkable, fine-grained development. And then we're going to work with a community that actually is living that way and do it iteratively. The Xi Jinping thing makes me crack up because my little dream is to build cities. And then every once in a while, these authoritarians in China or Egypt will get a shot, and they do such a bad job. It's not real. It's such a bad job. It's just, like, cartoonish, right? You're seeing it in Africa, too. A couple, I think, who is, somebody, some entrepreneur wanted to build a city, like, funded by blockchain or something in Africa. It's just, like, this is not how great cities have evolved over time. They're organic, evolutionary processes. And there's too much hubris, I think, in the American urban planning mindset where we think that everything should be zoned, decreed, structured.

16:01 And it's, like, messiness is okay.

16:05 You know, there's, on the public side of this, there's two things that come to mind for me. And one of them is from our earlier conversation. The first is, in all the conversations about affordable housing, and we obviously know more supply makes housing more affordable, but also you need some more emergency interventions, because it has been 50 years, and we've got a little bit of a deficit to make up. You know, we were talking to Zellner Meirey earlier this year, obviously didn't win the New York City primary, but he's got quite a road in front of him. And he was talking a lot about the idea of, you know, essentially mixed income publicly built buildings, right, which is to say, if you want to build a lot of affordable housing and subsidized housing, and that costs money, a very nice way to pay for it is for the government to also build publicly built market rate housing that can actually bring in revenues to the government, to say nothing of mixed use and retail in the building.

16:52 And it reminds me of the second thing, which is, we talked a lot about, you know, we think about materials and, you know, prefabrication and all these different technologies and opportunities, but they need a demand signal, was the word you used. And the opportunity of, if there is a public round of building that kicks things off, that that can send a demand signal that actually kickstarts those buildings, makes those tools more affordable, and then the private sector can take advantage of that and build more cheaply. Is that anything? I am more skeptical of government building directly, partly because, as I said, I just, if you look at like our economic challenges and where public dollars have such impact, in housing, our core challenge is actually not that there are not private sector dollars that want to build housing.

17:44 And you see this across, not just the United States, but all OECD countries, like actually, if you cut the red tape, if you cut the large lot sizes and the parking minimums and the ban on mixed use or multifamily, and actually capital flows in. And then people will say, okay, yeah, but that's market or luxury apartments, and that's not how supply and demand works. Like, actually, as you satiate each segment of the market, it cascades such that it becomes more affordable for everybody. That's not academic. That's literally what's happened in places like Austin, Texas, which has seen radical decreases in rent for all segments because they've been building more. It's what you see in Tokyo, which, despite being an expensive city to live, has actually relatively affordable housing because they just build a ton of it, right? So the first thing I'd want to see major metropolises do is just, like, take a hard look at your zoning code.

18:32 Cambridge, Massachusetts, under, in the last couple of years, passed a 100-page zoning reform piece of legislation, and about 90 of those pages was just getting rid of stuff. And I'll tell you what, it's going to work. They're going to build a lot of housing in Cambridge. It's going to make Cambridge nicer, and it's going to make Cambridge more affordable. So that would be my first step. You are right, though, that there is a role for the public as a demand signal. I would prefer to do that, though, in a way that ratchets up the off-site construction and de-risks modular housing. And to do that, you can do that with the military. We've got lots of bases in the country. Affordable housing for our soldiers and sailors and coast guardsmen is a challenge.

19:19 The Pentagon just puts the procurement ticket on the table. It says, build it. And then what you do is you give the economies of scale and scope to the developers, the off-site construction developers, to be able to get their factories humming, and then they can offer more economical options to cities. Okay, you keep saying stuff that's in my head that I don't know we're allowed to talk about yet. Tell me more about this building housing for, affordable housing for folks in the military. Tell me more about that. Yeah, I mean, as you know, we've got millions of service members, right, and they all live somewhere, whether it's on base or directly off base. But the military has a big role to play in the provisioning of that housing, a lot of it's old stock. And the one thing the Pentagon can do very effectively, oftentimes doesn't, is to issue strong demand signals for the commercial sector and then let the commercial sector figure out all the stuff, and the Pentagon just pays for performance.

20:11 Now, they don't do that enough, but with housing, they could. And then what you have is, I'll give you an example, I was talking to a manufactured, an off-site construction, manufactured housing startup in Massachusetts, and they were saying, we probably need between 1,000 to 10,000 units a year to get our factory to a place where we can make the unit economics work, where, you know, the incredible fixed costs that we have to put down to have a factory that builds housing, make it economical, that gets amortized, and then every additional unit becomes something that's sort of unit profitable. It's pretty hard to go to a city, to go to any nonprofit developer and say, like, give me an order for 10,000 of something when it's a new technology, right?

20:57 But the military has that kind of scale, right? And actually, to a certain extent, HUD has that kind of scale, too. Federal housing and urban development could also issue those kind of sharp demand signals, but the military is probably the easiest place because they actually have direct authority over the individuals living there. So tell me if this is fair. It sounds like on the idea that public construction can leverage economies of scale to help the rest of construction, that that is a thing, but you think that would not create effective public cities, but would be very useful and helpful, A, for the military, and B, have downstream consequences across wider society and construction. Yeah, I think that there's a very long and grand tradition of public money de-risking new technologies. We should do that. I think military housing is a way to do that. HUD could do that, potentially, as well.

21:44 Another way to do that, which I've written about, has been, so Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, as you know, they securitize mortgages. So basically, they subsidize demand for housing. Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, probably within existing statute, could also help securitize construction financing for the production of housing. So they could say, hey, your cost of capital is high as a developer of housing, whether it's new technology or traditional stick-built, and we're going to help, you know, make that a more liquid market for construction financing to lower your cost of capital. That is a very pro-market way to induce more home building. It doesn't require the government to build housing itself, which doesn't have a great track record, but it's using public dollars for high leverage. And, you know, while we're talking about ways that, you know, public construction can help private construction, I think it's worth reflecting on the opposite, too, which is I was almost going to ask you, okay, for these cities, does, you know, the government need to build the roads and the trees and the parks and stuff?

22:42 And, like, that is one option. But we have seen sometimes when private corporations are incentivized to build public spaces because they think it will lead to more money, they do a weirdly good job. I don't know. In New York, I think Domino Park is one of the nicest little cities in the Williamsburg waterfront, and that was a public-private, you know, cooperation. I'm mostly thinking I'm from San Jose, and we have a little outdoor mall called Santana Row, which looks like a little mini European plaza. And now that the Niners play there and not San Francisco, which is an hour south, which really bums out the players who didn't realize that before they got to Santa Clara. Sorry, guys. When the team gives them a little, like, one sheet of what to do while they're in town, and they figure out they're not in San Francisco, it tells them to go there.

23:28 But it is very lovely. It's very lovely because, like the Disney example, Disney is an extreme capitalist, and, yes, it's very expensive to get in there. But private corporations are able to build interesting public spaces when they want to and think it's in their benefit. Sure, and probably the exemplar is that is Bentonville, Arkansas, where Walmart has created, like, a literally wholly-owned city, as far as I can tell. I've never been there. I am told that the public services are quite good. As you said, it's in Walmart's interest, right, because basically it's a company town, and so they want everyone to... It's sort of a retention tool, right? I am sort of fine with the idea that corporations can deliver some of these public accommodations. I will say, though, that I think Democrats should be insistent that public spaces are for everybody and that we can uphold their quality and their experience through local governance.

24:20 And one of the hits on our party has been that in blue cities over the last 10 years there has been a degradation of public service and quality of life, whether it's fare evasion, whether it's shoplifting, whether it's open-air drug use. These are issues that we should not shrug our shoulders and be like, eh, I'll just go to, like, the, you know, the Walmart park and let this park be crap. That's a bad answer for Democrats to give. I think Democrats should say we are going to uphold law and order in this city, and we're going to ensure that public dollars support public accommodations for the public, because we believe that government can deliver. But it hasn't done a good enough job recently. You know, sometimes when the right talks about this, they get a little bloodthirsty, right? And I literally saw someone the other day, they're like, oh, these beta males and cucks made it so that, you know, this can happen and we should hang these guys.

25:12 But I told you I come from the theater industry, and every lefty event I've ever been to or thrown myself has had a code of conduct where you say, if you say weird, racist, sexist stuff or hit on people, there's going to be X, Y, and Z consequences. And it doesn't seem that weird to think the public commons needs a code of conduct. I mean, absolutely. I mean, whether it's sort of norms like neighborliness or whether it's more specific about littering or shoplifting. The point is, though, is the Republicans used to cast themselves as the party of law and order, right? Now, the party that is voting to defund the FBI, that's trying to overturn a free and fair election, that's flooding our streets with guns that can't be detected by a metal detector, is not my idea of a party that stands for law and order. And that mantle is waiting to be claimed.

25:57 And Democrats can claim it in part by defending the law and the Constitution as we are and as we should continue to. But we also have to claim it by being the party that upholds order that says, actually, I want to be able to go to CVS and not have to ask the clerk to unlock the shampoo case. So we are going to prosecute shoplifting. And, like, actually, you know, smoking weed outside on a public street isn't acceptable because it affects everybody else, people who may not want to be smelling secondhand smoke. These are things that too often get shrugged off as, like, quote, victimless crimes. They're not victimless crimes. The victim is social order, and Democrats need to stand tall for it. You know, I often think a hard thing in our politics that both parties need to do a better job at is painting Americans a better picture and a vision of what they intend to bring.

26:45 And I think you'll be able to buy shampoo off the shelves is not a bad vision. You know, a moment ago you brought up a big corporation, and I brought up Silicon Valley. So we've got an easy segue to the final thing I want to talk about. Can you guess what it is? Digital dopamine. Tell us what you mean by that. First, what's dopamine? I'm sure many of your listeners will know this, but worth just a brief. Dopamine's a neurotransmitter, and it was there in the first brains 500 million years ago. And those, you know, in the one-inch-long worms in the primal ocean had dopamine. And what dopamine does is basically it's reinforcement. When you expect something to be pleasurable, dopamine tells you to do more of it. It's an expectation system, expectation reinforcement reward system. And I think an increasingly big cultural fault line that we have right now is that the online realm is becoming the realm of digital dopamine.

27:38 The social media corporations, pornography, particularly online gambling for young men, is using bits of software to deliver bits of dopamine, cutting out the in-real-life effort, the sweat, the striving that I think creates meaning for people. And on the other side of this fault line is the real world, where we've got to build stuff. And the problem is, and I'm on the committee of jurisdiction over the tech companies, we have stacked a deck in favor of online dopamine hacking. It's easy to build an app and to just deliver those hits of dopamine. It is super hard to build a nuclear power plant. And so we wonder why younger Americans are drifting into this realm. And I think the answer is we've under-regulated the world of bits and we've over-regulated the world of atoms.

28:29 And so my op-ed is a call to action to basically say, enact some tough standards for these merchants and miners of dopamine, but then also, like, cut back the red tape and let us get stuff done in the real world again.

28:43 Because if we've got to build 5 million homes, if we've got to build five Hoover dams worth of nuclear power, we've got to build more ships in the Chinese Navy. If we want to start more small businesses in the rest of the world combined, like, everything can't take 15 years. So, I mean, what do you see as the appropriate regulations and steps? I can go through a bunch of them, but let me instead give a point of view on it. Yeah. The current point of view on the dopamine corporations is antitrust. So you just saw last week that Google, in court, was ordered to share its search engine data with competitors. I don't think that matters to the average American. I think antitrust is a 19th century law that has relevance for some traditional industries, but does not have relevance for industries with network effects that, by actually the standards of the Sherman Antitrust Act, are lowering prices and are delivering, you know, quote, superior services.

29:37 Like, it's a law that does not fit the actual business model of the digital universe. My approach is to say, let's just regulate the thing we actually care about. And the thing we actually care about is that, particularly in young people, their basal ganglia, their nucleus acumens, basically their dopamine reward system is highly sensitive. It is very susceptible to being rewired. This is true of all young people. It's just a feature of cognitive development. And we want to protect that. We don't think it's acceptable for whether it's social media, pornography, online gambling, et cetera, to hack young people's dopamine. And so we are going to investigate digital dopamine and regulate it the same way that you would any other biomedical intervention, a pharmaceutical. How much is safe?

30:23 What are the parameters around it? And then, say, the Consumer Product Safety Commission issues some standards and labels and guidelines that can inform adult use. Because we're not going to tell adults what they should do with their phone. It's up to adults. But actually restrict children's use.

30:39 That's, yeah, the framing of it as a drug is very interesting. It is. And then you have that same tension between what are you allowed to do to yourself versus, like, how do we, what's the appropriate role here? But at least there's precedent for that conversation. Yeah, I mean, listen, adults, I'm not going to, I don't think adults want to hear from their member of Congress about how they're going to use their phone. With some, you know, broad guidelines, right? But in general, I think adults are going to make their own decisions. I do think it's different, and this is true across many realms of society, it is different for the developing brain. Yeah. Where I think society has a compelling interest. And talking about dopamine as a drug is, it's not an approximation. It is what it is. I'll give you an example of this. Parkinson's patients.

31:18 Parkinson's is in many ways a disease where dopamine is a key element of what is malfunctioning. So Parkinson's patients are oftentimes given dopamine. And it's a very well understood side effect that these patients will develop compulsive gambling habits.

31:36 Because they've been given a drug that has rewired their reward system. And variable reward, otherwise known as gambling, right, or variable unpredictable reward triggers dopamine systems very effectively, which is why gambling has always been a problem across societies. And so we know that dopamine is doing this. We're seeing it. It is a medical treatment that is being regulated in another realm. But we're allowing, you know, whereas the FDA has to approve every single dopamine treatment that a Parkinson's patient gets, like Facebook is allowed to create AI chatbots for 12-year-olds that are feeding them their own dopamine and has their own internal documents that says they're allowed to have, quote, sensual conversations with adolescents. Why isn't that being regulated? How are you going to bring that up when I'm trying to close out this podcast, man?

32:23 Look, as always, you are packed to the gills with compelling literature and research and some pretty novel, a little edgy, savvy ideas. So we could spend hours with you, but your staff won't let us. So as we come to a close, what didn't I ask you that I should have? Classrooms and education, which I know is not on the thread of housing production and Yimbyism. But as you know, so much of the conversation about new housing is really a conversation about schools and people's anxiety about schools. And the hard truth that Democrats need to wrestle with is that the school closures were a catastrophe. They were much more common and much more prolonged in places governed by Democrats. This is not Monday morning quarterbacking.

33:09 My day one issue when I took office in 2020 was reopening the schools because it was apparent socially, epidemiologically, that they should be open. It took way too long. The effects are catastrophic.

33:20 12th graders are at their lowest level for reading since 1992. Of the 50 million American school students, probably about 25 million are behind on either reading or math. That's the bad news. The good news is we know what to do about it. One-on-one, high-dosage tutoring on a daily basis with professionals. And it's affordable. I'm seeing it in Massachusetts. We're going to surge it to 10,000 first graders in Massachusetts thanks to Governor Healy. And this needs to be part of our platform about how Democrats are not just about lowering costs. They're also about delivering excellence in the classrooms. And we should make these social media corporations pay for it. They're the ones that have been attention-fracking our children, especially during the pandemic. They will pay to deliver excellence and education for our kids. You know, one of the excitements of the abundance movement is seeing, I think, some of the themes of UMBism applied to other areas, right?

34:10 Housing, duh. Energy, duh. Transport, duh. You spoke very eloquently in our very first podcast about abundance in health care. And we will be doing more of that, I promise. But come back sometime and tell us about abundance in education. It is. That's exactly the right frame because it's one-on-one tutoring used to be a bespoke thing that the wealthy could afford for their children.

34:32 Because of a synthesis of high-speed Internet and new pedagogical tools, every single kid can have it. And, again, not academic. I've seen it in Fall River, Massachusetts. Every single kid can have high-quality one-on-one tutoring. We should have abundance of one-on-one tutoring. Which is not from Facebook's sensual bots. No, humans. Humans. Humans. Humans. It's about humans. All right. Speaking of humans, thank you, humans, for tuning in to Radio Abundance. I have been your host, Steve Boyle. And I am very grateful to Congressman Jake Akencloss for joining us yet again. Thank you for listening to Radio Abundance.com. Now it's time for you to join the movement. There's no time to lose. Head to yimbydemocrats.org slash join to sign up.

35:18 And make sure to follow us at radioabundance.substack.com. And thank you.