What if America's housing crisis needs more than just rezoning existing cities? Congressman Jake Auchincloss (MA-04) joins us to make the case for building entirely new cities from scratch. We dive deep into the practical details: site selection, tax increment financing, transit connectivity, and the politics of making it happen. Plus, Jake explains why he prefers talking about "cost disease" over "abundance," discusses autonomous vehicles and walkable communities, and warns about the d...

If you want better senators in 2032, start by electing better city councilors in 2026. Amanda Litman (Run for Something) joins Everybody Gets Pie to lay out a practical path to a deeper Democratic bench, why renters should run, and how local reforms can make elections more competitive. What we cover: • Why competitive districts have declined and incumbency has hardened • How proportional representation and ranked choice voting can improve representation • The $50M Battle Up plan to recruit G...

In this episode of Everybody Gets Pie, we sit down with Laura Friedman (D-CA-30), whose unique journey took her from producing Hollywood films to shaping housing, transit, and climate policy in Washington. We dive deep into her “abundance agenda,” exploring how streamlining federal approvals, cutting outdated red tape and rethinking land use can unlock affordable housing and smarter growth for communities. Highlights include: How Laura’s background in storytelling and architecture led her int...

Everyone agrees we need to build clean energy — fast. Solar, wind, transmission lines, geothermal. But when Congress tried to speed things up, even environmentalists split. The fight over permitting reform revealed something deeper: a clash between those who want to build faster and those who want to build perfectly. In this episode of Everybody Gets Pie, we dig into why speeding up clean energy has become so hard and why even people who agree on the goal can’t agree on how to get there. We t...

Voters consistently rank inflation, cost of living, and the economy as their top concerns—and they trust Republicans more on every one of them. In this episode, Senator Ruben Gallego explains why Democrats are losing ground on economic trust and how they can win it back. We dive into housing costs, the childcare crunch, skyrocketing energy bills, and why permitting reform could be key to lowering prices. The conversation also covers manufactured housing, the federal role in unlocking supply, ...

Democrats aren’t just up against Republicans—they’re wrestling with their own identity. From climate activists protesting Matthew Yglesias over fracking, to internal fights about whether to go big on cultural issues or focus narrowly on economic growth, the left feels more fractured than ever. In this episode of Everybody Gets Pie, Justine Underhill, Burhan Azeem, and Armand Domalewski sit down with Matt Yglesias—author of the Slow Boring newsletter and the “Common Sense Democrat Manifesto”—t...

For decades, the California Environmental Quality Act (CEQA) was untouchable. Originally passed to protect the environment, CEQA evolved into a sprawling law that let almost anyone sue to block nearly any project, not just oil refineries, but also student housing, food banks, daycare centers, bike lanes, and even high-speed rail. Reform was considered politically impossible. Then, in the final hours of June 2025, that changed. Governor Gavin Newsom called it “the most consequential housing re...