Hundreds of totebag-toting San Franciscans swarmed the Sydney Goldstein Theater Wednesday night to think deeply about housing policy, deregulation, broadband internet provisions, and … just kidding, they were there to thirst after Ezra Klein.

“I loooove Ezra,” gushed house manager Dana Dawson of the 40-year-old New York Times journalist, whose weekly opinion podcast has earned him a devoted, almost ravenous following among highly educated, centrist Democrats. The California native returned to his former home this week for two sold-out City Arts shows to promote his and co-author Derek Thompson’s new book “Abundance,” which is being billed as a solution to the Democratic malaise that settled in after Donald Trump’s second victory.

It was an especially special event for Dawson, who is usually an usher but was bumped up to house manager for the night because her colleague was on vacation. “It was my big thrill,” she said of greeting Klein and Thompson as they entered earlier that evening. “He’s only 40 years old, and he can take in twice as much as most people,” she said of Klein, whose podcast she listens to weekly. “I feel like he does the work for me.”

It was a sentiment shared by many in the crowd of college professors, policy experts, and tech workers who tittered excitedly in the lobby and picked up copies of “Abundance” included in the $90 to $100 orchestra seats. Few displayed much knowledge about the larger concept of abundance — namely, the idea that governmental overregulation is holding back societal progress — and fewer still were familiar with Thompson, a podcaster and longtime writer for the Atlantic, whom one attendee mistakenly referred to as “Drew.” But Klein’s podcast makes them feel at home, like something in the world makes sense, even for just a tightly edited hour-and-a-half each week. 

“With all of the noise coming from everyone else, it’s kind of a balm for the mind,” said one middle-aged woman, who asked not to be named. “You don’t feel so alone and bombarded.”

True, but did she also think he was hot? Her friend interjected immediately: “Yes!” A man behind them laughed, but eventually conceded: “He’s a good-looking guy.”

Klein, who started his career as a political blogger at just 18 before being scooped up by the Washington Post and then co-founding the popular explanatory journalism site Vox, reached new levels of celebrity last year when his podcast became central in driving Joe Biden off the Democratic ticket. Far from turning on the journalist after Trump emerged victorious, Democrats have embraced Klein’s thoughtful questioning and slow, measured analyses as a safe harbor in politically turbulent waters. 

It didn’t hurt that Klein also had what New York Magazine referred to as “a bit of a glow-up,” sporting a “salt-and-pepper beard and David Beckham–esque haircut.” His new book tour, which includes stops in New York, Los Angeles, Seattle, and Chicago, seems poised to raise his stature as a public intellectual to Gladwellian levels — a policy wonk who can fill auditoriums not just for his ideas, but for his persona.

All too aware of this sentiment, Manny Yekutiel, a San Francisco social ringleader and host of Wednesday’s festivities, introduced Klein and Thompson as “the two most attractive men in Democratic politics — other than me.” (Yekutiel later visibly blushed when Klein called him “an incredible specimen.”)

But despite the bawdy intros, what followed was an incredibly wonkish discussion of Biden’s infrastructure bill, building policies in Austin, Texas, and why California hasn’t gotten its high-speed railroad. Perched on red velvet chairs in front of an array of potted plants supplied by Yekutiel’s eponymous bookshop-slash-event-space, Klein and Thompson did their best to make the case to a liberal audience for why reducing regulations is a good thing — and apparently succeeding. (Thompson even received a round of applause for declaring that, if a red state’s policy works well, “just adopt the policy and don’t worry if it makes you a Republican.”)

The hosts did the requisite amount of Trump bashing, at one point decrying the “incompetence and maliciousness at the center of this whole organization.” But they saved some of their harshest critiques for liberal Democrats. Klein got some of the loudest applause of the night for an extended riff in which he pretended to be a NIMBY, saying mockingly: “I’m not against housing. I would’ve voted for Obama a third time.”

Though a few guests filtered out during the audience Q&A, which featured questions on such riveting subjects as semiconductor manufacturing and the cancellation of federal grants to Columbia University, most stayed firmly seated until the end of the 90-minute event, when about half the room rose from their seats for a standing ovation.

Afterward, the line for book signings stretched out the theater doors and all the way to the back of the parking lot. Attendees gabbed about how to implement abundance at home and whether the conversation had sufficiently tackled the problem of whiteness, despite the hour stretching past 9 o’clock — “midnight for San Francisco,” as Yekutiel called it.

Waiting in line was perhaps the one pure Thompson fan, David Flasterstein, a data scientist for nonprofits who said he’d been following the journalist since his original essay on abundance in 2022. “I wanted something hopeful in politics about what are the new directions our country is gonna go in? What are the new things we’re gonna be building?” Flasterstein said. But even he had started listening to Klein’s podcast lately. “He has a very soothing voice,” he said.

Lingering at the end of the book-signing line was a couple who were religious listeners of the podcast and who were eager for a “rallying cry for what a better model of liberal politics can look like.”

But they were also there for another reason: to determine if the man they’d served a mezcal Negroni to at Burning Man years earlier was, as they suspected, actually Klein. “We were like, this is the most exciting moment ever,” the young woman said eagerly. “Now we have an excuse to ask him a question.”

As the line dwindled to nearly nothing and fans waited outside the doorway for their Uber home, the couple approached the table and made the most of their few seconds in Klein’s presence. Leaving the table a minute later, they turned and flashed a thumbs-up. It was him.