An Evening with Anand Giridharadas (Nov 2019)

please join me in welcoming uh none and Eric good evening classy room for this conversation last year's room I've ever spoken it really you speaking for the rooms this is very very clad this marble in this room classiest substance it's good we're gonna have fun so I thank you all for being here this is a remarkable and a little overwhelming thing so talk a little about people's Liberty but I think what today kind of came to personify in some ways was this this notion that we're living in a really interesting and at the same time generous time but also in a really an unequal time and this this can't these conversations that we're having up the street and then the conversations we're gonna have tonight it's just like let's let's dig into that a little bit and so the gentleman sitting here next to me Anand wrote this really brave bold troubling hopeful challenging book a third book but it's the book we're gonna talk about tonight and I think there was just we thought this was the right the right culmination for what the work we've been trying to do at people's everyday to sort of bring these topics to bear so we're gonna do them a little bit of a James Lipton thing so you were born in Cleveland so welcome welcome home I guess to Ohio every time the president is like go back to your country cleave I'm always like but the winters are so cold and clean why would you do that yeah so what was what was young on and like what was what was growing up in Cleveland like my mother said to me recently that she is so glad that I found the billionaires because before I went after them I would just kind of go after her so so that's what I was like you know like a like a tough like a tough kid who asked questions about why things were had you know the way they were why those rules were the rules and question my parents Authority so now I'm just doing it with billionaires and my mother profoundly relieved did-did-did you talk about like I guess how was money or power like was that a conversation growing up or was that how was that treated I guess I think in many ways I grew up with a very common immigrant family narrative that is a very limited narrative which is a narrative about we came to this country with nothing and then we made it work and there's an implied it wasn't explicit but there's an emeritus and implied like anybody could make it work right and that was the story of my family and a lot of families I knew that had that kind of different immigrant background and it a big part of my education has been as a writer as a journalist as a person has been realizing the falsity or the limitedness of that story and for me interestingly it was a reversal of my parents journey that that helped me see that more clearly I had never lived in India where they came from even though I was one of the original Cleveland Indians as my father as my father always called us I know that's how that's how he introduced us at like his office parties and I know it was tough it's amazing that I'm still here and but I'd never lived in it yet we'd visit it every now and then but you know the first thing I knew about India was that my parents had chosen to get out of it so that's not like a tourism brochure that's you know that's not a great advertisement like the two people you love the most thought I shouldn't stay here so that colored my impression of India as a child my idea of India also India helped that narrative a lot with the way it was frankly a hard place for most people and it's striking to be five or six years old and little children your age banging on the glass and Delhi and Bombay and something you just have not seen in that same abjectness in this country and it's it's a very jarring thing and for a whole set of complicated reasons I got some great advice once I want because a teenager want to become a journalist mentored by a journalist at the New York Times and I was in high school who said to me if you want to become a journalist go out into the world and like collide with the don'ts don't stick around New York and Washington trying to get internships and submit to freelance pieces a year like go far away and learn about things other people don't know places other people don't know and have something to say that you know other people don't and so I thought about where should I go and it slowly dawned on me that I should go to a place that I have this troubled relationship with India and it was the best decision ever made because uncomfortableness we're exploring tonight is a very fertile thing I didn't like that country but I was curious about that country that country is also you know made me and so I went there and I tell you this because if there was ever a society in history designed to shatter the narrative that people end up where they end up because of their for in hard work or lack of it it is India right you take the most right-wing libertarian person to India and you say really you think everybody here is in where they are in this situation because like all these people like all of these people except those five people all of them didn't work hard enough right in America the numbers are such that you can live that lie and live in the right suburb and sort of think it's true you're still wrong but it's possible to construct a life in America where you can live with the thought that everybody is where they are because of what they've done in India it is impossible to have that thought right there's and so it was such a an important I became a journalist there those are the stories I was telling and I was going into people's lives and reporting on their stories and it just helped me really see past that family narrative and it's been a consistent theme of my work ever since my first book had a lot to do with that my second book was about you know racial divide in America and had a lot to do with with that and the idea that this story that we make our fate is is so manifestly contradicted in more and more country when it's always been contradicted in this country but it's so it's it's becoming less and less true of us even as more and more of us cling to the story and in some ways I the path that led to this book was trying to ask what other stories we can tell to actually get achieve the kind of country in which more people are able to make their own faith so you bring up stories right I mean the book is a great collection of stories for those who haven't read it highly recommend it the first one I'll just jump into this I don't want we're not gonna have like the whole 50 minutes whatever it was be a book report so we're gonna like get some of the good stuff out of here and we can talk a little bit so the first story is about Hilary Cohen you tell me a blow about her like her tell us about her story yeah so just to step back a second you know the I think the question animating this book that's naughty that that but before I reported a rodent that just motivated me was why is it that we live in I'm sure it's true in this city and it's true all across this country why is it that we live in this time in which rich and powerful people are everywhere seemingly trying to change the world do good give back make a difference every rich person as a foundation foundations are the new Birkin bags you know there's no company doesn't have some tab on their website prominently community CSR living with health the worst the company you are right like if you're come if your business model is making people's lives shorter one way or another then you're gonna have a really community minded tab like the worst you are the better the tab young people on elite campuses like want to make a difference say they want to make a difference start social enterprises the finance industry right as mercenary and industry as exists now says you know we have to have impact investment funds double bottom lines triple bottom lines basically to summarize like everything bono is involved with you take all that stuff and you say how is it that all that stuff by all that group of people that that plutocratic class how come that coincides interestingly with an age in which that same plutocratic class has been grabbing more and more of a share of the wealth and power of this country that's kind of interesting like if they're so interested in generosity and sharing and opening up the country you'd think that their share of the nation's new income wouldn't be increasing over time it would be going to hell if they were so interested in some of these things that their foundations and impact funds talked about and the tote bags and whatever like maybe their share of the wealth in this country will be going down but it's going up if they were so interested in equality and justice maybe they would be for things like a wealth tax not doing what they're doing this week which is all of them having a massive pollute freaked out about a wealth tax and as of tonight Mike Bloomberg looks like he's now entering the presidential race to prevent an anti second Gilded Age candidate from winning and so I just became curious about like how do you explain all these generous deeds and the persistent reality that the same group of people is also rigging the system on a much grander scale than the do-gooding to make opportunity elusive for most people and and hoard the benefits of the future and and so to get to Hillary my answer to that question that I found through the reporting is you have a lot of fundamentally decent people at the top who are maintaining and upholding an indecent system and you have to come up with what's the bridge between decent people in an indecent system I I did not encounter in my in my reporting a lot of billionaires meeting in secret rooms trying to keep people poor that's actually not how it works they actually think they're helping that's what's so scary I I can assure you Mark Zuckerberg thinks he's making the world a better place that's what makes him so dangerous if he was cynical we'd be fine right if he if he knew that he just ran a predatory ad agency we could deal with him it's precisely the fact that he thinks he's saving us that in some certain inner way he may be decent I mean I use that in a certain way and that makes us so vulnerable to him and so what I became curious about is what is it that we are teaching decent people that allow them to fight to maintain such indecent structures what stories are we telling them because in every era right whether it's the era of slavery whether it's the era of feudalism whether it's a caste system in India in every era there is some story that people at the top tell themselves to justify the thing because most people can't tolerate the idea of being evil it's a lot to bear and so the story in our time that I tried to trace is the story of about the idea that it is possible for the winners of our age to seek to change the world make a difference give back in ways that do not threaten their wealth and power do not threaten this system and that it can somehow work that it is somehow possible to lift people up without affecting the lives of those standing on their necks which as a matter of physics as well as of sociology seems very dubious and so Hilary Cohen I didn't want to start the book of the billionaire I want to start the book with a person drafted into this culture who could have gone another way she was 21 or 22 and the time that I'm writing about her she was a senior at Georgetown she came from an upper-middle class background she like many young graduates on a campus like Georgetown wanted to make a difference wanted to change the world wanted to start a social enterprise wanted to give back wanted to work on racial equity blah blah blah blah blah right and she would say try every classmate of hers in her orbit had similar feelings very few people talked in that milieu of I want to be a banker and make a lot of money of course there are people who are gonna go on to do that but that's not how they talked right there was not the 80's culture even the people want to be bankers said they wanted to help Africa now people are in Africa are tired of being helped by people who want to be bankers in Georgetown but they thought they were helping and then something happened to her and she got slowly seduced on this campus through all kinds of things different clubs the campus recruiting the ideas of the culture more generally she got seduced into this notion that if she really wanted to change the world she should go into business and this culture is so ubiquitous on these campuses every campus I go to these students come up to me and say like please help us like the campus recruitment process they keep away from us anybody doing real change and they Jam in our faces JPMorgan and whatever else with their like cocktail parties for these college students and she got sucked into this thing and then there was some fellowship that like takes you to America's 20 biggest companies if you get into this thing there's no equivalent for legal aid or running for local office and so she gets drafted into this she works at Goldman Sachs and then McKinsey and she's immediately realized that she's made an enormous mistake and she's about to leave because she realizes that while they pitched her on the idea that if she took that job she would be helping Haiti and advising the Vatican turns out that's actually not the work she's about to leave and she gets a phone call from the only person in America maybe who could make her doubt her own doubts which is Barack Obama he's about to leave office he's thinking about setting up this foundation the goal so far at that point was to revitalize democracy rebalance it in favor of people make communities stronger and who did he hire to advise him on how to make democracy stronger but Mackenzie and Hilary's not asked to join this project and she thinks I think Barack Obama's getting seduced by the same fraudulent culture that I got seduced by on the other hand of course I'm gonna work with Barack Obama so she joins the thing she ended up leaving McKinsey for the foundation and doing other stuff later but it was an illustration the reason I started the book with it is she was a good and decent and socially concerned person she wasn't a plutocrat trying to protect billions of dollars and she got drafted into a culture that was a lie and she was lucky enough that she saw her way out of the lie but many people don't and I believe that lie the lie that you can kind of have your cake and eat it too that you can fight for justice in an age of plutocracy without ending plutocracy is the live behind so much so many of the facts of our age and the fact that we have this kind of president who is able to prey on a culture that is clearly having multiple organ failures if someone like him can get anywhere near that office okay no that's awesome and you just like now I have like two questions left because we weren't there no I know I think we're okay no the this notion of that the Mark Zuckerberg comment about how well he doesn't think he's doing bad but this difference like is this malevolence or is this just naivete or is this some or both you know Paulo Freire I had this line about there's a kind of he talked about this thing called aspirin practices which are like palliatives you give the public to just relieve the headache so they don't realize they have cancer a lot of what I mean a lot of what I'm writing about in the sense is aspirin practices and he had this he kind of addressed this question of like wait are you saying the aspirin practices are like evil are they like evil scheming to give the public aspirin or do they think they're helping the public they don't realize the public has cancer like and he and his answer was there's a spectrum from the naive to the shrewd so it brings together than I even the shrewd so I'll give you my version of that that I've seen in the reporting and I'll oversimplify a little bit I think you have both and sometimes it's mingled sometimes it's separate when I spend time on Wall Street interviewing people generally mics and this is actually thing I like about Wall Street although I don't like Wall Street a lot there's a straightforwardness there so on Wall Street a lot of the do-gooding is pretty clearly understood by themselves as being part of the business model and part of their continued dominance right like they create the financial crisis in 2008 like in order to be able to do that again and have impunity again they need to throw a certain amount of lubricant in the engine of taking and maintain their hated 'no sand a certain level and that women and girls shelter where that 10,000 women program the goldman sachs did never mind that it helped ten million women go bankrupt in the financial crisis but helped the 10,000 that's nice JPMorgan revitalizing cities on and on and on these things are just part of and they're often literally run out of the marketing departments of these banks so that's like super clear right it's just part of the business model it's part of the cost of doing predatory business I do not think that is the same story with someone like Bill Gates or Mark Zuckerberg who are very different themselves with both of them what they have in common is I think they both come from a place of idealism I do not think that in Silicon Valley most of the people I've encountered to do this world-changing stuff I actually don't think they're doing it to just make money and this is cosmetic do-gooding I think part of why they're actually way more dangerous than Wall Street is that they're like little private sector chairmen mouths like they want to remake the entire world according to their idea and I actually think although we do have financial crises every now and then like Wall Street is pretty thoroughly regulated and we have quite a few defenses not perfect we basically don't regulate Silicon Valley at all and I think the idealism the apparent idealism is a big part of why I think until very recently I mean the narrative has changed in the last year or two Zuckerberg was a kid in a hoodie who like didn't want to meet girls in person so he like invented an app girls didn't want to meet him in person either and and he was someone connecting the world he wasn't connecting the world right Bill Gates made the personal computer for everyone this and that now I think when you look at someone like Gates who's made a lot of money I think in that case this is not just like a cosmetic effort to cover over sins like I think Bill Gates is incredibly genuine about applying his intellect in the remaining years in the planet to solving his own biggest problems I still think there are enormous questions about how much power should one person have our public life in a democracy I've less of a concern for him doing public health work in countries that do not have the capacity democratically to solve those problems but when he gets into education in our country well I don't understand --tx plane to myself why he should have more than the one vote that he gets more than the one vote that all of you get and when you do get to push through something like Common Core you get way more than one vote obviously and so even when there's not like deep sin that you're trying to cover up there's a problem of power but with someone like Zuckerberg this is a guy who I mean there is there there are serious people who suggest we might not be living in the Trump era without Facebook having done what it did without having provided a platform for a Russian counterintelligence operation operation on this country that Facebook basically slow-walked any effort to thwart when regulators and journalists started digging into it they threatened them and pushed back against them and the idea that someone like that who in my view is one of the most dangerous people on the planet it's just walking around free while kids who you know once carry little marijuana around in my neighborhood of Brooklyn are now in jail is bizarre like I just think we should make one of those kids the CEO of Facebook and put Zuckerberg in jail actually we should just shut down Facebook I don't I don't think it's a viable company in a democracy anymore and what I'm curious about is how someone like Zuckerberg is able to you play this naive idealistic card to kind of lubricate this situation in which he continues to hold a monopoly hoard power compromised democracy itself and like live with total impunity in a country that he is completely selling out there's a bunch of questions in here monitor I boil it down to one there's this this attack on democracy it's like they're that democracy is kind of fighting with its hands behind back a little bit I feel like if you talk a little bit about this kind of like let's two-phase kind of like at a core operation on the rise of business and then the depression or holding down of government a little bit can like it seems like it's it's there's something related to a Zuckerberg ascendancy and the lack and sort of democracies an inability to deal with that yes so a lot of what I'm talking about is a lot of like the it's kind of like whoa capitalism whether that's like people claiming that their cupcake company is giving back or people claiming that the tote bag is giving back or bono claiming with the things bono claims TOMS shoes is gonna put shoes on other people's feet the impact front they're gonna just add a bottom line to the existing bottom line and suddenly poverty will be cured a lot of this is like the Business Roundtable this big umbrella group of America CEOs of biggest companies making a statement this summer that the purpose of a business is now to help society not just make money you know this is all woke capitalism and what what capitalism is is like voluntary virtue it's like my son claiming that he's going to clean up the living room and I think the way we got to woke capitalism the phase what capitalism to me is like trickle-down economics with a cherry on top and a lot of whipped cream it's a lot tastier seeming than trickle-down economics so phase one from the 70s onward was trickle-down economics right the straight up and it was appealing to a lot of people but it was like you know that first time you had tequila I mean it was like it's a pretty straight up ideology right so it's like government is bad business good taxes or bad regulations are bad anybody who gets public assistance is an enemy of the state on and on and on the Reagan thing the Thatcher thing now they process and there's an amazing book by Jane Mayer called dark money which you all should read it which tells the story of how this happened on the right it's sort of the right wing version of my book it's like five families on the right that really pushed this from the 70s then it obviously became a bigger movement but it was really like a small group of people who are like businesses threatened the students are protesting like we got a businesses have to grab political power and they did and they invented an ideology and they invented a culture and they succeeded it was really a remarkable cultural success the problem with this ideology is that it's very unkind and it's very ruthless and what starts to happen after a certain number of years is that the social costs of it start to rise so with government having less money people start to get hurt more in all kinds of ways and those hurts multiplied with there being less support for housing more people get evicted and that's a social problem that people are able to see with taxes being lower there's fewer libraries and that's a problem you start to see and so you know uninsured people go up all the visible things and so you can only go so far with this slash-and-burn thing and then there starts to be pressure to be kinder and what I described as phase two and what's really the heart of this book is the people the winners of this era who were the biggest beneficiaries of this wave of deregulation and and kind of the hegemony of business in American life the winners of it who were more on the left politically have felt they were but who were benefiting from this time who realized that yes inequality is bad getting unsustainable yes we need to work on issues of justice yes in a city like this or across the country there's racial equity problems that cannot be ignored anymore and these people with a lot of power a lot of wealth being listened to in Washington giving money having Foundation's decided to step up and they thought of themselves as not at all believing in trickle-down economic they thought they were answering the problem of it and what I'm describing is the way in which they decided to step up and the ways in which they decided to step up had one thing in common they were all predicated on the idea that none of this stepping up should threaten the system fundamentally that has allowed us this wealth and power so we can fix that we can fix this we can help those women and girls we can help that minority community but only in ways that do not touch this system so to be specific on every issue you care about in America today there is an abundance of elite LED fake change I would call it and then there's some real change on offer or maybe already happening and they're really different so if you take the issue of how do you empower women to play all of their roles in a society there's quite a bit of evidence from other countries that have done better at this about what you got to do there's that there's a playbook it's not some divine mystery certain basic policy things of in health care helped Universal child care helps is a bunch of just basic policy things that move the numbers for women playing all of their roles what's the problem with that stuff the real change super expensive super expensive right trillion-dollar money not billion-dollar money we have enough money to do it to be clear but it's expensive right rich people would absolute at stuff without rich people not falling into poverty but just maybe even having like one less home like we're talking about substantial and let's up let's not like people rich people in Norway or definitely less rich than rich people in America this is a this would be a change so what do we do the trickle-down economics would approach it be like well screw women you know let them fend for themselves the woke capitalists don't say that what they say is yes I am equally committed to this goal but I counter propose another approach let's call it lean in let's try to convince women cuz the author of that idea is of course a billionaire who despite being a woman would play way higher taxes if we actually empowered women so let's promote the idea that patriarchy is a posture problem if women just reclined at a different angle thousands of years of patriarchy would melt away that's fake change right and on every issue you go to education and you say in this country we have a system we have chosen to fund education in possibly the most barbaric way you could fund education which is by local property taxes so you say you're gonna get an education proportionate to how nice your parents home is which is like maybe the opposite of how you should fund education so we do that and there are people out there there's lawyers trying to fight cases to make that unconstitutional that's a 20-year game but that's the right approach so just that should not be legal right that is by the way racial segregation by backdoor means it's a legal form of racial segregation in this country but what would happen if we did that the real change way right every upper middle class and wealthy person in this country would lose their privileged access to a extra good public school and the tennis courts and the whole thing right so that's not appealing but again the trickle-down economics people would just say well you know fend for yourselves know the wool capitalists come and come I can say we hear you we need to make education more equitable so I'm gonna create one charter school for 200 minority kids in this community not in quite in this community like a little bit far from this community but like pretty close to this community and as Darren Walker who runs the Ford Foundation says in my book he's like you know and they like to go brag that they got three black boys into Yale and their work is done and so the role that the fake changed plays is serving as a substitute for real change it's not a gateway drug to real change it's not the first step to real change that's what often they say that's often what people will challenge me with well we just start with this charter school and then we get to equity no lean in the charter school all these different the totebag the environmental little nudge you do that prevents you for me to think about a carbon tax all of these things are forms of change that fundamentally changed nothing and I believe there are a whole bunch of people and that was part of what you were doing today out there in our communities who for a long time have been beating a different drum about different types of solutions who have not been listened to and the reason they're not being listened to is the phony religion that says that they're kind of changed which involves the redistribution of power is bad and that real change involves win wins and I kind of wanted to just slay the win/win theory of change and suggest that that other theory the less appealing theory to those in power is actually the only plausible theory if you think about it thank you [Applause] it's speaking of power because this is a book primarily about power and who has it who doesn't have it a lot of the solutions I don't think thank you for not putting a solutions chapter in there like how to solve social equity in six days and six ways or something like that we don't have that which is good well go back to that in a second but there are there is a sort of a bias that they a little bit that the the solutions that should be pursued are for public sector or government sort of government focused solutions and it and I'm trying to think of there's a bill out recently about how it keeps coming up and up and again about it just feels like government is like captured and corrupt as much as maybe the power in private sector is sometimes I mean it's not it quite as representational as it may or should be so why would we why should we how could we how do we trust in a potentially captured and corrupt government that's currently that's precisely the reason to go fix government and you don't fix government by working at Procter & Gamble no offense to the you know big giant company so like when your family is dysfunctional you don't join another family hopefully I mean you try to make your family better you try to heal what's broken you try to talk to people and and and the difference between government and a company is that it's totally fine if company's dire nor a place but that's what's supposed to happen in the market government is not like that government is a set of collective institutions we've built to take care of each other and you don't it is more like your family than it is like some restaurant that's you know you don't keep going to a restaurant service bad food out of loyalty but you do stick with your family when it serves bad food and so you know government is just the people who we most recently elected and while it's easy to despair in this moment like a lot is changing and has changed and continues to change but when most of our most talented capable people feel it's a more worthy life to go build apples in Silicon Valley but then run for office we have a problem when you know nobody who could do anything else would become a civil servant in Washington whereas 5060 years ago that was the most prestigious thing you could do we have a problem you get the government you were willing to fight for and too many of us just look down on that life and and the reality is on whatever issue you care about and to be very clear like I'm not suggesting that these glasses should be made by the government like in this country as in you know every country in the world maybe except North Korea the private sector will continue to do 99% of things and transaction in society like no European country there's no country in Europe in which that's not true all we are talking about is our the handful of our biggest shared problems that we are too powerless individually or even at a level of a city to deal with alone the the collapse of the American mobility structure is not a problem anybody in this room can fight alone it's not a problem actually the city could fight alone it's not a problem this state could fight alone it is a national emergency that can only be achieved and solved by marshalling the full powers of government at every level of the society and I do not think companies getting a little woke ER or paying people a little more or doing a community service day or whatever they come up with those t-shirts is is going to solve something like that I don't think we're gonna tote bagg our way out of that problem if you think about the unfinished work dealing with race in this country I just do not think there's enough money in rich people's pockets that throwing coins out of them is gonna solve it it is necessarily structural Democratic work and also we got to make another point there's ninety thousand distinct government entities in America okay and we keep using Donald Trump and Mitch McConnell as our reason for not solving problems they control two of those 90,000 now they control big ones but this is a very localized country and a lot of issues are actually very local and I'm gonna give you an example I live in New York City and and here's something shameful about New York City which thinks it is so woke so liberal 90 some percent of people vote for Democrats it's a little bit hard to explain why New York City is as or more unequal than Idaho right like we rule the roost in New York City we can pass whatever local labor ordinances pensions city tax we can pass whatever we want 90% Democrats Wow now there's an issue with the state but the states under Democratic control now - but it's kind of interesting that you get a 90 percent Democrats and it's kind of the same as a red state so it sort of makes us realize that blaming Republicans in the places where they hold power absolves us of the question of in every city in America where to give you one very tangible example the Fair Work Week I don't know if you have it here or don't have it here just making it unlawful for employers to change people's schedules around all the time cut hours I mean I've been in businesses where people are sent home at 1:00 p.m. even though their shift ended at 4:00 not paid for those extra three hours because there wasn't enough demand for the burgers that's very common labor practice in America I'm not sure that is legal in any country in Europe and it should not be legal here so this is an example of an issue you could pass a federal law about this but also any city in America can pass a law about this and some have it's called Fair Work Week now how do we explain the fact that all these super liberal cities I haven't really passed this either right are you gonna sit here gonna win Donald Trump for that this is something that in the regular lives of regular people is the bane of their exist a lot more people feel screwed over by their hours being shifted around then by the latest outrage from Trump not to minimize Trump but you but you want to talk about like what's making my life hard on Tuesday being sent home three hours early in tears and knowing that I'm gonna miss a bill by the end of the week because of that so and in these places where liberals run the joint no one is passing or how hard is it to pass a city ordinance it's not that hard right and instead you think you're gonna go start some apps so what I am suggesting is that we stop starting the apps and we come back home to our democracy when you see something that bothers you think of a solution that has the following four qualities its public its Democratic its institutional and its Universal which thank you you you have these cards on your your chairs so we're actually we're gonna keep talking a little bit but if you do have questions Jake and Megan and I think Claire maybe there are people walking around so we're gonna start collecting those and we'll just like pick one we'll just be the plutocrats and pick which ones we like best but we'll see how many of those we can get through there's so I don't know if I should admit this so last week I was at an event that was sponsored by Bloomberg philanthropies Aspen Institute and the Atlantic right in in DC it was it was remarkable the conspiracy theories real yeah it was Wow okay so this book has made me like I'm like in the matrix in the red like eaten up with the red pill now and I'm seeing everything and this is like thank you for yeah helping me of that but there's like this big billboard up for General Motors in the back it's like nope no no deaths no collisions no congestion no something as their corporate mottos there's things now like you caused all those things anyway okay so we're sitting there and it was there anything about paying people no talk about that so okay but the thing I was gonna get to so we're sitting there in this room and Dave Grohl is introduced right as Foo Fighters frontman and urban thought leader I think every single person on the stage was actually identified as an urban thought leader but I'm just like I'm curious like while we're collecting some questions like who gets to be or who decides who gets to be a thought leader and who is just a graduate of political philosophy or or you know just a random anonymous philosopher but so one of the chapters in the book is called the critic and the thought leader and one of the one of the mysteries one of the kind of things that I needed to try to figure out when I was trying to go back to the earlier thing think about how did decent people uphold an indecent system and believe they're doing good is it requires the help a big assist from faulty ideas right you need like there needs to be a body of ideas out there so that Sheryl Sandberg actually thinks lean in is a adequate response to patriarchy because I do not think she is sitting there thinking I'm gonna screw over all these women I think she absolutely thinks that this is the right thing there someone has to generate the things she's reading to come to that profoundly wrong conclusion and so I became interested in who's doing that intellectual production and the answer I found was a very interesting thing has happened if you want to make a life as a thinker these days a lot of the traditional sources of support for thinkers have really withered right so academia the rise of adjunct I'm just tenure-track positions are way down universities have less money and everybody's an adjunct making like 400 bucks for a semester right so that's just not economically but also in terms of tenure you just do not have the the cushion to like spend a life five years thinking about a hard question say whatever you want knowing you're not going to get fired etc it's a lot fewer people now have that pretension newspapers newsrooms are about half the size they were 10 or 15 years ago that's an enormous right and it's all the fad that got cut but the fad was also the people that doing longer range projects thinking harder thoughts investigating that's gone book advances you know but the publishing industry in general under the pressure of Amazon and others like many few people can get book deals nonfiction advances fiction advances down so in that world something else came on the scene as an alternate source of patron ID which is like that circuit of Aspen Davos Ted these places which offer an audience but in many of those particular spaces there's a unspoken or sometimes even spoken understanding that you can't say the stuff you would say otherwise if you want to speak on these stages and so people who are thinkers have a choice they can stay thinkers and maybe maybe make it some can make it but maybe not make it probably not make it or not make a living at it or they can become what I call thought leaders which is thinkers who don't threaten power right thinkers who just cut out any parts of their diagnosis and prescription that would hurt power right if you look at what a lot of the books in airport bookstores have in common there's a kind of missing power lens and a lot of them write human history is getting better and better this is the best time to be alive like Steven Pinker Jared Diamond these kind of dudes it's very duty duty thing and I write about a couple of thinkers in my book this books a lot about grappling and I read about a couple people who actually grapple with who were serious thinkers who were saying harsh things and then maybe just as an experiment set a slightly different thing that was less hostile I write about a feminist thinker who said give one talk that was less about patriarchy and more about how women can make power poses in the bathroom to be empowered she did not intend that as not talking about the other thing it was one piece of research in a very big body of research she did but the plutocratic world glommed wait so you're saying that if women just do exercise in the bathroom we're good like American Express all these companies like wait till we can just like we don't have to have more women or we don't to listen to them we can just have like bigger bathroom stalls where they can stretch out and get powerful and Amy navigator and she shared with me how she navigated that because on the one hand you want to be heard as a thinker on the other hand you don't want to be heard for something that's not what you believe and I think one of the challenges in our time and something where you can all do and as individual people because a lot of what I suggest is hard to do is individual people but in your lives you can also just support thinkers and artists and musicians and others who are actually challenging power structures and not keep gravitating to the same books and same pieces of art that are reinforcing power structures and and give support to the the thinkers and the critics and the and and the kind of people making plays that challenge challenge the way you see so I mean talk about getting heard this is your a couple years now you're obviously like talking about this thing do you think you're being and you're getting into the rooms are you think the people the right people are in those rooms to hear hear really what you're saying or if you think it's my definition of the right people is not the plutocrats I mean I want to end the plutocracy so the right people to me right on the plutocrats well you know they're going to hear the conversation to be sure but what I am trying to very simply do is suggest to most people who are not plutocrats which is basically everybody except the plutocrats that what's that line there's there's more of us and that that if we stop outsourcing the changing of the world to the people with the most to lose from change we might actually start changing some and when we put foxes in charge of hen protection you're just going to get fatter foxes and when you put people who would pay a disproportionate share of the cost of reform in charge of the reform commission what you're going to get is stasis and so my audience over the last year of going around the country talking about this book is above all anybody who wants to be part of using movements from below and and and acts of citizenship and organizing to build a countervailing power to plutocracy that is sufficient to end the second Gilded Age that said there have been more people from inside that world than I expected who are responsive to the argument that doesn't mean they agree with the argument right responsive I know won't say anything sorry well I mean I won't get into the content of our conversation because I was but I was you know after Bloomberg announced he was running I was so depressed by that I started messaging like Bloomberg's political guys like why is he do you know but we were talking like right before I went on stage I disagree with these people profoundly but I have found always found that important as a reporter to talk to everybody and so I've had interesting conversations over the last year with some people in that structure I think there is a small minority of people within the plutocracy who actually agree that something fundamental is wrong and needs to change maybe they agree with 30 percent of what I say instead of 2% like the rest of their friends I don't think they're going to be the ones to lead us there this is a whole book trying to explain why not but in every transition like this there's some role that people like that play as leakers first of all just actually leaking to journalists and others like how these things work that's actually a very important part of this as persuaders of their own tribe and I think you're starting to see when a certain number of billionaires actually advocate for not just income taxes which is a kind of old thing they did because they don't have any income but actually advocate for wealth taxes that's a pretty new phenomenon I think you're starting to see people say you know what we can't do this alone as companies and rich people you're gonna have to need government they're not going to be the leaders to the promised land but I think the the useful role some of the plutocrats play right now is rendering most of their fellow plutocrats ridiculous by comparison because they're revealing that no it is not true that we wouldn't have started this business if you took 2% of our wealth that's a lie that we tell and when they say that it makes all their other friends a joke and that's a useful role but the only truly thing the only true thing that is going to change what we're talking about tonight is cross racial working-class based political coalition's of people that don't have 51% of the vote but that have 70 percent of support out there to threaten anybody who doesn't who prefers to defend plutocrats over them so we have this huge stack of questions so I hope you get out of the room because there's gonna be a lot of people asking questions I'm just gonna start I'm assuming these are in rank order of some sort no no these are just like random questions I get to pick this is awesome just while I'm sorting through these what am I what's this okay here's a real cheese everybody's like what oh okay so just like how do you how do you prevent the burnout from the phew her trying to make some change like it's like if there's more people that need to do this and you were talking about that there's people who've been trying to make change for a long time how did we like keep that momentum how do we like keep people from burning out it's interesting I was reading some of the other day that talked about how people who do you know that kind of real change community change or organizing it's both more draining and exhausting but also more exhilarating and life-giving then a cupcake company that gives 5% back while also selling sugary products the kids that it's trying to help and I think there's a lot of truth to that but I but I don't think there's an easy answer to this like I think what I'm suggesting is a much harder way to change the world I think working at Facebook and having a nice living and telling yourself that you're you know part of some like racial equity program that it does on the side in Oakland is like really comfortable it's not real it doesn't help people and unfortunately you're just increasing the odds of people in Oakland have to live under Donald Trump but you can at least tell yourself you're helping kids in Oakland and if you actually want to get involved in real political change it's like a it's a tougher life I think we're gonna be honest with people about that it's not like everybody has to run for office or everybody has to like knock on doors ten hours a day but I do think there's a general emphasis of a society in in any given age towards the private or the public and in some ways all I'm suggesting imagine a person standing on two feet you can put your weight on one foot of the other foot I think the weight shifts in history between the public and the private in the mid 20th century there's just much more public emphasis in the society what people talked about what people wanted to do when they graduated from college what was rewarded socially and that emphasis has shifted so radically to the other foot that the only things we respect our private sector endeavors and I think what I'm advocating for is a return of the weight to the other foot all this stuff can-can in you but it's got to continue within a framework of much stronger public institutions and you know we don't need woke capitalism I think we need a yoke around capitalism all right this this is like overwhelming I feel like we did like just throw them up in the air and like just pick one okay so what the books been out for two years right is there something a year okay and now in paperback a thing congratulations um is is there something that's like would you put is there something that should have been in there now two years out or year-and-a-half out or maybe the flip side is there stuff that you put in there you're like that problem I probably shouldn't put that in there um no I don't think has anything in there that I shouldn't I mean I think there's always like things you wish you know you could have put in there I mean this book you know do you any any book I mean this book's what up probably a hundred thousand words you probably write five or six hundred thousand words to get this man 100 thousand all the false starts cut chapters I mean there's there's one chapter in this book that's I went on a cruise ship with 3,000 world-changing entrepreneurs so that you don't have to and and there were actually three they were so ridiculous that I actually had three chapters about them and I really felt it merited the full three chapter I mean it was a lot it was like three chapters out of ten about one weekend on a cruise but I was like these people are ridiculous they embody the whole thing and then I was like that's that's yeah it's too many chapters so a lot of you you know there's some deleted chapters you know I I do feel I don't think I could have done it in this book and it's not the kind of book I want to write but I do think there is a missing book someone else should write that this book makes people want to feel they had which someone else here tonight should take up which is a like okay how do I make the other kind of change book now that's not my it's not what I do like I mean I write narrative nonfiction I read stories about people in these larger forces it's not there's a million people who do that better than me but I think there is a lost literacy around change-making that is a consequence of the age of markets while we've been telling this story about like business heroism we haven't been telling young people in particular other stories and you have some amazing protest movements out there but you frankly don't have enough of them and the fact that Donald Trump has actually not resulted in the full shutdown of life in this country even one time I was good at that was a question that that did come up I on and not see it in my yellow vest we don't see like the scale of Hong Kong things like this in just three not to minimize the situation of a Hong Kong like the Chinese state is a very serious thing and but like that started because of an extradition law Santiago it's like four cents on everybody not added up everybody you know but like most people in this room probably think we are under the trump presidency like a couple drinks away from maybe losing the country now the fact that so many people can feel that and we haven't had one day where the whole country or large parts of the country looks like Hong Kong is mystifying to me I go to campuses all the time I don't nothing is burning nothing is being occupied you know like black lives matter is the only truly successful protest movement in our time that has the women's March was great it was so short and they've been occasional repeats I'm talking about like I'm talking about why is it possible to go to work in America every day of the year and not have the streets completely blocked if we really feel about this president what we all say we feel about him and I don't know the answer but it's very distressing and not to minimize something like Vietnam which is a different kind of thing where you have so many people dying and people's friends dying and family members dying that is as grave as it gets but I actually think a smaller fraction of people in that era felt that the country about to be lost itself and yet everything was affected by it and a wonderful book by a wonderful writer Jia Tolentino this great new book trick mirror she talks about this she says you know that we have been lulled into kind of thinking that clicking is the same thing as joining but clicking is actually not joining and when we are online feeling civically active and she details how these platforms are built to make you feel civically active when you swipe your index finger on them for 20 minutes what you are actually doing is donating your attention the most precious thing you own for free to a for-profit advertising company that is a monopoly a surveillance oriented monopoly that is fueling polarization and the underlying conditions that allow Trump to be possible but you are simp you're getting a simulated sensation of being civically active you often feel I feels all the time I feel like a couple minutes on Twitter like I've done my bit as a citizen and it's literally the opposite and then we're not joining things we're not being part of membership organizations and you know like the people in the civil rights movement actually knew each other IRL they were actually friends they were actually had like offline network I mean obviously offline because they didn't have online and I think we've just forgotten that heritage and need to really reclaim the idea of IRL joining so this is I've been sort of looking for this for a while people who know me know and I've been reading and watching a lot of stuff I guess you even have the badge I even have a little pollutes gonna pollute but I learned how to make a button a little button maker it was awesome I have a couple extras here anyway we did a picture that button a little while ago saying the first look exclusive first look at the Michael Bloomberg presidential campaign badge please get up loose okay so I'm last question because we unfortunately we need to move I don't know why I don't know if I would stay here all night probably so the biggest fear if we don't get this right or we don't make this change I'll tell you the biggest fear what's the biggest opportunity because here the biggest hope was to the fear first I think the I think the age of capital which I would define as a kind of roughly forty year period that we've been in since 1980 or so I think it's on its last legs I mean it could have another two years another ten years it could have another 20 years but I think fundamentally so much of what you're seeing what you're seeing frankly on the right Donald Trump was not a classic neoliberal candidate he became a very neoliberal president but he'd ran against financial capitalism also which tell you something about the state of people's relationship to the economy and then the Democratic side too at the top three are not neil liberals so and a centrist like peabody judge says we got to end the era of neoliberalism even though he wouldn't like that tells you how far the consensus is shifting so I I would view the age of capital as doomed I think what we are in a race for is like what's the next era and I think there's two big contenders the good one is the age of reform which is what I'm advocating for and even it's exactly like what we do under years ago the Progressive Era the New Deal but better but more inclusive and building common institutions that solve these problems at the root for everybody the age of reform is competing with a second replacement possibility which is the politics of blood and soil and you got to remember we are lucky that Donald Trump is an idiot there is there's many people out there waiting in the wings tucker carlson is a good example who are literate people smart people with the same philosophy we've forgotten how lucky we've gotten the Donald Trump barely can read I'm actually see this I heard this from someone is a very close friend of his says this guy actually can't read a full page of paper and so his ability to deliver on his evil agenda is limited but next time around you could get someone with Barack Obama's oratorical talents Young may be handsome and this set of ideas and then we're in trouble in a way that's even deeper than this and so there's a race between the age of reform and blood and soil 2.0 and so to me the fear is that you get a bloomberg in the race someone seems decent enough and you just keep running out the age of capital so that people get so angry so polarized lose so much faith in the country there's a sense of scarcity that leads to the racial resentment that fuels the Trump movement that the blood and soil future wins and that's a very real possibility right now the hope is I see a turning in our conversation in this country I have been having a version of this conversation in every part of this country for the last year and I have a lot of data from just talking to people and I think a lot of the fantasies of the last two decades are no longer believed by people I cover Bernie Sanders for a Time magazine cover piece and I was there with in April than the pieces in June and I saw all these guys who you just look at them physically like beefy older white guys in the Midwest who do not look like they would be attracted to a Jewish Socialist from Vermont but were there I was like why are you here do you like socialism nah don't like socialism the Socialists but they have been so shafted by all the stories that we've been telling that they're open to new possibilities and new stories and what gives me hope is that a hundred years ago in the first Gilded Age we were in a situation quite like this new technologies amazing innovation great new fortunes but many many people left behind most people left behind vast and widening inequalities and a bunch of problems that couldn't be solved by people working a little bit harder or communities being a little more generous and we ended that Gilded Age we came together and we did things like getting those children and their little fingers out of the factories and granting women's suffrage and then women organizing now that they had suffrage to pass any number of Progressive Era and New Deal era legislative things were protecting workers unions all of that not having antifreeze in medicine which used to be okay until we created the FDA because there was antifreeze in medicine and that was considered normal it's not tasty and so we did this before we can do it again we have been told a false story about how you make change but we know how you make change in this country and no change worth making is made the way they tell us it is made from below it is made through movements and is made through democracy and it's time we came home as a result of this I think every time I hear win-win every time I hear thought-leader my ears perk up and I winced a little bit this is this conversation your materials have have changed the way I sort of approach my work as a funder flight there poit working for a foundation that role of philanthropy in this are it just it's it's changed my worldview so I thank you for that it also makes me want to wrestle back who's a thought leader again so it also one other thing I guess it does also make me question when people come up with a solution that you say that that it's to make change without changing power and so I thank you all for being here I hope you'll join me in thanking I don't gear to desk [Applause] [Music]

Channel: Urban Consulate

Views: 23,883

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Id: QBSYwct-ROk

Length: 69min 7sec (4147 seconds)

Published: Wed Dec 04 2019