Anand Giridharadas with Teddy Schleifer | JCCSF

sisqó hey guys how are you how many did everyone go again how many you guys have read and on the book show of hands do honors Cory's give a full disclosure we actually can't see you so that didn't really work some hands up some hands down you only think I'm Barry I'm sure you practice this you want to give a very quick like two-minute version of for people who have not read the book of your central argument yes two things are pretty undeniably true about America today we live in a golden age of the richest and most powerful people in this country bending over backwards to change the world give money back philanthropy but not just philanthropy inventing all kinds of new modalities of elite do-gooding impact investing which is finance people caring for the people they also screw social enterprise which is businesses that also help Society here in Silicon Valley businesses that just claim to be intrinsically humanitarian in their pursuit of profit you know it's a monopoly that saves lives and and basically all the stuff that Bono is involved with and and the second undeniably true thing is that that same class of people in some cases the same people but certainly the same class of people the same structure and network of people is has been engaged in the last generation and and and to this day in monopolizing progress itself in this country the same class of people has been pushing for public policies that protect its own wealth and power that ensure that more money goes to corporate earnings than to wages more money goes to corporate earnings than to taxes and so I started to become curious about what the relationship was between an age of extraordinary elite generosity which is real on which I do not deny and an age of extraordinary elite hoarding which they can't deny and the question is what's the link and I think the conventional wisdom out there was the link is a drop in the bucket the link is the hoarding is real the inequality is real it's a problem but they're on the case will do more if only there were 10 Mark Zuckerberg not one if only I know scary right how much social awkwardness could could one world bear and like we're all paying the price for him just trying to meet girls in a more easy way and it's amazing like someone should have just introduced him to someone this Donald Trump wouldn't be President if he'd just like met someone and I know this is San Francisco this happened all my events in San Francisco - shout-out to all the people who work at Facebook and the Chan Zuckerberg initiative you're welcome here and I appreciate all the leaks you give me at these events and on Twitter so thank you I felt that the relationship I suspected the relationship was actually not the drop in the bucket relationship that the helping was not on its way to addressing the hoarding that in fact the helping the extraordinary helping was part of how we uphold a system of extraordinary elite hoarding that the making a difference which is real was a wingman of making a killing on a much bigger scale that the changing the world was a wingman of making sure that their world actually didn't change and that the doing more good was the wingman of protecting their right on a much grander canvas to do harm and although I am very opinionated now I approach this as a reporter the way you are and reported this out and the last thing I'll say is most people for a lot of obvious reasons when they're writing about inequality write about poor people right if you think about the best books ever about inequality they actually just about poor people and there's a reason because poor people are very nice to reporters poor people generally want to be witnessed want their lives to be seen because there's a hope that visibility might lead to some kind of change and rich people do not want anything to change they don't want visibility and generally don't let you in and I thought but you know writing about inequality by interviewing poor people is like writing about the architecture of this building by interviewing like some guy in the front row you don't know anything about the architecture here's a guy in the front row poor people did not invent the world that made them poor and so I thought it might be interesting to actually interview the plutocrats and the people around the plutocrats in that network about plutocracy and how it maintains itself and so I went into their world for a few years and we're say call is the is the result and this is I think often kind of mischaracterizes it book about philanthropy this is you're really making a political rant our book is premise on the idea that philanthropy is not enough so therefore you're not necessarily just critiquing philanthropy as insufficient like the the obvious conclusion of your book is politics is screwed up right in addition to being staged friends we're gonna be good friends because now that you deep that like I it's so interesting in the in the and I get like shorthand is useful but like in the public eye it's like the philanthropy book right and there's one or two chapters about philanthropy and then six or seven I've forgotten it's been a little time but do you think you could you can you could agree with you on the philanthropy and not agree with you on the political point in terms of the conclusion of what you should do if philanthropy is insufficient like is there a world or if you have you encountered sources or people out there and events like these you say you know I totally agree with you that philanthropy is insufficient vehicle for social change but I disagree with you on the solution and you think it's goal legitimate point or is that not make sure but what I'm describing and there's a reason you know there's a reason this book doesn't have a ten-point plan in the end first of all no good book has ever had a ten good ten point plan at the end I once said that an event and then found out that my host at the event had just published a book with a ten point plan at the end and I continue to stand by my statement and but look I think philanthropy is a very flashy and prominent example of what I am trying to show is a much broader thing so I use this I coined this term for the book called market world one word capital m capital W and market world is a network of people the people I'm writing about in the book it includes like billionaires but it also includes a 22 year old graduate at Stanford with a lot of debt who's deciding what to do with her life and whether to run for City Council or go work at Facebook and chooses to go work at Facebook that moment she becomes part of market world to market world is a group of people who are among the winners of our age who have two things in common a they are sincere about what they understand we live in an age of inequality they're pissed about it and they want do something about it okay so they're not Koch brothers they actually want to reduce right these are people who are genuinely at least think they're doing the right yes and I would say most of them vote for Democrats and most of them I said about Jamie Dimon yesterday in Seattle and like I think Jamie Dimon genuinely believes that he's not a slightly handsomer third Koch brother I think he believes this I genuinely think he believes this and so that's the first thing that income the second thing they have in common is when they pursue the betterment of the world according to their desire to increase justice and equality whatever they pursue it in ways that do not change the things that are allowing them to be on the top of the heap and so if you believe and in some ways the book is a long brief trying to make this case that a lot of the reason that maybe most Americans are stuck at the bottom in our time is not that they you know fell of their own accord or tripped but that there's some people standing on them there's no logical way to talk about lifting them up without making people cease and desist from standing on them and they stand on them through how they pay people or don't they stand on them in this city by making them contractors instead of employees which they actually are they stand on them by lobbying for public policies that benefit them create kind of bottleservice public policy that is at the expense of 99% of people and then having defrauded the society starved the government of resources defanged regulation they turn around look at the scene and say what a shame all these festering social problems government's not doing it well this country has been very good to me allow me to step in and chip in and in that moment when we allow that when we receive the check when we put their name on the wall we are part of the loop that allows the arsonists to reinvent themselves as firefighters so you see your fundamental solution if you if we if you skip forward a couple of a couple steps in the process philanthropy insufficient people are using this to whitewash reputations problems are real which you know dispute the fundamental solution is we need higher taxes more government spending to solve the problems that a democratic way in the same sort of generous way but the argument making at the end of the at the end of the day is for a more you know liberal you know in u.s. context higher taxes higher social spending yes but let's be very clear about this because it's very important that we not be gas lit by the plutocrats into thinking that that agenda is radical okay like I don't think Bernie Sanders has proposed the nationalization of a single enterprise in this country right so and he's the furthest out person in the in in in our national politics like what we are really talking about in the most extreme version of what I suggest ninety-nine percent of activity in this society will remain private activity I don't want my iPhone made by the government even though a lot of the underlying technology was enabled by the government I appreciate that I don't want the airplane I'm taking tonight to be flown by the government like there's a whole bunch of things that our private will remain private private transactions are going to be and by the way are dominant in like Norway also what we are talking about what I'm talking about is the biggest shared problems we have that are by their nature not solvable through markets and individual exchange that is not most things but dealing with the racial wealth gap and the larger legacy of slavery and segregation and Jim Crow is not a problem by rich people throwing coins what happened what happens in a world where I understand the ideal scenario is to have a more expansive government vision what happens in a world like today where you know let's let's let's put yourself and you know you're 2019 you know it's October 29th there's I'm trying to imagine there's currently a Republican there's currently a Republican president obviously there will be future Republican presidents there'll be future times when there's more government services less government services you know you know in a world where I understand the argument is we need to make sure that we have more a broader impact provided by the government but sometimes that's not going to happen right sometimes there will be conservative politicians Republican presidents what's the role philanthropy then because then you have a situation where the options either fight like hell for a Democratic president and for a liberal government or philanthropists don't do anything in the meantime what do you what should people do if if the given state is at a particular time we're in a Republican or conservative administration it's a good question so a couple things I want to be very clear that I think as your question indicates I think a more just America would have fewer billionaires would have if any we could even just try to not having billionaires for a little while through better tax policies and let's try that and we can go back to a billionaires if we feel like we're really missing something but I have a feeling the city might get a little more fun if there were fewer billionaires in it and yeah you know like how many of those like vests can we see these got like Bros with their vests and this is like and and yet you're right that we're not going to get to the world I'm talking about now and there may be periods of history where we don't and I do think in those periods and right now there's a role for philanthropy and I'll spell out what I think that is if you are persuaded by what I'm saying that that we live in a system fundamentally that is allowing the benefits of the future to be cornered by too few people and you're persuaded that that's a problem and we're not in a moment where government's going to solve that you can do philanthropy that would tend towards ending the bad system and hastening the advent of the next system or you can do philanthropy that is actually lubricating the bad system and giving it another week another year of life right and I'll give you a couple examples of each so if you take the issue of feminism and how do we another another great example of a collective shared problem that we can't ask people to solve on their own okay how do you dismantle the structures of patriarchy yeah even power women to play all the roles women need to play them want to play there is a lot of money chasing fake change in that area most prominently you got Sheryl Sandberg trying to convince women while selling women out to a misogynist president because she doesn't want the growth of her company to be interfered with trying to convince women that thousands of years of patriarchy is a problem of recline women were leaning at the wrong angle if women were to correct their angle of lien men would would completely respect them and there would be no issues no more groping no more talking over and meanwhile and those kind of initiatives get a lot of money get a lot of support leaned in circles got a lot of media Good Morning America the whole nine yards there's meanwhile like a bunch of feminist organizations trying to organize for universal daycare to cite one policy example of something that has been shown in actual countries to actually empower women but what's the problem with that Oh unlike Sheryl Sandberg's thing which action just makes Sheryl Sandberg richer the second thing would make Sheryl Sandberg and everybody liked Sheryl Sandberg poorer to do that universal they could be incredibly expensive it's the right thing to do incredibly expensive and so I just did a deep dive on one of them but on every issue education right we do charter schools what happens we can fundamentally preserve an architecture in which your kids still get to go to better white schools and everybody else's kids and we don't change that architecture but we create one black school in your town that's a charter school and you can mentor as Darren Walker from the Ford Foundation says in my book you can tell all your friends you got three black boys into Yale and you put your name on it and it's great and nothing's changed or you could do the kind of philanthropy where you're funding the lawyers and they are out there who are actually fighting court cases to make it unconstitutional it's going to take 20 years to do this to fund public education by local property taxes which is barbaric and unconscionable and also the way we do it so it's very interesting so some philanthropy you see as less toxic I think there is greater to your class philanthropy right and there is class protection philanthropy right and most of what I see out there is class protection philanthropy what do you what the idea of in a conservative administration or in a period of when philanthropy is needed what do you want the idea of people who have a conscience and believe in our society giving a lot of money to political causes and what on the one hand that theoretically that you know political giving a ton of money to a democratic super fact which is gonna spend a fortune to increase increase taxes put in government that's gonna be more just theoretically on the one hand that is class trader philanthropy on the other hand that would raise a ton of concerns about it's very complicated and I read about a book called one of with one of my characters wrestles with this so so there's two sides of this first of all whether it's political donations or even within philanthropic giving there is a case for counter majoritarian giving in other words and that's particularly true when you're like this one so generally I want things to be done by the democracy which is the point we're making something like a universal daycare right but there are things where democracies are intolerant and hateful right and right now it's not really a majority but we're being governed by that kind of thing and so should is helping kids on the border a good use of philanthropy when the government is not only failing and do that but is validly on the other side of that issue yes right even even though that what it that is a democratic mega donors influence correct spread but to me it is it is more justified better too bad off by the fact that it's a counter pressure however there's again still a way to do it there are some ways to do that and we see this by the way there's some ways to work on the border that it's all about the billionaires swagger and ideas and doesn't actually involve local communities and and there's other ways to structure that same thing where people actually work through civic processes right so if you are doing something where you are like running programs that is very different than if you're doing something if you're like training people from a particular community to run for office even if the total dollar amount is the same yes even if we're not what you're basically working through a democratic process part of the problem with philanthropy is that it's a in some ways a uniquely unaccountable form of power right so if you're if you're political power that's a lot of power but you have elections right and the most powerful person in politics can be gone pretty soon right if you're in business the market is a somewhat ruthless not if you have a Silicon Valley monopoly but like the market imposes a certain kind of discipline and if you're sounding something that nobody wants you're not here next year there there's no mechanism like that in philanthropy if you made 50 billion dollars and you want to transform education and your big idea is that science is the only thing we should teach there's actually nothing stopping you from buying 50 billion dollars worth of that idea and you know and is some cash starved district in Arizona gonna take your ten million dollars and like get rid of a bunch of its other humanities classes to take that money yeah of course right and I think one of the things that I try to do with this book is make people realize that philanthropy is not all good or not all bad but is a but as a power flex and power flexes of all kinds require scrutiny Rob Rousseff Stanford not too far away talks about this you know we are skeptical of the exertion of military power even though a lot of people who go into the military are idealistic doesn't matter if they're idealistic who cares we watch over them like hawks multiple congressional committees the number of watchdogs is an international you know war crimes tribunal right then how many how many people in this country are reporters covering that sector of life philanthropy is a four hundred billion dollar exertion of power a year in the United States up there with the intelligence community budget military but in that order of magnitude right most publications you're an exception most publications do not have a person covering it what other four hundred billion dollar plus exertion of power does not have a single assigned reporter at most publications in America it's been this place and and the reason it matters is it is a place where in addition to doing real good and I am NOT a denialist of the idea that there's good being done those malaria nets are real they do cover real people's beds the AIDS drugs are real like a lot of this stuff is real I have met people benefited by this stuff I'm sure you have too but in addition to the good it does I believe a lot of this elite do-gooding does a couple other things a it cleanses names that don't deserve to be clean and that a reduces the social cost of having hurt the society if you're like on the older side and your money-making days are done it just changes your name and reduces the lifetime cost of having done that but if you're on the younger side like a lot of people you cover and you're signing your philanthropy in your 30s but you still got a lot of money making ahead of you it actually enables you to keep harming society because you've now improved your reputation and it's lubricant in the engine of continued taking it also is an undemocratic form of power why do we fuss so much about one-person one-vote if in the nightclub of democracy there's the second line over here where only billionaires can enter and they get 10 million votes each on the same things you are voting about with your one vote public education how to empower women and girls etc and so once we start to see a lot of these elite do-gooding activities as a and exertion of power but B as part of how a bad system gets another year of life every year I think it becomes incumbent on us to not only scrutinize but to push back against the ways in which we are being abused through acts of helping I want to I want to dive into a couple a couple specific areas on kind of philanthropy you mentioned malaria nets one of the criticisms of of your book is that it's a very kind of us centric model that you're describing the problem is with us billionaires we need to have more taxes on us wealth to compensate for the us problems when it comes to something like International Development which obviously is a big part of the amount of money that's spent overseas by big part of them total money set by philanthropists - addressed overseas what's the solution of that because that's not a world where we can say as a globe that we're gonna raise taxes on everybody to pay for a problem in Chad or a problem in Central African Republic I'm sort of international work are you more tolerant of kind of elite philanthropy than you would be if with you know schools in Newark or something like that that question is close to my heart as my best friend her first grade was named Chad it's a very good point so you know first of all I want to say that if I had written if I had written the book that some of these critics proposed where I took a global view and wrote about all the countries it'd be long book it the critics would say he wrote about all these places he doesn't live in and that doesn't know right I learned a long time ago it's better to under claim you know a lot of men disagree but you know I I think like I remember one of my most interesting experience as a writer going back to books was like I wrote a book about India and it's like that I mean it was by definition like only about India and my experience and into my family but also my own reporting in India and all these people from these other countries who had like whose parents had left Lebanon and they'd moved to Lebanon you know some version of my story came out to me like oh my god this is totally like Lebanon this is totally like Chile but if I had said that it would have been terrible because I don't know so to me it's better to focus on a bounded thing right well then let people see what they see the solution I mean it right I think you're right that the issues presented by developing countries in particular countries where the government's capacity to solve their biggest shared problems is zero potentially raise the different set of issues so I am much less skeptical of Bill Gates funding malaria nets than I am of Bill Gates funding Common Core okay the capacity of the countries where he sends malaria nets to do that without him is low the capacity of this country to fix its own education system is much higher right we do not feel that way and so to me there's a legitimacy where it's not gonna happen otherwise that said you know there was a really important I forget them author's important political science paper some years ago about aid and foreign aid in African countries and one of the arguments his paper made was that in the West traditionally the citizen leader relationship developed and representation developed because leaders started taxing citizens to do more ambitious stuff right we're taking a little bit of your grains now we kind of want to invade that country next to us right we're gonna need like a lot more of your grain and so they would take more of the grain and people would be like dude you took a lot of my grain I want to say in how we invade that country right and that's the birth of Parliament's and assemblies and congresses and the point this paper made was buy so much money coming into a lot of these countries from the side the leader of that country is essentially able to address their biggest shared problems by having by being on Bill Gates's good side or DIF it's good side what happens is you delay the development of a citizen state relationship that is actually the only long-term solution to that country's woes and you delay a kind of democratic deepening in those countries right so basically the the argument rests on a bedrock belief that the democracy in this place works right so in a in a dictatorship or you know frankly if you if you believe in the United States that democracy doesn't work for other reasons you might say philanthropy is imperfect but so is government I mean someone someone could make yes right but obviously that's not Chabot but but to a great degree in this country rich people are the reason democracy doesn't work in the first place okay and and and this is the big problem and this is the gaslighting okay the gas lighting is a lot of what I hear from the people with the like venture capital vests is poor poor went out for them and and your end welcome if you're here tonight I can't see anything is you know dude I'm totally with you I'd love government love government I once went to the White House in eighth grade but it's just not up to the challenge so a VC like me has to be deciding things about public education now what this does is it starts with a day one analysis of the problem when in fact we are late into the problem since the 70s that VC guy and his predecessors and members of his larger exactly and have been pushing for a world in which government did as little as possible taxes were as low as possible regulations were as low as possible people were as unprotected in the market as possible and all the predictable stuff happened in that social problems multiply turns out you don't get people stable jobs then they don't have stable lives and they get evicted from things and they get addiction issues and end up on government assistance and all the obvious things that are gonna happen and then you step in that scenario and say what a shame the government's not on the case dude you made it not on the case you fought tooth and nail for a world in which government could not and would not solve these problems and now you use the result of what you did to justify your further incursion but I just mine decided to talk about ideology there's also questions like competency right some people who would say that even if government was equipped and was and there was some popular mandate to handle some of these challenges their authority there's an argument we made that maybe government is just not capable of it for very this is what I'm saying that two parts of this a it's not I mean a to the extent that it's true they made it less capable how do you starve government from Fineman if you look at the data on what a wealth tax would raise for example right the Sanders and Warren wealth tax are actually fairly modest like people would still get richer every year under both of them probably look how much money they would raise millions and trillions of dollars right like the idea to say that government should be equally capable if it didn't have those trillions of dollars or if it did is preposterous of course it's incapable of a bunch of things if it doesn't have resources if I took away half of your money you'd be incapable of a lot of stuff you currently do also write a B it's not actually true that government is uniquely incapable and and this is something people really don't talk about enough okay as soon as the government that there is a there is a view out there that people want you to believe that the entire government federal state local we have ninety thousand different government entities in the United States by the way and Mitch McConnell controls one of the ninety thousand and there's a story out there that wants you to believe that all government is essentially the DMV that's like but don't you feel like you've internalized that picture like it's not like government is the DMV what here's here's the truth as soon as the government solves a problem successfully and permanently it goes into the category of things we are no longer grateful for and no longer remember okay so I actually want to take a moment to redeem government for a second things that work you know like let's talk about like if the claim is that a lot of government activity is not socially useful a lot of people in government are not having the impact they should a lot of institutions and government could do more for the well-being of the planet than they do I would say sure and that's true of every sector and every human endeavor and I spend a lot of time in Silicon Valley going to a lot of companies where I see a lot of people also doing things that are of zero social value so people doing things that are not that socially useful is just sort of common to human beings regardless of you know in every sphere there are some minority of activities that have a disproportionate impact okay but you know the United States Court system when's the last time you thought about it hopefully for you not recently is a remarkable institution that almost none of us think about that great stories don't get written about that completely underpins everything all of us did today the fact that any of these businesses can function and that many of them could not function where you work could not function in a bunch of countries in the world could not have been founded in those countries is precisely because of how contract law works in America when was the last time you were grateful for contract law it's settled it just works the fact that the security Exchange Commission looks into not perfect doesn't jail enough bankers but like basically police's the investment markets so that you can have reasonable certitude that your pension is not like fake stocks which in some countries could happen but does not happen in this country is the result of remarkable government activity that is ongoing every day the fact that social security keeps millions and millions of people out of poverty the fact that you know we actually successfully through the New Deal state did many programs that are in effect to this day cushioning people from the vicissitudes of life and the market these things are so successful that we don't appreciate them kind of like our parents and and I feel that's like the perfect JCCC comment to make love your parents catering to the like underappreciated parents market [Applause] that was pandering I admit and feel a lot of what one blame and so like I don't accept the premise that government's not effective I look at the life I have been able to have in this country as being very much a product of this being one of the most successful machineries of state in the history of human civilization with flaws with limitations with unfinished business with right now a really terrible president and even under the terrible president much of that system is unaffected and brilliant and completely unappreciated let's talk a little about about kind of Silicon Valley specifically you mentioned earlier that you know you're trying out too far with a broad brush is mentioned Bill Gates obviously he's held up in philanthropy circles as the one guy has got it right you know there's a lot of wandering by rich people as they try to figure out how they should give their money away Bill Gates is you know runs the biggest foundation in the world he's been doing it for 20 years the conventional wisdom is he's done it he's doing the pieces of best-case scenario for how philanthropy can change the world I'm curious does anybody else beyond Bill Gates who you think it was doing a good job I think we should stick with Gates for a second okay Tillis traits illustrate something I have a feeling I never going with a son based on your tweets right um first of all I think it is true that unlike certain people unlike I would say the Sackler family members of the second family unlike the Zuckerberg kind of example you haven't Bill Gates someone who did not make them money through that kind of acute social harm now to be clear and we've forgotten this somebody who self was Amman operate some people would argue in a bully it's just not it's not killing hundreds of thousands of people in an opioid crisis right I mean there's a there's a question of degree here I think the monopoly is a bigger deal than people remember in the sense that you know actually an X Microsoft very senior person came out to one of my events and I had said something kind of making this point he was like yeah you're right it's not monopoly is not but he's like what it basically means is that for a certain period of time you give no oxygen to anybody who wants to start a company in a pretty large area and you think about like all the immigrants who came to this country and studied and wanted to start something that was in their orbit and like never started that company and maybe went back to their country because like there was only allowed to be one company in that area so monopoly is real and he was one and he was you know sued by the Justice Department so like let's remember that but that said I'll stipulate that I think he's not on the money-making side not the extreme case of social harm and on the do-gooding side is more serious about this is not goldman sachs giving two million dollars to some women's shelter to cover up the way in which it caused millions of women to lose their home in the financial crisis this is like real strategic analytical giving it's very clear i've ever seen it like this guy bleeds for this stuff it's the intellectual priority of his life he cares right so let's stipulate on you do you agree that's given in them in the of all the donors out there do you agree that he's their best argument no better but but hold on so that deals with the what so I don't think he's a Sackler okay the question is are there still residual issues if we take that off the table he's not narrowly doing this to change his name he's sincere about it he's doing real work are there still issues and I think the following two issues still remain issue number one is it is no matter how you made the money and no matter how effectively you're spending it to me it is still too much power for a private unelected individual over public life plain and simple right it is undemocratic or if it's not undemocratic then why do we bother to limit other forms of private power if if like some rich person gets to just read aside public school policy to me it's just inherently undemocratic right and I would say like even if you take someone who absolutely did not harm anybody by making money Serena Williams if she did Bill Gates his education activity I would have the same concern about why should any one person get to decide things that we should all be deciding together okay second issue in playing in the do-gooding social change world the way someone like Bill Gates does with that level of power someone like Bill Gates inevitably changes our conversation about change this is a very important point to understand changes the terms we use right changes the kind of what is valorized and what is not changes the moral valence that something like a teacher's union might have versus something like a charter school might have and in so doing all of us end up unwittingly participating in a cultural landscape that is rigged and I think it's very important to think about that gates example because even if these people are not problematic in the money-making side of life which I think he is but even if we stipulate they're not it's still problematic and I also think and this may be what you were getting at with the tweets the fact that he one of the greatest advocates and warriors for children on earth had the profound misjudgment to spend a significant amount of time with Jeffrey Epstein after he was a convicted child rapist sexual predator and was not forthcoming about it when called out about by the New Yorker and others to me raises profound questions not about his ability to decide big things for Humanity but about any flawed human beings ability to decide big things for Humanity I'm not saying he's unique in the misjudgment he showed I think it was terrible but I think that is the whole reason why we don't have kings and through this kind of philanthropy thing we've allowed ourselves to have these private Kings right who's who's a good example of someone who you think is you know if you stipulate that someone's gonna have you know maybe not however much Gates has but you know a billionaire user is there an example out there of a billionaire who you think is who's doing the least harm society with their giving um here is I have to apologize in advance but like here's why I can't do that because I don't know all of their practices and I know what's gonna happen if I do that is tomorrow morning there will be some story about how the person I named like actually like bought the Cayman Islands is Treasury Department and you know and so like I don't want to endorse a person who's you know whose entire books I haven't seen but I do think there are people out there you know an organization that I think is very interesting is resource generation there are organizations out there thinking about how do you if you do happen to have this money but you agree with a lot of what I'm saying how do you spend it in ways that would help dismantle the system there are people out there thinking about traitor to your class philanthropy and and you know and and there are causes that you can give to if you're one of those people someone like a Marc Benioff would I mean I mean obviously you so I'll give you an example with Benioff that I think is interesting like marked as a bunch of standard I would say standard market world stuff like I think it's been called one one one there's like one percent of profits right right that's the kind of standard playbook like business and he says like business is the greatest platform for change and I think he is completely wrong about that but that's what he says and like so he does some stuff around that but more recently he got involved in this city in the homelessness issue and he specifically got involved in advocating for a higher tax on companies right and to fund the homelessness issue Benioff almost seems like the least market oriented major tech philanthropist and there's some of them out here but I think what's interesting is and I've had conversations with him about this I think in his mind these were just two different things he was doing and and it was like now the second thing is actually system change and the first thing is fine but it's fundamentally part of a kind of feudal model of business throwing coins while refusing changes system raising taxes fixing these larger structures get to a different place and we have seen he's not the only one Eli Broad came out in favor of I think a wealth tax you had a letter Abigail Disney there's Pritzker people like there have been more calls for not just higher income taxes but wealth taxation I actually have conversations with a lot of these a lot of these folks Abigail and others who've read read the book and grappled with it and try to figure out where to land on some of these issues right and and I think where the most thoughtful people in that world land in my view is when they land on you know what like the answer to a winners take all world is actually winners taking less and the only way to do that is not me throwing coins at people but actually having it coerced through government action right taxation this is a question I get all the time and we're talking backstage about what's the solution like if you if you're a if you're a billionaire and you have five billion dollars and you're trying to you know accept the premise that you have the money what what what are they supposed to do with it right I mean I know I know you this question all the time but like do you recommend they send it to the IRS do you recommend that they seriously throw it out because I mean you you have a world where the wealth exists this goes back to a previous question about what do you do in a conservative administration Bork Benioff can't change US policy by himself right Marc Benioff could decide to spend a lot of money to advocate for Democratic candidates which he does he could decide to somehow take less personally at Salesforce he could decide to no longer to CSR initiatives with the Salesforce foundation but what is an individual actor if you agree the problem this problem what is an individual person one of three hundred thirty million people in the US what should they do a couple things first of all towards the end of the book I interview this brilliant Italian political philosopher Chiara Cordell II at the University of Chicago and and she says you know these people talking about the pollutes she says you know these people have a concept of agency that doesn't make sense when the project is to capture governmental power and fight for lower taxes or less regulation or a loophole then they're very down with system change and they understand perfectly how to do it and they're all up in there when it's like how do I raise the taxes that I fought to lower earlier or how do I restore the regulation that I fought to repeal earlier suddenly it's like you know I'm just one person out of 330 million what do I hears all the time like what do I know about the political sphere well it's like it's like like y'all literally did the things you're trying to reverse I don't know how did you how did you do the things in the first place same play book probably same lobbyists just just ask them to do the opposite of what they did so I just want to say as an overall point because I like Marc Benioff I think tried like one initiative raise taxes and it succeeded and now taxes are higher so like I think these people can actually get a lot done the same way they got stuff done the wrong way so that's the overall point in terms of what to do I have a two-part answer for you part one is first unwind your complicity okay stop doing bad stuff stop doing bad stuff that is and the partial list would be like do a complicity audit of your company all right here's where complicity audit would start to ask not exhaustive right like how are you paying people how much are you paying people how precariously are you paying people are you making people contractors not employees all those shenanigans right taxes second part of the complicity on it are you using the double Irish with a Dutch sandwich stop using that sandwich are you using like weird Caribbean islands that you are not actually like interested in being part of the community you know the whole set of things you can do around taxation lobbying what are you lobbying for as a company by the way this is a question employees of companies should ask because employees generally have no idea what their company lobbying for on behalf of their work product they're just doing the work product right and often companies are asking for things in Washington that are so destructive I once spoke after at this conference of business in society round something like that and and the woman it spoken performance from like the coca-cola clean water initiative perfect warm up for me and I was like I was like I don't doubt that the woman who just spoke to you that hurt a little part of coca-cola I'm gonna stipulate although I don't know that her little part is a net good for the world I don't know that to be true but I'm gonna stipulate that the coca-cola clean water thing in isolation is like better than not having it the problem is there is someone else at coca-cola with a nicer suit than her who is fighting for things to be slipped into the federal budget and trade deals of Mexico and China that is having an effect on the world a thousandfold the effect of what the clean water woman is able to achieve so look at your lobbying so step one is unwind complicity stop doing things that are actively making the world worse first second if you still have a little stamina in you begin advocating as a rich person as a CEO as a as a as a person who is in the plutocracy begin advocating at a systemic level for the kinds of structural changes that would solve this problem universally publicly democratically institutionally and lobby for them with all the might that you might have otherwise lobbied for things that were of private benefit you know I have shared this elsewhere like I got this random phone call or email which led to a phone call from Jamie Dimon in August who didn't like the fact that I questioned his big business roundtable initiative which said that you know all these companies claiming that shareholders are not the only be all and all business it's about stakeholders now - it's like the business world realizing what every four-year-old understood which is like you should not care about people and he didn't like that I gave this skeptical quote so he like have this phone call and I basically kept saying them on this phone call if you really believe business should care about the environment care about people we have an amazing way to make sure that happens which is called the law it's called policy right that way doesn't depend on Jamie Dimon like feeling handsome a particular morning I don't want like your pay to depend on whether he's feeling handsome on a Tuesday and so that's the whole point of regulation so if he's doing this stuff but then in Washington JP Morgan or the Business Roundtable representing these hundred eighty some companies is lobbying against forcing companies to be more stakeholder minded you're undoing this little virtuous claim so unwind complicity and then actually begin proactively advocating for the kind of structural changes that might be bad for your class but good for the one you so good example that would be there's kind of a class of a billionaires probably most prominent is probably drugs Soros who's basically calling for wealth tax like that to you fits the bill of advocacy that who knows if it's a really if they really are gonna you know it's very easy to sign an op-ed right but like who knows whether or not they're actually gonna be advocating for this but it might but again the how is important right right so you want spend a hundred million dollars pushing towards a wealth tax right there's some very blue t ways to do that like right because like obviously that but you could argue that the Storch democracy spending dollars and again I'm not saying that I'm like on that issue I think it's complicated and like I think if you are fighting against your own class interests I give you a much freer pass to exert political influence because it's just not selfish in the same so Michael Bloomberg would sort of qualify too though no not on well that she's been on guns issues or immigration issues then he uses the guns issues right right right you know he said to Elizabeth Warren backstage at this gun safety forum do you know this story so he has his gun safety forum this is such an important example of how this whole thing works and why the woke billionaires are as problematic as a regular billionaires and so he is his gun safety form that I guess he's one of his organization every to every town it's like what do you see Montana gives me into all the money box was he all the money right I believe so yeah so Elizabeth Warren and others speak at this forum and I didn't see her talk but I think she gave not only a gun thing but probably her standard critique of plutocracy and money and a lot of the stuff you've heard like less eloquently tonight and backstage and he shares this anecdote with pride but that's the great thing about guys like that like they're not embarrassed I remember I remember watching if you got there Barbara as he gets up on stage right yeah you know here's his robe I appreciate that about it in like that it's like yeah so transparent about their vulgarity so so so he comes onstage and says I just saw her backstage and I said to her you know if I hadn't been really successful in my business and I put on that like vest picture if I hadn't been successful my business we wouldn't have this forum so you know nice speech but enough already okay now a little casual moment little flip but think about just unpack it for a second because I actually think you could tell the whole story that we're talking about here through that encounter what he is saying he is using the do-gooding he does to say because I sponsored this forum philanthropically I'm giving you a chance to speak at my forum which assumes that somehow she doesn't have other places to speak as a top-tier presidential candidate I this man I'm giving you this woman a voice which is pretty preposterous given that she's much bigger voice than he does right now and therefore because I am doing that which we've already explored how dubious the claim that he's even doing that is but because I'm doing that for you you should stop questioning the system that allowed me to make the money that gave you this platform which is actually not that much of a platform for her that is the move people this is if you take away one thing you got to understand that these are not separate things him making his money in the system we have and then him being a woke philanthropists are not unrelated in that moment the mask slipped he used the do-gooding to justify the system of extreme taking don't talk about this because if you talk about this I'm not gonna give you a stage to share your ideas right it's that loop that makes me as skeptical if not more of the billionaires we're supposed to trust so on Soros or others if they want to work on 100 million dollars to advocate for a wealth tax the key things to think about what is the least plutocratic lis enhancing way to do that even though the policy substantively is anti plutocratic I give you a lot of credit just for that but there are still ways to do it that would have your opinions dictate but let's imagine instead 100 million dollars would be spent on recruiting and training a generation of pro tax candidates to run for local state and federal office of the next 20 years that would to me be an example of something that was just a little less blue tea because your money would be going into the system and affecting something but for it to work people would have to actually win elections which would mean that the filtration of democracy would be legitimating as opposed to like giving the money to a super PAC and tipping an election right right that you wouldn't otherwise have won gotcha last thing before we get I go to some audience questions after this are you just playing at all that like presidential candidates are not talking about obviously there can it's talking about a wealth tax but like the issue around billionaires and billionaire philanthropy is not something people are talking about explicitly you know there's a lot of conversation around kind of these foundations that exist whether or not this foundation should be existing in perpetuity there's a debate about donor advised funds but this is still pretty niche stuff like is there a part of you that wishes that like there was a much more explicit political conversation around the horrors of philanthropy or what we get there in 20 years I mean it's interesting like I understand why people running for office for president don't get super into the weeds on an issue I had what I would actually say I'm actually incredibly satisfied with the conversation in this primary I actually think this Democratic primary is a real referendum on capitalism and structural change in a way that I feel we have not been treated to in my lifetime so I'm actually like we're not talking about philanthropy which is maybe a little niche for the the game they're playing but we are absolutely talking about like whether we should even have billionaires right which is a pretty put at a one of the scene that we wouldn't CNN Town Hall's yes I mean that was like a reddit like the darker sides of reddit conversation a year or two ago that is now a main stage presidential debate question you know the last debate I was very struck I think this was kind of newsworthy like all the people who are not for a wealth tax basically said like yeah I'm sort of for a wealth tax I just haven't put one out yet right which is sort of interesting so the Overton Window has really moved and and I actually feel this primary has been a remarkable exposition of two theories of change a win/win theory of change which is kind of the theory that my book is attempting to dismantle and a theory that actually understands that real change in a moment like this involves the loss of power and that you can't fight for the people below without cramping the style of the people standing on their necks and just as you cannot address patriarchy and the me to movement without restricting and dealing with the power and impunity of men and limiting it reducing it just as you can't end white supremacy without and deal with racism without reducing the power and impunity of white people there's no way to reduce the power of there's no way to fight plutocracy without making the plutocrats less wealthy and powerful and so in this race you have two candidates who are basically questioning in Bernie Sanders Elizabeth Warren the win-win premise and they are saying the only way to do right by most of us is to actually make some people less influential and powerful and even wealthy than they are right now and then you've a bunch of other people who are kind of offering the same win-win Democratic Party stuff of like we can lift everybody up together and we can somehow pull the guy on the floor up without affecting her Joe Biden without changing anything fundamental for the person standing on their neck which is a remarkable feat of physics if he's able to pull it off alright I think we're gonna get one time with questions so there are two there Mike's jumping around we're gonna start in the front row cool I'm the testimony he gave her the hague was amazing number one thank you i hope one day someone invites you heard in the US through the same question for you since you're an author is you talked to so many ceos the number one book that seems to have influenced them is the Atlas Shrugged that's the first part of the question is what do you think about the book and second since an author may be a next book needs to be a thousand-page book that inspires the next set of CEOs on the other side of the spectrum iein rant go ahead and two things sorry I just want to say that the first thing you mentioned because it's I think is really significant and should shame us into action this is a true story I was invited I didn't believe this was true until I experienced it I was invited by the Dutch parliament to testify before Parliament and given that I am American I immediately thought I was like being in you know ensnared in some investigation of malfeasance involving Ukraine but it turns out in other countries people testify for things other than trying to investigate the crimes of the leaders of the country and it sounds like what's this testimony about and they're like oh look here in the Netherlands you're gonna start crying when you hear this here in the Netherlands we often have authors testify before Parliament to improve our lawmaking abilities like we want to know the cutting edge thinking out there in the world so we've had Paquette e we've had the Dalai Lama they give me this whole list of authors who had testified it's like a stop on the book circuit it's to like share your thinking with the Dutch parliament so I go to this thing they've coalition governments that you know members of six different parties show up from the left to the right the right wing people are as engaged in the conversation as the left they all ask amazing questions they're literally like okay so how what kind of tax laws could we pass to end this look like they're thinking they're making notes most of the members and questions cited books that I should read none of which I knew about like they knew all these like obscure academic books that they had read to try to like get better at their jobs it was the most depressing I've ever encountered in my life and and but going to the Hague gave me the opportunity to to start with the opening line in Parliament it is great to be here in The Hague the past home of my wife and the future home of President Trump so they laughed like delayed and nervously about that I don't I don't think they want him in terms of Iran I mean because a lot of CEOs love that book I've never read it I'm not I'm not so interested in that kind of book you know I probably should read it just to understand their their weirdness but you know I think what's so interesting is like I notice in like airports like what books are for sale or like in airplanes like there's a certain kind of like business bro reading like I feel like this is all the fit all the same titles a sapiens book and like Jared Diamond like I took apart Jared Diamond the New York Times Book Review earlier this year because much of what he said was like not true which is a problem and I feel like the only thoughtful thing I can maybe say about your things I don't know about iron Rand is like I feel a lot of the problem we have particularly with these men I think it's a lot of men is that they're just like literally reading the wrong something that don't know a lot about society because they read this stuff that gives them this like weird 30,000 foot view kind of mechanistic view of society they don't understand people and they don't like and I often I mean I really felt this in my Jamie Dimon conversation I feel like I'm talking to people who are remarkably powerful and very smart in certain ways but like completely socially illiterate and it's very dangerous when people with this much economic power political power through the lobbying and then like social power through the philanthropy stuff we've been talking about have so much power of a public life and they literally just don't know a lot about human beings and human societies next question on your right next question um hi I first of all just want to thank you that like everything you've you have said just like rings so true and you say it so clearly and simply and I just love that seeing somebody on stage doing that ah so my question is yes my question is you have talked about this idea of class trader philanthropy you also talked about how the people that you interviewed don't really want to be examined and in the book you talk about your own sort of educational pedigree and being in an intellectual class that gives you a certain amount of power and privilege once the book came out and you perhaps was writing this intellectually class traitorous thing are you still allowed in those rooms are you seen as a threat I mean and if you're not how did you survive the label of trader and still retain power and privilege to get into those rooms interesting question I mean I've definitely not invited to a lot of places I used to be invited for sure you know very senior person I mean this we haven't talked about that tonight but this book originated as a speech at the Aspen Institute where they'd asked me to talk about a previous book of mine and I said yes and then pretended I was gonna do that and then actually gave a talk about how the people in the room who were there to change the world were actually the problem that needed changing super awkward moment then looked at that led to this book and after that one of the people there was like I just want you to know like you're always welcome back on campus like the physical campus but like you'll never have any kind of you know participation here until like the current trustees are dead which I thought was you know in that case the Aspen Institute they're all over 90 so like that wasn't that bad but like that was a world that really you know and then there have been like conferences that you know where I've spoken in the past like before I wrote this book that loved my ideas and there was an explicit conversation after this book a private conversation that was basically like you know I love you man but I'm never gonna put this on a stage because this this is gonna you know like go after my friends or this is gonna make billionaires give less and I think billionaires giving is the only thing that will save the world so there's been explicit D invitations of that kind the most hilarious thing this year was like Town and Country magazine had this thing of like these are the most sought-after dinner guests in the world and I was like on the first page of it like number two next to some prominent and I was like this is so funny because it's not true like I'm not invited any of this I was like what was the last time I was invited to a dinner party of someone I'm not already super close friends like the most town of country thing is that story and then getting it wrong right exactly I was like peak peak town peak country you know that said I don't want to give a picture like I think in some ways through what the act of writing this book and this is sort of my choice in a way the spaces I'm in have just changed and I kind of wanted them to change it's sort of why I wrote it I felt I was I had defaulted into it I think in a way a lot of writers do and that in that Aspen like Ted like sort of sucker own media yeah like I wasn't a business person but just by being a media person yeah who'd like reach a certain level of like platform I was in and adjacent to these worlds and I just didn't like them like I wasn't interested like at some point my wife and I literally had a conversation about like I'm tired of having dinners with people who think raising rounds of financing is appropriate dinner party conversation like I actually just don't want to have a lot of dinners with entrepreneurs anymore I don't like I think they should have the right to eat dinner but I don't want to have dinner with them and talk about Series A I don't want to know what Series A is like I don't know like they don't know about my eczema like why do I know about their Series A right like that's your personal business so by writing the book a lot of that fell out of my life but like don't cry for me like I also spent a lot more time with like writers and artists now and a lot of the spaces that have really embraced me and taken me in including this one maybe is is our space is that I'm much happier to be a part of we have time for just two more questions I just want to tell everybody to stick around afterwards on it's gonna be signing books in the atrium so join us for that on your right hi Anand thank you so much I also deeply resonate with everything you've written and spoken about my name is Agatha and I used to work for a philanthropic organization here in the Bay Area and the rumor is that a shipment of your books came to the office sent from an unknown sender and instead of being distributed to the employees this box was quickly scurried away I no longer work there and you give us the name of this organization I don't feel quite comfortable to say it right but um I'm now running for US Congress here in San Francisco thank you tell us tell us your name and the district number my name is Agatha basilar and I'm running in California district 12 otherwise known as also known as Nancy Pelosi's seat and there's a lot of people say that she's an indispensable leader because she's leading impeachment and because she has this uncanny ability to raise money for the Democratic Party but I think that's similar to doing some good but ignoring other impacts I just curious if you have thoughts about that it's such an interesting thing and thank you for sharing the story of the jettisoned books at the unnamed foundation I want to learn more about that later I think Nancy Pelosi is such a it's a perfect example you pull that and of course you've pulled it out because that's the fight you're in but she really embodies on the one hand she's not an easy case like Mark Zuckerberg is an easy case it's like a bad Democrat who we'd all be better off without being a Democrat Nancy Pelosi it's complicated right like she is very effective in her job she's clearly very effective on this impeachment stuff she understands power in a way that a lot of Democrats don't and I think all of that is valuable and she's now reluctantly but now leading this charge against the president what I really resonate with in what you said is I think she is also part of why we have a president that needs to be impeached in the sense that she is part of a two-party consensus on money driving American politics and she's been on the left half of that that to me is the reason for our deeper disease and it's complicated if you're in her position I'm sure she has all the right positions about getting money out of politics eventually and all of that but I think we have to accept that even Democrats we may like we may love we may admire we may like the way they clap at President Trump and were on the fundamental question of creeping plutocracy over the last 30 or 40 years not sufficiently against it were not spent too much of their time at cocktail parties with very rich people were very rich themselves as the case may be and you know Cynthia Nixon when she was running for governor of New York had this line you know we need not just more Democrats with better Democrats and so I think the question of her aside there's this question of for the Democratic Party to truly be what it's about it needs to be a party where its leaders literally do not know rich people in my view right I think when you look at someone like AOC to take one example prominent member in that same body I think this is someone whose social networks literally do not intersect with the plutocracy and actually it makes it easier to be the party that checks plutocracy if they're not also the people you're hanging out with secretly while you're also in this really important job to check their power good luck to you okay last question right here on the Left thank you there's been a lot of discussion of individual billionaires and I suppose they have some role in this they don't interest me too much I'm interested in the non-federal centers of power which are cities and states and I'm also interested in foundations can you say something about what people here may do to strengthen their role in moving all this in the right direction and great question I'll give you a meta answer and then an action answer the meta answer is my way of thinking about the moment that we have been living in that in has engendered all the problems we've been talking about is that it is with the 30 40 years we've been living in what I call the age of capital an age defined by the longings of capital in a way it's a way of organizing you know it's called neoliberalism as many names but it's a way of organizing the world in which kind of when faced with a choice about how to design society you ask like what would money want and that's been the design algorithm for our country for the last 30 or 40 years and I think what is happening is the age of capital is giving out I think it is sputtering I think the lack of trust in Silicon Valley the fact that a fake billionaire president has so flamboyantly discredited the idea that businesspeople are smart and capable of solving all social problems you know like I think this is like end times for this cult it doesn't mean it's gonna end tomorrow but I do feel it's end times for the cult and I think what follows it I hope is not the age of tribal nationalism that Donald Trump wants but the age of reform much as we pivoted a hundred years ago from an age of the Gilded Age to the age of reform progressive era than the New Deal so to your question what everybody in this room can do is figure out your own way in that if you are with me that that is a turning that needs to happen that we need to pivot to an age defined more by public purpose and private purpose by common institution building by political solutions to these problems not private whims then you have to figure out in your life what's your way to advance the ball on that larger turning for someone it may mean standing up and running for Congress against the most formidable possible person to run for Congress against right for someone else it may mean sticking to your crappy law firm job but at least volunteering to knock on doors for a city council election and then it may mean everything else in between I've met so many people have come up to me at book events and said like I've changed my job because of these conversations like there are people who were working for people who they didn't like and they didn't respect maybe that's some of you here tonight and they like realize at some point life is too short for that so I can't tell you a one-size-fits-all thing of what that life is if you're at a certain stage of life you're retired like maybe you can become political volunteer if you are 35 and you have a lot of authority within a company that has an outsize influence on the world maybe you trying to do that job more honorably than a lot of your colleagues want you to is the best thing you can do you got to figure out whether it's by quitting something by joining something by speaking up a little more at work by running for something you're gonna help the age of reform arrive sooner but to me the work to be done right now is to is to end the age of capital once and for all and restore bring us back to an age of humanity and an age of common purpose and an age of reform great anon will be out in the lobby signing anyone who wants a book signing and that's all thanks so much I'm get your books on cuz I'm often invited places once so this may be your only your only shot thank you so much [Applause] you

Channel: JCCSF

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Length: 78min 28sec (4708 seconds)

Published: Mon Nov 04 2019