[MUSIC PLAYING] ANAND GIRIDHARADAS:
Thank you for having me. Look, we all recognize
the awkwardness of me talking about the
elite charade of changing the world at Google. So let's just name that
upfront, and be aware of that, and be aware of our complicated
feelings we may have. This is going to
be like therapy. I want to start by laying
out some kind of propositions to you, and I say this in a
spirit of sharing with you some of what I've found as I spent
the last three years thinking about what happens when
the winners of our age move with great sincerity to
try to solve some of our biggest societal problems,
but also, in my view, end up having an effect
that they don't sometimes understand, which is changing
how we think about change, and redefining
change in ways that makes it friendly
to winners and makes it hard to make real change. I'm going to advance some
of these propositions, and then I'd really love to
have a dialogue with you, because we are here in
the belly of the beast. The first proposition
is that we live in an age of extraordinary
generosity by any measure. Some of you may just have
seen the Bezos announcement a couple hours ago, which
only is the latest installment in very wealthy people
who've done very well, many of them in the technology
realm, deciding they want to give back, deciding
they want to make a difference. There's 184 people who have
signed the Giving Pledge. I think American philanthropy
is now $410 billion a year being given away,
which is starting to approach the level of
nonmilitary discretionary spending by the
federal government. Every young person-- and
that includes many of you-- but you go to any campus,
every young person wants to change the world. There are talks about
making a difference in millions of lives. Starting a social enterprise--
people will tell you they've just come
back from Africa where they started
some organization to recycle poop into
coffee, or there's all these kinds of
efforts everywhere you look of elites using their
skills and talents to try to respond to an age of extreme
inequality in the United States, an age of extreme
anger, and do something. But the second proposition is
that we also cannot deny that we live in an age of
extraordinary cruelty in the United States, that this
is as unequal as our society has been in 100 years. It's as tough a time to achieve
the American dream of building a better life than your parents
as we've had in 100 years. When you look at economic growth
over the last 30 or 40 years, almost all the
benefits of growth have bypassed the bottom
half of Americans. About 117 million Americans
saw their average income go up from $16,000 to $16,200
in the age of Google, and the genetics revolution,
and the rise of India and China, and automation, and everything
else Tom Friedman writes about. All of that amazing stuff--
the progress that you probably see around you every day
in 50 different forms somehow miraculously
bypassed the bottom line of half of our country. It actually takes a
lot of engineering to achieve that outcome. That is not a natural outcome. And so what I became
very interested in is the question of, how do we
explain the extraordinary elite helping of our time and the
extraordinary elite hoarding of our time? How do we understand the two
of those things together? What is the relationship
between all these elites making a difference and
all these elites building a winners
take all economy that only generally works for them? And one possible answer is
that the elite helpfulness is trying as hard as it
can, doing the most it can, working as hard as it can,
disrupting things, and creating things, but it's
just not fast enough. It's just a drop in the bucket. That's one possibility. And I think that's probably
the conventional wisdom that's out there. Yeah, we live in a very unequal
time, but people are helping. The ambulance is on the way. What I want to argue is a
more awkward proposition in this space, which is
I've come to believe and be persuaded that a lot of the
elite helpfulness in our time is part of how we
maintain the hoarding. We do giving in ways that
protect the opportunity to keep taking. We make a difference
in ways that protect the continued
opportunity to make a killing, and we seek to change the
world in ways carefully chosen to not change our world. When you look at the ways in
which the winners of our age give back, help out,
make a difference, they are often designed to
protect the system above all that the winners
stand on top of. And so I want to
explore what I think of as the ideology behind a
lot of elite change making, and it's an ideology
that'll be familiar to you. It's an ideology that has a lot
of resonance in Silicon Valley. It's also an idea that you hear
in Wall Street foundations, and an idea you
can actually hear every time you go to the
shopping mall and someone pitches you a red
iPhone case that's going to change the world,
or a tote bag that's going to change the
world, or coffee that's going to change the world. What's the ideology? Something that you probably
have heard five times in the last week-- the word win-win. How many of you have heard
that term in the last week would you say? How many of you have
used that term recently? And what's your
general impression? Win-win-- good or bad? AUDIENCE: Good. ANAND GIRIDHARADAS: Good, right? Positive. It's not just one victory. It's two. Double the pleasure,
double the fun. What I want to suggest
today is that win-win is a more sinister and dangerous
ideology than we recognize, and I know that's a little
mind bending, particularly in an institution like
this that has created some genuine win-wins
for the world, but here's the problem with
a lot of what happens when the win-win becomes our way of
thinking not about business, but about social change. Win-win starts to mean that the
only kind of social change that is acceptable, or the kind
that should get the most funding and the most attention
is the kind of social change that kicks something
up to the powerful. The only kinds of social
change that are good are the kind that
don't cause problems, don't ruffle feathers,
don't blame anybody, don't accuse anybody, don't
have perpetrators-- just solves a problem in a way that is a win
for the people you're helping and frankly a win for
those who are helped. And what has
happened in our time, I believe and I have found
through my reporting, is that, on any number of the
most fundamental questions of what ails us as a society,
there is a real change option out there if we think
hard and study hard, but often that
real change option is expensive for the winners
of our age one way or another. And then, miraculously, a
fake change, light facsimile of change materializes
that is very inexpensive for the
winners, and often what happens in
our culture now-- in a culture overrun by
win-win thinking in my view-- is that we go for
the fake change. We go for the light
facsimile of change because that kind
of change is free. So I'm going to give
you a couple examples. In theory, everybody in this
room and many, many people in America would
agree that we need to do a better job
of empowering women, particularly empowering
women at work and in playing their many roles in life. Now, we know, if you look
at most countries that have done this better
than we have, the reason they generally have done this
better than we have is social policy. They actually have
maternity leave in a way that we do not as our law. They actually provide
a childcare tax credit that makes it not
punitively expensive to go to work after
having a child, and they do any
number of other things at the level of the
system and for everybody. Well, what's the problem
with all those ideas? Expensive. That's real money. We're talking about multibillion
dollar kind of money to fix a problem like that. It's not a mystery,
but it's expensive. So what happens? We get an idea like Lean In. And again, Lean In seems great. Good for your back
to move around. What's the problem with Lean In? It is telling women to bear
the burden of our failure to create the kind of policies
that would actually help them. It is telling women to
bear the burden of sexism. It is telling women
to bear the burden of their lack of representation
in the halls of power, and this is what we often do. Faced with a real change that
we know would make a difference, we gravitate as a culture--
and not just rich people-- people who then follow
rich people's ideas, and that includes many of us. We gravitate to the Lean
In school of change, which is cheaper and
easier on the winners, and frankly, for many
women, unfortunately becomes fake change. Let's take another
issue-- education. Across this country, right
and left, rural and urban, many, many Americans
would agree we have a problem with education. Many Americans I think would
agree that if you want to fix many of the deeper
other problems we have-- from climate change to our
political polarization, to our economy-- education would be
a great single lever to make a lot of difference on
a lot of those other issues-- a good bargain. Do that, get a bunch
of other fixes free. But when the winners of our
age, as they very often do-- this is one of their
most popular issues-- move into making
public schools better, what is their most
common approach? Charter schools, or other kinds
of programs that maybe help match more effective teachers
with students in need, or things like that. You know what the
winners of our age don't do in general when
they approach the problem of public education in America? They don't actually
raise the question of how we fund public
schools in America, which is a barbaric way of funding
public schools, which is funding public
schools according to the value of essentially
the homes in your parents' neighborhood. Now, I don't know anybody in
this building or any building who could actually sit, and look
at a six-year-old in the face, and explain why their education
should be indexed to the home values in their neighborhood. I actually don't think there
are right wing people who, as a matter of deep
principle, believe that that is the optimal way to
organize an education system. And I think there are many
people on the left who would find that
really objectionable, but frankly, who do
nothing to challenge that, because in the neighborhoods
where the winners live, in the neighborhoods where
perhaps many of us live, we benefit from a system that
ring fences our own property taxes for our own
schools, and that leaves schools in other parts
of this country high and dry. And so when the winners
step into social change, they change change. They're not just joining change. They change what change
is, how it's defined, how it's talked about, how
it gets covered in the press. And those are just
two examples of how that change in how
we think about change can actually be devastating. It can mean that on some of
the biggest issues of our time we move from the
possibility of doing something transformational,
bringing millions of women into the workforce who find it
hard to play their many roles, to sort of telling them
to raise their hand more-- actually funding public schools
equally and for all, which you could achieve in theory
with a single Supreme Court ruling holding this
system that we currently have unconstitutional versus
what a lot of rich people do, which is setting up one charter
school in a poor neighborhood in their city, and going,
and being on the board, and mentoring, and telling all
their friends at the country club that they helped those
three minority kids get into Yale, and it's so great. So great. And I'm happy to be
having this conference. I'm surprised to be having
this conversation at Google, and I'm happy to be having
this conversation at Google. And I applaud whoever it was
who invited me or did not read my book carefully
when they invited me, because I think this is ground
zero for this conversation. And it's ground zero for
the following reasons that are obvious. One, who represents
the winners of our age more than this institution? Who represents the
complexity of win-win change? Because this is not like
a Koch brothers factory. This is a company that
I think we all know does tremendous real
good in the world, that has made a lot of money
making a lot of people's lives better. The win-win is real,
and you guys know that and live that every day. But this is also a
company that, because of the very real fact of the
win-win, can perhaps in my view be blind to the ways and the
places in which that story breaks down. When that ceases
to be true, you may be the last to know
precisely because of how deep the truth is. One of the people I
write about-- some of you may have known him or
worked with him-- is a guy named Justin Rosenstein. He worked at Google
and Facebook, invented some very important-- I think he was part
of the team that invented Google Drive, but
some very important things in this company. And he and I talked
about the win-win, and he said, you know, the thing
about tech that is so amazing is that, in tech
particularly-- there's other industries where it's
true, but in tech particularly, there really are opportunities
where you can have your cake and eat it, too. You can make something that
makes you a lot of money, that makes a big company, that allows
you to have the darling of Wall Street, and you can truly
make the world better. And he said, actually, in our
interview, Google search-- out of the many things
that you all do, search is the greatest
example of this of all time. It's an incredibly lucrative
franchise that has immeasurably made the world better
for all kinds of people, and I think you could argue has
particularly empowered people with the least power. If you're a doctor at Mt. Sinai here in the US,
maybe Google search made a certain amount
of difference to you. If you're a doctor in a
very rural clinic in Uganda, the marginal effect
of Google for you is probably transformative. So that's very real, but as
I was speaking to Justin, I started to realize
where we diverge and where our
perspectives diverge. And I think all of you know
that the way in which America thinks about Silicon Valley and
thinks about these companies has evolved over the
last year or two, and you may be feeling that. And I started to realize
where Justin and I parted from that initial sense that,
yeah, you can, in some cases, have your cake and eat it,
too-- make the world a better and make a great company,
and make a lot of money. And where we diverged
was the world he was calling for was a world
in which the concentration of wealth and power and
the emancipation of mankind could both keep growing
in tandem to infinity. If he is right that a
company like Google, or Facebook, or others
is able to make money in ways that just
empower more people and do more public good the more
money is made, play that out. What does 50 more years
of that look like? What does 100 more
years of that look like? It a vision in which it
is possible to imagine there are only three companies
left in the United States, but everybody is so
empowered they're tired of being empowered. And I think even those
of you who are here know that there's probably some
kind of irreconcilable tension in that vision that needs to be
thought through and worked out. And that's way I think you
will notice all around you-- and I think we notice all
around us in this society-- more and more of a desire to
challenge the win-win story, to challenge you all who work
in Google, who work in tech, who work among the winners
of our age to push yourselves a little harder than to simply
say whatever we do happens to be what's best for humanity,
to explore the uncomfortable possibility that there are
places and situations-- and there may be more
of them than you think-- where what is good for you
and what is good for the world are different. And what will you do when
you come to those places? That is a very
important question. And what will the society do
when we come to those places. A lot of the
winners of our age-- when they're thinking
about getting back, when they're thinking
about doing CSR, when they're thinking
about any number of things, a lot of the winners of our age
ask the following question-- what can I do? What can I start? What can I create? That's an
understandable question in the age of entrepreneurship. What a lot of the winners
of our age refuse to ask is, what am I already doing? How am I already involved
in these problems? How am I complicit in an
economy and a society that has been so unkind
to so many people, even as it builds and
created amazing things? How am I part of the central
drama of American life today, which is more
future raining on America than we know what to do with,
but the very few harvesting almost all of that rain water? How am I involved in
that, and how could I be part of changing that? And not just what new
initiative could I create. So I want to raise with
you a couple of questions that I'm sure you
think about a lot, I'm sure you explore
within, and I'm raising them as questions as an outsider. The obvious question that
comes up again and again is the question of, should
Google be broken up? Is this company intrinsically
anti-competitive in just the scale that it's got? And that's a hard question. I mean, do we divide the
room this way, or would we divide the room this
way, or how would we do it? It's an awkward
thing to talk about. Let's be honest, we're
all feeling awkward right now because I'm talking about
breaking up Google at Google. Does this happen all the
time, or this never happens? Never happens. I told you they
didn't read my book. So I'll give you one example
of where this question comes up in an important way in my
industry, which is the media. One place where
the story of what's good for us is good
for humanity, one place where that breaks down-- I think an important place. We'd all agree an
important place. So a recent piece in "The
Guardian" I'm quoting. "In the nine years since Google
bought the mobile ad company AdMob, annual ad revenue
of Google and Facebook has soared to more than $95
billion and almost $40 billion respectively. During this period, ad
revenue at newspapers fell around $50 billion in 2005
to under $20 billion today." And you all know. You read all the time the
stories that flow from that. Newspapers cutting-- they're
laying off half their staff overnight. There's another one of those
kinds of stories every day. Newsrooms in America
lost 40% of their people over the last decade or two. In my world and as a
journalist, the profession essentially feels like
something's been gutted. And it's not "The
New York Times" and "The Post" that
actually have some resources and are going to do OK. It's every state legislature
in this country that basically doesn't have a full time
correspondent anymore sitting there, reporting on
what happens in the state. I mean, there are many
states in this country that basically their
legislative process is now an unreported thing. You might as well have
the Chinese system, because what is done by public
officials in that space is not reported on in a way that's
presented back to people. Now, did Google go in and
cause that effect directly and mean to? Probably not. But most of the
best thinking on how it is that in a
very brief period you went from $50 billion
in ad revenue in newspapers to $20 billion involves
the rise of the online ad business, which is what
powers what you guys do. But also-- and this is not
no one would have sour grapes if it was like, you did
better than everybody else-- there's the question
of monopoly. Let's be real. There's a real
question of, is there the abuse of a
monopolistic level of power over that online ad business? I mean, does anybody
really use Yahoo. Let's be real here. That creates a condition in
which newspapers could not thrive even if they were
thinking, innovating, figuring it out, hacking
it, reinventing themselves. That's what monopoly
means, right? And I am not an
anti-trust lawyer, and I can't litigate
that question here today, and I'm sure you're
relieved, but I think it's an important question. And certainly in the
EU you have people who have grappled
with that question and have charge big
fines to Google, and have found that there is
an anti-competitive issue, and that it is suffocating
the parts of the economy that we need full of air. And the question is,
do you block that, or do you let the public do what
it needs to do on that score? Do you obstruct that, or do
you say, OK, here's a place where Justin Rosenstein's
theory cracks a little bit? Here's a place
where there may be a divergence between what's good
for me and good for the world. And what will your
posture be then. If it is simply to
insist on the old story-- more of what's good
for you is more of what's good for the world-- we may live in a world in
which this country doesn't have journalism anymore. I will tell you as a
working journalist that is not an insane possibility. That's not a remote possibility. It may not be
probable, but in an era when the business is collapsing
with the numbers I said to you, and the President of the United
States thinks news is fake and journalists are
enemies of the people, those are headwinds that
may not be recovered from. Moving on from the
monopoly issue, there's the question
of, when organizations like this give back and
help, what does that buy you in terms of influence? When I say the
winners change change by getting into the
arena of change, there's that whole controversy
that some of you may remember, which made very
big waves and was on the front page of
newspapers where you all had made some very
well-meaning donations to New America, a think tank
which does exemplary work. And it does work on
actually thinking about, how do you bring this
country together, how do you have solutions
that are cross partisan, and any number of other-- thinking a lot of things
about democracy right now. How do we protect and
defend democracy right now? But when one of those-- not just one person,
but one person plus a whole team of
thinkers with New America sponsorship started to push
the question-- actually, I said I was moving
away from monopoly. It's sort of related-- started to push the
question of what do we do about
Google's market power, Eric Schmidt made his
displeasure known. The guy was fired. New America spun off that
think tank to itself, and there was a whole discussion
at New America and elsewhere about how do we protect honest
research and scholarship from the winners of our
age who have all the money now so they inevitably are
going to end up sponsoring research and thinking. There are fewer institutions
that have the kind of money to sponsor that
thinking, and again, you get into this cycle of that
very noble giving comes with strings attached. And it's going to take
a lot of fortitude on your part, and a lot
of self protectiveness on the part of think
tanks and others to take that help in ways that
don't compromise the help, to take that help in ways
that allow researchers and thinkers to actually
push for real change and not be hobbled by the
source of their patronage. Moving on to a third
issue, how many of you feel like you have a good
sense of what Google lobbies for in Washington? Who it meets, what
issues it lobbies on, what positions it takes on
those issues, who it gives money to in terms of
campaign donations, and how that is structured to
kind of deliver against those. Raise your hand if
you think you know. I mean, it's being
done in your name. It's being done on
behalf of your work. They're doing that
to make your work-- to protect it, to allow
you to do your work, but you don't really know that. And that's something
that I've heard a lot-- that companies-- a lot of
where the rubber of an age of an extreme equality
hits the road-- a lot of where that happens
is actually in lobbying, not in the companies themselves,
because the companies are doing what they're doing, but in
order for that work to be-- individual people are
head down at their desk doing their individual thing. It is somewhere else, often,
that a particular policy is fought for,
external to you, that has to do with the interface of
the society and the company-- that is actually the place
where, out of your view, a certain policy is
being fought for that would relax the
pressure on this, or that would allow
this or not allow this. And one of the things I found-- and I've been educated
by going on book tour and talking to people, and
talking to a lot of people privately about
their experiences-- particularly in Silicon
Valley companies-- and I'm obviously
using that term broadly because we're in Boston-- people are almost
totally kept in the dark about what's being done with
their work, and in their name, and with the resources
they generate in the realm of politics. And the reason
that's important is I actually think that if
people in these companies insisted on the following-- I'm going to propose
this idea, and you guys see if you want to run with it. I think the employees
of a company like this that is all
about transparency and open information-- you should demand, as
employees, to know-- have an annual report, not
a financial annual report, but another annual report
that is an audited report that discloses to you, as
employees, the full lobbying and political persuasion
activities of your company. I think you should
know those things. We can argue about whether
I should know those things, but I think you are entitled
to know those things, and I think you should know if
your work is being used to spy on people in other countries. I think you have a
right to know that, because I think you have the
right to decide whether or not you want to be part of that. I think you deserve to know
whether your work is being advocated for in ways
that foster your belief, say, in competition, or in
journalism, in anything else, or whether your work
is being used in ways that undermine your own values. That's the whole point
of having values. You're allowed to do you, and
the company is allowed to do it, but often that cognitive
dissonance that I actually have found has a very
deep reality in many, many of these elite
spaces in our time-- my reporting tells me there's
a huge divergence between many people-- in these leading
institutions of our country, there's a huge divergence
between what many workers and executives feel and the
way their companies show up in the world. And part of what allows that
cognitive dissonance to go on is not knowing what
your company actually-- how it fully shows
up in the world-- not knowing. And I think that's something
that we could start right here at Google with some
of you insisting that you have the right to know that,
and you have the right to know what is being
done with your work. I think one of the challenges
of some of these kinds of ideas of looking within is
that, because there is some truth to the story
that you here at Google have at your fingertips
some genuine tools of human liberation-- because
there is truth in that story, it is possible to also
believe that anything that slows you down from
executing on your mission is bad. Journalists asking
you questions, bad. Regulators pushing back, bad. Courts that want to
slap fines on you, slowing you down from your
mission of emancipation. And so I think what's
going to be incredibly important in phase two
of the tech revolution if we think of this backlash
that you've been living with as a kind of pivot point-- I think what's
going to be really important is to be able
to actually hold two different ideas in your head. Number one, that you
have at your fingertips some genuine tools of
human liberation that, if deployed correctly, can
really make the world better. Number two, that there
are large and possibly growing areas of
human societies where what is good for you
is different from what is good for the world. And not just solving
those problems or Columbus-ing your
way into those problems, but actually,
first and foremost, not being part of
the obstruction of the world as a world,
as a society, as a nation, as a city, as an EU, whatever. Not being part of
the obstruction of the public solving
those problems as a public and understanding that a
deeper consequence of the kind of world you fought
to build, a world that is transparent, and has
information, and knows truth-- a consequence of that once
you get big and powerful is that much of what that
world is going to want may not benefit you, and to
have the fortitude, as I say, to press on with humility in
the face of the public's desire to solve some of
its own problems without your permission slip. When I was growing
up, I remember seeing on the news you'd see
news of some war torn country, and you'd often see rebels
in pickup trucks fighting-- this kind of ragtag army
fighting an unjust king or fighting a president
that was corrupt. And sometimes the
rebel army would win, and the guy in the back
of the pickup truck would end up in the palace. And I think that's
what happened to tech. This was, in many ways,
an industry of renegades, and hackers, and tinkerers,
and people doing weird things, and I could imagine when
some of these technologies-- and some of you
may be old enough to remember-- some
of these technologies were getting off the ground. I can imagine that to
be up against General Electric, or Walmart, or IBM
you must have felt like rebels against an incredibly
powerful establishment, but here's the problem. When the rebel in the pickup
truck ends up in the palace, you know you're in trouble if
they keep wearing that beret. Think of Saddam, or
Mugabe, Idi Amin. The people who keep
the beret on-- you know what happens to them? They never actually
process their own arrival. They actually never
cross that threshold of understanding that I am
now the establishment that I was once fighting against. I am now power. I'm not going up against power. I'm not the rebel. I am Goliath now. And there is a great danger
in being a Goliath who thinks they're a David. There is great danger in being
an establishment figure who thinks they're a rebel. There's great danger
in being a king who thinks they're an insurgent. And the danger is a blindness
to those spaces where the story of what is good
for me and good for the world breaks down. I think what would be
really important to start thinking about in this realm
of tech, what would mark a new kind of maturity as a
response to this backlash, as a response to the way in
which the society seems to be looking at you with new lenses
is actually relinquishing this fantasy of the win-win. It's a cherished fantasy. All of you seem to have
positive associations with it, but I think maturity-- now that you've
ascended to the palace, maturity means accepting that
it is your job to play offense, and it's the society's
job to play defence. It's the society's job to
protect a bunch of things that are properly its
to protect and that you can't be in charge of both. There's that saying
the best offense-- the best defense-- the
best offense is the-- I'm very bad at sports. The best offense is defense. And in a way, you tell
us something similar, that the best defense of
our values and institutions as a society is letting you
play offense unencumbered. But I think we have to
accept that our best defense as a society
is not your offense. Maybe that was true at
some moment in time, but I don't think it
can be true today. I think those of you in the
temples of this new power need to learn do you
and let us do us. I think you have to learn to
be satisfied with creating, and innovating, and
profiting, and doing all those amazing things that you
do, and yes, by all means, do them with a view to making
the world better, but also stepping out of the way when
the society, unimpeded by you, seeks to tend to its
own welfare in ways that may be at your expense, that
may make it harder to build a particular business,
that may mean more intrusion into your
affairs, that may mean less profitable quarters. I think, if we think about
what it means for this industry and spaces like this to
truly accept their arrival, to accept showing
up in the palace and to take off that
beret, it means actually it will require moving past
the win-win fantasy, accepting the world's
need to fight for itself in ways that may threaten you. And above all actually-- because I truly believe this-- above all, listening more,
and giving more space to the voices of individuals
within this company and many organizations like
it who I think privately-- and they confess
to me all the time, and they did so for
my book, and now that I'm out in the
world with the book I'm getting more and
more messages every day. There is a quiet
rebellion happening across many of the victorious
institutions of our age-- tech, big philanthropy,
any number of big banks in Wall Street. And I get these messages
every day from people-- young people often,
but not only-- saying I don't like
the way my institution shows up in the world. I like what I do, but I
can't defend what it does in some bigger aggregate way. And the way things
are set up now people are sending
me that in private. I mean, you guys
probably know about it because you're at Google,
but in general, it's private to most people. And I think what
we've got to think about is how do we actually
let those people that-- I'm convinced there's a minority
of people at least of rank and file people within some of
the most powerful institutions in our age who know that they
are part of a system that they can't defend and who
want it to be different, but who are often
isolated from each other, and don't quite know
how to speak up, and who sit there
calculating in a meeting the risk of their
speaking truth to power. I think we need to think
about how can we create space for those people, because
those people are the people who are actually going to turn
these ships in directions that are going to make fewer people
hate you and actually may help you get out of the way of the
society doing what you have long been committed to
doing, which is changing the world for the better. Thank you very much. [APPLAUSE] AUDIENCE: So there's
an idea, I think, that's at the root of a lot
of people not wanting to, for example, increase
the top marginal tax rate to fund early childhood
education, that kind of thing-- is this idea-- and
I think it's wrong-- that the government
can't do anything right. And I think it's because the
government is doing things right all the time,
and it's transparent, and we don't notice it
unless it's not there. Why or why isn't
changing people's minds about that particular
thing sort of part of the solution
where people might stop hoarding their money, and
then spending it privately, and support higher tax
rates, for example? ANAND GIRIDHARADAS: I think
that's a such a great question, and you're absolutely right. The way that I tell
the story in the book is there has been a 30 or
40 year all out war mainly from the political right in this
country against the very idea of the government, against
the idea of virtually having a government. Government is the problem. Government is the enemy. The government is taking this. The government is doing that. Now, I think most people
here probably don't subscribe to that version of the theory. That has been a very
successful revolution. Government has
truly scaled back. There's a reason that that
private philanthropy giving is starting to approach the
level of federal nonmilitary spending--
discretionary spending. But one of the things
that I explore in the book is that that
revolution prosecuted by the political right
didn't end there, because often what happens when
a revolution like that succeeds is that it kind of changes the
cultural atmosphere in which everybody operates. And even those on
the other side of it end up playing on its
field, if you see it I mean. You may be an
opponent of that idea, but you're not
playing that game. You're forced to play that game. So it is not an accident
that, after Reagan said government is the
problem, some years later, Bill Clinton
from the other party-- very different world view,
much more favorable view of government-- nonetheless
said the era of big government is over. That's what it means
to be an opponent who's still fundamentally playing
on someone else's field. And I fully, fully, fully agree
with you that one of the most essential things we need to do--
and I end the book by talking about this on a hopeful note-- is we need to redeem the idea
of government in people's eyes. Is the government bloated, and
inefficient, and underfunded, and not good at a
bunch of things? Yeah, but as you say, the
government is also a miracle. All the things that go right-- I mean, have you been
to other countries where you need to
do a lot of homework before you eat out in public? When was the last time you got
sick eating in a restaurant in America. When was the last time you
put your kid in a car seat and wondered if it had
been properly tested? When was the last time
you stayed in a hotel room and wondered if it was safe
or it had been cleaned? I mean, you think
about all the greed in this society-- even
Wall Street, for all that it does wrong, it is so
carefully regulated and hyper regulated, and you can't
just do crazy stuff, except every now and
then when you can and tank the world economy. But we forget how
much works right because we have not
some big overbearing evil step-dad of a
government, but because we have a government that actually
in all these million unsung ways tends to common welfare. And I would say-- I'm not saying
Google specifically, but Silicon Valley
institutions and the complex of thinking around tech
have been part, I think, of discrediting government,
of framing government as this old kind of 1.0 thing
that can't really fix things anymore, and crediting the
kind of innovative sphere as being the place where
real change happens. And I think that's very
unfortunate, not least because the entire
internet was made by the government in its
origin, but also because there's a real reason that
Silicon Valley didn't arise in another country. A lot of the common
institutions we share in this country-- the
courts, the boring stuff that you don't even realize
allows you to do what you do are public things,
are common things, are things we share
in common, and we need to give those
things more credit. Otherwise we're going to head
into a society that is actually like many very poor
countries where there's a lot of rich people and
some great companies, and most people are just
not part of the economy, are not part of
building a better world, and I don't think
that's actually a world that anybody wants to live in. AUDIENCE: So in your
discussion today, you've talked about some
of the problems that can result from good
faith actors who maybe go about things in a way
that's not helpful to society. How much of the
problem do you think comes from bad faith actors? Or how much do they end
up co-opting or corrupting good faith efforts? ANAND GIRIDHARADAS:
That's a great question. I mean, I focused
this book on people who I think are genuine in
trying to make a difference and who end up upholding
the system that causes the problems, but
you're exactly right. And I think that has
more to do with what I saying a moment ago. When I think about
the Koch brothers, they're not part of my story. When I think about Fox News,
that's not part of my story. I don't think that those
are people chiefly motivated by making the world
a better place. I think those are
people who wanted to grab wealth and
power, and understood that a certain kind of influence
campaign and changing people's norms and values, and
kind of tricking-- astroturfing issues
so that regular people supported things that actually
only benefit billionaires-- that that was a cynical effort
to achieve their own business interest at the
expense of the society. And there's a very
good book on that called "Dark Money" by Jane
Mayer about how that was done. That's not my story. My story is the story of how
is it that Mark Zuckerberg can be one of the most powerful
idealists in American history, but also the first person
in American history to potentially allow an
election to be compromised. And are those things
just a coincidence, or is his idealism
part of why he was able to get enough power
to have the election be compromised, and part of why,
when reporter friends of mine have tried to
investigate what happened and what happened with
Cambridge Analytica, they get so much pushback
from him and his company that they can
barely do their job? Is his idealism and his
sense of himself as a savior part of what actually
allows that problem to happen the way it did? AUDIENCE: So you
asked the question, what are we already doing? And one answer
that comes to mind that I see at
Google and elsewhere is the issue of subcontracting. There' was a great "New
York Times" article recently comparing a janitor at Kodak I
think in the '70s and a janitor at Apple today, and back in
the day, the janitor at Kodak received the same vacation
and health benefits as every other Kodak employee. And now the janitor at Apple is
an employee of some contracting company, and they're
not receiving any of the same benefits,
and my understanding is the situation is similar here. And we see these
workers every day. Can you comment at all on
that particular situation? ANAND GIRIDHARADAS:
That's a great question. There's another story
even more recently. The Kodak one was amazing. There's another story a couple
of days ago about Harvard, and the students at Harvard
on the exact same issue you named revolted
against the administration and basically
forced them to stop doing this thing of
subcontracting it out to-- essentially it's like the labor
version of shell companies so that you can say
I had no idea they didn't provide maternity leave. I'm shocked. Shocked. And Harvard students
found out about that and pushed Larry Summers, who
was the president of Harvard at the time, and
Harvard fixed it. And the story was focused
on this woman who works-- I forget what part of the
university she works in-- but she and her
husband between them make a low six figure income
both doing working class jobs. It's exactly like what it used
to be at Kodak in the past, and they make a good living. They have a home. They are living in
dignity and decency, and it was because students
said don't clean up after us, or don't serve us food in a way
that's degrading other people. And so look, one of the things
that people have talked about is, relative to most
employees in America, you have a lot of power. You really do. The China thing, the Microsoft
thing that happened-- these are all stories-- particularly the people
with that kind of coding and engineering background
have an enormous amount of power in these companies,
but you all have a lot of power. You're very talented
people, and each of you in general with
a couple exceptions-- there's always a couple
exceptions, but each of you generally would be a huge
loss for your company. They don't want your talent next
door fighting for someone else. And then I think you've
got to think about, who do you use that? If there were people
at this company who wanted to work on
that issue, I 100% guarantee you you could get
that issue done in a month, and that would
have a huge effect. How many offices does Google
have around the world? AUDIENCE: A lot. ANAND GIRIDHARADAS: That
would have a huge, real effect this month on a lot of people's
lives, on people's kids, and whether their kids
can go to school or not-- real. That's an example of using
that power in a way that feels right, but that involves
a painful conversation about that's going
to cost real money. That's going to come at
the expense of something, and those are exactly
the kind of conversations I would encourage you to have. And I think one of the myths-- one of the people that read the
book recently and explore kind of what it meant for
her-- she said this very profound thing,
which is this book has made me resist my urge
to overestimate the risks of speaking truth to power. I think we all tend to
overestimate the risk of speaking truth to power. I actually think if you
raised the issue you raised-- I don't think anything
would happen to you, and we could all do
more on those fronts. So thank you for your
question, and good luck with your campaign. AUDIENCE: Thank you. AUDIENCE: Looking forward
to reading your book, and thank you for,
in your words, coming and speaking in
the belly of the beast. My question is regarding
global movement of capital. I mean, capital moves
with complete impunity, and the issues that
you spoke about-- health care, education-- all
of these are national issues. How, without any
democratic control over movement of capital
versus, say, movement of labor-- how are we going to make
any real effective changes and what-- of course, this is a
very general question, but what do you think
we, as Google employees, can even say or do
about some of these? ANAND GIRIDHARADAS:
That's a great question. I mean, so when I think about,
if you're persuaded by me, that we need to do less of
the fake change and more real change. You start thinking about, OK,
what are the three or four really big areas of
American life where a little tinkering is
not going to solve it, where are we need some
transformational reform? I would say a couple. One is health. Regardless of what your
view is on the right system, I think we can all
agree we're not a particularly healthy country. It's very cruel. People are dying of things
they don't need to die of. Life expectancy is going down. It's not supposed to
move in that direction-- health. I think we'd all
agree on education as another major area, major
transformational change required simply to keep up
with where the world is. I think a third area is
labor and thinking about work and the kind of
question that was raised by that woman,
but also questions around what does it
mean to protect an Uber driver from the vicissitudes
of the gig economy? And the solutions
we have don't really fit the realities we've created,
but the fourth area that I think is a big one is
the one you raised, which is, in a world where
money is not necessarily a physical thing in your
wallet, not just a thing in an account anymore
either, but can be-- I mean, I don't understand
what all of these things are, but you probably
do, but is virtual, and can bounce around untraced,
and can be anonymized, and can be moved
through shell companies, and transferred, and
turned into things faster than any government may ever
be able to make sense of. What does it mean to tax people? Let's just face reality. Many of the largest
American corporations do not pay corporate income
tax in any given year. I'm talking about big,
big, big, big companies-- companies that make an
enormous amount of money. There's the double Dutch
with an Irish sandwich. I don't know if
you've eaten that, but that's a tax
maneuver that saves-- a lot of companies pretend
to be a lot bigger in Ireland than they actually are. Let's put it that way. You've got all these tax havens
that kind of rich individuals use-- and others. And I think we just
have to face I don't know what the answer
is, but in a world in which it is as
easy as it is-- and by the way, all of
that that I described is without any of
this crypto stuff having really affected it. We haven't even seen-- when GE adopts crypto. It's going to be a slow-- and then that becomes part of
how we have figure out taxing, it's going to be a nightmare. And we're very-- if
we're not careful, we are heading into a world in
which the most important pots of money to tax to fund
a basic common existence are going to be invisible
to the taxation authorities. And so what can
you at Google do? I mean, the technology
and know how you have-- you're probably one of the
few people who can actually think about solving that issue. From the beginning of this money
revolution that's happening, how do we embed in
those inventions the ability to tax people? That's antithetical to why a
lot of these people do crypto, but one of the things we
learned with the internet that you know very well is early
design choices matter a lot. The internet was designed
to protect anonymity, and that's very hard
to work around that. Well, the internet ended up
being this incredibly abusive, racist space, and if
persistent identity had been more of a part of the
early design of the internet, maybe the internet would
be in a different way. Maybe people would
behave online more than the way they do at cocktail
parties, which is occasionally mean, but not calling
people by racist names every time they say something
that slightly offends them. These kind of design
choices matter, so I think it's
worth thinking about, how do you design money, this
new money in a way that is not going to lead to a
world in which there is no money for the common good? AUDIENCE: So I'm really
glad you came here also. I came because I heard your
interview on Ezra Klein, which I thought was great. ANAND GIRIDHARADAS:
He's one of the greatest interviewers on earth. AUDIENCE: He's very good. I was struck by how much you
seemed to get all of it right. I don't have a lot of-- I don't see a lot of what
having big plans [INAUDIBLE],, but it all makes sense. You have a whole
bunch of people who there's concentrated wealth. They're going to give money. Those people are going
to be unintentionally or intentionally influenced. Everything you say
makes a ton of sense. And to your question,
I've actually brought stuff to an SVP-- so I was one of like
5,000 of his reports, and pushed him directly,
and got no retribution. ANAND GIRIDHARADAS: On that
issue or a different issue? AUDIENCE: Completely
different issue, but I don't mind
getting yelled at. ANAND GIRIDHARADAS:
That's an important asset in making change. AUDIENCE: I got
surprisingly little pushback as it went up the chain-- only just crisp up your
message, but go for it. The only thing I
want to push back on is it's not always easy
to tell when you're being the Goliath or not. So Google started off
as a very small company. We grew. We put a lot of businesses
out of business. Was that bad? Which of those businesses that
we put out of business was bad? There's some, I think, fairly
relatively clear cut cases, but with a lot of
cases companies grow, and then they get old,
and they become inefficient, and they eventually
go out of business. Google will not be in business
probably 300 years from now. That's OK. What are your
guidelines for that? ANAND GIRIDHARADAS: I think the
simple answer for that that's actually embedded in the law-- it is not bad to put another
company out of business when you do so out of an
abundance of competition. It is bad to put
another company out of business when
you do so because of a lack of competition. So when you guys
were starting out, and you were smarter and
nimbler than competitors, and there were a
bunch of competitors, and people wanted to come
to you instead of them, I don't think anybody
cries for that, except the people who are being
disrupted, as you guys say. But I think when
you get to a state where there's many
people wanting to advertise basically only one
company left to do their ad buy on, and you then see "The New
York Times," or "The Washington Post," or actually, more to
the point, smaller newspapers struggling to exist-- at that point, I don't think
that business is struggling because only of competition. I think if there were eight
Googles vying for the online ad business the price
dynamics in the market might be different enough that
that newspaper could compete. So I think you have
to ask yourself, when is there an
abundance of competition, and when have we become
the thing that results in a lack of competition? [APPLAUSE] Thank you. Thank you for embracing
the awkwardness.
