Speaker 1: This is Master's in Business with Barry rid Hoolds on
Speaker 1: Bloomberg Radio.
Speaker 2: My extra special guest this week is anand Gerdadis. He
Speaker 2: is the best selling author of four separate books. Previously,
Speaker 2: he was a foreign correspondent and columnist for The New
Speaker 2: York Times. He has published at The New Yorker, the
Speaker 2: Atlantic Time Magazine. He is an on air political analyst
Speaker 2: for MSNBC and a publisher of the newsletter The inc.
Speaker 2: His previous book, Winners Take All, was a bestseller. His
Speaker 2: new book, The Persuaders at the front Lines of the
Speaker 2: Fight for the Hearts and Minds of Democracy is out
Speaker 2: now onand Welcome to Bloomberg.
Speaker 1: Thank you so much for having me.
Speaker 2: Well, I've been following your work for a while and
Speaker 2: I'm really excited to talk to you about both the
Speaker 2: new book and some of the articles you've published recently.
Speaker 2: But let's start out a little bit with your background,
Speaker 2: because I've been in journalism for a few decades now.
Speaker 2: But you began as a business analyst for McKinsey. I mean,
Speaker 2: that's about his establishment as it gets. What was the
Speaker 2: career plan?
Speaker 1: You know, I actually knew exactly what I wanted to
Speaker 1: do from a pretty young age, which is really what
Speaker 1: I'm doing now, which is writing and being a journalist.
Speaker 1: I figured it out for a semester of my sophomore
Speaker 1: year of high school. That was when you could join
Speaker 1: the high school newspaper, and with this newspaper at my
Speaker 1: high school called Horizon, and I applied, and I got
Speaker 1: into the newspaper, and from the first couple weeks of
Speaker 1: writing stupid little school newspaper articles, I think I was
Speaker 1: assigned to cover sports, and I didn't really play sports.
Speaker 1: It was not that the content was so riveting to me,
Speaker 1: but the idea that you could go out, look at
Speaker 1: the world, see things, talk to people, see things with
Speaker 1: your eyes, interpret what they mean, go back, write it up,
Speaker 1: process it in your way, think about what you think
Speaker 1: it means, and then on this very small scale few
Speaker 1: hundred people would get it printed and delivered and they
Speaker 1: would see it and it would go into their brains.
Speaker 1: It was such an insanely magical concept to me that
Speaker 1: I was very clear that first semester of softomore of
Speaker 1: high school, like, this is what I want to do.
Speaker 1: And you know, fast forward twenty eight years later, if
Speaker 1: I have the math right, like, that's what I do
Speaker 1: but there was this blip in the middle, and the
Speaker 1: reason for the blip, the one year blip, was it
Speaker 1: getting into journalism. Getting into writing is harder than getting
Speaker 1: into you know, the most exclusive nightclub in Berlin.
Speaker 2: You know.
Speaker 1: I think it's gotten in some ways better because of
Speaker 1: more awareness around how these barriers keep lots of people out.
Speaker 1: In some ways it's gotten harder just because there's fewer
Speaker 1: journalism jobs now even than when I was fifteen or
Speaker 1: seventeen or twenty. But it was always this profession where,
Speaker 1: at least in my experience, like there weren't job sites
Speaker 1: where these jobs were listed. You kind of had to
Speaker 1: figure out your way in and maybe write some freelance
Speaker 1: articles for someone. And so as I was finishing college again,
Speaker 1: dead set on journalism, applied for jobs, couldn't really find anything,
Speaker 1: couldn't you know. I wanted to maybe go overseas, couldn't
Speaker 1: find anything. And I got some advice from one of
Speaker 1: my mentors, Jill Abramson, who was an editor at the
Speaker 1: New York Times then and later became the editor of
Speaker 1: the paper, and she said, you know, go out into
Speaker 1: the world. Don't try to be a journalist by hanging
Speaker 1: around in New York and Washington, like a thousand other
Speaker 1: people trying to vuy for one job, one internship, Go
Speaker 1: far away, see the world, come back with some knowledge
Speaker 1: of something other people don't know, don't have some expertise
Speaker 1: in something. Just go collide with the world.
Speaker 2: Did you follow that advice?
Speaker 1: I did? And so where did you go? So I
Speaker 1: went to India, and so I worked for McKinsey, actually
Speaker 1: because I basically decided I wanted to go to India,
Speaker 1: and then I tried to get a journalism job. My
Speaker 1: family had come from India.
Speaker 2: My parents had ever grew up in Ohio.
Speaker 1: I had never lived in India.
Speaker 2: I mean you did you speak the language?
Speaker 1: Nope?
Speaker 2: I mean everybody speaks English, right.
Speaker 1: I mean no, no, no, no, Like really the entire
Speaker 1: elite speaks English. One or two percent of people speak
Speaker 1: English and no one else does. And so I actually
Speaker 1: had this quite tortured relationship to India, which is the
Speaker 1: same as many you know, second generation kids where you know,
Speaker 1: I always say, like, the first thing I learned about
Speaker 1: India was that my parents chose to get out of it.
Speaker 1: So it's not the best YELP review, right, But part
Speaker 1: of me took this advice of colliding with the world. So,
Speaker 1: you know, I should go to a place that I
Speaker 1: have difficulty with, not a place that I have ease.
Speaker 1: I mean I could go to London or whatever. I
Speaker 1: should go to India because it'll be complicated and I'll
Speaker 1: have to grapple with things and that'll make me a writer.
Speaker 1: I had this kind of fantasy that the that the
Speaker 1: forced grappling.
Speaker 2: Yeah, and so how was it?
Speaker 1: It was incredible. I mean, that job was terrible. I
Speaker 1: applied for journalism jobs. You know, no one was going
Speaker 1: to send a twenty one year old University of Michigan
Speaker 1: graduate to go be a foreign correspondent in India, which
Speaker 1: I didn't quite understand at the time. So I started
Speaker 1: looking for other things and I applied to the local
Speaker 1: office of McKinsey. I think, making fourteen thousand dollars a
Speaker 1: year on a local contract, I could barely pay for
Speaker 1: my like shared it's like a room in someone else's
Speaker 1: apartment because Bombay real estate prices are the same as
Speaker 1: New York. Even though my salary was fourteen thousand dollars
Speaker 1: a year. Wow, people live with their families or you know,
Speaker 1: make make do. So that job was not great, and
Speaker 1: I was not cut out for business. So I was
Speaker 1: quite miserable that year. But I was miserable in a
Speaker 1: way because I'd come to this really interesting place and
Speaker 1: working in business. I had no engagement with the place.
Speaker 1: I was just doing some random job, and I realized, like,
Speaker 1: I need to either leave or I need to dig
Speaker 1: into the society in my way, which is writing, thinking, journalism.
Speaker 1: And so I, luckily after that year, got a job
Speaker 1: at the New York Times. It was easier to get
Speaker 1: a job once I was there on the ground, set
Speaker 1: up new things, new people, and I got this job,
Speaker 1: talked my way into this job at the Times, and
Speaker 1: I've been a full time writer ever since it.
Speaker 2: You wrote a book about your experience.
Speaker 1: At the end of that six years in India. I
Speaker 1: wrote a book about the transformation of modern India through
Speaker 1: the stories of five families. It was so remarkable. Once
Speaker 1: I had the right job, you know, and for someone
Speaker 1: else doing business in India in that time would have
Speaker 1: been a very exciting things my thing in the world.
Speaker 1: But once my job was to observe what was around
Speaker 1: me and try to process it and make sense of
Speaker 1: it and turn it into writing and sometimes even art.
Speaker 1: It was just the most remarkable place to be and
Speaker 1: here as a remarkable country to be a writer, and
Speaker 1: it's a colleague of mine Lydia. Paul Green once said
Speaker 1: that there's no shortage of public opinion and it was
Speaker 1: a remarkable place to cut my teeth as a as
Speaker 1: a journalist.
Speaker 2: So, how did your six years of experience in India
Speaker 2: affect how you think about the job of seeing what's
Speaker 2: happening in the world or in a local space, processing
Speaker 2: it and writing it. And secondly, that's a really stratified
Speaker 2: class system. How did India affect how you see the
Speaker 2: world of you know, the top one percent, the top
Speaker 2: point one percent and eventually winner's take all.
Speaker 1: Such a good question. I'll do the second one first.
Speaker 1: The kind of gruesome inequities of India that have just
Speaker 1: been baked into India for a very long time.
Speaker 2: Do people do people just assume it's just never going
Speaker 2: to change, they just take it for granted, or is
Speaker 2: there foment under the surface.
Speaker 1: Well, remember, India never had a revolution the way China did, right,
Speaker 1: And they never had a revolution the way Russia did, right.
Speaker 1: So a lot of countries coming out of colonization in
Speaker 1: the twentieth century had these kind of disruptions to the
Speaker 1: social order. What is remarkable about modern India is that
Speaker 1: it kind of built a liberal democracy coming out of colonization,
Speaker 1: with this incredible group of communities and populations that are
Speaker 1: as or more diverse than the countries of the European Union,
Speaker 1: let's say, right, but all in one country, and it
Speaker 1: never really had a rupture with the past where it
Speaker 1: got rid of the old social order the way say
Speaker 1: the Chinese cracked down on Confucianism or something like that.
Speaker 1: So everything new that has been added India is sort
Speaker 1: of layered on top of the old, but no old
Speaker 1: layer was ever eradicated. And so what that results in
Speaker 1: India is a lot of these very hierarchies that have
Speaker 1: been pretty undisturbed. The caste system, but also just in
Speaker 1: some places, in some rural areas, like the cast system
Speaker 1: very much still functions. If you look at the distribution
Speaker 1: of who works in the IT industry, it's still very
Speaker 1: much follows cast even if people are not conscious of it.
Speaker 1: Much like race here, but even more powerful than that
Speaker 1: is an idea of caste, The kind of residual idea
Speaker 1: of caste is the naturalness of human inequality. When the
Speaker 1: Declaration of Independence starts with all men are created equal,
Speaker 1: it's a radical statement. It was a radical statement.
Speaker 2: Footnote that little three fifths thing will deal with it.
Speaker 1: Writer. But even the articulation of that idea we don't
Speaker 1: realize because we think that's just a normal idea. And
Speaker 1: in fact they didn't go far enough. They didn't include women,
Speaker 1: they didn't include black people. But even articulating that in
Speaker 1: seventeen seventy six was quite a break, pretty radical from
Speaker 1: how people thought. And I think in India you just
Speaker 1: see very dramatically the naturalness in people's minds of human inequality.
Speaker 1: People are naturally born at different levels people in many ways.
Speaker 1: In a lot of Hindu traditions, people believe that you
Speaker 1: deserve the station into which you're born. If you were
Speaker 1: a humble servant, it's because you did something wrong in
Speaker 1: a past life. I know people in my own family
Speaker 1: who do heroic work taking care of the poor. But
Speaker 1: you've asked them why they think those people who they
Speaker 1: take care of are poor. They believe, deep down it's
Speaker 1: because they did something wrong in a past life.
Speaker 2: That seems like a fantastic mechanism for controlling the pores
Speaker 2: to say, we're going to take this belief system and
Speaker 2: impose it on you. And yeah, this may be a horrible, miserable,
Speaker 2: low paying job, backbreaking job, but hey man, you learned it,
Speaker 2: you did something, and now you've got to suffer the concept.
Speaker 2: And it's almost puritanical to draw the parallel.
Speaker 1: But there's also an incentive structure built into it, which is,
Speaker 1: if you now spend this lowly poor existence doing good
Speaker 1: thing well the next life, waiting, waiting on your superiors
Speaker 1: with alacrity, you know, then you'll be born into a
Speaker 1: higher station next time. And the reason I say all
Speaker 1: that to you is when you said, how did it
Speaker 1: imprint my view of other things? I grew up with
Speaker 1: illusions in this country, in the United States that I
Speaker 1: think many of us grew up with, or that in
Speaker 1: an immigrant, upwardly mobile immigrant family. My family had this
Speaker 1: notion of America country where you make your own destiny,
Speaker 1: you rise as high as your merit can take you, etc.
Speaker 1: And I think we didn't necessarily see the limits of
Speaker 1: that truth in our own experience because we were fortunate,
Speaker 1: and going to India radicalized me not only about India,
Speaker 1: but it actually made me see America in a new way,
Speaker 1: because what is true in India in the most dramatic
Speaker 1: form is actually true everywhere. Most people in the world
Speaker 1: do not, in fact make their destiny. Most people in
Speaker 1: the world do not, in fact rise as far as
Speaker 1: their merit can take them.
Speaker 2: So let me push back, and I'm loving this conversation.
Speaker 2: But when you look at feudal England and the monarchy like,
Speaker 2: but what still is hanging around of the monarch system
Speaker 2: and the lords and the nobles and the dukes and
Speaker 2: all that stuff. There are remnants of it. There's some
Speaker 2: persistence in landed gentry, but by and large it seems
Speaker 2: from afar like the UK is a far more equitable
Speaker 2: country today than it was five hundred years ago. What
Speaker 2: I'm hearing from you about the cast system is not
Speaker 2: only is this an overlay on modern India or an
Speaker 2: underlay with modern India built on top, but at a
Speaker 2: very first principles level philosophically, not a lot of people
Speaker 2: are shrugging it off the way you see the monarchy
Speaker 2: sort of being shrugged off in the UK.
Speaker 1: The way I think about it is, I think there
Speaker 1: is an arc and a continuum, right what Martin Luther
Speaker 1: King talked about as the arc of the moral universe
Speaker 1: from systems and structures of extreme hierarchy and extreme kind
Speaker 1: of discarding of most people on one end, and then
Speaker 1: on other end systems of imagine perfect equality, which of
Speaker 1: course exists nowhere. I think there's no question that most
Speaker 1: societies and I can think of have moved along the arc.
Speaker 1: I think some places like the United States are much
Speaker 1: further along the arc in certain ways than a place
Speaker 1: like India, you know, large because of affluence. I mean,
Speaker 1: it's easier to empower people when you have an American
Speaker 1: level of per capita GDP than an Indian level of
Speaker 1: per capita GDP. But also there is a philosophical difference.
Speaker 1: But I think in this country, in the United States,
Speaker 1: we over believe our story that people can just invent
Speaker 1: themselves to their chosen level. It's not that it doesn't
Speaker 1: happen for anyone. It happens for actually millions and millions
Speaker 1: of people. And that's remarkable. That's a new thing in
Speaker 1: the world. In America actually in the mid twentieth century
Speaker 1: built that and it felt like a new thing in
Speaker 1: the world. The idea that you know, average people could
Speaker 1: you know, go to college, get a nice house in
Speaker 1: the suburbs. But of course it was mostly white people.
Speaker 1: But there was a new idea in this country that
Speaker 1: you know, that the regular person could could rise. But
Speaker 1: I think in more recent decades we've also just become
Speaker 1: more aware of the limitations of that and all the
Speaker 1: people for whom that doesn't feel like a true story.
Speaker 2: Huh. Really quite fascinating. How long? How long were you
Speaker 2: writing for The New York Times?
Speaker 1: For so I started then in India in two thousand
Speaker 1: and five, and I continued for eleven years. So first,
Speaker 1: you know, four and a half years in India. Wrote
Speaker 1: my first book about India at the end of that
Speaker 1: time in India, and in the writing of that book,
Speaker 1: I decided that writing books is what I wanted to do.
Speaker 1: You know, I hadn't I hadn't tried it yet. So
Speaker 1: I've been writing, you know, newspaper articles for The Times
Speaker 1: about India and social transformation in India, human stories. And
Speaker 1: then there was something about going deep in a book,
Speaker 1: thinking about the same thing in the shower every day
Speaker 1: for three years, that instead of a different thing in
Speaker 1: the shower every day for three years. That really appealed
Speaker 1: to me. So I decided that was kind of going
Speaker 1: to be my focus. So I continued after that time
Speaker 1: to write a column a once in two week kind
Speaker 1: of easy, easy, one day, you know, one day every
Speaker 1: two weeks of my time a column just to kind
Speaker 1: of stay engaged, but kind of pivoted to books and
Speaker 1: have have been writing books as my kind of main
Speaker 1: thing ever since.
Speaker 2: You briefly taught narrative journalism at New York University. Looking
Speaker 2: at your background BA in history at at University of
Speaker 2: Michigan and some doctoral studies at Harvard, you could have
Speaker 2: very easily become an academic, which is a fairly comfortable lifestyle.
Speaker 2: Did that ever hold any appeal or.
Speaker 1: You know, it's interesting you ask in that in between
Speaker 1: period of leaving India, winding down my full time job
Speaker 1: at the New York Times, finishing that first book. In
Speaker 1: between them, that's when I was when I went to
Speaker 1: grad school, and I think at that there was a
Speaker 1: moment when I was looking at all three right, newspapers
Speaker 1: at the kind of highest level of immediacy, academia at
Speaker 1: the kind of lowest level of immediacy and reflection, and
Speaker 1: then this kind of book public facing book writing as
Speaker 1: sort of in between the two, and I really held
Speaker 1: all three as options kind of around the time I
Speaker 1: was turning thirty, and as I progressed and wrote the book,
Speaker 1: I realized a couple of things. One, as I said
Speaker 1: that I think the newspaper writing felt it felt very
Speaker 1: come and go. It just felt like you would really
Speaker 1: work on these things and then everybody would talk about
Speaker 1: them if you were very lucky, for like an hour
Speaker 1: and then and then it was just gone. And some
Speaker 1: of the most beautiful things I still feel. I ever
Speaker 1: wrote when I was in my twenties in India that
Speaker 1: human stories India like it's just not part of the
Speaker 1: culture anymore in a way that books really last. So
Speaker 1: I was drawn to books. And I did try the
Speaker 1: academic thing by going to grad school, and to be
Speaker 1: honest without being rude, it kind of disgusted me in
Speaker 1: a way. And what I mean by that is I
Speaker 1: was not in theoretical physics or something like that. I
Speaker 1: was in the government department at Harvard, which is what
Speaker 1: they call, you know, politics or political science. And I
Speaker 1: have never met we now would understand that time into
Speaker 1: two thousand and nine, ten eleven, you know, there's a
Speaker 1: time when there was a big unraveling already going on
Speaker 1: after the financial crisis. Democracy. I think you could now
Speaker 1: trace back some of the democratic unraveling we've since seen,
Speaker 1: you know, to trace it back to those years big
Speaker 1: things were happening in the country, the tea part, and
Speaker 1: it was a group of people who often seemed completely
Speaker 1: removed from the actual experience of what was happening in
Speaker 1: the country, like everything was turned into regression analysis of
Speaker 1: kind of trivial questions. And the people in that department,
Speaker 1: and there were several who really did engage in the society,
Speaker 1: were sort of made fun of behind their backs, the
Speaker 1: not famous ones and also some of the famous ones,
Speaker 1: like some of the ones who are who you and
Speaker 1: I would know their names, but they actually did not
Speaker 1: have the respect of anybody in the building, like they
Speaker 1: were the They were the kind of runts of the
Speaker 1: litter in that world right to have, you know, I
Speaker 1: don't mind mentioning one of them who I deeply admire,
Speaker 1: Michael Sendel. You know, this is a guy who teaches
Speaker 1: this course on justice, biggest, one of the biggest courses
Speaker 1: at Harvard, nine hundred people or something. But he also
Speaker 1: started spreading this to China, and he's somehow despite the
Speaker 1: Chinese government, he got like millions of people to take
Speaker 1: this course I think on law YouTube. Yeah, because it
Speaker 1: was these kind of abstract concepts of justice and it
Speaker 1: didn't get into you know, democracy, Like he found a
Speaker 1: way to sneak like like a course on like Western
Speaker 1: philosophy and political theory into like, I can't think of
Speaker 1: something more admirable that you should do if you're like
Speaker 1: a fancy professor at Harvard. And I remember people talk
Speaker 1: about him as like not a serious academic really, and
Speaker 1: I was just like, this is the opposite of my
Speaker 1: moral compass, like and last example.
Speaker 2: But before you move on from that, you're reminding me
Speaker 2: of I'm gonna I'm gonna mangle this quote. Maybe it'll
Speaker 2: maybe it'll resonate with you. Why is academic politics so vicious?
Speaker 2: And the answer is because it's so meaningless, right, and
Speaker 2: and that sort of penniness seems like it's along those lines.
Speaker 2: You know, people have this odd way of projecting their
Speaker 2: own failures and insecurities onto others. I'm a big student
Speaker 2: of behavioral finance, and you look at the decision making
Speaker 2: process and it's just full of cognitive errors. But I
Speaker 2: got to ask one other question related to the academic side.
Speaker 2: It wasn't the teaching and the students, it was everything
Speaker 2: around it that you found problem.
Speaker 1: At It was the lack of engagement in the world.
Speaker 1: American democracy has been coming apart, and this was a
Speaker 1: political science slash government department, and it was.
Speaker 2: Much more than the admin headaches. No, it was they
Speaker 2: were in a like a even at Harvard, it's a
Speaker 2: backwater that's not connected to reality.
Speaker 1: Even at Harvard, I think Harvard is like off the
Speaker 1: charts connected to like the contemporary world. And of course
Speaker 1: there's parts of Harvard that are very engaged in the world.
Speaker 2: Right.
Speaker 1: I was not at the Kennedy School, but it just
Speaker 1: seemed to me in a moment when American democracy was
Speaker 1: bursting at the seams, it didn't feel to most people
Speaker 1: around me in that world like it was the project
Speaker 1: of thinkers and scholars and theorists and data scientists at
Speaker 1: Harvard's political hub to think about how to save the country,
Speaker 1: to think about how to rescue the world from authoritarianism.
Speaker 1: It just felt like it just felt like regression. Analysis
Speaker 1: of trivialities and the people the exceptions Michael Sandels, they
Speaker 1: had a scotchpow others who are doing the best work
Speaker 1: out there. The snide comments about them by others just
Speaker 1: made me realize what I value here is not what
Speaker 1: is valued.
Speaker 2: So let me get a little ahead of myself and
Speaker 2: bring a question from a latter section forward. It's pretty
Speaker 2: obvious today, with the benefit of hindsight, that you could
Speaker 2: draw a straight line from the financial crisis and the
Speaker 2: rescue of the banks to the detriment of homeowners, mortgage holders,
Speaker 2: the average person in the street. There's a straight line
Speaker 2: from that to the rise of popular authoritarianism. Let me
Speaker 2: cut to the chase. Why did we miss so much
Speaker 2: of that? Well, why did so many of us miss
Speaker 2: that in real time as it was happening.
Speaker 1: Yeah, you know at my newsletter, which you are kind
Speaker 1: enough to mention the ink. We've been doing a lot
Speaker 1: on with twenty twenty four trying to pull back and
Speaker 1: understand why this is happening to our democracy right, not
Speaker 1: just the day to day, not just who's up and
Speaker 1: down in New Hampshire, but what has been happening to
Speaker 1: our democracy that we are in this kind of condition right,
Speaker 1: Because you know, when you have a kind of cancer,
Speaker 1: the way our body politic does. Now there's the immediate
Speaker 1: question of what do you do tomorrow, But there's also
Speaker 1: the question of what is the context in which this
Speaker 1: became possible? And I think the financial crisis story is
Speaker 1: so important because I think there are really two things
Speaker 1: to me that converged in this authoritarian moment in the
Speaker 1: weakening of our democratic order. One is when there's enormous
Speaker 1: social change, as there has been, I would argue positive
Speaker 1: social change the first side of the ledgers like positive
Speaker 1: stuff change in progress and gender progress, in racial inclusion,
Speaker 1: you know, shifting demographics and and a kind of a
Speaker 1: bigger WII in this country. Those kind of changes discombobulate
Speaker 1: people and cause people to sometimes feel you know, there's
Speaker 1: that old frame when you're accustomed to privilege, equality feels
Speaker 1: like oppression if you're not used to it, right, you
Speaker 1: feel like, hey, hold on, as a white guy, why
Speaker 1: am I? And it's actually totally surmountable, right, as I'm
Speaker 1: sure you would attest, Like a whole bunch of white guys,
Speaker 1: whole bunch of white people, whole bunch of men figured
Speaker 1: it out. Figure out that you know what, I used
Speaker 1: to be able to pinch someone in the office and
Speaker 1: we don't do that in this decade anymore. And like,
Speaker 1: millions of people still completely successfully adjust to that, right,
Speaker 1: millions of people completely adjust to you know what, I
Speaker 1: never thought about race. I never thought about who was
Speaker 1: talking in a meeting, But I'm aware of that now.
Speaker 1: But millions of people find it harder to sometimes make
Speaker 1: those adjustments. And so when you have enormous social progress
Speaker 1: and change and you don't have a real plan for
Speaker 1: helping the people who are more discombobulated by it, unsettled
Speaker 1: by it, you don't have a plan for helping them
Speaker 1: think through it, figure it themselves out. That creates one
Speaker 1: enormous source of weakness for democracy. And second to the
Speaker 1: financial crisis point, when you have big events and people
Speaker 1: are hurt and democracy does not deliver for them, does
Speaker 1: not do the thing it is supposed to do, which
Speaker 1: is make their life better through their choosing, that really
Speaker 1: pisses people off. So so, now, if you think of
Speaker 1: the era we've lived in story number one, enormous social progress,
Speaker 1: people dislocated, right, it's been just this remarkable era of
Speaker 1: change and gender in race, in LGBT rights, in demographics.
Speaker 1: Story number two, it's been the era of you know, Iraq,
Speaker 1: Hurricane Katrina, the financial crisis, COVID, twenty year wars against
Speaker 1: ragtag militaries that we can't win COVID for sure. Again
Speaker 1: and again, people have seen their Civics class bravado not
Speaker 1: come true. This idea that we all learned in seventh
Speaker 1: grade that like if people choose their leaders and George
Speaker 1: Washington blah blah blah, and it hasn't come true for people.
Speaker 1: Like if you were living in New Orleans in two
Speaker 1: thousand and five, do you think your Civics lesson about
Speaker 1: how democracy is the best system for giving people the
Speaker 1: world they want? Do you think that rings true to you?
Speaker 1: Like if your son died in Iraq, or you had
Speaker 1: multiple children die in Iraq, do you think the notion
Speaker 1: that democracy is this self correcting force where people realize
Speaker 1: something's going You know, if you were in COVID and
Speaker 1: seeing just lots of people die who didn't have to
Speaker 1: die because public health guidance wasn't clear, or the president
Speaker 1: was drinking bleach or whatever else, you haven't really experienced
Speaker 1: democracy delivering. President Biden said this early in his term,
Speaker 1: we have to prove to people that democracy works. When
Speaker 1: I was growing up in this country. I don't know
Speaker 1: about you, no one.
Speaker 2: That was an assumption, that was just a given right.
Speaker 1: But he's right. And the reason he said that is
Speaker 1: because it is no longer self evident to people because
Speaker 1: of things like the financial crisis.
Speaker 2: So let me give you a little bit of pushback
Speaker 2: on that. And here's what some of the academics would say.
Speaker 2: Democracy works when people vote. And we are recording this
Speaker 2: late in January, where just after the Iowa primaries where
Speaker 2: something like five percent of the population cast to vote.
Speaker 2: All right, but that's a caucus. When we look at
Speaker 2: the broad presidential elections, the US has amongst the worst
Speaker 2: voter participation. And I don't want to blame the victim
Speaker 2: and I don't want to cast a spur that way,
Speaker 2: but democracy works when people are involved in the democratic process.
Speaker 2: But when half of the eligible voters can't be bothered, well,
Speaker 2: then you're just letting a small you know, the turning
Speaker 2: of the minority, tell you exactly what you should do
Speaker 2: instead of taking charge yourself.
Speaker 1: Look, I think I would love to say I think
Speaker 1: you're right. I mean, first of all, it's important to vote,
Speaker 1: and the fact that about half of people do, even
Speaker 1: in a moment when everything feels like it's at stake
Speaker 1: and you could end up with a dictatorship if you
Speaker 1: kind of go the wrong way. Look, I'm with you. However,
Speaker 1: I think for all the people who do vote and
Speaker 1: have voted, and who've heard that lecture from you know,
Speaker 1: frustrated from Obama, don't boo vote whatever, and who came
Speaker 1: out and did this and that, Okay, I think a
Speaker 1: lot of them would say, I have what did I get?
Speaker 2: Look?
Speaker 1: I am as My entire career from India onwards has
Speaker 1: been in and around the question of democracy. I write
Speaker 1: a lot about human beings and individual human stories, but
Speaker 1: it's all. Democracy is my great abiding subject. I believe
Speaker 1: in it. However, I think we have to reckon with
Speaker 1: the fact that if it is not a self evident truth,
Speaker 1: but in fact an evidence based truth that needs to
Speaker 1: prove to people, as the President said, that it works,
Speaker 1: that it's superior to what the Chinese are doing or whatever,
Speaker 1: we have to make the case, and that case has
Speaker 1: to be felt deeply in people's lives and in you're
Speaker 1: in my lifetime. I think a great many Americans, including
Speaker 1: Americans who vote, can't be faulted for feeling that when
Speaker 1: things got dire and they needed help, there was no
Speaker 1: government there. The government did not help. Democracy did not deliver.
Speaker 2: H really quite fascinating. I want to start talking about winners.
Speaker 2: Take all. This is really kind of a fascinating story,
Speaker 2: and I have to start by asking which are the
Speaker 2: winners you describe? This isn't the top ten percent or
Speaker 2: the top one percent. This is like the zero point
Speaker 2: zero one percent that really ruled the world.
Speaker 1: Absolutely. This is a book about people I would you know,
Speaker 1: call plutocrats. And the word plutocrats is sort of you know,
Speaker 1: the first part of the word is pluto money, rich, wealth,
Speaker 1: and the second is ruling, like democrat. Plutocrat is someone
Speaker 1: who rules governs us through their wealth. And so this
Speaker 1: is a book about a class of very wealthy and
Speaker 1: powerful people, the billionaire class, you could say. And it's
Speaker 1: a story of how this billionaire class has amassed extraordinary
Speaker 1: wealth and power, which is something people know in part,
Speaker 1: and this is the twist, and what I tried to
Speaker 1: break some ground on in part by using the appearance
Speaker 1: of giving back, of doing good, of making a difference,
Speaker 1: of philanthropy, of impact investing, of all these things that
Speaker 1: we talk about these days. The argument of the book
Speaker 1: is that the richest, most powerful people use giving back
Speaker 1: and taking care of society as a kind of ruse
Speaker 1: and a distraction to continue and intensify their grabbing of
Speaker 1: wealth and power, and essentially have pulled off this brilliant
Speaker 1: trick of convincing lots of regular people that the billionaire
Speaker 1: class holds the answers to the problems they are still
Speaker 1: actively causing, that they are the solution to the problem
Speaker 1: that they represent.
Speaker 2: So let's let's break that down a bit. And some
Speaker 2: of this is a little controversial, So I'm gonna I'm
Speaker 2: gonna put your feet to the fire. Hey has always
Speaker 2: been ultra wealthy, the Rockefellers, the Gettys, go back to
Speaker 2: you know, the Norman Kings and what happened in France.
Speaker 2: The wealthy have always been here with us, whether it's
Speaker 2: Henry Ford or Thomas Edison, They'll always be here with us.
Speaker 2: What's different about today?
Speaker 1: You're absolutely right, and in fact, one of the you know,
Speaker 1: I think there's something old and constant in the book
Speaker 1: and something new. I think the old and constant thing
Speaker 1: is there's always, as you say, a ruling elite financially
Speaker 1: And what is also a constant throughout history is ruling
Speaker 1: elites always invent a story that, by the way, has
Speaker 1: to be believed, not just by them, because then it
Speaker 1: wouldn't work. It has to be believed by everybody about
Speaker 1: why it is best to let them continue being ruling elite. Right,
Speaker 1: so Southern planters, plantation owners, and slave owners and enslavers
Speaker 1: of people in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries couldn't just
Speaker 1: run their businesses. It was very, very important to invent
Speaker 1: a story of racism, about the naturalness of white superiority
Speaker 1: and the naturalness of black inferiority. If you didn't invent
Speaker 1: that story, and by the way, convince a certain number
Speaker 1: of people who were not white of the truth of
Speaker 1: that story, and a certain number of people who were
Speaker 1: not rich white people but were poor, if you didn't
Speaker 1: have lots of people believe the story about that ruling
Speaker 1: order being the best possible ruling order, it would fall apart. Right,
Speaker 1: Racism had to be invented to help prop up that
Speaker 1: kind of regime. Well, the Indian cast system has its story,
Speaker 1: and the British feudal time had its story. Every ruling
Speaker 1: system has its story. The argument of this book is that. Yes,
Speaker 1: that's a constant. And I'm trying to unpack what that
Speaker 1: story is now, and I think it's a different story
Speaker 1: the past stories. It is not. This is natural. It's
Speaker 1: not inequality as naturally you can't say that, right, No
Speaker 1: rich person can go out and say I deserve to
Speaker 1: be here and you all deserve to be the poorest.
Speaker 1: Right that stories of old story wouldn't work now. So
Speaker 1: a lot of the old stories have gone out the window.
Speaker 1: You can't say them anymore. And so I was trying
Speaker 1: to explain what the news story is, and I think
Speaker 1: the new story is, Yes, I may have more than
Speaker 1: everybody else. Yes, these inequalities may be savage and corrosive
Speaker 1: to the social order. However, I, as a rich person
Speaker 1: have a unique ability to also heal this society by
Speaker 1: giving back. And if you cramp my style, if you
Speaker 1: tax my wealth, if you come after my business or regulation,
Speaker 1: if you do X y Z on the policy side,
Speaker 1: you are actually hurting the society. You are hurting regular
Speaker 1: people because you're cramping my ability to eradicate diseases, to
Speaker 1: help democracy, to go to the moon or Mars or whatever.
Speaker 2: So these are all governmental responsibilities. That when the tax
Speaker 2: base was higher, we did more of And what you're
Speaker 2: implying in the book is primarily in the Reagan era
Speaker 2: and beyond when we had both aggressive tax cuts and
Speaker 2: then under Bill Clinton, where we had a cap on
Speaker 2: dollar compensation for executives but lots of stock options. We
Speaker 2: ended up creating a class of There's always been wealthy,
Speaker 2: but the argument is we've now created a new class
Speaker 2: of super wealthy that the world has never seen before. Yes,
Speaker 2: fair statement, yep.
Speaker 1: And I think, you know, going back one hundred years
Speaker 1: when you really have the birth of modern philanthropy. As
Speaker 1: I talk about in the book, people have always given money.
Speaker 1: I mean in the Islamic religion, Christian religion, there's been
Speaker 1: these commandments to give back, tithe whatever. A giving is
Speaker 1: an old concept. But when I'm talking about philanthropy in
Speaker 1: the way that you and I would think about gates
Speaker 1: as philanthropy, that's a relatively new thing, about one hundred
Speaker 1: years old, and the way political scientists define it is
Speaker 1: kind of the birth with the Rockefellers and Carnegie of
Speaker 1: others of fortunes that were so big that they were
Speaker 1: kind of it was kind of like nation state level
Speaker 1: money First of.
Speaker 2: All, Ford Foundation, right, is a man still.
Speaker 1: So like you if you have you know, you're a
Speaker 1: successful guy. If you have a few hundred thousand dollars
Speaker 1: you want to give to some cause you're not affecting
Speaker 1: governance in New York City by doing that. You may
Speaker 1: help some people, you may not, right, But if you
Speaker 1: had like fifty billion.
Speaker 2: Dollars to give away, you can move the needle.
Speaker 1: But you but you might, but you could also like
Speaker 1: break the needle. You could also just like lose the
Speaker 1: needle in your coat pocket, like you like you could
Speaker 1: make the needle go backwards, like if you had fifty
Speaker 1: billion dollars and you you know, this is obviously a
Speaker 1: real example. People like Bill Gates and you had, you know,
Speaker 1: Barry's thoughts about education. There's the possibility that you could
Speaker 1: make education better. And there's the possibility that you could
Speaker 1: become our unelected, unchosen, illegitimate czar of education creating new
Speaker 1: standards that are actually a mistake, you know that that
Speaker 1: have all these unintended consequences. It could work or it
Speaker 1: could not work. But the question is, like who the
Speaker 1: heck is you?
Speaker 2: Right?
Speaker 1: And And the issue with modern billionaire philanthropy even when
Speaker 1: it's well executed like Bill Gates's, and certainly when it's not,
Speaker 1: like you know, others like Bill Gates really does want
Speaker 1: to get rid of polio, right, He's devoted the second
Speaker 1: half of his life to thinking about these problems. I
Speaker 1: do not doubt his sincerity. Where something like GS Gibbs
Speaker 1: was literally invented during the financial crisis, when it's marketing,
Speaker 1: when there was like New York Times investigations how Goldman had.
Speaker 2: Like so, let me ask you a more challenging question.
Speaker 2: If the very wealthy want to give money to fight disease,
Speaker 2: or they want to give to the symphony, or they
Speaker 2: want to put public works, I don't really care about that.
Speaker 2: Where I start to get concerned is where, through the
Speaker 2: guise of tax exempt deductions, they begin to get very political.
Speaker 2: So you have these think tanks that certainly don't have
Speaker 2: the common man's best interest at heart, affecting legislation, affecting
Speaker 2: who gets appointed as judges, affecting tax policy, and all
Speaker 2: this comes under the guise of philanthropy, when really it's
Speaker 2: a very And again some of this is specifically mentioned
Speaker 2: in your book, very very specific tax exempt impact on
Speaker 2: maintaining the status quo for the carried interest exemption and
Speaker 2: the exemption on long term capital gains or the shorter
Speaker 2: ta like, there's a lot of things that are described
Speaker 2: as philanthropy, but it's really lobbying.
Speaker 1: Yeah, look, I think you have to look at the
Speaker 1: whole arc of this money. So I think the American
Speaker 1: business model, kind of social business model, we've ended up with,
Speaker 1: is telling business people that in phase one of your life,
Speaker 1: you have to make as much money as possible, in
Speaker 1: as ruthless and corner cutting away as possible. That's just
Speaker 1: the norm, right, And a lot of the old kind
Speaker 1: of what is now thought of as inefficiencies that were
Speaker 1: in corporate America in the fifties, sixties and seventies really
Speaker 1: got edged out by shareholder pressure, shareholder activism, the McKenzie
Speaker 1: kind of revolution, etc. Where all slack was eliminated, right,
Speaker 1: and that your janitor who might have been an employee
Speaker 1: of your company in the fifties and sixties was now
Speaker 1: a contractor of a contractor of a contractor, no health insurance,
Speaker 1: nothing you know, can and just imagine that writ large
Speaker 1: for the whole economy, every piece optimized, right, So that
Speaker 1: happened and the lesson. I think for business people, the
Speaker 1: message of the post Reagan era was cut every corner
Speaker 1: you can you get legally or illegally in some cases,
Speaker 1: pay as little as taxes in taxes as you can
Speaker 1: possibly do. If you have to do double dutch with
Speaker 1: an Irish sandwich or this and that, do that right.
Speaker 1: Pay people as little as possible, take on as little
Speaker 1: as risk. There's a book called the Great Risk Shift.
Speaker 1: Shift as much risk onto workers and consumers as you
Speaker 1: can so the corporation is not bearing the risk. And
Speaker 1: then you'll make more money than you would make if
Speaker 1: you didn't do all those things. Okay, that's phase one.
Speaker 1: Phase two is now the Phase two starts with workers
Speaker 1: being paid less than they would otherwise have been paid,
Speaker 1: the commons in many ways being kind of starved, but
Speaker 1: companies having more money. And then phase two is like, okay,
Speaker 1: now get back. Now that you've made all this money,
Speaker 1: maybe more money than you would have otherwise made, give
Speaker 1: back and give to you know, after school programs for
Speaker 1: boys and coloss here's the problem, right, Phase one of
Speaker 1: your life in that model has has kind of created
Speaker 1: these social problems. Or Phase one is why those kids
Speaker 1: don't have a good education five days a week, and
Speaker 1: then phase two you might give them a boys and
Speaker 1: girls club to go to on Thursday afternoons. Right in
Speaker 1: phase one, you are creating a world in which you
Speaker 1: know there's not enough money for universal pre k or
Speaker 1: there's not enough world for community college classes for people
Speaker 1: to reinvent themselves, and they get laid off. And then
Speaker 1: in phase two you're creating like a little progra for
Speaker 1: like one hundred people in Appalachia to you know, transition
Speaker 1: out of coal mining.
Speaker 2: There's no symmetry though.
Speaker 1: There's no symmetry, but the reality is is what is
Speaker 1: done by operational daylight is just on a vaster scale,
Speaker 1: infinitely vaster scale then what can be cleaned up by
Speaker 1: philanthropic moonlight. However, the philanthropic moonlighting is marketed much more
Speaker 1: heavily than what is done in operational daylight. Right, so
Speaker 1: we don't really know except when we get occasional glimpses.
Speaker 2: So let's talk about something that I'm intrigued about. In
Speaker 2: the book, you discuss the concept of the rise of
Speaker 2: thought leaders, displacing academic experts and public intellectuals, primarily driven
Speaker 2: through non expertise selection. That we have this group of
Speaker 2: I don't even want to call them experts, almost self
Speaker 2: determined experts that very much are influencing policy in a
Speaker 2: way that true experts might not explain.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I have a chapter on the rise of the critics,
Speaker 1: called the Critic and the thought Leader, and the rise
Speaker 1: of the thought leader, as in the way that I
Speaker 1: define it in the book, a kind of thinker who
Speaker 1: is safe, who is deemed safe for the kind of
Speaker 1: plutocratic establishment. And so it goes back to that notion
Speaker 1: of ruling elites have to invent and nurture a story
Speaker 1: that justifies their rule. And part of that is that
Speaker 1: there are certain thinkers out there who are threatening to
Speaker 1: the official story of the time, and there's other people
Speaker 1: out there who are kind of willing to play ball
Speaker 1: and spread ideas that are helpful to the ruling story
Speaker 1: of the time.
Speaker 2: Right.
Speaker 1: So, if you think about pick one realm that I
Speaker 1: write about in the book telling the story of Amy Cutty,
Speaker 1: if you think about the area of the empowerment of
Speaker 1: women feminism, issues with the workplace and the way workplaces
Speaker 1: treat women, institutions treat women, there is a non plutocratic
Speaker 1: friendly way of talking about that issue and advocating on
Speaker 1: their issue, and there is a plutocratic friendly version, right,
Speaker 1: So the non plutocratic friendly one is like real structural change,
Speaker 1: whether policy things like you know, paid paid family leave
Speaker 1: and medical leave, which so many women in the political
Speaker 1: sphare have advocated for, or universal pre K and childcare
Speaker 1: and things like that that would make it easier for many,
Speaker 1: many women to juggle all their roles and obligations and aspirations.
Speaker 1: Kinds of ideas that would really empower women have been
Speaker 1: shown in other societies to have those effects, but are expensive, right,
Speaker 1: the examples I just gave you all things that would
Speaker 1: cost company's money, costs rich people money. Right, think about
Speaker 1: the Elizabeth Warren campaign to cent wealth tax to fund
Speaker 1: precisely those kinds of things. Well, that's a that's a
Speaker 1: kind of way of empowering women that is not does
Speaker 1: not thrill the plutocrats. Okay, now here's another. Here's something
Speaker 1: they like more lean in, right, I mean one of them,
Speaker 1: a plutocrat herself.
Speaker 2: Wrote literally that book, that's the title.
Speaker 1: Cheryl Sandberg's book, right, And what was the argument that actually,
Speaker 1: very much within this system we have, if women just
Speaker 1: leaned in, raised their hand more tried to be more
Speaker 1: assertive at the meeting.
Speaker 2: Hey, I did it goodn't you?
Speaker 1: Correct?
Speaker 2: Right?
Speaker 1: I help?
Speaker 2: That's kind of an arrogant statement.
Speaker 1: I helped just I helped rise. I rose to the
Speaker 1: top and helped destroy American democracy. Any any sister can
Speaker 1: do it too.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 1: And so you look at this kind of Cheryl Sandberg's
Speaker 1: lean in idea as like, Wow, that is costless empowerment
Speaker 1: of women. That is a way of empowering women that
Speaker 1: literally would cost the wealthy establishment nothing.
Speaker 2: As opposed to an equal rights amendment that mandates the
Speaker 2: same salary for the same job, correct sog.
Speaker 1: So what do you think is going to be on
Speaker 1: the main stage of TED? Which which talks do you
Speaker 1: think are going to be given? You think at the
Speaker 1: Clinton Global Initiative there's going to be a talk about
Speaker 1: how the kinds of wealthy donors that donate to the
Speaker 1: Clinton Foundation.
Speaker 2: So I'm so glad you brought that up, because that's
Speaker 2: what I've been thinking about. Once you start accepting donations
Speaker 2: from outside parties, does that mean you lose your academic
Speaker 2: freedom and now you're beholden to whatever belief system they
Speaker 2: want to push? Is there is there a way around
Speaker 2: that or it's just.
Speaker 1: There is actually and I think this is not as
Speaker 1: hard a problem as it as it seems like. I mean,
Speaker 1: we have lots of institutions that do take money from
Speaker 1: wealthy people and somehow have some norms around protecting the
Speaker 1: integrity of the work.
Speaker 2: Right.
Speaker 1: So, I mean, the New York Times has advertising, you know,
Speaker 1: I think you could make some comments at the margins
Speaker 1: that you know, the housing section has more about fancy
Speaker 1: life than it does about right right. But in general,
Speaker 1: I think most people who advertise the New York Times,
Speaker 1: who work in the New York Times, who read the
Speaker 1: New York Times would generally understand that like Gucci just
Speaker 1: because it buys an ad is not placing a call
Speaker 1: to an editor and saying I want this story. Like
Speaker 1: that's not how the New York Times works. People are
Speaker 1: going to listen to this thinking I'm crazy, Like it's really.
Speaker 2: There's a firewall.
Speaker 1: There's a firewall. It's a pretty well star firewall, like
Speaker 1: in these universities, right, even the best universities. I mean
Speaker 1: they you know, there's this whole issues with donors and
Speaker 1: these centers. But like the average professor mm hmm. At
Speaker 1: these years, we've built a pretty good system of the
Speaker 1: average professor being relatively insulated from what donors want. And
Speaker 1: part of what is so bizarre right now with the
Speaker 1: bill Ackmans of the world is like they're trying to
Speaker 1: maybe should In other words, we have institutions that have
Speaker 1: a pretty good record of being able to take money,
Speaker 1: whether you whatever you think about that and building some
Speaker 1: culture and norms. I never met an advertiser once, or
Speaker 1: spoke to an advertiser once, or spoke to anybody in
Speaker 1: the advertising department of the New York Times once when
Speaker 1: I worked there for eleven years. Like those are just
Speaker 1: not conversations that happen.
Speaker 2: But in the modern world. And we haven't talked about
Speaker 2: the Koch brothers yet, but you look at the Mercato School,
Speaker 2: you look at a lot of donations specifically to institutions
Speaker 2: in academia that come with.
Speaker 1: Absolutely and that's becoming more and more than norm My
Speaker 1: only point is some places have solved this problem, and
Speaker 1: we should look at it.
Speaker 2: Right.
Speaker 1: I think you could have, you know, conferences of ideas
Speaker 1: that that fine, take money from rich people, and you
Speaker 1: could create some kind of firewall, norms whatever, and learn
Speaker 1: from the New York Times. I don't think people have
Speaker 1: figured out how to do that, but the answer is
Speaker 1: there is. I'm just suggesting. Look, I would prefer to
Speaker 1: live in a world in which these fortunes were not
Speaker 1: so gigantic to begin with, it didn't have this influence.
Speaker 1: But even in the world we live in, there are
Speaker 1: thoughtful ways to say, you can take the money, but
Speaker 1: you don't get to decide what's on stage. You don't
Speaker 1: get to decide what opera we do.
Speaker 2: So I want to connect the two books on that
Speaker 2: exact point. From worders take all to the Persuaders, And
Speaker 2: it just happens that within the Persuaders, one of the
Speaker 2: discussions you have is on the decline of institutions and
Speaker 2: how they've fallen, which is not a coincidence. There are
Speaker 2: forces out there that have been trying to do this.
Speaker 2: It just happened. In this week's Business Week there was
Speaker 2: a whole analysis of all the drops in institutional approval
Speaker 2: level at just about every level of society. It's really
Speaker 2: quite astonishing, and it raises the question, how can a
Speaker 2: democracy persist if the institutional aspects and it's everything. It's
Speaker 2: the church, and it's the Supreme Court, and it's the military,
Speaker 2: and it's the police, and it's Congress and as well
Speaker 2: as the media. If every one of these entities is
Speaker 2: falling in the belief system of the average individual, what
Speaker 2: are the ramifications of that for democracy?
Speaker 1: I think we are in this very complicated moment and
Speaker 1: situation in which we have to kind of there's a
Speaker 1: circular problem if we have to show people, prove to
Speaker 1: people the democracy can make their lives better, as you
Speaker 1: and I were talking about before, but we need them
Speaker 1: to trust us to even have the authority to make
Speaker 1: people's lives better.
Speaker 2: Right.
Speaker 1: In other words, with the kind of Senate that President
Speaker 1: Biden has, these kind of razor thin margins, a hostile house,
Speaker 1: he can't do a lot of things that would make
Speaker 1: people's lives better. And so then people's lives don't get better,
Speaker 1: and then people don't vote for you to have more authority.
Speaker 1: Give you a bigger House margin, give you a bigger
Speaker 1: Senate margin, and about it and then complain about it,
Speaker 1: and again, like I think people, I think voters are
Speaker 1: often wrong about when they kind of try to diagnose
Speaker 1: what the actual issue is or what the best policy
Speaker 1: solution would be. But I think voters are very intelligent
Speaker 1: about do they feel like the people who are in
Speaker 1: charge care about them and are and are kind of
Speaker 1: making their life better in a material way. And part
Speaker 1: of the puzzle of the Republican Party in recent decades
Speaker 1: has been its ability to win sometimes although not often,
Speaker 1: while not materially delivering for people. And the way it
Speaker 1: has done that is by kind of weaponizing these social
Speaker 1: changes we were talking about.
Speaker 2: So let me stop you there because I want to
Speaker 2: roll this back to the Persuaders and the prologue of
Speaker 2: the book, which is fascinating, right. So you tell the
Speaker 2: story of these two women who turn out to be
Speaker 2: Russian agents. They go on across country trip across America,
Speaker 2: sort of a little bit of find out who we
Speaker 2: Americans are in order to report back to the motherland.
Speaker 2: Tell us about these two women and what did they
Speaker 2: find and how was it weaponized.
Speaker 1: This is a kind of Russian Thumba and Luisa, these
Speaker 1: two intelligence analysts arrived. They travel around the country. We
Speaker 1: don't know exactly, you know, who they met with, but
Speaker 1: they kind of went around, went to probably you know,
Speaker 1: rallies or it kind of took in the political scene,
Speaker 1: maybe met with people all around the country. And we
Speaker 1: do know that what they were doing was gathering not
Speaker 1: intel in the in the like Cloak and Daggers covert,
Speaker 1: just like what's going on in this society out in
Speaker 1: the world, Because what they were actually feeding back home
Speaker 1: was this giant Russian online campaign to you know, toxify
Speaker 1: the American discourse.
Speaker 2: The Internet Research Agency cranks out millions of tweets, millions
Speaker 2: of Facebook posts. The people who run that have not
Speaker 2: done a good job clearing this out, and it has
Speaker 2: a huge impact on our discourse.
Speaker 1: And you know, I very like I whenever I can't
Speaker 1: figure something out, I try to go to the text,
Speaker 1: go to the original sourcemans here, go talk to people
Speaker 1: with this Russian thing. There was so much stuff in
Speaker 1: the they were trying to get Trump elected. They were
Speaker 1: to I was like, let me read this stuff myself, right,
Speaker 1: So I downloaded. I picked two of the most prominent
Speaker 1: accounts in the Russian effort, and I downloaded thousands of
Speaker 1: each of their tweets, and I just read through them
Speaker 1: almost like a book, like read them like a story.
Speaker 1: Started classifying them as this you know, crazy spreadsheet where
Speaker 1: I was analyzing them and what I realized, I mean,
Speaker 1: one of them was trying to get Trump elected. The
Speaker 1: other one was like a pro Black Lives Matter left.
Speaker 2: It's left about It's less about getting something done and
Speaker 2: more about just creating.
Speaker 1: They I realized as I read these tweets, First of all,
Speaker 1: I read them with this kind of weird hate hate admiration.
Speaker 1: Right they I don't know it. It's like when you're
Speaker 1: in a breakup with someone and they they say something
Speaker 1: so mean to you, but it's so insightful, you know,
Speaker 1: and it's like, Wow, you really get me, and I
Speaker 1: never want to be with you ever again. I feel
Speaker 1: like they saw the truth of us, this this mission,
Speaker 1: and their ability to poke at certain trigger points. It
Speaker 1: was just a really astute, well informed effort. So what
Speaker 1: are they getting out of it? If one's trying to
Speaker 1: get Trump elected, the others not. What is the project?
Speaker 1: And I think the project, as I started to interpret it,
Speaker 1: was less about this particular outcome and less even just
Speaker 1: about fomenting division, which is the other thing people said.
Speaker 1: I think it was about promoting a fatalism in Americans
Speaker 1: about other kinds of Americans.
Speaker 2: And that that leads to not only distrusting institutions, but
Speaker 2: us distrusting it.
Speaker 1: Yes, and for anyone who's you know, ever been in
Speaker 1: a relationship or relationship counseling, You know, like, fights are
Speaker 1: not actually dangerous in a relationship. It's actually couples who
Speaker 1: don't fight that you got to worry about. Contempt is
Speaker 1: fatal in a relationship. Can't come back from contempt, very
Speaker 1: hard to come back from contempt, that kind of writing off, Oh,
Speaker 1: you are just always that way, You've always been that way. Ugh,
Speaker 1: I couldn't. Why do I even bother that? When couples
Speaker 1: don't really have much of a shit, that's when it's dead, right,
Speaker 1: And I realized the specific attitude they were trying to
Speaker 1: cultivate in US was not division, which is you and
Speaker 1: I believe in a different tax rate. You and I
Speaker 1: believe in tax rate eighty percent apart from each other.
Speaker 2: It's not it's since the tax system we're but me
Speaker 2: me thinking you're just some money guy, right, and you
Speaker 2: will never listen to reason you don't care about right.
Speaker 1: That is really different than you and I having a
Speaker 1: different number in mind for a top tax rate. And
Speaker 1: what I realized looking at the Russian thing is that
Speaker 1: they're you know, big, but in some ways modest in
Speaker 1: terms of the scope of the American conversation. Their effort
Speaker 1: was to turn us fatalistic about each other, pessimistic about
Speaker 1: the possibility that we can evolve, change, grow, learn, And
Speaker 1: we have been playing so brilliantly into their plan and
Speaker 1: the book The Persuaders as an attempt to say, we
Speaker 1: got to get off this track. We have to stop
Speaker 1: being useful idiots for the Russian intelligence services and actually
Speaker 1: reclaim this notion that people can change. People's minds can change.
Speaker 1: It's the only thing that has ever changed societies. It
Speaker 1: happens all the time. It happens every day. It still
Speaker 1: is happening right now, and we have to kind of,
Speaker 1: you know, pull up our bridges and get back to
Speaker 1: the work of persuasion that we're going to save this country.
Speaker 2: Huh. Really amazing. You had a really interesting column recently
Speaker 2: about the upcoming twenty twenty four election. The real battleground
Speaker 2: of twenty twenty four is emotion. Fascinating stuff.
Speaker 1: Explain why, Look, emotion is the new Michigan, Pennsylvania or Wisconsin.
Speaker 2: It's the swing state.
Speaker 1: It's the swing state. And what I mean by that is,
Speaker 1: I think when we talk about politics, we're often talking
Speaker 1: about the wrong thing. We talk about policies, right, or
Speaker 1: we talk about crises like the border, or we talk
Speaker 1: about issues like critical race theory, the agendap issue like that,
Speaker 1: or issues like climate change and what do we do
Speaker 1: about that? But what is actually motivating voters? Not motivating voters,
Speaker 1: riling people up, not riling people up leading to certain
Speaker 1: kinds of candidates versus others. Being attractive to people is
Speaker 1: often deeper stuff, right, And I think those of us
Speaker 1: who talk and think about politics for a living are
Speaker 1: often quite blind to that because we are quite interested
Speaker 1: in policy. We think Medicare for All has an interesting
Speaker 1: idea to talk about. But I think what I've learned
Speaker 1: spending most of my life writing about regular people dealing
Speaker 1: with the big forces of the world, is that for
Speaker 1: most people, the things that really animate them, the questions
Speaker 1: that we animate them are much more in the kind
Speaker 1: of emotional terrain. So taking a shoe like CRT, critical
Speaker 1: race theory, honest history in schools, all this stuff, right,
Speaker 1: I don't think any of that is about the stuff
Speaker 1: that it's formally about. I think that is about the
Speaker 1: universal dread that every parent has that your kid will
Speaker 1: drift away from you, which, by the way, they will.
Speaker 1: That's the meaning of life of parents. Your kid will
Speaker 1: drift away from you once they come out, no going
Speaker 1: back in. Right, it's awful for us parents. You hug
Speaker 1: your kids close. One day, they stop wanting as many hugs. Right,
Speaker 1: one day they don't come into bed and cuddled anymore.
Speaker 1: Too old for that one day they you know, mom
Speaker 1: and faught right. The whole process of parenting is like
Speaker 1: losing your kids slowly into their own life. And what
Speaker 1: is this CRT stuff? But weaponizing that fear. Your kids
Speaker 1: are going to learn stuff that will make them think
Speaker 1: differently from you. Your kids are going to know a
Speaker 1: different story about the country than the one you know.
Speaker 1: Your kids will be turned a gender according to this
Speaker 1: fantasy that is not the gender you knew them to me.
Speaker 1: It is all weaponizing this completely human thing of my
Speaker 1: kids are going to grow up and leave me. Right,
Speaker 1: my kids are going to become out of my control.
Speaker 1: And I think when we I'm just taking that one issue,
Speaker 1: when we actually start that, you could do that analogy
Speaker 1: any issue.
Speaker 2: Right.
Speaker 1: You think there's border things about you think anyone in
Speaker 1: the country understands the actual nuance immigration positive order. People
Speaker 1: feel invaded psychologically by the era we live in, people
Speaker 1: feel like, ah, there's not enough for me. I don't
Speaker 1: know if I can get ahead, Like the whole world's
Speaker 1: coming in. Right, that's just like a deep emotional experience
Speaker 1: that then shows up and oh yeah, the border that
Speaker 1: sounds like what may be responsible for the way I'm feeling.
Speaker 2: Right, So I find that fascinating that that you managed
Speaker 2: to take a broad spectrum of high resonance policy issues
Speaker 2: and just boiled it down to, Hey, they're pushing an
Speaker 2: emotional hot button, and if you don't figure out how
Speaker 2: to play that same game, if you're on the other side,
Speaker 2: you're gonna lose.
Speaker 1: Think about the kids who are so incredibly Areiculate and
Speaker 1: vision Are and Climate gen Z climate people. First of all,
Speaker 1: they're absolutely right on the policy, and they're the only
Speaker 1: people who might save us. But I think when I
Speaker 1: even talk to them, there's it even a deeper thing there,
Speaker 1: like their parents. If you're twenty five, your parents are
Speaker 1: telling you how much they love you every day. If
Speaker 1: you're lucky, your parents are leaving you a dying world
Speaker 1: while telling you they love you. That's really confusing, right,
Speaker 1: So if you are a pro democracy leader who's trying
Speaker 1: to build coalitions around climate, around honest history, or whatever else.
Speaker 1: I just think the essay was a plea to understand
Speaker 1: those depths. It doesn't mean the policy issues are not important.
Speaker 1: It means that if you are not speaking to people
Speaker 1: at the level which they're actually living these things and
Speaker 1: understanding those dynamics, you're leaving them open to authoritarians who
Speaker 1: are always good at speaking to emotions.
Speaker 2: And that's what I found so persuasive about that essay.
Speaker 2: I strongly suggest everybody go read The real bad ground
Speaker 2: of twenty twenty four is emotion. I only have you
Speaker 2: for another four or five minutes. Let's jump to our
Speaker 2: speed round, our favorite questions. We ask all of our guests,
Speaker 2: starting with what have you been listening to or watching?
Speaker 2: What's been keeping you intellectually challenged these days?
Speaker 1: Watching? You know, like you have joint bank accounts and
Speaker 1: individual bank accounts. I have shows for myself and shows
Speaker 1: for everyone in my family. So my son and I
Speaker 1: are watching Seinfeld. He's almost nine. We're starting from episode one,
Speaker 1: season one and trying to go all the way through.
Speaker 2: Is nine the right age?
Speaker 1: I think he's just getting like a literally okay, maybe
Speaker 1: a year short, but I was right. Yeah, my daughter
Speaker 1: and I are watching Is It Cake? When I watch
Speaker 1: with Something with the two of them together, great British
Speaker 1: bacon show. I watch Atlanta by myself, that's my solo show.
Speaker 1: And I'm watching Veep right now with my wife.
Speaker 2: The first season is very tough to get through. Yeah,
Speaker 2: it's very cringey the first couple episodes, as is politics.
Speaker 1: Okay, go ahead.
Speaker 2: Mentors who helped shape your career.
Speaker 1: I talked about her a little bit, Jill Abrams, and
Speaker 1: she got me in a journalism, gave me a chance,
Speaker 1: advocated for me, and I don't think I'd be a
Speaker 1: journalist if it wasn't for her.
Speaker 2: Let's talk about books. What are some of your favorites.
Speaker 2: What are you reading currently?
Speaker 1: I'm reading this book everybody was talking about a couple
Speaker 1: of years ago, called A Little Life and Novel. It's
Speaker 1: most wrenching, searing, awfully painful, but brilliant novel by Hannah
Speaker 1: Hanya Jana Gehara, So so good. And then you know,
Speaker 1: in terms of the books that have been most important
Speaker 1: to me historical, I would say my genre of narrative nonfiction.
Speaker 1: So of the most important books, Behind the Beautiful Forevers
Speaker 1: by Catherine Boo Random Family. You know, I'm really interested
Speaker 1: in these books that kind of do this deep immersive
Speaker 1: work following, following people through their lives. That's the kind
Speaker 1: of work that I've dedicated myself to doing.
Speaker 2: And our final two questions, what sort of advice would
Speaker 2: you give a recent college grad in a career in journalism.
Speaker 1: It's tough. The business model in many ways is gone.
Speaker 1: But I go to parties every month and meet people,
Speaker 1: do all kinds of things, and ninety five percent of
Speaker 1: people I meet don't believe in what they do. Huh,
Speaker 1: don't think it's socially important. It wasn't the thing that
Speaker 1: they promised themselves they'd be doing when they were twenty.
Speaker 1: And if you become a journalist and stick with it
Speaker 1: and find a way throw all the ups and downs,
Speaker 1: you will not be one.
Speaker 2: Of those people like really interesting.
Speaker 1: You will love what you do and believe in what
Speaker 1: you do and know that you're doing something that is
Speaker 1: good for the world.
Speaker 2: And our final question, what do you know about the
Speaker 2: world today? You wish you knew twenty plus years ago
Speaker 2: when you were first getting started.
Speaker 1: I wish that I knew how fragile the American system
Speaker 1: is I grew up on a myth of how utterly
Speaker 1: durable it is, and it turned out not to be.
Speaker 1: And I wish I had seen that earlier and been
Speaker 1: able to see those cracks earlier. There were always people
Speaker 1: all along telling us about those things. Sometimes we don't
Speaker 1: listen to those people early enough. And I've tried to
Speaker 1: become a better listener to the people telling us things
Speaker 1: before everybody else.
Speaker 2: That's a really insightful response. And hindsight's always twenty twenty.
Speaker 2: But knowing what you know now, and you go back
Speaker 2: and look throughout American history, like the red flags were
Speaker 2: there starting with the communist witch hunts in the fifties,
Speaker 2: how we treated the Japanese during World War Two, how
Speaker 2: long it took to give women the vote, Like you
Speaker 2: could just keep going back, Jim oh, and just work
Speaker 2: your way back decade by decade. There were lots and
Speaker 2: lots of warnings out there.
Speaker 1: And lots of people waving those red flags who we
Speaker 1: didn't listen to.
Speaker 2: And no, no, no, the system is fine, which kind
Speaker 2: of raises a question, is the system really sturdier than
Speaker 2: we realized it survived all this, or does the cumulative
Speaker 2: damage of all these little cracks eventually lead to some breakage.
Speaker 1: I think the system has been sturdy in that it's held,
Speaker 1: but under the system, awful things have been able to
Speaker 1: happen in this country. You know, Slavery was a legal,
Speaker 1: constitutional part of this system until it wasn't. Internment was
Speaker 1: a legal part of this country and part of the
Speaker 1: system until it wasn't. Segregation was a part of this
Speaker 1: country until it wasn't. You know, criminalization of homosexuality was
Speaker 1: part of the system. So the system has held, but
Speaker 1: the system can tolerate a great deal of barbarism. And
Speaker 1: I think we've what we're learning now is that we
Speaker 1: just have to we have to make sure that our
Speaker 1: definition of the system holding is not you know, having
Speaker 1: some kind of formal familiarity of the New Hampshire Primary
Speaker 1: and this and that and all these kind of rights
Speaker 1: and rituals that we recognize, while in fact what's going
Speaker 1: on under the hood is barbarism. And I think that's
Speaker 1: that's going to be a decisive choice the country faces
Speaker 1: later this year.
Speaker 2: Really really fascinating on Thank you for being so generous
Speaker 2: with your time. We have been speaking with on Georgadis.
Speaker 2: He is the author of Winners Take All, and more recently,
Speaker 2: The Persuaders. If you enjoy this conversation, be sure and
Speaker 2: check out any of the previous five hundred we've done
Speaker 2: over the past ten years. You can find those at iTunes, Spotify, YouTube,
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Speaker 2: I did not thank our crack staff that helps put
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Speaker 2: I'm Barry Dhelts. You've been listening to Masters in Business
Speaker 2: on Bloomberg Radio.