Recode Decode: Anand Giridharadas

MUD, SAM, SNOW, THE TRACK, different surfaces, same truth. Every ground is our proving ground, ready, sat on the board. Hi, I'm Karis Swisher, editor at Large of Recode. You may know me as someone who would have been one of the good billionaires, and if you don't believe me, just give me a billion dollars so we can find out.

But in my spare time, I talk tech and you're listening to Recode Decode from the Vox Media Podcast Network. Today, we're going to play a live interview every single conducted in New York with Anand Geer Daddas, who's been on this show before. He's the author of the book Winners Take All, and has been one of the sharpest critics of how supposedly philanthropic tech billionaires are trying to change the world. This interview was recorded live at the Made By We Space in New York City, which is an event space in the Flatiron District owned by WeWork.

Let's go there to hear my interview with Anand Geer Daddas. Thank you, everybody. Thank you for coming to this place. This is lovely, actually.

I'm sort of amazed by it. And I want to introduce Anand Geer Daddas. Is that right? Fantastic.

Thank you very much. We're going to talk about a lot of things substantively, how to see Anand, you can relax. I can never quite relax around you. That's fair.

We destroyed so many tech barons. Yes, that's true, but you're not one of them. We share something in common about what we want to do with them. I am so glad to be here in New York.

We're taking a lot of Rico Dcos on the road, because we really think one of the things that we made a bet on when we started the Rico Dcos podcast was that people like substance in this twitchy, horrible time and want to talk substantively with great people about important issues. And so we've been doing tons and tons of live podcasts all over the country, and we're going to be doing more as we move forward, because we think it's super important to address some issues, both with the players and other people who are critics of the players. And so I'm very excited to talk to Anand because we did a podcast how long ago. Six months ago.

Six months ago. Six months ago. Six months ago. Six months ago.

Six months ago. Really rich people ruining the world essentially. Anand, so thank you for coming. So talk a little bit about your book and why you started you for people who aren't familiar with winner takes all.

I think I observed something that probably many of you have observed one way or another, which is that we live in this time in which on one hand very rich people are extraordinarily generous and socially concerned. And it's not only lip service. It's not only all the hippie imagery that we see in a we work. It is more money being given away than serving in a way that's really real.

It's a lot of the tech companies that you've spent so long writing about that genuinely have kind of civilizational missions and have done genuine good for the world while also doing other stuff. It is product. You can't go shopping without finding socks that are going to change the world, tote bags that are going to change the world. Kicking two bucks at Walgreens, Bono is involved in all of it.

Impact, the hardest-hearted business people on earth now feel a need to not just do investing but impact investing. Right. Right? And they want to empower humanity unless you're Bill McGlashon, you're doing impact investing, but you don't want people, you're empowering to compete with your son for that seat that you bribe for him.

We'll get to him. So that's all true, an age of extraordinary elite generosity. But there's the other half of the story, which this is also an age of extraordinary elite hoarding. People use the word inequality.

I think it makes people's eyes glaze over. Inequality is just a gap. There's all kinds of gaps. Everywhere has a gap.

I think what has happened in America is more specific. The rainwater of the future has been abundant in the last 34 years. If you look at Spain, a country like that's a different situation. I don't think Spain has been rained on by a lot of future in the last 34 years.

As you know, but in this room, we've had a lot of future in this country. Innovation is a Latin word for new shit. We've had a lot of new shit in this country in the last 34 years. It's just that the very few have kind of monopolized the gains.

That's true of tech. It's also true, by the way, of this thing in the news this week, Chinese trade. America as a whole has benefited from trading with the Chinese. Investors have benefited, companies have benefited, consumers have benefited.

It was just that we totally failed to redistribute the gains from the country trading with China. And that has been the case everywhere. So I tried to start the book with the question, what is the relationship between the extraordinary elite generosity of our time, which is real, and the extraordinary elite hoarding of our time, the monopolization of the future itself. And I think the conventional theory out there is that the relationship is one of a drop in the bucket that, yes, we do have these big problems, but these people are trying.

Zuck is trying, the Google people are trying, the Wall Street people are trying, the Goldman Sachs people doing social impact bonds are trying. If only there were more of them and they had more billions and they tried harder and they crunched their spreadsheets in new ways, they could solve these problems. And I started to become curious about an opposite possibility, which is that maybe the extraordinary elite generosity of our time is how we maintain the extraordinary elite hoarding of our time. Maybe the generosity is the wingman of the injustice and the differences the wingman of making a killing.

The giving back is a wingman of taking ruthlessly. And I reported it out because like you're a reporter, I went into these worlds and I found it to be unfortunately true. True, this is linked together. You'd rather them just keep their dirty money, essentially.

This is a very good question. So the easiest and the most immediate pushback I've got is what you prefer, they just bought a yacht. So it's a complicated question, right? And I think most people's intuition is what that would never be better.

At least they're doing something, even if you're sympathetic to my view. So let's take, I think in some cases, of course we'd be better off with them at least trying to do something than buying a yacht, in some cases. I think there are other cases where that's actually not true. So let's take three one very quickly.

The Sacklers. No. No one likes the Sacklers because honestly like 400,000 people killed in your country is sort of genocide numbers so it's not, they're not attractive. For those not keeping up, OB, let's go ahead.

So the Sacklers made billions and billions of dollars, members of that family, by selling Oxycontin and now as accused by several states including the state of New York, knowingly pushing something they knew had problems, they knew was more addictive, deceiving people, etc. So you make billions and then they spent millions philanthropically, art museums everywhere, right? They don't donate to art museums in the communities they're hurting. They donate to art museums in places where people like you and me live.

So we know not to, we think they're good people, all the big cities with the journalists live, the regulators live and they did this for a long time. So now you say, okay, would we have been better off if the Sacklers had just bought yachts? I would argue yes. Because what would have happened if they'd bought yachts?

They would have been doing this stuff with their business, people would have been dying and they would have had no reputational cover. Regulators would not have thought of them as an art family. Journalists wouldn't thought of them as an art family. When I was growing up in Washington DC, this thing was going on.

I didn't know about that. I didn't know about the Sackler Gallery. And I believe it is plausible that regulators and journalists would have come for them way earlier if they had not had the moral glow purchased through philanthropy. Mark Zuckerberg, same story.

If he didn't have that changed the world vibe. If we saw him the way we see anybody buying stuff for a dollar and selling for two in this country, I'm not saying as an evil person, I'm just not saying as a sage. If we saw him the way you see someone in the chemical company, right? If that had been our image of him for the last 20 years, you think you would have gotten away with this shit?

Well, we'll get to him in a second. But actually let's get to him right now. Do you? He has not been.

Most of the tech people have not been as philanthropic. Gates was the first one who really started and shifted his image really drastically from sort of, you know, Darth Vader. I was thinking too. It's interesting because he was the apex predator.

He was the one that you couldn't make a move in tech. And everyone had that image of him from the very beginning. Not as a sweet, you know, sweatshirt wearing young man as sort of a nasty nerd really who decided to kill you. He would do it.

And you couldn't start a business without him doing it. That was his reputation from the get-go. Besides being a world's richest man. And aside from the odd little like he takes coach or whatever, those kind of stories, which are entirely untrue, he was not seen as one.

He takes a coach on the private Jackson. He takes a bad person. Yeah, it would be funny if he had a coach. Like with horses and everything.

Personality coach. Yeah. Well, no, he doesn't have that. So, sorry, I shouldn't make this.

I'm wondering when he's going to revoke the blurb on my book. He already called me a communist when he was a devil. Okay, good. Which you clearly are.

So he started this off, this philanthropy. But most of tech hadn't been that philanthropic in the way the Sacklers have been and some of the things that he's been doing. But go through Mark. So Mark, please.

But Mark made that big announcement that led her to his daughter that they were going to give her 99% of shares. Which was I think maybe the biggest statement in the tech world where someone had, you know, after Gates, this younger group had done it. Except they were going to do it through an LLC, which is a really weird modality. But they're definitely doing stuff.

And I meet public school teachers all the time whose lives are being upended by Mark's ideas about public schools. Because part of what I'm really writing about is a culture, not just set of practices. A culture in which we think people who have made a lot of money should have thoughts about everything. And that those thought should be the law.

Mark Zuckerberg, as far as I understand it, wanted to like find, you know, build a social network to help people at Harvard meet each other. He ended up being the most dangerous person in the world. And now, incidentally, as a byproduct of that, gets the have thoughts about how public schools are in America. You know, they have tech companies in Germany.

I don't think anybody in the German education ministry is curious about the thoughts of German social networking CEOs about education. They're allowed to exist. I don't know. I think Mark Zuckerberg should legally be allowed to have thoughts about education.

I just don't think they should have any more weight than he is able to express through voting every two or four years. So nonetheless, he comes with him quite a lot of cash. And I think a lot of, go through what happened here in Newark. It was a huge announcement.

It was on, Oprah was on everywhere about that. He was giving this money. Cory Booker was right in there with him who's running for president. I'm going to give this much money to fix schools in Newark.

I mean, Mark Zuckerberg's Newark donation was when some was modeled after another great philanthropist, Christopher Columbus, who also decided to change a place without having been there before. And didn't seem to know much about kind of saw it as a blank slate. Which is more his own blank list projected onto what he found. And so Mark Zuckerberg, who never been to Newark, goes on Oprah, makes us announce we're going to transform Newark.

And $100 million. And by all accounts, it literally did nothing. It just appeared. It did nothing.

And what is so remarkable about that is how obvious it is. This is the whole reason that we transitioned over hundreds of years out of feudalism to democracy. We have actually, this thing is not new that they're trying to do. It's old.

This is a refutalization of, like if you watch it down in Abby, you understand the idea that there's a guy in a castle and then no one else owns land in the show. Anytime people don't own land, get a weird idea about how they die in a car accident. And rich people are nice, but they're in charge of how the help works. They're in charge of shaping the society through their kindness, through their generosity.

And this is the Zuckerberg model. And now it extends, he's trying to get rid of all the world's diseases as a public education as a hard enough problem. And I just think, how remarkable. We have doctors.

He may not be aware of them, but we have some. His wife is one. We have an entire public health infrastructure. We have the Centers for Disease Control.

We have the NIH. Mark is going to get rid of all the diseases, even though his own company is a plague. Okay. That was especially imagination.

So why do you think, as you were doing this book, where's the mentality for it from? Because we have a history also in this country, you know, in Andrew Carnegie or the Ford's, or these all foundations which now seem rather pleasant, you know, in terms of what they did, whether it was libraries or the Ford Foundation continues, all these things, even, you know, the people's surprises were the origin is not the greatest origin. Talk a little bit about this kind of, like this is something we are used to in this country. We're the very wealthy people.

Give back. It's interesting, you're totally right, but it's an arch of the story. So this really began 100 years ago, where you started to have these fortunes that were kind of what we'd call billionaires today, not just people who are rich, but really, essentially when they started becoming interested in giving money away, the way historians define this in philanthropy is they started to have enough money to be able to do the kinds of things that governments do. That's one way to think of it.

That was really 100 years ago. It was not benevolent associations and these things. It was someone who could really privately govern. And Carnegie wrote this incredibly important thing called the Gospel of Wealth, which many of you may have studied in high school or college, in which he laid out what has become the intellectual foundation for money making and money giving.

And it was basically a truce. It basically said part, the argument is in two parts, part one, making money is super hard. It's a jungle out there. You got to leave us alone.

We got to pay people as little as possible. Maybe we can't pay our taxes as much as you'd like. It's just no judgment. Making money is hard.

If we don't do all this stuff, someone's going to eat our lunch, you know, this argument from everybody in the Valley. You always think they're about to be eaten. And what was radical about Carnegie on the other side is he said, however, when we then make a bunch of money from being left alone in the jungle, that money actually doesn't belong to us. We are mere trustees of that wealth and have to spend it on the public good and do it within our lifetimes.

So he was a justifier of the most ruthless capitalist. However, he also advocated for a pretty radical motive giving. And a lot of people really remember the first part of Carnegie, but kind of forgotten the second part. But he laid out this bargain that I think has ruled to today where if they give back, that buys them immunity from questions about how they made the money, how they keep the money, we're talking about taxes, we're talking about wages, we're talking about what you lobby for in Washington.

There has been this silent bargain that all of us have participated and frankly the media has participated in, that generosity entitles you to a little bit of a suspension of scrutiny. And what was really interesting a hundred years ago when this was getting started, it took time for this immunity to develop. When Rockefeller proposed the foundation in 1909 to create the first foundation of that kind, there was no legal structure for it, right, 501, whatever all this stuff we have now that didn't exist. So he was trying to figure out what's, yes, Congress said no, you can't create a structure to give your money away.

Can you imagine that today? Why? Because they didn't want him exerting that much power of public life. He came back a year later, this is one of the most amazing documents I've ever read, with a counterproposal of the Congress.

I've heard you, I understand you're concerned about one private citizen governing privately, you're right, here's a counterproposal for a new idea for a charter and this should actually become a reclaimed heritage. He proposed in various ways in great detail a way to do a foundation where the public would have some say over it. If the Congress or subcommittee created decided that this foundation was no longer doing better at giving away money privately than say, Congress, it could just put the money into the treasury, right, it could dissolve it. It could create committees to help allocate the money.

So it wouldn't just be some private guy and his like nieces and nephews and children allocating the money. That whole heritage of skepticism and people even Theodore Roosevelt saying no, no, no, no, amount of generosity can excuse how the money was made. Even Democrats don't talk like that anymore. Everybody's for these people giving back.

And basically what happened was that initial wave of skepticism gave way to those people spending a lot of money. And every institution in this country, one way or another, started to be a beneficiary of that money. And lo and behold, you start bribing the society at large. People start to develop a very positive idea of you.

And part of what I and there's several others right in parallel with me have been trying to do is to say, you know, a lot of this philanthropy, a lot of this do-gooding impact investing is basically trickle down economics with a cherry on top and a little bit of whipped cream. And I imagine they should do with their money then. I mean, first of all, right now, Mark and others in tech, for example, who have all the money, who have seen amounts of money actually, are in trouble for their businesses, how their businesses are operating, which will probably never impact what they're making. You know how they're making.

What do you imagine, so when they get that rich, they're like, we have to give away the money. How do you get to that first idea that Ford had, which would be the correct one, where you don't give these people more power on the other side that we've already given them in the first place? Well, first of all, the question in that world everybody loves to ask, and I think very rich people in general is like, what can I do? What can I start?

Right. And so the first thing I would say to them is to flip around John Kennedy, ask not what you can do for your country. Ask what you've done to your country. These people love being future oriented because that kind of prevents us from being past oriented.

Yeah, I'm aware of that. So I'm more interested in Zuckerberg seizing and dissisting from doing a bunch of things, and I'm happy to give him a list than you have even better list than me. I'm way more interested in that than I am in what prospective things he can do. I'm happy to let public schools, principals and teachers go back to just running their own show.

I think we'll be okay. I would love him to actually stop abusing our privacy, stop compromising our democracy, and then go back to the government to regulate what it needs to regulate, not lobby against that in Washington, but that stew dusse behind him. I think the more important, what a lot of these folks do is these modest acts of do-going, and they lobby for stuff in Washington, just lobbying on its own that has 1,000 fold the impact of the good. I'll do one example.

So Pepsi and Coke, right? They all have playgrounds. They make smaller cans now so you got to drink two to get diabetes. So that's great.

And they run these ads. They're basically a water company with sugar in the water. But it was revealed during the Trump trade negotiations with the renegotiation of the trade deal in Mexicans. That one of the things that I think these beverage companies and food companies were pushing and the Trump administration took their request to the Mexicans was to remove the Mexicans' right as a democracy to put nutrition labels on a bunch of products.

Imagine that for a second. Under this deal, if the Mexican government represented their people and wanted to put informative labeling on it, they wouldn't be able to, because an American company had persuaded the American government to prevent the Mexican government from doing what its people wanted to do under a democracy. And you wonder why people angry in this age were in. So I don't need Pepsi and Coca-Cola's playgrounds to help 1,000th of 1% of the kids they have harmed lose a little weight.

I need them to not do the things they're doing right now. And the real way to have them do that is to have government play a way more assertive role in public life and stop trusting the Foxes to be the handkeepers. Is there any of these efforts that you think work with Bill Gates, for example, what they're doing? Sure.

So one of the easier cases is places where government is not functional. So when you're giving money to places, as he does, he also does a lot here. But when you're giving money to places where frankly government could never solve that problem, I think it's much easier to justify. By the way, I still think there's a lot of questions around being paternalistic, being imperialistic, how you do it, et cetera, et cetera.

Centering human beings, centering communities versus just dictating, all of that still applies. But the case for crowding out public capacity in places where there is no public capacity is stronger. Where you're redesigning common core here, you're designing common core. It's education or?

You're jamming it down. A bunch of state legislatures without a vote. And then people getting angry. I think there's a lot less of justification of that.

People often bring up Gates to me, because Gates is not the Sacklers. I don't even think he's necessarily Zuck. But I think even if you invent someone who made their money perfectly, didn't harm anybody, wasn't Darth Vader. Even in that case, the question people often ask me, is there any problem with that?

Let's imagine someone who really has not, Serena Williams, which makes a lot of money in the sense of transform public capacity. Everybody likes Serena Williams. Correct. Even if there's no problem in that case with how the money was made, there's no problem with any of that stuff.

So you hit the ball. That was it. Correct. There's still a question of should anyone person, however amazing, have that much say over public life.

And the question it raises for me is, why do we actually bother fuss so much about voting rights? Why is it so important that a relatively small number of people not get turned away at the polls? Important that we fought against poll taxes and all this stuff. Why was it important to fight for women's suffrage?

If we create this entire system where the choices about our biggest shared problems are made by us, but then we create this other door to the nightclub of democracy where only people with a billion dollars can come in and they can just also sort of overrule us on a bunch of things. So you knew that there was someone with nobody should have this rule over public life. What would you do with their money? Just tax it and then- We should just tax it more heavily, right?

First of all, and there's pretty good evidence that places that the tax more of it, just have more dignity and decency. People want to tell you that that's a mystery and we don't really know, but we know. Many people that are probably been to those countries, it's just different there. So that's one thing.

I remember when I lived in England for a year, in England it's pretty free market in the European spectrum, but less so than us. I lived in England, I got sick. I went to the doctor and afterward I was like, so how do we settle this out? I don't know.

And they were like, just go home. And not only was it free, I remember it, like that moment, there was an expressive, I thought the society was expressing itself to me, expressing its values in the transaction, in the absence of a transaction. And there was a moral meaning in the person saying to me, who wasn't a citizen, it wasn't even technically a resident, it was a student there, they didn't even know any of that, they were just a person who looked like someone maybe they'd colonized and from another country they'd colonized. It's always a safe bet there.

And they were just like, we got it. And it's just like that's the met, like we got this. So it should be the government that should be, the government that you are, that should be doing this. And to be clear, I'm just talking about our biggest shared problems.

I don't want my phone to be made by the government. I don't want my flights to be, airplanes to be made by the government. I don't want these chairs to be made by the government. What we are really talking about is the commons, is the stuff, frankly, that the systems, the infrastructure, social, physical, that we are powerless to do alone.

But the commons has changed into a private thing. I think I just wrote about this last week, that the public square is not Twitter, for example, even though it's Facebook, but it's become that, that we've allowed, for example, political discourse, because it infects everything. The commons not privately owned more and more, whether it's an online commons or toll roads are of different, when you, I think what we don't sometimes realize is we've been on the receiving end of a 40-year war on the idea of government, not just on government, the idea of government. It's an ideology, the way any fundamental, it's a market fundamentalism.

I call it capital supremacy, right? And like every other supremacy, it excludes and marginalizes every other thing that's not its reality. And so in this culture, money was good, entrepreneurs are good, businesses are good, government is bad, public purpose bad, private game good, and so on and so forth. This shaped everything, it shaped what people wanted to do when they were graduating.

And technology will fix it too, because that's an overriding part of it. You remember what Gates said? So many things. So many things.

We have all these hierarchies in the physical world. But when tech comes in, tech doesn't care who you are, it's just going to eliminate those hierarchies from the physical world. I mean, what an extraordinarily naive thing to say from the standpoint of 2019 by a man who was brilliant and meant well by saying that, but I think was fully unable to understand if you take a historical view, rather than a computer science view, most new tools submit to the existing power situation, right? New tools don't change everything, nothing changes everything.

You only think something changes everything from a computer science degree and you dropped out two years early, right? These people need to all go back to school and get a liberal arts degree. You know that. You know that.

So if we're in the state where people do welcome, the state governments welcome this money when they bring it in, and then when people complain, they get less attention for what they're doing. Taxing would be one way, just taking their money, just taking their money and having government decide to do with it. How do you get rid of this idea that these people are better and smarter? Because I think that's one of the ways we'll fix it for you.

We know more about this and that. And what's interesting to me among all these people is Jeff Bezos doesn't do a lot of philanthropy. In fact, he just started, which I thought was fascinating. He resisted for a very long time.

And then I think felt pressure and some must have felt pressure in some way to do that. And again, what was so striking about his announcement was that I think our... He was to do two billion dollars to start. A billion to a Montessori program where kids would be treated like customers in Amazon.

That's his quote, not mine. I guess you can return your education within 14 days or whatever. And it's free. And then so that was creating his own thing.

And the other billion was homeless programs that was supporting existing programs I think in around Seattle. What was interesting about it is I think our societal view of this stuff is maturing. So whereas when Gates made his announcement, people were just goggling, like, so nice, so nice. And even Zuck several years ago now, it was still fairly uncritical by my standards.

When the business thing happened in September, I think it was, the day one story, to use his favorite expression, the day one story in the news media was, yeah, but you bet your taxes? Yeah, but don't you have workers peeing in bottles? Don't you have all these work campers that Jessica Bruder wrote about in Nomad Land, such an important book about these essentially homeless people living in carvents, traveling around the country, working seasonal couple months here, couple months there at Amazon. Why are you fighting homelessness by philanthropic moonlight while you're causing homelessness by operational daylight?

Why don't you just not cause homelessness? Right? I don't know. I'm sure these people in the valley have teaching girls to code, just a thousand girls to go here.

Why don't you just not run your companies in a way that increase the likelihood of 160 million women in this country living under a misogynist? I think every woman I know would be willing to forgo a coding class for free, but not live under a misogynist. Right? It's so much better that these people just don't cause these problems, that they then clean up one percent of with this like little web wipe of philanthropy.

Okay, we're going to take a quick break now. We'll be back after this with Anand Geer Dada, the author of winners take all. Mud, sand, snow, the track, places where excuses don't work, where capability is something you prove one race at a time, off road racing, formula one, different worlds that pose the same question. What are you made of?

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He was for I think we just tax people more. And then the government didn't want the money. I just interviewed the mayor there. That was such a fascinating situation.

Right. In this case San Francisco, mark Benny off was for a tax. He wanted to be taxed more. And other internet billionaires did not want to be taxed more.

And they were fighting with each other. And then the mayor sided with the ones who didn't want to be taxed more. Because she felt it'd be too much money suddenly for the city to administer a world because they didn't have a plan. What was so interesting about this was, and I've had interesting conversations with Mark about this because he's not a lot of the philanthropy stuff, CSR stuff.

And this was I think one of the first things where instead of doing that with him giving the money and doing it, he used his money to advocate for public policy to raise tax on people like him. And I've talked to him since. And he sort of amazed at the amount of money it generates every month. Because you know what?

The government is really big. Even the government of San Francisco is just really big. And at least it's operating on a scale that even these rich guys actually can't imagine. And what's nice about that kind of tax is, as in my British experience, it has an expressive value.

It's not just about the money. This is a loss of vocabulary. But it matters when a society does something versus a person doing it. It matters when San Francisco has a plan to deal with homelessness versus a billionaire has a plan.

We've lost the idea that that matters. But that's kind of the whole reason we built a democracy. I mean, the Chinese make very good public policy on a bunch of things. I would argue on certain areas that quality of policy making, given the interest of their people, is higher than ours.

But neither I nor anybody in this country wants to switch to their system because the procedure matters. The fact that we are consulted the way we are in this country matters. And I think we're all willing to have a slightly worse outcome or a much worse outcome. If we all do that.

To have just procedures. All right. Let's finish talking about the 2020 elections. A lot of these Democrats, especially, have been very close to the tech companies.

And Corey was very close to Mark on Newark and other things. What do you imagine will happen? Does government have the will to sort of stop taking advice from these people? I mean, do you remember such as Corey Booker?

Obama sat in a town hall with Mark Zuckerberg, the way you and I are sitting and doing this now. I mean, you can't imagine him doing that with some chemical CEO, right? Like so many people participated in turning these people into sages. And he just stopped doing that, including the media.

Now, I think that 2020, I mean, the numbers are getting a little ridiculous. I'm sure half this room is now going to announce it's running for the Democratic nomination. It's becoming the clown car. I think it's like 25 now after today.

Two more today. I don't know. It's a lot. I actually think this is going to be a phenomenal primary.

And I'm not so alarmed by the numbers. The reason it's phenomenal is we are going to have a real all out philosophical argument about so many things in this country because you have represented among this group, very pro-tech and people want to break up the tech companies. People who are very close to billionaires and people who want there to be maybe no billionaires anymore or much fewer, many fewer. You have died in the world capitalists and then you have a Democratic socialist and then you have an Elizabeth Warren, someone whose policies are very close to Democratic socialist, but says she's a capitalist in her bones.

So we are having already and it's going to get better. A real conversation of a kind that I don't think we've had where a lot of the fundamental values of this country are tested on these questions of power and justice and capitalism, whether you can have a real democracy when wealth is as concentrated as it is. I think this is going to be a great, this is going to be the primary about everything. So when you think about wealth as concentrated as it really is and it is concentrated among when you look at the list of top 10 richest people, they are mostly tech people actually.

How do you change that? How can it be changed without them just giving away the money or continuing, you know, family after family, generation after generation? Wealth tax. Capital gains tax.

Crack down heavily on evasion and avoidance. People like to treat it like some huge mystery. It's so complicated. You know, one of the people I interviewed for the book that was so brilliant is this political philosophy in Kiarak Kordelli, the University of Chicago.

And she's a political philosopher studies wealth and philanthropy. She wrote a book called The Privatized State, which sort of gets what we were talking about earlier. And she said something that is so profoundly true. She said these people, by which she met some of the tech barons, but just the plutocratic class more generally.

She said these people have a concept of agency that makes no sense. When they want to work government power to get Glass-Steagall repealed, when they want to work government power to shoot down Obamacare, when they want to work government power to make sure Medicare for all doesn't happen, when they want to work government power to make sure a minimum wage increase doesn't happen, they're very capable of navigating the system. They're very deaf. Suddenly you say, how do we fight inequality instead of increase it?

How do we raise the minimum wage? How do we create a wealth tax? And suddenly it's like, you know, the system is just so hard to under who even understands the system. Yeah.

Yeah. I can just do my thing over here. I don't understand. I'm so, I'm a small guy, very rich.

I can do, I can just do what I can do through my foundation. I can control it. I just, I don't understand that. I'm so little.

I just don't understand that. They do that when you, when you ask them about how to fix the things we've done. Correct. First when they spend most of their time explaining how smart they are and then when you actually ask them to fix something, they're like, it's very hard, Cara.

It's very hard. It's very hard. But somehow when people think $20 million a year, you're lobbying in Washington. Right.

Exactly. So what would the perfect rich person look like who gives money away? Because there's always going to be charity and charity is an important part. Yes.

Like do you mind them buying, making hospitals or things like that? Is that a bad thing or? It's okay. But here's what I say.

I think. You don't like Pepsi making a jungle gym. I got that part. No, I get it.

What would be the good use of people who make enormous amount of wealth? What would be the way we let them give their money to us besides taxes? Look, I, to be clear, I think I want to live in America in which fewer billionaires would fewer to give away. But we're not there yet.

We may not get there. So we got to work there. You're going to get a trillionaire. Right.

We do need to work in the premise that you just laid out for now. And I think when you live in an age of extreme inequality like this one, of hoarding, elite hoarding, elite monopolizing of the future itself, if you are a serious person who wants to give in better ways, the only acceptable kind of giving is trader to your class giving. FDR was a trader to his class. FDR ran this government as a trader to his class.

Good for people, bad for his fellow rich people. I think the kind of philanthropy that feels right to me in this moment is FDR's stuff philanthropy, not running a government, which is philanthropy that would actually break down dismantle, help accelerate the end of a bad system instead of shore up a bad system. So Goldman Sachs 10,000 women program, that's just giving back. It's not really giving anything up.

It's not dismantling a bad system. It's actually trying to buy yourself a little bit of wiggle room to continue being Goldman Sachs. And Goldman Sachs saying, we're going to actually get out of the student loan activities that we're doing, which are actually just hurting and dooming millions of people. We're going to stop lobbying against glass dealer.

We're going to stop lobbying against this consumer financial protection because actually it would be good for people even though it would be bad for us. That would actually be giving up. And you could have philanthropists. I was at a room full of philanthropists this afternoon.

I asked them how many of you in this room about this size because they all worked for big foundations giving away lots of money. And I said, how many of you, your foundations, random foundations, how many of your foundations work on impact investing? Maybe half the room's hands went up, three-quarters of the room's hands went up. Most foundations in that room are engaged in that.

I said, great, how many of you are working on, how many of your foundations are working on a wealth tax? It's like one lonely guy in the middle. Right? So it's very simple what I advocate.

People in that room, more than should be working on the wealth tax, more than should be working on equalizing public school funding, winning a Supreme Court case so that there's no longer legal in this country to fund public schools according to how big mommy your daddy's house is. Those kinds of things that would actually help dismantle a bad system. And would actually not crowd government out, but crowd government in, where you'd use your giving to test things privately and then try to mainstream it into policy. That heritage has been lost under this fantasy of billionaires.

I know best. Who want to build these companies as little kings and then want to rule over public life as little kings. And who I think if they don't quite get on the right side of history are going to meet the fate of some of the more despised kings in history. All right.

So very last thing, impact investing. That guy. Bill McGlashan. Yeah.

Fantastic guy. How many of you know the name Bill McGlashan? How many of you know the name Laurie Loflin or Felicity Huffman? Yeah.

This is the problem with America. Two actresses taking the fall for a bunch of... So here's what happened, right? We were all spoon fed the story of two actresses who are in America.

Well, a lot of men have been doing this for a very long time with a lot less scrutiny cheating on a much bigger scale than by one college seat. So in this group of defendants with the two actresses was actually the most important person caught up in that thing. Bill McGlashan. Who was the...

Alert from Bill McGlashan right there. Who was the head of something called the Rise Fund. Right? DPG, biggest private equity fund in the world.

The bad is good. It is the best. And they created their normal like ruthless private equity fund, but they created the side fund, the Rise Fund that was helping people. Fighting poverty injustice.

Bono was literally involved in this one. I'm not just saying that. They were like brothers, co-founders of this Rise Fund. They both went to Davos in January.

They're sitting in obligatory parkas, even though it was probably inside the studio, wearing the parkas, like talking about fighting poverty through impact investing. And what was only revealed a few months after Davos is that this guy who has been out there, out there, this is a $2 billion impact investing fund. A lot of impact investing has been like half a million dollars. Five million dollars.

There's two billion. There's real money claiming we can fight poverty through finance. And it turns out that Dean of Impact Investing, Bill McGlashan, it is now revealed by the feds, was after trying to empower the poor through finance by day, was going home at night and making phone calls to make sure that a seat in college was reserved for his son through bribery so that none of the people that he was empowering through his impact investing fund, no matter how empowered they got, no matter they went to some better for-profit school in some African village or whatever the hell he was doing, that none of those kids could at the end of the day compete with his kid for the seat that had been bought. And I think there's something so profoundly metaphorical because what it teaches us is when you have someone like Bill McGlashan, a domain like Impact Investing, trying to make the world a better place in ways that pay them a high return on investment, it is a clue.

When you put those with the most to lose from real change, in charge of change, you can expect some distortions. They're going to change change. And I think what I am calling for is for us to simply take the changing of the world back from those who actually don't want change at all and have stolen the idea of it in order to defang it. All right.

On that note, questions from the audience. I'm happy to also offer artistic criticism of all the we work in the art. No, you may not. They're very nice to have us.

You'd be nice. It's really radical in this topic. I agree. That's cool.

I think you make a great mayor of New York. You think about it? You got a crazy. Thanks.

My question is about the rise of the rest mentality. I don't know if it's Steve Case and Mark Cuban. And there was this recent article about spreading, coding, academy, and Appalachia and this sort of idea that the prosperity of tech can spread to the rest of the country. And I just want to get your thoughts on that.

There's differences just to be clear. Steve is doing more investing in companies across the country. He's not doing a lot with coding. He's not that involved.

Because it's very clear coding is going commodity. So it's not going to be the savior of anybody in Appalachia. It's just not. Coding is the new coal.

Exactly. It's not going to be. The idea is he had promised really. His idea was that right now 80% of venture funding now goes to three states and most of it to California and most of it to Silicon Valley.

And so he'd want to spread around the investing. But what do you think of that? I mean, I think those initiatives are great at the margin. But the problem is my understanding of the problems in West Virginia, which is limited to what I read, are I think the lack of venture funding is an incredibly small part of the problem.

I have a feeling that if they paid the teachers what teachers wanted to be paid in those strikes and they had actually a decent education system, I think you might see some of that startup activity happening on its own. So a lot of this stuff ends up being nicotine patches for massive systemic failures of governance. And I just, I mean, you can try it, but I just think you're going to get a lot more Newark's and a lot more Columbus thing. And I don't think it's going to change anything.

Okay. Thanks. Hi. I just want to ask you what you think about the Bedrock Foundation and what's happening down in Detroit.

I was just there. And there's a resurgence. There's, I can't remember the name, but the guy who owns the Cleveland Cavaliers. Yeah, and Gilbert.

So he's investing, changing the city, but there's still so much homeless and there's still so much work to be done. There are a lot of factories out there, the Chinole is out there doing watches and everything else. And they're saying that it's made in America, but it's really not. So I just kind of want to see what you think of the capitalist point of view with philanthropic.

I mean, what's interesting that I just saw this the other day, but you know, there's a story that you probably saw that TurboTax has been lying to people who could file for free. And they've been like gaming the search results so they don't know that enough to pay TurboTax something. TurboTax is like a spinoff from the company that Dan Gilbert, you know, was involved in founding. And so this is sort of how it works.

Like you have these entities, generate a lot of money and some of that money goes to trying to help Detroit. But frankly, I've had a lot of people in Detroit were also screwed by that practice and various other practices. You know, Detroit from what I hear is also sort of becoming like Dan Gilbert's town, which to me feels like refutilization. I just think we worked really, really hard to leave the Middle Ages where you had like towns where you had one Lord and Lady and everybody else was just there like seamless drivers, you know, back projected 500 years.

And we're like willingly reentering that world in so many ways. There's just so many, I was just in Michigan like a couple weeks ago. So many structural issues, racial segregation, water and flam. Just structural issues in Michigan.

That's how rich guys are on coin is just not going to be part of solving. They have that CEO governor, I don't know if they still have that guy, Snyder, you know, like private equity guy or something like that. The people who caused this problem should be nowhere near the wheel of solving it. Okay.

One more. Hi, I'm a big time care sister fan. Hello there. And much like another, I think that care, I think that care, I think that care, I should run for, I don't know, president, but I think maybe in Forster for Elizabeth Warren.

So anyone comes out. She's a smart lady. Yeah. And so I think.

Too smart for the men. Well, sometimes much like the throne, you know, the person who needs the who should be in power isn't the one who's actually in power. Yeah. So the question, thank you.

Has many been, there's been a lot of amendments made to the Constitution in the past to address gross social inequities or things that need to be addressed? What do you think would be like three main topics that could be in that amendment? I mean, first of all, our country's so broken that we can't pass like spending resolutions on amendment requiring three quarters of the states and two thirds votes and it's complicated. However, I actually think the issue of inequitable public school funding is the, in some ways, the gravest unresolved constitutional violation of this country.

It's basically racial segregation ongoing through class. And so a de facto Jim Crow is still on the books because Greenwich can fund Greenwich of Schools and Bridgeport funds, Bridgeport schools in Connecticut and everywhere. So I, and when I talk to people, not politicians, but regular people on the right in this country, they're actually as offended by that. That's not a particularly conservative value either.

There's a little bit of local control thing, but I think abolishing unequal public school funding would do more to advance justice in this country than maybe any other single thing. Right now, it is legal. I mean, you just have to get your head around the idea that there are places in their districts in this country that spend $30,000 a year on public schools and there are other districts, sometimes next door that spend $5,000 a year on school. This is essentially picking some kids to condemn because their parents' house is smaller and usually because they're more likely to be poor and black and whatever else.

So to me, this feels like something that's as unconstitutional as various other things that we couldn't achieve through a court ruling and had to do through that process. So that's what I would submit. So last question very quick. Do you think the tide is turning on this?

I do. I'm going to give a real shout out to someone who I think has been such an important catalyst for change and awakening in this country, which is Donald Trump. Okay. Because for 30 or 40 years, this ideology that I've been talking about, we've been talking about, has been pretty indomitable.

Right? Business people are smarter than everybody else. Success in some domain means you should have thoughts about all the domains. People who cause problems are the most qualified to fix them.

This has been in the water for a long time. It's the tech rhetoric, it's the bankers rhetoric. No one has so quickly, efficiently and flamboyantly discredited the entire tau of philanthropism the way Donald Trump has in just two years. It is now inarguable that being a business person is no guarantee of intelligence.

It is now inarguable that knowing one industry does not make you an expert, even necessarily on that industry and certainly anything else. It is now inarguable that in fact being the guy who made ties in Mexico and China does not make you supremely qualified to bring jobs back from Mexico and China. Arsenists are not in fact the best firefighters. And so my hope, and I think we saw a lot of this in 2018, go like improbable victories, all people running for office, all the women who ran who didn't necessarily win but are going to be running next time and the next time, that people are actually waking up to the idea that we're not going to change the world through an app.

We're not going to change the world through like management consulting firms or CSR or tech companies or whatever that you get the kind of society you're willing to invest in democratically. Democracy is not a supermarket. I need milk, I'm going to pop in, grab a little milk. It's a farm.

You don't grow anything, you don't plant anything, you don't get anything. I think that has been awakened. And I see a revival of civic life. I see people knowing the names of various bills, HR, 64.

Like there is an awakening happening that I don't think I've seen in my lifetime and I think of taking back of just the very idea of self-government. And people with Donald Trump's level of IQ often have unintended legacies that exceed their intended legacies. It's a nice way to put it. And I think his unintended legacies are disastrous.

Don't get me wrong. But I think his unintended legacy may be greater and lower. If we survive the intended legacies that we woke up to the idea that we weren't going to be saved by money, that we're going to save ourselves. He so poorly has his money.

All right. Thank you so much. Thank you. Thanks again to OnEnd for coming on the show and thanks to you all for listening.

You can follow me on Twitter at Terris Swisher. My executive producer, Erica Anderson, is at Erica America. My producer, Eric Johnson, is at Hey, Hey, ESJ. If you liked this episode, we really appreciate it if you share it with a friend.

And make sure to check out our other podcast, ReCode Media and Pivot. Search for them on your podcasting app of choice. Thanks also to our editor, Joel Robbie. Special thanks to Jill Pendergast and David Rosenberg.

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