WHY ARE BILLIONAIRES?!?: You’re Not Gonna Believe This B.S. with Amanda & Anand Giridharadas

Welcome to We Can Do Hard Things. This is Amanda, and you're not going to believe this bullshit. I'm feeling very excited and nervous and energized and vulnerable, hoping that you love this new little series I'm hosting that I am loosely calling, you're not going to believe this bullshit. It's going to be a set of shows throughout the year that are sort of Real Housewives meets History Channel meets Ted Talk meets your favorite etymology book. My goal is to bring you one thing that seems maybe obscure or isolated or niche, like Cat Ladies, Preselvacy, the carbon footprint, birth control, the bar exam, the CIA, something which sort of take as given. And we're going to bust it open. We're going to dig back into the history of that thing, how it was invented, because of course everything is invented for someone else's profit and at someone else's expense. And we're going to peel back what that seemingly inevitable, idiosyncratic one thing reveals about everything, about power and culture and our daily lives, and it will be about our actual lives because nothing is more political than our daily lives. I have a hunch that most structural power is built of tiny Jenga pieces that seem insignificant, isolated and obscure, that those who are on top of the structural power system need us to believe and see as natural and inevitable. And that the more we take them out, turn one another over in our hands and really examine it, the closer we are to toppling the whole damn thing and being able to build back a sturdier structure that we can all live and breathe and thrive inside of. That's my dream. And if we fall short of that dream, we'll at least have some really interesting contexts to reframe the way we interpret what we see in the news and experience in our lives. And at the very, very least, we'll have some sexy new facts to share at the dinner table or bus stop or grocery line. I'm anxious because I hope you will love this series and I'm trying to be brave because I think it's going to be fun and important. So here we go, y'all, our first one. And you're not gonna believe this bullshit about billionaires. I've wondered for a long time why we are not talking about billionaires. Our societal lust and adoration for them, their extreme stranglehold ownership over the economy, the media and the government. It's the reason we are in this God-forsaken trainwreck of an era. So today we are pulling back the curtain on the entire political theater playing out in front of us. Why are billionaires? Who are the billionaires? How did they happen? Who is paying for a billionaire's right to exist? Why do we praise them as philanthropic heroes instead of preventing their inane hoarding of what should be collective prosperity? We are diving into the different roles, written and unwritten they play by. What created our cultural obsession with them. I mean, I think we should be obsessed with billionaires, but for very different reasons than we are. First, I need us to understand what we are talking about when we are talking about billionaires. We tend to refer to millionaires and billionaires. The fact is that a millionaire is closer economically to a minimum wage worker than to a billionaire. This is what a billion is. If you earned $1 every second, you would reach one million after 11 and a half days. To get to a billion dollars, you would need 31.7 years. If you earned $100,000 a year, you would earn a million after 10 years of work. At the same rate, you would need to work 10,000 years to earn a billion. If you spent $1,000 a day, it would take you just 2.7 years to spend a million dollars. If you spent the same amount a day, it would take you 2,740 years, longer than the Roman Empire existed to spend $1 billion. That's what a billion is. That's what billionaires have. More money than they could ever ethically make. More money than they quite literally could ever spend in thousands of lifetimes. Across the world, eight billionaires own the same wealth as 3.6 billion people, half the entire population of the planet. Eight people in America. The top 1% of Americans hold more wealth than the bottom 90%. In these United States of America, the three wealthiest men, Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos and Mark Zuckerberg, all of whom were in the front row of Trump's inauguration and are in the driver's seat of his administration. He has an unprecedented 13 billionaires in his administration. Those three men own more wealth than the bottom half of America. More wealth than over 165 million of us. In America, we have a deeply curated and intentional story that billionaires are the natural result of extraordinary effort, inventive brilliance and brave risk-taking. This, my friends, is some bootstrap bullshit. Take Elon. Elon Musk, the man purported to despise big government, has netted out a personal individual in his pocket profit of $9.2 billion thanks to government subsidies, grants, tax breaks and contracts to his companies. Bezos has received more than $15 billion in government subsidies and contracts. Take the Waltons, who own Walmart. Walmart pays, it's more than 1.6 million American workers below a living wage, which means that roughly one in four Walmart employees relies on public assistance, costing the American taxpayers $6 billion a year. While we pick up the tab, the billionaire Walton family collects the profits generated by their poverty wages, meaning that your money is directly subsidizing the Walton family fortune, which is now at $430 billion. Taxpayers are effectively writing a check to the Walton family for roughly $3 billion every year since they own half of Walmart, by subsidizing low wages through public benefits. Billionaires are not bootstrapers who pulled themselves up. They are in fact an invention of specific policies that created them, specific laws that didn't exist until the 1980s that allow hoarded wealth to scale limitless, while denying workers the fruits of their productivity. A line from E.L. Dr. Rose Ragtime goes, how can the masses permit themselves to be exploited by the few? The answer is by being persuaded to identify with them. We have been persuaded that billionaires are not unethical hoarders, but aspirational heroes. And that we too could be that wealthy if only we were clever enough and hardworking enough with a little luck. Hoping to be winners like them. We are children standing before a carnival game that the owners have already ensured is unwinnable. We keep trying, we keep losing, while the carnival owners chuckle, pocket our tickets, and assure us we'll get them next time. The problem with idolizing billionaires is that we aspire to wealth we will never come close to touching instead of changing the system that protects only the hoarders and hurts the vast majority of us. The vast majority of us, who are the people we should be identifying with? Because if we stop fighting with each other for this billionaire scraps for a hot minute, we could unite to create a more just, stable society where folks have enough, where people can even get rich, but where one dinner party's worth of people cannot ensure the economy, the media, and the government work exclusively for them. Now, there is extreme wealth, which I suppose one could argue is not inherently unethical. But what we have today is extreme wealth and extreme wealth inequality. Extreme wealth by a few in a nation where the majority of hardworking people are not even able to get by. So who is subsidizing billionaires? In order to reach the low end of Bezos' wealth, the average worker would need to work for four million years. Elon Musk makes more in a single day than a teacher will earn in thousands of lifetimes. The fortunes of the five richest men in the world more than doubled between 2020 and 2024, while billions of workers who made their success possible declined in wages and living standards. Here's what we need to understand. It's not that there isn't enough productivity or money. Productivity per worker has nearly doubled since the 1970s. It's just that anyone who isn't at the top is denied access to the fruits of their own productivity. In the 1970s, median wages tracked productivity fairly closely, but from 1980 to today, median wages have barely budged, even though productivity rose by as much as 80%. This means that workers create far more value than they're compensated for. That compensation is just captured by owners and execs. In 1970, a US worker produced $20 an hour of output and earned $19 an hour. Okay, you produce 20, you earn 19. In 2024, a worker produced $50 an hour and earned 25. Since 2019, CEO compensation has increased 50% while worker pay rose by less than 1%. Right now, over 60% of our fellow Americans live paycheck to paycheck. 40% of us would not be able to come up with $400 for an emergency. 85 million are uninsured or underinsured, and more than 20 million households spend over half their incomes on rent and mortgages. Over 60,000 people die every year because they can't afford to go to a doctor on time. 25% of our seniors survive on less than $15,000 a year. We have the highest rate of childhood poverty of almost any major country on earth, and working people, unsurprisingly, live far shorter lives than the rich. This is not natural. This is not how it has always been. This is a political decision, and we can and must make a different one. This is a Jenga piece we have to pull out. I'm delighted to bring into this conversation Anand Giridhas. We talk about billionaires, what the Epstein files reveal about their rules, what the Mandani election reveals about who they are, and by the end of this conversation, you will never again hear the phrase win-win or hear of a billionaire philanthropist without questioning both deeply. You will see why lean-in and other ultra-elite faux solutions are propaganda's bullshit, and you will have reason to be deeply hopeful that as much as we are in the throes of crisis and injustice, we are also on the precipice of a new progressive era in which we will get to have nice things, nice things that much of the world already enjoys. I am delighted to be today with Anand Giridhas to talk about the bullshit stories and rules of billionaires. Anand Giridhas is the author of the New York Times bestseller, The Pursuaders, the international bestseller, Winners Take All, The True American, and India Calling. A former foreign correspondent and columnist for the New York Times, he is an on-air political analyst for MSNBC and publisher of the newsletter, The Inc. Thank you for being here, Anand, thank you. I'm so happy to be with you. This is such a treat. I feel like the effort of every power structure is to have us believe that it has always been this way, that this is inevitable and natural, and to just accept it and live within it. And so I wonder if we can set the stage with the brief historical evolution of how this happened, because it wasn't always like this. The post-World War II period through 1973, we have high taxes on the rich, we have strong unions, we have regulated finance, rapidly growing wages that actually are tied to productivity, imagine that. And then 1980s happens and Reaganism happens. So 1982, US has 13 billionaires. Now we have more than 900 billionaires in America. So what the hell happened there that took us to a place where we have accepted massive inequality as normal? Well, first of all, I'm so happy to be on the show. I've admired it from afar and it's a thrill to be talking to you. I actually wanna start where you were a second ago, which is that every ruling class throughout history invents a story to do a few things, I think, to make it seem like this is the only way, to make it seem like this is fair, this is justified, and that it would be too difficult, too costly, too dangerous to change it, right? And the reason I think it's worth starting there is it is easier to see how this is done when you are looking at other people's times and places. It's actually hardest to see this in your own time, right, precisely because of how the story works. Let's pause before we get to now. Think about slavery time. You can't just have slavery. You can't just have a material system in which some people are enslaved and put in bondage and killed if they break rules and chased if they leave. You can't just do that activity. It's incredibly important to invent a narrative if you want that kind of regime. And we all know that, right? Because it's a different time and place. And by the way, you gotta invent a narrative, ideally, if that's what you wanna defend, that the people on the top of that system believe, obviously, but you gotta invent a narrative, ideally, that even some of the people who are not benefiting from that regime believe. So in the case of slavery, you wanted to get a lot of the poor white people who are not benefiting from the capitalist exploitation of enslaved labor. You wanna get some of them believing it. Ideally, you wanna get some of the enslaved people thinking that there's some naturalness to this order. You think about a caste system in India. You can't just divide people into the warriors and the priests and the laborers and the people who have to think they're untouchable. Their shadow can't even cross someone. They gotta sweep behind themselves as they walk through the village to make sure that they don't contaminate anybody else. You can't just divide labor and hope it all goes well. You have to invent a story. And so in India, the ancient caste system, there was a tremendous amount of narrative work done to allow that. And even though the caste discrimination and stuff is formally illegal in India, that story, still very much in India, thousands of years later, you can feel it. It has implications for the present. We could go on example, example, example, feudal times. Think of Downton Abbey, right? Think of any of these worlds from the past. It's not enough to just split people into upstairs and downstairs. You gotta invent the story. And so what I was interested in is, what is that story for now? What is the story? Because everybody sees the story once it's in history. Once it's in your eighth grade history textbook, you're like, man, those were some suckers believing that narrative. It's real easy to look at 150 years ago, and be like, man, people were real idiots back then. They just believed whatever the elites wanted them to believe. The more interesting question is, what are you believing right now that your great grandchildren will be like, can't believe my ancestors believed that? And I began the project that became Winner's Take All with that question of like, what is that for now? Because as you say, starting in the early 80s, there was this Reagan policy regime, tax cuts, spending cuts, cut what government does, help people less, trust people to pursue the American dream on their own devices. Pull yourself up by your bootstraps, whether or not you have shoes or even feet. Let's see what happens. So what started to happen was the obvious predictable thing. People were suffering, people were hurt, people were not getting the help they need, people were not able, in fact, to pull themselves up when they didn't have the right education, didn't have the right healthcare, and so on and so forth. And in that environment, as government pulled back, as inequality started to yawn wider and wider and wider, it became important to do what elites have always done, which is continue to articulate a story. But this particular elite in our era needed to invent a story suited to our time. If they had said, well, we're rich because we're white, like that might've worked in 1850, people don't love that narrative today. If they had said, we're rich because my grandfather inherited this land, as you might've said in Downton Abbey kind of world, people don't really like that story anymore. So the story sometimes has to evolve. What people respect in our time is entrepreneurship, is go it alone, business success, is hacking it and making it in the free market. We live in an age that's called the age of meritocracy, is being very smart and being very credentialed and making something and making something of yourself through that. They figured out they needed to make a story about the naturalness of this inequality in this time by telling a story of their brilliance, their enterprise, their grit, their perseverance in making these fortunes. And this is the really interesting twist. Because I think they began to understand the anger that was emerging over inequality. People are not stupid, they know when they're hurting. So these elites, and this is the twist, they went further than many elites in not only saying we earned it. They told a second related story, which is those of you who are mad and don't maybe think we earned it, or think that even if we did earn it, this ain't right. You only need to simmer down because if you really want change, which is what you say you want, if you really want reform, if you really want to change the world, you really want revolution even. Actually in our time, in a time like ours, the only way to get it is, lo and behold, for us rich people at the very tippy top of our society to give it to you. That's right, the only way to change the world now is for Mark Zuckerberg to eradicate diseases. And Elon Musk to fight climate change. And Google to organize all the world's information and transform education and make YouTube videos for the poor and Goldman Sachs to bring finance, rural farmers in Africa. And this was where this ruling class story got so smart. They were basically saying, if you mess with us billionaires and these big companies, if you come for us, if you tax us, if you regulate us, you're not hurting us. You are hurting the wretched of the earth who we are on the cusp of liberating through our apps and through our foundations and through our give one, get one products. You will hurt the people with the least power in this world if you come for the most powerful people in the world. It is on its face such a bizarre story, but I think in other ways, attempting and seductive one because it has just enough truth to not feel like a lie. I mean, Google did organize all the world's information. Elon Musk has built things that can have an effect on the environment and climate. Mark Zuckerberg does have enough money to make a dent in diseases as he promised and then moved away from. So they invented this story and the story serves to say, don't mess with our power. It was almost like the most powerful people on earth use the people with the least power on earth as human shields and said, don't come at us with your reform. It seems to me a circular argument because you have to believe that these people who accumulated this tremendous disproportionate wealth came by it through merit and skill and ingenuity in order to believe that those people are uniquely situated to apply that ingenuity and genius to the world's problems. If you take a different tact and if you say, no, actually these people came to these billions because capital gains are tax less than labor because there's no wealth tax, because estate tax exemption because of weakened and declining unions. It takes away from their inherent savior status. They become people who are built because of a system that intended to build them, not people who rose to the top and therefore are uniquely situated to save us from the perils of civilization. Like if you start to unpack, the only thing unique about these people is they had enough money to buy policies that ensure that they will continue to be rich, then you lose that kind of a lore that they are the ones that will save us. Yes, I think this is one of the crucial, crucial points in how this whole thing works, which is, again, to just think about past elites for a moment, brilliance was not always an important part of the pitch. If you think about like the landed aristocracy in England, or you think about uppercast people in India, or you think about Germans who are trying to criminalize being Jewish and then exterminate Jews, it wasn't necessarily important to any of these stories that they were smarter than the people they were going against. But in our age, for a bunch of different reasons, being smart has become very important to the self-conception of these people. Because these other stories of what would justify these fortunes have faded, right? Like inheriting the land, no one cares that your great-granddaddy lived on the land. That's like an old story that no one cares about anymore. It's important for a lot of these business people, they can't just be rich, it's important for them to seed in you the idea that they're very smart. That's part of the naturalness. And so then you're absolutely right. Then what they do is they say, my money making is evidence of my smarts. Instead of all the things you talked about, which is actually it's evidence in many cases, of wage theft and bending the rules, and being a little more sociopathic than the guy next to you, and a little more willing to hurt people. So you tell the story that my money came from my brilliance. And therefore, now that I have this money, I wanna do this initiative, whatever, I can parachute into the work of social change and bring to it these same kind of ninja skills of the mind that allowed me to make money. In fact, to now solve these other social problems, the same skills are the most useful. And people who are not conversant in these skills should step aside. Now this again is a brilliant and sinister move that I think you can't really find precedent for in previous elites. What they are saying is are big shared social problems. How do you empower women to play all the roles that they can and wish to play? That's a civilizational challenge. That's a tough problem. There's a super sinister way of looking at this, which is that, I mean, it's not sinister, it's human nature, that if I know that there is a problem, the solution to which will hurt me. I need to get in charge of solving that problem so I can come up with an alternate solution that doesn't hurt me. So this is your whole theory of win-win being the myth that billionaires can be benefactors of philanthropy. The paradigm is we will never ask them to stop doing harm. We will only ask them to do good. The problem of women's access that you described, you have this crazy situation in which the corporations that are purporting to solve that problem, they offer us lean in circles. The way for you to get ahead is to have lean in circles and women's committees and women's initiatives. This is the solution that's being proposed because it's the only one that doesn't threaten them while at the same time, they are actively lobbying to overrule what is in the public interest, what would actually solve the problem, which is paid family leave and child tax care credits. They're putting out a little puppet that says, here is our solution, look at us actively doing the good and solving the problem, while behind the curtain, they are fighting tooth and nail to actually kill what would be the solutions while they take credit for doing good in the world. You got it, that is at the heart of Winters Take Alls About. And it is what is new in this time. I don't think past generations of elites, as I read the history, felt it was necessary to almost appropriate the reform against them. At least there was some recognition of like, I play offense, you play defense. Right, like it's clear here, we know who the good guys are, we know who the bad guys are, we know who the rich, we know who are the poor. I'm gonna use my power against you and you try to marshal a lot of people against me and like, let's see where we end up. What these people are doing is exactly right, is saying, we are the reformers actually. Let's take Sheryl Sandberg versus Zoran Mamdani and their ideas about empowering women. Even though one of them is a woman and one of them is not, I would argue, Sheryl Sandberg, of course famously would lean in, which to oversimplify only slightly suggests that thousands of years of patriarchy is a posture problem. Women are just, we're leaning at the wrong angle. And if women could just change their incline, raise their hand more, speak up in a meeting, just lean further, ladies. Like no more like this, you got, you know, acute angles. She did her lean in circles. She got a lot of celebrities to plug them. How did she do? Like, is there any social science that suggests women became more empowered as a result of her lean in circle? She's a very wealthy, powerful, smart person who put a lot into that. Is there any evidence that women, do you know any women who have had their lives transformed? Any towns, any states where you could say this status of women changed? Then you look at someone like Zoran, you know, but he's not the only one obviously, who talks about let's just have like universal childcare in New York. It's not specifically targeting women, it's just childcare. I would submit to you, and there's quite a bit of research on this point, unlike Sheryl Sandberg's stuff, that would have more of an impact on women, status of women, than, you know, any number of book discussion circles from Sheryl Sandberg. Here's the thing though, here's the difference that you alluded to. Zoran's thing would help almost everybody in New York if it's enacted, but it would definitely cost a small number of elites money, more money in taxes, including some women who don't need free childcare because they have expensive childcare, paid childcare. And the question is, are we gonna fall for the idea of what you rightly kind of framed as almost like this kind of billionaire counteroffer? Like, no, no, no, don't do this Zoran thing, that's expensive for us, but they're not gonna say that. Don't do this Zoran thing, it's unwise, it's this, it's that. Here's the answer. It's un-American. Exactly. It's dangerous. It's un-American because we don't do that because every man for himself, because if I work so hard, I should get what I pay for without paying for someone else without realizing that the entirety of our society is subsidizing directly the invention of billionaires. This is what makes me want to just light my hair on fire is because we are acting like we are subsidizing the poor with food stamps, with welfare, with whatever. When the actual vast majority of the collective prosperity is being intentionally siphoned to the billionaires, they are the subsidy recipients. They are the ones with the tax credits and all of the laws in their favor. But we're gonna talk about not how that's un-American, but that how every family should work hard enough to be able to take care of itself. So Zoran is dangerous because he is suggesting that we have some collective accountability to each other, but we're gonna hide the fact that our collective prosperity is going all the way to the top, literally 100% nearly of all new wealth in the last five years has gone to the top, literally. That is the un-American part. It's like, thou doth protest too much. The more they scream about un-American is trying to steer our eyes away from what is the grossly most un-American thing, which is that three people have more money than half of America. There's a moment a lot of us eventually hit at work where something just feels off. When you notice you're doing great work on paper, but inside you feel overwhelmed, depleted, or strangely disconnected from the job that used to mean something to you. If that sounds familiar, Strawberry.me was created exactly for that crossroads. Their career coaches don't just hand you generic advice. They help you figure out what's actually behind the burnout. 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If you have that privilege of travel, you start to realize very quickly that there's all these nice things that these other societies just have. By the way, many of these countries are actually less rich than us. Like most Western European countries, on a per-person basis, are actually significantly poorer than us. Like sometimes 30, 40% poorer, the average GDP per person. France is not a little poorer than America. It's actually quite a bit poorer than America. Germany's like, but you go to those places and there's just things people take for granted, from the cradle to the grave. You're born and there's levels of maternity leave. There's a box that might arrive in the mail in some places, full of the things for free from the government that you need to take care of a baby. There's childcare when you're ready for it, that baby's ready for it. That's free. You kids start going to school. The schools are good and free. College free or close to it. Healthcare free, retirement. You get, you know, we have social security, that you get retirement benefit. You start to think these places are poorer than us on a per-person basis, but they've managed to take a lot of the misery and chance out of life. I see on websites all the time, you know, you're on reading the New York Times, you're reading whatever publication you see as ads. Have you yet saved $3 million for retirement? People in this country, as statistics have recently shown, like most people don't have a few hundred bucks saved if they had an emergency. They broke their arm or something happened to their truck. And those same people who don't have 300 bucks saved are seeing these ads. Do you have $3 million saved for retirement? Let me tell you something. In a lot of countries in the world, people don't need to stress about saving $3 million for retirement because they don't need to deal with all those risks themselves. By the way, they don't need to save for college. They don't need to spend sometimes more than their own salary on childcare. There are people in like many countries, affluent countries living their best lives out here, not stressing about the shit that is stressing your marriage out, that is making you short with your kids when you wish you were just playing with them. The things that never leave the back of your mind. There are countries, almost all of them, slightly poorer than us, or quite a bit poorer than us, that have just literally removed those anxieties. We can have nice... This is a choice. This is a choice. It's a collective choice, a choice we don't even realize we have made to live without nice things. And for people who are billionaires to have a near monopoly on all the nice things. The majority of us know we don't have nice things. We might not know that there are other places that do and that it is possible. But I feel like the forces have recognized that we recognize that we don't have nice things. So enter the scapegoats. I can't get out of my head this political cartoon that has this old white guy at the end of a table and he has a plate with just a mountain of cookies, just overflowing cookies. And he's looking at two people across from each other. One is a construction worker. He has two cookies on his plate. Across from him is an immigrant with one cookie on his plate. And the gentleman with the pile of cookies is sticking his finger at the construction worker and saying, look out, he's gonna take your cookie. Like this is the state of our union. How did we fall for this? How did this story go that instead of the two guys across from each other teaming up and saying, we're taking your fucking cookies. Why do you have so many cookies? They are fighting with each other over their not enough cookies that they're going to have to divvy up. How did that happen? I mean, I know sort of how it happened. It's the same thing you brought up in Slaveman. It's the same thing when poor white people started to actually look around and say, wait, these enslaved people are more aligned to us than the enslavers. And we should fight for something better. Then they started doling out whiteness. Then they started doling out the benefits and the privileges of that to make it just a little bit better the same way that you think that you might be closer to being a billionaire if you just hold on a little tighter. There are so many more of us. Our interests are so more aligned than the literally eight people who own half of what America owns. What is that story? And how do we get across it? Cause the lines are more intractable than ever in terms of who we believe is responsible for why we don't have nice things. First of all, all this discussion of cookies is making me hungry. Yes, we can have cookies. We can have nice cookies. It actually reminds me as a storyteller, as an artist, as a journalist, how powerful stories are. Gosh, the stories matter because you're right. There is no way such a small number of people could maintain the regime they do. And you ask yourself, again, go back in history. How many people did the British have in India? It was not an enormous number. Were they outnumbered 100 to 1,000 to 1,000? I don't know. Think about that. Entire old civilization given over, right? Yeah, they had violence. There weren't that many of them. The story rules. And this possibility in American history of people coming together in solidarity over difference. Specifically, I would say white and black people. Of course, over time, others have entered the picture in a bigger way, particularly since 1965. But anytime in American history, you see these moments of crackling possibility of white people on the wrong end of power and black people and other people of color on the wrong end of power, finding common cause and coming together. There's often a very, very concerted effort to break it up. And so you see, I don't think it's an accident that in our era, as you've had rising inequality, as you've had some real power in the Bernie Sanders of the world and Elizabeth Warrens of the world and AOCs of the world, Zoran's of the world, making a case that is appealing to people of all backgrounds about taking back their power, coming together in coalition. You go back to Jesse Jackson, the Rainbow Coalition idea. Anytime you have these ideas, those are also often the moments when you have white supremacy, as you said, doled out, right? Because it's really then important to get white people on the wrong end of power to believe in it. Let me tell you something. I have known Steve Bannon since 2011. Wow. I can't say I know him particularly well now, but we text. I mean, frankly, he texts like everyone in the media. It's important to me to maintain one relationship in Trump world, so that's my one relationship in Trump world, to try to understand certain things. But I met him in 2011 when he was not quite in this incarnation, nothing to do with Trump. He liked something I'd written about how the real line in American life was no longer left versus right, but kind of up versus down. And a lot of Steve Bannon sounds like Bernie Sanders, if you've ever listened to him. It's kind of confusing, right? The circle goes all the way around until it meets in the middle. And he wasn't as far as I knew, he wasn't a Republican, at least as far as I knew at the time. He was like this random guy with a radio show who invited me on his radio show, and we had these conversations on his radio show. Like all people of color, I have enough of a vibe radar to know when I'm in the presence of someone who's racist or doesn't see me as an equal. I've spent time with Steve Bannon. I've interviewed him many times. Like Steve Bannon doesn't radiate that at all. Steve Bannon treats me very well. Steve Bannon has respect for my work and sometimes texts me about that, even though my work is the opposite of everything he's trying to do. I don't get it. Steve Bannon doesn't believe a lot of the things he needs a bunch of poor white people to believe, to uphold his power. If you're the kind of flag waving, Confederate flag waving white nationalist racist that he needs other people to be, you can't work for Goldman Sachs the way he did. You'll get fired. You can't move in a lot of the circles he moved in. So I'm not saying there's no racism in Steve Bannon's heart. All I'm saying is I often get more racism, a vibe sitting in a plane next to someone than I do from sitting with Steve Bannon and talking about these issues. These are powerful people who need poor white people to agree with a bunch of bullshit that even they really don't believe in order to keep them in power and frankly keep those poor white people locked out of power. Everything you're saying leads me to the Epstein files because there are no true believers here. These people are agnostic. I mean, look at Trump. He was like a Democrat and believed in abortion, giving money to Democrats for however long until he saw a strategic power structure that could advance him until he realized he could use the tools that he knew about the psychology of people to manipulate them into believing something that would advance him. The binaries that are set up, the liberal conservative, the black and white, all of those are actually made up things to divide us when actually the loyalty that exists within this power elite is only loyalty to their own concentration of power, to their own impunity, to their own ability to serve their own interests. So I'm so interested in what you have learned from your full read of the Epstein files because to me that pulls the curtain back, even Dems right now are like, well, I know who the bad guy is and it's those right wing conservatives when in fact it's much more complicated and much more simple than that. That's exactly right. So there's been different things that have been released over time, but a few weeks ago, the congressional committee that was looking into this, unleashed a bunch of emails that had come from, you know, I think Epstein's estate and it was thousands and thousands and thousands of emails from him to him, to his kind of associates, friends, colleagues, whatever. I started looking at them. I didn't really have an agenda. I thought maybe I would write something for my newsletter or the ink and I thought maybe, you know, maybe there would be something interesting about it. I started reading them and I was watching the news at the time and watching how other people, I always, you know, how are other people telling the story? What are they finding in it? And what everybody was kind of focused on, the media was focused on understandably was a kind of hunt for very specific smoking gun which is like, is Donald Trump a child rapist? And do these emails reveal that? Now I understand as much as anybody why that is an important question and a reporting question. I understand based on Donald Trump's character that it's not a question that is, you know, spurious or pointless to look at. But as I started reading the emails, it seemed to me, this is something those of us in the media often do. We often kind of fixate on like one narrative or one storyline and then everybody is like hurting and competing to answer that. And the more I read the emails, I was like, I don't think these emails are about that. It was missing a lot of what I was just reading in the emails. And so I decided, you know what, I'm gonna read all of these emails, which I didn't even know how long it would take me. It ended up taking me five or six days. Then I'm telling you like eight hours a day, like reading Jeffrey Epstein's emails to and from. And I didn't know what I was gonna do with it at first. I just started making notes and trying to find patterns as I do. And I'm kind of a language person. I'm trying to understand what are the words people are using? Like what is happening here? What is going on here? Like an anthropologist of like these emails. Studying a culture. You are studying a culture. Cause it is a culture, right? And the first thing very rich people do when they have a little wealth and power is to make it impossible to see their private communications. They don't use Gmail the way you and I do. They got private servers. They got IT people coming to their house, rigging things up for them. So this kind of glimpse into not just how one monster in Jeffrey Epstein behaved, but how this entire social elite Jeffrey Epstein, Lawrence Summers, former treasury secretary, Bill Gates, people from Harvard, people from MIT, people from the philanthropy world, people from the business world, Obama's White House counsel, this woman, Catherine Ruehler, on and on and on. You don't normally get glimpses into how these people operate. So I started reading. And I started with the question of how could all these eminent people from prestigious institutions lower themselves to consort with a guy like Jeffrey Epstein, convicted sex offender. And the more I read, I actually realized how misguided my question was. The idea that these high people had somehow lowered themselves to the standards of this man. When actually what the email showed, if you connected the dots of who these people are, how they've operated in our society over the last generation, these are people who obviously, of course, had no problem looking away at what Jeffrey Epstein did, because looking away was their superpower. And they trained up to looking away from his pedophilia by looking away at all other manner of pain. They looked away at rising inequality, sometimes that they helped cause. They looked away at financial crises, sometimes some of them helped cause. They looked away at people dying in a bogus war in Iraq that some of them helped sell. They looked away at the pain and suffering of climate disasters that some of them helped minimize or profit from. And so when he was convicted and made a plea deal and became a convicted sex offender and tried to return to society after that, he needed a group of people to kind of hoist himself back into the good graces of mankind. And Jeffrey Epstein, perhaps with the kind of same skills that allowed him to be a predatory grooming figure to a bunch of young girls and women, Jeffrey Epstein seized upon a power elite, an American power elite, what Ro Khanna, the congressman from California is called an Epstein class. That was perfectly suited to rehabilitate him. He chose well, he chose insightfully. These people are good at nothing, if not disregarding American pain. And a lot of the women, it's really important to pay attention to a lot of these survivors, Virginia, Jouffrey and others who have said, don't just let this be a story about sex and trafficking. They have said this. This is really a story about power at the highest levels, about money, about impunity. It shrinks the story actually, to make it what a relatively small number of men in this network might have done in the sexual realm and in the abuse realm and in the trafficking realm. The real context around this, as revealed by these emails, is a group of people who simply don't care about you, about me, about people outside of their elite network, whose loyalty, as you said, is to each other. And this is a group of people, they're Republicans and Democrats in this network, they work for different administrations, they fight for different policies. They don't look all the same on the surface and they're not all the same. But what they share in common is they are the cast of characters and they wish to be the cast of characters running American life. And in the play we're all watching, one member of the cast, maybe yelling at another member of the cast and we all think, wow, what divisions. But what's, they're really interested in just making sure that they remain the cast. And that we are in the audience. And when people in this world fail, they are punished with promotion. When Larry Summers helps deregulate the economy under Bill Clinton, and that sure as hell, results in a financial crisis down the road. He is punished by becoming Obama's economic advisor and helping figure out the crisis he helped cause. When people help sell a bogus war in Iraq, they are punished with better professorships and television commentary gigs. When people promise that technology is gonna empower girls and women, it's gonna empower poor people, gonna liberate people. And then it becomes the most dramatic tool of consolidation we've ever seen. They are rewarded with book deals, right? Many people listening to this will know that you don't get a lot of second chances. That get fired from a job that's really hard to get back in the labor market. Your car breaks down, you have an expense of that kind, and a whole bunch of things can spiral from there. There's not a lot of forgiveness and mercy in most people's lives in this country, but for this power elite around Epstein, there are infinite second chances. And the worse they fail and the more they hurt you, the better the job, the better the promotion, the better the prospects, the more money, the more power, the more clout they get. And that is the rule. The rule is no consequences. The alliance of those people in power is to protect the rule that people in power don't have consequences. Exactly. And it seems to me that the lesson, I mean, we're all taught to emulate and idolize and try to be like billionaires, right? And the joke is that we will never be like them in that way, but the one thing that we can take a lesson from is see how they align with people whose interests are the same as theirs. The joke's on fucking us. We've got Dems and Republicans that are perfectly aligned like this and strategizing and working it out and figuring out a way to protect each other. We've got people in different industries doing, they are not the enemies, they wish that we would believe that they are. They are protecting each other because their interests are aligned with each other, but they will make damn sure that we have every block between aligning with people whose interests are aligned with ours, precisely because they know how powerful it is to do that. It's what they've been doing forever. They are friends who pretend to be enemies in order to keep us imagining our friends are our enemies. Yes. We're being had, right? I am as guilty of what I'm about to say as anybody. I don't wanna make, this is not a whole-earned-down thing, but if you think about, it's been now 10 and a half years since Trump came down the escalator, we think about that 10 and a half year period. One of the things that has defined it culturally on all sides of the equation is a rising dismissal by all of us of large swaths of us. Those people will never change, those people are all racist, those people are all pedophiles, those people are all, right? Our society is full of these stories. And we have been persuaded that we are each other's biggest obstacles. And again, I have succumbed to this story as much as anybody. I have felt the rage about people who have voted for Donald Trump three times. I feel more rage when there are people who for whatever reason have suffered because of him and should know better because they've felt the pain of living under someone who cares about them so much. And still, I feel rage at them. You always have to keep your eyes on the powerful and distinguish the leaders from the followers. And your contempt and your rage must always be directed at the top. It is in a way incoherent to say, there's all these people who have been duped, as I would believe, by Fox News, by Brainwashed, by different media, taught to hate in the ways you were describing, and then to also view them as the perpetrators of all this. In many ways, the people who vote the most opposite from you are also victims of these powerful stories. And it takes a lot of generosity sometimes to view them as people who are your fellow victims of a certain kind of regime. But I think if we don't figure out how to have at least as much solidarity with our friends and neighbors and family in many cases, as these powerful elites have with each other, we're cooked. ["Memories of the Year"] Most of us approach nutrition like trial and error. We try keto or intermittent fasting or cutting sugar and hope something finally works. But food is chemistry. It works with your hormones, your immune system, and your stress response. 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That for me was eye-opening in a surprising way and I'm not used to being surprised by things anymore. I'll tell you one thing first, it's just like a funny thing. My amazing wife, Priya Parker, has been on the show before. Love, Priya Parker. Y'all, if you haven't listened to that episode, do it. She's the art of gathering. I mean, just bringing intentionality into every space, into every interaction, she's brilliant. She put this out publicly the other day, so I'm not talking out of school, but she helped Zoran's campaign quite a bit on gathering. The first campaign, she's talked about this for years, campaigns need to think of those houses as gatherings. His is the first campaign that ever took gathering seriously. And she had a lot of influence over it in that realm. And so people in our social circles and people who know us knew that she was kind of in there. And I'll tell you something that happened. Before he won, lots of different business people we knew who were trying to tell her how dangerous he was. Dangerous, there's that word. And then after he won, some of the same people were reaching out to her asking for introductions to Zoran because they wanted to do business deals with City Hall. Yep, that sounds right. Wow, dangerous. And now you want a business partner. Who's dangerous? Look, what happened with Zoran was so interesting. I think Zoran represents a wrinkle and evolution in the kind of progressive ascendancy that we've seen since Bernie's 2016 campaign. So Bernie came on the scene, and shocked everybody in 2016. And then 2020 wins first three primaries. And there's a freak out. Obama, I think, helps orchestrate some kind of coalescing around Biden and the rest is history. And then in the meantime, you have AOC rising, you have Elizabeth Warren also in 2020, you have a wealth tax on the agenda, which a majority of Republicans were supportive of, let alone a vast majority of Democrats. Things are changing. Things that you and I have not really seen in the discourse in our lifetime were starting to happen. But I think what a lot of that progressivism, these are all people I have great respect for, but I think if you look back, there was an anger that was fueling a lot of that and an anger that was in some ways the defining affect of a lot of that movement, at least as people outside of the movement saw it. And as many people inside the movement saw it. And by the way, it was righteous anger. If you've listened to this conversation that you and I have been having, is all the reasons to be angry. But anger is tricky in politics because you're also kind of choosing a shepherd, right? And you kind of want to go with someone. And you want that person to be the person who's gonna comfort you if there's a terrible thing that happens and you want that person to, you know, feel your pain as Bill Clinton said. And some of what those earlier waves of progressive, particularly Bernie, but not only Bernie, were defined by an anger and were unable to do some of the other effects that I think people need. As part of a balanced political diet. So Zoran comes along. And Zoran, on paper, if you look at his analysis, if you look at his policies, if you look at his views, his past statements, he thinks the same thing, Bernie thinks. He was a real threat to these people. He didn't read angry. I spent a little time with him. He doesn't see anger. He's angry about all the things he would have been talking about. But he doesn't read that way and he doesn't lead with that. He is animated by the sense of what could be with an angry analysis kind of behind it. And I think he became threatening to these powerful elites in New York City because it was a smiling, inviting, galvanizing cause that was pulling people in who believed all kinds of things. You know how many capitalists voted for Zoran Mamdani? A lot. You know how many people who don't need free buses voted for Zoran Mamdani? Do you know how many people who don't need free childcare who voted for him? Do you know how many people who, if you go to his website, probably disagree to two thirds of his policies, could not help but be in his movement? Which is what happens when you have really powerful candidates and leaders. And you had all these people threatening to leave New York. We're gonna leave New York. Now, I was asking Andrew Ross Sorkin came on my newsletter show who covers business for the New York Times, knows all these CEOs. Did any of these people left? I'm talking a big game about leaving. They have planes and stuff. They don't have to wait for like a United ticket. We can leave like right now. Have they left? I haven't noticed Tribeca being like thinner in the population, but maybe I'm missing something. I think they're still here. Now they're trying to figure out how to do business deals with him. And so it just shows what a lot of people in that world want folks to believe is that Azoran is dangerous for you. Free buses seem nice, but it's gonna hurt you. Free childcare seems nice, but it's gonna hurt you. But what they're really saying is it's just gonna cost them a little bit. And you having a slightly easier life is not worth it to them. And I wanna say one more thing about that. I think people do not appreciate. This is not about this being their resources that a bunch of people are trying to like redistribute to themselves. Their resources are only possible because of what you bust your ass to fund. Yes. How come none of these people base their corporations in Somalia? Do you know what it's like to enforce a contract in Somalia? No. If these people like a pliable regulatory environment, I'm sure Somalia has fewer onerous financial regulations weighing down a Goldman Sachs. Why doesn't Goldman Sachs base itself in Somalia? There's often been so little government there that parts of it have been controlled by random groups. They'd like limited government, right? Nothing says limited government more than a government that doesn't even control a lot of its country. There's places like that around the world. Have you ever seen any of these corporations uproot and anchor themselves in places that don't have a working government that controls the whole country? In theory, this should be their fantasy, right? Right. No government. We can find you some places with no government, or very limited government. There's no Dodd-Frank in Somalia. There was no Glass-Steagall Act in Somalia. Why aren't you all setting up in Somalia? Because you like the laws and courts that we fund. You actually like and benefit from the Securities and Exchange Commission, even if you don't like each thing. Everything about their fortunes is dependent on what you and I fund. The schools we fund that educate their employees. Elizabeth Warren made this point very eloquently some years ago. The roads that allow the things to come. Do you know what a factory looks like? It doesn't have roads coming up to it? And I have been, as I was saying, part of my experience traveling, I was talking about some of the affluent countries I've traveled to. I've also traveled to some very poor countries. My family comes from India. It's been a lot of time in India. You take someone to court in India. It's like 20 years before that suit comes up. What is that business environment? The people who are wealthy in the United States of America, and turn around and piss on the system, and degrade government, are the most ungrateful people in the world. Because even more than someone in India who can claim to have succeeded despite the system, not because of it, if you succeeded here, you succeeded because of our system. You succeeded because of what we paid for. And if you are so confident that you could have done this in a place without all these things, show us. They can't. That's why they're still in New York. Okay, this is my last question for you. Throughout history, this vast inequity of wealth, it is an independent social risk factor. It is a stress test to society, and it actually risks breakdown, overthrow, et cetera. And there's been some pretty dramatic historical crises that have resulted from this. And there are also some periods, during the Gilded Age, we had the exact same level of wealth and inequality that we have now that led to the progressive area. Do Americans have a reason to be hopeful that this stress test that we are in now may lead to another progressive era, another kind of massive reform? Because it's gonna be a fork in the road. It is leading somewhere. It always does. This is the historical truth that we are either going down the path of good night moon or we are going down the path to a new era either way. So do you feel hopeful? And what do you feel like we can do to hasten that? I love that question. I do feel hopeful, contrary to what you and I have been talking about and how upsetting a lot of it is. Think about this. I'll tell you some things that make me hopeful in this conversation. One is, I think the level of public awareness of what you and I have been talking about in this hour, today versus a decade ago is night and day. Wow, that's good. Partly because of some of these political candidacies that we've talked about, which were even when they lose, they win the game of educating people. If you look at young people with political accounts on TikTok and Instagram and all these things, right? This young generation is so amazing in their ability to see through the bullshit story. Like they're not even native to this bullshit story. They haven't even seen their way out of it. I don't know how, but they were just never successfully indoctrinated into it. You know what, is it like the frog? Like we were just slowly boiled so much over time that it seemed so innocuous. We were like, Bush, oh, that war is weird. Oh God, slowly, slowly. And then we get to Trump, so we've been boiling. But they're, God bless him. They were just thrown in the boiling water and they were like, this sucks. Yes. It's too hot. By the way, I recently used that analogy and I'm a scientist. Oh God. Emailed me. Is it wrong? To be like, I am sick and tired of frogs being maligned. Frogs absolutely jump out of water if you keep raising the temperature. The whole world. Isn't this amazing? You should do a whole episode on this, by the way. Like he was like, I've studied frogs my whole life. Frogs are smart, intelligent creatures. I am sick and tired of everybody in the media. He's like, the frogs be jumping out of the boiling water and y'all have to stop saying this. It was amazing. It was one of the best. Yeah. That gives me, this is how desperate I am for shreds of hope. I'm like, y'all we can jump. We can jump. It's not inevitable. Yeah. That said, you're right. This generation just like never, I don't think they ever wanted to like be Mark Zuckerberg and then saw through. I think they just don't want to be Mark Zuckerberg. And that's a generation that Zoran, by the way, really mobilized. I think another thing is that you can only make people not know the condition of their own lives to like a certain point. And I think this billionaire class, these oligarchs, overplayed their hand, right? The whole way this thing works is by giving out just enough that people think it's fine. And I think they actually just like miscalculated. If most people don't have a couple of hundred bucks to deal with an emergency expense, you've gone too far. If most people feel like when they go to the grocery store, they've been like manhandled by the economy, you've gone too far. If most people think their kids are gonna be worse off than them, you've gone too far. They took too much. They took too much. It's this administration. Health insurance, like if you would have left us just poor and getting by, we would have been like, that's probably what we deserve. But then you took our health insurance right in our faces and told us to be proud of it, the massive tax cuts to the rich. Then it's just, it's a let them eat cake. And we're like, we were fine. We were fine being miserable, but now you have made it a little too aggressive. And it's so interesting. I wrote a piece, there was a moment, I don't know if you remember, it was two concurrent news stories, like the biggest stories of the week. Donald Trump was fighting for cuts to snap. Yes, snap is what you think of as food stamps. So he's cutting back that. And in the same week, he announced a deal that in theory would make ozempic and other weight loss drugs, in theory, more affordable to people. Now that drug's been very helpful to people. It has a lot of health benefits, obviously. But it felt like a biopsy of America in 2025. Cut food aid for people and make it easier to access drugs that make you feel less hungry. That also makes drug manufacturers millions of dollars because we are also at the same time that we're investigating the insurance companies for the most massive fraud against taxpayers ever. We have increased the amount that we are paying to insurance companies and therefore to drug manufacturers. So no, you can't have food, but let's go ahead and get you hooked on this drug that will make the billionaires more money. And here's, you know, I think when you think of that phrase behind you, we can do hard things. There's a lot of ways to interpret that. I think one of the ways, and some of your shows are about this, are about the ways that we is a kind of plural of individuals, right? You can do a hard thing and I can do a hard thing and maybe we can give each other courage, but you can figure out your marriage and you can figure out that thing with your boss. And so there's a certain we that's like a loose collective of individuals doing hard things. But of course, the ultimate for me, we can do hard thing, is a truly collective we. And the hard thing that we need to do now is reclaim this country for people rather than huge companies. Reclaim this country for your kids instead of Jeff Bezos' yacht. Reclaim this country for ideals of all people created equal, endowed with rights, life, liberty, pursuit of happiness, very powerful ideas. Reclaim that heritage instead of the heritage of avoiding taxes and buying government access as the only way the future is chosen. At the end of the day, democracy is a fancy Greek word for who chooses the future, people choosing the future. We choose the future, we shape the future. We get together in this messy process, this 24, 7, 365, rollicking argument with each other. This occasional practice of writing down who we wanna lead us on a piece of paper, putting it in the machine. And we choose the future. And the ultimate hard thing, but over history, most powerful possible idea is that the people who should choose the future is not some guy whose dad also chose it, is not the people with the most land in the village, is not the people with a certain last name, is not the people with a certain skin color, is not the people who have the most gold or the most treasury bills or the most equities, that the people who should choose the future with us, that we beautifully, messily, cacophonously should choose the future together. This is the ultimate hard thing. And I think it's a hard thing we can do. And the first step to doing it is to stop believing those who tell you that's not your birthright. Ah, thank you. Thank you for your work and for your time and your wisdom, I'm super grateful. Thank you for this conversation and your questions and letting me riff on your title forever. I love it, I love it. It is our birthright and our mission and dare I say our responsibility. And now that we know that we can jump out of the pot, let's do it, let's do it. I love that. And then thank you, give Priya a big old hug from all of us. Thank you so much, Amanda. We Can Do Hard Things is an independent production podcast brought to you by Treat Media. Treat Media makes art for humans who want to stay human. And you can follow us at We Can Do Hard Things on Instagram and at We Can Do Hard Things show on TikTok.