Winners Take All | Anand Giridharadas | Talks at Google

Anand Giridharadas 0:00 [ on-hold music]

Anand Giridharadas 0:06 Thank you for having me. Um, look, we all recognize the awkwardness of me talking about the elite charade of changing the world at Google. So let's just name that up front, and be aware of that, and be aware of our feelings, complicated feelings we may have. This is gonna be like therapy. Um, I wanna start by laying out some of, uh, some kind of propositions to you, and I, I, I say this in a spirit of, um, sharing with you some of what I've found as I've spent the last three years thinking about what happens when the winners of our age move with great sincerity to try to solve some of our biggest societal problems, but also, in my view, end up having an effect that they don't sometimes understand, which is changing how we think about change, and redefining change in ways

Anand Giridharadas 1:11 that makes it friendly to winners, and makes it hard to make real change. Um, I'm gonna advance some of these propositions, and then I'd really love to have a, a dialogue with you, because we are here in the belly of the beast. The first proposition is that we live in an age of extraordinary generosity by any measure. Some of you may just have seen the Bezos announcement a couple hours ago, uh, which only is the latest installment in very wealthy people who've done very well, uh, many of them in the technology realm, deciding they wanna give back, deciding they wanna make a difference. There's 184 people have signed the Giving Pledge. I think American philanthropy is now $410 billion a year being given away, which is starting to approach the level of non-military discretionary spending by the federal government. Um, every young person, and that includes many of you, but you go to any campus, like, every young person wants to change the world. They're, th- talks about making a difference in millions of lives, um, starting a social enterprise. People tell you they've just come back from Africa, where they started some organization to recycle poop into coffee or, you know. There's all these kinds of efforts everywhere you look of elites using their skills and talents to try to respond to an age of extreme inequality in the United States, an age of extreme anger, and do something. But the second proposition is that we also cannot deny that we live in an age of extraordinary cruelty in the United States, that this is as unequal as our society has been in 100 years. It's as tough a time to achieve the American dream of building a better life than your parents, uh, as we've had in 100 years. When you look at economic growth over the last 30 or 40 years, almost all the benefits of the, of growth have bypassed the bottom half of Americans. About 117 million Americans saw their average income go up from $16,000 to $16,200 in the age of Google, and the genetics revolution, and the rise of India and China, and automation, and everything else Tom Friedman writes about. All of that amazing stuff, the progress that you probably see around you every day in 50 different forms, somehow miraculously bypassed the bottom line of half of our country. It actually takes a lot of engineering to achieve that outcome. That is not a natural outcome. And so what I became very interested is the question of: How do we explain the extraordinary elite helping of our time and the extraordinary elite hoarding of our time? How do we understand the two of those things together? What is the relationship between all these elites making a difference and all these elites building a winners-take-all economy that only generally works for them? And one possible answer

Anand Giridharadas 4:13 is that the elite helpfulness is, is trying as hard as it can, doing the most it can, working as hard as it can, disrupting things and creating things, but it's just not fast enough. It's just a drop in the bucket. That's one possibility, and I think that's probably the conventional wisdom that's out there. Yeah, we live in a very unequal time, but people are helping. That, there-- the ambulance is on the way. What I wanna argue is a more awkward proposition in this space, which is I've come to believe and be persuaded that a lot of the elite helpfulness in our time is part of how we maintain the hoarding. We do giving in ways that protect the opportunity to keep taking. We make a difference in ways that protect the continued opportunity to make a killing, and we seek to change the world in ways carefully chosen to not change our world. When you look at the ways in which the winners of our age give back, help out, make a difference, they are often designed to protect the system, above all, that the winners stand on top of. And so I wanna explore what I think of as the ideology behind a lot of elite change-making. It's an ideology that'll be familiar

Anand Giridharadas 5:45 to you. It's a, it's an idea, i- ideology that has a lot of resonance in Silicon Valley. Um, it's also an idea that you will hear in Wall Street foundations, uh, and an idea you can actually hear every time you go to the shopping mall And someone, you know, pitches you a red iPhone case that's gonna change the world, or a tote bag that's gonna change the world, um, or coffee that's gonna change the world. What's the ideology? Something that you probably have heard five times in the last week, the word win-win. How many of you have heard that term in the last week, would you say? How many of you have used that term recently? And what's your general impression, win-win, good or bad? Good. Good, right? Positive. It's got, it's not just one victory- Mm ... it's two, right? Double the pleasure, double the fun. What I wanna suggest today is that win-win is a more sinister and dangerous ideology than we recognize, and I know that's a little mind-bending, um, particularly in an institution like this that has created some genuine win-wins for the world. Um, but here's the problem with a lot of what happens when the win-win becomes our way of thinking, not about business, but about social change. Win-win starts to mean that the only kind of social change that is acceptable, or the kind that should get the most funding and the most attention, is the kind of social change that kicks something up to the powerful. The only kinds of social change that are good are the kind that don't cause problems, don't ruffle feathers, don't blame anybody, don't accuse anybody, don't have perpetrators, just solves a problem in a way that is a win for the people you're helping, and frankly, a win for those who are, who are helped. And what has happened in our time, I believe, and I have found through my reporting, is that on any number of the most fundamental questions of what ails us as a society, there is a real change option out there if we think hard and study hard, but often that real change option is expensive for the winners of our age, one way or another. And then miraculously, a fake change, light facsimile of change materializes that is very inexpensive

Anand Giridharadas 8:19 for the winners. And often what happens in our culture now, in a culture overrun by win-win thinking in my view, is that we, we go for the fake change, we go for the light facsimile of change because that kinda change is free. So let me give you a couple examples. In theory, everybody in this room, many, many people in America would agree that we need to do a better job of empowering women, particularly empowering women at work and in playing their many roles in life. Now we know if you look at most countries that have done this better than we have, the reason they generally have done this better than we have is social policy. Like, they actually have maternity leave in a way that we do not, as our law. They actually provide a childcare tax credit that makes it not punitively expensive to go to work after having a child. And they do any number of other things at the level of the system and for everybody. Well, what's the problem with all those ideas? Expensive. Those, that's real money, right? The, the, that we're talking about multi-billion dollar kind of money to fix a problem like that. It's not a mystery, but it's expensive. So what happens? We get an idea like lean in. Now, again, lean in seems great, good for your back to move around. What's the problem with lean in? It is telling women to bear the burden of our failure to create the kind of policies that would actually help them. It is telling women to bear the burden of sexism. It is telling women to bear the burden of their lack of representation in the halls of power. And this is what we often do. We, faced with a real change that we know would make a difference, we gravitate as a culture, and not just rich people, people who then follow rich people's ideas, and that includes many of us, we gravitate to the lean in school of change, which is cheaper and easier

Anand Giridharadas 10:19 on the winners, and frankly, for many women unfortunately becomes fake change. Let's take another issue, education. Across this country, right and left, rural and urban, many, many Americans would agree we have a problem with education. Many Americans I think would agree that if you wanna fix many of the deeper other problems we have, from climate change to our political polarization, to our economy, education would be a great single lever to make a lot of difference on a lot of those other issues, right? A good bargain. Do that, get a bunch of other fixes free. But when the winners of our age, as they very often do, this is one of their most popular issues, move into making public schools better, what is their most common approach? Charter schools, right? Or other kinds of programs that maybe find, help match more effective teachers with the students in need or things like that. You know what the winners of our age don't do in general when they approach the problem of public education in America? They don't actually raise the question of how we fund public schools in America, which is a barbaric way of funding public schools, which is funding public schools according to the value of essentially the homes in your parents' neighborhood. Now, I don't know anybody in this building or any building who could actually sit and look at a six-year-old in the face and explain why their education should be indexed to the home values in their neighborhood. I actually don't think there are right-wing people who as a matter of deep principle believe that that is the optimal way to organize an education system. And I think there are many people on the left who would find that really objectionable, but frankly who do nothing to challenge that. Because in the neighborhoods where the winners live, in the neighborhoods where perhaps many of us live, we benefit from a system that ring-fences our own property taxes for our own schools, and that leaves schools in other parts of this country high and dry. And so when the winners step into social change, they change change. They're not just joining change, they change what change is, how it's defined, how it's talked about, how it gets covered in the press. And those are just two examples of how that change in how we think about change can actually be devastating. It can mean that on some of the biggest issues of our time, we move from the possibility of doing something transformational, bringing millions of women into the workforce who find it hard to play their many roles, to sort of telling them to raise their hand more. Actually funding public schools equally and for all, which you could achieve in theory with a single Supreme Court ruling holding this system that we currently have unconstitutional, versus what a lot of rich

Anand Giridharadas 13:20 people do, which is setting up one charter school in a poor neighborhood in their city, and going and being on the board, and mentoring, and telling all their friends at the country club that they helped those three minority kids get into Yale, and it's so great. It's so great. And I'm happy to be having this conver- I'm surprised to be having this conversation at Google, and I'm happy to be having this conversation at Google. And I applaud whoever it was who invited me or did not read my book carefully when they invited me. Um, because I think this is ground zero for this conversation. It's ground zero for the f- the following reasons that are obvious. One, who, who represents the winners of our age more than this institution? Who represents the complexity of win-win change? Because this is not like a Koch brothers factory. This is a company that I think we all know does tremendous real good in the world, that has made a lot of money making a lot of people's lives better. The win-win is real, and you guys know that and live that every day. But this is also a company that because of the very real fact of the win-win can perhaps in my view be blind to the ways and the places in which that story breaks down. When that ceases to be true, you may be the last to know, precisely because of how deep the truth is. One of the people I write about, some of you may

Anand Giridharadas 14:52 have known him or worked with him, is a guy named Justin Rosenstein. Um, worked at Google, then Facebook, invented some very important, um, I think he was one of the, part of the team that invented Google Drive, but some very important things in, in, in this company. And we, he and I talked about the win-win. And he said, "You know, the thing about tech that is so amazing is that in tech particularly," there's other industries where it's true, "but in tech particularly, there really are opportunities where you can have your cake and eat it, too. You can make something that makes you a lot of money, that make, that makes a big company, that allows you to, to have the, the darling of Wall Street, and you can truly make the world better." And, and he said actually in, in our interview, Google Search, out of the many things that, that you all do, Search is like the greatest example of this of all time. It's an incredibly lucrative franchise that has immeasurably made the world better for all kinds of people, right? And I think you could argue has particularly empowered people with the least power. If you're a, you know, if you're a doctor at Mount Sinai here in the US, maybe Google Search made a certain amount of difference to you. If you're a doctor in a very rural clinic in Uganda, the marginal effect of Google for you is probably transformative. So that's very real. But as I was speaking to Justin, I started to realize where we diverge and where our perspectives diverge. And I think all of you know that the way in which America thinks about Silicon Valley and thinks about these companies has evolved over the last year or two, and you may be feeling that. And I started to realize where we, Justin and I, parted from that initial sense that, yeah, you can in some cases have your cake and eat it, too, make the world better and, and, and, and make a great company and make a lot of money. And where we diverged was the world he was calling for was a world in which the concentration of wealth and power and the emancipation of mankind could both keep growing in tandem to infinity. If he is right that a company like Google or Facebook or others is able to make money in ways that just empower more people and, and, and do more public good the more money is made, play that out. What does 50 more years of that look like? What does 100 more years of that look like? It is a vision in which it is possible to imagine there are only three companies left in the United States, but everybody is so empowered they're tired of being empowered. And I think even those of you who are here know that there's probably some kind of irreconcilable tension in that vision that needs to be thought through and worked out. And that's why I think you will notice all around you, and I think we notice all around us in this society, more and more of a desire to challenge the win-win story, to challenge you all who work in Google, work in tech, who work among the winners of our age. To push yourselves a little harder than to simply say, "Whatever we do happens to be what's best for humanity." To explore the uncomfortable possibility that there are places and situations, and there may be more of them that you, than you think, where what is good for you and what is good for the world are different. And what will you do when you come to those places? That is a very important question, and what will the society do when we come to those places? A lot of the winners of our age, when they're thinking about giving back, when they're thinking about doing CSR, when they're thinking about any number of things, a lot of the winners of our age ask the following question: "What can I do? What can I start? What can I create?" That's an understandable question in the age of entrepreneurship, right? Uh, what a lot of the winners of our age refuse to ask is, "What am I already doing? How am I already involved in these problems? How am I complicit in an economy and a society that has been so unkind to so many people, even as it built and created amazing things? How am I part of the central drama of American life today, which is more future raining on America than we know what to do with, but the very few harvesting almost all of that rainwater? How am I involved in that and how could I be part of changing that, and not just what new initiative could I create?" So I wanna raise with you a couple of questions that I'm sure you think about a lot, I'm sure you explore within, and I'm raising

Anand Giridharadas 19:57 them as questions as an outsider. The obvious question, um, that comes up again and again is the question of should Google be broken up, right? Is, is this company intrinsically anti-competitive in just the scale that it's got? Right. And that's a hard question, right? I mean, do we, would we divide the room this way, or would we divide the room this way, or how would, how would we do it? It's an awkward thing to talk about, let's be honest. We're all feeling awkward right now, 'cause I'm talking about breaking up Google at Google.

Speaker 20:29 [laughs]

Anand Giridharadas 20:31 This happen all the time, or this, like, never happens? Never happens, yeah.

Speaker 20:34 [laughs]

Anand Giridharadas 20:35 Told you they didn't read my book. Um-

Speaker 20:37 [laughs]

Anand Giridharadas 20:38 So I'll give you one example of where this question comes up in an important way, in m- in my, in my industry, which is the media, right? One place where the story of what's good for us is good for humanity, one place where that breaks down, I think an important place, we'd all agree an important place. So a recent piece in The Guardian, I'm quoting, "In the nine years since Google h- bought the mobile ad company AdMob, annual ad revenue at Google and Facebook has soared to more than $95 billion and almost $45 billion d- $40 billion respectively. During this period, ad revenue at newspapers fell, around $50 billion in 2005 to under $20 billion today." And you all know, you read all the time, the stories that flow from that. You know, newspapers cutting their, laying off half their staff overnight. There's another one of those kinds of stories every day. Newsrooms in America lost 40% of their people over the last decade or two, right? In my world, and as a journalist, the profession essentially feels like something's been gutted, right? They're just... And, and it's not The New York Times and The Post, the, you know, that, that actually have some, some resources and are gonna do okay. It's every state legislature in this country that basically, like, doesn't have a full-time correspondent anymore sitting there reporting on what happens in the state. I mean, there are many states in this country that basically, like, their legislative process is now an unreported thing. You might as well have the Chinese system because what is done by public officials in that space is not reported on in a way that's presented back to people. Now, did Google go in and cause that effect directly and mean to? Probably not, right? But most of the best thinking on how it is that in a very brief period you went from $50 billion in ad revenue at newspapers to $20 million, billion involves the rise of the online ad business, which is the, what powers what you guys do, but also, and this is not, no one would have sour grapes if it was like, you did better than everybody else, there's the question of monopoly. Right? Let's be real. There's a real question of i- is there the abuse of a monopolistic level of power over that online ad business that, I mean, does anybody really use Yahoo? Let's be, let's be real here. Um, that creates a condition in which newspapers could not thrive even if they were thinking, innovating, figuring it out, hacking it, reinventing themselves. That's what monopoly means, right? And I am not an antitrust lawyer, um, and I can't litigate that question [laughs] here today, and I'm sure you're relieved. Um, but I think it's an important question. And certainly in the EU you have people who've grappled with that question and have charged big fines to Google and have found that there is an anti-competitive issue, and that it is suffocating to parts of the economy that we need full of air. And the question is, do you block that, or do you let the public do what it needs to do on that score? Do you obstruct that, or do you say, "Okay, here's a place where Justin Rosenstein's theory cracks a little bit. Here's a place where there may be a divergence between what's good for me and good for the world." And what will your posture be then? If it is simply to insist on the old story, more of what's good for you is more of what's good for the world- We may live in a world in which this country doesn't have journalism anymore. That is not, I will tell you as a working journalist, that is not a, an insane possibility. That's not a remote possibility. It may not be probable, but in an era when the business is collapsing with the numbers I said to you, and the President of the United States thinks news is fake and journalists are enemies of the people, those are headwinds that may not be recovered from. There's

Anand Giridharadas 24:44 the question also, moving on from the monopoly issue, there's the question of when organizations like this give back and help, what does that buy you in terms of influence, right? When I say the winners change change by getting into the arena of change, there's that whole controversy that some of you may remember, which made very big waves and was on the front page of newspapers, where you all had made some very well-meaning donations to New America, the think tank, which does exemplary work, and it does work on actually thinking about how do you bring this country together, how do you have solutions that are cross-partisan, and any number of other ... Thinking a lot of thinking about democracy right now. How do we protect and defend democracy right now? But when one of those, not just one person, but one person plus a whole team of thinkers with New America sponsorship started to push the question, actually, I said I was moving away from monopoly, it's sort of related, started to push the question of, what do we do about Google's market power? Eric Schmidt made his displeasure known. The guy was fired. New America spun off that think tank to itself, right? And there was a whole discussion at New America and elsewhere about how do we protect honest research and scholarship from the winners of our age who have all the money now, so they inevitably are going to end up sponsoring, uh, research and thinking. There are fewer institutions that have the kind of money to sponsor that thinking. And again, you get into this cycle of that very noble giving comes with strings attached. And it's gonna take a lot of fortitude on your part and a lot of self-protectiveness on the part of think tanks and others

Anand Giridharadas 26:49 to take that help in ways that don't compromise the help, to take that help in ways that allow researchers and thinkers to actually push for real change and not be hobbled by the source of their patronage. How many of you, moving on to a third issue, how many of you feel like you have a good sense of what Google lobbies for in Washington? Who it meets, what issues it lobbies on, what positions it takes on those issues, who it gives money to, and in terms of campaign donations and how that is structured to kind of deliver against those ... Uh, does anybody here ... Raise your hand if you think you know. I mean, it's being done in your name. It's being done on behalf of your work. They're doing that to make your work, to protect it, to, to allow you to do your work, but you don't really know that, right? And, and, and that's something that I've, that I've heard a lot, um, that companies, a lot of where the rubber of an age of an extreme equality hits the road, a lot of where that happens is actually in lobbying, not in the companies themselves, right? Because the companies are doing what they're doing. But in order for that work to ... I mean, individual people are at their head down at their desk doing their individual thing. It is somewhere else, often, that a particular policy is fought for, external to you, uh, that, that, that has to do with the interface of the society and the company. That is actually the place where, out of your view, a certain policy is being fought for that would relax the pressure on this, or that would allow this or not allow this, right? And one of the things I've found, and I've been educated by, you know, going on book tour and talking to people and talking to a lot of people privately about their experiences, particularly in Silicon Valley companies, and I obviously using that term broadly because we're in Boston, um, people are almost totally kept in the dark about what's being done with their work and in their name and with the resources they generate in the realm of politics. And the reason that's important is I actually think that if people in these companies insisted on the following idea, I'm gonna propose this idea and you guys see if you wanna run with it. I think the employees of a company like this that is all about transparency and open information, you should demand as employees to know, have an annual report, not a financial annual report, but another annual report that is an audited report that discloses to you as employees the full lobbying and political persuasion activities of your company. I think you should know those things. We can argue about whether I should know those things, but I think you are entitled to know those things. And I think you should know if your work is being used to spy on people in other countries. I think you have a right to know that because I think you have the right to decide whether or not you wanna be part of that. I think you deserve to know whether your work is being advocated for in ways that foster your belief, say, in competition or in any, in journalism, in any- anything else, or whether you, your work is being used in ways that undermine your own values. That's the whole point of having values. You're allowed to do, you're allowed to do you, and the company's allowed to do it, right? But often, that cognitive dissonance that I actually have found as a very deep reality in many, many of these elite spaces in our time, my reporting tells me there's a huge divergence between many people in th- in, in these leading institutions of our country. There's a huge divergence between what many workers and executives feel and the way their companies show up in the world. And part of what allows that cognitive dissonance to go on is not knowing what your company actually, how it fully shows up in the world, not knowing. And I think that's something that, that we could start right here at Google with some of you insisting that you have the right to know that, and you have the kn- you have the right to know what is being done with your work. Um, I think one of the challenges of some of these kinds of ideas of, of looking within is that because there is some truth to the story that you here at Google have in your finger tip- at your fingertips some genuine tools of human liberation, because there is truth in that story, it is possible to also believe that anything that slows you down from executing on your mission is bad. Journalists asking you questions, bad. Regulators pushing back, bad. Courts that wanna slap fines on you, slowing you down from your mission of emancipation. And so I think what's gonna be incredibly important in phase two of the tech revolution, if w- if we think of this backlash that you've been living with as a kind of pivot point, I think what's gonna be really important is to be able to actually hold two different ideas in your head. Number one, that you have at your fingertips some genuine tools of human liberation that, if deployed correctly, can really make the world better. Number two, that there are large and possibly growing areas of human societies where what is good for you is different from what is good for the world. And not just solving those problems or Columbusing your way into those problems, but actually first and foremost not being part of the obstruction of the world as a world, as a society, as a nation, as a city, as an EU, whatever. Not being part of the obstruction of the public solving those problems as a public. And understanding that a deeper consequence of the kind of world you've fought to build, a world that's transparent, and has information, and knows truth, a consequence of that, once you get big and powerful,

Anand Giridharadas 33:28 is that much of what that world is gonna want may not benefit you. And to have the fortitude, as I say, to, to press on with humility in the face of the public's desire to solve some of its own problems without your permission slip. I think when you ... Uh, wh- when I was growing up, I remember seeing on the news, you know, you'd see news of some war-torn country, and you'd often see, like, rebels in pickup trucks, you know, fighting this kinda ragtag army, fighting a unjust king or fighting a president that was corrupt. And sometimes the rebel army would win, and the guy in the back of the pickup truck would end up in the palace. And I think that's what happened to tech. This was, in many ways, an industry of renegades, and hackers, and tinkerers, and people doing weird things. And I could imagine when some of these technol- and some of you may be old enough to remember, some of these technologies were getting off the ground. I could imagine that to be up against General Electric, or Walmart, or IBM, you must have felt like rebels against a incredibly powerful establishment. But here's the problem: When the rebel in the pickup truck ends up in the palace, you know you're in trouble if they keep wearing that beret. Think of Saddam or Mugabi, the p- Idi Amin. The people who keep the beret on, you know what happens to them? They never truly process their own arrival. They actually never cross that threshold of understanding that I am now the establishment that I was once fighting against. I am now power. I'm not going up against power. I'm not the rebel. I am Goliath now. And there is a great danger in being a Goliath who thinks they're a David. There's great danger in being an establishment figure who thinks they're a rebel. There's great danger in being a king who thinks they're an insurgent. And the danger is a blindness to those spaces where the story of what is good for me and good for the world breaks down. I think what would be really important to start thinking about in this realm of tech, what would mark a new kind of maturity as a response to this backlash, as a response to the way in which the society seems to be looking at you with new lenses, is actually relinquishing this fantasy of the win-win. It's a cherished fantasy. All of you seem to have positive associations with it. But I think maturity, now that you've ascended to the palace, maturity means accepting that it is your job to play offense and it's the society's job to play defense. It's the society's job to protect a bunch of things that are properly its to protect, and that you can't be in charge of both. You know, there's that saying, the best offense-

Speaker 37:00 The best defense

Anand Giridharadas 37:01 Sorry, the best offense is the... I'm very bad at sports. The best offense is defense. And in a way, you tell us something similar, that the best defense of our values and institutions as a society is letting you play offense unencumbered. But I think we have to accept that our best defense as a society is not your offense. Maybe that was true at some moment in time, but I don't think it can be true today. I think those of you in the temples of this new power need to learn to do you and let us do us. I think you have to be lear- you have to learn to be satisfied with creating and innovating and profiting and doing all those amazing things that you do, and yes, by all means, do them with a view to making the world better, but also stepping out of the way when the society, unimpeded by you, seeks to tend to its own welfare in ways that may be at your expense, that may make it harder to build a particular business, that may mean more intrusion into your affairs, that may mean less profitable quarters. I think if you, if we think about what it means for this industry and spaces like this to truly accept their arrival, to accept showing up in the palace and to take off that beret, it means, actually, it will require moving past the win-win fantasy, accepting the world's need to fight for itself in ways that may threaten you, and above all, actually, because

Anand Giridharadas 39:02 I truly believe this, above all, listening more and giving more space to the voices of individuals within this company and org- and or- and many organizations like it, who I think privately, and they confess to me all the time, and they did so for my book, and now that I'm out in the world with the book, I'm getting more and more messages every day. There is a quiet rebellion happening across many of the victorious institutions of our age, tech, big philanthropy, any number, big banks in Wall Street, and I get these messages every day from people, young people often, but not only, saying, "I don't like the way my institution shows up in the world. I like what I do, but I can't defend what it does in some bigger aggregate way." And the way things are set up now, people are sending me that in private. I mean, you guys probably know about it because you're at Google, but in general, it's private to most people. And I think what we gotta think about is how do we actually let those people that, I, I'm convinced there's a minority of people, at least, of rank and file people within some of the most powerful institutions in our age who know that they are part of a system that they can't defend and who want it to be different, but who are often isolated from each other and don't quite know how to speak up and who sit there calculating in a meeting the risk of their speaking truth to power. And I need to, I think we need to think about how can we create space for those people, because those people are the people who are actually going to turn these ships in directions that are gonna make fewer people hate you and actually may help you get out of the way of the society doing what you have long been committed to doing, which is changing the world for the better. Thank you very much. [audience applauds]

Speaker 41:13 So I think, uh, a lot of the, there's sort, there's a, an idea I think that's at the root of a lot of people not wanting to, for example, increase the top marginal tax rate to fund early hod- early childhood education, that kind of thing, is this idea, and I think it's wrong, that the government can't do anything right, and I think it's because the government's doing things right all the time, and it's transparent, and we don't notice it unless it's not there. Um, h- why or why isn't changing people's minds about that, that particular thing sort of the part of the solution where people might stop hoarding their money and then spending it privately and, and support higher tax rates, for example?

Anand Giridharadas 41:49 I think that's a such a great question, and you're absolutely right. The way that I tell the story in the book is there was a, has been a 30 or 40 year all out war, mainly from the political right in this country, against the very idea of government, against the idea of virtually of having a government. Government is the problem. Government is the enemy. The government's taking this. The government's doing that, right? Now, I think most people here probably don't subscribe to that version of the theory. That has been a very successful revolution, right? Government has truly scaled back. The, there's a reason that that private philanthropy giving is starting to approach the level of ... federal non-military spending, discretionary spending. But one of the things I explore in the book is that that revolution prosecuted by the political right didn't end there. Because often what happens when a revolution like that succeeds is that it kinda changes the cultural atmosphere in which everybody operates, and even those on the other side of it end up playing on its field, if you see what I mean. You may be, you may be an, an opponent of that idea, but you're now playing that game. You're forced to play that game. So it is not an accident that after Reagan said the, you know, "Government is the problem," some years later, Bill Clinton from the other party, very different worldview, very mu- much more favorable view of government, nonetheless said, "The era of big government is over." Right? That's what it means to be an opponent who's still fundamentally playing on someone else's field. And I fully, fully, fully agree with you that one of the most essential things we need to do, and I end the book by talking about this on a hopeful note, is we need to redeem the idea of government in people's eyes. Is the government bloated, and inefficient, and underfunded, and not good at a bunch of things? Yeah. But as you say, the government is also a miracle. All the things that go right. I mean, have you been to other countries where you need to, like, do a lot of the homework before you eat out in public to figure out, ma- make sure you don't... When was the last time you got sick eating in a restaurant in America? When was the last time you put your kid in a car seat and wondered if it had been properly tested? When was the last time, you know, you stayed in a hotel room and wondered if it was safe or had been cleaned? Like, when was the last time, you know, you... I mean, you think about all the people, the greed in this society. I mean, Wall Street, for all that it does wrong, it is so carefully regulated, and hyper-regulated, and you can't just do crazy stuff, except every now and then when you can and tank the world economy.

Speaker 44:38 [laughs]

Anand Giridharadas 44:40 Um, but we forget, like, how much works right because we have not some big, overbearing, like, evil stepdad of a government, but because we have a government that actually in all these million unsung ways tends to common welfare. And I, what I would say, I'm not saying Google specifically, but Silicon Valley institutions and the complex of thinking around tech have been part, I think, of discrediting government, of framing government as this old kinda 1.0 thing that can't really fix things anymore, and crediting the kind of innovative sphere as being the place where real change happens. And I think that's very unfortunate, not least because the entire internet was made by the government in its origin, but also because there's a real reason that Silicon Valley didn't arise in another country, right? A lot of the common institutions we share in this country, the courts, the boring stuff that you don't even realize allows you to do what you do, are public things, are common things, are things we share in common, and we need to give those things more credit. Otherwise, we're gonna head into a society that is actually like many very poor countries where there's a lot of rich people and some great companies, and most people are just not part of the, are just not part of the economy, are not part of building a better world, and I don't think that's actually a world that anybody wants to live in.

Speaker 46:04 So in your discussion today, you've talked about some of the problems that can result from good faith actors, uh, who maybe go about things in a way that's not helpful to society. How much of the problem do you think comes from bad faith actors? Or, like, how, how much do they end up co-opting or corrupting good faith efforts?

Anand Giridharadas 46:21 That's a great, that's a great question. I mean, I, I focused this book on people who I think are genuine in trying to make a difference, and who end up upholding the system that causes the problems, but you're exactly right. And I think that has more to do with what I was saying a moment ago. I think when I think about the Koch brothers, I don't... They're not part of my story. When I think about Fox News, that's not part of my story. I don't think that those are people chiefly motivated by making the world a better place. I think those are people who wanted to grab wealth and power, and understood that a certain kind of influence campaign, and changing people's norms and values, and, and, and, and kind of tricking, astroturfing issues so that regular people supported things that actually only benefit billionaires, that that was a cynical effort to achieve their own business interest at the expense of the society. And th- you know, there's a very good book on that called Dark Money by Jane Mayer about how that was done. That's not my story. My story is the story of how is it that Mark Zuckerberg can be one of the most powerful idealists in American history, but also the first person in American history to potentially allow an election to be compromised. And, and are those things just a coincidence, or is his idealism part of why he was able to get enough power to have the election be compromised, and part of why when reporter friends of mine have tried to investigate what happened and what happened with Cambridge Analytica, they get so much pushback from him and his company that they can barely do their job? Is his idealism and his sense of himself as a savior part of what actually allows that problem to happen the way it did?

Speaker 48:20 So you asked the question, what are we already doing? Uh, and one answer that comes to mind that I see at Google and elsewhere is the issue of subcontracting. There was a great New York Times article recently comparing a janitor at Kodak, I think in the '70s, and a janitor at Apple today, and back in the day, the janitor at Kodak received the same vacation and health benefits- ... as every other Kodak employee, and now the janitor at Apple is an employee of some s- contracting company, and they're not receiving any of the same benefits. Uh, and I- my understanding is the situation is similar here. Um, and we see these workers every day. Um, can you, uh, can you comment at all on that particular situation?

Anand Giridharadas 49:09 It's a great question. There's another story even more recently. The Kodak one was amazing. There's another story a couple days ago about Harvard. And Harvard, the students at Harvard, on the exact same issue you named, revolted against the administration and basically forced them to stop doing this thing of subcontracting it out to, like, you know, essentially it's like the labor version of shell companies so that you can say, "Oh, I, I had no idea they didn't provide maternity leave. I'm shocked, shocked." Um, and Harvard students found out about that and pushed, uh, Larry Summers, who was the president of Harvard at the time, and, uh, Harvard fixed it. And they, you know, the pro- the story was focused on, on this woman, um, who works... I forget what part of the, the university she works in, but she makes-- she and her husband between them make, like, a low six-figure income, both doing, like, working class jobs. It's exactly like what it used to be at Kodak in the past. And they make a good living. They have a home. They're living in dignity and decency. And it was because students said, "Don't clean up after us," or, "Don't serve us food in a way that's degrading other people." And so look, one of the things that people have talked about is you all, like, relative to most employees in America, you have a lot of power. You really do. Right? The China thing, the Microsoft thing that happened, like these are all sto- like particularly the people with the kind of, I think, coding and engineering background, like, have an enormous amount of power in these companies, but you all have a lot of power. Like this-- you're very talented people, and each of you in general, with a couple exceptions, there's always a couple exceptions, but each of you generally would be a huge loss for your company, right? Each of you, they don't want your talent next door fighting for someone else, right? And I think you gotta think about, like, how do you use that? How do you... If you, if, if, if there were people at this company who wanted to work on that issue, I 100% guarantee you you could get that issue done in a month, and that would have a huge effect. How many offices does Google have around the world?

Speaker 51:20 A lot. [laughs]

Anand Giridharadas 51:21 That would have a huge real effect like this month on a lot of people's lives, on people's kids, on whether their kids can go to school or not, on wha- right? Like real, real. That's an example of using that power in a way that feels right and, uh, uh, but, but that involves a painful conversation about, like, that's gonna cost real money. That's gonna come at the expense of something. And those are exactly the kind of conversations that I would encourage you to have. And I think one of the myths-- one of the people that read the book recently and explored kind of what it meant for her, she said this very profound thing, which is, "This book has raised, ha- has made me resist my urge to overestimate the risks of speaking truth to power." I think we all tend to overestimate the risk of speaking truth to power. I actually think if you raise the issue you raised, I don't think anything would happen to you.

Speaker 52:17 [laughs]

Anand Giridharadas 52:19 Um, and we could all do more on those fronts. So thank you for your question, and good luck with your campaign.

Speaker 52:25 Thank you. [laughs]

Anand Giridharadas 52:26 [laughs]

Speaker 52:27 Looking forward to reading your book, and thank you for, in your words, speaking in the belly of the-- coming and speaking in the belly [laughs] of the beast.

Anand Giridharadas 52:34 [laughs]

Speaker 52:34 Um, my question is regarding, uh, global movement of capital, right? I mean, there is abs-- capital moves with complete impunity, and the issues that you spoke about, uh, healthcare, education, all of these are national issues. Uh, how, without any democratic control over, over, uh, movement of capital versus, say, movement of labor, how are we going to make any real effective changes? And what... Of course, this is a very general question, but what, uh, do you think we as Google employees can even say or do about something like this?

Anand Giridharadas 53:11 That's a great question. I mean, I, so when I think about if you're persuaded by me that we need to do less of the fake change and more real change, you start thinking about, okay, what are the three or four really big areas of American life where a little tinkering is not gonna solve it, where we, where, you know, we need some transformational reform? I would say a couple. One is health. Regardless of what your view is on the right system, I think we can all agree, like, we're not a particularly healthy country. It's very cruel. People are dying of things they don't need to die of. Life expectancy is going down. It's not supposed to move in that direction. Like, health. I think we'd all agree on education as another, you know, major area, major transformational change required simply to keep up with where the world is. I think a third area is labor, and thinking about work, and the kind of question, um, that was raised by that woman, but also questions around, like, what does it, what does it mean to protect an Uber driver from the vicissitudes of the gig economy? And, you know, it's not-- the solutions we have don't really fit the realities we've created. But the fourth area that I think is a big one is the one you raised, which is in a world where money is not necessarily a physical thing in your wallet, not just a thing in an account anymore either, but can be cryp- I mean, I don't even understand what all these things are, but, but you probably do. You know, but is virtual and can bounce around untraced and can be anonymized and can be, you know, moved through shell companies and transferred and turned into things faster than any government may ever be able to make sense of. What does it mean to tax people? Right? Like, let's just face reality. Many of the largest American corporations do not pay corporate income tax any given year. I'm talking about big, big, big, big companies. Companies that make an enormous amount of money, right? There's the double Dutch with an Irish sandwich. I don't know if you've ever eaten that. But that's a-

Speaker 55:13 [laughs]

Anand Giridharadas 55:13 ... tax maneuver that saves, you know, a lot of companies pretend to be a lot bigger in Ireland than they actually are, let's put it that way. Um, you got all these tax havens that kind of rich individuals use an- and, and others. And I think we just have to face, I don't know what the answer is, but in a world in which it is as easy as it is, and by the way, all of that that I described is, like, without any of this crypto stuff having really affected it, right? We, we haven't even seen, like, when GE adopts crypto, right? Like, it's, it's gonna be a slo- and then that becomes part of how we have to figure out tax a- like, it's gonna be a nightmare. And we're very, if we're not careful, we are heading into a world in which the most important pots of money to tax to fund a basic common existence are gonna be invisible to the taxation authorities. And so what can you at Google do? I mean, you're prob- the technology and know-how you have, you're probably one of the few people who can actually think about solving that issue. How do we, from the beginning of this money revolution that's happening, how do we embed in that, those inventions the ability to tax people, right? That may be very anti- that's antithetical to why a lot of these people do crypto, right? But one of the things we learned with the internet that you know very well is, like, early design choices matter a lot, right? The internet was designed to protect anonymity, and that's very hard to work around that. Well, the internet, inter- internet ended up being this, like, incredibly abusive, racist space that, you know, and if persistent identity had been more of a part of the early design of the internet, maybe the internet would be in a different way. Maybe people would behave online more the way they do at cocktail parties, which is, like, occasionally mean, but not, you know, calling people by, like, racist names every time they say something that slightly offends them. Um, these kind of design choices matter. So I, I think it's worth thinking about how do you design money, this new money, in a way that is not gonna lead to a world in which there is no money for the common good?

Speaker 57:26 So I'm really glad you came here. Also, um, I came 'cause I heard your interview on Ezra Klein, which I thought was great, and as-

Anand Giridharadas 57:32 He's, like, one of the greatest interviewers on Earth.

Speaker 57:34 He's, he's very good. Like, I, I was struck by, like, how, how much you seem to get all of it right. Like, I, I don't have a lot of, I don't see a lot of what having the, a big plan thing, but it all makes sense. Like, we, you have a whole bunch of people who are like, "There's concentrated wealth. They're gonna get money. Those people are gonna be unintentionally or intentionally influenced by that." Like, that, that all, like, everything you say makes a ton of sense. Um, and to your question, uh-

Anand Giridharadas 58:01 [coughs]

Speaker 58:02 ... I've actually brought stuff to an SVP, so I was one of, like, 5,000 of his reports, and brought him some, like, you know, like, pushed him directly, so, and got no retribution.

Anand Giridharadas 58:11 On that issue or a different issue?

Speaker 58:13 Completely different issue, but just, like, uh, I don't mind getting yelled at.

Anand Giridharadas 58:19 That's an important asset in making change.

Speaker 58:21 [laughs]

Speaker 58:22 [laughs]

Speaker 58:22 I got surprisingly little pushback as it went up the chain. Only just, like, "Crisp up your message," but, like, "Go for it." Um, the only thing I wanna push back on is, like, it's, it's not always easy to tell when you're being the Goliath or not. So Google started off as a very small company. We grew. We put a lot of businesses out of business. Was that bad? Which of those businesses that we put out of business was bad? Like, there's, there's some, I think, fairly, relatively clear-cut cases, but there's a lot of cases, like, companies grow, and then they get old, and they become inefficient, and they eventually go out of business. Like, Google will not be in business probably 300 years from now. That's okay. So, like, how, like, what, what is your-

Anand Giridharadas 59:09 Yeah, but I, I think-

Speaker 59:09 What are the guidelines for that?

Anand Giridharadas 59:10 ... the simple answer for that that's actually embedded in the law, it is not bad to put another company out of business when you do so out of an abundance of competition. It is bad to put another company out of business when you do so because of a lack of competition. So when you guys were starting out, and you were s- smarter and nimbler than competitors, and there were a bunch of competitors, and, and, and, and people wanted to come to you instead of them, I don't think anybody cries for that, except the people who are being disrupted, as you guys say, right? But I think when you get to a state where there's, like, for many people wanting to advertise, basically only one company left to do their ad buy on, and you then see, like, The New York Times or The Washington Post, or actually more to the point, smaller newspapers struggling to exist, at that point, I don't think that business is struggling because only of competition. I think if there were eight Googles vying for the online ad business, the price dynamics in the market might be different enough that newspaper could compete. Um, so I think you have to ask yourself, when is there an abundance of competition, and when have we become the thing that results in a lack of competition? [audience applauds] Thank you. Thank you for embracing the awkwardness.