Evan Osnos: What Advisors Need to Know About the New Gilded Age

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What if the yachts, bunkers, and private islands aren't signs of indulgence, but signs of fear? Hi everyone, I'm business coach Steve Sandusky for Barron's Advisor, The Way Forward Podcast. My guest today is Evan Osnos. Evan is a staff writer for The New Yorker. He's a National Book Award winner, and he's the author of a book called The Haves and Have Yachts. Dispatches on the Ultra Rich. This book is a sharp and timely look at how extreme wealth is transforming America and what it means for the rest of us. Today's conversation is episode 3 in my miniseries on The Geopolitical Edge. Evan and I explore how the ultra wealthy are no longer just living large. They're building fortresses of protection from a world they no longer trust. We talk about the fear that drives billionaires to prepare for societal collapse, the cultural distortion created by unchecked wealth, and the rising backlash that's starting to echo the original Gilded Age. For financial advisors, this isn't just sociology, it's strategy. The behaviors of the ultra-rich are shaping policy, influencing markets, and setting emotional benchmarks that ripple through your clients' expectations and fears. This conversation will help you better understand where wealth is heading, what it's reacting to, and how you can guide your clients through a world that's being quietly and powerfully reshaped. With that, here's my conversation with Evan Asnos. What I am hoping to do in our conversation here today is to stitch together 3 threads that you seem to have a very uncanny ability to be right at the center of. So the first one is you wrote a book called "Wildland: The Making of America's Fury," and you talk about some of the extreme inequality that we have here in the US. And you do that from the perspective of 3 cities where you lived that sort of display that. One is Greenwich, Connecticut, the opposite of that, Clarksburg, West Virginia, and then perhaps in the middle of that is Chicago. And then the second thread is your newest book called "The Haves and Have Yachts," where you talk about the ultra-rich and the influence that they're having in our political area, for example. And then the third is you lived in China for many years and you reported from China, and now we're locked in this great power rivalry with China. So somehow you've been at the center of all three of these things. And for Barron's here, I'm doing a miniseries on what I'm calling The Geopolitical Edge. And so I'd love to have you perhaps add some context to that. And as you think about those three threads, do you somehow tie them together or not tie them together?

Well, it's a fascinating way into it, Steve. And I think the short answer is that I think that edge comes from curiosity and you're driven by curiosity to things that you can't sometimes even explain why they're deeply rooted in what fascinates you. But we all have them. We all recognize it when we've come on a topic like that. And curiously enough, I think you and I hadn't even talked about this beforehand, but you hit on something very important, which is that actually there is a through line that connects the passions that have frankly driven my work over the last 25 years, which is that I was in China for 8 years, from 2005 to 2013, in a sense, the sort of the heart of the go-go period in China. And I'd studied the language back, in the '90s, I'd gotten the bug a little bit, just fascinated by the culture, by the length of the civilization, by the complexity of it. Frankly, it felt to me like the only other place on earth that was as complex as the United States and that had as distinctive of a self-narrative. So I wanted to understand it. And then the years that I was there, it happened to be that the best framework for understanding what China was experiencing in this period of extraordinary growth, where you had the railway system building out across the country for the for the first time, you had as much cement being used in a given year as we had in the building of entire cities in this country, that the best framework was actually to go back and look at the United States at the turn of the 20th century, that that period, the sort of building of the American industrial age, was enormously revealing. And in fact, I started rereading Great Gatsby because I wanted to understand some of what I was seeing in Shanghai and Beijing. In fact, I quoted from it in my book on China because it made so much resonant sense. And then I came home to the United States in 2013 and discovered that actually, in fact, some of those same issues which had animated our, our imagination of what it means when a country is muscular and building, but also struggling with internal tensions and this constant battle of how do you make sure that the tide is lifting as many boats as possible? All of these issues were also playing out in our country. And so that became then, in a way, I transported those same passions back to my own country. And here we are fittingly talking in 2025, which is the 100th anniversary of The Great Gatsby. And so all of these issues are very much on my mind as I try to think about what makes countries strong, what makes them durable, what makes them resilient, perhaps most importantly of all. And how will these two, China and the United States, manage their own internal challenges as they go through this rivalry in the 21st century?

It's funny that you mentioned The Great Gatsby because I had pulled a quote from F. Scott Fitzgerald that I wanted to run by you here. And so I do want to talk about these three threads. So let's start with the billionaires. And one of the things that Fitzgerald wrote was, let me tell you about the very rich. They are different from you and me. So, a very popular quote. You've spent time with billionaires. You've been on their gigayachts. You've been in their palatial homes. You've been in their survival bunkers. So what have you learned about the super wealthy, about these billionaires? What is it that drives them? Are they driven by power? Are they driven by money? Are they driven by status? And what has caused them to move so far into politics in the current Trump administration?

It's perhaps sacrilege to disagree with Fitzgerald, but I actually have thought a lot about his quote, and I think he may be wrong. The longer I've reported inside the worlds of stratospheric wealth, really levels of wealth that we haven't had in our history— just as a technical matter, we didn't have centibillionaires a decade ago. This is a relatively new phenomenon for us. And one of the things I've come to believe pretty firmly is that the same social dynamics that govern any community are at play when it comes to very powerful figures, meaning the anxieties, the competitions, the rivalries, the fear, which can be strange to talk about. Sometimes we imagine if we can get ourselves into that realm of wealth, then maybe we will be relieved finally of whatever the primal fears are that drive us in our lives. But actually, And we can talk about it. Those fears continue and drive people to do things like imagine a doomsday bunker that they'll go to if things all fall apart. I think that what drives people into politics is a version of those same quite familiar social dynamics, particularly the idea of feeling as if the world is either within our control or outside of our control. One of the very distinct artifacts of data on public attitudes right now in this period of time is that people feel, whether they're at the bottom of the income scale or the top, that the world feels out of control, that it seems somehow chaotic and illegible, that very hard to figure out what is really driving us. And I think part of that is because of the accelerating power of the internet era, that things are just— social phenomena mature faster, they become fluorescent faster, the competition for our attention is that much more intense and so on. But one of the things is that when you are in the position where you have the resources to be able to say, I'm going to try to restore some level of control over the regulatory environment or the political environment, which seems so disorderly and you can do it, well, then you do it. And the prime example, of course, being Elon Musk, who was the largest donor in the 2024 presidential election. Just to put a fine point on the numbers, the numbers really are quite eloquent here. In 2004, billionaires in the United States contributed about $13 million with an M to the presidential election that year. And it seemed like a lot at the time, but actually it was a pittance compared to where we are today. Today, billionaires contributed in 2024 election about 200 times as much, $3 billion with a B. So we've just entered into a whole new terrain. And Elon Musk, had some really specific ideas about what he wanted to achieve in Washington. There will be a range of opinions on what people think of what he did, but his idea of going in and revolutionizing government the way that he had tried to revolutionize businesses, that was his goal. And a lot of people might have the idea but not able to do it because they don't have the influence. He was able to almost literally buy a department of government that would allow him to effectuate these things. And even at the high point of their wealth 100 years ago, the Vanderbilts, the Carnegies, the Rockefellers, none of them actually had that level of control. And I, I've had a good time speaking with some of their biographers to compare notes about these two periods of time. And that is a big distinction between then and now.

My thesis in this series is that if we look at what's happened over the past 40 years, let's go back to, say, August of 1982. When what I would say the great bull market that I think we're still in essentially started, the whole Reagan era and everything. There were a lot of tailwinds from then to now, and my thesis is that we've lost a lot of those tailwinds, and now we've got some new headwinds. Do you look at this rise of these super rich, the Elon Musks, the Mark Zuckerbergs— there's a whole slew of these people— and we look at the Trump administration, and I think there was at least 13 billionaires in his administration. So how do you see the rise of these really wealthy people in some respect— I'm not going to say take over politics, but get super involved in politics? We've seen Musk has flamed out, at least at the time we're having our conversation, he's flamed out. Who knows, you know, where he'll be by the time this publishes. But how do you see these super wealthy people affecting society? Where's this ultimately going to lead us to, do you think?

I think you're absolutely right that we're in a period now when we simply have not had that level of control. Just look at the inauguration stage on January 20th. It was in its own way, a kind of instant classic of a period of time, a snapshot. The number of billionaires that were standing with the president just said a lot about where power lies. And I think that what's a metric that I use to try to understand this period is this within the bandwidth of normal changes that we've had in our country? Is this part of the constant oscillation of concentration of wealth and then diffusion of wealth? Or are we actually into something that's outside of those normal patterns? And what you find when you look at that is that over 250 years of history, we actually have had a kind of pendulum swing between concentration and, and greater distribution.. And that's what inspired Mark Twain to name it the Gilded Age in 1873. Then we saw this tack towards the Progressive Era and the New Deal, and that was an effort to try to bring the pendulum back. And then you had it begin to also swing again starting in the mid-'70s and bringing us today. But the difference is that today, in a way, I think we have the perfect storm because you have a political environment of intense polarization. So we live in a country essentially of 50/50 America. So a small investment, quote unquote, in politics can yield a huge return because if you can shift the political balance either in the executive branch or in the legislature from one side to the other, you can have a tremendous benefit, partly because our political system is so much a winner-take-all system. You get every committee in the Senate, you get every committee in the House if you're in charge. And so you can have a giant effect. And there are a few people who figured that out, and they've started to invest heavily, either quietly in the form of dark money or more overtly in the form of the way Musk has done it, to try to say, look, as long as these levers of government are up for sale, I'm gonna seize the levers, and I don't wanna have this be done to me. I wanna take control. Now, I think that where I get, as an American and as somebody who keeps an eye on history, I try to say what happens and when that happens. And what worries me is that the combination of that level of control in the hands of a relatively small number of people who have specific interests. In some cases, they have a fiduciary responsibility. In other cases, they have esoteric political ideas that they're trying to accomplish. Whatever you want to call it, it's not ultimately the public will necessarily that's really dominating. And I think what is the origins of this country's political system? It's about the idea that the political will, even with all of the ways it was constrained from the outset, we know that the vote was confined only, frankly, to people who looked like me, white men who had property. But the whole idea was the public will would prevail. That's our— if we're talking about edge, that's the American edge. And if we lose the ability to have the public will reflected in the actions and affairs of state, then we get into shaky territory. And I've lived in countries that have an absence of democracy or have authoritarian systems of one kind or another, and they're not as resilient, they're not as innovative, they're not as prosperous. And that's what worries me.

This is a hypothetical question along the lines of what you're just talking about there. So we've got the G7 countries, some of the biggest countries in the world. They get together periodically and try and shape policy. If you were to create a shadow G7 made up of influential billionaires, what do you think they would be talking about behind closed doors, and what kind of What kind of policy would they be trying to shape, do you think? And do you think what they would be trying to do would be more self-serving, or do you think it would be more magnanimous in terms of they're trying to benefit the greater population in general? Because as you and I know, if we go too far in one extreme where they're really out to just for their own self-interest, there's going to be a revolution on our hands. Now, that may sound a little bit dramatic, but how do you think about that hypothetical question?

I think any of us, you and I included, who travel in circles where we know people who have succeeded, they are worried about that possibility. The idea that our country is fragile, that there is tremendous unease and anxiety that could well up. So I don't think it's an abstraction to a lot of folks. I think that I would expand our, let's call it our B7, our billionaire 7, to use your really interesting scenario. Let's expand it across the ages so that it can encompass some people from earlier periods in American history too. So we'll take somebody like Jay Gould, who was the richest man on Wall Street in the end of the 19th century. He's a guy that was almost the kind of caricature, really almost a cartoon of the self-interested tycoon. Mark Twain said that he was the guy who taught Americans not only to value money, but to kneel down and worship it. And he criticized Gould for that. Then you fast forward a little bit and you get some interesting figures, more complex figures. Like Andrew Carnegie, who, of course, was one of the richest men in the world, but also believed that, as he said, he looked across society and he worried about illiteracy. He worried about ignorance among people who didn't have access to education. And he said, if we continue down this path, we're going to end up in a country of what he described as rigid castes separated by mutual ignorance and mutual distrust. Which is a remarkably prescient thing. I think you could argue we're, even today, in an age of tremendous connectivity, we are struggling with the same fact. And then you had somebody like Rockefeller, who was a giant of an entrepreneurial success, but also believed that his responsibility was then to make sure that he was seeding the conditions for greater prosperity for the future. So he gave away 50% of his fortune, his son got the rest. His son gave away 90% of what he had so that eventually the heirs to the Rockefeller fortune, they had to go out and work pretty hard if they wanted to live the level that their grandparents had. And then you fast forward to today and you get something more complicated. I've spent time around enough of the billionaires who define our cultural period to form a sense of what's motivating some folks. I'll take Mark Zuckerberg as an example. I write about him at some length in the book. I've interviewed him repeatedly. I think that he was motivated motivated initially by a kind of narrow idea, which was success in technology. He came out, remember, of course, he succeeded as a teenager, left college, went out and built this extraordinary business, a company that almost was bigger than anything in the history of commerce, to be blunt. It had more customers than Christianity, to put the numbers on it. Then he decided, okay, what am I really here for? What kind of imprint am I going to leave on the world? And so then he and his wife started a foundation which was similar in some ways to what the Gates Foundation had been. They were dedicated to public health and education. And then I think that he went through a bit of a blowback after the 2016 election. He realized, wait a second, the public is saying that I've actually injured democracy because my website was not engineered well enough to protect against misinformation. It was invading people's privacy. It was— maybe it was a monopoly according to the Federal Trade Commission. So he then had this whole realization, oh, God, I don't— maybe the world doesn't see me as I see myself. And so then he narrowed his— call them his societal ambitions and has said, you know, look, I'm no longer going to do fact-checking the way you want me to. I'm going to— honestly, I'm just going to do what I need to do to, to get out of the crosshairs of Donald Trump. So I think he's taken a much narrower definition of his role in society. And then I'll just add one last member and then I'll wrap up our B7 portrait. But you then take somebody like Warren Buffett, who's such an interesting and admired figure because Buffett has been very clear that, as he has said many times, from his perspective, the tax code doesn't make any sense. He doesn't know why his secretary is paying more in taxes than he is. He's written about it in op-eds in The New York Times. He's really tried to make this case publicly. He's giving away a huge portion of his net worth. In fact, as he says, he's trying to give it away faster than he can even give it away fast enough because it's continued to accumulate. And he has been, as so many people would say, the conscience of capitalism of the last half a century. And I think you put all of these different kinds of views into one room, and that's frankly part of the reason why I wrote this book, was to say there are many different ways to be in the world and to have tremendous resources and to have influence, and you can decide how you want to be. And personally, I'm partial to the Buffett view of things and saying I'm going to try to turn my winnings back into, as he would say himself, people who will get more utility out of it than I will. But I do look out across the landscape today and I think, Steve, I see fewer Buffetts than Zuckerbergs, and that gives me pause.

Yeah, it's interesting that you brought up Buffett because I think he is so different from the other people, from the Elon Musks and the Mark Zuckerbergs. So two thoughts there. So I was born and raised in Omaha, and so I've been cognizant of Warren Buffett since the 1970s. Yeah, I just met him once. What I find interesting about him is that he's from at least, what, 2 or 3 generations removed from Zuckerberg, okay? So he grew up in a culture that was very different, and the values that he grew up with, I think, were very different from the values that a Zuckerberg or Musk grew up with in today's society. So it seems to me that the culture that you're growing up in obviously has a huge influence on how you think about things. So one of the things that I'm concerned about is the culture we see today in many ways doesn't reward or necessarily recognize the Warren Buffett type values. Yeah. And just one other thing that I think is a little— I'm going to say maybe hypocritical about Warren Buffett, and this might be heresy, but here's the guy who talks about, hey, my secretary pays a higher tax rate than I do because he only takes $100,000 per year annual salary. He gives away all of his money. So the vast estate that he has very little of that is going to go to the U.S. Treasury in the form of taxes because there's going to be no taxes on his charitable giving. So even though he says, hey, tax me more, he has structured his whole estate to pay the least amount of taxes possible. So I'm not going to give him a full pass on that aspect, though.

Totally. And what I think is so interesting is he'll tell you if he was on this podcast, which would be a great get, by the way, if he was, Steve, we would say, what are you doing, Warren? And he would probably say, I'm doing what the law allows and I'm doing what I think I don't fault him for it. Oh, totally. But the reason I mention that is that in some ways, that's one of the things I hear over and over as I talk to people about their choices, whether it comes to how they structure their estate or how they structure inheritance. Sometimes people will even say, look, I know that you don't want to leave your kids too much because it'll ruin them. On the other hand, I'm then going to go and set up a trust in Nevada so that they can avoid any additional taxes they wouldn't have to pay if it if it was there. And I think to myself, you have your own instincts are colliding in some ways. So that's why I think that the environment that people are coming up in is so important. I'm very conscious of this about, I'm a dad, I've got 2 kids, and I think about who are the big figures on the horizon that are dominating our pop culture world? Both my kids, ages 9 and 7, have now heard the name Elon Musk. On one level, I can say, okay, there are things you might appreciate about his innovative capabilities, his leadership, his grit. On the other hand, there's a whole lot about him that I would never want my family to emulate and that I think are deeply destructive. And so I think that there are, to your very first question, are the rich different than you and me? In some ways, what's similar is that there are fashions that go through communities, and those communities can either be in Omaha or they can be in Palo Alto. And, and the Big Island in Hawaii where people have some of their estates like Mark Zuckerberg or, they can—

Larry Ellison.

Larry Ellison. Exactly. And so the fact—

he owns a Hawaiian island.

Exactly. Yeah. And I think in a way it's about saying, I'm trying to identify and anatomize that. And so I can say, here's what the fashion is, because it's very powerful and it's having impacts on people's lives very far away from the islands in Hawaii.

So let's go to the opposite extreme of the super wealthy, and let's talk about the inequality. And obviously, this is a huge issue that's faced our country for some time now. We can go back to admitting China to the World Trade Organization back in the early 2000s. We can talk about the hollowing out of America. We can talk about how Trump tapped into that and was able to use that as one way for him to, you know, ride it to the presidency. Twice to really tap into the issues and the problems related to that. So you lived in Clarksburg, West Virginia, which I think is in the heart of Appalachia, which has a lot of these problems that we're talking about. You also lived in Greenwich, Connecticut, home of the hedge funders and extreme wealth. So you've seen it from both ends. Where do you see that leading? It appears that the inequality is even widening as we sit here today. Where does that ultimately end up? Where does that lead us to?

I'll give you an interesting way that links these two places and these two very different cultures together. We just got latest data a few weeks ago on CEO pay at the moment, which is now, according to the Wall Street Journal, the median CEO of a big public company is— can make about 350 times what the frontline worker is making, which is a huge ratio and very different than what it was, frankly, in Greenwich 50 years ago. This is not abstract. One of the biggest guys in town back in the '70s and early '80s was Reg Jones, who was the CEO of General Electric. And I remember I was interviewing his daughter, and Reg Jones, at the peak of his powers, he was the most influential businessman in America. He was chairman of the Business Roundtable. He was an advisor to presidents, both Democrats and Republicans. I remember talking to one of the guys who worked for him who said he made about between 12 and 18 times what the frontline worker was. And his daughter said, yeah, I remember my mother used to say, we've got everything we need. We've got a great house. We live in Greenwich. Honestly, what more do we really need? Reg had grown up in a kind of working-class British family. It was just a very different world. Fast forward, his successor, of course, Jack Welch, celebrated entrepreneur, but also somebody who left the company ultimately with a exit package, a parachute, hundreds of millions of dollars, really the largest that we'd ever seen. And then you fast forward to today, and we've gone from Reg Jones making between 10 and 20 times what his frontline workers made to today's CEOs who are making, median example, 350 times. And it is not going unnoticed. It's creating a lot of distress. So if you go to Clarksburg, West Virginia, which is where I went first job out of college, worked at a small newspaper there, and I've been going back ever since.. It's a place that means a lot to me, helps me understand this country. And I remember actually having a conversation not too long ago with a coal miner there named David Ifa, who was aware of this statistic, these new CEO stats that showed that compensation was now much larger than it had been before. And he said to me at one point, he said, deep down, have you ever met a man who is really worth 300 or 400 other men? He said, I haven't. And what he meant was not obviously net worth, he meant worth. So on some deep level, here's somebody whose job has really evaporated over the course of a generation. Being a coal miner today in 2025 is unrecognizable from what it was 40 years ago when you were— we sometimes forget this far away, but being a coal miner was actually a pretty great job in the 1980s and '90s in a place like Clarksburg, West Virginia, because you were You had a stable job. You often were a provider for your family. It was— you were locked into a reliable business that was— you had multiple employer options. And all of that's just gone away. And it's a complex story about why. I don't think anybody's looking to revive the coal industry today, nor should they, given the environmental impact. But the decisions that we made as a society about how to cushion the blow or not cushion the blow for people like that, while at the same time folks at the top of society were making a huge amount, we're feeling the impact of that. And that fluctuation, reverberation, all of that, I think a lot of the instability we see in American life today is about people becoming aware at the bottom of how well people have done at the top. And a growing sense that, hold on, the American dream is not just about making as much as you possibly can, it's also about having a system in which everybody else gets to make as much as they can too.

That's how these two stories fit together. You mentioned Reg Jones. I think he's a great example of this idea of the cultural values of the time. And so back then, he was raised in an environment where that made sense, and it was more about equality and opportunity. But it wasn't like outrageousness, like to some extent that we have today, where I think we've totally flipped that. But it seems like there's also a paradox here in the sense that some people resent these ultra-wealthy people and say, you've got way too much. You've got a Bernie Sanders who basically says there shouldn't be billionaires. You've got a Zohran Mamdani who just won the Democratic mayoral race in New York City, who essentially said, I don't think there should be billionaires. So on the one hand, you have this backlash against that great wealth. But on the other hand, I think most people would say, I still want the opportunity in America where I could become one of them. So don't take away that opportunity too. So How do you see this sort of tension between a little bit of perhaps resentment to the wealthy, but also, "Don't take away my ability to possibly become one of them someday"?

Absolutely. You've hit on something that is really at the core of the American mood right now. And we see this in survey after survey. There was one done last year which found that 59% of Americans believe that billionaires are making the country less fair And an identical portion of Americans, 59%, want to become billionaires themselves. And in fact, in some cases, it was the same respondent who has those two views. And I think that gets to a deep and very enduring feature of the American mind, which is that we are deep down, we're just wired to want to prosper. We're wired to want to get rich. It's a big piece of the American idea. But alongside that, and I think we have to keep this equally present in our mind. There is a feeling that we have a big belief in fairness. We usually talk about it as political fairness, the idea of one man, one vote. But there comes a point when it was— I was talking to a great scholar not long ago who said— she said most people historically and comparative to other countries, Americans are quite tolerant of inequality, economic inequality. It's— we chalk it up to a feature of a country in which you can make it. But we're quite intolerant of political inequality. This is part of the reason why we had a revolution. So in a way, where we're seeing those two attitudes collide that you put so well a moment ago is that people are starting to look at the influence or the control exerted by somebody like Elon Musk, who bought his way into a massive level of control in government and then was given the power to start shutting down agencies and getting rid of workers and undermining American soft power overseas. I think that started to clang with America's understanding of how political power is supposed to work. People say we're supposed to vote for these kinds of decisions. So that's where these two things can collide. But I think deep down, Americans, even today, when there is widening inequality, And it is wider. I think it's worth just stating clearly that the data is very clear that we are now at a condition where the amount of wealth controlled by the top fraction of 1% is higher than it was even during the Gilded Age when the Vanderbilts and the Rockefellers ruled the roost. So we're in unprecedented territory. And part of the tension that we're seeing is that it's not true that you can continue to have all this money accumulating in the hands of a few without having an impact on other people's social mobility. We know this from a heap of very reliable social science literature, that there comes a point when income inequality, or should I more specifically, economic inequality, does have a negative impact on social mobility. And social mobility, as we all know, that is the coin of the realm. That's what Americans want. That's what we expect.. And the data on this, unfortunately, is clear. If a child born in 1940 in this country had about a 90% chance of outearning their parents, but a child coming of age today has less than half that chance of outearning their parents. And that's what makes people unhappy.

One of the other things I'm trying to do with this series is try and see if there are signals to be watching out for. Or trends to be paying attention to? I know you're not a financial advisor, but if you were to put your financial advisor hat on, are there certain signals or trends or things that you sort of watch out for out there that as you monitor those things, you say, okay, I'm looking at this, that, and the other thing, and if it starts moving in this direction or that direction, that's a signal to me that, whoa, something significant's going to happen there. And ideally, connect this to, like, economic consequences.

There are a couple things that are on my radar screen. One of them is, you mentioned the Mondani victory in New York City in the Democratic primary, what a shock that was to the political class, folks in my business who spend a lot of time analyzing politics. I also went and reported a bit at some of the Bernie Sanders rallies that we saw earlier this year. What was interesting about both cases, particularly the Sanders rallies, was that I met people who had never been to a Sanders rally before. These were not diehard Bernie Bros. These are not Democratic socialists. In some cases, they were people who were much more sympathetic to a traditional Republican set of values and priorities. Small business owners, in some cases, definitely not interested in paying higher taxes themselves, but also deeply concerned about affordability in this country, about cost, about the idea that it seemed as if political decisions were being made to benefit a few giant players and perhaps not actually help people who needed help. And I think you see something similar in Mamdani's case. Look, let's set aside— there's a whole political conversation about why he won and what it says about New York politics and so on. But it tells us two very distinct facts. One, young people are fed up with the status quo. They don't really wanna see another generation or another decade of leadership by folks in their 70s and 80s. Then it's also true that cost affordability is a giant, perhaps even dominant concern for people. It crowds out everything else. So I think that there comes a point when no matter how much political skill Skill can either be a positive or negative thing. I think whether you like Donald Trump or not, he is a very skillful political figure and has been able to harness the frustration people have about the barriers in their lives, about the feeling of opportunity unrealized, about the problem of affordability in healthcare and education, and has turned it into political advantage. But at a certain point, people start to expect expect a return on that political investment. They want to see when's this actually going to be to my benefit. So that's one thing I'm watching to see if that frustration that is expressed in the form of voting for outsider candidates, people like Mondani or— interesting data point— Bernie Sanders won every county in West Virginia in the Democratic primary in 2016, which is an amazing fact. We're at one of the reddest states in the union. And a Democratic socialist won the Democratic primary. Tells you something about displeasure, not only with Hillary Clinton, but with the establishment and concern about some of these issues. And then the last thing I'll mention is I'm watching very closely what artificial intelligence is going to do to our politics, because I'm not talking about deepfake videos and things like that. I'm talking about the fact that Dario Amodei, who is the CEO of Anthropic, one of the most well-informed, connected AI entrepreneurs of our time, is saying that we're gonna have job losses of 50% in the next 1 to 5 years, which is a massive fact. But he's talking about white-collar workers. You had the CEO of Ford just the other day endorse this and say that you're now gonna see probably 50% job cuts among white-collar workers, not at Ford, but talking broadly. And then finally, one thing on that is, you probably noticed it, Steve, but just the other day Amazon reported that it is now soon to be using more robots than humans in its warehouses. So we're on the threshold of a dislocation in the labor force that will magnify a lot of the atmospheric things we've been talking about, and not in the direction of stability and reassurance, but in fact in the direction of real turbulence. And so I think one of the key things to watch is Who in politics is figuring out how to talk to people in a way that they honestly believe, that feels authentic, that feels like it's meeting them where they are really in distress? And bet on that horse, because authenticity right now, particularly in the age of fakery in so many ways, authenticity is the most valuable asset in American politics. I've been doing this now for 25 years, and I've never believed it more firmly. Authenticity is the thing. If you can generate it, if you can express it, you can win.

Yeah, and I really appreciate all the points that you made there. And just a couple of things there. So one, going back to Mamdani for a second here, and you talk about authenticity. So he talked about things like freezing rent in New York City, about having the government run grocery stores. And a lot of people say that's totally impractical. If you freeze rent, it means there's going to be fewer new housing come up because people can't make a profit. Landlords are not going to keep— I mean, so yeah, you can come up with all these reasons why that's not going to work. But I think what a lot of people really liked was he's going to try things, right? And hey, they may not work, but at least I need to try. Okay, I'm not giving up that we can't come up with something. So I think a lot of people want to believe in someone who's going to try some stuff, because if it's not working for me now, I need you to do something different. So try something even if the elites say, hey, this isn't going to work. So getting back to your point of authenticity, I think that was a key thing there. The second thing about AI, I think, is such another crucial thing. And to your point about that being something that we need to watch here, tie that back into what the guy from Anthropic said, what Jim Farley at Ford said, we're going to lose half of the white-collar jobs. So I think that's something to keep an eye out to is we know that technology, obviously, big disruptor. We know historically, technology eliminates jobs, but on the other hand, it also creates jobs. But there's that middle part there where we're making the transition from jobs that are lost to jobs that are created. And the people who lose the jobs, are they able to retrain to get the new jobs, or do they get left behind? And I think getting back to the hollowing out of America and jobs being shipped to China, we miss the middle part about, okay, people who lost their jobs, how are we going to get them back into the workforce? And so I think watching the job statistics watching whether or not the politicians are talking about job retraining, whether corporations are talking about, hey, I know your job may be going away from AI, but let's figure out how can we retrain you so that you can use AI plus human to make you more valuable to the company instead of just laying you off and letting your retraining be somebody else's problem. So I think those are all things that we can be watching out for that will be a sign of either A, A, we're making progress on all this, or B, we're not, and it's going to be a bigger problem that none of us want to see happen in the future.

Absolutely. Look, I am mindful of what history tells us, and you can be a capitalist and an entrepreneur and be concerned about the patterns that we see around us. You've heard Ray Dalio talk about his concerns about widening inequality in this country. Paul Tudor Jones has said very clearly that history suggests that if we continue down this path, that it either ends in war or unrest or very high tax rates. So it's a pattern that tells us where it's headed. And I think that we need to be mindful of what the political signals are. And what you just described rings true to me, which is that there comes a point when people's demand of not just their politicians, but also their business leaders, that they take more of a hand in trying to think of the solutions rather than just admiring the problem. And I'm thinking a lot about, we've got AI entrepreneurs that are incredibly successful at building out some of these new models, but there comes a point where people will say, do you have an obligation as a firm, as an innovator, as a builder, to also try to use some of these same skills and creativity to try to manage that transition. Because it can't just be that we're all gonna wake up in the future and suddenly, yes, we'll have cured cancer and we'll have all kinds of dramatic improvements in our technological lives. But if we have 20% chronic unemployment, nothing's gonna be much of a society that we wanna live in. And I think that's where we're approaching. We're getting to the point where the societal impacts, I think, are demanding as much conversation and study. There's a pattern right now, which is that it all tends to be that we listen on stage or we talk about the amazing advances that are coming in our technology. And then we all get off, we go to lunch and talk about our anxieties and our fears about our, what kind of world our kids are going to grow up in. And I think we need to unify these two conversations and begin to say, let's have a candid dialogue about the pros and the cons and how we bring this into society responsibly.

And if those two big things we've been talking about here are not enough to worry about, let's throw China into the mix here. I want to talk about how China thinks about billionaires and how the U.S. thinks about billionaires. Is there anything that the U.S. can learn about the way China deals with their billionaires? And conversely, is there anything China can learn about how we deal with billionaires?

Well, it's fascinating. There was a period when it was really the Wild West in China. This was started more or less at the turn of the 21st century, and I wrote about some just amazing cases of guys who would go from being, in some cases quite literally, somebody who was a farmer who discovered some untapped market. In one case, she was an egg farmer who discovered that she could actually tap into these huge— this huge demand for poultry and ultimately made a fortune before she'd even learned to read. And it's not an abstract example. And then at a certain point, that period of what I thought of as the sort of unbridled age of ambition rode up against the limits of what the Communist Party could accept. For let's remember, it is in the end a Communist Party. And Xi Jinping, who took power, as we know, in 2013, he is deep down a Marxist-Leninist. He is not not somebody who is agnostic about ideology. He believes deeply that is the system that will help China succeed. And so one of the first things he did was go off and start trimming all the tall poppies in society. And that applied not just politically and ideologically, people who he thought were out of step with his political aims, Democrats, for instance, but also people who had accumulated so much power in capital that they could be independent sources of power. So we've gone from, I suppose, what we could say was the Gilded Age in China to the Gelded Age. Now you have Jack Ma, who is back after he was disappeared for a while, but he got the message. He now sits quite docile on stage next to Xi Jinping when called upon. But there is a limit to what China will ever allow independent private sector billionaires to do because they fundamentally, Xi Jinping and his generation, just don't trust the private sector as a political entity. They think it's a challenge. There's not a lot about the Chinese system that I think we want to import when it comes to that very top stratum of society. There's a lot about actually the sheer grit and hard work that I see among ordinary Chinese people that I have tremendous admiration for, and I'd love to see a little more of that in our society. But I think that there is a way in which the Chinese leadership has essentially ordered their wealthiest citizens to be responsible, as they would say, meaning to give back. It really doesn't have much to do with taxes. Taxes are a pretty perforated system in China. People pay more or less what they want or what they think they can get away with. But it's really more that they've said of these Chinese billionaires, you are Chinese, you are not a global citizen, you are not doing things that serve other countries, you should serve this country. And there's something about that is, I don't think it's translatable to ours because we are a free society. We are motivated fundamentally by liberty in a way that is very different and irreconcilable with Chinese core beliefs. But I think that there is a way in which they have prevented oligarchy in China from overtaking the government. Xi Jinping, frankly, Steve, He looked at what happened in Moscow and he said, I never wanna have oligarchs challenge me the way they challenged Boris Yeltsin for power. I'm never gonna let that happen. And so they've kept their oligarchs in a box in Beijing. Whereas in the United States, we've opened it up and we've said, all right, this is gonna be a joint venture between a president and some of the wealthiest people in society. And let's all figure out what we can do together. That's not a recipe for a functioning democracy. I think that it's not so much learning from one another as it is let's restore American democracy to the condition that has worked for so much of our history, where we make sure that political equality is the dominant thing, not necessarily economic equality. Nobody expects equality of outcome, but let's make sure that we're not giving so much political power to a small number of people that it throws off everybody else's ability to thrive.

Yeah, and your point about there's not much that you'd want to import from China in terms of how they deal with their wealthy people, because we're a free society here— totally agree with that. And I think it gets back to this idea of culture. It's like culture shapes behavior. And so what is the culture that permeates our society today? And if it's an oligarchic culture where that sort of runs society, yeah, we're going to have some problems. But if we get back to the Reg Jones, if we get back to the Warren Buffetts who were shaped by a different culture, then maybe things will change. So, I think maybe another thing that we could add to the radar here, if we're trying to monitor some things on the dashboard, is how is culture evolving? And is it evolving in a direction that is going to create a culture that continues our democracy in the way that it's been successful for more than 200 years? 250 years or so. Is it moving in that direction, or is it moving in a different direction? So now, of course, everyone's going to have an opinion on what the best culture is, and so I'm not here to say what's the right culture, but for whatever you think it should be, like, let's monitor those things.

Yeah, I'm very conscious of the fact that here we are at a moment of tremendous wealth. Arguably, we've never had greater wealth in our country. It's just an immense achievement that we're living at a time where massive innovation and technological progress has achieved a higher median income than this country's ever really had. And at the same time, half of American adults can't afford a $1,000 expense. That's nuts, actually. And the actual mood that people have right now about their own economic prospects is not as good as you would expect based on that top-line figure about how much we've generated. And I think that the takeaway for me is, It's not about figuring out, let's get rid of all the billionaires. That's not a recipe for inspiring people to achieve great things. But let's figure out why it is that we've got a system that's driving so much into the hands of so few that it's actually preventing a great many others from having the kind of flourishing life that we've promised them as a country and that has made us actually our best. I am nostalgic, actually, for something that still exists in our society, which is celebrating and valorizing people who are figuring out not only how to succeed personally, but how to make everybody else around them succeed. And I think drawing the widest possible perimeter of empathy and success. There are companies out there, we all know of them, but I happen to look at companies like Patagonia. It's not an abstract fact. They've made it a corporate virtue and a value of theirs to make sure that they're succeeding well personally, but also succeeding for everybody else. And I like that. When I think about who my kids emulate, I want them to look at leaders in our society who are not just— who don't just have the biggest yachts, so to speak, but also have the biggest imprint on history by helping the most people flourish. Yeah.

So not the people who necessarily have the biggest boat, but the one who can help all the other boats rise with them.

Yeah. Well said. I like that.

That's exactly right. The first guest in this geopolitical series was Robert D. Kaplan. And he's got a lot of expertise in China as well, like you do. And one of the things that he said, like the scariest thing to him about China and the US and our rivalry, the geopolitical thing that he said could cause massive economic consequences, is if there is a real war in the South China Sea area between the US and China, perhaps China decides they want to take over Taiwan. He said that would be a real issue. So I'd love to get your take on, do you see that as a potential possibility? Is there something else that might scare you in this, quote, rivalry that we have going on with China right now?

Yeah, I do worry about the possibility of a hot war between these two countries. I think that there's no question, frankly, that Xi Jinping has become more assertive and emphatic about his determination to try to gain control of Taiwan. And so the job of the United States is deterrence, essentially trying to prevent him from changing the status quo. We need him to get up every day, look out the window, and decide today is not the day. So how do we do that? We know what makes deterrence. Deterrence comes from a credible capacity to prevent somebody from trying to achieve what they want through force of arms, and also the credibility that we do what we say. So if we're holding fast to those two ideas, then we're able to deter them. What concerns me is that Xi Jinping looks over at the United States of the last 12 months and says, huh, looks like that they gave up on Ukraine at a certain point. They decided it was too expensive. Maybe it was too remote from the lives of everyday people. Maybe they didn't, they don't care as much about Ukraine as we in Beijing thought they did. And at a certain point he might say, I think that they don't care that much about Taiwan. And at that point he starts to probe. And the way that he probes is first they, let's say they send a detachment of Marines to one of these outlying islands, something like Kinmen Island, which is right off the coast of China. It's so close to China you can swim from Jin Mani, I wrote about a guy who did that. And they see what happens, see how this administration responds. And eventually you can end up in a situation where they do move on Taiwan. And at that point, it becomes a question of how much do Americans really resist? I think it would be a catastrophe for the United States to give up Taiwan, to allow that to happen. It is, in fact, one of the bulwarks of the status quo in Asia. And there's another issue that I think we should be thinking about, which is that Right at the moment that China is investing in science and technology, we are in fact withdrawing our investments from the National Science Foundation. We're throwing the National Institutes of Health into chaos. We're monkeying around with some of the premier institutions that have created America's underlying strength for centuries, like Harvard University. And the question is, why are we doing it? Are we doing it for really short-term political point gains? Are we doing it because we want to own the libs? Are we doing it because we don't like the idea of schools that are standing against what the administration is trying to achieve? Let's think about the long term here, because you can be sure the Chinese are thinking about the long term.

And speaking of that, there was an article on July 4th in Bloomberg, and this is a little bit of a long quote here, so bear with me for just a second there, to your exact point about investing in science and technology. So the article said, the more advanced the knowledge economy becomes, the more we depend on the tiny minority of people who can first absorb the vast body of learning that has already accumulated, and second, make innovative breakthroughs. Such people will increasingly determine our geopolitical might, perhaps even our survival, in a world where warfare is being transformed by science and innovation. China is now following Singapore's example in turning itself into an authoritarian meritocracy that searches the population for talent and allocates the bulk of that talent to science and engineering and the military. So to your point, China's putting a lot into that, and is the U.S. going to be falling behind if we don't do the same thing?

Yeah, take meritocracy. I think we were just talking a moment ago about a place like Harvard University, which is— has been able to attract The greatest talent from around the world, the biggest brains from all over the planet say, I want to eventually make it to Harvard. And what we're doing right now is systematically undermining its appeal, its charisma. And I think that applies to the United States. I think we're really— we're messing around with what has been our greatest asset. And I think we're doing it chaotically. We're doing it impulsively. As somebody who really has spent a lot of time paying attention to these two giant countries and the courses that we're on, I'm deeply concerned that we're making what are essentially day-to-day decisions right now about some of America's core strengths. And we're doing it to satisfy very short-term political motives. We're not laying in the kind of investment or even preserving the power that we have to be the target of every big talented technologist who emerges on the scene. To put a fine point on it, Steve, we're in a world right now where pretty soon you're gonna have kids all over the world growing up in poor places where they have the power through the AI models that we're developing in our country. By using their ChatGPT, they can essentially tap into extraordinary knowledge and educate themselves. If they're the kind of person that was born with that sort of talent and ingenuity, they're gonna, rise above the rest of the people around them. They're going to get to the top of the heap. They're going to thrive in school. They're going to finally get themselves out of that village, out of that town, out of that county. They're going to want to go to the greatest institutions in the world. And I sure as heck want them to be able to come to this country and to want them to come to this country and to survive and thrive here and benefit the United States and benefit the rest of the world. And I'm concerned that we're making really short-term choices that are not going to make them want to come here. They're going to want to go to Canada, they're going to want to go elsewhere, and that'll be to our loss.

And with that as a lead-in, final question here: as you put your futuristic hat on, what final thought, comment, observation would you have for our listeners about all the work that you do, the research, the places you've lived? What's a final parting thought here?

I think the thing that I come away from all of this research over the last couple of decades with is a very distinct sense that we actually have more control over the fate of our countries than we think we do. And it can sometimes feel as if, gosh, do I have really any ability to bend the curve of politics in this country? It feels like it's out of my reach. Actually, our own history tells us that at the turn of the 20th century, when we were drifting down a path of the Gilded Age that looked so much— in many ways like the Gilded Age we're in now— that actually people finally said, "No, no, this is not a path to greatness." It really took sustained commitment on the part of civil society. You needed some investigative reporters, frankly, to go out and start to describe what the real shape of income inequality was and some ways to tweak the laws and the rules to make it actually a more sustainable and fair system. And people did that. And as a result, we ended up producing the most incredible century of human experience that's ever been. The American 20th century was like nothing else. And I think it is within our reach to say, you know what, we're not that comfortable having people like Elon Musk take over our politics. Let's prevent that from happening again. So we can do it. We just need to make our voices heard.

Well, Levin, this has been great. I appreciate your time here today. And I love your books. And as an author myself, I'm always amazed when I talk to people like you who just have an ability to write extremely well, to have topics that are so timely and on point. I don't know how you do it, but I greatly admire your work. So I appreciate having an hour here to spend with you today.

Great pleasure, Steve. Thanks for the conversation. I really enjoyed thinking through these big issues with you, and I hope we can do it again.

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