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Capital evolution with Elizabeth MacBride · A New Angle

• 0:00
  [music]
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  SPEAKER_02: This is A New Angle, conversations about how we're doing and where we're going.
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  SPEAKER_02: I'm your host, Justin Angle.
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  SPEAKER_02: This show is supported by the Headwaters Foundation,
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  SPEAKER_02: First Security Bank, and the University of Montana College of Business.
• 0:22
  [music]
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  SPEAKER_02: Hey folks, welcome back, and thanks for tuning in.
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  SPEAKER_02: Today, I'm speaking with award-winning journalist Elizabeth McBride.
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  SPEAKER_02: Elizabeth's work has been published in prominent outlets such as
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  SPEAKER_02: the MIT Technology Review, The Atlantic, Newsweek, and many others.
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  SPEAKER_00: Building on the idea of cooperatives,
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  SPEAKER_00: exploring new ways to enable people to share ownership of the value they create,
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  SPEAKER_00: I think their ideas are amazing,
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  SPEAKER_00: rooted in the unique history of Montana, and because of that, really powerful.
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  SPEAKER_02: She recently co-authored Capital Evolution, The New American Economy with Seth Levine.
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  SPEAKER_02: Elizabeth will be delivering the keynote address at the upcoming CoBuild Montana Summit.
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  SPEAKER_02: Elizabeth, thanks for joining me.
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  SPEAKER_00: Thank you so much.
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  SPEAKER_00: I'm happy to be here.
• 1:14
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 1:14
  SPEAKER_00: So tell us, where did you grow up and what did
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  SPEAKER_02: your parents do?
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  SPEAKER_00: So I'm a military brat.
• 1:18
  SPEAKER_00: I spent about eight years in Europe on air bases in Europe.
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  SPEAKER_00: And we also lived in the deep south in Georgia for a time, in Virginia.
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  SPEAKER_00: And then we ended up in Georgia when I was graduating from high school.
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  SPEAKER_00: And from there, I went to the University of Maryland.
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  SPEAKER_00: But my dad was the military officer.
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  SPEAKER_00: So he was in logistics in the Air Force.
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  SPEAKER_00: And then my mom actually left college to marry him.
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  SPEAKER_00: Spent most of my growing up years getting a college education and then became a teacher.
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  SPEAKER_02: Excellent.
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  SPEAKER_02: And how did you get into journalism?
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  SPEAKER_00: I was writing my application for the University of Maryland.
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  SPEAKER_00: I always loved to write.
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  SPEAKER_00: And so I had written English and my dad walked behind me and he said,
• 2:01
  SPEAKER_00: Elizabeth, that is not very practical.
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  SPEAKER_00: And so I erased English and I wrote journalism.
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  SPEAKER_02: So within journalism, what sorts of issues are you interested in and why?
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  SPEAKER_00: I graduated actually in 1993, which was a very sharp, deep recession, jobs recession.
• 2:21
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
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  SPEAKER_00: And because of that, there were no jobs to be had in journalism.
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  SPEAKER_00: And I had been kind of like a star in the journalism school and been the editor
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  SPEAKER_00: of my college paper, but there were still no jobs.
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  SPEAKER_02: Sounds familiar.
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  SPEAKER_00: Right, right.
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  SPEAKER_00: I know a lot of people are going through this right now, right?
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  SPEAKER_00: And so I was sort of like, well, what do I do?
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  SPEAKER_00: And some of my peers found jobs overseas,
• 2:45
  SPEAKER_00: like people were doing just because we figured it wouldn't last forever.
• 2:49
  SPEAKER_00: We had some optimism about the future.
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  SPEAKER_00: So I just sort of ended up thinking, well, I'm going to quit journalism.
• 2:55
  SPEAKER_00: I applied to other things.
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  SPEAKER_00: But then I arrived in a town in Pennsylvania.
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  SPEAKER_00: I followed my then boyfriend up there and I moved in with him.
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  SPEAKER_00: And I just started walking around delivering my resumes to every publication in the town.
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  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
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  SPEAKER_00: And the only job, the only full-time job open was in business.
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  SPEAKER_02: Interesting.
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  SPEAKER_00: So that's how I became a business journalist.
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  SPEAKER_02: As you're coming up as a business reporter,
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  SPEAKER_02: are you developing a view of capitalism, our current version of it?
• 3:26
  SPEAKER_02: How is your thinking around how we marshal resources in our society evolving at this time?
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  SPEAKER_00: I've always been patriotic in kind of an old school sense.
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  SPEAKER_00: Revolutionary War ancestors and the whole raised in a military family.
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  SPEAKER_00: And when I was coming up as a business journalist,
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  SPEAKER_00: I was writing about really the American dream.
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  SPEAKER_00: I was writing a lot about small business owners who built their companies
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  SPEAKER_00: over generations and handed them down.
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  SPEAKER_00: My background as a business journalist That's kind of where I'm rooted, right?
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  SPEAKER_00: It's the importance of innovation and small business.
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  SPEAKER_00: But that's the root of it is people who are entrepreneurial,
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  SPEAKER_00: who have an idea for an innovation or just work a lot harder
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  SPEAKER_00: and grow their companies.
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  SPEAKER_00: I went to Silicon Valley for a little while.
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  SPEAKER_00: I took a detour.
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  SPEAKER_00: Silicon Valley companies, one half of it is the idea.
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  SPEAKER_00: The other half is a lot of money.
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  SPEAKER_02: How they get money.
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  SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
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  SPEAKER_00: And the ones with money are almost always the ones that win.
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  SPEAKER_00: And so understanding that was very important.
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  SPEAKER_00: So that shaped my view of capitalism.
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  SPEAKER_00: That was the capital piece, if you will.
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  SPEAKER_00: And then the last piece is that I ended up doing a bunch of work in the Middle East.
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  SPEAKER_00: So it's sort of those three things, right?
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  SPEAKER_00: It's like the American dream,
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  SPEAKER_00: the kind of importance of finance and how that works,
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  SPEAKER_00: how that flows or doesn't flow.
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  SPEAKER_00: And then this third piece of a system isn't like invented naturally.
• 4:57
  SPEAKER_00: It doesn't occur organically.
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  SPEAKER_00: We invent it and we build it.
• 5:00
  SPEAKER_02: I'd love to get into capital evolution.
• 5:02
  SPEAKER_02: I feel like there's a move we need to make before we get there at the risk
• 5:05
  SPEAKER_02: of maybe losing some of our listeners.
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  SPEAKER_02: But the book comes across
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  SPEAKER_02: as a hopeful critique of neoliberal capitalism.
• 5:17
  SPEAKER_02: That's even hard to say.
• 5:19
  SPEAKER_02: What is neoliberal capitalism?
• 5:21
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, I think it's important.
• 5:22
  SPEAKER_00: So you have to look at it from the frame of how Different people understand it.
• 5:27
  SPEAKER_00: And then part of your conversation when you're talking about any issue like this is,
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  SPEAKER_00: well, let's agree on the term.
• 5:33
  SPEAKER_00: So let's define it.
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  SPEAKER_00: So for purposes of our history and our conversation,
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  SPEAKER_00: let's talk about the definition of capitalism through this neoliberal lens.
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  SPEAKER_00: So what I would start by saying is that I just established capitalism is not firm.
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  SPEAKER_00: It's not a firm concept anywhere.
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  SPEAKER_00: And it also can change.
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  SPEAKER_00: So it's incredibly fluid, actually.
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  SPEAKER_00: And in fact,
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  SPEAKER_00: in this century in the US,
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  SPEAKER_00: we've had, I would say, at least three versions of capitalism.
• 6:05
  SPEAKER_00: So in the middle of the 20th century,
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  SPEAKER_00: which is when people really like to point to as the golden age,
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  SPEAKER_00: that was one version of capitalism.
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  SPEAKER_00: And it worked actually quite well for a time.
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  SPEAKER_00: And then in the early 1970s, things are starting to crack a little bit.
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  SPEAKER_00: And at the same time,
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  SPEAKER_00: the policies were shifting in Washington to focus more on consumers instead
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  SPEAKER_00: of businesses, which is a shift people don't often recognize.
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  SPEAKER_00: So people were thinking about concepts of freedom and There were price controls
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  SPEAKER_00: during that oil crisis.
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  SPEAKER_00: All these things stir up and form into a different version of capitalism.
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  SPEAKER_00: As we define in the book,
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  SPEAKER_00: generally capitalism is a social compact between business,
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  SPEAKER_00: labor, and the government.
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  SPEAKER_00: In the 70s, the new social compact emerged.
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  SPEAKER_00: Based on the work of an economist from the University of Chicago.
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  SPEAKER_00: So the concepts that he really popularized are about less government, less to no government.
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  SPEAKER_00: Government,
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  SPEAKER_00: Ronald Reagan famously said,
• 7:18
  SPEAKER_00: government's not the solution, it's the enemy or something like that, right?
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  SPEAKER_00: This idea that like the less regulation,
• 7:26
  SPEAKER_00: less government,
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  SPEAKER_00: that the natural free hand of the market is going to result in the highest growth
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  SPEAKER_00: And eventually it will basically lift everybody's boats.
• 7:36
  SPEAKER_02: And I think a key piece of that too is that the job of the CEO is to serve
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  SPEAKER_02: the shareholders solely, like shareholder primacy above all else and that rules out.
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  SPEAKER_02: Corporate social responsibility,
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  SPEAKER_02: sustainability,
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  SPEAKER_02: some of these other things that a CEO might pursue,
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  SPEAKER_02: if they don't serve the purpose of raising the share price,
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  SPEAKER_02: they should be off limits.
• 7:57
  SPEAKER_00: Yes, exactly.
• 7:58
  SPEAKER_00: That's actually come into our current conversation is like the central tenet
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  SPEAKER_00: of neoliberalism is shareholder primacy.
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  SPEAKER_02: The CEOs are beholden to quarterly earnings reports and the managing of a company
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  SPEAKER_02: to maximize short-term returns at the expense of maybe long-term firm health.
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  SPEAKER_00: So in the real world, there's lots of examples where CEOs, in fact, do have wiggle room.
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  SPEAKER_00: But shareholder primacy, and it's encoded in some of our laws and our regulations,
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  SPEAKER_00: It did create a norm that shifted things more toward that short-term profitability measure.
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  SPEAKER_00: And obviously the reporting on the stock market, which is the transparencies.
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  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, CEOs that want to go another way are a little bit hamstrung.
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  SPEAKER_00: And also it can be an excuse too, right?
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  SPEAKER_00: CEOs would talk about short-term profitability and
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  SPEAKER_00: yet I often would see them hiring their buddies.
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  SPEAKER_02: Right?
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  SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
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  SPEAKER_00: Human beings, we're herd animals.
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  SPEAKER_00: We are emotional.
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  SPEAKER_00: We have relationships.
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  SPEAKER_00: And even in the world of corporate players,
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  SPEAKER_00: it doesn't always work completely,
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  SPEAKER_00: transparently, efficiently, or in the best interest of shareholders already, right?
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  SPEAKER_00: It's already pretty mushy.
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  SPEAKER_00: But we also have this norm or this illusion of shareholder primacy.
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  SPEAKER_02: So let's get into the book.
• 9:29
  SPEAKER_02: Why write it?
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  SPEAKER_02: What's the central claim you're trying to make?
• 9:47
  SPEAKER_02: People throw around the term late stage capitalism.
• 9:50
  SPEAKER_02: I'm not really sure what that means or if it's actually a thing.
• 9:54
  SPEAKER_02: It sounds smart when you say it, I guess.
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  SPEAKER_02: But it does signal that we're approaching some time of disruption or maybe already
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  SPEAKER_02: in it, as you say.
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  SPEAKER_00: I believe that.
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  SPEAKER_00: It's sort of at this point common sense, right?
• 10:08
  SPEAKER_00: I think Trump's reelection really cemented the fact
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  SPEAKER_00: that there's something fundamental shifting at this time.
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  SPEAKER_00: So when we were writing,
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  SPEAKER_00: which was before we started this book three or four years ago,
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  SPEAKER_00: so we could see the cracks already and they've only gotten wider.
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  SPEAKER_00: But we decided during the writing of the book that we didn't want to take a doom
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  SPEAKER_00: and gloom approach.
• 10:33
  SPEAKER_00: And in fact, I don't think one is warranted because there's so much good work.
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  SPEAKER_00: There are people actively trying to reinvent the system in a better way.
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  SPEAKER_00: So we call what's emerging now dynamic capitalism.
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  SPEAKER_00: Leaders who want to be part of this shift should be acting more in the long term.
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  SPEAKER_00: They should be exploring new forms of ownership,
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  SPEAKER_00: sharing ownership,
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  SPEAKER_00: new ways to share the economic value and the wealth created by their companies.
• 11:03
  SPEAKER_00: Spread the returns.
• 11:04
  SPEAKER_00: Spread the returns.
• 11:05
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, so that's the second premise.
• 11:07
  SPEAKER_00: It's really environmentalism, right?
• 11:10
  SPEAKER_00: Recognizing that there's a lot about our system that is not sustainable.
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  SPEAKER_00: And embracing a real accountability for externalities,
• 11:20
  SPEAKER_00: which is sort of the financial way of thinking about that.
• 11:23
  SPEAKER_00: And then we added the rule of law.
• 11:27
  SPEAKER_00: That's a big one.
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  SPEAKER_00: Yes, it is.
• 11:29
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
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  SPEAKER_02: So we've got a mix of sort of normative responses.
• 11:33
  SPEAKER_02: We need better humans, basically.
• 11:35
  SPEAKER_02: How do we get better humans?
• 11:38
  SPEAKER_02: That's a big question.
• 11:39
  SPEAKER_00: That's a good question.
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  SPEAKER_02: There's all sorts of off-ramps to being a good citizen.
• 11:44
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 11:46
  SPEAKER_00: Well, it's interesting.
• 11:48
  SPEAKER_00: This work, Capital Evolution, has taken on a life of its own, which is a great thing.
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  SPEAKER_00: One of the things that's happened is that there's a group in Colorado that's working
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  SPEAKER_00: on classes around values-based leadership.
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  SPEAKER_00: Fantastic.
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  SPEAKER_00: Based on the book,
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  SPEAKER_00: which is really that question of how are you a better human in a business context,
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  SPEAKER_00: which is really complicated, right?
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  SPEAKER_00: It's still a big challenge to be a better human like in your family
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  SPEAKER_00: and your relationships and your personal life.
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  SPEAKER_00: Doing it in the business world where you do have responsibilities to employees,
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  SPEAKER_00: shareholders, customers gets even more complicated.
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  SPEAKER_00: And so we have a bunch of examples in the book of values-driven leadership.
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  SPEAKER_00: So I think it's a lot about sticking to the nuance actually, right?
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  SPEAKER_00: And it's also about listening to your employees and knowing
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  SPEAKER_00: that whatever value you've adopted is centralized on what the company is about,
• 12:46
  SPEAKER_00: right?
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  SPEAKER_02: In this vision, where does the shareholder live?
• 12:51
  SPEAKER_02: I mean, it's pretty clear in neoliberal capitalism that the shareholder comes first.
• 12:57
  SPEAKER_02: My sense is you're not arguing that the shareholder needs to be prepared for lower returns.
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  SPEAKER_02: Maybe adjust the time horizon on those returns.
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  SPEAKER_02: How are you thinking about what is owed to the shareholder?
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  SPEAKER_00: Seth, my co-author,
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  SPEAKER_00: who's more on the front line of these decisions because he's a venture capitalist,
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  SPEAKER_00: the answer he gives to his companies is, oh,
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  SPEAKER_00: you've got to be a good guy and you still have to produce the highest,
• 13:24
  SPEAKER_00: highest, highest returns.
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  SPEAKER_00: But then in the next breath, he'll say, I know that's a bullshit answer.
• 13:30
  SPEAKER_00: And we all know it's a bullshit answer,
• 13:32
  SPEAKER_00: but it's sort of what you have to say if you're an investor.
• 13:35
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, I think it's beyond what you have to say.
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  SPEAKER_02: Maybe you have to at least try to live that ethic.
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  SPEAKER_02: I think the truth comes out in the edge cases where you have to trade off being
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  SPEAKER_02: a nice guy, as it were, with...
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  SPEAKER_02: Favoring shareholders.
• 13:49
  SPEAKER_00: Right.
• 13:49
  SPEAKER_00: Because nothing about this is extreme, right?
• 13:51
  SPEAKER_00: It is very much case by case.
• 13:53
  SPEAKER_00: And it also gets back to that point of how you are a better human in a business context.
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  SPEAKER_00: But let me just answer the shareholder question as clearly as I can.
• 14:04
  SPEAKER_00: I think that broadening the idea of who you're Stakeholders are, so that's one thing.
• 14:14
  SPEAKER_00: That's an easy answer, right?
• 14:15
  SPEAKER_00: People talk about stakeholder capitalism.
• 14:17
  SPEAKER_00: But I think actually broadening who your shareholders are is key as well, right?
• 14:23
  SPEAKER_00: And if your shareholders are also employees, well, that changes the dynamic.
• 14:30
  SPEAKER_00: If your shareholders are, say,
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  SPEAKER_00: a nonprofit that owns your company's shares, That also changes the dynamic, right?
• 14:38
  SPEAKER_00: And that I think is ultimately the shift we need to make in the near term to
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  SPEAKER_00: the institutions and our norms is this idea of sharing the actual ownership
• 14:53
  SPEAKER_00: of our wealth producing engines.
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  SPEAKER_00: That's what a company really is, but sharing the ownership broadly.
• 15:01
  SPEAKER_02: We'll be back to my conversation with Elizabeth McBride after this short break.
• 15:09
  SPEAKER_02: A New Angle would not be possible without the generous support of
• 15:12
  SPEAKER_02: the Headwaters Foundation,
• 15:14
  SPEAKER_02: working side by side with Western Montanans to improve the health
• 15:17
  SPEAKER_02: of our communities.
• 15:19
  SPEAKER_02: And you can't do that sort of work without access to capital and education.
• 15:24
  SPEAKER_02: Two critical catalysts offered by First Security Bank and the University
• 15:27
  SPEAKER_02: of Montana College of Business.
• 15:30
  SPEAKER_02: Hey folks,
• 15:30
  SPEAKER_02: I'd like to call your attention
• 15:32
  SPEAKER_02: to Climate Smart Missoula's fourth annual Climate Solutions Week,
• 15:36
  SPEAKER_02: running from September 26th to October 4th.
• 15:39
  SPEAKER_02: This year's theme is Humming Along,
• 15:41
  SPEAKER_02: and the week offers over 20 free events to learn, create, and connect.
• 15:46
  SPEAKER_01: Check out missoulaclimate.org for more information.
• 15:50
  SPEAKER_01: Hey, this is John Wicks from Def Charlie, and you are listening to A New Angle.
• 15:57
  SPEAKER_02: Welcome back to A New Angle.
• 15:59
  SPEAKER_02: I'm speaking with Elizabeth McBride about the future of capitalism.
• 16:03
  SPEAKER_02: What you're describing, are you thinking of that as distinct from nationalizing industries?
• 16:09
  SPEAKER_02: Should the government take an ownership position?
• 16:11
  SPEAKER_02: And the government has surprisingly under
• 16:13
  SPEAKER_02: the Trump administration taken ownership positions in a variety of corporations.
• 16:18
  SPEAKER_02: But what you're describing is distinct from nationalizing.
• 16:21
  SPEAKER_00: Yes.
• 16:22
  SPEAKER_00: I think there's a role for nationally owned
• 16:27
  SPEAKER_00: Right, they're really utilities.
• 16:29
  SPEAKER_00: Sure.
• 16:29
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, yeah.
• 16:31
  SPEAKER_00: But as little as possible, right?
• 16:33
  SPEAKER_00: Because it takes some of the dynamism out of the economy
• 16:36
  SPEAKER_00: because government is not good at making the rapid decisions required in
• 16:41
  SPEAKER_00: the marketplace.
• 16:41
  SPEAKER_00: Well, we'll see.
• 16:43
  SPEAKER_02: We'll see with the new bodegas in New York City that are getting rolled out.
• 16:48
  SPEAKER_00: Well, if that actually happens.
• 16:50
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
• 16:50
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 16:51
  SPEAKER_00: There's a lot about Mom Donnie.
• 16:52
  SPEAKER_00: I feel like all of my wealthy friends are so freaked out by Mom Donnie.
• 16:58
  SPEAKER_00: And I'm sort of like, hi, let's see what really happens.
• 17:02
  SPEAKER_00: There's a lot people say, politicians say, and it takes a long time to do it.
• 17:07
  SPEAKER_02: Well, and I think too, at the risk of derailing us, What gets lost in this?
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  SPEAKER_02: It's easy for people to critique the idea of a government-owned grocery store
• 17:17
  SPEAKER_02: and say, that's terrible.
• 17:18
  SPEAKER_02: The government will be terrible at that, blah, blah, blah.
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  SPEAKER_02: What people lose sight of is the actual problem that's trying to be solved,
• 17:24
  SPEAKER_02: that people don't have access to affordable, high-quality, nutritious food.
• 17:29
  SPEAKER_02: We have food deserts.
• 17:31
  SPEAKER_00: And so that's a legitimate problem.
• 17:33
  SPEAKER_02: We can have a debate as to whether...
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  SPEAKER_02: The market should be the place to solve it or government.
• 17:38
  SPEAKER_02: It doesn't seem like the market is solving it for a whole variety of reasons.
• 17:45
  SPEAKER_02: But anyway,
• 17:45
  SPEAKER_02: we get distracted from the core problem and we fight about solutions
• 17:49
  SPEAKER_02: and their merits.
• 17:50
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 17:51
  SPEAKER_00: Or it's not even based on their merits.
• 17:52
  SPEAKER_00: I feel like at this point we're fighting just to fight.
• 17:56
  SPEAKER_02: Oh, yeah.
• 17:57
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, for sure.
• 17:59
  SPEAKER_00: Right?
• 18:00
  SPEAKER_00: And I would say, I think of this about New York.
• 18:02
  SPEAKER_00: New York is historically a place where we have always tried things.
• 18:05
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
• 18:06
  SPEAKER_00: It's always an edge case because we don't have a city like it.
• 18:10
  SPEAKER_00: There are other cities in the world like it, but in our country, it's the only place like it.
• 18:15
  SPEAKER_00: And so if we want to try a government-owned grocery store, maybe it's a good experiment.
• 18:21
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, what could go wrong?
• 18:21
  SPEAKER_00: Right, and let's just see what happens.
• 18:23
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 18:23
  SPEAKER_02: Prove the critics correct.
• 18:26
  SPEAKER_00: Right.
• 18:26
  SPEAKER_00: And maybe this is exactly like that kind of new norm or new form of partnership
• 18:33
  SPEAKER_00: between government and business.
• 18:34
  SPEAKER_00: We're working on a new compact between government, business, and labor right now.
• 18:40
  SPEAKER_00: Why not?
• 18:40
  SPEAKER_00: That would be my position about it.
• 18:41
  SPEAKER_02: I would agree.
• 18:42
  SPEAKER_02: We shouldn't be afraid of experiments.
• 18:43
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
• 18:44
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
• 18:45
  SPEAKER_02: What you were painting is a picture of, hey,
• 18:48
  SPEAKER_02: what we have is really precious and it took a lot of effort,
• 18:55
  SPEAKER_02: good fortune, smart, committed people to build over a long period of time.
• 18:59
  SPEAKER_02: Let's be really careful about throwing it out.
• 19:03
  SPEAKER_02: You're making the case to let's improve what we have rather than tear it down.
• 19:06
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, exactly.
• 19:08
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 19:08
  SPEAKER_00: Nobody has said that in my interviews with people about the book,
• 19:12
  SPEAKER_00: but yeah, that's exactly what We are arguing for it.
• 19:15
  SPEAKER_00: I do think it's not a question of tweaking the old system.
• 19:19
  SPEAKER_00: There's fundamental problems that we need to solve.
• 19:22
  SPEAKER_00: One of them is this huge inequality that's happening.
• 19:26
  SPEAKER_00: We need to get a handle on the value,
• 19:30
  SPEAKER_00: get a handle on the fact that the increasing technology is changing
• 19:34
  SPEAKER_00: the way people's Skills are valued.
• 19:38
  SPEAKER_00: We need to get a handle on these things,
• 19:40
  SPEAKER_00: which is the other reason we suggested new forms of ownership,
• 19:43
  SPEAKER_00: because I'm not sure that the number of people of working age who need to make
• 19:49
  SPEAKER_00: a living in the economy can do so based on their labor going forward.
• 19:56
  SPEAKER_00: So you've got to have other means of wealth distribution.
• 19:58
  SPEAKER_00: That's a major change, but it doesn't mean throwing capitalism out.
• 20:04
  SPEAKER_02: What do you think explains the attractiveness of the Democratic Socialist Party at the moment?
• 20:09
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, you know, my other hat, I've been talking here as my kind of journalism finance hat.
• 20:15
  SPEAKER_00: Also, I have a degree from the School of Advanced International Studies at Johns Hopkins.
• 20:22
  SPEAKER_00: And I went back to school there to focus on the question of disinformation
• 20:26
  SPEAKER_00: and our information environment.
• 20:29
  SPEAKER_00: I just saw so much going.
• 20:33
  SPEAKER_00: That is a disaster, right?
• 20:35
  SPEAKER_00: Our information system is just a complete disaster.
• 20:38
  SPEAKER_00: And so that's my answer, honestly.
• 20:41
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, there's so much now driven by narratives of fear and hate.
• 20:48
  SPEAKER_00: And so I think The political party,
• 20:52
  SPEAKER_00: politicians,
• 20:53
  SPEAKER_00: people who make their living in politics,
• 20:55
  SPEAKER_00: recognize that they needed something different because that's the environment we're
• 21:00
  SPEAKER_00: in.
• 21:01
  SPEAKER_02: So you could argue that this is the result of a capitalist system,
• 21:07
  SPEAKER_02: that we have a media environment,
• 21:12
  SPEAKER_02: social media,
• 21:13
  SPEAKER_02: et cetera, that have figured out that the algorithms reward enragement.
• 21:19
  SPEAKER_02: And keeping people enraged is the way to keep them engaged and
• 21:23
  SPEAKER_02: that way we can serve them more advertising.
• 21:26
  SPEAKER_02: That seems like a market outcome.
• 21:28
  SPEAKER_00: For sure.
• 21:29
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, do you push against that premise?
• 21:30
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, I can.
• 21:32
  SPEAKER_00: Okay, please.
• 21:33
  SPEAKER_00: Well, I would just add to the premise, right?
• 21:35
  SPEAKER_00: So, I mean,
• 21:36
  SPEAKER_00: the tech company is super profit motivated and there's some ethical,
• 21:40
  SPEAKER_00: real ethical issues in Silicon Valley.
• 21:42
  SPEAKER_02: Yes.
• 21:42
  SPEAKER_00: But they built their systems, which were bad enough already, and then they got weaponized by...
• 21:49
  SPEAKER_00: The Russians and the Chinese.
• 21:51
  SPEAKER_00: The evidence of this is so clear.
• 21:53
  SPEAKER_02: Well, they saw a weakness in our society and in our institutional guardrails
• 22:00
  SPEAKER_02: and took advantage of
• 22:01
  SPEAKER_00: it.
• 22:01
  SPEAKER_00: I don't understand why more people don't talk about that.
• 22:06
  SPEAKER_00: When we all sort of know it, but like we haven't changed our behavior.
• 22:10
  SPEAKER_00: TikTok is still a Chinese own.
• 22:14
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, we are in a geopolitical world, right?
• 22:17
  SPEAKER_00: There are people who want to take our country down.
• 22:20
  SPEAKER_00: This is a fact of life.
• 22:23
  SPEAKER_00: And so that's what I would say, right?
• 22:24
  SPEAKER_00: That the information environment, in fact, was broken by market forces.
• 22:29
  SPEAKER_00: I do think we need to fix the market for information.
• 22:33
  SPEAKER_00: But at the same time,
• 22:34
  SPEAKER_00: you have to recognize that also what those companies had built was weaponized
• 22:39
  SPEAKER_00: by our enemies.
• 22:40
  SPEAKER_02: We haven't talked about this too much,
• 22:42
  SPEAKER_02: and we're gonna run out of time here,
• 22:44
  SPEAKER_02: but regulation,
• 22:45
  SPEAKER_02: rule of law,
• 22:47
  SPEAKER_02: a more effective regulatory state,
• 22:50
  SPEAKER_02: more effective legislative state, that's a big part of this equation as well.
• 22:55
  SPEAKER_02: Do you have any prescriptions on how we might get there?
• 22:58
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, well, I'll give you the fast and easy one, right?
• 23:01
  SPEAKER_00: Citizens United is obviously a huge problem.
• 23:06
  SPEAKER_02: The deep roots here in Montana, origins.
• 23:09
  SPEAKER_02: Yes, yeah.
• 23:11
  SPEAKER_00: And now there's an effort to push back in Montana on this, right?
• 23:29
  SPEAKER_00: Definitely.
• 23:30
  SPEAKER_00: But at a certain point,
• 23:32
  SPEAKER_00: the big businesses recognized that and decided,
• 23:35
  SPEAKER_00: we're not going to get rid of the regulations.
• 23:36
  SPEAKER_00: We're just going to control the regulations.
• 23:39
  SPEAKER_00: And so that's what we're facing.
• 23:40
  SPEAKER_00: Corporate capture.
• 23:41
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 23:41
  SPEAKER_00: It's corporate capture at this point,
• 23:43
  SPEAKER_00: which I think is actually a bigger problem than the government regulation.
• 23:48
  SPEAKER_00: But both are problems.
• 23:49
  SPEAKER_02: You mentioned that Montana holds a fond place in your heart.
• 23:52
  SPEAKER_02: You've been visiting Montana for many years.
• 23:55
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
• 23:57
  SPEAKER_02: Tell us about your connection to the state and then we'll get on to the event in October.
• 24:01
  SPEAKER_00: You know from the early part of the conversation that I'm sort of not too rooted
• 24:06
  SPEAKER_00: in any one geography.
• 24:08
  SPEAKER_00: My family wasn't that rooted and my mother came here when she was about 60.
• 24:15
  SPEAKER_00: And she did what you're never supposed to do,
• 24:18
  SPEAKER_00: which is she fell in love with a place on vacation and then moved here
• 24:22
  SPEAKER_00: on retirement.
• 24:23
  SPEAKER_00: Why are you never supposed to do that?
• 24:24
  SPEAKER_00: It seems like a great way to go.
• 24:26
  SPEAKER_00: Because you haven't lived through a winter in Montana.
• 24:29
  SPEAKER_02: Or smoke season.
• 24:30
  SPEAKER_00: Or smoke season.
• 24:32
  SPEAKER_00: But anyway,
• 24:33
  SPEAKER_00: so she fell in love with it,
• 24:34
  SPEAKER_00: convinced my dad, and they built a house here in Montana 25 years ago.
• 24:38
  SPEAKER_00: So I've been coming every summer since then.
• 24:40
  SPEAKER_00: I've not yet spent a winter.
• 24:44
  SPEAKER_00: But really, I love it for so many reasons.
• 24:47
  SPEAKER_00: And then we didn't talk about this at all,
• 24:51
  SPEAKER_00: but I took an interlude in my career of two or three years
• 24:54
  SPEAKER_00: and I was doing investigative work on the NRA.
• 24:57
  SPEAKER_02: Oh, yeah.
• 24:57
  SPEAKER_00: So as part of that, I was trying to understand the culture of guns.
• 25:03
  SPEAKER_00: So I went on an outfitting trip in the Bob Marshall Wilderness area.
• 25:07
  SPEAKER_02: Okay.
• 25:07
  SPEAKER_02: Readers or listeners, you should go to Quartz and read your story about the NRA.
• 25:14
  SPEAKER_02: It's fantastic.
• 25:15
  SPEAKER_02: We don't have time to cover it here, but that's a big part of the plot as well.
• 25:18
  SPEAKER_00: So anyway,
• 25:19
  SPEAKER_00: but in that kind of exploration of Montana,
• 25:22
  SPEAKER_00: I just came to really get the idea that this in fact is a different place, right?
• 25:28
  SPEAKER_00: The libertarian mindset is strong here, but it's coupled with this idea of public lands, right?
• 25:34
  SPEAKER_00: There's just a lot of rich...
• 25:36
  SPEAKER_00: And people live with a lot of contradictions and other people
• 25:42
  SPEAKER_02: Which makes it a beautiful place.
• 25:44
  SPEAKER_02: And you will be visiting the CoBuild Montana Summit,
• 25:49
  SPEAKER_02: delivering the keynote address October 20 to 22nd, I believe.
• 25:55
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, why'd you say yes to that invitation?
• 25:59
  SPEAKER_00: Well, partly because I thought it'd be a great chance to come back to Montana.
• 26:03
  SPEAKER_00: But also because I'm really,
• 26:07
  SPEAKER_00: the idea that the organizers have of how to build on Some of the new forms
• 26:14
  SPEAKER_00: of ownership,
• 26:15
  SPEAKER_00: they're not new because they do exist in Montana,
• 26:18
  SPEAKER_00: but building on the idea of cooperatives,
• 26:20
  SPEAKER_00: exploring new ways to enable people to share ownership of the value they create
• 26:27
  SPEAKER_00: through their companies.
• 26:29
  SPEAKER_00: I think their ideas are amazing,
• 26:32
  SPEAKER_00: rooted in the unique history of Montana, and because of that, really powerful.
• 26:37
  SPEAKER_02: Fantastic.
• 26:37
  SPEAKER_02: Listeners can find information about the summit online,
• 26:40
  SPEAKER_02: CoBuild Montana, coming up in late October.
• 26:43
  SPEAKER_02: Our last question, Elizabeth, is tell us about the last time you changed your mind.
• 26:48
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, I think, so I'll put it back into the book.
• 26:53
  SPEAKER_00: It's not the last time I changed my mind.
• 26:54
  SPEAKER_00: I'm sure it was insignificant.
• 26:56
  SPEAKER_00: But around the book, it was,
• 26:59
  SPEAKER_00: I think I went into the conversation with Jamie Dimon thinking
• 27:03
  SPEAKER_00: about Either he'd be like charming,
• 27:06
  SPEAKER_00: and I've interviewed lots and lots of charming CEOs who sort of say nothing
• 27:11
  SPEAKER_00: but still make you feel good.
• 27:13
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, exactly.
• 27:14
  SPEAKER_00: I thought he'd either be like that or I thought I would really dislike him.
• 27:18
  SPEAKER_00: I thought he's kind of like this.
• 27:21
  SPEAKER_00: You know, billionaire, CEO, whatever.
• 27:23
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, stereotypes.
• 27:24
  SPEAKER_00: Right, right.
• 27:25
  SPEAKER_00: And so when we actually talked to him, I changed my mind.
• 27:29
  SPEAKER_00: And I thought, okay, these are actually thoughtful answers.
• 27:34
  SPEAKER_00: And he has.
• 27:35
  SPEAKER_00: When I looked at the four biggest banks and I thought,
• 27:38
  SPEAKER_00: okay, he's got a tough job and thank goodness he's doing it.
• 27:42
  SPEAKER_00: So I changed my mind about Jamie Dimon.
• 27:45
  SPEAKER_02: And he plays a prominent role in the story told in your book.
• 27:49
  SPEAKER_02: It shows both a lot of courage to put Jamie Dimon up there,
• 27:51
  SPEAKER_02: but also a lot of just humility to go into an interaction like that,
• 27:56
  SPEAKER_02: willing to learn and grow.
• 27:58
  SPEAKER_02: Elizabeth, this has been a delight.
• 27:59
  SPEAKER_02: The book is Capital Evolution, The New American Economy.
• 28:03
  SPEAKER_02: Check out the book.
• 28:04
  SPEAKER_02: Check out Elizabeth's remarks in late October.
• 28:07
  SPEAKER_02: Thanks for joining us today.
• 28:08
  SPEAKER_00: Thank you so much for having me.
• 28:09
  SPEAKER_00: It was so much fun.
• 28:13
  SPEAKER_02: Thanks for listening to A New Angle.
• 28:15
  SPEAKER_02: If you like what we do and want to support us directly,
• 28:17
  SPEAKER_02: please consider a subscription at anewanglepodcast.com.
• 28:24
  SPEAKER_02: A New Angle is recorded at Studio 49, a generous gift from UM alums Michelle and Lauren Hanson.
• 28:30
  SPEAKER_02: Our presenting sponsor is the Headwaters Foundation,
• 28:33
  SPEAKER_02: working side-by-side with Western Montanans to improve the health
• 28:36
  SPEAKER_02: of our communities.
• 28:39
  SPEAKER_02: We are also supported by First Security Bank and the University of Montana College
• 28:43
  SPEAKER_02: of Business, with additional help from CED, Drum Coffee, and Montana Public Radio.
• 28:50
  SPEAKER_02: Keely Larson is our producer.
• 28:52
  SPEAKER_02: John Brownell, Jeff Ament, and John Wicks made our music.
• 28:57
  SPEAKER_02: Thanks a lot, and we'll see you next time.