Ben Meiselas and Anand Giridharadas on Fearless Reporting

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That's mantisx.com. Hey everybody, Brett from Midas Touch here.
My brother Ben and I just had such an incredible conversation with Anand Giridotis on the Midas Plus sub-stack. Anand is a brilliant journalist and best-selling author, and he has been warning about the oligarchy and the threat of billionaires in the United States for years.
His work has actually informed a lot of what we do here at the Midas Touch Network, and I found his comments today to be incredibly illuminating. We've been hosting live conversations with incredible guests like this every Thursday on Midas Plus.
That's the Midas Touch Substack. So make sure you visit MidasPlus.com now and sign up so you could be the first to hear conversations like this.
Without further ado, enjoy the interview. All right.
Welcome everybody to our weekly Midas Touch Network speaking series. I'm here with Anand Giridotis.
You all know him from The Inc. right here on Substack.
And Anand, on your Substack today, I saw also celebrating, what, two decades from when you first wrote at the New York Times. The article is still up right now.
And you wrote this piece today reflecting back on what it was like to start as a journalist then, what it's like now, kind of the mixed feelings that you have, but the importance of being an independent reporter and keeping your independence. And, you know, one of the things I've always respected about your work, in addition to the content that I agree with your thesis that you've been talking about, especially as it relates to the dangers of the oligarchy.
But Anand, you've been calling this out now since the beginning of your career. This isn't, you're jumping on the oligarchs are bad fad.
You've been, by the way, if people want to jump on that fad, jump on it because it's true. But you've been warning about it really since day one.
All of your books have really been focused primarily on that topic and this class war that's being inflicted by these oligarchs, but also the way they were doing it, almost shape-shifting and pretending that they weren't doing it. And you said, they're waiting for this mask-off moment.
Just you wait. They're hiding behind their philanthropy and winner takes all.
You said they're hiding behind their philanthropy, but they'll have this mask-off moment once they amass enough power, and they're going to let you know who they are. And it was such a prescient book, 2018 to where we are today.
So first off, I wanted to let everybody know that I am someone who appreciates your work. I am a consumer of your sub stack and you and I had been talking over the past six to nine months.
So I'm glad we can collaborate and find some time to work together. Yes, I love it.
I love what you guys are doing. I think you are role modeling a spirit of fighting that has essentially become absent from the political left in this country.
And you are role modeling it back to life. And I so appreciate that.
You know, it's funny you talk about that book, Winners Take All, which is my third book. I was joking the other day to a friend of mine, but I was only half joking.
I was like, do I have the least successful career of all time? Because my first book, four books, all warnings, first book about India, but the message was social change, even progress can be psychologically destabilizing to people in ways that we got to pay attention to. My second book was a warning about rising white resentment as the kind of dominant political force in the country, 2014.
Third book was warning the billionaires to kind of grab all the wealth and power by convincing us they're heroes. And the fourth book was about how the left was growing too insular and not devoted enough to persuasion.
And so I sometimes reflect on the fact that I wrote four books offering four warnings, and none of them were heeded by anybody. So, you know, but here I am.
Here I am. Hope springs eternal.
Well, I'll say this. The warnings were heeded by us at the Midas Tredge Network, and intellectually, they formed part of the intellectual infrastructure in terms of what we felt that we needed to build, especially your latest book where you say that liberals were getting too insular progressives or whoever's not the right-wing fascist at this point, whatever you want to call them.
I call it the George Democracy Movement. Exactly.
I often get asked that, but we were building what we thought could be that infrastructure brick by brick. So you've laid the intellectual foundation, right? So as J.D.
Vance was looking to, what's that guy's name, Garvis or Jarvis, or who is his right-wing guy? We were looking to people like you who've been informing us. And so what do you think, though, right now? Here we are 2025, the state of journalism as you see it.
Well, just to go back to your billionaire thing, and I'll come to the journalism thing, you know. 2018, long time ago in the kind of dogeared reality that we're living in right now, when I wrote a book critiquing billionaires, and by the way, I wasn't just critiquing right-wing billionaires in that book.
In fact, I focused on billionaires who you and I might be more sympathetic to, to illustrate the point that even the good billionaires are problematic, right? even the ones who have the same policy goals as you are problematic because to have that much money is to have a power over other a level of power over other people that is inconsistent with the democracy we care about and when i wrote that in 2018 so many democrats people on the left were like yeah i get I get inequality is kind of sad, but like, why are you going after, you know, Bill Gates is, is doing some good work. And, you know, Jeff Bezos says he wants to give some money away and, and get really buff and, and, and, you know, he needs some money to take Lauren Sanchez on dates or whatever.
Like people were just like, couldn't understand. Yes.
Go after the really bad ones, but why? What is the problem with kind of billionaires in general? I got criticized for using the word oligarchs on MSNBC back then. And fast forward to now, where I think, as you say, the mask has come off.
And what has become, I think, really, really clear to people is the thing that was very difficult to show back then, convince people back then is that they don't just rule through evil because that wouldn't be very effective because there's not that many of them they rule by cultivating this aura of heroism that lots of people buy into and they need lots of people buy into to buy into to have actually any power right because in france i was just in france on a on a work trip a few months ago i at a discussion about philanthropy i asked the room to france have billionaires do any of your billionaires shape education policy in your country and the entire room started laughing i was actually asking a serious question. They treated it like I'd asked if bananas shape education policy in their country.
They didn't understand a connection between having been successful in business and being successful in policy.

I have a friend who's a venture capitalist in China.

He once said to me,

and he's a citizen of the United States also,

I think dual citizen.

He said, I'm a rich guy in China and I'm a rich guy in the United States.

The difference is, in my native country of China,

no one thinks my views about public policy matter.

Whereas when I fly to America,

my second country, not even where I was born,

We can see that the next step is to make a difference. thinks my views about public policy matter.
Whereas when I fly to America, my second country, not even where I was born, being a rich guy, my thoughts about who should be in power or what policy suddenly become very, very important. Right? So that notion of wealth buying the right to shape what this society is like.
That is what oligarchy is.

And I'm happy we're living in a time in which I think more and more people get it. And it's very related to the media point.
Because we're in a world in which the infrastructure of reality is owned by more and more by oligarchs. And we've seen the oligarchs to be spineless people in general who are so scared of Donald Trump.

You think Jeff Bezos would not give Lauren Sanchez to Donald Trump

if that was the tribute that Donald Trump demanded?

There is nothing they won't do to cultivate Donald Trump.

So we're living in a world in which the ability to even just find out

Thank you. There is nothing they won't do to cultivate Donald Trump.
So we're living in a world in which the ability to even just find out what is happening is mediated by a bunch of fraidy cat oligarchs who should be self-confident and brave because that's the whole point of having that much money, but instead are the biggest pansies you could find.

Someone asked this question, and on Substacks, I'll curse, but someone says, why are they scared? What are these billionaires actually scared about? And this is where I'll curse. You've heard the expression, fuck you money, and that's what the billionaires like to say that they have, that they've got FU money.
But in theory, these people who say they have FU money are scared of their own shadow and have given away all of their power for the appearance of power to the fake billionaire who's become a real billionaire over them in a Trump. So what you've studied them, what are they, what's their worry? What's their fear? You know, as far as I know,

you know, I'm only going to live once. I rather live my life courageously than die a thousand

embarrassing deaths every single day, the way some of they do. So what's your assessment of that?

It's a great point. First of all, I share that view with you.
Like if I ever had that much money,

Thank you.

Like if I ever had that much money,

I don't know that I would be buying yachts first or 50 houses first.

I can assure you the first thing I would do

if I had that much money,

I mean, I'm kind of already doing it,

so maybe it's not a big change,

but the first thing I would do would be to shed any fear of anybody. If that is not the point of that money, I don't know what the point of that money is.
If it is not to liberate yourself from living under the imagined thumb of anybody else, what is the money doing for you? So that's kind of point number one. In terms of what they are actually afraid of, it's actually very revealing.
So part of why I would argue that nobody should even have a billion dollars is because if you understand how markets work and how competitive markets work in a free society, it's actually quite hard to make that kind of money. And the reason it's hard to make that kind of money is if you're onto something, we all learn this.
If you study Econ 101, you're onto something that's kind of a good thing to be on to. Right.
You create a you create a sub stack. People like it.
People notice that it's growing. Well, you know what happens? A lot of other people start doing it.
Right. If you got you selling umbrellas on the street in a rainstorm, unfortunately, you don't get to go it alone.
People will notice the next time the rainstorm comes, they're going to be 10 times more rainstorm umbrella entrepreneurs. And that drives prices down and makes it really hard for one person to clean up everything.
So if you end up with $300 billion in a supposed market economy, I'm oversimplifying a lot here, but I think this is important. If you end up with like $300 billion or even $10 billion, probably you didn't just show up in a competitive marketplace and have something really good that you were offering.
Because that kind of doesn't explain why that wasn't cut into by competitors probably you did some things to limit the entry of other competitors into that arena to have monopolies uh on something to monopolize let's say government contracts that you know fed you and not others and if you look at all these guys you actually break into they have done, it's all based on stepping on other people, right?

And so what they are afraid of is the fact that they actually cannot sustain that level of wealth without affirmative action for billionaires, right?

They need, like that fortune is not based on their product being awesome. It's not.
That fortune is based 90 plus percent of the time in some kind of predatory or aggressive behavior that they need not to be regulated, not to be investigated, not to be unionized against.

So they are, in a way, very, very vulnerable and dependent

because their entire structure depends on kind of special perks

and special privileges.

So in a way, they're not masters of the universe.

In a way, they are right to be afraid

because what they're really afraid of

is competing on an open market.

And that's why their priorities

are often a form of socialism,

but just for the billionaires,

where the billionaires get the benefits

and then what that actually is called

is not socialism for billionaires. It's actually called oligarchy.
And then you start looking like what you have in Russia and in Soviet states of the past. And we used to look at that in a certain way.
And what your thesis there is, you know, also perfectly explains why they do the most illogical things vis-a-vis the market. We all know that tariffs would result in the outcomes we're seeing now.
We all know that these threats against our allies would result in the markets tanking. We all have seen in the history where, no, America wasn't economically most successful, as Donald Trump Trump likes to believe during the years of the Great Depression.
We remember those years as the Great Depression for a reason. So if you're looking for some sort of pseudo capitalist explanation of why they're, you know, supporting this, it's actually because these billionaires are not capitalists.
They are oligarchs and they actually want to undermine the whole system. And if we, the people suffer, that's not a bug.
That's actually their design. As long as their proximity to power is preserved, which for them, they'll buy into all this bullshit about the tariffs here and this, and it's going to make us great and gold cards.
They're like, and they can see the markets tanking. And for them, it's like, are we just going to be close to power? It's fascinating, but I think it explains everything.
No, I'll respond to that in the following way, taking us a little bit outside of this country, because it's sometimes helpful to look from the inside out. My family's from India.
I was born in this country in the United States, but my parents ever got here. When I was growing up, you go to India as a child, I'd noticed certain cultural differences in the way people speak about life, opportunity, job, businesses.
And in India, there was this thing, and it's still there, it was certainly even more there back in the 80s, where everything was about connection. So if you did anything successful, the assumption is, well, would you know? Or did you know somebody? Or how did you get that? Right? So it's a very sad thing.
In a highly bureaucratic, it was then kind of in a socialist phase. Now it's in a capitalist phase, but it's sort of the same.
The assumption was if you've made money, come on. You had to know somebody.
Right? And that's so corrosive to have a whole society where people look at success that way. That's what we're becoming.
Right. We're becoming a society where if you're like a 25 year old Gen Z kid with a brilliant idea in Bushwick, New York, it's gonna be pretty hard for you to get the capital, get the stability, get the runway to do it.
But if you're already a rich guy who already has those connections, you're in.

What I don't think most americans realize is that puts you into the territory being a completely different society a society when as when my childhood in india where people would kind of assume success was evidence of connections is a fundamentally different kind of society. You don't want to become that kind of society.
Here's my question, if I could chime in. I think what Ben was about to say also, that if you want to subscribe to all of our sub stacks here that you could follow, there's a follow button right up here.
It takes two seconds. You could quickly subscribe to all of our sub stacks, make sure you're getting all the information.

So the thing I wanted to ask you about on this topic is I think the thing that has maybe surprised me the most over the past year or two is how willing the kind of general public is to go along with whatever the billionaires are saying.

I feel like there used to at least be a little bit of kind of, whether you want to call it class solidarity or something else, where we view these billionaire people as assholes, for lack of a better word. But now it's like Elon Musk says something, and you just have all these people, yes, Mr.
Musk, yes, I'm with you. And it's been just disheartening to see, like, really are you're going to do the bidding of this guy who doesn't give a crap about you.
I'm just curious to get your thoughts on that. Do you think that's why they view with such importance to control the kind of flow of information? Why Elon Musk bought a platform like Twitter overvalued and then sunk the valuation? Why Bezos bought the Washington Post? Like, are those things all linked? And I guess, sorry, I'm throwing a lot of various things at you, but is that also tied to them appearing on these Joe Rogan podcasts and kind of laundering their image? You got Zuckerberg there with his new weird haircut and acting like a bro and talking about boxing and all this stuff.
And what's your take on take on on kind of all that i know i think i think there's there's two levels of it one very sinister and one less sinister so so the sinister thing is is a story you know very well the last several decades you know the books like dark money by jane mayer evil geniuses by kurt anderson really trace as well there was a group frankly, a very small number of people, families on the right,

that really got organized.

Howell memo is part of this story, got organized,

felt they were losing the country in the 70s,

got organized, grabbed power,

and they built a media infrastructure to go with it and kind of lubricate their machinery of government,

their takeover of that machinery.

And, you know, that has been a very successful campaign. And unlike a lot of folks on the left, with the exception of you all, for sure, they understood the importance of media as part of that whole game.
It wasn't an afterthought. It wasn't a nice to have.
It was essential to the work of building power. I think there's a less sinister explanation, which is worth thinking about, which is I think deep in its bones the United States is built different I think we're not France I lived in France also with a child I still go there every now and then I think the United States is not Sweden I don't think it's a collectivist as I like China I don't think it's just the takeover of the right.
I think deep because of how this country was settled, lots of different things. Deep in the American bloodstream.

this is the country settled by non-consensually and consensually by very hardy people who survived very tough journeys often people who came by choice were like the one brother in

their italian family who left when seven people were like, this village seems fine to me, right? And so over time, and then we had all this conflict, you know, over time this country, and there's some like fascinating genetic stuff about this, this country disproportionately attracted and the people who kind of survived the passage of this country were hardy tough people who often had a spirit of individualism that was different meaningfully different from european countries and that's fine um i think what a lot of folks who feel that way and feel you know some reverence for nilon musk because they see it, therefore, as the kind of the kind of geek of that individualistic striving is that someone like Elon Musk, the way they operate actually gets in the way of your individual freedom. And I think a lot of Americans don't haven't made that connection.
They think of Elon Musk or Mark Zuckerberg or whatever. Yeah,

maybe it's a little too much. Yeah, maybe they spend too much.
But I can be them. They're a role model.
They're in the lane far ahead of me and I'm trying to catch up. And actually, the better way to understand those people is they're your roadblock.
Their success depends on you not realizing your dreams. Their success depends on you not getting that degree, you not having the freedom of healthcare you can count on to therefore sketch an idea on the back of a napkin and quit your job and go realize it.
Their wealth and power is not some advanced team for your success. It is the opposition to your success.
And that idea, I think, has been very hard to sell Americans on, not only because of this recent right-wing takeover, but because of this very deep thing in the Americans. And sorry to dwell on it, but I think this gives the pro-democracy movement some marching orders.
This is a big organizing challenge that goes beyond beating the right. I think we have to educate the mass of American people about individualism and community and the ways in which just leaving the wolves free endangers all the lambs.
And I think that's a really exciting media challenge for folks like us. And it sort of abnors us to just say, you know, it's not just a right that needs to be overthrown.
We have persuasion work to do among our people. That leads us to, I think, the final question that I see so many people asking,

which is, you know, the natural progression of a discussion like this. And I'll call it the $19 trillion question, because with the $4.5 trillion in tax cuts that Trump is going to

be giving to the billionaires, it looks like our deficit will increase at least $19 trillion

over the next 10 years. But that $19 trillion question is, what do we do about it? Well, here, we're taking your thesis and we're trying to put it into action by creating a network like the Midas Touch Network, where we talk about these ideas, where we rally people, we let people know where the rug pull is happening, which we think is an important service.
We can break it down with our respective backgrounds, me as a former litigator, Brett as a former digital rapid responder, Jordi as a marketer, and then our great hosts who have all of these backgrounds, us also bringing your voice to our audience

and making sure that we let people know about your Substack,

the Inc., and your works as well,

so people get acclimated with it.

But tell us all what you think is, what do we do? I guess is that $19 trillion question. What do we do? You know, I'm such a junkie for these sub stack lives.
I was just on another one where I was asking the questions of the great Anat Shankar Osorio. If you guys haven't had her on, she's absolutely incredible.
As you know, there's so many things I could say to answer that. I'm going to focus on one idea that she really gave us a few weeks ago, and we're talking about it more today, that really blew my mind and may be helpful for your listeners.
I think a lot of us have been feeling despair, powerless, kind of aghast at obviously what the right is doing, but I think profoundly undefended by Democratic leaders. I think that's as significant an emotion in many people's hearts right now.
I think it's why a lot of people come to you all. And what Anat helped me reframe, she said, you know, by all means, keep making the phone calls to Capitol Hill, keep marching, keep yelling at the Republicans, keep telling Hakeem Jeffries to grow a spy, all of that.
Yes, keep doing it. But she said the most important form of activism people can do right now is not up there to the very powerful people.
It is actually laterally in their community to solve the first problem of this moment, which is that most people think no one else feels the way they do. Most people think they're the one on the block who's afraid of what Elon Musk's doing, but everybody else is going about their life.
And if you, I live in a very progressive place in Brooklyn, New York, if I were to walk down the street and just judge by the atmosphere, it would, it would appear that no one really cares that we're in an existential crisis for the republic. It certainly looks like no one cares.
There's no signs. There's no hats.
There's no clothes. Right? I understand.
People are living their life. But her reframe was so powerful to me.
The first thing you can do, and we need symbolism. I think you all have the scale to maybe help people coordinate that.
She suggested the slogan, free America. We need to free America from all these people, free America from these wannabe tyrants.
But we also want an America that is free. So it's the end state as well as the action.
We need hats. We need symbols.
We need colors. We need, you know, she suggested a badge that says, I'm in the know.
And people then ask you, in the know about what? And then it gives you a chance to, right? We need to kind of, she called it social proof. But this level of activism, I think, is neglected in a lot of conversations.
your first rung of activism is coalescing

all the people around you actually feel the same

way you do

but there's a kind of first mover problem

right? And everybody's like sitting watching your thing on their stream, on their couch by themselves, not realizing that the guy next to them is also watching your stream at the same time. And it is a very simple, doable form of activism, not just to try to depose these high leaders who seem untouchable, but to try to create social proof in your community that a lot of people feel this way.
Let's see each other. Let's know each other are there.
And then you go from there. That feels like wonderfully doable and incredibly important and foundational to the work ahead.
Well, that makes me feel mighty. Wow.
The might is mighty. What do you all think about that? And I'm here just so everybody knows I'm taking a ton of notes, right? I take a ton of notes.
So when I do these speaking series, you know, it's a class for me where we do a lot of learning and reflecting here about how we could be better with our media network and what we need to focus on. And having on and in is a perfect way for us to learn.
And I think we all have to be open to learning more, doing better, being better, homing in on our message and getting it out to as many people as possible. Anand, I want to thank you so much for joining us today.
I want to remind everybody about your sub stack, The Ink. You should all check it out.
If you enjoyed this conversation, you're going to enjoy what he's writing over there on a daily basis. Remember to subscribe here as well.
You see it right up there at the top to the Midas Touch sub stack. We're going to keep on growing.
We're going to keep on having this speaking series. Hey, thank you so much for joining us.
Thank you so much. And thank you guys for, I think you are, you're doing spinal development for the nation.
So, and it's going to take a lot of spine going forward. So I really, really appreciate so much what you all are doing.
I think in the long run of history, it's going to be viewed as very, very important. So thank you.

We appreciate it. Day by day, generational.
We're in this together. Thank you, everybody.

Keep checking in the sub stack for new and updated content. And we'll be back with

your normally scheduled programming here on the Midas Touch Network. Thanks, everybody.