YouSaid · the spoken record

Anand Giridharadas

lines on the record: 88
first: 2024-05-23
most recent: 2024-05-23
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“Look, I think I would love to, I think you're right. I mean, first of all, it's important to vote and the fact that about half of people do even in a moment when... Everything feels like it's at stake, and you could end up with a dictatorship. You kind of go the wrong way. Look, I'm with you. However, I think for all the people who do vote and have voted and who've heard that lecture from”
2024-05-23 · Masters in Business · Anand Giridharadas on the Financial Crisis, Covid and the State of Democracy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Given He's right. And the reason he said that is because it is no longer self-evident to people because of things like the financial crisis.”
2024-05-23 · Masters in Business · Anand Giridharadas on the Financial Crisis, Covid and the State of Democracy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Do you think the notion that democracy is this self-correcting force where people realize something's going? If you were In COVID and seeing just lots of people die who didn't have to die because public health guidance wasn't clear or the president was drinking bleach or whatever else. You haven't really experienced democracy delivering. President Biden said this early in his term. We have to prove to people that democracy works. When I was growing up in this country, I don't know about you, no one felt.”
2024-05-23 · Masters in Business · Anand Giridharadas on the Financial Crisis, Covid and the State of Democracy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Story number one, enormous social progress people dislocated, right? It's been just this remarkable era of change and gender, in race, in LGBT rights, in demographics. Story number two, it's been the era of Iraq. Hurricane Katrina, the financial crisis. 20 year wars Against ragtag militaries that we can't win, COVID, for sure. Again and again, people have seen their civics class bravado not come true. This idea that we all learned in seventh grade that like if people choose their leaders and George Washington, blah, blah, blah, it hasn't come true for people. If you were living in New Orleans in 2005. Do you think your civics lesson about how democracy is the best system? For giving people the world they want. Do you think that rings true to you? If your son died in Iraq or you had multiple children die in Iraq,”
2024-05-23 · Masters in Business · Anand Giridharadas on the Financial Crisis, Covid and the State of Democracy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Millions of people completely adjust to you know what I never thought about race I never thought about who was talking in a meeting but I'm aware of that now but millions of people find it harder to sometimes Those adjustments. And so when you have enormous social progress and change and you don't have a real plan for helping the people who are more discombobulated by it, unsettled by it, you don't have a plan for helping them think through it, figure themselves out, that creates one enormous source of weakness for democracy. And second to the financial crisis point. When you have big events, And people are hurt, and democracy does not deliver for them. Does not do the thing it is supposed to do, which is make their life better through their choosing. That really pisses people off. So now if you think of the era we've lived in”
2024-05-23 · Masters in Business · Anand Giridharadas on the Financial Crisis, Covid and the State of Democracy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Figure it out. Figure out that, you know what? I used to be able to pinch someone in the office and we don't do that in this decade anymore. And like millions of people completely successfully adjust to that.”
2024-05-23 · Masters in Business · Anand Giridharadas on the Financial Crisis, Covid and the State of Democracy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“When there's enormous social change as there has been, I would argue positive social change. The first side of the ledger is like positive stuff change in progress in gender, progress in. Racial inclusion, you know, shifting demographics and a kind of a bigger we in this country, those kind of changes discombobulate people and cause people to sometimes feel, you know, there's that old frank, when you're accustomed to privilege equality feels like oppression. If you're not used to it, you feel like, hey, hold on. As a white guy, why am I? And it's actually totally surmountable, right? As I'm sure you would attest. Like a whole bunch of white guys, a whole bunch of white people, a whole bunch of men”
2024-05-23 · Masters in Business · Anand Giridharadas on the Financial Crisis, Covid and the State of Democracy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, you know, my newsletter, which you were kind enough to mention, the ink, we've been doing a lot on with 2024 trying to pull back and understand why this is happening to our democracy, right? Not just the day-to-day, not just who's up and down in New Hampshire, but what has been happening to our democracy that we are in this kind of condition, right? Because when you have a kind of cancer, the way our body politics does now, there's the immediate question of what do you do tomorrow. But there's also the question of what is the context in which this became possible. And I think the financial crisis story is so important. I think there are really two things to me that converged in this authoritarian moment and the weakening of our democratic order. One”
2024-05-23 · Masters in Business · Anand Giridharadas on the Financial Crisis, Covid and the State of Democracy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Even at Harvard, I think Harvard is off the charts connected to the contemporary world. And of course, there's parts of Harvard that are very engaged in the world, right? I was not at the Kennedy School. But it just seemed to me in a moment when American democracy was bursting at the seams. Didn't feel to most people around me in that world like it was the project of. Thinkers and scholars and theorists and data scientists at Harvard's political hub to think about how to save the country, to think about how to rescue the world from authoritarianism. It just felt like regression analysis of trivialities and the people, the exceptions Michael Sandel, Theta, Scotchpaul, others who were doing the best work out there. The snide comments about them by others just made me realize”
2024-05-23 · Masters in Business · Anand Giridharadas on the Financial Crisis, Covid and the State of Democracy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It was the lack of engagement in the world. American democracy has been coming apart and this was a political science slash government department.”
2024-05-23 · Masters in Business · Anand Giridharadas on the Financial Crisis, Covid and the State of Democracy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Like a course on Western philosophy and political theory into, like, I can't think of something more admirable. You should do if you're like a fancy professor at Harvard. And I remember people talking about him as like not a serious academic. And I was just like, this is the opposite of my moral compass. Like, and last example, I was in a...”
2024-05-23 · Masters in Business · Anand Giridharadas on the Financial Crisis, Covid and the State of Democracy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The not famous ones and also some of the famous ones, like some of the ones who you and I would know their names, but they actually did not have the respect of anybody in the building. Like they were the kind of runts of the litter in that world, right? To have, you know, I don't mind mentioning one of them who I deeply admire Michael Sandell. You know, this is a guy who teaches this course on justice. One of the biggest courses at Harvard, 900 people or something. But he also started spreading this to China. And he somehow, despite the Chinese government, he got like millions of people to take this course, I think.”
2024-05-23 · Masters in Business · Anand Giridharadas on the Financial Crisis, Covid and the State of Democracy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And I have never met, we now would understand that time in a 2009, 10, 11, this is a time when there was a big unraveling already going on after the financial crisis. Democracy, I think you could now trace back some of the democratic unraveling we've since seen, to trace it back to those years. Big things were happening in the country, the Tea Party. And it was a group of people who often seemed Completely removed from the actual experience of what was happening in the country. Like everything was turned into regression analysis of kind of trivial questions. And the people in that department, and there were several who really did engage in the society were sort of made fun of behind their backs.”
2024-05-23 · Masters in Business · Anand Giridharadas on the Financial Crisis, Covid and the State of Democracy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And then everybody would talk about them if you were very lucky for like an hour. And then it was just gone. And some of the most beautiful things I still feel I ever wrote when I was in my 20s in India. About human stories in that. It's just not part of the culture anymore, in a way that books really last. So I was drawn to books. And I did try the academic thing by going to grad school. And to be honest, Without being rude, it kind of disgusted me in a way. And what I mean by that is. I was not in theoretical physics or something like that. I was in the government department at Harvard, which is what they call politics or political science.”
2024-05-23 · Masters in Business · Anand Giridharadas on the Financial Crisis, Covid and the State of Democracy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's interesting you ask in that in between period of leaving India. Winding down my full time job at the New York Times Finishing that first book in between them, this is when I went into grad school. And I think at that, there was a moment when I was looking at all three, right? Newspapers The kind of highest level of immediacy academia at the kind of lowest level of immediacy and reflection. And then this kind of book public-facing book writing as sort of in between the two. And I really held all three as options, kind of around the time I was turning 30. As I progressed and wrote the book, I realized a couple things. One, as I said, that I think the newspaper writing felt it felt very come and go. It just felt like you would really work on these things.”
2024-05-23 · Masters in Business · Anand Giridharadas on the Financial Crisis, Covid and the State of Democracy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That really appealed to me. So I decided that was kind of going to be my focus. And so I continued after that time to write a column, a once-in-two week kind of easy, easy one-day every two weeks of my time, a column just to kind of stay engaged, but kind of pivoted to books and have been writing books as my kind of main thing ever since.”
2024-05-23 · Masters in Business · Anand Giridharadas on the Financial Crisis, Covid and the State of Democracy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So I started then in India in 2005 and I continued for 11 years. So first, you know, four and a half years in India, wrote my first book about India at the end of that time in India. And in the writing of that book, I decided that writing books was what I wanted to do. I hadn't tried it yet. So I'd been writing newspaper articles for the Times about India and social transformation in India, human stories. And then there was something about going deep in a book, thinking about the same thing in the shower every day for three years, that instead of a different thing in the shower every day for three years.”
2024-05-23 · Masters in Business · Anand Giridharadas on the Financial Crisis, Covid and the State of Democracy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“But there was a new idea in this country that the regular person could rise. But I think in more recent decades, we've also just become more aware of the limitations of that. And all the people for whom that doesn't feel like a true story.”
2024-05-23 · Masters in Business · Anand Giridharadas on the Financial Crisis, Covid and the State of Democracy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Know, largely because of affluence. I mean, it's easier to empower people when you have an American level of per capita GDP than an Indian level of per capita GDP. But also, there is a philosophical difference. But I think in this country, in the United States, we overbelieve our story that people can just invent themselves to their chosen level. It's not that it doesn't happen for anyone. It happens for actually millions and millions of people. And that's remarkable. That's a new thing in the world. And America actually in the mid 20th century built that. And it felt like a new thing in the world, the idea that average people could go to college, get a nice house in the suburbs, but of course it was mostly white people.”
2024-05-23 · Masters in Business · Anand Giridharadas on the Financial Crisis, Covid and the State of Democracy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The way I think about it is I think there is an arc and a continuum, right? What Martin Luther King talked about is the arc of the moral universe from systems and structures of extreme hierarchy and extreme kind of discarding of most people on one end. And then on the other end, systems of imagine perfect equality, which of course exists nowhere. I think there's no question that most societies you and I can think of have moved along the arc. I think some places like the United States are much further along the arc in certain ways than a place like India.”
2024-05-23 · Masters in Business · Anand Giridharadas on the Financial Crisis, Covid and the State of Democracy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Dramatic form is actually true everywhere. Most people in the world do not in fact make their destiny. Most people in the world do not, in fact, rise as far as their merit can take them.”
2024-05-23 · Masters in Business · Anand Giridharadas on the Financial Crisis, Covid and the State of Democracy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Waiting on your superiors with alacrity. Then you'll be born into a higher station next time. And the reason I say all that to you is when you said, how did it imprint my view of other things? I grew up with illusions in this country, in the United States, that I think many of us grew up with, that in an immigrant. Upwardly mobile immigrant family, my family had this notion of America, a country where you make your own destiny, you rise as high as your merit can take you, et cetera. And I think we didn't necessarily see the limits of that truth in our own experience because we were fortunate. And going to India radicalized me not only about India, but it actually made me see America in a new way. Because what is true in India in the most”
2024-05-23 · Masters in Business · Anand Giridharadas on the Financial Crisis, Covid and the State of Democracy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“From how people thought And I think in India You just see very dramatically. Naturalness in people's minds of human inequality. People are naturally born at different levels. People deserve, in many ways, in a lot of Hindu traditions. People believe that you deserve the station into which you're born. If you were a humble servant, it's because you did something. Wrong in a past life. I know people in my own family who do heroic work taking care of the poor, but if you've asked them why they think those people who they take care of are poor, they believe deep down. It's because they did something wrong in a past life.”
2024-05-23 · Masters in Business · Anand Giridharadas on the Financial Crisis, Covid and the State of Democracy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Of course. But even the articulation of that idea, we don't realize because we think that's just a normal idea. And in fact, they didn't go far enough. They didn't include women. They didn't include black people. Right.”
2024-05-23 · Masters in Business · Anand Giridharadas on the Financial Crisis, Covid and the State of Democracy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So everything new that has been added in India is sort of layered on top of the old, but no old layer was ever eradicated. And so what that resulted in India is a lot of these very ancient hierarchies that have been pretty undisturbed, the caste system, but also just in some places, in some rural areas, like the caste system very much still functions. If you look at the distribution of who works in the IT industry, it's still very much follows caste, even if people are not conscious of it. Much like race here, but even more powerful than that is an idea of caste, the kind of residual idea of caste, is the naturalness of human inequality. When the Declaration of Independence starts with all men are created equal, a radical statement. It was a radical statement.”
2024-05-23 · Masters in Business · Anand Giridharadas on the Financial Crisis, Covid and the State of Democracy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, remember, India never had a revolution the way China did, right? India never had a revolution the way Russia did, right? So a lot of countries coming out of colonization in the 20th century had these kind of disruptions to the social order. What is remarkable about modern India is that it kind of built a liberal democracy coming out of colonization with this incredible group of communities and populations that are as or more diverse than the countries of the European Union, let's say, but all in one country. And it never really had a rupture with the past where it got rid of the old social order, the way, say, the Chinese cracked down on Confucianism or something like that.”
2024-05-23 · Masters in Business · Anand Giridharadas on the Financial Crisis, Covid and the State of Democracy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Such a good question. I'll do the second one first, the kind of gruesome inequities of India that have just been baked into India for a very long time.”
2024-05-23 · Masters in Business · Anand Giridharadas on the Financial Crisis, Covid and the State of Democracy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“At the end of that six years in India, I wrote a book about the transformation of modern India through the stories of five families. It was so remarkable once I had the right job, you know, and for someone else doing business in India in that time would have been a very exciting thing. It's just not my thing in the world. But once my job was to observe what was around me and try to process it and make sense of it and turn it into writing and sometimes even art, it was just the most remarkable place to be. India's a remarkable country to be a writer in. It's a colleague of mine, Lydia Polgreen, once said that there's no shortage of public opinion. And it was a remarkable place to cut my teeth as a journalist.”
2024-05-23 · Masters in Business · Anand Giridharadas on the Financial Crisis, Covid and the State of Democracy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And I realized I need to either leave or I need to dig into this society in my way, which is writing, thinking, journalism. And so I luckily after that year got a job at the New York Times. It was easier to get a job once I was there on the ground, set up new things, new people. And I got this job, talked my way into this job at the times. And I've been a full time writer ever since.”
2024-05-23 · Masters in Business · Anand Giridharadas on the Financial Crisis, Covid and the State of Democracy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Contract, I could barely pay for my shared, there's like a room in someone else's apartment because Bombay real estate prices are the same as New York, even though my salary was $14,000 a year. People live with their families or make do. To that job was not great. And I was not cut out for business. So I was quite miserable that year. But I was miserable in a way because I'd come to this really interesting place and working in business, I had no engagement with the place. I was just doing some random job.”
2024-05-23 · Masters in Business · Anand Giridharadas on the Financial Crisis, Covid and the State of Democracy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It was incredible, and that job was terrible. I applied for journalism jobs. No one was going to send a 21-year-old University of Michigan graduate to go be a foreign correspondent in India, which I didn't quite understand at the time. So I started looking for other things. And I applied to the local office of McKinsey. I think making $14,000 a year on a local...”
2024-05-23 · Masters in Business · Anand Giridharadas on the Financial Crisis, Covid and the State of Democracy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And so I actually had this quite tortured relationship to India, which is the same as many second generation kids where I always say the first thing I learned about India was that my parents chose to get out of it. So it's not the best Yelp review, right? But part of me took this advice of colliding with the world. It's like, you know, I should go to a place that I have difficulty with, not a place that I have ease. I mean, I could go to London or whatever. I should go to India because it'll be complicated and I'll have to grapple with things and that'll make me a writer. I had this kind of fantasy that the forced grappling. Yeah. And how was it?”
2024-05-23 · Masters in Business · Anand Giridharadas on the Financial Crisis, Covid and the State of Democracy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I mean, no, no, no, no. Oh, really? The entire elite speaks English. One or two percent of people speak English, and no one else does.”
2024-05-23 · Masters in Business · Anand Giridharadas on the Financial Crisis, Covid and the State of Democracy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I did. And so I thought. Where did you go? So I went to India. And so I worked from McKinsey actually because I basically decided I wanted to go to India. And then I tried to get a journalism job. My family had come from India. My parents had emigrated.”
2024-05-23 · Masters in Business · Anand Giridharadas on the Financial Crisis, Covid and the State of Democracy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Vie for one job, one internship, go far away, see the world. Come back with some knowledge of something other people don't know, don't have some expertise in something, just go collide with the world.”
2024-05-23 · Masters in Business · Anand Giridharadas on the Financial Crisis, Covid and the State of Democracy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Into the most exclusive nightclub in Berlin. You know, I think it's gotten in some ways better because of more awareness around how these barriers keep lots of people out. In some ways, it's gotten harder just because there's fewer journalism jobs now even than when I was 15 or 17 or 20. But it was always this profession where, at least in my experience, like there weren't job sites where these jobs were listed. You kind of had to figure out your way in and maybe write some freelance articles for someone. And so as I was finishing college, again, dead set on journalism, applied for jobs, couldn't really find anything, couldn't wanted to maybe go overseas, couldn't find anything. And I got some advice from one of my mentors, Jill Abramson, who was an editor at the New York Times then and later became the editor of the paper. And she said, you know, go out into the world. Don't try to be a journalist by hanging around in New York and Washington like a thousand other people trying to.”
2024-05-23 · Masters in Business · Anand Giridharadas on the Financial Crisis, Covid and the State of Democracy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Couple weeks of writing stupid little school newspaper articles. I think I was assigned to cover sports and I didn't really play sports. It was not that the content was so riveting to me, but the idea that you could go out, look at the world, see things, talk to people, see things with your eyes, interpret what they mean, go back, write it up, process it in your way, think about what you think it means. And then on this very small scale, a few hundred people would get it printed and delivered and they would see it and it would go into their brains. It was such an insanely magical concept to me that I was very clear that first semester of sophomore year of high school, like this is what I want to do. And, you know, fast forward 28 years later if I have the math right, like that's what I do. But there was this blip in the middle. And the reason for the blip, the one-year blip, was it getting into journalism, getting into writing is harder than getting...”
2024-05-23 · Masters in Business · Anand Giridharadas on the Financial Crisis, Covid and the State of Democracy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You know, I actually knew exactly what I wanted to do from a pretty young age, which was what I'm doing now, which is writing and being a journalist. I figured it out first semester of my sophomore year of high school. That was when you could join the high school newspaper and we had this newspaper at my high school called Horizon. And I applied and I got into the newspaper. And from the first...”
2024-05-23 · Masters in Business · Anand Giridharadas on the Financial Crisis, Covid and the State of Democracy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source