Webcast transcript
Willy Walker: Thanks, Susan, and good morning to all of you on Western time zones. And good afternoon to those on the East Coast where Evan, my guest today, is. Before I dive into Evan's biography and then into his incredible writing, I had my friend Greg Maffei on last week to talk about Liberty Media, F1 and a bunch of other things. We haven't typically had quotes from the Walker webcast put out on ESPN and SiriusXM Radio, and it was kind of fun to see some of the comments that Greg and I had in the podcast last week picked up by those sources. And then before that, just before Greg, I had Alex Rodriguez on. Similarly, some of the things that A-Rod and I talked about about the crossover between baseball and his business career were not only interesting, but fun to see all of that head out through A-Rod's channels as it relates to baseball and his ownership of the Minnesota Timberwolves on the basketball side of things.
Today, we focus on politics. Whenever I talk politics on this webcast, I try to stay as apolitical as possible. And one of the things that I find to be so interesting about Evan's writing is that Evan really spends the time to go to look at what is happening in American society from an economic standpoint, from a social standpoint, from a race standpoint, from an immigration policy standpoint, etc., to get to what the politics of America are today. So it is my hope that Evan and I can dive in on this and talk about this from a fact based standpoint and not necessarily from a political standpoint. But let me read Evan's bio quickly and then we'll dive into discussions on both his book Wildland as well as other things.
Evan Osnos is a journalist and author known for his work on politics and foreign affairs. He is a magna cum laude graduate of Harvard College. He joined the Chicago Tribune in 2002, and after the 9/11 attacks, was assigned to the Middle East, reporting from Egypt, Iran, Saudi Arabia and Syria. He then became the China correspondent for the Tribune, living in Beijing from 2005 until 2013. He has published three books, “Age of Ambition, Chasing Fortune, Truth and Faith in the New China,” “Joe Biden: The Life, The Run and What Matters Now,” and his most recent book, “Wildland: The Making of America's Fury” a New York Times bestseller. Osnos has won the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award. He has a weekly podcast called The Political Scene and is a frequent contributor to The New Yorker magazine.
So, Evan, first of all, welcome. I thought one needed to live in New York to write for The New Yorker magazine. How do you write for The New Yorker and live in Washington, DC?
Evan Osnos: Well, thanks Willy, it's a lot of fun to be with you. I think that a little distance from the Home Office makes the heart grow fonder. I think perhaps for both ends. I've been at the New Yorker now 15 years, and I have not been based in New York during that entire time. So I've told my wife that I do wonder if we move to the city and they get to know me better, that may be the end of my employment at The New Yorker. So I'm sticking with it for now.
Willy Walker: So, Evan, you spent a long time in China. Let's start here on US-China relations, because Secretary Blinken was just over in China and had the most senior bilateral discussions between the U.S. and China for I believe five years. Give us your quick take on US-China relations. They seem to be frenemy. Are they more friend or foe today than they were, let's just say, a year ago?
Evan Osnos: Yeah, And I think you're right to use the word “today,” because it is, to put it mildly, a completely dynamic situation. I mean, you and I are talking here on Wednesday, June 28th, and it's not an exaggeration to say that an event in the next, say, 24 hours could fundamentally disrupt this relationship, which points to the larger point, which is that it is brittle, it's fragile. That is a new state of affairs. I mean, for the most I've been studying and working in China for 25 years, I got into it at a time when it was assumed to be on a certain kind of trajectory. And that was a core idea of the 21st century, the idea that the U.S. and China would be more and more aligned, integrated, (and different on a fundamental level. We know that.) But that they would have a set of shared interests economically in commercial terms, in business terms, and then fundamentally, that would lead to this ability for a communist system and a democratic system to get along. That assumption has foundered. It's no longer operative and it's changed over the course of the last, I'd say, six years. And so the condition of the relationship today (and we can talk about why that happened, how it happened, it's a fascinating thing.) But the condition of the relationship today is that it's more or less at its worst point since Henry Kissinger and Richard Nixon went to China in the early 1970s. And that's a remarkable fact. And it's slightly better than it was three weeks ago now, because Tony Blinken, the U.S. secretary of state, went to Beijing. As you said, he had a series of meetings. He got some things out of it. He didn't get one important thing that he wanted out of it, which was opening up essentially a sort of open line between military to military leadership. But the fact that the meeting happened is significant. This is just some texture on it. I was seeing a senior administration official maybe 48 hours before the visit. And this person said this really could go badly because they could decide in any one of a variety of ways to humiliate him, to embarrass him. You know, they could get him over there, give him lousy meetings, have him sitting in the hotel. They could do all these kinds of things that would send the message that they're not interested in a robust or at least an improved communication. That didn't happen. So we'll take the wins where we can get them as a civilization. I mean, and I think we're a half step away from World War III than where we were a month ago, Willy.
Willy Walker: You and I are going to Sun Valley to open up the Sun Valley Writers Conference and talk about “Wildland.” I had Admiral James Stavridis do that with me last year when we talked about his book, “2034,” which was a hypothetical, that China invades Taiwan and sets off World War III. Given what you just said, and literally this morning over in Portugal, Sarah Eisen had a fantastic panel with Chairman Jerome Powell, and she asked him and he had European Central Bank President Christine Lagarde on it as well as the head of the Japan Central Bank and the British Central Bank. And she asked Jerome Powell whether the Fed has a contingency plan should China invade Taiwan, to which chairman Powell said, look, we have contingency plans for all sorts of things. She tried to probe and say, well, what happens to the world economy if China does that? And he said, I'll leave that to your imagination. But I guess specifically there, how much of a threat is this issue as it relates to China invading Taiwan?
Evan Osnos: Well, you know, and speaking of imagination, I would second your mention of James Stavridis’ book, which he wrote with Elliot Ackerman, which is just a superb visualization, more than imagination of what would conceivably happen if you had an encounter between these two massive militaries in the South China Sea. And it comes as close as you can get to political science fiction, but credible, obviously Jim Stavridis has the credibility to describe those scenarios. He's been on a boat most of his adult life.
So, look, the reality is, the possibility of China going into Taiwan, which has taken on a huge piece of mental real estate in the China conversation, where I'm talking to you from, which is Washington is a real prospect, meaning we need to take it very seriously. There is a reason why a lot of diplomatic and military energy is expended right now on thinking through those scenarios. What does it mean for the United States? What does it mean primarily, of course, for the Taiwanese people? What does it mean for the global economy?
But I want to actually make a clear distinction between what is the rumination on this subject and what is a kind of momentum of what's taking hold. The fact that it is now part of a vernacular conversation about China includes the idea that they might go into Taiwan and what the actual intelligence is telling us, because most recently, Bill Burns, who of course, is director of CIA, he came forward and said quite clearly that the best available intelligence from the United States tells us that the Chinese leadership has not yet determined either whether they would invade, but also whether they have the capacity to do so, whether they could win. That's a really key piece of detail to listen to.
And, you know, if you're in my business, I spend part of my time in the China Center at the Brookings Institution. What we're always looking for when it comes to trying to assess the real risk of something is not how much are the pundits like me talking about it, but honestly, how much are the people in a position with real visibility on what we know and don't know – how certain are they about what they know? And when you hear the director of the CIA saying that it is, as far as we know, not clear that the Chinese leadership thinks they can do this and pull it off. That's a key fact that tells you that things are actually more abstract, more down the road than some of the most immediate predictions might have suggested.
Willy Walker: One of the things just before we move off of this is, Evan, there are a lot of business leaders who say, look, Russia invades Ukraine. We pull the switch, we're out, we cut off supply chains, we pull out all our stores, what have you. Kind of overnight and within two weeks, most major U.S. companies pulled out of Russia after the invasion of Ukraine. And they all sit there and say, we didn't like that to do it, but we did it. And it was not that hard and it wasn't that big an impact on our business. But then you raise China and they say, Whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa. Totally different deal.
And Todd Fisher, he was a friend of mine who is the chief investment officer of the CHIPS Act. Him and I were talking about U.S. chip manufacturing, NVIDIA's market cap just went over $1,000,000,000,000 week before last I guess it is. And I was talking to Todd about the manufacturing of those high chips for AI and it's all Taiwan. He said, look, we're trying to invest here in the United States. We're building up chip manufacturing. But this is not easy stuff. And it all still, even though the design comes out of NVIDIA, it's all still made over in Taiwan. So the dependency on China, from our economic standpoint, I mean, just the ramifications, this is not like Russia invading Ukraine and we pull – this is something that brings down the global economy literally overnight, does it not?
Evan Osnos: You're completely correct that it is an utterly different scenario. The level of economic integration between China and the United States, for instance, is obviously unprecedented. I mean, to put it in clear terms, in the final years of the Cold War, the U.S. and the Soviet Union had about $2 billion in trade per year. The US and China today have $2 billion in trade per day. So that's not even talking about the role that Taiwan and specifically TSMC plays in the global supply chain for advanced chips. Yes, the reality is, if China went into Taiwan and disrupted that supply chain, it would be an earthquake in international relations, but also in global economics. And one of the things that's useful as we sort of do some scenario planning, meaning what are the pressures that are prevailing on Xi Jinping and other people at the top of the Chinese government? You think to yourself, what is it that they're trying to accomplish and what are they willing to risk?
And, it's been clear I'm not telling a secret here, but the U.S. has made clear that if it became clear that China was going to gain control of TSMC, that the U.S. would probably figure out a way to, in effect, “blow it up.” That's not my term. That's actually the term of people who are in the position of making plans for how you would deal with an invasion, meaning that the idea that China could go in and suddenly take control of TSMC and it be some sort of clean chain of custody between, you know, the old company and the new company wouldn't happen.
So China has to think about it. Do they really want to end up with an inert TSMC? Essentially Do they want to drop that out of the global supply chain and end up with a huge hunk of metal? Maybe not. Do they have a plan B? Because they, after all, are also reliant to some degree, to a significant degree on the things that are coming out of Taiwan. So exactly as you say, this would be a tsunami that would run through the global economy. And I think people are just coming to terms with it. And that's one of the reasons why it takes up a lot of mindshare.
Willy Walker: So let's shift gears to your book on “Joe Biden: The Life, The Run, And What Matters Now.” I guess the most simplistic question I'd have for you, Evan, is what surprised you the most about the first two years of the Biden administration?
Evan Osnos: In some ways, he is the guy that is easy to forget as president, because after all , let's be honest with ourselves. That's kind of what people wanted when they voted for him. I mean, part of it was people were sick of the Trump era. Whether or not they thought of Donald Trump, they liked him or they hated him. In a lot of cases, you just heard people saying, I just want to spend less time thinking about presidential politics. It doesn't need to be the fact that dominates our dinner table conversation every night. People wanted to stop losing friendships over the question of politics. It was like, can we right size what politics should be in our lives? And somebody said to me before Biden was elected, I think Americans are ready for a boring president again. I don't think Joe Biden would embrace that characterization. But the reality is, he has kind of slipped off of the front page of our minds, and that has both positive benefits and it also has a negative implication for him politically. The positive benefit is that it gives us a little bit of a relief from that sense that we're all living under the tyranny of political information, kind of reflexively checking our news feeds all the time. It's difficult for them as an administration because if you go down the list just trying to be dispassionate about it empirically, you look at things like the level of unemployment. Obviously, inflation is much higher than they've wanted it to be. But you look at things like what they've gotten done in Congress in terms of infrastructure spending and things like that. Those are issues that ordinarily you might say they might see some of the effect of that showing up in their favorability numbers. But it's not, he's a very unpopular president. And that's partly because Americans have just said, if you're on his side, quote unquote, people feel kind of meh about so much in their lives right now, whether it's prices at the grocery store or the sense of being safe or unsafe in parts of the country that they're not really prepared to say. And therefore, I'm enthusiastic about what Joe Biden's done on infrastructure. So he doesn't get much credit there. And then, of course, on the other side of the aisle, because of the nature of our polarized politics, there is an instinct to just say, let's not actually acknowledge where we think we've made some headway on issues of a genuine, broad based national concern. So the net effect is that he's sort of there, but not there, which is weird for us, right? As a population, we're used to having this very intense, almost personal relationship with the president, and we're getting used to this now.
Willy Walker: So you've studied him closely and wrote a book on him. You know, he's been at this game of politics longer than almost anybody. I believe, the youngest U.S. senator ever elected?
Evan Osnos: That's true. And he was actually so young that when he was elected, he couldn't actually take office until the time when he was supposed to be sworn in because he was still underage at that point.
Willy Walker: I guess the question would be to your point, he's sort of seen not seen. He is actually mentally capable of staying in the office and you sort of look at his personality and say he'd wake up one day and just say, you know what, I've done what I needed to do. I'm going to sunset and let someone else step in here. What is it Evan that you know about him that says right now he thinks he's up for another term?
Evan Osnos: A couple of things that weigh in my mind as I think about him and his own calculations around age. I remember once I was interviewing him during the vice presidency, I was in the West Wing in his office. At that point, you remember, he was already rather long in the tooth. And I remember asking him, we were talking in 2014, and I'm paraphrasing here, “Do you think you have enough gas in the tank to run for president in the next election, which would have been 2016?” And he said something kind of fascinating, just off the cuff. He said, “Well, I encouraged my father to retire, and I think that was a mistake.” And then he kind of changed tack and what he was getting at. I've talked to people around him enough to understand some of the family dynamics. He felt as if he and his siblings had encouraged his dad to retire and by doing so that it had kind of sapped his mojo.
And this is a familiar story. We know a lot of people like this, both of us who are a little bit like sharks, where they feel like if they stop swimming, they don't know exactly what's going to happen. And I think there is a piece of Joe Biden who is in that mindset. That's one element. The other thing that I think is really important that gets to the essence of your question, how you framed it, which is a really key detail, which is that he came to power as a very young man. And in some ways his self-identity was cemented as a young guy. He was known and it's hard to believe it now - any listener who's under the age of 30 will find it hard to picture. Joe Biden was known as a young man in a hurry for most of his professional life. And so that's kind of coded into his self-identity. And it's been hard for him. I've watched it. I've interviewed him over the years and sort of watched him coming to terms with the idea that he's actually now the graybeard, you know, that he's the white hair in the room, that takes some doing. And then the final piece of it, which is the blunt edge, let's be honest about politics. Piece of it is that he is, after all, the only Democrat who's ever beaten Donald J. Trump for president. He thinks that Donald Trump is probably going to be the nominee, the numbers would support that and he doesn't (and this is now me imputing this last piece into him, he hasn't said this explicitly) but I think he looks around and he doesn't see another Democrat who he's confident necessarily can win over Trump. And as long as that's the case, he's going to run.
Willy Walker: And on that, do you think that we haven't had an incumbent get primaried since Ted Kennedy tried to primary Jimmy Carter in 1979? Do you think we might have our second primary of a presidential candidate in the incumbent party in 2024?
Evan Osnos: Not as it stands now. I don't think that somebody else is going to jump in unless you see something happen to Joe Biden, either politically or some physical event. I think it's partly for the reason that you raised, which is that the memory of 1979 kind of burns in the memory of Democrats, which is that people feel as if Jimmy Carter was weakened by Ted Kennedy's challenge. There are a lot of reasons why Jimmy Carter probably lost. But that is a fact that particularly if he's starting at a base that Joe Biden is now, which is to say very low favorability, I think there's a general feeling among Democrats, the ones I talked to, that they are reluctantly coalescing around him, but they're doing so. And that's because they don't see a scenario that would be an easy, bloodless way to get to another nominee.
Willy Walker: So I'm going to use a stat from “Wildland” to segway from what we're talking about now and current to back up a little bit on the book. But one of the points about Jimmy Carter, it might be the only mention of Jimmy Carter in the entire book, Evan, is where you point out that Jimmy Carter actually lowered the capital gains rate from 48% to 28% in 1978, which I think there's been this and we're going to talk about this in a second, but these certain things in people's minds that are almost impossible to change.
You cite, for instance, in the book the number of Muslims in America and the Pew poll that goes out and says how many Muslims are in America? And most people say one in six, and the actual number is one in 100. And a number of other things. But I do think that the Democrats are viewed as this, you know, tax and spend party. And I just thought that point you raised in the book about Jimmy Carter having lowered the capital gains rate. The Democratic Party certainly hasn't used that in campaigns to say that our party actually understands how to cut taxes at certain times.
Evan Osnos: I think that's right. You're great to zero in on that. You know, you have a voracious appetite for this kind of information, as I do. And I think that is a window into the mindset of the 1970s and some of the decisions that were made as a political society, which we now look on and begin, this is a an impartial economic analysis tells you that a lot of the questions we're contending with around opportunity and inequality, that you have to trace those back to the 1970s, arguably, perhaps even a couple of years earlier. But that was a period when Americans were really looking hard and saying, hold on a second, is the system that we created after World War II, which has delivered so much prosperity for the last three and a half decades, does it still work? And they were starting to tweak some dials and in some ways were living in the shadow of that ever since.
Willy Walker: So in “Wildland,” you tackle so many big issues. From 9/11, Black Lives Matter, the Proud Boys, to corporate greed, to the justice system, to the great financial crisis, to the great pandemic, to the demise of local politics, to newspapers going away, to the advent of the Internet, to guns, to despair, to pain, to activism. And there's so many things. And what you decided to do to create a frame for that was go and basically study three cities: Chicago, Illinois, Greenwich, Connecticut, and Clarksburg, West Virginia. Why did you pick those three?
Evan Osnos: I have a personal connection with each one of them. And, you know, one of the big conceptual things I realized early on was place matters. Place matters in such a big way. It determines in so many ways the parameters of what's possible in your life. So take me, for example. I mean, I was very lucky to grow up in Greenwich, Connecticut, a very prosperous place. I got a terrific public school education. I mean, one of the best public schools you can go to in America. And through no work of my own, I was obviously the great beneficiary of where my family was at the time. And the the first place I went to work out of college was Clarksburg, West Virginia, which is a small city in the northern part of the state. I went to work at a little newspaper and I know well, of course, your mom was a photographer at Time. And my first job was as a photographer.
Willy Walker: I noticed that. I noticed that in the book. I was going to ask you about that because you used to travel around and take pictures. And I was like, well, Evan’s a writer, not a photographer. But your first job, was it both writing and taking pictures or just photographing?
Evan Osnos: You know, I had interest in both. And I knew I probably wanted to be a writer, but I thought that learning to understand how photography really works would help me be better at this job, particularly being a foreign correspondent.
I eventually realized that I probably was cut out to be a writer, not a photographer, after I was a foreign correspondent and going to places like Iraq. And I realized, boy, if you're a photographer in Iraq, you really can't be anywhere but the absolute front line. And I said, I think I'm more of a second line kind of guy. And so there I was. I was pretty clear that I thought, you have to have a gift.
Willy Walker: Let me jump in on that for just one little public service to anyone who hasn't watched the 60 Minutes piece on James Nachtwey and his photography in covering conflicts around the globe. Just go to the 60 Minutes Website and watch it, because to exactly what Evan's talking about, you want a real eye on conflict, war, poverty, civil unrest, James Nachtwey and his photographs are some of the most amazing ever. But anyway, sorry to interrupt you on that, but your exact totally.
Evan Osnos: Agree with you. And, you know, he was one of my heroes. I mean, I was kind of trailing around looking at his photos as a young guy and was really sort of dazzled by it. I mean, interestingly, from your perspective and mine, one of the other people I worked with when I was a young reporter was a photographer named Pete Souza at the Chicago Tribune. Pete, of course, went on to become White House photographer.
What's fascinating about him is Pete had been White House photographer for Ronald Reagan and then later came back as Barack Obama's White House photographer. He was trusted equally by both families, which I think is kind of a credit to the fact that he is a professional of the highest order. He's not there as a political practitioner. He's there to say, I am making a document of history and I work ultimately for the people, the people of the United States.
So, you know, a lot of people know Pete Souza because he's got a big presence on social media, but he is in some ways, I think of as some of the best of what media stands for.
But to your point, you know, to go back to why pick these three places? So Clarksburg, West Virginia, a small town where I worked after college, mostly white. It's a window into what's happening in the white working class, which, of course, has become essential to understanding what's going on in American society and politics. And the third place that I wrote about is Chicago. I worked at the Chicago Tribune for nine years. My family was originally from Chicago. And my family came from the south side of Chicago around Hyde Park and it is a mostly African-American neighborhood now.
And if you want to understand what was going on in the economics and the politics of the South Side of Chicago and ultimately what's happening in black neighborhoods in America, there's a reason why great sociologists have always lingered in Chicago. It's kind of what somebody once called the great American city in both the best sense and the worst sense, it's dealing with all of the problems we are as a country. So if you think of these three places, Greenwich, Connecticut, Clarksburg, West Virginia, and Chicago, all I had to do was just watch and listen. And I got to know people over the years, of course, in all these places, and I tried to put these three cities in a kind of conversation with one another and say, how much is what's happening in one place, affecting what's happening in another place? How much are they cut off from each other and how much are they actually responding to similar national themes? And what can I understand about what's going on in the U.S. by just hanging out? That's the great gift, honestly, of being able to do this kind of work, of being able to write long things in The New Yorker, in books. I'm not in a hurry and I can just listen and it goes on for a while.
Willy Walker: So one of the way you weave these stories together is fantastic and fascinating. And I will say there are a couple round trips, if you will, where you're headed down one path, for instance, and we'll get to it in a moment. But you're profiling an African-American gentleman in Chicago who's in the drug trade, goes to jail, gets out of jail. But of all the things is you're following his story. All of a sudden, he takes out a mortgage for his mom's home and in comes the subprime mortgage crisis in Countrywide. And it was just so interesting because you think that you're talking about just race and the criminal justice system and the prevalence of drugs and this, that, and then all of a sudden it's like, oh, no. But they're also impacted by this massive hit that also hit West Virginia at the same time and also hit Greenwich, Connecticut, the same time. I just thought it was interesting how as you went down these paths, you were sort of presented with these opportunities to comment on a much bigger story that may not have been in your purview when you first started following these people.
Evan Osnos: You're absolutely right. I mean, in some ways I've decided that if you go out and you're looking for a really specific target in your journalism, meaning I'm going to go find somebody who was impacted by a specific kind of policy or a specific practice, you will find what you're looking for. It'll be a kind of, in some ways, a sort of narrow channel of understanding.
But that's a different thing than saying I'm just going to park myself in the life of a guy like Maurice Clark who you were just describing. And I will say, you know, people sometimes wonder, how do you meet these people that you write about?
Willy Walker: You met him at a funeral. You met him with somebody else you were following.
Evan Osnos: That's exactly it. So I was writing about the death of a gang member in Chicago. One gang member figured that was a way to kind of understand the world a little bit. So I'm talking to the priest. I'm hanging out at the funeral. After the funeral, I left and I went over to the little shrine on the street that had been built for the guy who had been killed.
And as I'm standing at that shrine, a man comes up to me who's about my age, and he says, “What are you doing?” And I said, “Well, I'm writing a magazine article for The New Yorker about this shooting right here.” And he says, “Oh, who do you work for?” I said, “The New Yorker magazine.” And he said, “Is that the one with the cartoons? “And I said, “Yeah.” And he said, “Well, I used to read that in prison. And I thought to myself, you know, this is somebody I think I really want to know a little more about. That was the beginning of really dozens of interviews over the course of the next few years in which his life more or less helped me understand actually, the course of this country over the last two decades.
Willy Walker: Just as one quick anecdote, and then I want to jump off on something else. But just the scene of you going back to his house and him having the scrapbook of all of the funeral programs from the gang members who had died was just such a I can only imagine as he pulled that out and put it in front of you and you flipped page to page. Seeing all of these funeral programs, I mean, just the concept that he saved them all and created a scrapbook from them is just amazing. But he also has a math mind and I thought about that as you talked about him further, being very, very talented with math. That made me think there was a little bit of that programming, if you will, of him keeping track of things like that. That was part of his personality.
But Evan, let me as I was trying to figure out kind of a theme to follow the ball as we go from Greenwich to Clarksburg to Chicago. And I want to follow the money, if you will.
So let's start in Greenwich on following the money. You profiled at the beginning a very talented sort of up from his bootstraps doctor named Chip Skowron. Here's this Vanderbilt graduate with very humble beginnings, lost his mother, got a very prestigious fellowship at Yale Medical School and then all of a sudden decides I'm going to go to Wall Street and ends up going to work for SAC and then another hedge fund that's part of the SAC, if you will, constellation of funds called FrontPoint. And you see this doctor who was so talented to go in, if you will, help humanity, who, as you point out, between 2007 and 2010 made $30 million working for FrontPoint. And then he steps over the line, pick up there on Chip Skowron and what you want to add as it relates to, I would say, your profiling of big money in the Golden Triangle in Greenwich and why profiling Chip Skowron and what happened at FrontPoint is so important to the distrust that America has created for big money and for Wall Street more broadly.
Evan Osnos: Chip Skowron is a fascinating case. He's a guy who in many ways was living the American dream. I mean, he had the intelligence. He had the ambition to get from one rung on the ladder to the next. As you say, he got into Vanderbilt despite having a pretty rough set of events happen. His mother died when he was a teenager. He then goes on, he gets this incredibly prestigious family. First he goes to Yale Medical School. He then goes on to Harvard for his fellowship.
I mean, he is at the top of the game and he's also kind of losing interest. And he eventually gets this offer to go to Wall Street. It was right at the period when hedge funds were taking off. He knew nothing about finance at the beginning. I mean, he literally went to the store and bought a book called Getting Started in Hedge Funds, a kind of almost a brochure of what it means to work in finance. He'd never looked at an income statement. He didn't know anything about it. And he succeeded. And he's a smart guy, figured it out. As he's kind of moving up, the pressures on him to keep delivering and keep succeeding and building. He broke the law. What he started doing was he took these and this is to some people will be a story they've heard in other contexts. He was introduced to experts in the pharmaceutical industry through an expert network, and he started to cultivate some of these experts to say, actually, let's see if I can get access to information about drug trials before they're public. And eventually he ends up making trades on the basis of this inside information. The Feds catch up to him and he gets arrested and sent to prison.
Why I was interested in him because his story is not unique. His story was kind of playing out in a number of other cases and contexts at that point in time, which is to say this was the years around the financial crisis when Americans were starting to ask: hold on a second. Who should I trust exactly? Which institutions are reliable stewards of my money and are taking care of our system in a way that's sustainable? And what I wanted to get at was the way in which ideas, both good and bad, can be transmitted through a system.
As Chip Skowron said to me, and I have to give him credit for being really generous and willing to tell his story in incredible detail to me over the course of a few years, really, you know, sort of bearing some pretty painful facts, embarrassing facts about how he ended up where he did. Was that, as he said, I didn't think I was doing anything all that different from what others were doing. And we've heard versions of that from many people who get caught.
And this was, yeah, look, I grew up in a fantastic place. I love this town. And there were so many people in this neighborhood who were getting caught for financial crimes that the street that we lived on, which was called Round Hill Road, got a nickname which was Rogues Hill Road. I thought, how did that happen? And what does that tell us about broader confidence in the systems that ultimately undergird America's financial and political stability?
I mean, what we know Willy, and we've now all become sort of more and more aware of this is that our social and political system rests on some implicit assumptions, a kind of compact, the idea that if you do something for me and I promise to pay you for it, then I'll do so. If I join a society or a profession, I'll follow the norms and the rules and the laws of that profession. And what we've seen and really this is the sort of molten core at the center of our political moment is that people have been losing faith over the course of the last three decades in that assumption, the assumption of a basic fairness. And as that happens, it gets harder and harder to hold together politically. That's what I wanted to get at, but in the most concrete, specific terms, not by making big abstract pronouncements, but by just telling one man's life and seeing how it unfolded.
Willy Walker: And one of the things that you go to there, Evan, which I think is interesting, and then we're going to follow the money to West Virginia here because a bunch of those hedge funds then invested in a bankrupt mining company. So that's how we're going to get there.
But just for two quick seconds so that people who haven't read the book understand this, Evan does a masterful job of just talking about the criminal justice system and the difference in sentencing for whites versus minorities. And when Governor McDonnell of Virginia was sentenced for having done some pretty bad things and getting caught really with his hand in the cookie jar after the sentencing - Evan, you called up Bryan Stevenson and said to Bryan Stevenson, what do you think about this? And he pointed you to the sentencing of a young black gentleman, I think, in Chicago, and just sort of said, look at these two things and the length of time the young black man is going to spend in jail versus what McDonnell had to do.
One of the things that is very important as one reads the book to realize is that there is that sense, whether it's Rogues Hill Road or whether it's to the sentencing guidelines for people who are selling drugs on the corner versus literally taking down the financial system, there is this sense that there are two criminal justice systems, there are two sentencing guidelines, and that that sense of inequality is something that underpins the and the the fundamental fairness of our system, I guess, is what I took away from your writing.
Evan Osnos: Yeah, that's exactly the way to put it. I think in some cases, we know intellectually that there are these differences that if you are a young teenager who is picked up on a drug charge and ends up being in a sense on the receiving end of a very harsh sentence, even though the impact of that crime, the actions were very specific and were not broadly felt, it is that the hinge in your life from which it is almost impossible to recover.
And I saw this through Maurice Clark's experience. This is a guy, the guy in Chicago we talked about a moment ago. You know, he went off as a teenager for a drug crime. He and I are more or less the same age. I was born in an environment in which one thing was open to me after another. I ended up going off and was very lucky to get a great education at the same age. He goes off to prison for an attempted murder charge. This is no joke.
Willy Walker: Attempted murder charge because of a pit bull fight that he won and paraded in the middle and said afterwards, oh, that was the biggest mistake of my life. And four days later, the competing gang came and that's when he ended up shaving there. So he wasn't even trying to deal drugs. He was actually in the midst of a pit bull fight.
Evan Osnos: Exactly. What I think is so amazing is that he was succeeding within the parameters of the world that was given to him. And I'm not letting him off the hook. I'm not exonerating this guy for what he did. But, you know, if that's the world that he inhabits and you say, this is how you succeed in your world, you become the drug kingpin on your block. That's what he did. And, you know, you mentioned earlier about the fact that he was a math genius. I mean, to put it in perspective, it's exactly right. I mean, he used to follow his mother around in the grocery store as a kid and would mentally tally up the bill as she put items in the cart and would calculate the tax in his head and would then see if he got it right down to the penny when they got to the cash register.
And I often think to myself, if you took that kid who is ultimately no different in terms of intellectual firepower than somebody like Chip Skowron, who was fortunate enough to get the opportunity to go to Vanderbilt, Yale, Harvard, if somebody had just pointed the young Maurice Clark two degrees off of, you know, giving him that opportunity, taking him out of his out of his neighborhood for the summer, sent him to that summer camp, put him into an environment in which he was, as is a great expression is and I've come to really believe this, this is something I think that's a take away from the book for me and for listeners is “You can't be what you can't see.” And he didn't even know that there was the possibility of being something like a professional who would go downtown to Chicago and put on a suit every day. He didn't know that was an option for him, honestly. So that kind of set the course of his life.
Willy Walker: So jumping through to West Virginia real quick, because one of the confounding issues here, you point out in the book, West Virginia was a solidly Democratic state until the election of 2000. Karl Rove and George Bush realized that West Virginia was winnable and he was the first Republican to win West Virginia - not a reelection year, but in his first election since Herbert Hoover in 1928. So they win West Virginia.
Today, 23 years later, we think West Virginia is firmly Republican. And that's where all of you'd think that Trumpism has emanated from West Virginia. But 23 years ago, it was still a very blue state and had blue roots to it.
But you paint this picture Evan, that is honestly so depressing because you basically talk about the coal industry, you talk about mountaintop mining, you talk about the mud river. And I have pulled up. I'm not going to flash it, but I pulled up two pictures of the Mud River and the absolute environmental devastation that has come to West Virginia. You focus on this court case literally in the proceedings in the court case, they state that the land in West Virginia is only good to be a refuse site. In other words, you can't do anything else with it. You either mine it or you turn it into a waste dump. But there's nothing else to be done with the land.
They literally testify in a court case to that. As these people are getting hit with the downturn in coal mining, along comes the great financial crisis, which wipes out a whole nother swath of people. At the same time where you get Obama being elected as the first minority president in American history. Lots of attention to blacks, Latinos and to LGBTQ. Exactly at the time where this swath of middle America is going. Hang on a second. What about me? You add on top of that that in the Obama administration they cranked up EPA, which West Virginia as a state, even as you clearly outlined, is in more need of EPA protection than any state in the entire country. And yet they bemoan the EPA. They hate the EPA because they think that the EPA has taken down their industry. And so the pictures I have up on my screen are saying this is a Superfund site that needs more environmental help to clean up than you can possibly find. And then the final kind of kick to it is the opiate pandemic. You profile a young man who was a military that from West Virginia gets on the wrong side of the tracks, had been a decorated soldier comes back, shoots two guys, walks outside as he's fleeing from shooting two guys, turns around, shoots two other people and back to the exact same thing that you did in Chicago with Countrywide coming into that story. The two people he turns around and shoots are a father and a son who are on the paper route for the paper that you used to write for.
Evan Osnos: Yeah, I bet. For one thing, I really am grateful to you for kind of thinking about this story in the way that I hoped people would, which is that it feels like an epic story for me of American life, because it's life as it's lived.
Which is to say, I didn't go out looking for a case of a dramatic arc of a life story. It was right there in front of us. The guy you mentioned, Sidney Mueller, who was this Marine who went off and did exactly what the country asked of him. It's worth remembering that for a long time there's always been places in the country that give more people to the military than other places. It's West Virginia, it's Alaska, it's Montana. It's places where for a long time the military was a way that you could get up and get out.
Sidney Muller grew up in Clarksburg, West Virginia, goes off to the Marines. There was actually a moment when he was in the Marines, they were in an especially brutal area in Afghanistan. And Bob Gates, secretary of defense, flew over and actually said to his group of Marines, you guys are making a tremendous sacrifice. They'd lost more lives, I should tell you, than any other Marine unit since September 11th in any of the wars fighting in those two decades. He said, if there's anything that I can ever do, do not hesitate to ask.
Sidney Muller came home to West Virginia and he was falling into a hole. Like so many veterans, he just didn't have the support he needed. And he reached out. And I tell the story in the book. I mean, I was able to get essentially this kind of invisibility into his interactions with the VA, some of his records. And he tried over and over again to get help and it failed.
And the takeaway from that story is that I think what runs through this one place after another place is the sense of a of the question, how much do any of us you, me, Sidney Muller, Maurice Clarke, Chip Skowron, how much do we deserve what we have, both the good and the bad? And how honest can we be with ourselves about how our system is able to reward us for our best attributes and also give us forgiveness in an appropriate way when we show the capacity to try to do better and to try to get ourselves back on a productive track. The degree to which we answer those and how we answer those questions as a society has a big role to play in whether we're going to be able to pull together and rebuild confidence in the system.
Willy Walker: So let's jump to the politics of today, because right after all of this, there are a couple of data points that I'll throw out there, Evan, and then you dive in and jump on this. But there are a couple of things that really surprised me. The first is that Donald Trump copy wrote “Make America Great Again” the week after Mitt Romney lost the 2012 election. I did not know that. That is a fascinating point.
The other thing that I thought was really interesting, which I'd never heard before, was you went back to the 2009 Rick Santelli CNBC rant. I had never in my life heard anyone talk about the Rick Santelli 2009 rant. As you can imagine, I went back and looked at it. And interestingly, Rick Santelli talks about having a tea party on the weekend and that, as you point out, is what basically gave life to the Tea Party. He talks about on the floor of the Chicago Mercantile Exchange, the silent majority, which turned into a key phrase for the last over decade as it relates to the silent majority. I feel that you pointing this out, I went back and looked at and thought about how much it plays into the narrative that has evolved from there. Yet I'd never heard any give Rick Santelli credit for having kind of been the starting point of what has built into this movement.
Evan Osnos: Yeah, well, in some ways, Santelli and Trump serve a similar function in our understanding of the last 25 years in American life, because they were as much a reflection of things that were bubbling up as they were the origin of anything.
So when Rick Santelli got up there during the financial crisis and essentially gave voice to what later became the Tea Party movement, he was waving a flag that was telling us that something was happening, particularly in conservative politics, that was ultimately going to change in a profound way how the Republican Party talked about and ultimately worked with or didn't work with the Democrats.
When Donald Trump registered in 2012, I mean, four years before he became president, he registered this copyright for “Make America Great Again,” that was because in his own way, he picked up on something. He sensed that there was an opportunity for somebody to come in and to seize the party away from its traditional stewards. You know, I remember at the time the assumption was that the future of the party is somebody like Mitt Romney, maybe Jeb Bush. And instead, Donald Trump sort of took it in this totally different direction.
There is a link between what we're talking about right now and what we talked about a moment ago, which is that in both cases, you have somebody who is giving voice to the idea that the system, quote unquote, is rigged. That is an idea that is immensely powerful. And you hear it. Curiously enough, this is one of the things that I realized in the course of the book: you hear almost an identical expression from people on the right who use that expression and people on the left. You hear it from a guy like Maurice Clark, who is, after all, growing up as a black man, going to prison on the south side of Chicago. And then I heard it from friends in Clarksburg, West Virginia, who are coal miners who have found that their way of life is no longer possible. They all feel as if the system is rigged. That idea became and that's, after all, what Donald Trump said to people. And that's why he was able to build a following. Whether or not you like him or hate him, you have to acknowledge that was his thing. In some ways, I think what we're contending with now is this enduring sense of how do you restore credibility, that the system is deserving of our confidence and support. And that's the great challenge for politicians.
And I will tell you that when you look at younger politicians who are trying to move in and change the tone, change the tenor of things, whether it's Pete Buttigieg or Wes Moore, who is the new governor of Maryland, is a very interesting guy. You know, one of the things they talk about is trying to rebuild civic faith in the idea that our system understands that people feel excluded, they understand that it feels unfair and that they're trying to fix that because you can't rebuild confidence unless you address the fact that people feel as if it's unfair.
Willy Walker: So in the book you talk about Lee Hanly underwriting a study by Patrick Caddell, who was a pollster that identified the six and a half million sort of truly disenfranchised white voters - this lost kind of demographic, if you will, and at that time, that's really where all the things you just talked about as it relates to Trump registering “Make America Great Again” and some of the some of the rhetoric that started to come out. I mean, I've got so many thoughts here. I want to be clear in my question to you.
But there was so much xenophobia starting with 9/11 and then NAFTA and taking jobs and the rhetoric that came out that we need to kind of stop this inflow of immigration, the whole NRA and promoting guns. And you put forth the point that when George Floyd was tragically murdered in June of 2020, that in that month alone, 3.6 million guns were sold, the highest month of gun sales ever.
But interestingly, Evan on guns, one of the other things you said was gun ownership in the United States has actually shrunk. Back 50 years ago, 50% of Americans owned guns. Today, it's only a third of Americans, but the third that own them on over eight. Am I right?
Evan Osnos: You zeroed in on it just in an immensely illustrative fact, because you could actually take that same principle and apply it across our politics, that the fact is that it's a smaller and smaller segment of the population that owns guns. But for the ones who do, it's turned into an identity for them, it's an absolute issue and they're absolutists about it. And as a result, they can exert this disproportionate force on our politics, where if you look at the polling data, it's overwhelmingly clear more than two thirds of Americans want to see major movement on gun control, you know, over even gun owners in many cases. But you have this very slender piece of a political society that is capable through money, through its use of the media, through its kind of canny role in lobbying and in Washington, that it's able to exert a disproportionate force on politics. This gets to the core of the issue, which is that people feel as if it is why the public will doesn't end up in the actions of the government over and over.
You saw it on issues of climate change. More than two thirds of Americans wanted action on climate change, and for years you saw almost nothing happening until recently where you did see actually a significant bill that was passed in Congress. That's progress. But it was because in some ways, the political machinery had made it too easy for these kinds of micro minorities, ultimately, like the NRA, to exert extraordinary power over our ultimate political direction.
Same thing when you look at what happened if you look at the Electoral College, one of the reasons why people want to get rid of the Electoral College is that it gives essentially a disproportionate power to a minority in politics. That's not how it's supposed to work. That's one of the themes that runs through this book, is fixing the machinery in a way that allows it to actually reflect the public will.
Willy Walker: You point that out at the end of the book, Evan, where you talk about the fact that Biden won by 7 million votes, but we're not for 20,000 votes here and there, he would have lost. And similarly, you point out Bush with West Virginia in 2000 won because he won West Virginia. Had he not won West Virginia, all that happened in Florida would have been a moot point because West Virginia would have gone to Gore and Gore would have been the next president of the United States. But I think you and I are probably in agreement that getting rid of the Electoral College is probably a low probability event.
Let's talk for a moment as we finish about the positive side, because as I read the book, it gets pretty grim in the sense of we've got this problem and that problem and that problem. And most importantly, I think one of the things you point out is that if you will, and this isn't a political statement, the number of lies that President Trump said during his presidency has been widely, widely documented. What has come out of that is a sense from I think it was Michael Lewis's book, the you quote that in it I think it was Steve Bannon who said that it's not the judiciary we've got to worry about, it's the press, because the press actually tracks these things, tracks them down and puts truth forward. So the only way to deal with the press is just throw a ton of shit at them and just keep throwing shit at them all the time and then you just can't sort through it all. Which I thought was interesting and somewhat depressing.
But you also talk about the fact that transparency, the ability to mobilize things on both sides of the aisle, good and bad, on both sides of the aisle, allow people to get a voice and to actually come together and make a difference in this world. You cite some of them. Do you really think that transparency and the ability to use social media is our savior or does something else have to come into play here?
Evan Osnos: I will tell you, I am enormously encouraged by the moment that we are in now that can feel, let's be honest, very uncertain. But I'll tell you exactly what I mean. I've lived in societies that are closed societies. I lived in China for eight years. As a little kid, when my father was a reporter, we lived in the Soviet Union. I mean, I sort of understand what close societies and authoritarianism looks like and how it operates.
The fact that we are going through in this country, this kind of public agony about what is it going to take to fix the problems? How do I document them, first of all, and as we do in a book like this, and then who is the person who can carry that idea, pick up the baton, implement these ideas, who has the combination of political vision, charisma and support? That is not something that is going on right now in Moscow. There was a great phrase the other day somebody was describing. I was looking into Vladimir Putin and his ability to assemble politics, frankly, and this is not news, but has rested on a similar instinct to what they call a sort of firehose of, let's call it fertilizer, but just showering people in bullshit all the time. It makes it impossible to tell, as Steve Bannon so rightly and darkly described, makes it impossible to tell what's real and what's not, and people ultimately just disengage.
But that's what happens in a country where you're not allowed to talk about the things that are of immense public importance and interest. That's what leads a country into ruin. What we're seeing right now actually is politics. We are actually engaged in the hard work of deciding what we care about as a country. Progress is not quiet. You know, one of the really guiding lessons that I took out of this was from Frederick Douglass, actually, who said that if you want progress without noise, it's like wanting the rain without thunder and lightning. It's impossible. In fact, it's often in the quiet periods that injustice continues. And I'm not saying this as somebody who I'm not, you know, way out on the left and describing my aspirations for blowing up the system, I'm actually saying if we want to have a system that works, we have to be able to acknowledge when it is that it's not delivering fairness, when it's not giving reasonable opportunity to people who weren't born with it. If we can't have those conversations, then we're closing ourselves off from the possibility of reform and renewal.
And the biggest is tying back to the very first thing you raise in this conversation, Willy, which was China, I can say with total credibility. I mean, I lived in both of these places. The thing that differentiates us from China in terms of our capacity in the 21st century, we're both dealing with tremendous challenges domestically. But we have the infrastructure of renewal built right into our system constitutionally. Every four years, we get to try over. Every two years we get to try over. And the price of that is engagement, turning out, caring, being involved. I mean, this is something that we have that other systems, other big powers in the world today, whether it's China, Russia or elsewhere, people there don't have that luxury. And that is our secret sauce.
Willy Walker: I'm going to leave it there because that's a great and upbeat way to end the conversation. Evan, I look forward to seeing you in Sun Valley and continuing this discussion. I got four more pages of notes to discuss with you today, but the time just went away. So to everyone who joined us today, as you can tell, I was wildly impressed by “Wildfire.” Strongly encourage anyone who is interested in these issues to read it. Evan, thanks very much. And I hope everyone has a great day and we'll see you again soon.
Evan Osnos: My pleasure, Willy. Great to be with you.
Willy Walker: Thank you.
