Yoni Appelbaum: How America Got Stuck

25:44That was like a revolutionary thing, right? That communities no longer got to function like members-only clubs, but they used you. So that was what we got right. And then what we got wrong was that after 100 years of remarkable fluidity, and these are in the 19th century, maybe one out of three Americans was moving every year. Today, it's fallen to one out of 13. The thing that shifts is that we give communities a whole new set of tools. And it starts actually, the very first tool starts in 1885 in Modesto, California, where the town really, really doesn't want any Chinese immigrants living within its borders.

26:23And they try all kinds of ways to get rid of the Chinese. They try arson, burning down their buildings. They try vigilante violence. They come in, they round them up, they beat them. And they can't force them out because those Chinese residents want the same thing everybody else wants, right? They want opportunity. They want better lives for their kids. They can see that Modesto is going to give that. And then they hit on this really ingenious solution. They say, well, we can't pass laws that discriminate against the Chinese because the courts won't let us do that. And beating them up hasn't worked.

26:52Burning them out hasn't worked. But we could pass a law in this town which says that the laundries, which were the only thing that would employ the Chinese at that point, they all have to be in this one narrow part of town, Chinatown. We'll push them back in. And that was the first American zoning statute. It's the first time that a municipality passes a zoning rule. It was to push the Chinese out of Modesto and back into Chinatown. And that tool proves remarkably powerful. So after 100 years of almost unlimited mobility, America starts to roll it back. But wouldn't somebody say that the reason why there are zoning regulations is to prevent excessive traffic or excessive population or something like that?

27:39They're not going to say it's because they're Chinese. So, like, how do they do it today? Yeah, the amazing thing about 1885 is they actually said it. They said, this is a pretext, which is sort of, as a historian, it's a wonderful thing to see somebody say the quiet part loud like that. But yeah, there's lots of good reasons to regulate land use. Where you run into trouble is where you let people create one set of rules for really rich areas and another set of rules for the poorer areas. Because always those rules will be rigged against the poor. And today, the zoning rules that go into affluent areas are often very well-intentioned.

28:17They're about protecting the environment, protecting the history of the community. They're about worrying about traffic and light and shadow. There's always a good reason not to build. But the way I've come to think of this is it's a little bit like dropping an apple core on the sidewalk. If I drop one apple core on the sidewalk, I'm not really making the world much worse off. If everybody drops their apple core on the sidewalk, pretty soon that sidewalk gets a rat infested, smelly, disgusting, right? It's the same thing with blocking buildings. For zoning rules, you can create rules that apply really well in any individual circumstance.

28:52And if you block one building, that's not a big deal. If you block all the buildings, then there's no longer a way in. And so these rules that come out of a history of discrimination get sort of laundered over time where we come up with polite ways to talk about it. You're right. Nobody these days says, oh, I'm zoning this for single family homes because I don't want any Hispanic immigrants moving into my community. Instead, they say, I'm zoning this for single family homes because apartment buildings are not a fit for the character of this place. But they sometimes mean that they're more worried about the characters in those apartment buildings.

29:26There is a way in which we've come up with light ways to talk about segregating ourselves economically. And in America, if you segregate yourself economically, it usually means segregating yourself racially too. Now, you mentioned three ways to deal with it. This is consistency, tolerance, and abundance, right? Now, if I may paraphrase those three. So consistency means that there's not local regulations. It's like consistent for the entire state, at least, let's say. And then tolerance is tolerance of differences and abundance means create more housing. But as I read that, I said, man, this guy, can you name three more impossible things to do?

30:06You're going to go to this progressive mafia and say, all right, so we're going to have no more local zoning. We're going to have you understanding other people's frameworks and skin colors and religions and genders and sexual orientation. And we want you to build more housing. man i i hope you don't run for office on that platform yeah in some ways it's a tough sell but i'll tell you this if you walk up to somebody and say do you want um multifamily housing on your block usually they'll say no we're all changeovers we're used to the way things are and you know if you said should there be an apartment building across the street most people say no i don't want but that's not the only way you can ask the question you can ask them do you think that your neighborhood should be a place where young families can still move in?

30:53Do you think that the service workers who are making your life possible, the daycare workers and the hospital nurses and the firefighters, should they get to live in the same town where they're providing services on behalf of the people? Do you think that your community should be welcoming to people of diverse backgrounds or reserved for the rich? If you ask the questions that way, Americans will overwhelmingly say, no, no, I want opportunities for families. And if the price I have to pay is that there's an apartment building in a neighborhood of single family homes, I'm happy to pay it. And so a lot of this depends on whether you see the problem as one isolated building where you don't want the change or whether you can help people zoom out and see the bigger picture and say, this was a country that grew prosperous and diverse because it let people move toward opportunity.

31:44We've broken that. It's embittered our politics. It is the thing that, above all else, I genuinely believe drove support for Donald Trump. It was the rage he tapped into, the sense that people had that there were islands of prosperity that had walled themselves off from the rest of the country. And he was angry at the right people, right? He was championing their cause. People really felt stuck in their lives. And if you put it to them like that, it'd be like, do you want to fix America? Do you want to restore the American dream? What you have to do is let somebody builds in your neighborhood so that new families can move in, so the firefighters have a place to live.

32:16My experience at least is people say, yeah, I'm willing to pay that price. That's a good trade. I mean, you must run around with different people than I do, Yoni, because if I ask people that I know, and let's take the extreme example of Atherton, California, the most expensive zip code in the United States. If I said to them, don't you want to make it so that young families can move here so your service workers don't have as difficult a commute and blah, blah. They would say, nope, nope, I like it. I want minimum zoning of two acres and I don't want any affordable housing. I don't want any more traffic.

32:51I'm already spending too much time in my G class. I need to get a new set of friends zoning. No, it's a good objection that you're raising, right? And I don't mean to sugarcoat this too much. A hundred years ago, and it's really that recent, we gave towns a new set of tools they'd never had before. Zoning wasn't legal. When people started passing zoning laws, they knew it was unconstitutional, that they were deliberately trying to spread it around the country so fast that by the time it got to the Supreme Court, it would be too widespread to undo. The drafters of zoning rules understood that what they were undertaking was like a legal revolution and that if the courts heard about it too early, it wouldn't take.

33:30They pulled it off. They spread it. You know, by the time the Supreme Court hears the first zoning case, Washington, D.C. is zoned and they're walking to court to their jobs through a zoned city and it comes to scene unimaginable that you could roll it back but it's a recent change and it came from states delegating powers down to local communities and what we've seen over time is that the richer those communities are the better educated their inhabitants are the better able they are to use these rules in order to create a members-only club back out of their community right remember we talked about america It starts as members-only clubs, these communities that could warn you out if you were poor, if you had the wrong skin color.

34:10Like, we're back to that now. Communities today have figured out how to build new walls around themselves, how to wall themselves off. But there's no reason that they have to have that power. They didn't historically have that power. When they got that power, everyone had initially thought it was unconstitutional. And it's up to the states. The states have the capacity to say, most of the voters in this state don't get to live in Atherton. And what we're going to do is try to create a society that shares prosperity more broadly. If Atherton's got great schools, and let's build more housing in Atherton so that more kids get to go to those schools.

34:42And that will be good for all of us because those kids, they're going to grow up to be the next generation of venture capital barons out on Sand Hill Road, right? There's a way in which, you know, rather than creating an elite that's self-perpetuating, if you allow people to move, you can create a genuinely meritocratic society that gives new opportunities for new waves of people to move up. Up next on Remarkable People. I think this country is an amazingly resilient place. America will die if it chokes itself off, if it loses its optimism, if it loses its ability to innovate, if it loses its openness to change.

35:20We're at some risk for that right now. That is the direction, I think, in which Donald Trump is pointing us. And so I don't mean to suggest that America is invulnerable. But I think that fundamentally, most Americans view this as a land of opportunity, think that the country is stronger because it has their neighbors in it too. And as long as we don't lose sight of those fundamental values, I think America will survive a heck of a lot longer than I will.

36:02Thank you to all our regular podcast listeners. It's our pleasure and honor to make the show for you. If you find our show valuable, please do us a favor and subscribe, rate, and review it. Even better, forward it to a friend. A big mahalo to you for doing this. You're listening to Remarkable People with Guy Kawasaki. I would make the case that, based on the last few months anyway, that when you talk about stock, your book is primarily about within America moving, right? But right now, getting into America is even a bigger stock problem. If the climate of today were true when my great-grandparents tried to move from Japan to Hawaii, I would be working at a Starbucks in Hiroshima right now.

36:54What's the consequence of trying to prevent people from coming to America? So first you want me to advocate apartment buildings in Atherton, and now you're asking me to go after immigrants. Exactly. Exactly. No, but it's a good question. And it's not unrelated, right? Whatever you think our immigration policy should be, whatever the right level of immigration is, whatever the right enforcement mechanisms are, I don't think anyone doubts for a moment that immigration is one of America's great strengths. We have brought so many talented people to this country through the years. And I know something about the psychology that comes with mobility.

37:34People who feel stuck who are born someplace and want to leave and can't. They change psychologically. They grow more cynical, more pessimistic about the world, more hostile to outsiders. They tend to see the world as a zero-sum game in which anyone new coming into their community is dividing the same pie into smaller slices. And that, frankly, describes a good number of Trump supporters who were much more likely than Democratic voters to still live in the communities in which they were born, much more likely to report that they wanted to move when they could, and much more likely to be really resentful of immigration, to see it as diminishing their possibilities.

38:17If you let that same person move toward opportunity, they get a sense of agency in their own lives. Suddenly, instead of the world acting on them, they're taking control of their own lives. They're making their own decisions. That's really empowering. It's not just empowering. It makes them more optimistic, and it does something else. they stop seeing the world as a CSM game. They start to understand that they've moved toward opportunity, the place where their living will thrive if others have that same chance. They start to see the pie getting bigger. And instead of somebody else taking a slice out of that pie, diminishing their slice, they understand that together they can make that pie big enough that everybody gets a larger slice than they started off with.

38:58And it sounds a little counterintuitive, but one of the things that has changed the American debate over immigration is that more and more Americans are stuck where they are and feel cynical about the world because they're not getting in their country the kinds of opportunities they expected to have. If you can restore that sense of agency, of mobility, you can restore the kind of optimism that had for a long time fueled a unique American ability to absorb new waves of immigrants and to build a cohesive country. So wait, let me make sure I got this right. So are you saying that if Americans had a greater sense, and it was actually true, of mobility, that we would be more empathetic and tolerant of immigrants moving into America?

39:46That is what the psychologists tell me. When you look at people who have moved in the last year, they feel better about the world. They are more tolerant of others. They're more likely to reach out to others of diverse backgrounds. And when you look at people who want to move and can't, the opposite things are true. All right. So I'm going to switch gears again. Don't worry. We'll let you plug your book at the end. Okay. So now, do you believe that the, because I caught this sentiment earlier in your writing that the Republican Party is fighting a battle they cannot win against the pure math of demographics.

40:26But it seems to me, since you made that kind of sentiment, 2019, 2020, it seems to me that they have disproven that, that they are not fighting a losing battle. They own all three branches. They theoretically are more popular than ever. So what happened to this demographic inevitability? Yeah, that's a great question. And there were a lot of people out there suggesting that there was some irresistible demographic tie that was going to sweep Republicans from power. I think the most interesting thing that Donald Trump has done is found ways to build his support, particularly among young men who don't have the benefits of a college education.

41:10And he's done that across racial boundaries. In some ways, we should all be happy about this. American politics was becoming increasingly racial polarized and Donald Trump has depolarized it a little bit. In other words, it's really worrying because some of the appeal that he's exercised is about enlarging. He did what the Republicans, I thought, needed to do, just not the way I was hoping they would do it, right? He enlarged a sense of who could be a Republican. He said, I'll take people of all backgrounds, of all colors. We'll build that kind of party and we'll do it through our hatred and resentment of them.

41:46And so he managed to switch the us and them. He enlarged the Republican us by targeting them, progressives, liberal elites. And that was a very effective political message for Donald Trump. It still ultimately doesn't leave the Republicans in a great spot where they have struggled when Donald Trump is not at the top of the ticket. He has fused this coalition of resentment together, but it's not a coalition that holds in midterm elections. It's not a coalition that holds in gubernatorial races. There, they continue to face this problem that Trump can weld these folks together, but their other politicians don't seem able to do it.

42:26I need a Harvard-educated brain or Harvard professor to explain to me how Donald Trump did this. Because from the outside looking in, I completely agree with the demographic inevitability. But then I've learned that young black men and young Hispanic men and young Muslim men and all, they voted for Donald Trump. Explain that to me that this guy says that the Mexicans are rapists and drug dealers and the black people are all like criminals and the Muslims are terrorists, but their young people are voting for me. I'm having an out-of-body experience. I only went to Stanford. I didn't go to Harvard.

43:06So explain this to me. I think this is a question a lot of people have. And there's two ways to think about political preferences. One is as shaped by a bunch of disqualifications. So you look at it and you say, well, this candidate said this and that and the other thing, and I don't agree with that. I'm not going to back him. Another way to think about it is by thinking about what they call negative polarization. So not, you know, what is this candidate and what's disqualified them, but rather, who does this candidate resent? Who do they hate? Do they hate the same people that I hate? Are their enemies the same as my enemies?

43:40And I think for an awful lot of Americans, and this, and you'll forgive me for this, is one of the things I'm getting at in the book. For an awful lot of Americans, there's a sense that something has gone wrong in their lives. Particularly young men without college degrees don't have access to the same kinds of jobs that they did a generation ago. We don't have the same kinds of blue-collar jobs in this country. Donald Trump has talked about that over and over again. We don't offer those young men the same kinds of opportunities. 60 % of college matriculants are now women. Men are much less likely to be going to college than their female peers.

44:13They're much less likely to wind up with full-time employment. They're much less likely to be able to build the kinds of happy and productive and satisfied lives. And Trump is a genius for spotting resentment. And he channeled that anger. That doesn't mean that he has any practical solutions. It doesn't mean that he's given them a vision that can turn their lives around. but it does mean that he was able to make them feel seen and people will overlook a lot in somebody they'll overlook the things he said they'll overlook the things he's done if he makes them feel as if they are real they are recognized that somebody has looked at their pain or their suffering understands it blames some of the same people that they blame gives them a narrative that explains why it's happening to them those are really powerful political forces and that is one thing.

45:00I think that Donald Trump has done brilliantly. The Democrats have really struggled to match. I got to tell you, Lon, if I had not lived through it, I would not believe it. If this happened 200 years ago, I was, this is impossible. There's no way that happened. But wow. Okay, I'm going to ask you one last heavy question, then I have some short questions. And the last heavy question is, what's your thoughts on if and when America will die? I think this country is an amazingly resilient place. America will die if it chokes itself off, if it loses its optimism, if it loses its ability to innovate, if it loses its openness to change.

45:43We're at some risk for that right now. That is the direction, I think, in which Donald Trump is pointing us. And so I don't mean to suggest that America is invulnerable, but I think that fundamentally, most Americans view this as a land of opportunity, think that the country is stronger because it has their neighbors in it too. And as long as we don't lose sight of those fundamental values, I think America will survive a heck of a lot longer than I will. Well, like I said before, every part of my body that can cross is now crossed again. Yeah, Yeah, thank you. Okay, so some quickie questions for you.

46:19Okay. First, where do you get your news? I get my news from mainstream outlets mostly. So I read as many newspapers and magazines as I can. And I like particularly to read magazines and newspapers that publish things I disagree with. Okay, so tell us what are the things you disagree with? I love reading op-ed pages. I love reading really smart reporting that pushes me in some direction I didn't expect to go. I already know what I think. But when I open a newspaper, I really like to read something that surprises me or tells me what I'm wrong. Which newspapers are you opening when you look for these authors?

47:04I get the New York Times, the Washington Post every day at my door. And I do that so I can share them with my kids so they can see me not staring at a phone, but actually opening a newspaper and reading it. I didn't even know there were print editions still. What do you think of the work of Katie Drummond and Wired? Because in my mind, Wired was this thing that we talk about artificial intelligence and virtual reality. And all of a sudden, it's like the new Washington Post. So what's going on with Wired? I love the reporting they're doing. And it's a reminder that part of what's happening here is a transfusion of people and values from Silicon Valley into Washington.

47:46And Wired is uniquely well positioned to cover that because they understand the Valley. They're familiar with the players. And, you know, a lot of the outlets that are based in D.C., they're covering it like foreign correspondents. Wow, these Silicon Valley people, who are they and what are they up to? But Wired is there to bring leaders to that story. Madison, make a note that we got to go subscribe Pay a subscription to Wired I've been forgetting to do that Alright, next quick question Do you participate in social media at all? Or is it just a waste of time for you? More than I should I'm on X You're on X?

48:24I am You're a collaborator, what? Well, I enjoy on X On Blue Sky on Facebook, I enjoy being reminded that other people don't see the world the way that I do. It's the biggest danger I have as a journalist is sitting in a room with a bunch of other people whose views may more or less align with mine. And if I want to be interesting, if I want to find good stories, I've got to constantly expose myself to things that might be a little enraging, but at least show me the world through a different set of eyes. And for all of its flaws, Plus, that is one thing that social media does beautifully. It can give me the perspective of somebody living in a different state, somebody with a different education, somebody with a different set of values.

49:08And remind me that mine is not the only way to see it. Okay, I get the point of read-only access, but are you participating? Are you posting and commenting, or you're just using it as a data source? Not as much as I did. It's really hard to have a meaningful conversation on social media these days. this has been a very very stimulating episode and i like to give authors because madison and i we've authored a few books too so i just want to give you this opportunity for you to pitch stock as your book so that listeners can say well i gotta go read that book i wrote this book because i wanted to understand what had gone wrong in america and what was fun about it was giving the whole historical arc, how we invented this idea of mobility.

49:57We set Americans loose to define their own identities, that this was the thing that created so much social and economic mobility in America. It made us able to welcome people from other lands. It gave us much of what we consider American values was this outgrowth of this historical accident that we had set people loose to define their own lives. And one little thing in the book that I particularly loved was discovering moving day. All the leases in a particular town or city would expire on the same day. And a quarter, a third, half the people would pick up and swap apartments, move houses, switch farms.

50:34It was an annual ritual that people would come over from Europe just to watch all the carts, carry the goods through the city, going in every direction. And getting the sense of what mobility had once meant to Americans, and then seeing how we had accidentally choked it off, It's one of those things where it's like breathing the air, right? You take it for granted. You take it for granted that you can decide where you want to live. It's easy to take for granted that we have the ability to move someplace new. But when you see how quickly we're losing it and how much is at stake, suddenly you see the world a different way.

51:06At least I did as I wrote the book, and I hope that as people read the book, they'll see their own stories in there and they'll see their country in a new and modern model. All right, Dionne. Thank you so much for me, you listeners. I hope you got these main points about fostering mobility and also of remaining optimistic in the future of America. And you can't just be optimistic. You have to actually get involved. And Yoni suggested, rather than just post it, read it, bitch, you've got to get involved and actually take action locally, do something. And I will say that for the fourth time, I think, I hope you are right.

51:45And I would tell you, subscribe, pay the subscription for The Atlantic and Wired and watch what he does. And maybe if you want to work at The Atlantic, you start commenting on Yoni's articles and he's going to reach out to you and give you a job at The Atlantic. And that would make another great story for the Remarkable People podcast. I'm Guy Kawasaki. This has been the Remarkable People podcast. our guest was Yoni Applebaum and he is the deputive executive editor of The Atlantic one of my favorite publications so I think he's helped us be remarkable and my thanks to Madison Neismar producer and co-author Tessa Neismar, researcher and then the two sound design engineers which is Shannon Hernandez and Jeff C and we are the remarkable team and I hope we made you a little bit more remarkable today Yoni, for sure you did So thank you very much.

52:47This is Remarkable People.