 Next to the stage is going to be Anand Girardas, an American author. He is a former columnist for the New York Times and the author of three books. India Calling, an intimate portrait of a nation's remaking, The True American, Murder and Mercy in Texas, and most recently, Winners Take All, the elite charade of changing the world. Anand is brought to this work by a duty he feels to speak truth to power and has met controversy while trying to do it. In his own words, writers are here to say things that people with salaries can't. Girardas' work comes from the recording of observations in the field and the critique of the elite that has grown out of reporting the dialogues he sees every day. I'll leave the rest to him. Please welcome to the stage Anand Girardas. So cap. So cap. So cap. I want to begin by sending our shared thoughts to all those targeted and terrorized by the male bombs this morning. This country stands at a crossroads, look one way and it's just more polarization, division, fear, anger and violence and look another way. And there is a glimpse of another future where we actually use moments like this to come together and reclaim our common citizenship. And I hope all of you will go home today thinking about one thing you can do to be part of a weaving of this country on a dark day like today. It is great to be here in Silicon Valley or as it will soon be known, Riyadh West. Saudi Arabian investors influence in this area is so pernicious that I hear all Ubers will have swords in them starting next year. And WAG is going to shift to a children walking app because dogs are taboo in Saudi Arabia. Now if you've heard anything about my book, you may be asking yourself or it's sick burn of a subtitle, the elite charade of changing the world. You may be asking what is he doing here? Is Aziz Ansari still having his time out? Is the heatmizer not available? The truth is I'm here as a diversity speaker, not because I'm dark. This conference desperately needed someone who didn't believe that people at this conference are necessarily changing the world. This conference needed someone to say what many of you I know as a reporter secretly think, which is that an event sponsored by Blackstone, Google and the Walton Foundation is a complicated venue for discussing the pursuit of social justice. When we're done here, you may not be grateful to me, but I will be grateful to you for the chance to challenge you and the chance to challenge what may be some of your assumptions. I come at this as a writer who made an observation, an observation that will be familiar to many of you, that we live in an age on one hand of extraordinary elite generosity. Rich people giving their money away, people signing the giving pledge, a billion here, a billion there, two billionaires fighting right now over how to help the homeless in San Francisco, the bearded billionaires, beef, I call it. You go to the shopping mall, red iPhone cases to save the world, tote bags to save the world. Tom's shoes are obviously changing the world, Bono is heavily involved. Every young person on a college campus has a social enterprise idea to turn recycled poop into coffee and then send it to Rwanda. They've never been to Rwanda, but they're determined to save it from what they don't know maybe themselves. And yet this age of undeniable elite generosity sits uneasily beside an era of elite hoarding, of profound elite hoarding. The bottom half of this country on average has not gotten a raise since 1979 and we know where the money went because it went to the people in the top half and really the top 10th and really the top 1% and really the top .001%. Often the people with foundations giving back. We also know that life expectancy has actually declined in this country in some recent years which is something that doesn't really happen. The last time that happened was during the AIDS crisis. It is now happening because so many Americans are unhealthy. We also know that last year the top 1% saw their salaries grow four times faster than those of the bottom 90% of Americans. We also know that last year 82% of new wealth that was created, new wealth, forget historical legacies which you should not do but for one second forget historical legacies. 82% of new wealth created last year went to the top 1% and so the uncomfortable fact of the matter, I listened intently to a lot of the hopeful talks but the uncomfortable fact of the matter is that we live in a time here in America in which super elites are earnestly helping and frantically hoarding all at the same time. They are doing their best to give back, help out, chip in even as they tend to cling to a system that keeps them on top and locks others out. I became interested in this paradox. I wanted to understand the relationship between this elite social concern and this elite predation between this extraordinary helping and this extraordinary hoarding. I immersed myself in this world as a reporter spending time with entrepreneurs, philanthropists, a former American president who got very, very rich, young people planting the seeds of their careers and others trying to understand the central conceit of elite world changers which is the ideology and it is an ideology of doing well by doing good. What I found was that as elites have stepped into the arena of social change they haven't been content to sit in the back row. They have taken over the pursuit of social change. They have gotten on the board of social change Inc. They have taken over the pursuit of how we think about social change. And as the winners have taken over change they have changed change. They have pushed for a redefinition of change, a new kind of change that helps some people save some lives, make some difference, but above all and first things first doesn't threaten the social arrangements, the status quo that keep the winners on top. And I became persuaded through my reporting that the kinds of change the winners pursue aren't merely a drop in the bucket or insufficiently impactful to use one of their favored words. I've come to believe that the kind of winner-friendly, win-win doing well by doing good social change promoted by the winners is part of how the winners maintain the cruel system that has kept them on top. I have come to believe that a lot of elite giving therefore becomes the wingman of continued taking. Generosity becomes the wingman of injustice. Making a difference becomes the wingman of making a killing. And changing the world becomes the wingman of keeping your world and your position in it the same. I know this may be an uncomfortable notion for some of you working at what this conference calls the intersection of money and meaning, which are actually not real streets. But it is a notion you must grapple with if you want to truly be the change agents many of you aspire to be. I once heard a quote attributed to Archbishop Desmond Tutu addressing a room full of philanthropists. Your job, he said, is not to make the poor more comfortable in their chains. Your job is to break the chains. The question I would ask those of you who seek to change the world through capitalism through the spoils of capitalism with monopolies like Google and extractive financial firms like Blackstone and fortunes like the Walton Foundation built on wages that should have been paid to workers changing the world in that way is whether you are really breaking the chains or making them more comfy. For a long time when I was writing Winner's Take All, I felt alone in some of these thoughts. People don't talk to people with open notebooks. But since I have come out into the world of the book and traveled all around this country talking to people, I am left with the realization that an awakening is underway in this space and in this country. In public at forums like this, people on stage boldly profess their confidence in things like impact investing and double bottom lines and social enterprises and social venture capital and ice cream socials even and disruptive innovation to change the world and redress injustice. But then the people who boldly proclaimed those things in stage, they come talk to me, come talk to me privately and they confess profound doubts about the systems atop which they stand and the methods that they are using in their day jobs. There is a growing feeling and perhaps you, some of you feel this too, that the doing well by doing good industrial complex is to a great extent a sweet lipped fraud. That the fashion for win-win solutions is less about social justice than about protecting the winners of our age from real change. Change that would threaten their position and perhaps raise their tax rate. The confusion of the people who come and whisper to me can be explained by the prevalence of certain widespread myths. All around us are certain cultural messages that tell the supremely privileged that they can have their cake and give it to a donor advised fund too. That they can exploit workers and support a movement for social justice. That they can help cause a financial crisis and then use some of the profits from causing it to fund a CSR program to revitalize the cities they helped destroy. That they lead the search for the solutions to the problems they caused. My book is above all about these myths. The myth of the win-win which is really about winners wanting a kickback from helping those below them. The myth of Silicon Valley which casts itself as being David when it is in fact Goliath in denial of its power and responsibility. The myth of thought leaders who bounce around the lecture circuit telling winners the truths they want to hear, avoiding the truths they don't want to hear, and being rewarded handsomely with their patronage. The myth that arsonists are the best firefighters. The people who built the winners take all economy are the best qualified to attack poverty and inequality. The idea that generosity is a substitute for justice. The myth that public-private partnerships are the answer to our problems. That business as I heard a few minutes ago is the greatest tool for emancipating people, not democracy. The myth that we can change the world without touching power. When the winners of our age devote themselves to changing the world in ways that just so happen to be good for them or just so happen to be fine for them or unthreatening to them, they put themselves in the uncomfortable position of those lords and ladies in Downton Abbey who did everything they could to help the serfs except question the fact that they were the only ones who owned all the land. They put themselves in the uncomfortable position of America's founders who wrote so movingly about freedom and equality except for their slaves. They put themselves in the position of, to quote the paraphrase, Leo Tolstoy, the man who sits on a man's back choking him, thinking of always possible to save him except by getting off his back. So what do you do? What do you do? If you're persuaded by me even a little, you can first of all come to my book signing at 1 p.m. If you've been feeling this quietly, if you've been shouting this from the rooftops all along and telling yourself from some of your faces you have, what do you do? Above all, the answer to a Winner's Take All Society is a society in which the winners take less. This should be the focus of anyone working seriously on social justice today. So much of what passes for world changing in contemporary American life is putting lipstick on the pig of a bad power distribution. The work of justice in America today cannot be merely to give back and do well by doing good. It must be to change who has power. I believe that we should all be fighting for an America in which the rich and powerful have less to give away to begin with and in which they have created fewer social problems that require ex post facto remediation. I believe that the number of billionaires we have in this city, 74, and in this country and the number of billions they have is not a sign of our success but a measure of our failure and that if we keep chasing the wrong glories we will keep living the same cruelties. But I am also a realist and I understand that we live down here in a sublunary world in which there is this system right now and there are those people with money and there are those billions to be given away. So how can they do it better? First of all, by resisting the temptation to solve, solve, solve. The winners of our age should go deeper than their favorite question, what can we do? To appropriate JFK, I say ask not what you can do for your country. Ask what you've done to your country. If you're Google we don't need you to create some little initiative to save America. We need you to stop being a monopoly that sucks oxygen out of much of the economy and society of this country and is eviscerating the news business. If you're a Wall Street bank, we actually don't need you mentoring 10,000 women. We need you to just avoid causing millions of women to lose their home. If you made your fortune at Walmart, we don't need you promoting the idea of money and meaning. We need you to change how Walmart treats workers now. So first examine and unwind your own complicity. Stop causing harm before you worry about doing more good. But what about those who desire and are ready to think about giving and want to do it better? I have two pieces of advice for you. I know you all love practical advice. The first is to shift from giving back to giving up. To shift from standing on top of the indefensible mountain and throwing a few scraps down to actually having the courage, the fortitude to look at your own role in an unjust system and be willing to invest in the kind of changes that would threaten your position. It's the difference between Jeff Bezos donating a billion dollars to homelessness and Jeff Bezos donating a billion dollars, let's imagine, to a future of unions project that is actually trying to strengthen worker power. That is not giving back. That would be giving up. That would make his stock worth less, but it would be good for America and good for the world. The second shift is from crowding government out to crowding government in. Too many plutocrats in our age give in ways that work around government and continue to help government atrophy. It is possible to give differently in a way where the private giving serves as a start-up incubator for government action. And you test things in the quiet of philanthropy and then seek to mainstream them into our laws and institutions and systems. But I want to be clear, my real advice is not to those elites who would save the world. My real advice is to the rest of us, to the general public, to stop entrusting your future to the unelected elite, to stop trusting that the people with the most to lose from real change are going to deliver it. And I believe this is already happening. All across this country, people are waking up to the phoniness of what has passed for real change and setting their sights on true reform. And I want to end on this note of hope. Donald Trump does not regularly fill people with hope. But Donald Trump is the greatest gift to those of us who have been hoping for a long time that fake change by phony billionaires is the real deal. We have gotten so lucky, in a sense, to have a president who flamboyantly discredits the worst myths of the last few decades, that billionaires are going to save us, that it's possible to fight for the least among us while enriching yourself, that those who caused our problems are the best equipped to solve them. Donald Trump is the reductio ad absurdum of a culture that asks the rich to fix what they have broken. And it is my hope that when the Trump era passes, when Orange Mussolini is gone, it will not only be the end of a presidency, but the end of this gilded age and the birth of a new age of reform. Thank you very much.