The Chris Voss Show - The Chris Voss Show Podcast – Capital Evolution: The New American Economy by Seth Levine, Elizabeth MacBride

Episode Date: December 7, 2025

Capital Evolution: The New American Economy by Seth Levine, Elizabeth MacBride https://www.amazon.com/Capital-Evolution-New-American-Economy/dp/1637747780 Business overtook government. Now what? The future of capitalism isn’t left or right—it’s forward. In Capital Evolution: The New American Economy, Seth Levine and Elizabeth MacBride deliver a bold and timely reassessment of capitalism in America. Drawing on decades of experience in finance, journalism, and policy, Levine and MacBride argue that capitalism isn’t the problem—it’s the outdated neoliberal version we’ve been practicing that’s failing us. From the rise of populism to the growing disillusionment among younger generations, the signs of strain are everywhere. But Levine and MacBride reveal how a new consensus—what they call Dynamic Capitalism—is already taking shape, one that balances profit with purpose, empowers the middle class, and addresses the urgent challenges of inequality and climate change. Through compelling stories of leaders like Jamie Dimon, Dan Schulman, Lisa Green Hall, and Larry Fink, Capital Evolution shows how businesses, governments, and individuals can work together to create an economy that works for everyone. This book is a call to action to embrace change, rebuild trust, and ensure capitalism remains the most dynamic force for progress the world has ever known. The future isn’t a choice between old ideologies—it’s about evolving to meet the needs of a new era. Capital Evolution is a compelling look at the changes taking hold in America’s political system, information environment, and society, asking tough questions about the rising power of businesses in our economic system. Drawing on dozens of interviews with CEOs, academics, employees, and thought leaders, venture capitalist and author Seth Levine and journalist Elizabeth MacBride boldly challenge readers to take a hard look at our divisions and their impact on American economic supremacy.

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Because you're about to go on a moment. monster education roller coaster with your brain now here's your host chris voss here from the chrisvoss show dot com ladies young with our only things that makes official welcome for 16 years going on 17 of the chris voss show over 18 years on the youtube we've been bringing the chris voss show and what we need to do is run this like an m lm from here on out where you invite five people in your downline to subscribe to the show for free Go to Goodrease.com, Fortresschusch, Christfoss, LinkedIn.com, Fortezschristch, Christfoss, Facebook.com, YouTube.com, Fortezs, Chris Foss, and all those crazy places on the interwebs in the sky.

Today, a amazing young man on the show, and we're going to be talking about his insightful book, his experiences, and how he can give you some ideas on maybe where the American economy and capitalism is going. That certainly is a discussion, I think, that is forefront in 2025, for those of you watch this 10 years from now. His book is coming out December 9th, 2025. It is entitled Capital Evolution, the New American Economy. Seth Levine joins us on the show today. We're going to be getting into it with him, and he is a longtime venture capitalist. He works with venture funds and companies around the globe.

His day job is a partner at Foundry, a Boulder, Colorado-based venture capital firm. He co-founded in 2006. He is also the co-founder and chief strategy officer of Goodbred, a small business lending platform. Easily distracted and a passion advocate for entrepreneurship, he spends his time as advisor to venture funds and companies around the world. Welcome to the show. Seth, how are you, sir? Chris, thank you for that energetic introduction. I appreciate it. It's all about the energy on the Chris Fos show. That's all we do here. We just talk with energy and say nothing. No, I'm just kidding. We say a lot of people.

We'll have a lot to say today, so we're going forward to it. Give us dot com's websites, wherever you want people to look you up on the internet. Yeah, I know, appreciate that. They can find the book at The Capital Evolution.com. Of course, they can find it on Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Books a Million, their local bookstore as well. You can find me at Seth Levine.com, L-E-V-I-N-E dot com. Seth, give us a $30,000 overview. What's in your new book?

Yeah, really, Capital Evolution is an exploration of where we sit in capitalism, a bit of a defense of capitalism, which three years ago when we started writing it wasn't exactly what I was thinking would be necessary, but obviously at this moment in time when we're talking, we've just elected a socialist mayor of New York, the largest city in the country and the financial capital of the world. So maybe it is a good time to talk about capitalism and maybe why capitalism is important, but also the book describes how 50 years of neoliberal capitalism, the style of capitalism that we've been operating under, which really supported shareholders over everything else. It hasn't necessarily served us well. And it has led us to this moment in time where inequality is rising and where sort of political instability seems

quite high, not just in the U.S., but all around the world. And that's perhaps an inevitable outcome of the neoliberal style of capitalism. So we talk through that, the history of that in the book, but then describe maybe a slight twist on capitalism that's still very much market-based, very much capitalist, but perhaps can maybe bring some people together and help the middle class and ultimately help our entire economy. Now, is this in reference this neo liberal era? Is this kind of things Nome Chomsky was talking about in the 80s? I mean, the guy that I mean, Nome is probably not a neoliberal. The guy that's most associated with it is Milton Friedman. He was famous economist. And he really, he wrote about this in kind of the 1960s,

but then in 1970, he published an article in the New York Times that was titled, the only responsibility of a corporation is to its shareholders. Yes. I'm phrasing the title slightly. And that's when those ideas at least got into sort of the public square. It was really Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher here in the U.S. and then the U.K., who kind of embodied those ideas and took them mainstream. And then that's kind of what we've been operating under for the last 50 years.

You know, people our age, Chris, like, this is sort of all we've ever known. I actually hadn't thought that deeply about it until I started writing the book. It felt like something wasn't quite working, but I hadn't really realized or at least appreciated how capitalism sort of shows up in different forms in different places. And it also, in the U.S. has showed up in different forms over time. And we in the sort of, at the end of World War II through basically in 1970, the U.S. was in what is known as colloquially as as the golden nation. of capitalism, but it was a much more sort of equal time, right? Their CEO pay wasn't quite so high relative to workers. Workers were sharing a greater percentage of revenue and ultimately therefore profits. And overall, the economy was actually growing faster, right? It was both

more stable and growing faster. And so we wanted to ask ourselves, I wrote the book with a co-author. She and I have written now a couple books together. We wanted to ask the question of, does it have to be this way? And we're not alone in that, right? I mean, really, I would probably argue that the neoliberal age has ended. We're sort of in this messy middle, like nothing has taken over yet, but really in the late teens and kind of punctuated in 2019, the business roundtable, which is this group of CEOs, about 200 CEOs of the largest companies in the United States. They came out with this statement about a purpose of a corporation. And in a Jamie diamond from JP Morgan, Chase, who we also interviewed for the book, with,

chairman of the BRT at the time. And the new statement basically said, hey, actually, there are other stakeholders that matter here, employees, suppliers, the environment, et cetera. And that was probably a good sign that things were changing. And we could debate how serious they were and whether they really implemented those ideas. But I mean, the half-life was small because it was like November 19. And then five months later, COVID was in full force. And I think we moved on to some other things. But to me, like, that was a sign that the winds were changing. Now, what we move to, you know, we'll see. We outline something in the book, which we call dynamic capitalism, which is sort of a different way of thinking about capitalism.

I sure hope it's not socialism. That's not, that doesn't work from my frame of reference at all. But I think it's important that we be thoughtful about it because we, you know, we have a lot of people who feel like they're completely left out of the system right now. And presumably that's why they, you know, express themselves in our politics in the way. way that they do. Yeah. Yeah, most definitely. There's a question I have on that. Let's get into it. So I was looking actually for the Milton Friedman thing, and I couldn't remember who did it. And I just put in 80s thesis of the Wall Street greed. You know, you and I grew up. I was, I graduated from high school in 86. And so I was witness to, and you may have also been witness to this era, but we lived in the

era where Main Street ruled the world, right? Yeah. Where, It was, whether you were in a small town, there was plenty of businesses or, you know, most business, I have been to most small towns, I guess, maybe. But there was, you know, Main Street rule of the world. And then there was the rise of the big box stuff, the Walmarts, the Walmartification, big box store of America. But, you know, the Ivan Bioski era, greed is good, you know. It's funny, you cite that. And people go, yeah, that was the movie. And you're like, no, some asshole actually said that.

Yeah, someone actually said that. He was actually a criminal. I went to jail for insider trading. But I watched that whole thing rise and where it flipped. And it became, you know, job security. I watched my father and struggle with this change over a life where, you know, you no longer had the job where you work for 40 years and got a little watch at the end and the sweet retirement over to this thing.

And then the illiberalism, like you said, of Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher. I mean, him getting Wall Street to ship jobs overseas and destroy the unions, which was, you know, very illiberal. It, you know, it destroyed a lot of stuff. And so I think you're the same sort of mindset that we kind of got there from here, that Milton Freeman, they kind of, Wall Street seems to have used as like a get out of jail car. Okay, we can fire people and raise stock prices. It's all about stock prices. Yeah, and it's very so totally great. I graduated from high school in 1990, so I'm a couple years behind you, but I was all the same thing.

We grew up the same time. So I watched all of that. So not only greed is good, Boski, but also Reagan saying government isn't the solution, it's the problem. Yeah. And so then, and so we ended up in these two camps, neither of which are right, one of which was government shouldn't do anything. We want government to be as ineffective as possible. And then the other was, you know, government should step into everything. And then, of course, like most things, like neither of those two sort of polar sides make sense.

But Reagan really presided over, yeah, the greedification. Let's call it that. I like that thinking of our economy. But there's another thing that happened there, which is that company shifted from thinking to the medium to long term to just thinking in the short term, right? And there's no, there's a reason why stock-based compensation sort of took off again in the 80s. And it just, it forced executives, or I shouldn't say forced, it incented executives to think for the short term. Now, it turns out short-term thinking actually doesn't work that well. If you look at the Fortune 500, the half-life, this might be interesting to you and to listeners.

The average half-life of a company on the Fortune 500 is 20 years. These are the biggest companies in the world, right, or at least in the U.S., and they actually don't do a very good job of perpetuating themselves because 250 of them aren't going to be amongst the 500 biggest companies 20 years from now. But that's the result of this kind of short-term thinking. So one of the things that we describe in the book is one of the tenets, of dynamic capitalism is thinking for the longer term. And I think that that's quite important. You also reference something else that is really important for us to sort of address and we do in the book, which is we've treated the middle class for the last 40 years as like a resource to be extracted from, right? The middle class wages over that time period grew 12%, not to be confused

with the sort of upper management wages, which grew 900%. I mean 12% total over that entire, you know, let's say the last 30 years. It was really 78 until essentially now, so more than 30 years, 40 years. And what do we do? We piled that we are like, hey, you need to be consumers. By the way, we're going to outsource everything to China so it'll be cheap and we'll make debt readily available and cheap. And you'll figure out how to keep up with the economy by just piling debt on to more debt to more debt. And that's just unsustainable. We've kind of reached a breaking point there. And again, I think we see that. Interestingly, we see it in the rise of Mamdami in New York and the sort of, hey, I don't have a foot on the economic ladder. You know,

what free stuff can I get? But it's the same as as what drove the populism on the right as well, which is my jobs have gone away. My dad or my grandfather had a job in manufacturing. Now I can't even find a place to work, which is probably why some double-diquid percentage of Mondani voters were Trump voters and also why Trump and Mamdani had this summit when everyone is they're going to go at it and whatever and you know they kind of got along because they have very different ideas for what to do

about these problems but the overall problems or the underlying problems they talk about are not that dissimilar and in that way politics is less a continuum with a point on either end and more of a circle you know and these two points at the top actually come pretty close together yeah

it's interesting how this whole thing plays out and there's There's political aspects of it, too, like we said with Ronald Reagan and illiberalism and Margaret Thatcher, and we think we've had plenty of authors discussing that on the show. And kind of the attack on unions, because of the flip for President Johnson, the attack on the unions, the Reagan volley, and you still see that attack going on today. We saw the government unions disabled under Trump, and I think unions across the border really on the fence. I think I saw one that went bankrupt or was going to go bankrupt without some funding in Michigan the other day. I'm not sure, but it was something along those lines. I believe it was a bailed out, government bailed out union.

I think it was in Michigan or Iowa or something. Anyway, so you guys have designed, let's get to the book, because I'm kind of wandering here. You guys describe. Wandering is good, right? These are important topics and they're broad, right? I mean, I hope that people who are listening are like, this is kind of interesting stuff. And obviously my prescription would be go by the book and read about it because, you know, we spend 300 and some odd pages like really kind of digging around into that but in a very accessible

kind of you know easy to understand kind of way it's not one and one of our one of the reasons we wrote the book is because we felt like there were sort of two kind of book on on capitalism one was like written by academics that it sort of never had any real business world experience and they were kind of I don't know very heady and not very I didn't find them to be very easy to read and then the other kind was sort of like a personal journey like a CEO talks about their own experience at their one company and what they did. And we, you know, Elizabeth, my co-authors of business journalists, I've been in venture capital for 25 years. And, you know, we're real practice. Before that, I was in business. Like, we are actual, like, practitioners of business.

We felt like we would be a, maybe a better, a better pair to be talking about this than the people had been previously writing about it. Yeah. The, do you, do you, and the important thing in what you said is, you know, the one thing, man, I always say this on the show. The one thing, man can learn from his history is that man never learns from his history and thereby we go round and around and you know a lot of people think you know this is a latest president thing this is the latest two president things no this this thing's been going for 40 50 years i'm still waiting for my check i think it was in junior high when trickled down economics came out yeah was sold to the public and i'm still waiting for my check i don't know about you but in the mail somewhere in the mail somewhere

And I watched the disillusion of the middle class. And I could see it coming out of high school. Yeah. And you could see, you know, this new upending of everything. And where Wall Street was just important, it was just like, it became like a badge. We laid out 40,000 people. Oh, yeah, we can do, hold my beer. We can do more.

And the stock price goes up, right? Yeah, stock price scores. And I remember the gall of it, too, back then, because it was such a shock. You'd be like, are you guys really doing that greed thing? Like, we sent I of a Bioski to jail and you're still doing the greed thing. Okay. Well, again, to my point about the Fortune 500, it's not really working for companies in the way that they think it is. It's like a sugar high, right?

I mean, if you pound a Coke, you will have a burst of energy. It's got a lot of sugar in it and some caffeine. But there will be a crash later. And I think one of the things that we have not done well in this economy, but that we argue for. And I think the BRT, the Business Roundtable was sort of saying underneath its latest proclamation in 2019 is, hey, we should stop managing to quarter to quarter results, take a longer term view.

And, you know, there are companies that have tried to do that. I mean, Google famously described that in their IPO filing, you know, back in whatever year that was 2010, something like that, when they went public. But, you know, there was a long letter from the two founders kind of saying, hey, we're not going to manage to quarter, quarter over quarter, we want, and so if you want to invest in our stock, you should be, you know, in for the long haul. I think they've, they probably have actually mostly done that. No, they have this huge advantage of having this massive cash flow engine and it doesn't require a lot of people to, to operate that business on a relative basis.

And, you know, one of the things we talk about a lot in the book is this trend where businesses are, and we actually have a graph of it in the book, if you, if you graph the percentage of revenue, that goes to labor, to employees over time, it goes, it's gone way down. And the argument isn't that we should force companies to hire more people than they need. That's not at all what we're saying, but we do need to find more and better ways for labor to participate as owners. And so we really talk a lot about empowering an ownership economy. I like to say it's creating more capitalists, right? So, you know, some of my friends that are a little more skeptic because they're in the, you know, one percent or one-tenth of one percent. And they're like, no, we're doing pretty well.

you know why do we need to do that and say hey actually this will this will help perpetuate the economy that's working so well for you why don't we concentrate on growing the pie and maybe spend less time arguing over how we split the pie up not that that's not an irrelevant discussion to have but the much more important discussion is how do we make a bigger pie and we talk about things like GDP growth that's ultimately what we what they're saying we don't do a good job of maybe explaining it But having more capitalists, more owners, more people with a stake in our society, you know, these things are good things, right? I mean, a good example of that, by the way, is like these baby bonds.

Trump wants to call them Trump bonds, but whatever. The $1,000 that was in the BD for every child born between, I think it was 25 and 28, it hasn't been implemented yet. But things like that where people have a stake in the markets, great, let's do that stuff. But how do we do that at a larger scale? meeting more than just a couple years, and how do we enable more opportunities for people who are workers turn their labor into ownership? And we talk about some examples of that in the book, one of which, by the way, speaking about sort of 80s and greed is good, but one of them is actually

been implemented by KKR, Barbarians at the gate, which is a takeover. Jump one. And those guys were, I mean, those guys are ruthless. And yet, you know, there's this this guy that we met, Pete Stavros, is super senior at KKR. And he's implemented all of these labor employee ownership programs in these manufacturing businesses that they've invested in. And it's done incredibly well. Like it's been, it's been really effective. And he's super clear. Yeah, I mean, I think this is the right thing to do is both his parents were middle class. He grew up sort of understanding these divisions between labor and capital. But he's look, we're making more money for for us and our shareholders, right? And in that

case, I mean, KKR is public. Anyone listening could be a shareholder of KKR. But I think that's a good example, and maybe a counterintuitive example, because KKR is sort of at the zenith of capitalism, someone trying to promote these practices of employee ownership. So I don't make an argument that we should do it in any altruistic way. I think we should do it because it's better for society and it makes more money for everyone. It grows the pie. You know, I, would you say we suffer from unbridled capitalism? I've heard that term use before. I think we was trying to get an author on that. But we've talked to from time to time about you know, capitalism is great.

I think it's awesome. I'm an entrepreneur. I've been one since 18. And I think it'll be a shame if we move away from it. But it does need constraints. It does need rules, laws, regulations. Yeah. Yeah.

What are your thoughts on that? Absolutely. I mean, I guess I would describe it more as it's not even necessarily capitalism run a mock, although maybe that's a, I guess that's a reasonable way to describe it. But it's the wrong type of capitalism, right? This sole focus on shareholders has distracted us. us, and by the way, it's kind of unrealistic because no company only focuses on share. I ask a CEO, what's the most important asset of your business? They're all going to tell you their employees,

right? Now, whether they really follow that up with how they treat their employees is a separate matter, but the type of capitalism that we've been following, which is this sole focus on, on shareholders, has not been working. It's led to too much consolidation of wealth and power and opportunity in our economy. And our economy is becoming less dynamic. The American dream is actually starting to go away. 30 years ago, if you were born in the top, or excuse me, the bottom 25th percentile of wealth, you had about a 25 percent chance of dying in the top 25th percentile of wealth. Today, you've got about a 5 percent chance, right? Like the American dream at its core is that, is the ability to move up your station in life,

make more money than your parents. And it through hard work and determination, not everyone has that, but through hard work and determination actually make something of your life. But we've now constrained that our economy put shackles on that. And to me, that's a perversion of capitalism more than anything else, right? Because we are, think of it this way from an economy-wide perspective. We are giving up growth and opportunity as an economy because we are not allowing people to reach their full potential and their full economic potential specifically. Yeah, I mean, it's something that's making everyone really not happy.

Yeah. And I've watched it over 40 years, and it's interesting how, unfortunately, we think so short-term. And it's kind of, I don't know, it seems like our population or our vision of our, as a country of America, we seem to be like in the old days, we seem more long-term. Maybe I'm deluding myself as an asshole American, quote, unquote. But, you know, because we kind of think we're the best or whatever. There's a mindset there I'm referring to. But where we kind of think we're like, we're the greatest country on earth. We're perfect.

And Merck. But the one thing I've heard from CEOs, and I think I heard this specifically for one CEO we had on the show, who had worked at a public company. And I think I've run it by a few other people, and they've agreed. So I'm interested in your thoughts on this. But one of the problems the CEO cited to me was when you work with public companies, you have maybe an average of two to three years, tenure. I think it's two, the average tenure, two years.

And in those two years, you've got to do things that raise the stock price and make the board happy and make everyone money. And he told me, it's really hard, Chris, to invest in something long term because you're not going to be there to see it. And you know you're not going to be there. So you invest in, I don't know, like AI, maybe those centers that run power or whatever, right? you're not going to see that being built over two to three years finished. And so he goes, your mindset really becomes, what do I do now to bump the stock price? And of course, since, you know, what we've been talking about is this thing since the 80s, where it's, oh, we just fire a ton of people and, and oh, we also put up PR that we care about people and our employees and we're an ethical company.

We care with moral standards. And by the way, 20,000 years fired. And so he stated that to me. That's the reason it's so hard as a CEO to think long-term, like what you've been talking about because it's so short-term focused and you don't know you're going to be there. And I think in the old days, CEOs were on companies for much longer. You look at Lee Iacocca and who was the gentleman who ran. I'm thinking of the big guy who ran GE, you know, those guys.

He was a problematic figure from a particular. Yeah, he was kind of firing employees and turned out to kind of be building a house. cars. But I think your point, Chris, is well taken. So first, you are absolutely right, right? During the golden age of capitalism, there was longer tenure and a greater focus on the longer term. Now, I think some of these things become self-fulfilling. Some of these things become stories that we tell ourselves. And then because that's the story, we act in a certain way. And because we act in a certain way, it leads to a certain outcome. And I think that to the extent to which CEOs are either afraid of losing their jobs. I mean, if you, if you run a company being afraid of losing your

job, you're not going to do a good job, period. And there needs to be alignment between companies and their boards of directors. And it's a failure of governance. I feel like this a little, sometimes I'm watching football and, you know, head coach is in his second season and they're already talking about firing. And I'm like, what are you, like, this is the reason, I'm not going to diss on any specific teams, but this is the reason. I'm just like never good. because they just had so much turnover. And you have to give them a little bit of time. And the same is true for boards.

And I said on a lot of boards. These are private company boards. But I understand the overall board dynamic and the desire to like, hey, we should be making progress. So I'll be interested to see one of the CEOs that we profile in the book is Dan Shulman. He was at the time we talked to him as CEO of PayPal. He then left PayPal and sort of took some time off. Now he's just been installed as the CEO of Verizon. And I'll be interested in it.

That's a huge company. I'm sure there will be some layoffs and other like they've got they've got some he's got some work to do but he also took a very holistic view about how he treats his employees and very and specifically told us a story about sort of assuming if they were paying prevailing wages at PayPal they were fine and it turned out that there were a lot of people like super struggling right there was one story of a guy who was selling plasma to make ends meet blood plasma yeah crazy stuff and dan was like hey this is a problem we are a whatever it was at the time four billion dollar company we can afford to figure out how to pay people better. And by the way, over time, that meant

lowered employee turnover, higher employee satisfaction, higher productivity and things like that. It ultimately paid off. That'll be an example of where I'm interested to see what agreement did you have with the board coming in, right? And how is he able to act? But I would push back on that CEO, not that that wasn't his belief in what he was going to experience or was experiencing, but that if that becomes the story, then you can never get out of it. And so it's going to take some people either to have the conversation with their board and say, I'm not taking this role unless we've got a, we take a five-year view on this and I want to make some decisions that won't necessarily pay off in years one, two, and three. And it's going to take some people

who say, look, I'm doing some things that I understand will pay off for the next CEO. And that's fine with me, right? I'm planting seeds that makes sense, right? This draft class to go back to my, you know, my analogy, you know, I'm the GM and I'm drafting this class, but I, you know, I've about my eyes on another job, like, I'm going to, I'm doing the work for someone else, but that's okay. That's, that's how this works. So you guys propose this new capital evolution, basically a new way of maybe looking at capitalism, redesigning it. Can you give us kind of a framework, a quick framework on it? Yeah, let me give you, we call it dynamic capitalism. Okay. We couldn't, we couldn't, we had a few different words for it over the, over time. And we did a couple

search and replaces and we settled on dynamic capitalism. Dynamic capitalism. Dynamic capitalism is really marked by four things. One is all of which we've talked a little bit about and most of which. The first is this longer term view versus just short term thinking. The second is the empowerment of a the ownership economy. So more turn more people into capitalists. Labor as owners, not just labor as labor is like this distinction between the two. Role, but a limited role for government, right? We believe that government has a role to play in setting guard rails and reasonable regulations and things like that. But we need to be really careful about not overdoing that. I sit in Colorado where the sixth most regulated state. That is

undoubtedly been an impediment to the growth of the Colorado economy. I'm arguing and fighting to pull that back. So reasonable role for government, but not too big a role. And then the last thing is rule of law, right? Which is that we haven't touched on this. But we need to be able to operate in a world where we understand what the rules are and that we, and there are consequences for not abiding by them. And there are, there have been times more recently where it feels like maybe that's a little shakier, which is why we had to say it, I mean, it's saying it, saying this 10 years ago, would have people would have looked at me like, what are you talking about? We have the rule of law in the United States, a little less so today. And so it's worth actually saying,

this is important for the proper functioning of businesses and markets. And if you only need to go to some countries where they clearly don't have the rule of law to see what happens to markets and economies when that goes away. We do not want to do that as a country. And those are the four tenets of dynamic capital. I kind of like our new rule of law. You just pay a meme coin and you can get a bargaining. Yeah, whatever you want.

Yeah, exactly. It's pretty cool. It's who you know, what you know, Chris. Where do you pay? It's going to be funny to see we here retrace those. So you propose this new economy and is what is the core of it that maybe helps the middle class, helps consumers, you know, I believe in an abundance sort of mindset. Rising tide lifts all boats, but it seems like in the 80s the economy turned to scarcity, whereas I'm going to get mine and I'm going to get yours and I'm going to try and fuck you out of yours as much as I can. And, you know,

you see the trillion dollar pay package to Elon Musk, which is extraordinary by how poorly he's run the country, or the company, at least as of late. I mean, I mean, there are so many Tesla as I see driving around that have, they've changed the logo on the car to where it looks like a Toyota Corolla

over that Nazi salute. It was just insane. But to see someone get a trillion dollars like that, I think, I think that's a real benchmark. mark of what the real problem is with shareholder value being preeminent or billionaires being preeminent and yet people I just I just saw something today in fact I was going to post about on Facebook dollar store had its like best earnings ever and I guess blew up the market today

or yesterday so it tells you where the economy is everyone find that people are struggling right no it is yeah and and people are putting all their groceries now on Klarna and a firm and the short-term lender things. This is insane. This is like a 2008 house of cards. It doesn't work. And by the way, we're doing that as an economy. I mean, my biggest beef with the BBB was that it created $2 trillion in additional deficit

spending. So we're adding $2 trillion a year to the debt. Like that just is unfathomable and is unsustainable. I mean, Jesus. Jimmy Carter proposed a budget. This is $19, whatever, $79. or whatever it was, but it had a $20 billion deficit, and it was like the world had ended. And, you know, now we're talking trillions, it just doesn't make any sense.

So, look, there are no easy prescriptions because we, I agree with your comment about abundance. By the way, abundance both in the general concept and abundance in sort of what, you know, was argued in the book abundance, which is, hey, how do we make it easier to like actually build things and do things in the United States? The reason Texas has lower housing costs than California is because you can build a house there. and actually in that case, declining housing costs, despite the fact that there's an influx of population.

So that all makes sense. I also sometimes frame it in the like sort of zero-sum mindset that we should get out of that mindset, which is the I win you lose thing that you describe. So we need to get out of that because we need to grow the pie, not just have a pie and keep arguing about how we divvy the pie up. And to do that, we need to give more opportunity to more people. There are long-term things we can and should do around that,

around how we educate the population, maybe how we integrate AI into education or other aspects of our lives, absolutely about how we empower more people to be owners, some guardrails around what companies sort of can and can do in a bit of a different way. We talk a lot about leading into power and power generation, the U.S. I don't know that everyone sort of appreciates the extent to which the U.S. won the economy of the 20th century because of our dominance around power generation primarily in that case it was around fossil fuels but but power generation and the same thing will be true of the 21st century that the country that wins power is going to win and I worry a lot when I look at what's going on in China 35 nuclear power plants that are being built right now

as opposed to one or zero in the US it depends and also if you count like three mile island which is like a 60 year old power plant that we're going to try to refurb right we like we need to do a better job Whether it's nuclear or continuing on fossil fuels, which I think is important or, you know, or wind or solar, we need to be investing more in those areas of our economy. And it's going to create some hard tradeoffs, right, where we have to decide, can we afford to spend a trillion dollars on, you know, weapon systems that fought, you know, in the 1980s and 1990s? Is that the right way to spend money? What level of social programs is the appropriate level of social programs?

Where do we invest in education and job training so that people can increase their economic output and economic opportunity? Those are, I don't have all the answers. I mean, I have my own personal answers to those questions, but I certainly don't profess to have all the answers to that. But those are the types of questions that we're going to have to ask ourselves if we are to chart a path forward. And being able to have those discussions, I think is kind of at the heart of what we describe in the book, which is not easy, but needs to happen. We need to build some coalitions. We need to be willing to talk to people that have different opinions than we do. And we need to just think about solutions that aren't based on what worked 20 years ago,

but that are based on what might work for the next 20 years. Yeah. You know, during this discussion, I've been thinking about this offering that Elon pushes, and I don't trust Elon further than I can throw him. And, you know, he's always, I don't know if this is bait that he's playing with or reality. but he talks about having, you know, AI creating this generation where we all get, I'm not sure the term he uses, but we basically get a free paycheck. We get earned income or free income because.

Yeah, universal basic income. Universal income. Yeah. That's probably not the way to solve this when you think, because that seems like you'd just get enslaved maybe to a corporation. Yeah, I am, we touch on UBI in the book a little bit. I'm skeptical of it. it's very popular in tech circles.

I think it assuages our guilt that we're going to somehow, you know, automate the world out of jobs. I think a couple things. One is, one, as I should say, I am a techno optimist, right? Like I do,

I don't believe we know how AI is going to affect sort of the overall world, but I do believe that there are, I believe and hope that it will ultimately be positive. That doesn't mean that there will be some short-term disruptions. Oh, which you also probably learn from the outsourcing of the 90s, which we handled really badly and think about how we help people through that transition. But I also believe, I don't think that people just want, most people just want a government

handout, right? I think what there's like, I think people sometimes forget when they start talking about this stuff. And I think Elon might fall into this category that there's a certain, like people get a paycheck out of working. But they also get a dignity and a purpose out of working. and I don't think you can simply ignore that last part and just say, hey, gee, the economy is now so productive that, you know, people, you don't have to work and we'll just give you a little bit of money. I don't think that's really what people want. Now, do I think that there are things that we have to deal with now that we as individuals won't have to deal with later? And by the way, I'd remind everyone, like, there's never been a better time to be a human on planet Earth than now.

just from a like overall like quality of life we have met i mean as fucked up as our health care system is we have medicines if you you know i mean it was what a hundred years ago a little over a hundred years ago if you got an infection you might die because we didn't even have antibiotics right now we have all sorts of antibiotics you know there are there are all these things that we have that make life on planet earth which frankly for most of the existence of the human race has been pretty miserable, much, much better now, right? You'd much, much rather be alive, even if you're not, like, the life that I, that a person who is not wealthy lives in the United States is better than the life that, you know, an aristocrat in the, whatever, middle ages lived, right?

When, you know, half the population died of a black, black fever. Black flag. So, you know, I don't know that I'm answering your question directly, Chris, but I, I feel like we need to do more than just wave our hands and say, hey, everything's going to be so productive. People can have free money. I don't think that's how our economy works. And I think, and I think we need to be more productive because we need to grow our GDP. We have a big debt and we need to get, we need to grow out of it, rather than inflate out of it. That will be incredibly painful for workers. And so I think that will happen. How that looks, I mean, look, we were saying a little bit of the same stuff around the internet when it came out. We're never going to have to go to work again. And we're going to

all, you know, and one, it took like 25 years for that to happen. Like, we're finally talking over, you know, over Zoom or 20 years in the pandemic. But, but two, people came up with other things, right? And, you know, when we invented the automobile, and then there were a lot of people that made their living, you know, dealing with horses and stuff like that. At one, it was scary, right?

Literally had to walk in front of cars. They were called flaggers. They would wave a flag in front of the car because it was so scary and dangerous, right? So things that used to be seen as like, Brand new technology and incredibly scary are now no longer scary, right? Cars, airplanes, things like that. Internet are that's part of it. Those are all examples of that. And, you know, two, and another example is, look, a hundred years ago, 30 to 40 percent of the population made their living on a farm. And now 2% of us feed the rest of us, right? So it's a long way of saying, we don't know how this is going to work out. But just because we got more, efficient at farming doesn't mean that all the jobs that were on farms went away. People found different things to do. And I think ultimately that's what happens in AI. So what I worry most about is this transition period, which I think can be messy. Yeah. The trough that you have to go through

of the Luddites, I suppose, is a good example. You know, and there's a lot of crossroads. You see these younger generation that they think socialism is great. You know, I was listening to, I think, someone on the Sam Harris podcast, and I forget the name. of the person. People can message me if they want to know. I'll look it up. But they were talking about how what we've been doing in our politics and also that's been affecting the business and money and the middle class is we just keep going to more extremes. It seems like we're pushing further apart. You know, I used to be a liberal and I've also been a Republican. I used to be a liberal in the Democrat Party and the woke crowd, they just took that whole liberal thing and

And they just moved it way over there to the left. And I went, wait, I'm in the middle now. You know, me and Bill Maher are like going, hey, we used to be liberals, but that's not, you know, what you're doing is not liberal. And, you know, you see this, like you mentioned at the beginning of the show, the New York mayor, I don't know how socialist he's going to be now that he's in office. You know, it seems like lately everyone's promising to fix the ills of the middle class and then not doing it. Politicians lie. No way, Chris. so anyway

what's even interesting is we expect them to lie and then they know we expect them to lie and like how stupid is this whole equation but you know it seems like we know we just get further right and further left with our politics and then also those politics that affect the business acumen

we've you know it affects how you know everything operates and then of course the economy as well if people don't have faith in the economy if business people don't have faith in the economy you've seen the disruption with so many of my friends and own companies with the tariffs and just knowing what stable is.

You know, what's tomorrow bringing you? Can we pay the bills tomorrow or the company? That affects everything. And then, of course, the people as well. But I think we're just, we're really on this vast track to hit the wall unless something changes like what you talk about in your book. You know, the dwindling population standards we've had, you know, we've talked about a few of those things on the show.

And the whole world is dealing with that. And, of course, how that affects the economy, cost, this debt that we have with the government, you know, all these different things. But it's interesting to me that we're kind of, we keep throwing the baby out with the bathwater is what I'm trying to say with this, always going to extremes. And it's, okay, we've got to just get rid of capitalism now and just go right to socialism or whatever communism or whatever kleptocracy or oligarchy, whatever. And, yeah, we need to, we need to go, look, okay, we got a great product. to your capitalism. We just need to innovate it and improve it a little bit. We need some regulations for it so that everybody gets a share and yada, yada, yada. I don't know. I mean, you're speaking the book, right? I mean, I think that, I mean, again, when we started writing it, it was

maybe a little less extreme. But I mean, I would point to a couple examples. San Francisco went way crazy left, right? And then now under Daniel Lurie's kind of pulled back because it didn't work. By the way, it doesn't work. I say this. I have kids who are, you know, I think that age where they're interested in things other than capitalism, and I'm trying to convince them as well. We've tried socialism many, many time. We should just take a trip to Cuba because that's the longest running socialist economy. And it just does, it is completely and fundamentally broken. I've had some friends who've gone relatively recently. And they're like, hey, if you go, you need to bring your own food. Because it doesn't matter how much money you have.

They just can't produce enough food. You can have a thousand dollars to spend on dinner. It doesn't matter. If the food isn't there, it's not there. like it we know declaratively that socialism does not work right now i think what they're really saying is and i don't want to put words in monday's mouth but there are aspects of our capital at least i choose to believe they're saying there are aspects of our capitalist system that is not enabling and empowering enough people great like that i can buy but it just you know and again so i started by mentioning san francisco minneapolis went through their own version of this as well they've now pulled back in this most recent election a couple months ago, or not even earlier this month.

And so, you know, I think that we have this tendency to sort of get polarized and my optimistic hope is that we can kind of bring it a little bit back together because I've had a similar experience to you, Chris, which is that I, you know, I feel like I haven't really moved very far, but like where I sit in the political spectrum is completely changed because the ends have sort of polarized. and they become very much kind of lipness test. And I say this to, I'm friends with a decent number of, in particular, Democratic politicians, but I've said to them, like, hey, we need a big tent, right? I am a capitalist by job title and inclination. And I need to feel, if I'm going to vote, if I'm going to keep voting for at least some Democrats, I need to feel like I belong there. And if the answer is, we hate all capitalists, then okay, I'm going to go find something else.

Yeah. But yeah, going to capitalism or socialism or communism, which I think kind of, isn't that a, if you give people paychecks like Elon wants to do, isn't that communism? I don't, I don't entirely know what that is. I mean, communism is central planning, right? So it's socialism with the central planning, which is, which is different, right, because China is communist, so central plan, but also in their case, capitalists. So they've got this, like, central planning, quasi-capitalist system. it's it's odd yeah and but the problem i see with it and i guess it depends on how it's formatted like you say we're it's a little ambiguous and it might be just bait link bait

but you know the one of the things i thought about when i was young and this was a driver for me starting my first company 18 was i could see you know you and i grew up with you know probably hiding under our desks from the ussr yeah yeah exactly yeah most people don't know those old, the Levittown steel desks, Ken with sand, a nuclear bomb. Yeah. It's the wood and the steel. I think there's some abestis and radiated. Yeah, some other fun stuff that we were breathing in.

Yeah, we were all taking it in there. That's what we lived, and that's why we survived as Gen X folks. So anyway, you know, I was watching capitalism, and of course, eventually the fall on 89 of the wall. Yeah. Was it 89 or 90? 89. Yeah.

I'm getting old. Right now, people listening to the show that are. younger. Like, these two guys are really fucking old. What wall? Yeah, I don't even remember that. What is he talking about a wall? He's talking about that border on Mexico. Anyway, but I really looked at what communism had to offer. And of course, you know, everyone gets paid regardless. I think everyone gets the same pay. I don't really know exactly if that's true, or used to be true, but everyone gets paid. And to me, it squelched the spirit of human nature to excel, to dream, to work hard to desire, because you're just like, why don't I fucking want to work harder if

Bob's going to get the same paycheck I do? I'm just going to not give us. I was in, we took a family trip this a number of years ago to the Czech Republic. We were in Prague and we were, this guy was showing us around. He's probably 10 years older than we are. You know, he'd really, really lived under communism. And I was asking him about what it was like. And we were right in front of a restaurant. And so he sort of pointed to that. He was like, I remember this restaurant. But the menu at every restaurant had to be the same. It was prescribed by the, whatever, centralized power. And so there was no incentive and the prices all had to be the same. So every restaurant had the same menu and the same prices. And there was very little incentive he was describing for anyone to try to do anything with that because you had a fixed potential revenue, right? There was no opportunity to innovate or do anything with that. And he, I mean, he really described it, passionate terms, just how destructive that communist mindset is. And, you know, the challenge is that these, that generation is kind of going away, right? He probably no longer, he's, I'm sure he's in

his 70s now. He's no longer giving tours, you know, to American tourists or Western tourists anymore. And we, you know, we run the risk of kind of forgetting about what those things were like because the people that experienced that are kind of going away. And, you know, like we do with history all the time as we tend to romanticize. And I think there is a sincere belief on the part of a lot of people that what's happening now isn't working. And there's this pull to romanticize, hey, wouldn't it all be great if we shared more? And their version of that is socialism. And you know, I would encourage people who are maybe at least curious about that. Javier Millet, who's the president of Argentina, gave a very impassioned speech at the UN. This is like a year

and a half ago, where he talks about the history of Argentina, right, which was once the fifth largest economy in the world, right, back in the early 1900s, and just was destroyed, I mean, completely destroyed by socialism. And, you know, he's, Millet has his own challenges. And again, no one is perfect. I'm not, and this is not an ad for him in any way. He describes really well and eloquently how that came about and why it was such a mistake. And, you know, we should not forget that because we should learn from history. I mean, you said we tend to repeat, even though we shouldn't, but I would encourage people, especially people who are really enamored with this idea of socialism or leaning in that direction. Go look up some history and

let's like work on something that's better, right? We don't have to throw the whole thing out because it's not working exactly how we want it to be. Let's find a better way forward. And that's, I mean, again, back to the book. That's what we try to outline in the book. Here's a blueprint for how to move forward in a better way that's still. still captures all of the benefit from capitalism, which is a little bit like the Churchill quote about democracy. Like capitalism is terrible, except it's the better. It's better than all the others, right? Like I wouldn't say it's terrible, but it's got flaws. But it's better than all the others, right? So how do we capture the best of capitalism, the benefits of scale, fast moving,

dynamic markets, but do so in a way that allows more people to benefit? And it's not actually not that hard to do, you just need to decide we want to do it. So I hope a lot of politicians read the book because I don't think it's that hard. I had it out to some people and stuff. The Hugo Savas, too, I watched him destroy Venezuela. Yeah. I think Venezuela is the fourth, was the fourth richest country or in oil reserves was the fourth richest country.

I mean, it's unbelievable that, you know, it's socialism and then it's corruption, right? They kill these economies. I mean, there are so many, so many examples around the world of economies, Venezuela is a great one that are just like natural. resource rich. That should be a rich, rich, rich country. But it is not. Yeah. And then it's interesting how socialism seems to, I haven't studied this across the board, but socialism seems to lead into authoritarianism. You know, you saw that with Chavez. Yeah. Oh, yeah. You saw that. I mean, you saw that in Venezuela as well, right? Once he started much, the Federal Reserve and the

monetary things, and then they create stupid inflation. They just muck about and trying to fix everything that they break and, you know, it's just a mess. And then, of course, you see Maduro now and yada yada. This is very interesting. And, yeah, I believe we don't need to throw the baby out with the bathwater. We just need to, you know, there needs to be rules and regulations. And everyone, like you said, needs to follow the same rules. We need to know that if Bob steals, you know, Bob goes to jail.

And so I don't steal because I don't want to go to jail. Yeah, no, absolutely. Kind of weird way of doing things in life. If listeners do pick up the book, and I hope they will, we actually talk a lot about this in the epilogue and I know I know it's it's like you got to the end of the book and you probably skip the epilogue but actually in this case I wouldn't because we talk a lot about that and we talk about that specific meaning about the rule of law we talk about that specific point that you're making Chris about like why like there will there will never be enough policemen to watch over everyone if everyone starts breaking the rules and believes that the rules don't apply so we actually need a rules based economy for a bunch of those reasons I would so say it much more eloquently in the epilogue. So don't skip that part when you read the book. Thank you very much for coming the show. We really appreciate Seth and it's been a great discussion and very interesting and hopefully we learn from all this. So this is great, Chris. Thank you. Order of the book. Give us to

your dot coms really quick so people can find you on the interwebs. Yeah, absolutely. It's thecapitalevolution.com. You can find different ways to order the book. Obviously you can find it on Amazon, Barnes & Noble, your local bookstore. And you can find me at Seth Levine.com. My contact information is there as well. So if you hated what I said, write me. If you liked what I said, write me. I mean, I'm around. I love the feedback part of why I wrote the book. You don't really make money writing books, but you get a lot of feedback.

Elizabeth and I wrote the books. We were actually interested in putting these ideas out in the public sphere and getting some feedback. Yeah. And if you do write as hate mail, make sure you read the whole book. Like, it's amazing how many people, like on Facebook, I'll write some big long thing. people read like the first line and then they'll comment oh i'm sure did you read the you know and they do that with books too they'll just yeah how about this if you're going to write me about how much you hated the book take a picture of you with the book so i know you actually at least bought it and

in theory you know thumbed through it you know you know people are like i don't know i was watched the show and i hated the book and the author and you're just like maybe you should read his book i mean i mean that's i mean god knows i've got thousands of books on audible so i need to read Yeah, absolutely. By the way, we are on Audible. I was just listening to it. Yeah, you can download it there. It's probably the time this comes out. It'll basically be available. It's December night. Yeah, it should be out in three to five days. So, Seth, thank you very much for coming the show. We really appreciate it, man. Awesome. Thanks, Chris. This is great. And please come back anytime. You're welcome to comment on the American economy for us. In fact, I remember that show vividly where Reagan was on Carson and delivered that line. I think that may have been the first time he was spinning that out, the one that, the one that, to government is the problem. Yeah, and eventually he incorporated it into his inauguration speech. That's how important it was to him, right? Yeah, yeah.

Crazy. You know, any day now, we're going to get that trickle-down economic check. So I know it's coming. Tell me when you're that's there. Yeah, yeah, okay. Or out the book, folks, wherever fine books are sold, capital evolution. The new American economy, December 9th, 2025. Let's quit going to extreme folks.

Let's just fix what we have and make it better. That's really American innovation when it comes down to it, really. Let's do that. Anyway, guys, thanks for tuning in. Go to goodreads.com, foreshestchristch, Christfoss, LinkedIn.com, for chest, Christfoss, YouTube.com, for chest, Chris Foss, and Facebook.com, fordststch, Chris Foss.

Be good to each other. Stay safe. We'll see you guys. Next. You've been listening to the most amazing, intelligent podcast ever made to improve your brain and your life. Warning, consuming too much of the Chris Walsh Show podcast can lead to people thinking you're smarter, younger,

and irresistible sexy. Consume in regularly moderated amounts. consult a doctor for any resulting brain bleed all right says thank you very much for coming the show