We Can Do Hard Things · Treat Media and Glennon Doyle

WHY ARE BILLIONAIRES?!?: You’re Not Gonna Believe This B.S. with Amanda & Anand Giridharadas

January 20, 2026·1 hr 20 min·4 clips

Giridharadas reveals how billionaires used the world's poorest people as 'human shields' to deflect regulation and taxation.

Amanda opens by introducing 'You're Not Going to Believe This Bullshit,' a new recurring series she describes as Real Housewives meets History Channel meets TED Talk, aimed at exposing the hidden origins of things society treats as natural and inevitable. Her first subject is billionaires. She begins with a scale exercise: earning $1 per second, it takes 11.5 days to reach $1 million but 31.7 years to reach $1 billion, and spending $1,000 a day, you would exhaust $1 billion in 2,740 years — longer than the Roman Empire existed. She notes that eight billionaires globally own as much as 3.6 billion people, and that in the US, the top 1% hold more wealth than the bottom 90%. Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, and Mark Zuckerberg — all present at Trump's inauguration — together own more than the bottom 165 million Americans. Amanda argues the bootstrap narrative is false: Musk has received $9.2 billion in government subsidies, Bezos over $15 billion, and Walmart's below-living wages cost taxpayers $6 billion annually while the Walton family's fortune reaches $430 billion. She frames billionaires not as self-made individuals but as the product of specific post-1980 policy choices: weakened unions, capital gains taxed below labor, no wealth tax, and expanded estate tax exemptions. She cites productivity data showing that in 1970 a worker produced $20 an hour and earned $19, while in 2024 a worker produces $50 an hour and earns $25, with the gap captured by owners and executives. She then introduces guest Anand Giridharadas, author of 'Winners Take All.' Giridharadas argues that every ruling class throughout history has needed a narrative to make its power seem natural — slavery, India's caste system, feudalism — and asks what equivalent story we are currently believing. He traces the shift to Reaganism: in 1982 the US had 13 billionaires; today it has over 900. As inequality widened, elites needed a new story suited to an age of meritocracy, one centered on entrepreneurial brilliance and grit rather than inherited land or racial hierarchy. The twist, Giridharadas explains, was a second narrative: that billionaires are not just self-made but are uniquely positioned to solve the world's problems through philanthropy and technology, and that taxing or regulating them would hurt the world's poorest people. He calls this using the powerless as 'human shields' against reform. Amanda and Giridharadas then discuss how this logic requires believing billionaires' wealth came from merit — once you recognize it came from policy, their savior status collapses. They use Sheryl Sandberg's 'Lean In' versus Zohran Mamdani's universal childcare proposal as a case study: Lean In offers a solution that costs elites nothing, while universal childcare would actually improve women's lives but requires taxing the wealthy. Giridharadas notes there is research supporting childcare's impact and none supporting Lean In circles. Amanda introduces the 'cookie cartoon' metaphor — a billionaire with a mountain of cookies pointing at a construction worker and an immigrant, each with almost nothing, warning them about each other — to illustrate how manufactured division prevents solidarity. Giridharadas connects this to historical moments when cross-racial coalitions threatened elite power, noting that such moments are often met with a deliberate 'doling out' of whiteness. He shares that he has known Steve Bannon since 2011 and argues Bannon does not personally believe the white nationalist ideology he promotes, but uses it to keep poor white people from recognizing their alignment with other working people. The episode closes with a discussion of how much of the rest of the world — including countries poorer than the US — already provides universal healthcare, childcare, college, and retirement security, framing these as achievable choices rather than utopian fantasies.

As heard by us

The Jenga-tower episode that argues every institution we take as given was built for someone else's profit.

Amanda kicks off a new recurring subseries -- think Real Housewives meets History Channel meets TED Talk -- built around the argument that fixtures like the bar exam, birth control, and the CIA were not inevitable but deliberately constructed for someone's benefit.

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Why you'd press play

If the permanence of concentrated power ever struck you as suspicious but you could not say why, this is the hour.

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