Yoni Appelbaum: How America Got Stuck

Guy Kawasaki:
My name is Guy Kawasaki. This is the Remarkable People Podcast. And as you may gather, we're in the business of helping people be remarkable by finding other remarkable people to interview and find out their story and find out what they're doing and how they got to where they are.
And we have a remarkable guest, of course for you today. His name is Yoni Appelbaum, and he is the deputy executive editor of The Atlantic. And I want people to know I love The Atlantic. It is a bastion of freedom of expression and freedom of thought. And, Yoni, I want you to know I am a paid subscriber. I'm not just freeloading on your intellectual efforts. Okay?

Yoni Appelbaum:
Love to hear it.

Guy Kawasaki:
Now, Yoni has also taught at Harvard, Babson, Babson, that enlightened educational institution gave me an honorary doctorate. I love Babson. I got to make sure I pronounce this right. Is it Brandeis? How do you say that university?

Yoni Appelbaum:
Brandeis. Yeah.

Guy Kawasaki:
Brandeis. All right. So obviously I didn't go there. And I have to tell you that Yoni has one of the best stories about how he got his job ever. So I know you must be tired of telling these stories, like when people ask me, what was it like to work for Steve Jobs? But I got to ask you, please tell the story of how you got this job at The Atlantic.

Yoni Appelbaum:
I got my job by procrastinating. I was a doctoral student in American history, and what you do if you're getting a doctorate is you write a dissertation. What you actually do if you're getting a doctorate is you do almost anything to avoid writing the dissertation. It's a really big project. It's really hard.
And I was prone to distraction, and I was on my computer one day when I was supposed to be writing and clicked over and saw a new blog I'd never seen before, and the blogger had written something that I thought was wrong. So I jumped into his comment section to tell him why I thought he was wrong. This is the kind of thing a lot of people waste a lot of time doing on the internet.
But something really unusual happened, which is that he jumped into the comment section himself and said, "Oh, that's a really good point. I'm glad you said that." I thought that's unusual. So I came back the next day and engaged on his next post, and we struck up a conversation.
I was commenting anonymously and was mortified when one day he reached out to me and said, "You sound like you're a historian." And I thought, "On the internet, nobody's supposed to know if you're a dog." But I'm writing in such stilted paragraphs and in such long-winded way that it's obvious to him I'm an academic because who else talks like that?
And so he outed me, and we talked, and he was a staff writer for The Atlantic, his name was Ta-Nehisi Coates. And he was thinking out loud on his blog and inviting others into the conversation, and he's a wonderful and warm and generous guy. And he went to his editor about me. I didn't know that.
I'm sitting at my desk one day and the phone rings and the editor of The Atlantic is on the other end of the line, and he says, Ta-Nehisi says, "There's a guy in his comments section, who should be writing for us? How would you like to be a contributor to The Atlantic?" And that's how I ended up doing journalism.

Guy Kawasaki:
When I read that story, I said, "Wow, that is literally the only positive thing I've ever heard coming from commenting on somebody else's podcast on somebody else's column." That's a great story. Oh, man. But do you think it's because he has such an open mind and he's so smart? I mean, I don't know if this would work with most people.

Yoni Appelbaum:
I wrote for The Atlantic for five years, and then I got another call and they said, "Why don't you resign your post to Harvard? Give up the only profession that still offers a guarantee of lifetime employment and switch to journalism."

Guy Kawasaki:
That was an IQ test, Yoni.

Yoni Appelbaum:
And I failed. That's the sad thing. I failed. I did switch it, but it was a hard choice, right? It was another one of those branching moments in my life where I thought, "God, why would I do that? I'm doing what I love." I really loved teaching, I loved writing, and I thought, "Why would I give that up to switch to a profession that seems like it's in free fall?"
But this is the answer to your question. The two things that drew me to journalism, one was when I was an academic, I was supposed to have all the answers. I'd stand in front of the classroom and my students would ask me things and I needed to know. As a journalist, and this was I think, Ta-Nehisi's superpower, you're encouraged to be ignorant. You're not supposed to have the answers. You get this amazing privilege just because you're a journalist.
You get to pick up the phone and call people or stop them on the street corner and say, "Hey, I'd like to understand this. Could you explain it to me? Could you tell me how the world looks through your eyes? Could you explain this complicated thing that I don't get?" It was a privilege to be ignorant. It was a privilege to be curious, to get to ask the questions rather than have to have the answers. And that was one reason I left.
And I think it was the big thing about Ta-Nehisi that really set him apart was he took that to the nth degree. He is relentlessly curious. And so he was open to hearing different things from different people. And I've tried to model myself on that. And then the other part of it was academia, it's a solitary pursuit, right?
I was pursuing my own glory, my own research, sat in my own office on the end of a long hall with a lot of other brilliant people who were smarter than I was who were sitting in their offices. And sometimes I'd see them down by the coffee machine, but in the job I moved into, my job as an editor is to make other people's work better. And that just turned out to be a lot more satisfying.

Guy Kawasaki:
And pray tell, did this job change involve a physical move?

Yoni Appelbaum:
I'm glad you asked that. It involved an involuntary move. I was very happy where I was and they said, "You're going to have to leave Cambridge, Massachusetts," which is where I was living, "and move down to Washington DC if you want to take this job." And so I did.

Guy Kawasaki:
So you weren't stuck?

Yoni Appelbaum:
I wasn't, but I was thinking about it already. And what you're getting out there is the thesis of my new book, which is about moving.

Guy Kawasaki:
Okay, we will come back to the subject of Stuck because I know you're on my podcast, not because you like me, but you want people to read your book, which I understand that. Okay? But you have such an interesting background. Let me fast-forward to March 2019.
And you know what questions is coming, right? You write this piece recommending the impeachment of Donald Trump. Just tell me, when you write a piece like that at The Atlantic, what the hell happens to you? Do you just get shitloads of angry emails and what happens when you do something like that?

Yoni Appelbaum:
Yeah, it was an argument I backed my way into. I started writing a piece about President Andrew Johnson and the first impeachment. I thought, "What could I learn from this history?" And by the time I was done with the research, I thought, I've learned a big thing here, which is this is an important and valuable process, and I got to lay that out. It's actually something that Congress should be taking much more seriously than it has.
And then I published that. I threw it out into the world and discovered that not everybody agreed with me on this. In fact, a lot of the president's ardent supporters let me know in detailed and graphic ways just how profoundly they disagreed with me about this.
And some of that could be laughed off. Some of that was detailed and threatening in ways that pose a direct risk to safety. Unfortunately, our political atmosphere means that these things often move in really unpleasant directions if you're going to make a bold claim that the backlash can be switched in fierce.

Guy Kawasaki:
And today when you hear the candidate to run the FBI or the attorney generally saying, "Now we're going to hunt down all Donald Trump's enemies." You're probably on that enemies list, right? So I mean, right after they arrest Nancy Pelosi, are they going to come for you? Do you have any paranoid thoughts like that?

Yoni Appelbaum:
I think everybody might want to work as paranoid thoughts right now, it's not a subject I like to dwell on a whole lot because my ultimate responsibility is to our readers and the articles we assign, the reporting that we do, it's in the interest of pursuing the truth. And you don't want your selection of stories to be shaped by too many thoughts about how people are going to react to it.
You select the stories that are worth going after you pursue them wherever the facts lead you, and then you owe it to your readers. I owe it to our readers to write whatever it is that I come to as a conclusion without fear of favor, without worrying about what the consequences will be.

Guy Kawasaki:
Wow. Well, maybe you'll be roomies with Heather Cox Richardson. Think of the conversation the two of you could have at night. Oh, geez.

Yoni Appelbaum:
It would be a great conversation. I'd be a little intimidated. Heather was on my doctoral committee and say, I already had to pass her judgment once and would worry about what she'd say about my latest work.

Guy Kawasaki:
Now, back then, when you wrote that story, I think the attitude of many people was that impeachment is going to work, it's going to prevent the abuse of the Constitution, et cetera, et cetera. But obviously we've been proven wrong twice. So what happened going into that? There was much more optimism coming out, two-time impeachment, and now re-elected, how do you explain that?

Yoni Appelbaum:
That's a great question. I think one problem that we're all grappling with is that the founders, when they designed the constitution, expected the branches of government to be jealous of their powers.
They were balancing the branches against each other, and they just assumed that if you had an executive who was pushing the boundaries of what the executive should do and then step way over the line, that the legislative branch would say, "Whoa, hold on there. We may agree with you on policy. We may like some of what you've done, but you're upsetting the system."
And so it's our job, our constitutional responsibility to push back at that. They didn't count on the kind of toxic partisanship that has really come to predominate in this country where people tend to see things more through that partisan lens than through the constitutional one. And we're all grappling with what that means because the basic checks and balances that were built into the Constitution, they're not going to work in a highly partisan atmosphere.

Guy Kawasaki:
The only kind of checks right now we have is to the inauguration committee. And the only kind of balance is how much is a billionaire worth, that's checks and balances circa 2025. And now Al Green is looking into doing this for number three, Trump has a higher probability of a three-peat than the Kansas City Chiefs.

Yoni Appelbaum:
That's an interesting thought, right? Because the Kansas City Chiefs went out there and everybody knew what the outcome of that game was going to be before the first kickoff, and by the end it was not what people had expected. What can happen, and this is a lesson that politicians have repeatedly learned, is that you're riding high. You think the public's behind you, you feel invulnerable.
And that's precisely when people tend to overstep and overreach. The check and balance that is still there, that still operates is the participation of the American people. And I think in this administration, when it runs up against limits, that's where it's going to find them. You can be Donald Trump and order your attorney general to charge somebody with a Trumped up crime.
But they still have to go to a grand jury and get an indictment, which means that you have to persuade a dozen ordinary Americans that there's been at least enough evidence to charge somebody with a crime. Then you got to go in front of another jury and you got to secure the conviction. And again, that puts the ball back in the hands of ordinary Americans who tend to not like to be fooled, what to do, who tend to like to form their own judgments.
I would expect that if there is a check on Donald Trump's pushing the boundaries of executive authority, it's not going to come from Congress, and it will only be sustained if it comes from the courts if ordinary Americans make clear their own views and set their own fidelity to the Constitution.

Guy Kawasaki:
I want to emphasize this point. So you're saying that if the courts fail because I mean, what's the US marshals going to do? They're going to invade the White House, right? So if the courts failed because they don't have much power to enforce, but you are still optimistic because ultimately it is the will of the American people that will survive.

Yoni Appelbaum:
I have a lot of faith in the American people to eventually do the right thing when they've run out of all their options. Ultimately our democratic system does not depend on the document. It doesn't depend on the virtues of the politicians that we put in office. And thank God for that. Imagine if our democracy rested on politicians being virtuous, it would've been over a long time ago.
It really rests on the extent to which we believe in each other. And as long as Americans are committed to our common project, I tend to think that there will be elections that put people in office with whom I disagree, and elections where I'm happier about the result. But that's what will make democracy survive is the American people being committed to that common project.

Guy Kawasaki:
Yoni, every part of my body that can be crossed is crossed right now hoping you're right. Recently I got into a discussion with a history professor and I said, "Right now if you go to a history class in college or high school, they're teaching you about Samuel Jackson or the original framers of the Constitution, and they're going back hundreds of years and trying to opine and try to interpret what happened. But it seems to me that we may be living the most important and interesting time ever in American history."
So I said, "Why are you constantly referring to the past? You should just be studying current events every day now, because 200 years from now, people are going to be looking back and saying, 'Who was this Donald Trump?"" How did it happen?
And the history professor said, "You cannot do that. You have to use history to understand the present. So we have to teach about Clinton and Nixon and Jackson in order to understand today." So do you agree with that or can history today in such an interesting time, just be the study of current events?

Yoni Appelbaum:
When I was a boy, I sometimes resented that I didn't get to live through any great momentous events. There were no wars raging, we were not in a great depression. It's the kind of childish thought that a lot of us are prone to. And then all of a sudden you find yourself in the middle of very interesting events and crave just a small hint of normalcy.
It's a tough moment to be living through, and there's enough to see every day that you could occupy yourself just chronicling what we see unfolding around us. But the past is actually really valuable, in two ways. One is it helps us understand how we've gotten to where we are, but the other way that you can look at the past is as a palimpsest of possibilities, so much of what we see at present can feel foreordained. It can feel as if there's no other option.
This is the way things are. This is the way things were meant to be. And when you go back into the past, it's a strange world. People did things really differently. And you come to understand that the way we do things today is as much a result of accident, of contingency as it is of inevitability.
And to me, that gives me a lot of hope in this moment because it means that the things that feel like historical inevitabilities, things that feel as if they're bound to happen, that we're stuck on this one track and we're barreling ahead toward the future. That's not how the past has usually unfolded, right? Things happen unexpectedly, contingent events intervene.
People organize themselves and decide collectively to make change in ways that nobody had anticipated. And when you look back into that kind of history, I think it's not just about explaining how we got to this moment, it's also a way of imagining other directions we could take.

Guy Kawasaki:
If we're sitting here trying to imagine directions. And a podcaster says to you, "So yes, you're a historian, you understand what happened in the past. You understand what's possible. Now you're deputy executive editor of The Atlantic."

Yoni Appelbaum:
Oh, you nailed it that time.

Guy Kawasaki:
So give me some practical tips about what can I do to help preserve the America I love?

Yoni Appelbaum:
Yeah, I can't give any simple solutions because it's not a simple problem that we face. The first thing I'd suggest is actually get involved with your community at the local level. That's the place to start. And by involved not tweeting or posting or clicking like on somebody else's post, too often we become political hobbyists who follow politics as if we were following the NFL.
And you're sitting on your couch cheering for the quarterback, who threw us the deep strike and feeling as if you're putting on that special game day jersey made a big difference. That's fandom, right? That's really different than going out there on the field yourself. And so the first way to make a difference is to stop being a fan, stop being somebody who's a spectator, who's doing this on social media.
And to start being a participant, to come off the bench to say, "Okay, I'm going in and maybe I can't fix the world, but I can make a difference with my local school board. I can make a difference with something that's happening in my local community. I can get back. I can find a way to affect positive change in the world immediately around me." And I think that's tremendously empowering. I think it changes our whole attitudes.
If you're out there making a positive change in the world, other possibilities open up. So that's the second thing is to think about how to scale that change. If you have people who are really invested in the country, not as it is, but as they think it should be, as they think it could be, and they're willing to work together in honor to realize that vision and they start to hook up with each other, they start to build. We've seen too many social movements in the last couple of decades.
They call millions of people out into the streets, and they feel as if they're going to change everything. And then everybody goes home and there's no infrastructure there. There's not weekly meetings where somebody's keeping the minutes and somebody else is making a motion. That's how Americans used to affect social change. They built this infrastructure slowly from the ground up.
It was hard work, it was difficult work, but it meant that when something big happened, there was an infrastructure to activate. It meant that after everybody went home from the rally, there was follow-up and they said, "Hey, and on Tuesday, please write to your senator. And on Wednesday we're looking for people to come testify to the local city council."
Without that infrastructure, it's really, really hard, no matter how well-intentioned people are to affect change, right? So you start at the local level, you hook up with other activists, other people who are just ordinary Americans trying to make the world a little bit better.
And you create that infrastructure and then ultimately it scales the national level where politicians are really reactive craving creatures. When they see that people are well organized, when they're articulating what they want, it doesn't actually take a majority of the population to move. It takes a large chunk of the population that makes it clear that it has a set of priorities that they will hold politicians accountable for pursuing.
And politicians will respond to that incentive ten times out of ten. I think it's one thing that Donald Trump has done really well is he's made it entirely clear to all Republican elected officeholders that his voters will respond to him, they will show up, they will vote, and they will vote against the people who cross him. If you want to push back against that, you've got to show that you can be equally powerful at organizing from the bottom up.

Guy Kawasaki:
Okay. All right. Let's switch to your book for a second. All right, so walk me through the gist of your book Stuck, about how the lack of mobility is a key factor in American society today. Unstuck. My mind about Stuck.

Yoni Appelbaum:
I started writing this book more than a decade ago. I was living in Cambridge. I was in an apartment that was already getting a little too small for my family, and I could look out the window at the streets around me. And I knew as a historian something about the neighborhood I was living in. It was a special neighborhood. For a hundred years it had been a neighborhood where the children of immigrants moved in and moved up.
One wave after another, after another, had gotten onto that bottom rung of the American ladder of opportunity. And they kept climbing. They started in that neighborhood and they kept going. And by the time I lived there, I could look out that window and I mostly saw young professionals walking by. The city I was living in had lost two thirds of its kids, families couldn't afford to live there anymore.
And I thought, "This is really weird. How was it able to accommodate all that growth for all those years and bring in so many different people seeking opportunity in America and help them find it?" And now I can't do that anymore. Now the people I'm talking to are moving out. The pastors at the local churches were telling me that their parking lots fell on Sunday because their parishioners had all moved to other communities.
They drive back on Sunday, but there was nobody to fill the pews. Something had gone very badly wrong in this place and I wanted to know what it was. And I started digging. And what I landed on eventually was that we had given communities a set of tools that had broken the most powerful part of the American idea. That was that you had the opportunity as an individual to move toward opportunity and to leave the circumstances of your birth, the identities you'd inherited.
You had the option, you could embrace them or you could build your own identity. You could stay where you were or you could move someplace new and over and over and over again, the people who move someplace new, they thrive, their children thrive.
They were able to go toward the new opportunities that were opening up in some other part of the country in some other part of their own community. And as long as we gave people the chance to do that, this society became more equal over time. It spread rights more broadly over time. And as we've rolled that back over the last fifty years and really priced people out of the prosperous places, it's broken.

Guy Kawasaki:
I mean, why can't somebody move? Because my experience, I moved from Honolulu to where I went to undergraduate, then I moved to LA and then I moved to Orange County. Then I came back and I went to San Francisco, I went to Atherton, I went to Santa Cruz, I went to Watsonville. I've moved six, seven times. So what is preventing people from moving? It's not like there's immigration. You can't move to Texas unless you get a resident card or something.

Yoni Appelbaum:
Yeah, no, I love the way you laid out that sequence of moves. I love asking people for their stories. And I bet a lot of your listeners have stories like that themselves where they moved many times in their lives, and those are very American stories. It used to be the case in this country that it was like you needed a permit. If you moved into a community in America, in the colonial period, they could warn you out.
Even if you owned a house, even if you'd rented property, even if you had a job, they could deliver a notice to your door that said, "We don't want you here." And they did it. They did it routinely. They did it often to poor people. They did it to racial minorities. They did it for people who were moving in where there was already a blacksmith in town and they didn't want a second one.
This was like European societies. It was a very closed society. You couldn't just live where you wanted. You needed the permission of the community to accept you. And then right around 1800, we launched this legal revolution. For the first time in world history, instead of the communities choosing their people in America we say, "People can choose their own communities. If you can find a place to live in that community, you can establish residence in that community."
Not because anybody gave you permission, but just because you decided it was where going to live. Residence will be a matter of intent rather than acceptance. That was a revolutionary thing that communities no longer got to function like members-only clubs, but they used to.
So that was what we got right. And then what we got wrong was that after a hundred years of remarkable fluidity, and in the nineteenth century, maybe one out of three Americans was moving every year. Today it's fallen to one out of thirteen. 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 and Modesto, California, where the town really, really doesn't want any Chinese immigrants living within its borders.
And 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, burning 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. Well 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 a hundred years of almost unlimited mobility, America starts to roll it back.

Guy Kawasaki:
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? They're not going to say it's because they're Chinese. So how do they do it today?

Yoni Appelbaum:
Yeah, 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 poor 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, they'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. And 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. There is a way in which we've come up with polite ways to talk about segregating ourselves economically. And in America, if you segregate yourself economically, it usually means segregating yourself racially too.

Guy Kawasaki:
You mentioned three ways to deal with it. This is consistency, tolerance, and an abundance, right? Now, if I may paraphrase those three. So consistency means that there's not local regulations. It's 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?" You'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 hope you don't run for office on that platform.

Yoni Appelbaum:
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 multifamily housing on your block?" Usually they'll say, no. We're all change-averse. We're used to the way things are. And as you said, should there be an apartment building across the street? Most people will say, "No, I don't want an apartment building."
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? Do 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. We've broken that. It's embedded 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 build in your neighborhood so that new families can move in. So the firefighters have a place to live." My experience at least is people say, "Yeah, I'm willing to pay that price. That's a good trade."

Guy Kawasaki:
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. I'm already spending too much time in my G class." I need to get a new set of friends, Yoni.

Yoni Appelbaum:
No, it is 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've 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. They pulled it off. They spread it. By the time the Supreme Court hears the first zoning case, Washington DC is zoned and they're walking to court to their jobs through a zoned city.
And it comes to seem 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.
Remember how we talked about America starts as members-only clubs these communities that could warn you out if you were poor, if you had the wrong skin color? 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. And 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." There's a way in which 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 out.

Guy Kawasaki:
I would make the case that based on the last few months anyway, that when you talk about Stuck, your book is primarily about within America moving, right? But right now, getting into America is even a bigger “stuck” 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. What's the consequence of trying to prevent people from coming to America?

Yoni Appelbaum:
So first you want me to advocate apartment buildings in Atherton and now you're asking me to go after immigration, Guy.

Guy Kawasaki:
Exactly.

Yoni Appelbaum:
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.
People 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 than they could and much more likely to be really resentful of immigration, to see it as diminishing their possibilities. If 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 zero-sum 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 then they started off with.
And 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.

Guy Kawasaki:
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?

Yoni Appelbaum:
That is what the psychologists tell me. And 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.

Guy Kawasaki:
All right, so I'm going to switch gears again. I'm don't worry. We'll let you plug your book at the end. Okay? So now do you believe that 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.
But it seems to me, since you made that kind of sentiment, 2019, 2020, it seems to me that they 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?

Yoni Appelbaum:
Yeah, that's a great question. And there were a lot of people out there are suggesting that there was some irresistible demographic tide 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, and 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 ways, 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." And 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 there are other politicians don't seem able to do it.

Guy Kawasaki:
Okay, I 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 yet I've learned that young Black men and young Hispanic men and young Muslim men and all that, 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. So explain this to me.

Yoni Appelbaum:
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 disqualification. 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 them."
Another way to think about it is by thinking about what they call negative polarization. So not 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?
And I think for an awful lot of Americans, and you'll forgive me for this, is one of the things I'm getting out 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 percent of college matriculants are now women. Men are much less likely to be going to college than their female peers. They'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're 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 I think that Donald Trump has done brilliantly that Democrats have really struggled to match.

Guy Kawasaki:
I got to tell you, Yoni, if I had not lived through it, I would not believe it. If this happened 200 years ago, I will say, "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.

Yoni Appelbaum:
All right.

Guy Kawasaki:
And the last heavy question is what's your thoughts on if and when America will die?

Yoni Appelbaum:
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. We're at some risk of 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, as 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.

Guy Kawasaki:
Like I said before, every part of my body that can cross is now crossed again. Yeah, thank you. Okay, so some quickie questions for you. Okay. First, where do you get your news?

Yoni Appelbaum:
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.

Guy Kawasaki:
Okay. So tell us what are the things you disagree with?

Yoni Appelbaum:
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's wrong.

Guy Kawasaki:
Okay, and which newspapers are you opening when you look for these op-eds?

Yoni Appelbaum:
I 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.

Guy Kawasaki:
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 the WIRED?

Yoni Appelbaum:
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. And WIRED is uniquely well positioned to cover that because they understand the Valley, they're familiar with the players and a lot of the outlets that are based in DC, they're covering it like foreign correspondents. "Wow, these Silicon Valley people, who are they? What are they up to?" But WIRED is there to bring leaders to that story.

Guy Kawasaki:
Madisun, make a note that we got to go subscribe and pay a subscription to WIRED. I've been forgetting to do that. All right, next quick question. Do you participate in social media at all or it's just a waste of time?

Yoni Appelbaum:
More than I should. I'm on X.

Guy Kawasaki:
You're on X.

Yoni Appelbaum:
I am.

Guy Kawasaki:
You're a collaborator. What?

Yoni Appelbaum:
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, 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, and remind me that mine is not the only way to see things.

Guy Kawasaki:
Okay, I get the point of read-only access, but are you participating? Are you posting it and commenting or you're just using it as a data source?

Yoni Appelbaum:
Not as much as I did. It's really hard to have a meaningful conversation on social media these days.

Guy Kawasaki:
Okay, so that's the end of my questions. And this has been a very, very stimulating episode. And I like to give authors because Madisun and I, we've authored a few books too. So I just want to give you this opportunity for you to pitch Stuck as your book so that listeners can say, "Well, I got to go read that book."

Yoni Appelbaum:
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. We 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 rules 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.
It was an annual ritual that people would come over from Europe just to watch all the carts carrying 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 could 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 in a different way. At least I did as I wrote the book. And I hope that listeners will read the book, they'll see their own stories in there and they'll see their country in a new way.

Guy Kawasaki:
All right, Yoni, thank you so much. I mean, 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 and bitch, you 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. And I will 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 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 Appelbaum, and he is the deputy of executive editor of The Atlantic, one of my favorite publications. So I think he's helped us be remarkable.
And my thanks to Madisun Nuismer, producer and co-author, Tessa Nuismer, researcher, and then the two sound design engineers, which is Shannon Hernandez and Jeff Sieh. 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.