Before and After the Polls Close, Bruce Mehlman at Page Annual

While the outcome of this unusual election cycle is uncertain, one thing is clear: CCOs will be treading carefully between two political minefields. At our recent Annual Conference, Bruce Mehlman, a renowned expert on the intersection of business, politics and technology, delivered a compelling session on the key drivers of today’s political climate and its implications for business leaders. We’re excited to bring you this highly-rated talk.

Transcript

[00:00:00] Eliot Mizrachi: November's just around the corner, and with it comes the culmination of one of the most contentious, unusual, and some might say exhausting election cycles in the history of the United States. While nobody can predict the future, one thing is for certain. No matter what the outcome, chief communication officers and their teams will need to continue walking a tightrope between two political minefields.

At our recent annual conference, we were joined by Bruce Mehlman. a leading voice in understanding the intersection between business, politics, and technology. He took the stage to offer a dynamic take on the drivers behind our current political climate, where it may be headed, and what it all means for business leaders.

We're bringing you this highly rated session in the hope that it provides fresh perspectives and helps you prepare for and navigate this period of intense disruption. I'm Eliot Mizrachi, and this is The New CCO.

[00:00:52] Bruce Mehlman: This is Bruce Mehlman, you don't know why you're listening to him, but hopefully you'll be glad you did. Uh, I'm gonna go through the drivers of our political environment. How did it get this messed up, and where do I think things are going, what does that mean for business?

First, the populism anti institution sentiments we're seeing all around the world are a predictable recurring bug. In democratic systems, when you don't update the operating system, the policies, the parties, the institutions, we're part of what we're doing is we're going through that disruptive period.

Number two, CCOs have, as you know, extraordinary roles, but the roles are changing. They're becoming more multi dimensional. You guys are going to have to know more things about more different areas and play in ways that I don't think the, the, the corporate diagram, the boxes would have suggested two decades ago, the CCO had to know about, had to think about, had to play on.

If you were dealing with GR two decades ago, you were doing a merger and acquisition that was controversial or something terrible has happened. So to understand where things are going, you have to start, how'd we get here? And I think too many people make the mistake of attributing it to one event or to one person.

I think it is multi decadal, three big macro trends that are, that explain the world and explain politics. Tech, geopolitical, cultural. Start with tech. I'll go back four decades. That'd be 1984. In 1984, Apple came out with a Macintosh, personal computer, Michael Dell starts selling customized PCs out of his dorm room at the University of Texas.

Over four decades, everything is digitized, networked, and made mobile. Now this creates extraordinary opportunities. If you invent smart software, you can instantly get 4 or 5 billion global consumers if it's the right sort of product. It took two weeks for Chet GPT to get to 100 million users. That is bonkers.

It's re it's changing how we do drug discovery, changing how we manage supply chains. Amazing opportunities. Yet, roughly, this is the same time when we started seeing income inequality rise. McKinsey Global Institute says we're in a superstar economy, where those with more education, more skills, more access to capital not only have a lead, But their lead is growing.

So heading into 2020, we were already amidst the backlash. This is a backlash against the data dominant players, the Facebooks, the Googles, the Amazons, as people around the world started to conclude, we're not their customers, we're their products.

Well, how does that make people feel? They feel disrupted. But in parallel, number two, go back three and a half decades. 1989 is the year the Berlin Wall came down. Between 1991 and 1994, as the Cold War ended, you had all the former nations of the Soviet Union join the global economy.

Big reforms in India and China brought billions of consumers and workers into the global economy in a way they hadn't been. In 1993, the EU was born. In 94, NAFTA passes here, and the World Trade Organization is launched. The result? Hyper globalization. Suddenly, you can tap global talent, global capital, global markets.

Amazing for businesses, amazing for universities. Yet, not an unalloyed good. A lot of Americans, a lot of social scientists say, Yeah, that's when the factory got moved, that powered the town, that's when it got moved to China. And so here again we saw a backlash. This was a backlash and it was around the world and it took the form of populists running for office. So Bolsonaro in Brazil, AMLO in Mexico. Modi in India, Boris Johnson and the Brexiteers in the U. K., Bernie Sanders, Donald Trump in the United States. To go from a steady state cold war to this unipolar moment where the whole world followed the American lead to something that's clearly new and different again, how does that make people feel?

We feel disrupted. Biggest land war happening right now again in Europe since World War II. What's going on and what does it mean for me? We don't know. In parallel with these two disruptive trends is the third trend. I'll go back five and a half decades. In 1970, America was overwhelmingly white, Christian, non college educated.

Not all that many opportunities for women in the workforce. As a result of multiple civil rights movements, as a result of accelerating immigration, we're a much more diverse society. It had been 10 percent of Americans got a college degree in 1970, it's up to 38 percent today. Far more opportunities for women in the workforce, many more channels for new voices to get heard.

And that is clearly an unalloyed awesome good yet amidst this change of voice got lost because you go back to 1970, the most trusted person in America, wasn't a business leader or a government leader. Or a military leader. It was the guy who read the news on TV, which is kind of, for a young person, blows your mind because you know, that would be the person you trust the most.

Can you think of anybody on TV today? You'd think I trust that person more than anybody else. You know, we'd watch with our families, Cronkite and the other two networks, what's happening with Vietnam or Watergate or Sputnik to be fair to the current guys, there were only three networks, there wasn't social.

So they had time to fact check. They could come, they were all, they were competing to serve all of America. It's gotten atomized. There's thousands of channels. And the media these days is less likely to inform than they are to affirm. But it means we enter public policy questions without a shared set of facts.

We no longer think of the other side as the loyal opposition, and we're increasingly likely, as the media feeds us, to think of them as a threat to our way of life. And so here again, backlash number three. That's a backlash against the pace of change. So much that we saw in the 2010s with rising activism, fueled, enabled, accelerated by social media.

But it's against the pace of change. Left of center voters tell pollsters, why are women still paid less for doing the exact same job as compared to men? Why is there still so much racism evident in how we conduct policing in the 2010s? Right of center voters tell pollsters, there is so little regard for immigration law, I feel like a stranger in my own country.

There's so much political correctness, I'm afraid to have an honestly held point of view. For fear I'm gonna get cancelled. So in an age of disruption, where do we turn to make sense of all of these trends?

Because Gallup helpfully asks a battery of Americans every year a whole bunch of questions around institutional trust.

I put ten institutions up here,You go back to the late 1970s. Six of the ten that I have up here are trusted at the highest level. A great deal, quite a lot. by more than 50 percent of the population.

Today, only the military is north of the 50 yard line. Hell, only the military and the only church thereafter is trusted at the highest level by even a third of Americans. So in terms of how we got here, what do you think happens to politics if you're in an era of accelerating disruption and institutions don't inspire confidence that they're gonna help people navigate it?

The answer is disruption arrives in politics. What do I think of as disruption in politics? Well, it's voting for change.

macro theory of what's driving all of this distrust, the challenges, the trends in politics, are that people, voters, all around the world, look at the policies, the parties, and the institutions, including business and universities, that govern our lives, and we often conclude these were created in the 20th century.

To deal with the realities of the 20th century. I feel fragile. I don't feel like I'm protected. I don't feel like they've got my back. I'm gonna vote for change. Throw out the bums, bring in some new bums. So where are we today? Start with tech. Well, to me, if the digital revolution and how it was transformational is the yesterday explanation, today, digital proficiency is defining the winners and the losers. Start with stock market. Go back a decade. Three of the ten most valuable companies in the world were in information technology a decade ago.

Today, three of the ten aren't, and I put an asterisk by Saudi Aramco, which is really a country, and Berkshire Hathaway is also a country. Um, it's, I, I, to me, Eli, you know, congratulations, GLP 1s, uh, are a, are a pretty good innovation. How about politics?

how do you find your, the, the narrow sliver of people who actually matter and get to them in 2008, Hillary Clinton was going to be the nominee. It was her turn. Barack Obama didn't get the memo, but he got the memo about social media and how it will allow him to go outside the institutional establishment that will, you know, that knew how it was going to be.

The Clintons had mastered and dominated that and a whole lot of talent, and he managed to seize the nomination. and become a pretty transformational president. Nothing in Donald Trump's resume would have said, yes, I assume whoever was the celebrity apprentice, uh, get, you know, main host, he would become the president.

But he understood how the Twitter algorithm worked and how, in the attention economy, he could basically hack the system and in 2016, overcome a lot of experience, senators and governors, and what felt like the whole next generation, the best and brightest in the Republican field, and he mowed them down.

Alexandria Ocasio Cortez, He's an oppressive young person, but I emphasize young. I would have assumed she'll be a power player in a decade or two. She's a power player now. Why? She understands how to use TikTok and Instagram to be a legit influencer among younger voters of the progressive left. If you follow what's happening in warfare, Russia has this powerful Black Sea fleet.

Clearly they were going to cut off Ukrainian exports of grain and otherwise their ability to use the Black Sea, only these days you don't want the fleet, you want the drone. And we're seeing warfare get transformed, and the walk away lesson that we're taking away, I hope, I pray Taiwan is taking it away, I know China is paying attention, digital proficiency is defining the winners and the losers.

The yesterday trend on geopolitics was that hyper global era, which was really important to help so many of the businesses represented here succeed. The Milton Friedman, Tom Friedman, that era is over. We're now seeing a world, regardless of who wins in 2024, where the drivers are de globalizers. First, there is a global subsidy arms race.

We've got a CHIPS Act, the EU has a CHIPS Act. Japan has, they may have named it something different, but they're investing in their semiconductor makers and equipment makers, as is Korea. And all of the, everybody I've mentioned combined are investing less. In indigenous innovation and semiconductors than China are.

Well, if everybody is subsidizing things because of need for resilience or desire for domestic champions, that leads to gluts. So China, which is struggling through their real estate, uh, crisis, their plan is industrial manufacturing, export it, drop the costs low. Only what that means in Detroit, in Stuttgart is it was a nice auto industry while you had it, but I guess, I guess we're just going to have to just give it up because they're going to make it cheaper.

Nuh uh. That's why the Biden administration put 100 percent tariffs on EVs. Why Germany and the EU is starting to look at very much the same. We're seeing it in steel, in batteries, in legacy systems. The response to excess capacity when we've been subsidizing as we want capabilities is, well, how do we slow down the bad guys and protect our good guys?

Maybe it's export controls. Maybe it's buy local, buy America. Uh, tariffs or bans, you know, the, the Inflation Reduction Act has a build America, buy America. So, of course, the Europeans want to do the same thing to make sure their subsidies. Our business is to stay home to the industrial policy era is here.

Trump really began a lot of this. Biden very much perfected it. If you're if you follow this, Jake Sullivan, the National Security Advisor, has given a couple of really thoughtful speeches that articulate this. But whether it's Trump 2. 0 or Harris 1. 0, we're in an era where they will, they're both industrial policy minded people far more than free marketeers.

Culturally, people look around in the last five years in particular and they sense disorder. We've been through an extraordinary couple of years where we saw systems fail and institutions fail and leadership fail. We hadn't been talking about the risk of nuclear war with Russia for three decades. It's back.

Inflation hadn't been this much of a burden on households and this front of mind for voters in four decades. It's back. Abortion was a settled question. It was a constitutional right over. So, for five decades, suddenly it's being decided by states, we hadn't seen assassination attempts on major political figures since Hinckley shot Reagan in 81.

That's back. With all of this disorder, it makes people not happy with how things are going. And when pollsters ask, do you think we're moving in the right direction, or we're off on the wrong track? We're at a post Cold War high, second year in a row, where the NBC polling, it's the bipartisan team that does it, has roughly three quarters of Americans saying we're off on the wrong track.

Which brings us to the election. Now, January, if I was here, I would have told you, um, that we're having the re election that, or the rematch that nobody wants. Because the other thing that three quarters of Americans said are, for the love of God, please, no! You know, not these old geezers again, give me anything else.

Europeans and others said, aren't there 333 million Americans? Like, really? This is all you got? But, it's settled in to be the longest general election in American history. Except, if you follow politics, I know Matt does, uh, you know, one of the big, big lessons is, nothing goes to plan, and extraordinary events, Can can lead to iconic moments and iconic images that change everything.

Think about Dukakis photo op in the tank that left a mark. You saw that you're like, Nope, that's going to be a problem. Or, you know, or George W with the bull horn. My, the, the, my firm is 11 Republicans and 11 Democrats and our lead Democrat used to work for Al Gore. So, you know, they needless to say, didn't like how things went in 20, in the year 2000, but at that moment with the president at ground zero firefighter under his arm and a bull horn, he was his president too.

The longest general election campaign in American history ended prematurely. First time we saw something like this since arguably 1968. Why? Two extraordinary moments. The debate where Joe Biden was clearly confused, or whether he was sick, whatever you want to attribute it to, the gentleman on the stage, despite 50 years of impressive service, did not have four more years in him in the hardest job in America.

And suddenly the whole world could see that. Combined with Trump, and whether you love him or hate him, when he gets shot, you know, winged in the ear, His response as a 77, 78 year old man was pretty extraordinary. Those moments had the polls starting to move faster. They had been glacial, but all of a sudden, a blowout is brewing.

In the seven swing states, Trump is ahead, outside the margin of error, in either 5 or 6. I can't remember. These are average of polls by RealClearPolitics, and I can't remember if the margin is 2. 5 or 3. The Dems knew the writing was on the wall. We're going to get blown out by Donald Trump. What do we do about that?

The answer is, well, we don't have primaries. We don't have a beauty contest. We install the part, we tell Biden, you got to go. You know, the hammer, Nancy Pelosi goes and visits him and said, Joe, it's time. And all of the party leadership, whether it's Chuck Schumer or Nancy Pelosi or former president Obama or the Clintons, they all get behind the sitting vice president Harris.

It's, it's done. There were two reasons that Joe Biden didn't want to get out. First, he had wanted to be president for roughly 9, 000 years. And to cut a brother a break, he had a really strong, I mean, his first two years legislatively were off the charts, like most accomplishments, I'd argue, since LBJ. I mean, he had reason to feel like he had done a pretty good job.

But his other reason was, uh, when he takes a look at the, um, At net, at net favorability, he was underwater. His, his favorable minus unfavorable was negative 14. But Harris's was, she was even more So she gets the nomination. Two months later, what do we see?

She's dead even. We haven't had a major political figure whose favorability equals their unfavorability in a really long time. That's just not the nature of the media, the nature of the opposition. Um, that's pretty extraordinary. The other big thing it did is the Democrats. All of my Democratic colleagues were just, you know, somewhere between morose and drunk all the time because they're, you know, we got Biden.

So CNBC does a nice helpful polling and they went and they asked voters, are you excited Democrats to vote for Biden? Are you excited and enthusiastic Republicans to vote for Trump? Trump was at 71, Dems a third were excited and two thirds were like, yeah, we got to vote for him. They do the swap a roo even, and I'll be interested to see their September numbers, some of the stuff I've seen roughly after the debate, like I think it was the New York Times, Harris is up to 90 percent, which is bonkers, Trump's at 82, that's really good, 90 percent is crazy.

So, uh, Dems are now fully engaged, uh, the question, and you take a look at the polling in the seven swing states, It had been a blowout brewing. These numbers change every day.

Um, all you need to know is this is the closest as a polling matter election in our lifetimes so far. And that suggests that's what we're going to get. How are you going to win it? Make it about the other. If Harris can, if Trump makes this a referendum on the Biden administration, the fav, the Biden administration, the Biden Harris administration is net unfavorable.

And likewise, a lot of the positions that Vice President Harris took in 2020 are unfavorable. If he can make it about her, he's got a chance to win. If she makes it about Donald Trump, if it's a referendum on Trump, she will definitely win. So what's her case for that? Well, that, uh, he's chaotic, corrosive, corrupt.

Remember the four years where we would all look at Twitter every morning? You know, are there new tariffs that are going to influence the business? Did we bomb New Zealand for some reason? We didn't know. So for a lot of voters, after the last couple of years, we don't want to go back to that stomach churn.

You know, it was fun while it lasted, but this is, it's a scarier world in the 2020s. Others, like former Republican Senator Pat Toomey of Pennsylvania, would say January 6th was a disqualifying event. You know, others point out, this sort of is the drum Harris is, she just this morning got quoted saying she's ready to get rid of the filibuster.

to enshrine, uh, to pass a law that enshrines the Roe v. Wade level protections for reproductive rights, um, across the nation. Since the Dobbs decision, polling and, and, uh, referenda in every state demonstrate two thirds of Americans think Roe was right. And one third of Americans thinks Dobbs was right.

Two thirds is bigger than one thirds, and that is, you know, Trump, put the justices on the court who gave you Dobbs. Finally, he was convicted in a court in New York, although of all the things they're going after him on, that's the weakest. But two different things that she's doing that Biden didn't do.

Number one, she's also pointing out, and that dude's really old, which you might think takes a lot of chutzpah, and it does. Like you were next to Skeletor eight seconds ago and now, however, you know, Trump is the oldest nominee in American history.

she looks a lot younger than him. The other big difference is when Joe Biden was running against, Donald Trump, his theory is this guy is an existential threat to democracy. He's 10 feet tall. I always thought this was a bad, this was not like, I wouldn't put all my eggs in this basket for two reasons.

One, if you believe this, you were already on the team I don't think there's any American who would learn for the first time, the things that would make you believe this. But the other thing I thought was a mistake is the thing Trump cares about the most is that people think of him as strong.

Dangerous equals powerful. You know what doesn't equal powerful? Weird.

the genius of this is this, you know, instead of focusing on what a risk is, because we live in scary times and for a lot of Americans, you know, he may be offensive, but we need a tough leader. What you don't need is a leader talking about Hannibal Lecter and eating cats and dogs if you're dealing with, you know, going eye to eye with people around the world.

So what's the approach Trump is taking to go after Harris? Well, the cases involves four things. First, what did she know and when did she know it? She had lunch with President Biden once a week. She was always she would tell you she was as the vice president, the last person in the room to make all the decisions, you know, the day before he dropped out.

She was saying he's fine. Well, George Clooney knew it wasn't true. Did she not know it or was she spinning the media and donors and others when she was saying he's totally fine? Every vice president ever in American history runs on, you know the things you like from the administration? Yeah, I'm responsible for those.

You know the things you didn't like? I, I am unfamiliar with any, that's what all VPs do. However, you know, the border, uh, has gotten meaningfully better post an executive order that imitated a lot of the policies that President Trump had in place, but before that it was not. In theory, she could answer for that or inflation.

Her 2020 campaign, when she was running for the nomination in a crowded field that included Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders, saw her go very far to the populist left. For the most part, she has, through the campaign, either refused to comment on whether she still embraces a lot of these positions or walked them back, though not always explained why.

A more disciplined opponent, Uh, and a media that, was less biased was less unhappy with one of the candidates might prosecute a I understand your values haven't changed But your position did on fracking so why and so in theory that is a risk that she faces Although I thought that what is gonna blow her up in her first week and she's made it two months and has played a pretty Flawless hand so maybe she can make it another 40 days finally Historically, she's not been a strong manager.

That is Uh, as a campaign matter is not going to be a problem because there's just not enough time. She inherited an excellent campaign that only had one problem. It's candidate. Uh, and she fixed that, but she's also prone in unscripted moments to say things like, and I'll quote here. It is time for us to do what we have been doing.

And that time is every day. She was not a CCO is all I got to say about that. So to me, I go back to those circles. Who's the change candidate? This is the, this is the high ground. If you want to win this election, you want to be the candidate to change. Well, first, who's the incumbent? They're not the candidate to change, typically.

That would be Advantage Trump as the change candidate. Who's basically saying four more years of the direction we've been going? That's Harris. That makes Trump the candidate, only he kind of has an asterisk on his change because his idea of change is going back to what you had for four years. So it's not.

Fresh change, the way it is for everybody since Grover Cleveland. Um, number three. Sheik seems to be cut from the populist, technocratic, you know, uh, uh, Gavin Newsom, Barack Obama. I mean, it's a mold that appeals to over educated people like me, but the Global zeitgeist is towards the populist anti elitist.

I think that's why Walls was a kind of smart pick for her, but that probably advantages Trump as the change candidate. And she was Senator for four years and then vice president for four, eight years unbroken in Washington. He did his four in town and he's the out of town candidate that favors him, but it's not that simple.

Because she's been kind of front of mind, the leader of the Democratic Party for only two months. She has changed as recently as this summer. She's changed from Biden. She feels very changed. He's been the leader for nine years, which is 63 in communicator dog years. He does not feel new. He does not feel fresh.

He doesn't feel like this will be a change. 45 out of 46 American presidents were white. 46 out of 46 were dudes. She is definitionally a change. She, a lot of her supporters like to say she's really a Gen Xer. Look, I'm a Gen Xer. You wanna be part of my generation, you gotta be born in January of 65 or later.

She was born in November of 64. So, you boomers, she's yours. She's not mine. But, it is a generational change to go from the oldest boomer you can imagine to somebody who just barely stays in the boomer category. And we haven't had somebody running, attempting to run on kind of being positive and optimistic and hopeful and joyful since Barack Obama in 2008.

Here's what we know. If passed this prologue, this thing is going to be close in the electoral college, which is the scoreboard that matters. Hillary Clinton wins. If you just rearrange fewer than 80, 000 votes across three states in 2016. In 2020, Trump gets re elected because it becomes a tie in the Electoral College, and the tie in the Electoral College would, uh, would bounce to the House, which had 26 Republican delegations, so it would have been Trump again, with fewer than 43, 000 votes change.

We also know that half of the nation is going to reject the results. Just like a third of Clinton voters said Trump's not legitimate, And two third of Trump voters said Biden is not legitimate. if you think in six, seven weeks, this thing is over, that's when the nine week slog begins.

And I feel like we're not looking to necessarily comfortable sailing possibly four months.

the zero trust election. You know, I worry, we were chatting about IBM, and I worry that AI's introduction to the world is some combination of the latest market bubble with Nvidia stock being worth a three trillion dollars, or this is what causes people to mistrustful of what they see, what they hear.

Social media made it easier to,shared disinformation, AI makes it easier to create disinformation. Very scary. It ain't gonna be over the night of and the next morning. States, particularly Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, Arizona are stupid about how they count their votes. Believe it or not, Florida, which was not good in 2000, got really good.

So Florida, you know who won or lost pretty quick because they've got, for all the absentee and the vote by mail and the vote early, all but like the military overseas, which has to be shipped. They do, they don't do that in a lot of other places. So election night, Trump will be declaring victory. He may well be ahead in places like Pennsylvania and Arizona because they haven't counted, All of the votes, and the Dems will have voted by mail or absentee in greater numbers than the Republicans.

People don't feel safe. We know foreign governments are trying to, make us angry at one another. I worry about violence. Who here saw the show Succession last season? I worry about life imitating art. To me, the kind of the Bruce sum of all fears is what if God forbid there's violence, let's say, just make it, we don't need to have anything actually happen, but say some bomb threats get called intoinner city, Detroit precincts.

Well, the election ends if Trump wins. Michigan narrowly, 100 percent certainty by every Democrat that was, um, you know, uh, minority voter suppression. That's about as textbook as it gets. It'll go up to the Supreme Court. The Supreme Court will say, Hey, sometimes there's a hurricane. Sometimes there's a power outage.

We don't do do overs. We can't, there's nothing we can do about it. Sorry. If judges on election day in this scenario do what they're supposed to do, which is to say, we need to accommodate voters who have been displaced. So we're going to have. Extra polling places, we're going to move some machines, we're going to have extra hours.

The Trump folks will say all of those changes were judges rigging this thing against them. I mean, look, he declared 2016 rigged and he won, so we know how that one's going to go. What I worry the most about, and I think this puts the biggest burden arguably on CEOs and CCOs is, we're in an era of no trusted referees.

Republicans don't trust the mainstream media. Democrats don't trust Fox. Democrats don't trust the Supreme Court. Republicans don't trust the FBI. If it's this close, and they're really tough questions, who's going to make the calls that people can believe? So, when Jennifer and I were talking, and she invited me, she said, Hey, one thing I need you to do is to be optimistic.

How am I doing? I got this, right? Well, I actually am optimistic in the medium and the long term. I'm pretty scared in the short term. But in the medium and the long term, I'm optimistic for a couple of reasons, and I'll go back to technology, geopolitics, and culture again. Uh, If politics makes you crazy, you have two options.

Ignore it, which makes you probably bad at your job, or pair it with history. Read American history. And one thing you'll find is people always feel like it's the end of the republic, we couldn't keep it, Ben Franklin was right. There is nothing that divides America today that was half as divisive as Vietnam was across cities, across college campuses, among families.

In the late 60s and early 70s, the crime spike we saw in 2020 after the murder of George Floyd led to some rioting around mostly peaceful protests. That was scary, but contrast that with the murder of Dr. King and Bobby Kennedy in 1968. Cities burned down. That was crazy. I made the mistake of complaining to my parents, uh, about, uh, a, uh, a mortgage that was, I think, at five and a half percent, and they pointed out to me the 18 percent that we had our first house.

Point taken. What happened after 1968? Well, that next year, we landed on the moon. Now, not only was this a national shot in the arm, but this was the birth of the microchip industry, semiconductors, this was the birth of a huge amount of innovations in material science. When I look around. And I'm a nerd, so I read more than politics, but a lot of what's happening, particularly in health care, but also in energy, in artificial intelligence, the future is going to see faster innovation, higher productivity, healthier living, more empowered people.

There really is There's a Cambrian explosion of technology enabled improvements that are happening. Now we've got to figure out how to get it right. Policymakers in Washington understand that we took the approach on social media of, well, it's all speech, leave it alone, the market will regulate itself, it'll work out in the best interests.

I don't think most policymakers think that's what happened in the United States with social media. So there's a sense of, um, all this technological possibility puts that much more pressure on us to think about what the right guardrails are. Geopolitics, we're in a new era. It's a new world order, and it means some of the lessons of the past don't necessarily apply.

The old Cold War was bipolar, east versus west, and the unaligned countries were pretty small. Then you went through that three decades after the Cold War ended, before the Ukraine War started, where it was pretty much the American led era. We're in a multipolar world. Who's side is India on? They're on India's side.

Same with Saudi, same with Indonesia, same with so many of the now very substantial, rapidly growing, and demographically future of the world, countries around the world. Businesses and universities aren't necessarily accustomed to operating in this new multipolar environment that is not what we had for the last 30 years,

There are new challenges. Not only is there a new cold war between the United States and China, and this, no matter who, which one of these is, whether it's Harris or Trump, this will persist. Uh, there are also hot wars in cold places, whether it's cyber or outer space or undersea cables.

And the inability of the world to come together to try to deal with challenges runs at the same time into existential threats. Posed in many ways by climate change and, and some believe by AI. Also, we have new priorities. We went through the Freedman period, the Freedman age, the Milton Freedman's, Tom Freedman, where people believe the globalized, globalization's rising tide would lift all boats.

So if it was good for business, it was good for globalization. Great. Increasingly, people say we need to be more resilient. And if we're going to do nation building, let's do it here at home. Culturally, think about the time. It's historic levels of inequality. Immigration is hit the immigrants as a share of the, of the population are at a historic high, and that's being debated as either the secret sauce that powers our country or the biggest single cultural problem we've got.

Technology is upending how we work, live, play, learn, and parent. And the richest 0. 01 percent seemingly now can spend with abandoned and therefore have undue influence on elections that give us red States and blue States.

If you go back and you read, you know, after you're done reading about the sixties and the seventies and how much fun they were, go back and read about the Gilded Age, Doris Kearns. Goodwin's bully pulp. It's a good book. What happened? Well, this is America in the Gilded Age, and this is America today. The reason I'm medium term optimistic, what happened then?

We figured it out. To deal with the Bezos and the Google guys of their day, they literally invented antitrust law in 1890 and 1914. There was worker safety laws and food safety laws. Politically, when the system felt stuck, they didn't pass a new law. They amended the Constitution. You guys know how hard it is to get a law passed.

Amending the Constitution is really hard. Direct election of senators, giving women the right to vote. As a legal matter, they banned corporate and union contributions, and they tried to take some of the power away from the Speaker. There were social reforms. Groups like this led to business leaders going to government leaders in the early 1900s and say, you know, we are Around the world, we're seeing a new industrial era, the Henry Ford mass production era.

But American students at the time, they're all done in eighth grade and depends where you went to school. Nobody's learning the same stuff, and they're not particularly well suited as a workforce for where the economic future is. How about they go 9th through 12th paid for by taxpayers and learning the skills that are relevant.

to this new 20th century. At the time, the opponents decried it. That's socialism. Today we call it high school. And rather than crushing America's capitalist system, it is American capitalism that saved the world twice. We were the arsenal of democracy that defeated fascism. We out competed communism. When I try to put my happy hat on, or if last night a couple of glasses of wine, I think we're in a new reform era.

Somewhat like the progressive era, small p of before, The challenges, it feels really bad, but this is what happened. The challenges are how do, what are the economic reforms? We don't wanna kill ai, but we need to restrain it in a way. We don't wanna, uh, lose capitalism, but we wanna make sure that everybody has an opportunity.

How do we strengthen the safety nets so that they don't all go bankrupt in the 2030s? How do we get more resilient?How do we rehabilitate media in the progressive era? It was the Muck rakers cause Rockefeller and others had gained control of the press. we are in a new reform era. The reform era requires engagement with government stakeholders. It ain't fun, but it really matters what we say, how we lead.

We can't, we can't, you can actually, you can fight a rear guard action for a pretty long time and you have to obviously stay alive as a business. But at the end of the day, We are going to fix the policies and the parties and the institutions to make them more responsive to people and if we don't, we're going to keep getting populists who are going to keep disrupting your business, your university and our system until we do.

Two parting thoughts, two recommendations. First, I didn't expect that a bipartisan lobbying firm to get as many calls as I did in the late, in the mid to late 2010s originally it was, hey, Trump might tweet about us, what should I do? It was always shocking to me, it's like, alright, if he's going to tweet about you, based upon all the other tweets, overwhelmingly likely he's going to tweet because you just announced an investment in a foreign country.

So you're going to want to respond real time. How many, how many people do you employ in the United States? Oh, we don't know. Like, why don't you know that? Why don't you have that at hand? You know, who's going to do the response? Well, uh, I don't, maybe the con, like, we don't know. It's like, basically, whoever the CEO can see at the time

So, people hadn't thought through, hadn't prepared. You then started seeing the same thing in the 2010s with the pressure on C suites, on university leaders to speak out on a growing number of issues. You know, the kind of the rising DEI, ESG crescendo that after the murder of George Floyd was really out there.

But I think a lot of businesses ultimately felt like, you know, we're not a foreign policy entity. We can't have an opinion on everything. And then some things like theIsrael Gaza war, among others, led people to realize we may be overextended. We've got to get smarter. So how do you manage these sort of issues?

We spent a lot of time talking to a lot of folks, spent a lot of time studying it. I've concluded it's a four part approach, each with an internal and an external leg. first, team. Internally, who's at the table to make these decisions? You should know this, because you know you're gonna, you know, whether it's affirmative action, whether if Trump comes back, it's mass deportations, or his ending DEI in the federal government and maybe among federal government contractors, there's Who's the, you know, when the bat phone rings, where does it ring?

It needs to be diverse in backgrounds, in identity, in ideology and in function. You guys need to be there, but if you notice that the government relations people aren't in the room, you probably want them to, because they bring things. If the people who deal with the employee resource groups, they should be in there.

Number two, move with the herd. Occasionally, if you're Patagonia, actually, you might want to take on the Trump administration, mano a mano, because that's good for your brand. For the most part, though, you want to move with the herd. There is safety in number and wisdom in crowds. Go with regional, go with business allies.

This stuff is more fraught than, brand additive. Number two process. So we've got our great team. If we never bring the fire truck out until the five alarm fire, maybe it works. Maybe it doesn't. Usually they're shakeout runs. I helped. one client in 2022 maybe go through a, a bunch of red team exercises.

And what happened is the people who thought we need to weigh in on everything realized, yeah, that's, that doesn't work. And the people who think we should never weigh in, you are like, that doesn't work. And they learn to work together and to trust each other. If NGOs come to you and say, you've gotta weigh in, check with you, you know, if they, if they're gonna go to Walmart and say, Target's already on the letter, and when Walmart calls Target, target says, we're thinking about going on the letter.

But we haven't made a commitment yet. But if you hear that all of your competitors are, you may feel like you've got to do it. If people want you to weigh in for or against legislation, have you read it? You probably ought to read it first. Number three, words. It's a lot more important to speak to your employees than for your employees.

At the end of the day, trust is about communication, and communication is about listening as much as about talking. You guys sit in such a critical role. This is more than just investors so much the internal and external communications presumably run through you. That makes us a tougher job than ever before.

When you explain why you're doing things to the world, you should be able to put it in terms of the value to the organization. If it's just values, if you can't come up with a business reason we're doing it, but we just feel like it's right. Maybe that should be done on people's own time.

And by the way, there's almost always. A business value. DEI is smart for any organization that wants to attract and retain the best people. People should stop being kind of performative and virtue signaling and explain it as the business decision that it is. It's the same decision. Finally, actions are a lot more important than tweets.

So, a lot of these things that might come our way, we know they're coming, we can plan, we can prepare, but like, a few clients came to me who were really worried about the affirmative action decision, and I said, well, that's in front of the Supreme Court. So in the short term, you can write an amicus brief, and that's about it, and that's, you know, mildly impactful, but what I would suggest you do, is you're gonna want a decent answer to your employee resource groups for whom this is an existential problem.

So, why don't you fund a scholarship? If you're worried about election laws, it seems to me one option is to say we're against the Georgia law because you can't give water to somebody within 150 feet. Of a polling place, but we've been silent on New York law, which says you can't give water to somebody 100 feet.

So does democracy die between 100 and 150 feet? The answer is do a voter registration drive, help get, you know, help create resources for your employees to understand, to be more informed, be better citizens, give people time off to vote or to volunteer. There's so many partnerships you can have where it's like, we're not going to want to weigh in when it's a hyper political question, but there's all these things that we could do.

As a community player, and at the end of the day, I think that's business's highest and best use. Last recommendation. The other thing you guys should be able to help everybody with, more than most, is perspective. You're communicators. Many of you worked in the media, but all of you deal with the media, and what we all know is if it bleeds, it leads.

The media's a business. So they try to hype stuff up, but it's frequently not what matters most for history and humanity. The biggest news story in 1994 was Newt Gingrich and the Republican Revolutionaries taking over. Was that more impactful to the world than the birth of e commerce? Well, it got a lot more ink in part because you have to be pretty nerdy and smart to understand mosaic and its implications.

Turns out, that was way bigger news. That's like that slide I offered before with all of the things that were happening in 2020. You know, CRISPR didn't come up with a treatment for sickle cell anemia. It came up with a cure. Amazing. In 2001, it was 9 11 terrorist attacks. Obviously, that should have been the biggest news story.

But what's going to shape 2025 more? 9 11 and its aftermath or the fact that by joining the world trade organization and working really hard, China took over America's spot over the ensuing two decades as the world's factory floor, the leading manufacturing nation. They are the leading trading partner with more nations than anyone else.

That used to be us. They're a near peer in technology and defense. In 2007, that was the mortgage foreclosure crisis that sucked up all the oxygen and all the headlines. Scary times for sure. That's when the iPhone came out. And I believe at the time, I told DT at my firm that he could take my BlackBerry from my cold, dead hands.

I'm not giving up that keyboard. This stupid thing that my brother in law got. I missed that one. We all got very rotated around the biggest pandemic globally in a, in a century as kind of makes sense, but what are we missing? What are the extraordinary changes in technology? What are the, you know, I mentioned CRISPR, the fastest vaccine in human history had been four years.

The average was 10. They came up with one that was safe and effective in fewer than, you know, just a few months, in fewer than one year. I really do think the future is going to be extraordinary, but the challenges for businesses, for institutions during this age of disruption to help navigate, your organization through new and unprecedented in the scary waters, it's going to take CCOs playing a more multidisciplinary role, being more engaged in more things.

So congratulations, you have more work. if you enjoyed this, you'll probably like my free sub stack. If you did not like this, do not sign up for my sub stack. You will hate it. But thanks for having me.

[00:45:13] Eliot Mizrachi: Bruce then fielded some thoughtful questions from the audience. We'll share one multifaceted answer to a question one member asked on how to deal with disinformation.

[00:45:22] Bruce Mehlman: in some ways, disinformation has forever been a problem. The problem is in a social media environment where information is so completely free and unconstrained.

it can make more mischief. It can move faster. And these days with AI, it can look more real than it's ever looked before. Um, You know, but whether you go back to the Birchers or a lot of others in American history, it's, it's always been a problem. I worry a lot about it.

Uh, You like to think you can educate, but educated people fall for stuff too. You know, my own sense is I try, at least in my own world, I mean, the easy stuff is, you know, I'm not going to read R. T. and some of those others. But,People, in part, become, even all of us, become, likelier to fall for, either heavily biased or disinformation if your entire media diet is one side or the other.

And I think making sure you have a balanced media diet, it doesn't mean you got to go read nuts. But, you know, if you're left of center, pick a, you know, David Brooks, a Peggy Noonan, or Ross Douthat, you know, pretty mainstream. But conservative voices and, and they're, you know, I love Matt Iglesias and Noah Smith and a variety on the left, you know, try to get as much of that as you can, but also in this, in the CCO world, you both are expected to respond real time, but you have less certainty that you're responding to reality than you ever had.

Good luck with that. That's super tough. I don't have advice that says any obvious way to get around it. You know, last thought is finally, it kind of comes down to leadership. You know, I'm not sure we teach, uh, I know we don't teach civics, including, how to be a savvier media consumer in high school.

I don't think we teach it in college. I don't see why we wouldn't. They seem like basic, digital literacy in the, in the, in the 21st century that we should teach

[00:47:14] We hope you enjoyed this session as much as the attendees at the conference did, and that you gained valuable insights to bring back to your team. At a minimum, I hope it leaves you more prepared. Or at least more informed about the political and cultural forces shaping our world today. If you'd like to explore these topics further, be sure to check out Bruce's free substack and follow his insights on the evolving business landscape.

[00:47:37] Eliot Mizrachi: And if you enjoy our podcast, please don't forget to subscribe and to leave us a review. Thanks as always for listening. I'm Eliot Mizrachi, and I'll see you next time on The New CCO.