Most people don’t wake up thinking about “the American Dream.”
They wake up thinking about rent, healthcare, their kid’s future, and whether the system is quietly rigged against them.
Here’s the uncomfortable stat that frames everything: only about one in four Americans still believes the American Dream is real. Not “hard,” not “uneven,” but real at all.
That’s not a vibes problem. That’s a systems failure.
This blog post distills the core ideas from a wide-ranging conversation with Oliver Libby, a civic entrepreneur, venture capitalist, and author of Strong Floor, No Ceiling. If you don’t have time for the full episode, this is the intellectual spine.
The core idea, in one sentence
A healthy capitalist society needs two things at the same time, a strong floor so people don’t fall into despair, and no ceiling so ambition, innovation, and wealth creation still matter.
We’ve been arguing as if those ideas are opposites. They’re not. They’re complements.
Break either one, and the whole system starts eating itself.
What a “strong floor” actually means
A strong floor is not socialism. It’s not equal outcomes. It’s not “free stuff for everyone forever.”
It’s the minimum foundation required for a modern economy to function without tearing itself apart.
Think of it like the operating system of a country. If the OS is unstable, no app, startup, or market innovation runs well on top of it.
The floor is built from boring but essential things:
Healthcare that doesn’t bankrupt people for getting sick
Education that prepares people for real jobs, not just expensive credentials
Housing that doesn’t turn shelter into a speculative blood sport
Infrastructure that actually works
A justice system that keeps people safe without warehousing human potential
Access to capital so small businesses can exist at all
Here’s the key inversion most debates miss:
A strong floor is not a moral concession. It’s an economic investment.
You cannot run a high-performance economy on a population that’s constantly one bad month away from collapse.
Why markets fail when incentives are miswired
Healthcare is the clearest example of what happens when markets are “present” but fundamentally broken.
In most industries, the person who pays, the person who benefits, and the person who decides are roughly the same.
In healthcare, they’re completely disconnected.
Employers pay
Insurers decide
Providers bill
Patients hope
Outcomes are optional
That’s not a market. That’s a Kafka novel with an HSA.
When outcomes, prices, and accountability aren’t linked, you don’t get efficiency. You get cost explosions and mediocre results.
This isn’t an argument against innovation. It’s the opposite. Innovation thrives when incentives make sense.
Education broke its promise
For decades, we told an entire generation a simple story: go to college, take on debt, and your life outcomes will improve.
That math no longer works.
College graduates now face historically high underemployment, while trades like electricians, plumbers, and nurses remain critically understaffed and well-paid.
The failure wasn’t people choosing the “wrong” degrees.
The failure was a system that stopped signaling where real demand was.
A functioning floor means:
Early childhood education as baseline infrastructure
Trade schools and service academies treated with the same respect as elite universities
Clear pathways from learning to earning
When signals are distorted long enough, frustration becomes anger. That’s not cultural, it’s mechanical.
Capital as a floor, not just a reward
One of the most underrated ideas is that capital itself can be part of the floor.
If half the country doesn’t meaningfully participate in markets, you shouldn’t be surprised when markets lose legitimacy.
Giving people early, long-term exposure to ownership, even small amounts, changes how they relate to the system. Compounding doesn’t just grow money. It grows patience, agency, and belief.
When people are stakeholders, they stop rooting for collapse.
The “no ceiling” part everyone forgets
Here’s where the argument usually derails.
People hear “strong floor” and assume it implies capped ambition, punished success, or flattened incentives.
That’s backwards.
A strong floor only works if there’s no ceiling.
If wealth creation is capped, the pie stops growing. If the pie stops growing, redistribution turns into trench warfare.
No ceiling means:
If you create massive value, you can capture massive upside
Innovation is rewarded, not rationed
Entrepreneurship remains a legitimate path upward
No ceiling does not mean no rules. It means success is constrained by value creation, not resentment.
You can believe billionaires should pay taxes and still believe society benefits when people build extraordinary things.
Both can be true. Adults can hold two ideas at once.
The role of founders, VCs, and private capital
Private capital isn’t separate from this system. It’s the fuel.
You cannot fund a strong floor without a growing, innovative economy. And you cannot grow that economy if founders and investors treat government, policy, and public trust as externalities.
The dirty secret of innovation is that government has always been a silent co-founder:
Early research funding
Infrastructure
Defense and biotech spillovers
Market creation
The future isn’t “markets versus government.”
It’s alignment versus dysfunction.
The real obstacle isn’t policy, it’s belief
The hardest truth is this: none of these ideas fail on paper.
They fail when a country stops believing it can execute long-term plans at all.
Historically, America was at its best when it was about something.
The New Deal
The Great Society
Becoming the arsenal of democracy
Today, we argue policy details without agreeing on direction.
You can’t steer if everyone’s fighting over the wheel.
The takeaway
A strong floor without a no ceiling becomes stagnation.
A no ceiling without a strong floor becomes instability.
We tried both extremes. Neither worked.
The work now is integration, not ideology.
This isn’t about left versus right.
It’s about whether a complex system can be redesigned before it breaks completely.
The American Dream doesn’t need nostalgia.
It needs better systems, clearer incentives, and the courage to think long-term again.
That’s the real contrarian bet.
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Chapters:
00:01 — Oliver Libby Returns
02:30 — Strong Floor, No Ceiling Explained
05:45 — The American Dream Crisis
09:10 — Capitalism vs Socialism Framing
12:00 — Healthcare as a Broken Market
16:20 — Incentives, Outcomes, and Costs
19:40 — Education System Mismatch
23:30 — Trade Schools and National Priority Jobs
27:10 — Infrastructure and Economic Foundations
31:00 — Justice, Safety, and Incarceration
36:00 — Capital Access and Small Businesses
40:20 — Ownership, Markets, and Compounding
44:30 — Strong Floor Without Capping Ambition
47:15 — No Ceiling and Wealth Creation
Transcript
Brian Bell (00:01:02):
Hey, everyone. Welcome back to the Ignite podcast. Today, we’re thrilled to have Oliver Libby on the mic. He’s a civic entrepreneur, venture capitalist, and author of Strong Floor, No Ceiling, his new book, Building a New Foundation for the American Dream. And he has the important distinction of being only the second-time guest on the podcast. So thanks for coming back, Oliver.
Oliver Libby (00:01:21):
Well, thanks for having me, Brian. I’m honored to be your second repeat guest and happy to be here.
Brian Bell (00:01:25):
Yeah. And so for anybody interested, you can go back and listen to episode 172 and find out a lot about Oliver and who he is. But maybe for new listeners, new audience members out there, you can just kind of tell us who you are and how you got to do what you’re doing and what you do and why you wrote the book and what the book is.
Oliver Libby (00:01:42):
Totally. Yeah. And episode 172 was banger, folks. So go back to it. I’m really glad to be back. And for those who didn’t hear that episode, I’m Oliver. I’m based in New York. I’m kind of a strange, strange career. I’ve been through all the sectors that America has to offer. I started very early on, actually recruited while I was in college to the U.S. intelligence community and I did work at the CIA briefly, but very meaningful experience in my life. I went from there to consulting for large corporations, but rapidly got typecast as the guy who would take on the startup engagements and began to kind of suss out 20 years ago, the idea of a venture studio and taking equity for compensation instead of, instead of just working for high
Brian Bell (00:03:04):
Yeah. So tell us about the book. The name of the book is Strong Floor, No Ceiling. What does that mean? And what is building a new foundation for the American dream mean in the book?
Oliver Libby (00:03:13):
Yeah, you know, it’s interesting, Brian, what you and I are in the innovation ecosystem professionally. And and I think, you know, while there are elements of skepticism and you’ve got to be a thoughtful due diligence or investor, this is a fundamentally pretty hopeful industry in VC. And we believe in technology and we believe in its ability to improve lives and livelihoods. But we are in a time of real suffering and pessimism. One of the scariest statistics in America right now is just over a quarter of Americans believe in the American dream. And if you ask me as someone who started my life in the national security world, whether an external threat like a 9-11 could destroy the country or whether it be something internal, I would say, you know, absolutely. We are resilient to outside attack, but we’re really hard to survive is if we as a society fundamentally no longer believe in the American dream. That’s the thing that for generations has gotten Americans out of bed. You know, the idea that you could work hard, play by the rules and improve your lot and leave yourself and your kids better off than you. And that’s largely been true for most of American history, even difficult times in our history. But it’s not true anymore. And people feel it. So 27% of Americans believe in that. The rest don’t. And that is a national security problem. It’s a national morale problem. And it’s a national motivation problem. And so Strong Floor No Ceiling simply says that there is an engine that could relight the American dream. And it is the combination of two ideas that are often thought of as opposites. A strong floor below which we don’t let our fellow Americans fall and the planks of that strong floor making up education, health care, jobs and housing, opportunity and capital, justice, the real building blocks of opportunity. but that you should be able to stand on that floor and reach into the middle class or maybe even to great wealth. There should be no ceiling to what you can accomplish in this country. If you work hard and play by the rules, you pay your taxes. And what’s more than just these ideas existing intrinsically is you can’t afford the strong floor without having the economy that a no ceiling gets you. But there’s no purpose in building that economy if there’s not a talented, educated, consumer-oriented population. And then the strong floor is an investment in that. So that’s call for a no ceiling. It’s a pathway to reimagining them.
Brian Bell (00:05:20):
Yeah, I like that. And I think we talked about this last time we were on the podcast, but I grew up poor and section housing, welfare, free lunch. You know, so I do believe in a pretty strong floor, kind of lean left a little bit politically, because I’m a product of that, you know, social capitalist society, you might call it, especially, you know, in Seattle, Washington State, where I’m from, which kind of leans pretty left and has a lot of public services and stuff. I guess the, you know, the critics on the right would say, you know, we’re kind of spiraling into socialism, right? I think they were talking about this on the All In podcast this week. You know, David Freeberg’s like, okay, this is how socialism rises. And, you know, he’s very much a libertarian thinker. And to what degree do people just need to pick themselves up by their bootstraps and, you know, go out there and start a business versus, you know, at what point do we need to intervene and help people? What are we doing too much? And what’s the right amount, you know?
Oliver Libby (00:06:09):
Yeah, I mean, I am a capitalist. It’s in the job title. And I believe in the markets. I think that you have to be able to create wealth in this country. And if you create something worthwhile, you can become pretty rich. I think most Americans agree with that. I mean, people are angry right now and they’re angry. They’re angry for righteous reasons, right? I mean, our institutions have largely failed people. But there wouldn’t be such a hatred of the billionaires if there were a really robust middle class and most people were part of it. Right. I mean, it’s easier to hate wealth if you have 400 bucks in the bank and you’re always at risk of going bankrupt. And so the strong floor to my mind isn’t about socialism. I like to say America has enough to make sure everybody has enough. That doesn’t mean that everyone has the same. Right. And socialism bespeaks, you know, we all have the same and we’ve redistributed everything to even. And I don’t believe in that. But I think, like I said before, that it’s an investment in a robust capitalist economy to make sure that everyone has that little bit of help. You know, you run an asset management firm and you invest in startups and you have the background that you just shared with your listeners. I’m sure it’s not news to them. That’s a great investment. And it’s not, it wasn’t a handout that absolved you of working hard in your life. And it didn’t turn off your instinct to work hard. Clearly here you are, right? And and so I think it’s really important to distinguish a strong floor and the hand that are fundamentally very charitable. So I mean, by the way, regardless of politics, Americans are a charitable people. We care about our neighbors most of the time. And we’ve done that for our whole history. It’s a very American thing. We give so much to the society. We help each other out. The Rotary Club, the church, just, you know, the the jacket drive at school, whatever it is. We like that part of our society. And so we have to just make sure that people have that little bit of a hand. And then they strive. And there’s no more American idea than that.
Brian Bell (00:07:57):
Is it a government failure, a policy failure, or like a market failure? Where’s the failure occurring right now? Because one of the things that... they’ll talk about on the online podcast again, is, well, if we didn’t let the government get in there and guarantee all these student loans, people wouldn’t be $250,000 in debt with art history degrees and working at Starbucks, right? And so they feel like they got kind of the short end of the stick. Do we need more trade schools? Like what were the three to five things that you think that we need to improve on the floor?
Oliver Libby (00:08:25):
Well, for, for one minute, the book’s 75,000 words, 350 pages, and it’s got like a hundred policy proposals to take your pick for something on, on almost anything. I mean, you know, the online guys, I mean, you know, one of these days I want to go talk to them because by the way, there isn’t a bigger partner to the innovation ecosystem than the federal government. I mean, it’s 30 or 40% of the pipeline so much bench research. You know, I mean, Elon’s biggest partner and everything he ever built is the federal government, CSEC’s largest customer, Tesla, a partner in every deal. So I mean, you have to come off a little bit that the government has a role even in the heights to which they have risen. But you ask where the failure is. I mean, look, there is failure to go around, right? I mean, since Vietnam and Watergate, we have, we, our institutions have failed our people deeply, right? And there’s a reason people are so upset and they ought to be. But, you know, people ask me, why aren’t you angry? Like, I’m plenty angry. I just don’t think you govern for me. I mean, I think, you know, what I want to say, what should we be trying to do to help people? It’s not just be pissed off at the other side. It’s come up with some good ideas. And there are a lot of good ideas. And I wonder oftentimes why we have saddled our companies with so much of the floor. I mean, why, you know, famously General Motors executive said that GM during the crisis had become a pensioner fund in a healthcare company that made cars on the side. I mean, where’s the sense of that? You know, why did we all, I pay healthcare for my employees, I’m proud to do it, but like, why is that up to me? We have to have portable benefits and pensions that follow everybody around the country, especially in the new creator economy, which we’ve been investing in startups that support that. We may not have jobs much like the old jobs, but we ought to have support, like the support that people have long succeeded with in our country.
Brian Bell (00:10:03):
yeah i mean i i can relate to the healthcare thing running my own venture fund and my wife has an ai startup right and so now we’re kind of you know we’re paying 2 000 a month pre-tax thankfully thanks thanks for that but 2 000 months for major medical with a 7 500 deductible and it’s crazy we’re buying kind of middling
Oliver Libby (00:10:19):
healthcare for people i mean we we have like a great package for our employees i’m proud to say and yet i’m not sure they’re going to get good care every time they go to the doctor’s office i mean You know, it’s one of the things I write this in the book. I grew up in the healthcare family. I actually used to work the front desk at my mom’s doctor’s office and I used to help out at the lab for my grandfather’s Nobel prize winning laboratory. So I I’ve been in the healthcare world and I was like 12 or 13 years old. First time I was back there helping like run paperwork and Xerox stuff. And I remember asking my mom, like, an ultrasound around here is 300 bucks. Why do we never get paid 300 bucks? Sometimes we get more, sometimes we get less. Sometimes if someone doesn’t have insurance, we just ask them for like 50 bucks. Like, what is happening? Like, do we even know what this ultrasound costs? And she kind of chuckled and was like, no, no, no, no, that’s not how this works. That’s like, why? You know, why is that? So right in the book, you know, we talk about America having the best healthcare in the world. Nuance that. If you are wealthy and you live next to a major teaching hospital in a big city and you know two of the board members and you know that surgeon by name and were referred by two people who had prior surgery, now you have the best healthcare in the world. If you’re an American in a rural county somewhere, at best you’re in the number of industrialized metals. So how much you’re spending all this on, you know, we’re spending 20 cents on the dollar in our economy on kind of like mediocre outfits.
Brian Bell (00:11:32):
That’s interesting. What do you think it is? Let’s just take healthcare for a sec and we can explore other aspects of the strong floor before we go into the ceiling, but the no ceiling part. But, you know, if you were, you know, not king for a day, but I guess you were able to push through a policy, you know, through government, would it be like Medicare for all? And that way it’s just kind of like taken off the table and we all have this basic floor of healthcare. And what do other countries, I mean, there’s a comparative, you know, there’s dozens of other, you know, established economies, first world countries that have free healthcare. I think we’re the only in the top 20 in the G20 that do not. We’re the only one, right?
Oliver Libby (00:12:09):
Oh, yes, absolutely that. And we’re far below 20 in our average outcomes on healthcare. You know, one thing I would invite you to do if you think about strong floor no-selling is the book isn’t actually split into strong floor policies and no-selling policies. What I try and do is pull both into everything. So a good example, like, yes, I make an impassioned argument for a public auction. I think it’s long overdue. I think we have to have it to your point where the only ones you don’t, it’s silly. But if you ask me my favorite, favorite policy in the healthcare chapter, it’s actually the preventative healthcare tax bill. I mentioned before we spend 20 cents on the dollar in this country, plus or minus 50 cents on health care. A lot of that is spent unwisely when you get really sick and you go to the hospital. When you show up in an ambulance and you’ve had a heart attack, you are an expensive problem to the hospital. And you better hope that that person has health care and many don’t. By the way, the entire asinine conversation about health care for illegal immigrants in this country was so BS. We already provide health care to illegal immigrants in this country if they get really sick and go to the ER because you’re not asking to send your papers before you get defibrillated. And that’s a good thing in our country. We ought not try to ascertain your citizenship before you get revived. But so we’re already doing this. But so nationwide, we spend an enormous amount of money when you get really good and sick. And look, this is an area of commonality between me and the Make America Healthy Again folks. I really hate their vaccine position, but I actually think that it shares DNA with Michelle Obama’s efforts and all that, which is we ought to try and be healthier. So there ought to be a tax credit or some benefit that the federal government gives you to go get checked out over here. And take your medications, whatever, you know. And we can discuss the tactics of that. I’m not here to prescribe the precise policy. But think about the implication if just way more Americans stayed on top of their health care and just took basic good care of themselves. How much that would cut out of the cost of health care and doing it by setting an incentive is actually a pretty conservative approach to what would be a really, really helpful outcome. So it’s strong for, right, in its outcome, but it’s no ceiling in its approach. And that’s like every policy in the book.
Brian Bell (00:07:57):
Is it a government failure, a policy failure, or like a market failure? Where’s the failure occurring right now? Because one of the things that... they’ll talk about on the online podcast again, is, well, if we didn’t let the government get in there and guarantee all these student loans, people wouldn’t be $250,000 in debt with art history degrees and working at Starbucks, right? And so they feel like they got kind of the short end of the stick. Do we need more trade schools? Like what were the three to five things that you think that we need to improve on the floor?
Oliver Libby (00:08:25):
Well, for, for one minute, the book’s 75,000 words, 350 pages, and it’s got like a hundred policy proposals to take your pick for something on, on almost anything. I mean, you know, the online guys, I mean, you know, one of these days I want to go talk to them because by the way, there isn’t a bigger partner to the innovation ecosystem than the federal government. I mean, it’s 30 or 40% of the pipeline so much bench research. You know, I mean, Elon’s biggest partner and everything he ever built is the federal government, CSEC’s largest customer, Tesla, a partner in every deal. So I mean, you have to come off a little bit that the government has a role even in the heights to which they have risen. But you ask where the failure is. I mean, look, there is failure to go around, right? I mean, since Vietnam and Watergate, we have, we, our institutions have failed our people deeply, right? And there’s a reason people are so upset and they ought to be. But, you know, people ask me, why aren’t you angry? Like, I’m plenty angry. I just don’t think you govern for me. I mean, I think, you know, what I want to say, what should we be trying to do to help people? It’s not just be pissed off at the other side. It’s come up with some good ideas. And there are a lot of good ideas. And I wonder oftentimes why we have saddled our companies with so much of the floor. I mean, why, you know, famously General Motors executive said that GM during the crisis had become a pensioner fund in a healthcare company that made cars on the side. I mean, where’s the sense of that? You know, why did we all, I pay healthcare for my employees, I’m proud to do it, but like, why is that up to me? We have to have portable benefits and pensions that follow everybody around the country, especially in the new creator economy, which we’ve been investing in startups that support that. We may not have jobs much like the old jobs, but we ought to have support, like the support that people have long succeeded with in our country.
Brian Bell (00:10:03):
yeah i mean i i can relate to the healthcare thing running my own venture fund and my wife has an ai startup right and so now we’re kind of you know we’re paying 2 000 a month pre-tax thankfully thanks thanks for that but 2 000 months for major medical with a 7 500 deductible and it’s crazy we’re buying kind of middling
Oliver Libby (00:10:19):
healthcare for people i mean we we have like a great package for our employees i’m proud to say and yet i’m not sure they’re going to get good care every time they go to the doctor’s office i mean You know, it’s one of the things I write this in the book. I grew up in the healthcare family. I actually used to work the front desk at my mom’s doctor’s office and I used to help out at the lab for my grandfather’s Nobel prize winning laboratory. So I I’ve been in the healthcare world and I was like 12 or 13 years old. First time I was back there helping like run paperwork and Xerox stuff. And I remember asking my mom, like, an ultrasound around here is 300 bucks. Why do we never get paid 300 bucks? Sometimes we get more, sometimes we get less. Sometimes if someone doesn’t have insurance, we just ask them for like 50 bucks. Like, what is happening? Like, do we even know what this ultrasound costs? And she kind of chuckled and was like, no, no, no, no, that’s not how this works. That’s like, why? You know, why is that? So right in the book, you know, we talk about America having the best healthcare in the world. Nuance that. If you are wealthy and you live next to a major teaching hospital in a big city and you know two of the board members and you know that surgeon by name and were referred by two people who had prior surgery, now you have the best healthcare in the world. If you’re an American in a rural county somewhere, at best you’re in the number of industrialized metals. So how much you’re spending all this on, you know, we’re spending 20 cents on the dollar in our economy on kind of like mediocre outfits.
Brian Bell (00:11:32):
That’s interesting. What do you think it is? Let’s just take healthcare for a sec and we can explore other aspects of the strong floor before we go into the ceiling, but the no ceiling part. But, you know, if you were, you know, not king for a day, but I guess you were able to push through a policy, you know, through government, would it be like Medicare for all? And that way it’s just kind of like taken off the table and we all have this basic floor of healthcare. And what do other countries, I mean, there’s a comparative, you know, there’s dozens of other, you know, established economies, first world countries that have free healthcare. I think we’re the only in the top 20 in the G20 that do not. We’re the only one, right?
Oliver Libby (00:12:09):
Oh, yes, absolutely that. And we’re far below 20 in our average outcomes on healthcare. You know, one thing I would invite you to do if you think about strong floor no-selling is the book isn’t actually split into strong floor policies and no-selling policies. What I try and do is pull both into everything. So a good example, like, yes, I make an impassioned argument for a public auction. I think it’s long overdue. I think we have to have it to your point where the only ones you don’t, it’s silly. But if you ask me my favorite, favorite policy in the healthcare chapter, it’s actually the preventative healthcare tax bill. I mentioned before we spend 20 cents on the dollar in this country, plus or minus 50 cents on health care. A lot of that is spent unwisely when you get really sick and you go to the hospital. When you show up in an ambulance and you’ve had a heart attack, you are an expensive problem to the hospital. And you better hope that that person has health care and many don’t. By the way, the entire asinine conversation about health care for illegal immigrants in this country was so BS. We already provide health care to illegal immigrants in this country if they get really sick and go to the ER because you’re not asking to send your papers before you get defibrillated. And that’s a good thing in our country. We ought not try to ascertain your citizenship before you get revived. But so we’re already doing this. But so nationwide, we spend an enormous amount of money when you get really good and sick. And look, this is an area of commonality between me and the Make America Healthy Again folks. I really hate their vaccine position, but I actually think that it shares DNA with Michelle Obama’s efforts and all that, which is we ought to try and be healthier. So there ought to be a tax credit or some benefit that the federal government gives you to go get checked out over here. And take your medications, whatever, you know. And we can discuss the tactics of that. I’m not here to prescribe the precise policy. But think about the implication if just way more Americans stayed on top of their health care and just took basic good care of themselves. How much that would cut out of the cost of health care and doing it by setting an incentive is actually a pretty conservative approach to what would be a really, really helpful outcome. So it’s strong for, right, in its outcome, but it’s no ceiling in its approach. And that’s like every policy in the book.
Brian Bell (00:17:56):
Yeah, I like the trade school idea because there’s a great path to the middle class for a lot of folks that don’t go to college, right? To learn a skill, electrician, tradesman, insert your favorite trade there, nursing. But there doesn’t seem to be kind of this market working properly where there’s not enough signal for... Basically, the demand signal is not getting through to the supply of labor somehow. Because kids are just kind of going in and going, oh, okay, I would just get an economics degree. Or insert your favorite college degree. And so they’re kind of coming out and they’re like, oh, okay, what do I do with that? And how do I get paid? And now with AI, a lot of these early jobs are kind of drying up. And we have, I think, the highest unemployment for college graduates that we’ve ever had.
Oliver Libby (00:18:41):
And that’s just beginning. We do a really crappy job of skating to the park on stuff like this. Like we taught an entire generation how to code just in time for five coding. And look, it’s not bad that people understand what’s under the engine, but fundamentally, did I be able to make a living doing that for much longer? And we told everyone that their lifetime outcomes would be so much better with a college degree. And that math like broke. I mean, I think last year, right, is the first year where it became quite clear that that’s no longer necessarily true. So, yeah, I mean, look, when you, when you raise an entire society on certain received wisdom and you force everyone to be, to do really expensive things to abide by that, and then you’re wrong. You shouldn’t be surprised to get people got pretty frustrated, right? And they are frustrated indeed. people with this massive debt and to your point i don’t understand why we don’t give a bigger signal i mean it is unequivocally true i mean hospitals across the country are taking centimillion dollar write-offs on you know having to hire traveling nurses which are twice or three times more expensive and burning through their personnel and we don’t think nursing i mean by the way do you know that the administration like last week took nursing off of their priority jobs osha categorization you know that’s cracked yeah
Oliver Libby (00:19:49):
Yeah. Yeah. I, someone told me this because they read the book and they said, oh, that job’s a national priority thing. They’ve only agreed with you. Nurses are no longer one of these, these are priority jobs. I was like, that’s unless the nursing price is over that I don’t know about that’s crazy. And the same thing, like we have so much of it, we have. so many things i mean if you want to put a building up in new york your biggest barrier is not nimby red tape although that’s pretty bad it’s plumbers and electricians i mean that’s that’s nonsense and to your point plumbers and electricians make good money and and that is work with your hands and it’s working with spending your day with people those are those should be good and honored jobs
Brian Bell (00:20:25):
right well that that kind of segues ways into the next pillar area which is infrastructure you probably you have a whole chapter on that as well yeah
Oliver Libby (00:20:32):
Yeah, look, I’m a big believer in sound mind and a sound body. And the same thing applies to a country. We all know what it feels like in Donald Trump, you know, held forth on, you know, the American disaster catastrophe in LaGuardia airport. LaGuardia is way nicer now and people are happier going through it. But I mean, yeah, you need good bones in the country and good bones are expensive to build, which means an investment. They need a lot of people working on them, which is jobs. And that is something that has helped true since the new deal and all the way forward. By the way, the Biden administration had a successful bipartisan infrastructure act, which they got no credit for because it takes time to build. And the CHIPS Act is going to be another one that in a 10 year period, the chip fabs are ultra expensive and complicated builds. But to have that here at home in America is really good. So yeah, infrastructure is critical and there’s no more strong flow, no ceiling. you know, policy than that. We are literally constructing foundations of the country and keeping people employed and making it easier to do things like AI and freight around the country and all that. This is just an unalloyed.
Brian Bell (00:21:31):
What about justice? I have this in my notes. Did you cover part of the legal system somehow?
Oliver Libby (00:21:35):
Yeah, you know, it is one of the most fraught things in American life, because, you know, you’ve, you’ve had some, you’ve had some powerful branding running into the justice dollar station, defund the police, which I think in the book, I call one of the most destructive political slogans in American history, mainly because not that we don’t need to spend funding on different things. And I think a lot of very senior police officials now also believe in community police and have even had a mental health professionals around. And look, I think we can all agree, America is roughly five times more incarcerated than other civilized countries, than I’m sorry, than other industrialized happy intentions have. And look, if that’s right, then our people are five times worse than people in industrialized societies around the world. I don’t believe that. So there is something about how much we lock people up in this country that is fundamentally wrong. But you have to balance that with the fact that one of the, if not the most important handshakes we have with government, why we allow ourselves to be ruled in a government is safety. And, you know, I remember when defund the police came out and then he talked to, for example, older black women in communities and like, I don’t want to get rid of the cops. That’s nonsense. Like that’s terrible idea. And I live in New York where there’s no real sense that we were unsafe walking around the streets or being in the subways. Then there’s no way to run a society. So we somehow have to, and there are policies in the justice chapter. Like, how do we make sure we stay safe? We do it smarter. And yet we de-incarcerate our population, many of whom are unnecessarily incarcerated for unnecessary amounts of time, even though we could also- Nonviolent offenses.
Brian Bell (00:23:07):
Yeah.
Oliver Libby (00:23:08):
But we can hold in our heads also the fact that there are people who want to be behind bars for a good long time. And both those things can be possible.
Brian Bell (00:23:14):
What about capital? I have in my notes, capital is a strong floor. What do you mean by that?
Oliver Libby (00:23:18):
Yeah, I mean, the availability of capital is crucial. And we ought to think about how we can use the tools of financial structuring, for example, to achieve some ends that we’re looking for as a society. A good example being, I make a proposal because there’s so much now private equity ownership of homes, single-family homes and multifamily. I make a proposal that we forgive capital gains taxes on the builders, developers of single-family homes if they sell to a first-time homeowner. What a cool way to get people home ownership in an economically sensible manner. That’s a cool suggestion. But, you know, capital is everything to small businesses. And, you know, we ought to be lighting the pathway. There are so many programs, Brian, in this country that people don’t even know about. Like if you’re a small business owner, there is actually a lot you can get in terms of loans and financial support and grants and stuff that most people don’t know about. And we ought to light the pathway to that stuff. Those are great investments. 25 million small business owners in America are the true backbone of the economy. NVIDIA is cool, but 25 million small businesses, that’s American business right there.
Brian Bell (00:24:19):
Yeah. What do you think of the idea to give every child born a Roth IRA at the start? I think they’re starting to run this pilot or program now where you kind of see like four or five grand. Yeah.
Oliver Libby (00:24:29):
Yeah, this is the Trump account conversation too. Yeah. I think it’s, by the way, you know, it’s funny. I’ve always wondered what would happen if Donald Trump got a copy of strong fund that’s selling Reddit because I think you’d agree with a lot of it. Not all of it. Yeah, I think that’s a great investment.
Brian Bell (00:24:44):
Give everybody a piece of the equity pie, right? Right at the beginning of their lives. And they can’t touch it unless it’s an emergency or maybe they’re buying their first home or going to college or something. And like the amount of compounding on a, like just a S&P index or like some sort of target date fund for when they’re 65 years old. Could be an enormous multiple, right? You could, you know, even a 10% a year would double every seven years. So you’re talking about eight, nine doublings? They’re in the public markets.
Oliver Libby (00:25:12):
How many times have we all heard that the markets are great, but people feel bad about the economy? It’s because like half of Americans and more don’t participate in it.
Brian Bell (00:25:20):
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So you can do the math on that two to the eighth power times 5,000. It turns into millions of dollars by the time you retire. And so it kind of solves social security in a way because now everybody has a million or two sitting there when they turn 65 and just for being born in the country. And that whole program would cost 15 billion a year.
Oliver Libby (00:25:37):
That’s it. These are exactly the kinds of conversations we ought to be having and just fall for no ceiling land. Right. And There are no sacred cows. I mean, I think the internal programs are really important, but there is no doubt we need to do some big thinking about how to keep them solvent. You know, retirement age is another question, but whether it is, you know, kind of job type testing because there’s certain jobs where you shouldn’t be doing beyond a certain time and others that you can do until you’re 90. So, but all these things ought to be on the table. We’ve got to run this country for the next hundred years and the next hundred after that. That’s going to take some creative thinking. We’re able to do that in so many places in our society.
Brian Bell (00:26:12):
How do we solve, speaking of capital, kind of the debt crisis, that cycle we’re in, where we just kind of keep adding trillions of dollars every year to the debt and deflating our way out of it, basically, or inflating our way out of it?
Oliver Libby (00:26:23):
We need to get the budget balanced. It’s been done in our lifetimes. Bill Clinton did it. We need to enforce the tax code, not increase taxes on people, just enforce the tax code, because it’s like hundreds of billions and trillions of dollars just by doing that properly. I mean, I’m like the contractor that’s defunding the IRS. And the other thing is, like, look, I think we have had a general credit card swiping problem in our country as a nation where we swipe the national credit card, whatever we want. But undeniably, we spent, we made some big purchases, like an Iraq war, that were really, really bad ideas. And I don’t denigrate in any way the service of the many Americans who went to Dufford and served to Washington. your little wives, your little limbs in that war. But that was not a good expenditure of American will, American veterans. Oh, yeah, we spent trillions over there in Iraq and Afghanistan as well. For no discernible benefit at the end of the day. I really do not think our society met it out of that in a serious way. And at least in Afghanistan, we’re going to have to put people to hurt us. Much deeper debate, right?
Oliver Libby (00:27:27):
Yeah. Yeah. So to my mind, it’s interesting, again, in the realm of like you know, not throwing the baby out of the bathwater. Like I share a concern with some of the most doji folks that went into the Trump administration about the deficit, just how we fix it. We differ. You have to fundamentally misunderstand the federal budget to think that firing national weather service workers is going to help one iota in fixing deficits. Right. That’s a whole topic. Just for your listeners, because I think it’s fascinating. And I remember when someone took me through this 20 years ago and I was like, holy crap, that’s crazy. The federal government’s like something like another 20 or so cents on the dollar of the entire GDP, right? So, you know, we spend a lot of money as a federal government. But if you look at how it’s done, almost none of it is discretionary spending of the type that the Doge guys were after. You know, basically five cents of the 20 cents is Social Security. Five cents of it’s Medicare and Medicaid. That’s like half of it right there. Then another, you know, five percent of five cents is kind of the defense veterans online security. So now you’re at that’s 75 percent of the federal budget of Medicare, Medicaid, Social Security and defense, broadly speaking. And then you’ve got debt service, which during higher interest times can reach up to like two or three cents of that money, which packs the whole rest of the government into like a couple cents of the of the entire GDP. And that’s like all of it. That’s like the Pell grants and all the science stuff and paying all the federal workers. And so when you sell, we cut like 100,000 workers out of the federal government. That is the minimum amount of the federal budget, the way it’s done. And it’s important people understand that because it’s easy to be snowed under by reductions in force at the federal level that do actually nothing to help us and hurt a bunch of services that are important to have to do.
Brian Bell (00:29:13):
Right. I heard a stat. If you add up, I think our GDP is what, 25 trillion as a country? If you add up the state, federal and municipal levels, all of their budgets, it’s about half of our GDP. Isn’t that like, isn’t the government a little bit too large if it’s half your GDP? Well, it depends on what you’re buying, right? And look, I’m often noticed.
Oliver Libby (00:29:31):
I’ve gotten used to saying- It’s a tax, you know? Yeah, yeah. But by the way, like the things we’re paying, and that includes like infrastructure and police and tons of investment in the private sector.
Brian Bell (00:29:44):
I think roughly half of the population works for some government at some level.
Oliver Libby (00:29:48):
But I may look, I’m a believer in what I call Goldilocks government. Like I’m not a big government person. I’m not a small government person. I’m an enough government person. and there is you know we should all we should be hunting it at all times right but there is a certain level of government that you want and then there’s too much or too little and it’s like any sports you know any sports team or any any sport you might want to watch and you don’t want the players to be self-regulating that would be pretty hilarious you also don’t want the whole game to be watching refs you know argue about the rules you want there to be a good game with fair rules and good enforcement of those rules where you’re not pissed off at the ump too much And then let the players play their hearts out.
Brian Bell (00:30:25):
You know, we’ve talked about some different topical areas, but if you could go in and imagine you’re at the Constitutional Congress redesigning the country, are there two or three structural things you would change with the way government operates that would, you know, kind of lead to better outcomes?
Oliver Libby (00:30:39):
I’m going to cheat a little bit because the Constitutional Convention wouldn’t have imagined the problems we’re having now in certain ways. But so it’s funny, chapter two of the book, I actually had to, I was really struggling because one of the big criticisms of the book, to be honest with all your listeners, is if you read the back six chapters, it’s like a hundred policy proposals, foreign policy, the tax policy, the healthcare education, all this stuff we’ve talked about. And people ask me all the time, like, what chance in hell does all of that have to work? And I struggled with that a lot because I felt like there were some things we would need to upfront do in our society to give ourselves the best chance of making all the rest of that stuff happen. So chapter two is that chapter. So there are three things. The first is I actually believe we should have a national service program. should be probably after high school, and it should be multi-track. You should be serving the military, do AmeriCorps or Peace Corps, depending on why you want to work here or overseas, teach, work in local government, or build infrastructure. Something like that would re-knit the fabric of our society in a way that hasn’t happened since the end of World War II. And that had a real impact on the seriousness level and the unity of our country for a generation thereafter. We’ve geographically and digitally sorted ourselves into echo chambers and balkanized ourselves out of being able to see eye to eye. And so a service program where you geographically jumbled everybody and ideological jumbled everybody will be really good.
Oliver Libby (00:32:00):
Number two, social media and the media ecosystem look fundamentally. Democracy requires a large number of people to have reasonably shared good information and therefore make reasonably good decisions most of the time. Not every time, but most of the time. Well, do we have reasonably good quality shared information right now? No. I’m a big believer in technology. I think social media has a lot to recommend it, but we have got to get the algorithms aligned with what we want in society. And if you deepfake somebody, you ought to go to federal jail. I mean, it should be that big of a deal.
Oliver Libby (00:32:33):
And then the last thing, the third thing is there are tactical things in our political system now that need to change. We have to get money out of politics and it’s public. I am a donor to politicians, but that should not be something we do in this country. And Elon Musk should not be able to dump it. of quarter to half a billion dollars into elections just because he’s got money that is not something that should be allowed and gerrymandering of the kind that is going on across the country now in this gerrymandering war that’s stupid too draw simple sensible districts make the whole thing competitive every time the fact that we have any safe districts in america speaks to the fact that it’s fundamentally not democratic so get the money out of politics get the gerrymandering out of politics and let the best ideas win for good instance
Brian Bell (00:33:14):
Yeah, I love that. I might add to that, you know, rank choice voting so we can have more than a two party system.
Oliver Libby (00:33:18):
Yeah. And look, there’s a, I totally agree. Rank choice is very, very interesting. You know, mobile voting. I mean, we’re going to get there eventually, but do everything else mobile. We ought to be able to do that. Bradley Tussle, shout out. You know, but yeah, I mean, these little tactical things would make a big, big difference. And if we can get those things on, if we’re, if we’re kind of re-knitting the fabric of our society, if we’re sharing a reality, at least somewhat, and we get some of these not just things out of politics, then we have a real chance to get things back in hand here.
Brian Bell (00:33:46):
Yeah, I love that. Well, let’s talk about the no ceiling part. So you mentioned open ambition, innovation, entrepreneurship, growth, and probably some things I’m missing, but we can take them one at a time or you can take the whole category and tell the story to the audience about that.
Oliver Libby (00:33:59):
Yeah, I mean, look, it’s already threaded through everything we’ve talked about here. And there’s so much of no ceiling that is parts of, you know, like in the healthcare bit, we talked about the innovation ecosystem, healthcare and biotech and extending the patent life. But look, I believe that the American people want to work hard, they’ve got the rules and get theirs. We have a weird loving relationship with wealth in this country, but at the end of the day, people want to believe they can get rich or at least take care of their families. And that’s what New Zealand is all about. And all the things we’ve talked about are part of that. We ought to have moonshots in this country.
Oliver Libby (00:34:33):
Let me give you an example, actually. You know, there’s all this back and forth about tariffs. And generally speaking, I’m a big believer in just talking straight to the American people like tariffs or taxes. So we just have a huge tax increase that’s called tax. But are all tariffs bad? I would argue, actually, that if you really want to do a smart version of this, You would pick five or so industries. It’s not a magic number, but let’s call it five. Let’s say it would be battery technology, defense tech of certain kinds, chips, like the Chips Act would be the example of this. And, you know, a few more things we care about. And we were to say on those things over a 10-year period, the tariffs are going to go to a thousand percent. I mean, like impossible to buy those things from overseas, but it’s going to be predictable. It’s going to go up stepwise every year. There’s not going to be any, you know, back and forth chaos and all that’s super predictable. You’ve got 10 years to get off of foreign sources of these things.
Oliver Libby (00:35:23):
At the same time, we will have a national infrastructure bank, a first loss facility, a big job training program as part of the jobs of national priority programs. So it’s like a national version of the CHIPS Act for five major technology areas that we, for national security and competitive reasons, want to reshore. Now, it’s important to understand that a lot of the reshoring might mean not a lot of humans are working in those factories, but at least that activity would be here at home. And that’s a good potential use of tariffs, would be the no ceiling part of the policies here.
Oliver Libby (00:35:53):
But fundamentally throughout all these areas, Brian, like there are, we want people to start businesses, to innovate. We want them to see financial rewards for that. We want them to use their education and their training and their good health to buy things and workplaces. That’s the no-seeing limit. You ought to be able to make a great living at that and have a good life.
Brian Bell (00:36:11):
yeah i love that so how do you avoid the trap of creating a floor but potentially capping the upside
Oliver Libby (00:36:16):
you don’t so it’s interesting a lot of people say oh no ceiling there should be a ceiling and i’m just fond of saying that no ceiling doesn’t mean no rules like what is the theoretical maximum for someone’s i mean arguably aside from his politics and some of the craziness like if elon creates spacex which helps us spread humanity into the stars and tesla which may help us get off the oil drip and help save the planet, I think. Is there a reason he shouldn’t be absurdly wealthy as long as he pays his taxes and maybe he’s not trying to buy much?
Brian Bell (00:36:47):
I have no problem with Elon being a trillionaire if he creates a hundred trillion of value in society, right?
Oliver Libby (00:36:52):
Right. But then we ought to, but then the strong force. So these things are really knit, right? Like in my conception, you wouldn’t have one without the other because you can’t afford the strong form. You just run out of money at some point, right? We need to, but, and look, this is a really important thing. I’m really glad you raised it. Like to believe in strong form, no ceiling, you have to believe in the capacity to increase the pie. If this is a zero sum game and there’s only so much pie, then I understand why it’s Donald Trump versus the democratic socialist, right? Because then we’re like fighting over these scraps of what remains. The idea of capping success is only sensible if there’s a limited amount of, benefit and i don’t believe that’s the case we keep increasing the pie sometimes dramatically and so the the look i’m a big science fiction fan like you just want to be in the gene roddenberry star trek version of the future you don’t want to be in like the alien version of the future where like a big mining company now rules the doubts and we can pick which one of those futures we want
Brian Bell (00:37:43):
Yeah, totally. So you recently had a controversial mayoral election in New York. How are you feeling about that with your new mayor and some of his policy proposals?
Oliver Libby (00:37:53):
Yeah, I mean, it’s a great question. I think it’s a little bit of an N of one race insofar as that I’m not sure that there was a quality opposition to mayor-elect Mondani. I am a New Yorker who wants New York to be successful. So just like I wished Donald Trump well when he was originally elected in January or inaugurated in January 2017, I wish mayor-elect Mondani well because I want my city to be successful. Do I think that the city is most successful if we give a bunch of stuff away for free and that’s it? No. But I think that the mayor-elect has shown some signs of bringing some quality people around him and let’s just keep the juries out, right? But like, I do not believe that democratic socialism has the answers for our country, even if they have an important voice in reminding people of the importance of the stronghold.
Oliver Libby (00:38:39):
But I was actually asked this at a book event, does the DSA, you know, can the DSA deliver the whole stronghold and no-selling agenda? And I think no, right? Because you need the no-selling, you need the ability to strive, to work hard, to create wealth and all that. So, yeah, what do I think? I mean, look, I wish him well. I hope the city benefits. I hope he’s half as good a leader as he was a candidate because he was a hell of a candidate. And let’s hope he surrounds himself with experienced people. Because the other thing is, by the way, he’s young and it’s hard to run New York. So you got to have the right people around you.
Brian Bell (00:39:05):
What’s a policy or economic lever in your book that you think is most overlooked by, let’s start with, you know, the tech community, startups, venture capitals, and then by policymakers, the government?
Oliver Libby (00:39:18):
Well, I’ll give you examples from each side of the aisle, so to speak. I think the right now’s tech and venture industry deeply, deeply underprices the role of government. Like, you know, we talked about this when you brought up all in, but, you know, the government is the perennial and storied partner of innovation in this country. You don’t get Manhattan Project. You don’t get the Apollo program. You don’t have Silicon Valley. Silicon Valley, none of it. So like, we got to stop the kind of war between government and innovation. That’s silly. It’s funny. GLP ones, you know, if there hadn’t been some obscure federally funded research into Gila monster saliva lizard that like no venture capitalist would ever have backed some postdoc and they’re like, I want to investigate why this lizard doesn’t eat very frequently. And they’d have been like, that’s great. Let me give you a seed round. Hell no. right? No way. But now we have GLP ones, which pretty sure are going to be a big economic driver and a big health driver too. It’s crazy, right?
Oliver Libby (00:40:15):
Now on the other side, a big debate I have with a lot of folks on the left is defense spending. I am pretty hawkish about defense spending. I think defense spending is actually a massive investment in America in a whole bunch of different ways. First of all, actually a lot of the dollars in the defense budget are spent here in America. Even the dollars that we quote unquote send to Ukraine and other places like that, actually a lot of those High Mars rounds are made like in Camden, Alabama, for example, and billions of dollars worth. So when we talk about a trillion dollar defense budget, it’s not like lighting a trillion dollars on fire and putting it in the tube of a tank and firing it overseas. Like, that’s not what’s happening. I mean, the bases, the...
Oliver Libby (00:40:50):
And then also the investment in what it means for America to be strong means it’s much less likely that we have to go to war. The stronger we in American history, the stronger we are, the less frequently we have to go fight places. And that’s good because I’d rather keep our people in the office, in the factory than in the trenches.
Brian Bell (00:41:06):
But we don’t probably need to spend a trillion a year on defense, do we?
Oliver Libby (00:41:11):
Yeah, the defense budget’s a little bit like the federal budget. Of course, there’s all sorts of good examples of military bases where like, why is this still open? Particular weapons systems are like, we really don’t need that anymore. There’s a lot of big, big, big bulk of defense spending is things like real estate and human resources. It’s the largest employer in America. Enormous font of manufacturing. It’s a huge spin out of technologies. Think about, you know, it’s so funny where like right now in venture, it’s like, oh, defense tech is hot now. Guys, it has been hot since World War II. Just different people benefiting from, right? Innovation dollars have been spent at Lockheed Martin, Boeing, Northrop, Raytheon, et cetera, the whole time. We’re just getting into doing seed rounds, right?
Oliver Libby (00:41:52):
So, yeah, I think that that’s an important driver. It’s often thought of as like... Foreign defense money is just kind of over here. And like, we don’t see any benefit of that as the American people. It’s just like the defense budgets, this big monolithic thing. It’s a bad idea. That’s not accurate.
