Intelligence Is Not Transferable

I have been in tech for twenty years. For most of them I followed Kara Swisher, and for most of them she was great. She asked the question everyone else in the room was too polite or too invested to ask. She was early on things other people got to late. I learned from her.

Somewhere along the way it went to her head. I don't think she noticed the moment it happened. Nobody does. She spent so long covering the powerful that she became one of them, and she never updated the self-image. She is a wealthy, connected, ruling-class media figure who still performs the scrappy outsider banging on the glass. The glass is a mirror now.

She grew up comfortable in Princeton, went to Georgetown, and has spent thirty years in the rooms where the decisions get made. There is nothing wrong with any of that. There is something a little off about pretending otherwise.

Which brings me to Scott Galloway, who is the gentler case, because I actually like him.

Galloway is a nice guy. Hold onto that sentence, because I am going to take it away from him in about four paragraphs, and I want it on the record that I meant it when I wrote it. He seems like an excellent father. He is very good at making money. If I ran a company, I would want him on my board. He is the exact profile you want in that chair. His tech analysis is decent. His market analysis is decent. And then he wades into politics, and you remember that intelligence is not transferable.

That phrase is the thing I wish someone had told me at twenty-five. I am forty-six now. One of the slowest lessons of my life has been that intelligence and money are barely correlated, and neither of them promises anything about the rest. Some of the simplest people I grew up with make a great deal of money. Some of the most complicated, intense, genuinely brilliant people I have known are still struggling, and will be struggling at seventy.

Every man in my family has lived inside this problem. They were smart. They did not make it past fifty-five. The private machinery of self-destruction ran on schedule, and they all burned up in it. Here is the part that still gets me. They didn't even burn bright. That was supposed to be the trade, the short hot life, and they didn't get the light either. They just went out early. Smart is not the same as wise. Smart is not even the same as durable. I know this in my blood.

So when I say Galloway should not talk politics, I am not saying it from above. I am saying it as a man who has watched intelligence fail to transfer his entire life.

I am a capitalist. I have real critiques of it, but it remains the best machine we have ever built for getting people out of poverty, and I am not embarrassed to say so. Galloway is a capitalist too. The difference is that he wants a specific kind of credit for it. He wants to be the nice capitalist. The good one. The guy who does it right and cares about the right things and lets you know he cares, often.

I tell my kids a version of this. If you have to announce that you are nice, or smart, or funny, the announcement is the tell. It is the thing you are least sure of. I tell my daughter something more specific. Any boy who tells you he is a nice guy, walk the other way. That is not a red flag. A red flag is something you have to interpret. This is a flare. It is lit, it is overhead, and it is telling you exactly where not to go.

This is the only thing I have ever fully trusted in politics. Not what people say. What they do when they think it costs them nothing.

Which is why I keep coming back to schools. Show me where your kids go to school and I will show you your politics. It is the one place where a person's stated values and actual choices get dragged into the same room and made to look at each other.

I am not going to guess about Swisher's children or Galloway's, and I would think less of the piece if I did. I don't know, it isn't my business, and the kids didn't sign up for any of it. I don't need the specifics. The pattern is not a secret and it does not require an investigation. There is an entire class of people in this country who are affluent, credentialed, culturally liberal, and privately spending enormous sums to purchase distance. Distance from bad schools, from bad neighborhoods, from risk, and above all from the one form of difference that actually decides a life, which is class. They will tell you what they believe until the sun goes down. Then the tuition clears.

I want to be careful here, because the obvious response is that anyone would do this for their own children, and the obvious response is correct. I would. That is the point. Buying the best thing you can afford for your kid is not a moral failure. It is a parent. The failure is the second move, the one where you turn around and address the country as though you were still standing in the same weather as everyone else.

I should say where I am standing. None of what follows makes me important. I am a low-level person on a Democratic committee, which is exactly as glamorous as it sounds. But it does mean I have sat in the rooms, and the rooms are the evidence.

This is what I think is actually wrong with the Democratic party, and it is not a policy problem. It is a proximity problem. The people who set the frame are, materially, upper class, and they have built a public identity out of solidarity with people whose lives they no longer touch. Not out of malice. Most of them mean it. But meaning it is not the same as knowing it, and a party run by people who have to imagine the middle class will keep producing a politics that middle-class people can tell was imagined. You cannot represent a condition you have spent thirty years successfully escaping. You can represent an idea of it, which is what we have been getting, and which is why it keeps losing to people who are worse.

Galloway was all for Mamdani's pied-à-terre tax. Tax the wealthy, fund the city, the reasonable progressive position, and he took it proudly. Then Mamdani's administration published a searchable list of nearly a million names and addresses, and Galloway's was on it, and now he has questions. Now it is a "wanted poster." Now he wants to know what the upside could possibly be. The upside was always going to arrive at his door. He just assumed his door would be the one they skipped.

And here is what makes it worth watching. Galloway is far too smart to believe Mamdani likes him. He knows exactly what he is to a man like Mamdani, which is his money and his success and nothing warmer than that. So he is in a pickle. He has to keep signaling that he is aligned, that he is one of the thoughtful good ones who cares about the culture, while standing next to an administration that would happily itemize him. He is not confused about any of this. That is the part that gets me. A confused man you forgive. Galloway knows precisely where he stands and performs the opposite of it, in public, on a schedule.

None of it was hidden, either. This is an administration that staffed the office protecting tenants with someone who had written that the "white" middle class should be impoverished as a matter of policy, and that endorsed a congressional candidate whose post about "colonizer women" drew the enthusiastic public agreement of David Duke. You did not need sources. You needed to read.

Galloway read all of it, endorsed the tax, and was startled by the invoice. He is a smart man. He should not talk politics.